2,996 and counting

This is shocking. These kids, assuming they haven't been taken out back and shot somewhere, have managed to crack open the event of the century using nothing but footage and information in the public domain.
I wept as I watched it, just as I did my junior year in Japan as I watched a video on media manipulation, and I realized that our country sticks its fingers into matters all over the world, plying one side or the other for their own gains, which usually backfire.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5946593973848835726&q=loose+change

In memory of not only those who lost their lives, their loved ones, their friends and associates, but every soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq and every family who sits on pins waiting for them to come home. For every peace protestor threatened by police, for every Iraqi whose life has been turned upside down, not just by our war, but by the despot WE put there 20 years ago. For every prisoner at Guantanamo, held illegally, transported to other countries for unspeakable torture, held so often without cause or reason. And now, I include everyone who will shudder at the idea that our government thinks it's not only ok, but imperative, that they engineer the deaths of innocent citizens in the short and long term, for ends they could achieve through compromise and compassion, and they don't even try.

That's a lot more than 2,996.

Intolerable Cruelty

http://www.glumbert.com/media/tonguetwister.html

Wow. Suddenly I'm not so sorry to be home.

(Safe for work, if work allows clips of men suffering the ultimate pain as punishment for misprounouncing tongue-twisters. Everyone is clothed, and of there are any naughty words or references to sex, they're in Japanese, so you're probably ok.)

The Batsh*t Boob Patrol...GREAT Name.

I've found something to slash my katana at!

This makes me. Very. Angry.

http://womenshealthnews.blogspot.com/2006/07/babytalk-magazine-cover-controversy.html
http://theogeo.blogspot.com/2006/07/boobs.html

You might have to copy and paste the links. Because I'm lazy. But it's worth it. People are IDIOTS.

love to all! Home in a week!

Katanaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggggg!

From Tokyo, with Love, Part 2

August. Amazing. I know I pledged to post once a week, but truly, this is the first free evening I've had all month. And all last month. This course is kicking my ass. Fortunately it's kicking everyone else's ass (as one seasoned ICU veteran said, "yes, well; the Japanese do tend to overdo things, don't they?"), so I don't feel too bad when my tests come back with grades so bad I can't even tell my parents. More on that later. For now, I'll try to recap events by week, one per post, and change things up a bit with other posts too.
For now, here's a picture of me about to kick ass with a crappy fake katana. Not the course's ass, unfortunately. Undefined ass. But still.

Shall We Dance?

Some people ask me—often in the tone of aghast wonder reserved for Scientologists and people who live on wheatgrass—just what the appeal of competetive ballroom dance is. Someone even came to practice and asked me as part of a sociological study. All I can say is, judging by the attendance at the practices and competitions, I'm not alone in my madness. Partly it's the combination of exercise and socializing, and of course, dancing on a regular basis makes me happy. I knew that Berkeley would have an active social dance scene, so I didn't have to be sold on the team when I encountered the team table on Sproul. I signed right up.
The first meeting was at LaVal's on Northside, and I chatted with a lot of other people while waiting for the free pizza, feeling insecure. Information was handed out in dribs and drabs at first, as the team members circulated and gave quick answers to questions, then one pretty girl (our rookie coordinator Andrea, a soul of patience unparalled even in laid-back Berkeley) stood up, gave us all the bullet on the first practice and the various forms and requirements, and answered a few more queries from her mostly rapt audience between bites. I left feeling nonplussed. It seemed like pretty routine official stuff to me, so there was no indication about what kind of club it really was.
The first lesson was hugely crowded. 80 people or so crammed into a bright gym/dance studio, with our instructors. One of them looked so much like my old roommate that I kept pulling double takes all night. We learned a few waltz and rumba steps, got to know the people we partnered with, and exchanged hopes and concerns and interest in the superficial manner of people who might become quite close but aren't sure yet. We could barely move on the floor without bumping into someone else, stepping on feet, ducking errant elbows, but like judo, it was deceptively simple with the promise of infinite complexity, and I was hooked.
Lesson after lesson, practice after practice, week after week in the semester. We learned about form, frame, weight, carriage, styling, footwork, timing, body isolation. We learned turns and fans on top of the basics. Fewer and fewer people showed up for class each week. The more dedicated started staying at the Wednesday and Saturday practices longer. Most of them were pairing off, but I hadn't been lucky so far. I'm much taller than most of the boys, and some of them averred that they weren't as sold on it as I seemed to be. I eventually found a partner, and we went on to do very well for the first semester (see my monthly posts for details), but the real influence on me, the motivation for the passion that I believe has been crucial to my success, was John.
Around this time, an e-mail went out to the team from one of the more advanced leaders, requesting a partner for extra practice, rookies okay. “I cannot get enough of dancing. Sometimes my partner asks me for a 30-second break.” Good Lord. He included a picture of himself posed in a full split so we would know who he was. Good *Lord*. He was the slightly frightening Chinese guy I saw at Wednesday practice. Built like a greyhound, pale as milk, severe and unsmiling, dancing at practice before I arrived and staying after I left, he could have been championship level for all I knew. I learned later that he was trained extremely rigorously in ballet, had danced with several companies before an injury took him off the stage and into the ballroom. Had I known this I probably wouldn't have been able to do much but gabble and trip in his presence. But I had no partner, and I knew I'd never get better without one, so I replied, and we met in the corridor of Wheeler Hall one evening.
I was late, of course, and as clumsy as a drunken sailor. He had brought an iPod with a splicer for the earbuds, so we each had our own set for his music. But I was definitely not ready for practicing with music. We had to do it in silence. I only had a few steps for each dance anyway, but John was patient, stopping when I lost the beat, correcting my footwork when I stepped on his toes, giving tips on turns and form. It was like a 2-hour private lesson, and even though I sucked, it felt good. He was quiet, though, completely professional with no chitchat or pleasantries offered, no sense of who he was beyond the sure feet and perfect frame.
We met several times a week, for two hours or more, and it began to feel like those montages in sports or dance movies where the young novice, pushed by the weathered mentor, improves with each scene over the stirring music. Except the montage was hours and days and weeks and months long. The day I finished the waltz sequence that we had been working on for weeks without a single misstep, I could hear “Eye of the Tiger” back in some murky sentimental corner of my brain. By that time, John and I had started talking during our breaks, and I could make him laugh and get him to open up a little. And the improvement was really showing. At the end of October, after six weeks of practice almost 4 or 5 times a week (bear in mind, I had few friends at the time, so weekend nights were best taken up with something that didn't reinforce my general loser-ness), my partner and I placed 3rd in our standard events, waltz and quickstep. I hope all the grueling hours of running through basic figures with my two left feet helped John and Julia, his “real” partner, with their high placements all through the semester. He tells me, though, that he throws the ribbons away and puts the trophies where he can't see them. It isn't the competition that draws him; perhaps the performance is alluring, but for him, dance, to be sappy, is the purest expression of his soul. He's happy no matter what he's doing, be it taking a rookie through her basics, dancing Argentine tango with smelly men, running endless routines in preparation for comps, or throwing some poor girl around the club floor in a hustle. (I've seen him do all but the smelly tango, but he assures me that it's happened, and he's still happy.) He never gets tired, he never gets bored. He also never seems to eat or sleep.
John never lets me rest as much as I think I want to, just as much as I need to. Starting in September, he tried to get me down to a full split by my birthday in March (and failed miserably, but I think he has high hopes for next year). He ignores me when I whine about my stretches, pushing down harder on my back or shoulders to get that extra inch. “You won't die!”, he exclaims. “You won't die! It won't even hurt tomorrow!” To my annoyance, he's usually right. He will come up to me while I'm waiting in line for a heat, or even when I'm just standing around at a practice, grasp my shoulders, and pull them up and back so I'll stand up straight. “You are your mother's masterpiece!”, he tells me. “Make sure you always look like it.” He taught me West Coast Swing just for fun over winter break, as a vacation from the ten-dance routines for ballroom. We go to salsa dances at Metronome and Allegro, where everyone tells us how good we look and I claim no responsibility for it, admitting freely that it's all him. This past winter, he actually came and picked me up from the airport at 4 in the morning, keeping the promise he made when my flight was supposed to get in at 10 PM, even after I assured him repeatedly that he was off the hook once the plane had been grounded for five hours. Occasionally he fusses over me, trying to set my up with likely guys both on and off the dance floor (he's since stopped, thankfully), and in affectionate frustration I tell him he's as pesky as an older brother.
We don't practice as much these days; he's rising higher in the ranks and has ever more complicated routines and steps to work on, and I ran through a few temporary competition partners before finding a (hopefully) permanent one, so I had to practice a lot with them. These days he seems frailer to me, lighter, because he's not as big and sturdy as my regular partner. Of course I know to compensate for the difference in a partner's physique, but I worry I'll push too hard on him—he only outweighs me by 10 pounds—and he'll stagger or stumble. But, he promises he'll always catch me if he tries a dip or a hold, and I believe him, even when my hair, short as it is, brushes the floor.

Fron Tokyo, With Love: Part 1

I'm back in Japan! I can hardly believe it. Back in the land where ambulance drivers wear gloves and helmets but drive on the left, where grown men shove old ladies aside for seats on the trains, and the old ladies are happy to give them up, and buildings under construction are swathed in tarps and netting until they can be revealed in their new glory.

I know I'll fall behind in my journal-keeping, but I'm going to do my best with a weekly digest. Yeah I know you've all heard THAT before...but. Anyway. I wrote part of this on the plane, and the rest after I'd been here for a few days.

I'm well over the International Date Line at this point, so I guess I'm really gone. I'm already in tomorrow. I feel very far away.
We have an hour before we land, and it seems like it'll be earlier than it said on the ticket, so I don't know if my host family will be there when I arrive. I suppose customs will take some time.
But the flight's been great! Upgrades: awesome. Business class: awesome :-) The seats are huge and they recline to almost flat (I slept for 4 hours!), with a million controls for footrests, headrests, lumbar support, etc. I was swaddled in a huge blanket, 3 times the size of an economy class one, and a big ugly JAL sweater, and showered with free wine, earplugs, eye masks (I'm accumulating quite a collection of those), warm towels (they're called “oshibori” in Japanese, and you'll get one at every restaurant you go to, and they're wonderful when flying), slippers; and FED, fed until I could barely walk. I'm so used to the starvation diets on domestic American flights (and also wasn't expecting the upgrade), that I had a sandwich and picked up a few snackies before boarding. Needless to say, I haven't touched them. And after the meal had been served, when I thought my stomach couldn't hold another gram of food, they came trotting by with digestifs and truffles. If plans are cattle cars, I feel like Kobe beef...
The flight attendants are lovely, trim Japanese ladies with the cutest service aprons I've ever seen! I'm tempted to steal one: they have a light greyscale aerial view of some European city, probably Paris, as a background, and big colorful dirigibles and hot-air balloons all over them. Really, really good design. The movies were terrible, so I watched an NHK (Japanese public television) special on bears in Hokkaido, and was gratified that I could understand about half of the narration! Also, it was filmed in a national park that was the subject of a translation exercise I had last fall, so that was sort of interesting. There's some sort of Important Cultural Personage on board, or some such thing; an older Japanese man who gets a LOT of attention from the flight attendants. They're always offiering him something, or, in one case, listening to him for about half an hour, half-crouched near his seat. I wish I knew who he was!
When we landed, I stupidly waited at the wrong carousel for my luggage, and finally found it before it was loaded onto an unclaimed-luggage-pound cart (yikes!), but I got out into the receiving lobby, and there was my host family, with a cute little sign, waiting for me! Kumiko (my host mother) is petite and pretty, and Tatsuya (my host father) has a sort of boyish face, and a big grin. They have a big shiny black Toyota SUV, and we loaded up my luggage, and drove the two hours back to Tokyo. I'm not familiar with the Tokyo highways, so it was a while before I recognized anything, but it was still cool to see all the signs, and the cars full of real Japanese people—wow! (it isn't nice to say that they all look the same, but compared to the sea of American faces, it's sort of relaxing to see that everyone seems to have at least the same basic underlying facial structure). We chatted all the way through the ride home. Kumiko was very relieved that I could speak lots of Japanese and understand it too, since she doesn't speak any English. Tatsuya understands some English, but doesn't speak it much either. I'm glad; it means I won't be called upon to teach English or have to rely on it a lot.
They live in Mitaka, which is only about 15 minutes by bus from the university. They house is totally Western and modern, not a tatami mat in sight. It's European-style, with the living quarters on the second floor. Their son, Koichi, looks a lot like my friend's boyfriend, i.e., cute, and he's friendly and cheerful, not at all surly or teenager-ish, and he doesn't ignore me. I get his room (he's in the guest room downstairs, so that's all right). It's small but perfect for 6 weeks. We had a great dinner of temaki-zushi, which sort of make-your-own using presliced fish and vegetables. No sushi knife experience needed. Afterwards they went over the house rules, which all seem very reasonable (even the curfew, since it's flexible as long as I let them know in advance) and i'm happy to be the new “musume-san” (daughter). Tomorrow I have to get registered at school, so I took a bath (mmm, first Japanese bath in 4 years. Delicious!) and headed straight to bed. It's really hot and sticky here, but I set the timer for the fan for 30 minutes and was out cold (well, not really cold. I wish!) in 10.

September

September

Ok, the August post was long enough, so some of the stuff from that month is going here. Besides, I might not have enough material for the September post otherwise; once you're in school, the days sort of bleed into one another and become all the same.
When we last left our intrepid heroine, she had safely navigated the treacherous waters of Berkeley housing, and found a place to roost.
It's a room. Just a room. But it was perfect. (Still is. I signed the lease for another year!) I found an ad on CraigsList for a women's boarding house, in my price range, three blocks from the south part of campus. Sylvia, the landlady, agreed to see me the next day, and Dad and I pulled up in front of a chocolate-brown, sturdy Victorian (no gingerbread trim, alas, just a solid-looking box of a house with a brick porch). Sylvia is a lovely, motherly ex-hippie who reminds me of a mother deer, with her tawny hair and big eyes. She led us through a hall with an improbably ornate mirror and marble-topped bench, up some ratty, paint-chipped carpeted stairs, into a totally nondescript hall, and unlocked the door on the far left. And I knew I was home.
It's big, with a bank of north- and east-facing windows. The ceilings are 9 feet high or higher, curved above the crown molding, and the floors are the color of dark honey. Of course rooms look bigger when they're empty, and this one seemed to stretch away from me forever. Best of all, there's an alcove in which some former resident's father had built a closet frame, hung it with poles and racks, and draped a curtain over the whole thing to hide it. And while there's no private bathroom, there is a huge closet with a small sink. The walls with the windows are set back slightly from the rest of the walls, making a sort of square bay perfect for a bed. There's a huge tree outside that provides substantial cover for the street (not that I'm not scrupulous about keeping my blinds closed!). Also, a cute little back garden with fig trees—yummy!—and on-site laundry. It doesn't get better than this, at least in my price range. Dad found nothing wrong with it. He declared it “just shabby enough”, i.e., the slightly run-down entrance and bathroom. It'll keep me humble, I think, is the reasoning. I decided on it within minutes. I haven't regretted it yet.
After I signed the lease, I could begin the delightful (at least for me) process of assembling the trappings of domesticity, namely, furniture. I already had a dresser Dad found on the side of the road (nothing but the best for his little girl, no sir!); a cool old trunk that would probably sell at Anthropologie for $250 but which cost me $8 at the Magic Johnson AIDS Clinic Thrift Shop (“Out of the Closet”); and it was the work of an hour to pick out the quintessential student futon (black, hollow-tubing frame, unbleached cotton mattress). For the rest, I spent a very pleasant day at Urban Ore (highly recommended), and came away with a lovely Danish desk, a hutch for it, a round chair (I've always wanted one!), a comfy old easy chair, and a Mission-style pillar lamp with a gorgeous stained-glass shade. Plus, Sylvia told me I could paint the walls, so I picked out my favorite sky-blue turquoise for the ceiling, and a rich pink to be overlaid with a butter yellow wash on the walls. Aron came over the hill with his pickup to haul furniture, and Gabe came from Santa Cruz to help paint and, saint that he is, chauffeur me to various monuments to capitalism to collect the remaining bits and pieces of home life. It's awfully fun to sort of spend—wisely, of course—but freely. Gabe and I dined at the Scharffen Berger Cacao Cafe. Mmmmmmm. (makes yummy sounds). Sadly, it closed for dinner a few months ago, so I'm glad we went.
Mom and Dad sent a bunch of stuff through the mail, which didn't arrive until I had an actual address at a mail center a few weeks later (the mail system at Dana House consists of a dresser in the foyer on which mail is placed, and requires great faith on the part of the occupants in the two girls assigned to sort it and place it in everyone's designated slot. And there's no way to get a package safely into the house if no one opens the door for the delivery boy. I took one look at it and headed straight for Postal Annex. Worth every penny). So I was still getting packages of linens and other stuff well into the first few weeks of school, but I was basically moved in by the first day.
As for my housemates, unfortunately, I see very little of them. The downstairs apartments have two or three girls each in them, and I hear lots of parties down there on weekends. The rest of us upstairs keep mostly to ourselves. It's hard to socialize when the doors fall closed as soon as they're opened. Also, I never had to entertain someone in my bedroom in college, because I always had an apartment, and so it feels weird to have people step into my nest with all the laundry and unmade bedding in plain sight. I was lonely for several weeks, even though the girl next door and one upstairs and I made vague plans to hang out. I still feel a little lonely when I contemplate how nice having a roommate can be. But as the year went on, I got so busy I'm rarely bothered by it now, and I really need solitude to be truly happy. The product of an only childhood. No hard feelings, Mom and Dad. Promise!
I got a brief visit from Stu the second week of September. It was nice just to have someone around who already knew me, to whom I was not explaining about myself ad infinitum while hanging ou don't mind eating solo, but it also made me homesick in new and creative ways to be with someone who still had a life back East. So we went and saw _The Forty-Year-Old Virgin_ and wet our pants laughing at it and it was better.

Unfortunately, my bike was stolen out of the back garden over Labor Day weekend. Partly my fault for not locking it, and merely leaning it against a tree, and partly someone else's for leaving the gate open overnight after doing her laundry.
Back to school! I feel like a kid again, or at least an undergraduate. Orientation for the department was all right. Meeting my “colleagues” was more fun than touring all the buildings and services, but it made me a lot more comfortable and at home to know exactly where to go. The department advisor told us to study in a different library every time we want to study for a few weeks, until we can pick our favorite. I took her advice to heart; more on that later.
The classrooms are all the same. Classrooms are the same the world over. Same smell of chalk and floor cleaner and gum under desks. The hallways are always full of students, usually sprawled on the floor, waiting for their next class. In front of the big classrooms it can get dangerous, stepping over all those feet and bags. I took the placement test for Japanese a few days before the start of classes, and after handing back two tests (one of the professors, having taught on the East Coast, noted that Haverford was a very good schol, and tried to put me in fifth year. Not a chance. The fourth-year test was similarly over my head), and a conversation with a sweet-as-pie prof, I was placed in third-year. Which, privately, is where I knew I belonged, but knowing the Japanese love of procedure and empirical evidence as I do, I kept quiet and diligently filled out my kanji tables and sentence completion.

My other classes seem pretty typical high-level undergraduate stuff (we're encouraged to take that level of instruction our first semseter). Two classes—Japanese translation and Japanese linguistics—with the same professor, and a seminar that I thought was going to be a lot of work and isn't. So now I have a little too much time on my hands, basically an unfilled week. But there's ballroom! The stuff of my next post!

But for now...to finish out the month, Gabe and I went hiking at Point Reyes as soon as he was free from the shackles of qualifying exams. We went with my cousin Sam and his girlfriend, and my grandmother's dear friend Yvie, who knows the trails like her own street. It was a perfect day, blazing hot and sunny. Starting out, we stopped for the requisite coffee (for G, naturally. I still don't touch the stuff), and I left my wallet on top of his car. No kidding, it was still there when we pulled up at the bridge toll 20 minutes and 10 miles later. God protects fools and little children, indeed.
We arrived in Marin at Yvie's to find her enormous dining room table COVERED with food. Even though we had brought our own snacks and trail mix, we dug in gleefully and fueled up. Then we stopped at Bovine Bakery where we parked, for second breakfast (might have been third by that time...). The trail we picked was neither easy nor hard, in my opinion. I was certainly tired at the end, but aside from somewhat exhausted ankles from plowing through the sandy paths, I wasn't totally wiped out at the end. We got to see elk on the way, but no whales. The ocean views, and sounds, and smell more than made up for it, though. I love cliffs.
We went back to Yvie's to wash up, and off to Sushiko's for dinner. Yumyumyumyum...On the way back, Sam managed to lead us into a warehouse parking lot, or some such thing, and nearly killed himself in the process. Gabe has since extracted a promise from me that I won't get into a car with him. My own cousin...
but. Great way to end the month! I think I'm going to like it here!

Broken Silence

Because I've been a wee bit busy for the past few months, I've missed posting. Yeah. Sorry. So in the 2 months remaining of my the summer, I will attempt to chronicle my 10 months here in Berkeley: graduate school, ballroom dance, the whole bit. But since I never really got into the habit of journaling or keeping track of it all, it's going to be hard to do this. Plus, I very much doubt that the vast majority of my loyal readers would appreciate the degree of excruciating detail my full account would entail. So , I'll attempt a monthly digest of events. I intended to post those weekly, but after doing the math, I discover that 9 weeks is almost more time than this summer allows, and since I'll almost certainly interrupt it for weekly posts while I'm in Japan, I'll probably post a few times a week, as I write them. You all know the rules: very few people will be named by name, and only in the most innocuous circumstances. No gossip, no drama, no matter how significant it might have been at the time. I know you're all crushed. Read it anyway.

WARNING: I was too lazy to actually write the August post, so it's just a couple of e-mails I sent to people. So it repeats itself. Much like I do, come to think of it. And yes, it's intentional.


August

trapped in the airport
trapped in the airport all night long
we steal blankets and pull chairs together
dad sleeps on the floor
like in “the terminal”
i should have known that shedding my old life would never be as easy as getting on a plane
shearing off the ground
landing only slightly wilted
i have to be stripped of all the trappings
almost forget how i used to be

Speaking of new homes, I've landed in mine. Sort of. I'm in Berkeley, after a hellish trip from Baltimore to Atlanta to Memphis to San Francisco (instead of Oakland), a VERY uncomfortable night on the floor of an airport (I forget which one. Atlanta, I think), and the (hopefully temporary) "misplacement" of every stitch of clothing and other article I own (at press time 2 of the 4 bags had been returned, and the other 2 located and on their way, I think). But Liz and Dierdre were very welcoming, and Dad is just as happy as a clam to be "home" back on the West Coast and in Berkeley. He was taking great lungfuls of air as we climbed out of the subway and exulting about it all.
Myself, I'm uncomfortably chilly most of the time, and mildly distressed about the seeming lack of consistent sunlight. Maybe if I thought of myself in England I'd cope better. But honestly, right now England would seem less foreign. The lay of the land is different, the people look different, even the squirrels are a different color. I can't shake the feeling that I'm not here permanently, despite spending most of yesterday afternoon apartment-searching as soon as we got here. Frankly, I'm probably a little behind on most of my university stuff, so I don't feel prepared. My aunt is pretty helpful, but she's in athletic administration, not academics, so her advice is pretty general.
As for the apartments, a lot of them are "lacking in charm", as Liz said. Cheap, to be sure, and I'm sure I'll find one I like, but. Yikes. I know it's only the first day, but my dad's leaving for the mountains tomorrow, and he's so helpful when it comes to apartment searching and inspection. It's the contractor in him, I think. And he always remembers the questions I forget :-) So I want to be installed before he leaves. Plus, Dierdre's having a baby, so I can't crash on their couch forever.
But this is my new home, so I'll get used to it and like it eventually. I always do. It's just that I've never been in a place I didn't know inside out already (Japan is an exception, but Japan was so crazy far away it doesn't count. Plus, I knew I would be walked through just about everything, whether I liked it or not). Even at Haverford, I never felt like I didn't belong, I was never homesick, and I already knew the campus from visiting during my dad's reunions.

It's chilly here.  It seems to be always this way.  I cannot shake the
feeling that this is only a temporary visit, not a semi-permanent move.
 I've moved 5 times not counting college and Japan, and this feels the least
like a move.  No boxes.  No fresh paint.  No posse of friends coming over 
to
drink beer and haul furniture and go out for Indian afterwards.  Just a new
laptop and a pile of suitcases, and my aunties and my father, each one
falling over the other to ask, ask, ask.  Have you seen this apartment, 
what
about that one, did you call the luggage tracking service, when do you sign
up for your courses, are you sure that place is too far away, hey, do you
have a cell phone yet?

Aren't you excited?

Well, no.   Unless you mean, excited in the sense that people who are
kidnapped and then dropped by the side of the road in some godforsaken spot
are said to be "excited".
I try to lose myself in the minutiae of packing and apartment searching to
disguise the fact that when we drive out somewhere and I imagine myself BY
myself, walking and studying and independent, my bowels loosen.  I've never
been somewhere I didn't already know inside and out (same school for 12
years, and I picked the college my dad went to, so I had already seen it
several times at reunions), with the exception of Japan.  But that was so
different I couldn't be faulted for my terror.  Here, everyone expects me 
to
be wild with joy at the prospect of at least six weeks of getting lost,
overpaying for things,  asking questions every five minutes, and buying
furniture off the side of the road.

I am adrift.
I don't have a bank account, a cell phone, a student ID, a real home. All of my things (my luggage was mercifully returned to me, in full, yesterday afternoon) are piled in bags and crates in my aunts' spare room, and it's all in different places and I can't find anything. Getting dressed and groomed requires rooting through just about every bag: underwear in this suitcase, pants in another, shirts in another, toothbrush and jewelry in yet another. The Cal bureaucracy is a typical one: huge, creaking, rapidly antiquating and staffed by underpaid, overworked drones who have seen everything and whose greatest wish is to see none of it again. I keep getting shunted from office to office clutching my forms and registration. It makes me homesick for Haverford's cute little system, with the offices no more than 5 minutes away, and secretaries who knew your name and fixed your problems before you knew you had them.
I am the world's most clueless graduate student.
Selah.
The apartment search is going. Not well, not poorly. I've visited a lot of fairly grim, drab boxlike apartments, some close to campus, some far, all for about the same price. The one I really want--a huge place, minutes from campus, all the amenities you could want, seemingly really nice people--is the only one whose tenants I can't get in touch with :-(

(the next day)
Now I'm 3 for 4 (bank account, cell phone, student ID—all acquired within 3 hours in and around Berkeley), I'm registered for courses, and the apartment search is looking up. After a parade of grim, drab little rooms and apartments--and, of course, Julian*--I seem to have found a pretty little room close to campus, cheapcheapcheap and generously sized for what it is. And they'll let me paint the walls.
Mustn't jinx it, though. It's in a "rooming house", which I guess is Cal-speak for what I would call a boarding house, and it's a little isolating. Most of the drawbacks of a dorm--shared bathroom, creaky old everything, kind of cramped--with few of the advantages, like camaraderie. Then again, I'm not sure I'll have much time for that.
But I just want to move in SOMEwhere. I still don't feel permanent(ly) here.
Tomorrow I won't have nearly as much to do as before, since all the business-y things are taken care of. So I'll write in my journal, maybe get a few posts up on the godforsaken blog, and walk around trying not to spend anything.


*Julian requires special mention. CraigsList is, of course, a student's best friend in finding apartments (and just about anything else, I suppose), and it was extra helpful to have my aunts around so I could yell out the street address for a prospective apartment (“Ward and Dana?” “MLK and Stuart?”) and have them give me the bullet on location, proximity to campus, general quality of the neighborhood, likelihood of things like drug busts or frat parties. When I discovered a dirt-cheap room in what sounded like a lovely condo on Northside, with an eloquent description and the possibility of sharing it with a “European artist”, as he described himself, I had to take a look. After receiving a slightly disturbing e-mail (he went on a little too long about the personalities of other Evelyns he had known), I took my long-suffering aunt along as backup and went out one evening to inspect the place. The building was indeed in a nice, quiet, woodsy part of town, set on a hill but close to campus (although, as it turned out, if I had taken it I would have been at least 20 minutes away from any of the buildings I would end up taking classes or practicing in), and I knocked on the door with only mild trepidation.
Which quickly turned into serious trepidation when the door opened and I was confronted by a short, hairy troll of a man wearing a black faux-snakeskin shirt of the kind available at Hot Topic and (I'm weeping as I type) beige denim hot pants. There's no other word for them. I must say, they showed off his abundant leg hair to great advantage. The hair on his head was lovely, long and black and curly and framing the face of a wizened, degenerate 50-year-old. Decorum prevented me from turning around and running back down the steps, although I did consider faking a seizure. Liz and I should have had a signal worked out. We were ushered in.
Liz says his little lizard eyes never left me, and he came down $100 on the asking price after seeing me. Also, he asked if I wanted to “model” and “help out” with his “art”. While going through the motions of asking about utilities and rent and inspecting the applianes (honestly, this was over the moment he opened the door. I'm sorry if it's lookist or something, but a girl can't take chances on this sort of thing), stole a glance at a few of his photographs, which seemed to feature naked women draped against rocks and looking either blissful or catatonic. And that's just what was on the walls. Tasteful, but not the sort of part-time job you can tell Grandma about with alacrity.
I think it was the pile of stuffed animals—big, fluffy, bizarre in their very presence and number—in the dining room that really did it. I rushed through the standard thanks-so-much-it's-lovely-I'm-looking-at-a-bunch-of-other-places-I'll-call-you-soon wrap-up, threw one last longing gaze at the porch with its gorgeous view of the city and the Bay (not worth it, not worth it, not worth it!), and left, with my aunt, who had been pretty quiet, in tow.
We made it down the steps, out the door, and into the car, which we locked. And lost it. We laughed and laughed and laughed until my sides hurt and Liz was crying. Somehow we made it home, where we told Dierdre and lost it all over again. I managed somehow to stay optimistic about the househunting after that, called Julian two days later with polite apologies and a lie about moving in with some friends, and signed the lease on my cozy little nest on Southside exactly two weeks to the day of arriving in Berkeley.

I'll See You in Hell

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Moderate
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

In the Beginning

Valentine's Day was uneventful as such; a regular, busy Tuesday, trying to catch up after my absence on Thursday and Friday to attend a conference in New York (more on that later), and cope with the horrendous sleep deficit caused by said conference and accompanying snowstorm that trapped me on a runway for five hours. But somewhere in between scrambling to get to class on time and handing out the worksheets in my seminar, I remembered that it was Valentine's Day 2005 that I received the acceptance e-mail to Berkeley (the letter followed), and my life changed. I started this blog, for instance. But seriously, the limbo that I had been laboring in for months was gone, suddenly, and my path was cleared for the next two years. This is a wonderful feeling. I can still remember plopping into my chair to check e-mail at the beginning of another workday, seeing the Berkeley address in the "Sender" column, thinking it was just a "please hold; we will consider your application in the order it was received. Thank you for your patience" notice, or a request for some other scrap of paperwork, and then opening it and grinning from ear to ear, calling everyone I knew, etc. And then spending three months trying to hide it from my boss, for fear he would can me posthaste in order to hire someone who actually knew what s/he was doing.
And then the ceremony of quitting (tossing ID badge in harbor, getting plastered at the Midtown Yacht Club), sailing, loafing at home with Mom while she recovered (swimmingly) from her foot surgery, trips to Woods Hole and New York, a lovely twinkly yummy funny crazy going-away party, one last swelter in the heat wave, and getting here and starting all over again.
I'll do my best to chronicle the past six months concisely, but some of you might wonder just why I'm here, studying Japanese and running up ghastly debt while doing so. So here's an excerpt from my personal statement on a financial aid application (apparently you can't just say, "give me money, you fools!" to the officials here, nor can you kick and scream and beg and plead and hold your breath and turn purple. Well, you could, I suppose. But it won't work. You have to be all articulate and stuff.

At first, Japan hovered on the edges, strokes in the backdrop of my upbringing. My maternal grandfather kept a small jade statue of Kannon in his study, and another one of tigereye next to his reading chair. I loved to walk around them, bending around (I was not allowed to touch, naturally) to watch light glow through the milky, melon-colored jade and set the caramel-colored ribbons in the tigereye rippling through the brown stone. In a woodlbock print of a Kabuki scene, frightening men with white faces and stretched, agonized expressions contorted grotesquely in their quiet dining room. This I stayed away from, but they danced in blue and red, catching my eye every time I went to the kitchen, until I was almost in high school.
My father, stained-glass artist, used bamboo brushes to paint on glass, and let me try them a few times. He had grown up in Fresno, taken judo as a boy from an old sensei. He kept books of kimono, paper patterns, basketweaving and marquetry in his studio to inspire the delicate tessellations of glass he set in lead for his window designs, and more recently, took careful photos of Japanese roofs and porches when I led him through Tokyo. A year later, he proudly showed me a glass portrait of St. Francis Xavier, part of a series of hagiographic church panels. Francis X went to Japan and started a painting school, and the window shows him standing on the veranda of a Japanese house, complete with tiles and sliding doors, gazing up at flame-colored momiji maple leaves.
That was all, when I was little. Colorful origami guides I could never quite master at Christmas. Whispers that the Japanese ate fish raw—why?!—and could kill you with their hands, when I was in middle school. Tidy, quiet Japanese ladies, wives of doctoral students at Hopkins, teaching one semester of Japanese to a sel`ect group of seniors (myself not among them), in high school. Growing up on the East Coast, the closest most of us ever came to Japan was a brother's video game and embarrassing Hello Kitty childhood toys.
Until I took a Japanese history class, taught by a vivacious art history doctoral student from Penn who led us through twelve centuries of Japanese history using mostly slides and an inexhaustible supply of praise for brushstrokes, bubbling glazes, and lacquer. Wandering on a beach the next summer, sorting through potential majors, Japanese came up again and again, for many reasons. I was already familiar with the exotic baubles of Japanese aesthetic culture, and now, more deeply, its history and character. I learned languages quickly and thoroughly, as sixteen years of French would prove, and taking an area-studies major more or less required a study abroad. I was in all the way.
Six years later, having plowed through a dozen textbooks and hundreds of kanji, partied with salarymen in Ueno Park in cherry-blossom season, woken to the scent of incense and the bonging and chanting of a Zen temple's morning prayers, translated a Tokugawa-period manual on wifely behavior, and endured two years of secretary grunt work to get back to graduate school, I still haven't had enough. There are always more kanji, more paintings, more proverbs and gitaigo and ki-idioms.
My current research focuses on the voice of Japanese-ness in Western literature. First of all, the voice of Japanese-ness in the context of naturalization vs. barbarization; more precisely, the choices made by the translators to produce an exotic, “Japanese” voice markedly different from that of a comparable writer in English. While Waley, in his translation of Genji Monogatari, deliberately strove to create a Japanese Camelot for his readers, I argue that it is possible for translators of Japanese classics to unconsciously slip into an overly and overtly exotic, foreignized tone which places the text above the reach of a modern reader. Secondly, the voice of Japanese-ness adopted by non-Japanese writers for their own fiction. Arthur Golden, of Memoirs of a Geisha fame, is the most famous contemporary example, but many others—Pico Iyer, Laura Joh Rowland, Liza Dalby—attempt to produce a Japanese voice in English. Do they succeed, i.e., does this “read” in Japanese, or is it simply an over-exoticized aping of a more delicate and subtle literary collective voice?
Currently, I am starting from the beginnings, taking courses in classical Japanese to plumb the depths of the origins of Japanese literary voice. Study of modern Japanese literature will follow, coupled with close readings of the above-mentioned authors to compare the style and voice. With my degree in linguistics, I have been continuing my study of the intricacies of Japanese language, including an in-depth examination of Haruki Murakami's stylistics, the linguistic analysis of style.
My career aspirations lie in art or writing: museum work or publishing, travel writing or a post at a newspaper or magazine, in Japan, Europe or the United States. I want to understand Japanese like I understand French: to the point where the chatter of children and the murmurings of grandmothers are intelligible, where I get jokes in bars, where the subtitles aren't the first thing I look at in the movies, where regional dialects are intriguing instead of frustrating. I miss Japan, with its narrow streets, rows of bicycles, its energy that flows along different channels than in the US but no less intensely.

The rest is mostly puppy-eyed pleading and flattery, but that ought to give y'all a sense of what I'm doing, why and how, and where I hope it goes.

Rainy Monday...not much else to say. I'm going to a sewing circle tonight to fix up the costumes I bought for my upcoming competition at Harvard. But that's another story entirely.

And here we are...President's Day at Cesar Chavez Park, with frisbees and kites. Good day.

My Best Friends' Weddings, Part Deux

So the last post was a melancholy meditation on the wedding of my oldest friend--not my friend who is the oldest, my friend whose friendship with me is the oldest--but the sharper-eyed of you may have noticed that the title is plural, and right you are. This second part is about my tribe, my posse, my apartment, the friends I made in college and lived with for two years. They are all getting married, and all to each other, it seems.
I went back and read the entry I made in April of this year, after going to the Haverford Corporation meeting, where I snivelled about how much I miss college and how rotten my life seemed in comparison, and came to the line where I bravely asserted that I was all down about it just because I wasn't doing what I really wanted to be doing (living independently, using my brain for more than avoiding obstacles in my path) and that as soon as I got out of the holding pattern I'd been in, the feeling would disappear.
Well, it did, for the most part, but yesterday Aron and Stu and Gabe came to town, and we ate sushi and played frisbee and talkedtalkedtalked, and while I haven't laughed that hard in quite a while, I would be struck in quiet moments with the knowledge that this is no substitute for the Way We Were, and we can't go back.

And then A told me Kingsley was getting married. And I literally dropped my chopsticks.

No kidding. I thought that sort of thing belonged with spit-takes under "Cheesy Movie Reactions to Shocking News", but when I heard that Chris KINGSLEY is getting MARRIED, for Christ's sake, honest to god my fingers just stopped working for a second.

Not that Chris is unfit for marriage, or that Maura, his choice of bride, isn't the right one. I'm sure he is, and I know she is. That's fine. It's just the thought of my friends getting married. Some of them already have: David (see last post), John Boyle way back (but he's older), a few other couples from college. But we saw those coming a mile off. What throws me is that when and if we manage to get everyone together again, those gold bands on some of those fingers will make it utterly impossible to be, or even to pretend, that we were The Way We Were. You can play at adolescence for years, like me, back in school and planning to travel and muck around for the forseeable future, and so when you hang with your college buddies, it's almost just like back in school. Not quite, but enough so you can pretend. But one by one (two by two, actually), my friends are passing over a threshold of adulthood, a real one that you can't undo or return from or come back through. They're on the other side of this divide, and good for them. We've all gotta cross it sometime. But their doing it is really unsettling, not least because my turn's coming up. Certainly not soon, but if they can do it, so can I. So should I.

Plus, I have NO idea what to get them.

My Best Friends' Weddings

My father calls us cradlemates. Our mothers were friends as we grew, first inside and then out. His mother felt ill watching Reagan's inauguration, but it turned out to be him, about to be born. David. Beloved. I myself emerged the day before Reagan was shot; in the days before everyday luxuries were common in hospital rooms, my mother had to special-order a television on which to watch the drama unfold while holding me on my first day of life. Evelyn. Hazelnut.

And now he's married, wed one meltingly hot day in June, next to a stream on his aunt's farm, to his Anne, surrounded by his sister and brother and cousins and friends and family, by a freshly and suspiciously ordained youth who barely looked old enough to drive a car, let alone preside over a wedding. But he did, and it was legal, and binding, and beastly hot, so we hurried back up the hill to the tent, where the food was lovely, of course, and the wine was flowing, and we even danced a little dripping sweat all the way.

David is the closest thing to family I had in Baltimore after my grandparents died. He and I spent holidays and weekends together, play-fighting, play-flirting, reading comic books and watching movies, sneaking treats off the tables and annoying our fathers playing poker. Later we would sprawl around the living room, he strumming on the guitar that seemed to be an extension of his hands, me playing with his sister's hair or scratching the ear of whatever dog had thumped down next to me. We built our wit, riffing off of each other's jokes, trading good-natured jabs or teasing the other kids around. Even later we played off of each other in public, for real, on stage in school plays. I was usually the straight man: Juliet's Nurse to his Mercutio; the Prince of Aragon; a dour stagehand (for real and for show); while he got the leads, the goofball parts, the ones that required lots of lines and lots of energy and lots of hard dramatic work.

And we danced. He was my first real partner (cootie-infested elementary-school boys in my early early ballroom classes notwithstanding), and together we learned the silky footwork of East Coast Swing: the steps, the twirls, the subtle hand cues and leads. We went to clubs and dances in the Scottish Rite Temple and Tall Cedars Hall. He was fluid on the floor, as if he had bones of silicone as supple as the flesh around them. I was more energetic, always hoping for another spin, another tricky step, another lift. I still do.

Then we went to college, and that was sort of it, except at holidays. But it wasn't the same. We were so wrapped up in our lives there--as we should have been, of course--and suddenly our stories about this guy and that time we were all locked out and what that crackpot prof said and so on didn't work. We had all this history, but for once I felt like it didn't matter.
But I think I equalized a little, after the total-immersion first semester, when everything was new, and once I settled in it was easier to come home and be home. David came home and stayed there, pushing through a thicket of depression. I can have no conception of what that was like, and not for the first time, I felt like I stood on the outside of his life.

One of our friends committed suicide. I don't have the e-mail that Dave wrote me after the funeral that I didn't attend, but I still have one he wrote a few years later, when I was in Japan. It's wise and warm and shot through with not only his stiletto wit and cleverness, but, I fancy, a tacit understanding of all we were together. I always thought he was much cooler and more advanced than I was, and that could make me feel like a clumsy, silly child, but to read his chatty, intimate, utterly comfortable prose cut through all that, and I knew that we would continue to drift away from each other, but keep a line, however, thin, between us. We can't cut it.

We're not that close anymore. I don't even have his e-mail address. I saw him briefly at the annual New Year's party, but he and Anne split early. And of course, he had other things on his mind at the wedding. But no matter what, he knew me when I was missing teeth and got scared by loud movies, and it's important to have someone like that in your life. No matter where you are with them, you're home. You've got a link to your own past that's outside your own head. I hope he thinks of me in the same way. My cradlemate. Beloved.

'Twas the Night Before Christmas Random Ten

Every good mother has an ace in the hole. Several, actually: a few in the pantry (special meals-in-a-box that she knows the family likes that can be whipped out in the event of simultaneous crankiness on her family's part and extreme busyness/stress on hers), some on her nightstand (good books, rich chocolate, deluxe hand cream, to give her an instant mood lift), her purse, and her closet. My mother always has emergency gifts wrapped and stashed somewhere she can grab them easily, and when I was little she would occasionally present me with some little something when it was needed or appropriate. Or when I was being insufferable and needed to be distracted. If I had known this I would have been insufferable more often. No, even MORE often.
In the sense that this blog is my baby, I too have a few cards up my sleeve. Maybe not aces, but there's bound to be something in the vault I can use when I'm too overworked to actually post something real or current because I'm teaching two sections of Asian Studies and I'm taking 4 of my own classes plus grad seminar plus pedagogy AND I have a competition this Saturday and I have a new partner so I have to practice extra with him, and, and, and *pant pant pant*.

Yes. Anyway. No time for real post. So here's one I've been keeping, undoubtedly too long, to throw up on the ol' blog, and keep all my fans happy and pacified for another week. Love you all, natch, but. So. Busy.


'Twas the Night Before Christmas Random Ten

Really, I don't have any good ideas of my own. My work starts with derivation and goes from there. I might occasionally improve on something I stole from somewhere, something or someone else, but not in this case. I'm going to do it anyway, though.
Once more, I'm biting from the Post-Modern Drunkard, who is currently—and wisely, considering the wretched cold and the snarly transit strike in his adopted city—spending Navidad in Madrid, far away enough for me to consider attempting a little flattering plagiarism.
The Random Ten is a facet of iPod culture. Ten songs, from the “shuffle” setting on your little digital baby. You listen, you rate them, you calculate the average for the week. Yet another blissfully indulgent manifestation of autocultural exhibitionism. Bear with me; I'm practicing my big words for when I start teaching (ulp).
So:

“"Gimme Some Money"”, Spinal Tap
Stupid? Kind of. Overdone? Of course. But it (and the whole movie) is an uncannily brilliant parody, and the songs themselves, including, are actually fairly good. Go Nigel, go! 6/10

“"One By One”", Enya
Yeah, I know. Shut up. But they're not THAT bad. And I use some of them for dance practice! Like, umm, “Tea-House Moon” has a perfect slow waltz beat, and “Caribbean Blue” is good for Viennese, and...oh, there's no excuse. And this one particularly sucks. 2/10

“"Siren"”, ellipsis...
These people are great. They're a trio of Swat grads who used to play in our basement and in Lunt Cafe, and everyone should go right to iTunes and pick up their album, “"take what you will”". But this pretty, sly little ballad with the clever mandolin solos didn't make it onto their debut. It was on a demo that they sent to their loyal fans. Out of the three songs on that demo it's the weakest, but if they ever make it big, they can run it and no one will care. 7/10

“"Old Man River"”, Django Reinhardt
Now, I love Django Reinhardt. But I also love Paul Robeson, and I squirm a little when I hear the D-man jazzing up and playing fast and loose with the most soulful song on Broadway. Anything but this, Django. Anything but this. 4/10

“"Skin"”, Andrew Bird
Like Henry Mancini meets Thelonious Monk. Playful and interesting and tres hip. Wish I could whistle like this. 6/10

“"Oceans of Grey”", Green
I really hope these guys make it big. They're friends of a friend, and they've got the look and the sound tailor-made for general appeal, and somehow the lyrics are poetic and intelligent enough to make them listenable. 8/10

Bicycle Country Blackout
This was blackout music in a production of A Bicycle Country that I did tech for. Normally you get so sick of the soundtrack of a show after the first few weeks you want to rip the speakers out of the walls, but Cuban guitar? Love it. I really wish I knew what it's called and who wrote it and who performed it, though. I know it makes it sort of obscure and pointless to put on the Random Ten, but it's, y'know, random. Not much I can do about it. Just take my word for it: 7/10

“"Yeah! Oh Yeah"”, Magnetic Fields
Part of a going-away present of hundreds of songs designed to make me cool for at least 10-12 months until all these bands made it to California. His voice sort of annoys me, and between the 'Fields and the Decemberists, I have more music about failed love than I know what to do with, but this is catchy, in a lugubrious, perverse sort of way. 6/10

“"Bell Bottom'd Trousers"”, The Pyrates Royale
A cappella sea chanteys and comedy. I'm a geek, ok? I've accepted it. This one is a cautionary tale for maids in Drury Lane: don't get into bed with men who wear bell-bottoms. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't be here if my mother had heeded that advice, and I daresay many of you wouldn't either. 4/10

“"Istanbul (not Constantinople)"”, They Might be Giants
An excellent cover of an excellent standby, from the Turkish-sounding fiddle intro to the kickin' drums to the Giants' vocals. My standard quickstep practice song and always guaranteed to make me grin. 10/10


An even 6/10 for the week. The geekitude factor of Tap and Pyrates, the obscurity of Green, "Siren", and "Random Cuban Music", and the musical travesty that is Enya push it farther down than even my cool-making gift music could save. Well, there's always next week.

The Bitch Is Back, And So Is Her Blog

No excuse, I know. Not even the whole move-across-the-country-start-school-again-be-independent-for-the-first-time song and dance will forgive, oh FIVE MONTHS of blogolary silence. I mean, honestly. I should have been posting all this time about finding an apartment, starting classes, dancing on the UC ballroom team, hiking Pt. Reyes, watching the clouds roll over the High Sierras, holding my new baby cousin for the first time. But inertia took over, as it often does, and I was locked into the mentality that I couldn't start posting about current events until I got the travelogue and my posting about David's wedding finished. Not helpful.
But I finally *did* finish the sailing trip account, and I wrote out the wedding post, although I need a title. So I'll get the gears moving again. I'll try to hit that balance of detail and overview so as not to simultaneously bore or confuse anyone. It's amazing how quickly time begins to flow past you, though. One moment everything is new, and you remember everything down to the name of the cashier at the bookstore you wandered through on that Sunday afternoon after you had breakfast with your aunts and took BART to SF for the first time. The next, you're wondering where 5 months of dancing and homework and Kingpin Doughnuts went (yes, they are the best ever. No, I don't weigh 400 pounds now. But only through great effort, restraint, and exercise. They're so. Damn. Good.)
So here's the rest of my sailing trip, to be followed soon by the rest of my summer (well, the bits fit for public consumption, which were few and far between) and then, my attempts at chronicling my new life in (usually) sunny California. Reader, your loyalty has been severely tested. I lead you now into pastures rich with posts. I hope.

Ship to Shore, Part II

RECAP: When we last left our intrepid Chesapeake sailors, they were pulling into Ockohannock Creek, preparing for dinner and a pleasant night in the middle of the shallow inlet, and I was dismayed by the stench of the air around us, but it turned out to be John's crab trap...)

So the crabs will feast tonight on gamy bluefish steaks. I'm not too disappointed, being guaranteed more bluefish than I can eat in Woods Hole, and now there will be no disputes over how to prepare it.
We drop anchor in what appears to be solidly in the middle of the creek and Gordan sets about preparing lamburgers, spiced with his blend of cumin and coriander, to be grilled. The grill is hanging over the rail, and John prepped the coals to get the burgers ready. I'm below decks, slapping together a peanut-sesame dressing with chili oil and soy sauce and trying futilely to do something about the clutter born of the day's inertia, when I hear a splash and a stream of language to make a sailor blush. This can mean only one thing: Davy Jones wants a burger, too. Doom. Dooooooooooooooooom. I stay below (read: hide) until the oaths and the stomping subside. When they do, I venture up to comfort Gordan, who is describing the burger's descent as resembling "the face of a loved one disappearing beneath the waves". I don't understand why he insists on being a computer geek; he could easily make just as comfortable a living churning out novels of his choice of quality: from romances with raised lettering on the covers to high "hlitrature". He is so distraught by the loss that he overcooks the rest, which must be carefully divided so that no one is short. Fortunately, they were big to begin with, and the added spices keep them tasty.
For dessert Michael and Otto toss the last pieces of the mace cake on the grill, after I complain that I underbaked it and it's getting soggy. The smokiness and crisp exterior on the grilled pieces enhance its sweetness, and we gobble up the last bits.
After dinner we all sit chatting in the night. Michael begins to tell me about his little girl, Madison, and I watch his face glow as he describes her habits and quirks, likes and dislikes.
The night is so warm that I suggest a late-night swim. We all change and jump in, except for John who goes to bed. The water is pleasant, cool without being stinging, and when Otto cannonballs in, I notice that the water shines more than normal. Then I see little greeny glowy blobs when someone paddles over to a float: bioluminescence! Delighted, I call out for everyone to look at the comb jellies. They're harmless, I reassure everyone; in fact, they're fun to pick up and poke! Soon we discover that lifting hands out of water results in glowing squiggles running off our fingers, and treading water produces a blurry halo around our paddling hands and feet. I mention that we ought to play REM's "Nghtswimming" in honor of our plunge, and Brian obligingly climbs out to put on the CD. Soon we're swimming to soundtrack; we're far enough out that the noise shouldn't be a problem, although I know that sound carries far over water.
After 45 minutes or so of paddling around companionably, trying to stay attached to the float and lines Michael tossed out, we start getting cold, so we hoist ourselves out, dry off, and head to bed. The water, being brackish, becomes neither sticky like saltwater nor muddy-grimy like fresh lakewater as it dries on me. So I skip the shower and fall asleep, idly wondering what shape my now-soaked hair will take in the morning.

Day 6: Thursday

I'm hoping for a morning dip before we start out today, and I'm not disappointed. Ignoring the warnings about swimming after meals (after all, I have no fewer than five able-bodied lifeguards at my disposal, do I not?), Brian and I jump in after our eggs and French toast. Michael claims it's the best he's ever tasted, but he says that about a lot of my cooking, plus my hand slipped when I was adding the vanilla to his, so may have just gotten a big mouthful of alcohol. While on deck, I considered following Brian, who has struck out for the shore, but as soon as I hit the water I change my mind, for two reasons: first, because the shore, from water level, has revealed itself to be much farther than it looked on deck, and also because the tidal current is very, very strong, and it carries me up the inlet alarmingly fast. It requires concerted, though not strenuous effort to remain in safe proximity to the Maverick. I splash around for a while until Michael calls us aboard. Brian has decided to abandon his landfall expedition, and is floating on his back. He doesn't have an easy time of it with the current, and when he's finally aboard he flops onto his back and stays there for fifteen minutes recovering. Yikes.
We arrive at Tangier Island's harbor in mid-afternoon. The sun is high and strong and bright, and it turns the marsh grasses a vivid green and highlights the plum-and-beige trim of a Queen Anne-style house a spit far from any other buildings. I marvel that it survived Isabel, and wonder if it has electricity now, as it serves as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's regional headquarters.
Motoring up to the marina is comparable to driving along Main Street of a small town. The canal is lined with the residents' crab sheds, boats parked outside. All the boats are named for the watermen's wives, with first and middle names common to the generation just younger than my parents--the ones born solidly in the fifies and early sixties: the Donna Marie, the Linda Joy, the Mary Barbara. One, though, is named the Mariah Cheyenne, and I decide that that must be someone's daughter. All the names are painted on in the same light and dark blue wavy script. It seems like a sweet ritual: coming of age in this little place, getting married, acquiring a boat and a wife on the same day, couples beaming giddily at each other when the name is painted on.
We tie up at the slip closest to the dock, and conduct business (pumpout, water, fuel) with Mr. Parks, the owner of the marina. He is probably no more than sixty, but one could be forgiven for placing him at eighty-five or over. Barrel-chested, with a shock of white hair and skin like shoe leather, he chats with us about his children, Baltimore's Inner Harbor before it was cleaned up, and the cost of keeping a car in Crisfield for monthly trips to the mainland (on the island, they use golf carts and the occasional light pickup). Being sailors, we are treated with more genuine warmth than I suspect the day-trippers off the boats are, and he seems anxious to have us know that the island is not dying, as Smith seems to be. Tangier children have their own school, K-12, and even though the crabs are small and scarce, half the young people stay on-island.
We stroll through the narrow streets, admiring the old frame houses and tidy gardens. The residents ignore us for the most part, zooming hither and yon on their bikes and golf carts. All of the heavy men and women are driving, and all the trim ones are pedaling or walking...
Most of the gift shops are closed for 2 hours in the afternoon, unfortunately for us, although no one is in the market for souvenirs. We pass a white chapel with a square steeple, read the names naming those who performed military service (quite a few, since the Army is a good escape from here, should one feel the need), and stare at the graves in tiny plots of high ground. They appear to be coffins encased in or covered with slabs. Some of them are very small.
Ambling through the narrow streets, we can hear the natives' bizarre accents. When selling us soda or giving directions, their patois resembles most rural Mid-Atlantic ones, but when speaking to each other they are almost unintelligible, a thick Irish brogue by way of Deliverance.
We start scouting for a place for dinner and find a charming eating house, but discover that they serve unusually early and we have missed it at 5:30. So we head back for the boat and pick a seafood place for dinner and Sparky's soda fountain for dessert.
One of the advantages of being the only wench on the boat is that I don't have to wait for the showers. I'm very hot, but it's not the wiped-out torpor that comes from oppressive humidity. The cold water pounds on my head, and it's so soft I have to scrub hard to get all the soap off. I feel slimy but cool afterwards. I comb my hair down flat, pull on a shirt with buttons, a skirt, and a necklace. They feel almost alien after a week of shorts and tees.
Scrubbed and sunburned, we join other boaters, tourists, honeymooners, and one local couple on a date at the restaurant. Everything is fried, but it's local, and we tuck into its crispy brown goodness with relish. Afterwards we straggle to Sparky's, a sweet little ice cream parlor stuffed with '50s kitsch. I offer up ice cream as my treat and it's enthusiastically welcomed. It's still warm, so it's refreshing after all the oil.
Back on deck it hits us that this is our last night out. Tomorrow we will be in the Solomon's Island Naval Recreation Center docks, and I will leave my crew after dinner to make it to David's wedding on Saturday. We break out wine and some cookies, sit on deck and enjoy the night and the many cats who visit, especially Baby (named for her cry) who makes several stowaway attempts.


Day 7: Friday

We're up and out of Tangier with nary a hitch. The trip is long but not difficult, and Gordan and Otto and I lie out on deck in the sun. Brian teaches me a little more sailcraft when they hoist the sails, but mostly we all relax.
We pull into the Solomon's Island docks in mid-afternoon. Like the OC marina, this is a new setup, but rather prettier, surrounded by vegetation, and a good deal smaller. We tie up and hop off to collect ice and booze now that were back in civilization. I have phoned my mother to give her directions and get an ETA, and then climb up the bank to join the expedition. We reigister at the office with a wiseass clerk whom I can't imagine in uniform. He gives us a ride and sympathizes with the boys about having me along for the trip; he can barely stand a 5-minute car ride. I like my smart mouth.
Mom arrives only a little late, with Pokey in tow. She charms everyone right off the bad (naturally!), chatting with John about greyhounds and grandchildren (surprisingly similar), and rescuing Otto from certain death on the highway. He was nearly killed crossing the interstate to get to the liquor store, so he clambers gratefully into the car with his cases.
The Naval Recreation Center, or what we see of it, is extensive and expansive. For some reason, they offer yurts as one of the housing options.
While Gordan bustles about with his goulash, Mom admires the boat, which Michael is only too happy to show off. Pokey is less impressed, pacing and fretting when we lift her aboard and finally has to be settled on the dock with her towel.
Gordan makes a pitcher of mojitos to carry up to the picnic table, but first we have to take a picture, complete with the flotilla banner (burgee? bergie? berjee?). Then it's chowtime. Mom is enchanted with the boatmaker Jenneau-insignia tableware, but what goes in them--perfect mojitos, fresh salad and rich, spicy goulash--is even better. We have a lively meal, trading jokes and stories, and I hold these moments close, knowing they are running out.
At last, the last of the goulash is scraped out, the mojitos are drained, the sun almost disappeared. We can delay our departure no longer. I still haven't adjusted to the land; I can walk fine, but if I stand for too long my body compensates for pitch and roll that isn't there. I don't want to have to step into a car instead of a boat, don't want to leave the sea behind.
I hug each of my shipmates in turn, thanking them for, well, everything. The mosquitoes have come out to feast, the dog is getting restless, and I know I can't linger.
Mom and I have a nice catchup session on the long way home. It's near midnight when we pull in.
While I have been on the sea, summer has come and come to stay. Even in the dark I can see that the garden has grown a mile, and the bricks underfoot have that damp, mossy feel from night watering and high humidity. Inside, the kitchen is stuffy and bright. It's bigger than the galley and cabin, minus the staterooms. It feels huge. Tiptoeing through dining room, living room, library, I get the same feeling I got when I returned from Japan, that our house is much too huge for just three people. I slip upstairs, catch my father just before he falls asleep, and sink into a bed that doesn't rock or sway for the first time in days. I fall asleep and dream of waves, wine and sail.