Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

I used to cry a lot, like a really really lot.  For large periods of my life, I cried at least once a day.  I'm not going to get into specifics about what times of my life were the "worst" since what was going on in my life wasn't responsible for the tears.  It was like I was a cup that was full of water and any little thing would just make me overflow, and the only way I knew to deal with things was to cry.  Difficult conversations with people would start the waterworks, and I'd keep talking, since I thought that was just my reaction to any kind of emotional stress and just try to convince whoever I was talking to that that particular conversation wasn't responsible.  And I was right.  I wasn't crying about that little conversation, I was crying about all of it.  It took a divorce (accepting that I could be imperfect and still loved), Nicaragua (learning that I could make things happen when I really wanted), and my mom's death (finally dealing with ma...

I've been volunteering at Reading For the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D) for a few months now, and I love it.  I felt crummy last Monday, so I didn't go and I went this past Saturday, and then again tonight.  Even with everything else going on, I love my time there. I get to read interesting things - Saturday it was an anthology of modern African literature, and then tonight it was a book about skepticism and Christianity.  And I love the singularity of purpose that it entails.  I love going into that little booth, cellphone on silent, with one thing to do.  No emails popping up, no boss on the phone, just one thing. Short but sweet, and there it is. Back to NaNoWriMo.

My awareness of pop culture has clearly fallen off because I heard "Love the Way You Lie" for the first time on Friday (thank you Jimmy Fallon), and I really liked it.  Then another friend posted the video and I loved that, too.  Before Googling, and getting the answer from the internet, I thought about watching Rihanna & Eminem singing a song about a violent relationship, and well, I have thoughts. Before these thoughts, a disclaimer:  I've never been in a physically violent relationship.  I watched my parents, whose relationship was emotionally violent and on rare occasions physically violent.  I would characterize our childhood home as emotionally abusive, both to adults and us kids.  As an adult, I've been in one relationship that was extremely passionate, both in good times and bad.  It was the kind of relationship I could imagine easily devolving, and it scared me.  When I watched this video, that's the relationship I thought of. ...

Bill Ayers has been a teacher at U of Illinois since 1987, and Christopher Kennedy just urged the university board to reject his emeritus status because he intends to "vote against conferring the honorific title of our university to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy. There can be no place in a democracy to celebrate political assassinations or to honor those who do so." The professor already has the vote of confidence of the university by being hired there in the first place.  I guess I had a little more belief in Camelot than I thought because I'm really disappointed to see this from a Kennedy. When Emeritus Isn't Automatic from Inside Higher Ed

I got some goodies lately. Story in 12 words, courtesy of Australia. From someone else in the US.  I love it! Who even knows the national symbol of Singapore is a Merlion??

I'm having an emotionally strange day in which I feel like there are two very distinct versions of me.  First, there's the me that's feeling uncaccountably sad.  Contributing factors:     I'm single.  I maybe could go out with someone, but I'm not emotionally ready to do that and even if I was, I don't think this person would be a good fit for me.  I refuse to date or fall in love with anyone else who isn't good enough for me, or just plain isn't good to me.  I foresee being single for a while.  Even people with convictions get lonely.     I recently hung out with the person who I could probably date.  I've tried to be clear about that not happening, but I worry that it's not, so I'm a little uncomfortable all the time, and instead of it being a good time, it just makes me sad because I know this person is lonely too, and I don't want to contribute to that.     A friend from middle school just posted al...

I've been randomly picking things off my Netflix instant queue, added at some time or another because it was on a list or some blog I read commented on it.  It is an odd assortment of films that don't really seem to follow any rhyme or reason.  Hence, in the middle of this beautiful almost fall day, I ended up watching Blue Velvet . My fiction class last semester, Monsieur Woody Jones , and this random dart Netflixing have somehow added up to a recent introduction to film noire, a genre I really haven't enjoyed previously.  I'm not sure I'd say I enjoy it now, but I have been intrigued by the portrayal of women in these films.  Blue Velvet was released in 1986, and I'll admit I don't know much about the film history of that period.  Older classics and modern films I'm pretty familiar with, but in general I seemed to have skipped over much of the 80s. Because I don't know much about film from the 80s, I don't know much about how women were com...

Today via email, for the first time, I was referred to as David's "assistant."  Yes, I know that my title is Research Assistant, but my business card title is Project Manager.  And I do research and work for the center, and yes, I suppose I assist David.  I have met and come to rely on a number of assistants, administrative and otherwise, in the past couple weeks.  They are some of the hardest working people here, and I deeply respect what they do and how underappreciated they are.  And yet, today, I felt my entire body stiffen.  My parents did not raise me to be someone else's assistant. I think this just hit me at a vulnerable time.  I've been watching my boss carefully lately.  He's fairly young to have the amount of academic responsibility he has, and I'm going to soak it all up like a sponge.  I'm also going to learn about university finances and I'm sure one day that will come in handy too.  And in the past couple years...

Joe Purdy is inducing melancholia today, the kind that comes on quiet afternoons when I'm alone here.  Today I realized I've been here long enough that I needed to dust the bookshelves.  In my mind, and occasionally in conversation, I still refer to Columbia as home.  I'm settling here, but it still doesn't feel like home.  It feels like this house is home, but it's just in a neighborhood that's very far from the town I live in. It's been a whirlwind few weeks.  My job officially started, and I'm learning all about how university finances work.  It's a lot of stuff I never thought I'd know or even need to know, about how grant funds work, how hard it is sometimes to just buy a stapler, and how many different kinds of funds there are and what you can and cannot do with each one.  It turns out to all be distressingly complicated.  It's my job though now, and I knew that coming here.  On the bright side, I like knowing how things work, and I...

Snow by George Bilgere A heavy snow, and men my age   all over the city are having heart attacks in their driveways, dropping their nice new shovels   with the ergonomic handles that finally did them no good. Gray-headed men who meant no harm,   who abided by the rules and worked hard for modest rewards, are slipping softly from their mortgages,   falling out of their marriages. How gracefully they swoon— that lovely, old-fashioned word—   from dinner parties, grandkids, vacations in Florida. They should have known better   than to shovel snow at their age. If only they'd heeded the sensible advice of their wives   and hired a snow-removal service. But there's more to life than merely being sensible. Sometimes   a man must take up his shovel and head out alone into the snow. from the Writer's Almanac

This week has been a terror.  One thing after another going dismally and me spinning my wheels, trying to get somewhere where I may not even be wanted.  There has been some upheaval at work and the state of Virginia seems dead set against letting me get a driver's license.  I keep telling myself that in a couple months, none of these problems will even exist, and worrying about them is just an additional waste of my time. Today at the UU, the theme was productive anticipation: looking forward to something, but being an active participant in that process.  So rather than just battening down the hatches in light of everything that's been happening and just waiting on things to settle down, it made me realize I also need to be doing everything I can do to make sure I'm going to land on my feet when the earth stops moving.  It helped me reset some of my expectations, both for my situation, and for myself. All this prompted me to think about why I even go there i...

On my drive back up from SC this last time, I was listening to old CDs, and Virtute the Cat Explains her Departure came up in the rotation.  I adore that song, but it makes me cry every single time.  It is sad and beautiful and deep somehow.  I believe the word I'm looking for is pathos , a word that gets a bad rap these days.  I think it's actually a pretty great word, a useful word to describe an essential part of the human experience.   Pathos  is defined as a quality that arouses compassion, pity, or sorrow.  When I think about pathos , I think most about sorrow, the kind of sorrow that's universal.  Same root as empathy, sympathy, apathy, and pathetic.  I wish pathetic had retained more of its original meaning of being moving, stirring, or affecting.  I need a word that means that without sounding well, pathetic, because I feel this all the time.  I enjoy feeling this (in balance with other things), but I especially love wh...

I actually made it to the UU (Unitarian Universalist) 10 AM service this morning.  That would be miraculous for me on a Sunday, except that I spent this Friday and Saturday nights rather quietly. Anyway, I'm not about pimping any particular religion, which is why I like the UUs.  The fellowship seems really active here, and I'm looking forward to getting involved.  I may even become a member here.  I don't really have an organized post on this, just a few things I want to share. I can't find anything I disagree with in the 7 UU principles: The inherent worth and dignity of every person; Justice, equity and compassion in human relations; Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; A free and responsible search for truth and meaning; The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregation and in society at large; The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; Resp...

Pictures of the modern houses:

I've been here a good solid week, and I think my first impressions are solidifying.  I admit there's space for change, but they're first  impressions, so here's some stuff I like. 1. Parks (not particularly Rec) - Cville has great parks and public pools, and lots of them.  They're building and Aquatic and Fitness Center that's set to open this fall, and I hope the membership prices are reasonable (please see the upcoming post on The Bad).  There are 2 parks within walking distance of our house, one that has a pool and another with walking trails along the river . 2. Randomness - This town is a crazy hodge podge of neighborhoods and commercial stuff.  It's a true college town with the university bleeding all over the place and most people in some way affiliated with The Grape, as I have taken to calling it.  Belmont has houses everywhere, and then a corner with 3 restaurants (including Belmont BBQ) and a little store.  Near our house, it looks l...

I was telling crazy family stories the other day, and I decided to start putting them up there, randomly, as they occur to me in little bits and pieces.  My sister lived with my parents for a lot longer than I did, so it's highly likely that she knows more info about this stuff.  Because I'm intrigued by the way family stories change as they get passed around, I'm going to post my version, ask my sister for her input, and then add any revisions.  Please accept that many of these stories are things I learned when I was a kid, and so I make no claims to historical accuracy.  Names will occasionally be changed to protect the less than innocent. So, first story: at some point in my mother's youth, she was engaged to a lion tamer.  I have no idea when this happened, if it was before or after my half-sister, if she really meant to marry the guy or if it was some kind of lark.  They didn't get married, but I don't know why.  The only evidence I have for the...

Well, I live here now: It’s a nice house, and I’ve settled in about as well as I can until I get an infusion of cash from my gainful employment, which isn’t feeling particularly gainful right now…   As evidence of my ability to set up house in a new place, I present to you my living room: That little painting in the corner to the left is from Australia and was a gift from my undergraduate research advisor.   The female figure with the shock of red hair is a Dre Lopez original.   I wish I could say it was me, but alas, it’s not.   The small print to the left of it was a gift from Mr. Sammy Lopez.   And that square urn on top of the left bookshelf – well, that’s my momma.   To all the Dominion Power customer service reps who I know are reading this, please take note of the bookshelves full of books, and the lack of television.   I haven’t felt any overwhelming urges to kill myself yet due to boredom, so I think I’m probably doing okay. I also have...

Other than that, I really enjoyed Maarten Troost's (MT for short) The Sex Lives of Cannibals , a story of life in the equatorial Pacific.  He and his not-quite-yet-wife Sylvia lived on South Tarawa in Kiribatis (pronounced Ki-ree-bas) for two years while she worked for an international aid organization and he maintained a long-term flirtation with the idea of writing a novel.  While he failed at fiction, I'm pleased that he was more successful at writing an accurate yet entertaining account of their life in a place he learned to love. MT's prose is lively, conversational, and it's impossible to become bored with the book, as each chapter is almost a stand alone short story that can be devoured in little chunks.  Most chapters revolve around unique events or experiences, but what ties them all together is MT's personal narrative.  We see him change from an innocent I-Matang  (foreigner) who packs sweaters for a tropical island to someone who takes it for g...

The first of many topics to be expounded upon from the Recon Success! post. So Thursday, less than half an hour after arriving in Charlottesville, we were hit with a what is known in the meteorological world as a wet microburst .  This picture from the Wikipedia page pretty much sums it up: Imagine you are standing in the middle of this. It's an intense downward wind focused in an area of less than 4 sq km.  Basically it was sunny, and within about 2 minutes there was horizontal rain, hail, and wind strong enough to pull full grown trees up by the roots.  It was over in a matter of minutes.  Power was out in half the town, roads were blocked all over, and this morning I had to carefully drive under the edge of a drooping powerline to get out of the neighborhood I was staying in.  For the safety of all involved it was festooned with streamers of bright yellow caution tape. This afternoon there were still about 3700 people without power , and that's after...

Thursday morning I set out for Charlottesville bright and early-ish, and just got back about 45 minutes ago (it's Saturday).  I'm zonked. A recap of things that may or may not get follow-up posts as time and inclination allow: Charlottesville has microbursts.  I got there just in time for one.  It was scary. I signed a lease on a house!! The house is within 2 blocks of a regular park, a crazy water park thing, and a farmer's market. UVA was beautiful but kind of intimidating.  Dominion Southern Power and the municipal forces of Charlottesville really impressed me. Did I mention microbursts are scary? Charlottesville has 2 independent weeklies, tons of great restaurants, and booming music, arts, and literary scenes.  I'm sure I will be overcommitted a week after arriving there.  The drive isn't terrible, although getting out and taking a long lunch break is a necessity.  I already programmed my new favorite Charlottesville radio station in m...

This is the summer of Operation Fresh Start, and all I can say is, it's about damned time. At the end of July, I'm moving to Virginia. This wasn't an easy decision, as my family is here, my friends are here, and as much as people hate it, I like Columbia, *gasp*. But there's a great job there, good music, foothills, and of course, the fresh start. Columbia and I have been dancing around each other for 10 years now. I went to college here(twice), got married and divorced here, taught at 3 different venerable institutions, and lived in 5 different neighborhoods. My group of friends has changed, from undergrad to grad, from married to single, and pre and post Nicaragua. There are times I have loved my life here, and times I have hated it. These were the best of times. These were the worst of times. I think though, that it might be time to have my best and worst times somewhere else. The hope for a fresh start is always that what lies ahead is better than wha...

In the grand tradition of narcissistic 20-something bloggers (I've got one more year to use that title, so I'm doing it), I am going to blab about something deeply personal that is frustrating the hell out of me. Two Fridays ago, I hated myself more than anyone else on the planet.  I had some stuff going on, and it was one of those things where how I was feeling was embarrassing and would have been difficult to explain, but like 90% of my bad days, it was relationship related.  The self-loathing part is when I hate myself for feeling that way.  I hate that I'm so weak as to feel something that would be impossible to say out loud to even my closest friends.  I hate having emotions that, were I to see them in someone else, would make me deeply dislike that person.  Much like everything else emotionally, I am coming to recognize that these days happen, and they pass, and I just have to wait a little while to feel like myself again.  However, despite the ra...

For those of you that read this occasionally / regularly, would you mind giving me writing feedback?  I am consciously working on trying to become a better writer.  This means everything from spelling and grammar to writing style.  I moderate the comments, so if you write something there, I'll see it and then have to the option to publish or not, so feel free to be brutal in your feedback.  It would be greatly appreciated.

Imagine walking through a sea of distracted engineers, free to ogle as your heart desires.  I know, this is only appealing to a certain demographic of nerd, but whatever.  How did I get this privilege? Last Friday I proctored the morning session of the Principles and Practice in Engineering Exam at the Jamil Temple. How did I get involved in this?  A friend told me about it, and it paid $13 an hour to walk around and minimize your yawn volume. The space is basically an enormous high school gymnasium filled with row upon row of folding tables and chairs.  We had 251 people signed up to take the 8 hour test (2 sessions or 4 hours each).  It consists of practical problems and it's open-book, so the engineers lined up at the door a little before 7 were trailing behind them any and all types of item conveyance, from bins of books on dollies to actual suitcases that I myself would fit into were I folded properly.  There was even a guy with a small rolling books...

Jessica sent me this poem a long time ago, and I keep it by my bed.  I feel like it's a promise I make to myself every day in Derek Walcott's words. The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

I met my new therapist last week.  I test drove a few, and she was the one that stuck.  She seems like she's not going to let me get by with any bullshit, and she said a couple of things that zinged me in our very first meeting.  That was unexpected, delightful, and now, with time to think about it, terrifying. I've been doing so much soul searching lately, so much careful consideration of my life and where I am - you'd think I'd be finding myself, but instead I feel so completely lost.  A few reasons: 1. I sabotage relationships in a really predictable way.  I had always thought of this behavior in one way, but with one sentence, this woman last week made me question everything I thought about that.  It's good to question it; it's what I wanted, but to be confronted so quickly by something that I had never considered is frightening.  I've spent so much time trying to figure this stuff out, and it turns out that I've been so completely wrong about ...

Just after I wrote that stuff yesterday about how we wouldn't think Liz Lemon was as funny if Tina Fey herself were single, I run across a series of other posts from some of my favorite blogs about how Liz Lemon is not, as the series tries to pretend she is, ugly. "Liz Lemmoning": Isn't it time we all admit that Tina Fey is conventionally attractive? - From Jezebel.  They also mention Laney Boggs in this post, which is one of my all time pet peeves.  Give her glasses.  Yep, now she's ugly. Pretty ugly: Can we please stop pretending that beautiful women aren't beautiful? - From feministing.com

I've been thinking a lot about age lately, probably due to the unfortunate approach of my birthday. I think a large part of mulling this over so much is not about my actual age, but rather who and how I thought I'd be by the time I was this age. I had expectations, and those haven't exactly panned out. That's not actually a bad thing, as other good things have happened that I never could have predicted, but either way, I've been thinking it over a lot. And two recent observations have prompted further consideration: 1. I've been watching a lot of 30 Rock, as I am wont to do, and Liz's most recent lady problem is about her "Future Husband" for whom she has an entry in her phone contacts after oral surgery. Turns out his name is Wesley Snipes, a British fellow, and they hate each other. But no matter how much they try to escape this non-relationship, they keep meeting in unusual ways. Wesley decides that it's the universe's way of tell...

A friend of mine wrote on her Twitter that "do not engage" applied to many areas of her life, and she said it like it was a bad thing, but I honestly think that it might be some of the best wisdom I've heard in a while. Another very smart friend of mine also recently pointed out to me that sometimes not doing anything is about the best thing I can do. You see, someone told me on Friday that I am high strung. Really, me? High strung. Nah. This actually struck me as funny because I'm pretty sure it's a fact that everyone already knows. I think it goes along with how hard I push people and why my expectations are so high. I have similar expectations for myself, and I push myself even harder than anyone else. If that's what it means to be high strung, I guess I'm okay with that. However, sometimes it means that I push myself to make progress faster than I should. Stopping, not pushing myself to do something before I'm ready might be a really sma...

I am becoming an embittered, snobbish bitch, and I find that as I age, I don't really care so much. Optimism should be reserved for the girls in their early 20s that my ex-boyfriends date immediately after they break up with me. I am, at present, trying to transfer some of my feelings about family and relationships to my friends. I have a lot of great adult friends, and their inherent greatness was made evident to me yet again this Saturday in my fiction class. This is also how I know I'm a huge snob. My fiction class is a mixed bag of people because it's a Saturday "evening" class. There are other adults with full-time jobs, as well as regular students. It's an odd assortment, and I think that can be a good thing. It can also, at times, be quite painful. The level of discourse isn't always exactly what I would hope for. In order that I may not seem like a complete ass, I have compiled a list of things that people have never heard of: waiting for...

I just finished Ghost Town by Robert Coover last night for my class at 9 AM this morning. This is because I hated it. I started reading it on Monday, and every two pages, I'd make a grumpy face and put it down again. It jumps all over the place, trying to parody every single wild west stereotype. It does a pretty good job of addressing them at least: prostitute & schoolmarm (whore & virgin), sheriffs & interchangeable deputies, train robberies, cattle and accompanying rustlers, a rattlesnake in an empty skull, saloons, bar fights, tumbleweeds, good guys in white and bad guys in black, a jailbreak. I'm leaving quite a few things out, but trust me, it's all in there. All in 147 spastic, disconnected pages. It was episodic, much like the spaghetti westerns it's meant to parody, and it did have its high points. It's one of those books where I get what he was trying to do, but ultimately I just didn't care. One of the other students in my class p...

I think I figured something out this morning. I'm not saying this applies to me, but I always wondered why people became teachers if they hated kids. I don't think they started that way. I think it's like how guilty I feel when I walk around in front of my dad. If you're a teacher, and you think your life's potential is tapped, and all these pretty young things brimming with possibility are walking around in front of you, it's like they're rubbing it in your face. That seems like it could be bitterness inducing. Good thing I've still got potential oozing from every pore.

Life is not like Sex and the City, or Private Practice, or any other show where people in their late 20's / 30's / 40's are dating for our amusement. It's not fun. It's not glamorous. Relationships do not end with a lesson learned and a glass of wine. Okay, the wine is fairly accurate. The rest of it is crap. We watch those shows because of how inaccurate they are. We'd like to believe that after our latest heartbreak, we will recline in a bubble bath or in front of our computers, marveling at our newfound wisdom and patting ourselves on the back for becoming a more mature person. Let's for a moment apply this entirely artificial paradigm to my life. The basic ingredients are there: single woman in her distressingly late 20s, eligible-ish men, dates, alcohol, occasionally fabulous clothes. Hell, I've even got the klatch of cackling besties to tell me that the latest guy is unworthy of my distress. The basics are here. Things just don't see...

In my Fiction class (which I shall elaborate more on later), we read and discussed Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. I'd never read any Doctorow before, but I am now pretty excited about reading Welcome to Hard Times , the second book for my class... also by Doctorow. This post is just random stuff that I liked about the book, passages that stuck out, questions I still have, etc. It's not organized; it's not a review; I'm just writing here. The novel follows three fictional plotlines: 1) a WASP family named simply Mother, Father, Mother's Younger Brother, and the Boy; 2) a Jewish immigrant family of Tateh, Mameh, and their daughter; 3) an African-American family of Sarah, Coalhouse Walker and their son. Their stories are interwoven with those of numerous historical characters, including Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Booker T. Washington, JP Morgan, Henry Ford, and Harry Houdini. The novel is set in the early 20th century. I think Doctorow does a great job of constructin...

I just had a conversation with my Dad. Well, we tried. He kept saying, "Six, nine, eight, nine." When I'd say the words back to him, he'd smile and nod, like maybe this time I was getting it. When I said I didn't understand, he'd patiently repeat himself, adding with a questioning look, "Six times nine?" We played 20 questions, and I successfully concluded that he didn't need anything; that he wasn't talking about my sister, Keegan, or me; that he had not seen a mouse; that he knew it was raining and that that was completely irrelevant. He finally lost patience, good-naturedly waving his left hand at me as he retreated in his wheelchair back inside his room. I think he just wanted to share something with me, some thought spurred by what he was watching on TV. This is the second time in as many years that I have watched a parent become trapped inside their own bodies, and it's not any easier this time around. With my father, ther...