Today I visited the Land of 1,000 Kicks, which is infinitely better than visiting the Land of 1,000 Push-Ups. For one totally insane moment I considered going for a run afterward, but surprisingly, my common sense convinced me that was a stupid idea. Throwing a thousand kicks isn't necessarily difficult, if you choose the right ones--front kick or half-moon kick, for instance. Start throwing in back side sicks and crescent kicks, and you're about to start yourself sweating. It was pretty fun, but I'll be tired in the morning. Especially since I'm washing the whole workout down with a blackberry wine cooler. That's a smart thing to do after you've sweat out all the fluids in your body. My common sense didn't stick around very long.

Leave the fireflies? Leave the cardinals?

Couldn't do it.

Just thinking about packing up everything we own and moving across the country makes me weep w/exhaustion. Some days, it seems like a really fine idea, going home. Other days, I can't imagine why we'd want to leave such an easy life. There's a lot to leave behind--I'm involved in about a million extracurricular activities, for one. And there's a quality of life we'll never be able to reproduce in an urban environment. It seems insane to throw ourselves into the rat race somewhere else where we'll never be as comfortable. But, still, it would be going home, wouldn't it? And that has to be better than being so far away, I guess.

I think this is just one of those "I'm trapped" weeks, where I'd rather be anywhere in the world but where I am at the moment. Wait awhile. It'll pass.

I am too fucking old for hapkido.

A nice weekend, full of laziness. Spent most of this morning drinking coffee and playing chess with Catherine. She would have won except she finally made a fatal error w/her queen. Up until then, I really thought she was going to take the game.

Hockey was better tonight. I felt more comfortable w/the group that showed up. In fact, one of my linemates was there, and it was good getting to skate w/her again. We played cross-ice 3-on-3. I could type a ten page essay on the whole hockey subject, but it's midnight, and I'm tired. However...

1. Hockey is good enough for now. My identity as an athlete is still suffering, even w/running and tae kwon do, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that. But I have so much free time now. I hadn't realized how much of our lives was dedicated to my hockey until it was gone. I think playing pick up for a while is fine.

2. Although I'm sad about a lot of things re: hockey, I guess what I'm mostly sad about is that I didn't realize that if I left the team, I'd leave my friendship w/Jenna. Apparently I'm naive. I keep trying to puzzle through it, but it all comes back to the same thing, hockey was more important than our friendship in the end. I wish Rough Guides would publish a guide to friendship. God knows I'm lost often enough, I could really use a map and a guide in an easy-to-read format.

3. My identity as an athlete is in limbo, but my identity as a musician is starting to re-emerge. I'm not sure when the anxiety and emotional turmoil I always associated w/band disappeared. I can still find the pain if I want to, but what I've mostly noticed is that I've just grown up and relaxed. No more throwing up before performances, no more beating my head against the door frame because I'm not good enough. If I could go back to my freshman year in college and take the confidence I have now w/me, I'd definitely go through w/being a music major (conducting, though, not performance).

Argh, a few notes before I go to bed so often turns into a few paragraphs into a few pages. Must. Stop. Talking.

Well, Catherine, Garry, and Amanda are watching an incredibly violent film, and I finally had to give it up. I tried to sit there and read, but kept flinching, so I'm taking refuge in my office.

My first week of work is over. I'm not sure I could spend my life working for an organization that operates according to the whims of whoever is in the White House. For instance, how do foresters really deal with Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative, when they know it might drop off the list of FS priorities if Bush get voted out of office (please, please, please)?

I sincerely believe that Bush made the Healthy Forests statement w/the intention of opening up the forests to large scale logging; that doesn't seem to be how the FS is interpreting it, but I do think that was the main goal of the initiative. The FS seems to be taking it more literally--managing forests in a manner that reduces the threat of forest fire. To do this, they've created "categorical exclusions," exemptions to the regular rules by which the FS has to abide in order to ensure "hazardous fuel reduction." The two categorical exclusions basically say: in order to promote hazardous fuel reduction, the FS can either thin trees or burn off so many acres (I can't remember how many acres) w/out doing an environmental impact statement before hand. In other words, they can't be sued by private citizens as long as they stay w/in the number of acres covered in the categorical exclusion.

Well, I'm not a forester, and I can't say w/any sort of authority whether thinning and burning will reduce the impact of fire on humans. Probably they do. But, if I wasn't working for the FS, I'd have to say I was nervous about the whole concept of a categorical exclusion. Foresters aren't necessarily preservationists, the FS does sell timber. Hopefully, they do it in an environmentally responsible manner, but then again, if it falls under a categorical exclusion, they don't really have to. And again, I'm still holding the position that I don't like to see forests managed at all. Why should humans be privileged? I don't particularly like to think about little animals being burned up, but I also don't like humans mucking about with nature. On the other hand, if someone doesn't step in and manage the forests and abide by at least a few rules, Bush would clear cut the entire country.

Anyway, the point is, I've spent all week thinking about the Healthy Forests Initiative, and in two years or so, it might not even matter. If Bush is booted out of office (please, please, please), the Democrats might just drop the whole thing, then a whole new set of rules will govern the FS. How can you really manage a forest if the major framework is handed down from a political party instead of distinterested group? I think it would suck to really want to do the best you could by the forests, and have the gov't tell you, "Well, we need you to raise this much money w/timber sales this year, so go cut down all those trees."

Gosh.

We studied our finances, went downtown, and talked to Bobby, and I now have a great set of bells in my living room. I made a down payment, Bobby wrote up a contract, and even though I have three more payments to make, they let me take them home. Very, very nifty.

Next Saturday, I'm taking my drum kit in as a down payment on a new kit. I'll probably be without a set for a couple of months, but that's okay. I can play on a practice pad for awhile if I get the kit I want in the end.

We also took four boxes of books into the used bookstore, and ended up with $160 credit. That should last awhile, since I can only stand to be in the store for five minutes at a time. I'm always afraid some shelf or stack of books will come crashing down on me when I'm not looking. Rich used to work there, and he told me that it's not exactly an irrational feeling, people get hit by falling books all the time.

Yeah, that would be a bruised ego. So, maybe I need to get thicker skin, but it kind of hurts my feelings to know that Bobby and Brian discussed the fact that maybe it isn't the instrument that sounds bad, but the musician. In other words, the bells are fine, but my technique sucks. Rationally, I know they're wrong--I'm absolutely competent--but emotionally, I'm not very happy about it.

I'm going to buy a better set of bells, yes, I am. I found a set downtown that sounds angelic compared to the bells the band own (even though they are still fairly low end), and I'm putting a down payment on them tomorrow. I'd save myself about 50 bucks if I bought them off the web, but if I buy them downtown, I can put them on layway for a mere $23. I'll have ten months to come up with the rest. Hopefully, it won't take that long.

What I really want is a Mapex M series drum kit. My kit so needs to be upgraded, and at $880, the Mapex I found today is an absolute steal, but I'd have trouble coming up with the 10% down right now, much less the rest of the money in months to come. The set is so beautiful, a nice burgundy w/a natural wood hoop on the bass, and I do like the Mapex sound. I just have to let it go, though, 'cause we just can't afford it. My one hope is if someone steps forward to buy my existing kit. It's probably worth a couple hundred, maybe $225 or $250 w/cymbals (which I don't really want to sell but would if it would get me my Mapex kit).

I guess it's just one more thing to put on my list for when I get a real job w/a real salary. Someone needs to endow my life. I promise I'll name a chair after them if they do.

I'm sure all the taxpayers I know will be glad to hear that I earned 4 hours of overtime pay today, in addition to the 1/2 hour I earned yesterday. Yeah, I bet they'll be happy to hear they're paying me time-and-a-half, too.

It's a little surreal to find myself suddenly working for the very gov't I despise. At least it's not the Department of Defense or something like that. And at least I agree (more or less) with the end goal of the Forest Service, if not all of its actual practices. I think the idea of "managing" forests is pretty arrogant, but I like the idea of being a caretaker of all the little living things. My boss has already been suggesting pretty hard that I stay on Forest and work for the FS the rest of my life. Unfortunately, every suggestion is followed up with the realization that there are no jobs for me on the Hoosier (nor anywhere else). I'm betting IT will be outsourced if not next year, five years after that--not that I want to spend the rest of my life in IT, god no--and engineering tech jobs, where my real qualifications are, are hard to get.

Anyway, I'd love to stay on Forest, but I'd rather be doing trailbuilding and construction work than IT work, and that's definitely a seasonal kind of gig. And I'm getting old. And I hate the gov't. Just a few stumbling blocks.

My wife has spent the last two days hanging with Liam Neeson, Bill Condon, and a couple other Hollywood people (I think a screen writer and a set designer). I've got pictures to prove it, but it seems like an invasion of Mr. Neeson's privacy to post them on the web. One of them is really cute, though, a group photo w/Tom's dachsund licking Bill Condon's face.

Mr. Neeson and friends were in town to scope out the Institute and do a bit of research for the movie they're making about Kinsey. Catherine says he was as nice as you would ever hope he would be. And he's tall (again, I have photos to prove it, etc.).

Me, I spent the afternoon being (re)certified by the Red Cross in first aid, at the taxpayers' expense. If you ever get bit by a cottonmouth, I'm your woman. I know exactly what to do for you (mostly? call 911). Tomorrow I'm off to Tell City. It's amazing how tolerable meetings become when you realize they absolutely no bearing on your life because you'll be leaving your job in two or three months, anyway.

It occurs to me that this is actually the second time band rehearsal has drawn blood. I scraped up a shin tripping over someone's trumpet case a couple weeks ago. And they say band kids are wimps.

My teeth are killing me, despite a handful of ibuprofen. I couldn't have hit myself harder last night if I'd tried.

I am just very pleased that Kes got back in touch with us. Very pleased, indeed.

Another 10 bucks, another cool toy. A very beautiful toy, I might add. Supposedly functional, but I won't know until this weekend when I feed her a bit of 8mm film. I'm way excited, I can hardly wait to watch Catherine's old home movies.

I think the job will be okay. I'll admit I'm a little over-qualified, and it's not going to be full of intellectual challenges, but there's something to be said for just doing something that feels comfortable for awhile. My supervisor seems like he'll be easy to work with, so that should make for a decent summer. My first road trip is later this week, we're going down to Tell City to work on some printers and go to an all Forest meeting. My first big road trip is next week, an overnight trip to the Shawnee (southern Illinois? No idea, I'll have to look it up) to configure some routers. So, at least I'll get to see some new places. My supervisor said we might even get to go to Milwaukee (the regional office) later this summer. That would be cool.

Anyway, no stress or strain over the new job. I got there, started working, pretty simple. Installed two new systems today, pulled one down, re-configured it, and will re-deploy it tomorrow. I think that may describe my entire summer.

The most exciting thing that happened to me today--and by exciting, I mean painful--was I busted myself in the face w/a music stand at rehearsal. I thought I knocked a tooth out, but I guess I got lucky. A straight-line cut across my lower lip, nicely highlighted by bruising. It didn't bleed too much, but it hurts. That is exactly the type of person I am: play hockey with the guys, I don't get so much as a muscle strain. Send me to band rehearsal, and I come home in need of first aid.

I got a lot done today, my last day of freedom before starting the summer job tomorrow. Slept in, went for a run, worked on the lawn furniture rehab project, finished up a rocket, put up a rabbit fence around one of the garden beds, had a late lunch with Catherine on campus. The most significant thing I did today, though, was play hockey. This was the first day of summer hockey, and I decided to give it a try.

I had totally forgotten how much crap it takes to play the game. No wonder my feet always hurt, my hockey bag adds 100 lbs. to my body weight. It took forever to get everything put together this evening (I didn't even know where my hockey bag was--how do you misplace a bag the size of a coffin, I'd like to know). Wrist brace, ankle brace, knee brace (at least, I picked it up once, it didn't actually make it into my bag). Neck protector, pelvic protector, mouth guard (which I even washed). Hockey tights, sports bra, regular socks, hockey socks, snug-fitting t-shirt. Knee pads, chest protector, elbow pads, gloves, helmet. Dark jersey, light jersey. The glasses I wear so I don't break my good ones. White tape for my feet and wrist, clear tape for my socks, black tape for my stick. Towel for wiping down my skates. Miscellaneous personal hygiene items (for afterward, there is no hygiene in hockey). Oh, an a stick, which I almost forgot.

Well, the whole thing was pretty surreal. For one thing, Pan Am had trouble finishing up the ice on the American Rink, so they had two sessions scheduled and only one rink available for use. We ended up sharing the Olympic Rink with the men's pickup hockey session, which definitely wasn't ideal. Of all male athletes, hockey players are probably the worst. I know I have a lot of frustration built up in the back of my head, it's been a long week, but I think I let a lot of it out when I finally yelled at a guy on the opposite team, "Do you think you could just stop being such an asshole?" Unfortunately, I don't think he heard me, and one of the guys on my team thought I was yelling at him, but since I was generally annoyed with all of them, I didn't bother to correct his misimpression.

But the really weird part was the locker room. I looked around and realized that most of the women there had either been kicked off or left the Sirens because of disagreements with the team. Gosh, when did I become a rebel? I've always been the good kid, played by the rules. And suddenly I find myself skating with the untouchables. I tried to keep my head down and only spoke when spoken to--in other words, acted more like myself, and less like JR--but I couldn't help hearing some of the team gossip. It sounds like the whole act went up in flames before the end of the season, and I'm glad I missed the drama. I have enough mini-crises in my life, I don't need to go looking for anymore.

Anyway, my hip flexor feels as if I'd just spent seven days at hockey camp, so I have to do something about that. Other than that, being on the ice was okay. No injuries, no major incidents, just regular old hockey.

Albert J. Dremel is my hero.

That Bridget Pettis is such a cutie. The way that woman plays ball...mmmm.

Today was the home opener for the Fever--good game against the Mystics. It's just such a fortunate thing we didn't trade Pettis, the energy she brings to the floor always swings the momentum back to the Fever, even when they're down. I'm trying to cut Stephanie White some slack. It's obvious she's been working hard, her legs and arms look good, you can tell she's been in the weight room. I'm not sure what the tan and blonde hair are all about, but if it makes her play better ball, I'm all for it. I will say, if I have to listen to the women behind me call her "Whitey" all season, heads are going to roll.

I know the ticket office was trying to do us a favor by "improving" our seats this year, but I'm annoyed. We were in row 14 last year, and I really liked the sight line. We asked to stay in our same seats, but they moved us down to row 9. I guess most (taller) people would be happy, but it ruined my view of the game.

The crowd was noticeably more heterosexual today. Usually, I can walk into the Fieldhouse before a game, open my arms and murmur, "My people!" Today, though, I would have been encompassing as many men as women, and from the looks of it, as many straight women as lesbians. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, because more fans in the seats is definitely a plus, but it does change the dynamics. I guess crowd diversity will be good for the sport, and admittedly, it's going to take a lot more straight people to really dilute the dyke density of the crowd, but still.

I thought for a few moments that today's post would go something like "My thirty-five years of a crime-free lifestyle are over, I got my first parking ticket today," but as it turns out, I beat the parking citation guy to my car by about 50 feet.

My sister just sent us this thing from Australia. I think it's called a bull roarer? It took me a couple of minutes, but I eventually got it to make noise. It's probably very white man of me, but I think it's kind of cool.

Well...here it is, my new home. I'm sorry that I lost my old journal, but maybe it was time to start something new.

Ouch. I guess I set myself up for that one

I'm so pleased with myself. I really shouldn't have gone out and spent $25, but since I did...I'm pleased with myself.

We stopped at the antique mall on the way home from our walk this afternoon, and I got hung up looking at this way cool movie projector from 1961. It didn't have a price on it, and it wasn't like I needed a projector that probably didn't work, anyway, but it was so neat, I couldn't stop picking up, putting it down, picking it up, etc. I've got a nifty (if small) camera collection in our living room--a box camera, a Hawkeye, an old Kodak Brownie movie camera--and the movie projector would have fit right in with the rest of them. I've never seen a projector quite like this one: it takes 8mm "Magi-Cartridge" films. You just slide the cartridge in the back of the projector, turn it on, and it supposedly works. Kind of a precursor to a videotape, I guess.

No price tag, though. Then I saw an 8mm camera hanging nearby, and discovered that it, the projector, two reels of film, and a small projection screen were a package deal--$25. That's too good to pass up. Even if nothing worked, I wanted it just because of they way they all looked together.

Bought them (after a little hand-wringing over the state of my bank account), brought them home, set the whole outfit up in my garage, and discovered *the projector works*! One of the reels is this totally classic 60s flick on how to use the projector (if you don't know how to use the projector already, how do you watch the film?), and the other one was "Spectacular Spills," a flick of professional stunt ski jumpers. They both rocked.

The projector, front view:



The back of the projector, where the cartridge fits. The coolest thing is the little red button that automatically retracts the power cord:



One of the film cartridges:



The Savoy 8mm camera:



The projection screen (worth $25 on its own):



So, now I have to start going to garage/estate sales and see if I can drum up some old home Magi-Cartridge movies. Very, very cool.

Mm...maybe this will kick me out of my "god, I hate writing" stage.

I'm pleased to announce the Bloomington Academy of Rocket Science is re-opened for business. I think Catherine just realized this morning that I had an ulterior motive for cleaning out the garage. My real goal was simply to unearth my workbench/rocket lab--having an organized garage was simply a happy side effect.

The workbench has been cleared and dusted, and I dusted off the rockets that have been just sitting there, waiting to be launched. I have some really cool rockets, I (re)-discovered. I just need to renew my membership in the NAR, rejoin Launch Crue (or maybe try ROCI or AMOREA this time around?), and get down to business. I may be heartbroken about not playing hockey this summer, but I'm determined to use the extra time on my hands to good advantage.

I think if I'd realized that cleaning out the garage would be a three day job, I never would have started it.

Finally. The moment of peace only held about ten seconds, but they sure looked cute while it lasted.



Summer is officially here. We went to our first drive-in movie of the season. It's fun watching all the kids and families play frisbee and run around before/between the movies.

Kind of a full day. Got up and did some landscape work for Habitat until noon, had lunch, worked on the garage for about four hours, had dinner, went to the movies.

My allergies are killing me. Not literally, but I look hideous, with a giant rash.

Well...miserly with my emotions...probably not. Miserly with my words? Without question. Where the hell did they all go? I never stop writing, so what's happening? I wouldn't be so worried if it was just that I was tired of autobiographical writing, but I'm not writing anything at all these days. Nothing. Just....nothing.

The thing about digital cameras...you can be totally miserly w/your words and emotions in your journal, but still add some visual mark that will help you remember what you were thinking about when you took the picture.

Trying to rehab the front yard:



Raised beds, planted:

I am just stubborn enough to drag my feet about going out to dinner. And maybe I'll regret it later, but then again, maybe it would be nice to assert myself for a change.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. I spent most of yesterday in bed, or on the couch. When I woke up, my head was totally clogged up, my allergies finally kicked in, I guess. I stayed in bed really late hoping it would go away, but it never really did.

I'm down to about three tasks on my "get the yard in at least slightly better shape" list. Yesterday's task was to finish trimming the hedges around the house. I'd done one bush the day before, and had three to go. By the time I got through the second, I was so congested, I almost called it a day. And I guess I should have, because by the time I got through with the third, I couldn't breathe at all. Kind of like...I don't know, an asthma attack? What I imagine an asthma attack would feel like, I guess.

Well, we're going to hire Bob Rogers to finish the trimming, because in the long run, it's less expensive to hire him than it is to pay for a trip to the emergency room. I hate to waste a perfectly good trip to my doctor on something as lame as allergies, but I think I might have to now. Anyway, I've promised to stop working on the yard until Catherine's home to help me.

I think we're supposed to be doing landscaping at the Habitat house this weekend, I may cancel.

Gardening is way too much work, especially since I don't even like vegetables.

Catherine spreading compost/soil in the box Garry and I put together this morning:

Garry digging out clay so we can build the second bed:

Amanda moving soil from the front yard to the garden plot:

My shoes after I knocked most of the mud off:

How does this work? I get out of bed saying that I'm not going to do any work today, none at all, and the next thing I know, I'm in the mud transplanting tomato plants. Why does this happen to me?

For a day of no work, I was awfully busy. We planted a whole bunch of stuff, almost all heirloom plants. The things that weren't heirloom were at least organic, with the possible exception the cucumbers. Maybe they'll die! I hope something grows for Catherine's sake, she's pretty emotionally involved w/all the little plants we've been raising. I pretty much don't like gardening, so it's going to be a long summer.

This morning we planted: tomatoes, two kinds of peppers, eggplant, beans, onions, carrots, squash, zucchini, melon, watermelon, pumpkin, and maybe something else, I can't remember. Amanda is going to treat the peas and plant those tomorrow, I guess. It's a little late to be putting in some of these crops, but we've got a long growing season in Indiana, so we'll see what happens.

I also ended up edging all the walks, and moving some gravel to fill a muddy spot on our driveway. Catherine is cleaning out gutters even as I type. Why aren't weekends just for resting? I want to know.

Damn, this is the way it always happens.

We met some really cool people, and finally managed to coordinate our schedules so we could spend some time at their house this evening. Rich and Lisa are both artists, and they have the greatest space, a lot of depth to it.

Rich is a photographer, and one of his hobbies is picking up old home movies, like at estate auctions, and having public showings of them on their porch. We went over for a private, indoors showing of a set of films of a family from New Haven, Indiana, taken in the late 1950s. Totally awesome. Melancholy, I guess, you get a real sense of your mortality, watching films of real live people who are probably dead now, but still, awesome. We just had a good time.

So, what sucks is they told us tonight they're moving to Massachusetts in a month or two. They bought some space in a converted mill for studios and apartments, so now all they have to do is sell their house here in town. We tried to be excited for them, because it's a great opportunity and they really want to do it, but what we were really thinking was, "Wait! We just found you! You can't leave yet!"

Damn.

Every once in awhile I do something that makes me feel good about myself.

Just got back from the dedication for Luz Maria's house, the Women's Build house. Ordinarily, I would avoid this kind of function; in fact, I didn't go to the dedication for Ricardo and Luz's house. Who wants to talk to strangers? But anyway, we went tonight because Catherine wanted to see the house, and it was actually pretty fun. Actually, pretty touching, watching a single mom being handed the keys to her own home.

As I was standing there listening to all the thank you speeches, I started tallying up all the affordable housing projects I'd worked on this year. This is my second Habitat home, and we've got three going at BRI. I start a third habitat home next weekend, and then a fourth in June. So, that's seven houses for low income individual/families. That's pretty good, and it just goes to show what a just one person can do to help out around the community.

So, anyway, I gave myself a pat on the shoulder tonight. Unusual behavior, but sometimes I think I deserve it.

Well, if I can't sleep tonight, it won't be from because I didn't work hard enough to wear my body out today. I'm looking forward to a good nap.

Got up, went running. Okay, a short run, but still, it was running. Came home, spent the rest of the morning turning up sod for a garden plot. Cleaned up, ate lunch, then went out to Cedar Bluff and got some flowers I couldn't really afford. Came home and finally filled in the bed around the limestone monument in our front yard. Cleaned up again, went and fed Diane's cats, went to taekwondo. Came home, cleaned up again, had dinner, and then went out to Menard's w/Gary and Amanda so we could get some 2x12s for the borders of our garden. Came home, spent a lot of time standing on the back porch alternately watching the lunar eclipse and the skunk playing in our backyard.

Hmmm...it seems unfair that I can summarize my entire busy day in a single paragraph.

"I know a woman who says it's only at three o'clock in the morning when anyone can measure things. She says if you love yourself at three o'clock in the morning, if there's someone in your bed that you love at least as much as you love yourself at three o'clock in the morning, if you heart is quiet in your chest and neither muses nor shades crowd the room, it probably means things are well. It's the hardest moment to lie to yourself, three o'clock in the morning, she told me."--Marlena de Blasi

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/hiatomicbomb/manhattan.html
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.2/br_77.html
http://www.geometry.net/physics_bk/atomic_physics.html
http://www.childrenofthemanhattanproject.org/COTMP/bibliography.htm
http://members.tripod.com/~Arnold_Dion/Daghlian/read.html
http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/ColdWarSci.html
http://depts.washington.edu/hssexec/library_list.html

Well...that's okay, then. A little late with the apology, but at least if I come back in the fall, I know it won't happen again. Or shouldn't happen again. They might have all forgotten about it by then and I'll be right back where I started from. But at least he said he was sorry.

Damn, I hate being an adult.

Finished.

I am exactly the kind of person for which pain killers were invented. It hurts? Let's do it anyway!

Before I left for the Habitat site yesterday, I told Catherine I didn't care what I ended up doing as long as I wasn't on the roofing crew. That would be my own personal nightmare. I know my fear of heights is totally stupid, but I don't seem to be able to do anything about it. So, when Valerie asked me if I wanted to go up on the roof after lunch, it is completely beyond me why I shrugged and said, "Sure." I thought I would be able to will myself through my fear, I have a lot of pride and figured I wouldn't embarrass myself by admitting I was scared when a half dozen other women were doing just fine, but once I was up on the trusses, I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it. I toughed it out through the first course of decking, thinking maybe it would be better if I had something to walk on, but even that freaked me out, so I finally just said, "Uh, this isn't going to work for me," and called for a ladder.

Well, I felt like a wuss, but it was okay, because the roofing team needed someone on the ground to throw up decking material. So, I spent many hours hoisting 4' x 8' sheets of OSB over my head and up to the roof (luckily Ricardo and Steven were usually around to give me a hand), and cutting OSB to fit the odd spaces. I was totally worn out by 3:00, checking my watch every 15 minutes, but gave it up around 4:30 when I realized that it was going to take another hour or so to finish the roof and I wasn't going anywhere until it was done.

I learned a valuable lesson about cutting OSB. When the person on the roof hands you a diagram for an L-shaped piece, be sure and turn the OSB over before you cut. I *might* have realized that earlier in the day, but by 5:30, when I was cutting this piece, I was so tired that all my energy was focused on the circular saw, not the roofing process. "Okay, you're really, really tired, you have a power tool in your hand that could easily sever an artery if it jumps, so *focus* on what you're doing, ignore everything else." Anyway, maybe if I'd taken a little time out of my focusing I would have thought to flip that piece of OSB. Or maybe I would have just cut a thumb off, hard to say.

Well, we didn't finish until after 6:00. I know now why I've only volunteered for four hours shifts before this. 8.5 hours would have been long enough, 9.5 hours pretty much killed me. And I look like someone took a stick to me and beat me, I'm totally black and blue. Pretty good knot on my right knee where a piece of OSB slipped across it, and my fingers hurt where Michelle accidentally stood on them, but other than that, it's just tired muscles.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I handed Kirk one set of drawings this morning, handed a second to Steve, so now all I have to do is grading, and I'll be done. If I can make it through rehearsal this evening, everything else will be fine. I can sleep in a little tomorrow before tackling my students' finals, and that should get rid of the circles under my eyes and restore my youthful good looks

Something good did happen this week--we got new neighbors. The owners of the house next door completely renovated it, and Catherine talked two of her co-workers into renting it. The whole moving in process sort of slipped by me since I was away from the house most of the week, but this morning Amanda came over to see if she could borrow an egg. Fantastico! I've always wanted friends living next door who would just stop by for whatever, whenever.

Sadly, we didn't have an egg. But still, it was a nice feeling knowing we would have someone to lend it to if we ever happened to have one.

"Not that it makes any difference." This is what Mom said to me when she called me to tell me Uncle Walt died on Tuesday. What does that mean, "Not that it makes any difference?" I asked, and she replied, "Well, he was ninety years old, and he had a stroke." Is that supposed to make sense? It doesn’t make any difference that he died because he was ninety? No wonder I have so much trouble coping with loss and the grieving process—look at my role models.

Anyway, I wish my mom would stop calling me, because she only phones when someone dies.

Then also, she called to tell me that Pat died this week, and that's just…I don't know. Cancer of the kidneys. Wayne said they sent her down to Wenatchee, scheduled for surgery on Monday, and they didn’t think she’d make it through the operation. I guess she did, but not much longer. I'd really like to ask my mom what she thinks. Did she talk to her before she died? If not, did she wish she’d talked to her before she died? There's so much lost there, and no way to talk about it. I tried to talk to Catherine about it, but it turned into something bigger than I can handle thinking about this week, so I'll have to deal with all the complexities of our family histories some other time.

This has probably been the most frustrating week I've had since I started teaching full time. There is just nothing good about being adjunct faculty. You get no support. I know that part of it is incidental, I'm getting caught in the crossfire in a war between the permanent faculty, but it doesn't make it easier. I feel like I'm getting pounded from both sides—students behaving inappropriately on one hand, faculty behaving inappropriately on the other. And I'm stuck in the middle, just hoping I get to the end of the semester without hitting somebody.

I'm just a little over-extended right now, trying to do too many things. I just have to make it to Monday and it will be okay.

Well…I could type for two hours and not get to all the things keeping me awake at night. I started in sleep deficit Monday morning, and it's just been getting worse. The more tired I am, the less likely I am to be able to sleep. The only place I really feel like I could nod off is—unfortunately—behind the wheel of my car. I guess I need to find someone to drive me around town for a few hours so I can take a nap to the hum of the engine.

Better topics: I started construction management for one of the BRI homes, so at least I'm partly employed. Well, I get about $700 per house for showing up at the building site once every two weeks to make sure the contractor is doing what he's supposed to be doing. Unfortunately, I don’t get the money until the house is finished, so I won't be seeing it for awhile.

The Habitat women's build starts tomorrow. I really wanted to go help frame, but I'm just too tired, so I'm not going over until Sunday. The Habitat/Bloomingfoods straw bale house is scheduled to break ground on June 14th. They're mixing stucco and plaster for that house tomorrow, but I don’t think I'm going to make that, either. I'm scheduled to build twice next week, then again on the 24th and 31st, then move from there to the straw bale house. So, even if I’m more or less unemployed, I'll be doing something useful.

I'm just a little tired.

It was kind of like being in a movie--a small town in middle America, a parade with the high school band, the streets around the town square closed off for a small scale carnival, and a community band on the lawn.

That would be us, the community band. Given it was my first concert in forever, and my first as a percussionist, I think it went pretty well. Well...I screwed some stuff up, but so did everyone else, so that was okay. And I forgot the sunblock, which was not okay. Other than that, it's over, it went pretty well, and I'm ready to take a nap.

Completely nervous before the concert (I should have done up my shirt one button higher):



The entire band, ready to play:


During Windstar, right after Brian yelled at me to throw him the woodblock:


Catherine catches me between songs, looking manic:


Tim, Brian and I, totally focused, during the Washington Post March.

Okay, self....good luck.

I was sort of hoping it would rain today--early this morning I dreamt it was snowing, in fact--but no such luck. I guess the concert will go on. I haven't performed any sort of music since...god...1996? And that was vocals, so that was easier. Hopefully I'll get into a zone once we get set up and just go for it. Otherwise I might die of nervous exhaustion.

A totally amazing statistic: I have seen four movies in seven days. I never watch movies, definitely never volunteer to go to the movies, and tend to wander out of the room when we're watching them on video or TV. So four movies...that's a lot for me. Even more interesting, though, is the fact that every single one of them was about daughters in conflict w/their parents.

In order of appearance (but not preference):

1. Alma. I've had a few more thoughts on mental illness and its role in the life of an individual since seeing this last Friday. There were moments in the documentary when Alma really sounded as if she was suffering from schizophrenia, like when she was hearing voices in the "overhead," for instance. Partly I wonder if meds would help her, but then partly I wonder why we should medicate someone just because they're experiencing a different reality. And really, hearing voices from the cosmic ductwork somehow doesn't seem that implausible. If I can conceive of an "overhead," isn't possible that one exists?

But really, sometimes I wonder what the difference is between mental illness and just a solid will to survive. If you're raped at the age of three, and your family tells you that they can't take you to the hospital because the uncle that raped you would get arrested and no one wants that to happen, do they?, and then you start making up this story about your uncle being your first boyfriend because isn't that better than facing the fact your parents don't value enough to take you to the doctor, is that mental illness, or is that just a really efficient coping mechanism? If you suffer through all this crap, then tell yourself stories to rationalize it, or damage yourself physically to prevent it from happening again, is that really mental illness, or just surviving? I don't know, it just reminds me a lot of what they taught us about eating disorders: we become bulimic not because we want to damage our bodies and minds (that's just a happy coincidence); the real goal of bulimia is to give us something to distract ourselves with so we won't just give up and die.

Tough film.

2. Real Women Have Curves. I wrote out a lot in an e-mail to a friend about this one. I liked it a lot, but mostly was more interested in the peripheral characters than the main character (because let's face it, teenagers really aren't all that compelling). I'd really like to settle down with a novel about the older sister, and not just because I thought she was the cute one. I want to know what choices she made in life to end up owning a dress factory (okay, sweat shop). You could see her ambitions, and pretty easily speculate on the stumbling blocks that kept her from realizing them, but I would really like to know the specifics. She wasn't exactly filling a traditional role, since she wasn't married, but on the other hand, she was staying close to family in a way Ana wouldn't. So, anyway, I wanted to hear about her. And I really wanted to hear more about the old woman who started out the movie with a song.

3. My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Someone is going to have to explain to me why this was such a big hit. Same essential plot, daughter rebelling against parents, but just not very well done. For one thing, please explain to me why everyone keeps telling me, "Oh, it's all about how the ugly chick gets the guy." Nia Vardalos is beautiful, and I totally didn't buy the motivation (what motivation?) for her self-imposed makeover at the beginning of the movie. There was zero character development, zero plot development, and pretty much was a waste of my time. Blah. I wanted to like it, but just didn't.

4. Bend It Like Beckham. Man. I loved this movie, and for no other reason that it was about soccer. Yeah, it was also about the daughter rebelling against her traditional family values, but it's real value was the soccer. The story was almost exactly the same as Real Women Have Curves, almost exactly. But did I mention it had soccer? Well, like Real Women and Greek Wedding, the movie awards people would dump this into the "ethnic" category, and that always leaves the material open for comments like, "Geez, could they put any more stereotypes into this movie?" I guess all three had a little bit of that (but Greek Wedding was by far the worst), but sometimes I think you've got to put up with at least a little of that, otherwise you're going to be sitting in the movie theater for four hours instead of two.

Ah...that is why this isn't a real Indian movie, it was only two hours long! A real Indian movie should be at least five hours long! I loved the soundtrack, it made me want to run out and rent an Amitabh Bachchan movie.

The lesbian/gay subplot was okay, I guess. I get tired of the whole "my daughter's a lesbian!" routine, played for laughs. Of course, the daughter's not really a lesbian, it's just a big misunderstanding, and isn't that funny? Well, it was kind of funny, but still, how many times do I have to watch this same story?

But, mostly I just turned my mind off and enjoyed the sports. It's sappy, but I felt for Jess not being able to play soccer. I hated having to give it up, and although I've made peace with that, my sports emotions are probably still a little raw from having to leave hockey. So, there was a sports tear shed in there somewhere near the end of the movie. It wasn't the most suspenseful sports movie, doesn't come close to Hoosiers, but I still really liked it.

Oh. The closing credits alone made it worth the price of admission.

Bobby gave me my first cadence today, which is....cool. I know I can get cadences off the web, but this is just a lot more cool. It's the second version of the Bridgemen cadence. Dennis DeLucia brought it with him to the Star of Indiana after he left the Bayonne Bridgemen. Bobby wrote it out for me, which is....just cool.

Oh, lovely.

It's like being a cat toy. I'm amusing for awhile, but no one worries too much if I eventually get lost in a dark corner of the house.

Speaking of cats, the quote on the cat calendar this morning was, "If a cat spoke, it would say things like, 'Hey, I don't see the problem here.'" (J.R. Blount) After watching Luna act up all morning, I'm thinking there wasn't enough profanity included in that translation.

What I read last night while waiting for Mr. Rocca to take the stage.
What Catherine read last night (and I read yesterday afternooon) while waiting for Mr. Rocca to take the stage.
What I'm reading now.

It's a good thing we were only gone for three days. The friends who said they'd feed our cats didn't show up, so Jack and Luna had to make do with the bowl of dry food we put out for them Friday morning. I thought Luna was going to explode, she ate so fast when we finally got home this evening and fed her.

For Catherine's birthday, we went down to Madison, Indiana for the weekend. This is a pretty neat town, 133 blocks of it are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It's definitely the off season, most museums, shops and restaurants were closed, but we had a good time walking around in the cold, anyway.

It was really cold when we got there on Friday, but we poked around a bit anyway. We walked around quite awhile trying to find somewhere to eat (we even went into the Central Hotel, but that was a bit of a mistake) before going up the hill to Clifty Inn at Clifty Falls State Park. The dinner there wasn't spectacular, just a buffet, but the location was supreme.

When we were out walking earlier in the day, we passed by the Ohio Theater, one of the dying breed of downtown movie houses. The prices were great, 3.00 admission, 2.00 for a large popcorn. We decided to go back downtown after dinner and see Harry Potter, who can pass up a three-dollar movie?

Saturday was also cold, but we still went out on a self-guided walking tour of downtown. Lots and lots of architecture. I'd like to go back w/a tripod and slide film, I could build up a pretty good collection of 19th c. American architecture slides. We stopped in at the Madison Fudge Factory, and the owner, Jim Grant, showed us around the upstairs, which he rents out as a B&B. We might stay there next time we go to Madison.

He recommended lunch at the Cafe Express, so we went there after we walked around a bit more. Was that rainbow flag outside just there to be colorful, or did it have meaning? We couldn't decide.

After a great lunch, we drove back up to the park and took a short hike to Clifty Falls (Big and Little). It was still pretty cold, but probably above freezing. At least in the sun, I felt like I could take my hat off. One thing I realized, looking at our photos from this trip, I really need to find some clothes that fit. Everything is just way too big, and I look like the Great Pumpkin rotting in the field, walking around in a fleece vest that is 6 sizes too big.

Anyway, the trail was a bit muddy and icy in places, but it was nice to be out in the woods. Afterward, we sat in the car and listened to the end of the IU game, then went back to our room at the Inn so I could take a much needed nap (was up a lot of the night before being sick). Catherine watched a lot of ESPN while I read and slept for a couple of hours.

Skipped dinner and went back to the movies. Shelled out three more bucks for Star Trek. Considering how much I hate to go to the movies, watching two in a row is pretty good for me, especially given that I'd watched 6 or 7 movies on DVD earlier in the week.

This morning we did some more walking around town, then drove up to Versailles and Milan. If you know how to pronounce those "correctly," then you are a Hoosier. This is the first time we have been to Milan, and really, there's not much there. There's supposed to be a '54 Milan Museum, but we couldn't find it. It is an obligatory basketball pilgrimage site, though, home of the "Miracle of Milan," inspiration for the movie Hoosiers, my second favorite movie.

Yay!

I gave Catherine the major part of her birthday present today, five days early, and she is absolutely glowing. Who knew technology could please a woman so much? She is finally the owner of a DVD player of her very own. I thought she might get mad because I spent so much money when we're a little cash poor, but I should have realized she loves anything and everything to do with the television. I can never go wrong with a TV-related present.

She'll have to wait for the rest of her present until the 5th, but since she was planning on going to town to rent videos tomorrow, I figured she might as well rent DVDs instead. She's already got it hooked up and working. I can't even figure out the VCR, so I'm really impressed. I think she would be watching one of the free DVDs that came off one of my cereal boxes, but the Pacers are playing, and she absolutely cannot be distracted from sports these days.

This evening she thanked me for not letting her get rid of the Lunatic. We've both grown rather fond of the little terrorist.

[erasure]

[erasure]
2:12 PM


The good thing about having whiplash is that you have every excuse in the world to sit around the house and read. The bad thing about having whiplash is that you really can't rally your mental forces enough to make reading possible.

My head feels okay, actually, no pain at all, but I'm still having a little difficulty coming up with words at the ends of my sentences. Luckily, there's no one around to talk to today. Mostly I just feel like I got hit...not too surprising, since I did. Well, the hit wasn't the problem, it was hitting the ice and bouncing that was the problem. My neck should loosen up in a couple days, though. No serious damage done, I could probably skate again tomorrow if I really wanted to do so.

A sporting weekend.

Drove up to Indy yesterday to see the Tennessee v. Notre Dame game at the Fieldhouse. Fantastic seats, third row just off the head of Tennessee's bench. We could hear every word Pat Summitt and her coaching staff said (or yelled, as the case may be). I love to watch her coach, love to watch her work with her staff. Whiplash threatened as I tried to watch both the coach and the players on the court simultaneously.

Tennessee won pretty decisively, but they didn't look all that polished. Still early in the season, I guess. But man, they've got talent on the floor. They have a freshman out of Syracuse, Indiana that is going to be really, really good. I totally bought one of her pass fakes--I was on the train, waiting to leave, I so bought it--and then she puts it in the hoop.

At one point, I turned to Catherine and said, "I made eye contact with Pat Summitt!" (she was really looking back to talk to the people to the right of us), and Catherine responded, "Well, I made eye contact with Kara Lawson!"
Kara Lawson looks like a brick wall on television, but in person, she's really quite small, only 5'-8" and not at all stocky or solid.

So, that was cool.

Then we spent the afternoon in a sports bar, watching IU lose to Temple. Ah...the travesty. Why didn't Coverdale take that last shot? I think the whole team needs to go visit a sports psychologist.

After that, we drove to the Pepsi Coliseum to watch the Indianapolis Ice play the Shreveport Mudbugs (apparently mudbugs are crawdads). It was a pretty good game, but I had a pounding headache by the time it was over. It is beyond me why every pause in the game must be filled in with blaring music. This happens at every professional sporting event, why? Do the teams think the crowd is going to lose interest in the game and go home during timeouts, or what?

But...two live sporting events and one afternoon in a sports bar makes for a pretty good Saturday.

Slept in this morning, then went to a stick-and-puck session at the Frank, which turned out to be a pick-up hockey game instead. Ah. But this isn't the right journal for that entry.

The imprint from the book I finished yesterday:



I grabbed Henrietta Buckmaster's Deep River off a shelf in the Main Library in as random a manner as possible. I walked through the stacks, stuck my arm up, and pulled down the first book my fingertips dragged across. I do this a lot. Usually I end up reading a page or two of whatever book it is that I picked, then return it to the stacks w/out ever finishing it. This one, though, I checked out and carried around in my car for six months, reading it over lunch every day.

As is obvious from the imprint, Buckmaster published her book during WWII. It was pretty popular when it first arrived at IU--it circulated in Oct. 1945, twice in Dec. 1945, again in Dec. 1946, and then again in Oct. 1947. A faculty member checked it out then, and returned it on Sept. 11 of some unknown year. It had to be 1952 or earlier, though, because it circulated again Jul. 1953. It went out to faculty again, and was returned Feb. 1958. And there it sat, never to circulate again until I pulled it off the shelf.

And this is what I don't understand--how could such a book sit there, unnoticed for 40-something years? I don't understand exactly how Deep River didn't make it into the canon of American literature. Who has even heard of Henrietta Buckmaster? I never had. If you *have* heard of her, it's probably because of her biography of Harriet Tubman, or her book Let My People Go, about the Underground Railroad. It isn't because of Deep River, and that's a damn shame.

It took me awhile to really get into the book, Buckmaster is of the school of writing that believes in capturing actual language w/her writing, and it can be rough going, trying to stumble through her attempts at recording Georgia "mountain" speech. Actually, her entire writing style is different than anything I've read before, so I couldn't just drift off and let my eyes do the reading, I had to keep paying attention with my mind, too. I wasn't sure it was going to be worth the effort, but it was.

A basic summary: it's an abolitionist's novel, written almost a century after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book is divided into the two parts, the first focusing on Savanna, the daughter of a plantation owner who marries an abolition-minded mountain man; and the second focusing on her husband, Simon, who leaves the mountains to study law so he can destroy the institution of slavery. The book is set right before the outbreak of the War Between the States. Simon and Savanna have recently married, and between them, they need to decide where their loyalties fall: to each other, to their families, to their neighbors, to the State of Georgia, and/or to the Union.

It is indeed a novel, even though it follows the lives of real people and events as well as any history book, and I think Buckmaster's particular talent shows in her ability to make it feel like a 19th. rather than 20th c. novel. It's obviously of this century, she couldn't write about the events the way she did if she was writing while they were current, but she manages to completely capture the turmoil and political terror of the times. It's too bad it couldn't have been written a hundred years earlier, I think it would have made a better abolitionist argument than Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I didn't even notice this was a "war book" until C. pointed it out the imprint a few days ago. One of my goals in the next few days is to see if I can find some book reviews from when Deep River first came out. Was it controversial? I don't know anything about Buckmaster--I deliberately didn't look her up after I started reading the book, because I wanted to judge it for myself, not let someone else tell me how to think. I have since discovered that she received an Ohioana fiction award and a Guggenheim Fellowship for it, but what did everyone else think? Because if this would have been an abolitionist novel in 1845, it was very plainly a Civil Rights novel in 1945. The threads of Enlightenment philosophy that run through the book are astounding, and although its couched in terms of the Civil War, the declarative statement is really: we are failures as humans as long as we continue to let oppression exist unopposed. It's a book intended to grab white people by the front of their shirts and make them see what they've been doing without thinking all their lives. It's an argument for the abolition of oppression not just of black men, but of women--all women--as well.

What impresses me most, I guess, is that the book was published at all. I understand why it was wartime book, it was unapologetically pro-Union and pro-North, but I'm guessing that the publication censors must have just skimmed the text before saying, "Yeah, pro-U.S., good." They must have missed the whole bit about that guy Marx, who had some good things to say about workers and how they should see the benefit of their labors and how the poor white men of the South would do good to take Marx's lessons to heart and think about what a revolution would get them. I can't imagine the U.S. government at any time taking kindly to teaching black men about Marx, and all I can guess is that they had no idea what the real intention of the book was--to call for a rising up in Buckmaster's own day and age. I also can't believe they missed the obvious oratory on breaking the law--we're morally and ethically obligated to go against the law of the United States if that law violates a larger law (which in this case, was styled as both Biblical law and a more Enlightenment-informed Natural Law).

I don't know, it's a very complex book. A lot of the abolitionist arguments made at the outset are made in relation to the lives of poor white trash: how plantation owners, through their use of slave labor, are manipulating the economic structure of the South to their favor at the expense of the poor Georgia crackers. A lot of the rallying cries in the first half of the book involve getting the poor white dirt farmer to recognize how slavery is ruining his life. Then half way through the book, the argument starts to change to one intent on humanizing black slaves. Simon the lawyer moves away from fighting against slavery to better the lives of his white constituents toward fighting it because he believes in the humanity of slaves and their right to live a safe and dignified and prosperous life.

There's a courtroom scene in the second half of the book, where Simon has to defend not only a slave who has been falsely accused of raping a white woman (who happens to be poor white trash), but also defend an abolitionist who passed Bible scriptures encouraging freedom to the same slave. It's not as accessible as what Harper Lee provides in To Kill A Mockingbird, but it's such a good part of the book. Simon finds he can defend the slave, Harry, more easily than the abolitionist, because the slave is property, and property is money, and no court will take away a plantation owner's property without evidence. So Simon is faced w/a dilemma--he can save Harry by arguing that he is valuable property, an argument he hates, but will spare the Harry's life. Or, he can argue for Harry's intrinsic value as a human being, and sentence him to death. Either way, he finds he has to deal with the institution of "sacred white womanhood," what he can and cannot say about a (white) woman, and more importantly, what he can and cannot say about a *poor* white woman.

As it turns out, he can't adequately defend the abolitionist, because he's of no value to anyone financially, no one cares about him except that he stop trying to steal slaves away.

What makes me angry in the end is I had to read a lot of stupid stuff in high school...oh...Faulkner springs to mind....Hemingway...writers that say *nothing* to me, and here is this great book rotting away on the library shelves. It's a fantastic look back at the all the chaos before the Civil War, but it's also an excellent distillation of this moment before the Civil Rights movement explodes in the United States. I really don't think I'm giving Buckmaster too much credit by saying she was encouraging a Civil Rights rebellion, I think she knew exactly what kind of statement she was making, and it's too bad it was ignored, forgotten and abandoned. Maybe it would have been too challenging for me in high school, but then again, maybe I wouldn't have hated 10th grade English so much if I would have gotten to read something outside the canon of the Great White Male Against the World.
10:54 PM


Feeling good about yourself? Go shopping for new clothes, and that will put an end to it.

[erasure]

Oh my....the snow, the snow. We're supposed to get up to a foot, and although I'm usually skeptical about such predictions, this time I think I believe it.
3:27 PM


Three other notable photos (taken neither by Catherine nor by me):

This picture just cracks me up. On the back, Catherine has written "Catherine goes nuts! May 1987." She's freaking out over getting her M.A. thesis done, and well she should freak out, because it was about three times as long as mine, so it must have taken her forever. Notice the article in the foreground and the calendar on the wall--both Thomas Moran.



For some reason, this photo of me and my roommate Mary in Pavlosk was in the same box as Catherine's photos. This is the first summer I was in Russia (it was still the Soviet Union back then). The notable thing about this photo, though, isn't the location, but rather the absolute lack of flesh on my bones. I'm twenty years old, weigh probably 118, and feel fatter than I had ever felt in my life.

I only went to Leningrad that summer because I was kicked off a paleontology team for being too fat. I had spent the spring raising money and volunteering as part of a student group that was going to spend the summer in Montana on a dinosaur dig. I had taken the classes, earned my money, done my time, and was ready to go. But the professor in charge thought I couldn't hack it, I wasn't in good enough shape. I pointed out to him that I was on UW's Tae Kwon Do (competitive) team, and that I cycled 20 miles a day, more on weekends, but he said he would only let me go if I could prove my dedication by losing 10 pounds.

Well, I tried, and I failed. And looking at this picture, I think, "No freaking wonder I couldn't lose any weight. Where would I have lost it from?" Stepan used to just berate me about my efforts to lose weight, and now I see why.

(An interesting side note: this prof. was the first person who ever mistook me for a boy. I turned in some papers to him before class one day, and during class, he asked if the young man who had given him the papers would come back and see him because he had neglected to write down his name. Yeah, that was me, that young man.)

The ironic thing is: I probably lost the ten pounds while I was in Russia. This picture was taken shortly before I became deathly--and I mean deathly--ill with bronchitis. I probably lost a lot more than ten pounds by the time I was over it, and I didn't have that kind of weight to lose. But when I got home, everyone thought I looked great. Freaks!



And finally, this photo was in the same box. Here I am with my brother at Long Bay in Skagway, Alaska. It's 1976, and the notable thing about this picture is that my brother's hair is a lot longer than mine!


3:20 PM


We were looking for a video, but came across a box of miscellaneous photos, so we stopped and spent an hour or so with old pictures last night.

Before I met Catherine, she was a photographer. A really, really good photographer. As part of our move across the country, we sold off her enlarger, her developing trays, etc. We've talked about building her a darkroom, but it has never seemed very practical. But looking through some of her old photographs last night, I decided that the darkroom idea has to be realized. If I move my weight bench, I could put up a partition wall and she could have a little area under the stairs. Catherine points out a partition wall isn't necessary, a temporary wall of storage bins is good enough, and would protect her equipment from any errant hockey pucks. The washer and dryer used to be in the basement, so it wouldn't be very difficult to get her some running water.

So, this will be my project for the new year: putting together some place for Catherine to develop photos, and replacing all her equipment.

Here are a few photos that I found last night that I really liked. Unfortunately, I have a low-end scanner, so I'm not doing them justice.

Hmmm....Christmas. I should write about Christmas while I'm in a good mood. Christmas is a holiday that never stands on its own, it tends to drag past Christmases home with it. Thanksgiving runs a close second when it comes to holidays weighed down with emotional baggage, but I think Christmas always crosses the line first. We're almost forced to sit down and contemplate the "meaning" of Christmas in our lives, and that usually leads to a consideration of holidays past and their role in getting us to today's state of celebration and/or desperation.

I, unfortunately, have a very good memory. What this means is that before I can arrive at a place of contentment (which is where have been spending a large amount of my time the past few days), I have to remember and then deliberately forget everything that I usually associate with Christmas. Then I can move forward and get down to the business of enjoying myself.

It's a tedious ritual, and one day I'll figure out how to put an end to it. In the meantime, before I can reach a more peaceful spot, I have to drive around in my car and let myself remember how much it hurt to get a box of dirt (and cornstalks!) from my brother for Christmas one year. I have to consider that long, dark Christmas break when I was thirteen when I tried to kill myself (word--it actually hurts to slash your wrists, why didn't anyone tell me that before I tried? Geez.). And I get to relive the long December nights of my freshman year in college when all I did was stay awake all night long worrying about how much my parents seemed to hate each other, wondering if my dad really was going to divorce my mom or if that was just something you say when you're yelling at your spouse, and how much was I going to like having to decide which parent to visit over holidays if they lived in different houses?

Every year, I work my way through the past to my freshman year, which seems to be some sort of watershed. From that year on, Christmas seemed to get better instead of worse. I think at some point the concept of "personal agency" really took hold, and I started holding myself responsible for the way I spent the holidays. I could enjoy myself or not, and the choice my mine to make. And, of course, it goes without saying that choosing to spend the past ten Christmases with Catherine was an excellent decision.

Anyway, remembering my way forward from some of those bleak childhood Christmases takes less time and energy w/each passing year. Things that used to be painful are now mostly just stories I tell my friends to make them laugh. And that brings me to the real point of this entry. I think all (emotionally healthy) glbt persons at some point make a decision to surround themselves w/people who make them happy, who respect and care for them, and who help make life that much more pleasant. I'm lucky in that my biological family eventually came around to a more civilized way of behaving, but I'm even luckier that I managed to build my own family of good friends. It's an interesting process, learning to care about other people and letting other people care about you, and what I think most right now, is that I kind of like Christmas, because even if it come burdened with the past, it also gives me a chance to stop and look around in the present. That way I can recognize everyone I hold close to my heart, and just let myself enjoy their presence in the spirit of the holiday.
3:36 PM


Once again, I've conclusively proven that rollerblading and ice-skating are two completely different sports. You'd think the skill set would transfer between the two, but it doesn't. And ten seconds into today's activities, I remembered exactly how it was that I broke my elbow the first time. I am just not a good rollerblader. I totally do not get the stopping concept, I instinctively tried a hockey stop and almost broke my ankle. I know I should be using that little stopping thing behind my right heel, but it seems to me to be an invitation to the emergency room every time I consider it.

Well, the good news, I'm better than I was before I quit rollerblading (after said broken elbow three years ago), but I don't think I'll be playing inline hockey anytime soon. Maybe it would be easier if I got rockered skates. I think, though, Catherine would divorce me if I started buying inline hockey equipment along with ice hockey equipment. We'd be in the poorhouse by the end of next month.

I'd love to be that sporty chick who can play anything, do anything, but I think I may be smart enough to recognize my limitations on this one.

What I really wish is that someone would e-mail me and tell me what to write in Shawn's Christmas card. It's the first card I should have sent, yet it will be the last one that actually goes out. Everytime I pick up a pen, my mind goes blank. I want her to know I'm thinking about her, but my god, what am I supposed to say?

There's very little in the world I wouldn't talk to Shawn about--there's very little we haven't talked about at some point in the past--but I can hardly think of a word to write to her these days. I can't bring myself to call because I just hang on the line in silence, trying not to make my grief her problem.

So, even if you're a complete stranger, have a heart and drop me a line and tell me what to write, because I am absolutely without words at this point.
9:56 PM


Never in my life did I think I would hear Dorothy Allison quoted in a church sermon, much less hear her identified as "an author and lesbian feminist" in front of a religious congregation.

I feel like I've been taking a crash course in theology. Religion--our new hobby! We went to church *twice* today, once for Sunday services and once for a winter solstice concert. It may be that hell is freezing over somewhere.

We actually hung out for a few minutes after church and talked with some people. It completely stressed me out, talking to strangers. We met an older couple, Gerta and Edward, they are new to Bloomington (but longtime Unitarians), and we talked with them for awhile. Catherine pointed out to me last week that if nothing else, the whole church experience is good for us because where else would we interact with people of such different ages? We're never around kids, and never around old people, and now we've spent four Sundays with both.

The Rev. Breeden's sermon was excellent, actually. I teared up twice at church today, once during the children's story, and then at the end of the sermon, an unheard of event. I never cry in public. I never even cry in front of Catherine if I can help it. Anyway, I felt like sitting there listening improved my life a little bit today, even if I didn't agree with the entire text of the service. Gerta had some strong opinions on it as well, especially on the part about loving people who seem unlovable, or at least not letting unlovable people take away our option to love. She was pretty old, and she was wearing a pin that was a combination pink triangle and Star of David (we think her son is gay), and she said, "When you get to be a certain age, you just want to talk back during the sermon. There are people in the world who can't be loved, who are truly evil. There is nothing to love about them, and I shouldn't be asked to love them." And I guess I have to agree. You can't really stand there talking to a person of a certain age w/some sort of European accent wearing a Star of David and expect them to concede to the idea that everyone in the world should be loved.

Anyway, I don't believe love can be de-personalized to such an extent that you can apply it to the entire world. Love to me is pretty much a one-on-one emotion, and grows out of personal interaction. I can respect humanity in general, have compassion, empathy, sympathy, and a variety of other emotions toward the world at large, but I can't love you unless I've established a direct, personal relationship with you. The things I feel for all humankind--that everyone should be entitled to live a life free of fear, hunger and (preventable) disease, for instance--don't really fall under the heading "love," in my mind.

Anyway, I'm too tired to write a dissertation on love at the moment. Today I: slept in, went to church, went out for coffee, did some grading, went to a concert, went to the gym, drove around and looked at Christmas lights, went out to dinner, and addressed at least three Christmas cards. No wonder my head hurts.

What do I miss about graduate school? Nothing! Okay, that's not true. The one thing I really miss from the old days is the graduate reading group Todd and I sort of organized. All the participants were history grad students, but all from different fields: I was 19th c. British imperialism/colonialism, Todd was 20th c. American intellectual, Pat was Tokugawa period, Loyd was...hm...also Tokugawa? I can't remember. Something Japanese. Kristen was medieval Italy. Jeff was 20th c. Environmental/Native American. Every other week, someone would recommend an article, and we'd get together and discuss it over beer and pizza. It was great, because we got to read across several disciplines--anthropology, philosophy, gender studies--and different subsets of history.

That's the only thing I miss: A cohort interested in reading and talking about what we read. I undervalued it when I had it, I bitched and moaned about all the work involved in making it happen, but as it turns out, it was the only memorable part of the whole never-ending academic experience.

Since quitting grad school, I've slowly been weeding my bookshelves of books associated with my discipline(s). About once a year I dig a little deeper and add a few more into the stack to take to the used bookstore. I have almost no British history books left at this point. I've gotten rid of a large chunk of my art history books, and even some architecture books. I'm still holding on to a few philosophy books--Foucault, Kierkegaard, Said, Sartre--even though the longer I'm out of school the less ability I have to comprehend any of them. I don't know, maybe they're just there to remind that once upon a time my brain actually functioned on a reasonably high level, unlike now.

Anyway, tonight I very firmly closed the door on going back to grad school. I decided to get rid of not only The Return of Martin Guerre, but also The Epic of Gilgamesh. Two classics of world history, and I'm finally ditching them. That's a pretty good signal to myself that I never expect to teach History 101 ever again.
8:58 PM


Before anyone else sends me an article suggesting I'm not the best husband in the world, I would like everyone to know that instead of settling into my recliner to watch the NCAA volleyball championships today, as a husband should on a Saturday afternoon, I took myself into the bathroom and gave it a good cleaning. I scrubbed the tub, the sink, the toilet, the floor, everything. I missed two volleyball games in the process, but hey, at least I'm pulling my weight. Happy now, tocaya? :)

Blah...Stanford lost, anyway. And then we got to watch our men's basketball ball coach totally melt down on national television, taking what might have turned out to be a tied game going into over time and turning it into a definite loss by 7 points. I hope his mother calls him tonight and chews his butt good.

Our women won, though, beating South Florida. Not a snappy win, but a win just the same, so I'll take it. Cyndi Valentin is going to be a fantastic player, if she ever learns how to stop messing with her shorts while she's on the floor.

I'm going to rest and relax for the next few days and see if it helps me feel any better. I know I haven't been getting enough sleep or eating enough protein. I almost hit the floor tiles again today when I was at the used book store, and all I can think is maybe it's a low blood sugar thing, or maybe I'm anemic and just need to pump up my blood. I'll just say, the floor at Caveat Emptor isn't all that clean, and I don't want to have to sit down on it to keep from fainting again anytime soon.

Feeling a little steadier today. I almost fainted twice yesterday afternoon. Add that to the two times I had to put my head on my desk on Wednesday to keep from fainting and/or vomiting, and that makes for a very annoying couple of days.

My goal today: plot the final drawings for 934 W. 6th St., and plot the draft set for 902 W. 7th St. That should take a few hours. I told my students yesterday that I plan for three hours for every set of working drawings I plot, and they told me I was nuts, but then they tried to plot out their drawings in an hour yesterday and discovere it wasn't possible.

I've got a ton of correcting to do, but I'm not even going to think about it until Sunday. Grades aren't due until Dec. 26, so I can slack for a couple of days.

Just got a Christmas card from my cousins Sean, Meaghan and Torin. Enclosed was a list of "three of life's lessons learned this year that [they] would like to share with those we love":

Torin: "Baseball doesn't hurt nearly as badly when you try to catch with your eyes open."

Sean: "The walls may appear solid, but people can still hear what you say about them when they're outside of your cubicle."

Meaghan: "Grandma REALLY DOES have a good reason for telling us not to play on the stairs."

Lessons to live by.
7:08 PM


Well, that totally sucked. I really hate instructors who write up these finals that are ten times harder than the stuff you've been doing as homework. I worked up to the last second, and I still didn't get it done, and let's face it, I'm the best student in the class by far.
11:06 AM


The thing that gets me about Trent Lott is that he doesn't even understand how facile the remark "I am not a racist" is.

You can't magically become "not a racist" just by saying it is so, or by wishing it is so. To become even *sort of* not a racist takes a lot of work. You have to think, read, listen, talk, ask, work and work hard. You have to be willing to educate yourself and others, but also to let other people educate you. You have to be willing to listen to yourself and catch yourself and find out that you're far from perfect even though you've been working hard. You have to be willing to change. No matter how much progress you make, there's a lot more that needs to happen to make you a little closer to being "not a racist." It takes constant vigilance, and even then, you'll find yourself thinking or saying something you just wish you hadn't. Every day you have to start over, and start over willingly, or it doesn't get you anywhere.

Every single one of us lives within a social framework riven through with racism, and every day we need to reassess it and see what can be done about it. Who influences what we think? How do we pass on that influence? What's the television telling us, the radio, the magazine at the doctor's office? What kind of jokes do we tell our friends? Do we laugh even though we know we really shouldn't ought to? Do we notice who makes us nervous in an elevator and why? Do we notice who we make eye contact with on the street and who we pretend not to see?

That Trent Lott even expects me to believe that he isn't a racist shows me what an idiot he is even more clearly than his remarks in praise of Dixiecrat politics. He obviously slept through all the courses requiring any sort of critical thinking in college, and he should probably lose his position in Congress just because he's an intellectual embarrassment.

Dave's e-mail totally cracked me up. Flamadiddle!

After church this morning, I got my hair cut. Came home, corrected papers, went for a run. Came home, took a shower, got dressed. Glanced in the mirror while I was brushing my teeth.

And there, looking back at me, was some boy named Jimmy. I tried to photograph him, but he disappeared every time I picked up my digital camera.

I really hate to disagree with Aaron McGruder about anything. His voice is so important, and he's usually so right on that I wonder if I'm not the one having the brain freeze on those rare occasions when I think he's on the wrong tack.

A couple of weeks ago he ran a series that started off with harshing on Winona Ryder, suggesting that the reason she got off with a slap on the wrist was because she was white. I wish I could find a copy of it online, but anyway, I'm down with that one. The whole week was funny. But in one of the later strips in the series McGruder suggested--I'm paraphrasing--that Eminem was more popular than other rappers because he was white, and I found myself thinking, "Well....no. Eminem is popular *despite* the fact that he's white."

To begin with, I think any white rapper is damned from the outset thanks to Vanilla Ice. I wonder how many times Eminem heard, "Ah, he's just another Ice, Ice Baby." White rappers aren't cool, they're dorky. White people don't want to hear other white people rap.

What I really think, however, is that when you say Eminem is palatable because he's white, you really leave out a lot of the story. Over the past couple months I've been doing a lot of thinking about white privilege because it's not actually all that visible in the lives of my students. I know if one of my students was up against a student of color for a job here in southern Indiana, and they had equal education and qualifications, the white kid would get the job. That seems clear. But the thing is, I don't think these kids will ever be in the position to experience the privileges of their race. They're never even going to be offered an interview, much less a job. Watching them, I have to wonder which plays a larger role in their lives: race or class?

I am teaching a large group of young men, essentially disenfranchised, essentially powerless. They all live with their parents, they have jobs stocking grocery shelves, they all have payments they can't afford to make for their pickup trucks. One of my students missed class the other day because he was home watching his sister's baby--he still lives at home, his sister lives at home. I'm sure none of my students have ever voted or will ever vote. I'm not even certain they registered for the selective service, although surely someone chased them down and made them do it.

I guess the point is, I often wonder if they will ever have the chance to be "rewarded" for their race, if they will ever pull themselves out of their present circumstances far enough to even have the possibility for profiting from their white male-ness. I have a student who can't read. Or, if he can read, it's at a very low level. Unless some miracle happens, he is going to live out the rest of his days out in the county, sitting in front of the television, feeling angry and ripped off and not even know why. He probably doesn't even know he's supposed to be privileged, he just know life sucks and he can't get a job.

Okay, back to the point about Eminem--all of my young, male students like him, they were completely psyched to go see Eight-Mile when it opened, and they're always trying to watch his videos and stuff online. And I've been listening to them talk about the movie and the music, and it just strikes me that they identify with the image that Eminem projects--an angry, disillusioned, white boy who grew up in a single-wide trailer in the wrong part of town, whose family sucked and always will suck, and who only managed to save himself from repeating his family history because he rapped his way out of Detroit.

It's all an act, I think, but Eminem has a fantastic talent for expressing anger. In his "Cleaning out My Closet" single, there are a couple of lines addressed to his mother, ("Wasn't it the reason you made that CD for me, Ma? So you could try to justify the way you treated me, Ma?"), and it is absolutely stunning how much bitterness he manages to squeeze into the one-syllable word, "Ma." And I'm watching my students watch him, and I compare the way I listen to an Eminem song and the way they listen to the same song, and I suddenly wish our school had metal detectors at the front gate.

West coast/East coast rappers say nothing to a poor boy from out in the county who is being promised everything via DirectTV but can't seem to actually get his hands on it in real life. Eminem, on the other hand, knows all about it. So, I guess I think that, yes, Eminem's success is because he's white, but not in the way that Aaron McGruder was suggesting.

Okay, it sounds like I want my student to all grow up and realize that they can live the good life because they're one step ahead because they're white and they should take advantage of it. But I'm not. I'm just a little confused as to how great a role class plays in the formulation of a power hierarchy. When does race overtake class and offer power? When does class erode race and disintegrate power?

What I really think, though, is just that I want my students to start doing their homework so I can quit worrying about them being unable to get a job so they can feed their kids and put a decent roof over their heads.