Down the Drain (podcast)

Ok, for some reason posting the podcast as an enclosure link isn't working, so...


You'll just have to click here to listen to it.

Down the Drain

Welcome to an experiment in more ways than one! For my first "real" assignment in Newsgathering (journalism bootcamp for first year master's students), we had to do a "micro-beat" at last week's home football game. Aside from feeling important because of our press pases, it was a ton of fun.

I chose to focus on the bathrooms (big surprise...hold the groans, please!). Out of my on-site reporting I created a short written piece and my partner and I made a podcast.

Hope this works...enjoy!

Two jumbo rolls.

That’s how much toilet paper is flushed down each toilet at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Folsom Field during Thursday night’s football game. Ning Sengeara knows this because it’s her job to clean the bathrooms. The Buffaloes took on the West Virgina Mountaineers. She took on mountains of paper towels.

Sengeara guesses each of the several hundred toilets will see 300 flushes. “Each woman goes at least five times.”

A woman waiting in line confirms this: “It’s my third trip in 20 minutes. I’m like an 85-year-old woman.”

Judging from the company Sengeara shares her workplace with you’d think this was Folsom Prison, not Folsom Field.

Three police officers file into a restroom on the east side of the indoor track. The woman standing on a toilet seat to gossip with a friend doesn’t notice as they escort someone out.

A girl apologizes and pushes to the front in a student section restroom, one hand around the shoulders of a friend with blood streaming down her face. “We just need to get to a sink.”

Several EMTs huddle outside a restroom. Inside, a woman is sitting cross-legged on the floor with her back against a locked stall door.

The floors are concrete so the whole mess can be hosed down the drain at the end of the night.

“It’s hard work,” says Sengeara, smiling shyly and mopping.

Sengeara and her colleagues will be scrubbing toilets and sinks by hand until 2 a.m., long after the fans stumble home. It’s the only way to get them clean.

For love of lists

Who doesn't love lists?

1. Not me!
2. Hopefully not you
3. Not Jezebel, either!

Jezebel, feminist(ish)/pop-culture/politics/cultural-criticism blog extraordinare posted a list "75 Books Every Woman Should Read" this week. Yay!

What struck me most about the list was...just how many of these books I have read. So, in the spirit of when I did this once before (but for the life of me I can't find that post), I'm reproducing the list here with the ones I've read bolded. Just, ya know, in case you were wondering.

* The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
* To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
* The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
* White Teeth, Zadie Smith
* The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
* Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
* Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
* The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
* Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
* The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
* Beloved, Toni Morrison
* Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
* Like Life, Lorrie Moore
* Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
* Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (times 10, at least...)
* The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
* A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
* A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
* The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
* You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
* Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
* To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
* Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
* Earthly Paradise, Colette
* Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
* Property, Valerie Martin
* Middlemarch, George Eliot
* Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
* The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
* Runaway, Alice Munro
* The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
* The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
* Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
* You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
* Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
* Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
* The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
* I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
* A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
* And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
* Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
* The Secret History, Donna Tartt
* The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
* The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
* The Group, Mary McCarthy
* Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
* The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
* The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
* Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
* Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
* In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
* The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
* Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
* Three Junes, Julia Glass
* A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
* Sophie's Choice, William Styron
* Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
* Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
* Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
* The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
* The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
* The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
* My Antonia, Willa Cather
* Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
* Spending, Mary Gordon
* The Lover, Marguerite Duras
* The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
* Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
* Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
* Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
* Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
* I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
* Possession, A.S. Byatt

Image from flickr user Eccentric Scholar shared with a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

I'm so glad K.T. mentioned the Boston Globe's article, "Fear of Fairy Tales" in her blog*. I knew having a card-carrying librarian as a friend would have its perks!

Anyway, I'm posting some of my reactions to the Globe's article here, instead of burdening K.T.'s comment section.

A lot of fairy tales had the original purpose of frightening children. They were warnings: Don't go into the woods alone. Don't trust strangers. Stay the hell away from the big bad wolf.

(Of course, depending on your flavor of literary interpretation, they can also be allegories about sex and gender and society and a whole assortment of other things.)

So now, we've become...afraid of being frightened? Or, afraid of frightening our children? Some might suggest that's because the world is already scary enough, but I don't think so. I think if you aren't exposed to fear when you are young, you'll just have a harder time dealing with it when you get older. In fact, maybe that's what has already happened.

And maybe that has happened to me, without even realizing it. My parents didn't shelter me from fairy tales (although I do remember thinking that the Grimm's version were some kind of transgression -- the naughty, scary, exciting version), but that doesn't mean they didn't shelter me from a lot of other things inadvertently.

Because that's what parents are supposed to do. They are supposed to protect their children. And that's why they need scary fairy tales -- to teach their children the value of fear without putting them in harm's way.

Fear is a survival mechanism.

Which leads me to an article in High Country News review two new books on fear and it's ecological and evolutionary role in nature:

A world without fear sounds nice, doesn't it? Liberated from our dread of nosy bosses, environmental catastrophe, cocktail-party conversation and clumsy dentistry, we could wander the planet with a spring in our step and a gleam in our eye. From our modern perspective, fear is an annoyance, an inconvenient emotion to be fenced out or shot down. But fear, as two new books make clear, has its uses -- not only as a critical survival strategy, but also as a supporting force for the entire natural world.

In case you don't want to read the review and skip straight to the books (The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World by Joel Berger; Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg), here's the punch line:

...a life without fear is the most dangerous of all.

It's no coincidence that the titles of both books harken back to the titles of fairy tales.

Any maybe my new-found fear of mountain lions isn't a crutch after all.

*Note: I used to read the Bookslut blog religiously until I started using an RSS reader. Then they didn't make the cut because they don't have an RSS feed. Whaaaa?

Image from flickr user emerald isle druid shared with a Creative Commons Attribution License.

A review of The Beast in the Garden

The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America by David Baron

rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I moved to Boulder I had two great semi-rational fears: ticks and lightning. Mountain lions have now joined the list. I started reading David Baron's* The Beast in the Garden -- an account of a fatal mountain lion attack in Boulder County in 1991 and the events leading up to it -- to assuage my fears and feed my morbid fascination. The book succeed at the later but utterly failed at the former.

The Beast in the Garden isn't quite Anna Karenina, but it's a sign of great writing if you can reveal the climax in the first chapter and still make the rest of the book compelling. Baron does just that, and focuses the rest of the book on how something as shocking as a mid-day mauling in the suburbs could occur.

Baron stipulates that humans have fundamentally changed the definition of wilderness. Or rather, the reality we've created doesn't fit the definition we maintain in our heads. Our refusal to let go of romantic notions of the frontier and the natural order that exists beyond that invisible edge has, well, come back to bite us.

The wilderness hasn't disappeared, but it has evolved. As we've urbanized the landscape, we've also urbanized its inhabitants -- human and animal. Much focus (and faith) is mankind's adaptability, but animals are equally adaptable. In the case of the mountain lion, they've been adapting to the urban and suburban landscape. In places like Colorado's rapidly urbanizing Front Range and Los Angeles County, that means that they have taken up residence in suburbs, watched humans to learn their patterns of behavior, determined that humans are not a threat, and begun to size humans up as prey. This didn't happen overnight. In Boulder County, the process was well documented by a city employee and University of Colorado professor.

The book has plenty of cougar lore (as well as natural history, blood and gore, government intrigue, you name it). But what it doesn't have is a happy ending wrapped nicely in a bow. The future, as Baron sees it, is one where human-lion encounters will grow more frequent, and possibly more deadly. He contrasts, rather darkly, the number of cougars killed by humans and the number of humans killed by cougars, suggesting that the handful of human deaths could be a form of penance. Whether your level of antropocentric thinking allows you to believe this, the conclusion remains that humans have shaken the "natural order" -- whatever the heck that is or was.

The subtext, which Baron never says outright, is that the "beast" is one that humans have created through their patterns of expansion and development. This puts him somewhere between Jeff Goldblum's beat-mathematician in Jurassic Park ("nature will find a way") and the man who goes swimming in toxic sludge ponds in Robert Sullivan's The Meadowlands. It's a fascinating -- though unsettling -- place to be. And Baron presents his perspective in a way that is appropriately tantalizing and frightening.

And what about me? Will I resort to carrying a hunting knife and a rifle when I'm running and hiking alone? I could always move back to Portland, land without ticks, lighting, or lions. For now, at least, I'll stay in Colorado and coexist with that which (semi-rationally) frightens me most.

*David Baron was one of the first people I met in Boulder, before I knew that the Front Range was prime lion habitat. I didn't realize that he was the author of "The Beast in the Garden" until I had less than 40 pages left. (That bumped my GoodReads rating up from 4 stars -- loved it -- to 5 stars -- I recommend it to everyone I meet.) I liked him right away, and not just because, like me, he splits his alliances between Boston and Boulder. He's on the board of the Scripps Fellows program at CU, and works with WBUR in Boston on programs like The World. Cool!


View all my reviews.

But I was promised 300 days of sun!

Ok, so it's cliche to talk about the weather, but today the Front Range (for those of you who are just tuning in, that's the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, where the Denver metro area, Boulder County, and most of Colorado's urban-ish population resides) is having a Willamette Valley day.

YES!!

Seriously, I had so much fun biking to school in the drizzle.

But then I looked at the weather report for Portland, and realized that they are having a Boulder day. And so it goes...

Anyway, I know the weather is boring and all, but I really don't have enough time right now to tell you about this awesome seminar I just attended with Jim White, geoscientist and paleo-climatologist at CU. He had some great insight into the role scientists have in terms of educating the public and why people haven't really caught on to the immediacy of the climate change issue. He presented his findings on abrupt climate changes (not quite like The Day After Tomorrow, but close) and how long- and short-term climate shifts act together. So...if I have time...someday...I've give you my full take on his presentation.

But for now, I'm off to tri team practice. It's a running day, and wouldn't you know it, we have perfect running weather! How appropriate that I brought my "training for the Portland Marathon" t-shirt, because I ran the Portland Marathon on, well, a day kind of like today.

Colorado Clouds

It's a given that the mountains of Western Colorado are captivating, but what has been most unexpectedly captivating are the clouds. Most mornings, the weather is so clear it makes you forget you even know what a cloud is. Yet by the afternoon, the clouds have materialized, the thunderstorms move in, and it seems as if it had never been sunny in the first place.

Last Saturday, I drove to Rocky Mountain National Park and spent some time above the treeline/timberline. Although I stopped to take pictures of the awesome vistas and valleys, I kept peering up at the sky to watch the clouds form and converge -- like gravity pulling together particples in a nebula.

I tried to capture the sky with my camera, but of course failed miserably. You can see my attempts in the slide show below. You can also see all the CU undergrads lined up beneath storm clouds -- in yellow shirts that matched the marigolds -- waiting to catch the shuttle to the CU/CSU rivalry football game.