goals, goals, goals

(Oh god that was a horrible pun. Forgive me.)

I'm sure that all of you have been waiting with bated breath to learn about my NaNoWriMo progress, to which I say: 22,012 words. Which, although more fiction than I have written the past year or possibly two or three, is not even halfway to 50,000, which is where I need to be exactly 19 days from now.

I will allow, though, that I am a little ahead of schedule -- by necessity, since I know the end of the month will be tricky -- and I am a little proud of the 70+ pages of truly bad prose I have written. Most importantly, I am having a damn good time doing it (despite the whining after I come home from a long day in the coal mines to sit down at a different computer with a different blank screen and waiting cursor). This is really pretty great, actually.

In the meantime (what meantime?) I've been crafting my 32 for 32 goals and have hit a roadblock. I think the problem is that my real goals this year are mostly in the not-achievable range; they're things like "probably move and start looking for a job in a new place but maybe not so learn to live with the uncertainty." That makes me want even more to create a list of manageable goals for myself, ones I can have control over finishing or not. Here's what I have so far:

Finish NaNoWriMo.
Get NaNoWriMo manuscript copy from CreateSpace.
Edit the results of NaNoWriMo.
Volunteer at the public library.
Write & publish another LJ column.
Finish the damn sweater.
Learn to knit colorwork.
Learn to knit cables.
Go on a 15-mile bike ride.
Go to at least three yoga classes.
Take kayaking class.
Graduate with current GPA.
Pay off X amount of loans before graduation.
Liquidate CD for loan purposes.
Figure out what happened with final internship credit.
Join the ALA mentorship program (unless you discover it sucks).
Do something fun with library people before graduation.
Visit one new state or country with J.
Visit with S. in Ithaca or NYC.
Go without caffeine for a month.
Go completely vegetarian for two weeks during lent with H.
Read one significant work of nonfiction.
Read East of Eden.
Write in journal every day for a month.
Clean out office closet.
Bake three recipes from new bread cookbook.
Take lunch to work for two weeks straight.
Throw caution to the wind three times.
See a play in Ithaca.

That's only 29, and I am totally out of steam. Anyone else have any ideas? I'm open.

rules for self

My wonderful DC friends got in last night and we stayed up talked until 4 a.m., and they're still sleeping. I woke up thinking about NaNoWriMo. For someone who is not particularly adventurous and never much of a rule-breaker, I have a lot of trouble with self control, as evidenced by multiple 30-something for 30-something goals (next installment coming soon!), so I started to get a little bit worried that some weird part of me will rebel and not do it just to spite me.

But I do work better within some sort of framework, when I can feel the boundaries around me, so I am setting up some gentle rules. In fact, let us call them guidelines instead.

1. It's OK to let other stuff slide in November. I will probably not go to the gym very often, which is awesome because I'm always looking for an excuse for that. I will allow our apartment to get even less spic and span. I may not call people back in a timely fashion (but if you are on fire, please tell me and I will of course call you back immediately). It's just a month and things like that will be alright.

2. It's also OK to waste a little money in November. I am allowed to buy the good coffee at work and also not pack my lunch, guilt-free. J. gave me 10 coupons for my birthday that say "one free NaNoWriMo dinner" on them, which is kind of perfect -- I suspect I will not be cooking much in November either.

3. I will not, however, miss my knitting group or African dance or my week-long DC/NJ/PA Thanksigiving visit (how on earth am I going to write this thing when I'm traveling?) or the Dar concert for which I already have tickets.

4. I will not stop doing schoolwork entirely or be late with assignments, even if that means I fall behind with my word count.

5. If I get freaked out, I will read this (Wednesday Chef, inspiring) or this (Junot Diaz, also inspiring or this (McSweeney's, hilarious) or Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.

6. I will update this blog periodically with annoying status updates and word counts.

Also, I don't want to be pushy, because this is, duh, a large time commitment and I wouldn't like to be forced or guilted into it myself. But if you're one of the people who's mentioned to me or written in the comments that you're sort of interested... please tell me if you're still sort of interested. I found out recently that one of my work friends has been planning to do it all on her own, and it made me feel instantly less alone in this crazy thing. As do all of you, just for reading this -- thank you in advance for the preliminary support.

NaNo... no way. (yes way?)

So, uh. I might do NaNoWriMo.

*scuffles feet on floor, stares at shoes, feels weird*

For those who don't read way too many blogs like I do and haven't seen multitudes of bloggers try this crazy thing, NaNoWriMo is a writing project. Specifically, it's a commitment to write a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30. You're not supposed to bring in any previous half-finished work, because you already care about it too much to be able to write the utter junk that will come out of writing so much so fast; it's supposed to be quantity, not quality. In the organizers' words:

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

I feel lame for even wanting to, because it's sort of targeted to people who haven't written novels, and I have, and it's sitting in a drawer being lonely and sad and I feel guilty whenever I even think about it -- and THAT, my friends, that is why I'm going to do this thing.

(Did I just say I AM going to do it and not I'm THINKING about doing it? Uh.)

But I don't want to feel bad and guilty about writing, I don't want all this weird baggage about agents and the economy and the feeling of looking at those thin pathetic rejection envelopes hanging around. The reason I started writing in the first place was because I wanted to, right? Because it was just what I wanted to do. And that hasn't changed, even though I bury it under all these layers of weirdness. I want to build without tearing down -- something that I, a relentlessly obsessive editor who actually enjoys the editing process, never even tried with the first novel.

November is even sort of a good time for me... my internship is over and I'm not going to start volunteering until after the holidays, which means I have one whole day a week when I don't have to be at school or at my job. (Things I am now ignoring: the entire week of Thanksgiving when I plan to be in three different states, the existence of end-of-semester papers and projects, a deadline for the longest and most in-depth article I've ever written for any publication, ever.) But hey, maybe I'll just write 20,000 words a day every Wednesday! Ha.

[T]he glow from making big, messy art, and watching others make big, messy art, lasts for a long, long time. The act of sustained creation does bizarre, wonderful things to you. It changes the way you read. And changes, a little bit, your sense of self. We like that.

It's insane.

I'm doing it.

I just registered.

(Who's with me? Someone? Maybe?)

prompt

Can I even begin to say how awesome it is that Elizabeth is doing this? Take chances, get messy, make mistakes...

---

Behind her the noise escalated.

Turning around didn't seem like a particularly appealing option, really, not when she knew the simian house hadn't been cleaned yet today. The second the capuchins saw you (as they'd seen her a minute ago), they started kicking up an incredible racket, like a bunch of tiny lunatics in a 19th-century mental institution. They would swing menacingly from the roof, smacking each other with those weirdly human hands and opening their weirdly human mouths. Sometimes they'd even fling things from their cage at you -- toys, food, their own shit. Needless to say, the whole cleaning crew at the zoo left the simian house until the end of the day, hoping that some emergency would come up (a barfing kid that needed the clean-up mop in front of the giraffes, an agitated panda that had topped over its bamboo stand, anything) and make it impossible for them to go back to the goddamn monkeys, leaving it for the next shift.

Instead, blissfully, Gloria walked toward the sea otter enclosure.

It was a new part of the zoo, built recently on the heels of some craze involving a children's book that told the story of a sea lion needing glasses and having to make a visit to the optometrist. Sea otters and sea lions weren't the same, of course, but sea otters had been a lot easier for the zoo to acquire and none of the visitors seemed to differentiate, particularly. Gloria slipped into the door of the back of the enclosure and pulled the special mop from the small supply closet, went into the humid main part of the enclosure, and began to work in the corner farthest from the glass pane separating her from the crowd. The people were dim and foggy behind the glass; the sea lions swam back and forth in their shallow pool, presumably. Gloria didn't take much notice.

Behind her, someone knocked on the door and she stood the mop against the wall. It wasn't unusual for another zoo employee to come in at the same time, either to share the cleaning or feed the animals. She hoped it was her supervisor, Big Joe, who sometimes brought her an elephant-shaped ice cream from the gift shop.

But it wasn't Big Joe. Instead, a little boy, probably about six, stared up at her mutely. He was unaccompanied by a parent or guardian -- against the zoo rules, of course -- and he looked scared.

Gloria, who didn't have kids yet and didn't know how to talked to them, just looked at him for a minute. She knelt down.

"Hi," she said. "Are you lost?"

The boy shook his head.

"Well, I bet you're not supposed to be here by yourself, right?"

The boy just stared past her, trying to see into the enclosure, when suddenly a woman rushed up behind him, loudly proclaiming her relief. The boy started to cry. Gloria noticed he had glasses, blue plastic frames now knocked a little crooked by the force of his mother's hug.

The woman began to apologize to Gloria, looking up at her and explaining they'd been at the monkey house and the boy had wandered away, and thanking Gloria for keeping him safe.

The boy, crying harder, spoke for the first time: "I hate the monkey house."

"Me too," Gloria said. The mother looked vaguely offended and Gloria suddenly resolved to do something she'd never done before. It was something strictly against the rules, and Gloria was not a rule-breaker.

She beckoned the two of them inside the sea otter enclosure. The mother looked doubtful, but still holding the boy, followed Gloria into the back and then the main part of the great, humid room, which blossomed with plants. Gloria put a finger to her lips even though silence was not really required.

Gloria led the two of them, the mother and the boy, toward the water and, still with her finger on her lips, peered down. Below the clear surface, the sea otters swam obliviously like Olympic champions, sleek and perfect, not noticing them at all. The boy looked up at Gloria, his mouth open and his eyes shining behind his steamy glasses.

writing: it's what's for lunch

My friend Elizabeth, whom I know from my writing group in DC, posted something today about how her blog is supposed to be a writing blog but more often winds up being about other things. I feel the same way, except about my life rather than my blog.

But let's forgo the boring introspection, shall we, and get right to her fun writing prompt? "Tell me about a school lunch you had once. ... Don't forget the details. Write for fifteen minutes."

OK, go.

Third or fourth grade, R*hrerst*wn Elementary, L*nc*ster, PA. The cafeteria is blue, with those tables that pull down from the wall. Round red stools are attached to the tables, and they magically spring to life as the tables become horizontal. When not serving as a cafeteria, the room is for assemblies, with a stage up front and a big American flag hanging on one wall. During assemblies, the little kids sit on the floor in the front, Indian-style, and chairs are set up in rows for the older kids in the back. (In my memory, the teachers stood at the ends of their classes' aisles for the entire assembly; could that possibly be true?) Also during assemblies, the kitchen part of the room where the food is served is shuttered up, clean and silent.

It's spaghetti day, a popular event, and the line snakes out the door. I don't remember waiting, exactly, or what else was on my tray, or giving my lunch ticket or money or whatever to the women who sat at the folding table with the cash registers at the end of the line. But I do remember taking the orange-ish red tray and walking to the condiment table set up in the middle of the room and putting spoonful after spoonful of cheese on my spaghetti. We didn't eat cheese on spaghetti in my house -- maybe it was a kosher thing -- and it was a thrilling concept. It's really good cheese, too: Not the powdery grated unidentifiable stuff, but big shreds, the kind you'd make with a medium-soft cheese on the largest holes of a box grater. Did some fairy-godmother lunch lady decide that a bunch of eight-year-olds needed freshly grated mozzarella?

Anyway, I heap my spaghetti with cheese, pick up my tray, and almost run into my principal, Mr. G**dman, a sweet man who lived up to his name.

"Hey, you gonna have some spaghetti with your cheese?"

I felt a mixture of amusement ("that was funny!") and shame ("he's making fun of how much cheese I took!") and specialness ("he talked to me!"). The memory ends there, but I so remember his face as he said it, his gray suit and red tie and white shirt, his longish black hair and his nice smile.

And that, my friends, is my most memorable school lunch. Tell me about one of yours? Thanks, Elizabeth, for making writing a little part of my evening.

sweet blog o' mine

Last updated: July 17? Where have I been all summer? Ah, the redundant question: a rhetorical staple I would probably not have to rely on if I'd actually been blogging more than once every six weeks. This has been the busiest summer of my life, I think, but also really fulfilling professionally. Internship #1 marked kind of a turning point: I started to stop feeling like a journalist pretending to be learning to be a librarian because I was writing a story about it, and now I just feel like a person who used to be a journalist and is currently learning to be a librarian. If that makes sense.

I'm looking back at photos of the garden from August of last year, and hoo boy are we behind. But, behold:
The very first ripe tomatoes, hooray. Those are the sungolds, and they're delicious -- I'm a little reluctant to eat them right off the vine when they're warm from the sun (all that fungicide I'm still spraying every week is not exactly appetizing) but they're amazingly sweet and wonderful after they've been washed.

Happy herbs:
J. is so into the dill, some of which is starting to flower, that I made him a birthday meal consisting of seared scallops with lemon and dill, roasted vegetables with dill, and dill, red onion and cheese drop biscuits. Three dill-icious dishes. Oh ha.

And here's a newcomer:
I had no idea that cucumbers looked like cacti when they first come in, but that thing is seriously spiky.

Another newcomer: I don't know, you guys. It's pretty and all, etc. etc., but you can't eat it. Cutting the little flowerbed feels wrong too, so it's not even like I take the nasturtiums and marigolds and wildflowers home with me. They're just being pretty and all in the middle of a weed-filled garden, in the middle of a field where no one sees them except for me and H. when we go to spend an hour weeding or gathering peas and cilantro for dinner. I have seen exactly none of the bug-deterring effects that were promised, although I somehow managed to plant the flower bed in just about the farthest spot from all of my producing plants. S-M-R-T!

Speaking of dinner:
It seems like the only unqualified successes this season are the new things -- the peas and the bush beans. The tri-color ones are especially awesome; those purple beans are bright green inside, and they all taste fantastic despite the fact that the Japanese beetles have turned their leaves to lace.

bird: a four-letter word

As though the garden didn't have enough problems with-- wait, there are so many that it calls for a bulleted list:

• Late blight. It's all over Ithaca, and most of central New York, and my community garden. It's actually kind of heart-breaking -- lots of people, including my gardening partner-in-crime H., had to pull up their tomato plants because of the dreaded plague. It's an ugly sucker, too, with that evil black stuff poisoning the vines. It first started in a big-box store a few miles away (another reason to support local farmers and buy only locally grown seedlings blah blah etc.) but the spores go airborne pretty quickly, and then everyone's done for. I think I got lucky because my tomato plants just happen to be at the end of my garden, isolated from other people and each other, and are also...
• Sad, stunted plants. Seriously, the biggest tomato seedlings, the two I bought from the farmer's market? MAYBE a foot and a half tall. And that is being charitable. All the rest that I started from seed, including the Oregon Springs that are supposed to be early producers, are sad little runts. Perversely, that might be what saved them from the dreaded blight: There just wasn't as much surface area for an airborne spore to grab.
• Rain. It rains every. single. day. and for a long time, too. Big soaking rains. All the bottom leaves are yellow, the soil is soggy, everything is sagging. Some of my herbs, especially the cilantro and the dill, are turning this weird rust color in addition to the sickly yellow and pale green. I'm sure the clouds are responsible for the above-mentioned stuntedness, too... last I checked, plants need sun to grow.
• Bugs. They love the rain and the soggy soil and they are just the HAPPIEST bugs you ever did see. Cucumber beetles, squash bugs, cylindrical black things, god knows what else. Isn't it thrilling that I can provide such a fine home for them.
• And finally, birds. The one plant that likes this crap weather, the peas, are being pecked apart by evil demons from the sky. They don't even eat the whole things -- they delicately remove all the peas from inside the pods and then leave the remainders hanging on the vine like little victory flags. I have a large ridiculous plastic owl on the top of the trellis; the birds are not fooled.

I am foiling them, however, by going out to pick the peas as frequently as humanly possible. I definitely have more than I know what to do with now. This was last night's dinner: (Shannon's recipe for ginger sugar snap peas did them justice.)

Oh yeah, and I was in Chicago for a week and went to an excellent conference with 14,000 librarians. And J. is almost done with his dissertation (knocking wood, crossing fingers) and school is kind of killing me but in a good way and my internship is going well. And I'm taking tonight off from everything to knit and watch Top Chef Masters, and going to Harry Potter tomorrow night. And in between, I will be weeding, killing bugs, and trying to chase birds off while waving my arms around like a lunatic.

radish freakshow

Step right up, folks:

A shiny quarter will get you a little closer:

That's not the only weird thing in the garden this year -- the massive amounts of rain have brought out some curious creatures that I definitely wasn't acquainted with last year. Giant orange slugs, which so far haven't done any damage I can see, and cucumber beetles, which most certainly have. The adults are eating lacy holes through my squash leaves, but the larvae are apparently the real concern. If they get into the roots and stem, you're toast. And not toast with delicious grilled squash on it, either. You are produce-less toast. I'm going to get some floating row covers, and those bugs had better float on by.

I have to say, I am feeling not so fine at the moment. Some bad and/or stressful and/or scary things are happening to some people in my life who don't deserve them, and I feel guilty over how whiny I am about my own lucky-ass life, because this is the first time that school is really changing my exceedingly comfortable existence here. A few times during this last year, I've felt stressed or out of time, but this is different. No vacations (unless you count a one-night family wedding in Chicago, a library conference also in Chicago, or a weeklong class in Syracuse)(and I do not count those things), no random weekend trips, turning down invitations to hang out on weeknights, skipping dance class to do schoolwork, neglecting the garden, not returning phone calls, forgetting birthdays, letting too many things slide. I am totally mystified at how people manage to go to school while working full-time and maintaining their sanity and also raising children and running marathons and solving crime and who knows what else. I've been trying it for four weeks now and am pretty much done with it already.

dude

Like, where have you BEEN all my life. I have been interning and writing papers and working and not sleeping enough and certainly not blogging ever. I often complain that my graduate program isn't haaaaard enough and I am not intellectually chaaaaaaallenged and it's expeeeeeensive and whiiiiiiiiine. I need to stop doing that, because the class I'm taking on telecom and information policies? It is hard. And my life would be easier if it were... easier. Fortunately, though, it's interesting, as is my internship, so I can't really complain. But I do miss bad TV and knitting and calling people back. (Sorry about that -- I really will, soon.)

Something else I haven't been doing enough? Weeding. Seriously, if this were a war, the weeds would be doing victory laps around my defeated lifeless body in chariots made of gold.

Here is the garden this year: Those pretty yellow flowers by the door? Weeds. A brief garden tour, starting at noon and going clockwise: trellis for growing bush beans, currently supporting 40000 weeds because the beans still haven't been planted; giant trellis with snow peas in the back and sugar snap peas in the front; just behind that is a flower bed with zinnias, nasturtiums and wildflowers (I know, right? weird and I still don't believe they'll actually grow); two rows of basil; 10 tomato plants going along 5, 6 and 7 o'clock; three mint plants (spearmint, variegated peppermint, pineapple mint (who knew? also, what am I going to do with it? pineapple tea?)) in the back corner against the fence; 3 zucchini; 3 yellow squash; 3 butternut squash; 8 bell pepper plants with space for two more; in the upper left corner, spinach; arugula; radishes; back to the weed/bean trellis. In the center of the circle, hopefully for maximum bug-repelling activity, is the herb garden -- cilantro, oregano, flat-leaf parsley, rosemary, sage, chives, dill, I am forgetting one or two.

Tri-color basil: I see purple and green... what could the third color be?

Am kind of in love with the peas: I had no idea how much fun it was to grow them. I love the tiny shoots that spring off and grab whatever they can reach. Sometimes they're grabbing on to weeds, and you have to gently twist them free. The weeds are not your friends, wee pea plants! Do not cling to unhealthy relationships to support you!

The squash cohort: Note that I am trying straw mulch this year. Not as much of a weed deterrent as I'd hoped, but it at least makes the paths through the garden clearer and gives me a better chance of not trampling my chives all the time.

Hm, I seem not to have taken a photo of the radishes in the actual ground where they grow, but here they are in cleaner form in J.'s hand: Radishes seem to mature really, really quickly, and we have been eating the ones I've had to thin. Delicious and spicy.

Send radish recipes, if you have any good ones. I have one for pickled radishes that a friend recommended, but I'm not sure. Let's put it to a vote: Pickled radishes, yes or no? And can anyone come help me weed? I will pay in radishes and baby arugula and eternal devotion.

april showers bring may's frost warning

Thanks for keeping life interesting, central New York weather! It's going to be in the low 30s tonight and tomorrow night. I guess they -- "they" -- weren't kidding with that whole Zone 5 spiel about how tender plants shouldn't go in before May 15. I think I'm supposed to be safe with peas and radishes, since they're early spring plants and as of Thursday afternoon, they weren't sending up their first shoots yet, but I doubt freezing temperatures are super great for seed germination either. Ah well.

I'm giving a workshop about Twitter at a public library in Syracuse Tuesday night, and it occurred to me on the drive back from Lancaster today that I am totally unprepared to demonstrate anything to 25 elderly computer users of various skill levels and am actually really damn freaked out about the whole thing. So tonight, I came home, unpacked my things, made a healthy dinner, placed admiring phone calls to my teacher friends who do this sort of thing multiple times every day to less forgiving audiences, carefully reviewed my detailed lesson plan, practiced my presentation, and went to bed early.

Ha. Instead, I...

1. Watched about a dozen videos of baby goats from the farm doing my yarn CSA.

2. Added books about raising goats and other farm animals to my various wishlists and library bookbags.

3. Drafted an email to a woman I met at a holiday party who has invited us to come out to her goat farm.

4. Enjoyed this Unshelved strip.

5. Bought the textbook for my summer class, which cost $80 used and looks a little daunting.

6. Searched the Food Goodness archives for recipes involving the only two fresh produce items we have in the house: one yellow pepper and half a package of spinach.

7. Ate cereal.

8. Watched the episode of Sex in the City where Carrie meets Berger, who I think is her second-best love interest (next to Aiden, of course, who is the only truly decent man she ever dated, and please do not argue with me on this point becuase I know I am right and will accept no other opinions, especially if they involve Mr. Big).

9. Decided it was too late to work on my presentation and I'll just worry about it tomorrow. Oy. Do I really have to do this?

the most wonderful time of the year

Spring planting! I am trying to fulfill my 31 for 31 resolution and branch out this year, starting with this: Pretty seed packets, come home with me. I want to make a quilt out of you or something.

I'm trying to start a lot more from seed this year: sugar snap peas, snow peas, green beans (their name is "Contender," which I love -- I imagine little beans putting on boxing gloves and running up and down the stairs of the Philadelphia Art Museum), tri-color bush beans, radishes, spinach, mesclun greens, more varieties of herbs. That stuff is going directly in the ground, but I'm also trying to start tomatoes indoors:

J returned from his travels last month with two varieties of tomato seeds, Oregon Spring and Yellow Jubilee, so I invested the $2.99 at yonder Agway for one of those mini-greenhouse trays and put it in the warmest, sunniest spot in the house. Everything was going swimmingly for the first week or two, until one morning when the first seedlings started hitting the top of the plastic lid and I decided it was time to take it off. When I got home from work that day, I was greeted with this: We have lost our nascent will to live.

Put the lid back on and the seedlings are fine again, but I'm now getting to the point where their growth is being stunted because they're hitting the lid, and they don't even tolerate a small amount of time without it. Tonight, I only had it off for a few hours before the melodramatic drooping started. I'm thinking maybe it's a lack of water, and they need a water tray beneath them? Or they're too cold, in which case I have no solution. Any and all suggestions appreciated.

Another new develoopment this year is that I have a partner in gardening crime. My friend, who will henceforth be known as H, has a spot in the community garden this year too, and she and her boyfriend and I have three plots next to each other. We spent most of yesterday building a gigantic 75-foot fence with J (H, I and J! ha), and today she and I were out for several hours doing our first plantings -- peas and radishes for me and potatoes for her. She is already putting me to shame with her neatly square raised beds and her detailed map that is, like, measured out and stuff.

In summary: Yay! I missed the garden and now it is back all over again.

kreative kat

My wonderful school friend Leslie tagged me with this: and now I will do this:

"List 7 things that you love, and then pass the award on to 7 bloggers that you love! Be sure to tag them and let them know that they have won. You can copy the picture of the award and paste it on your sideboard letting the whole world know...you are Kreativ."

1. Open windows.
2. Dogs and goats, up to and including rectangular pupils.
3. Walking into a new yarn store for the first time.
4. Dark brown eyes.
5. Stripes.
6. Vegetarian Times and Bitch magazine.
7. Twitter.

And I tag Shannon, Angie, Alissa, Kelly, Michael, Cindy, Cara and Scott.

naked as we came

(Special note for Bunny Watson: That song made me teary too, the first time I heard it.)

J's grandfather died on Friday, and I won't talk too much about it out of respect for his family -- it's not my story to tell. But as I was driving back from the funeral tonight, I was Thinking Many Thoughts About Life And Mortality etc. etc. and listening to Antje Duvekot's new CD, The Near Demise of the Highwire Dancer.

(Detour for shameless plug: A lot of us have been listening to Antje ever since she was just Alissa's cool roommate who played music, but this CD feels to me like it should be her big break. She has totally come into her own. Maybe it has something to do with production value or fancy music-producer things? All I know is that the album is amazing.)

Anyway. A few of the songs on it are songs she'd released on previous albums from live concerts, and wow why is it taking me so long to get to the point here, I was driving and it was dusk and the sun was setting over the Catskills and it looked something like this... Thanks to flickr user lillergy.

... but with huge mountains up so close to the road, bracing the left side of the whole drive. And then, in the middle of what may be my favorite-ever song from Antje (and in the running for my favorite-ever song from anyone in the history of time), came the lyric, "You can ask the mountain/ The mountain doesn't care." And it was perfect, and it seemed just like life: beautiful, heartbreaking, everything in between.

North Montana was so cold
She keeps her secrets frozen
Under glaciers way up north
People have got lost up there
In the home of the grizzly bear
And you can ask the mountain
The mountain doesn't care

And it's a long way to Delaware and back
And it's a long way
'Cause it's a long way, with clouds upon our backs
And it's a long, long, long, long way.

the best of the series of tubes

I don't know who Greg Rutter is, but his list of the 99 things you should have experienced on the Internet unless you're a loser or old or something is quite enjoyable.

In other news, I am planting today! In little plastic cups, not the ground. J. returned from a trip with a couple packages of tomato seeds, so I'm going to try starting my own seedlings this year. Am excited to get my hands dirty. But first, more schoolwork. Dirt will be my reward.

27: the final countdown

This Thing We're Doing is now officially That Thing We Did, and my favorite part of it was that a bunch of people from different places in my life did it, and it was so much fun to read everyone's thoughts so often. Hooray. It also has gotten me back in the habit of blogging, I think, because when I saw this, my first thought was that I couldn't wait to put it here:

Oh, I love it. What a perfect closing for This Thing. May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, and may you always line-dance like a Belgian commuter fueled by the fire of a Julie Andrews hip hop remix.

26: ow. also, wow.

I just came back from seeing Wendy and Lucy. My heart and brain and entire being hurt. That is one of the most powerful movies I've ever seen.

Uh. I feel like I was just run over by a truck. A truck full of despair. Here, from happier days (i.e. yesterday)... we baked these cupcakes for the birthday party of a friend who studies crickets: The praying mantis was so big that he didn't fit on a cupcake, so he had to be eaten separately.

25: hey, good-lookin'

Whatcha got cookin'? Hi, 25. You're looking pretty fine tonight. Yes, yes you are. What's that? You're more posts than I wrote in the entire year of 2007? Why, you're correct! (Also, I can tell you're a little unsettled by that new Blogger tab that says "monetize," and I don't blame you, because I am too.)

This occasion seems appropos for a post with a little more narrative tension than usual, don't you think?

I went to see the African Children's Choir tonight with a friend who had an extra ticket. I walked in kind of hazy on the details of what we were about to see (and so was she; her tickets had come as part of a package deal) and I walked out confused and conflicted. According to the brochure, which is a big "according to" and I really need to do some research about the backing organization, these kids come from very poor parts of Africa and are often orphaned by one or both parents. There was a video showing some of their neighborhoods in different countries in Africa, and testimonials from young adults about how much the choir, which has been around since 1984, has changed their lives.

During the program, a few real-live graduates sang and talked about the program, as well as their current successes in college and the way the program had helped them rise out of poverty. They were interspersed between these incredibly adorable little kids in costumes, singing and dancing. About half the songs were traditional African songs in Swahili or some of the kids' native languages (again, assuming), and the other half were in English. Those were mostly things along the lines of "This Little Light of Mine" set to horrifying '80s synthesizer soundtracks.

The good: Clearly, the children's lives are better for having done this. They are fed and clothed and healthy and educated. For the most part, at least in the first half, the kids looked like they were having a great time singing and dancing and drumming and responding to the applause of the audience. They also are taking home an amazing gift to the kids who don't get chosen: the vast sums of money that keep open special schools run by this program. They claim they educate thousands and thousands of African children a year, just a fraction of whom are the ones who actually go on tour with the choir. (As an aside, it must be a total head trip to be one of the people who chooses the most talented and attractive and healthy kids to go on tour and leaves the rest behind at the schools.)

The bad: What is the ethical cost of this? These kids aren't remotely old enough to choose this life for themselves, and certainly not old enough to choose their religion (although I suppose no kids who are raised with any kind of religion are). But it's pretty clear that they are being used -- trained, in fact, a word they used freely in the video, to sing and dance for rich Western audiences. They are taken around countries they know aren't theirs and asked to stand up every night and look happy at the right times, sad at the right times, sing songs in multiple languages they may or may not understand. They are asked to dance traditional dances for money, to dress up for money, to sing for money, to look cute for money, to look needy for money.

I can't even figure out what I think about this. I mean, in balance, this is good, right? However they've gotten our filthy Western money, they've gotten it, and they're making children's lives better with it. It wouldn't matter if the kids were chosen to go on tour by lottery, or standing up on stage juggling puppies and fire batons, or taught to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- this money is good. And people wouldn't fork over the $30 if they weren't getting a ticket to something that would give them a particular experience.

This entire set-up is counting on some Western need for a transaction to take place, for us to get something in return for the giving of money, right? People wanted the experience; they didn't just want to give $30 for this program without going to see it in action.

But wow, did it feel horrible to me to be having that experience. The beginning, with the African dances and pretty costumes, was odd but manageable. At intermission, my friend and I talked about how weird this felt and how we weren't sure we were comfortable, but we didn't actually consider leaving. Halfway through the second act, during the video, I wanted to run screaming from the room. I have never been so consciously aware of exploiting something or someone while in the act of doing it as I was tonight.

I am going to be more conscious about it from now on, but I'm still completely conflicted about the whole thing. Is it good that I went, or was it just perpetuating the problem? If I'd known what it would be like, should I have just written a check instead and not made myself uncomfortable for two hours on a Friday night, or was that experience worth something in itself?

24: i've got a bad case of lovin' you

So... huh. It turns out that if you stop eating cheese and butter and exercise more, your cholesterol WILL go down. I swear I didn't believe it until now, but there we have it. My doctor's appointment this morning was shockingly positive, with the guy giving me all sorts of kudos for my new and improved numbers, admiring my healthy eating habits, gently suggesting that I exercise every day of the week (oof), and sharing tips about what kind of cottage cheese he prefers.

Of course, things can't be all positive, so when he took my blood pressure, I got a careful, "Are you nervous?" Ha.

Still, this is sort of encouraging. And high on my new success, I went and laid down a few hundred dollars for a year-long gym membership. It isn't the most financially responsible thing I've ever done, since technically I am a member of all of C*rnell's sprawling fitness facilities for free, but the fact is that I hate them and I never go. This gym has tons of classes (in fact, it's the gym where I take African) and it's small and lovely and clean and close to my house and not full of sorority girls in skintight sweatpants with "juicy" written across the butt. Also, tax refund! Woo!

Alright, time to settle down for some exciting reading about benchmarking and assessment plans. And a lifetime of avoiding butter.

23: life lesson #3485734952341

Do not eat from a salad bar and/or a Chinese food bar after 9 p.m. You are not "lucky that it is still open," you are "eating food that has been sitting out for about a million hours." God, it sounds so obvious when it's all written out like that. Blech.

Here, you should watch this. Just trust me. Or don't, actually, at least not when it comes to advice on food-borne illnesses.

22: head of the class

In a moment of really weird judgement, I volunteered to teach a workshop at a public library near Syracuse. It's part of the library's "Tech Tuesday" series and it's about Twitter, which is near and dear to my heart. I went to another TT workshop tonight, and I think I can do this, but... help? Any teacher tips would be greatly appreciated. I have experience speaking in front of groups and feel fairly comfortable with it, but I've never tried to TEACH anyone anything in a formal setting except how to knit, which is a little different.