beauty, here and there

I spent a week in California (mostly San Diego) earlier this month. we did lots of beautiful and silly and fun things.

twenty years later, Disneyland remains impressively thorough and dedicated to the task of using plastic fakery (and other material/media) to evoke entire worlds of stories. I will confess that walking through the Galaxy's Edge sections was pretty amazing. the novelty of it. the heat and dust and droids and alien-ness, not to mention the actual model of the Millennium Falcon. I'm not even that much of a Star Wars nerd, am I? 

then I came home again. things here are no less beautiful and silly and fun, in their turns.

remember this gollum jade? he is expanded into a family of 5 separate plants now. the main one is doing so well, and hopefully the others will survive one way or another. 

 

 

poolside

sometimes I bike to the pool at our community center. it's one mile away, down the road and around the corner. 

are all the HOA fees (that I barely remembered to pay on time for this quarter) worth it for this lovely nearby pool?

hm... maybe. 

the sunshine is worth everything. and swimming a bit is a nice reward of sorts for a two-mile bike ride. 

usually I bring a book. today it was podcasts instead. 

 

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?

elevate

earlier this week we drove in my little blue car through several mountained places, between majestic canyon walls, into valleys and out of them again, up and down, back and forth, out across the plains, down and down and down. toward home. inexorably away from vacation-time, back to regular life (whatever that means).

the elevation here in Louisiana is 118 feet above sea level. that's not even 40 yards. not even half a football field above sea level. no wonder our backyard becomes a giant puddle every time it rains.

last week, miles and miles west of here, I was no less than 4,000 feet above sea level at all times, and sometimes almost as high as 8,000. we hiked. we picnicked. we chased nieces and nephews around and took family photos. 

and then we had to leave.

I imagine I felt every foot of the descent as we drove, this time. every mile of it.

by the time we crossed into Texas on Tuesday, I was starting to feel as flat as the stretching llano estacado plains. one part of me was eager to be home again, ready to work and finalize preparations for fall semester... but most of me was already really missing the mountains and family.

it might be another full year before I see my family again. that span of time didn't used to seem so long. being several thousand feet below and almost fifteen hundred miles away didn't used to seem that far really, either. but now it does. 

I'm trying let gratitude keep me lifted up, even though it feels pretty depressing to have left all the relatives and mountains behind us. I'm really lucky and glad we were able to travel so many miles and make so many good memories this summer. so lucky.

I guess now it's time to anticipate the next family gathering. and in the meantime, work, write, teach, and try to do some bits of good in the world.

as a postscript, I've got a few decently good things to show off about lately:

publications!
a reworked version of one of my dissertation chapters is now officially an online article in a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly. you can read it here if you like.

a collaborative article I've been working on with some Purdue Polytechnic colleagues has also just been accepted for publication in the Journal of Technology Studies. not sure when it will come out, but that's another exciting thing to anticipate.

presentations!
I got to be a part of a twitter conference last month. it was pretty different, but also fun, to share my scholarship for a new audience on such a platform. I hope people liked it. the thing still exists in its original twitter thread and here in a "twitter moment." it's always cool to talk about LibriVox, I say.

and speaking of LibriVox, my most recent LV contributions have been to an early twentieth-century feminist novel called With Her in Ourland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. it's incredibly interesting stuff, and some of it seems relevant now, a whole century later.

next on my list of things to record for LV: City of Din by Dan McKenzie. I've got the 100-page text split up into suitable sections and now I just need to start recording them. soon, hopefully...

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.

more of more

there are more miles on my car. there are more freckles on my face. more states on the list of states-I-have-visited-or-at-least-driven-through.

more waves of glorious possibility and excitement and hope.

more candy. from this adorable little candy/toy/comic shop in a town called Ypsilanti, Michigan.

more games. Bananagrams and Set and Ticket to Ride and Catan. maybe I'll work on Portal 2 a bit, inbetween studying for exams?

more tofu. like at that Thai place last week, or at the Vietnamese place a few days later, and also that very lovely fried tofu pasta red-pepper garlic thing we made last night. way good. three weeks and three days ago I began a second summer of meatlessness. there will be no excuses for actual haggis in actual Scotland this time, I promise. but I might eat fish every once in a while. cuz sushi. yeah.

speaking of fish though, this is an interesting thing to read, full of research and stories and thoughts. maybe I should learn all the names of all the fish someday. or at least the edible fish. the alphabetical list here doesn't seem too crazy long.

I also want to learn the names of trees. and the names of pasta shapes. why?

so I spent almost a week in Michigan and just got home today. my brain is reveling in that shifting, transient sensation of having recently moved between brand new territory and old, comfortable territory. it's not quite disorienting, and it's rather pleasant to notice that hmm... the windows here at home don't face south, they face west. they are not pretty bay windows with bench seats around the inside. these floors in my apartment are not beautiful hardwood.

and those roads outside aren't Huron Street and Washtenaw Avenue. the river just down the hill is just the Wabash, same curves and mud as ever. the traffic humming and rumbling by is normal, local Indiana traffic tracing its way around all the same roads you trace your way around when you drive from here to anywhere nearby.

but yesterday you woke up somewhere different after a whole string of days waking up there, and it became familiar enough. all those streets and bridges and Michigan license plates. Ypsi is now a little lightbulb on a big, beautiful, mostly blank map.

I should get a large wall map of this country someday, or maybe of the world, and mark all the other places with lightbulbs. places where I know some people, places where I've seen a few sidewalks. places with some important, personal, experiential resonance of some kind.

while I was in Michigan, June arrived. now there are fewer days left of this glorious summer break. fewer days of farmers' markets and fewer days of reading whatever I want. fewer days for figuring out how to prepare for preliminary exams. fewer days left to wrangle a new syllabus together.

let's quit talking in terms of fewer for now, though. more freckles. more smiles. more ice cream. it's still summer for a good long while yet.

atypical adventuring

my Friday began as ordinarily as any Friday. I waited at bus stops, sat in my office prepping for class, eeked a few moments of good class discussion out of my students, talked about our Empirical readings and micro-studies. but inbetween all those things--as I walked across campus from here to there, as I rushed through the halls from office to classroom and back and forth, my insides were nuzzling up to a great and impatient longing for adventure. like burrs will collect on your trouser cuffs when you walk through an unkept field, adventurousness collected around me with every step I took that morning.

I didn't know what kind of adventure to look for. of course my imagination was swirling with the kinds you read about in fantasy novels: meeting mysterious figures with intriguing secrets--wandering up to an irresistibly inviting magical doorway--suddenly confronting some supernatural abnormality in grave need of investigation--getting gradually but totally lost on some other plane of existence-- you know.

that sort of thing seemed unlikely even for such a deeply ordinary Friday, so I realized I would probably need to plot my own excitements. they didn't include anything very supernatural. they weren't particularly hazardous or daring. they involved spending bunches of money at various random spots on my way home, and then a speck of a town called Buck Creek, and then an empty cornfield. let adventure be in the attitude of the adventurer.

first, I ducked into Von's books and acquired the $70 text I needed for my Empirical class. perhaps that was the most harrowing part of the day. the semi-grizzled old bookstore clerk was nice enough, though. book in hand, I poked through a few other shelves (of books, of hats, of coin purses, of beads and stockings and scarves and trinkets) while I was there. noticed Jessica Hische's dropcap covers all lined up on one side. stepped around an employee sorting through a massive pile of aqua pendants and baubles on my way out. kept walking, very cheerfully, taking in all the grey chill of the weekend-to-be, thinking about how it didn't really matter what I spent the rest of the afternoon doing. we'd gotten out of class early. I had no particular obligations.

on my way, I grabbed chips and guacamole from Chipotle. I puzzled at their little posted sign about not having any pork while I waited, and then waltzed out, munching (probably awkwardly) my way from there to town across the pedestrian bridge. the river was completely thawed, all the grimy-looking, jagged chunks of ice from a few days earlier were gone.

before I got home, I wandered into the candy store on Main Street. last year I made it a tradition to buy myself chocolates from this lovely shop at all ends of all semesters, but fall of 2014 left me no time. so on this adventuresome Friday, I made up for it. raspberry cremes, caramel truffles, dark chocolate everything.

it was a long walk from there to my apartment, mainly because I wouldn't let myself eat any chocolates yet. once home, I unladened myself of books and bags, tossed some trail mix + a few cookies and chocolates into a container, and took my car out of its lonely parking spot for a drive. going on drives without destinations is not usually a thing I do. the newness of such an activity gives it at least a few extra adventure points, I say.

we went north, mainly. east-ish, sometimes. west-ish other times. I think. I never once looked at the map in my back seat. my sense of direction has no reliable anchor out here in this flat place. no mountains, no visible-from-everywhere landmarks. the sun wasn't even shining. in the face of such a horizon of nothingness, I trusted a few roadsigns and knew that if I needed it, that GPS I got from my brother for Christmas was right there.

but I didn't need it. maybe that's a sign of failure. I didn't let my adventure get me lost enough. or maybe it's a sign of awesomeness--that I have at least partially, subconsciously, mastered the Indiana landscape within a certain radius of where I live. or maybe both.

I still haven't looked at a map to see where exactly my meandering drive led me. my mental map would say my path traces something like a wonkily stretched-out figure eight with prongs. way out to the northeast, around in a bit of a circle across highway 25, and then back west to where I started recognizing things. like this absolutely striking one-lane bridge over the Wabash:

months and months back, friend Priya and I got lost here, too. we were looking for the Wabash Heritage Trail but we kept missing it, for some reason. we had a glorious time anyway, and there was ice cream afterwards.

I knew where I was at this point, but it was still too early to go home. so I turned north again. and then east again. there were acres and acres of half-frozen fields. cornstalk stubs prickling from the ground for miles. I pulled over and sat in the middle of all that for a while, rolled down the window, listened, waited, hoped nobody thought I was crazy or stranded or lost.

only one (nice-looking, scruffy, young-ish) farmboy slowed down his massive truck to make sure I was alright. a few other cars drove by, adding an unfortunate layer of self-consciousness to my sitting. I regret not bringing a notebook. I could have soaked in that nowhere till it got dark. wouldn't that have been nice?

instead, I returned to the road, wound my way a few inches north, back south, further west, and west, and then southwest, southsouth, southeast, and back to town. home. I rolled out some pie crust and folded it over some turkey-pot-pie-ish filling. I continued snacking on trail mix. I put on a show and pulled out my embroidery floss. I am making my own version of one of Gina's handstitched hats.

the rest of my evening was not quite as expansively calm as an empty cornfield. but it was cozy. I didn't save the world or anything, but I'm calling it all an adventure anyway.

word of mouth

my phone rang (and by rang, understand that I do mean buzzed silently in my pocket) in the middle of the first panel of the conference I attended last weekend. and even though this was an expected phone call, I could not answer it just then. I was listening to talks on digital pop music criticism and massively open online educational surveillance.

the message would probably be from the owner of the car I had parallel-parked next to the night before, on Riverside Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. it was nearing eleven o'clock at night. it was dark. my rearview mirror was dimmed. it was a tiny little smart car. I couldn't see it at all and I backed right into the thing.

I didn't see much damage, but since my own night vision was not to be trusted at that point, I took a couple photos of the car's front bumper and left a note of confession.

the message was indeed in response to that note. my head was full of dreadful scenarios as I listened... a chirpy salesfellow named Jason from Car2Go greeted me via voicemail with so much positive spin in his voice I immediately stopped worrying that I'd been just as blind to some dreadful gash on the car as I had been to the car itself. instead of any kind of angry blame, Jason explained that the Car2Go fleet was used to encountering occasional rough treatment on the streets of the city. no worries. and then he took a few extra minutes to tell me about the business, sandwiching his pitch inbetween thanks for my honesty.

since I'm not a regular Minneapolis resident I can't take advantage of this particular car-sharing service. but it was so nice and surprising to get such a happy little message that I thought I could at least blog about it. if this particular car-sharing program happens to operate in your corner of the universe, I can tell you they seem like pretty nice folks.

I considered joining a car-sharing dealio before the semester began, during my week of carlessness. they do seem cool. I've met several folks around here who use ZipCar, and much of the philosophy behind the whole car-sharing setup is awesome. making do with less is important.

but on the other hand... part-time access to a fleet of shared, borrowable vehicles like these wouldn't have been very convenient for flying around to Minnesota and Iowa last weekend. so.

beautiful places and seasons and things

tomorrow I shall revisit the lovely airport where for weeks and weeks they've had this lovely Christmas display up, right in the middle of the lobby between concourse A and concourse B. I didn't get any better photos of it. trust me, the tree and its sparkles are lovely, despite being locked up behind such state-of-the-art crowd-management technology. and yes, I am overusing the word "lovely" in a probably-annoying fashion. so what?

airports by themselves make me very happy, but seeing Christmas greenery and beautiful lights somehow adds to it. with any luck I'll have just enough time (after the end of our last matinee, the striking of the set, and a quick farewell to my fellow cast members on my way out of town) to enjoy the sight tomorrow evening. with any luck the weather will behave long enough for me to hop west to Denver, and west again to Salt Lake City.

while I'm home, I hope to spend significantly more time in the kitchen and at the piano than with this keyboard in my lap. there are also mountain sunrises to soak in, ice-skating rinks to visit, a few snowy hills to sled down, sushi to enjoy, and games to play with old friends and family. I trust the internet won't miss me much.

I also have this stack of proofs to get through, little by little. reading is another thing that makes me very happy--but reading with a red pencil in my hand is even better.

someday soon, I need to blog about this beautiful thing I acquired as a white elephant gift. friend Sam (who keeps quite a nice blog himself) rescued it from a thrift store and gave it to me at our cohort pre-Christmas turkey dinner last week.

a typewriter, especially an electric one like this with no ribbon, is a fairly useless thing to own, but goodness isn't its clean archaic plastic shape just lovely? I'll spend a whole post gushing about it one of these days. (note to self: this is what the sound of your typewriter reminds you of.)

maybe it's just the soft, fuzzy wake of a very rigorous semester, but I find myself lately in the throes of a wonderfully indescribable and unwreckably good mood. let it last. let it spread. make the last ten days of the year everything happy.

pale blue dots and bright blue lines

I move around a fair bit. I think I like it that way. I find newness very attractive. it's not always that I grow utterly tired of the places I've already been... I think it's that new places help me better appreciate old ones. and everything else.

in the past decade, I've received mail at sixteen addresses, and regularly located myself and my belongings at nineteen (not counting the two weeks I lived on Elm Street). if you pile on top of all those the traveling and visiting and camping and in-between places, who knows how many specific coordinates I might be able to claim? plenty of zipcodes have cradled my little head.

my moving around so much is nothing much to boast about. if you've lived in one place most of your life, I'm really curious what that's like. it's too late for me to find out for myself, so you have to tell me. how does that feel?

I have raided the Pictures directory on this old macbook in order to present to you a selection of random snapshots. none of them are from the same place. none of them hail from the current context within which I find myself. none of them come from any of the specific houses I've lived in, either. these are extracurricular locations. vacations. escapes from the coop of day-to-day existence. these photos are from adventures, not from life.

we're more likely, it seems, to document the unusual, out-of-the-way places we go. the images in my Pictures directory are primarily categorized that way: 2009 Hawaii. 2010 LA. 2011 Antelope Island. 2012 Europe. those collections--the extracurricular--outnumber the photos of my regular life... whatever that means. after all, what's the difference between the life in these photos and the life outside of them? all of it is my life, I think. why draw lines around certain bits and call those more important or more worthy of documentation than others?

either way, I only have so many photos. only so many days and only so many places. I still haven't figured out how to be on this side of the ocean and that side at the same time. they haven't started building houses on the ocean floor, yet. only a few people get to live on the border between here and space, so far.

last month Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke here at Purdue. his closing statement reprised Sagan's reflections on the pale blue dot, this time using a photo taken from behind the rings of Saturn. "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark," the book of Sagan tells us. we live and play and move on "a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena."

the words and that moment gave me chills.

{ photo borrowed from the awesome folks at NASA }

in the cozy little zipcodes where I spend most of my time, it's easy to forget all the great, enveloping cosmic dark. other times it's not easy at all. but at least on this little planet, inside so much cosmic dark, there are plenty of warm, bright spheres full of anything but darkness. every golden autumn, well-wrapped winter, slippery springtime, and unbridled summer makes room for bits of adventure, whether the lines between zipcodes or seasons or vacation times matter or not.

fourth walls

today I am saying goodbye to these, the third set of windows I've called home here in this town, at this place called Tech. I took a few photographs, thinking back to the idea I had for documenting all the places I've ever slept.

everything that I once kept in this room has been shoved into my little car. we are going on a long, awesome roadtrip. I anticipate the return of the accelerated feeling traveling for extended periods sometimes brings. wish me luck handling all this jostling and re-jostling.