plans for a tournament of pies

we have been over my haphazard recipe cataloging skills before. did I ever think I'd need to change my habit of just sorting through a pile of recipes-written-on-the-backs-of-whatever to find the one in the handwriting of a lovely Canadian on a square-ish grease-stained piece of blank notepad paper? not really. it's a fine enough system. I know how it works.

but nevertheless, one of my current projects is to sort out all the recipes I really want to keep from the pile where they sometimes mingle with too-ambitious recipe printouts that I only thought I might want to follow someday but never have, to rewrite any that need to be rewritten, and then organize them all into proper usable sections. the fat yellow folder that used to hold them has long ago been repurposed for something else, and I've kept recipes since then in a little black binder. or in a manila folder in the cupboard. or bookmarked in my phone. it's messy.

for my last birthday, Jeremiah bought me some butter-themed fabric with which to cover the new recipe binder, as soon as I might get around to it. there are a handful of savory dinner-esque recipes to finish sorting and writing out to fit. all the more fun things like brownies and brunches and custards and pies are already done and filed in a sort-of-thematic-sort-of-alphabetical way in their sections.

pies are my favorite things to bake. my mother's pie crust recipe almost doesn't need to be in the recipe book, because I've memorized it by now and could probably mix it up blindfolded if I needed to.

and ever since the tournament of RPG books a few summers back, I've been pondering what else to write tournament-style reviews of... so why not pies? it's perhaps not quite as ambitious as this neat pie-baking project (also far less likely to get a book deal, I assume...), but pretty fun anyway.

baking sixteen pies is a lot though. and for a proper tournament experience I might need to bake the winners of opening rounds multiple times as they advance in the bracket... so... I am still not totally sure how I'll plan this out, schedule all the celebratory pie tastings, ration my supply of butter and eggs properly, and all that. but I have gotten as far as choosing eight savory and eight sweet pies which could contend against one another:

chicken pot pie,
shepherd's pie,
mushroom and barley pie,
vegetable cornish pasties,
tomato corn pie,
squash galette (this one or this one? hmmm...),
quiche (not sure what type...),
spanikopita;

and 

pumpkin,
mixed berry,
cherry,
peach,
apple,
key lime,
french silk,
banana cream.

I do not like lemon meringue so it is not invited, even if it is a very classic variety of pie.

what I haven't decided yet is which pies should face which other pies to start with. and should we narrow down all the sweet pies to one, all the savory pies to one, and have those winners face off against each other? or would it really be more fair to have them share the victory?

it hardly matters, since it's all just a silly excuse to bake and eat 1.3 dozen pies (or more) in some too-short span of time. I'll figure it out at some point and see how it goes.

today is pi/e day, which is a great day for baking pies (or for talking about math and Greek letters, a la the legendary Vi Hart-- who seems to have taken down all their great pi- and tau-related youtube videos from back in the day. odd, but I can't say I blame them). but alas, I am not organized enough yet. maybe for next year I can time everything to announce final winners on Saturday, March 14, 2026. let me know if you want to come visit and share the responsibilities of pie-judging and dish-washing with me next year.

warm weather and vulnerabilities

I love being barefoot.

I love the feeling of clean carpet or tile or concrete under my feet. love walking on cool grass or warm sand or slick mud.

thankfully Arizona gives us plenty of good being-barefoot weather, overall. I avoid socks at all costs unless I'm jogging or hiking in actual shoes.

being-barefoot weather is upon us for good now. spring! summer break mere 3 weeks hence!

it's exhilarating and intimidating, the idea of summer. I won't be teaching. what will I do? how will I choose between all the crafts and writing and projects and excursions and naps I want to fit in? 

maybe I can figure out a way to do it all. (there was a pretty cool podcast episode from Maisie Hill about that, just last month.)

we shall see.

first I need to survive the semester and all its grading, meetings, lesson plans, presentations, and commencement shenanigans. 

I will. we all will. all 97 of my students and I and my colleagues too. 

somehow.

April is national poetry month, isn't it? 

I'm not a poet-- not really. but sometimes my brain thinks very poetically.

I like to read poetry. 

even more I like to hear poetry read aloud. seeing it on a page isn't quite good enough usually.

this poem, "The Hill We Climb," from a whole fifteen months ago, is a good and grand tear-jerking hopeful poem to listen to. 

to read it silently-- well, it might still be good. or it might seem long and uneven, or as the post I linked to just there has it, too dense.

what are the best parts? it is hard to choose. and pasting them here won't do any justice to how they sound in Amanda Gorman's own voice.

listen and watch the whole thing first:

and now, here are the most moving sections for me-- these three from near the beginning, middle, and end:

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

and

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? 

and the last few lines, singed with cliche just at the edges--

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid. The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

maybe I ought to go looking for more of Ms. Gorman's poetry.

 

for the record, I've been reading various other non-poetry lately, including:

The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey  (not the winner of this year's Tournament of Books)

Poet Warrior, by Joy Harjo (recommended via yoga church friends)

Trigger Warning, short stories by Neil Gaiman

The Marvelous Clouds, by John Durham Peters

and 

A Primer for Forgetting, by Lewis Hyde (the same one who wrote Common as Air, which I managed to cite in my dissertation) 

 

here's to springtime and reading and being barefoot as much as possible. 

almost winter break

the stars in the winter seem brighter, or shinier, or at least more, possibly because there is more night for them to shine in.

yesterday, it rained and rained and rained all afternoon and evening. it began around noon as the barest mist of precipitation in the grey, chill air. at some point while I was teaching my last three technical writing classes of the semester, it intensified until all the sidewalks were slicked and slippery. 

today was the first fully cold-cold day of the season. 

a dusting of snow on top of Granite Mountain made it look a little like a delightfully craggy, if lopsided, bundt cake. 

(did you know that "bundt" is technically a trademarked brand name? I was somewhat astonished to learn this when I doublechecked my spelling just now. I guess it's like kleenex and google and velcro and all the other trademarks that have crept into the zone of regular old vocabulary for what was once the latest amazing innovation but is now just everyday stuff. the company still enforces its trademark over Bundt cake pans-- but you can call the cake itself a bundt cake without issue. thank goodness.) 

way up to the north, the mountains around Flagstaff have much more than a dusting of snow-- they look like they've been repainted altogether in a major revision to the horizon. the distant trio of sharp peaks seem to be layered with at least seven perfectly fine, perfectly white veils of silk. 

when will it snow here in the valley? my guess is not until next month. but it's hard to say. the nights are officially freezing. the skies have been grey all week. the chill wind and the bright sun are battling over the temperature of the air.

now that classes are over, we'll see if I can sleep in past the late sunrises and hibernate a bit more, as nature's signals have been directing us all to do for at least a month. 

what else? my other winter break plans include... 

- visiting my family and homeland to the north
- getting a neat haircut, and maybe some highlights or color or something to go with it
- reading at least ten books for fun
- watching all the longest versions of all the Lord of the Rings films
- baking several pies + some other sort of holiday sweets for the neighbors 

I did want to join a Christmas choir this month, but I'm still a bit too worried about a certain viral pandemic situation. and singing in a facemask doesn't seem like it would be feasible or effective. hopefully next year...?

in less fun (but still pretty fun) arenas, I also have research to work on (more podcast transcript tracking, among other things) and LibriVox projects to edit and finish (just 4 more sections of this to get done). and that is plenty. in fact, I should take some of my expectations about all that down a few notches. two pies will probably be plenty. 

we'll see how industrious I actually want to be during the nineteen or so days of de facto freedom I have before spring semester drags me back to the office. if I can plan all my Business Communication syllabi next week, I won't have to think about that at all until probably... January 10 or so. 

 

{ these two images are very old scans of very old Christmas card sketches }

wintery mix

yesterday it snowed for hours.

so we opened the blinds and pulled aside our gauzy curtain to watch the flurry of sparkly white magic blow around in the chaotic winds. every texture of snow was represented-- icy shards of sleet, tiny flakes of snow-dust, and cottony pea-sized puffballs. it was mesmerizing.

on our after-dinner walk last night, we admired the pink sunset light glinting off the corners of windows in houses across the gully. all the cleanly snow-covered rooftops gave the suburban landscape a seasonal uniformity, and the smooth swathes of rosy, opalescent clouds glowing above it all made for a highly dramatic, majestic backdrop. everyone we saw on that walk was taking a photo of the sky: the neighbor with his two larger dogs paused at the end of the parking lot to document the loveliness; a woman on a third-floor balcony in the next building leaned out with her phone to capture the perfect light.

after months and months with a mere handful of days with any precipitation at all, this afternoon of winter was wholeheartedly welcome. despite all the blustering wind, I wanted to walk around in it all evening. only the older pug's protestations prevented this. Wesley hates these cold, cold days.

thankfully, our little layer of snow is still around (though as the Tuesday morning grey fades into the brightness of afternoon, I'm sure it will all melt away before long). thismorning the clouds to the north lengthened themselves into perfect ridges, like the tips of a heavenly mountain range. to the east the sky seemed to be auditioning for a role in a Bob Ross painting-- everything blended back into soft smoothness. 

the snow-dust and puffballs, for now, are plastered evenly around the west-facing sides of the tree trunks, draped over eaves and ledges and windowsills like thick frosting, and clumped in the leaves and needles of all the shrubbery. my inner child imagines all this fallen snow as lost and scattered fairy-pearls, broken free from their settings and necklace strings, blown frivolously into our world from some other enchanted dimension. while they're here-- before they melt back into magic-- we can shake them out of the trees, into the cold grey sky, onto our hatted heads. we can dent the clumps and layers of them with our footprints and fingerprints. most of all, we can inhale all the serene beauty that the whiteness has added to these days at end of the year.

maybe it will snow again this week. the weather channel gives it a 5% chance.

time collage duet

these are photos from the past. same season, more or less, but last year.



at least close enough.

autumn. such as autumn in Louisiana exists.

today it was 32° at 7:00 am.

in the eastern half of the backyard sky, way back behind the slatted chainlink and the neighbor's trees and their neighbors' neighbors' trees too, there was a luminous deep pink glow. I know it was there because some of it leaked through the curtains onto the wall across from the bed. such a warm orange-pink color--cotton-candy pink, but not so wispy as cotton candy--imagine if pink cotton candy was as thick and felted as the warmest wool blanket. it almost looked out of place on such a cold morning.

although I'm not used to it anymore, I do kind of relish all this chill in the air. it feels right. it feels energizing.

will the still-green cherry tomatoes out on their vines find it energizing? possibly not. I might need to bring those plants inside for the rest of the year.

or I might not. it may warm back up to 70° over the weekend. we'll see. 
 

these here are photos from several summers ago.



Michigan beaches. blue sky, blue lake, all layered like animated elemental paint swatches.

sun, sand, mist. campfires. ice cream.

this isn't a real collage. you'll have to pretend. clip a few images from now, from last year, from three years ago... see what they look like up next to each other. does the cold of today make those sunny June beaches look less warm than they were? or can the memory of the beach insulate this first day of November against all the risk of frost?

images, tendencies, and commandments

the local public library is doing free Monday night yoga this summer, led by one of the proprietors of this local yoga place that I haven't yet visited.

I've been to Monday night library yoga twice so far. it's nice. last week, I lay there and breathed and thought a bit about about my ideal self.


{ image borrowed from this kind soul on Flickr } 

past versions of my ideal self have taken various shapes and sizes and attitudes. but one thing seems to always happen when I think about this future maybe-barely-realistically-attainable person. I think about what she looks like. 

draped over an armchair. surrounded by books and children in a sepia-looking library. wearing comfy (but very stylish) grey loungewear. surrounded by plants, accompanied by a fluffy orange cat and a cup of tea. dressed in homemade and perfectly-tailored dresses. slender but not too tall of course. curly (not frizzy) hair in a perfect messy bun. the perfect pair of glasses on a thoughtful face with a flawless complexion.

why is most of what I think about when I think about her centered on what she looks like? dresses like? what her body is shaped like and how her hair is styled? I picture her in short bursts of vivid-- with this kind of dress. that kind of toned abdomen. a certain kind of skin.

why don't I think half so much about what she does? how she spends her time and energy?
I do think about that too. but it's less easy to fixate on. visuals are easier. for some reason actions don't print themselves so firmly on my thoughts. they don't fit into the short bursts.

why not?

{ favourite oatmeal-chocolate-chip muffins } 

I’ve read so many blogs that have praised Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. Smacksy is the one that comes to mind most readily at the moment but I'm 76% sure I've seen the book mentioned by at least twelve other bloggers, too. 

maybe I'll read it someday. (probably not really though)

for now, I'm skim-reading Rubin's blog. which I came across not long ago, as one does, via another blog entirely, when a fellow-academic on twitter linked to this handy blog about building robust academic writing habits, in that post, under habit #6, there was a link.

this link: The Four Tendencies Quiz.

academic writing habit blogger, Dr. Katelyn Knox, advises that knowing what your tendencies are when it comes to meeting expectations (whether your own or other people's) is helpful for knowing how to nurture good habits.

so I took the quiz, and at the end I was supremely interested (though not really surprised) to learn that I am a Questioner.

of course I am. I would have to be, eh? (I suspect that most of my family members are also questioners-- we like to understand the reasons for doing a thing before we're gonna set out and do it.)

now, I know very well from skim-reading the rest of Gretchen Rubin's blog and website that she is using this quiz and her blog and her online presence generally to sell books and to book speaking gigs and such. and books with titles like "The Happiness Project" pretty much always sound hokey to me. it seems sales-pitchy, snake-oil-y, just a little bit. "buy my book! be happier!" yeah, okay.
but I'm also not unconvinced that there is value in these ideas. the knowledge that I tend to Question before I commit to any course of action or acquiesce to any expectations about how I should do things is kind of eye-opening, however much it also confirms what I already know about myself. it seems like there’s something to it. something insightful, something that feels mind-expanding and practical. it’s not The Answer or The Solution to anything-- no silver bullet-- but it is a starting point, perhaps.

elswhere on Rubin's blog there is a post about writing custom personal commandments for your life, as aspirational guideposts or whatnot. maybe this is hokey and maybe it's helpful. it can be both at once.

the first custom amelia commandment that came to mind was "always whip your own cream," which is an easy one, but also a synecdoche for my general preference for homemade and handmade stuff. if there is ever a plastic tub of cool whip in my kitchen, it will not be because I wanted it there.

it's kind of fun to try thinking of personalized commandments. I could probably articulate a few unconscious ones I follow already, about word usage and getting enough sleep and such.

maybe "take photographs of your old beat-up shoes" is another one I could formally adopt?

{ black flats from Goodwill }

{ polka-dot flip-flips from a Ross in Hawaii }


last week while I was laying in savasana at the end of yoga practice at the library, letting my thoughts drift, I thought of one more custom commandment: refuse the numbness. I guess this one is also shorthand. it's about a deep hope that I'll always be able to be surprised by things, to be affected by things instead of jaded and uninterested. that I'll always be able to listen to the universe sending me messages about itself, about me, about everything. it's easy to let default mode take over, but I don't want that. I want to always be looking for connections, finding things to care about, practicing sensitivity to the world and what I can do in it.

savory, not sweet

as coffeeshops go, Greyhouse is a pretty nice one. it gets crowded, but the ambiance is great (all that brick and art, and the big windows) and the hot chocolate is lovely.

they also do crepes.

my favourite is the Idaho Dream: Roasted rosemary potatoes, kale chips, sauteed leek, bechamel, and creme fraiche. there is an option to add sausage but I never add sausage.

growing up, we only ever made sweet crepes at our house. we were very much missing out though-- savory crepes are glorious.

fall semester, 2016

no courses to describe this time around. just teaching some of same old things, working on learning how to be a real academic.

this is the weekend before the semester officially begins, and for days campus has been buzzing with students and faculty and that grand, subtle feeling of autumn ambition and learning-ness that I have loved for so long. it has been an exciting week.

I have just finalized the syllabus and assignments for my Business Writing class.

I am making lists and planning to dedicate this much work time to libraries, that much to notebooks, just enough to the undergraduates, and all the leftover time to my research gig.

and after work I will bake and eat, and read more stories, and walk and daydream, and water all the plants on my windowsills.

in sixteen weeks I'll be better at being a real academic. and it might be snowing.

it feels so good to be where I am. lucky me.

weekly again

my current journal has completely blank pages. which means I use it as a sketchbook every now and then. sketches are useful both for rejuvinating dying pens and for clearing my head.

many of you have probably seen this new internet corner I've begun carving out for my professional ivory-tower self. there isn't much there yet. so far only an excerpt from this old post and a placeholder 'about' page. and some links.

what else should I put there?

shiny emerald wisps of inspiration

sometimes, though not so much lately, I feel like I am fighting inspiration off with a stick--making great efforts to do one thing at a time and actually finish a project before yet another wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-I-also... comes along to take me in some new direction.

inspiration, for me at least, isn't always the most useful thing. it can be distracting. or infuriating, the way it tantalizes me. I tend to be plagued with flighty, wispy kinds of inspiration. the kinds that hover just out of reach, just beyond practical-possible priority.

an hour or so ago I read this piece about teaching abroad. about the prospect of "relocating to a continent renowned for civil unrest, poverty, and disease-- but also for untarnished landscapes, wildlife, many cultures, and a complex history." high daydream potential, this sort of thing.

and yes, some of the descriptions in this piece are on the sweeping, sensationalish side. but you can at least see what I mean about the distance stretched out between me and such prospects. this inspiring stuff always seems to float just six inches or so higher than my hands seem to reach-- things to daydream about but not things I could actually do-- not yet anyway. and perhaps that's the way daydreaming is supposed to work. before you can reach a thing with your hands, you can settle for reaching it with your brain. imagining it. a first step, of sorts.

on Monday I attended a very nice talk by a former professor of mine: Dr. Cheryl Ball. she taught my professional writing capstone course ten whole years ago. since that far-away semester, she has worked at three other institutions and done many more boundary-pushing academic things. she taught and researched in Norway on a Fulbright scholarship. she is developing this fancy-looking revolutionary publishing system.

sometimes inspiration starts out as envy.

or maybe they are secretly long-lost twins, envy and inspiration. yeah.

anyway. the talk on Monday was about digital humanities + digital publishing and the paths Dr. Ball has wandered in getting to where she is now. now she is scholaring in an emerging field she calls publishing studies, a place full of multimodal and digital work, editing, technology, infrastructure, and lots of other finicky processes that have to do with making things public.

she began the talk with childhood tales featuring inspirational words like vision and initiative. and she ended with this slide, of which I took a crooked and slightly fuzzy photograph:

there are, I saw on facebook earlier, several much better photos of Dr. Ball's visit to Indiana in an album here.

her concluding list of lessons learned isn't earth-shatteringly inspirational in general, but in this specific sub-section of academia it counts. for me, swimming in semi-aimless circles in the middle of my PhD, it very much counts. so I have typed these points out again for ease-of-reading and for the thought-provoking reminders they might be to my current and future overly-inspired but somewhat lost, less-motivated self.

publishing studies has taught me [Dr. Cheryl Ball]...
- editing praxis for media-based texts
- the arbitrariness of style guides
- the ethics of access/ibility and preservation
- the importance of building communities and infrastructure
- the importance of global communication practices
- the necessity of teaching writing in use-contexts
- the necessity of teaching multimodal communication
- that vocational training isn't a dirty word for liberal arts.

there were examples and stories referenced at each of these points, but stories and examples are not as easy to transcribe into a neat list. I will have to trust my memory to weave the stories from her life into and alongside stories from my own.

the paths I'm wandering aren't the same. ten whole years is a long time and lots of things are different in the world. the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I follow around (or don't) will be unique to my brain and my habits.

at the moment, one of the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I have wrapped my fingers around is reading audiobook snippets for LibriVox. I have an official page in their catalogue as a reader, even. I've only just started. the project is wide and ambitious. it's not the exact same kind of digital publishing Dr. Ball presented, but it is a digital publishing project nonetheless, and a fascinating one. we'll see what it teaches me.

lists and dreams

eight days and a bit until a new year.

I have dozens and dozens of things to blog about. I have photos all lined up from my Blue Apron adventures (Patti has begun blogging about that already and I am way behind on my side). I have reflections on my final fall semester of coursework, and in-progress thoughts on winter break projects, and daydreams about future things. I have books I could review and places I could muse about.

when I have too many things to blog about, but haven't blogged in too long, and cannot decide where to start, it seems the best thing to do is set the vague list aside and throw something random together. photos usually work pretty well.

so. let us take a whirlwind snapshot tour of this amelia girl's past few months. summer feels both like yesterday and an entirely different country. I saw some new places. Kentucky in the spring. Michigan in May. New Orleans in June. Wisconsin in August. New England for October. 

ponds and gardens. lakes and boats.

we waded in Walden Pond. I collected a few acorns.

I saw some old places too. Indiana trails and creeks. city blocks and tucked-away parks.


and I went home for a wedding in September. met some new nieces and nephews.

my crazy brother's wedding day was perhaps the most windy day I have ever lived to see.

and I'm home again now, reshuffling and unwinding after a crazy semester, breathing in and stretching out before the next one begins.

there is snow. and chocolate. music and family.

I'll blog more about all the other stuff later. 

usable pasts

one thousand blogposts. it would be cool to make a chart or map or diagram of them all.

I found these old sketches last week in old notebooks. the old notebooks will help me (presumably) study for prelims over the next six weeks.

the sketches are pretty much just there. not relevant to studying at all, really. I took photos of them and have thereby transferred some of their inky randomness onto the internet. I think they were drawn sometime late in 2013.

I keep coming across this phrase, "a usable past," in academic books, mainly, where authors use it to hedge around the reality that the true past is and ever will be inaccessible. our biases will always cloud our memories--personal and cultural. the biases of past peoples don't exactly help clarify reality for us either.

I wonder in another thousand blogposts how I will look back and read the things I'm writing here. already the ten years of this blog stretch off into foggy, familiar, fuzzy, foreign places. are they usable, now? will they be usable still in ten more years?

probably to someone. but it's hard to say what for...

let's go

it is the season of fireflies. the intermittent glinting of those little bugs is one of the most marvelous parts of living in this sticky, expansive midwest land. a few nights ago we went walking around the celery bog in West Lafayette at sunset, and before long the whole wooded area around the marsh was sparkling. fireflies everywhere.

I don't have any pictures of that night. photographs of such a night wouldn't look real. they wouldn't be satisfying or magical in the same way being there was. if I were good at and/or patient with photography in general, maybe I could end up with something like this. but I'm not. and as cool as that photo is, that's not what walking through the woods watching fireflies wink at each other is like. maybe a video would get closer, but even then I'd expect it to be way unsatisfying.

I do have some pictures of Turkey Run State Park, where friend Lena and I hiked last week. are they more real-looking?

do they capture the dance of stream-reflected light, gently speckling up against the rocks? not quite. nor do they capture the feeling of moss-scented breezes or semi-slippery stones along the trail or thick June sunshine settling through all the tall, tall trees.

let's go back and hike some more. let's go every week this summer and memorize the trail maps. let's kayak Sugar Creek again once or twice (remembering sunscreen this time) and let's bring picnic things and stay all evening if they'll let us, watching fireflies and stars come out. we can take more photographs. or not.

might as well

I think it is a cardinal there building a nest outside my bedroom window. she flies away when I move too suddenly, so it's hard to get a decent look. watching the nest take shape in the crook of those little branches is pretty awesome.

will there be baby cardinals hatching, eventually? that will probably be awesome too.

every time I startle that bird into rushing off, every time I interrupt her nest-building, I wonder if she'll be gone forever. if she'll abandon the work and find somewhere less window-adjacent to build a little nest. so far she keeps coming back, and the twigs keep accumulating.

it would be sad if she left. but I'd probably understand.

slowly, I have been working on designing classes for fall semester. I'll be teaching a new approach to English 106, and I'll be teaching English 420 for the first time, too. it's going to be crazy, I feel like. hopefully good-crazy and not overly-stressful-crazy.

teaching still (and might always) feels like the hardest and most mystical thing. planning one's teaching is a little more concrete and manageable, as far as planning goes, but there is still a made-up-ness to it, a pretending, a humongous hopefulness with sprinkles of optimistic assumptions on top that still makes it really hard.

did you know syllabus isn't even a real word?

I might possibly be in one of those whyamIevendoingthis? sorts of moods again. yep.

summer has given me time for reading random books, and here is one of them. Syllabus by Lynda Barry (she has a tumblr where she posts class notes, too). I blogged about one of her other books many years ago. my relationship to this one is a little different, my place and my wants significantly shapeshifted. the way Lynda Barry does art isn't gonna be the way I do it. the way Lynda Barry teaches won't be the way I do that either, no matter how much I might pine for her style and concision or how much I admire the slice of her prompts and questions.

using Syllabus for a textbook would be pretty neat, but I get to use this for one instead. it is fat. colorful. we'll see how much the students complain about it.

they'll complain no matter what textbook they have to buy, I'm sure. students are funny and I don't know if I will ever figure out what exactly to do with them. maybe that's okay.

outside these syllabusy readings and note-takings and thinking and such, I've been reading other things. I did finish friend Sam's copy of Metaphors We Live By. yesterday I got to the end of Tim Ingold's Lines: A Brief History, which I have because of my Professional Writing Theory course last fall. it was too short. I'll possibly have to go read more Tim Ingold books to make up for this.

these whyamIevendoingthis? moods try to get in the way of life. I'm learning not to let them. why read all these books? because I like to. why bother thinking about how to engage your students with words and ideas? because even if I don't remember them all, I had teachers who must have done something like that for me and I can't thank them enough. why bother writing this stupid article draft? I have a few smart things to say. even if they don't matter any huge amount, this knack for observation and description might as well do something scholarly while it's here in this gradschool space.

the point is to live everything

I picked up Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet for a few moments at a party in October. sometimes, I behave rather anti-socially at parties. music, small talk, and hors d'oeuvres aren't always quite enough. I want my eyes to have more to look at, my hands to have some kind of project or game. so at certain kinds of parties, even though it might be weird to be embroidering while the music blares, or crocheting as the small talk happens, or browsing bookshelves inbetween hors d'oeuvres, these are things I have been known to do.

the music and food and company at this particular October party was all lovely. the bookshelf of poetry in the corner took up a small set of moments that night, but those moments popped back into my head when I came across a quote from Rilke's book earlier. recently, On Being joined the handful of podcasts on my iPod, and I have been letting old episodes play in the background of my housework and bus riding. they are sometimes a little too earnest, these soft, meandering conversations between curious, profound people. there is almost an overly-tender, tenuous idealism hanging over it all. but usually they're interesting despite this. so when a friend posted a link to the On Being blogpost of today, I let my intrigue follow it, trailing its author from Anne Hillman's poem and the Rilke quote to the five questions below-- and eventually to google where I found this digitization of all ten letters. the inspirational tidbit in question is from letter 4. "have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language," translated Rilke advises. I was talking to my clever sister about this earlier--about the complex value of holding pluralities and indeterminacy in one's head. uncertainty is precious. ignorance is room for discovery. darkness and shadows make cradles for the candles and the lightbulbs. the blogpost at On Being suggests that to not know = to be alive.

these are the questions Parker J. Palmer has come up with, remixing Rilke and Hillman into New Year's inspiration:

• How can I let go of my need for fixed answers in favor of aliveness?
• What is my next challenge in daring to be human?
• How can I open myself to the beauty of nature and human nature?
• Who or what do I need to learn to love next? And next? And next?
• What is the new creation that wants to be born in and through me?

I love questions. how they lead to more and more and more unknown, unsettled, untraveled spaces. the idea of living in the moment, living in questions, feels excessively appealing. and here, in no particular order, are my pondering, tentative responses:

• keep asking questions. around and about and underneath all the answers you think you might be setting in with, there are always more questions.
• prepare for and take responsibility for the things you want, even if you aren't sure you want them, even if you aren't sure how or why or when or what will happen as a result.
• get a haircut.
• walk to school one or two mornings every week.
• collect and cultivate a few more potted plants.
• listen more selflessly.
• write on paper. take more notes. make more connections among the books and articles and conversations.

these aren't all. I'll come back and keep pondering.

years and their turnings are indeed arbitrary temporal thresholds. every millisecond could be just as momentous as this one we're waiting for at midnight tonight. that the digit at the end of 2014 is switching by one is pretty neat, and this sort of switch does only happen once every thirty-one-and-a-half-million seconds, but given the way we quantify time, every single moment some digit of the timestamp is switching, spinning, ticking away. we could use every one of those ticks as an excuse to throw confetti, to dance, to live. every moment is a beautiful new question.

answerless

puzzles make very neat metaphors. much like black boxes, the concept could be hiding almost anywhere. and like so, so many other words (wave, pencil, etc.) it is both a noun and a verb.

you don't exactly puzzle a puzzle though. you solve it, if you can.

most of the time we puzzle over other stuff: puzzling, bewildering things that may or not literally be puzzles.

this week I am puzzling over the syllabus I'm supposed to be polishing up and the worthiness of owning this or that sort of gas-powered vehicle.

literal puzzles are more fun. they have such low stakes and predetermined answers. the crossword kind might be my favourite. mm.

{ photo via this kind soul on flickr. }

I think words are more interesting than paintings... but jigsaws can be just the thing if you've got the space and a few uninterrupted weekends with family.

so many kinds of puzzles, there are. once upon a time ten years ago friend Wilson introduced me to this infamously most difficult of all internet riddles. I didn't finish it.

a few days ago I ran across this maddening puzzle via twitter. I spent a few stop-and-go days getting up to level 31. I have been there for ages now. please, if anyone gets past this one... tell me the secret.

it must be solvable. I just can't figure it out yet.

regular life is not a jigsaw or a game, I don't think. definitely not one with neat, pre-cut, smooth-edged pieces. no... life is more like this image from a poem I read recently:

When the wind comes, and the snow repeats us,
 / how like our warped lives it is,
Melting objects, disappearing sounds,
Like lichen on gnarled rocks.
For we have lived in the wind, and loosened ourselves like ice
 / melt.
Nothing can hold us, I've come to know. 

it's from "My Old Clinch Mountain Home" by Charles Wright. his book Caribou was on the new books shelf (how I love new books shelves) at the library and I brought it home, not expecting much. I like it though. I didn't get the line spacing quite right in my excerpt, but hopefully the language conjures something poignant for you anyway. as I was thinking about puzzles and their solutions, this poem countered with its un-polished un-clear scenery. wind and water melting and eating away at everything, transforming and being transformed. all of that seems very, very beyond a puzzle.

we like puzzles so much because they have answers and we can hold those answers in our heads and hands and figure them out. this Vsauce video on games gets at this idea, comparing/contrasting life and play. we can win at Poker or Chess or Tennis... but how can we tell if anyone ever wins at Justice or Teenagerhood or Making A Difference? games and life don't work the same. unless they do...

unless it's only that nobody's figured out exactly how yet.

so far so endless

finals week has ended.

semi-frantic emails from my students about their grades have begun.

I am still in the middle of the last bits of grading. relax, students. there is pretty much nothing you can do about your grade at this point.

this is the pile of borrowed books I want to read in the next month or so. it's about 60/40 academic/non-academic, I think. the Gilbert is one I read about during the most recent tournament of books: The Signature of All Things. the Gibson is one I may have read already (his books have a dejà vu about them, more often than not, weirdly), but I wasn't sure. it was the only Gibson the library had on its shelf that day, so I brought it home just in case.

finals week is behind me now, but this academic treadmill has no end. life goes on and it is full of things. there are articles to write and proposals to draft and next semester to plan, and so many goals and ideals to make sense of. German to practice and songs to sing and sunrises to watch. some of all that is prescriptive--shoulds and expectations. some of it is deeper than that, and my little brain is anxious for reading and thinking and enjoying the work of it. most of it is a little bit of both. half-want, half-ought. that makes me pretty lucky, I guess. or congenial and submissive toward my chosen lot. or at least delusional enough to find (slash hallucinate?) a little bit of want into the efforts this context currently expects of me.

speaking of hybridly fun-required projects, this here is the very first draft of a game I developed for Dr. Blackmon's class this semester. it is roughly based on a very long, very random, very adventuresome story I started writing ten+ years ago (more info). there is an island. a mystical ocean. pie. yaks. sock-related conflict. the main character in the story wears lots of plaid. a game doesn't really have a main character, and while identity is a major game element, plaid doesn't really play into it as much... so I'm not really sure if it should keep the name The Plaid Identity, but so far no better name has suggested itself. my colleagues and classmates who have play-tested the draft versions agree that the name seems to suit the randomness of the game itself just fine.

Dr. Blackmon's class is all finished now, but I'm still fiddling with the game, its little pieces, and its design. since there is no main character, I'm experimenting with making the board wear plaid. bright orange plaid for zombie-river spaces, deep green plaid for yak-meadow spaces, brown plaid for pie spaces, sandy beach plaid for fulgurite spaces, and a small grey plaid for sock spaces. and then lots of blue for the ocean. I'm not sure how practical this design is at the moment--it needs testing. I hope to get my family and old friends to play it a few times with me when I'm home next week. I hope there will be time for it between the camping and the theatre and the dinner parties and maybe a little sewing/crafting stuff. 

oh and all that reading I have piled up. there will need to be time for that, too. 

nothing new and nothing old

adventuring takes effort. resources. time. it means pausing the usual and taking up with unknowns.

when I travel, almost everything shifts. the first-person present-tense narrator in my head steps back and the place becomes protagonist. everything about it comes up to the foreground. elements I wouldn't blink at back home seem exotic and fascinating here. metro billboards. sidewalk paving stones. rooftops. raindrops. clouds. it's all different because it's here. the here-ness of it is the whole reason you've come.

so many traditionally Parisian things both were and were not what I expected to find upon meeting this new place. one hears about Notre Dame, its bells, its mythos--but those things are not what it's like to wake up across the Seine from Notre Dame, its bells gently chiming as the sun pinks the sky behind all that intricate stonework of gargoyles and buttresses.

one hears about the cafes and the shops and the smell and the French. but none of that can ever be all of what visiting Paris is.

nothing I'll write here will capture the fully expected and the unequivocally unexpected everything that kept brushing up against itself as I walked around Paris. the Seine is muddy and green. practically everyone in Paris is practically always smoking. French food is generally exquisite. (here and here most particularly.)

this tower--as cliche a symbol of France as anything could ever get--both is and is not exactly what you think it will be when you arrive to meet it in person. from our seventh-story balcony in the Latin quarter it looked as quaint and delicate--and as distant--as on any little postcard or glossy travel poster. but walking up from the Champs de Mars metro station, crossing a few short streets, rounding a few dark corners, and being confronted with this strikingly tall, sparkly slice of iconic Parisian architecture for the very first time--that is a moment and a thrill I only have this picture and now these paltry words to re-evoke.

yes, go, go...

for a long string of months my flashbacks have been looping through a single three week section of my semi-recent history. blips of Eastern Europe--its food, its weather, its languages--crowd my memory.

the streets and skylines of Budapest and Bratislava...

so many days we spent cozying up with Budapest. and then buying cheap ice cream cones from every streetcorner vendor in Bratislava....

trying and imagining we could manage to shake the tourist vibe at least a little bit.

haggling helplessly with Romanian women at the bakery in Sighişoara.

coffeeshops and cathedrals. everso shy snatches of German. endlessly perplexed eavesdropping, all over Vienna.

but now, after nearly two years since the seedling idea of that trip was planted in my head, its flashback loop is being infiltrated by and remixed with other further-past memory scenes: the last time I was in England... 

airports and train stations. platforms, terminals, tickets, timetables.

layovers in California. January sun and shore.

Hawaii sand and sunburns.

before that, Canada.

Celsius, scriptures, and snow.

such a comfortable, tight routine that was. such a dear, irreplaceable microcosm.

how the sequences of these travel- and place-themed flashbacks are arranged inside my brain, I don't know. there is no recognizable order to it. I can never tell what will remind me of when. all of it reminds me, subtly, that here and now don't have to be exactly here and now. I'm incredibly lucky to have access beyond my little academic slice of Indiana, to then and there and elsewhere.

soon it'll be this particular elsewhere. I am going to Paris next week.

{ photo borrowed from this kind soul on tumblr. }

what will France add to my mixed flashback-reel? which vividnesses will I fruitlessly long for as I move non-flashingly forward through time in the normal fashion? what kinds of faces and voices and scenery will join the everywhere and everywhen I've already collected?