Research - T minus 15 days

I think today for the first time, it hit me that I'll be traveling to New Zealand on a research grant in just over two weeks.

Yikes.

Can I say that again?

Yikes.

Thanks.

All of a sudden, "plenty of time" means very little. The stack of books I was supposed to have read seems very large. And my relative ability to speak coherently to individuals in an informal interview setting seems extraordinarily low.

Nonetheless, I will be departing in 15 days. Ergo, the map-examining, timetable-plotting, and various document-copying becomes as rampant as slouching teenagers in the mall in July. Ergo, the reading list is undergoing a transformation. No more of this science fiction business.

-Said, On Exile
-Shakespeare's Drama of Exile
-New Zealand Drama
-A Theatre in the House
-Post-colonial Drama

The list goes on. And archives. Lots and lots of archives. Stay tuned for more information. Aaaaand....Go.

zzzz...

Huh?

You mean these things don't absorb into my brain while I sleep and produce a fascinating and brilliant commentary that is pre-packaged in a thesis-sized envelope?

Dang it.

I think I'd better think it out again...

I am reeeeviewing...duhdle duhdle duh...the situation...

Dancing with Cinderella

For ten seconds of the wedding I attended this weekend, I was jealous of the wedding photographer. It was late, the dance floor was emptying out, and the bride and groom were beginning to say their goodbyes.

On one corner of the floor, in perfect tableau, were three dads dancing with their little girls.

One was just a baby, swaying and rocking in her father's arms as her eyelids began to droop. One, maybe three years old, was doing a quiet two-step, holding her father's hands and bouncing a little when the mood hit her, content to keep her feet on the ground. The other, maybe five or six, was leaping into the air on the strength of her father's arms, twirling and spinning with pure abandon.

This took place just a few hours after a beautiful father-daughter dance to Steven Curtis Chapman's "Cinderella." The whole thing was like a time-lapse photography sequence of dads and their little girls.

It was exquisite.

Broken Glass and Knobby Cloth

"My shop burned down this week. But..."

This from an elderly man who had just shown me a black-and-white photograph in a frame with cracked glass, displaying an old-fashioned weaver's loom that had belonged to his mother, and on which he had learned to weave as a boy.

I was at a local farmer's market and had stopped to run a finger over the assortment of brightly colored woven rugs which, he told me, were made from rejected drapery/other material ("seconds").

Unless I can afford to buy, I tend not to linger for long at any one booth. Mainly because I get the uncomfortable feeling that I'm raising the seller's expectations of a sale. But this time I was curious.

He showed me the little knobs on some of the rugs from the sewn toes of woolen socks. He pulled out a few rugs to show how a flaw in the colors of the original fabric had turned into a beautiful pattern in his rugs. He told me about the woodworking he did on the side, and showed me the woven-wood seat of the chair he'd been sitting on.

He told me that he'd been weaving for 30 years, since his retirement. That he'd first learned from his mother. That there were so many unhappy people, and this was what he wanted to do. He took a craftsman's pride in the array of colors and patterns he had designed.

And then he said, "My shop burned down this week. But..."

But he was still there. Still expressing a love for what he did. A joy in what he had created and what he could share with passersby, like me, who took a moment to stop and listen.

His rugs were lovely, and I'm hoping to get one eventually, but even more than that, listening to his story reminded me how many times fear of what people will think or assume causes me to miss out on something precious or fail to honor something beautiful.

It's the Little Things

Sometimes all it takes is the successful prevention of a ginormous black snake from eating an adorable tiny bunny.

Allow me to illustrate.

1.

(bunny) [BUSH] (snake)


(Jen)

2.
(bunny)[BUSH](snake)

o-pebble
(Jen)

3.
(bunny) <------- [B0USH] ->(snake)
|
|
v
(Jen)

(Also known as the expansion and transformation of an isosceles triangle into a scalene triangle.)

(Better known as) Not on my watch, Mr. Racer. Not on my watch.

Use Your Words, New England

Although the precise moment at which one leaves "the south" and enters "the north" is far from definitive, one thing is certain: it's a long drive getting there.

Road trips are always an adventure, and spending more than 10 hours in the car in a single day is bound to add humor to otherwise mundane elements of life. For example, road signs in New England are a fascinating study.

As I road-tripped (not to be confused with the act of stumbling over uneven pavement, a verb which I have never personally enacted) to Boston last weekend, we stopped for gas somewhere in western New York. The Food/Gas/Lodging signs did not indicate, until you had merged onto a concrete-bordered, no-turns-for-three miles side road, that the gas station indicated on the sign was, in fact, three miles off the interstate.

In the meantime, we wound through a wooded, quaint community with a church and a hodge podge of businesses. Standard fare. What was not so typical were the back-to-back yellow warning signs proclaiming, "Falling Rocks Zone" and "Deaf Children Area."

First thought: the community did an incredibly poor job surveying the road-crossing area before building a school for the deaf.

Lest this be seen as an anomaly, Boston took the signage to a whole new level with:

Caution
Seniors

and

Slow
Deaf Children

And we say grammar, punctuation, and enunciation don't matter...

But Boston was quick to redeem itself for its grammatical ambiguities via another set of signs found at the Haymarket farmers' market: strawberries, 2 quarts/$1; peaches, 8/$1. Just around the corner at a small festival, the plethora of signs reading Free Samples didn't hurt either.

Good job, Boston.

If all signage fails, like the long stretches of roads in Pennsylvania that detail excessive speeding penalties without ever telling the speed limit, the clouds can always be counted on to provide distraction, interpretive material, and the laughter which, when combined with coffee, makes road trips so much fun.

Review

The Book Thief (Zusak): beautiful, brilliant book. Read it.

:-)

Be a Woman

Ever since I watched Nine a few weeks ago (and aided and abetted by the fact that I've been periodically listening to the soundtrack since then), several of the songs have taken turns getting stuck in my head: Fergie's 'Be Italian' and Nicole Kidman's 'A Very Unusual Way' are vying for top pick.

And in a very unusual way, thoughts of this movie, with its complex commentary on the roles defined for women, keep intersecting with thoughts of Ultimate Frisbee.

I told you, it's unusual.

Being a woman who enjoys playing sports and is competitive comes with a few complications. I enjoy being a respected part of a co-rec team and treated as an equal when my performance merits. I also appreciate recognition that I am a woman (*news flash!*).

This is where it gets tricky. To play sports well does not make one masculine, and, no matter how socially accepted the phrase has become, it is not a compliment to say, "You don't play like a girl," or "We don't think of you as a girl."

Here's the thing: "You play well" or "you're more aggressive than most girls who play recreational sports" delivers a similar message, but leaves out the association that feminine = 'not good at sports' and masculine = 'good at sports.' The same statement could apply to any number of other designations limited in popular imagination to either men or women.

Drat. Now I'm sounding like a feminist, aren't I? Well, maybe I am. With qualification.

"Feminist" is a word that has taken on epic and negative connotations, some deserved, some not. I like to think that it is possible to be a respecter of persons--seeking equality, not a flip-flop that places women on top, and encouraging mindfulness with the words and phrases that reinforce stereotypes and create unnecessary contradictions like,

• I am a woman.
• I am competitive/brainy/independent.
• Women are not competitive/brainy/independent;
• therefore, I must choose one part of my identity and discard the other.

To be honest, I think more people would acknowledge this syllogism to be false than take the effort to avoid language that reinforces it. It's a challenge for women as well as men.

To be fair, it is also a challenge to cultivate both an independent, tough, competitive (fine, aggressive) side and a relational, gentle, refined side, and I have a tendency to neglect one or the other; however, it's a challenge, not an impossibility, and I hope one day the most natural words of commendation on a sports field, or in other settings now dubbed "masculine" or "feminine", will reflect this fact.

Go team!

Life in 10 seconds

Now reading The Book Thief, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and getting ready to start Drood (Simmons), There a Petal Silently Falls (a collection of Korean short stories), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer), and Foe (Coetzee).

Recently watched La Vie En Rose, Empire of the Sun, Maria Full of Grace, and Across the Universe for the first time.

Working. Planning summer travel. Gardening. Dancing. Movies. Not a bad life, overall, with the exception of arctic air conditioning over the only library desks near windows...

Blind Luck

Today, I read this article on human trafficking in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, reminding me that there are a lot of things we Americans, myself included, don't like to think or talk about.

Sometimes it's easier to be blind.

Yesterday, I went grocery shopping, and as I waited to cross a line of traffic in the parking lot, I saw a near-collision between a couple heading into the store and a long line of carts a store employee was returning to the building.

The couple reacted angrily, spinning around to glare at the employee, and one yelled loud enough for all passersby to hear, "Why don't you just go back to India where you belong?"

I was not the only bystander who was taken aback. In the first place, the employee did not appear to be Indian. The accusation was full of layers: you are not like us. you do not belong here. we don't want you here. It had very little to do with the accidental collision of several carts in a crowded space.

Perhaps the speaker had recently lost a job and was looking for someone to blame. Maybe. I don't know. It wouldn't excuse their behavior, but it made me stop and think. Whatever caused that anger and aggression caused the shopper to disregard the employee as an individual with a complex story of her own.

Sometimes it's easier to be blind.

But then some unrelated incident, like a crowded parking lot or rush hour traffic or a willful child or an imperfect friendship forces the anger to the surface and causes the ugliness of our thoughts to be displayed before our own eyes.

It's easier to get upset about social injustice or the injustice others display than it is to recognize the angry thoughts I am careful to suppress or the damaging words I rehearse but tell myself I'll never use.

All of these are ugly. All are evidence of brokenness. All, I think rightly, provoke a sense of anger and indignation and a desire for change.

The problem comes when I imagine that it's possible to repair the external manifestations without dealing with the internal causes.

Sometimes it's easier to be blind.

Things that make me happy

It's the little things...

• The soundtrack of Nine, especially Marion Cotillard
  
• The Preakness tomorrow
  
• The soundtrack of Next to Normal
• The premiere of So You Think You Can Dance (season 7) in 2 weeks
• Kindred, by Octavia Butler
• Functional computers
• Having jobs
• Planting tomatoes, peppers, and basil in my garden