Words’ End

You’ll notice I’m skipping the eighth prompt. Yeah, that one was a tad too narcissistic for me.

(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)

What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

Three years ago, then-five-year-old Eleanor asked Mark if she could please please PLEASE go to Burning Man. He said something to the effect of, not until you can take care of yourself in the desert; not now, for sure. And she said, we should have Burning Man right here, in our backyard! Thus, BackYard Burning Man was born.

This past summer was BYBM’s third year, and it was soul-warming, all day. Mark and Eleanor, graciously hosting out-of-towners, worked at their place all day. In the afternoon, Rosa and I joined them to do what we do best: help with food (and, secondarily, the rest of the prep). Colorful streamers everywhere; a couple of open tents with gorgeous brightly-colored curtains; crafts for kids and grownups. Beer and big-girl drinks in the coolers; a pot luck of tasty foods; the grill going. My funky food contribution this year were little chocolate cakes made in scooped-out orange shells, wrapped in foil, “baked” on the grill. Campfire cakes, they’re called. Wicked fun! Try it—but do use decent ingredients. We had gluten free chocolate cake mixes and quail eggs, to accommodate some friends who don’t do gluten or chicken eggs, and it came out phenomenal.

A brief aside for Bostonians north of the river: Seabra supermarket in Somerville reliably has good, cheap quail eggs. And a bunch of Latin American foods that make it one of my favorite groceries around here.

Yeah, this isn’t really Burning Man. It’s not even Firefly. There’s a gas grill and modern plumbing. At the last two, there’s been a bouncy castle. (I had no idea how easy it was to rent one!) Really, it’s a mid-summer party. But it’s not just that. For one thing, it was conceived and executed (with help from her dad and friends) by a kid who gets pretty creative with it, I’ll tell ya. There must’ve been two dozen or more children there over the course of the day, and activities involving making things. There was hooping and juggling and belly dancing. In the evening, when most everyone had left, MartinH brought out his guitar and we sang and sang, The Beatles and Paul Simon and I don’t even remember what else. Fairy lights everywhere.

That’s magic I love.

(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)

Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

To my great surprise, I discovered community in my field.

When I went to my first digital humanities conference in 2001, back when it had the unwieldy name ACH-ALLC, I thought I’d discovered community. Perfect strangers sought you out and asked you about your work. Then you asked them about theirs, and next thing you knew, you were spending the many coffee breaks and every evening chatting about text encoding and digital map work and dogs and cooking. Seasoned scholars mentored us whipper-snappers, first informally for several academic generations, then formally through mentoring programs. There’s a vibrant DH presence on Twitter and in the blogosphere.

I’ve felt part of a community ever since then. Even so, work was quite lonely sometimes. Writing the dissertation is inherently lonely. And between graduation and about a year ago, my immediate vicinity was pretty low on DH.

Within the last year, things have shifted. My own horizons expanded: I’m finally comfortable with my place in the digital library world, insofar as anyone with no library degree can be. Digital humanists on Twitter have prompted me to write and think about new DH topics. I disovered DHSI for myself, and met even more brilliant people, among them Julie.

Can hardly wait to start the new job. (On Monday!) The pragmatic (if not explicit) mandate to build community is practically in the job description. And next year, more of the same, please.

And more of my personal community! Which I’d write about here, but it’s late, and I didn’t discover it this year. No, it’s been around for a long time, for me. The whole DH thing, though… still startles me at the end of the year. It’s been a long year, fundamentally a good one! So yes, more of the same, please.

A day late, and what of it?

(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)

What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

The last thing I made was dinner for twenty.

I used to self-identify as a person who makes decent-to-great food and feeds it to her friends and loved ones. My most magical, quietly vibrant self manifests in the kitchen.

During and following my excruciatingly protracted divorce, cooking became difficult. Everything was difficult, but cooking was the most surprising—and the most frustrating. I had lost the life that had been there just a moment ago, and with it my most reliable (up to that point) inanimate tool for connecting with the world.

Been getting back to it slowly, lurching a bit back and forth. Still, I go through dry spells. A recent one annoyed me so much that I immediately made plans to cook dinner for twenty.

Honestly, I wish I could afford to do this more often. It was SO MUCH FUN. I spent several days shopping (in like five different places), and a full evening and following day cooking. It was a mezze sort of evening — I made two different bean dips, and a beet something-or-other, and lamb kabobs served as individual meat pieces, and there had to have been something with eggplant. I don’t even remember what else. (Were you there? What did you eat?)

What I took away from it was the laughter and warmth. They did that, some people I love came over and filled the place with light, and all I had to do was have a good time in the kitchen. Everybody wins.

As for something I’d like to make if I only had (made) the time… I’d love to do cross-stitch again. Something gorgeous and symbolic and pagan and shaded.

(Oh! A deviled duck egg salad! As good as deviled eggs, but salad.)

Today is a day off—U.S. Independence Day, Observed—so it turns out that I have all this time to do whatever I want. In reality that’s not exactly true, as Plans are afoot soon enough, but it’s positively glorious to have nowhere in particular to be for hours on end.

An occasionally resurgent meme has been going around on LiveJournal: “comment on this post, and I’ll give you five words that I associate with you. Then you write about them.” I asked, and I received, and so here they are.

Home. Ooh, this is a good one. I’ve been looking for that for a while. Thought I’d found it with Ethan, but that turns out not to be the case. I miss the home we had [in|with] each other in the first year and a half or so of our relationship. This is somewhat, though not even close to entirely, balanced by not missing the relationship in the months leading to its rather abrupt (for me) end.

When I stayed in Boston after graduating from BU, and commuted to Providence for grad school, initially I lived with Colleen. And other people too, but emotionally it was mostly with her When in late 1997 I abruptly needed to move from where I was living and posted about it to the Moxy Früvous newsgroup, a fellow Fruhead told me she was moving up to Boston in the next five months, and maybe we should think about getting a place together? Five months seemed like a long time, but we did meet at a Früvous show in December with the specific intention of finding out whether this was a good idea, and then wrote each other 300Kb of emails a month or something crazy like that, and in February of 1998 we moved in together. With some geographically and head-spatially induced ebbs and flows, Cee has been one of my closest people for longer than anyone who isn’t my immediate family (brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and mom).

(I have the hardest time calling Jo Ann my sister-in-law. It sounds so… remote. Usually I refer to her and my brother collectively as my siblings.)

In many ways, and up until very recently, that was a unique occurrence in my life. We weren’t related but were quite close, without being romantically involved. It was the quintessential Boston marriage. We seemed to have similar ideas of what we wanted out of a living arrangement, or in some cases we worked it out then. Cee had romantic relationships, and I did too, and eventually, when our adorable quirky 210-year-old house got sold, we moved apart because I wanted to move in with my then-boyfriend. I’ve wondered how differently shaped my life might be had we moved somewhere else together, but ultimately it might’ve been good for our relationship at that particular time. I certainly don’t regret the experiences I did have as a result of that move, either: namely, moving in with a boyfriend who didn’t turn all evil on me in three months’ time, being proposed to and accepting, living together for a while, deciding together that getting married wasn’t a good idea, and eventually deciding together that we didn’t want to be involved, and had in fact grown apart.

All of the time I lived with Chris was hugely educational in that almost completely non-traumatic way, but it wasn’t home in the way that it had been with Cee. We gave it a good try, but ultimately it just didn’t work. I think that one of the reasons for that is my desire to live with other people in community. After some years of living with him, I moved to London to live with my siblings and help raise my nephew for a year, as I was applying for the special-studies PhD program at Brown. That was nostalgic in many ways, I missed my people in Boston, but it was in no way lonely. That was another unique experience in that we bonded, the nephew and I, ooh boy, we did. And I’d lived with Zhenya and Jo before, and we knew we all liked it, and frankly, if circumstances were right (which isn’t likely), I’d live with them again in a heartbeat.

Then I lived alone in Providence for a year and a half. That was perfect, some of my favorite time. I definitely had a home then. Found my feet in that way that’s only possible when you live alone, found my professional feet doing the now-approved PhD in humanities computing, found that having Talan living just downstairs was a good reminder of what it was that I liked about living with other people, without actually living together.

Then Ethan moved in from all the way across the country in Pullman, WA. Someday I’ll write about the arc of that as home, but today is not that day.

The day after I graduated in 2007, we moved to Somerville, a close neighbor of Boston that would be one of its boroughs, were this New York City. We were two humans and two cats in a house of seven humans and five cats (and a dog, and a bird). And/Or was and remains a great place, and was good to live in, but wasn’t that default, deep-down home unless I was actively working to keep my own rhythm aligned to the house’s. Ethan lived there for six months, and I stayed for two years; when I started thinking of how, some years from now, I’d like to be raising a child without a primary partner, And/Or didn’t feel like the right place for that.

So in May I moved to Something Completely Different. We’re experimenting, it’s too early to know, but for now it feels like it felt to live with Cee. People drop by and hang out, from the apartment upstairs and from the outside; a lot of cooking and significant communal eating goes on, insofar as our schedules permit it; there’s both a stated intent and an emotional sense of crafting a home. I’m comfortable here, and even if it doesn’t work, I’ll still have had this amazing reminder, in some ways maybe a crystallization, of knowing what I want in a home.

Heritage. I’m Russian by birth, grew up speaking Russian in a Soviet Republic capital where, like in all of the USSR, the predominant language was Russian. I also grew up in Moldova, where people speak Moldovan (pretty much Romanian) and have Moldovan culture and holidays and food and way of life—and all of that was alongside me, not part of my primary experience. So that’s weird. And it’s weird, too, that I am Jewish (ethnically if not religiously), but didn’t even know my dad spoke fluent Yiddish until I was thirteen and we went to visit his home village and his parents’ graves in the Ukraine before emigrating to the U.S. So I grew up with the Barry Sisters, but still don’t have most of the holidays straight, and don’t like gefilte fish. So that’s weird too.

I was never able to refer to myself as an American, though more than half my life (and therefore part of my heritage) has been spent here. It just didn’t feel like that’s what I was. Oddly, the entire last presidential election season changed that. Then again, I’m a fully vested citizen of the internet, so U.S. national boundaries are about as meaningful as other places in the world.

Dark. A place of introspection, and introversion. A season that’s difficult for me. A time when fun things happen. A time when, and I’m accepting this in stages, I need to take care of myself above most other things in order to remain functional. Also a time when having responsibilities to others (like small-girl-sitting once a week) gets me out of my head and supplies a kind of joy that’s unavailable elsewhere.

Curious. I am! Curious Vika is curious. This sort of gets me in trouble, though not in the way I’m making it sound. I ask people questions and listen to the answers more than I tell stories. In conversation, I tend more toward learning than toward teaching (unless I’m thinking my way through an issue by arguing, which can be great with the right conversation partner). There was just so damn much to learn from Ethan that I fell into this odd and stupid learned helplessness, looking to him for information when I should have relied on myself. When there’s stuff to be learned by talking to someone, I vastly prefer that to finding out on my own. It’s more fun. Unfortunately, it can get on a partner’s nerves.

These days I am re-discovering my curiosity, and pay more attention to balancing out asking questions and telling stories.

Joy. Something I feel quite frequently, in short intense bursts, usually unrelated to any one thing but being rather a confluence of thoughts coming together in my consciousness. Perfect moments, like sunshine and Davis Square and ice cream, or walking under the flame umbrella in pouring rain, singing along with the stuff in my headphones, feeling the air that smells of ocean. Or even snow shoveling during the quiet, voluminous snowfall, under the night streetlights. Or that rare occurrence of having hours on end to do with as I please.

So, to go build stuff abroad through Habitat for Humanity costs a lot. Like, a couple thousand dollars, which may or may not include airfare, and… well, aside from the fact that I don’t have that kind of money, if I did (through fundraising or whatnot), there would probably be wiser ways to spend it on others.

Is there an organization that’ll take me abroad to… do whatever, really, as long as they pay for most or all of it? And here’s the catch: it needs to be non-religious. Like, if a church organizes it, fine, good deeds and all. But if they so much as peep to the natives about Jesus (or whatever), or even hold prayer meetings with the already-converted, I don’t want any part of it.

I know there’s a lot to do locally. Right now I’m exploring international options. I’m particularly interested in Latin America, but would consider other places.

Earlier today (yesterday) I wondered why it felt so odd to feel kinship and rightness in both Solstice and New Year’s Eve-into-Day. I grew up with New Year’s like some of my friends grew up with Christmas. That’s when you had the tree (Yule tree, though I didn’t know Yule then), had the gifts, had the big party or went to one. We had no Christmas, nor Hannukah. Both of these have always been a bit alien to me, because I didn’t get exposed to either until I was almost 14. Then, six or seven years ago, I simultaneously tuned out of Christmas, repelled by all the consumerism and the omnipresent tchotchkes everywhere, and got into marking time by actual seasons – celebrating the solstices and the equinoxes.

Somehow, New Year’s didn’t get touched by this. It makes sense emotionally, but not logically – how is it that I deeply, viscerally relate to both? And I decided that they’re different markers. The Solstice is, for me, a turning point in the natural cycle. I move within it, and with it, and am happier following a moon calendar that changes ever so slightly to keep in tune with the planets and star and galaxy around us. Solstice/Yule is a social thing only because I happen to be surrounded by people who keep time by it, too, and for some of whom it is – as it is for me – a holy day. Not all of us have that privilege, and I’m thankful to live where I live.

New Year’s is a social thing in a larger sense. I’m part of a larger human community that keeps a 365ish-day calendar, and that by and large marks the midnight of December 31st into January 1st. I’ve taken part in that since I was little, staying up past midnight for the first time when I was six or so. (And stayed up until 6am! I should ask my mom exactly how insufferable I was the next day. If she doesn’t remember, that’s probably a good sign.)

Tonight I was with acquaintances and beloveds, eating good food and drinking goofy-making drinks and enjoying my brand-blue hair and petting the love cat, talking, listening, taking it all in. At midnight I was napping in a warm happy bed upstairs from the party. The new year is here, and it is welcome. My personal newest chapter began over a week ago; but the passing of 2008 actually closed the previous one. Couldn’t have happened soon enough.

Good night, fellow humans. Happy new year.

Yesterday I woke up grumpy. I had my reasons, but mostly it boils down to, I’ve been getting abysmal amounts of sleep this week – five to six hours a night. No good reason for it.

Moaned about, got out of bed like an hour late, went to work and stayed there for ten hours, in part because the first half of the day I was mostly useless. (Enh. It happens. It’s SAD season, and I do what I can, and somehow work-blogging after hours feels different, calmer, with nobody around.) And near the end of the business day I found out I’d made some people unhappy, and had to deal with that, and it wasn’t a big deal—in fact, the conversation with a third party was helpful and reassuring—but it’s never a good feeling to know you’ve screwed up. On the other hand, learning experience, and a mild one as such things go.

So by the time I left work at 8pm I was tired. And… not exactly grumpy, just feeling off. But then.

Then I came home, and there was a circus band rehearsing in my living room. Went upstairs, and housemate Coraline was hanging out in the kitchen with her friend Carolyn. I threw my stuff down and—having had no dinner—declared I needed scotch, and to make a casserole. Why? I dunno. I guess I’d had a fantastic casserole at Molly’s the day before, and I’ve had random foodstuffs hanging around the cupboards for forever, AND I’d never made casserole before.

Yeah, really.

So we broke out the bottle of 12-year-old scotch that I’d taken to Burning Man and we’d never gotten around to opening (there was other alcohol around, but it’s not tempting to drink a lot of dehydrating liquid in that climate). And I made a casserole of frozen artichoke hearts, frozen peas, frozen corn, frozen mixed mushrooms (thank you, bulk food ordering, I have a mushroom invasion in my freezer), chick peas, canned tuna, multi-colored potatoes, cream and two kinds of cheese. And I’m probably forgetting other stuff.

All the while, people around me chatted and sipped tasty alcohol and giggled a lot. And later I ate and felt more human, and around 10:45pm Coraline (ok, Johanna) and Eric and I went out against all better judgment, because spectacularly under-advertised Midnight Madness was going on in Davis Square. We gawked at antique bobbles and boutique-y clothes, but mostly we dropped by Dave’s Fresh Pasta, sampled tasty foods, and brought home mozzarella made that evening by a neighbor of theirs (or something).

Oh. my. gods. Homemade mozzarella with crushed pink peppercorns and a drizzle of truffled olive oil. Yeah, I’d say that, combined with hanging out with my awesome housemates, was a win even though it meant that once again I got too little sleep.

Boy, if that was a bad day, bring them on, you know? Speaking of days, I should probly go face mine. The sun’s rising, a warm shower awaits, and today I get to take tasty casserole to work for lunch. Oh, and tonight I get to see both of my favorite small girls (can’t call them toddlers anymore, as they’re skipping and giggling on either side of three years old), and go to the Museum of Science with one of them and her dad. WOE. Woe is me in this sad season.

Today I’m thankful for good people in my life, and for all the weird bipolar days that, in the end, let me know that things are going to be ok.

…at 6:30am on a Saturday morning. To make home fries, some with bacon grease, some without, then get picked up in a big truck and go move some boxes from south of here to west of here. All of this before brunch, a couple of hours after which I’ll be hanging with a toddler for a while, and then with another one of my dearest.

Life doesn’t suck! Though maybe a little more sleep would be good.

This will be redundant if you read any of my housemates’ journals, but: I love my household. Interviewing potential new housemate last night was full of giggling and conversation about EVERYthing and cake and blueberry wine. I have my issues with living here (mostly having to do with allergies, and we’re working on this). But the people, and the circus band in my living room (oh, you think I’m kidding, do you?), and the art and science and foodie quotients are all near optimal.

My job continues to delight me. I suspect it’ll be taking up more of my brain in the next couple of months, as I transition from being almost exclusively computing support to doing more of the balanced mish-mosh of support and digital library work I’m supposed to be doing. This transition is right on schedule; I’m glad for the increased variety, and also glad to have had a reasonably intense introduction to networking and other larger computing issues at BU.

Random students whom I don’t believe I’ve ever actually met grin at me and compliment the blue hair. So do some of the faculty and staff at the school. Nobody has made a huge deal out of it, and nobody seems too weirded out. Also, I may have finally found a community event at work I’d probably feel consistently good participating in: Sabbath space, a sanctuary of sorts on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, in a beautiful chapel space used for prayer, quiet conversation, meditation and… coloring mandalas. Clearly not entirely Christian, for which I’m thankful. It’s been a strange landscape to navigate, this School of Theology. Before I came there, I thought STH was, you know, like majoring in religion except on a graduate level: you learn about as many different religions as you can, and do anthropology and cultural studies and stuff. But no, this is a Methodist seminary, and though they’re all excellent people and extremely tolerant and clearly versed in many religions (several faculty members have artifacts from all over East Asia in their offices), it’s still a Methodist seminary. People learn how to preach, they practice ministry, they graduate and go work in churches and on missions. To me, this is all alien, and the more vociferous Christian contingent hasn’t exactly been sane in this country of late, or anywhere ever. But, you know, so it goes. I’m there to do computer stuff, and to help create digital resources that help people of vastly different backgrounds find out about each other. I work with good people who do good work for their fellow human beings. Ultimately, what they believe in looks like a cross between anthropology, social activism and mythology to me. And I’d be willing to bet that not a single one of them has ever contemplated harming a doctor who performs abortions.

Spiritually speaking, I tend to steer clear of monotheism, and don’t like it around me. But the people at work are fascinating and multifaceted and kind and compassionate and, most of the time, present. I like people who are fully there in the moment with me.

It’s oh-gods-late, and I must go to sleep. There is a seven-day candle burning in my room; every one of those that burns down will light the next one until the vernal Equinox. A continuous flame through the darkest part of the year; thanks to Molly for the idea. G’night.

Now with matching accessories!

A couple of spots are slightly lighter than the rest, almost turquoise. Dude in a coffee shop said, “Wow, it looks like there’s light coming out of your head.” I think I’ll keep it this way.

Lesson of the evening, learned for the 248th time: don’t drink strong coffee at 8pm if you want your sleep schedule to stay more or less normal.

On the other hand, party! For one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, on the occasion of her moving away to the Wrong Coast. With surprisingly fun karaoke, fantastic people and an impromptu aerial silks performance that, as usual, made me laugh in delight several times.

Conclusion: sleep is for the weak. (“But you’re weak, Vika.” – “Shut up.”)