Words’ End

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.

It looks like I’ll be in Baltimore soon. I’ll be flying in on Sunday 11/16, and leaving Tuesday evening 11/18. On Sunday I can travel in the morning, or in the evening. If I get there in the morning (or around noon), I’ll have the rest of the day to kick around.

Worth it? What’s there to do in Baltimore? I don’t know that city at all.

If you’re reading on LJ, please to leave any comments on Words’ End and not on the LJ feed. Thanks in advance for any advice!

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.

Internets,

I need to pay for one night in any place with private rooms (hotel, b&b, whatever) in Amsterdam in early November. Naturally, I’d like to pay as little as possible while still having a door to close and no cigarette smell in the bed. Any suggestions?

(LJ feed readers: I won’t see replies left directly on LJ. You know what to do.)

At the moment of the summer solstice – at least, it was solstice as far as the internet was concerned – I was washing dishes in a quieted house, after an exquisitely summery grilled meal. A year ago I was in a very different place. The last year has brought with it changes I’d never imagined, not then, not in the near future. I went to the darkest place I’d ever been, and have come back out into the light.

Life is softly humming along. I’ve been getting re-acquainted with how it feels to rely almost exclusively on public transport and my feet for getting from point N to point ΔN. It feels long-ago-homey – more like Kishinev than even my recent experiences in New York and Boston. Maybe it also feels a little like London, where I also took both subway trains and buses regularly. It’s an entirely different pace of life, and (aside from the fact that some things are just not possible without a car) I think I like it better. But I need more audio books.

There are still many, many days left in the season before I begin feeling like they’re getting short again. The sun tends to lighten people, and I’ve been feeling my friends’ burdens fade into the background even as they don’t fall away. My own, too.

Been daydreaming about the Burning Man road trip. Right now I’m thinking something like this on the way out, and maybe a southerly route on the way back. It’s a lot of driving – the way out west as I’ve mapped it out is 11 driving hours more than the shortest route, and the way back – 13, which amounts to two extra days of driving. I don’t know how I’ll afford it, but this is the year of a cathartic road trip, so hopefully I’ll find a way to make this happen. Or, you know, shorten the route. The shortening will likely be on the southerly side, though, because the northern plains and the Bad Lands (thanks for the link, Rosa) are calling me.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some mushroom caps to stuff. Happy solar holiday, all.

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.

Friday afternoon I left town just a bit too late, too close to Friday traffic going out of the city along the Pike. That and the slush coming down from the sky made the trip to Inspirit Common in Hadley a two-and-a-half-hour one; good thing that just before leaving I had downloaded some talks by Ajahn Brahm (thanks for the suggestion, Rob, what I’ve heard so far is good).

Together with Emily and Bucky (the friends who own and run the above-linked mind-body-spirit center) and their six-month-old son Kadin, I went to a drum-and-dance event. And for the first time ever I played a djembe in a drum circle, for half an hour or so. It’s a rush! I came in with this tightness in the middle of my chest, which almost worked itself out in the course of trancy dancing to the drums, but it was still there afterwards. Sat down to make rhythms, next thing I know there’s a lightness where the bad used to be. Later on in the evening Bucky said, “It opens up the heart, doesn’t it?” That’s exactly what drumming did for me. I will buy a djembe before I buy an iPhone, and that’s saying a lot.

Driving home late at night, I took the long way along Route 9. On and on and on through endless trees and industrial towns and mist. The road looked like it belonged in Neil Gaiman’s stories.

Subject line of a spam email: “saskatoon typography festival”. My first reaction: Damn, I want to go!

But, speaking of travel: I’ll be in Chicago 12/27-30 for a conference. I have a hotel room for the nights of the 27th and 28th; does anyone reading this have, or know of, a place I could crash on the eve of the 29th? My plane leaves O’Hare at 9am on the 30th, which means I’ll want to be there by 7:15-7:30ish; so proximity to public transport would be lovely. Bribes of chocolate, genuine Boston saltwater taffy, a drink and/or dinner available.

I’m so tired of travel.

On Friday I came back from the latest – to Maryland on Tuesday, to give a talk at MITH; and then DC for the Reinvention Center conference. This was my fourth trip in just under two months: the other three were to Nebraska (digital humanities workshop), Fredericton (text-analysis conference) and Chester, Vermont (Readex Digital Institute, which got extensively blogged here). On Tuesday I leave for Chester again, to return on Wednesday after a meeting. This is the blessed last trip for the foreseeable future.

Don’t get me wrong: all the events I went to have been fabulous (see below), and I’m looking forward to going back to Readex. But – and I’ve known this from the start – this is too much travel right now.

The talk at MITH went well. I guess the crowd was a bit diminished compared to their usual; it was election day, and there was a Human-Computer Interaction event precisely coinciding with my talk. Nevertheless, it was a good group, and boy, they really mean it when they call these things “Digital Dialogues.” They jumped right in about five minutes into my talk, and the lively conversation didn’t stop for the next hour and a half or so. I showed the Virtual Humanities Lab and we talked about collaboration, its logistical issues and benefits-vs-drawbacks and ways in which VHL can be made a more friendly collaboration environment. It was great to receive feedback from people not only interested, but way more knowledgeable about the state of the field. It felt easy to be there; they’ve created a great atmosphere both for conversation and for work.

Wednesday I took advantage of MITH’s generous offer to use their “coffeehouse” space for work. That evening I found myself at the downtown Washington hotel where the Reinvention Center conference was to take place in the next two days.

I’ve a ton of notes from that conference. I only got to go because my dissertation director was leading one of the sessions, and asked me to be his session recorder; this way the Center gives a few grad students the opportunity to see what’s going on in research universities around the country, while at the same time getting young’uns to more or less write the proceedings. A more than fair price, I must say.

So I’d been reasonably interested in the conference, but had no idea how useful it would be and how much new information I would get that will be applicable in my near-future work. For one thing, I saw the largest concentration of high-level university administrators that I’ve ever seen before. Not sure what the ratio of administrators (and staff, like librarians) to faculty was, but it felt something like 2:1 or maybe even 3:1, and perhaps 300 people in attendance. (I may be wildly off here. It’s just an estimate.) I’ll have to go over my notes later and perhaps write it up here, if I get to it.

If I get to it. Friday I came back; and yesterday my adored husband took me out for a romantic evening out that stretched well into this morning. I had no idea what we were doing; turned out, we were going to an Ani DiFranco concert. Well, holy shit: I hadn’t been to a concert in a long, long time, and had only seen Ani in concert once. It was a treat. Not only does she rock the the house, but she is touring while quite pregnant, and her happiness with where she is and what she’s doing could be felt all the way at the back bar where we were standing. She had with her a stand-up-bassist and a percussionist with a xylophone and a steel drum and a bunch of other unusual rhythm instruments. Beautiful sound, mostly good crowd, amazing energy.

Then we reconnected over dinner and conversation and general dalliance. This past summer, going into early fall, was difficult for both of us. We both had to reduce and eventually stop taking anti-depressants: welcome to U.S. health care, which left us scrambling for two months (three in Ethan’s case). In the fall we both dove into new work, and have been trying to catch up with each other ever since. Last evening (orchestrated in part by a kind friend – many thanks!) was a badly needed one.

And now… now there’s more work. The final VHL report to the NEH is due at the end of the month. My write-up of our session at the Reinvention Center conference is due at the same time. I’ve got a job app to send out tomorrow, blessedly almost done but still on the to-do list. Tuesday-Wednesday there’s the trip, and my next task for the dissertation is the transcription and encoding of around 600 lines of poetry. Then there’s another fellowship app to get together.

And then there’s the social life, without which Vika gets to be a dull and sad girl. Tonight we were treated by our fabulous housemate to Marie Antoinette the movie, which had an unexpected soundtrack (Aphex Twin!) and was generally not half bad. Monday (tomorrow!) we have a friend visiting. Haven’t seen her in a long long time, so I’m really looking forward to it, and to the inevitable good food associated with the visit.

So what do I do? Instead of getting some sleep I write a long blog entry. Ah well, at least now I have a de facto to do list. There’s more to write about – details of the movie, Sean McMullen’s The Miocene Arrow which I’m enjoying these days, my relationship with the uncertainties of life after May, various anxieties about whether I’ll finish the dissertation in time. But all these can wait. Good night now.

…to get me blogging again. I hope.

Much has happened on the personal front. For one, I’m back to the PhD gig, writing my dissertation this year. Been kinda re-evaluating this whole blogging thing, but for now I’ll just try to blog the 2006 Readex Digital Institute in scenic (whooboy, is it scenic! seriously) Chester, Vermont.