Softer Side of Keanu

Oh krist, now he's asking me for a copy of my Pilgrimage paper, and being all nice to me.

As Jon Stewart said to John McCain last year, "Don't make me love you!!"

How to dither-dather a woman who writes? Sincere praise on her writing and wanting a personal copy will do it every time. Yikes, I fell right into flattery pond.

So, now I have to figure out what to say to him when I walk a copy to his office.
How about, "So Keanu, how do I get an A in your class? You nit-picked my first paper, quibbled over syntax on my midterm, and took off one symbolic point from my latest paper that you actually liked. What gives? I got an A in a much harder anthropology class last term when I had to learn human genome 101 in 10 weeks. What's the deal?"

Or---just slink in and slip it into his mailbox cubby and bolt.
As a former boss lady and ex-administrator, I am just dying to tell him how to improve his teaching methods, but then the Kwan Yin compassionate lotus fairy sees him struggling and wishes I could offer some support like a colleague who's in the weeds with a group of cashier trainees. He asks the class a question on the reading assigned for that day, and there's all this restless silence in the classroom for what seems like minutes, until I can't stand it anymore and offer the answer. He turns from the board and realizes it was me. This can happen three or four times an hour, unless I just won't play along. Yesterday it was political history with the Iran-Iraq war and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, or which earlier anti-immigrant backlash occurred with which peoples in the early 1900s. And why?

Okay, so I don't have the student loan debt load (yet), years in the field on site with a trowel, multi-degrees and office in the department, but the guy is only a year older than I am and I just can't defer to him. He's more like a neighbor standing out in front of his house with a dead smoking lawnmower and you want to just hand him a cold beer and offer your weed whacker.

One more week of classes, one last exam, then it's all just a smudge on my transcripts, how I couldn't manage an A in a class in my major that was basically writing assignments with no math or human genomes or science. Little dings, all in a row.

But he talks about his dog all the time, so I know he's not just a total creep.
One more week of watching the doe-eyed nursing student in the front row bending over in short skirts to retrieve her bookbag and looking to see if he's noticing.

Class dismissed.

Weeding in the Rain

please read today's Poppalina

Washed my hands long enough to throw a load of clean clothes into the dryer, and check Poppalina, otherwise known as Shula in Australia, whom I adore and want to have a drink with someday. Okay, one of those swimming-pool sized mojitos complete with umbrellas and plastic jewel-colored monkeys hanging from the rim.

And pulling weeds in a misty rain rewards me with the complete 8" long withered roots of the freakin' dandelions and their cousins the thorny variety, and that is a Warm Fuzzy to we gardening types.

This has been a stiff term for me. It's almost over, no more Professor Keanu and astrophysics will return to being a hobby, thanks for all the software and the Hubble websites!

I got the job on campus with the bankers hours, and was beat tired after only the first week. Too funny. It will all blend in nicely with the rest of my life and classes, so I will sleep more, big deal. Having today off both work and school to make a a three day weekend was very restorative, hurling me out to the weed bed between loads of washing and chatting with neighbors, talking tomatoes. I added some borrowed mint varieties to the herb rock garden, cleared away some of the lambs ears obscuring the blooming thyme and blooming sages, and left space for the basils yet to be procured. My echinaceas came back, and now I'm thinking yarrow, both red and yellow. Portland Nursery again in my future. Another neighbor has some bronze fennel---wonder if he'd want some of these lambs ears? Another neighbor has some beautiful monarda, and Steven's getting rudebeckia. If it were up to me, I'd pull out all but one clump of the lambs ears and plant more lavenders, there are sweet white and pink varieties. A bunch of my mammoth sunflowers are emerging from the dirt, and four cucumber plants are ready to put in.

If we had a goat, these weeds would get eaten and recycled as fertilizer. I want to be an urban homesteader...

Hired-Up

My interview for work went well enough on Monday that I was offered the job on Friday. The job I was iffy about for more money, not the library job I was excited about for less.

So after mulling it over for a few hours, I decided to sign on and re-join the working class, take the plunge, and as Dr Strangelove would say, "How I stopped worrying (about $$$) and learned to love the bomb," or Job. Whatever. Being two terms into the student experience, and actually looking at graduation for Summer 2009, I am not as worried about being sucked into a work situation that I enable by making myself indispensable to my boss, then finding my feet captured by quick-curing cement into the foundation workings of the established business. I can balance things better now after the hiatus and back-to-school trail, and I'm actually thinking how higher income can help me out with some things, like modern dentistry and and the urban homesteading ideas germinating in my noggin.

This Spring Term was tougher on me than I'd have thought, the astro-physical strain was high, and all those many equation-analyzing hours would not have been available to cover a real job and still squeak out a decent grade for this degree-requirement class. It's somehow all working out, and when the hiring manager replied to my acceptance email, she said my current class schedule was perfect for their scheduling needs for now, and being term oriented, schedules are always readjusted to accommodate the students' classtimes. I like this. Going forward, I'll be packing together as many Anthropology classes into each term as I can and don't see anything ahead as brain-reconfiguring as teaching myself Trigonometry by doing forensics on equation fragments to determine cause of impossible results. All that effort will now go back into my major classes, and brainspace for learning a new workplace culture and software system.

And it is summer, after all. Finally picked up some plants for the garden yesterday morning, some hearty tomato starts at Fred Meyer's Founders Day sale, and those quaint forget-me-nots I've been craving since forever for that shady corner under the mock orange bush. In Michigan my grandparents had a pink version of it too, and the blue with some pink carpeted the shade under the huge lilac bushes by the rhubarb patch. The cheerful purple and yellow faces of johnny-jump-up pansies rounded it out as a border. They all reseeded and came back after every harsh Michigan winter. Slowly, but steadily, I am gaining ground in the ultimate conversion of this home into a facsimile of the family 1902 homestead that I loved so much growing up. Okay, a mix of that and the Bath Street house, the two old houses I hated to leave behind. We double Cancers are just a mess with this house business, I've surrendered completely to it and have much more peace now. It just is this way.

Four cucumber plants, five types of tomatoes, beans, peas, peppers, sunflowers, herbs, and now I'm thinking potatoes. A trip to the Limbo organic market for some specimens to let go spiky with sprouting eyes, to cut up and plant in a big pot like Kathy does, and where can lettuce fit in, and a bush soybean? Sprouts of Texas red grapefruit seeds are working in a shallow sushi tray and I started another avocado pit in water. These of course are hot climate dreams, or the beginnings of cultured trees in a conservatory to be built when the neighbors gather to re-claim the lot where Steven's house is. He still plays along that it's okay to have his house moved off the lot and donate it to charity, so his 'friendly' neighbors can converge on the plot and create the communal garden space with bamboo tea house I've been dreaming of. What a great sport.

I've Done a Bad Thing

Bad, as in thoughtless, careless, unwittingly mindless, self-absorbed happiness foot in mouth stupid.

The other day, while chatting with my gorgeous neighbor Steven, I realized I was going on and on in a bubbling brook of happiness sort of way, and upon hearing the actual words coming out of my mouth, I stopped, and had to apologize, in a very female sort of way.

It sounded like bragging, and I was horrified. "Steven, ohmigod, you do understand, right, that all of this wonderful school miracle good fortune that is surrounding me these days makes me pinch myself all the time in wonderment, I don't mean that I'm just so fucking fabulous, I am just in complete amazement after all those years of slogging in the B-store trenches and the 25 years of not being able to do this, that I'm giddy happy and---" and he cut me off.
"Of course my dear, and it is so nice to really talk with someone at length about good things going on, and I get it, I really do, you're genuinely happy and it's great! Don't worry about anything with this and me, okay?" What a generous pal he is. But it happened today with someone else, and after a comment they made off-handedly, I realized "Oh oh, oh no, I just meant to communicate that they shouldn't worry, things were improving and financially were on the upswing after some tough times, it wasn't meant as a boast, really!" Oh bloody hell, now I just have to sit quiet and say "Fine," when asked how school is going, limit it to "great!" and not reveal my amazement that it's all still happening, it isn't being yanked out from under me somehow, inexplicably, just stop there. Shit.

There is still this feeling of it all being unreal somehow, it can't last, it will get ripped away somehow like it did the last time, this thing that meant everything to me. It's unfair for me to assume people I know here in Portland would just know this about me, they haven't known me that long, they met me as a B-store drone, and so, okay, fine, you're finishing a degree, great, so shut up already. I can get carried away, but never ever meant to offend. Crap.

Of course, there is a volume of back-story about this, and I won't pour it all out here except to say that there was always a pattern of my academic achievements being sloughed off as no big deal, pipe down, go do your chores, don't act so big. So more unfinished business regarding school, as well as the plowing through the final credit hours. I'm just happy this is all happening, and I want to go all the way, and I don't want to be a jerk.

"--til the lady in the pantsuit says it is"

My girl is not winning the race and it's affecting me in a truly deep way, I feel very subdued. It's hard to explain, because I'm suffering from campaign fatigue like everyone else, and wanted it to be August 6 months ago already. She was ahead then, if I had only known what I was wishing for.

So many of my hopes were pinned on her winning, and of seeing her run against McCain, and the thrill of watching her inauguration as the first woman president of my country, I lived to see it, and I voted her in, and would probably cry watching the magnificent moment of her taking the oath, with Bill holding the bible tearing up himself, like he does. It had already all played out in my heart and after 8 years of Bush Purgatorio, 2009 was going to be off to such a great start.

So, now the re-grouping. It has been a high tide of many emotions, and my wave is now a mere line of bubbles in the sand, hissing into silence. Silly me, I let myself get carried up in it, all those years of feminism in my hair was now the real world. My satisfaction was tangible. She was my highest ambition coming true, liberal values and equality taking over at last! I feel kinda lost.

Of course, Barack Obama is another great candidate, another history-making moment to be alive and witnessing, and I am proud that we've reached this point, certainly. As candidates, they weren't that far apart, and I'm not a Democratic Party zealot, I go for the person more than the affiliation. But my heart isn't in it for him, he's not my guy. I'm not sending him any of my money, I'm tired of hearing about how he never was for the war, as if anyone but Bush/Cheney had a hard-on for American soldiers and Iraqi civilians being killed. That slant may sway the kids I go to school with, but to me it sounds empty, Obama wasn't even a Senator yet and wasn't in a position to even vote on it, so shut up already about it, it sounds lame. Inexperience speaks loudly for itself. But my disappointment is making me bitter. Barring some horrific October Surprise, I'll probably be voting for him, knowing he is gathering a SWAT team of movers and shakers that Hillary would have hired, so it may all even out some.

Besides, there's all those girls and young women who now take this new threshold as the New Reality Base, and will go on from here, and that does warm my heart. Always forward, no more Disney-style Neo-con Nostalgia for a Myth that never was real for the majority of us. I hope Obama exceeds my expectations and graciously moves us ahead, and shows the Republicans how it should be done. I like all the boxing gloves I see at Hillary rallies, and I wonder if she'll try again. As all women in the trenches know, you cannot quit, you cannot wimp out, you cannot whine or make excuses or do anything to appear weak and ineffectual. There's those sneering critics just waiting for a chance to gloat that "she couldn't take the heat!" The women pundits know why she hasn't quit, and sit there with their hands folded pretending to listen to the guys go on and on about it back and forth, and don't reveal the reason. But we know why. You cannot quit, ever.

Start of Porch Season

At last, ma cherie, it is time for the languid and curried hours of porch love---oh, how we have missed you, fickle mistress, during your endless stay in your sister Persephone's guest cottage in Hades, finally over until October.

Yet you taunt us in February, a lozenge of warmth from two until five on a Wednesday afternoon, only to flit off again with the giggle of a teenage girl--so cruel, yet so delicious. It helped me remember the winter sun in the tropics, also gold and cool, burnishing the world with an amber glow before suddenly slipping away behind a man-o-war cloud.

In March there were a few false starts, one splendid stretch on a Saturday afternoon that tanned the tops of my feet, and I succumbed to the decadence completely by dozing off for an hour or so. My anxiety was gently treated by these brief embraces and promises of an extended stay soon, perhaps with your next visit. My role as the porch priestess was to keep the watch for the first hint of clear blue skies after one pm, have some urgent reading material ready, some cold and refreshing liquid tribute accessible, and position the solar seating at the correct angle to the position of the sun. I take my duties seriously.

Finally, Enchanted April, as you began to venture away from your winter digs more frequently, dragging out those last damp goodbyes with the Hades', with some hail and sideways freezing rainy days tossed in just because you can, because your games always turn out so beautifully in May, because you know we can't help ourselves that we love you, tolerate the infidelity each fall, and will always make ready the best chambers in our hearts for you. That first day-long picnic with you in May, those endless warm days in June reading poetry from the inside of my eyelids to you while I hover in the still blue air---I live for this, and you know it.

Why do I fight you? So silly of me, but there is work for me to do, tasks of living with my feet on the ground that must be done, reading and cleaning and working for that coin and paper that mean so much down here. But you don't understand, you are the ultimate source of energy, of light, what makes everything else go.

I know it. And left the tropics in spite of it, and there are rare times when I remember that day of my first summer there, in early July, when the humidity was so high, and I had no shadow standing by that giant fuschia bouganvilla. I looked around and the sky was bleached white, there was no blue, yet no clouds at all, the light was coming from right over my head and pressed down like a white-hot anvil, the only shadows were lying deep under a giant banyan grove across the white coral dirt alley. There wasn't even a breath of air or breeze, the palm fronds hung heavy and slack like sweaty hands. Nothing moved, the white heat shimmered and I could feel my bones melting. Complete seduction, I was now forever a servant to the rays of the sun and follower of the changing light.

Heliocentric

Whatever I'm doing, whenever it is, if there's a sustained sunbreak, I drop my piddling little task and bolt for the outside. It's just time for winter to be finally over, and time to sit on the porch in something other than black solar-magnet clothes to ward off the chill while waiting for the blaze.

How funny is it that in Astronomy class we are studying the Sun, being tantalized by films of solar flares, boiling radiance of the photosphere, waving heat coronas in eclipse---and I get to walk home from the bus in sideways frozen rain. Brrrr.

The astonishing thing lately is that I am starting to begin to understand some of this trigonometry.
The calculator I bought has helped, and the professor is focusing more on the 'what' instead of the 'how', but neat pieces of this whole snarl of Greek letters, exponents and subsets are falling into place. Slowly, I should add, so as not to challenge the Math Gods with my arrogance.

There are all these websites to visit with animations of a full day's Sun rotation, seeing sunspot frequency, the granulations of convection cells rising to the surface and cooling (to 5 million degrees Kelvin) and sinking back under the surface to be reheated. In the presentation, there are all these cooking and stove analogies, and who knew that neutrinos came in three flavors?
During the break after the first hour of class, I saw my face in the ladies room mirror, and I looked sunburned.

This is the official Midterm week, and I just found out today I am getting an aid package for the summer term that starts the end of June. It's what I was hoping would work out, to stay at it and make up for some of all the lost time. Hopefully, there's going to be something offered that I want to take, now that I'm committed. Until the summer schedule is posted, I hover in the mysterious cloud of unknowing. Flirting with the sun.