Words’ End

Today my father would’ve been 71 years old. But he’s seven years gone, buried on a gorgeous hill in Lost Angels. I miss him a lot.

I’ve inherited a lot of him. I have his eyes, and his love of driving, and his dislike of being in financial debt to anyone, and his temper – though, I like to think, version 2.0. And also I have his indomitable will, and his analytical skills, and his sense of commitment (with some additional flexibility thrown in; I tend to tinker with recipes).

Thanks, dad. Happy birthday. And to the rest of you, have a fitting instrumental by Daniel Lanois; it’s called “JJ Leaves LA.” I left LA in 1994 with no regrets, having hated it there, and now mom doesn’t live there anymore either – but I’ll go back to visit dad.

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.

Cures for what ails ya (or me, anyway, specifically today, more specifically when the ailment is wintertime depression and life’s turbulence):

Long walk with a good friend, conversation, laughter and groceries. Ocean’s Thirteen. Making a good-hearted effort to connect with someone, even if it brings no result. Getting things out of the house that need to be got out of the house. Reading fluffy sci-fi. Napping with the cats.

Mental and emotional clutter: successfully reduced. Though at a price, as it’s 3:30am, and I get up in five hours to go listen to a lovely Tibetan man tell me about meditation and related practices. On the other hand, there’s nothing quite like the delight of middle-of-the-night quiet. As quiet as we get around here, anyway, what with Nochka tearing around the room in feline ecstasy (this is one of her three or four usual states). Aki watches her indulgently – such behavior is beneath him except when it’s not – and bats her away when she gets too close.

An hour ago I woke up from a nightmare in which we (whoever “we” is) were on a road trip somewhere in a camper, stopped for a picnic in a park, let the cats out, and Aki got mauled by a bear.

But wait, it gets better! The bear, an adolescent cub really, took him in both its front paws and twisted him a bit — something I doubt a bear would be able to do. I remember thinking that there were no sickening breaking sounds, and that this meant there was hope. I somehow wrested him from the bear, and he was lying in my arms belly up, eyes wide like Puss in Boots’, staring at me. I was asking some dog-walking jogger ladies where the nearest animal hospital was, feeling very vivid shock, when I woke up to Aki on my belly, purring sleepily as he had been doing for hours.

He never lies on my belly for hours; I’m usually too tossy-turny. But he did, and I was still enough for his highness, and I think this was my first nightmare ever about him.

I’m glad that nightmares aren’t a regular occurrence, because man, they sure are intense when they happen.

Of course, now I want to go on a road trip with the cats. But the idea of a gas-guzzling camper has always bothered me, and who knows how they’d do in a Honda Fit?

Six years today since my father died. I’ve learned many lessons since then. From time to time I wonder what our relationship would be like, were he suddenly to come back. Don’t think I’ll ever stop wondering this.

Back from California, with a cold given to me by brother and nephew, who brought it with them from New York.

The funeral was… a funeral. It was sad. We cried.

I feel like my grandmother left so long ago, it’s difficult to find the words for talking about her death as something recent. Far more real for me was my mother’s pain, and my uncle’s. From this perspective, the family time was a very good thing indeed.

Now we’re back, and I would be diving right into the work if not for the cold that waylaid me in the morning and early afternoon. And I have a doctor’s appointment in an hour (unrelated)! Guess today’s a sick day.

Last week Ethan and I and other family had a long and at times heated conversation about politics, environment and other controversial topics. My mom and I have one of those more or less every time we see each other, and given that we’re on the opposite sides of the political spectrum from each other, you can imagine how they tend to go. One thing, though – we’re learning to not let the disagreements cloud our interactions for days. I guess that’s a good thing.

I’m all for providing information, but hate it when someone force-feeds it to me. So, WHEREAS I desire to share information on contentious topics with my mother, AND I love her, AND I don’t want to force all of it upon her, LET THEREFORE be established a new purpose for this weblog, BEING to more thoroughly document my perception of the world.

Let’s see if this lasts for more than a day, mm? I was always terrible at letter-writing, and diary-writing, and blogging. I’m hurtling headlong into the (hopefully?) final stages of my dissertation. But the world keeps going, and I need an outlet – and a tangible link to the outside of my head.

The evening after our big debate, I found the following interesting bits on the web.

Personal Responsibility

Wired reports that people can cause earthquakes! The 5.6 one that took place in 1989 in Australia was caused, National Geographic says, by 200 years of coal mining. And, HA ha, the extensive damage done by the earthquake cost more than all the coal they got out of that mine, put together. The damage and undoubted deaths aren’t funny, but in a perverse sense, the whole thing is. Remember, gang: what we do with our environment affects everyone.

Global warming isn’t new. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. With or without us. Except that this time around, it’s us making it happen.

Fear not, though, some of us are acting to make things better. Jyllands-Posten reports that Danes will have access to bioethanol by 2010. Denmark is generally pretty cool, as Brad DeLong documents in “The Scandinavian Model.”

So what can you do? Well, for one thing you can offset the emissions you generate through travel by buying energy credits. Their calculator is flawed, but the money goes to developing renewable-energy projects.

Depending on where you live, you may also have the option of paying a little more to get your energy from renewable sources only. Here’s one place to start (in the US, at least).

You can even join Al Gore’s information troops.

Giving The Man The Finger

Wired:

All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it.

They do warn that tampering with these chips is illegal, and let me emphasize that I’m linking to someone else’s article here. Don’t shoot the messenger, Mr. Man!

Just Cool

Pleo the Robo-Dinosaur!

Off to the doctor’s. Y’all take care now, y’hear?

My grandmother died last night. We’re flying to Lost Angels on Monday. I’m numb, don’t really know how I feel.

It was time – she’d had Alzheimer’s, had stopped recognizing my mother. None of that makes it better.

I had a dream about her last night. It involved … well, first we were sitting around a table with a very earnest Young Pioneer in dress uniform saying Very Earnest Things. Then we (babushka and I) were watching that same person on a webcast, or something. She said something inane, and we both went “That’s bullshit!” in unison. And the video stream blinked out. She then turned to me and said, “Maybe her feelings were hurt.”

The funeral will likely be on the 2nd – the day, in 2001, when my father died. Might as well make a dark day darker, I guess.

Do you know what I did today? I worked on Roland. It was bliss.

Partly it was bliss because I worked on Roland, which hadn’t happened (not reliably or for any significant length of time) for a couple of weeks. I did more dissertation work when I was traveling – in the interstices among those five trips in the space of two months, the last of them being in mid-November – than I did in the last two weeks.

At least, for once I wasn’t slacking. During that time I wrote something like 8000 words in different venues, most of which writing was “public” (like the final NEH report for the two-year Virtual Humanities Lab). I think, all things considered, things went pretty well with all the obligations. Only a few relatively minor balls dropped, unless someone isn’t telling me something big.

Then there was Thanksgiving! And it was grand! For the first time in a long time I wasn’t with my family. That wasn’t the part that was grand; the good part was that I got to meet my two, uh, half-brothers-in-law. Who are in their early to mid-20s, and both funky and interesting and smart and well-traveled. It was good to spend time with Ethan’s family again, those I’d met before and new acquaintances. Including the puppy, to whom I didn’t become allergic for hours. Hooray for modern medicine.

Then we came home, and this week we have a cold. Nasty cold, too: I took yesterday off from work completely… eeexcept for the totally-burning stuff.

And tonight, I started in on Roland again. I have to encode everything I’m going to encode for the thesis (which is not all of Roland’s corpus, that’ll take years more than I have) by the end of December, so thought I’d make a list of everything that still needs to be encoded. Oh boy, it’ll be a fun month! Good thing I’m lovin’ it. tm.

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.

Via the inimitable Ms. Bitch comes a link to a Washington Post article (free registration required, I believe): “As Europe Grows Grayer, France Devises a Baby Boom.”

France has woken up to a bit of population crisis going around Europe: all of Europe is below replacement rate, meaning the population count is going down. In addition, they like families. You know, have family values. I remember hearing something about that in the U.S., vaguely and only once or twice.

Some excerpts from the article:

When the municipal day-care center ran out of space because of a local baby boom, the town government gave Maylis Staub and her husband $200 a month to defray the cost of a “maternal assistant” to care for their two children.

When Staub delivered twins last December — her third and fourth children — the nation not only increased their tax deductions and child allowances, the government-owned French train system offered 40 percent discounts off tickets for the parents and the children until they reach their 18th birthdays.[...]

France heavily subsidizes children and families from pregnancy to young adulthood with liberal maternity leaves and part-time work laws for women. The government also covers some child-care costs of toddlers up to 3 years old and offers free child-care centers from age 3 to kindergarten, in addition to tax breaks and discounts on transportation, cultural events and shopping. [...]

A century ago, France was one of the first European countries to face a declining population. Since then, almost every elected French government — regardless of party — has instituted laws that encourage bigger families and make it easier for women to keep their jobs while raising children.

Now that’s family values.