My Un-Thanksgiving

Pictures are up from last week's cross country meet!


Here they be, arrrrr!

Let's see...my Thanksgiving weekend was almost painfully uneventful. While I was bordering on wallowing in my own sorry state of...prolonged wallowing, Paul reminded me that I did, in fact, do several things this weekend. They include:

1) Going to Seoul. I caught Seoul's Biennale (more on Korean art later...), went to a few salsa clubs (despite the fact that I'm absolutely hopeless with anything more complicated than a two-step...), ate well, and slept even better.

2) Reading a book. That's always good for the old self esteem!

3) Running half of a marathon (as per my marathon training schedule).

4) Eating a lot of cereal and granola bars while watching sordid reality shows (hey, often they are the only thing that is on in English!).

Ok, so maybe the last one is the least impressive...

Keep bugging me until I write more, guys! I have news of river/sewers that flow from wretched to beautiful (both man-made states) and under buildings and through parkings garages, more computer generated art than your brain can handle, Korean hospitality, and of course, more installations of "wacky news from the lower half of the penninsula."

Are we running today?

I realized that one of the reasons I've been having trouble writing about my experiences in Korea is that I've been trying to do it while strategically slicing out everything related to the school where I work. That's a fatal flaw, because it means constructing a narrative void of, well, people. So, I can't remedy those omissions all at once, but I'll begin by writing about this weekend.

Ever since the second week of school (oh, wow, 12 weeks ago now...?) I've been coaching the cross-country team. I use coaching in a somewhat loose sense, because normally when athletes are being coached they have some sort of drive motivating a desire to work hard and improve, as well as a commitment to their teammates, their coaches, and their sport. This was, most of the time, not the case with my athletes.

Ok, so I'm selling some of my students short. There were a few notable exceptions, but for the most part getting my students to run four days a week (or even three, or two...) was worse than getting them do their own homework instead of copying a friend's answers.

"Miss W.B., are we running today?"
"Yes, we run every day."

You don't even want to know how many times I had this exchange...with the same student.

"Miss W.B., are we running today?"
"Why would we NOT run today?"
"Because it rained this morning."
"You are hopeless."

My students would walk whenever I was out of eyesight, then start running again as soon as they knew I could see them. They complained of sore ankles, sore muscles, sore skin, sore eyelids, who knows what else...

And yet, when race day rolled around...

We killed. Annihilated. Flattened. The other schools looked at us with simultaneous contempt and respect.

"You...practiced? How much?"

As if practicing was a form of cheating or something.

More about race weekend to come, but at least now you have (some of) the background.

Korean SAT, Pepero Day, XC

Tomorrow is the Korean Collegiate Scholastic Aptitude Test. It is offered only one day a year.

Imagine that your admission to college was based solely on one test and all of your peers across the entire country are taking the test all at once. It's a huge huge huge deal. My Korean teacher (who also teaches at a public high school) said that she's very tired from cramming the students for the test, but after tomorrow, she doesn't have to teach any more classes.

During the test, planes all across Korea are not allowed to take off because the noise could potentially distract test-takers.

Two years ago, there was large cell-phone cheating scandal in Gwangju involving 100 students.

In lighter new, last Saturday was "Pepero Day." Ever had the Japanese candy Pocky? It's called Pepero in Korea. Pepero Day is Valentine's Day's little sister (er...one of them...there are several Valentine's Days in Korea). Everyone buys pepero, which range from small to ginormous (I even say a baguette dipped in chocolate and a two-foot long stuffed animal pepero) and gives them away to their friends. In Hapkido, we watched "The Transporter" for Pepero Day.

This weekend I'm going to Pohang (about a 5 hour drive East of Gwanju) for my school's one and only cross country meet. I hope they do well...

We leave Friday at noon at get back Saturday at 6 pm. I'll let you know how it goes.

Ho-shin-su

Today I learned the craziest move in hapkido. We practice three main things: palchagi, or kicks; nakpo, or rolls; and hoshinsu, or holds. Rather, I should correct myself, we practice methods of getting out of a hold or a punch. (Keep in mind I have to interpret all of the Korean...I really have no idea what my instructor ever says...)

The first "hoshinsu" methods I learned involved getting free from a wrist hold. Instead of pulling back, which makes it easier for someone to hold on to you, you push your wrist forward, releasing yourself. The next set of moves involved doing that and then elbowing your attacker in the stomach or neck.

The third set, which I learned today, consisted of kicking the person holding your wrist in the shin, grabbing a pressure point near his (or her) thumb, pulling his arm back, karate chopping the back of his elbow, pinning him to the ground, and bending his wrist backwards, and emitting a final lethal-sounding "eeeeeeeyah!" to prove your point.

I guess things get complicated fast around here...

Korean language lessons are the same way. We spent a month on the alphabet, then all of a sudden learnt about four grammatical forms in one hour.

It's like when you say "hello" to someone in Korean they start a rapid fire exchange...as if you must be fluent.

I like it.

A not-much week...

It got cold literally over night here, so it's a good thing I dropped the cash for that new comforter!

(Eerrrrrr, my roommate Diana and I are still trying to figure out how to turn on the heat: after four weeks of Korean lessons we've only learned about ten words and being able to read the alphabet is useless if the words aren't in the dictionary...)

Cross-country seems to be going well as a few of my kids are actually displaying (gasp!) motivation and commitment. It's amazing! Too bad we only get two and a half weeks of full-on training. If for every five kids who stop and walk halfway through the practice I have one who tries, it warms my heart.

In hapkido today we had relay races! It made me think that being a PE teacher would actually be a pretty strobey job.

Sorry I don't have much to report. This week, although abnormally slow, has otherwise been mundane. All in the spirit of keeping my blogging up, though, I write anyway!

Someday soon I'll write about running through rice-fields in the dark by a full-moon...I get to do that nearly every day (well, except for the full-moon part, obviously).

A day at the races

Today my body went through quite a roller-coaster of experiences. In the morning, I rounded out my first week of marathon training (er, first HALF week of marathon training is more accurate...) with a 10 mile run. I found one of Gwangju's rivers, and ran on a road that followed it until it was time to turn around. One side of the river was sprawling marshland covered in tall grasses going to see. The other side was a long string of farming plots tended by old men and women. There were many small lean-to huts in between the vegetable plots. On the other side of the rode were a few golfing driving ranges and several churches.

I also ran past a funeral home where a hearse with the back converted into a golden temple roof was parked.

As I was running back, a woman in jeans and a jean jacket started running next to me. Soon she fell back, but I could hear her continuing to run behind me.

This afternoon I went to the "Jimjirbang", or Korean bath-house/sauna. Upstairs I sweated away in various rooms. There was a salt room where the floor was covered in large salt crystals and the walls were made out of salt bricks, a coal room, an ice room complete with fake snow and a snowman, an earth room (my favorite), and a pine oven.

Next I got a much needed sports massage. After an hour of intense pain (sometimes the masseuse would literally hit and slap my muscles) my body felt, surprisingly, refreshed. We'll see how I feel tomorrow morning...I don't know whether the massage will end up producing head-to-toe bruises or alleviating muscle soreness.

Finally, I went downstairs to the baths. There was a Chinese medicine, an herb pool, and a Japanese wood pool. There were also cold and hot baths, as well as baths outside and baths with all sorts of massaging jets. A little girl latched on to me and followed me around. She gave me some pear juice and kept gesturing about my eyebrow ring.

Now I'm ready to take a looooong nap.

Perhaps I'll write more about jimjirbangs later. You could literally stay there forever if you wanted because they are open 24 hours, have places to sleep, and serve food.

The Ilguk Hospital

One of the most prominent landmarks in Ilguk, the neighborhood three beverage factories (Coca-Cola, Chilsing Cider, and OB Blue) away from my own Yangsan-dong, is a hospital. Like Korean churches, every hospital is marked with a glowing neon cross; the ones adorning the hospitals are squat, symmetric, and green instead of red.

The residents of the Ilguk hospital are not hidden inside, but are allowed to wander (or, as is often the case, acquiesce) on sidewalks in front of the hospital. Patients in pale hospital gowns are interspersed with medical apparatus on the brick inlay. Some partients stare bleakly at the traffic and passers-by from their wheelchairs. Some nod their shaved heads at me as I walk by on my way to get groceries. Others are engrossed in their own IVs. Once, I saw a man in a hospital gown briskly crossing the street and heading for the nearby park, where he began speed-walking around and around on the concrete path.

Home decorating in Korea

IMG_4194.JPG
Originally uploaded by jordanwb.

After shivering for several nights in a row (it didn't get below 70 until the last days of October!) I gave in and bought a new comforter. Errrrrr, and duvet. I couldn't help it. It was just so striped and...not pink!

It's shiny, but marvelous.

Not quite

First off, I want to say sorry. Sorry for effectively dropping off the face of the Earth for the past few months.

I can't really begin to describe everything that has happened in my hiatus. (The difficulty of that should be self-evident.) Instead, I'll just do my best to write whatever comes into my mind.

It's no secret that I'm having a really hard time in Korea. Or rather...I'm having a really hard time with my job in Korea. There is inherent difficulty in teaching six classes (most of which don't have firm pre-constructed curriculums) to ESL students as a first year teacher. I know this. Yet I have still felt like a failure countless times. The stress of teaching is compounded by the fact that if I fail I'm not the one who suffers. I've had to pretty much set that thought aside, however.

There was a time when I bounced back and forth between asking myself why am I here (to work every waking of the day, rendering myself to tired to even realize that I'm not just at KFS I'm also in KOREA?) and beating myself up for not being a great teacher. Then I realized that I'm trying, and my teaching abilities will rise along with my morale and mental health.

All right, this boring saga has continued on long enough. I started taking hapkido (which, if you have been one of the fortunate few who have talked to me in the past month, has quickly become all I talk about--besides school, that is). I started taking Korean lessons. I made myself a very ambitious training schedule for the Hong Kong Marathon in March. Yes, it does sound like I'm trying my very hardest to burn myself out, but at least I feel like I'm using the opportunity I have to live in Asia:

I revel in feeling like the epitome of moronic as I contort my mouth and focus on tensing my throat while trying to pronounce Korean consonants and vowels. (All the talk about the refreshing logic of Hangul, the Korean writing system, is well founded, which offsets the fact that the phonetics confound me.)

I love getting a confused look on my face then trying to kick or roll in some position that my body will never acquiesce to in hapkido.

The marathon training has gotten off to a bit of a slower start due to its untimely coincidence with first quarter grading and a strained hamstring, but I'm still optimistic about that, too. Coaching the cross-country team, while aggravating, have given my legs some much needed beatings, too.

I didn't intend the tone of this belated post to be sullen; in truth, I'm finally starting to enjoy myself here in nearly all venues. Teaching is going better, I've come to really appreciate the friendship of some of the other teachers, I'm excited about hapkido, I've been reading great books, I've been exploring...but something is still missing, so I'm working on that.

Keep bugging me to update the blog, folks. The hardest part is stepping out the door.

I have a cell phone--er, "han-do p'hon" as it's known in Korean--now (and a regular phone, which I've always had...), so if you want to call me...

Another grey (yet colorful) weekend in Korea

Before I get to work writing tests for my students (progress reports are due at the end of the week, so they have a ton of tests…sorry!), here’s a few highlights from my weekend:

On Friday I experienced many things that are rare in Korea:
- Italian food
- Whole wheat bread! (I found this at a local bakery that has samples of just about every item out for you to try…I’m definitely returning…when I’m hungry…)
- Jeans that fit me. This is astonishing, seeing as the average size in Korea is about a 2, making me super plus sized.
- Snakes on a Plane

My Saturday was more distinctly Korean. My roommate, Diana, and I took a trip to the port city of Mokpo, located to the southwest of Gwangju. Although we hit a few speed bumps (literally and figuratively) on the way there (who knew Gwangju has two different train stations?), we made it to Mokpo around 12:45 armed with instructions of the best (and most touristy) places to go, straight from the mouth of a future maritime engineer who wanted to practice his English slang with us before starting a job in a shipyard.

Even though Admiral Yi, who’s statue, name, and presence are evident all over Mokpo, staved off a Japanese invasion in the last 16th century, the Japanese influence is very strong in Mokpo. From the top of Yudal-San, which rises up out of the lights and buildings of downtown, islands of rock in a sea of tile roofs and winding alleys, we could see the foggy archipelago to the east, as well as the continuous string of ships going in an out of Mokpo’s harbor. Unlike Gwangju and Seoul, which are littered with row upon row (upon row upon row) of high rise apartments, much of the housing in Mokpo consists of small one- or two-story traditional style buildings. Many of them have bright orange roofs or bright orange trim, a feature I have yet to find anywhere else.

Mokpo’s downtown streets are covered with plastic facades lined with light bulbs that turn alleys into light-filled tunnels. Mokpo is a cross between a port-city and an amusement park. At night, spotlights aimed at Yudal-san illuminate the mountains rock formations. If Mokpo were Disneyland, Yudal-san would be Sleeping Beauty’s Castle; Diana and I would be the living Disney characters. We couldn’t go five minutes without being accosted by groups of Koreans (mostly old men and women) who wanted to ask us questions in Korean (which we couldn’t answer) and practice their English (which we couldn’t understand). One woman said “I love you!” as soon as she saw us reach one of the rocky look-outs near the top of the mountain.

Once we passed the many yodeling and singing Koreans (some jockeying back and forth like a human version of dueling banjos) at the little summit, we finally got some peace in the form of hundreds of stairs rising up to Yudal-san’s peak. From there, we could see the other side of the mountain, the shipyard, “raw fish town”, and more islands. Construction had started on a bridge connecting Mokpo to “Long Island” (where Admiral Yi’s shrine stands), and eventually the bridge will look something like Boston’s Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge. Although the bridge doesn’t exist yet, it has been digitally added to the photograph on the front of Mokpo’s tourist map.

Coming down from Yudal-san, we aimed ourselves in the direction of “Peace Square”, an area with reputable raw fish restaurants. After all, the search for good raw fish is largely what brought us to Mokpo in the first place. We took a city bus to Mokpo’s museum district and then walked over another small mountain (Gatbawi) to Mokpo’s seaside esplanade. We were thoroughly stared at (yet again) as we passed the elderly men smoking cigarettes and eating raw fish and the young hot rods on roller blades passed us. We also ran into a wide concrete park where parents rented tiny electric cars that they drove with their children in their laps.

Mustering up all of our courange and consolidating our limited Korean-speaking skills, we headed across the street to a large tourist hotel (Sangria Hotel, or maybe it was was supposed to be Shangria Hotel, or even Shangrila Hotel…the Romanization of Korean poses many problems) to ask where a good saeng-seon-hoe-jjip, or raw fish restaurant, was. As an army of hotel employees ran around asking each other where one was, I thought “This is Mokpo, shouldn’t there be one on every street corner?” The concierge even called up directory assistance and came up empty handed. However, after a few minutes we learned that “sang-seon-hoe-jjip” is not the same as saeng-seon-hoe-jjip, and we finally got directions. Who knows what we were originally asking for…It really could be anything.

One step closer to our meal of raw fish, we began wandering down the street trying to match the words the concierge had written in Korean on a business card to the signs on the local businesses. This proved harder than it sounded, and eventually we asked a Korean woman for help. In typical Korean form, she went above and beyond to help us, even calling a friend on her “hand phone” to ask where the restaurant was. Finally, once she found out, she led us there, even though it was completely out of her way.

We were finally ready to eat our most adventurous meal in Korea yet. In retrospect, I think I prefer the way Japanese raw fish is served, but it was still an, ummm, interesting experience. There were fish bones and pieces of fish skin everywhere, on the fish filets, in my mouth, coming back out of my mouth. It was quite the experience. Our sliced raw fish came on a bed of clear curly noodle-like things, that I suspect were really some form of seaweed. (I suppose I’ll never really know, though…) My favorite was a whole fish, silver and point-nosed, that came to us skin and all. Once we figured out how to avoid the bones, it was delicious.

After dinner we had another mishap on the city bus (even with a crew of three concerned Korean passengers and the bus driver trying to tell us what to do, it took us three tries to get on the right one). Eventually we made it back to the train station and bought tickets back to Gwangju. We had almost an hour to spare, so we walked back up towards Yudal-san to find a coffee shop. (I kept falling asleep on the bus.) We found one, Café Manon, that had plush soft chairs, really good coffee, thick and abundant fashion magazines, and semi-pop versions of country and gospel songs coming out of the speakers. The building was designed like German beer hall, so it was a very eclectic coffee shop.

We made it back to Gwangju at around 9:10, and then had another bus experience (I am going to be a pro at riding Korean city busses…just give it time…) that landed us downtown. (Our actual desired destination! Amazing!) Initiating a search for a bar that serves imported beer, we ended up at “Miller Time.” This place was…crazy. It was completely packed, and every single person in the bar (except for Diana and me) was drinking draught Miller served in pitchers shaped like giant beer bottles. I got a stout (a stout!) from Australia. Not quite a Guinness, but still good. We ordered nachos, and learned that nachos in Korea are nothing like nachos at all. I think they probably put them together from a picture of nachos. Instead of nacho cheese, we had honey mustard sauce. Instead of salsa, red-plum mixed with tomato. Instead of sour cream, mashed sweet potato. It was…another interesting experience, complete with cole slaw and crispy sweet noodle things.

Ok, that’s about all the blogging I have in me for now. I forgot to take my camera to Mokpo, so unfortunately there aren’t any pictures. I’ll probably return to take a tour of the islands, so hopefully I’ll remember my camera next time.

Back to writing tests…I told my physics class if they all got As on their first test we’ll have an eating contest.

The update of all updates...

I’ve given up on waiting for a magical chunk of time in the near future where I’m neither busy nor exhausted, so I figure now (when I’ve been at the school for 12 hours already today and still have to finish prepping for tomorrow’s classes) is as good a time as any to start unloading the cartloads of thoughts that are zipping around my brain. How’s this: I’ll write until I fall asleep.

Bear with me, folks. This will be the update of updates, but I’m going to do it in reverse chronological order.

Today was the first day of school and, much to my surprise, I’m still alive. Some students no doubt think I’m a moron and a flake, some think I’m ultra-cool because I did sports in college, and most are probably contemplating my enormous pit-stains. (First day jitters + hot humid classroom = copious amounts of sweat.)

I woke up at 5 am (or maybe it was 4 am?), which isn’t as bad as it sounds because it’s what my body wants to do right now. I prepped for Model UN all morning…while IM-ing people on my computer, of course. (To cut the suspense: it paid off, I think Model UN rocked…watch me eat my words tomorrow when I get their homework back…) After that I had breakfast, sadly took out my eyebrow ring (school dress code) and had a small crisis trying to determine what my most “teacherly” outfit was. It didn’t help that during our teacher orientation they gave us a guide to the “Your First 60 Days of Teaching” that emphasized the first seven seconds as the most important seven seconds of the entire year.

Once at school, I wrangled with the copy machine, took an hour and a half worth of deep breaths, and paced around the room wondering whether I should be sitting at my desk (in the back of my room), standing in front of the board (in the middle of the room), or standing by the door (in the front of the room) when my kids first arrived. Before I could come up with the best strategy, they started trickling in the door.

Commence…10th Grade Homeroom

Nothing happens in homeroom. At least…that’s what I’ve been told. I hate the standing-around-waiting-for-people-to-arrive game, so I think tomorrow I’m just going to have to come up with some frivolous activity (maybe have the kids guess how old I am?) to pass the time.

Lesson 1: Don’t ask the students whether we are supposed to do anything in Homeroom or not. Just do whatever I want to do. Right.

The 10th graders are a trip. They are very rambunctious and talkative and they have a ton of questions about everything. I think they’ll be a ton of fun as soon as I figure out how to keep them quiet while I’m talking. One of the other teachers recommended “boy/girl/boy/girl” seating, so I’m going to try that tomorrow.

After homeroom, I have the 10th graders for both Biology and Modern World History. To tell the truth, I don’t really remember much of this morning, even though it was only 12 hours ago. I think I was too flustered to possess a short-term memory. The jist of it, however, was that I felt like a complete moron and airhead. My kids are definitely interested in me (they “ooooh”-ed and “ahhhhhh”-ed when I read my introductory letter, especially the parts about college), but I’m not sure they think I’m competent yet. I definitely remember trying to throw together what I remembered from high school about the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire and mumbling about when Constantine converted to Christianity (“Uhhh…it was 100 something or…200 something…”). Tomorrow’s got to be better, right?

After that I had Algebra 2. No one in that class talks. Ever. They just stare at me blankly and occasionally mumble when I prod them. I think some of them were trying to point out an error I made when I was doing a problem on the board, but they couldn’t say it loud enough for me to hear. They also must think I’m a moron. I can’t tell from their silence if they already know everything I’m teaching them or if they are utterly lost. In this class I said, “This should be easy, right?” way too many times. This class will also be better tomorrow. You’ll see.

After that, I sat down at my desk and stared blankly at my computer for a few minutes before starting on some work I needed to finish for my afternoon classes. Lunch period was almost over before I remembered that it was lunch period, but I made it just in time for kimchee, some kind of sweet beef, and Korean grapes.

----------------- Side note: Korean grapes ----------------------------------

You don’t eat the skin of Korean grapes. It is very thick and leathery and sour and has a very dark purple color. However, you can usually suck the interior grape through the hole left where the grape attached to the stem. It comes out with a satisfyingly squishy slurp. I don’t know if this is ridiculously impolite or not. Korean grapes are fleshier and sourer than American grapes, and they always have humongous seeds.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After that I had the boon of all boons: a free period. It consisted of much collating and stapling.

The afternoon went much much better than the morning. Or maybe I had lowered my expectations. I had 11th and 12th graders for Pre-Calc, 12th graders for Physics, and 11th and 12th graders for Model UN. There were a few awkward moments, like when I completely lost them while trying to explain how the space shuttle works (not because of the science, but because of the language) and ended up drawing an embarrassingly phallic diagram, but for the most part things went smoothly. It was during these classes where it really became apparent to me that the biggest challenge this year isn’t going to be subject material itself, but conveying the subject material without using words beyond the scope of my students’ vocabulary. They are, with a few exceptions, essentially ESL students who are learning from textbooks used by American students. I am in awe with how hard they must work to keep up with it. If anything, this may finally kill my bad habit of speed-talking.

Ooof, this blogging isn’t going well because my eyelids are getting droopy. But if I don’t write about what happened before the first day of school now, when will I do it? That’s a whole week’s worth of crazy new experiences!

A few more short notes from today:
- I handed out information notecards to call my students and some of them drew the craziest doodles on them. I thought they were still working on writing out their information, when they were really just drawing cartoons and little dog-bones and aliens and stuff.
- My kids all really really really want textbooks for some reason. As if textbooks ever taught anyone anything…
- In Korea, bathrooms are always red for women and blue for men. The symbol on the door is freely stylized: some are cartoons, some have stylish ladies and men in fedoras.
- It’s the little things that keep throwing me off, like that fact that in my apartment I have to push the handle on the faucet down to turn the water on.
- I handed out a sign-out sheet for the textbooks. In the “condition of book” column one student wrote “Sublime.”
- I made it all the way until 10 pm today! (That’s quite an accomplishment, because I went to bed at 8 pm yesterday, 6 pm the night before, 4 pm the night before that…oh man, that’s a linear relationship! I have to tell my Algebra 2 students…)

Oh yeah, when I finally got home from school (at about 7:30 pm) I tore into any and every food item I could find in my apartment. My dinner was:
- magical pre-cooked rice: it comes in a non-perishable container but it’s already fluffy…how do they do that?
- Mystery Chinese black curry thing (all the instructions were in Korean but luckily all I had to do was head it up)
- Choco patty cookie moon-pie type thing
- Corn chips (which are really really sweet)
- Maple soju (which tasted, to me, like vodka)

Ok…so with the blogging I only barely made it through the first day. I wrote down a lot of stuff in my journal from the first few days here, so I’ll try to transcribe that stuff tomorrow. My personal goal is to get better at being a teacher every single day, and part of that includes getting faster (and better) at preparing for lessons. We’ll see, she said…

A few links...

In a few hours I'm leaving for South Korea. Craziness. I'm exhausted and dehydrated and nervous and excited.

Per Alice's request (and my own as-of-yet-unfulfilled promise), here is the link to photos from my backpacking trip.

Also, I have a new blog. There's not much on it yet, and I'll probably end up posting most/all of the entries I put up there on this blog, but you should check it out anyway because it has a few extra bonuses.

Ok...time to do some last minute packing.

Today's Local Freak-Outage (or is it Freakout-age?)

Can someone forget how to write? If such a feat is possible, I think I just might have done it. Oh well, time to relearn what I’m unlearnt (or unlearn what I’ve relearnt?) and hunker down to practice. Just like riding a bicycle, right?

A good portion of my day (and my week) was spent realizing that yes, I am actually really-truly going to Korea in two-and-a-half weeks. (Is it really that soon? Can we legitimately call it three? Let me check my calendar...) The realization was catalyzed by today’s purchase of a non-refundable plane ticket, and many other frustrating logistical thorns in my side. Luckily, those have, for the most part, run their course and now I just have to prepare myself.
I dealt with the freak-outage much like I would deal with a power-outage: I started collecting all the essentials, only instead of canned foods, batteries, and bottled water, I fled towards Korean language books, sugary drink (a Slurpee from 7-11 to be exact), and peanut-butter crackers. I also sent Paul frantic text-messages and emails as if the world was ending imminently.

A few hours later, I can semi-proficiently read hangeul and I know four verbs (ka-, to go, iss- to be/exist, sa-, to buy, and ha-, to do), and I feel no more confident about anything (living in Korea, being a teacher).

I think the best words of advice came from Paul: “Prepare yourself to be unprepared.”
I can’t teach myself Korean in two-and-a-half (or even three) weeks, and I can’t teach myself to be a teacher without any students. But I am, I think, pretty good at being unprepared, so here we go.

On a completely different note: I’m in the Boston Public Library and a while ago a security guard came up to me and told me I had to sit up straight. I didn’t even realize I was slouching! My head had just started to hover towards my shoulder. I guess resting your head too close to the table is a security threat.

My Week Alone in the Woods

Ok, here’s the journal I kept during my solo backpacking trip. I hiked along the PCT (mostly) from Timberline Lodge (up on Mt. Hood) to the Bridge of the Gods (on the Columbia River) over the course of seven days.
I have a big honkin’ pile of pictures (I took about 375 but narrowed it down to 125 to put up on flickr...with annotations!) but the internet connection at the Boston Public Library (where I am right now) doesn’t have enough bandwidth to upload them, so those are forthcoming.
I’m planning on revising all of this and writing something more artful...eventually. These are just my rough notes, pretty much unchanged, so take them for what they are. It really isn’t up to snuff my best writing, but it is what it is. If you are interesting in the “writing process” it may be cool to stay tuned and see how this stuff develops.

July 14, 2006, 8:06 PM
This moment is achingly close to perfect: the last hour of sun-light on my first day of my first solo backpacking trip is dwindling. I’m sitting adjacent to Ramona Falls. The mountain breeze is carrying the mist from the falls towards me, offering me solace from the mosquitoes and biting flies that relish attacking my camp about 600 feet away. (Even those are much more manageable than the notorious just-melted snow-pack infestations I’d heard plague this section of the trail, the flies don’t seem to remember that they are supposed to be morbidly repelled by DEET.) I’m nestled in a nook between tree-roots. I’m glad I made it to the Ramona Falls camp because 1) it’s gorgeous, 2) although the area is relatively crowded, I was able to find the perfect spot just out of eye- and earshot of the group of 7 or so men up the trail, but close enough to smell the wood smoke from their campfire, and 3) the white noise from the falls, coupled with my exhaustion, should help mitigate my lonely anxious fear of every bump in the night.
The only thing that could possibly make this moment any better would be sharing it with someone I love. Huh, it just got oddly brighter. I’ll pretend it was because I was thinking about Paul, or my family, or my friends. Being in the woods brings out the cheese in me. True, part of the purpose of this trip is that I have to succeed alone, but part of that entails being acutely aware of what being alone means I’m missing.
Today went by with only one (semi) major hitch (not counting the oddly heinous series of debacles serving as a prequel to departure). I almost think that my subconscious made it happen on purpose, because what would the first day of my first solo be without getting lost? I was merrily hiking along the trail a little ways past Paradise Park when a switchback just...didn’t switch back. The trail just turned and started heading back towards Timberline Lodge. The day-hikers I stopped to ask looked at me like I was crazy (and I probably was), and when I told them it was the first day of a week-long trip they looked like they thought for sure I would never make it. Oh well. I didn’t know how I got turned around backwards; when retracing my steps and consulting the map I found nothing. (There will, no doubt, be more consultation of the map later tonight!) So I bush-whacked a few ridges over and used my mad map skills to deduce where I was supposed to be going, and headed in that direction. After 15 minutes or so of semi-worried bush-whacking, I eventually met up with a trail I hoped (and thought) was the right one. Seeing as right now I’m sitting exactly where I had planned to be, it must have been. All in a days work.
The most beautiful part of the hike was from Timberline Lodge to right where I got lost. I stopped nearly every 30 seconds to take pictures, and wish there was some way I could have just recorded every frame I saw. I spotted a male deer with a few points on top of a neighboring ridge. I hope that shows up digitally. The mountain was never silent: the ambient buzz of flies, bumble bees, and other humming winged and segmented creatures whirring in the background like a well-run led factory never ceased.
My euphoria dropped into pain, boredom, and self-doubt as the tail dropped from alpine meadow and jagged glaciated volcanic outcrops to zig-zagging Rhododendron filled forest. However, my spirits rose again as I crossed the Sandy River (so small up here!...though still the most treacherous obstacle of the day), and started climbing up again to Ramona Falls (which I must try to draw tomorrow).
Oh, only other mishap: forgot a pot-holder, but on the upside, discovered a great new use for my extra pair of wool socks.
I hope Mom got back to the Lodge ok. Her knees were bothering her when she left me at the Zig Zag River. No doubt she’s worrying about me, too, seeing as I don’t get any cell phone service.

Let’s see, some vital stats on the day:
Miles hiked: ~11 (give or take because I got lost)
Started: ~1:15, arrived at Ramona Falls ~6:35, in camp at ~6:45, fred, cleaned, and built a “home” for the night by ~8:00.
Great first day. Let’s hope it only gets better.
9:49 PM: Ok...now it’s dark. Whole new ball-game? Not really. I’m definitely more nervous about my mom than I am about myself...wish I could have used my cell phone tonight. Maybe up on Yokum Ridge I’ll get service tomorrow. If not, definitely by Sunday night. Sigh.

July 15, 2006, 8:57 AM
Well, I made it through the first night alive. My food was pristine and untouched, too. Let’s just hope the critters don’t catch on to me by tomorrow morning.
When I woke up at 7:30 the big group camping next to me was already moving out. Wow that made me feel lazy. But then I reminded myself that I hadn’t slept very well the night before (took over an hour to fall asleep, woke up at 2:40 and couldn’t fall back asleep for an hour and a half, woke up again at 5:45 and 6:30), and I didn’t need to pack up my camp for the day.
I will be heading up Yokum Ridge today, hopefully I’ll get cell phone reception at the top.
12:20 PM: This is unbelievable. I’m as remote as I’m going to be for the rest of my trip. If not the first, I’m definitely one of the first hikers up the Yokum Ridge Trail this season. I can’t tell exactly where it terminates, but I think I made it pretty close to the end. Too bad the trail disappeared under snow. I was starting to doubt the author’s “strong recommendation” of this side-trip until I hit the treeline alpine meadows and amazing views. I guess slogging and switchbacking through 2 hours of woods was worth it. My family will be waiting for me back at Ramona Falls, and I even got to leave a voicemail for Paul!
7:40 PM: Ok...I’m officially exhausted. Perhaps because today turned into an 18-mile day? (11+ for Yocum Ridge, ~7 down to the Ramona Falls trailhead with my parents and a run back up). I think I may just eat my copious clam chowder (don’t even want to see what’s hiding under it stuck and burnt to the bottom of my pot) and collapse. It’s times like this that I really wish Paul was here. The novelty of the trip has started to wear off and now I realize that I still have 5 more days alone. Oh well, 1 more day and I’ll really hit the “rhythm” phase and then it will be over before I know it. And now I have my running shoes because my mom brought then up with her today. Yay!
8:55 PM: Oof, everything hurts. Just the way things should be, right?
Tonight my neighbors are a young couple and their 9-12 month old baby daughter. Awwwwwwwwww...
Vital stats:
Miles: ~18
Up by: 7:30, on trail by 9:00 AM
Dinner: Burnt but yummy clam chowder with shrimp in it instead of clams

July 16, 2006, 7:40 PM
The theme fo the day shall be “Roughing it Smoothly”...though only because of my humble $25 “F-Loop” Lost Lake campsite. Ha. I went from probably the lowest point of the trip to-date today (heading down through the viewless forests, my feet aching every step, tired, sore, and dehydrated) to one of the highest (now, very peaceful, full of Jaipur vegetables and soon fake cheesecake, calm, and happy). Wow, has my first gas canister run-out? (Note: it never did; I didn’t use it up the entire trip.) That would truly be an accomplishment. It’s making lots of weird noises...let’s hope the stove doesn’t self-destruct.
Anyway, when I got here I was at the height of exhaustion and soreness. I dropped my stuff at a (deluxe, more expensive, lake front) site and wandered around confusedly trying to find where to pay. Once I finally got back an hour later, I set up my tent and sleeping bag and collapsed for an hour with my feet uphill. When I woke up from my nap I could barely walk, but after groggily stuffing my face I decided I felt like going on a slow run around the 3.2 mile lake shore trail. Best decision of the day, by far. Turns out even though I could barely walk running felt great. My legs are still very sore, but stretching them after running felt amazing. Maybe another early-morning loop tomorrow? We’ll see how I feel in the morning. It’s going to be another long day (14 mi?) as it is.
Afterwards I took a “shower” (or maybe it was more of a bath?) in the lake with my new friend, Dr. Branner’s (18-in-one all-purpose soap...I have no idea what the 18 uses are...) Goal for tonight: read everything on the bottle. Ha...just kidding...you’ll only know why that’s funny if you’ve ever actually seen one.
Crows are cawing everywhere...or maybe they are just big ornery blue-jays? Either way, now it’s time for some tea and lakeside reflection. Will 3 bags be enough?
8:24 PM: Oh wow, just now while sitting by the lake shore a crawdad (or something similar) swan right up by my foot to explore a jutting rock (must have some good moss for eating on there or something...). As I leaned in to take a picture he scuttled (or maybe swam?) away very quickly. I had no idea those guys can move so well. A few minutes later, some large, crazy bird dove into the water (swooped? trying to catch a fish maybe) then flew up and off. It’s amazing what you can see when you are quiet and still.
Oh, let I forget, today also included crossings of treacherous debris flows (I’m so less daring when I’m by myself) and rapid semi-deep river fordings. Woo! Maybe slogging for miles with sloshy wet feet and socks is what made me cranky.
Oh wow, there are huge cedars here. No phone unless I want to walk 12 miles down the road. I really want to talk to Paul. He just...calms me and energizes me at the same time somehow. He’d love it here because lots of people have boats out. Maybe I’ll find service tomorrow.
Vital stats:
Mileage: 17.1 with pack, ~2 to store and back, 3.2 running = 22.3!!
Up at 6:30, on the trail by 7:50, arrived at Lost Lake around 3:30, in camp by 4:30

July 17, 2006, 8:37 PM
I’m writing from “indoors” (aka, inside my tent) tonight because Wahtum Lake, though beautiful, is home to many biting insects. Let’s see...I’ve continued to make very good time, reaching my camp at 2:15 today. I got very frustrated and almost started crying halfway between Indian Springs and Wahtum Lake because I thought I hadn’t made it to Indian Springs yet. I’m starting to learn that one of my biggest weaknesses (though it hasn’t become a point of failure yet) is pressing on too hard for too far and too long without taking a break. I need to just let myself stop or take it easy (or even take a drink) sometimes. Which, of course, will be my biggest challenge for the final three days of the trip. Going at the rate I have been going at, I could probably make it to the Bridge of the Gods by early afternoon tomorrow. My mom won’t be there until about 48 hours later. Hmmmm. I’ve made the conscious decision to challenge myself “mentally” by taking a slow, easy trek out. I could have outlined a grueling itinerary, looping down Herman Creek and back, but I’ve already proven to myself that I can cover 17, 19, 20 miles in a day. (And with plenty of daylight left...right now it’s just my stupid sore feet that make me need to stop.) So, now I’ll force myself to be alone, by myself, without my exhaustion to distract me. We’ll see how it goes.
The loneliness is definitely growing rather than subsiding. I hiked 2+ miles up to the top of Mt. Chindere before dinner so I could call Paul. That felt really good, and the view was amazing. I could see Hood, Jefferson, St. Helens, Adams, and Rainier (I think). I can’t wait to see Paul, and I can’t tell if the days are passing slower or faster here than they were when I was at home.
When I got here, I tried to take a nap inside my tent but ended up lying frustrated, hot and bothered, in a pool of my own sweat. I didn’t have much better luck outside. Oh well, the whole country is experiencing a heat wave right now, so I think I’ve got it pretty good considering. During my sweaty delirium a chipmunk chewed a hole through my bag of trail mix. I saw it scampering around gleefully afterwards and I tried to give it a dirty look.
I saw absolutely no one on the trail today between Lost Lake and Wahtum Lake, though there were some people canoeing on Wahtum Lake and camping up on top of the ridge. I wonder if they will still be there tonight. If not, or even if they are, this is the most “alone” I’ve been thus far. Funny, doesn’t feel that remote.
Mmmmm...dinner was actually awesome. Tuna yellow curry (from a magic pouch) and whole wheat spaghetti.
All I’ve been hearing since I got here is the wind blowing through the trees. It never stops. Time for more Moby Dick.
Vital stats:
On trail by 7:45 (but got slightly lost leaving...ha ha...at Lost Lake...)
Mileage: Lost Lake to Wahtum Lake, 14.7, side trip to Chinidere Mtn. and back, plus up to the pit toilet out at the trailhead, ~20 total

July 18, 2006, 5:22 PM
Oh man, someone just came down to share my campsite (Mica from Hood River). Oh well, I don’t really mind, it just means I can’t walk around naked or pee as freely...ha. Anyway, it’s still beautiful and peaceful here next to Eagle Creek. This spot of the stream almost looks deep enough to swim in. Don’t know if its inviting appearance is enough to override how cold I know it is. I can see the water splashing under the surface and then bubbling up again in this pool...where are the fish? Anyway, Day 1 of my 3-day anti-gruel relax-a-thon has gone pretty well so far. I slept in after a rather strange and interesting night: I had lots of crazy dreams, many of which were about playing basketball (with no actual playing, in high school but with people I know from college or middle school, some not even basketball players, tying into a separate dream about fashion...weird). I also had a dream where I was pregnant. Weird.
Anyway, the most remarkable thing about last night was when I woke up around 1:50 AM and thought someone was shining a flashlight into my tent, which was flooded with light from a very bright source low and to the east. I saw up, scrambled for my glasses, only to find that it was a very very bright moon close to the lake-horizon. I’ve never seen a moon so low and bright. Wow. And the stars were amazing, too.
The animals stayed out of my food all night, then managed to nibble into the trail mix again right after I got up this morning, so that grudgingly had to “be let go.” I sadly threw out the whole bag on my way back up to Mt. Chinidere (again) to call Paul. Now my phone is almost out of batteries. And I just felt some rumblings in my tummy...uh oh.
Today was rather boring, but nice nonetheless. I’m not sure what I’ll do tomorrow, when I have even more time and even less to do. The falls today were beautiful, though. Maybe I wan walk back up there for lunch and a swim? We’ll see.
Ugh...stomach not feeling too good. Great. I’ll have to take care of that soon. It’s so crazy to think this little creek carved this massive canyon. I should plunk my feet in and see what it can do for them.
8:09 PM: Well, today was a good, if short, day. Tomorrow should be similar. I kind of like this relaxed pace, and I’m really getting into Moby Dick. Again another good dinner (more tuna curry, red panang this time). I hope the little gnawing creatures are deterred by my sheisty bag-hanging job (ha ha...let’s hope the garbage bag doesn’t break either). It’s so great to have the sound of the creek trickling (ok, maybe Eagle Creek does more than trickle) along right next to me. I should be able to sleep well tonight. Tomorrow I’ll try to head down to Tenas Camp. Hopefully it won’t be occupied, but if it is, oh well. The description in the PCT guide made it sound very nice. If I hit it in the morning before heading up to the Benson Plateau it should be good. Hopefully I’ll get a cell signal up there--though I don’t know if the views will be anything spectacular. Hopefully flat enough for a good run, too?
Vital stats:
Up around 7:40, on Eagle Creek Trail by 10:40
Mileage: Up Mt. Chinidere and back, ~4 (running), on trail with pack, ~8, Total: 12...easy day!

July 19th, 2006, 7:40 PM
It’s the last night of my trip and it definitely feels like it. I’m glad that I’m looking forward to returning to my “normal” life. The solitary life was good while it lasted, but not something I want to practice permanently.
Well, I buckled under the challenge of “taking it easy.” Maybe it was my inner urge to prove myself to...myself, or maybe it was Mica from Hood River, sharing my campsite next to Eagle Creek smoking and doing yoga that girded me on, but today I made it all the way to Herman Creek. My “weakness” set in, probably the reason I’m camping at this “official” forest service campground and by I-84 instead of the primitive (probably more scenic) Herman Camp that was 0.7 miles up the trail. Oh well, I just don’t know how to make myself stop until I’m too tired and the damage has been irreversibly done. This place isn’t so bad...the cars constantly going by on the freeway sound almost like Eagle Creek, oddly enough. I’m not even joking.
I ate Chandler’s gifted “smelly Mexican food” for dinner. I’ll have to tell her that it was actually pretty good. I didn’t eat all of it because I don’t have to pack out my garbage tonight (see, one perk to pseudo-car-camping without a car...) and I wanted to make sure my bowels don’t go berserk on the last day. Although there’s a pit toilet here, I do have 6+ miles of lonely trail to go until I reach the Bridge of the Gods.
Oh yeah, I saw a lot of garter snakes slinking off the trail as soon as they heard me coming yesterday and today. And lots of insects copulating. A sign on the Eagle Creek Trail answered my question as to why all the biggest trees I saw were old dead snags: the area was burnt by a forest fire in 1902, and is now covered by “young” Douglas Firs. Right. It’s cool to see a burn zone that’s old enough not to be immediately recognizable as a burn zone anymore. I was starting to wonder if all the snags were coincidences. I guess there aren’t many coincidences in nature, though.
I had a nice talk with another solo backpacking today (I’ve actually seen quite a few others at it alone...no women except me, though). I had passed him yesterday while he was on a day hike up to Wahtum Lake. It’s strange, I can go forever without seeing anyone, yet I’m still not startled when I finally encounter another person. Maybe that’s because people are so conspicuous and loud.
Mmmm...more tea. I love the way the bottle of water post-tea tastes, too.
Dry Creek Falls was kind of erie today. There was an abandoned pair of boots, some used fireworks, and a weird concrete and metal dam-type thing (used for who knows what).
Ok...I came to this campsite because I wanted to feel safe on my last night, but now I think I would have felt safer at the more remote Herman Camp. (Note: After I got back, my parents would tell me a bunch of stories about people dying or getting attacked on trails and at campsites...good thing I hadn’t heard them yet.) Oh well, I will be on the trail heading out in about 12 hours.
I’m definitely getting weaker and more tired (slower too) as the trip wears on...isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
Oh yeah, it’s slightly weird to pass bikers instead of hikers on the trail (like I did today).
Vital states:
On trail by 9:30 AM, reached camp ~5 PM
Mileage: WIth pack, hiked 15.6 miles (roughly, including my accidental detour up a power-line access road)

And that concludes my “on trail” journal. Some notes about the final day:

July 20th, 2006
There were a bunch of scary loud trains that kept going by last night. I don’t know how I didn’t hear them until after I was in bed...
The slugs were out in full-force today. I must have seen dozens between Herman Creek and the Bridge of the Gods trailhead. Maybe they know something that I don’t.
After getting to the trailhead, I got some coffee and a cookie (smothered in fudge and marshmallows...I believe it was called “rocky road”) before using the last 45 seconds left on my cell phone battery to call my mom. I found out she was stuck in Chicago due to thunderstorms. Uh oh. Her advice was to go to “plan B” as far as getting picked up...but there is not plan B! Luckily, everything got worked out eventually. My mom talked to my dad and my brother, and they all decided that my dad should drive down from Seattle (awww, thanks Dad!) and pick me, then my mom (when her plane finally got in) from the airport. I found out all of this after purchasing a $5 phone card from a local general store. The phone card was enough for 3 calls from a pay phone. Sheesh.
I ended up having about 5 hours to kill in Cascade Locks (right on the Gorge), so I wandered around, waved and said hi to the locals (who were all extremely nice), and bought the day’s Oregonian, my first news in a week.
I read every single article in the paper (even the obituaries) and was very proud of Oregon for what I read (protecting more wilderness area on Mt. Hood, where I just was, approving free wi-fi for the whole city of Portland, etc.) I was in the middle of doing the crossword and word jumble when my dad arrived. We headed back to the airport for a beer (mmmmm) before my mom’s plane touched down.

Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Liberals

Today as my mom, my brother, and I were heading to Portland's "First Thursday" we were listening to Fresh Air on NPR. Geoff Nunberg was talking about his new book, Talking Right, a linguistic analysis of how the "right" has deftly controlled the political vocabulary. In the bit, they played a commercial from 2004 where an elderly couple is criticizing:

"Those latte-Drinking, sushi-Eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving liberals."

If you are familiar with me and my family, you already know why this is hilarious. We were even coming straight from dinner at a sushi bar when we heard it.

Anyway, I felt like Nunberg had some interesting observations to make. I also think it would be even more interesting to see how the people "in power" have used vocabulary and linguistic influence to garner control throughout world history. But I guess that would have been a little bit beyond the scope of his book. I'm sure there's something like that out there already, I just have to go out and find it.

The Gardner Museum

Yesterday Anat and I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Now where to start with this? The museum is the brainchild of one very rich woman, who loved art (though I'm not quite sure how you could appreciate art by the thousands...) and wanted not only to own it but also to have control over how others experienced it. I don't know very much about this infamous woman, but at the museum her name is mentioned with the awe and recognition of a goddess. Her vision was to create a space for the pieces of artwork she collected and to arrange them not thematically or chronologically, but aesthetically.

We didn't tag along with any of the numerous tours that chased each other around the indoor coutryard through the four-wings of the museum, but I did manage to eavesdrop on snippets of the dosants' speeches. One woman was obsessed with the "connections" establishes by the museum. "Isabella loved connections," she said, "and she tried to bring those out in her arrangements. The fabric on the woman in this portrait's skirt echoes the upholstry on the chair below. The flowers she's holding are similar to those in the portrait across the room." And on and on. Another dosant was caught up on the words "emotion" and "motion", and couldn't avoid using them together in nearly every sentence as she described a painting of a flamenco dancer. (That was, actually, one of the coolest parts of the museum.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Isabella Steward Gardner was rich and bought a lot (and I mean a lot) of artwork. Then she build a huge house to hold it all, and arranged it all herself, and lived in the house (I think), and then said that after she died anyone could come and view her collection, as long as no one touched or moved anything. As a result the museum is very very creepy. It's like a haunted house. There are hundreds of chairs that no one is allowed to use. The place is dark and cluttered and overwhelming. There's a beautiful interior garden that no one may walk through. Yet somehow this place has to be maintained. Someone has to touch everything, dust everything, rake the un-used gravel walkways, weed the flowerbeds. Yet that presence is oddly absent. A few rooms were closed off for "refurbishment", but those were completely covered in black plastic as if their existence were nullified. All in all, the place felt like a haunted house, and the initial strictness of the security guards (no cell phones, not even silenced, no unworn coats, no bags, no umbrellas in hand) began to make immaculate sense.

The place was beautiful, but oddly so. It was one woman's idea of perfect aestheticism. An idea of perfection that died with Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1924. The museum's website claims it is a place, "Unchanged but certainly not stagnant." I am not sure whether that duality is achieved, but I certainly applaud them for trying.

I know, I know...

I'm supposd to be writing about graduating and leaving MIT and "moving on" (at least about the Boston Marathon, for my mom's sake...), but right now all I feel like writing about is Robert Sullivan's Rats.

I'm going to keep this brief (as my stomach is grumbling and there's a piece of homemade zucchini bread in my bag that I can't eat until I leave the Boston Public Library and its free wireless access), but I'd like to start by saying that Robert Sullivan is my writing hero.

As you all already know if you are acquainted with me (or any of my recent writings), I'm preoccupied with all things gross, putrid, and disgusting. Even though Sullivan gives rats a fair evaluation in his book, the fact that rats are undeniably gross shines through on every page; this is why I loved it so much.

I'm going to go easy on quoting Sullivan (as I trust that you are all going to go out and read the book, and not just for its "excellent rat cover"), but I can't resist completely (even though, at points, I have to admit I got a bit tired of his Thoreau-emulating).

Sullivan notes that while there may not actually be one rat for every American (though there are plenty of rats everywhere...yes everywhere), there is at least one rat story for every American. I picked up this book on the suggestion of my Nature Writing professor, after I described some of the rats around MIT while brainstorming for my first essay. One of the rat-catchers Sullivan talks with remarks, "The general consensus...is that if you see one, then there are ten, and if you see them during the day, then you don't know what you've got." Yesterday at about 9 am in from of the Z Center I saw a good-sized rat scampering (because rats always scamper) about on top of a short rock wall.

My other favorite parts of the book include the historical descriptions of the plague outbreak in San Fransisco of 1900 (I'd be interested in hearing how many of you knew about this...I certainly didn't), which gave rise to the plague-carrying rodent populations in the American Southwest that I heard about while backpacking in Utah. I also enjoyed the sections about rat fighting. Apparently dogs were unleashed upon 100 rats at a time: "Jocko the Wonder Dog, a London-based rat fighting dog, was said to hold the world's record, having killing one hundred rats in five minutes and twenty-eight seconds."

Also, there a chapter called "Excellent." Excellent.

The Afterword (not the actual booky book) ends thusly:
"Now, go and have a drink or relax or something, because the book you just read that was all about rats is thankfully over."

I think I'm going to go do just that.

Then I'm going to ruminate on more gross things, and hope that gross-ness isn't going to become vogue. But if it does, that's ok too.

Everything is going crazy around here and it's going to continue to be like this until after I graduate. But I wouldn't have it any other way, right? I think every weekend until June 9th is all or at least partially booked. (And I'm not just trying to brag about how popular I am...) I got wall calender so that I could look at everything at once...but it just scares me to look at it so I've stopped writing everything on it.

I want to spend my time doing fun things like hiking and running and drinking and meddling and cooking and shennanigan-izing...

But I'm still taking five classes!! Ahhhh!!!

Ok, enough of that. No more complaining! Go!

(Take home message: I haven't been not writing because my life is empty, but because it's way too full...)

Yanni's here...

Yes, I know I need to write about the Boston Marathon, but I'm not going to do that yet... (Except to say: 3:33:55!!)

Instead, I'm bringing you a few adventures in Yanni-Land (aka Kayanna's visit):

Today I opened the door of my room to the soundtrack of sporadic and labored buzzing. The "biggest bumblebee I've ever seen" (in Kayanna's words) had somehow (ok, I know how: the window) found his way into my room and was busily (ha! just kidding, I didn't really want to use that adjective: I wanted to use confusedly) exploring every corner of my room except for the ones containing the window and the door. He kept trying to fly out through the ceiling, and then he tried to set up camp in one of my wool hats. Anyway, after a lot of excited jumping up and down and waving of hands (and pieces of paper) we finally decided to give up and leave and trust that he'd eventually stumble upon the open window. When we came back he was gone, so he either managed to escape or I'll find his hairy dead exoskeleton around here one of these days...

Yesterday Kayanna and I poked our heads into LSC's first "hippie lecture". Here is the official description:

Author Ross Gelbspan gives a talk on global climate change -- in particular, he explains the problems involved and offers a set of three macro-level, global-scale policy solutions to the challenge, as described in his book Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists are Fueling the Climate Crisis -- and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster. Join us for a question-and-answer session after his presentation.

We arrived approximately 1 minute before the talk was supposed to start and were shocked to see...no one. Absolutely no one. Ok, I liked just a little bit. There were two people sitting in the front row who were clearly related to the speaker. But other than that, I say again: no one.

Was it under-publicized? Or does no one at MIT care? Either way, it made us feel sad and uncomfortable, so we left.

23 hours to go...

The Boston Marathon is tomorrow. I know this sounds cheesy, but I have a tear (or two, or three) in my eye as I'm writing this. I don't know what it is (well, I have an idea), but reading and thinking about marathons, walking around the Boston finish line, watching runners excitedly (and nervously) get off the T at the marathon expo, all these things make me cry. I don't think it's something a non-runner could understand. (Just as I couldn't really understand crying when the Red Sox lose...)

As it's finally hitting me that the marathon is tomorrow and I'll be running tomorrow, it's also finally hitting me how ready I am. Yes, I'm coming off of basketball season, and yes, I was woken up several times last night due to the screams of unknowing underclassmen, and yes, I rolled my ankle last weekend, but I'm ready.

I'm ready because I deserve this. I'm ready because I'm leaving Boston (most likely forever) in less than two months. I'm ready because I'm graduating. I'm ready because I've decided to do the scariest thing I've ever done and leave the country to be a teacher. I'm ready because no one's there to help me along this year. I'm ready because I have to pee every 20 minutes. I'm ready because I trained. I'm ready because I want this.

Who knows what my time will be. Judging from my training I know I have the ability to run a great time, but I also know that it all depends on the day. Whether or not tomorrow will be my day, it's going to be my day. You know?

Ok...enough cheesy talk. What does a girl like me do the day before the marathon? Clean her room. I need to go finish that. 23 hours until start time. Go!

Sunflowers and Daffodils

I have so many updates stored away in my head. I just need to get back in the groove. (Bewaaare the groooove!)

Last week it was sunny and warm and beautiful, and I was feeling good, and I was walking back from Central Square and I saw a giant sunflower outside of a flower shop. I bought it for my friend who was feeling down.

The next day she bought me some daffodils to replace my the week-old ones withering on my dresser.

Flowers are great. They make me happy. When did this happen? Did flowers always make me happy? I really don't know.

The point is: buying flowers randomly for yourself and for your friends is an acceptable act, and one that I want to start doing more frequently. This isn't going to turn into a "Oh, flowers have been corrupted because they are almost exclusively used as symbols for romance and eath" rant. It's just a ... people need to do things that make themselves and those around them happy, just for the sake of doing it rant. But that sentiment is too nice for a rant.

Baking cookies is good too. I did that a lot last year. I wish I had done it more this year.

C-c-c-caving!

Today is my day off from running (Boston Marathon less than two weeks away!), and should be using the extra time I have to do homework (getting all my work done and getting 8 hours of sleep a night next week is going to be quite the challenge), but I’ve been embarrassingly neglecting of my blog, so I think I’ll do some writing instead. (And this is more important anyway, right?)

I should cash in on my empty promises or you guys are going to stop reading…so here’s my attempt to drive my Spring Break Caving Adventure.

The problem with writing about caving is I want to convey two main things: 1) how absolutely hardcore and badass it was (because I’m always trying to let the work know how hardcore I am, right?), and 2) how fun and amazing it was. Wait, why is that a problem? The problem lies in the fact that only a person who has been caving will ever be able to appreciate how intense it was and how crawling around in the soaking cold dark through mud and over sharp rocks while avoiding chasms of death and accruing an innumerable amount of bruises can be considered “fun.” To borrow from Stanley Fish (who is simultaneously infuriating and ingenious), “I say it to you now, knowing full well that you will agree with me (that is, understand) only if you already agree with me.”

Of course, I could probably say the same thing about a lot of fringe (or even not so fringe) activities.

But nonetheless, I’ll try…

We got off to a late start Friday afternoon, about half an hour after our projected departure time of 6 pm. We arrived at the cave at about 10 am. Phew. Of course the travel time included abundant stops, including “New York style” deli food in Pennsylvania (or was it Connecticut? We drove through so many states—Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia--it’s hard to remember…), countless gas stations, and a diner in West Virginia, decorated with garishly bright colors and flowers and Easter eggs and lollipops and other ghastly things, where I finished my plate of pancakes before the waitress could bring everyone’s food to the table.

We crawled out of the cars and into the cave to sleep for the night…err…day. I think this was the low-point of the trip for me. It wasn’t the crawling through a small crevice with my sleeping bag, or the laying on a bed of mud without a sleeping pad (that was actually quite comfortable), it was the three or so servings of caffeinated beverage combined with the equal (or greater) amounts of water I’d had on the drive to West Virginia. Combined with the fact that it isn’t environmentally responsible to urinate in a cave unless there is running water (there wasn’t), you get the idea. Let’s just say that by the fourth time I had to get up I got quite good at peeing into a bottle. Eerm. I don’t think I got a single minute of sleep.

Luckily we were soon up and caving and the pain and dampness and bruises and death (a.k.a. hazardous “depth” to watch for) made me forget the 8 hours of bladder-agony. But I’m painting too rosy a picture, aren’t I? Just kidding, I enjoyed it. A lot. The first day we were in Sharp Cave, located off Highway 219 in West Virginia somewhere “to the right.” (Actually across a snow-covered field…oh did I mention there was a blizzard on the way down and our driver did about a…oh…540 spin out into the guard rail of a winding mountain road on the way down?) The odd thing is…it’s warmer inside the cave. That’s because it’s always the same time of day and time of year in a cave. The cave temperature in West Virginia is a pleasant 48F—it’s like night time in Portland in Fall all year round. The cave was very exciting, featuring lots of exciting boulders for me to hop over and lots of excellent mud.

The mud. It was so great. I’ve never felt anything with such an amazing consistency. And no, I’m not being cheeky. There was one spot where there were hundreds of human-made sculptures, with sizes ranging from a finger’s width to a cocker spaniel, spread out across a glorious muddy ledge. People had built, over who knows how many years, mud creations of every form imaginable. (Some cavers have very sick minds.) It was fantastic.

Sharp Cave also has a waterfall. By the time we got to the waterfall I wasn’t too eager to jump into the water to scale up it, but I still enjoyed it’s awe-inspiring beauty and all those wonderful things.

Caving is like an endless string of very short-lived very gratifying moments. For example, peeing into a bottle became the greatest thing in the world…but by the second time I knew that less than an hour later I would be debating whether to hop out of my sleeping bag again or keep holding it. Also, I’d been in a cave for over twelve hours, getting out and breathing fresh non-cavey air was glorious…until I froze while waiting for everyone else to climb out. But once I started sprinting back across the snow-covered field I was happy again…until I had to strip off all my mud-soaked clothes at the side of the road and stand shivering while the driver of my car refused to start it to preserve his commendable gas mileage. (We solved that one by the next day.)

We stayed in a “cabin” (more of a house if you ask me) with heating and hot water (well, the first night…) and a stove and I got my first full-night’s sleep in a long time.

The next day we went to another cave. (Oh man, I wish I had written down the names, because I seriously can’t remember at this point.) Let’s Call is Cave X. Cave X had a hideous slope of death (“Do not proceed down this slope or you will die”) that led to an 80-foot drop off. We repelled down it. Wow. That was my first serious repelling experience. Repelling down a stairwell or off a climbing wall is nothing like repelling in the dark, by yourself, down an 80-foot plunge. It was excellent.

The next day we tackled a 200-feet repel, followed by an ascent.

The highlight of the second day:
A 40-foot tall steep mud slope (just steep enough so that if you lay flat against it like a human starfish and you moved just the wrong way you would slide all the way back down), no foot- or hand-holds. What did we do to the slope? Why, climb up it, of course! Or rather, I don’t think climbing is the right word. I managed to do it by a kind of side-ways humping motion and a whole lot of grunting and swearing. I’m not sure what other people did, I was too busy trying not to slide all the way back down to the bottom (which happened…). That mud hill has to be somewhere in Dante’s Inferno. Seriously.

I was so exhausted and sweaty when I got to the top, but I somehow retained the sense of mind not to slide all the way back down to the bottom on my butt just for fun.

One thing caving reinforces is: Pain and hardship is always way less painful and hard after the fact. Funny.

The third day was definitely punctuated by the aforementioned repel and ascent, but the best part of the day for me was when I got to climb a mountain! (Well, sort of.) After finding the cave entrance, which was halfway up a “mountain” (an Oregon hill), I just ditched my caving gear and kept going all the way to the top. “I’ll be back, don’t worry,” I told my cohorts. I realized that as fun and exciting as caving is, I am so much happier when I’m heading to a summit. Maybe I’m too goal-oriented, who knows? Anyway, regardless of my own psychoanalytical motives, it was beautiful up there, and the peak I’d bagged carried me through the rest of the day.

The fourth day we did an easy cave in the morning and then headed home…arriving back at 3:45 am or so. And I had a radio show that morning. Excellent!

Of course there was a lot of eating and hot-tubbing and “your mom” jokes in between everything I described, but I felt the omissions were justified. I’m very tired.

I wanted to write about lots of other things, like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which I watched for the first time yesterday, and the discussion on environmentalism in the political and social sphere we had in my nature writing class yesterday (three out of the four of us came to the conclusion that environmentalists needed to employ propaganda).

But for now…I think I’ll…stop…

A description of my wild caving adventure in West Virginia coming soon, but until then:

New Radio Show!
I got back from caving at 3:45 or so and then woke up three hours later to head to the radio station. Rock. I have to say, I think this one is pretty good (except for the two minutes of dead air because I had dropped the mouse on a button).

Doing work and errands and whatnot for the rest of spring break. Rock even harder...

Dreams and creams and beams and...ok, really just dreams...

Wow...in my delerious half-sleep of just now (I was up late last night then had to get up at 5 am to finish a project...then I went back to bed for a "morning nap"...ow...) I had the craziest dreams. Here are descriptions of them, given in a somewhat rushed "I want to get everything down without making it sound like good writing" kind of way:

1) I've never had the "oh no I'm walking through the halls of school naked!" dream, but this one kind of came close. I had finished a long run and was somehow naked. Also, somehow I ended up in the canopy of some sort of rain forest. I wanted to get home, but my keys were on the other side of a big spiderweb. I asked my friend, who was on the other side, to throw me the keys. She did, but I dropped them and watched them plummet, lost forever, to the bottom hundreds of feet below. Then I had to walk home naked and try to find keys to my room.

2) Next I was in an Athena cluster sitting next to Sarah. The Athena cluster was very crowded. This guy that is kind of hairy and a whole lot nerdy walked up to Sarah and said he really likes what she does (whatever that may be) and wants to offer her a job. Sarah keeps trying to politely refuse him, but this guy was very adamant. Finally I say something mean to him, and he walks away in a bit of a tiff. Then he comes back with these stacks of papers and distributes them around the Athena cluster. They are seating charts that have everyone's names on them. Everyone (except for me and Sarah, who has disappeared) love them and praise the hairy nerdy man for his cleverness and say something about him bridging the "language of lonliness." I get into an argument with him because my name isn't on there, and he says that I'm just jealous. Then he proceeds to dive into some story about his relationship history while I walk away and find Sarah. I gripe to her how that guy really sucks, and she says yeah, she got in a big argument with him too. Then we walk into another room in the Athena cluster (it's really big, like the 5th floor of the student center) and I borrow some guy's Athena station because now he is off drinking Irish car bombs. Weird.

3) I'm watching a movie, only I'm kind of in the movie as well. It's a movie tracking the life story of a man and his sister. The sister is kind of my mom, but not all the time. Anyway, the man is some sort of male model who exerpeinces the rise to and then subsequent fall from glory and riches (like in Goodfellas and Boogie NIghts). I remember most clearly the end of the movie. This man's family is very poor and he falls at his son's feet (he's wearing my Doc Martens, which I just polished last week) and laments all the luxuries that he used to have that he's lost. Then his daughter starts powdering his ears with this strange beauty product and chanting some kind of jingle/advertising slogan for the product. She does this methodically, like a robot, and can't stop. We see the man getting angrier and more upset. Then the movie cuts to two cars. The daughter now has metal ears (presumably the man ripped off her ears in rage and then she had to get them replaced with aluminum ears or something...it really made sense at the time). The daugther also looks like a random person from one of my classes who I don't know. Anyway, the daughter is getting into a car with her older brother, who is blonde and has very long hair and is named Winston. As she is doing that, she says that she has no more feelings, but she knows that she used to have feelings because she is crying though she doesn't know what for. It's exactly like the "sympathetic limb" effect (or I forget what it's called) that amputees have where they think they can feel their missing appendages. The man and the rest of the family get in a different car. Presumably they will part ways (this is post some big court case...though I'm not sure what the ruling was).

Then my dream switches back to me in the movie theater and I'm talking about it with the people around me. This one annoying girl from one of my classes asks me if I understood what happened at the end (in this really condescending way). I tell her that I think I did.

And then I wake up.



Weeeeeird. And also more boring than I anticipated. We read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams a few weeks ago for Literary Theory, and I wonder if I could attempt to do a self-analysis on those. But it would probably be tedious and rather fruitless. If it really is all about wish-fulfillment...I bet I can find some way to identify those wishes without doing dream analysis.

Also...I need to decide in the next few days (by tomorrow, really...) whether I want to go to Korea to teach next year. Any thoughts?

Also...I updated my Nature Writing blog.

Also...Spring Break! I'm going caving...after I finish my 20-miler tomorrow. Excellent.

A really good weekend...

I just wanted to document the fact that this weekend was the best in recent memory.

Why?

- Saideep visited me
- We watched a Charlie Chaplin movie (City Lights)
- Tried (unsuccessfully) to convince myself that I wasn't just listening to the same song over and over again at the Phoenix Landing (but had fun dancing anyway)
- The Field
- Finally polished my five-year-old shoes
- Slept through Broken Flowers
- Saideep took me out to Ma Soba and then Toscannini's (mmmm)
- Saideep also helped me back up the music from my ipod
- Running 12 miles feels so short when you are used to doing 18
- Hung out with an ex, and actually felt happy and not sad afterwards
- Spike's Junkyard Dogs is amazing
- The Hong Kong and scorpion bowls with tiny plastic animals in them
- Deli Haus
- Ras Na Hierran 5K road race (well, not really much of a race for me) in Somerville, featuring the best finisher's medal ever (it's a bottle opener) and post-running brunch
- Lost my wallet but then found it!
- Finally replaced my running shoes
- Out of context gem: woman running down the street after me yelling, "You forgot your body glide!"
- Somehow managed to pilfer the same number of tea-bags and sugar packets at independent locations
- Impulse buys at book stores
- Quality time with Sarah's family
- Free scoop of hot fudge at Herrell's
- Naps in libraries

Sorry for the list-style blogging. Maybe I'll come back and flush things out later. Which are actually of interest? (It was a full, long, fun weekend...and I even got homework done too! But now I have to go do more...homework...)

Radio radio...

I did another radio show this week. You can listen to it here (3_15_06 show, it's the middle one).

Also, if you haven't yet noticed, I put up my nature writing essay. I got really annoyed with it and wanted to throw it in a trash can and set it on fire, but I couldn't do that because I had to turn it in, and it was on my computer, which, even though it hates me, I still wouldn't burn at this point.

(That previous sentence was an example of the infininite regression concept of language.)

Anyway, I'd like to hear what you like about it, and, more importantly, what you don't like about it. I'm not too hot on the title or the ending, but c'est la vie.

The Oldest Potato

The only piece of mail I look forward to getting at Christmas is the one Fred, my mother’s favorite uncle, sends us every year. Tucked inside a snow-covered tree or a solitary candle or a poinsettia will be a small stack of sketches: ghostly textured lumps flattened skillfully with a pencil and edged into three-by-five-inch sheets of white paper. He draws anything that catches his eye, from driftwood to soggy dishrags to his own excrement.

My mom and I like to play a game where we try to guess what each sketch is without looking at the caption. We never get it right, but it doesn’t matter. Fred only draws things in which he sees something else, something alive. Each item’s physical impetus remains a mysterious shadow, but the individual details and subsurface life forms shine through. I want to run my fingers across the paper to feel each crevice, each dimple, each stain, but if I do I’ll smudge the drawing and ruin it forever.

I have never met Fred, but I imagine he has stacks of palm sized sheets lying around his Rhode Island home, nestled between towers of water-color paintings of all sizes, just waiting for his discerning hand to stumble over them and seal them up in an envelope bound for the West Coast. Inked signatures in each corner disdain the passage of time: ’86, ’92, and ’01. Regardless of how ancient his drawings are, he always remembers exactly what he was thinking when he drew them and annotates them in a chicken-scratch script that looks just like my mom’s handwriting. “This,” he writes, “is a log in the backyard that seemed to have a porcine, silly, and slightly insane face (another self portrait?).” I ask my mom if she can see the face, and she says she can. I tell her that I can’t see the log.



While visiting for my final college basketball game, my parents and I make our first trip to the MIT Museum. I’m wondering why the rooms are so dim. The rhythmic squeak of metal wheels dallies behind me as I walk, stopping when I do and resuming when I take another step. Like a cartoon villain wearing a bushy mustache and a devious grin, my dad sneakily tails me with a cart bearing a sign commanding, “Push Me.” He, however, is not quick enough to dash behind a tree or vanish into thin air when I turn around, and I catch him in the act. Elbowing him out of the way, I chase myself around in squeaky circles, half expecting to grow to an alarming size or shrink into near-oblivion like in Alice in Wonderland. A blue shag-carpet treadmill on the top of the cart turns as the wheels do. Three worms, their bodies not segmented but woven from metal fibers, squirm in self-contortions as I push the cart. “Whoa! They’re crawling!” I can’t help but mentally scold myself for sounding like a five-year old as my dad says matter-of-factly, “No, they aren’t.”
He’s right, of course.
Except that they are crawling.

The room is full of crawling, writhing, lumbering, sauntering, watching, battling, and flapping things. Nothing here (except my parents and me) is alive, so how can they crawl, writhe, lumber, saunter, watch, battle, and flap? Arthur Ganson, longtime member of the World Sculpture Racing Society, has created an artful microcosm of lifelike kinetic sculpture out of wire, oil, gears, chains, paper, and dried organic material. The name of the exhibit is “Gestural Engineering.”

Like a gesture line, the first line you draw when attempting to capture a figure, Ganson’s sculptures tell a simple truth. A single coarse wire, an artichoke leaf, these unadorned objects effortlessly tell the truth of living motion, conveying as much grace, diligence, wonder, and vitality in their movements as a ballet dancer or a basketball player. A pile of linked chain holds all the tension of a droplet of water waiting to fall.

When you look at another person’s face, it’s not like looking at a house or a tree or a landscape. Human brains have a special function for perceiving, recognizing, and remembering faces. More synapses fire and more light bulbs turn on in our heads as we understand that what we are looking at is not just part of the backdrop but another person. In The Eye of the Beholder, a book on face recognition, Vicki Bruce and Andrew Young write, “ infants who are only 2-3 weeks old can imitate facial movements including tongue protrusion, mouth opening, and lip protrusion. An important aspect of this finding is that it shows the baby must have some kind of ‘map’ to indicate which of its own facial muscles corresponds to those of another human being, even though it has never experimented with a mirror.”

What if there is something in us that recognizes life, living motion, animation? Is there an intuitive on-board map that connects what is alive within us to what is alive in our environment? Does life itself go through a mirror-stage? And if my great-uncle Fred sees spirits and sprites in a decaying gourd sent to him by one of his former students, and Arthur Ganson sees a lumbering gait in an artichoke petal, is this faculty in them finely tuned or discordant? Maybe they have made the long dark crawl out of the cave.

In the winter, everything looks and feels dead, especially the mechanical. If I want to find life I have to go searching for it. I start inside an urban triangle, each side a one-way street channeling clouds of stiflingly sweet exhaust as they are spit from sighing buses and trucks, in a shallow sea of snow. Maybe I will head to the cemetery across the road, over the shadows—like prison bars—cast by the iron fence, and navigate through the half-buried gravestones. Sounding the depths with my hand, I will combat the stinging numbness of the snow to reach the rough secret warmth of the gravestones hidden beneath the surface. Although it is a transgression, I will sink my hand further and deeper, all the way into the forgotten graves.

In the cold desert now, let’s say, I will start with a shovel in hand, digging through the dry sandy soil for several meters. Even though it will be broad daylight, and colleagues and journalists will surround me, it will still feel like grave robbing. By the time I finally hit something solid and wooden (not just another stray chunk of bedrock out to deceive me), my hands will burn with blisters. I’ll need a crow bar to pry open the lid of the simple Volkswagen-sized pine box, but finally I’ll rend it off and peer into the dusty darkness. A faint warm fragrance will waft up through my nostrils; a few seconds will pass before I recognize it as rose petals. Shining my flashlight inside, I’ll light first on a knee, then a tan shoulder, then a leathery bald head: Dasha-Dorzho Itigilov, spiritual leader of the Russian Buddhists, sitting in a perfect lotus position seventy-five years after his death. Scientists have described Itigilov’s corpse as one that had been dead for only thirty-six hours. That is, the body has yet to catch up to the fact that it’s inhabitant is no longer alive.

The case of Dasha-Dorzho Itigilov’s self-mummification is rare but not unique. Tetsu Munki, a Japanese Buddhist monk who sacrificed himself in a form of public protest, remains undecayed after two-hundred years; a Tibetan man, his name long since forgotten, has been sitting in a small shack, knees tucked under his chin, lips still in a sorrowful smirk, for nearly five-hundred years. For these men, who purportedly underwent no embalming process other than their own intensive meditation rituals, dying is an art.

All of these men, had they followed the course of decay you and I will undergo one day, would have been disarrayed piles of dusty bones by now. This process would have started with self-digestion, also known as autolysis. Mary Rotch was lucky enough (or unfortunate enough) to witness this process first hand at The Body Farm, a “wooded patch of death-soaked land behind a hospital in the hills of Tennessee,” where forensic scientists study the processes of human decay in morbid detail by burying bodies in the garden and watching them ripen. In addition to the effusion of rank vapors and fluids, Rotch notes “Something else is going on. Squirming grains of rice are crowded into the man’s belly button. It’s a rice grain mosh pit. But rice grains do not move. These cannot be grains of rice. They are not. … It’s kind of beautiful, this man’s skin with these tiny white slivers embedded just beneath its surface. It looks like expensive Japanese rice paper. You tell yourself these things.” After self-digestion comes bloat, where “Bacteria-generated gas bloats the lips and tongue, the latter often to the point of making it protrude from the mouth: In real life as it is in cartoons. The eyes do not bloat because the liquid has long ago leached out. They are gone. Xs. In read life as it is in cartoons.”

When my tenth grade English teacher, midway through Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, gave us his version of the cliché that everything boils down to sex and death, that all words and thoughts can be reduced to simmering syrup of proliferation and extermination, we all laughed. It seemed silly to us because at best (or worst) most of us had smelled only telltale whiffs of one or the other and not taken a bite of either. I have never experienced the kind of decay Rotch describes in her book Stiff (a title that would have also made my tenth grade English class titter). I have never even imagined this kind of decay. I close Mary Rotch’s book, rush to the grocery store, and buy an over-ripe peach and a browning banana. I bring them home, set them on a shelf, and wait to see what happens.

Every day I check up on my fruit. I take pictures even, hoping to catch the process in the act. A week and a half later my fruit are still appetizing. The smell a bit too sweet, but far short of sickening; the peach’s top has grown withered, but hasn’t ruptured; the banana has grown more brown, but I would still eat it (though perhaps only baked in bread). I’m a little disappointed. I am no better at expediting decay than I will be at preventing it.

There is a difference between what is gross and what is disconcerting. Gross is magnetic and contagious (though perhaps I only inherited that as a family quirk), whereas disconcerting is repulsive and shameful to the observer. Take dumpster diving, for example. The gross thing about wading through a pile of trash is that everything is covered in some unidentifiable liquid. The disconcerting thing isn’t the domination of decay but its absence. So many things are well preserved: unbruised apples, heads of lettuce, loaves of bread, boxes of cereal, even unbroken eggs. Decay, on its own, is not disconcerting, and neither is preservation. Annie Dillard knows what I’m talking about. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she writes, “Things are well in their place. […]Things out of place are ill.[…] I used to kill insects with carbon tetrachloride—cleaning fluid vapor—and pin them in cigar boxes, labeled, in neat rows. That was many years ago: I quit when one day I opened a cigar box lid and saw a carrion beetle, staked down high between its wing covers, trying to crawl, swimming on its pin. It was dancing with its own shadow, untouching, and had been for days.[…] I know that one night, in just this sort of rattling wind, I will go to the kitchen for milk and find on the back of the stove a sudden stew I never fixed, bubbling, with a deer leg sticking out.”



Ganson’s sculpture draws me back, and I return to the MIT Museum a week later with a sketchpad. Staying away from the spindly mechanical coils, wires, and gears that comprise the guts of each sculpture, I focus on the wishbone that is frozen mid-stride, its right leg arrested and dangling a finger’s width above the track. Last week, it was a methodical ambler, an old man with rheumatic hips aching at each step yet plodding on. This week the button is broken and no matter how many times I press it the wishbone remains a lonely dead yellow twig, help up awkwardly by a coiled copper wire garter on each leg. When I draw the wishbone’s pores and fibers, its sponginess, I use the same techniques I would use to draw a human figure. I don’t know whether that is became the wishbone demands them, or because they are the only techniques I know.


Ganson’s kinetic sculptures capture fluid lifelike motion, but they also capture perpetual stasis. Red plastic cocktail swords circle each other indefinitely, coming close but never clashing blades. An artichoke petal, its head hung, its spine slouched, lumbers in a bear walk, circumnavigating an ever-rotating disc. A tiny white plastic man dressed in a white tuxedo, no bigger than my thumbnail, turns his head from left to right and back again, searching ceaselessly and never finding what he seeks. The head of a doll, faintly smudged with dirt, mounted on a metal shaft, uses its cartoonish plastic eyes to track a plastic balloon that spirals up and down. The caption reads “Child Watching Ball, Mixed Media, 1996.” Today the baby is ten years old.

Before his death, Socrates speculated that, “For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them.” Ganson’s sculptures will never have the luxury of finding out whether Socrates was right. They will never die because they were never alive. Although Socrates poses a question that the living—and the immortal—can never answer, one thing is clear; for the bacteria waiting patiently in our intestines and the insects waiting patiently in the woodwork, our death is beyond a doubt the best thing that will happen to them.

Brownian motion describes the random movement of particles in a fluid. Ganson’s Brownian Rice, a tray of dry grains that writhe as I turn a metal crank, however, is not Brownian. Rice, charged with maintaining our physical bodies, a synonym for nourishment itself, has come to resemble the things that help us, ultimately, to decay, to cease to be physically: maggots. To me, there’s nothing random about that.

Moving to the “Robots and Beyond” room, I watch video footage of a mechanical kangaroo hopping around a track and stumble upon Kismet, a “sociable robot” with expressive eyebrows and floppy docile ears. The robots in this room, the test-bed for artificial intelligence, are famous for their ability to learn, adapt, and think, yet I never mistake them for something alive the way I do with Ganson’s plastic doll and writhing chains. No spark in my brain ignites, as it does when I hear bushes rustling due to the rats scurrying in the underbrush, or my eye catches a plastic bag racing across the concrete sidewalk carried by the wind. These robots have all the details of living motion without that intangible fundamental gesture.

In Bruce and Young’s book I read about a facial recognition disorder called Capgras delusion, “the claim that one or more close relatives has been replaced by near-identical impostors.” The most famous sufferer was Victorian painter Richard Dadd, known better for murdering his father than for his fantasy paintings. At the time, he didn’t recognize his own father. He thought he was killing the devil. Bruce and Young give a scientific explanation for the Capgras delusion: a broken link in the brain’s orienting pathways, which, “When we look at faces of people we know … set up preparatory reactions for the type of interaction that is likely to follow.” For a person with Capgras delusion, the act of recognition occurs without the supporting emotional framework. Maybe this is what I feel when I come face to face with the robots here.



After three and a half years of living less than an hour’s drive from my Uncle Fred, I finally decide to skip my Friday afternoon classes, grab my friend Anat (to whom I promised an adventure), and make the trip down to see him.

Fred grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island, went to school at the Rhode Island School of Design, spent several years in Germany on a fellowship, and has lived in a duplex in Providence for the past thirty-six years. Fred never throws anything away. Two spindly fossils sit on the windowsill in his kitchen. He hands one to me, saying, “This is what I call ‘The Oldest Potato.’” It is brittle and dry and cavernous and bristly, and Anat won’t touch it for fear of breaking it. In an old margarine container, green tentacles sprout in every direction and smother a withered brown and crimson root sitting in a bath of cloudy water. “And here’s the infamous ‘Bull Scrotum Beet’.” Anat is surprised that it doesn’t smell bad at all. “That’s because he’s still alive,” Fred says. “I feel bad for exploiting him for so long. He’s been through enough.” The series of watercolors Fred has done of the Bull Scrotum Beet show the progressively ratty and overgrown head of green hair mangled yet full of motion. “In this one he looks forlorn,” Fred says, “but he used to look mischievous.”

Clues of a long since grown-up child are scattered about the house, like the curling Sesame Street poster diagramming the parts of the body that looks down upon the Bull Scrotum Beet. Faded crayon drawings are taped to the wall next to a 1977 airline schedule in a room upstairs. Plastic Easter eggs dangle from a few branches tied to the ceiling with twine.

The carpets are beyond threadbare; in some places they are worn completely through to the hardwood floor. Heading up the narrow stairways, curling yellow wallpaper, cracked in geometric tessellations like the surface of once wet desert soil, hides underneath paintings that Fred did earlier in his life. He doesn’t use oil anymore, only watercolor, because he feels he can express more with the medium. While most of his paintings are of spirits he sees in dead objects, some of them are demons from inside his head. “These demons kept me up night after night,” Fred says, “and I stared at them until I could paint them.”

Anat and I squat beside Fred as he shows us his albums of watercolor paintings. The newest ones, not yet matted and photographed, are tucked inside a book. We aren’t merely looking at tomatoes and rocks and tree-roots, but gnomes and monsters and ghosts. “Ah, I have to tell you what this one is,” Fred says excitedly. “Every few years I get a colonoscopy, and I always ask to keep the pictures they take. I call it ‘A Voice from Deep Within’.” After a few dozen paintings, before he tells us, we already know that one is a sea-dragon and another is howling at the moon.

We are heading into the sun for most of the drive back to Boston, and I can barely see through the glare, no matter how many times Anat tries to clean the dirt off the windshield by squirting water from my bottle on it.



Moist coffee grounds and soggy tea-bags always make me nervous. I used to think it was a matter of unfamiliarity, but as my caffeine consumption sky-rocketed the past year I realized that wasn’t the case. No matter how many times I brew my own coffee or tea, I’m always uneasy as I scrape coarse black sludge or dripping leaves into the trash. Used coffee grounds and used tea-bags haven’t lost anything; they’ve gained a fluid overcoat. Yet what makes coffee coffee, or tea tea, its essence, its usefulness, its functionality, its ability to procure change, has been siphoned off into oblivion. What’s left behind is a Dasha-Dorzho Itigilov, a Tetsu Munki, an anonymous Tibetan monk. Perhaps these Buddhist lamas would balk at being compared to used food products; I think they’d grin, reveling in their own non-fungibility.

What would it be like to draw Dasha-Dorzho Itigilov, if I had the chance?