Locals and Boston-area lovers,
This Saturday evening is the Wolf Moon – February’s full moon. No better time to go visit the ocean, I say.
If you were going to the ocean somewhere in the vicinity of Boston, somewhere wildish, where you can stand on a beach and not have a road twenty feet behind you, where would you go? I’ll be car-enabled.
(LJ readers, please to respond directly on Words’ End. Thank you!)
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.
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.”)
Some helpful soul transcribed what-all Joe Cocker was singing at Woodstock. Helpful cat is helpful!
Don’t be drinking anything when you watch this, and oh, do watch it. Four-ish minutes.
[I started writing this yesterday but decided to sleep before finishing. A wise choice.]
It’s not even 10pm, and I’m already in bed in pursuit of enough sleep. A couple of days ago Mark and I talked about the concept of enough, for the most part agreeing that it was not a useful measure. When does the lovingest cat in the world (who happens to live with Mark) get enough love? What is enough contentment? How much time on the playa is enough? And so on. Since that conversation I’ve thought of two things to which I can usefully apply the modifier enough: food and sleep. My body definitely has a range of “enough” when it comes to nutrition, and lately I’m glad to say I’ve mostly stayed in that range. Likewise with sleep. Too much sleep, which makes me logy, happily doesn’t happen often. But before the trip I was underslept for weeks with only occasional breaks, and every such period takes a heavier toll than the one before it. One of the unmistakable signs of aging.
(Yes, I know I’m only 31. I said aging, not getting old, and this isn’t even a complaint: I’m just fascinated with the changes my body is patently undergoing.)
I got a surprisingly decent amount of sleep at Burning Man. The noise doesn’t bother my lucky brain, which can wander off into dreamland under most any conditions if it’s tired enough. And the weather between the Monday and Saturday dust storms was so mild that the tents didn’t get stifling until well after 9! Both of the times I’ve been to the playa before, the beating sun made it difficult to stay in the tents around 7:30.
Tuesday night was a night for wandering, though. I went out with some of my campmates, maybe a group of eight? We were – oh wait, do you know what the city looks like? Here, take a look at the map – we were camped at almost-9 o’clock and A, riiight around the round 9:00 Plaza. We went straight across the playa, past the Man, and to 3:00; that alone is a 5400-foot walk right there, just over a mile. We then proceeded to walk the diameter of the Esplanade all the way around clockwise, back to 9:00. There were sparkly and shiny things everywhere; many of those things were faces. We saw … actually, I don’t remember what-all we saw. I remember the feeling of it, but not the camps and installations themselves. Campmates, help in comments? :)
Around 8:30 I broke off with my friends and walked into a full-on techno-y disco, in an attempt to find Sean. Failed miserably at that, but did find two other friends – Rob and Sara(h?) – who had both made these gorgeous faux-fur coats rippling all over with LEDs sewn into them. Gorgeous.
Walked back into camp, recouped and realized that my evening was very much not over. So I got to wander the playa for a couple of hours with Dan. This was fantastic: Dan lives in San Francisco, and I don’t get to see him a whole lot; and the little time we’ve actually spent together is somehow always graced with an ease that I love. Plus, he has an incredible eye for visual composition.
We wandered through a small forest of skis, which surrounded a little meditation space with benches made of snowboards: a beautiful memorial to a skiing-and-snowboarding dude by his friends. And we found the balloons!
The balloons were surreal. There were three huge strings of them hanging more or less vertically in the air, lit up (it was nighttime, after all) – blue, green and red. The playa messes with your sense of geographical perspective at the best of times, and at night, slightly sleep deprived and giddy and not entirely sober, with all those lights around – well, we couldn’t really tell where the balloon strings met the earth. But toward them we went, and they turned out to not be very far away. Lucky us!
They were helium-filled balloons affixed to heavy-gauge kite string, with an LED taped to a small battery affixed under each balloon. They were twelve feet apart, and each string had hundreds of balloons, and more were being put on as we watched. They were so, so high up in the air – but you could catch the string and sort of walk it down with your hands; which is what people did, and we did too, and Dan even lay on the ground with some other folk who were passing them fire-brigade-style and laughing as though they’d been inhaling that helium. (They weren’t. It was just that fun.)
Why balloons, and why did we find them so fun, hanging out in the sky like that, 500 feet up in the air? For no better reason than people find horse races or museums or monster truck rallies or hiking in the woods fun. It was art we could play with. It was some of the best time I had on the playa this year.
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.
To hell with sleep. I now have an ungodly amount of pesto. Probably a couple of pounds of it (or a medium mixing bowl – pesto is heavy, what with the oil and all).
Oh, tasty tasty summer. And I’m just starting with the pesto. Watch out, world.
