Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Technical Difficulties
I hit "Publish", somehow, in the middle of the narrative. Just as well. It's a huge chunk, and, well, the rest isn't quite all written yet. So look for the next installment soon!
Ship to Shore
Now that I'm not around these days, I absolutely MUST be better at posting. Having shirked my responsibilities as a blogger through most of the summer, putting up place-holder posts with little to no information, and being more or less off the grid while up north for 3 weeks, I have now attempted to remedy the situation by posting the much-awaited (by some) travelogue of my weeklong circumnavigation of the DelMarVa Peninsula by sail, in its entirety. Hopefully this'll keep everyone busy while I try to chronicle my arrival and the beginning of my adventures in California.
NB: I'm going to skip boring you with my annual vacation to Woods Hole because all I did was work at the bakery and frolic on the beach, and the highlights of my New York trip are thus: I saw Lance Armstrong and Cheryl Crow at Da Silvano in the Village, and Lindsay Lohan at a hole-in-the-wall Japanese ink-painting "school"; I lost precipitously at poker (I, who have been playing since I was old enough to hold my cards up and not shriek with glee at my hand!), and I spent most of the rest of the time seeking air conditioning, because I don't think it went below 80 degrees, day or night, the entire time I was there.
Now that we're all up to speed, let's jump back to June, shall we?
Day .5: Friday
Gordan finally arrives after 2 days of frantic hellish baking--largely successful, although one tube of almost paste was rocklike, the biscuits are a complete wash and I had to hand-feed the food processor with ground chicken and raw eggs like it was some hideous mechanical baby bird. We get to Annapolis in damp pitch-dark and unload all the food. The car smells like a grocery store all the way down and Gordan is fussy about where to put it all for the five-minute trip through the marina to the boat. Silly, I thought, until I saw that the path had a nasty little hill, and that maneuvering a handcart full of fruit (heavy) is NOT easy.
The boat, the Maverick, is smaller than I expected but everything, is of course, cleverly stowed and organized. The main cabin is lovely: amber honey-colored wood with strips of blondwood between the floorboards, lockers all around, a banquette that seats six people, and a tiny but fully stocked galley. The staterooms are fore and aft. The fore cabin is belongs to the captain and his father. It comes to a point at the bow, of course, and it's lined with lockers. The aft cabin is cavelike, with a large overhang two feet into the room. Both cabins are mostly bed with a little storage. We stow our gear along the wall, and I hope it doesn't bash into me in high seas.
We meet Michael, the captain, and Brian, the navigator. It turns out we don't have any dry ice. This is a problem; food goes bad distressingly fast at sea. Maybe we can obtain some tomorrow. The rest of the crew, Otto and John, Michael's father,
arrive and there is a little We sleep on the boat, rocking in a most soothing, safe-harbor/womb way.
Day 1: Saturday
We overslept! It's almost 10 AM when we emerge, groggily, from the stateroom. It's cloudy and calm, so we motor out and away. The sun peeks through a little bit around the Bay Bridge to be that perfect pearl-clear light I love. Then it clouds over all iron and gray to port and blue to starboard. Gordan and I grill sausages and peppers, and people have been stuffing cookies in their mouths all day. I beam with maternal pride.
There is nothing to do under motor except steer, and even then there's an auto-pilot. After lunch we sit and talk, and Michael gives me a book on sailing for women and some pointers on seasickness and the basics of sailing. I read these over and then spend two or three hours napping in my cabin. No one wakes me up. The stateroom is directly over the motor (actually, parts of it are right in the cabin, behind one of the lockers), and I try not to think about what it's doing to my hearing.
We pull into a marina for fuel and to spend the night. In the restaurant before dinner. John and I discuss Elvis and Japan with gusto while Gordan and Michael slaughter each other in pool. Gordan misses a sucker shot on the 8-ball, but wins the game--barely. The dress code runs heavily to t-shirts, old jeans, comfy shoes, hairspray, and tattoos. After today's effortless trip I begin to wonder if I'll ever learn to sail, or if I'll just read and sleep all the way down the coast. I haven't felt the slightest bit queasy yet, even while reading.
It's 10 PM before we finally sit down to kabocha (a type of Japanese pumpkin-squash), chicken and cornbread. It's a hit. Afterwards we all slob about, cracking jokes and watching John polish off the cranberry-walnut tart that Brian brought and that I had to beg people to eat after my meal. Gordan and I walk under the stars for a while to digest, and sleep comes easy.
Day 2: Sunday
This morning I'm up early to see the morning, misty and moist. We leave the marina and motor up to another one for showers. It's warm enough, even at 9AM, to change into my new bikini, the first I've ever owned. Of course I slather on the sunscreen; I know just how strong sun on the water can be.
The day stays hazy and pale. We try to shake out the sails, but give up after an hour or so. Too bad, because I enjoy the quiet respite from the motor.
Brunch! Nice and greasy, egg bacon and parm paninni with red pepper soup. A frantic search for the St. Andre to top them yielded nothing. Gordan suspects foul play at his office. After lunch, naps and sunburn. We've left the bay and inlets and are in much more open water now. Salem Nuclear Facility is ominously visible and never seems to move.
There seems to some back-and-forth among the crew about where (or if) we will dock for the night. I find the radio chatter frustratingly obscure. I wish I could be instantly knowledgeable, or at least au courant.
Brian and Michael attempt to use the sails again, with some luck. But we hit the midday doldrums and it's back to the motor. I don't mind; I like the speed and the swells, the boat dancing along in wakes, but the noise is stressful. Brian and Otto nap. John and Michael and Gordan jaw on deck. I read the Triangle, Drexel's student newspaper (barely edited: "Commencement" is misspelled in inch-high type above the fold). John untangles his rod and reel and trolls for a while. Gordan and I drowse under the boom until John hollers that he's caught something! He loses it, but we're in the middle of a bluefish feeding convention, and they're flopping everywhere. But who do you think has to teach these boys how to cast and reel, to watch the birds, and even how to kill the fish that we finally manage to hook? Me, that's who. (for the record,my preferred method involves a ball-peen hammer with the fish on a paper bag.)
The fish we've landed is 12 inches, but we have hopes for more. Sadly, though, we only manage the one, despite cutting the engine and drifting in a circle for almost an hour.
All the lazing about results in a late dinner, again. We've decided to stay in Ocean City, MD for the night, so Michael kicks up the motor and requests dinner by dark. It's my turn again, this time with chicken meatball kebabs on a bed of spinach, and bamboo rice. I can barely honor Michael's deadline, because the damn water won't boil. When it's finally served, though, everyone is highly complimentary again, despite the staggered courses and the divided dining topsides and in the cabin.
It has whipped up a little, and I find preparing food in a bobbing galley somewhat nauseating. I pop a Dramamine and a few ginger capsules, which control the collywobbles, but the former knocks me out cold as we motor through the evening. I doze on Gordan's lap on deck and then crawl back below decks to drool on the banqette until we arrive at our slip.
The OC marina is brand-new and large. The pilings are still green the planks still sharp and fresh. The showers are gleaming and expansive but half a mile away. Gordan and I pad along, past hundreds of boats, a cafe, and a spotless fish-cleaning station, to wash off the salt spray and sunblock before bed. Drunk on Dramamine, we drop off immediately,
Day 3: Monday
Apparently, Norfolk can be reached after dark , so we hang around OC for the morning. Michael and I take the dinghy to Assateague Island with Brian and Gordan in kayaks.
Assateague puts me in mind of Sippewissett Beach on Cape Cod. We're at low tide, so the whole beach is mucky and rotten-smelling. Sandpipers scamper up and down the banks, and ospreys and gulls and big, black-capped terns glide over the water, blood-warm and ankle-deep. But best of all, we see the ponies.
A little inland, around a salt pool, is a clump of shaggy brown ponies. A few chestnuts, some odd blondes--not palaminos, but with brown coats and straw-colored manes and tails--and a pinto are grazing, 8 mares and a stallion. I think the pinto is pregnant. They may all be pregnant, or they may just be round-barreled. They are concerned by our presence but not spooked. The stallion plays lookout, swishing his tail and tossing his head to make his harem amble out of our range. Still, they're close enough for great pictures. We also beachcomb for moon snails, live whelks that we chuck back into the water (despite Gordan's musings about how to best prepare them) and many dead ones, razor clams in perfect paired condition, horseshoe crab exoskeletons and one enormous dead skate. I show off my Woods Hole wisdom, quizzing about whelk and skate egg cases and answering all manner of questions. It feels good to have some knowledge to offer in exchange for the mysteries of sailing. Brian is especially inquisitive. He and I fumble with the dinghy all the way back to he Marina--it won't start so we have to row--while Gordan and Michael kayak effortlessly.
After a quick rinse-off, we shove off and organize watches. I am on the 8-12 with Michael, and I'm very relieved. It's easy, not too late at night, and I'm with the most experienced of the crew. However, it's rough and choppy all the way out and threatens storm.
The boys continue to wolf down my cookies as if I had laced them with cocaine, so it's hours before anyone thinks of food and we enjoy Gordan's coconut-ginger-pumpkin soup at the improbable hour of 4:30. I think. I have no watch or clock on this trip, out of both fear of loss or breakage and because I see no need for it. Most pleasant.
Gordan is on at 4-8, and again at 4-8 in the morning so he stays topsides with John and steers, while I head below to nap before I'm on at 8. The boat is pitching and rolling constantly now; serving the soup was an excellent simulation practice should I ever need to serve the homeless while drunk. Of course we're serving the most impractical meal on this, the bumpiest night so far. Fortunately not much is slopped around.
I hate sleeping with the motor on now. The whole cabin shudders and roars. One of the things I failed to bring or buy when ashore, along with soap and lip balms, was earplugs, and I sorely need them now. It's like trying to sleep during a rock concert. But I awaken just before 8, so I must have drifted off sometime.
Gordan arrives to wake me up, dripping and cold, announcing that the foul weather has only worsened, so I pull on all my warm clothes: jeans, socks, wool Navy blouse, fleece and windbreaker. I climb to the deck with apprehension.
He wasn't kidding. It's wild, windy, chill and ROUGH. I stagger to the benches and concentrate very hard on the horizon over the two-foot swells and the crazily seesawing prow. The sunset it pretty, and for a while I enjoy the salty wind and the bumpy pitch that reminds me of Nina's boat. But it begins to get dark and no less rough, and I'm getting nervous. It doesn't help that Brian emerges from the nav station where he's been monitoring the weather and mutters something in Michael's ear while gesturing at a printout. I catch the words "70-mile-an-hour winds", and images of _The Perfect Storm_ creep into my anxious brain.
I sit for four hours in the cold and damp with an occasional blast of spray when the boat hits a wave the wrong way. One thing to be glad of: the seawater on my face is always warm. At 70 degrees, this is not water you die in. If I fall overboard, it won't be hypothermia that gets me.
Brian and Otto on the 12-4 watch come up to keep us company. Brian brings a peppery, succulent salmon jerky he picked up at Trader Joe's. One moment he's digging into the bag as I make appreciative yummy sounds about it. The next, he's flung it across the deck to me and diving for the stern. I can't hear him, but Michael's rueful smile and good-natured thump on the back confirms that acute nausea has come up on him faster than I though possible. I hand over a towel that was used when Gordan lost his pumpkin soup on his watch whilst concentrating too hard on tying something to the boom, and in a minute Brian is back, smiling apologetically and reaching not quite as eagerly for the jerky again.
Michael goes below for something, and I take the helm. The difference between sitting on the side and actually being behind the wheel grows on me quickly. Taking readings every half hour (time, speed, GPS, bearings and windspeed) from the various meters and displays on the console makes me feel like a pro, and maybe this sailing thing isn't so hard or scary after all. The boys and I laugh and talk through the wind, the rocking and the occasional spurt of lightning. Between our companion boat, the _Sales Call_ up front and the land to starboard, I feel safe enough that the panic subsides.
But I'm stiff and cold, and exhausted, though not sleepy, from vigilance. When it's midnight I'm glad to get up, stretch, and head below to sleep. We haven't been staying up late, so far. John turns in soon after dinner, and the rest of us (occasionally aided by Dramamine) shuffle off early too, mindful of the hard work and alertness that days require. I brush teeth, peel off my thick layers, and crawl in. The cabin is dreadfully loud, worse than an airplane. The night is fitful; I am awakened by the the incessant thrumming intend on grinding through my skull. I am lulled by it to the brink of rest and then dragged back. It is by turns supremely disturbing and strangely soothing. I cna't escape it and I don't sleep well.
Day 4: Tuesday
I'm awakened by the announcement that Norfolk is sighted and we will be there soon. Everyone looks cheerful and relieved that the worst is over. The storm has vanished; the new sky is thin, pale blue, already hazy, with a warm wind.
The approach to Norfolk is smooth and calm. There are "warships" in the distance, on either side (apparently, all naval vessels, even the training dinghies, are now being referred to as "warships"). I ask John how this is possible, as we are not, technically, at war with anyone. I expect a lengthy seminar on war in general, the Geneva Convention protocols, the rules of engagement, and the psychological implications of nomenclature as they relate to the power of suggestion, as my father would have launched into, but John just shrugs and says something about Navy boys getting ahead of themselves before turning back to his lines. Ah, vacation. We hear the Navy chatter on the radio and see the amphibious lanches coming out to meet one of the ships to our port side.
We pull into the large marina along with the _Vixen_ and the Sales Call, our companion ships. After we've settled in Gordan and I climb the hill to the guest area to shower and do laundry. The day is shaping up to be hot, and appraising glances are cast at the small swimming pool across the street. We chat with a woman from the _Vixen_ as our clothes dry and learn a little about racing sailboats. I think I'll stick with just sailing for the moment, no finish line necessary.
We head back to the boat to return the clean clothes and change for a swim. Everyone is asleep in the air-conditioned calm, worn out from the night before. Gordan and I splash around in the gorgeously cold water of the otherwise deserted pool. Fearful of the effects of chlorine on hennaed hair, I don't submerge completely, but it's still refreshing. I discover that the cute little belt on my bikini creates so much drag on the bottom half it feels as through it will shear off. It comes off and goes around my head instead. Once we're cooled off the air seems chillier, and the sun has disappeared. Gordan and I go for lunch at the restaurant, which is quietly attended but loudly decorated with flamingoes, leis, floridly painted stuffed fish, and a mannequin torso with shell bra and thick lipstick. I order a bleu cheese burger. Brian joins us; he was trying to catch a cab to the grocery store but missed it, so he kills time with us while awaiting the next one. We finish, Brian catches his cab, and we slip back down to the boat for our own nap.
The evening brings cool air, but also mosquitoes. Gordan sets about making pierogi and heating up his paprikash. I try to play sous-chef but find it difficult, due to the mess generated by 5 guys in a small space for days. The nght's chaos and the long naps have only promoted the entropy. We eat on deck in the hazy evening, savoring the juicy, tender chicken and the spicy broth against thick, satisfying dumplings. Afterwards I bring out the mace cake and strawberries. Even lacking whipped cream, it garners praise, as does the rest of the meal. We make a good cook team, G and I.
Someone else insists on doing the cleanup, as usaual, so Gordan and I lounge on deck, chatting, as people wander below and off the boat. The sun throws out shots of pink and orange into the sky as it sets, and for a few minutes the boats are aglow and the water looks like one big organic oil slick.
Michael has been seized by the desire to watch, of all things, _The Perfect Storm_. Perhaps he finds it reassuring. Or something. In any case, I can only bear to watch up until the part where they decide to head home, so as not to lose their catch to the broken icemaker. It's late, anyway.
Day 5: Wednesday
Morning is as hazy and torpid as yesterday. We motor over to the filling station for fuel, leaving Gordan and Brian to fetch more groceries. We pick them up on the way out (Gordan acts as if we were planning to leave him there). We serve beer and cheddar crackers once we're underway. I feel out of sorts, nauseated and listless all day. Perhaps it's the stress and tire of Monday night catching up to me. I loll, relax, do nothing, but it does no good. I only recover after a nap, when we're pulling into Ackahannock (sp?) Creek. The sun is setting and the sky shows more color than it has all day. The creek is very shallow, so Michael sends Gordan and Brian in the dinghy to take soundings. The keel is 5 feet deep, so we need at least that much to keep from running aground, but some patches of the creek aren't even knee-deep. The guys get good at their job, Gordan plunging his gaff like a Polynesian fisherman spearing things, Brian deftly maneuvering the dinghy. We do run aground once, but Michael says there are only two kinds of sailors: those who have run aground and those who lie about it.
Once we're sure of the passage, Michael brings the dinghy crew back and we breeze up the creek. Perched on the port bow, I can smell the lovely cedar-and-salt scent of the evening, like the bath at a rural Japanese inn, but every few minutes there's a terrible, poopy stench. I was hoping for a swim, either tonight or tomorrow, or both, but not if the water appears to contain E. coli. Disappointment along with a general despair for the state of the Bay take over until John says something about his crab trap. Turns out he's baited it with the rotting remains of the one bluefish we caught on Sunday. Gordan filleted and then forgot about it until it was too late.
NB: I'm going to skip boring you with my annual vacation to Woods Hole because all I did was work at the bakery and frolic on the beach, and the highlights of my New York trip are thus: I saw Lance Armstrong and Cheryl Crow at Da Silvano in the Village, and Lindsay Lohan at a hole-in-the-wall Japanese ink-painting "school"; I lost precipitously at poker (I, who have been playing since I was old enough to hold my cards up and not shriek with glee at my hand!), and I spent most of the rest of the time seeking air conditioning, because I don't think it went below 80 degrees, day or night, the entire time I was there.
Now that we're all up to speed, let's jump back to June, shall we?
Day .5: Friday
Gordan finally arrives after 2 days of frantic hellish baking--largely successful, although one tube of almost paste was rocklike, the biscuits are a complete wash and I had to hand-feed the food processor with ground chicken and raw eggs like it was some hideous mechanical baby bird. We get to Annapolis in damp pitch-dark and unload all the food. The car smells like a grocery store all the way down and Gordan is fussy about where to put it all for the five-minute trip through the marina to the boat. Silly, I thought, until I saw that the path had a nasty little hill, and that maneuvering a handcart full of fruit (heavy) is NOT easy.
The boat, the Maverick, is smaller than I expected but everything, is of course, cleverly stowed and organized. The main cabin is lovely: amber honey-colored wood with strips of blondwood between the floorboards, lockers all around, a banquette that seats six people, and a tiny but fully stocked galley. The staterooms are fore and aft. The fore cabin is belongs to the captain and his father. It comes to a point at the bow, of course, and it's lined with lockers. The aft cabin is cavelike, with a large overhang two feet into the room. Both cabins are mostly bed with a little storage. We stow our gear along the wall, and I hope it doesn't bash into me in high seas.
We meet Michael, the captain, and Brian, the navigator. It turns out we don't have any dry ice. This is a problem; food goes bad distressingly fast at sea. Maybe we can obtain some tomorrow. The rest of the crew, Otto and John, Michael's father,
arrive and there is a little We sleep on the boat, rocking in a most soothing, safe-harbor/womb way.
Day 1: Saturday
We overslept! It's almost 10 AM when we emerge, groggily, from the stateroom. It's cloudy and calm, so we motor out and away. The sun peeks through a little bit around the Bay Bridge to be that perfect pearl-clear light I love. Then it clouds over all iron and gray to port and blue to starboard. Gordan and I grill sausages and peppers, and people have been stuffing cookies in their mouths all day. I beam with maternal pride.
There is nothing to do under motor except steer, and even then there's an auto-pilot. After lunch we sit and talk, and Michael gives me a book on sailing for women and some pointers on seasickness and the basics of sailing. I read these over and then spend two or three hours napping in my cabin. No one wakes me up. The stateroom is directly over the motor (actually, parts of it are right in the cabin, behind one of the lockers), and I try not to think about what it's doing to my hearing.
We pull into a marina for fuel and to spend the night. In the restaurant before dinner. John and I discuss Elvis and Japan with gusto while Gordan and Michael slaughter each other in pool. Gordan misses a sucker shot on the 8-ball, but wins the game--barely. The dress code runs heavily to t-shirts, old jeans, comfy shoes, hairspray, and tattoos. After today's effortless trip I begin to wonder if I'll ever learn to sail, or if I'll just read and sleep all the way down the coast. I haven't felt the slightest bit queasy yet, even while reading.
It's 10 PM before we finally sit down to kabocha (a type of Japanese pumpkin-squash), chicken and cornbread. It's a hit. Afterwards we all slob about, cracking jokes and watching John polish off the cranberry-walnut tart that Brian brought and that I had to beg people to eat after my meal. Gordan and I walk under the stars for a while to digest, and sleep comes easy.
Day 2: Sunday
This morning I'm up early to see the morning, misty and moist. We leave the marina and motor up to another one for showers. It's warm enough, even at 9AM, to change into my new bikini, the first I've ever owned. Of course I slather on the sunscreen; I know just how strong sun on the water can be.
The day stays hazy and pale. We try to shake out the sails, but give up after an hour or so. Too bad, because I enjoy the quiet respite from the motor.
Brunch! Nice and greasy, egg bacon and parm paninni with red pepper soup. A frantic search for the St. Andre to top them yielded nothing. Gordan suspects foul play at his office. After lunch, naps and sunburn. We've left the bay and inlets and are in much more open water now. Salem Nuclear Facility is ominously visible and never seems to move.
There seems to some back-and-forth among the crew about where (or if) we will dock for the night. I find the radio chatter frustratingly obscure. I wish I could be instantly knowledgeable, or at least au courant.
Brian and Michael attempt to use the sails again, with some luck. But we hit the midday doldrums and it's back to the motor. I don't mind; I like the speed and the swells, the boat dancing along in wakes, but the noise is stressful. Brian and Otto nap. John and Michael and Gordan jaw on deck. I read the Triangle, Drexel's student newspaper (barely edited: "Commencement" is misspelled in inch-high type above the fold). John untangles his rod and reel and trolls for a while. Gordan and I drowse under the boom until John hollers that he's caught something! He loses it, but we're in the middle of a bluefish feeding convention, and they're flopping everywhere. But who do you think has to teach these boys how to cast and reel, to watch the birds, and even how to kill the fish that we finally manage to hook? Me, that's who. (for the record,my preferred method involves a ball-peen hammer with the fish on a paper bag.)
The fish we've landed is 12 inches, but we have hopes for more. Sadly, though, we only manage the one, despite cutting the engine and drifting in a circle for almost an hour.
All the lazing about results in a late dinner, again. We've decided to stay in Ocean City, MD for the night, so Michael kicks up the motor and requests dinner by dark. It's my turn again, this time with chicken meatball kebabs on a bed of spinach, and bamboo rice. I can barely honor Michael's deadline, because the damn water won't boil. When it's finally served, though, everyone is highly complimentary again, despite the staggered courses and the divided dining topsides and in the cabin.
It has whipped up a little, and I find preparing food in a bobbing galley somewhat nauseating. I pop a Dramamine and a few ginger capsules, which control the collywobbles, but the former knocks me out cold as we motor through the evening. I doze on Gordan's lap on deck and then crawl back below decks to drool on the banqette until we arrive at our slip.
The OC marina is brand-new and large. The pilings are still green the planks still sharp and fresh. The showers are gleaming and expansive but half a mile away. Gordan and I pad along, past hundreds of boats, a cafe, and a spotless fish-cleaning station, to wash off the salt spray and sunblock before bed. Drunk on Dramamine, we drop off immediately,
Day 3: Monday
Apparently, Norfolk can be reached after dark , so we hang around OC for the morning. Michael and I take the dinghy to Assateague Island with Brian and Gordan in kayaks.
Assateague puts me in mind of Sippewissett Beach on Cape Cod. We're at low tide, so the whole beach is mucky and rotten-smelling. Sandpipers scamper up and down the banks, and ospreys and gulls and big, black-capped terns glide over the water, blood-warm and ankle-deep. But best of all, we see the ponies.
A little inland, around a salt pool, is a clump of shaggy brown ponies. A few chestnuts, some odd blondes--not palaminos, but with brown coats and straw-colored manes and tails--and a pinto are grazing, 8 mares and a stallion. I think the pinto is pregnant. They may all be pregnant, or they may just be round-barreled. They are concerned by our presence but not spooked. The stallion plays lookout, swishing his tail and tossing his head to make his harem amble out of our range. Still, they're close enough for great pictures. We also beachcomb for moon snails, live whelks that we chuck back into the water (despite Gordan's musings about how to best prepare them) and many dead ones, razor clams in perfect paired condition, horseshoe crab exoskeletons and one enormous dead skate. I show off my Woods Hole wisdom, quizzing about whelk and skate egg cases and answering all manner of questions. It feels good to have some knowledge to offer in exchange for the mysteries of sailing. Brian is especially inquisitive. He and I fumble with the dinghy all the way back to he Marina--it won't start so we have to row--while Gordan and Michael kayak effortlessly.
After a quick rinse-off, we shove off and organize watches. I am on the 8-12 with Michael, and I'm very relieved. It's easy, not too late at night, and I'm with the most experienced of the crew. However, it's rough and choppy all the way out and threatens storm.
The boys continue to wolf down my cookies as if I had laced them with cocaine, so it's hours before anyone thinks of food and we enjoy Gordan's coconut-ginger-pumpkin soup at the improbable hour of 4:30. I think. I have no watch or clock on this trip, out of both fear of loss or breakage and because I see no need for it. Most pleasant.
Gordan is on at 4-8, and again at 4-8 in the morning so he stays topsides with John and steers, while I head below to nap before I'm on at 8. The boat is pitching and rolling constantly now; serving the soup was an excellent simulation practice should I ever need to serve the homeless while drunk. Of course we're serving the most impractical meal on this, the bumpiest night so far. Fortunately not much is slopped around.
I hate sleeping with the motor on now. The whole cabin shudders and roars. One of the things I failed to bring or buy when ashore, along with soap and lip balms, was earplugs, and I sorely need them now. It's like trying to sleep during a rock concert. But I awaken just before 8, so I must have drifted off sometime.
Gordan arrives to wake me up, dripping and cold, announcing that the foul weather has only worsened, so I pull on all my warm clothes: jeans, socks, wool Navy blouse, fleece and windbreaker. I climb to the deck with apprehension.
He wasn't kidding. It's wild, windy, chill and ROUGH. I stagger to the benches and concentrate very hard on the horizon over the two-foot swells and the crazily seesawing prow. The sunset it pretty, and for a while I enjoy the salty wind and the bumpy pitch that reminds me of Nina's boat. But it begins to get dark and no less rough, and I'm getting nervous. It doesn't help that Brian emerges from the nav station where he's been monitoring the weather and mutters something in Michael's ear while gesturing at a printout. I catch the words "70-mile-an-hour winds", and images of _The Perfect Storm_ creep into my anxious brain.
I sit for four hours in the cold and damp with an occasional blast of spray when the boat hits a wave the wrong way. One thing to be glad of: the seawater on my face is always warm. At 70 degrees, this is not water you die in. If I fall overboard, it won't be hypothermia that gets me.
Brian and Otto on the 12-4 watch come up to keep us company. Brian brings a peppery, succulent salmon jerky he picked up at Trader Joe's. One moment he's digging into the bag as I make appreciative yummy sounds about it. The next, he's flung it across the deck to me and diving for the stern. I can't hear him, but Michael's rueful smile and good-natured thump on the back confirms that acute nausea has come up on him faster than I though possible. I hand over a towel that was used when Gordan lost his pumpkin soup on his watch whilst concentrating too hard on tying something to the boom, and in a minute Brian is back, smiling apologetically and reaching not quite as eagerly for the jerky again.
Michael goes below for something, and I take the helm. The difference between sitting on the side and actually being behind the wheel grows on me quickly. Taking readings every half hour (time, speed, GPS, bearings and windspeed) from the various meters and displays on the console makes me feel like a pro, and maybe this sailing thing isn't so hard or scary after all. The boys and I laugh and talk through the wind, the rocking and the occasional spurt of lightning. Between our companion boat, the _Sales Call_ up front and the land to starboard, I feel safe enough that the panic subsides.
But I'm stiff and cold, and exhausted, though not sleepy, from vigilance. When it's midnight I'm glad to get up, stretch, and head below to sleep. We haven't been staying up late, so far. John turns in soon after dinner, and the rest of us (occasionally aided by Dramamine) shuffle off early too, mindful of the hard work and alertness that days require. I brush teeth, peel off my thick layers, and crawl in. The cabin is dreadfully loud, worse than an airplane. The night is fitful; I am awakened by the the incessant thrumming intend on grinding through my skull. I am lulled by it to the brink of rest and then dragged back. It is by turns supremely disturbing and strangely soothing. I cna't escape it and I don't sleep well.
Day 4: Tuesday
I'm awakened by the announcement that Norfolk is sighted and we will be there soon. Everyone looks cheerful and relieved that the worst is over. The storm has vanished; the new sky is thin, pale blue, already hazy, with a warm wind.
The approach to Norfolk is smooth and calm. There are "warships" in the distance, on either side (apparently, all naval vessels, even the training dinghies, are now being referred to as "warships"). I ask John how this is possible, as we are not, technically, at war with anyone. I expect a lengthy seminar on war in general, the Geneva Convention protocols, the rules of engagement, and the psychological implications of nomenclature as they relate to the power of suggestion, as my father would have launched into, but John just shrugs and says something about Navy boys getting ahead of themselves before turning back to his lines. Ah, vacation. We hear the Navy chatter on the radio and see the amphibious lanches coming out to meet one of the ships to our port side.
We pull into the large marina along with the _Vixen_ and the Sales Call, our companion ships. After we've settled in Gordan and I climb the hill to the guest area to shower and do laundry. The day is shaping up to be hot, and appraising glances are cast at the small swimming pool across the street. We chat with a woman from the _Vixen_ as our clothes dry and learn a little about racing sailboats. I think I'll stick with just sailing for the moment, no finish line necessary.
We head back to the boat to return the clean clothes and change for a swim. Everyone is asleep in the air-conditioned calm, worn out from the night before. Gordan and I splash around in the gorgeously cold water of the otherwise deserted pool. Fearful of the effects of chlorine on hennaed hair, I don't submerge completely, but it's still refreshing. I discover that the cute little belt on my bikini creates so much drag on the bottom half it feels as through it will shear off. It comes off and goes around my head instead. Once we're cooled off the air seems chillier, and the sun has disappeared. Gordan and I go for lunch at the restaurant, which is quietly attended but loudly decorated with flamingoes, leis, floridly painted stuffed fish, and a mannequin torso with shell bra and thick lipstick. I order a bleu cheese burger. Brian joins us; he was trying to catch a cab to the grocery store but missed it, so he kills time with us while awaiting the next one. We finish, Brian catches his cab, and we slip back down to the boat for our own nap.
The evening brings cool air, but also mosquitoes. Gordan sets about making pierogi and heating up his paprikash. I try to play sous-chef but find it difficult, due to the mess generated by 5 guys in a small space for days. The nght's chaos and the long naps have only promoted the entropy. We eat on deck in the hazy evening, savoring the juicy, tender chicken and the spicy broth against thick, satisfying dumplings. Afterwards I bring out the mace cake and strawberries. Even lacking whipped cream, it garners praise, as does the rest of the meal. We make a good cook team, G and I.
Someone else insists on doing the cleanup, as usaual, so Gordan and I lounge on deck, chatting, as people wander below and off the boat. The sun throws out shots of pink and orange into the sky as it sets, and for a few minutes the boats are aglow and the water looks like one big organic oil slick.
Michael has been seized by the desire to watch, of all things, _The Perfect Storm_. Perhaps he finds it reassuring. Or something. In any case, I can only bear to watch up until the part where they decide to head home, so as not to lose their catch to the broken icemaker. It's late, anyway.
Day 5: Wednesday
Morning is as hazy and torpid as yesterday. We motor over to the filling station for fuel, leaving Gordan and Brian to fetch more groceries. We pick them up on the way out (Gordan acts as if we were planning to leave him there). We serve beer and cheddar crackers once we're underway. I feel out of sorts, nauseated and listless all day. Perhaps it's the stress and tire of Monday night catching up to me. I loll, relax, do nothing, but it does no good. I only recover after a nap, when we're pulling into Ackahannock (sp?) Creek. The sun is setting and the sky shows more color than it has all day. The creek is very shallow, so Michael sends Gordan and Brian in the dinghy to take soundings. The keel is 5 feet deep, so we need at least that much to keep from running aground, but some patches of the creek aren't even knee-deep. The guys get good at their job, Gordan plunging his gaff like a Polynesian fisherman spearing things, Brian deftly maneuvering the dinghy. We do run aground once, but Michael says there are only two kinds of sailors: those who have run aground and those who lie about it.
Once we're sure of the passage, Michael brings the dinghy crew back and we breeze up the creek. Perched on the port bow, I can smell the lovely cedar-and-salt scent of the evening, like the bath at a rural Japanese inn, but every few minutes there's a terrible, poopy stench. I was hoping for a swim, either tonight or tomorrow, or both, but not if the water appears to contain E. coli. Disappointment along with a general despair for the state of the Bay take over until John says something about his crab trap. Turns out he's baited it with the rotting remains of the one bluefish we caught on Sunday. Gordan filleted and then forgot about it until it was too late.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
aaaAAAAAAAAaaaaaand, she does it again...
...waits WEEKS before posting. I just can't explain where the time goes when I *do* have access to a computer (actually, I can: www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal. Thanks a lot, S.I. I can't get anything done anymore, and neither will anyone else, if you try them (try them. They're delightful).
Now I'm in Woods Hole, though, and between shifts at Pie in the Sky, my annual marathon shopping mornings at the various emporia of Falmouth (I know, I know, Tax-a-chussetts, but they have the cutest things!), and of course, slothing at the beach day and night, and no computer at home, I just don't get to tapping at the keyboard like I thought I was going to do all summer. I keep making all these airy promises, but i don't appear to be a woman of my word...
The travelogue of the sailing trip is progressing, but I'd like to have it finished before I put it up. Ditto for some of the poetry. I'm leaving here on Sunday, staying in New York til Wednesday, and arriving home a week from today. My going-away party is that Saturday, so I'll send out E-vites soon!
Salty kisses,
-Ev
Now I'm in Woods Hole, though, and between shifts at Pie in the Sky, my annual marathon shopping mornings at the various emporia of Falmouth (I know, I know, Tax-a-chussetts, but they have the cutest things!), and of course, slothing at the beach day and night, and no computer at home, I just don't get to tapping at the keyboard like I thought I was going to do all summer. I keep making all these airy promises, but i don't appear to be a woman of my word...
The travelogue of the sailing trip is progressing, but I'd like to have it finished before I put it up. Ditto for some of the poetry. I'm leaving here on Sunday, staying in New York til Wednesday, and arriving home a week from today. My going-away party is that Saturday, so I'll send out E-vites soon!
Salty kisses,
-Ev
Friday, July 01, 2005
Sheepish
Oh no! A whole month gone, and I haven't posted in weeks! My loyal readers, I offer my deepest apologies. I will not test your loyalties further.
But I just can't get this trip journal written. Lying around, eating, and watching Ballykissangel are taking up too much time these days, and I'm so used to typing now that my hand cramps with alarming speed and regularity when I try to write these days. Must get back into practice; I have to start taking notes in class again soon!
So I'll try harder, maybe even get it up this weekend. Everyone have a lovely happy 4th free of pyrotechnic-related injuries. If you're going to be at Jeff Feige's party on Monday night (and if you're a friend of mine, you're a friend of hs and therefore invited: he lives on 11th and F Sts near Union station, and it starts at 7), I'll see you there!
Much love,
Your delinquent blogger Ev
P.S. I read my first spoken-word poem at SLAMicide this week, and it was VERY well-received! I'll put some of my work up soon, too.
But I just can't get this trip journal written. Lying around, eating, and watching Ballykissangel are taking up too much time these days, and I'm so used to typing now that my hand cramps with alarming speed and regularity when I try to write these days. Must get back into practice; I have to start taking notes in class again soon!
So I'll try harder, maybe even get it up this weekend. Everyone have a lovely happy 4th free of pyrotechnic-related injuries. If you're going to be at Jeff Feige's party on Monday night (and if you're a friend of mine, you're a friend of hs and therefore invited: he lives on 11th and F Sts near Union station, and it starts at 7), I'll see you there!
Much love,
Your delinquent blogger Ev
P.S. I read my first spoken-word poem at SLAMicide this week, and it was VERY well-received! I'll put some of my work up soon, too.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Suddenly Summer
I go away for a week, and look what happens.
Seriously. I left in cold, soppy rain, after a week of either indifferent clouds or more water-from-the-sky, and more or less leave the area, all to return to this:
The garden has exploded. It's 85 degrees all the time, the house is sweltering, and there are piles of clothes (winter to be put in the attic, and summer to be put in dressers) all over the place, but at least I don't get electric shocks from the car anymore.
I have also completely missed the peonies.
They're my favorite flower, right down to the ants that always seem to be crawling in them. Trust me, if I was an ant or something approximating that size, I'd LIVE for Peony Week.
But I'm too big to curl up into a peony, and they have bloomed and dropped already.
I suppose I can't lament my absence too much; I spent the week aboard the lovely Maverick, a 38-foot sailing yacht, with a crew of surprisingly un-scurvy guys. Now, I'm well acquainted with the ocean, having spent every summer of my life on Cape Cod, and I can pilot a Boston Whaler (a small, open motorboat), but I've never been sailing before, so a week circumnavigating the Delmarva peninsula is akin to chucking oneself in the deep end of a swimming pool after mastering only the dog paddle.
The log of that trip will be blogged soon, as will an account of the wedding I attended yesterday. But for now, I'm just going to enjoy the cool breeze that keeps the mosquitoes away, and the fresh lemonade in the fridge. Suddenly, it's summer.
Seriously. I left in cold, soppy rain, after a week of either indifferent clouds or more water-from-the-sky, and more or less leave the area, all to return to this:
The garden has exploded. It's 85 degrees all the time, the house is sweltering, and there are piles of clothes (winter to be put in the attic, and summer to be put in dressers) all over the place, but at least I don't get electric shocks from the car anymore.
I have also completely missed the peonies.
They're my favorite flower, right down to the ants that always seem to be crawling in them. Trust me, if I was an ant or something approximating that size, I'd LIVE for Peony Week.
But I'm too big to curl up into a peony, and they have bloomed and dropped already.
I suppose I can't lament my absence too much; I spent the week aboard the lovely Maverick, a 38-foot sailing yacht, with a crew of surprisingly un-scurvy guys. Now, I'm well acquainted with the ocean, having spent every summer of my life on Cape Cod, and I can pilot a Boston Whaler (a small, open motorboat), but I've never been sailing before, so a week circumnavigating the Delmarva peninsula is akin to chucking oneself in the deep end of a swimming pool after mastering only the dog paddle.
The log of that trip will be blogged soon, as will an account of the wedding I attended yesterday. But for now, I'm just going to enjoy the cool breeze that keeps the mosquitoes away, and the fresh lemonade in the fridge. Suddenly, it's summer.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Seeing Eye to i(Pod)
(or, An Ode to Apple's Newest Baby, As Dear to Me as One of My Own (If I Had Any))
It's smaller than the palm of my hand. It's blue and has a nice soft brushed finish, with a smooth white clickwheel that makes the sweetest clacking sound when you use it, like marbles falling together in a soft bag.
It is smarter than I am.
Of this I am certain.
It certainly knows more music than I do.
Dad engraved the back with his e-mail and phone number, so no one wants to steal it now. I'm going to buy it a holster and some skins and even a cocoon so I can take it anywhere. But I'm always real careful when I take it somewhere; it's either in my ears where I can hear it (and feel it), or in my purse or pocket. I always check. I don't want to lose the most advanced piece of technology I've ever owned.
Still, I haven't really learned much about how to take music on and off of it. Dad and I put a lot of music on the new computer, but it's not all stuff I want to listen to. Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, for example. Depressing and twangy, unpleasant to listen to. Grace Jones' "Slave to the Rhythm". Urgh. I gotta sit down with the tutorial CD and figure all that stuff out.
So what do I listen to? Well, I got a whole album of Dispatch, of Death Cab for Cutie, of ellipsis..., of Moloko, but it shreds my earbuds. So does M.I.A. Lots of classical, which is nothing but background noise for me. Good studying music, though. Must transfer to a different playlist.
iTunes will bankrupt me. The iPod holds 1,000 songs, and unbelievably, I've filled it to about 850 right now. Some of those are coming off for good (like the Grace Jones and the Jim Brickman piano sludge), and I'm going to put the classical on a separate "Music to Study By" playlist so I don't get a minuet every other time it shuffles the songs. But there's so much else I want! Show tunes, Led Zeppelin, more Death Cab, some good choral music--not to mention all the music i hope to educate myself about in Berkeley. Luckily for me, the editors/publishers of Dirty Linen live down the street. They're giving me lots of names and people to check out.
I love the shuffle feature. It makes listening to music a more active brain process, wondering what will come next and always feeling a little off guard.
Some people claim that their iPods have moods; that when they set it to Shuffle it seems to pick songs for a reason, not just randomly. I am convinced that this is absolutely true. The Apple people swear they ran all sorts of complicated formulae to make sure Shuffle was absolutely random, but I don't know. For sure, it will almost never play more than one song from the same album consecyutively, or even within a 10-song grouping. And if it were truly random, occasionally you'd get a perfect sequence of songs in an album, say, or alphabetical songs, or artists, or something, and I don't think that happens. And it raises all sorts of A.I./I, Robot-type questions about its little anodized brain.
Mine, for example, loves "Rebecca", as covered by the Ford S-Chords (it seems to love all the S-Chords songs, actually), my Arabic music album, ellipsis..., the Pyrates Royale, and amusingly, Garbage's "Androgyny". It also plays lots of classical, but that's because I have something like 180 tracks of that. Other songs, like Nina Simone's, never make it to my ears.
I love trying to figure out its little digital personality. I do worry for the state of my hearing, though. Between the already loud bus ride, the ambient office noise (especially the evil folding machine), and now the soundtrack injected straight into my aural cavities, I'm going to need a hearing aid before I'm 30.
The one thing I prefer about LiveJournal to Blogger is that at the end, you can put down your current music. If my life were a movie, the melancholy parts would have the Lost in Translation soundtrack's "Alone in Kyoto" overlaid on them, and the credits would roll to Nickel Creek's "This Side".
It's smaller than the palm of my hand. It's blue and has a nice soft brushed finish, with a smooth white clickwheel that makes the sweetest clacking sound when you use it, like marbles falling together in a soft bag.
It is smarter than I am.
Of this I am certain.
It certainly knows more music than I do.
Dad engraved the back with his e-mail and phone number, so no one wants to steal it now. I'm going to buy it a holster and some skins and even a cocoon so I can take it anywhere. But I'm always real careful when I take it somewhere; it's either in my ears where I can hear it (and feel it), or in my purse or pocket. I always check. I don't want to lose the most advanced piece of technology I've ever owned.
Still, I haven't really learned much about how to take music on and off of it. Dad and I put a lot of music on the new computer, but it's not all stuff I want to listen to. Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, for example. Depressing and twangy, unpleasant to listen to. Grace Jones' "Slave to the Rhythm". Urgh. I gotta sit down with the tutorial CD and figure all that stuff out.
So what do I listen to? Well, I got a whole album of Dispatch, of Death Cab for Cutie, of ellipsis..., of Moloko, but it shreds my earbuds. So does M.I.A. Lots of classical, which is nothing but background noise for me. Good studying music, though. Must transfer to a different playlist.
iTunes will bankrupt me. The iPod holds 1,000 songs, and unbelievably, I've filled it to about 850 right now. Some of those are coming off for good (like the Grace Jones and the Jim Brickman piano sludge), and I'm going to put the classical on a separate "Music to Study By" playlist so I don't get a minuet every other time it shuffles the songs. But there's so much else I want! Show tunes, Led Zeppelin, more Death Cab, some good choral music--not to mention all the music i hope to educate myself about in Berkeley. Luckily for me, the editors/publishers of Dirty Linen live down the street. They're giving me lots of names and people to check out.
I love the shuffle feature. It makes listening to music a more active brain process, wondering what will come next and always feeling a little off guard.
Some people claim that their iPods have moods; that when they set it to Shuffle it seems to pick songs for a reason, not just randomly. I am convinced that this is absolutely true. The Apple people swear they ran all sorts of complicated formulae to make sure Shuffle was absolutely random, but I don't know. For sure, it will almost never play more than one song from the same album consecyutively, or even within a 10-song grouping. And if it were truly random, occasionally you'd get a perfect sequence of songs in an album, say, or alphabetical songs, or artists, or something, and I don't think that happens. And it raises all sorts of A.I./I, Robot-type questions about its little anodized brain.
Mine, for example, loves "Rebecca", as covered by the Ford S-Chords (it seems to love all the S-Chords songs, actually), my Arabic music album, ellipsis..., the Pyrates Royale, and amusingly, Garbage's "Androgyny". It also plays lots of classical, but that's because I have something like 180 tracks of that. Other songs, like Nina Simone's, never make it to my ears.
I love trying to figure out its little digital personality. I do worry for the state of my hearing, though. Between the already loud bus ride, the ambient office noise (especially the evil folding machine), and now the soundtrack injected straight into my aural cavities, I'm going to need a hearing aid before I'm 30.
The one thing I prefer about LiveJournal to Blogger is that at the end, you can put down your current music. If my life were a movie, the melancholy parts would have the Lost in Translation soundtrack's "Alone in Kyoto" overlaid on them, and the credits would roll to Nickel Creek's "This Side".
Monday, May 09, 2005
Observations
I'm reading Prep right now, and it's so depressing I want to go back to bed. If you're thinking about reading it to see what private/boarding schools are like, don't. No prep school, especially not a boarding school, tosses its freshmen and new kids into their first year without some kind of orientation to get them up to speed on the school's rituals and quirks. Also, the protagonist clearly has Avoidant Personality Disorder, because I don't think this kind of alienation isn't really possible after 4 years. She would have been spotted and either counseled to within an inch of her life, or she would have dropped out on her own recognizance. Feh.
I just found a bump on my arm from what I think is an old TB test. When I went to Japan, I had to get a chest X-ray and present it to Customs to prove I wasn't carrying any infectious respiratory disease. This was before the SARS panic.
I have seventeen days left of work here. That sounds like much less than 3 weeks. I have all but lost the will to work.
I just found a bump on my arm from what I think is an old TB test. When I went to Japan, I had to get a chest X-ray and present it to Customs to prove I wasn't carrying any infectious respiratory disease. This was before the SARS panic.
I have seventeen days left of work here. That sounds like much less than 3 weeks. I have all but lost the will to work.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Holding Pattern
So...show's over. The last weekend was gratifyingly successful, despite the absence of SEVERAL of my friends who had every chance to come check it out. Hmph. Though I suppose it's not much of an incentive to see a show in which your friend...moves furniture. Dressed in black. I probably wouldn't pay $15 to see me do that, either. But still.
The post-show letdown is no less pronounced now that a) I'm only a stagehand, and an b) the performances were all a week apart. I don't know what I did with myself the week after the show closed. Mulched, watched TV, mucked around at work. The usual, I suppose. I DO know that by Friday I felt like a very old dishrag, but we'll get into that later.
That Saturday, the 23rd, I headed up to Haverford for the annual Corporation meeting. Anyone who knows me knows that I am the perfect candidate for a seat on the body that legally owns my alma mater, because I am a totally shameless proponent of it and all it stands for. It's almost embarrassing the degree to which I can immerse myself in my Haverford-cheerleader mode. To wit: I cried for hours on graduation day, getting snot on the good clothes of everyone within reach; I went back up to visit a mere 3 weeks after the ceremony, and again no few than half a dozen times that academic year. Then I realized that if I wasn't careful, I'd turn into that pathetic alum(na) who's always hanging around because she's not making much of her life, and may in fact be at risk for becoming so stuck on her past that she'll NEVER make much of her life, and so after the Corporation meeting last year, I didn't visit until this year's meeting.
Even so, I can't shake the feeling of absolute normalcy that descends as soon as I step on campus. I can't make my brain register the buildings and paths as unusual or different; my mind slips into such absolute familiarity with my surroundings I begin not to notice them.
And yet.
I've forgotten names of people and buildings (ok, just Hilles, and that's a forgettable name AND building, but still). People I know rush up to greet me, get the bullet on my life and times, and then rush off just as fast, to class or a meeting or lunch, reminding me that I DON'T have class or a meeting or lunch, and that I will never be more than a visitor at the place where I became the person I am now.
I caught a few episodes of Felicity in Japan, and my favorite was the one where they're all doing their exit interviews. Felicity has a whole monologue where she describes how cruel college is, to throw a bunch of smart, fun kids together, make them happy to be there, encourage all sorts of bonding and love, and then scatter them after four years, just when everyone was (usually) deeply happy and comfortable with their lives.
I know this melancholy is the result of being in a barely-tolerable situation at the moment, and that when I get up and out and start a life that's much more fulfilling than the one I'm living now, this feeling will disappear. For now, though, it still sucks.
A really good book that helped me a lot was Conquering your Quarterlife Crisis, by Alexandra Robbins. Highly recommended for anyone who's annoyed by the fact that your life doesn't match all the hype that your twenties are supposed to be the best years of your life. If that's true, what am I doing shopping at Payless and living at home? The book proves that you're not alone in your anxiety and worry by providing dozens of testimonials from people who lived through it all (fairly recently, so you don't feel lectured) and, more importantly, their tips and tricks for getting through it.
I'll go up for Commencement and hug my friends, and tell them that it's ok to spin your wheels for a little, but that the important thing is not to give up while you're doing it. And then I'll go up again for Alumni weekend with my dad, and talk to a few old fossils and remember that what I told those grads 2 weeks before applies to me, too.
One of these days I'll start writing many short posts instead of great big honkin' ones every 3 weeks. Promise.
FUN FACT: When I was a kid watching The Little Mermaid (before I knew all the nonsense about phallic undersea-castle towers and suspicious bumps poking out from the priest's robes), I liked the scene where the seagull is trying to tell Ariel and her friends that Ursula is charming the pants off of Eric, but no one understands. He gets so frustrated and carried away that he picks up Sebastian and starts whacking him on the deck for emphasis as he shouts (capitalization indicates the beats where the unfortunate crab hits the boards): "The PRINCE is MARrying the SEA witch in disGUISE!"
I ALWAYS heard "disguise" as "de skies", and even as an 8-year-old, I thought that was a very nice line, poetic and evocative of the ocean-land dichotomy, even Biblical-sounding. Now I know I'm a)some sort of bizarre verbal savant(e), and b)probably going to need a hearing aid sooner rather than later, if I was making mistakes like this at the age of 8.
The post-show letdown is no less pronounced now that a) I'm only a stagehand, and an b) the performances were all a week apart. I don't know what I did with myself the week after the show closed. Mulched, watched TV, mucked around at work. The usual, I suppose. I DO know that by Friday I felt like a very old dishrag, but we'll get into that later.
That Saturday, the 23rd, I headed up to Haverford for the annual Corporation meeting. Anyone who knows me knows that I am the perfect candidate for a seat on the body that legally owns my alma mater, because I am a totally shameless proponent of it and all it stands for. It's almost embarrassing the degree to which I can immerse myself in my Haverford-cheerleader mode. To wit: I cried for hours on graduation day, getting snot on the good clothes of everyone within reach; I went back up to visit a mere 3 weeks after the ceremony, and again no few than half a dozen times that academic year. Then I realized that if I wasn't careful, I'd turn into that pathetic alum(na) who's always hanging around because she's not making much of her life, and may in fact be at risk for becoming so stuck on her past that she'll NEVER make much of her life, and so after the Corporation meeting last year, I didn't visit until this year's meeting.
Even so, I can't shake the feeling of absolute normalcy that descends as soon as I step on campus. I can't make my brain register the buildings and paths as unusual or different; my mind slips into such absolute familiarity with my surroundings I begin not to notice them.
And yet.
I've forgotten names of people and buildings (ok, just Hilles, and that's a forgettable name AND building, but still). People I know rush up to greet me, get the bullet on my life and times, and then rush off just as fast, to class or a meeting or lunch, reminding me that I DON'T have class or a meeting or lunch, and that I will never be more than a visitor at the place where I became the person I am now.
I caught a few episodes of Felicity in Japan, and my favorite was the one where they're all doing their exit interviews. Felicity has a whole monologue where she describes how cruel college is, to throw a bunch of smart, fun kids together, make them happy to be there, encourage all sorts of bonding and love, and then scatter them after four years, just when everyone was (usually) deeply happy and comfortable with their lives.
I know this melancholy is the result of being in a barely-tolerable situation at the moment, and that when I get up and out and start a life that's much more fulfilling than the one I'm living now, this feeling will disappear. For now, though, it still sucks.
A really good book that helped me a lot was Conquering your Quarterlife Crisis, by Alexandra Robbins. Highly recommended for anyone who's annoyed by the fact that your life doesn't match all the hype that your twenties are supposed to be the best years of your life. If that's true, what am I doing shopping at Payless and living at home? The book proves that you're not alone in your anxiety and worry by providing dozens of testimonials from people who lived through it all (fairly recently, so you don't feel lectured) and, more importantly, their tips and tricks for getting through it.
I'll go up for Commencement and hug my friends, and tell them that it's ok to spin your wheels for a little, but that the important thing is not to give up while you're doing it. And then I'll go up again for Alumni weekend with my dad, and talk to a few old fossils and remember that what I told those grads 2 weeks before applies to me, too.
One of these days I'll start writing many short posts instead of great big honkin' ones every 3 weeks. Promise.
FUN FACT: When I was a kid watching The Little Mermaid (before I knew all the nonsense about phallic undersea-castle towers and suspicious bumps poking out from the priest's robes), I liked the scene where the seagull is trying to tell Ariel and her friends that Ursula is charming the pants off of Eric, but no one understands. He gets so frustrated and carried away that he picks up Sebastian and starts whacking him on the deck for emphasis as he shouts (capitalization indicates the beats where the unfortunate crab hits the boards): "The PRINCE is MARrying the SEA witch in disGUISE!"
I ALWAYS heard "disguise" as "de skies", and even as an 8-year-old, I thought that was a very nice line, poetic and evocative of the ocean-land dichotomy, even Biblical-sounding. Now I know I'm a)some sort of bizarre verbal savant(e), and b)probably going to need a hearing aid sooner rather than later, if I was making mistakes like this at the age of 8.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
evelyn is...
First of all, I'm sorry. I have lots of original posts in the works, but I'm lazy, and I've got a whole pile of financial aid forms to fill out tonight. So, like the dieter who swings by Burger King because it's faster than steaming kale and kohlrabi, I'm going to do it again.
Steal someone else's blog post, that is. I don't like kale.
My Customsmate from freshman year, Dabe Stone (not his real name) also has a blog on Blogger. He, being way cooler than I am, started it quite a while ago. But I only discovered it a few months ago. Because I'm slow.
Anyway, he went to googlism.com, a hi-larious site that, similar to the actual search engine, will give you your name or any other phrase you input as it appears in myriad contexts on the Web. What's freaky about this is that some, nay, most of them are uncannily right on.
All I did was type in my first name, evelyn. Up popped about 100 of these cryptic little phrases, covering everything from my activtties at school:
-evelyn is well prepared educationally for the duties of a council member (HC '02-'03!)
-evelyn is "still working for you" (this was an Honor Council slogan, at one point. I think.)
-evelyn is a 31 accountant (actually, I never did the books in our apt. at school. Honest.)
-evelyn is a vigilant grammar cop who is often caught yelling at the newspaper when she finds a dangling participle or an unclear antecedent (This is hysterical. I actually started the Abstract Editing Committee when I was on Honor Council so we wouldn't have to spend all kinds of time fixing typos. How does Google know this? I'm beginning to worry...)
-evelyn is the cement that holds this large department together
-evelyn is for all department members and students the source of information (my high school yearbook listed my contribution tio the school as "all the answers")
...to obsvervations about my character; the lavishly complimentary:
evelyn is an intriguing character
-evelyn is a real treat to be around
-evelyn is the best
-evelyn is a very gentle little girl
-evelyn is very helpful when you are feeling worthless
-evelyn is amiable and calm on the surface
-evelyn is someone truly special
-evelyn is sent (sent from heaven!)
-evelyn is not on the stage she enjoys art and please visit (yes!)
-evelyn is renowned around the world for beautiful gifts and everyday luxuries that capture the essence of english style
-evelyn is a project close to pierce brosnan's (heart, I hope. Though I don't know how I like being referred to as a "project". I'm not THAT much in need of a makeover, am I?)
-evelyn is responsible for the day (and the night, and the sun, and the moon...ahem. Was that out loud?)
the appalling:
-evelyn is unlucky
-evelyn is clueless
-evelyn is virtually impossible
and the oddly sweet:
-evelyn is a chameleon
-evelyn is likely the most intensely hyped rose (just look at my AIM and hotmail screennames!)
-evelyn is able to experience the music fully (with her new iPod!)
-evelyn is known almost exclusively for his diary (if by diary, you mean "blog")
-evelyn is the one to do it (absolutely! As soon as I figure out what "it" is...)
...to intriguing career possibilities (except I think that one of the real estate ones is just a word problem):
-evelyn is a continuing education instructor on hair loss and its related issues
-evelyn is a licensed real estate broker
-evelyn is offered a job selling real estate and she will have a 50 percent chance of making $10
-evelyn is a real estate agent that is known in the community of bainbridge for their dedicated client service
-evelyn is also involved in teaching the course elementary methods in computational geometry
-evelyn is an educator; a leader whose greatest concern is what is best
-evelyn is one of the key members of the staff at media services
-evelyn is presently working on her next patricia conley novel
-evelyn is carrying on [his] legacy of love for the museums
-evelyn is an internationally recognized baritone and highly sought after choral conductor
-evelyn is a specialized research consultant
-evelyn is an excellent clinical psychiatric nurse and also a team player (yes, but I can't get you drugs. Sorry.)
...to odd desciptors that I'm clearly not, but might like to be:
-evelyn is clearly referred to as a toy collie
-evelyn is an african
-evelyn is a member of the canadian medical and biological engineering society
-evelyn is a member of the haida nation
-evelyn is responsible for the much appreciated makeovers of '70s icon band journey (LOVE Journey. LOVE. Is this creepy, or what?)
-evelyn is one of the best practitioners in the united states (well, yes; but of what?)
-evelyn is designed especially for patients who require more intensive observation (hee!)
-evelyn is left to sweat it out in the family livery on her own
-evelyn is mistaken in thinking lou's argument to be fallacious (Lou is my neighbor, but I don't think we've ever had an argument...)
-evelyn is copied to the /tmp/bar on the machine running this command
...to some rather alarming assertions:
-evelyn is coping one day at the library when some unexpected events take place
-evelyn is descended from the illegitimate side of the family
-evelyn is attacked (oh no!)
-evelyn is the survivor of a neglectful and hurtful past (no, I'm not!!! I promise!! I love you, Mom and Dad!)
-evelyn is cheating on him (auugh! Who's smearing my good name? Who? Why?)
-evelyn is aghast at her incompetence
...to some very interesting predictions for my future:
-evelyn is beginning her third year as a ph (hopefully this ends with .D, and not with "testing strip")
-evelyn is married to john parsons
-evelyn is married and has two children
-evelyn is a delighted parent of two grown sons (names, anyone?)
-evelyn is spending time in the nursing home waiting room while her husband visits his mother there (I know this is from Fried Green Tomatoes, and I really, really hope I don't end up looking lke Kathy Bates.)
-evelyn is the most senior of the granny gears
-evelyn is proof positive that age is truly in the mind
to the final, comforting confirmation of my existence:
-evelyn is
Oh, what a relief. I am. Thank you, Googlism, for removing my doubts.
Seriously, though. SCARY. Only a handful of these hits were not somehow connected to me by something other than the name. The rest read like a background check on me done by Maryland's Poet Laureate after he smoked a bowl or two.
Because I love publicity, good or bad, I'm opening the blog to more of these. Like an online Slam Book (yeah, Judy Blume!). Feel free at add more of your own devising--I changed the settings so now you don't need a Blogger ID to post. Expect more audience-participatory posts in the future, too.
-evelyn is something the matter?
Steal someone else's blog post, that is. I don't like kale.
My Customsmate from freshman year, Dabe Stone (not his real name) also has a blog on Blogger. He, being way cooler than I am, started it quite a while ago. But I only discovered it a few months ago. Because I'm slow.
Anyway, he went to googlism.com, a hi-larious site that, similar to the actual search engine, will give you your name or any other phrase you input as it appears in myriad contexts on the Web. What's freaky about this is that some, nay, most of them are uncannily right on.
All I did was type in my first name, evelyn. Up popped about 100 of these cryptic little phrases, covering everything from my activtties at school:
-evelyn is well prepared educationally for the duties of a council member (HC '02-'03!)
-evelyn is "still working for you" (this was an Honor Council slogan, at one point. I think.)
-evelyn is a 31 accountant (actually, I never did the books in our apt. at school. Honest.)
-evelyn is a vigilant grammar cop who is often caught yelling at the newspaper when she finds a dangling participle or an unclear antecedent (This is hysterical. I actually started the Abstract Editing Committee when I was on Honor Council so we wouldn't have to spend all kinds of time fixing typos. How does Google know this? I'm beginning to worry...)
-evelyn is the cement that holds this large department together
-evelyn is for all department members and students the source of information (my high school yearbook listed my contribution tio the school as "all the answers")
...to obsvervations about my character; the lavishly complimentary:
evelyn is an intriguing character
-evelyn is a real treat to be around
-evelyn is the best
-evelyn is a very gentle little girl
-evelyn is very helpful when you are feeling worthless
-evelyn is amiable and calm on the surface
-evelyn is someone truly special
-evelyn is sent (sent from heaven!)
-evelyn is not on the stage she enjoys art and please visit (yes!)
-evelyn is renowned around the world for beautiful gifts and everyday luxuries that capture the essence of english style
-evelyn is a project close to pierce brosnan's (heart, I hope. Though I don't know how I like being referred to as a "project". I'm not THAT much in need of a makeover, am I?)
-evelyn is responsible for the day (and the night, and the sun, and the moon...ahem. Was that out loud?)
the appalling:
-evelyn is unlucky
-evelyn is clueless
-evelyn is virtually impossible
and the oddly sweet:
-evelyn is a chameleon
-evelyn is likely the most intensely hyped rose (just look at my AIM and hotmail screennames!)
-evelyn is able to experience the music fully (with her new iPod!)
-evelyn is known almost exclusively for his diary (if by diary, you mean "blog")
-evelyn is the one to do it (absolutely! As soon as I figure out what "it" is...)
...to intriguing career possibilities (except I think that one of the real estate ones is just a word problem):
-evelyn is a continuing education instructor on hair loss and its related issues
-evelyn is a licensed real estate broker
-evelyn is offered a job selling real estate and she will have a 50 percent chance of making $10
-evelyn is a real estate agent that is known in the community of bainbridge for their dedicated client service
-evelyn is also involved in teaching the course elementary methods in computational geometry
-evelyn is an educator; a leader whose greatest concern is what is best
-evelyn is one of the key members of the staff at media services
-evelyn is presently working on her next patricia conley novel
-evelyn is carrying on [his] legacy of love for the museums
-evelyn is an internationally recognized baritone and highly sought after choral conductor
-evelyn is a specialized research consultant
-evelyn is an excellent clinical psychiatric nurse and also a team player (yes, but I can't get you drugs. Sorry.)
...to odd desciptors that I'm clearly not, but might like to be:
-evelyn is clearly referred to as a toy collie
-evelyn is an african
-evelyn is a member of the canadian medical and biological engineering society
-evelyn is a member of the haida nation
-evelyn is responsible for the much appreciated makeovers of '70s icon band journey (LOVE Journey. LOVE. Is this creepy, or what?)
-evelyn is one of the best practitioners in the united states (well, yes; but of what?)
-evelyn is designed especially for patients who require more intensive observation (hee!)
-evelyn is left to sweat it out in the family livery on her own
-evelyn is mistaken in thinking lou's argument to be fallacious (Lou is my neighbor, but I don't think we've ever had an argument...)
-evelyn is copied to the /tmp/bar on the machine running this command
...to some rather alarming assertions:
-evelyn is coping one day at the library when some unexpected events take place
-evelyn is descended from the illegitimate side of the family
-evelyn is attacked (oh no!)
-evelyn is the survivor of a neglectful and hurtful past (no, I'm not!!! I promise!! I love you, Mom and Dad!)
-evelyn is cheating on him (auugh! Who's smearing my good name? Who? Why?)
-evelyn is aghast at her incompetence
...to some very interesting predictions for my future:
-evelyn is beginning her third year as a ph (hopefully this ends with .D, and not with "testing strip")
-evelyn is married to john parsons
-evelyn is married and has two children
-evelyn is a delighted parent of two grown sons (names, anyone?)
-evelyn is spending time in the nursing home waiting room while her husband visits his mother there (I know this is from Fried Green Tomatoes, and I really, really hope I don't end up looking lke Kathy Bates.)
-evelyn is the most senior of the granny gears
-evelyn is proof positive that age is truly in the mind
to the final, comforting confirmation of my existence:
-evelyn is
Oh, what a relief. I am. Thank you, Googlism, for removing my doubts.
Seriously, though. SCARY. Only a handful of these hits were not somehow connected to me by something other than the name. The rest read like a background check on me done by Maryland's Poet Laureate after he smoked a bowl or two.
Because I love publicity, good or bad, I'm opening the blog to more of these. Like an online Slam Book (yeah, Judy Blume!). Feel free at add more of your own devising--I changed the settings so now you don't need a Blogger ID to post. Expect more audience-participatory posts in the future, too.
-evelyn is something the matter?
Friday, April 08, 2005
Aping the Master
This summer, I became acquainted with one of the more excellent offerings in the blogosphere: The Post-Modern Drunkard.
For a while, I maintained a small running joke that it was PMD I was really after, not his storky roommate. It was funny because it was ridiculous. No one wants a curmudgeon-in-training, unless one is a crone-in-training, and I'm not. But I started reading his blog, his alcohol-soaked, wiseass, soulful blog, and while I still don't think I'd *date* him, per se, I find myself idolizing him. I want to be somewhere where my friends would be cool, snarky, cosmopolitan people like him. I want to write like him, travel like him, hold my liquor like him (we all know this last one is and will always be a physical impossibility, but hey, a girl can dream, can't she?).
Currently, though, all I can do is rip off his posting topics, visit now and then, and hope he reads this and isn't totally weirded out/annoyed by the whole hero's-pen-worship. But at least I know that the way to his heart, should I ever need it, is straight through his liver.
So, with apologies to the Post-Modern Drunkard, whose idea this sort of confession it was originally, here is a little compilation that in the interest of full disclosure, I publish here, for your general amusement. *bows with flourish*
Potentially Embarrassing Things I Probably Shouldn’t Reveal Until At Least the Third Date:
1. I still, at the advanced age of 23, sleep with a stuffed animal at night. Her name is Lammie. She’s a lamb, and I’ve had her since childbirth. She goes (almost) everywhere I go, has a passport, a full seasonal wardrobe, mostly sewn by me, and a distinct personality, created by my parents when I was little. She likes to drive. She’s terrible at it.
2. I am a terrible nail-biter. I can’t remember a time when I had nails visible above my fingertips. Not only do I pare them off, I then like to work them around my mouth—run them between my teeth, split them etc. before breaking them into little bits and spitting them out. It saves me from flossing but it looks disgraceful.
3. I talk to myself incessantly. It’s an only child thing, I think. When I was in college it helped because I could rehearse presentations and explain things to myself to learn them better, and of course if I’m in a play I’m always the first off-book, but I know it’s really weird to see a young, non-vagrant woman walking down the street muttering to herself with no visible cell phone apparatus. Plus, I emote when I’m doing it, especially if I’m rehearsing something to tell someone, or imagining/reenacting a scene between me and a friend, my parents, etc. So I must look totally insane most of the time. I also read interesting passages of books out loud to myself, occasionally.
4. I have a wretched music collection. While all my other friends have either huge CD libraries, zillions of files on their computers, iPods that hold more music than I’ve ever listened to in my life, or some combination of the above, I have a few dozen CD’s, some tapes stuffed into the seat pockets of the family car, and 10 songs on a computer I never use anymore. I totally missed the Napster boat. I have no knowledge of any music beyond the most basic facts and songs. Most of my albums are show tunes, traditional Japanese, or random bluegrass. No rock or hip postmodern music. In other words, not particularly listen-able stuff. Because of this, I rely on commercial radio for my auditory sustenance, and we all know how low that is.
5. I still live at home. This sounds pathetic at first, but the reasons are sensible: I don’t make enough money to eat properly or live anywhere decent, and since I’m trying to get into grad school (possibly overseas), it strikes me as foolish to waste a few months on rent when I might have to pick up and leave elsewhere in less than a year. But it’s pretty embarrassing entertain guests, especially male guests, in my parents’ house. Makes me feel about 12.
6. When I was living in Japan, I joined the college judo club. Because I was the newest member when the annual college festival rolled around, they made me dress up like a porn-star nurse, complete with skimpy vinyl dress, cap and fishnets, and advertise the club massage booth. There are pictures. I will never be able to run for public office. Anywhere.
7. I had seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation by the time I was fifteen. And all the movies. And owned a Star Trek communicator button that bleeped when you pressed it. Actually, I still have that somewhere.
8. I have a loom in my bedroom. And not one of the little craft-store kinds for making belts and headbands. A full-sized floor loom. And I know how to use it.
9. I haven’t seen the Star Wars series all the way through. Not even the older trilogy. Nor have I seen Braveheart, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dazed and Confused, or Die Hard. These don’t sound like such great cultural pillars to me, but every time I mention that I haven’t seen them, people’s mouths drop open as if I just informed them that I still watched my movies (whatever they may be, obviously not the big ones) on a Beta VCR. Which, just for the record, I don’t.
10. The same goes for television. Being a PBS kid meant no Spiderman, Batman, Transformers, Thundercats or, until recently, The Simpsons. And no, we don’t have cable.
11. I have an odd penchant for child-rearing books. Talk about creepy, guilty pleasures. When I babysat in high school, I used to curl up with the parents’ guides after the kids were asleep and my homework was finished. And I worked, briefly, at a baby and children’s clothing store where I was able to read “Today’s Child” and “Mothering” magazines to my heart’s content. I find them fascinating, and it’s probably a little narcissistic, too. Plus, my mother and I discuss my childhood at great length. I was, as you might expect, a model child.
13. However, I have ZERO tolerance for ill-behaved children. I am firmly convinced that much of the country’s current disorder stems from crappy parenting. I am not classist or racist about this; crappy parents come in all colors and socio-economic strata. I also don’t like toddlers, no matter how well they’re behaving. They’re just so…little, and weird. I’m sure this will change when/if I get a few of my own, but until then, expect no sympathy from me when your two-year-old pitches himself on the floor out of exhaustion and frustration because YOU didn’t take proper care of him earlier. If you can’t handle them, get your tubes tied.
14. I collect stamps. Years ago, my father suggested that I needed a hobby, and started me on baseball cards. It was cool. It was fun. It lasted a couple of years. Then, cleaving to the paper-ephemera theme, he said I should take up stamps. His motives became obvious a little later: my maternal grandfather had literally hundreds, from all over the place, and someone was needed to properly organize and catalogue them. That someone was me. And still is. And proud of it, too. If you'd like to see it, just ask. I'm not a snob about them; I don't go to stamp conventions (they're VERY weird) and I don't buy new ones, because god knows I have enough just sitting around at home, but I love those tiny works of public art, and I don't care who knows it.
15. I was staying in a huge old monastery-turned-summer-house in France, which had about 35 bedrooms and toilets in very odd places, including nowhere near my room. In the morning, I had no idea where the nearest toilet was--I had followed my host sister to hers, then she led me about half a mile away to my room in the dark. There was, however, a small sink in the bedroom, for washing up, etc. It would hold my weight if I braced my feet against a chair. You finish this story.
Now, I had to remove one of these Things from the list, because it involved not getting into graduate school. And I suppose I should remove the one about my music collection, because my new baby iPod and I are fixing that in a hurry. Other than that, though, none of this is likely to change, so if you were thinking of setting me up with someone, give him a copy of this and let him decide. If he laughs, he's a keeper. If he likes short nails, stamps, and textiles, I'm not interested. I'm weird enough for two people.
His roommate is the cutie-pie who gave my my new boyfriend, Phineas Lumpy (see last post), and I have spent not nearly enough happy hours chilling in their awesome Washington Heights apartment. PMD is a Fargo, ND transplant to New York, a sort of modern-day Norwegian bachelor farmer of the Lake Woebegon species. He smokes, he drinks, he grouses, he grumbles, he smirks; he's adorable. Go here to read it. And post comments; He loves it.
For a while, I maintained a small running joke that it was PMD I was really after, not his storky roommate. It was funny because it was ridiculous. No one wants a curmudgeon-in-training, unless one is a crone-in-training, and I'm not. But I started reading his blog, his alcohol-soaked, wiseass, soulful blog, and while I still don't think I'd *date* him, per se, I find myself idolizing him. I want to be somewhere where my friends would be cool, snarky, cosmopolitan people like him. I want to write like him, travel like him, hold my liquor like him (we all know this last one is and will always be a physical impossibility, but hey, a girl can dream, can't she?).
Currently, though, all I can do is rip off his posting topics, visit now and then, and hope he reads this and isn't totally weirded out/annoyed by the whole hero's-pen-worship. But at least I know that the way to his heart, should I ever need it, is straight through his liver.
So, with apologies to the Post-Modern Drunkard, whose idea this sort of confession it was originally, here is a little compilation that in the interest of full disclosure, I publish here, for your general amusement. *bows with flourish*
Potentially Embarrassing Things I Probably Shouldn’t Reveal Until At Least the Third Date:
1. I still, at the advanced age of 23, sleep with a stuffed animal at night. Her name is Lammie. She’s a lamb, and I’ve had her since childbirth. She goes (almost) everywhere I go, has a passport, a full seasonal wardrobe, mostly sewn by me, and a distinct personality, created by my parents when I was little. She likes to drive. She’s terrible at it.
2. I am a terrible nail-biter. I can’t remember a time when I had nails visible above my fingertips. Not only do I pare them off, I then like to work them around my mouth—run them between my teeth, split them etc. before breaking them into little bits and spitting them out. It saves me from flossing but it looks disgraceful.
3. I talk to myself incessantly. It’s an only child thing, I think. When I was in college it helped because I could rehearse presentations and explain things to myself to learn them better, and of course if I’m in a play I’m always the first off-book, but I know it’s really weird to see a young, non-vagrant woman walking down the street muttering to herself with no visible cell phone apparatus. Plus, I emote when I’m doing it, especially if I’m rehearsing something to tell someone, or imagining/reenacting a scene between me and a friend, my parents, etc. So I must look totally insane most of the time. I also read interesting passages of books out loud to myself, occasionally.
4. I have a wretched music collection. While all my other friends have either huge CD libraries, zillions of files on their computers, iPods that hold more music than I’ve ever listened to in my life, or some combination of the above, I have a few dozen CD’s, some tapes stuffed into the seat pockets of the family car, and 10 songs on a computer I never use anymore. I totally missed the Napster boat. I have no knowledge of any music beyond the most basic facts and songs. Most of my albums are show tunes, traditional Japanese, or random bluegrass. No rock or hip postmodern music. In other words, not particularly listen-able stuff. Because of this, I rely on commercial radio for my auditory sustenance, and we all know how low that is.
5. I still live at home. This sounds pathetic at first, but the reasons are sensible: I don’t make enough money to eat properly or live anywhere decent, and since I’m trying to get into grad school (possibly overseas), it strikes me as foolish to waste a few months on rent when I might have to pick up and leave elsewhere in less than a year. But it’s pretty embarrassing entertain guests, especially male guests, in my parents’ house. Makes me feel about 12.
6. When I was living in Japan, I joined the college judo club. Because I was the newest member when the annual college festival rolled around, they made me dress up like a porn-star nurse, complete with skimpy vinyl dress, cap and fishnets, and advertise the club massage booth. There are pictures. I will never be able to run for public office. Anywhere.
7. I had seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation by the time I was fifteen. And all the movies. And owned a Star Trek communicator button that bleeped when you pressed it. Actually, I still have that somewhere.
8. I have a loom in my bedroom. And not one of the little craft-store kinds for making belts and headbands. A full-sized floor loom. And I know how to use it.
9. I haven’t seen the Star Wars series all the way through. Not even the older trilogy. Nor have I seen Braveheart, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dazed and Confused, or Die Hard. These don’t sound like such great cultural pillars to me, but every time I mention that I haven’t seen them, people’s mouths drop open as if I just informed them that I still watched my movies (whatever they may be, obviously not the big ones) on a Beta VCR. Which, just for the record, I don’t.
10. The same goes for television. Being a PBS kid meant no Spiderman, Batman, Transformers, Thundercats or, until recently, The Simpsons. And no, we don’t have cable.
11. I have an odd penchant for child-rearing books. Talk about creepy, guilty pleasures. When I babysat in high school, I used to curl up with the parents’ guides after the kids were asleep and my homework was finished. And I worked, briefly, at a baby and children’s clothing store where I was able to read “Today’s Child” and “Mothering” magazines to my heart’s content. I find them fascinating, and it’s probably a little narcissistic, too. Plus, my mother and I discuss my childhood at great length. I was, as you might expect, a model child.
13. However, I have ZERO tolerance for ill-behaved children. I am firmly convinced that much of the country’s current disorder stems from crappy parenting. I am not classist or racist about this; crappy parents come in all colors and socio-economic strata. I also don’t like toddlers, no matter how well they’re behaving. They’re just so…little, and weird. I’m sure this will change when/if I get a few of my own, but until then, expect no sympathy from me when your two-year-old pitches himself on the floor out of exhaustion and frustration because YOU didn’t take proper care of him earlier. If you can’t handle them, get your tubes tied.
14. I collect stamps. Years ago, my father suggested that I needed a hobby, and started me on baseball cards. It was cool. It was fun. It lasted a couple of years. Then, cleaving to the paper-ephemera theme, he said I should take up stamps. His motives became obvious a little later: my maternal grandfather had literally hundreds, from all over the place, and someone was needed to properly organize and catalogue them. That someone was me. And still is. And proud of it, too. If you'd like to see it, just ask. I'm not a snob about them; I don't go to stamp conventions (they're VERY weird) and I don't buy new ones, because god knows I have enough just sitting around at home, but I love those tiny works of public art, and I don't care who knows it.
15. I was staying in a huge old monastery-turned-summer-house in France, which had about 35 bedrooms and toilets in very odd places, including nowhere near my room. In the morning, I had no idea where the nearest toilet was--I had followed my host sister to hers, then she led me about half a mile away to my room in the dark. There was, however, a small sink in the bedroom, for washing up, etc. It would hold my weight if I braced my feet against a chair. You finish this story.
Now, I had to remove one of these Things from the list, because it involved not getting into graduate school. And I suppose I should remove the one about my music collection, because my new baby iPod and I are fixing that in a hurry. Other than that, though, none of this is likely to change, so if you were thinking of setting me up with someone, give him a copy of this and let him decide. If he laughs, he's a keeper. If he likes short nails, stamps, and textiles, I'm not interested. I'm weird enough for two people.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
Happy birthday to ME!
Halloooo, loyal blog readers! Forgive the silence, and the slightly stale Easter greetings: 'Twas the week of production, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring--at least, not after opening night...
To back up: I am on the crew for an excellent production at the Mobtown Theater, Nilo Cruz' A Bicycle Country, for which I furnished the props, and work backstage during the first act--the second has no scene changes. To explain why would be to give most of the plot away, and if you're in the greater Baltimore area I want you to come see it (see the end of this post), so I won't. Suffice to say, I spent the week in a frenzy of shopping, sleep deprivation, and splinters. Including MY BIRTHDAY. On Tuesday. For which I received AN IPOD. The cutest little blue mini! Thank you, Mom and Dad! Also a lovely bracelet, the promise of a new swimsuit for my upcoming sailing trip, an intriguing Terry Pratchett novel, and a phrenological cranium model (go here for a description of people who still believe in it (crazies!), here for a more skeptical rundown, and here to see my new friend, Phineas Lumpy)! And lots of lovely greetings in various forms! So thank you, everyone!
My iPod is a miracle of technology! We also have a new computer, and are having SUCH fun uploading our music to iTunes and -Pod! I'm compiling a list of songs that will bankrupt me when I start up an account at iTunes.com.
The first signs of spring have emerged--the trees show mists of red buds where before there were only gray branches; the grass after a weekend of rain is now a startlingly rich green, incongruous against the bleak skies and mostly empty garden plots, and we've had our snowdrops and crocuses--we're already on to daffodils, narcissi and paperwhites. I love spring flowers the most (aside from peonies), because they herald spring, my favorite season. It's not my favorite because of my birthday, though my mother used to tell me that she went to the hospital on a night to have me before any flowers deigned to show themselves, and when we emerged 4 days later, everything was abloom in MY honor--this was doubtless a great influence on my character, which I like to describe as "self-affirming" but which other people have other choice words for.
But I digress. The air sweetens, the light softens, and there's mud and the promise of summer. This spring, there's even more promise: of quitting, sailing, Cape Cod, and grad school, in that order. But just like the flowers (and the warmth), it's coming slowly; 8 weeks til quitting seems to be going by awfully slowly.
More soon, and better composed; this was just a place-holder since I've been at the theater every night this week, sometimes til midnight. For a chick who needs 10 hours of sleep a night, trust me, it's painful.
A Bicycle County
by Nilo Cruz
The Mobtown Theater (directions here)
April 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23
8PM Fri/Sat, 2 PM Sun
Tickets: $15 adults, $12 students
To back up: I am on the crew for an excellent production at the Mobtown Theater, Nilo Cruz' A Bicycle Country, for which I furnished the props, and work backstage during the first act--the second has no scene changes. To explain why would be to give most of the plot away, and if you're in the greater Baltimore area I want you to come see it (see the end of this post), so I won't. Suffice to say, I spent the week in a frenzy of shopping, sleep deprivation, and splinters. Including MY BIRTHDAY. On Tuesday. For which I received AN IPOD. The cutest little blue mini! Thank you, Mom and Dad! Also a lovely bracelet, the promise of a new swimsuit for my upcoming sailing trip, an intriguing Terry Pratchett novel, and a phrenological cranium model (go here for a description of people who still believe in it (crazies!), here for a more skeptical rundown, and here to see my new friend, Phineas Lumpy)! And lots of lovely greetings in various forms! So thank you, everyone!
My iPod is a miracle of technology! We also have a new computer, and are having SUCH fun uploading our music to iTunes and -Pod! I'm compiling a list of songs that will bankrupt me when I start up an account at iTunes.com.
The first signs of spring have emerged--the trees show mists of red buds where before there were only gray branches; the grass after a weekend of rain is now a startlingly rich green, incongruous against the bleak skies and mostly empty garden plots, and we've had our snowdrops and crocuses--we're already on to daffodils, narcissi and paperwhites. I love spring flowers the most (aside from peonies), because they herald spring, my favorite season. It's not my favorite because of my birthday, though my mother used to tell me that she went to the hospital on a night to have me before any flowers deigned to show themselves, and when we emerged 4 days later, everything was abloom in MY honor--this was doubtless a great influence on my character, which I like to describe as "self-affirming" but which other people have other choice words for.
But I digress. The air sweetens, the light softens, and there's mud and the promise of summer. This spring, there's even more promise: of quitting, sailing, Cape Cod, and grad school, in that order. But just like the flowers (and the warmth), it's coming slowly; 8 weeks til quitting seems to be going by awfully slowly.
More soon, and better composed; this was just a place-holder since I've been at the theater every night this week, sometimes til midnight. For a chick who needs 10 hours of sleep a night, trust me, it's painful.
A Bicycle County
by Nilo Cruz
The Mobtown Theater (directions here)
April 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23
8PM Fri/Sat, 2 PM Sun
Tickets: $15 adults, $12 students
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Another day older and deeper in debt
On this, the one-year anniversary of my hiring at the Hateful Job (known hereafter as HJ, Inc., I present a list of objectionable aspects of my job. To be fair, I’ll include a list of positive aspects, but don’t expect a lengthy compendium there.
1. I hate my job. Period. HJ, Inc., as an organization, is not without merit. Problem is, all the intellectual substance of it takes place outside the office, at its various conferences. We drones in the headquarters can check our brains at the door with no noticeable effect on the quality of our work.
2. I hate what I do; or, more accurately, what I don’t do. I have a double B.A. in Linguistics and East Asian Studies from one of the top liberal arts schools in the country. I speak three languages and I’ve lived abroad for a cumulative total of 2 years. And yet, for all my worldliness, my day consists almost exclusively of tasks I could probably train a teenager to do. Well, maybe not a teenager. Probably a chimp, though. But I hate screwing up constantly because the work is simultaneously boring and stuff I’m not good at.
3. I hate the office itself. Being a non-profit, HJ, Inc., is dirt-poor, so all the furniture and accessories are hand-me-downs from the ‘70’s and ‘80s. Desks that disintegrate when you bump into them and file cabinets that shriek when they’re opened are NOT conducive to productivity. It took me a month to find a desk chair that either wasn’t designed by Tomas de Torquemada or that didn’t emit a cloud of toxic foam-spore when I sat down in it. Plus, it’s so cluttered with paper (see below) that there are parts of the office in which, if you get wedged in the wrong way, you literally can’t move. I’ve had to crawl out under tables to escape from paper logjams. Then there’s the air-conditioning that kept the whole office at a nice, polar 63 degrees all summer. I would come in wearing appropriately lightweight summer clothes and then have to don a fleece, leggings and thick socks just to be able to make it through the day. And my knuckles were still blue.
4. I hate the lack of organization and the neo-Luddite attitude toward data-keeping. Paper is king at HJ, Inc., and we’ve got mountains of it. In addition to triplicate copies of EVERYTHING dating back to 1979, banker’s boxes that reach to the ceiling, reams of now-outdated contact records, molding away in no fewer than 3 drawers of a filing cabinet (working copies, backups and sources—aaaaarghhh!), there’s also a mound of ephemera on the conference table that has nothing to do with the company at all. It’s the Bossman’s “research” for his “book”. At least, that’s the most valid reason I’ve been given so far…
5. I hate the fact that while I’ve been pushing for DSL for months and getting rebuffed every time (yes, we had single-user dial-up AOL, and no one seemed in the least bit upset about it), one (male) intern breezed in, talked with Bossman for 10 minutes, and had it installed 2 weeks later. Or the fact that the female interns are routinely put on secretarial tasks while the boys are given projects like corporate target development. There is a deep injustice here.
6. I don’t hate my coworkers. Quite the contrary; I think they’re great people. But they’re no fun to work with, because they’re all older than I am. By 50 years. Bossman is 70; Grandma the office manager is 80, and the part-time program manager—well, she doesn’t qualify for senior discounts yet, but she’s still older than she would need to be to by my mother. We’ll come back to them later.
7. I hate the pay that is so low I can’t move out of my parents’ house, pay off my student loans, or afford a car. I hate the clever interpretation of the labor laws that make it impossible for me to collect overtime, despite the fact that I work 40 hours a week and they only pay me for 37.5. I hate the half-hour lunch break, the events that I’m expected to work with no pay, the fact that I had to beg for insurance and I still haven’t seen a penny of the 75% Bossman said he’d pay of it. I’m being exploited, and I hate that most of all.
8. I hate never being taken seriously when I have ideas or suggestions. In fact, I’m actively discouraged from making innovations or taking initiative on projects. I’m supposed to do my job EXACTLY how I’m told to do it, regardless of how stupid or inconvenient the process may be, or how totally unfamiliar Bossman is with the workings of computers (last time I checked, he couldn’t find the “on” switch on his).
9. I hate the fact that I took over from an alcoholic who had been spiraling downwards for months and taking the office down with her. So I was hired in a hurry, received two days of training to prepare me for running an entire office, and chucked in the deep end. This is me, remember. I can’t keep my desk at home clean, or perform arithmetic well enough to balance a checkbook. What made them think that a college grad with NO administrative or office experience could handle the organization of an entire non-profit office? Drives me nuts.
10. I hate the 40-minute bus ride each way, through some nasty parts of Baltimore. I can’t complain too much, since I’ve never gotten thrown up on, stabbed, or mugged, like some riders of public transportation I know, but I could do without the screaming children, the stares that come from being the only white person on the bus, and (in the afternoons) the suburban zombies who try to include me in their conversations about leftovers and football. I think I’ve made it pretty clear that all I want to do on the way home is read (Dictionary of the Khazars, thank you very much. No, it’s not an actual dictionary. Too complicated for you. Go back to Danielle Steele.), but the occasional idiot keeps trying. Maybe I’ll start reading Playboy.
Amazingly, that’s all the crap I can think of at the moment. So, on to the upsides:
1. Carrie, the office manager, is sweet as pie. She was once a top-notch secretary, but these things begin to diminish when you hit 80 or so. And she can’t use a computer for anything. Still, she’s always fun to talk to—tells me about her three marriages, her son in the Navy, going dancing in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, and always wants to know about my weekend. She doesn’t approve of coed dorms, though, so I can’t ever make her understand how cool they really were.
2. I like my office. Because it’s mine. All mine. It’s not a cubicle, or a desk in the corner. It’s a real room, with a door that shuts. I have a nice Tibetan wall calendar, a wind-up walking sushi, a mini-Edward Gorey theater (his work can be seen here) and other little treats to make the day bearable.
3. You can’t beat the view from Baltimore’s World Trade Center. My office faces north, and I can see all the way to the high-rises on Prospect Hill in Towson. That’s about a mile north of my own house. City College, the prison, the North Ave. education building, Govans Manor—they may not be pretty, but they’re all visible.
4. I also like working downtown. It’s nice to sit out on the harbor at lunch, it’s convenient to meet people there in the evenings, and every once in a while I can cruise the sales at the Gallery. I just wish I lived down there too.
5. It looks great on a resume (though I may not get a recommendation at this point), and it’s nice to be able to make my mistakes now, and not have them bring the world to a grinding halt. Also, I do get to see top government officials speak for free, and occasionally, they’re even interesting. And the members are cool people. They’re all really, really old (I’m afraid I’ll forget how to be 23), and there are the requisite number of batty old ladies, annoying old ladies, and creepy old men who hit on me when I’m serving them wine, but the rest are neat. And there’s a cutie-pie environmental engineer who doesn’t look a day over 35…
So there we go. Bad outweighs good 2 to 1. I’m not the least bit surprised. Fortunately, I have just over 2 months to go, and then I can walk out and NOT LOOK BACK. Graduate school can’t be any worse than this.
1. I hate my job. Period. HJ, Inc., as an organization, is not without merit. Problem is, all the intellectual substance of it takes place outside the office, at its various conferences. We drones in the headquarters can check our brains at the door with no noticeable effect on the quality of our work.
2. I hate what I do; or, more accurately, what I don’t do. I have a double B.A. in Linguistics and East Asian Studies from one of the top liberal arts schools in the country. I speak three languages and I’ve lived abroad for a cumulative total of 2 years. And yet, for all my worldliness, my day consists almost exclusively of tasks I could probably train a teenager to do. Well, maybe not a teenager. Probably a chimp, though. But I hate screwing up constantly because the work is simultaneously boring and stuff I’m not good at.
3. I hate the office itself. Being a non-profit, HJ, Inc., is dirt-poor, so all the furniture and accessories are hand-me-downs from the ‘70’s and ‘80s. Desks that disintegrate when you bump into them and file cabinets that shriek when they’re opened are NOT conducive to productivity. It took me a month to find a desk chair that either wasn’t designed by Tomas de Torquemada or that didn’t emit a cloud of toxic foam-spore when I sat down in it. Plus, it’s so cluttered with paper (see below) that there are parts of the office in which, if you get wedged in the wrong way, you literally can’t move. I’ve had to crawl out under tables to escape from paper logjams. Then there’s the air-conditioning that kept the whole office at a nice, polar 63 degrees all summer. I would come in wearing appropriately lightweight summer clothes and then have to don a fleece, leggings and thick socks just to be able to make it through the day. And my knuckles were still blue.
4. I hate the lack of organization and the neo-Luddite attitude toward data-keeping. Paper is king at HJ, Inc., and we’ve got mountains of it. In addition to triplicate copies of EVERYTHING dating back to 1979, banker’s boxes that reach to the ceiling, reams of now-outdated contact records, molding away in no fewer than 3 drawers of a filing cabinet (working copies, backups and sources—aaaaarghhh!), there’s also a mound of ephemera on the conference table that has nothing to do with the company at all. It’s the Bossman’s “research” for his “book”. At least, that’s the most valid reason I’ve been given so far…
5. I hate the fact that while I’ve been pushing for DSL for months and getting rebuffed every time (yes, we had single-user dial-up AOL, and no one seemed in the least bit upset about it), one (male) intern breezed in, talked with Bossman for 10 minutes, and had it installed 2 weeks later. Or the fact that the female interns are routinely put on secretarial tasks while the boys are given projects like corporate target development. There is a deep injustice here.
6. I don’t hate my coworkers. Quite the contrary; I think they’re great people. But they’re no fun to work with, because they’re all older than I am. By 50 years. Bossman is 70; Grandma the office manager is 80, and the part-time program manager—well, she doesn’t qualify for senior discounts yet, but she’s still older than she would need to be to by my mother. We’ll come back to them later.
7. I hate the pay that is so low I can’t move out of my parents’ house, pay off my student loans, or afford a car. I hate the clever interpretation of the labor laws that make it impossible for me to collect overtime, despite the fact that I work 40 hours a week and they only pay me for 37.5. I hate the half-hour lunch break, the events that I’m expected to work with no pay, the fact that I had to beg for insurance and I still haven’t seen a penny of the 75% Bossman said he’d pay of it. I’m being exploited, and I hate that most of all.
8. I hate never being taken seriously when I have ideas or suggestions. In fact, I’m actively discouraged from making innovations or taking initiative on projects. I’m supposed to do my job EXACTLY how I’m told to do it, regardless of how stupid or inconvenient the process may be, or how totally unfamiliar Bossman is with the workings of computers (last time I checked, he couldn’t find the “on” switch on his).
9. I hate the fact that I took over from an alcoholic who had been spiraling downwards for months and taking the office down with her. So I was hired in a hurry, received two days of training to prepare me for running an entire office, and chucked in the deep end. This is me, remember. I can’t keep my desk at home clean, or perform arithmetic well enough to balance a checkbook. What made them think that a college grad with NO administrative or office experience could handle the organization of an entire non-profit office? Drives me nuts.
10. I hate the 40-minute bus ride each way, through some nasty parts of Baltimore. I can’t complain too much, since I’ve never gotten thrown up on, stabbed, or mugged, like some riders of public transportation I know, but I could do without the screaming children, the stares that come from being the only white person on the bus, and (in the afternoons) the suburban zombies who try to include me in their conversations about leftovers and football. I think I’ve made it pretty clear that all I want to do on the way home is read (Dictionary of the Khazars, thank you very much. No, it’s not an actual dictionary. Too complicated for you. Go back to Danielle Steele.), but the occasional idiot keeps trying. Maybe I’ll start reading Playboy.
Amazingly, that’s all the crap I can think of at the moment. So, on to the upsides:
1. Carrie, the office manager, is sweet as pie. She was once a top-notch secretary, but these things begin to diminish when you hit 80 or so. And she can’t use a computer for anything. Still, she’s always fun to talk to—tells me about her three marriages, her son in the Navy, going dancing in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, and always wants to know about my weekend. She doesn’t approve of coed dorms, though, so I can’t ever make her understand how cool they really were.
2. I like my office. Because it’s mine. All mine. It’s not a cubicle, or a desk in the corner. It’s a real room, with a door that shuts. I have a nice Tibetan wall calendar, a wind-up walking sushi, a mini-Edward Gorey theater (his work can be seen here) and other little treats to make the day bearable.
3. You can’t beat the view from Baltimore’s World Trade Center. My office faces north, and I can see all the way to the high-rises on Prospect Hill in Towson. That’s about a mile north of my own house. City College, the prison, the North Ave. education building, Govans Manor—they may not be pretty, but they’re all visible.
4. I also like working downtown. It’s nice to sit out on the harbor at lunch, it’s convenient to meet people there in the evenings, and every once in a while I can cruise the sales at the Gallery. I just wish I lived down there too.
5. It looks great on a resume (though I may not get a recommendation at this point), and it’s nice to be able to make my mistakes now, and not have them bring the world to a grinding halt. Also, I do get to see top government officials speak for free, and occasionally, they’re even interesting. And the members are cool people. They’re all really, really old (I’m afraid I’ll forget how to be 23), and there are the requisite number of batty old ladies, annoying old ladies, and creepy old men who hit on me when I’m serving them wine, but the rest are neat. And there’s a cutie-pie environmental engineer who doesn’t look a day over 35…
So there we go. Bad outweighs good 2 to 1. I’m not the least bit surprised. Fortunately, I have just over 2 months to go, and then I can walk out and NOT LOOK BACK. Graduate school can’t be any worse than this.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
My First Post!
And with that, my e-dentity is launched.
I am beginning this blog on the day I should have been born, allegedly. But I didn't emerge until almost 2 weeks later, thus setting me on a path of chronic lateness. At least, that's as good an excuse as any.
Now, in my opionion, babies come out when they are cooked, and not before. I am convinced that a little extra womb-time served to make me as cool as I am, giving God a little more time to knit me--finish off, tidy up, maybe add a little fringe or some bobbles. Knitting in the womb. I love Biblical imagery. It all but BEGS for mockery.
But I digress.
This blog will be about me. Now, my best friend Jayne declared a revulsion for what she termed the "obsessive self-chronicling" of this generation, and I agree. To a point. The comment was spawned by a visit to Anthropologie (love Anthropologie. Don't forget, folks, my birthday IS coming up!) and viewing with disgust, several overpriced journals labeled "What I Wore", "What I Ate", "Where I Went", and so forth. I think these are stupid, yes. If you have to buy a special, silk-covered journal at Anthropologie for $15.99 where your checkbook or a small daybook from Target at $7.99 would suffice, you really aren’t in much control of your life. Or your spending. More to the point, if you can’t remember what you bought and where you ate, I don’t think you should be allowed out on your own.
But there is a difference between obsessive self-chronicling, which is, well, unhealthy, and real diary-keeping, which is cool. And I hope that this will turn out to be the latter. If we’re to have purpose-driven lives, as that guy with the bestseller thinks we should; or better yet, if we are to have “considered and consequential lives”, as the heads of my school exhorted us to, I think we ought to have a record of them. This blog is a spot (get it? spot? hee) for me to post musings and wonderings and news-like events about me, since I have too many people scattered over too far, and for some reason, mass-emailing feels invasive and exhausting. This way, you can tune in to the Evelyn Show whenever YOU feel like it, and not have some e-mail with an address header that's longer than the message itself squatting in your inbox like a top-heavy toad.
Ribbit.
So this is my postmodern diary. I’ve tried keeping written ones: daily, weekly, in French, in Japanese, in pretty books and worn old binders with random sheets of notebook paper stuffed in them; and like most of my other “projects”, I eventually give up. But I realized that if I start posting a blog, I’ll have a very good incentive to maintain and sustain interest in my endeavors: an audience. This is why I should be showing my artwork in order to stimulate producing it; why I should take my shows on the road instead of belting them out in my room, why I should NOT be a secretary but instead do something that simultaneously allows me to show off, interact with people and produce a tangible product or result. If I think that someone, anyone, will read my pseudo-intellectual ramblings about trees and academic poverty and summer light, then by God, I’ll do it! Mustn’t disappoint my fans!
Now, given the hope that my fans (and by “fans” I mean “friends”, people who are much cooler than I am but keep me around because I can make them laugh the way an alligator fighting with its own tail could) will actually read this, I will do my best to keep specific people and telltale events out of my writings (starting now; the above reference to the lovely Jayne does not count). No one wants his or her fifteen minutes of fame to be a rant about him or her in someone else’s blog. It would be unladylike of me to mention anyone by name except in the most innocuous context, say, “I went to X bar with Y, Z and 4, and it was awesome! We started off with a round of the house lager…**”. I love my friends, and I don’t want them to be upset by something I said on my blog. This can sometimes make for rather bland reading, but it doesn’t bother me too much, because it will allow me to write more about myself. A topic of endless enjoyment and interest. Well, to me, anyway.
This is also an attempt to keep everyone up to date about me (again, going on the assumption that you want to, and that you’re not doing your best to forget about me!) without the rather invasive and slightly insulting mass e-mail. Now you can get my news at your leisure, rather than mine, and not at the same time as everyone else (because you’re all special, just like everyone else) and if you think real hard, it’ll sound like I’m talking to you!
A word about the title: The Hazelnut Electrograph is my attempt to go down in Googlewhacking history*. The Hazelnut is me, a reference to the very old French meaning of my name. You may not call me that.
The Electrograph is the blog, as I am basically writing with electricity (yes, I know it's more complicated than that, but don't bother explaining, I don't care). The URL is a phrase I always liked, for some reason, and used in the hopes that my blog will be as startling, rich, and sweet as its title.
*Googlewhacking is a new internet-based sport/time waster, wherein one types two words into Google's search engine in hopes of getting one--and only one!--hit. For more info, click here.
**I’ll give a cookie to anyone who can tell me why I would never utter that sentence. And no, it’s not because I don’t have a friend named 4. 4 and I are buds.
I am beginning this blog on the day I should have been born, allegedly. But I didn't emerge until almost 2 weeks later, thus setting me on a path of chronic lateness. At least, that's as good an excuse as any.
Now, in my opionion, babies come out when they are cooked, and not before. I am convinced that a little extra womb-time served to make me as cool as I am, giving God a little more time to knit me--finish off, tidy up, maybe add a little fringe or some bobbles. Knitting in the womb. I love Biblical imagery. It all but BEGS for mockery.
But I digress.
This blog will be about me. Now, my best friend Jayne declared a revulsion for what she termed the "obsessive self-chronicling" of this generation, and I agree. To a point. The comment was spawned by a visit to Anthropologie (love Anthropologie. Don't forget, folks, my birthday IS coming up!) and viewing with disgust, several overpriced journals labeled "What I Wore", "What I Ate", "Where I Went", and so forth. I think these are stupid, yes. If you have to buy a special, silk-covered journal at Anthropologie for $15.99 where your checkbook or a small daybook from Target at $7.99 would suffice, you really aren’t in much control of your life. Or your spending. More to the point, if you can’t remember what you bought and where you ate, I don’t think you should be allowed out on your own.
But there is a difference between obsessive self-chronicling, which is, well, unhealthy, and real diary-keeping, which is cool. And I hope that this will turn out to be the latter. If we’re to have purpose-driven lives, as that guy with the bestseller thinks we should; or better yet, if we are to have “considered and consequential lives”, as the heads of my school exhorted us to, I think we ought to have a record of them. This blog is a spot (get it? spot? hee) for me to post musings and wonderings and news-like events about me, since I have too many people scattered over too far, and for some reason, mass-emailing feels invasive and exhausting. This way, you can tune in to the Evelyn Show whenever YOU feel like it, and not have some e-mail with an address header that's longer than the message itself squatting in your inbox like a top-heavy toad.
Ribbit.
So this is my postmodern diary. I’ve tried keeping written ones: daily, weekly, in French, in Japanese, in pretty books and worn old binders with random sheets of notebook paper stuffed in them; and like most of my other “projects”, I eventually give up. But I realized that if I start posting a blog, I’ll have a very good incentive to maintain and sustain interest in my endeavors: an audience. This is why I should be showing my artwork in order to stimulate producing it; why I should take my shows on the road instead of belting them out in my room, why I should NOT be a secretary but instead do something that simultaneously allows me to show off, interact with people and produce a tangible product or result. If I think that someone, anyone, will read my pseudo-intellectual ramblings about trees and academic poverty and summer light, then by God, I’ll do it! Mustn’t disappoint my fans!
Now, given the hope that my fans (and by “fans” I mean “friends”, people who are much cooler than I am but keep me around because I can make them laugh the way an alligator fighting with its own tail could) will actually read this, I will do my best to keep specific people and telltale events out of my writings (starting now; the above reference to the lovely Jayne does not count). No one wants his or her fifteen minutes of fame to be a rant about him or her in someone else’s blog. It would be unladylike of me to mention anyone by name except in the most innocuous context, say, “I went to X bar with Y, Z and 4, and it was awesome! We started off with a round of the house lager…**”. I love my friends, and I don’t want them to be upset by something I said on my blog. This can sometimes make for rather bland reading, but it doesn’t bother me too much, because it will allow me to write more about myself. A topic of endless enjoyment and interest. Well, to me, anyway.
This is also an attempt to keep everyone up to date about me (again, going on the assumption that you want to, and that you’re not doing your best to forget about me!) without the rather invasive and slightly insulting mass e-mail. Now you can get my news at your leisure, rather than mine, and not at the same time as everyone else (because you’re all special, just like everyone else) and if you think real hard, it’ll sound like I’m talking to you!
A word about the title: The Hazelnut Electrograph is my attempt to go down in Googlewhacking history*. The Hazelnut is me, a reference to the very old French meaning of my name. You may not call me that.
The Electrograph is the blog, as I am basically writing with electricity (yes, I know it's more complicated than that, but don't bother explaining, I don't care). The URL is a phrase I always liked, for some reason, and used in the hopes that my blog will be as startling, rich, and sweet as its title.
*Googlewhacking is a new internet-based sport/time waster, wherein one types two words into Google's search engine in hopes of getting one--and only one!--hit. For more info, click here.
**I’ll give a cookie to anyone who can tell me why I would never utter that sentence. And no, it’s not because I don’t have a friend named 4. 4 and I are buds.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)