Words’ End

*happy sigh* “I love face masks. Love ‘em. They make me feel like a girl.”

“Funny; they make you look like a zombie.”

E: “….Wow. OK, I don’t know why I thought I needed to talk to God just now, but now that I have I’m going to bed.”

V: *dies laughing* “Can I post this?”

Last week, on the autumn equinox, was our first-first wedding anniversary. (We got married in the fall, and again on the spring equinox of this year.) We went camping, journeyed through the woods, gathered large sticks and cooked hobo stew wrapped in aluminum foil, drank prosecco out of the bottle and watched the fire crackle its way through the dark dark evening. Everything was alive, down to the myriad of spiders everywhere. I stayed away from the spiders and clung to my love, thankful and still amazed at the fortune of meeting him.

Today is my grandmother’s 90th birthday. Was, technically, as she was born in Baku (but is Jewish, not Azerbaijani) and it’s well past midnight there. I talked with her on the phone, and am pretty sure she didn’t really know who I was. She’s in that stage of Alzheimer’s where she sounds both lucid and calm, but that’s because she’s gotten used to the denial of going with the flow of whatever we say. Something to the effect of, You’re my granddaughter? Oh, that’s nice, dear. How nice of you to call.

Talking to her these days is creepy and sad. There’s no point in talking often: I’m a bad granddaughter, haven’t felt particularly close to her since my early teens and was terrible at writing letters from America when she was still living in Kishinev with my grandfather. He passed away in 1997, and she moved here in… 2000? 1999? something like that.

But they did help raise me, and I have many memories of their apartment with its dusty books and knick-knacks and tiny well-loved kitchen and grape vines overgrowing the windows and pigeons nesting in the vines. My grandmother read many newspapers and cooked tasty cheese wafers.

She had stunning black hair and a great sense of style. She flirted with my grandfather by leaning out the window, so that her shoulder-length mane would fall to the side like Rapunzel’s.

She waited for her husband to come back from world war 2 while caring for their three children with one other woman’s help. She watched one of her two sons slowly waste away when he, a chemist, was stricken by chemical poisoning and his workplace didn’t even acknowledge that this was possible, and didn’t support him at all.

She taught, first in schools (history) and then at the university (history of the Party). Her long-ago university students came to visit her up until she left the country. She played bridge with grampa and her friends. She would sit there and watch me eat, smiling with delight. She didn’t really drink, but smoked a pack a day until, I think, grampa died and she moved out of their place to a friend of the family’s, waiting for her emigration documents. They’d lived in that apartment since 1953.

She’s had a dignified, full life. Every once in a while the blind injustice of her chronic brain disease washes over me in a wave of dread.

Isn’t she beautiful?

While looking around Inside Higher Ed, I came across an old article about Princeton’s new policy of automatically granting a one-year leave from tenure track when a faculty member becomes a parent. I’d been delighted to read this back in August: one thing I don’t like at all about academe in the U.S. is the default assumption that people who make teaching and research their life’s work aren’t entitled to a life outside of the university.

Many more comments have been posted since I last read the article, and I boggle. Some of the people who choose to be “child-free” actually dare to imply that having children makes for lazy academics. That having children means you aren’t dedicated to education and research. I’d like to see them be responsible for a baby and hold down an exhausting full-time job at the same time, for just a month or so. I wonder if they’d change their mind then.

And spare me the “we have too many people on this planet” argument. Fertility is well below replacement rate (2.1 is said to keep a population stable) in a large portion of the world, including most of Europe and North America. The places with particularly high fertility rate (Niger tops the CIA World Factbook chart, with 7.55 children born per woman on the average) also have a huge infant mortality rate.

They’re up, and I am in big trouble. It’s way, way past bedtime.

It’s 2am in Bergen, Norway. It didn’t really get all the way dark until about midnight.

I meant to blog more extensively while visiting Jill and her mum, since net access from your own laptop is a beautiful thing. But somehow I got sucked into catching up on all my net-reading instead, and… there’s just so much.

Norway has great seafood. Bergen is mountainous and half-hidden in rolling fog, it’s as though they’re living in a cloud. I’ve never been so bruised in my life (biking + sleeping on hard ground afterwards, for days on end), and am loving it. Having a bed to sleep in for the past two nights has been an insane luxury. Jill’s daughter Aurora is the sweetest kid since my nephew. Denmark seems Very Hilly when you’re lugging a heavy trailer behind your bicycle, but is actually Rather Flat. Fjords are gorgeous and unexpectedly (for us and for the locals) windy just when you dedicate an entire day to biking around one. The Danish campsite network is impressive and convenient, but morning pastries overshadow all of that by a mile. Camp stove was superfluous, since most campsites have kitchens. We’ve only actually cooked once, but ate out (including Copenhagen) for about five meals out of more than a week, covering the rest with energy bars and remarkably satisfying supermarket food. Snails and slugs abound and are cute; spiders are not cute but luckily don’t abound either. Cows prance and frolic, I kid you not. The last campsite we stayed at had goats that talked to you, and not one but three of those huge inflatable bouncy trampoline-like pillows that you can flop and bounce on (and we did). Ferries rock, and – Molly and David, I feel like a traitor – Clif Shot energy packets are much tastier than Gu. Or perhaps it’s the texture.

I can feel myself getting stronger. Some biking-relevant muscle groups have gained a surprising amount of definition already.

It’s like a dream. Still a bit surreal, although we’ve been traveling for ten days now. To have and to hold such a brilliant mind and generous, patient, kind heart is a privilege, and isn’t lost on me. We’ve spent more time than I’d expected in companionable silence. At first this felt odd, since usually we can’t stop conversing, but it feels good, so to hell with the usual.

Tomorrow, ferry back to Denmark and ten more days of traveling. Net access from the campsites is spotty, and when it is available, it’s on the camp’s computer, not a wireless connection. (But it blows my mind that it exists in such boonies at all!) I’m internalizing much more than I’m able… well, willing to write. It’s too much effort to write. I’m retreating into my own head again, thoughts of family and humanity and my place in the world whirling like tiny mosquitoes all around me. How do you write about all of this when increasingly your MO is to live fully, day by day?

You don’t, is how. Especially not at 2:30am. Definitely time for sleep. I’ll leave you with a post I wrote on the plane over, many days ago.

–

Wed 18 May 11:01 Copenhagen time

I haven’t blogged much about personal life in a while, mostly due to time constraints. So much to do before honeymoon! I’m happy to say that, for the most part, the sudden rush of work in the last few weeks resulted in some happy developments. Now I just have to remember to pitch VHL’s new toys to some lists, and hopefully gather some interest.

Today is my mom’s 65^th birthday. For her, it’s still yesterday: she’s in Hawaii with a friend. Happy birthday, mom! We’re thinking of you.

I’m writing this on a plane from Reykjavik to Copenhagen. We left home at 4:30pm yesterday, and at 4 I was still doing the dishes. A bit of a rushed feeling persisted, but I noticed an undercurrent of that state whee you just can’t be bothered to do things any quicker, you know? It all worked out, in any case. Taxi to Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence, on to a bus to Boston’s Logan airport, timed so that we would arrive three hours before our flight left. We figured, we had two heavy and very carefully packed suitcases with bicycles in them. If TSA wanted to check that stuff by hand, there might’ve been trouble: they’re notorious for, well, repacking things in such a way that they get damaged. In an attempt to avoid this, we even taped love letters to TSA agents to the inside of the bike cases, explaining that if they break, our honeymoon will be VERY VERY SAD.

I don’t think they checked us, unless it was behind the scenes. The entire check-in process for Icelandair took about 10 minutes, including standing in line (of which there was none). Perhaps there’s more havoc when it comes closer to a flight, but it was just… so… pleasant. I don’t think there’s an elevated terrorist alert in the northern countries.

And so we left! Zooommm, off on a 9:40pm airplane. Dinner was bad food, but I didn’t care, as I spent most of that flight asleep. Now, post-nap and Reykjavik airport Earl Grey tea ($4.50 a cup) and airline coffee (surprisingly full-bodied and tasty!), I’m wide awake and bouncy. In a couple of hours we’ll be in Copenhagen.

What we saw of Iceland on the descent, and then on take-off, was pretty amazing. Pretty snow-covered mountains, steaming geysers, water so blue. We’ll be there for about a day and a half on the way back, staying in an actual hotel – the only hotel reservation we’ve made the entire trip.

That’s right, no hotel reservations at all in Denmark. We have all the camping gear we need, including over a dozen different spices for cooking: is anyone really surprised? Didn’t think so). The the suitcases in which our bikes are packed turn into trailers (have I mentioned how much Bike Friday rocks? Because they do), and Denmark is flat. It also boasts fifteen or so national bike routes, and a large number of regional ones. Some farmers will let you stay on their land for stupidly low prices. Plus, there are reasonably-equipped camping sites all over. From what we saw, most come with things like showers and electricity, I’m happy to pay a bit more to recharge the laptop. Reportedly, some sites even have wireless access: a geek’s wet dream vacation.

We have… what is it, 24? 28? rechargeable batteries. And the charger, and a laptop, and a digital camera, and Very Bright LED lights for our bikes, and an iPod and an iTrip, and two sets of cheapo radio headphones so that we can listen to the iPod broadcast. [Note at time of posting: this failed to work. Ah well.] And probably other stuff I’m forgetting. (There’ll be photos on flickr, that’s for sure. Watch that space.)

Yeah. Low-tech this trip ain’t. And while we’re on the subject of tech: about a week ago I bought a new battery for my PowerBook, as the old one was dying slowly but surely. Power saving technology sure has come a long way: on the dimmest monitor setting (before it goes totally blank), with the battery settings optimized, we should get something like 5 hours of text editing. Probably less for movie watching and photo handling, but damn. Hoo-ray.

Tomorrow I go to visit Espen Aarseth and his department. Should be fun! [It was! We nattered about the state of humanities computing, games research in Denmark, working and living in Europe, and weather. Which was beautiful.] At the end of the month we’ll take a ferry from Hanstholm, in the northwest of Denmark, to Bergen, Norway and visit with Jill for a while. That, I know, will be awesome. Other than that, we have no set plans, except for a vague itinerary that hits most of the places we would theoretically like to see. But first we have to get used to biking with trailers and panniers full of Stuff. It’s a good thing Denmark is flat.

I’m glad to be out of USA&tm; for a while. There has been a subtle but insidious change in the air over the past several years; the political strife both national and international is taking its toll on the daily lives of everyone around us. Perhaps this has always been the case, and I’m just more sensitive to it now because I’m deeply distressed about the direction the U.S. has taken under Bush Junior. Right now, though, it feels as though with every passing minute I’m shedding another layer of weight I didn’t quite know I was carrying. And it’s not just the feeling you get when you go on vacation after a busy time at work. My soul is more at peace; I feel as though we’re flying toward sanity.

–

Life will take over in quite a hectic and unceremonious manner pretty much the minute we get back. And yet, I feel like this intense traveling experience is about all I can take right now, so I watch the storm of activity rage all around me but keep it at arm’s length, the eye of the storm suspended somewhere in the middle of my ribcage.

I dreamed about an ex-lover, a friend to whom I’m about to write email (only partly because of the dream). He’s been, to a greater or lesser extent, in my dreams for something like a week now. I’ve no idea why. All I know is that I awake happy and slightly nostalgic, that I miss him and want him and Ethan to meet.

I told Ethan about this yesterday morning. His eyes reflected the shine in my own. He smiled, the corners of his eyes creasing; he wants to meet J. too. This is important – in some ways, this is it, it’s why I treasure him so. He gets what it means to love, nurtures the depth of feelings I carry for him and for others.

I wake, and before writing email I read blogs. My legs underneath the blanket freeze as I follow links from a post. A sixteen-year-old girl is accused of being terrorist threat and imprisoned – imprisoned! – for being a teenager. For not getting along with her parents, for wanting to get married at 16, for a misunderstanding in the family that involved the police because they trust in the system, a decision which cost their daughter her freedom after the police involved the FBI.

The girl’s Muslim. As the source of my links wrote, “this is the Patriot Act in action. This is religious persecution. This is your America.”

So, Mona (the administrative deity at my work) called us on Saturday morning (!) to tell us that, having come in randomly to pick something up, she noticed that our bike was here.

BIKE!!1!

Of course, our lazy morning swiftly became excited morning jumping around with one pant leg on, with one hand brushing the teeth. We flew (read: drove obeying all the traffic signs, officer!) to the Italian department…

…to find that I’d left my keys at home. D’oh.

Luckily, Simona the Visiting Prof was just getting in to do some work, so she let us in.

Two boxes. In them, two suitcases. In the suitcases, which convert into a trailer, a deconstructed tandem. W00t!

We happily got brunch at Whole Foods, intent on going to Providence Bicycle and getting saddles and some other stuff. Chattering like sparrows on the first day of spring (and what do you know, it was sunny and warm!), we ate gorgeous salad and drove over to the store…

…to find out that it was “closed for Sabbath.” D’oh.

Ethan laughed and laughed. He has this maniacal laugh whenever something happens that’s just the classic “nyah-nyah” from the multiverse. I love that laugh, it’s infectious. Undeterred, we went home and put it together. Without the saddles.

Sunday, lo and behold, was another Good Weather Day. We went to PB, got everything we needed….

…back up a little, because this is germane to the story. We deconstructed the tandem in order to fit it into the car. Even with it taken apart almost completely, it was a bit of a pain to put it in the car, and it took up all of the back seat. (It would’ve probly fit in the trunk if we’d taken it All the Way Apart, but we were trying to figure out the most efficient way to deal with the bike on a regular basis.)

We got the stuff, got some munchies, made sure the water bottles were full, and headed off to a nearby state park.

Mmmm, pretty park. We parked and put the thing together. It took about 10-15 minutes, and it was getting hot, so we were eager to go go go. We went!, and…

Oh wow. Ow. Tandem riding is HARD.

Especially if your pedals don’t spin independently. You pretty much have to be, like, a SINGLE PERSON.

Plus, of course, we had to fiddle with seat height and bar height and the clip pedals were weird. Have you ever tried to clip into a pedal while it was being spun by your partner’s efforts, and simultaneously attempt to assist those efforts with your other foot? It took us probably about half an hour to cease seeing our parked car when we looked behind us. And the trail is a loop.

We laughed, we panted, it was fun and frustrating as all hell. The hub gear shifter wasn’t working correctly. When we stopped, we kept trying to dismount on different sides. We’d been planning on picking up a bike-only trail, but didn’t find it, and cars kept passing us on the main park road.

At one point, I told Ethan: “This is like marriage-cooperation bootcamp! If we make it on this thing, we’ll get through anything together!”

Okay, so there were grumpy moments. But really, it was mostly fun. By the end of the long loop, we were already learning to work together. It felt good.

And yet, we’re returning the thing. For a bike whose very idea is compactness and ease of [dis]assembly, it’s a surprisingly clunky process to get it to the point where it fits anywhere in the car. Sadly, given our purpose (among other things, biking Denmark on our honeymoon, which will probably involve several bike rides to train stations followed by the folding/packing of said bikes), it’s impractical for us to keep it.

We’re gonna get singleton folding bikes. They’ll still rock, but I’ll miss the tandem experience.

On a more sober note, it’s my dad’s birthday. He would’ve been 68 this year. I feel like… I feel like celebrating! He was a difficult man and a passionate one, and he was my papa and I love him.

Still get sad that he’s gone, but not today. Today, I’m happy. It’s his birthday!

E., to me, as I balanced precariously on the living room couch, reaching to get yet another Farscape DVD out of his computer:

“You got something you want to do with that disk, or are you just gonna wave it around?”

Good Monday morning.