That was my favorite age

A truncated cruise on wednesday due to a CTD malfunction put us back on the boat all day thursday in beaufort 2 and rain and fog, nothing too trying except when trying to observe birds and mammals from the bow and record then on normal paper. Rite in the Rain is obviously going to be a worthwhile investment if I study the vertebrates, which I will not, so I know I’ll be safe and warm in the lab counting planktons until december.

Today we had a full day of software lectures, which was utterly murder and everyone agreed, so as soon as we were let out, Sarah and Cyndi and I practically sprinted to town, where I rented The Life Aquatic, and then we sprinted back for dinner, and sat on the deck watching the sunset over the harbor until it was too cold to sit out any more.

Beer run. Writing sea chanties. Twenty minutes in to the movie, all the kids from the diving class come into the commons recruiting swimmers for a dock swim. I was the only one who joined on, and the whole expedition resulted not in hypothermia as we all expected, but in lots and lots of bloodshed from the barnacles hidden in the tires that line the dock, which we used to climb out of the water. Ten minutes later, we’re all standing under the hot water in the dive showers and someone says “hey, who’s tracking blood all over the place in here?” Julie has gashes all over her leg, and so do I but not as bad. So does Christina, and Anthony and Aaron both have tiny scratches. But there’s still blood all over. Where is it coming from? My toe! Gushing and gushing. Rescue divers that they all are, it’s a chorus of “Looks arterial!” “put pressure on it” “I’ll go get the first aid kit!”

Got back to the dorm to watch the last 20 minutes of Life Aquatic, cried and cried.  They finally saw the leopard shark and didn’t want to kill it!  11 and a half was his favorite age!

But anyway, now the flap that got sliced off of my toe has closed over, but judging by the nutrient levels we’ve detected in the water near the dock, I should probably open it back up and give it a good scrub. Wish me luck!!

A rowboat to town across Friday Harbor

The night is cold and salt air, but perfectly still and clear.  The harbor is like old glass, the reflection of the moon warped languidly in the movement of the water.  the lights of the town and the stars in the sky are reflected all around us too.  As Rian paddles us towards town, Sarah and Van play their flashlights against the white flanks of the boats moored silently where we pass them, and into the faceless water.  When we laugh, the echoes come back to us from the rocks on the shore.

Lyrics For Kelly

Woah!

I know I like you, and I know that you like me.  I wish we could love each other, but there’s no parking on my street.

Woah!

We could get something started.  I think I’d buy you a toothbrush.  We could walk around naked in the morning light.  If you could just crash here tonight.

I have a coffee pot, but it’s too big for one.  I have some beers in my fridge but I don’t want to drink them alone.  I really want to love you, so bad and so hard, but parking in my neighborhood is like a chastity belt to meeeeeeeeeeeeee.  Woah!

I’d make you an omelette and we’d both eat off the same plate.  Then we’d call in sick to work and be together the rest of the day.  I really want to love you, so bad and so hard.  I really want to love you, so bad and so hard.  I really want to love you.  I really want to love you ooo woah.  woah.  I want to love you!

Thank you, Salty Poolish-Sensei

Great success this time around.  Magnificent flavor.  Unparalleled crust.  Only 2 tsp yeast, stopped just before I thought I was done kneading, proofed for about 2 hours instead of 40 minutes, used Crystal Geyeser bottled water instead of brita-ed tap… but the most important secret?

Fresh mountain air…

A bike ride in the woods…

And a dip in a cool mountain stream  

by which I mean fucking glacial.

Peace!

A cup of flour sees two teaspoons of yeast sitting at the bar all alone one afternoon…

It was not without a twinge of sadness that I prepared all the ingredients last night to cook my first full meal in almost a year. It was a simple meal. I had to start easy. Pasta sauce and two kinds of bread. I didn’t even make my own pasta, and I made way too much of it. But the sauce was a hit, eaten almost entirely out of the pan with a spoon before the salad was even tossed. The rustic loaf was too salty, which is a first for me, but with a fine crust. The crumb needs improvement, but that’s what I get for cooking in an electric oven.

Ah, the old maxim is true. An empty day is a happy day. I’m on vacation in mid-state Washington with my family. It’s just the four of us for the first time since Thailand 2002, which was an absolute nightmare of arguments and animosity and disassociations. Now were are all grown, and we all get along, and Leo and I ride bikes and talk about the architecture of fugues late into the evening. It’s only been since Saturday that I haven’t even touched a computer, but everything feels different already.  I wake up with yoga and zazen and then baking or reading. I bought a book on the geology of Washington state and I read it on the patio drinking tea overlooking the Kachess range and Kachess lake with the snowy Cascade ranges visible through a cleft to the west. Not  having to go to work, not having to maintain friendships, having an automated vacation responder on my email, with no one but my family around me, the dog for walks and the lake for swims, I feel freer than I have in months. As I was setting aside my rising baguette dough, already expanding into a perfectly smooth and luminous orb under the plastic wrap, my dad remarked that if I had just been freed from slavery, I would not have had time to do that. But I say, I just have been freed from slavery, and yes I do have the time, but more importantly, I finally have the heart to do it.

I am a fresh reblochon… where is my parisian baguette?

This is how I will be able to survive being a vegetarian: I will go only to fine Frency bistro cafes when I go out for dinner, which happen to be adjacent to the best cheese store east of Doheney, and I will order the wine flight and cheese board while everyone else indulges in lamb chops and hangar steaks, and long after they have swallowed their last fleshy mouthful, and collapsed back into their chairs in post-parandial exhaustion, desperately ready to order tarte tatines and sorbet trios and little cups of espresso with a lemon-peel twist sunrise next to the paradisal sugar cubes on the saucer with the shining tiny silver spoon of Grace, I will still be savoring another bite of unpasteurized cow banon paired with pouilly-fuisse, or a reblochon with the 2004 pino noir from languedoc, perhaps with a smudge of guava paste against the crust, and I will portion out slices from my cheese board like a magnanimous medieval queen to whomever asks most nicely.  Dining out is an event for taste, not nourishment.  That’s what rice cakes and peaut butter are for.

In my match made in heaven, are we the cheese or the wine or the bread?  Is he my roquefort or am I his cabernet?  Or is he my parisian baguette–an essential, stable, ubiquitous staple, that nonetheless must always embody utter perfection in all of those facets particular to fine bread if it is truly to be able to uphold, support and enhance the flavor of any good cheese?  In which case am I that cheese, which must also attain its own facets of perfection if it is to fully realize all of those secret flavors and characters to be found only in commensality with its natural partner, bread?  Or am I the bread, thinking I am a cheese, searching in vain for a support that only I myself can lend to another?

Oh where are you my chewy, tangy, cripsy, nutty baguette?   Where are you my rare unpasteurized castelmagno?  Ah I shall search and search.  Maybe one day our flavors will merge in perfect harmony but until then I will wait on my little shelf, biking my bike and labbing my lab and wine shopping my wine shop and avoiding blogging my blog and singing my songs and being PERFECTLY FUCKING FINE WITHOUT YOU!!

No.  I am a bottle of soju that I buy with my friends at 1 in the morning with a six-pack of modelo from the liquor store downstairs because we’ve already burned through eight beers and a bottle of sake and five cigarettes and then we all go to the 4:00 yoga class the next day because none of us have jobs.

Choice Overload

I should know better than to look at graduate programs online when I’m tired.  I wonder: with a little ingenuity, could I have gotten placement in the UCLA urban planning master’s or PhD program?  Should I be working on that now instead of pursuing a career in biology?  I want to advance quickly, but I can’t do that without knowing what I want to study and I can’t figure out what I want to study without putting the proper years of work in.  I have to be careful of my interest in ecology and evolution: how seriously can I take the lasting influence of an old flame?  Maybe I should be focusing on economics courses and working towards an econ PhD program!  Would I be happier if I were in a geography graduate program?  What if I just got a job as a script reader at a studio and worked my way up to fantastic wealth and fame?  Would my time be better spent if I just enrolled at the musician’s institute and wrote songs all the time?

Like Coyote said: “Some things are easy for some people, but those same things are not easy for me.”

Also relevent: “You keep same-ing when you oughtta be changing…” but I think the opposite is true of me.  Not so much “I made my bed now I have to lay in it…” but there are SO many things out there that I could do well and be really happy with.

I’ve chosen one for now.  I MUST follow through on it.

But what if I’m only motivated because some cute guy told me I’m smart?  I need to learn to separate my interest in the guy from my interest in the subject.  I’m only attracted to other subjects because then the relationship is totally unambiguous, not because I’m actually more interested in those subjects.  SCIENCE!  Just the sound of the word makes me smile.  Not so much URBAN PLANNING!  or ECONOMICS!  MUSIC! does it for me too.  SONGWRITING!  I can unequivocally say I am passionately interested in each of those subjects.  I wish I had a hundred times to be in my 20s.  I wish I had millions of dollars so I could be a full-time student and not have to have a job.  I wish I had the kind of mind where I could learn independently and not have to be enrolled in school to keep going.  I wish we lived in a society where we don’t need a letter on a transcript to prove that we know enough about something to talk about it seriously with other people.

But none of those parameters apply to my reality so I have to keep on living, and honoring whatever song my heart keeps singing.

Coachella: pop quiz in heartache

I remember two years ago, soon after I missed the Arcade Fire for the first time, listening to them on my headphones on the way from work to meet Carl and his parents for Thai food downtown. I was tired from a day with the toddler, but otherwise in a decent mood. It was drizzly and darkening after a hot muggy day. I knew I would need a sweatshirt but didn’t want to go home for one, and that’s all I was thinking about until Tunnels came on.

“You turn all the lead, sleeping in my head/As the day grows dim, hear me sing a golden hymn.”

And then I was weeping by the fence away from the street in Wicker Park.

They were the one band Carl told me to go see that year and I skipped out to float in the lake like I did every day, and would have later that same day anyway.

Then we were supposed to go see them together in Austin but decided not to go for some dumb reason like there might be a hurricane or something.

And then I spent all day Saturday in the front crush of the main stage, since Fountains of Wayne at 3:00 in the afternoon, through Regina Spektor and Travis and Kings of Leon, determined finally not to miss the Arcade Fire, and to do it right. I fought baking sun, no food, running out of water, moshing like a class IV rapids in Kings of Leon and rabid Chilli Pepper fan cunts from Boston to get a prime spot. But then suddenly, 30 minutes before the Band We’ve All Been Waiting For were supposed to come on, as the sun was going down, I bolted. Got myself crowd surfed to the front, lifted out by a security guard, ran to the back of the audience and wept on the ground through half the Arcade songs. I felt like a cruel parent who has promised her child a treat and then just before the appointed time recalls some wrong the child has done and rescinds it. And I was also the child who never anticipated being wronged in this way, and can’t even remember the incident that earned the punishment and is powerless to do anything about it at all. I was paralyzed with melancholy and anger except for when they played Wake Up, when I forced a rally and climbed on top of some stranger’s shoulders to see the stage better, was able to smile for five minutes. When it was over everything was darkness. I wandered around listless and hating myself, trying like everything just to block the feelings out but not succeding. There was no beat I could dance to, no food I could taste. I even called my ex boyfriend, which was really a bad sign since I only ever even think of doing that when something is going wrong with me and I am always able to resist it without effort.

What is it about the Arcade Fire?  And Regina Spektor?  And Joanna Newsom?

They sing to me about feelings I never have.  And because when I was in high school I wanted more than anything to be friends with Will Butler and his crowd and was never able to.  But having seen the Arcade Fire from the front of the stage would not have given me friends in high school or made everything okay with Carl, not any of the other times I’ve missed them and not this time either.

The Arcade Fire really is a fine band, really special, magical, but they don’t give me that strangling feeling any more, awakening my sisyphys to be someone I am not. I love their music but it’s not the music I make. And I can relate to their lyrics now without feeling like a hypocrite, a failure, a liar. I make music, and I feel feelings, and I write lyrics, and I wasn’t friends with the Arcade Fire in high school but I have friends now, and I am happy, and I am okay, and I love the Arcade Fire.

That’s what I learned at Coachella.

Rage against pants

I will join the hundreds of bloggers this Monday who are “joining the thousands of bloggers this Monday” and write about Coachella.

Lost my sunglasses.

Gained a parasol.

Got a haircut.

Raged against pants.

Zen and saving money

Brad Warner said that the thought process never goes anywhere.  We can cogitate and cogitate but when it comes time to act, all that thinking will turn out to have been totally irrelevant.  And if we follow a train of our own thoughts, we can’t expect them to lead us anywhere interesting, like a book would, because we’re just making them up.  (of course, the author is just making up the book.  Meaning and structure are relevant in fiction, require thought.  Why should this not apply to our lives?)

This has caused me to think a lot.  And every time I think I’ve got him foiled, think that there is a circumstance where musing or mulling imagining hypothesizing hypotheticalizing will get me somewhere, Brad turns out to be right after all.  All those thoughts are just running me down.  Yet thought is absolutely crucial to the practice of zazen, because understanding is its ultimate goal (I think).  How can we understand something if we don’t think about it?

The key difference is in following your thoughts versus exploring your thoughts.  A product of the practice of zazen would be a greater skill at exploring the currents of thought that come up naturally rather than damming them before they enter your mind and calling it a day, which is maybe how some people might interpret Brad’s comments on the issue.  Memories intrude, my heart pounds, a schedule pops up, plans are wrought and re-wrought in my brain, all without producing any action in the best cases but a lot of times in fact impeding the action of the tasks immediately in front of me, which have nothing to do with the deluge in my mind that’s keeping me from doing them well.

So if I only have a limited amount of money, and several trips I want to go on this year, plus I’m sure many others that haven’t even occured to me yet, how do I decide which plane ticket to buy except by thinking about it?  This is especially difficult because here “thinking” really just means elaborately daydreaming about what I’ll do in all of my potential destinations, even though I know that daydreams never come true, the reality always ends up forgotten, but I mean really forgotten, so that we don’t even have anything to compare our experiences with, if we’re lucky (and have been practicing zazen).