High Noon

Twelve page paper due tomorrow, so here I show up, if only to stall long enough to say I have found some great ideas for the new blog format, and that two compressed summer term classes at once is the height of stupidity.  Never again, unless I'm not working and drive instead of bus it.

Hopefully, I will still be able to put words together after today (in English).

For some reason, FaceBook scares me.  Like that "SecondLife" online reality game.  Creepy. 

Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control---

Avoidance is like a slow poison---building and building, greater and greater tolerance of it, now I've reached the point of there being no return to it, I cannot think about this now I have a 1000 word essay to write (and start even thinking about) and post before midnight, and it's now 9:30pm OMG.

Before my gorgeous friend Steven left on a long trip, he told me that re-defining is always my choice at anytime, and whatever feels outgrown or used up can be gently set aside or flung to high heaven.  I was sitting in his darkened living room while he washed dishes in his Calvin briefs, and we were both pretending that he wasn't leaving town for almost forever in a day or two, and this was just another chat, la la la la la.  

I told him I needed to change the whole blog idea now, or I was going to just stop doing it.

So much has shifted, things are so different, my ideas need a new vessel.  And while I was making up my mind, it was ground to a complete halt.  He kept washing, now doing the pots and pans, and said that he felt I needed to blast open the whole thing to incorporate more writing and not be so tied to a place or theme.

"Honey, we read blogs because we want to know about this amazing person writing them, and are your own favorite bloggers really tied to one specific theme?  Didn't you stumble on them and then marveled at their writing and personality, and now read whatever they want to post?"

"Well, yeah, completely.  But there had to be a thread of a theme that helped me find them in the first place...right?"

"Just write it, tell your friends to link to their friends with your address, it will get around."

I went home on that afternoon and sat looking at my new MacBook, pristine, glistening, fully charged with at least 5 hours of typing life, and knew I had to make a move.  Once I got caught up with my Summer Term reading and writing assignments, and had a chance to think about anything other than school.  Okay, so I'm barely caught up, but decided tonight that I would at least draw a line in the sand saying that this initial phase of blogging that began with the End of the B-store Life has drawn to a comfortable close.  The transition is complete.  I'm simmering some ideas and concepts to start a new blog focusing much more on writing (I think) and will most likely dive into it after exams are done mid-month.  All the doors and windows will be thrown open and anything may look appropriate to me to launch into.  I'll most likely link to it from here, in case anyone wants to try something new.  

Think Like a Mediterranean

First there was the lovely Friday evening beer cafe with the group known as 'the usual suspects', followed by the most sublime Thai garlic eggplant chicken I think I've ever had.  Celebration #1.

Saturday was a splendid day spent outdoors, ending with an another lovely evening spent with some new kids in town going over the best of David Sedaris' audio works, sipping hot coffee and cognac around a big table in the low orange mood lights.  Celebration #2.

Sunday I spent about three or four hours in the strong hot sun with my neighbors' free-ranging chickens acting like housecats and keeping the weeds down.  Other than allowing myself to get much too dehydrated, it was pure Eden, glowing down into sunset and porch time til after 10.

Spring Term 2008 is over, put to bed, now a stack of course materials and textbooks in my living room, and the anxiously awaited grades online tomorrow.  No lingering regrets this time, I am glad to wrap this term up, so I can go back to focusing on why I'm back in school in the first place; to savor the whole experience, not hoping it's over as soon as possible.  Like being washed up on Trigonometry Island with just a box of damp matches.

Summer Term is one big Time Machine, Oregon history and two Ancient Greek Civilization classes to finish out my transfer student requirements.  I've seen the syllabus for one 400-level class and there's a 12 page research paper due with a pre-approval bibliography submission.  What have I done?  The Fall Term will finish off the Greeks and bring in the Egyptians, Sumerians and pre-Greek Macedonians.  What does any of this have to do with anthropology?

Well---not much really, but I needed some electives to fill out, and there weren't many anth. classes offered this summer, most of the department is going to be doing field work in the archaeology aspect of the field, and I needed to stick around to work and stay in school.  Maybe next year.

Needing to stay disciplined to take an online class should prove a challenge, I've never taken one before that wasn't some kind of corporate training of brief duration.  So this slides right in to the porch time, why not, better than caged in a classroom from 3:30 on every afternoon for a month.  Out on the porch, laptop and books and pretending my tomatoes are really growing and becoming my nectar and ambrosial lunch. 

Can't discuss tomatoes now, I wasn't planing on crying this early in the day.

Summer Begins (dress rehearsal)

And I'm in the front row, on my porch, doing the last weekend of Astronomy homework EVER, and trying to get some solar remedial treatment for my head and chest cold. Alas, it is breezy and in the low 60s, a tad chilly to be in this tanktop and shorts, but I just keep moving into the widening band of sun.

It feels like I've been somewhere, even to me, like Spring Term was some sort of season on Survivor, a show I don't even watch. And I'm still on the island, somehow, holding the soggy torch and looking very pitiful. Sort of how my tomato plants look right now, waiting for the heat and sun, limping along, in their fixed tomato plant way. When we were through with April, I was happy to be done with it and don't need a three week nostalgic rehash of it in June.

Almost 4pm and the wind is still chilly, tarnation! Perhaps I should put the books and notes away, to show the proper sunshine readiness, to call in the blazing rays.

My neighbors' raised bed gardens are doing so much better than ours, with their fresh black sifted organic soils from Portland Nursery, and more shelter from the wind than ours. The inches of new mulch look great still, the herbs and roses look splendid, the lavender and lamb's ears are purple as far as the lot line. Next weekend, when exams and work are done for the week, I will come out here and make up for all the lost time I spent studying and writing papers for Keanu.
Who I am not giving a copy of my paper to after all. What if I wind up being a TA in the department and he's got students reading my paper on a sensitive chapter of my life? Eeww.
It's flattering and all, but I'm already over that and experiencing the relief of being done with his class and all the folderal of the dynamics in there.

Besides, he revealed that his real full-time job is being a writer and editor for something or some place, and this is just his part time gig, jacking people around in the name of anthropology.

This only raised my hackles some more. That's why he was grading my syntax and not the substance of my anthropology work. Putz! But I've moved on. Really.

Sure, this is merely stalling, taking a break from the second half of the dreaded-A practice exam. My head feels like a skewered cork you found under your refrigerator from a previous tenant, the dry coughing has blown my eardrums back and forth too many times to be good. "All I wanna do is have some sun..."

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.