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Now I’m Doing Something With My Time

It’s like being punched in the stomach.

First, endless weeks of being entirely responsible for my own time. Maybe interacting a person or two every day. Making every meal from scratch. Gorging on books, devouring good series. The most stress came from part-catering a bridal shower for two-score people, and the most excitement came from running around Cape Cod with Thomas, Mary, Judith, and Steve. Only the occasional RISD email or a day-trip to Providence reminded me that all this doing-nothing time was enjoyed in anticipation of important doing-something time.

I just had no idea how intense that doing-something time was going to be.

Welcome to RISD. Already, three weeks into the summer program, I feel like I’ve been here for months, if not years. I’ve gotten used to 9-9 days, plus a few nights staying up to witching hour to finish a “site plan, perspectives, and a model” given 18 hours before the due date. I’ve been driven to tears and I’ve held my classmates when they felt too like giving up, all of us soldiers in a war of paper and graphite. Together we’ve covered plant identification, river morphology, soil geology, site surveying, orthographic projection, isometric and perspective drawing, plaster-casting, charcoal sketching, woodworking, and canoeing. All this in the face of having to do it for three. full. years.

Yet whenever I have a spare hour… what can I do that is more fulfilling and creative than this? What socializing is more satisfying than working through difficult problems with a bunch of highly talented folks from every age and background? What is more relaxing than a waking up from two hours of sleep and a dinner of chocolate with a fuzzy-headed morning run? (Well… maybe not that last one.) The admissions office has placed a mantel on our shoulders that is intimidating and comforting at the same time. They’ve chosen us twenty-five to succeed at one of the top landscape architecture programs in the country, and though that is one big vote of confidence, we still have to live up to it.

I have a couple rules. Health has to be of equal importance to any work I have, because otherwise I’ll get sick and feel miserable and I won’t make it. That means making time for sleeping and running and nutritious food-eating. Next, I should be invested in my work. It should be awesome, because if I’m just doing it to get it done, I will resent my creations and they will become colorless crumples in turn. If I’m bored I’m doing it wrong. (Frustration, on the other hand, is unfortunately legit.) Lastly, if I ever feel too daunted, I just have to imagine that I’m the hero of an epic fantasy, and I’ve been given a difficult task not because it is fun or easy or even possible, but because I’m the best hope we have for saving the world.

It’s not quite as simple as taking the Ring to Mount Doom, but in a way landscape architects are vital to managing humanity’s impact on the planet. We help create land use policy, we manage how people live with floods and storms and earthquakes, we create greenways and artificial wetlands and places where humans can connect with the rest of nature, and we bring together folks who butt heads like rams in springtime — ecologists, engineers, home-owners, policy-makers — and get them to communicate. Right, so suddenly struggling with this blasted paper model ‘til 4:30 am doesn’t sound so tough, does it?

I want to change the world. I want to make it beautiful from the inside out. I want to come up with ideas and execute them and be surprised at just how cool those ideas are, and I want other people to admire them when I’m not there. And I have to believe that my efforts won’t be entirely absorbed by the wrinkled napkin of the industrial world. Somehow I don’t think RISD is going to knock sense into me as much as follow these foolhardy dreams with the upmost conviction.

What I have I gotten myself into?

2010 08 29 Life Comments (0)

Exercising Morality

In response to Emrys Westacott’s “Does Surveillance Make Us Morally Better?”

My research on shoes and chairs suggests that dreams of being perfectly relaxed and fully supported are wild goose chases that lead to atrophied muscles and malformed body parts so weak they need ever more support just to exist without pain. By analogy, “the discomfort of moral tension” may be that tautness of honed muscle that is that is more capable and better at working under its own strength. If people rely on surveillance to keep themselves in check, then they will need increasing amounts of it as their weakening senses of morality lead them to cause disputes at smaller and smaller levels.

There is no State of Nature in which everyone drives as fast as they can and steals from their grandmother: where there are no governmental laws, people still form regular patterns of behavior. Yet if people are constantly hemmed in by Big Brother, the moment they find an opening, I bet it will look a lot like an unguarded cookie jar. Without any sense of why endless cookies are bad for them, they would greedily empty the whole thing (and drive as fast as they can and steal from their grandmothers). Replace cookies with the Forbidden Fruit, too. What’s more, like some salaried boring-as-hill day job, both risks and rewards have been eliminated… leaving the employee with no motivation and no enthusiasm for justice and human goodness. Or refilling the printer ink. So I predict, anyway.

Life will find a way. Complex systems such as human societies are full of fractalesque holes and exceptions that can’t be covered by a finite set of rules. That’s why I don’t believe 1984 could happen: language is too complex to be completely white-washed. Likewise, there will always be situations which strain a moral code to the breaking point. That’s why we need strong moral muscles. We should be able to use neighbors, not cameras, for checking in on what’s really important. The BP folks cared more about the government regulations than about the poisoning of fish and children those regulations were supposed to prevent.

We need to exercise our empathy, too, because morality is fundamentally connected to it. That we shut ourselves off from, say, animals cough proselytize cough — but also human suffering abroad, in other strata of society, and desensitizing ourselves to violence in video games and the media — can only weaken our abilities to connect with the world around us in meaningful ways. Yes, it’s sometimes painful, but with sensitive feet and minds, nerves ablaze, I think our experiences will be richer for it and we’ll stop and do the right thing when it needs doing. That’s why Probity is so much more awesome than Scrutiny: the surveillance is integrated into the social network as we ask each other to be good people. We get rewarded with respect and friends and support rather than punished by an electronic eyeball. And we care enough to strive for our ideals.

From up here on my soapbox, you all look like ants! I hope my two cents won’t smoosh you from this height.

2010 07 14 Philosophy Comments (0)

New England Paradise

I’m living in a tropical paradise, weather-wise. It’s incredible — in the sense that people find me unbelievable when I say I like this hot-humid stuff. Maybe I run a few degrees cooler than most people, but with a light breeze and bit of shade, I’m in paradise.

Thomas is off in the fantastical story-worlds of Wayfinder, my Doctor without his companion. But I had my own adventure over Independence Day weekend — Kyle invited me to his grandparents’ lakeside house in Connecticut. We ran in the wooded trails behind his high school, with the sweetest air I’ve tasted. I met his myriad friends and family, lounging with them by the dock, staying up late launching Roman candles from our hands (pretend you didn’t read that, oh parents mine), and sleeping in our middle-class tent town. I ended the weekend with a bunch of new friends of my own!

One by one the girls got invited to a photo shoot by Kyle’s photo pro mom, Laurie Klein. It looked so silly as they floated in the water sticking their faces through gauzy fabric, but it felt bad to get left out — until I poked my head out of my book and promptly found out how much fun it was to be a model! Having a camera on me made me feel so glamorous, without a hint of flattery. And the photos afterwards were miraculous. Miraculously spooky! We four were transformed through the gauze and the infra-red into monsters, witches, drown victims, ghosts, and in my case, a creepy black-eyed little girl. The camera is a Transmogrifier.

Now, all you sensitive vegetarians out there were secretly cringing this summer holiday as their fellows scrape the grease of the innocent off their grills. (I get carried away with the words sometime! Woe to the folks who were eating eggs the morning I accidently put forth my chicken-menstrual-cycle comparison.) I, on the other hand, was happy to go against the grain (but really, I’m just going against the meat) and celebrate the Fourth like the Torrie I am — too much of a pacifist to think that a few political gripes were worth full-on war with all the suffering and death that entails, and thus unable to get behind the pride which winning that war is supposed to inspire. But you know what? With succulent vegetables and sweet corn on the grill, and a few vegetarians to wink at over the perfectly seasoned portobello burgers, I wasn’t all that unpatriotic. And we can all get behind big colorful explosions.

Happy summer, everyone!

2010 07 09 Life Comments (2)

Ecosystems and Secret Gardens

Last Thursday, Doug Tallamy came to the Cambridge Public Library as part of his book tour. His book, Bringing Nature Home, is about the importance of using native plants in our gardens, and he was introduced by the founder of the local Grow Native Cambridge group, Claudia Thompson. I mention Ms. Thompson because I actually got to meet her at the Secret Gardens of Cambridge yesterday — hers was my last stop on the open-garden tour (at which point I had been walking straight from 10 in the morning to 3:30 in the afternoon, with only a couple of handfuls of almondy native juneberries as fuel and still an hour from little Lee Street).

It was surprising to see how different her meandering backyard garden looked both from native-minded Pacific Northwest gardens, which go in for the grasses and smaller-leafed shrubbery, and from the lawn-with-a-border types in the old colonial estates. In terms of design, I much prefer the ones with a canopy layer that blocks the view somewhat, encouraging you to go in further and explore — gardens that indeed feel “secret”, as the title of the tour suggests, and perhaps a little wild. Mount Auburn Cemetery a great example, with its hills and trees creating myriad pockets of peaceful contemplation. In fact, it was the first cemetery in the US to be designed by a landscape architect, the first to follow in the European Rural Cemetery Movement that substituted wilderness-like parks for constricted church graveyards. This tradition continued to gain popularity and became the inspiration for the National Parks. The values here were to preserve nature as a space shared by humans, other animals, and plants, and a space that benefited us as much as them.

This was the sort of thing that Tallamy discussed in his talk: the need to bring back these shared spaces, and even more importantly, our desire to have them. Currently the National Parks are just too small and disconnected to protect most species, and the vast swathes of urban and agricultural “desert” lead many to become “functionally extinct” — no longer participating in their local ecosystems. Tallamy said that a third of all bird species are “imperiled”, in danger of becoming functionally extinct. Already many species are undergoing local extinctions due to habitat loss, something that is nostalgically captured in the book Ceremonial Time. Ecosystem collapse is a huge problem that directly impacts humans because we depend on many “ecosystem services” that we import into our cities and suburban sprawls, things like oxygen and the pollination of food crops. Instead of living off the interest, Tallamy says, we are dipping into the principle, which in this case is the carrying capacity of our landscapes.

He says sustainability is like pregnancy: you can’t be a little pregnant, and you can’t be more sustainable. The carrying capacity of a landscape is how many species and individuals it is able to sustain indefinitely. Biodiversity increases the carrying capacity, creating more habitat and food opportunities, and weaving a redundant food web that can better adapt to change. Front and back yards take up a tremendous amount of real estate, and so have a tremendous capacity increase a region’s biodiversity, but all too often these end up as wasted space. Empty swathes of grass. Carefully pruned rose bushes. Imported fancy-pants plants. Landscapers and horticulturalists are trained as “painters”, not as systems thinkers. They’re not trained to care.

There’s no better example of this than the fact that most people want insect-free gardens. Now this is crazy, as Tallamy explains, because insects are the basis for most food webs, since they make up a large portion of the diets of everything from birds to bears. So we spray everything and pull out the natives that serve as bug habitat, and then bemoan the loss of birds and butterflies. Yet even the bugs themselves aren’t necessarily ugly — Tallamy put up some slides of caterpillars crawling around in his backyard that looked like exotic sea slugs! The trick is to attract enough insects to attract their predators. He showed data showing that native plant gardens had the same or less aesthetic damage than those with conventional non-natives. And they certainly attracted way more birds — Tallamy said that while some people go on bird walks to spot the great plumage on display, he just has to go look out his bathroom window.

Tallamy’s audience already cared about plants and animals. After all, they were garden enthusiasts. But the problem is that most people nowadays don’t experience the outdoors — and so they don’t develop an emotional relationship with it. One of the things I see a lot, whether in discussing veganism or politics or philosophy, is a lack of empathy. Empathy is a muscle that gets bigger with exercise, but I suspect many people neglect to do so because it hurts. Extending empathy means feeling more of other people’s pain, other animals’ pain, and the pain of entire ecosystems collapsing around us. Yet it’s worth practicing empathy because otherwise we harden ourselves to the things we really ought to care about — and as it becomes a large-scale phenomenon, we find that we ourselves join the suffering because no one cares about us anymore, either. And although ecosystems don’t form emotional attachments to us, they do care for us in some pretty fundamental ways.

While I dream about tearing up roads and putting in a network of high-speed railways and replacing agricultural pastureland and monocultures with food forests, building thriving habitats in our yards is a much more realistic goal — and judging by the beauty of the native-focused gardens I saw around Cambridge yesterday and the abundance of wildlife I saw in Tallamy’s photographs, I predict no one will want to be left out of (what he calls) the new Suburban National Park. He ended with an anonymous quote that I immediately took to heart: “Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.”

2010 06 14 Life
Philosophy Comments (0)

Enough with the Gender Essentialism

Gender essentialism is a pet peeve of mine. You know, when one woman will confide in another a secret about how “men think”? How Psychology Today and Cosmopolitan are constantly headlining the essential differences between men and women, and how to make relationships between the two function (and lead more often to sex)? How even the scientific literature is strewn with studies that try to assign any disparity between the genders directly to simple hormone fluctuations and our apparently simple-minded hunter-gatherer ancestors? *

An article in Scientific American Mind, May/June 2010, caught my attention with its title, “The Truth About Boys and Girls”. They introduce the topic thusly: “Brain differences are indisputably bioloical, but they are not necessarily hardwired. The crucial, often overlooked fact is that experience itself changes brian structure and function… Most sex differences start out small — as mere biases in temperment and play style — but are amplified as children’s pink- or blue-tinted brains meet our gender-infused culture.” There follows much useful information, despite the rest of the magazine being about as bad as Psychology Today, and despite the fact that they kept referring to “sex difference” when they mean “gender difference”.

This begs the question, though: When does “sex difference” become “gender difference”? If gender is in the mind, then it comes into play as soon as an infant engages the gendered world outside the womb. Even though very young children are not aware of their assigned gender, most other people in their lives are. Do baby girls make more eye contact, or do we engage their eyes more?

Research into the ability to mentally rotate objects, a measure of spatial reasoning, shows that while the average man can outperform 80 percent of women, the average four-year-old boy outperforms only 60 percent of four-year-old girls. The article suggests that “sporting gear, vehicles, and building toys tend to exercise physical and spatial skills, whereas dolls, coloring books, and dress-up clothes tend to stimulate verbal, social, and fine-motor circuits”, leading to a greater gender dichotomy later in life.

When psychologists Karin Frey and Diane Ruble studied peer influence, they found that “elementary school-age boys and girls both opted for a less desirable toy (a kaleidoscope) over a slick Fisher-Price movie viewer after watching a commercial of a same-sex child choosing the kaleidoscope and an opposite-sex child choosing the movie viewer”. As children form their identities, their cultural personas, they define themselves in socially understandable ways and glom onto activities that those “like them” care about. We all try to simplify the complex world through generalizations and categories (sound like my thesis yet?), including ideas about ourselves. If my identity is Girl, and the category Girl is constantly lumped together with Pink and Plastic Baby Dolls, then those become part of my identity, too.

Physical fitness is something we think of as definitively testosterone-driven, but a meta-analysis by Warren Eaton and his colleagues showed that “the average boy is more active than about 69 percent of girls”, leaving “31 percent of girls who are more active than the average boy”. That’s not a statistic I would go betting on. “The sex [sic] difference in physical activity continues to widen during childhood, despite the fact that sex hormone levels do not differ between boys and girls from six months of age to puberty.” The article blames parenting for this growing disparity, but there are many other, more subtle cues that kids pick up on, such as the aforementioned gender-specific advertising.

This widening of the gender divide through socialization can also be seen in the oft-overstated case of empathy:

The sex [sic] difference in empathy is smaller than most people realize and also strongly dependent on how it is measured. When men and women are asked to self-report their empathic tendencies, women are much likelier to endorse statements such as ‘I am good at knowing how others feel’… When tested using more objective measures, however, such as recognizing the emotions in a series of photographed faces, the difference between men and women is much smaller… [and] the average woman is more accurate than just 66 percent of men. In children, the difference is tinier still, less than half that found in adults, reported psychologist Erin McClure.

The real difference is not in our hormones, but in how we think of ourselves and how we shape others through our expectations. What little sex difference there is at birth is amplified and suppressed and endlessly molded by society. Gender difference, a product of history, is the more accurate subject of psychological and sociological study.

The distinction between “sex” and “gender” is an important one to make because we view culture as mutable and biology as unchangeable. For us, genes are fate, allowing us to all-too-easily stereotype and give up on thinking critically about why the world is as it is and how we want it to be. Genetic fate and gendered statistics feed the pop psychology that ships men off to Mars and women to Venus and leaves the two halves of humanity puzzling over each other instead of acting like fellow human beings.

The evo-psych explanations of gendered behavior are also problematic because they assume in advance that these behaviors are genetically coded, and that they increased our ancestor’s fitness in an environment we really know little about. One theory of human evolution, that we evolved to run long distances, suggests that gender differences diminished our species as men and women, young and old, traveled together. Modern ultrarunning put women and the elderly, even nursing mothers, on equal footing with the usual athletic young men (McDougall, Born to Run). Contemporary hunter-gatherers, too, show less gender dichotomy than agricultural and industrial societies. Once again, gender is more informed sociohistorical movements than biological differences.

2010 06 05 Philosophy Comments (0)

Summer Approacheth

Winter is dithering into summer over here, with the early spring being punctuated by horrendous rains and bustling thunder storms. The past week has been all blue skies and humidity, and a cool breeze promising change yet again. I’ve been alternating busy days, going to goings-on with Rachael — who can now hobble with the best of them, after the set-back of her second surgery — and setting up my imaginary apartment in Providence. Imaginary until yesterday, that is, when it magically appeared on my first scouting mission. It’s got hardwood floors, thick walls, a view on the lovely little neighborhood on a big, steep hill. It’s walking distance from RISD and Whole Foods and a Portland-style shopping street replete with cafes and consignment shops. Thomas and I are jumping with joy from coast to coast!

Since I last wrote, after getting back to Cambridge, I’ve gone to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with Amy, seen mechanical wonders at the MIT Museum, willingly suffered through an art history lecture at the Harvard Art Museum, failed to get hired for several jobs, had a picnic tea party with Judith, attended a home harpsichord concert for Reed alumni, met a bunch of Amy and Thomas’s friends at a graduation party, taken the kitties to their cat-doctor appointments, gotten creamed in Scrabble by Rachael’s friend Hank, and watched a batch of baby spiders launch themselves one by one into what for them is a much wider world.

It’s true, I’ve been shy. Much too shy. It’s difficult to make friends and easy to wander around by myself in my own head, or get overtaken by errands and cooking and the miscellany of everyday life. I forget after a while that I need to socialize, for I am easily overwhelmed by too much of it, and then I am too cocooned to want to see people. Rachael is a great help, now that she’s up to going places, but I’ve also taken the initiative by signing up for a one-shot at the local game place, Pandemonium, and organizing get-togethers with Kyle and other of the Gordaniers’ friends and Rachael’s adopted children. This is something that Thomas is much better at, that and going with the flow — it’s one of the many reasons I miss having him around. But not for much longer! Summer approacheth.

2010 05 31 Life Comments (0)

Renn Fayre: The Final Frontier

What else would I spend $300 on besides… Renn Fayre: The Final Frontier? It was calling to me. Amy would be in Cambridge to take care of her mom, JetBlue was having a sale, and the theme was Star Trek. The hullabaloo about the Portland police going undercover in the hopes of busting open the drug scene ended up reddening their cheeks when Reedies were found not to be tripping so much as geeking the heck out. When Fox News ‘coptered themselves over campus Saturday morning, the Picters flipped them the bird and arranged their naked, blue butts to spell out messages. Meanwhile the local public television folks were having a blast, tagging along for an impromptu fake campus tour (“And then the Kerr Marmot pushed the Doyle Owl off the roof and fed him his children on a platter. And if you come to Reed, you’ll get the reference!”) and filming our cut-throat game of Swedish lawn bowling (in which I mercilessly threw my baton as Thomas, on the opposing team, taunted me with dove eyes, and it hit him instead of the kube I was trying to knock over).

Thesis Parade was a parade of science fiction. A sea of sparkly aliens, Red Shirts, a complete cast of Star Wars characters (including an AT-AT!), Star Fleet officers from every star date, and a handful of Doctor Who’s. Thomas and I didn’t get into full costumes until Saturday, when we went as Simon and Kaylee from Firefly — sadly, we had no Mal, only a chamagne-disheveled Wash, someone who accidently looked like River, and half of a Two-by-Two-Hands-of-Blue. But my, did my handsome-one look super-dashing in his vest and nose-perched shades!

When Thesis Parade lost its momentum and flooded the front lawn, and the Chunk Tower fell — my first time observing its fall! –, and it was getting chilly for the masses who were soaked with alcohol inside and out, my friends gathered in the hallowed halls of Tir na nOg to watch the new Star Trek movie. What could be more festive?

Unfortunately, being on East Coast time, I woke up bright and early the next morning and dragged Thomas out of bed with me. There had been hearty approval of my plan to meet at the food carts for brunch when I proposed it the night before! But no one was up — no even the food cart folks. Instead we wandered around a quiet campus, and settled in White Lodge for a nap in its twinkle-light-lit, pillow-filled womb.

And then we met everyone for brunch. And then, because the Tesla Coil was broken, we got in line for lunch. The Feast is always a stupendous event, and even the line is exciting as you talk with gathering friends and munch on the strawberries and ganache they bring by. My only objection is that a huge feature is Meat Smoke, a group of well-meaing folks who set up (what would otherwise be awesome) Pirate Camp on the far side of campus, and cook god-knows how many animals for the ravenous hordes. They bring out a whole pig, its body tied to its spit, and then cut it and serve slabs of flesh on a platter adorned with the poor thing’s head. It’s gross to see people slobbering over the stuff and shoving platefuls in their faces. (Very Lord of the Flies.) Yet I was not the only one veering away from the tables of carnage, and the vegetarian line got ahold of such delicacies as homemade bagels and hummus, roasted pear salad, too much berry cobbler, and those viral kale chips.

The event of the evening was quite possibly the best fireworks show yet. They did a whole scene of my favorite purple fireworks with white sparklers, and a whole act was performed to Carl Sagan remix music. Afterwards we hung out in Black Lodge for their Classical Hour, featuring such wonders as The Planets and Night on Bald Mountain. Unfortunately I didn’t get myself dancing until Sunday, but I then filled my quota to overflowing by moving continuously to March Fourth’s entire set. Their trumpets don’t let up, their clowns-on-stilts don’t let up, their energy just keeps electrifying the air and compelling me to dance!

Actually, that wasn’t the first time I danced on Sunday. My friends surprised me by meeting me for my 5 AM shift at the Peanut Butter and Sorry-We’re-Out-Of-Jelly Station, and the next four hours sailed by along a happy breeze, including such highlights as chatting with one senior about his studies in Egypt, and swing-dancing with Kellyn. I was so happy to smile as “customers” filed in, mostly people who stayed up all night and were ready for freshly brewed coffee, warm popcorn, oreos, and the eponymous peanut butter. Maybe I would enjoy running a cafe someday!

In the end, even my early-bird bones can’t deal with this mad schedule without faltering. I ended my shift and went for a nap in the MLLL, comic book by my side. It was enough sleep to get me jumping up and down for the end of the Math vs. Chem softball game, though! Poor Math kept winning, despite my enjoyment of it, causing them to miss the Feast and then to wake up early. Their streak ran out when Max tore his tendon in the next game, sliding into home base and immediately requesting a beer. Suffice to say they didn’t play well after that.

The day ended with a massive number of people eating dinner at the Delta, and a small number proceeding on to Gavin’s for a showing of The Last Star Fighter. I vaguely remember it from my childhood, yet its campiness charmed us all — and nothing quite as much as dear Beta. As with Renn Fayre, as Thomas said, any of its shortcomings can be forgiven in light of its geekiness. I tried to figure out if it was going to be worth the money to fly across the country for a long weekend, but they say money makes us happiest when it’s spent on experiences. And no purchased object would be as precious as the time I just spent with friends and family. And no means but flying can take me where NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE!

2010 05 06 Life Comments (0)

Sarah Gets a Super Hero Cape

Here’s an entry into the bright-side-of-life journal: Rachael broke her leg in a skiing accident last weekend — a bad break that required full-anaesthesia surgery and twelve weeks’ recovery. Yet it broke below the knee, at the end of the skiing season, and at precisely the time I happen to be around! I don’t believe in fate, but it’s darned lucky that I can play nurse. Lucky for both of us, really: the showering of gratitude from friends and family members, the feelings of responsibility and adulthood, the perfect excuse to play in the kitchen, and having a Buffy-watching companion, are all great balms for twenty-something-itis.

Before Rachael got home, we celebrated Joan’s birthday with sesame snap cookies — perfect for the woman who sees the ravaging effects of bad lifestyle choices every day as a nurse, and chooses to avoid processed and refined foods like the plague they are — and a rather Italian-seasoned tempeh stir-fry that I didn’t know I was making until I showed up. Joan reminds me of a hummingbird, beautiful and poised and high-energy. Her sister-in-law, Carol, is equally a ball of happy energy, but with a silly ease that cares not what others think. Their husbands, Rachael’s brothers Allyn and Gib, are mellow counterpoints to their partners, grounded and chill. Though, as I’m fast learning, all the Dorr siblings will talk your ears off if you give them half a chance, long and strolling ballads of life.

I woke up Wednesday morning, the day of Rachael’s homecoming, ready to organize the moving of her bed downstairs, and the resulting cascade of furniture finagling. I thought there would be brothers, band members, someone with half an iota of upper-body strength. Shows what I know: Scott woke up and admitted it was just us two. Could we do it…? After an hour of pondering, scootching, pushing, and wishing Rachael didn’t have a mechanical frickin’ bed, the answer was: Heck YES!

Now I have a captive audience for my delicious concoctions: fluffy warm slices of whole-wheat no-knead bread topped with scallion-sunflower pesto or lentil-walnut pate, rosemary beet and red lentil soup, lemon-tahini kale chips, and a fantastic seat-of-my-pants salad with massaged kale, apple, celery, scallions, almonds, dried cranberries, and umi plum vinaigrette. Not only that, but Rachael has coached me to making a top-notch espresso. My culinary skills know no bounds! (Except, of course, for animal products — Gavin and his girlfriend Amy are staying the week, and the meat they left marinating in the fridge this morning caught me off-guard and left me nauseated. I could barely bring myself to pick up eggs for Rachael last week. Oy, I’m getting worse, aren’t I?)

The glass is half full. Or perhaps the espresso mug. Because otherwise it would be too strong, right?

2010 04 18 Life Comments (0)

Folding Up Spring

I am practicing at being a crazy cat lady. Except that in my case, the cats are driving me crazy: Molly, the old matriarch, yowls loudly outside my door at all hours of the night and wee morning — and when I let her in, she yowls loudly into my face. Anyone know Feline for “I’m now have perpetual circles under my eyes and I don’t want to pet you right now?” Then there are the carpenter ants that are doing a survey of the kitchen and making forays up my legs. I suppose the good thing is that I’m not alone, even though Rachael is skiing in Montana and Scott, a member of Morgan’s band, is away at work all day.

So I spend my time reading, walking to the library, running down the red brick sidewalks of Harvard Street, checking off recipes from my ever-lengthening list, eating the delicious products of that task, practicing the ocarina like a mad songbird, and constructing polyhedrons out of origami. Also writing limericks for job applications. Seriously! Not only was my mind blown by finding actual “Help Wanted” signs posted here and there around town, there was one posted outside of Berry Line — god of the frozen yogurt and, since I’m vegan, the “can I just have the toppings?” cups. They wanted me to email them a resume and an autobiographical paragraph, and knowing them to be a hip bunch, I figured they’d appreciate a little something to set myself apart from the crowd. Clearly cleverness and originality are key skills in the food service industry!

Fortunately I have not been devoid of human companionship, either. While Thomas was here during his spring break I got to hang out with his friends, and now I get to hang out with his family. His cousin Rebecca and her partner Larry and their new puppy Wally invited myself and Ethan, Rebecca’s brother, to their awesome artist’s loft for dinner and a movie. Rebecca is a fanatic for fresh, whole foods — a kindred spirit — and she made a fantastic tempeh and squash chili. Then Larry showed me around their apartment, complete with a staircase made of salvaged dorm furniture, and his studio down the hall — a hall lined with other artists’ sculptures and paintings and projects — where he makes films for fun and profit. He is a great lover of Lovecraft, and has plenty of eldritch props lying around. When their friends Alison and Mike showed up, we rolled down the huge projector screen and watched my first Wes Anderson film, The Fantastic Mr Fox. It was a good time all around!

On Easter, I was adopted by Joan — Rachael’s sister-in-law — and her husband Allyn and their daughter Ashley (their son Morgan was off in Maryland with the band). We walked to Harvard Square in the effusive sunshine, dined outside at Grendel’s, and then made an excursion to Mt Auburn Cemetery. Appropriate for Easter Sunday, no? Well, more appropriate than reading ST’s God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong, anyway. Being the first landscaped cemetery — a park turned to less frivolous activities, really — and populated by the most upstanding New England surnames, we spent more time reading the names attached to the trees than engraved on the stones. Ashley loved the Weeping Beech — as in, “stop crying, you weeping beech!” — and Joan was rocking the Flaximus americana. We also saw a little tortoise and a big blue heron and the fancy-pants mausoleum of the founder of the Christian Scientists. Later I tried not to lie to Angela, the angry Brazilian cleaning lady, about not having gone to church, but perhaps a graveyard counts for something.

Now excuse me while I take a cat-free nap.

2010 04 07 Life Comments (0)

Weird Poetry to Read Aloud

Modern poetry just doesn’t have that read-aloud musical quality to it. It covers the page like a sketch, with rhythm and rhyme replaced by whitespace and unsettling juxtapositions. Needless to say, not my cup of joe — I’m more of an old-fashioned tea person. In fact, after I graduated from Shel Silverstein and my still-memorized third-grade poem, “Peanut Butter Shampoo,” I thought I just didn’t like poetry. But, just as my lovely Thomas introduced me to cooked vegetables, his love of Robert Service has infected me too.

Robert Service wrote a lot of war poetry, which is off-topic for me expect for the brilliant and undecipherably-Scottish “Haggis of Private McPhee,” and also cowboy poetry that my Uncle Mike tried to get me excited about way back when. But he also has Weird poetry — as in the genre somewhere between Horror, Fantasy, and Magical Realism, and mostly known only by fans of Lovecraft — set in the Alaskan wilderness. There is “The Ballad of the Black Fox Skin,” about a demonic fox who torments a hunter and then sparks a jealous rage in all who seek its glossy pelt; and the tale of the geas brought about by a friend’s dying wish in “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” These are wild adventures that are wicked fun to read aloud.

We traded poets with S T, actually, when he was looking for examples of Weird poetry. We pointed him to Robert Service, and he pointed us to Clark Ashton Smith. Smith writes like Extract of Lovecraft, combining the most fantastical imagery with the most obscure verbosity imaginable. The glossary in The Last Oblivion — yes, they had to include a glossary in a book of poetry — doesn’t even capture it all. But because this is poetry, the sounds of the words does as much justice as their meaning. The rhyming schemes are not at all cloying, and instead lull you into the imagery to build up to a cosmic awe that recalls the dizzying vastness of staring into a cloudless night sky and feeling at once infinite and infinitely insignificant.

Check this out (from “The Hashish Eater”):

[...] Things
Whose lightless length would mete the gyre of moons–
Born from the caverns of a dying sun
Uncoil to the very zenith, half-disclosed
From gulfs below the horizon; octopi
Like blazing moons with countless arms of fire,
Climb from the seas of ever-surging flame
That roll and roar through planets unconsumed,
Beating on coasts of unknown metals; beasts
That range the mighty worlds of Alioth rise,
Afforesting the heavens with mulitudinous horns
Amid whose maze the winds are lost; and borne
On cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras,
The shell-wrought towers of ocean-witches loom [...]

Some of his work reminds me of the Lotus Sutra, being a less horrific and more resplendent view of the universe. For example, “The Motes:”

I saw a universe today:
Through a disclosing bar of light
The motes were whirled in gleaming flight
That briefly dawned and sank away.

Each had its swift and tiny noon;
In orbit-streams I marked them flit,
Successively revealed and flit.
The sunlight paled and shifted soon.

It’s the swirling dust in the shafts of afternoon sunlight, the million specks each home to a billion Who’s. This is good stuff, I’m telling you! Best of all, his work is available online, so there’s no excuse not to start liking poetry and embracing the ancient art of the oral epic. These are stories with metre, not just paintings with words.

2010 03 31 Life Comments (0)