Little Happinesses

man oh man

2012-03-01T21:37:00.002-08:00

Have I mentioned recently that I'm the luckiest stasia in the world?

I haven't? Well, pardon this self-indulgent post;)

Despite the glorious sunshine that kicked this week off, I woke up this morning to a dusting of snow--nothing stuck to the roads, but a lovely covering on the grass, neighbor's roofs, some trees. As James and I biked to PSU together, him for work and me for my geography class, the sun was starting to shine, and we could see the West Hills all sparkly with snow between the gleaming buildings of downtown Portland. Our breath was billowy and white around our heads, and we wore our biggest snow gloves; the cold made me feel alive and alert.

After class, I usually go straight to work at the zoo. But this week our old roommate is in town, and he wanted to see the Japanese garden. Since I go right past it on my way up the hill, since I'm a member and can get him in for free, since I love the Japanese garden, since my work time at the zoo is somewhat flexible, I met him up there after class and we got a rare treat of seeing the garden under snow. The sun out was melting it quickly and it fell around us like rain. Despite being nearly frozen stiff by the time we left, it was amazing.

And then, the zoo, the loveliest job in the world, working with awesome teens, teaching little kids about nature, getting to do awesome things like go out and collect all kinds of winter twigs to bring to classes so kids can learn about buds and what plants do in the winter... Have I mentioned I love this job? And even better, when I leave it now, even at 6, it's not dark out yet. Every day is a little bit lighter, a little bit more springy. It's still a ways away yet, but I've got the taste of long summer evenings, of riding my bike into the never-ending evening, of being outside as much as humanely possible...

Life in Portland is so good, and I'm so grateful.

future fresh veggies!

2012-02-24T12:50:00.002-08:00

After having talked about it for several years now, James and I finally joined a CSA this year!

What that means, for you noninitiated, is that we joined something called Community Supported Agriculture: we sent a check to Love Farm Organics, a cute little farm not too far away in Forest Grove, and in return, during the harvest season, we can expect 24 weeks of fresh veggie and fruit baskets delivered to a pickup location not four blocks from our house.

Our upfront check, several months before we actually see any food, allows the farm some initial cash with which to start their crops; then, as the crops are ready, everyone who put up money at the beginning shares in the harvest. It's a way to spread the risk and benefits of farming out amongst many people, so that it's not just the little bitty farmer who gets screwed if the weather is bad this year. It also lets them know, should they end up with tons of produce, that they already have a home for it.

We've never tried it before because we kind of like choosing the different vegetables and fruits we want every week instead of just trying to figure out how to use what happened to be picked by one particular farm--but I think it's time to try it out. This will be the quintessential experiment in eating exactly what's ripe in our climate in any given week. I'm excited!

And I'm excited to help support a farm that's only about 35 miles away from our house, run by people who sounded oh so cute over the phone. I think this is going to be good:)

quite right

2012-02-11T22:08:00.000-08:00

I just finished Island, by Aldous Huxley (yep, that's right, the Brave New World fellow), and can't help but share a little gem of it.

The book is about an island, Pala, that has remained separate from the rest of the industrializing/globalizing world, and in doing so has followed a different path that leads to a basically utopian society. It's pretty good. But I loved this (come on, read it for real. I know people skip over quotes, but this one is good, I promise!):

"You [the people of Pala] seemed to have solved your economic problems pretty successfully."

"Solving them wasn't difficult. To begin with, we never allowed ourselves to produce more children than we could feed, clothe, house, and educate into something like full humanity. Not being overpopulated, we have plenty. But, although we have plenty, we've managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to--the temptation to overconsume. We don't give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six times as much saturated fat as we need. We don't hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set. And finally we don't spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for World War III or even World War's baby brother, Local War MMMCCCXXXIII. Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence--those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse."

Let's keep in mind that this was written in 1962. This is something I've been thinking a lot about because of the geography class I'm taking right now too: it's absolutely nuts how much the problems we talk about now are the SAME EXACT problems people were talking about decades ago. You'd think we'd get somewhere on them.

But problems of society aside, it's a pretty rad book. And nice to read something that, though an indictment of Western society, also presents the possibility of a positive alternative for once, doesn't just leave us with all doom and gloom. Nice job, Mr Huxley!:)

let the rain fall down

2012-01-30T09:39:00.001-08:00

I may appreciate this more today because it's actually sunny, but I'm getting a huge kick out of this song:

Portlandtown USA

Check it out! Maybe I won't be the only one with it stuck in my head:)

Non-objective reasons why you should not shop at Whole Foods

2012-01-28T17:28:00.000-08:00

Aside from being one of my favorite places in the world, the Hollywood Farmers Market is also objectively (really, objectively:) a really good thing to have in this world. Every week during most of the year, and now every other week in winter, it brings in fresh produce from farms near Portland and makes it available for purchase--good for farmers; good for urban shoppers. It has a Fresh Funds matching program so that people dependent on food stamps can double their purchasing power for fresh fruits and veggies. It brings the community together through volunteer labor, since the success of every market depends on people helping set it up, break it down, and take care of it while it's running. It truly brings the neighborhood together, in one of the most wholesome ways I can think of.

And then there's Whole Foods. There's a big one that opened down the street from us a few years ago, which brought with it what we thought might be some pretty cool options. Since Whole Foods purports to "care about our communities" as well as provide the "highest quality natural and organic products available" (that's what their website "values" section says, anyway), it seems like a good partnership, right? We have some similar stated values about natural products, one of our bigger farmers even sells to Whole Foods during the summer...we could certainly form some kind of mutually beneficial partnership, right?

We've advanced many opportunities over the last few years. The biggest one I worked on was composting, trying to get them to take the compost we generate during 5 hours a week of market time and then putting up signs thanking them for it, or whatever they thought was appropriate. (Since we don't have a permanent market site, we don't have our own site for compost collection, thus putting us in a weird position of having to depend on other people for it.) But we've tried many other tacks as well: perhaps they could help support our Fresh Funds program. Perhaps we could both put up signs on the produce we share, "available during the week at Whole Foods" and "find us at the Hollywood Farmers Market on Saturdays." There's a whole list of ways we tried to engage Whole Foods in some form of collective community-building and collaboration.

We went back and forth with them for a l.o.n.g time about collaborating, and essentially got the giant run-around. "Oh, we have to check with our team." "Oh, I don't know, we have to see if it fits into our values." "Oh, I don't know if we have the capacity." "Oh, I don't know, you'll have to ask this other person." "Oh, I don't know if that's a good fit for us right now." And on and on and on, for anything we thought to ever talk to them about.

Until now, when Whole Foods is suddenly trying to develop their own market on Saturdays. Now, all of a sudden, our customer base is valuable to them. Now, all of a sudden, they care about the community because it's full of potential shoppers that we can help get in their doors. Now, they want to help us with composting and give us more vendor stall space near their store because now, it will help them make more money. Now that they want to make their own market, they want to be our friend.

It makes me perhaps irrationally angry, mostly because it strikes me as so counterfeit. I mean, I know that if you're a business, you generally do what seems best for you, and that includes doing the things that can make you more money. But I can't help but feel that relationship-building is a large part of that. You can't just treat someone like shit for the whole time you've been around, then suddenly turn around a try to be nice when you need something. And you especially can't do that under the guise of trying to build community, when really what you're trying to build is your own bottom line.

In the meantime, Grocery Outlet, with very few (if any) ulterior motives, lets us use their parking lot every single week to house our market, takes our trash for us every single week, even puts happy little signs about us on their marquee, without us asking. They do it because they're wonderful people and they care about their neighborhood, even if our market surveys show that very few people who shop at the market go to Grocery Outlet on market day. They're just nice, and they're willing to share their extra space, or their extra garbage capacity, in a way that is apparently totally alien to Whole Foods.

So yeah. None of these are objective reasons why you should avoid Whole Foods (though I could find those too--the money doesn't stay in the community, they're hugely anti-union, they don't really support small farmers like they pretend to, their management won't acknowledge the possibility of global climate change, etc. etc). But it's just one more reason I personally plan to avoid them. Plus, in a city with a whole bunch of other great grocery options, why would I support a store where the profit goes back to Texas? Or a store who jerks around small nonprofits like the farmers market for their own benefit? Not that I went to Whole Foods that much anyway, but now I'm definitely done.

2012. And books.

2012-01-17T20:45:00.001-08:00

While I firmly believe that 2012 is going to be a great year, it's gotten off to a somewhat rocky start. Or maybe an ambivalent start, in the sense of encompassing both one thing and its opposite.

On the one hand, I am SO CRAZY EXCITED for all the stuff I'm starting out with: my job at the zoo, which is fantastic, both the Master Gardening class and a geography class at PSU that I think is going to be great, and volunteering with my lovely friend in his 7th grade classroom. Not to mention all the other great things about life, like living in Portland, life-sharing with James, more bike clubs coming up in the spring, and on and on.

On the other hand, since James and I got back from Honduras, I've been sick not once but twice, which puts quite a damper on my general enjoyment of life. I hate being sick! Argh! I hate being cooped up in our house, I hate sleeping all day, I do love soup but only to a point. Most of all, I hate how it challenges my self-perception of being a robust and healthy human being. heh. How can I be smugly self-satisfied about how healthy I am if I keep fricken getting sick?

Of course, even that has a silver lining, which is that I've had a whooooole lot of time to read. A good thing, since I'm woefully behind on reading 100 books in a year. It's hard reading two books a week! I should, according to the totally arbitrary confines I've set for myself, be finishing my 30th book this week, though I just now finished my 25th... Eh, I guess that's not woefully behind. And, whatever, like I said, it's a totally arbitrary and self-imposed thing that I won't stress out too much about. But it's still so satisfying to knock out a bunch of books quickly, especially when there's not much else you're doing with your life at the moment except for napping on the couch and dousing your forehead with wet washrags.

Anyway. Does anyone have any great recommendations for classics to read? I will definitely read something by John Steinbeck in the near future, but any other thoughts? That's the category I'm having the hardest time with.

Again, if you want to see the books I've got going so far, you can scope out my goodreads page. I think you can see it without being a friend or whatever they call it there, though let me know if not. And give me some thoughts about classics!:) It's not like I'm doing anything else over here at the moment:)

planty

2012-01-06T20:09:00.000-08:00

I started a new project last week: master gardening! It's going to be an 11-week class from the Oregon State University extension service in which I learn a humongous amount about horticulture--botany, plant propagation, water and soil quality, vegetable gardening, houseplants, landscape plants, pest management and mitigating plant disease, basic entomology, sustainable weed management, stuff about pesticides and herbicides and on and on and on. It's going to be amazing.

But the best part about it isn't even the knowledge I'm sure will be forthcoming. It's the system in which that knowledge is shared, a system much like the one in which I got all that amazing naturalist training last year. It works like this: people spend a lot of time teaching you a whole bunch about something, with the understanding that then you'll put into practice what you've learned and help teach it to others. You get the training in return for future volunteering you promise to do, sort of like paying your new knowledge forward.

I'm so into this kind of thing. For one, it makes learning tangible. You learn something, then you do it; I get trained as a naturalist, then I work as a naturalist, I get gardening knowledge, then I use gardening knowledge. Also, I like the idea of service as a replacement for money. I do have to pay for this Master Gardening class, but it's half the price if you do the volunteer internship afterward. And I didn't have to pay for the naturalist training at all, at least not in terms of money. I love the idea of removing knowledge from the realm of dollars--it makes it something I can acquire through service and giving back to my community, not something that comes as a privilege of my paycheck.

I guess this is all part of a larger love of volunteering, of coming together with people in my community to create something that wasn't there before...but more about that another time:) For now, bring on the gardening!:)

Poland!

2011-12-09T23:49:00.000-08:00

So, as some of you may know, I recently went to Poland with my mom, my brother, and my brother's godfather. Actually, I guess we didn't all go together (in fact, we all got there on different days), but we met up there, and spent a week together exploring Krakow in the south, Gdynia and Gdansk in the north, Lodz (where Alex had a speaking engagement) in the middle.

Being November, and given that it turns out Poland is pretty far north, it was quite cold. And it got dark rather early (think 3:30 or so). BUT the treat for me was that at least it wasn't raining like I'm used to in Portland, AND it was pretty sweet to play in a whole new country. Even if I didn't understand anything going on around me (actually, I kind of like that, just in the sense that it reminds me that my little comfortable Portland slice of the world is such a tiny, tiny portion of reality).

It's funny, too, to be somewhere where history is so... historical. I mean, nowhere in the US can you walk into a cathedral that's been standing since the 1300s. We've got our own kind of history, but it was fun in Poland to, say, go see the college where Copernicus went to school:

And the hotel we stayed at in Krakow was just a ten-minute walk from the old Wawel Castle (which apparently is worthy of nighttime illumination):

Anyway. For more pictures and ridiculous captions, feel free to check out the new Poland album on my Picasa page (for that matter, check out any other pictures you want, too:)

In just a few days, James and I are off to Honduras for a cousin's wedding, too--so stay tuned for more travel! Yay!:)

thanksyness

2011-12-04T22:15:00.001-08:00

Vegan thanksgiving at our house!!

For real Thanksgiving, we were in Sacramento with our families, but now that we're back in Portland, we hosted a super rad post-thanksgiving thanksgiving at our house. It gave us an excuse not only to make a whole bunch of vegan holidayish food, something we've been fantasizing about, but also to hang out with a whole bunch of our favorite people (something else we've been fantasizing about:)

Best idea ever! We cooked up a veritable feast of pot pie, stuffing, cranberry sauce, roasted veggies, mashed potatoes (both purple and white potatoes, swirled together in James' artistic potato yin-yang creation), fudge, and pumpkin pie bites--all vegan and made from scratch, mind you, though we didn't make our own bread for the stuffing, and I guess we cheated by using canned pumpkin instead of real. But it was all pretty fricken delicious, and with the addition of gravy that my boss made from mushrooms she picked herself, to pie and brussels sprouts and various beverages from other lovely guests, we had a pretty classy feast.

The best part, though, was all the people. I sometimes feel like I've collected friends from so many different parts of life that I don't really have a real group of them anymore. Or rather, even though I know a lot of really awesome people, since most of them don't know each other I lack that sort of group-friend-collective that you have when your friends are also friends with each other. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but there's something about knowing that your friends' lives are all intertwined, that you can talk to one friend and know it'll get around to your other friends as well since they're part of this meshed-up web around you.

My web is much more like a lot of exclusive relationships: I may have a lot of lines radiating outward from me, but they don't intersect with each other. (Man, if I could just draw this out instead of type it, it would be a lot easier.) But this weekend was awesome because it threw a whole bunch of people from different parts of my life together and mixed them up in a way that made me feel much more coherent. Looking around the room, I could see James, of course, and some old co-workers from my teaching days (heh), and some co-workers from the Community Cycling Center, my boss from the zoo, a woman I know from my naturalist volunteering, some running buddies, some dear friends from college, and old roommate... all sorts of random people, but most of my favorite random people. And putting them all together in a room (with some delicious vegan food) just reinforced to me how amazing all these people are, and how crazy lucky I am to have them all in my life.

My world is full of lovely people, and this weekend, we had about twenty of them in our house. With food. Getting along with each other and chatting like they were old friends. How much better than that can you get? :)

Book #6

2011-10-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

Just a little gem from one of my literary wanderings:

Consider four of the most enduring intellects to have worked and written in the English language: Abraham Lincoln, Fredrick Douglass, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. They were all educated similarly, but perhaps not how you'd think. Each received little or no formal schooling. Essentially self-educated in an era when self-education meant reading, they rose to eminence by virtue of the skills and knowledge their private reading taught them.

I am not suggesting that their educations provide a model of what education should be. Still, they remind us of the almost unlimited capacity of diligent reading to teach. For all four of these exceptional people and many others, "mere" reading was sufficient to foster and develop rare genius. And as for the rest of us, we are all self-educated, to some degree or another, by virtue of the reading we have done.

-Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion

Regardless of whether Lincoln, Douglass, Austen, and Dickens are really the four most enduring intellectuals of the English language, the part about self-education wrought of reading made me smile. Man, I'm going to be so smart by the end of this hundred-book year! heh.

(ps: again, find more books and thoughts about books on Goodreads. And keep those recommendations coming!:)

trashing the trash

2011-10-23T22:14:00.001-07:00

That's right. We're going to do it. After about a year of having our garbage picked up only once a month, we're now going to cancel our garbage service altogether.

Here's how it works: we'll still have to pay for recycling and green waste/compost (Portland will now accept kitchen scraps and compostable food containers in the green waste!), but we won't pay for garbage.

Of course, even though we try to be really, really good about avoiding packaging and waste, inevitably we will create some landfill-bound trash. When we really need it, then, we can call for a garbage pick-up, which will cost $8. That way, we're incentivized to create as little trash as humanly possible, since the less we create, the less we pay. As long as we go for at least two months without needing someone to pick up our trash, which shouldn't be too hard for us, it's cost-effective to pay per pickup.

I'm psyched. And I hope that the garbageless option is making other people rethink their waste, too. It's awesome that it's an option here to pay for only as much garbage as you create. I fricken love this city.

Goodreads

2011-10-12T23:21:00.001-07:00

By the way, for those of you who aren't familiar with it: on ye olde internet there's a site called Goodreads that's a sort of online library/record-keeping/recommendation-helping/literary social networking amalgamation that I've been sort of using for a while. It basically helps you keep track of what you've read, rate it, review it, whatever, and see what your friends are reading... I've gotten lots of good recommendations lately just by looking at what people I like are reading (thanks, goodreads friends!:)

I'll be the first to admit I've used it rather haphazardly since I signed up for it, but I'm trying to use it now to help manage these 100 future books of mine. I'm also trying to at least jot down a few thoughts about what I've read there.

So if you're interested, check it out. It'll probably be a much more comprehensive picture of my progress than this blog. You can find me here. Check it out and keep helping me figure out what to read!:)

a marathon, not a sprint

2011-10-12T23:04:00.000-07:00

I have to keep reminding myself that reading all these books in the next year is going to happen in exactly that: the next year. Not the next few days.

But as with anything I start, I feel an immense, immediate pressure to do everything now. Thus it was that not 10 pages into The Tipping Point, my first book of the lot, I found myself unable to focus on what I was reading, instead wondering "how many pages do I have left now? Now? Am I going to have enough time to read this? Should I be reading faster?"

Luckily, I was able to focus, finally--mostly by reminding myself of what I'm typing now. This is a marathon, not a sprint. It's like putting my bike in a super low gear to churn out a 20-mile hill, settling in for the long haul. It's like eating healthy--some days, you eat cookies anyway, but hopefully you still make good choices over the long run. It's something that happens over time, not all at once.

Once I decide to do something, I like it to happen now. So in some sense, I think this experiment will be good for me, for reminding me that some things take time, pacing, patience. 100 books will happen. Over time.

That being said, I finished The Tipping Point and am onto Catching Fire, the second of the Hunger Games triology. I read the first book when I was back in Sacramento last time and noticed my brother had it in his room; I couldn't resist putting the second one into my young adult category. Though it might be hard to wait for another year before I read the third one. I may need to read 101 books in the next year:)

books, books, books

2011-10-05T10:47:00.001-07:00

hi guys!

I'm about to embark on a reading journey of epic proportions and I need your help!

James' cousin alerted me to this 10-10-10 challenge: read 10 different books, by 10 different authors, in 10 different categories/genres, for a total of 100 books in a year. His cousin started on October 10 (heh, get it? 10/10/10:) and gave herself until Oct 10 of this year to finish them all. Being the crazy reader that she is, she finished early (and wrote about it here and here), thus inspiring me to give it a try. The somewhat artificial nature of the challenge is, I think, a good way to read a bunch of books that are outside of my general comfort zone, and I'm psyched about it.

So starting in 5 days, I will attempt the harrowing journey through 100 different authors in 365 days. (Yikes! When I write it out like that, it sounds hard!:)

Here's where I need your help. 100 is a lot of books, and even though I have quite the book queue built up on my own, I anticipate needing a lot of recommendations. Especially because many of the categories I came up with are categories that I don't generally read when I'm just picking books out for the fun of it. So I'm counting on you, dear readers, as well as all of my various resources, to help me find 100 quality books:)

The categories I chose for myself are, in no particular order:

-classics I haven't read yet
-young adult
-sci fi/fantasy
-nonfiction
-short stories
-auto/biography
-graphic novel
-African authors
-en otros idiomas (either Spanish or French)
-my choice

Know of any great classics? Any great nonfiction or biographies? Short story collections? Easy books I can read in Spanish or French? (Harry Potter is about the limit of my abilities there). Graphic novels that won't offend me with gratuitous violence? Please let me know, either in the comments here or via email. I can't promise I'll read all your recommendations, of course, but with 10 books for each category and very little time to read them, chances are good I'll take you up on it:)

Bring it on!:)

from the front lines of work

2011-06-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

One of the teens I work with today told me that she was going to start calling me "Ms. H." --not because I'm actually Ms. Honnold, but by virtue of my veganism and who knows what else, she has ascertained that I'm a giant hippie. But "Ms Hippie" is too weird, she said, so Ms H it is.

I'm curious what, exactly, makes her think I'm a hippie. I've only been at this job for a month or so, and and I've not been super vocal about any sort of veganism, leg-hairiness, car-lessness, or any other vestige of overt hippiness. I'm not sure I've even actually definitively said I don't eat meat. So I'm curious what it is, in my simple fact of existing, that makes me scream hippie.

Either way, I'm not too sad about it. heh. If she wants to call me a hippie, awesome. Maybe it'll inspire me to finally get some damn chickens for my yard:)

evening ruminations

2011-05-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting on our porch listening to the evening birds and watching the sunset sunlight turn our neighbor's flowering trees an impossible shade of pink. The traffic on nearby Division Street is a soft lullaby, undulating waves of tires on asphalt. Every so often, an airplane makes its slow arc overhead, leaving an expanding trail through thinly-stretched tufts of clouds. The sky is a template of pale blue. Everything is peaceful, soft, like the edges of life are blurred and wrap around me like a comfortable quilt.

I want to pull it all around me, cozy up to its stitches. I want to breathe deeply and slowly, letting the evening air fill my lungs with outdoors. I want to close my eyes and dissolve into the sounds that surround me, let my molecules drift away on the gentle breeze before they reconvene into a whole. I want to be alive to every sensation.

On an evening like tonight, I am so glad to be sitting on my porch in the midst of it all.

ode to bitty honnold

2011-04-22T10:26:00.000-07:00

Okay, okay. I try not to do this because I feel like he gets enough attention without me chiming in, but I sure am proud of my little bitty bro:

Maybe it's lame to say so with a picture of him on Nat Geo, since I'm proud of him regardless of whether anyone else recognizes him or not, but this picture is just so priceless. aw.

Anyway. Way to go, bitty Honnold! Now don't let it get to your head, punk;)

[edit 10/10/11: sorry, I took off the picture cuz I was sketched out about people I don't know downloading it.]

long time no see!

2011-04-07T21:33:00.000-07:00

Hmm.. it's been a while, huh? I guess I've sort of been taking an unplanned break from the bloggy world while life picked up a little: I started two new jobs, both of which are fantastic, and am taking some classes at Portland State. Plus there's all this volunteering stuff that I love and don't want to drop, even though I have much less time now. So I've been busy, and saving my writing for my real journal and my classes.

But you know what's awesome? Even though I feel really busy all of a sudden, it's fricken fantastic. I don't really even know how best to describe this except to say that even though I haven't been getting home until almost 9 on some days, every single thing that I have going on right now is something that I chose to do because I love it. I'm taking classes because they're interesting and stimulating, because they push me to learn. I'm teaching Bike Club, which is phenomenal, because I love bikes and kids and teaching, even more so when I can have them all at once. I've still got the farmer's market board stuff going on. I'm learning so much about birds and the natural world with Audubon and all this other naturalist stuff. I've been running, biking... I don't want to just make a list or anything, but every single fricken thing in my life right now feels like it's there because I want it to be, because it brings me joy and fulfillment and purpose. It's amazing.

This is why I left teaching, to find this way of living. I'm happy, fulfilled. And busy--but, so far, in the best of ways:)

PS

2011-03-02T17:26:00.000-08:00

Don't forget about my other blog, CarFreeRambles. I've been posting over there much more, so even though it's not as life-and-times-of-stasia as this one, it's still fun! heh. At least, I think so!:)

insomnia

2011-02-16T23:28:00.000-08:00

I can't sleep. Despite the fact that it's 11:30, despite the fact that I got in bed when I felt tired an hour and a half ago.

Tonight I feel like the loneliest person in the world. Which is entirely ridiculous, I know, I just feel so...blah. I'm not sure why. I tried to go through this all in my journal earlier, because I don't really understand myself right now. There is so much that's good and exciting about life, and yet today and yesterday I have had such a hard time being psyched. It might be an unemployment-induced torpor, I'm not sure--you know, feeling useless because you're not being productive or something. But it's not like I don't have stuff going on. I'm volunteering at twenty million different places (slight exaggeration;), I'm learning exciting new things, I have all this stuff I want to work on, and yet the activation energy required to start any of it today--or maintain it once started--has felt enormous, insurmountable.

It's possible that I'm getting sick or something. Or that I haven't run or for-real exercised for the last three days and am just in some sort of endorphin withdrawal. Whatever it is, I don't like it. I don't like this odd and hugely uncharacteristic feeling of lassitude, of ennui, of boredom with life. (Though I do like those words!:) And it's funny because if I sit down, like I did just now, to think of all the great, amazing things I've got going on, there are lots. So why am I here on my computer at 11:36 now, spilling my guts because I can't sleep and I don't know what else to do with myself?

Heh. I'm going to think I'm such a pathetic crazy person tomorrow if I actually post this. But I guess I will, just for the sake of perspective. It's balance, I guess: without sadness, happiness is not as meaningful; without stupid pathetic posts, the ones where all I do is fricken spout about how happy I am don't seem as awesome;)

Food field trip!

2011-02-14T12:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, James and I took a food field trip. That is, we went to this super huge Asian grocery store/mall not too far away from our house. I'd never been there, so we figured we'd take a trip to see what we could find (and also purportedly to look for the tofu pouches with which to make inari sushi).

It was amazing! We came home with a few things that I'm excited to figure out how to use. The first is lotus root (follow the link for a picture). It's like ginger in that it's the rhizome (the root, basically) of the lotus plan, but I guess it behaves in cooking sort of like a starchy veggie or a potato. I'm not sure what we'll do with it yet, but I'm psyched to try!

We also grabbed some ginkgo nuts. Did you even know that ginkgo trees had nuts? I didn't. (Though only the female trees produce nuts, I learned, so maybe I've only ever seen the male trees?) Since we got home, I've also learned that ginkgo nuts have a smell comparable to "rancid butter" (I don't know yet, since I haven't opened the package), but apparently they're still good. heh. I guess if you roast them, they're slightly sweet, or they're good in soups or to add texture to other dishes. We'll see. Again, I'm excited for the culinary exploration.

Even though we happened upon this food field trip sort of on a whim, I think it's a good idea to take a trip to a different store every once in a while--preferably one that has food you've never heard of. It's refreshing to be put back in my place: sure, I can find my way around a kitchen, but there is SO MUCH food in the world that I've never even heard of, much less know how to cook with. I like that reminder that the world is much, much bigger than my little portion of it.

branching out

2011-01-18T22:02:00.001-08:00

Not to cheat on blogger or anything, but I've been working on a new project. I decided there were a few things I wanted:

1. To own my own content (hence a move away from blogger)

2. To try out a more thematic blog

3. To have more stuff available on my blog--different pages and all

And some other stuff. Anyway, I'm still in the stages of figuring out what I want it to be exactly, but I'm ready for people to look at it and give me feedback. A lot of the content (i.e. everything but the last post) is the same as this blog right now, but that'll change as it gets going.

You can find it here: http://www.carfreerambles.org/

I think I'll probably leave this littlehappinesses blog up, maybe use it for more personal stuff, but I want to focus on the other one for a while. See how it goes.

Anyway, let me know what you think! (Just bear in mind that this is a fledgling project, so be gentle:)

Day nine: Santa Barbara!!

2011-01-14T13:16:00.000-08:00

Start: Isla Vista
End: Santa Barbara!
Miles biked: about 32-- 15ish to Santa Barbara, 17ish more biking around the city

The downside of bike touring--at least, if you're into spectacular mileposts--is that if you're not on the big highways, you often don't get a "welcome to..." sort of sign. So even though I finally made it to Santa Barbara today, I didn't really feel like I'd Arrived with a capital A until hours later, when I sent James a text from the public library saying I'd made it. Only then did I realize, hey, this was kind of an accomplishment after all! Just nine days ago, I was in Half Moon Bay; now I'm halfway down the coast in Santa Barbara!

It was kind of an anticlimactic ending, honestly. I woke up early, even though I was sequestered away in Skye's house, and as I expected, the world was wet and rainy: super storm had arrived. Mom was driving down to meet me that evening, and with only somewhere between 13 and 15 miles to the city, I had basically a whole day to explore Santa Barbara. Except that with the heinous rain, the normal exploring things I would do seemed less appealing. But on the other hand, it's not like there was much to do hanging around Skye's house either, so I set out into the storm.

Once I made it to mission Santa Barbara, like I said, only about 13 or so miles away, I was absolutely soaked. I had to stop for a while and regroup about what I wanted to do, since at that point I was feeling a little less excited about being outside.

But after a while of sitting there under the mission's shelter, I realized 1) that even if it was rainy, at least it wasn't that cold (a plus of being in southern California, I suppose), and 2) whatever dude, it rains in Portland all the time and I bike in it. California was clearly making me soft. So with my spirits renewed, I set out to actually explore Santa Barbara.

I won't actually write a step-by-step recollection of it or anything, but it's a lovely little town, with signed bike lanes and everything--even if, like in San Luis Obispo, they're a little narrow. But it's always so nice to explore a city with a bike network. That way, even if you don't have a map or don't know exactly where you are, you can just follow the bike signs that point you to a certain place. And you know you'll be able to follow the signs to get back too. I really appreciate that kind of city planning. And in California, it always made me a little nostalgic for Portland and its amazing bike boulevards.

This last day of my trip didn't honestly feel as much like the rest of it. Especially once I found the hotel that mom and I would stay in and ditched my trailer, biking around Santa Barbara felt pretty comparable to biking around Portland (the rain probably hugely contributed to that perception). Of course, I only had to look around at the palm trees--even as they peeked out through the clouds--to remember that I was, in fact, almost a thousand miles away.

Regardless, it definitely felt like the end of my trip. And trip ends for me are always a little hard. Partly it's the readjusting to normal life. Even the very fundamentals, like eating, are things I have to renegotiate and reconfigure. When you're biking all day, you eat a lot. But on this last day, with such light biking, and most of it just around town, I had to remind myself that food was something I should think about and partake of. I just wasn't hungry. Same with sleeping, choosing what to do with your time, just existing in the world--all need to be renegotiated. Even after only 9 days, my habits are different, my way of being in the world is different. It's hard to immediately switch back to electric lights, permanent shelter, one central location instead of being in motion all the time... It's something that I think makes James crazy, because I'm always a little crazy when I get back. And he has to put up with it until I reintegrate.

Anyway. Mom made it down to Santa Barbara and we had a lovely evening walking around, chatting, catching up. It was nice to have a friendly face to celebrate the end of an adventure with.

And when we drove back up to Half Moon Bay the next day--in absolutely dumping rain--Alex's van was still there where I'd left it. Hooray!

And now I'm back in Portland, after James and I had a nice Christmas in Sacramento with our families...and I'm already itching for more bike adventure...

Rainy end to amazing coast adventure.

Day eight: bring on the miles

2011-01-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

Start: Pismo Dunes
End: Isla Vista
Miles Biked: 92ish

I'm not sure if it's a blessing or a curse that I'm very good at waking myself up in the morning sans alarm. It's nice that if I know I have to get up early, I will--but it's lame that in the course of making sure I get up on time, I'll often wake up over and over during the night, convinced I've overslept.

That's what happened before today: after waking up basically every hour starting at midnight, I finally got up at 5, made myself some oatmeal while I huddled in my sleeping bag, packed up, and left Pismo Dunes by 6. In the dark.

The bleary-eyed bike awakening--slowly feeling more alive as I warmed up and the day turned grey, then light--nicely set the tone for a day spent mostly churning out the miles. This was a good day to spend biking. That's a nice way of saying that there wasn't really much else going on today. After a brief stint on hilly, unpeopled back roads and then the heinous, strip-mall city of Lompoc, the bike route joins up with Highway 101. And though there's a huge shoulder and the biking is relatively safe, 101 does not make for a scenic, pull-off-the-side-of-the-road-for-adventure journey.

Truth be told, Highway 101 is pretty ridiculously lame. Between the loud, fast cars (and trucks) and the rough, glass-hewn pavement--plus the fact that it goes ever so slightly uphill for 13 miles, and you can't even see the ocean anymore to raise your morale--it was definitely not the most enjoyable of rides. It was a good mental exercise, actually: how do I pass the time when it's just me and a boring ride, how do I keep my spirits up about bike adventure when what I'm doing for most of today hardcore blows.

So I sang, reveled in my wandering thoughts, and tried to focus on finding cool things in the landscape. All in all, it was a pretty nice day, despite the flat tire inflicted by the aforementioned glass-hewn pavement. Tip for anyone considering bike travel: make sure you can fix a flat by yourself before you go anywhere where you can't walk home;)

I biked for 60 miles or something before I finally stopped for lunch. And my lunch stop made me feel like a total badass. When I pulled off 101 into a little rest area near Gaviota, there they were, all the cars lined up in their neat little parking spaces while their occupants stretched, picnicked, whatever--and there I was, pulling off the highway on my bike, normal as could be. heh. I could feel one family watching me as I parked, stretched, opened up my trailer, grabbed my Jetboil, and made myself a pretty rockin lunch. They wanted to hear all about how bike travel works; I was super conscious of their little daughter--perhaps 5 or so--watching me with wide eyes. Score one more for bike travel ambassador.

Refugio State Beach, 80-some-odd miles into my day, is where I finally stopped to play a little:

And how amazing is that? Palm trees? Sand? Sun? All in the middle of December? This kind of thing is why I kept forgetting that Christmas was coming.

I was definitely tired by the time I got to Refugio, and it had a really nice campground, but I knew it was supposed to start raining hardcore that night and I was not super psyched about being in my tent for it. Or rather, being in my tent would have been fine, but packing up in the morning, with everything wet and no shelter once I collapsed my tent, was less appealing. So onward I went.

In case you forgot, Skye, one of the dudes I met in the Big Sur campground, had very generously offered his house to me if I needed it. He'd written his address in my journal and told me where to find the spare key; I could just let myself in and stay in from the rain. Plus, I should feel free to help myself to any of the food in the house. His generosity astounded me. I wasn't totally a stranger, but I was pretty close--and yet he not only let me stay in his house, but let me stay there when he knew that none of his housemates would be around, when I would have free reign of all his belongings, accessed with his spare key. I'm humbled by his trust in humanity. And I want this world to be one in which there are more people like that.

So I found his house, just a few miles away from a cute farmer's market that I of course stopped at.

It was just getting dark by the time I got there; the wind was picking up, it was getting cold, the sky was starting to cloud over. And after over 90 miles of biking, I was exhausted. Thank goodness for a warm, dry place to stay:)

Bike...flat...bike...headwind...bike.............ocean!!

Day seven: whales!

2011-01-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

Start: Morro Bay
End: Pismo Dunes
Miles Biked: 33

First view of the morning: Morro Rock. It was quite a picturesque way to start the day.

Another good start to the day: strawberries! You know you're in California when you can buy fresh strawberries in the middle of December. Whenever I see signs for little farm stands with fresh fruit, you can be sure I turn off the road, and today was no different. The chubby, cheery farmer from what I think was called Hidalgo farms--right on the side of Los Osos Avenue on the way in to San Luis Obispo--seemed highly amused at the rapture his delicious strawberries inspired in me.

But seriously, you can't argue with fresh strawberries.

Other than rocks and berries, my day was filled with San Luis Obispo. It's hard to say for sure whether a city is cool or not from only a few hours there, but San Luis Obispo seemed pretty cool. There were bike lanes, for one--not as nice as Santa Cruz or Monterey, and a little narrow, but at least they showed some effort to include non-motorized travelers as viable users of the road. There were also bike shops, which was a lovely discovery since my tires had been feeling a little low. (If you're never done this, pumping up your bike tires to full capacity after they've been low for a while will make it feel like you have a whole new bike.) Also exciting discoveries were a totally vegan restaurant where I had lunch (so yummy), a happy little creek by Mission San Luis Obispo where I could sit in peace and write in my journal, and a great public library where I could check my email and look up some directions to a few places I wanted to go.

I also found a good store to restock my always-dwindling food supply: trail mix, a few red peppers, some apples, tangerines, a protein bar or two, two delicious vegan cookies--I grabbed all the necessities and added them to my stash.

South of San Luis Obispo, I biked through Pismo Beach, a place I often hear the name of but would have had no idea where to place on a map. I think I've always heard of it as a nice place, but it kind of creeped me out, honestly. Perhaps I was there at a particularly dead time, but there was no one out, just a bunch of very pristine-looking houses and palm trees. It reminded me of a movie set, nothing moving beneath the facade. The best part of it was on the way out, when I saw this little reindeer reminder that I was biking in the middle of winter:

Until today, with this dude and a Santa whose lap you could sit on right by Mission San Luis Obispo, I'd totally forgotten that it was almost Christmas.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the day, however, came this evening, when I found the Oceano campground. They'd discontinued the hiker/biker sites there, which made me quite sad, but a friendly park ranger ended up letting me stay for free instead--an even better deal than the hiker/biker prices, which I didn't think was possible!:) The campground is right by the Pismo Dunes, which made for some fun landscape, and some beautiful sunset beach-walking. And what was that frolicking out in the waves as the sun went down? I can't be 100% sure about this, but I'm fairly certain it was.... whales!! At first I thought I was seeing things, or that maybe I was being tricked by a diving pelican or something, but no, that certainly did look like a tail... and some shooting water... and another tail... I'm pretty sure I indeed saw whales.

When I went to bed, the temperature seemed to be dropping rapidly. The storm everyone was talking about was supposed to hit the next night, and I had a big day of biking in front of me if I was going to make it to the house that Skye, one of the dudes from Big Sur, had offered to let me stay in. I went to sleep prepared to wake up, pack up, and set out in the morning dark...

Beaches, palms...was that a WHALE?!

Day six: and then the hills ended

2011-01-04T16:23:00.000-08:00

Start: Kirk Creek campground
End: Morro Bay
Miles Biked: 66

Today was an elephant seal day! After knocking out 30 soaring, ridiculously hilly miles after breakfast, I finally stopped for lunch at a little spot I believe is called Piedras Blancas--a reserve for elephant seals.

If you've never heard what an elephant seal sounds like, do yourself a favor and click on this link: elephant seal males. It's pretty fantastic.

Another great part about the elephant seals is that they had the decency to hang out in the sunshine. While I ate my lunch and listened to the seal-y gurgles, I took the nice-weather opportunity to spread my wet clothes, tent, and everything else all over the empty parking lot. I thought it was a great idea until a state trooper drove up and wanted to know if I was okay. I guess I looked homeless, or hopeless, or just flat-out weird. When I explained about the fog and my soggy possessions, though, he seemed to understand. Or maybe he just wanted to get out of there. Either way, it was nice of him to make sure I didn't need help.

Today's riding also took me by Hearst Castle. I didn't go, since I didn't want to spend either the money or the time to actually take a tour, but I did use their visitor center to restock my water. Water and food weren't really a problem at all this trip, since there are so many campgrounds and little towns along the way, but Kirk Creek Campground, where I'd stayed the night before, had water that was contaminated and non-potable. Though I'd boiled a little of it for cooking, I wasn't super psyched about drinking it. Heart Castle, then, was a watery lifesaver:)

Aside from those stops, I spent most of today biking. After lunch, the crazy, winding hills I'd been biking on for the last three days disappeared. I saw (and smelled) 5 roadkill skunks in the span of about 30 minutes--a skunkageddon. I made it to the campground where I was planning to stay by 1:30, so I kept biking to the next one down the road. Which explains why I went 66 miles instead of the 40 or something I'd been planning on. I decided, as it got cloudier and I could feel the drops condensing on my eyelashes, to stay in a super cheap Morro Bay Motel 6 for the night. That's the other great thing about self-contained bike touring: if you're really not feeling the rainy-night camping, just find a cheap motel! :)

[By the way, a few of you have asked me if there are more pictures from my trip. I'm taking all the pictures that are posted here from my picasa site (linked here or on the bottom of the menu of links on the right side of the page). If you want a shorter trip narrative, just head on over there and look at the picture captions.]

Epic climbs; prairie stretch--great biking!

Day five: rest day, basically

2011-01-03T11:54:00.001-08:00

Start: Big Sur state park
End: Kirk Creek Campground
Miles biked: 29--lazy day:)

I woke up to a surprising treat: perhaps because of the intense redwood cover, my tent was almost entirely dry! It probably takes a few days of contending with a heavily waterlogged tent to fully appreciate that fact; at day five, I was pretty psyched about it.

The combination of being up much later than I was used to and the fact that everything was dry (and thus conducive to me, say, sitting at a picnic table without getting soaked), led to a rather lazy morning. Despite the fact that I was still up by 6, it took me a really long time to leave the campground. I packed up my tent super leisure-style, read a little from the book of short stories I'd brought with me, wrote down the crazy dream I'd had in my journal, had a lovely breakfast and chat with Skye, who was also apparently having a lazy morning. It was a lovely change from my normal up-and-at-'em approach to setting out.

And even once I started biking, I took it super easy. The good thing about creating your own bike tour is you can do stuff like that: don't feel like biking hard? Then don't. Stop and enjoy the views, write in your journal, look for whales, go for a hike. It's fantastic.

Probably the coolest part of the day was a stop at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, where McWay waterfall spews from the rocky cliffs right onto the sand. It's just a short hike out to the viewpoint, where you can see this kind of thing (look for the waterfall on the left, just dumping onto the sand. I found that so weird):

I felt like a total bike ambassador when I stopped here, by the way. I guess I was feeling chatty, but I talked to a whole bunch of people who were curious to hear how I actually traveled around, by myself, with only my bike and trailer. One couple was particularly enamored of how "self-contained" I was: everything I needed to sustain myself was packed into my little Burley trailer and pulled by my own power. Apparently, the two of them used to bike a fair bit, too, but had never thought to actually travel that way. It made me super happy to hear one of them say that he was glad to have met and chatted with me, because it made him think it was possible for them to do a bike tour after all. Awesome!

Whenever I do stuff like this, I often think of myself as an example to others that it is possible--you know, everyone who drives by and wonders where I'm going, or anyone I talk to who thinks how novel an idea it is to travel without a car--all of them are the next potential bike tourists. I think the more that people can see cyclists out there, traveling by human power and fricken loving it, the more it will seem like a viable option. So I was happy to feel like a positive bike ambassador for the day:)

This couple let me in on something I hadn't been expecting, though: apparently, California was expecting a humongotron storm, destined to hit that weekend. If it was true, that meant I only had 3 or 4 more nice days of biking ahead of me. Time to rearrange my plans so I could get to Santa Barbara by Friday.

I got to Kirk Creek campground by 2:30, way earlier than I probably would have stopped except that John, who'd biked this route before, told me that it was the best campground within a day's reach. Feeling lazy anyway, I stopped for the day and spent the afternoon soaking up the sunshine, walking around, and playing in the ocean. Plus, John was right--you can't argue with this sort of campground:

That night, there was also a meteor shower--the Geminids?--that was supposed to peak around midnight. I woke up around then anyway to the sounds of the dubiously sober dude tented next to me verbally abusing a bunch of raccoons who had apparently infiltrated his camp. Mustering up the courage to venture into the cold, I wrapped myself in a bunch of random layers and dove into the dewey night--to great success. In the 15 or so minutes I could stand to be shivering outside (the difference in temperature between day and night was astounding), I saw probably a meteor every minute or two. Gorgeous. And what a lucky thing to be out in the middle of nowhere, nothing but a few clouds to interfere with the stars.

Lazy day; in bed by 7.

Day four: eeeeeeee!!!!

2010-12-30T17:53:00.000-08:00

Start: Veteran's Memorial Park, Monterey
End: Big Sur
Miles Biked: 33ish, I think. I didn't write it down this time

So, I haven't talked about this at all, but much of the trip prior to today was, in some sense, leading up to the stretch of road I was about to embark on. It's the stretch between Monterey and Ragged Point, the stretch that contains Big Sur and all its redwoods, the stretch that people are all thinking of when they imagine the soaring cliffs and winding roads of Highway 1. In short, it's the stretch that makes people think I was crazy for wanting to bike here.

All I knew about it was what it said in Bicycling the Pacific Coast, the fantastic book I used for directions and guidance:

South of Monterey, Highway 1 heads over a wild, undeveloped section of the coast. Rugged cliffs descend at near-vertical angles from the mountains to the pounding surf, leaving little room for man or his roads... Riding the steeply rolling terrain is strenuous, both physically and mentally. The road is narrow, with little to no shoulder when you need it. Traffic is moderate to heavy, consisting mainly of tourists and tour buses...

And, of course, there's what I heard from those near and dear to me, as well as random people who heard tell of my plans: "It's so dangerous!" "There's no shoulder!" "There are cliffs!" "There's so much traffic!" "You're going to get run off the road by some tourists in an RV gaping at the view!" "I can't believe you're doing this!" "You're crazy!"

Needless to say, I woke up quite nervous.

Even though I was antsy to get on the road early, I took a short detour into the city of Carmel. John, a fellow I'd met the night before in the hiker/biker site and who was also biking to Santa Barbara, showed me where there was a cute market where I was able to replenish my food stockpile. Then, after another side trip to Point Lobos Natural Reserve, where there are miles and miles of oceanside hiking trails and protected Monterey Cypress trees (and where I saw sea otter!!), I was on my way.

And oh. my. goodness. was it the most amazing biking EVER! The book was right: it was steep(ish) and winding, and there was often no shoulder. However, the unforeseen benefit of bike touring in the winter is that there's not nearly as much tourist traffic to contend with--but when there was, everyone was considerate and respectful. It probably helped that I often saw the same people over and over: they'd pass me, slowing down and giving me lots of room (sometimes even waving as they went by!), then they'd stop at a viewpoint. I'd pass them as they took pictures and ran around. Then they'd pass me again, give me another smile and wave. Then I'd pass them. It's harder to be a dick to someone who you know you'll see again. Perhaps that contributed to the hugely considerate drivers with whom I was sharing the road.

But dude. This road, despite the lack of shoulder and cars and whatever else, was fricken amazing. You know how I said that around Monterey I was so crazy happy to be alive? Today I couldn't contain it. I found myself exclaiming, talking, singing, yelling, whatever to myself because if I didn't I felt like I would explode. "Holy SHIT!" I might say. Or "Oh. My. GOD!" Or sometimes I'd just sort of squeal: "eee!" And then I would laugh, because it was so ridiculous that I was biking down the road, looking out over the crazy expanse of ocean, and yelling to no one; it was so ridiculous how happy I was.

(You can see the road in this picture, if you look--if you start at the bridge it might be easier to find).

So thus it was that the road I was so nervous about turned out to be, basically, the best thing ever.

I only biked a little over 30 miles this day because I wanted time to go hiking in Big Sur, which I'd heard was fantastic. And it was: full of towering redwoods, basically devoid of other people while I hiked. It also felt really nice to devote a few hours to hiking--you know, switch up the muscle groups used;)

To wrap up the awesomeness of the day, it turned out that the Big Sur hiker/biker site got pretty full that evening. There was John, the guy I'd met the night before at Vet's Memorial and who made it to Big Sur a few hours after I did, plus an older dude, Brian, who hiked in as part of a trail maintenance team, another hiker, a biking couple who came in pretty late, and a UC Santa Barbara senior called Syke who was biking north to San Francisco during his winter break. In a stroke of genius, Brian pilfered some firewood from the abandoned campground host site and built a fire, which meant that once it got dark at 5, we still had an excuse to stay up, hang out and chat. It was basically everything I'd hope for when taking a bike trip: impromptu friends, solidarity in our enjoyment of nature, and even connections for the future: Skye offered to let me camp out in his house near Santa Barbara if I wanted to when I got there.

When I finally crawled into my sleeping bag at--gasp!--nearly 10pm, I was so...full. So happy. So amazed at what happens when you just set out, trusting that you'll find good in the people around you.

Dreaded road is, in fact, spectacular.

Day three: Monterey!!

2010-12-30T12:40:00.000-08:00

Start: Sunset Beach
End: Veteran's Memorial Park, Monterey
Miles Biked: 57

I knew today was going to be a great day when, by 9:15, the sun was shining, I'd already seen a bunch of sea lions...

...and I'd found an amazing fruit stand on the side of the road where I was able to buy farm-fresh kiwis the size of my fist that dribbled kiwi juice down my chin when I bit into them. Delicious.

Indeed, the third day did not disappoint: like I wrote in my journal, "today was an I'm-so-happy-to-be-alive day of the most glorious sort." Even thinking about it now makes me happy all over again:)

There were a few things that made it so good. First of all, the sun--out early, then staying out--made a warm backdrop against which everything seemed more lovely, more possible. Also, can anyone say bike lanes?? I started the day on back roads and farmlands, then, after only a brief stint on a very busy Highway 1, turned off onto dedicated bike paths, where I stayed for most of the day. It's so wonderful to have a road made specifically for you, away from traffic, and, for the most part, right along the ocean. Here's a sample of what I was biking on (and a good thing to look at if you're one of the people who consistently told me how dangerous it would be to bike down the coast;)

Also, since Sunset Beach was only about 35 (I think) miles from Monterey, I made it to my campsite by noon. Which meant that I was able to set up my tent in the sunshine and let it dry out all afternoon. It also meant that I could stash my trailer again and then take off for a bike tour of Monterey without schlepping all my stuff with me.

Oh. My. Goodness. Monterey made my heart swell. Bike lanes right along the ocean? Fisherman's Wharf and Cannery Row? The aquarium (which I biked by but couldn't bring myself to forsake the gorgeous outside weather for)? Amazing rocks, expansive beaches, sea lions and harbor seals, tons of other people out on their bikes...I kind of fell in love a little.

Of course, it has its ridiculous side. I took a ride down this road called 17-Mile Drive, which is basically a humongotron gated community/golf course for the super wealthy. You have to pay to get into it if you're driving, though biking in is free. It's amazingly beautiful, continuing the roads that are right on the ocean, sweeping beaches and dramatic rocks, graceful cypress trees, the sounds of sea lions (and, less exciting to me, golf thwacks). But the blatant opulence of it all made me a little uncomfortable. Or rather, I enjoyed biking there when the ocean and the nature were prominent features; once the road took a turn inland and the main attraction was the sprawling mansions, I was much less excited about it. It didn't seem right, somehow, that people should have so much, all to themselves.

One of the most humble, free attractions of the day was actually my favorite: south of Monterey in Pacific Grove, there's a little bitty butterfly grove, where the monarch butterflies go to rest and mate before they head up to Alaska as part of their mysterious, thousands-of-miles migration. Hundreds of butterflies cluster in the eucalyptus and pine trees, hanging by the branches kind of like bats until it gets warm and sunny enough for them to want to flutter around. When I was there, the air was thick with butterflies (and then through the rest of my trip, every once in a while I'd see a lone monarch fluttering above me, which always made me smile). It was an amazing place, made even more awesome by the fact that there were a few docents with telescopes and binoculars you could borrow, all free of charge.

Except for the fact that it's drastically expensive, I would totally move to Monterey in a second. (I saw a house for sale for $13 million. Does that kind of thing really exist in the same world as me?)

This day made me so, amazingly happy for the opportunity to be traveling by bike. What a lucky stasia I am! :)

Farms, mansions: from production to consumption

Day two: city living

2010-12-28T20:15:00.000-08:00

Start: New Brighton State Beach
End: Sunset Beach
Miles Biked: 35ish.

I'd decided the day before that on the second day I'd head back up the way I came, north to Santa Cruz again to hang out in the city a little. With all of its bike lanes, signed bike paths, and hippie vibe, it seemed like a fun place to spend some time.

Happily, on the way out of New Brighton, I ran into the campground hosts who agreed to let me leave my trailer by their camper for the day so I could head back to Santa Cruz unencumbered. I don't mind pulling my trailer, but if I can bike around without it, I feel much lighter, more nimble, faster. And since I had to go right by the campground again anyway as I continued southward after Santa Cruz, it was the perfect set-up. Thank you, New Brighton hosts!

I was right about Santa Cruz: it was a charming place to spend the morning and afternoon. I found a local bookstore where I surreptitiously charged my cell-phone while reading a book about nutrition; not too far away was a cute health food store where I was able to buy oatmeal for future breakfasts. It wasn't super warm, but, unlike the day before, it was actually sunny. I enjoyed a picnic lunch while watching the surfers do their thing near the famous Santa Cruz surfer statue (I'm linking to this picture because I didn't actually take one for myself). All in all, it was a lovely, low-key day.

The pictoral highlight of my ride:

I'm not really sure how that works, but it made me smile. And the crops in the background are all brussels sprouts. It seemed to be prime harvest season, if the trucks hauling tons of them past me all day were any indication. At times, I felt a little like I was following the trail of brussels, as a neat little path of rouge sprouts splattered across the bike lane wended its way in front of my tires.

That evening, I camped only about 10 miles down the coast from my first night's site at New Brighton, but with the backtracking to Santa Cruz and subsequent wandering around the city, it still ended up being a very mellow 35 mile day. And it felt very classy to be staying at Sunset Beach. Doesn't "Sunset Beach" sound quintessentially Californian? It was beautiful, too:

As I set up camp, I came to terms with what would be mildly annoying for the rest of the trip: a tent that never quite dried out. Even on days that weren't foggy like the first one, the condensation in the air never quite disappeared. I'd sit outside and soon enough be able to see water drops covering the hair on my arms, be able to feel water collecting on my eyelashes. Even in the campground bathrooms, the toilet paper was always a little damp. Nothing ever really seemed to dry out.

So that morning, I'd packed my tent away while it was still soggy from the pernicious fog. Even though the day ultimately ended up being sunny, it took until at least noon for it to become so--much later than I wanted to hang around a campground waiting for my tent to dry, especially when my daylight hours were so precious. So this evening started another nightly ritual for me: I'd take out my tent, set it up, and then flap it around like a crazy person, which, while probably not actually doing much to dry it, at least made me feel a little better.

If fog and residual wetness are all I have to deal with for winter touring, though, sign me up for as many winter tours as I can handle.

Annoying early darkness. Headlamp is lifesaver.

Day one: fogstravaganza

2010-12-28T19:00:00.000-08:00

Start: Half Moon Bay
End: New Brighton State Beach, about 10mi south of Santa Cruz
Miles biked: 59

I went to bed the night before my bike adventure determined to wake up at the crack of dawn and set out before anyone could see me. Why? Because I was nervous about leaving Alex's van parked for over a week by some apartments in Half Moon Bay, and my response to that nervousness was simply to try to slip out unnoticed.

Unfortunately, I forgot that it was winter and dawn doesn't crack until, oh, 7:30 or so. So even though I was awake by 6, the combination of darkness and intense, soupy fog kept me hunkered in the back of Alex's van until much later, at which point the people I was trying to avoid were already out and about, walking their dogs or heading to work. I unloaded my bike and trailer much more conspicuously than I would have liked.

Preemptive nervousness is always the hardest part of any sort of adventure (or change) for me. Before I set out, I can only imagine what's ahead of me. The unknown-ness of it all is unsettling, especially in the face of what I already know, of what's already comfortable. But I understand myself well enough to push through the nervousness: once I jump in, I'm going to love it. It's simply a matter of mustering the initial activation energy.

Finally sucking it up and taking my bike out of the van was the inexorable step that set me off onto my bike adventure.

So what did day one of adventure hold? A lot of this:

That is, though I was biking on Highway 1--right along the coast--and though I could hear the ocean, I could see very little. I'm sure it must be quite beautiful when it's not cloaked in the mists. Regardless, I slipped into easy and enjoyable riding, and soon got over my foggy-day nervousness of cars coming at me from behind (it wasn't for nothing that I brought three extra lights and lots of reflective gear).

I made a few side trips along the way--nothing too intense because of the weather, but did manage to see harbor seals at Pebble Beach, not much of anything at Pigeon Point Lighthouse (I didn't even see the lighthouse through the fog until I was basically on top of it), and a bunch of other harbor seals that actually, upon closer inspection, turned out to be surfers.

The highlight of the day was probably my lunch stop, at Swanton Berry Farm. They had super friendly, handmade signs out on the Highway advertising the best soup ever, plus a 10% discount for touring cyclists. Feeling very welcomed, I pulled in to find an extravaganza of homemade food, almost all of it featuring organic berries or jam in some capacity. The best part? It was all based on the honor system: the prices were posted and the till was sitting right there on the counter, out in the open. You ate, you paid, you made yourself change, and the Swanton Berry people trusted you to be honest. It made me insanely happy, like there's still basic human integrity in the world. I guess in retrospect it's a feeling I had a lot on this trip.

Thus fortified with what may, in fact, have been the best pumpkin curry soup in the world, I made it down to Santa Cruz, where dedicated bike paths replaced Highway 1 as my route of choice, and then further south to New Brighton State Beach. I made an amazing discovery there: hiker/biker campsites! Many of the CA state parks have them, apparently. They're smaller sites without car parking that you can hike or bike into--and they only cost $5! It's the most amazing deal ever. I paid my $5 with glee.

I set up my tent as it was just starting to get dark. At 4:30. I'd sort of forgotten that my daylight touring hours were going to be so short. Or rather, until I actually felt, from start to finish, what 9 or so hours of daylight felt like, I hadn't realized it would be so truncated. Regardless, it was a lovely first day and I felt right at home again with my biking/camping regimen.

As it got darker, I hunkered down with my headlamp, book, and journal, something that became my evening routine. I was writing 6-word summaries of every day (part of a longer artistic experiment that I'm still working on), so I'll include the day's summary:

Day one: loving it so far.

Made it!!

2010-12-17T13:58:00.000-08:00

Well, folks: I made it to Santa Barbara. I'm in the public library right now (good old libraries and their internet access for the masses:) so won't say much more than that I made it, I'm safe, and I'm super psyched!! This has been an absolutely amazing trip and I can't wait to take some time to actually write about it (preferably with pictures attached!), sometime..... probably after Christmas, and the craziness that will ensue when James and I try to make all of our respective family feel equally that we've spent enough time with them. heh.

It's going to be hard to not spend my days biking, starting tomorrow. I've definitely gotten into the habit of looking at the whole day in terms of where I want to stop and play, how long I have to bike in between, and how I can maximize the (very short!) hours of daylight. The meditative pedaling-along-the-road indefinitely mindset is also something that I'm going to miss once I'm in the swirl of holidays. Plus, fricken biking along the ocean every day? Camping with the waves in the distance? Feeling like I'm bringing bike touring to the masses, each time someone new I talk to says "wow, I would never have thought traveling by bike was possible until I talked to you"? (I'm not making that up. At least three people told me that, almost verbatim.) There's something about this trip that I can't quite put my finger on, but it's amazing. I'm so ridiculously sold on long-distance bike travel.

Ironically, it's rainy and grey in Santa Barbara, not too unlike what I imagine Portland to be right now--except that there's an ocean right by me, and it's not as cold. And there are palm trees. I suppose it's only to be expected that a tour taken in the dead of winter would have its grey days, and I'm lucky that this, my last day, is the worst of them. But more on the littler details of my trip later.

Goodness. I'm so bursting with life and enthusiasm and happiness. Seriously, guys, take a bike trip. It'll change your life:)

it goes, the adventure

2010-12-08T18:56:00.001-08:00

Hi guys!

I haven't been posting not because I've forgotten you, or forsaken the internet, but because I've been without for real internet for the last week while I learned about organic farming in Galt. Tonight, I'm at a public library in Half Moon Bay, taking advantage of the lights and warmth to stay awake until a reasonable time. It's hard when it's been dark for two hours already and it's only 7--totally not a respectable time for sleeping. Even if I do want to get up at the ass crack of dawn, going to sleep at 7 is just fricken ridiculous.

And why do I need a library for light and to keep myself awake? Because tonight I'm sleeping in Alex's van; tomorrow I set out on the biking part of my adventure. I'll post more substantially about farming and biking later, when I don't have finite guest internet time.

It looks to be rainy tomorrow, but (hopefully!) nice after that. Think me happy thoughts, and away I go!!

Thankfulness

2010-11-29T12:29:00.000-08:00

I feel like I should write a Thanksgiving post (maybe just because everyone and their mom writes posts on Thanksgiving), but I can't help but feel silly every time I start. And it's taken me a few false starts like that to realize that it's because I'm not buying into the basic premise: sure, I'm thankful on Thanksgiving, but in all honesty, I try to be thankful every day. So trying to muster extra writey thankfulness just because it's the fourth Thursday of November seems a little forced to me this year.

Of course, I am thankful, for way too much to ever write here. Good health, this time of unemployment/exploration, good friends, happy home, did I mention good health, the ability to sustain myself, living in Portland... In truth, I am absolutely humbled by the amazing things that come to me in life. It seems unfair, even, that I could receive so much goodness.

I'm pretty thankful for this guy, too:

...and for our awesome weekend at the coast (complete with a reheated Thanksgiving meal that we'd prepared in advance. heh). As always, you can see pictures on my picasa page.

And I'm also thankful that tomorrow brings new adventure: a short stay on an organic farm in Galt, learning the ropes of small-scale organic farming, then a bike ride down the California coast. Like I said, it's amazing to me that life can be so awesome. I am a lucky girl.

There. A Thanksgiving post after all:) But please folks, keep being thankful even now, days after Thanksgiving, and help me stay thankful too. It's lovely out there, and there's so much.

secondary sponsorship

2010-11-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's pretty awesome to have a brother who's a professional athlete. As I bundled up to take a walk to the library yesterday, I couldn't help but notice that I felt a little like a human advertisement:

Which made me think that Alex's sponsors are pretty smart folk to send him more stuff than he needs, since of course then he ends up giving it away to lovely, mediocrely-hardcore people like me who then wear it out and about and inadvertently spread the brand-name word. In general, I'm pretty not about branding like that--but on the other hand, I do need a jacket, and I do like me a warm beanie, and a headlamp is a really useful running accoutrement in the winter. If I can get those things from Alex for free, of course I'm going to use them. Plus, that's the best jacket I think I've ever owned--nice job, North Face!:)

So I've kind of been thinking of myself as a beneficiary sponsor of The North Face and Black Diamond and Clif Bar, if only because I get Alex's cast-offs and the occasional present from his allotted budgets (thanks, Alex!:)

Anyway, Alex is off in Chad, then Israel, Turkey, and Greece right now, so for the next 4 months, I get another cast-off: his van. Tonight, James and I are taking it to the coast for a Thanksgiving on the ocean; afterward, I'm packing up my bike and trailer, driving down to California, and biking my ass down the coast for a few weeks. I'm psyched about it.

And in the meantime, if you want to read about Alex's adventures, The North Face has a blog that's been graced by the occasional Chad expedition post. If you want to see a goofy picture, try the first post from Africa. It'll make you want to travel for sure:)

such a winter's day

2010-11-23T16:00:00.000-08:00

It's cold in Portland today! Even more so comparatively, since I just got back from a weekend conference in Orlando--coming from warm, sunny skies to a mini snowfall and below-freezing temperatures. But who can argue with weather that actually feels like winter?

After having an early-morning breakfast date and escorting James to work over the (minimal) ice, I couldn't help but take a snow-day bike ride. The sunniness belied how frigid it actually was; regardless, how can I resist a ride when it's not raining out?? I came home a little frozen, but fully invigorated.

I LOVE WEATHER!!

patience--or, not everyone goes the same speed as you

2010-11-15T19:31:00.000-08:00

You know how it goes: you're bombing down the street when someone pulls out in front of you, of course going way more slowly than you ever were. You hit your brakes, grit your teeth, curse under your breath. If you're particularly vexed, you might wait until the very last second to brake in some misplaced attempt to show the offending person how very much their pulling out inconvenienced you, how annoyed you are that you had to slow down--as if the distance away from their bumper is inversely proportionate to how pissed off you are.

I'm pretty sure we've all been there.

Today, not only did a car pull out in front of me and do the slow-down trick, but it then proceeded to drive down the street w.a.y. more slowly than I would ever bike. Certainly, I was annoyed. Who was this fellow forcing me to go at a snail's pace where before I'd been cheerfully zooming to my destination?

But then, who was I to self-righteously assume that I should be able to go at precisely the speed I wanted, regardless of what else was going on around me? If I want people to slow down for me, be careful around me, why should I be immune to that same slowing? It turns out the driver who pulled out was going so slowly because he was waiting for another cyclist to get around the traffic circle. He was being a considerate human being, looking out for a more vulnerable roadway user. It kind of made me feel like a jackass for wishing he would speed up.

It was a good check. Be careful, stasia. Don't start feeling entitled, annoyed just because someone else dared to interrupt your flow. Assume positive intent, breathe, be patient. We're all in this together.

double standard

2010-11-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

Anyone heard of Groupon? It's this site where there's a different coupon deal every day, like pay $20 for $50 worth of books at Powell's, for example. You can sign up to pay the $20 or whatever for the groupon, and then if enough other people also want it, you actually get the coupon and use it like normal. If, on the other hand, not enough people want it to make it worthwhile for the company offering it, you don't get charged and you don't get the coupon. It seems like a pretty good deal.

The problem is that all the coupons they email me about are things like "endermologie treatments" (which I learned today are "treatments designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite while tightening and toning the body"), spa treatments, laser-hair removal, and airbrush-tanning sessions. I could really give a shit about that kind of stuff. So I sort of just figured that groupon was a lame deal, since the only companies that offer groupons are stupid vanity things.

Today, however, I got an email from a friend telling me to go buy the newest groupon. Understandably, I was a little confused as to why he would want to endorse an endermologie treamtent--but it turns out that the groupon deal that was emailed to him was actually for a a good deal at a local restaurant. So apparently we're getting different groupons emailed to us. What?

All I can figure is that there are actually a few different potential deals per day, and because I said I was a woman, I get the ones tailored to what they think women want: beauty aids. Is anyone other than me incensed by that? Come on now, do women really need yet another source of media telling them that they're not good enough as is?

So as an experiment, I switched my paltry groupon profile to say that I was a man. We'll see if I get better deals now:)

EDIT 11/15:
My groupons really have been way better! Admittedly, the first one I got--for an oil change--was a bit lame, but since then I've been getting all sorts of fitness and restaurant coupons! Not that I've bought any, but I've been appreciating the possibility of them much more. Clearly, I was meant to be a man--or, at least, the Groupon conception thereof;)

civic responsibility

2010-11-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

Don't forget to vote today!! :)

how beautiful the ordinary

2010-10-29T13:45:00.000-07:00

My intention was to escort James on his way to work, and then figure out what I wanted to do for the morning--probably find a spot where I could sit down (preferably without having to pay for anything), read, maybe get some administrative stuff taken care of. Thirty five miles and two and a half hours later, I've decided that this morning--the one where I actually got absolutely nothing save an impromptu bike ride done--is exactly the morning I wanted all along.

For those of you not likely to take bicycling joy rides, I'll try to describe the feeling. So much happens on a long(ish) bike ride. Not only are you seeing a huge variety of things (35 miles may not be tons, but it's still a lot of different terrain to cover, especially in a city), but once you're in a cycling groove, your mind is also turning over a ridiculous amount of thought, memory, daydreaming. So by the time you're even only 10 miles in, the beginning of the ride--what you were thinking of then, what you saw as you went past--feels like a whole different lifetime away.

Because you move more slowly than in a car, it also feels like you actually see everything you go through, like each new turn is a whole new discovery. Even though I've been in Portland for about 10 years, I'm still humbled by how much I don't know, how much I haven't experienced. I took a little path along the Columbia River Slough this morning that I've only ever been on at night. It was absolutely stunning. Peaceful, calm water, hundreds of ducks, greenery and the occasional red-turning trees--all conspiring to make me feel like I was miles and miles away from anything or anyone else. Shortly after, I stumbled across the back side of Portland Meadows, our resident horse racing track. This morning, a handful of jockeys were out running their horses, totally oblivious to all but themselves, the horses underneath them and the track as it uncurled in front of them. That, too, was a little slice of Portland, and I seemingly the only one noticing it.

And the ride back along the Columbia River--absolutely spectacular. I know it gets boring to hear me talk about how amazing all these things I see when I'm biking or hiking or running are, and for that I'm sorry, but I always feel like maybe this time I'll get it right. Maybe this will be the time I can finally describe it in such a way that anyone else will understand how achingly beautiful this world is, and how lucky I am to be in it, riding through on my bike.

It's not like a bike ride is necessarily transformative. I certainly have put in hundreds--thousands, really--of miles on my bike, and some of them were just that: miles. Miles spent getting from one place to another, miles in pouring rain, miles in miserable, cold damp where I just want to get home. And then there are rides like today, where everything seems right in the world, where I can be somehow witness to everything beautiful. I ride through, and the world unfurls around me in its lovely, perfect dance.

Bike Club!

2010-10-28T11:12:00.001-07:00

This picture, though not actually from my bike club, is how I've been spending a bunch of my time lately:

Bike Club is an after school program put on by Portland's Community Cycling Center, where low-income 9-12 year olds learn about bike safety and maintenance, get some bike riding confidence, and ultimately, upon graduation from the program, get to keep a donated bike, helmet, lock, and set of tools for their own use.

It's pretty fricken awesome. First of all, it hooks kids up with bikes--kids who generally wouldn't have access to functional bikes on their own. There's nothing like the freedom of a bicycle, and, if it's true that bikes are a form of social justice (which, clearly, they are;), we're doing a lot for these underserved kiddos. Secondly, it gives kids the skills to take care of their bikes, and a way to lock them so they can use them as viable transportation. It also gets them out exploring their own neighborhood by bicycle, learning to read maps and choose safe routes, learning about what's in their community, and otherwise seeing that it's feasible to get places on their own. They get the feeling of having earned something by their own hard work and learning. And, of course, it gets them outside and moving--always a good idea!

On my end, it's pretty fricken awesome, too. It lets me teach, outside. I get to interact with kids, help them learn the tangible skills that contribute to their own freedom and experience of the world. I get to be a goofball, since that seems to go over really well with 4th and 5th graders (yesterday found me doing a pretty mean impression of a lava monster, grabbing their feet as they gleefully danced about the playground we'd biked to;). And it's hooked me up with a large cohort of other socially-conscious, kid-loving, bicycling Bike Club teachers.

I come home every day after Bike Club so excited about life. This is, by far, one of the best things I've ever volunteered for.

Fall is...

2010-10-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

-Putting my sweatshirt on and then taking it off again about 40 times a day, as the sun comes out and dips away again, over and over

-Crunching through leaves!!

-Popping those fun little helicopter seed pods with my bike tires as I run over them, and smiling with glee

-Reading on our porch in the sunshine

-Looking out our front window at our neighbor's trees, every day more gloriously red and gold in the sunset

-Coming back from every morning run with wet feet from the dewy/frosty grass

-Seeing my breath when I bike hard

-Little kids with multicolored backpacks swarming around the schools

-Pumpkins and all manner of fall squash appearing in the farmer's markets!

-Apple crisp and cider

-Mist in the mornings

-Red cheeks and noses, warm beanies, gloves

-Frenzied squirrels EVERYWHERE (and their residual peanut shells buried in all parts of our garden)

-A super happy stasia:)

Adventure:)

2010-10-12T20:39:00.000-07:00

A lovely fall hike to Mt Jefferson--the mountain even fought its way out of the mists for us!

More pictures here. (Make sure to check out the one of James being a grass angel!:)

harvest!

2010-10-10T21:56:00.000-07:00

Today was a super productive day of the best sort: harvest time! James and I capitalized on this afternoon's lovely fall weather to get our gardening on, resulting in several hours' worth of hacking our way through our planter boxes run amok.

One result was several humongous bowls full of tomatoes.

Even as I type this, I can smell them simmering down into what will hopefully be a delicious sauce. It certainly smells tasty:)

We also pulled up even more potatoes. Tonight, they were bound for potato-leek soup. It's the third time I've made it this year with potatoes from our garden, and it just keeps getting better! This time's new innovation was adding mustard seeds early on with the leeks, which makes it a little more poppy. Mmm:)

And it wouldn't be harvesting season without some preserves! We didn't grow these cucumbers, but James sure turned them into pickles!:)

All in all, it's been good times in our garden this year. Next year, I think we'll try to grow our tomatoes in separate containers to keep them from taking over our entire planter boxes (and hopefully to keep them from splitting open in the rain the way they all did this year). And maybe we'll grow more beets again, since those did well for us this year. We'll definitely do potatoes again, and garlic. If we get chard even half as good next year as ours was this year, I'll be psyched. We even had some mild success with peppers--maybe better next year if we keep the aforementioned tomatoes from running wild over them. It's a process, but we may, slowly, be getting better at it.

Life is too short

2010-09-29T22:21:00.000-07:00

Life is too short to be stuck in traffic. In Sacramento, I've been driving much more than I normally do, and remembering why I don't particularly enjoy it. In a car, there's really nothing you can do about how fast you get places. I mean, you can speed, but if there's heinous traffic, you're basically stuck. And there is little worse than the feeling of absolutely wasting your time sitting on your ass, waiting for someone in front of you to move. I'm so excited to get back to Portland and on my bike, where even if it takes me longer to get places, I'm not just focused on the destination but am enjoying the journey, too.

Life is too short to squander a sunset. I've seen some pretty good sunsets the last few days: hiking the hills in Palo Alto, sitting on a back deck watching the red-wing blackbirds settle down for the night, riding bikes with my mom. And it made me realize that I haven't really been taking advantage of the sunsets back in Portland--the glorious, crisp fall sunsets that light up the trees and make everything, even for just a moment, magically alive. How many sunsets have I skipped because I was too busy with something else?

Life is too short to not tell someone how you really feel. Starting a few days ago, I've been trying to better live according to this. There are so many amazing people in my life, and the greatest shame is that they may not know how amazing I think they are. So often I don't voice the compliments that float through my head, or don't say what I'm really thinking, because it seems weird, somehow--too honest, perhaps, or risky for the way it opens me up. But I can't stand the fact that people might not know how they've affected me, inspired me, made me better. I'm not good at it, but I'm trying: I want, in the moment, to tell people what they mean to me.

Life is too short to stick with something that's not good enough. This is my life. I want it to be the best, absolute best, it can be. If something's not good enough--my job, say;)--I know it, deep down, even if it's hard to admit sometimes. There's not enough time to waste on jobs, people, books, places that aren't good enough. What kind of stuff are you putting up with just because it's a routine, just because it's what you know, even if it's not satisfying? I want to squeeze that stuff out of my life.

What about you? (Yes, YOU;) What is life too short for, and how can we all fix it?

hippies

2010-09-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

Tonight at an instructor training for the Bike Club I'll be a part of, I couldn't help but notice: counting me, there were seven women, five of whom had unshaven legs--the other two, I couldn't see. It's cold(ish) here, after all, and people are wearing pants. But I was super psyched. Even if the two mystery women had shaved their legs, that's a pretty good ratio!

So then I start asking myself questions. Is it just that women who are drawn to bikey education are more alternative? That biking women don't care as much about society's "feminine" ideals? That biking women feel the need to make up for hairless biking men? Can I even make these sweeping generalizations?

Regardless, it gave me the little thrill that I get inside when I feel like I'm bound to someone else in a secret conspiracy against the status quo. Rock it!

Thank you: part two

2010-09-20T13:58:00.000-07:00

Of course I joke about unemployment and being retired and having all this time, but in truth, sometimes it's pretty fucking scary to be here right now. I know, get out the tiniest violin in the world, right? Laugh at me if you want, but it's true. I don't like to admit it, but for however much I'm excited for this time to figure out what I want, it's deeply frightening to have, in some sense, a blank slate of life ahead of me, a slate that I can create however I want. If it ends up sucking, if I look back one or three or five years from now and wonder what the hell happened to get me to this heinous place, it's going to be all because I--only me, no one else--botched it.

That's always true, of course. We're all in control of our own destinies, even if some people get to be rather practiced at pretending they're simply victims of life or circumstance. But nowhere is it more apparent that you're creating your own vision of life when you rather publicly quit your job, and then blab about it on your blog, all in the name of trying to do better.

Trying to do better is the root of what freaks me out: what if, after having left a (relatively) secure job that wasn't, after all, that bad, I end up worse off than before? What if I try out all these random things and decide that still, I have no idea what I want from life? I think that's the undermining, nagging fear: what if I don't know what I want? Or, maybe worse, what if I know what I want but I can't make it happen?

Taken individually, of course, none of those questions is that scary. So what if I haven't solved the big problem of life in the next few months--it's a process, and the journey, not the destination, is what I'm interested in. So what if I don't figure out exactly what I want from life? So what if I have some setbacks about getting myself to where I want to be? None of that, by itself, is that bad. But add to it my guilt about other people's expectations of me, and it gets complicated.

It doesn't help when people always ask me what I'm going to do next. I know that their questions are well-intentioned and that they come from a place of caring. Family, friends, whoever just want to know that I'm going to be okay, maybe even happy. And this is probably just my own complex about wanting others to be proud of me. But how shitty does it make me feel to say, oh, I don't know, I think I'll float around for a bit, try to get some writing done--oh, no, I don't know what I want to write yet, but I hope to figure it out--maybe I'll do a lot of volunteer work--no, I won't be making money, but maybe eventually it'll lead somewhere--and on and on. I really don't have a problem not having a job, especially when I have a few months' worth of income from my severance package, but it makes me feel like a giant slacker when I have to look someone in the eyes and tell them that.

And that's when I feel scared, like maybe I'm going to get through this and somehow prove everyone right, that it's silly to dream, that it's silly to try to do better, that you should just take the safe path, do what people expect, what's easy and tried and rational. But I don't want that to be right. I want to be vindicated in questing for more, I want to prove that dreaming is not only a possibility but a necessity, that you can create life in your image, not fit yourself into someone else's conception of how it should be.

So this is a the biggest, most heartfelt, most tearful thank you that I can possibly muster for the people who, when I have a hard time quelling that frightened part of me, remind me that's it's all up to me to make of this life what I want--and that I can do it. Thank you so much for believing in me, and believing that I can create my world, not the other way around.

Bikey thank you: part one

2010-09-16T13:08:00.001-07:00

Every so often, I remember that sometimes it's scary to be on a bike contending with speedy, seemingly ambivalent motorized traffic. Yesterday, a somewhat harrowing ride home, the last leg of a three-day journey back from Smith Rock, was one of those days.

Highway 224 is a lovely, sparsely populated road that takes you into (or, in my case, out of) the Mt Hood National Forest. It's windy, hilly, and beautiful, following the Clackamas River for what seems like forever before hitting the city of Estacada. And usually, Estacada is where I turn off the highway in favor of little farm-laden, back country roads that roughly parallel 224 but with more hills and, I assume, less traffic. Yesterday, though, I decided to see what would happen if I didn't turn off, if I instead followed 224 to see what it had in store.

Initially, it was awesome: wide bike lane, nicely paved. I was feeling cocky and full of myself, churning out the miles at a pretty good clip, sprightly legs that day even after 50, 60 miles with my trailer. But then, and I'm not sure where it happened, exactly, but somewhere after a turnoff for Boring, OR, the bike lane disappeared. And the flat road got hillier. And the traffic, which had only been building since Estacada, just kept on getting busier.

A two-lane highway like 224 doesn't leave much room for a car and a bicycle to inhabit the same space--especially when there's near-constant oncoming traffic and plenty of blind curves, making a swerve into the oncoming lane difficult and dangerous. However, when there are both cars and a trailer-carrying bicycle on the road, something has to give. Which leads me to my thank you:

Thank you, thank you to the drivers who slowed down, moved over, and waited until it was safe to pass me. It was only a minute or so of your time, and it made an increasingly uncomfortable biker--and trust me, I'm not squeamish about these things--feel much safer. (And trust me on this too: if I'd known the road was going to be like that, I wouldn't have been there, either.) Thank you to the drivers who gave me a wave as they passed, instead of an angry blast of the horn. And especially, the biggest thank you of all, thank you to the trucks who gave me lots of room. Trucks are fricken scary, especially when you could reach out and touch them as they zoom by at 55, then pull you into the road with their backdraft. Thank you, truckers who gave me some space.

When I do most of my biking in Portland, on bike boulevards or at least on streets where people are used to cyclists, I forget that scary roads exist. And I forget the even on roads that seem safe to me, people are still often afraid of the cars that swirl around them, much faster and harder than they are on their squishable bicycles. Thank goodness for all the drivers like those to whom I extend this thank you, all the folks who helped take care of me (and, I'm assuming, others) by passing carefully. I'm glad to know people like that are out there.

Free ice cream??

2010-09-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

This totally made my day: free popsicles!

Score one for random acts of kindness:)

Back to school?

2010-09-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

Today would be the first day of school if I were still teaching. Oddly enough, even though I'm not going back this year, I still had the requisite teacher stress dream last night: when my alarm went off, I was deep in the throes of trying to get a class full of heedless hoodlums to pay attention to me.

Apparently, something in me is still wired to be nervous about incoming students, even if I don't have any. I find that comforting, somehow, even if I would rather leave the stress dreams behind.

volunteering

2010-09-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

I'm sure that it'll get old eventually, but unemployment, so far, has been a genuine gift to me. Just as I'd hoped, I've been filling my days with reading, running, biking, thinking, and, most of all, volunteering for things that I've always meant to do but somehow never felt I had the time or energy for.

Yesterday was my favorite so far: it started with the Hollywood Farmer's Market, which I've been working for all summer. There is nothing about farmer's markets that fails to make me happy. From fruits, little kids mawing on cinnamon rolls as big as their heads, piles of fresh produce, farmers who are so psyched to talk about their farms and food with you, and the general good community cheer that a local farmer's market brings, plus the feeling of working together to pull something like that off, there is everything in the world to bring a smile to my face. I love working for my farmer's market.

And continuing the food theme, yesterday evening James and I went down to the Blanchet House, a place that provides food, shelter, and clothing to people in need. We worked a dinner shift--James bused tables and I got to actually serve meals to a parade of homeless folk who came in and out during the hour that dinner was available. We left feeling like we'd done something useful and tangible. And funnily enough, later, we saw two of the folks we'd served meals to biking their way down to their Springwater Corridor "homes."

This kind of stuff is making me feel so much more connected to the community around me, and I love it. Now if only I were independently wealthy and could spend ALL my time doing this, with nary a thought of money or job...;)

getting psyched

2010-09-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

As weird as it is, I'm super psyched right now to not be wrapped up in back-to-school: no planning lessons, no setting up my classroom, no stressing about class size or the 14 cut days or the new schedules. I'm sad to not be a part of so many adolescents' lives, but I'm reveling in the tranquility of my mind. I'm grateful for this year of not teaching.

On the other hand, I'm super excited for the upcoming bike club I'll be a part of: I'll be helping low-income 9-12 year olds learn about bike safety, maintenance, and riding, and over the course of 6 weeks together they'll earn and get to keep the donated bikes that they work on. That's the kind of teaching I'm into right now--not standards-based, bureaucratically-stifled, oft-mind-numbing public school, but real-life, out-in-the-world, get-your-body-moving lessons. Ideally, all school would seem so essential, but for right now, I'm super excited to be outside with kids, teaching them skills they can use in all aspects of their lives.

In other news, I'd love an easy (but useful) part-time job for the hours before school is over. Looking, looking--but not stressing about it. Life is good right now.

in which I retun to the internet world

2010-08-31T10:20:00.000-07:00

Stasia's universal theorum about blogs: the longer it is between posts, the harder it is to regain momentum.

I have a good reason for being gone, though: more summer adventures...

...namely, in the form of an epic backpacking trip through Wyoming's Wind River Range. Really--we started at the south end of the range, and hiked our way up to the north end, 10 days and 101 miles in all. For an abridged travel narrative, check out my pictures.

The heroes of the story are The Great Outdoor Shop, a little, well, outdoor shop in Pinedale, WY. Since we started hiking at one end of the range and finished our trip at the totally other end, we paid the kind folks at the Outdoor Shop to shuttle Mike's car for us.

A shuttle is no ordinary feat. To get to our starting point, we drove for a pretty significant chunk of time over windy, narrow, unpaved roads, then left Mike's car amidst a sea of other cars in a totally free-for-all campground/day-use/long-term/who-knows-what-else parking lot. Since Mike couldn't find his spare key, we just left his normal key in a top-secret location that we'd told the Outdoor Shop folks about. And that was it. We left the car there for them to find and then shuttle (a 3-4 hour endeavor) to the northern end of the range, where we would be coming out of our hike.

Thinking back on it, I wasn't even sure if I'd told them Mike's license plate number or even what kind of car he has. They did know we were from Oregon, and they definitely knew where we left the key. But as we hiked, we both had visions of them driving out to shuttle the car and then having to check every single vehicle with Oregon plates for the keys, hoping that they'd find the right one. In fact, we were somewhat concerned that they wouldn't shuttle the car at all, that we'd get out after our 10 days of hiking only to discover that we had to find a way to hitchhike back to the beginning.

But the lovely folks at the Outdoor Shop totally came through for us, despite whatever information I didn't give them, and Mike's car was right there waiting for us at the end. Hooray! If you ever find yourself in Pinedale, WY, you should definitely head over there and give them a big old hug and thank you for me:)

For more exciting (mini) stories, again, check out my pictures!

Does this apply to you?

2010-08-02T15:53:00.000-07:00

Imagine you are trying to grow tomatoes. You believe that you'll get the juiciest, most succulent tomatoes if you prep your soil with ample compost and then water your bushes every evening, right before sunset, for 50 minutes. You've done this every year, and your tomatoes seem to be fine.

Then imagine that someone else tells you that it's actually optimal to water your tomatoes just 2 gallons per week, and that your relative overwatering is actually contributing to root rot. This person gives you miles and miles of studies from many different reputable sources showing that the optimal watering is, in fact, exactly 2 gallons per week and that your current practices are not only wasting water, but lowering the quality of your tomatoes.

Faced with the evidence, you'd amend your previous watering behavior, right?

Well, it turns out that most people may, when faced with facts that contradict a belief they hold, actually cling to their initial, incorrect belief even more strongly than ever. There's an interesting article from The Boston Globe right now where Joe Keohane writes that when people are confronted with contradicting facts, instead of changing their minds, they often become even more entrenched in their original beliefs. A lot of it seems to be about defensiveness: it's hard to admit that you were wrong; easier is to argue ever more forcefully that the facts you are being presented with--not your own beliefs--are flawed.

It has some interesting ramifications, though. Of course I'd like to believe that people will ultimately be swayed by and make their decisions based on the truth (with a little t, I suppose:). I'd also like to believe that if I hold incorrect beliefs, I would be able to recognize them as such when confronted with reputable contrary evidence. But honestly, with the glut of information available to us right now, it's often hard to tell which "facts" are real and which are simply fabrications. And beyond that, we also tend to be hugely cynical about facts (perhaps wisely) since depending on how they're presented, facts often seem to imply very different things--an ambiguity that makes it ever easier to dismiss the facts that don't align with what you already believe. But if we're all just working from our own beliefs, how can we ever make informed decisions that are based on what's actually going on in the world?

The interesting thing is that people with a good self-concept, or people who feel good about themselves (I know, a very amorphous concept), are more likely to change their minds when facts seem to contradict their beliefs. I like the implication: if you want to change someone's mind, the best way to do it is not to belittle their beliefs or attack them, but to approach them from a place where they don't feel threatened, where they don't immediately jump to the defensive.

I guess for my own life, I want to be vigilant about knowing why I believe what I do, and I want to make sure that I'll change my mind if what I believe is wrong. What's working against me, though, is the fact that I'm stubborn, and that when it comes down to it, I usually think I'm right. heh. Okay, that's more glib than I mean, but I do have a pretty high regard for my own thoughts, and--especially if I'm being directly challenged--it usually takes me more than it probably should to convince me that I'm wrong. But I don't want to be the person who keeps watering her tomatoes like a superstitious maniac even as everything around her tells her that she's doing the wrong thing for the outcome she wants. Keep me honest, guys, and each other too.

bikes for social change

2010-08-02T10:34:00.001-07:00

Bikes may not solve the issue of homelessness, but it seems like they can certainly improve the quality of life for those who have no homes:

This article explains how a large percentage of the transient population in Portland depends on bikes to at least get them back and forth to jobs (in a much more affordable way than public transit). Bikes also help them have their own mobile enclaves of living space.

It's not like bikes solve homelessness, but it does seem to me that they are a pretty large factor in helping people without homes or lots of money have access to services, jobs, and other necessaries that they might otherwise have a hard time accessing.

(Randomly enough, the guy with the big old white beard and cowboy hat in the pictures from the article is a guy I saw almost every single day on my way to work--him and his two buddies, always camped out by the river.)

boringness

2010-07-26T15:59:00.000-07:00

While I was looking for that other old livejournal post, I found this gem (full post here):

Tomorrow James and I make our first offer on our first home. Having never done this before, I don't really know what to expect, though if it's like the rest of the house-buying process thus far it will probably involve lots of jargon, lots of time, and our signatures on many identical-looking lines. We will also, in the span of only a few hours, certainly become about ten times as boring as we usually are. That seems to be the effect of house-buying thus far: exponentially increased boringness. I hope it's temporary, because with the increase of boringness I'm already suffering with this all-consuming teaching job, I don't know if I can handle the added boringness of house-buying without turning to stone.

Almost three years in to our new house, I'm glad to report that neither of us actually turned to stone during the buying process. However, I do still believe that doing something over and over and over, to the exclusion of other things that would normally contribute to your well-rounded personhood, is certain to ultimately make you quite boring, except maybe to other people who are also doing the same thing over and over and over.

I hope to avoid that.

familial thoughts

2010-07-26T12:44:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it's hard for me to write new stuff in light of things that I've already written. It's kind of a pernicious kind of writer's block, beginning when I have a hard time putting down what I want to talk about (or even knowing what I want to talk about), continuing when I start reading over all these things I've already written, then ending when I become convinced that I'm never going to be able to write anything better. I guess it's sort of conservative in nature, which is funny since I don't think of myself as particularly conservative, but it's all about the past being better--or at least better described.

I mention this because my head has been swirling with thoughts about family ever since James and I got back from a reunion for his mom's side of the family, immediately followed by a wedding between two of my friends and coworkers. But all I can think about is this old thing I wrote back in my livejournal days, coincidentally, also after meeting a bunch of James' mom's side of the family. Back then, I was much more worried about their liking me than I was this time--maybe because I'd already met (most of) them this time, or maybe because I feel more like James and I are a real family than I did before and thus am more inherently comfortable with people evaluating our relationship. Or something. I'm not sure, but even though I definitely still wanted them to like me, it felt much less like the full-blown audition I was worried about before.

But the family thoughts swirling around in my head: James and I are both happy spending our lives together without formalizing/legislating/defining our relationship with the all-important (to some) marriage license, but whenever I'm around a lot of family or at weddings, I wonder if people don't consider us our own family since we've never gone through the conventional motions. Even more so because we don't plan to have children. It seems like many people conceive of you as a family once you get married and intend to propagate, but is that really what family means?

You certainly can't choose the family that's come before you, but what is your own, constructed family if not the people who you decide you're going to spend your life with? It doesn't seem to me that marriage (or even a romantic relationship, necessarily) is a obligatory component of family. Thoughts, anyone?

gratefulness

2010-07-13T12:12:00.000-07:00

Over the last few days, I've been corresponding with a future housemate who's moving up from LA and remembering how much I love living in this city. The process of taking pictures of our house and imagining Portland from the eyes of someone who's new here makes me remember all over again everything that's so spectacular about this place.

What an amazing life I have here!

Mt. St. Helens. Or, All Roads Worth Biking (even with a trailer) Have Hills

2010-07-12T10:10:00.001-07:00

You know that bike trip I mentioned in my last post? Well, I'm back. And oh my goodness was it amazing.

I don't think I can really do the whole travel narrative thing; suffice it to say that I spent my days biking and hiking my ass off, surrounded by natural beauty, and I fell asleep in the super-quiet of non-mechanized space. I don't think there was a single flat road until the very end of my trip, the rather unscenic commute between Battleground and Vancouver, Washington--but like my title says, I think all the best roads are the hilly ones, since they're the windy, woody, rivery ones that not as many people drive on.

People's reactions to my biking fell into one of two extreme but predictable camps: either the "you are a badass" camp--I liked that one--or the "you are completely insane and does your mother know you're doing this?" camp. Seriously. There was no one who was just kind of eh about it, everyone I talked to either thought I was awesome or a total raving lunatic. It kind of made me feel like a biking iconoclast or something. And honestly, I kind of like that.

Anyway. Check the rest of my pictures if you want: Gifford Pinchot Bike Trip And ask me questions or leave me some comments/emails, cuz otherwise I feel like I'm just foisting my pictures upon you. Give me some interaction, here:)

compromising

2010-07-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

I guess this is less pertinent now that I'm not teaching anymore, but something that's always been hard about teaching and being in a relationship with a non-teacher is the summers. Being the crazy wanderlust stasia that I am, once school ends I'm ready to set off on grand adventure. Of course, James doesn't have the large summer chunk of time off, nor does he have my compulsion for epic exploration. What ends up happening is a very delicate dance of time spent here, time spent away, time spent on vacation together--all of which, I am grateful to remind myself, is a process that we've been able to (mostly:) successfully navigate like mature adults who love each other and have each others' best interest in mind.

Like my principal told me once this year when I was feeling grumpy, it's really nice that I'm sharing my life with someone who wants me to be around.

I mention this because this summer (even though I'm unemployed, this is still my summer:) I think we've hit upon a better compromise: instead of taking one epic trip that removes me from Portland and James for a very large, sustained amount of time, I've been taking little trips. A trip to the Gorge for one day, a camping trip for a weekend, little trips around town, and now, starting tomorrow, a bike trip up to Washington. This will be my longest trip so far--I haven't planned it specifically, but I think it will clock in at around a week, or maybe a few days more. But it feels okay that I'll be gone for that long since I've been able to spend a lot of time with James already this summer, and, when I get back, we're immediately taking a trip together to see a whole bunch of his family.

And then when I go backpacking in August, it will be after having spent two weeks back in Portland.

It seems like it's a compromise that's working well for us so far: James and I get to spend a bunch of time together; I still get to work out my wanderlust and see new and exciting things; we can intersperse a lot of Portlandy summer stuff like growing our garden and going to farmer's markets and reveling in the long, long days (even if they're not warm yet this summer); all is well.

I don't know how other teachers navigate this summer thing, but it seems like it was really hard to work out. Maybe that's just because I'm stubborn and self-centered and think that if I have time off everyone else should too, and they should want to spend it in the same way I do--or maybe it's just because it really is a hard compromise when one half of a relationship all of a sudden has a lot more free time than the other, and a much heightened desire to get the hell out of the city. Whatever it is, I'm super psyched this summer to feel like I can (to use an old cliche) have my cake and eat it too: time with James, time in Portland, time adventuring by myself, and time adventuring with James. How can life get any better? :)

school musings

2010-06-29T19:06:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am unemployed; no, when I left my job I didn't imagine that I was leaving education for good. Right now, however, I wonder how easy it will be to take a little step that leads away from education, then another one, and another, until I'm light years away from where I am right now.

I find myself wondering this mostly during a class I started on Monday through the Oregon Writing Project, a program that's run with Lewis and Clark and is supposed to help improve writing for both Oregon's students and their teachers. It sounds pretty cool, right? A class that both helps you write better and gives you some ideas for how to help your students get better as well?

Well, it hasn't really turned out that way so far. I find myself sitting there thinking of all the ways I could teach the class better, ways that I could make it more engaging, more rigorous, more relevant (I've come up with quite a few). And then I get discouraged because even though I'm fairly--let's call it 92%--certain that I could teach this class more effectively, I am also keenly aware that I only have 3 years of teaching experience and am thus very unlikely to be hired by anyone to teach other teachers. In fact, one of my classmates today said, without knowing how I would take it, that she thought it was "an absolute crime" to let teachers with less than 10 years of experience teach other teachers. Certainly her view is a little extreme, and just a bit age biased, but that kind of thing just makes me hopeless for education in general.

I'm not saying that I necessarily want to teach other teachers, though it has certainly crossed my mind. But I just find myself recently annoyed by--actually, I don't even know. It's possible that I'm just pissed off because this class seems like such a waste of time and it frustrates me that bad teaching exists in this world. And in a very stasia-centric view of the world, I think that if people would just let me take care of it, things would be much better. Which is largely ridiculous, of course, but there you go.

closure

2010-06-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

It's over. As of 1pm this afternoon, I am officially unemployed. My classroom is no longer mine; I don't have another school year coming up; my only students are past tense. From here on out, I navigate the great unknown.

Funny, though, that it would take joblessness to make me feel like I'm creating my own path in life. I mean, life is always up to me to create, but somehow with a steady job--at least, with this last steady teaching job (how weird to talk about it already as something-that-used-to-be!)--I felt more like the structure of my life had already been determined for me. In large part, I guess it was: I was confined by school hours, but it wasn't like I could turn off thinking about teaching and my students when contract hours were over. A very, very large chunk of my time was in some way dedicated to teaching. Which was my choice, initially, of course, but which kind of stopped seeming like one.

It's possible that every job I will ever have will ultimately make me feel like I'm not in control of my time or my life. I guess now it's up to me to figure out how true that is.

But as for closure. Today at school, while everyone else had inservice meetings, I packed up the last bits of my classroom and put together my curriculum plans for next year's language arts teachers to use. It was the perfectly satisfying end to this three-year career--cleaning everything up and getting ready to pass the torch. I left feeling like I'd done everything I needed to do here.

And as I walked out the door with the last of my stuff crammed in my backpack, I saw this, written on a poster where my coworkers had recorded what they thought were things to celebrate about this year:

Thank god for that. I wanted to give the writer a giant hug for the gift she gave me with those words. It is a bold move, and it is a celebration, and I am ready and excited for it.

Right now, I am faced with nothing but possibilities.

the race is on and I am losing

2010-06-14T20:12:00.000-07:00

Finishing up the school year is one thing; finishing it while simultaneously packing up my classroom is quite another. There's so much I want to write about right now, from telling my students that I'm leaving to some super thought-provoking articles I've read, to my amazingly mixed reactions to not being a part of my school next year and how astoundingly sweet my students all are. But right now, I'm kind of hunkered down trying to get grades done, say thank you to my coworkers, take down three years' worth of classroom buildup, and--the monumental task--set my students loose ready to think critically and take on the world.

Think me happy thoughts. On Friday, it's all over.

great expectations

2010-06-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

From an email my principal sent out today:

"Dear Staff,

Stasia has availed herself of the separation agreement and will be exploring new ways to save the world."

Yes!!

I'm pretty psyched he wrote that. Here I come!! :)

resigned

2010-06-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

Bruce Barcott writes in The Measure of a Mountain that "There are honorable and dishonorable forms of the quit...Implicit in the honorable quit is the knowledge of one's own limits, and the confidence to live with them--or at least know when, and when not, to push."

It's a weird concept to deal with, I think. I grew up with the idea of never quitting beaten into my skull--maybe because of people around me, maybe because of my own personality, but that's the way it was. Don't give up. Don't give in. Fight fight fight. Push forward, you can do it, achieve more than you think you can, keep going even when you want to stop. And mostly, I think it's true. It's on the fringes of what you think is possible, the very outward edge of what's comfortable that great things happen.

But lately I've been wondering if maybe sometimes it's just not that smart to keep pushing.

Today I submitted my resignation. For real. Like as-of-June-18th-no-longer-have-a-job kind of real. Because when it came down to it, this wasn't the place where I wanted to keep on pushing; when it came down to it, this kind of quit was the quit that needed to happen. I am very keenly aware of disappointing my students, disappointing my coworkers, and disappointing my principal, all of whom (well, except for my students maybe) have great expectations for me in this school--but to keep pushing here was just pushing for the sake of pushing, staying put simply for the ideal of not giving up, not because it was actually something worth not giving up for.

I quit for all sorts of reasons, many of which I'm still processing and many of which I will probably write more about later. But fundamentally, I think this was an act of self-preservation, a quit that opens up a whole different world of opportunity and excitement, a quit that gets me out of a situation that is becoming ever more soul-crushing.

Again, I hate to give up. But the more I think about this, the more I think that even though I am giving up a whole lot--it's been really hard for me to talk about this decision without crying, much to my annoyance--I'm gaining even more. I'm psyched to get back out into the world and see what it has to offer. I'm psyched to throw myself into something new. I'm psyched to stay connected to education in different ways, psyched to volunteer, psyched to read and write and take classes, but mostly psyched that I got out of this while I still loved students. My district is a system whose business is students but who seems to have forgotten that students are people too. I'm glad to get out before I forgot.

So I'm resigning, but not resigned. I'm going to do great things, even if I'm not quite sure what they are yet. Like Paulo Coelho says in The Alchemist, the universe will conspire to help me reach my goals. I'm setting my intentions and setting out.

weekend playing! (a fluff piece:)

2010-06-02T20:44:00.000-07:00

James and I saw Smith Rock for the first time ever this last weekend, on a camping trip that tried to follow the sun. Though we were only moderately successful in avoiding the pervasive wet, it was still a lovely trip, and quite good for quelling the stasia antsy-wanderlust.

Don't be fooled, though, Smith Rock is actually much larger than that last picture would lead you to believe. Try this one:

For more pictures and exciting captions, go here!

the real post

2010-05-28T21:45:00.001-07:00

That last birdwatching post was kind of a procrastination post, something to distract me from these huge, overwhelming issues that I really want to write about but am not sure how to attack.

Students, man. They're going to break my heart. One of my kiddos is withdrawing today, with 11 instructional days left of the school year, because he doesn't feel safe at school. One of my kiddos just turned in a paper rife with excruciating details about calling the police to keep her dad from assaulting her mom, then giving the testimony that sent him to jail. One of my kiddos comes to school every single day--every day--in the same putrid clothes because he's homeless and his mom cares more about drugs than she does about his having anything to wear or eat.

It is impossible for me to teach these guys without letting them into my heart, and it is impossible for me to let them into my heart without feeling every day that I'm leaving myself wide open to be chewed up and spit out. They are needy needy needy and still, for the most part, utterly self-centered; they will take as much as I can give and then some, and at the end, I will still feel like I couldn't do enough. They will break my heart, over and over and over, and they will have no idea--and I will let them do it, because sometimes I'm the only one who will.

birdwatching

2010-05-28T19:19:00.001-07:00

I've got a special bald eagle. I see him every few days on my way to or from work, sometimes hunting for fish; sometimes soaring super high above everything; once catching a fish; once fighting off one of the ospreys I also often see; mostly just sitting in what I now think of as his tree. Maybe it's just because bald eagles seem like such majestic, uncommon birds (I don't think I think that just because of the connotations of American government;), but it totally makes my day to see this guy. And every time I do, I think how awesome it is to be in Portland, where urban and nature can still place nicely together.

the theorum of parental visitation

2010-05-23T17:40:00.001-07:00

This theorum, which I am currently developing, goes something like this:

When parents come to visit their adult children, it is impossible for them to resist using their visit as an opportunity to clean our their own homes.

James and I have boatloads of proof for this theorum, all on display in the growing mountain of boxes in our basement. Many of them are a ginormous collection of baseball/magic: the gathering/other nerdy cards that James accrued in his childhood, left behind when he moved out, and recently re-acquired over several of his parents' visits. Others are boxes full of Christmas decorations, household knickknacks, and other various miscellanea from my mom, also acquired over a variety of her visits. I imagine the parental thought process to go something like this: finally my son/daughter has a house of his/her own! Not only can I now give him/her all this old shit of his/hers that's been taking up space in my house, but I can also pawn off all the old things that I feel bad getting rid of but that I don't actually want in my house! Certainly he/she will want them or know what to do with them!

Of course, the problem is that neither of us really know what to do with all of this stuff. When we bought this house, we were (and remain) determined not to collect a bunch of stuff just because we had room for it in our basement. We don't want to live here for 5 years or 15 years or whatever and realize that we own truckloads of things that we'd totally forgotten about just because they'd been tucked carefully away out of sight. But with this constant influx of things from our parents, it's harder.

Not to say that they don't bring things that we like and will use, of course. It's just that much of the random stuff that makes its way up here is stuff that we'd forgotten about for a reason: it's not that important to us. But once it's up here again, it's much harder to get rid of. Trips to Goodwill take planning and foresight when you're schlepping your things by bicycle (or renting a zipcar for an hour); not to say that it's impossible to take care of all this without a car, of course, but it's just one extra step that makes it easier to let all these boxes slowly take over the basement.

Clearly, we should have been more proactive about getting rid of all our old stuff in our parents' homes so they didn't have things to bring us--but I'm pretty convinced that they'd still bring stuff anyway, even if it wasn't necessarily ours. It's the parental way, right?

dilemmas

2010-05-17T19:14:00.000-07:00

If someone paid you to quit your job, would you do it?

Of course, the easy answer is a resounding "hell yeah!" Who doesn't want to get money to not have a job? But then again, that money only lasts so long, and after it runs out, it starts looking better and better to have had a job all along, right?

I ask because my school district, in what I imagine is an attempt to avoid having to fire teachers in yet another year of budget shortfall, recently offered a cash incentive to employees who wanted to "sever their relationship" with the district. You'd get a certain amount of money to leave, forfeiting any right to be recalled to your job when (and if) there is more money.

Clearly, the district's powers that be are hoping that teachers who already make a fair amount of money--people much higher on the pay scale than me--will take this incentive. That way, the amount they have to pay for the incentive is just a small percentage of what they'd have to pay to keep that employee employed. Of course, the problem is that if you already make a fair amount of money teaching and have been teaching long enough to have worked your way that far up the pay scale, it seems much less likely that you'd willingly quit your job and strike out anew. Especially since you're not likely to find another comparable job right now.

I hope my logic there is right, anyway. I hope that other people don't want to quit, because I want the district to let me do it. This could be grounds for a whole other post, of course, but I feel ready to try something new, and I can't imagine a better way to start off than by being paid to not have a job for a while.

cap the trash

2010-05-06T14:16:00.000-07:00

Portland's average household produces about 1326 pounds of garbage per year--which is significantly less than the American average of up to 1700 lbs per year per person. That's over 520 billion pounds of trash per year, just in America. And where does all that garbage go? Most of it ends up in landfills, the number one means of waste "management" in our country. We don't see it, of course, since we have nifty little trucks that come every week to take care of our dirty business, but imagine if we had to live amidst this kind of scene:

It's kind of disgusting, right?

But here's the worst part: a huge percentage of the stuff that goes to landfills doesn't need to be there. The EPA estimates that up to 40% of our landfills is simply paper that could have been recycled. 23% is potential compost, which could have been put back into our gardens for better soil. And that kind of stuff--stuff that could easily break down if treated correctly--is likely to stay for years and years and years in a landfill, simply because conditions there don't favor the breakdown of organic material.

Most landfills are lined with plastic or clay and then capped, which means that sunlight, moisture, and oxygen, the three things necessary for decomposition, are severely lacking. So a newspaper--you know how quickly newspaper can disintegrate in your yard, for example--can last for 15 years of longer; an apple core, which would decompose in about 2 months in your compost bin, can last for years. And in the meantime, that landfill, holding all the junk, is emitting between 40 and 70 million tons of methane a year. Yikes, right?

Luckily, there's stuff to be done. A few ideas:

1) Switch your garbage collection. James and I just switched our garbage service so that our trash only gets picked up once a month (our recycling and green waste, on the other hand, still come every week). Knowing that our tiny garbage can has to last us a whole months means that we're much more conscious about what we throw away (and as an extra bonus, we're now paying only a very small fraction of our past garbage bill). Most garbage collection agencies will also allow you to downsize your garbage can and pay a smaller collection rate.

2) Think about packaging. New toys, electronics, even food items are often a packaging nightmare. Be conscious of how much trash is coming along with whatever new exciting thing you're buying, and try to buy things that use less packaging. Relatedly,

3) Buy in bulk. James and I are lucky in that we have some really awesome grocery stores with hefty bulk sections by our house. We try our best to bring our own packaging--be it glass jars, old plastic bags, old plastic containers, whatever--with us to the store and carry home whatever we need in those. That way, we don't have to use bags from the store and when we get home there's very little that we have to throw away.

4) Compost. It pains me when I think of how long it takes something as innocuous as the apple core from my lunch to break down in a landfill. If I take it home and put it in my compost, on the other hand, it turns into rich, luscious soil I can add to my own garden in just a month or two. Yes, it was originally a pain for me to "pack out" my compost from school when it's so much easier to just throw it in the trash can, but after enough of feeling bad about it, its became just another habit to put my organic waste back in a tupperware, carry it home, and put it in my garden.

5) Recycle. Of course, it's best to not even use stuff in the first place if you can avoid it, but for when you have to use, please recycle what you can.

6) Advocate for community involvement. Portland is just now piloting a curbside compost collection program to help get all that great organic stuff out of landfills and into green recycling facilities. The result will be nutrient-rich soil that can be reused by landscapers and other agricultural users. It's like magic: take all your household scraps and create useful soil! It's still in its infancy, but because people here cared about reducing their waste, we're finding ways to make it feasible.

I'm sure there are a million other things to do as well. Feel free to add onto this list in the comments, or email me if you have any other suggestions. But seriously, guys, it's an easy problem to ignore since we aren't, in our lovely privileged position, forced to live amidst the filth we create. But that doesn't mean that we have a license to create it at will. People say it enough that it becomes kind of a cliche, but please, please think about our planet and your impact on it when you put your trash out of sight and out of mind. It doesn't just go away, as much as you'd like to believe it does.

...and in other news

2010-05-04T20:37:00.001-07:00

I'm so sick! I mean, I'm not actually feeling that bad, but I'm so fricken stuffy it's ridiculous. How am I going to run 31 miles if I can't breathe??? Argh! I hate stupid germs!!

educational quandry

2010-05-04T20:17:00.001-07:00

For all the time, energy, policy work, arguing, thought we spend on education, is it in the end really worth it? I've been reading a lot about education lately, from this article about how to make better teachers, to the latest Rethinking Schools issue, to an article in the New York Review of Books that made me totally rethink the grad school teaching education I'm a product of--and sometimes, in the midst of all these competing theories and different things to focus on and little bickering arguments and who knows what else, I can't help but think who cares about this, anyway?

Those are my hopeless moments. Those are the moments when I think that this problem of how to help people learn is way too big for anyone to tackle, that it doesn't matter what I do because it will never be enough, or if it is enough, it'll be enough of the wrong thing. It's hard to read all these hundreds of articles--and these are only the ones I know about--and sort through what makes sense, and then try to act accordingly in my classroom. What's more daunting is that after all that reading, even if I could figure out the right thing for my classroom, I'm still surrounded by millions of other teachers, administrators, and who knows who else in this huge, overwhelming system that is going five million directions at once. How will anything ever get better?

That's when I have to take a deep breath and realize that I'm defeating myself before I even begin. I'm not going to fix the whole system right now. I'm not even going to fix a fraction of the system right now. But I can try to be the best teacher I can be. That's the start. Maybe I will make a difference in the large-scale scheme of things and maybe I won't, but I can certainly try to make the biggest difference I can for my students. And maybe that's all I or anyone else needs to be doing right now. I don't think that's it, but at least it's a start, a positive step I can take without being paralyzed by the hugeness of what I'm stepping into.

next weekend: awesomeness!

2010-05-01T19:13:00.001-07:00

This time next weekend, I will hopefully be stuffing my face after a successful run through McDonald Forest. I haven't really talked about it much, especially since my "training" definitely deserves those quotation marks around it, but I'm starting to get kind of psyched.

This will be my longest run, ever. I'm pretty confident I can run 50k, even though I've never actually run nearly that far. I'm not confident I can run it in a self-respecting time. That'll be okay, really, once I start, because I'm pretty sure it will be a rad run through the forest regardless, but from here, sitting on my couch, I don't just want to run it, I want to run it well. That's just the self-competitive part of me that I pretend doesn't exist but in fact does, quite healthily.

In all reality though, given how ambivalently I've prepared for this, I'm quite mentally prepared to run at the back, enjoying the scenery with all the old ladies--except that it seems like it's the front of the race that's dominated by old people. So I'll be the young whippersnapper limping along at the back, huge grin on my face at a chance to run for six hours (or whatever) through the trees. Like I said, I'm psyched. Bring it on!!:)

rainbow season

2010-04-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

My poor gloves.

Back in February, the universe conspired to help me get rid of two old pairs of gloves that had way outlived their usefulness but that I couldn't quite get rid of. (If there's anything I hate, it's buying new stuff.)

First, I dropped one of my gloves somewhere in downtown Portland on a cold, wet night after seeing James' film. It was probably better that I lost it, because not too long before, my piano teacher's dog had chewed the middle finger off of it, which, needless to say, substantially decreased its warmth. Then, not three days later, I was wearing my backup pair of winter gloves--which still had all 10 intact fingers but were nevertheless rapidly unraveling through the seams--when I left them on the counter at New Seasons after some grocery shopping. In the span of about three days, I went from four ratty-but-still-arguably-functional gloves to very cold fingers.

These gloves in the picture, which I bought as a replacement, have been awesome, but in this weather I'm starting to remember the fatal flaw of non-waterproof biking gloves. Recently, the weather has been very typically Portland spring: super dramatic downpours followed by blinding sunshine, then a quick turnaround to more downpours and hail. It's quite normal to be in the brilliant sunshine and see in front of you nothing but the darkest, most ominous clouds you can imagine (happily, this leads to some pretty spectacular rainbows). My bike gloves, though, have been in a constant state of saturation.

It's like the weather knows when I'm leaving. It can be super nice out when I run, but the minute I pull my bike out of the garage to actually get to school, the heavens open up and I find myself drenched. So when I get to my classroom, I wring myself out, put my gloves and hat on my heater to dry off, and settle in.

When I leave, it's the same story. It might be nice out for a little, but inevitably, I find myself being dumped and hailed on. And when I get home, I wring myself out again, put my gloves and beanie on the heater, and, again, wait for them to dry off.

Don't get me wrong. I love this weather. I don't mind getting rained on; the drama and excitement of Portland spring is well worth getting soaked. It's just that my gloves smell so bad from all this soaking and drying. And it doesn't really seem to be a smell that ever goes away entirely, even after being washed. Or rather, it's like malaria or something: once you have it, it never quite leaves you, even if there are times when it's not as bad or when you don't notice. Someday someone will invent a biking glove that doesn't succumb to that pernicious mildew smell, and I will be a happy stasia.

But that's enough about gloves. Next time, something of substance:)

the wanderlust, incurable

2010-04-14T19:34:00.000-07:00

When the weather is nice, I have a hard time sitting still. I don't want to be at work, I want to be running, running, running, or pedaling to new and exciting lands, or hiking back to my tent. I want my bare feet to push against the spongy forest floor; I want to forget the noise of traffic and motors and seventh graders and surround myself with wind and birds and nature-silence. I want to be outside.

Thank god I bike to work. Thank god there's a farmer's market and little pockets of nature in Portland. Thank god for running and weekends and summer vacation. But I'm greedy. I want everything. I want to soak in the world, I want to fall every night exhausted into my bed, spent from a day's hard exertion, not just mental but physical. I want to ask everything I can of my body. I want to be outside, roaming, wandering, exploring.

Wanderlust, old friend, welcome back.

the natural ant nuke

2010-04-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

Did you know that ants hate cinnamon? This is a very useful factoid that James and I recently learned while trying to get rid of a semi-ginormous ant highway making its way around our fireplace.

As a sensitive human being (and a much better person than me;), James didn't want to kill the ants, and as chemically-averse as we both are, we didn't want to nuke them with any sort of questionable substance that would ultimately find its way into our own lungs as well. So the ever-resourceful internet suggested cinnamon. Apparently anything spicy-ish repels ants--so cayenne pepper or other comparable household goods would also work--as do things like citrus and mint. Since we have a very large, very old container of cinnamon, we figured we'd start with that.

We liberally sprinkled it around our hearth, paying careful attention to the areas where the ants seemed to be going in and out. And amazingly, the next day there were practically no ants! Since then, I've had to do a few touch-ups as they find trickier and more inventive ways into our house, but overall I've been pretty amazed.

So there you go. Get rid of your Raid and take out the cinnamon:)

discipline

2010-04-07T21:23:00.000-07:00

Instead of new year's resolutions, I tend to come up with a general theme that I want to focus on for the year. Last year, it was being stoked--choosing to be excited about life and opportunities. This year, my theme was (and is) discipline: doing the things I need to do, even when I don't feel like it.

Originally, I decided on discipline to help me stay focused on the things I really want to get better at this year. For running, it meant going out even in the freezing 5am rain before school to get in shape for my upcoming ultra, or scheduling the three or four hour weekend runs before the other, more glamorous weekend options. It meant spending time writing. It meant playing the piano even when I got home and didn't want to practice. It meant reading things of quality, not just the young adult two-hour books that I screen for my students. It meant eating well, which is much harder when I so love to bake vegan cookies:) Basically, when I decided on discipline, I meant it to help me do the things that are sometimes hard to get started on, even though I'm happier when I'm doing them.

I mention this because--like all new years resolutions or life goals--this has been hard at times. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about: everything will be going well, then something messes one up one little aspect of life and everything else starts to slide. My foot, for example. For a few weeks, I thought I had a stress fracture or some other such heinous and painful annoyance in my heel. I stopped running for a week, then two, then three. And when I'm not running, the laziness spills over into other parts of my life as well. I don't play piano. I read dumb internet stuff instead of writing. I'm not sure why letting one part of life slide affects all the others, but that seems to be the case for me.

So now I find myself in the process of trying to reclaim the discipline. My foot feels better; I should be running. But now after not having done it well for a while, it's fricken hard. I'm getting back into it, I mean, but it's so easy to slip back into sloth-hood when running isn't the effortless flying that I love. It's so easy to eat shitty food when running feels hard anyway so diet doesn't seem all that important to performance. And it's so easy, when I'm already being lazy about one thing, to be lazy about everything.

But I don't want to do what's easy; I want to do what ultimately makes me feel like I've earned my own self-respect. So it's back to the discipline, albeit begrudgingly at times. Back on track.

what matters

2010-03-31T20:11:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've been having a hard time writing because I've been hung up on the question of what matters. I have these lofty goals of writing about important things (whatever that means;), but then I sit down in front of my computer and all that comes out is my own experience. How narcissistic, right?

But I think the key might be to write about important things in a personal way, in a way that makes other people interested in the story of it all. I think that's why I'm drawn to fiction in the first place: it's an amazingly powerful medium with which to entice people to think a certain way about something. Think of (as much as I hate this book) Uncle Tom's Cabin or Beloved or To Kill a Mockingbird (apparently I'm on a civil liberties kick;) They're all stories--wonderfully empathy-inducing stories--that shifted the world, at least part of it, because of the way they made people think differently. That's the power of story. And if I were better at it, maybe I too could shift people's minds.

It doesn't necessarily have to be fiction, of course. Nonfiction can be equally enticing, though, again, I think it's the story of it that makes it so. (Or maybe I'm just an English major nerd who finds stories in everything.) It's fitting, though, that James and I just recently saw Annie Leonard, the creator of The Story of Stuff.

For those of you who haven't heard of it, The Story of Stuff is a video that basically explains the "materials economy," the path that all the normal, household stuff we own and consume takes from creation to disposal. It's important to think about--perhaps one of the most important things to think about--since the way we currently use and dispose of our resources in this world is so wholly unsustainable, not to mention heinously unconscionable. But who stops to care about how that water bottle in her hand or the headphones in her ears are created and where they go when she gets rid of them? Who thinks beyond the initial price tag and the ultimate heave into the garbage can? Probably not a lot of people, until you make it into a story like Anne Leonard has done. And now millions of people around the world are thinking about the goods they consume, all because now there's a narrative in their heads that has made it accessible.

I guess that's my goal. There's important stuff out there (and okay, less important but also interesting stuff, too:), and I want to be able to write about it in a way that makes people think, in a way that at least causes someone to pause if not actually change their mind. That's the goal I've tentatively set for myself. Maybe not on this blog, or maybe not all the time, but I want to use my writing to contribute to what matters, whatever that might be.

hey biking (or non-biking) ladies!!

2010-03-19T23:33:00.001-07:00

Regardless of where you live, please take a minute for this survey about women and cycling. It only takes about 10 minutes and anything you can say to help make our world more bike-friendly is great.

This survey in particular is women-specific--so ladies, get your voice heard!:)

happy spring break!

2010-03-19T22:57:00.001-07:00

Spring break officially started at 2:15 this afternoon--and unlike the last two years of teaching, I actually got the hell out of there at...oh, about 2:20. Portland cooperated nicely by providing the most glorious springy day we've seen so far, all bright and blue and flower-scented. I took off my shoes and socks, spread my toes in the muddy grass, and spent over three hours by the river in the sunshine, reading, people-watching, brimming over with happiness.

I love spring! This is when my exuberance overflows, every little thing makes me smile, and everything seems possible. Portland, life, nature, family, friends--I love you all!

fiction writing is hard

2010-03-15T21:46:00.000-07:00

It's another Monday night: time to try to pull yet another story together to share at my class tomorrow. I don't know that I've ever had this much trouble writing. Maybe it's just that I haven't been good about writing every day, so I find myself on Sunday and Monday trying to come up with an entire story without having given my poor creative brain time to play around, regroup, revise, rethink. If it were memoir or nonfiction I feel like it would be much easier for me to write, but it's proven amazingly difficult for me to pull together the characters, plot, conflict necessary for fictional stories. And every week I leave class thinking that this week I'll start earlier, give myself more time to write--and then of course Sunday rolls around and I've still barely even thought about what I want to do.

I feel bad that I'm not giving this class the attention it deserves. But I also feel good about all the other things I've been doing. I guess it's a matter of balance, as always.

So here's to another story I'll "finish" tomorrow during my prep period...

so to get students to do well.... fire their teachers?

2010-03-04T19:11:00.000-08:00

I've been hearing a lot lately about the chronically underperforming school in Rhode Island that decided to fire all its teachers so as get kids to do better. For those of you who missed that in the news, basically what happened is this: Central Falls High School graduates only about half of its students and has some abysmal percentage of students who pass state proficiency tests (I'm not sure about the numbers, but it seems like somewhere to the tune of 11% of students were "proficient" on whatever tests they have to determine that). After teachers refused to add time to the school day and provide extra-curricular tutoring without extra pay, the district decided to just fire them all and start over.

Really? So here we have an underperforming school from the poorest city in Rhode Island, and the best solution to help students do better is to get rid of everyone who was already trying? Where, I wonder, are they going to find 80 more (or whatever it was) quality teachers who just so happen to want to work in a really, really poor district, with severely disadvantaged kids, in a school where they can't count on any job security? Did that really seem like a good idea?

It's all so ridiculous. There's so much talk about improving achievement and getting more kids to graduate and--of course--racing to the top, but I think we're largely ignoring the real issues. Kids will do better when they have teachers who are invested in their success. And teachers who are truly invested in their students doing well don't need different evaluation techniques, don't need longer school days, don't need all manner of fancy-schmancy new scheduling, and don't need different pay scales (though it would certainly be nice!). What they need is working conditions that allow them to get their job done.

A longer school day will achieve nothing if students are still crammed into classes of 35. Better pay will do nothing if teachers don't have time to plan. A block schedule won't do anything if teachers don't have a chance to think about and then execute what they know is best for their specific students. We don't need anything fancy. We just need to spend our efforts creating environments where students can actually thrive, where there are few enough of them that no one gets lost, where teachers can teach instead of babysit and where they can teach their students instead of their curriculum.

Forget the drastic measures like starting a school over, hiring a whole new staff, making the school day 8 hours instead of 6 (really? It's hard enough to stay mentally focused for 6. Is two extra hours of sitting in a desk really going to achieve that much?). All of those drastic moves seem born of desperation; once you do something like that, you've already lost the war. I think the solution is much more simple than we make it out to be--but no one wants to talk about it because, after all, it means a radical restructuring of schools. Cut the class size. It's not going to fix everything, but it's a start, and a way better one than anything I've seen floating around in the news.

why you can no longer find me on Facebook

2010-02-27T17:24:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, I've had a tempestuous relationship with Facebook. I originally signed onto it with an account that my roommate created for me; in fact, my password has remained the one she made up, the name of the cat we shared. Since then, I've gone back and forth deleting and reactivating my account a few times, always lured back in by the thought that I was missing out by not being on it, that my friends and family were interacting as a group without me, that I was not privy to the information and pictures and jokes and whatever else that they were creating with the help of this massive online social network.

But what matters isn't my history with Facebook. What matters--and what I'm not exaggerating when I say is hugely, earth-shatteringly important--is why I'm done with it now. For real. Forever.

There are two big reasons I got rid of my account. First of all, there's the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. This is a site that until recently allowed users to commit Facebook (and other social network) "suicide." You could type in your username and password, and the machine would go in and systematically delete all your friends, account setting, and other data, effectively removing you from the Facebook system. I'm not super technological or anything, but as far as I can tell they used their own "worm" Facebook account to do this--kind of like having a spy behind enemy lines that could help you self-destruct.

Recently, I went back to this social network suicide site and was shocked to discover that Facebook had excommunicated them. Apparently, helping others voluntarily and of their own volition delete their accounts was violating the Facebook terms of use, enough so that Facebook threatened litigation. Read the press statement here.

Even without the second reason which I'll get to shortly, that was enough to get me off of Facebook. I have a very deep mistrust of any institution (if we can call Facebook an institution) that is so threatened by people disengaging from it that they threaten legal action. Really, Facebook? In retrospect, I guess it shouldn't surprise me: the wealth of marketable personal data that Facebook retains about its users is of course supremely valuable to them, and they wouldn't want anyone helping others delete themselves from it. But that alone is enough for me to want to get the hell out of there. I'd like to keep information about myself to myself, or to the people I personally choose to share it with--not the whole internet world and whoever else Facebook can sell it off to.

But enough of social conspiracy. The second reason I'm off of Facebook has to do with the idea of friendship itself. I recently read a fantastic article by William Deresiewicz that was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in December 2009. (You can read it here. Yes, it's long, but I sincerely hope that enough of you still have an attention span that you'll read it, because, like I said, it's absolutely fantastic. Print it if you need to; I know that--Luddite that I am, perhaps--I always do better reading from a paper than I do from a computer screen.)

Anyway, Deresiewicz argues, in a nutshell, that online "friends" have devalued the nature of real friendship, which itself, in modern times, was a replacement for the disappearing communities that used to give us a sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves. Social networking sites like Friendster, Myspace, and later, Facebook, took the notion of a circle of friends and expanded it to the whole of the world, "and in so doing, destroyed both its own nature and that of the individual friendship itself. Facebook's very premise," he continues, "and promise, is that it makes our friendship circles visible. They there are, my friends, all in the same place." The problem, of course, is that seeing your friends all on the same screen doesn't actually make them close, not really. Facebook is "inviting us to believe that by assembling a list, we have conjured a group. Visual juxtaposition creates the mirage of emotional proximity."

Basically, what he argues and what I've come to realize is that though it seems like I'm interacting with my friends or family on Facebook, I'm actually doing a very public dance of self-affirmation. Every time I post on someone else's wall, put up a status about myself, or comment on someone's picture, I'm not interacting with a friend. I'm cultivating a public persona, an image of myself that's shared not with a select individual but with an unknown and indeterminate audience. Deresiewicz said it well when he says that "we haven't just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle [of friends], but to a cloud."

Though it seems like I'm talking to my friends on Facbeook--and in some sense I am--there's also the other sense where I'm performing a very public act, totally at odds with the intimacy of friendship. It's like the students I have who say something in class and then immediately look around to see how everyone else is reacting. Facebook doesn't promote the probing-sharing-challenging-bettering of friendship. It promotes information-sharing and reaction to information-sharing, which is a whole different animal. Hopefully, I'm not your friend because you know a lot of facts about me; I'm your friend because there's something about me that you've come to value in the way I act, think, am--the things you can't really tell about me from a carefully-groomed profile. That's something that social networking "friendship" absolutely overlooks.

And that's why I said way up there at the beginning (are you still with me here?:) that this was hugely, earth-shatteringly important. You guys--my friends--matter to me. You matter to me because of who you are, who you help me to be, who we are together. You matter to me because of the meaning we've created together, the things we've done, and the ideas we've shared. We've done these for ourselves, not for an audience--and I don't want the whole of the online world audience mitigating our relationship anymore. Is it hypocritical of me to post this on a blog, that other method of public broadcasting? Perhaps. But this is something I want people in general to think about, and then something I want to engage with further with my friends. There are some things, like this massive treatise about Facebook, that I want to say to the whole world--but I don't want to confuse that with actually working on individual friendships. That happens in real life, away from the eyes of the world.

a woman of simple pleasures

2010-02-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

That's what my trail running buddy called me while we were driving back from Saturday's race, the Hagg Lake Mud Run. After 25km of slogging through some fantastic mud, after a post-race wade into the lake, shoes and all, to try to wash up a little, after cheering on a bunch of other runners, I was fantasizing about the bagel sandwich I was going to make for myself once I got home.

"I'm going to toast the bagel just right, then add hummus, and like half a red pepper, and some zucchini and helllllla spinach and it's going to be so. awesome," is basically what I said. And then I'm pretty sure I smiled gleefully to myself, delighting in the image of future stasia tearing into the perfect bagel sandwich.

He laughed at me and gave me the simple pleasures comment. And you know what? I am a woman of simple pleasures, and dammit, that's what makes life so great. Do me a favor: take some time today and revel in something little and awesome--a daffodil that wasn't there yesterday, a scone that comes perfectly browned out of the oven, a little kid trying to throw a basketball that's almost bigger than he is--and tell me about how it made you smile. Those simple things, man. That's what it's all about:)

whatever happened to biking?

2010-02-09T21:46:00.000-08:00

I was just looking at my blog the way it looks when you just navigate to the page--something I don't often do, since I tend to just see my discrete posts when I publish and edit them. I'd forgotten that I made a tag line for myself over there on the right that says "run, bike, teach, repeat."

Huh! It certainly is an appropriately-scattered tag line for a fairly shotgun-approach blog (one topic? Never will I be so constrained!:) But it made me realize that I haven't really talked much about biking lately. I guess in the winter biking becomes more of a simple issue of transportation, not necessarily something I revel in. Unless you're screaming down a mountain in the mud (something I would love to try; anyone have a mountain bike they want to give me?), biking in the winter isn't necessarily particularly awesome. It's not bad here, I mean--the rain gets demoralizing but it's certainly not the end of the world--but winter biking never really inspires in me the same sense of glee and freedom that biking in any other season does.

Now that we're coming into some sporadically sunny weather, though, my biking legs are getting fired up. The crocuses coming up, the birds in the morning, the sunshine through my classroom window the last two days--all these conspire to bring my bikey wanderlust out of hibernation.

Pretty soon, maybe, will be the day where--without having all my efforts thwarted by the next day's rain--I can deep-clean, re-cable, tweak and adjust until everything on my bike is sparkling clean and devastatingly efficient. That will be a glorious day, the return to well-oiled recreational biking.

I have a dream...

2010-02-05T22:18:00.000-08:00

...or maybe I should call it a vision. It begins with something real, a student making a seating chart for the class he's in.

Because he was fed up with sitting by a kid who'd rather steal pencils and self-inflict rubber band wounds onto his arms than do any semblance of work, he asked me earlier this week if he could make a new seating chart for the class. I abhor making seating charts, so I gladly agreed--and thus it was that today, we have a new 4th period seating chart, made by a 4th period student with only minor tweaks by me.

Of course, now other kids want to make seating charts. I already have a guy in 6th period trying to figure out how he can design it so that he sits by his friends but not so many of them that I won't approve the ultimate configuration (I already had to veto a few of his first choices, but he's still working at it:) It also means that students--at least in 4th period and, pretty soon, 6th--can no longer complain to me about seats they're unhappy with. When I heard the inevitable grumbles today about seats in the front or away from friends, I could just tell people that if they didn't like it, all they had to do was submit a new version of the seating chart. If it was reasonable, we'd try their version out next.

I didn't mean for this to be the case, but I realized that by giving my responsibility here away, I made students accountable for a chunk of their language arts world. If they don't like where they sit, they can do something about it--make a new seating chart that is reasonable enough that I will approve it. Quite by accident, I hit upon the solution to complaints: if students are the ones responsible for the way things are run in our classroom, all they have to do if they don't like something is try to get others to agree to change it. When you think about it, it's kind of the model for the real world, right? Things aren't going to change unless you step up and try to make them better.

So my dream, the dream that begins with a seating chart, is a classroom where students are making all those kinds of decisions. My dream is a democratically-run classroom where kids are trusted to try new things, decide for themselves what's best, given the support network to fail and learn from their mistakes, and always pushed to think about what's best for the community. My dream is a classroom where kids problem-solve with common goals in mind--a classroom where I facilitate and tweak, but where the kiddos do the work.

I'm not saying that I'd just let kids run loose and do whatever the hell they want. I'm the teacher; of course I'd be directing, pushing, prodding. But given parameters and an opportunity to have a say in things that matter, I think that kiddos will rise to the expectations I set. They want to be doing real things, things that have an impact, things that seem to matter to their world.

I'm not sure how to make it work quite yet. The seating chart is a start, but it's only a very small example--AND, an example I hit upon quite by accident. I know this dream requires giving up a lot of my own responsibility and trusting that my kiddos will be able to step up and take it over. And I know I'll figure it out as I go. But I'm starting to wonder if this is the only way that I'm going to feel good about teaching. I want to help make kids better, more thoughtful people, not just really good school machines. In my dream, I can do that.

garden planning

2010-02-02T21:18:00.001-08:00

Hey all you readers, both visible and stalkerly: I have a question for you. James and I just removed the concrete from the planting strip in front of our house so we can plant a mini-garden between the sidewalk and the street. So what should we plant?

The strip is about a foot and a half wide and maybe 40 feet long, and I'm pretty psyched about using native plants. Even better would be native plants that also serve to attract desirable insects, butterflies, or birds.

We could use it as a third planter box and maybe grow some food. Artichokes are an option, since they're something we've thought about for a while but are too big for our extant planter boxes; chard or kale might be fun too since it both looks pretty and is delicious.

And yet another option: it might be fun to put some rocks and short ground cover in. We can't exactly do a bioswale since the area's not sloped at all, but if anyone knows of plants that are good for water catchment, I'd love to hear about that.

I've been doing some research about native plants and the likes, but if anyone else has any input I'd love to hear it. Comment here, email me, call me, whatever--even if you're someone who I don't know reads this blog:)

Thank you!!

epiphany

2010-01-27T21:14:00.000-08:00

My ride to and from work is often when I puzzle out things that have been bothering me or that I haven't been able to figure out yet. Biking and running are similar to me in that when I'm doing them well, my mind freely associates and I'm able to come at problems in more creative ways than I can if I just sat down to think about them. So today on my way home, in my free-associative bikey way, I was thinking about the class I went to last night--my second writing workshop fiction class.

I wasn't entirely satisfied with it. In theory, it sounded good: we were all going to come with our two-page stories, we'd take turns reading them out loud, getting feedback, and talking about what worked and didn't work. In the course of our discussions about various stories, we'd come to a deeper understanding about what makes writing good so that we could apply it to the story we'd write for this week.

The problem, it turned out, is that two-page stories, even if there are only 11 of them, take a loooong time to read. We spent so much time reading stories that our discussions of them tended toward the trite--a few comments here and there and then on to the next story. If your story was really good, it probably stoked your ego a little, but if your story was pretty bad, like mine was, it gave very little in the way of constructive feedback. It was nice to hear others' good examples, but that doesn't necessarily give me any help about how to make my own work better. I could just read a whole bunch of really great short stories from the comfort of my own home if that's all I wanted out of this class.

If I were running a writer's workshop, I found myself thinking, I would have just two or three people read their stories out loud and spend a lot of time really talking about them. We'd talk about the authors' decisions about craft and style and tone, the great lines and what made them great, the little thorns that stick out and why they distract the reader, and along the way, everyone would end up with a better idea of what exactly contributed to a good story. Even though we wouldn't all have read our stories and gotten specific feedback on our own writing in any given class period, we'd still leave with concrete ideas of how we could make our writing better, based on what we talked about in other stories.

And then I realized. Whoa. I AM teaching a writer's workshop, and I AM taking exactly the approach I don't like, the approach we took in my fiction class of yesterday. ALL my students are sharing their work, and we're only sharing to publish. We clap after someone shares, and we take notes about anything we liked, but we don't talk about what was good, what we might try in our own writing; really, we don't debrief at all. Sharing isn't a learning experience the way it could be, it's more of a right of passage, something my students have to do when they're done writing. And though I'm sure they wouldn't articulate it the way I just did, I wonder if many of my students are frustrated by their sharing the same way I was frustrated about my own writing workshop experience.

I've got to make my writing workshop--the one I'm teaching, I mean--better!

impulse

2010-01-24T20:04:00.000-08:00

As much as I try to pretend I'm not, I am a fairly impulsive person. I'm not blindly impulsive--I usually do have a head for consequences and implications of my actions--but I like to be able to make decisions based on the circumstances at any given moment. I like to be infinitely adaptable.

This is a quality that drives James (as well as others, I'm sure) crazy, perhaps with reason. I can imagine how it's difficult to deal with an impulsive person. First of all, there's just the unpredictability of it all. Will I come home after work, or will I decide at the last minute to take the super long way home that keeps me away for an extra hour or two? I know I said I would make dinner tonight, but now that it's nice out, I'm feeling like a trip to the farmer's market might be in order instead. Like I said, I try to keep consequences and implications in mind--I don't want to impulsively hurt someone's feelings, or destroy someone else's plans--but I can see how it would still be frustrating, especially because it's really easy to put myself and how I feel at any given point way ahead of anyone else.

Secondly, there's the theory that when I act impulsively instead of taking my time to puzzle out the right course of action, I'm more likely to make a wrong decision. That could be a wrong decision simply in the sense that it leads to an undesirable outcome, or it could be a wrong decision in the morally wrong sense, like if a decision I made impulsively led me to, oh, I don't know, contribute to the deforestation of Brazil or something.

That theory isn't actually all that compelling to me, though. An occasional undesirabely-outcomed decision is, I think, a totally reasonable pride to pay for the freedom of decision making. And as far as the morality of impulsive decisions, I think it falls into the same realm as keeping consequences in mind when making decisions. If I'm clear on what my morals are, I won't impulsively make a decision that violates them.

Even though I often feel like I shouldn't be, I think I'm basically a huge fan of impulsiveness. I think it keeps me on my toes, keeps things interesting, keeps me from falling into too much routine. In some sense, impulse is a childish thing, and it helps me feel like I haven't lost that sense of wonder, experimentation, and joy that kids have and that gets beaten out of them as they get older. I only feel bad about it when confronted with that unwieldy real world voice, the voice that tells me to grow up, be responsible, think of my obligations, blah, blah, blah. It's the same nagging voice that tells me I can't be a real grown-up without having set plans and patterns and goals and routines.

And honestly, I'm not sure how those two voices--the impulsive and the responsible--play together. I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but I feel like they're often seen as such. Which is (I think) why people are so threatened by impulse.

I say embrace it, though. Figure out what you will and won't do, and then give yourself as much freedom to make as wide a variety of decisions as you possibly can.

writing writing writing

2010-01-21T20:54:00.000-08:00

Because I like to overextend myself, I started taking a fiction writing class on Tuesday.

Okay, no. I don't actually like to overextend myself (it actually makes me quite grumpy) and I certainly would never take a class for the sole purpose of overextention--but I did start a brand spanking new class on Tuesday, all so that I could learn how to write fiction.

It's a little overwhelming. I'm one of 12 budding writers in this class, surrounded by people who are, oh, just needing a kick in the pants to get their novel going again, or just having a bit of trouble with tone in the hundreds of short stories they've already written, or, you know, simply wanting a refresher after having graduated with honors from an illustrious MFA program. Not that that makes them good writers, necessarily, but it certainly makes me feel like a total gumby.

I had to admit in class that though I really like the idea of writing fiction, I've never actually done it in practice. Not for real. That's why I'm taking the class, I said, so that I can learn how. heh. I don't feel bad about it, and I'm certainly glad that I'll be in a class where it seems like I'll be able to learn a lot from the other students, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't wildly intimidating. For the story we have due next week, it's already all I can do to not outright dismiss anything I write as cliche and amateurish.

But our teacher recommended just sitting down and writing every day, and I'm determined to do that. So far, so good. I don't have a story yet, and I don't even have a great blog post, but I'm just going to keep plugging away and trust the process. I'm freaked out, but I'm glad for the push.

trail runnin'

2010-01-18T14:20:00.000-08:00

I'm flying. Not continuously, but my feet pick up and touch down softly, fleetingly, and shoot me forward again, leaving me a few glorious moments of weightlessness. I would say I'm pounding down the trail, but that's not it: I'm flying down it, hardly aware that I'm hitting the ground.

Occasionally I see hikers, gingerly sidestepping the boot-sucking mud and swampy, trail-wide puddles. I fly by them, too, caressing the ground with my toes, feet grazing exactly the right places, propelling me onward without breaking stride.

Time exists in a totally different dimension. In the span of only a few minutes, I've run forever; two hours, however, is over in an instant. All that exists is the forest and my body. My muscles flow effortlessly, my breath matches my footfalls, I fly through the mist and between the trees, bathed by occasional rainfall. My lungs fill with clean, crystal air and I keep running, running, running, barely confined to the earth.

I am so, so glad to be alive.

teachy

2010-01-13T20:43:00.000-08:00

If someone had asked me at 10:00 this morning whether I would be teaching at the same school--even in the same district, or maybe even teaching at all--at this point next year, my answer would have been a resounding hell no. Somehow the combination of bureaucratic morning meetings, stupid gossip, and rumors about things to (possibly) come put me in a pretty foul grump. Not helped at all, of course, by the idea of trying to muster up the patience and general good cheer necessary to redirect, prod, and excite a classroom full of hooligans. Lovable hooligans, of course, but certainly hooligans that take a lot of energy.

By 6th period, though--the most hooligany of the whole lot--I was feeling much better. If you'd asked me then whether I'd be back for more next year, my answer would have been more optimistic.

What changed? A few things that I want to hold onto for future bleak moments.

First of all, my journal. When I realized that I was reading the same sentence over and over and over, I put aside the papers I was trying to grade and took out my journal which, for some reason, I'd put in my backpack this morning. I wrote down my grumpiness and got it out of my mind. I drew a line between bureaucratic bullshit and my students, and decided that I wouldn't let my feelings about the system bleed over into my feelings about my students. Just writing it down helped dispel my grump.

Second, my students. Rather than dwell on what's wrong with school, I decided to spend the day reveling in my kiddos--the fiction they're writing, the huge amounts of creativity and enthusiasm they have, their crazy immature antics...everything. Each period, I made a goal that I would talk to at least one kid who usually escapes my notice. That meant that in some classes, I singled out a shy kid--you know, one of those who always gets their work done and never causes problems so goes largely unnoticed. Sometimes, it was one of the punk kids who I usually talk to when I'm annoyed (and thus don't necessarily have the best relationship with). Some classes it was just whoever seemed to be staring off into space while everyone else wrote. No matter what, though, today I just tried to talk to kids, be excited with them about their stories, be human with them.

Third, I started reading Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes. It's a story about a bunch of kids that society has given up on, but who have a teacher who lets them shine. Not necessarily in class, but he provides the space for them to figure out who they are and be recognized for the talents they bring to the world. It was a good reminder that the impact that a teacher can have isn't necessarily found in the classroom or the curriculum. That was big for me, since I've been feeling particularly unenthused about curriculum lately.

And by the end of the day, I remembered that I love kids. It suddenly made sense what some teachers say, that they hate the system but stay in it for the kids. I don't know if that's necessarily the tack I want to take, ultimately, but for now it gives me something to hold onto. This school may be broken, but my kiddos deserve the best I can give them.

in case you were curious

2010-01-06T21:26:00.000-08:00

I wonder what this says about our respective cultures.

Here in the US, we paint bike lanes rather abstractly. Two circles, a semblance of stick figure with a bowl on its head: that somehow adds up to equal a lane where people ride their bikes.

In New Zealand, the bike is rather expertly drawn, yet it lacks a rider:

Check that out, though! It even has crank arms and a full, geometrically-accurate diamond frame!

Aesthetically, I prefer the New Zealand approach. I love that the bike lane icon looks like a bike that could actually take you places, that it hints at a real, functioning method of transportation, that it seems to have been designed by someone who actually had seen a real bike in his or her life. Of course, I like that here we acknowledge that there are riders on the bikes over there in that lane: soft, smooshy riders (even if they don't have hands or feet and they ride on a contraption of two disparate circles) that one should look out for when one is on the road.

Of course, the real win here is that in both countries, there are lanes totally dedicated to bikes, colored and painted separately, a little safe haven for the self-propelled. I wasn't really expecting to see that in New Zealand, and was quite pleasantly surprised. It makes me think there's hope for the world when I see bikes being accepted as a legitimate means of transportation, no matter how the space for them is demarcated.

quote of the day

2010-01-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

Taken from the BBC news of this evening:

"In fact, the Alzheimer's mice performed as well on tests measuring memory and thinking skills as aged mice without dementia."

Does this make you think that maybe our scientific techniques are a little out of hand? Aged mice without dementia? Alzheimer's mice? Taking memory and thinking tests? Really?

Regardless of how I feel about using animals for testing, this quote strikes me as just a wee bit odd. Its from an article that--if you read it here--will tell you why (if you were a mouse, at least) using a cell-phone might help protect you from dementia. There's no discussion, however, of if it's weird that scientists out there are giving little mice rodent-versions of Alzheimers (and the like) and then administering rodent memory tests. Does anyone else find it odd that we just take that kind of thing for granted? That we just accept the vision of lab-coated scientists injecting mice with all sorts of weird things, poking and prodding them to reveal the secrets of science that might, just might, apply to humans too?

No one ever stops to talk about if that's a weird thing or not; we just go right to talking about the results and the implications they might have for human health.

I'm not the only one who thinks this is crazy, am I?

back to it all

2010-01-04T20:22:00.000-08:00

Imperceptibly, the days are getting longer. That's what they say, anyway; my ride to and from work this morning made it seem otherwise. The dark, dark clouds, pouring rain, and evening fog made it seem, if anything, like the days are shorter and more dreary than ever.

Or maybe it's just hard transitioning back to winter from two summery weeks in New Zealand:

The likes of this picture was James and my reality for the last two weeks--a reality that provided exactly the right amount of distance, both physical and psychic, between me and school. Two weeks of not worrying about lesson plans or how to shuffle the seating chart around or what book I might next be able to recommend to Kyle--or really even thinking about anything school-related at all--was absolutely spectacular. And now, even though I would like to have stayed in New Zealand for at least another month, I feel like I'm ready to tackle work again. I'm still not sold on the educational system, I mean, but I feel like I can again give my best shot at making it better. At least in my classroom.

But oh man. New Zealand. You can see more pictures here if you're so inclined; if you do look at them, I suggest flipping through them in big version (or slideshow), since the little version simply does not do the landscape justice. It's impossible to write a summary version of our trip here, but perhaps I can say it like this. We camped a lot, hiked a lot, saw a bunch of cool cities, lots of sheep, lots of deer pastures (like cow pastures, only for deer), felt like Lord of the Rings, and basically had a great time. There you go. New Zealand in a nutshell.

And now here we are again, in the dreary Portland winter that is sure to stretch on interminably. At least, it'll probably feel that way for the next few months. But maybe the days are getting longer after all; maybe tomorrow my morning will feel just a little brighter; maybe one of these days I'll realize I'm heading home and the sun hasn't set yet. In the meantime, I've had two stolen weeks of summer in the midst of it all, and that's pretty damn rad.

branching out

2009-12-19T19:54:00.001-08:00

Sometime during his expansive overseas journey this year, Alex started reading the Harry Potter series in French. Not to be outdone by my bitty bro, I decided that if he could do it, certainly I could also immerse myself in le monde de Poudlard--a feat made much easier by the fact that Powell's carries a fairly good section of books in other languages. That's how I found myself curled up in bed last night, reading Harry Potter en francais and underlining all the vocab words I didn't know.

Happily, I actually understood what I was reading! The insecure part of me had been somewhat concerned that I would open up my new book and immediately have to concede that somehow Alex had surpassed me in linguistic ability, that he could read French whereas I was stuck in a typical monolingual American box. I'm very glad that's not the case. Certainly there are words I don't know, and I'm pretty sure that my comprehension is much helped by the fact that I've already read the book in English, but overall, it makes me feel pretty competent. And it's what I would call a "just right" book if I were talking to my students: a book that's challenging enough that it's helping me become a better reader (in French), but not so hard that I get frustrated after only a page or two.

The whole thing makes me remember that you actually do get better at reading--at language--the more you're immersed in it. I know it sounds silly, but the more I read, the more I can feel my brain expanding. Since I've really only heard French for most of my life, not read it, it's amazing to see it written out as I pronounce the words in my head. Eventually, maybe I'll even be able to write it myself, at more than a learning-impaired, second-grade level.

There are some funny translation decisions that I don't really understand. How "Hogwarts" got translated to "Poudlard" I have no idea. I'm sure there's some reason behind it, just as there's surely some reason that "muggles" got translated to "moldus," but, not being well-enough versed in French, I don't really understand it. It's like I'm not in on the joke. Like I'm the kid tugging at her mom's sleeves asking about some innuendo that went over my head but that everyone else around me understands. But mostly, it makes sense to me, and it makes me super happy to read it. I'm always happy when I feel like I'm learning something new, and feeling like I'm getting better at French is awesome. Bring it on.

simile of the day

2009-12-18T20:46:00.001-08:00

We've been studying figurative language--metaphors and similes, specifically--in class, and today one of my students brought me the following simile:

Friendship is like peeing your pants: everyone can see it but only you can feel the true warmth.

Ha! Awesome, right? Not only for the humor factor of the simile, I mean, but because she saw this online, recognized it as a simile, AND thought to bring it in to class to share! Yay!

seek, and you shall find

2009-12-18T19:35:00.001-08:00

Apparently, this reverse dictionary absolutely exists: here

And it helped me find the word I wanted: nimiety. Seriously. What an awesome word, right? It's so awesome that blogger doesn't even think it's spelled right. It is though; blogger just doesn't know what to do with such an amazing word and, like many things in the world, attacks it as wrong instead of trying to learn what it's all about. heh.

Nimiety. Rad.

new invention?

2009-12-18T19:20:00.000-08:00

I need a reverse dictionary. You know, where I can input what the word means and get back a list of words that would work. It seems like that should be possible--and who knows, maybe it even exists already and I just don't know about it.

It would be exceedingly helpful right now, though, as I'm trying to remember the word of the day from my school calendar. It meant basically the same thing as plethora or surfeit--you know, a whole bunch of something--but it started with an N. Neity? Nienety? Nienal? I absolutely can't recall. And though I tried using the thesaurus to lead me back to it, apparently it's too obscure of a word to be listed with its more mundane cousins (I should have guessed as much, after my calendar told me it's rarely used--which is, of course, why I want to use it right now.)

All that to say that I'm suffering from a surfeit, plethora, overabundance, and n--- of things to write about on this blog, and have thus been paralyzed from posting anything, ever. It's one of those problems of feeling like you can't say anything without saying everything--and then, not having the time, space, or stamina to say everything, not being able to say anything at all.

So instead, here's a post saying nothing, except that I fail at remembering the awesome new word I wanted to sneak in to my and everyone else's functional vocabularies. I'll be sure to use it multiple times in the next post if I ever remember it. And if you know what I'm talking about, by all means, let me know!