Words’ End

Remember the Mooninite scare of last year? Well, Zebbler has put together a news-collage video to help you re-live the bad old days. Check it out, he says, before the news networks make him take it down:

01-31-07 Never Forget (aka the Great Boston Bomb Scare) from Zebbler on Vimeo.

And don’t forget to visit Zebbler’s site and Sean’s site.

Love you, guys. Keep making blinky shiny love art. And to the rest of you: has anything changed, do you think, in our collective attitude in the last year and a half?

After an almost three-week absence, I have not quite gotten my room back to an acceptable allergen level. This is a daily challenge even normally, no surprise considering I live with five cats and a dog. So the rest that my immune system had gotten and the full frontal assault upon my return from the desert to the humid state, and we’ve got fun times.

Today my Burner campmates and I, along with some hundreds of others, unloaded the two 53-foot containers whose rental our fearless container leader Cris Wagner organizes every year. They get loaded up with stuff people are taking to the playa two weeks before Burning Man, and unloaded two weeks after the event.

Everything comes back covered with the tenacious, alkaline playa dust, of course. I now have several bins of stuff to de-dust, launder and re-organize, plus a tent and an aerobed; I hope to deal with most of this tomorrow. Ah, the bliss of weekends when I can dedicate so many hours to a project.

On Monday 25 August, I drove the last westbound leg of my road trip, and entered Black Rock City, NV (just northeast of here, in the big white Black Rock desert). I drove in in a dust storm several hours long. It took me an hour or so to get from the ticket-check gates to the greeters’ station, and a good couple of hours more to get to my camp – visibility was that bad, and even though there was an endless caravan of arriving Burners all going 5mph or less, at some point everyone just stopped, got out of their vehicles and hung out for a while. Note to self: do not pack goggles on the Burning Truck. Seriously, bring them with.

I got to camp caked in dust, with my eyes burning and happy as happy could be. Hello, playa, I’d missed you.

The rest of the week proceeded to be gorgeous – only reasonably hot desert days and holy-gods-warm nights when I don’t think it got below 60 – right up until Saturday, when there was another half-a-day-long dust storm. By then I was exhausted and not a little strung out; emotions of all sorts are heightened at Burning Man, and this can be tiring. So I hid from the world for a while with great company of several people in succession. Lucky me – when I returned to Boston, I also returned to most of those people living within a five-mile radius of my house.

Right! I am once again falling into the trap of having so much to write that I don’t write anything. Bits and pieces are better than nothing. And so, bits and pieces.

In short: on Wednesday the 20th of last month I left home absurdly early and drove westward to Black Rock City, NV. I took a northerly route on the way there and went through Ohio, Duluth MN, Fargo ND, Billings MT, Custer National Forest, Yellowstone and Jackson Hole WY. I got to the burn in the afternoon on Monday the 25th, stayed in the desert until stupid-early in the morning on Monday the 1st, and got home around 4:30pm last Sunday the 7th. On the way home I went south to Las Vegas, and then drove through Albuquerque and Santa Fe NM, Tulsa OK, Little Rock AR, Memphis and Nashville and Knocksville TN, Pretty Everyplace PA and Sleepy Hollow, NY. I drove a total of 7,253.5 miles in my friend Molly’s little 2001 Honda Civic Something Just-Pre-Hybrid, which was a complete doll and got me an average of around 45mpg. I was gone nineteen days (Stephen King, where are you?) (The number 19 carries a huge significance in the Dark Tower series); my cats expressed their unequivocal disgruntlement, and are currently over it.

It was exhausting and exhilarating and exactly the cathartic road trip I wanted. I saw some friends I hadn’t seen for a long time, met new and fantastic people, had the best burn yet (of my meager three), and spent a lot of time thinking and singing, sometimes at the same time.

Neuromancer is a bitch to experience as an audio book if you’ve never read the paper copy before. When I told Mark (who gave me the audiobook for the road) about the difficulty I was having understanding anything that was going on, and mentioned it was my first pass through the novel, he looked downright sheepish. I am glad to report that, after several false starts, I did listen to it all the way through, and am now listening to the whole thing again. It is brilliant and well read.

It’s 11:18pm, and i’m sleepy. Many more thoughts on each of the above-mentioned places.

4:42pm: Molly and I leave a BU parking lot and head out to get her daughter Natalie from daycare, near their house. Normally this is a 25-30-minute drive.

5:20pm: traffic crawling the entire way there, both on Storrow Drive and on I-93. The sky’s been dark on and off for several hours, and thunderstorms were in the forecast, and at this point the clouds are black and boiling. We take opportunities to [photo|video]graph them off the freeway.

5:28pm: we’re on the off-ramp. The skies open up. Truly impressive sheets of water come down.

5:30pm: we’re underneath the big freeway overpass. Whoa, man: we’re at least fifty feet away from the nearest spot under the open sky, and we’re still getting wet from all the rain that’s being blown our way by the wind.

5:35pm: we’re at the daycare. Parked practically right in front of the front doors, and armed with Molly’s hyooge rainbow-colored umbrellas, we still get soaking wet up to our waists in the twenty feet between the car and the building’s front porch.

5:37pm: we open the doors to go outside and the poor child shrieks, terrified of the racket made by the rain and the wind. She’s still wailing when Molly puts her in the car; we make big excited noises about omigods it’s raining SO HARD and isn’t it COOL and we’re all WET and COLD and we should really get home and put on some dry clothing and maybe have tea! And isn’t this fun! Natalie, being a smart human, looks at us sceptically, but we actually mostly mean it. The flooding rain is ridiculous and exhilarating in its suddenness.

5:45pm: we’re at their place. Safely inside, we change into dry clothing – I get to wear her dad’s warm, awesome flannel-lined jeans. Her dad juggles and does other circusy stuff. This is relevant later. There is dinner full of noshing, and leftover beers from a birthday party last weekend. They are cool, and have a warming effect.

7:15pm: Natalie wants me to do bedtime with her. I read her two books, we giggle a lot, I turn out the light, we cuddle and giggle some more, she gets goodnight kisses from me and from mommy, relocates to her big-girl bed, and quietly sings herself to sleep. Bedtime is pretty fun these days, apparently.

8pm: Molly goes off to play Rock Band, as an entire Pixies album (their first?) was released for the game today. That’s why I’m monitor-sitting, you see.

9pm: I’m totally asleep on the couch, with the monitor.

10:15pm: Molly sheepishly wants to know if I’m willing to stay a little longer. I have no idea what time it is, so clearly, the answer is yes. I mumble as much into the phone.

11:25pm: she returns, grinning from ear to ear, the evening a total win. “B and C are waiting outside and can give you a ride, if you like!” Of course I like. B and C are also circus people – aerialist and musician, respectively.

11:30pm: David, whose clothing I’m wearing, returns from his evening’s outing and happily announces that there are circus freaks outside his house! I make a wide-eyed face and ominously declare that they’re waiting for me. Good-byes, a ride, conversation about accordions and a bass and how cool the Pixies album was.

11:45pm: I get home, and receive an offer of whipped parsnips with butter and cream. I swoon, but am not hungry, so this is a useful mental note for later.

11:50pm: I get an irresistible urge to juggle. And do. Must be channeling all them circus freaks.

00:21am: I take echinacea and goldenseal, just in case, to ward off what I think might be a cold. Or maybe it’s just allergies. Or maybe I should be asleep again. Or maybe I should’ve had tea instead of beer.

In conclusion: I love my friends.

OK, an hour ago I still had the excuse of long-overdue catching up with a friend. Now it’s just the sneezing and the achy throat keeping me up.

Significant bright sides, both from tonight and from the past weekend: conversation over ginger lemon tea and a hummus plate at Diesel right up until they closed. Coming back home and preserving lemons brought to me by erstwhile Croatian visitors. Tasting the resulting lemon-juice-and-much-salt concoction, which won’t actually be ready for 5-6 weeks, but hey, I was curious; and experiencing a unique taste sensation that is oddly compelling. Listening to Ottmar Liebert, one of my favorite guitarists, whose album “In the Arms of Love” I’ve come to associate with the calm of late evenings.

Last Friday, seeing Mischief in the Machine, incredibly satisfying not least because the musicians have been practicing in my living room for the past several months, and some of the other performers are friends and acquaintances, and oh, also because it was an excellent show.

Food shopping with two friends and a kid, and helping the two-year-old through a comparative critique of two fairly complex cheeses.

Dinner (involving sushi), dessert (involving cherries and really actually unfortunate bacon chocolate) and conversation (involving three of my favorite peeps) underneath the Templet.

Helping a friend move – not under the best of circumstances for him, but satisfying both in a physical sense and in that I was able to participate. I’ve been on a bit of a streak reacting to what I see as empty pronouncements of love and sunshiny feelings towards the world – the only meaningful way I’ve found to counteract that is to invest of myself in my world, in practical ways that benefit it (them) and therefore myself. Hey, it’s not the best of motivations, but whatever gets me up and running, no?

Speaking of up and running, weightlifting is still having a profound effect on my life. Have I mentioned that? Yeah, like, every other post. Well, it’s true. Soon, if Molly and I succeed at mutually motivating, I’ll go check out BU’s gym facilities.

Going from strenuous move to the best picnic “brunch” yet this season. Quotation marks because it lasted most of the day. Molly and Rosa really know how to make a girl happy with food.

And then quiet and important conversation with Mark, one of the aforementioned favorite people; feeding my haptic interface; and an opportunity to start organizing my life – and snail-mail – and other paperwork – that seems to have been just the push I needed to start digging myself out of the piles-of-paper-everywhere hole I seem to get into at least a couple of times a year.

On balance, things aren’t bad. Except, of course, for the things that are. But, as I’ve written for the past several months, that’s largely out of my control.

Aki is sitting guard by my side. Time to go cuddle the cat – if he deigns to assent. Here’s hoping that the echinacea and goldenseal capsules counterbalance the lack of sleep, where my immune system is concerned.

Been a while since I’ve blogged publicly, hasn’t it? Hello, again.

I go to write this post, and notice a new comment from Regina, an old friend from Moldova who now lives in Israel, with whom I’d fallen out of touch a while ago. Holy cats. Hello, again. It’s lovely to hear from you.

(The timing of the comment and of my being compelled to write here again are a coincidence.)

Yeah, there’s been a lot of sadness that I’m not quite ready to write down. Luckily, the last month or so has also been filled with joy and light and smart people and work (hooray, work!), so it’s not like there’s nothing to tell.

My job at Boston University, the title of which has now settled at Digital Collections and Computing Support Librarian [in the School of Theology], rocks my socks so far. It’s not that I’ve done a whole lot, yet; it’s only been a month, and the end of the academic year at that, and my boss the head librarian has been out on vacation for the past two weeks, so things are relatively slow. On the other hand, there’s plenty to do in the computing-support half of the job. I’ve been learning [more] about how BU’s network is set up, which is nifty. We’re purchasing a big pile of equipment to replace old stuff – both servers and personal workstations for faculty and staff – which, you know, from the support standpoint is great. Soon there’ll be no more @$#%! five-year-old Dells to support, and many of the four-year-old machines are going away too. People are open to the idea of Macs, which is huge in such a behemoth mostly-Windows org. (BU is an immense bureaucratic machine, and I say that with all the affection that one would expect a girl to have for her alma mater.)

Best of all, people want to learn. I’ve been getting to know the faculty and staff. Some of them are already doing digital humanities projects (like the History of Missiology site). Others have cool ideas (hello, Admissions Director using Facebook in all kinds of cool community-building ways). And still others want to figure out how computing can make their research and teaching (and administration, and the school as a community) more awesome.

This is what they hired me to work on. I’m unspeakably excited. Yeah, so far it’s been all support and no digilib, but I expect that to change. There’s a lot of hardware overhauling to do, and some basics to catch up on. That will take some months. But there’s already so much concrete investment of time, thought and resources in digital library stuff at STH that I have no doubt it’s going to go somewhere interesting.

Then there’s life outside of work. That’s been filled with friends, children, loved ones, cats, cooking, Burning Man planning, hand drumming, sci-fi reading, Battlestar Galactica, water and fire and earth, casual photography, breathing deeply. And the weather’s been nice.

Yesterday I flew to DC. Today I participated in a day-long grant proposal review panel for which I read a total of thirty proposals, which took an unreal amount of time and was fascinating and instructive, and I’m not being sarcastic about any of that. The panel itself was great too; in the past month or so I’ve learned a ton about the grant review and award process, and I fully intend to use this knowledge for good. I have generalized thoughts on the whole thing, but have to formulate them separately – must wrap my brain around the whole thing first, and also make sure not to cross any confidentiality boundaries. The whole thing made me feel awfully important, and going away for just over 24 hours meant I could travel with just my work bag, light and easy.

Coming back tonight, at the Reagan Airport, I texted a friend something to the effect of, I like traveling – the interstitial part, the going – even more than being places. She laughed and declared me liminal girl. Certainly that holds true for my life in a larger sense.

There’s more, always – the children I get to hang out with, the surprisingly strong presence of love in my days, feeling so strong from weightlifting with one of my dearest, the USB turntable I bought with which I’m digitizing records from the old country – but it’s 1:45am, and tomorrow’s a workday. Er, today. Whatever.

Penultimate drum-and-dance of the year in South Amherst yesterday. I brought my drum, even though I don’t have a bag for it yet and it was raining a little – but Molly and I threw garbage bags over the drums, and I’m very happy we did. By the end of the evening my hands were somehow hurting and a little numb at the same time, and I could still feel the just-played drumbeat in my ribcage.

I did better than had seemed possible, given how out of practice I’ve been with things that require sustaining a regular rhythm with my hands (drumming, juggling, playing the guitar which I haven’t done in any sort of sustained way since my first year in grad school). Concentrating on picking out, playing and sustaining relatively simple rhythms for several minutes at a time was great practice.

Molly and Natalie and I stayed over at our friends’ place in Hadley (Inspirit Common), and had breakfast at Cafe Esselon there. Natalie kept feeding us pretend food. The more ridiculously we reacted, the more giggles scattered, sparkling, across the table.

Days are filling up with small things of consequence.

This morning Molly and I punted on weightlifting in favor of coffee and quiet, sleepy conversation. You can’t photograph these moments of quotidian perfection, so the vignette is put into inadequate words here at words’ end.

This morning I noticed that my singing voice is getting stronger again. Must be springtime.

This morning I am thinking of late-night driving through city streets, and then on a perfectly picturesque winding highway, straight into the heart of Saturday night. Boston’s smaller highways are magic. If I could drive all the way out to the Nevada desert on them, awake and thinking and singing and arriving into the wide expanse of nowhere, I would. And I would channel Kerouac.

This morning I was fed pretend chamomile tea juice for breakfast by small children. Also, chocolate almond delight pizza.

This morning I fantasize about buying food with money from a reliable income source. Bonus: this would mean a job with a regular schedule, which in turn prooobably means I’d be making coffee or tea every morning. That’s a nice ritual I miss.

This morning I am restless and thinky and observing the undercurrent of sadness that runs through my days with a detachment I rarely achieve. All of this is illuminated by a flowy light somewhere in the middle of my ribcage, right under the skin.

I dislike Valentine’s Day with something between deep indifference and red fiery passion. That said, as a member of my household I just got the best V-Day present ever, and am now almost – uh – sanguine about the holiday. From an email by housemate/landlady’s awesome partner: “For Valentine’s Day, I brought you a dozen duck eggs, just laid today.” !! Thanks, Paul!

It’s snowing white all over and so, so quiet outside.

This past Saturday was Frostbyte’s memorial auction. I arranged food for what probably ended up being a couple hundred people over the course of about 24 hours. Didn’t really cook, except in a minimalist sense. Still, it was lovely – several times that day people asked me the requisite how-are-you and I would answer, “in my element.” Providing good food for people, even if I just shop and chop veggies and open cheese and get others to help me, fills my soul like nothing else does. Especially when people I don’t know take note of the food and are pleased with it. Especially-especially when I get to participate in a group effort such as this was, two years in the making (by others: I only came to it within the last month). Labor of true love, it was, despite the complexity and frustrations of the organizing process. The next day, as we were finishing cleaning up, one of my co-organizers smiled at me and said, “You’re a new old friend.” Burners’ spirit of instant community is priceless.

(I don’t actually know whether the person who made the above remark has gone to Burning Man. But he’s old-school TEP, and I gather that’s pretty close in all the relevant ways.)

Saturday evening I sat on a couch in front of Tensor, weaving slow conversation with the human beside me into its constantly changing color-light play. A swing hung between us and Tensor. Its shadow in the bright lights, sometimes swinging empty, most of the time complete with people’s silhouettes, was the narrative of remembrance unfolding. If the mark I leave on my community when I’m gone even approaches Kevin McCormick’s – he died at just 29 – I’ll have done well.

Yesterday I spent a few hours with a sweet, social two-year-old and remembered how exhausting and satisfying it is to live only for the present moment, all the time. I remembered the realization I’ve been coming back to over the last couple of months: the kind of family I want, the village that it takes to raise children and be the change I/we wish to see in the world, is already there. Here. All I need to do is participate in it.

Last night another new old friend, the luminous human with the Tensor-side conversation, brought me a present, a square of squares of color-cycling light. It is making slow progress in its simple programming as white snow layers itself onto the skylight, sounding like grains of sand falling. White cat at my feet, I watch the color cube and feel his still calm.