NoApostrophe

New year, new perspectives

2012-02-11T16:09:00.001-05:00

I believe that the days right before and after a birthday should contain surreal moments in which we say, "Did that just happen? What the heck was that?" Not in a bad way - not tragedy - just something we didn't expect, have few previous experiences to which we can compare it, and which make us wonder what it means for the coming year. It's life's gift to us, something to give us pause and inspire us to think about life in a slightly different way. Because this year will be different. It always is.

Number 32

2012-02-05T15:52:00.001-05:00

Saturday is the sixth anniversary of my 26th birthday. That's about how old I feel. I always thought I would age gracefully, embracing my ever-more mature and wiser state. But even at this young age, I can sense that I'll go kicking and screaming into old age. I examine my scalp for grey hairs, wince at the darkening circles under my eyes, and pretend to ignore the one small smile line on the right side of my face. I still battle acne all the time, and yet my skin seems slightly more creased, a little bit weary, not quite as smooth and fresh as it used to be. And things are starting to sag, just a little. Just enough to remind me that they didn't sag before. In this college town, nubile college girls are everywhere, and I am beginning to envy them. I see them scampering between bars in the cold in their tiny dresses and tall heels, and I think Perky bitches. I squandered my youth so. I used to wear semi-revealing clothing to bars, all the time worrying about maintaining my self-respect. I tried to be older than I was, tried to maintain an adult-like aura of responsibility and decorum, and hoped that others would take me as seriously as I took myself. I should have taken advantage of my youth and tried to get away with as much as I could have as a bright young thing. I don't mean sleeping around or showing off the goods to anyone who would look. I mean that I should have been young and fresh and new. Had fewer cares. Thrown more caution to the wind.

Thirty-two is still young. I still have two-thirds of my life ahead of me (yes, I fully intend to live to be 96, at least). There are many good things about 32, like more stability, more money, less drama, the wisdom to know how to make the best use of my talents. But you can't get away with as much in your 30s. If you are single at 23, you are told to go out and make a life for yourself and don't follow convention and don't settle. At 30, if you have done as you are told and are still single, suddenly you are a sad case. Suddenly, you are the old maid who must have something wrong with you, because otherwise you would have settled down by now. That message gets worse every year after 30 that you are still single, and your prospects dwindle by the day. If I had known at 23 that I would be in this predicament now, I would have settled, just a little bit. I would have worked a little harder to find someone to share my life with. Life is better and fuller now than it was at 25, but it don't mean nothing if you're still floating around in the ether, looking for your match.

Bambi's forest

2012-02-05T15:18:00.002-05:00

It's a warmish, sunny day in early February - the first weekend in February is often springlike, and the weather on the following weekend (my birthday weekend) is usually lousy, no matter where I live. So, live in the moment! And what a moment it is. I hung my bird feeder from a nail in the porch overhang and filled it with seeds that supposedly appeal to birds that inhabit the western United States. The dark-eyed juncos were the first to arrive, but they've been bullied about by a male-female pair of house finches that sit in the tray and hog all of the food. So, the juncos sit on the porch and rail just below the feeder and catch what the finches drop. A couple of red-breasted nuthatches visit often, as does a precocious red squirrel that teases Dear Kitty with a crazy dance and a tail flick, then jumps up and knocks the seeds from the feeder, since it can't climb up into the feeder. A male-female pair of northern flickers (probably the same ones who rap-tap-tapped on my house) hang out in the yard and have been hopping through the trees in the back all afternoon. Dear Kitty sits in the window and quietly titters at the birds and the squirrel, defending her territory. The California quail pop and squeak and coo in the bushes nearby.

As if the birds and squirrels weren't enough wildlife around here, the white-tailed deer visit frequently, the foxes prowl the neighborhood, often trotting down the street around dawn, and an owl hoot-hoots in the distance sometimes. Skunks have been seen, and more often smelled (and sometimes squished) along the main road. It feels like I live in Bambi's forest, all of these animals going about their business, trying to stay out of the way of humans but benefitting from our presence. All of these birds would likely find food somewhere, but they're certainly well-fed thanks to my feeder. By the end of the week, it's empty again.

Winter winds

2012-01-21T20:02:00.004-05:00

Every year, it's the same thing. November and December in the northern hemisphere feel so cold and dark. The pressure is on to celebrate the holidays with all of the festiveness we can muster. Everyone complains, but we all need it. Otherwise we'd spend the days with the covers pulled over our heads, hiding beneath wool and turtlenecks and down. Even if the weather isn't so bad, the expectation of a white Christmas makes this time feel like the winds are whipping around outside and the warm hearth calls to us. As a cruel joke nature plays, the shortest day of the year comes not in the middle of winter but at the beginning. The days begin to get lighter as the new year rings in, but there is still more cold and snow to come, for many months in some places. We're ready to get moving, start planning spring break, emerge from the blanketed beds and throw open the windows, and instead blows in a struggle to overcome expectations of spring when winter is in full force.

Whoever planned the holidays at this time knew what they were doing. They knew that without the cozy festiveness, dread of winter would drive us further into hiding, and without the promise of new things to come after an arbitrarily set day to mark a new year, we would all succumb to the reality of winter. As the days get lighter, we transition from stews to salads with the hope that when the wools and downs are finally shaken off, a newer person will be revealed. What is this experience like for those in the southern hemisphere, where summer abounds right now, and where their winter will be met not with festivities and yearly milestones but just a stretch of months in the middle of the year? How do they get through their cold, dark months without something to look forward to? We are lucky here, where the clouds roll in and the gales whip the snow and rain. We have much to anticipate as time marches on toward the long warm and sunny days.

Now it's real

2012-01-14T14:08:00.000-05:00

I have a real home now. With the assembly and set-up of the desk and chair in the spare bedroom, I have a home office for the first time in my adult life. All of the indoor furniture has been purchased and moved in. Some pictures have been hung on the walls, with more to come. Curtains with tie-backs grace the windows. I live in a house, and it is home.

Last summer, I started a new journal, after filling the previous one with all kinds of thoughts. It helped me process a lot of things that happened in my life, those three short years in DC. Every time I start a new journal, I make a list on the first page with hopes for the coming years. This new journal included a promise to find a place, make it home, and stay there for a while. I need to break the pattern of setting up shop and immediately looking for a new adventure somewhere else. Why do I start running again as soon as I arrive wherever I was heading? It's time to stop doing that. Resist the urge to seek out greener pastures elsewhere, and instead make my home pasture as green as can be.

Fox in the garden

2012-01-12T09:53:00.001-05:00

Last night, dear kitty wanted desperately to look out the bedroom window. The blinds were closed, but there was something out there she just had to see. So I turned out the lights, pulled the blinds up just a bit, and together we peered into the darkness. With her night vision, dear kitty saw them before I did, her eyes reflecting in the window: foxes roaming the yards in the cul de sac beneath the glowing streetlights, the moon not yet risen. It looked like four foxes, though there could have been just two, one with a white-tipped puffy tail, the other with a long snout and curled tail, more dog-like than fox. They sniffed under the junipers, poked through the wood pile, and investigated the low rock wall in my yard. Finding no tasty morsels there, they wandered off, noses to the ground, avoiding being illuminated by the headlights of an approaching car. Soon after they left, dear kitty lost interest and curled up on the bed.

How did dear kitty know they were there? Could she smell them through the plaster and wood of the sturdy house? Did she hear them silently sniffing for food, their small paws crunching on the pine needles and dried leaves? And why did their presence matter to her, a small house cat who goes outside only when supervised, and only during the day? Perhaps her wildness is not yet bred out completely. Perhaps her homeless days still hold a place somewhere in her tiny mind. Or perhaps she just wants to know about the world outside her home, even if she never ventures far from it.

Why we do it

2012-01-08T12:02:00.000-05:00

Whether or not it becomes your career, you don't decide to be a writer. It chooses you. Drawn to words from a young age, you seek out any opportunity to read what someone else has written - on cereal boxes, in any magazine or brochure or book that lands in front of you, even the closed captioning on a television program. When you see a word, you can own it. Parse out the sounds each letter makes, roll it off your brain and then your tongue to make it real. Put it together with other words. Try different combinations to see what gets the feeling and the meaning across. Compose a symphony, each word a musical note, each sentence a different instrument. When you wake up or go around a corner and words or phrases repeat themselves over and again in your mind, you know you are a writer, even if you do nothing with those words except let them float around in the ether.
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I don't remember learning how to read. I was just always able to put letters together, sound out the words, get a sense of their meanings. Everyone has a thing, something that they just know. Words, I just know. But what can you do with words? You can inform people. You can move them. You can haunt them. The best writers do this so well, and the rest of us just fumble in the dark for a way to tell others what we know. Despite this language that consumes us, we will never be like those whose words are held up high for all to read. It's this art that grips us 'til the end but which we can never seem to elevate beyond scribblings in journals and now musings in whatever public spaces we can manage. There's too much out there that's of too little value, but some of the really good, meaty non-fiction can be found here. With any luck, it could be any of us there someday, although given what some of those writers have been through or who they met to get the story, perhaps it's better them than us sometimes.

Call from the wild

2012-01-06T00:11:00.001-05:00

On Saturday afternoon, New Year's Eve, we heard a rap-tap-tapping on the house. It was loud, right outside the window, too many in a row and too random a rhythm to be made by a human. A peek out through the window revealed nothing immediately, but the image reflecting off the windshield of the car in the driveway below showed two birds clinging to the red clapboard of the house, just below the roof. I quietly snuck down through the open garage and peered up at the house. One bird flew away immediately, and the other, a Northern flicker, paused and peered at me for a moment, caught in the act of delivering a message, before it too flew away. This was no accident. My house cannot be mistaken for a tree. There is no rotting wood hiding grubs for hungry woodpeckers. The birds wanted us to know that change was coming. That the days ahead would be different. That we should keep our eyes to the sky.

Time to get back on the wagon

2012-01-05T19:03:00.000-05:00

Last year, 2011, was the year of not caring. The year of saying yes, of doing things I shouldn't have done or shouldn't have been able to get away with. Given the musical themes often present, last year felt like my joyous high school days, when life was easier but we thought it was hard, because we don't know any better when we are 17. Last year, and the late parts of the year before, were filled with what-the-heck fashion choices, like getting that third ear piercing and wearing aqua-colored fishnet tights with my black dress on New Year's Eve and a short school-girl skirt to dance away the night to music from the '90s sometime in April. Last year was I'm Going to Do Whatever I Want year - birthday at the aquarium, lots of concerts (like The Beach Boys at Wolftrap), a last-minute trip to Dallas to celebrate a milestone year with a best friend, kayaking and eating crabs in Annapolis, a solo camping trip with wild ponies on the Eastern Shore, way too many happy hours, a shirking of duties, birding in the park, and finally, the big move out West.

See, I needed last year to blow off adulthood. 2009 and 2010 were so full of caring about everything: the beginning, middle, and end of an intense relationship, a yearning to go somewhere, anywhere, just not where I was; an overwhelming sense of being utterly lost. By the time 2010 wound down, I was ready for something completely different. I was ready to just not care anymore. I said too much, sometimes inappropriately, and I let it all hang out, metaphorically. The heavy cloak fell from my shoulders, and I floated through 2011 with that whatever attitude that gets one into trouble - mostly the good kind though. I carried that with me to Idaho, where I figured that if no one knew me here, I could be whatever I wanted, and that's just how they would know me. I rode a mechanical bull on Halloween, for pete's sake. I chopped some wood and told people my secrets. I bought some real furniture.

The year ended on a different note, signaling that it's time to pull myself together, to get a little more serious again. I found myself really caring again, for someone special who lives in the mountains but isn't from the mountains. As the new year has rolled in and the lovely but fleeting relationship has slipped away, it seems like time to focus again. There's still room for fun - so many of the friends I've made here already have stepped in to distract me when I really need it, and I can't just stop having fun after getting so much better at it - but I have to put more thought into my life again. I have to decide where this is heading and start wandering that direction. The past few years were desperately spent getting to this point. This is no time to waste all that effort or squander the opportunity that is now presenting itself. Adulthood shouldn't mean boring, but it definitely can't be spent trying to escape by going back to our formative years. Age 29 was intense; 30 was rough, and 31 was just plain fun. May 32 be good. Not good as in good-but-not-great, but good as in satisfactory. Agreeable. Fit. And yes, virtuous.

Winter in Idaho

2012-01-03T19:44:00.000-05:00

Last year, I wrote about the vanilla sky and egg yolk sun of a winter in the Mid-Atlantic, a place so lush and green nearly year-round that the stark paleness of the winter light seems incongruous. But here in southwest Idaho, a place that is mostly pale during all except the wetness of spring, the light is bright and clear, the sky cerulean blue, the sunrises and sunsets juicy with strawberries, peaches and tangerines as the sun traverses across the sky from one mountain range to another. We are on the western edge of the Mountain time zone, and thus, the sun takes its time rising. It is still dark at 7am, with still just a hint of light in the distance at 7:30am. But once it is here, it is warm, even when the air is cold. And even during the shortest days of the year, the sun is still wandering slowly down the slopes at 5:30pm, heading toward the Pacific Ocean and the lands beyond this country to start a day anew half a world away.

Shoes. SHOES! Shooooooooooes....

2011-12-17T14:04:00.000-05:00

This is not a deep post about the complexities of life, nor is it symbolic of anything. This is a joyous celebration of a lifestyle in which I get to wear shoes. This might be the very first time in my life in which I can wear the fabulous but sometimes impractical shoes that my heart aches for when I walk through the department stores or along the rows and rows of displays at DSW. I have always loved shoes, mostly because my father works in the shoe business and my mother always loved shoes too. Foot fashion is a family affair. Oh, how I long to don a pair of high high heels or a tall boot to click-clack on tile floors and cement sidewalks for a night on the town; to wrap the ribbons of an espadrille wedge around my ankles or slide on a pair of mules for a summer excursion.

Alas, I was blessed with both an adoration of foot attire and the wrong-shaped foot for most of it. My size 6, narrow-heel/wide-toe, high-instep feet have proven prohibitive in this area. As a kid, I mostly wore fashion athletic shoes but had a few pairs of something fancier lurking in the closet. In college and grad school, I mostly wore what was comfortable because trudging around campus all day in uncomfortable shoes is a bad idea and mostly unnecessary. Why dress up for class when you're just going to head to the gym or computer lab afterward? While living in Chicago and DC, where fashionable feet are everywhere and there are plenty of excuses to strut your stuff, commuting is mostly done by walking, biking, and riding the train and bus, where you will likely have to stand a large portion of the time. Some people wear comfort shoes to commute, then change into their cute shoes upon arrival at their destination. I worked in offices where no one cared and I would have been out of place in pumps, so I opted for comfortable shoes that looked decent enough in the business-casual environs. Oddly enough, Casual Fridays were the only times that the cute shoes came out, because can be worn with jeans, and because as Stacy and Clinton say, just because it's casual doesn't mean you have to look like a slob.

In my new job, in this new state, every day is Casual Friday. I could get away with wearing jeans and a t-shirt and hiking boots all the time. But why? I drive to and from work, I sit at a desk all day, I don't have to run up and down a lot of stairs, and some of the young women in my office do dress more nicely. This is the ideal environment for all of those shoes that lay largely unused in my closet, plus some others that call to me from the store shelves. So, out come the teal suede Mary Jane heels with the cut-outs on the toes. Out come the black patent booties with the square toes and the tan suede booties with the buckle that rattles. In the past two months here, I have also acquired some brown boots with a chunky heel and grey suede wedges. These tootsies will have to relearn how to walk in heels, because it's time to get stylin' again. Of course, there will be some stylish flats to add to the collection as well, since matching the boring black slacks is no longer a concern.

Shoes may be a small, trivial thing in the grand scheme of life, but we all need our vices. How can we bring joy to others if we don't feel joy ourselves? And, after all, I'm stimulating the economy.

These are the things we tell ourselves to justify our selfishness. Please forgive me, and then compliment my shoes.

Another notch on the proverbial post

2011-12-04T12:49:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I went to the home improvement store and bought a log splitter. Today, I split all of the shorter logs in the pile underneath my porch. It came a month after I replaced my car's side view mirror on my own. Both tasks make me feel like beating my chest and grunting like Tim 'The Toolman' Taylor. Maybe it's more like when Tom Hanks rejoiced in Castaway after starting a fire on his own. I can do this myself, without anyone's help! Well, Google showed me how to replace the mirror, but I did it for real.

I don't recall ever having swung an ax before, but it looked difficult. The heavy iron head tapers to a sharp edge, balanced on a long, thin handle, which makes it hard to lift and too easy to bring down quickly. One false move and a foot or ankle is sliced to the bone. So I begin with caution. Find a crack in the phloem, the brittle bark, that goes all the way down to the xylem, the meaty wood. Lay the log on a flat surface, the crack exposed to all the world. Grasp the handle firmly. Line the blade up with the crack, lift it up over the shoulder, bring it down halfway, deliberately, then let gravity and momentum take over. Feel the wood resist the blade with a smack, or, if you actually hit the crack as planned, a satisfying creak as it splinters. Place a foot on the log for leverage to pry the blade from the cut. A couple (or many) more just like that and the log halves fall satisfyingly away from each other, exposing the fresh wood inside.

Most of the logs didn't take that long. My aim was decent, my strength enough to deliver sufficient power to the swing. Without a large enough crack, though, the wood would splinter but mostly remain intact. I like the physicality of the task, the breaking of something to use later, and the knowledge that I can do this myself. But I'm generally not good at exploiting cracks or weaknesses. I'd rather throw the log on the fire whole and let it burn down on its own, or else find something more powerful to cut it apart quickly, no whittling away needed. I might be better off with a wedge and a mallet - easier to wield, and less dangerous - but the stove is small and all I have is a log splitter, so I swing the ax with care and keep at it until the work is done.

There are more logs in a different pile, some without visible cracks and some too narrow to split and too long for the stove. For those, I will need a chainsaw...

The November of my youth

2011-11-28T17:11:00.001-05:00

In case it's not totally obvious from the previous post, today isn't exactly the cheeriest of days. Not depressing or anything, just grey. Boise has been grey for what seems like forever but is probably only a few days here and there. This must be what they call the inversion, when thin clouds settle over the valley and just hang out. Forever. Blue sky is visible in the distance, over the tops of the foothills somewhere, but the clouds hold it back just out of reach. Just enough to reassure us that the world hasn't ended and the entire planet isn't smothered. November in Chicago is cold and grey. It rains. It's windy. But at least it's doing something. Here, the temperature isn't too cold, and it's not particularly windy or rainy. Just grey. Sometimes the clouds thin out and the wan sunlight filters through, like looking at a lightbulb from beneath a bedsheet. It seems like everyone here skis, and now I know why. The ski resorts reside just above the cloud line, right where that unattainable blue sky hangs out. Up there, it's bright and sunny and the snow sparkles festively. Grey sky alone is one thing, but the looming mountains really make the valley feel closed-in, capped, sealed. As if we could climb up and poke a hole in the clouds and a whoosh of fresh air would come rushing in. Or better yet, sweep away the clouds with a broom like we do with the cobwebs in rooms that have gone stale.

Giving Thanks

2011-11-28T13:07:00.001-05:00

A few days past the official Thanksgiving holiday, I am especially appreciative of what I am fortunate enough to have. Last night on 60 Minutes, the first story was about families in Florida who are now living out of their cars because they lost their homes when the jobs left and the economy crashed. There have been many stories like this in the media lately; for example, Diane Sawyer hosted a one-hour special last month on an American Indian tribe in North Dakota that is among the poorest communities in the country. Poverty exists all over the world and is much more rampant in many places outside of the United States. It's one of the core reasons for violence in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and in other war-torn areas. From our comfy couches, it's easier to ignore them. Send some money to an international aid organization and hope it doesn't get accidentally used to pay off corrupt politicians or fund projects that are doomed from the start. Sponsor a child, Sally Struthers-style. Some people take up the cause and fly across the world to try to help people whose circumstances are mostly beyond the control of those who live outside that nation and have no political power. Sometimes it works - some microloans and education and infrastructure initiatives, for example - but without support of the government, it's much more difficult to raise a country as a whole out of poverty. So we throw up our hands and turn the heat up in our cozy homes.

But the United States is now on a slippery slope. Our people can't find work, which leads to tighter budgeting, which leads to feeding their families two meals a day instead of three, because they can't afford more food. Food pantries are struggling right now to provide enough food for the growing number of people who rely on them to put food on the table. This isn't just a problem of eating fast food because it's cheaper than fresh food. It's a problem of no food at all. One family in the 60 Minutes piece said that after cutting back from three meals to two meals a day, they still had no extra money, and they ended up living in their car until a woman who runs a local program helped get the family a hotel room to live in. But a family of five can't live in a hotel room forever. It's a temporary fix.

This is sad. We as a country are no longer taking care of our own. Our government is fighting about stupid stupid things, mostly about how to split the money. Raising taxes may or may not help. Cutting spending may or may not help. This problem isn't about just throwing money at people and hoping it doesn't get wasted. Government doesn't exist simply for its own good and it isn't about making rules for rules sake. It's about providing what our society needs to function and thrive. Private business is about providing goods and services for members of our society. During a time of increased need, not just from those in communities where poverty is perpetuated, but also in once-comfortable communities that looked just like ours, why are we fighting over words and ideas? Why are we not doing something, even if it's small, to help even one family move out of their car and into a real home? This isn't a bleeding-heart liberal thing. It's a human thing. Our country might be in debt for years to come, but our neighbors are faltering right now. It could happen to any of us. One medical emergency or a lost job, and we could be next.

On this day, I am especially thankful for all that I am fortunate enough to have. My furnace broke on Thanksgiving, and I had to rely on a space heater and a wood stove for warmth, although I was lucky enough to be able to stay with a friend for the weekend. What it must be like to have nothing but a wood stove for warmth all the time, or to have no one else to stay with in an emergency, or to have no home at all, I just can't imagine. My heart goes out to all of those people who need so much more. I wish that I could give it.

Adjusting

2011-11-20T16:50:00.001-05:00

I knew it would be different here. That was the point. I needed a reset. I needed to start over in a place where no one knows me, where they have no preconceived notions of who I am or where I came from, so I can be whatever I want. I needed a different view, to see things from another angle. But like my cat, I discovered that I long for freedom but am afraid of what's actually out there.

Life in the city is easy. Go to the same few bars and restaurants, shop in the few stores that have what you want, listen to your iPod as you go about your merry way. Keep up the same routines: go to the gym after work or during lunch. Run errands on the weekends. Meet up with friends in between. Meet new people. Cook dinner with the usual ingredients. Listen to the same radio shows, watch the same tv shows, read the same newspapers and magazines. These things are easily transferrable among lives.

It's life outside the city that's scary. Get up into the mountains, among the tall pines and gushing streams, and it's a different world. So quiet. No people around, no airplanes overhead, no birds chirping or leaves rustling. My attempts at hiking have been cut short as I was consumed with a fear of being eaten by a wolf. Or worse yet, partially eaten, with no cell service and no passers-by to help. Leisurely drives along roads in higher elevations feel like death traps, an icy patch or a sneeze all that's necessary to take one wrong turn off the road and plummet into the valley below. Venturing into the wild here is an exercise in stuffing fear into a compartment deep in the belly and trying to enjoy the incredible scenery instead. Coming from a land where people worry more about getting a flat tire on the highway than breaking an ankle while traversing a high mountain trail, this place feels utterly dangerous at times. Is this how other people feel when they move to the West after living in Mamby-Pamby Town for so long? Or are these fears totally unfounded, revealing themselves in this form but being rooted in some deeper, unconscious fear? This is the first time I've done something so different in my life, and being scared is an important part of the process. Maybe it's just that: it's new, and new is scary. Exciting too, but until you learn its secrets and crack its code, new means stumbling in the dark, the world only illuminated as far as your little flashlight beam can reach. Once you know what's just beyond the beam of light, you don't have to guess what's out there, and that's a more comforting place to be. Having someone to hold your hand helps too.

Urban Wildlife, Boise Style

2011-11-08T19:58:00.000-05:00

One of the first few days I was here for good, I looked out my window and saw a doe and two young deer standing in my yard. It was opening day for deer hunting, and I wanted to shout at them, "RUN!!!" But no one here in the foothills would shoot at a deer among the houses, especially not with two young. Right? There have been numerous skunks as roadkill, and I've heard rumors of foxes or coyotes running off with the neighborhood cats at night. My sweet kitty doesn't get to go outside at night at all. Not that I have a reason to be worried - she snuck out the open door one evening and came running back a few minutes later. Yearning for freedom, afraid of what's actually out there.

There are also the usual suspects - red and gray squirrels, Canada geese, various song birds, a few small raptors in the open areas. They remind me that I have to get to know a whole new selection of birds out here, because many species don't live out east. My favorite are the California quail that hang out in packs among the bushes, shrubs, and dense clusters of conifers out here. They sound like guinea pigs, squeaking and grunting in the foliage. It's pretty rare to see them - they go running from any disturbance. This evening, I looked out my bedroom window to see maybe 30 quail picking through the fallen willow leaves and pine needles in my backyard, followed by a nosy squirrel whom they didn't seem to notice. Quail are so funny, with their colorful patches of feathers and their one curled feather on their forehead that quivers as they bob for seeds and berries and bugs. Even the females have a little tuft of feather on their heads. It's so regal.

Identity

2011-11-08T19:40:00.000-05:00

"Stay in the North End," they said. "The North End is where everything is that you'll need. There's no reason to leave the North End." I've been fighting against this mindset that other educated, progressive Boiseans (Boiseites?) have regarding the old-home, kid-safe, coffee-shop-and-food-co-op neighborhood where apparently most of the liberals in Boise live. I grew up in a pretty diverse area in Chicago. My parents are working-middle class folks, and I always liked to think of myself as part of the proletariat in a way. I'm an educated professional, intellectually curious and well-rounded, but I never assumed badly of someone who works in retail or industry or who doesn't have a college degree. I worked in retail for many years with people who didn't go to college, and they mostly didn't seem like people I needed to avoid. Then again, I have always spent the majority of my time (outside of retail work) with people like me, by default, because after college, I have worked in all white-collar jobs. I never really noticed the difference between those who take a more nuanced approach to life and those who don't give much thought to intellectual pursuit until I moved to Washington, DC, a city rife with people ready to pick apart the world.

Anyway, this Boise Liberal attitude really left a bit of a distaste in my mouth. All of the other Boiseans I have run across have seemed really quite nice and normal, and we liberals can be a tad elitist at times.

Then I dived into the dating scene here, via a free online dating site. And now I understand why my cohorts here in Boise stick to the North End. There is a wider gulf here between those who are liberal and highly educated (often beyond a bachelor's degree) and those who are something else. Still lovely people all, but in a liberal-ish small city like Boise in a staunchly conservative state like Idaho, you just stick with what you know. Because it's easier than explaining yourself to those who don't get it, no matter what your political persuasion, level of education, religion, or job. It's live-and-let-live out here, and everyone stays on their side of the line.

Cross-country

2011-10-10T21:04:00.002-04:00

The drive across the United States, from the East Coast to the Northwest, is a lesson in land use. Head out up I-270 from Washington, DC, and suburban Maryland rolls with the hills, part subdivision and part farmland. The trees change color in early fall as elevation climbs into Pennsylvania. The highway winds through the mountains, where the temperature drops and billboards implore travelers to support the coal mining industry, as if there was nothing damaging about blowing apart the earth and hauling out its inner contents, displacing entire towns and polluting the air and water along the way. As if the local economy struggling from the loss of mining was worse than the long-term multiple impacts of extractive industries.

Soon, the mountains give way to a familiar sight: the flat agricultural lands of the Midwest. There's not much here that existed 100 years ago. It has been plowed and plucked and mowed and developed over and again. You're never far away from an ear of corn, a bale of hay, or a tractor. The highway through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois is a lesson in monotony. The giant aluminum siding cross at Effingham, Illinois, is the only distinguishing landmark for miles. But the sun setting over the Mississippi River approaching St. Louis is a thing of beauty. The Midwest is full of simple beauty, seemingly empty but at peace with it, knowing that important things are happening just beyond the view from the highway.

Missouri is a different story. It's a nice mix of farmland and foothills - more dramatic than other parts of the Midwest, because it has more to offer. It's multidimensional. And driving the cliffs along the Missouri River encourages vulnerability and the need to throw it all into the muddy water and leave it all behind. North along the river and through Nebraska is the last chance to enjoy the flat lands with the wide yellow sun, for just beyond the Wyoming border, the earth takes over. The Midwest looks wide and flat, but it's nothing compared to the wide open of the West. In the Midwest, one still feels under the watch of the sun and stars, and clouds float close overhead. In the West, storms arriving can be seen floating in mid-air, approaching but never actually coming close. The land out here is what it has been for thousands or millions of years. People out here don't use the land; the land permits them to reside where they dare, puncturing the upper crust in small splotches. Cows, goats, sheep, and horses graze in dispersed groups on hillsides, barely visible among the patches of sagebrush and the shadows cast by passing clouds. It's a humbling feeling to be out here, like we could disappear at any time and the earth would just swallow us up unnoticed.

Overtly personal

2011-09-18T21:24:00.002-04:00

I grew up with a mother who likes to analyze everything, who processes her life by talking about every speck of it, and so I have also become a person who is deeply introspective and fairly self-aware. I have come to measure my life not in terms of my accomplishments, but rather in terms of how I've progressed internally. In Chicago, I fostered my love of music, got in touch with my inner environmentalist, and planted the foodie seed. In North Carolina, I embraced my inner hippie, lost the urgency to get married and have kids, and discovered the value of having friends who are more like me. In DC, I became the independent outdoorswoman I am today. I learned the difference between the fantasies I wanted for my life and the realities that are much more suited to who I am. I struggled with tasks and forced myself to dig into them instead of taking the easy way out, accepting that sometimes just-good-enough isn't good enough. I discovered that I could open up to someone and love so deeply, and then heal more completely when that love went away. I identified the issues that have been holding me back for so long, like my reliance on other peoples' ideas instead of forming my own, and I learned to tell a select few people some deeply personal things that I have only just begun to accept for myself. I discovered that we are all flawed, and that it's okay to be flawed, and that being open about your flaws will not make people automatically dislike you. In the past 3+ years, I have made great strides - I think I had to move past a lot of things in my mind before I could move to a new place on this planet.

But we are all a work in progress, and I always have to have a project. The new one that will follow me to Boise is not a unique one: I don't like my body. In my mind and deep under my layers of cellulite lies a person who is toned and muscular and strong. I feel it in my muscles and in my bones. But my genes work against me, those eastern European Jewish genes that panic at the mere suggestion that it might be cold outside or that I might have to subsist on rations, and so no matter how strictly I count calories, limit carbs, pile on the fresh fruits and veggies and low-fat protein, bike, run, swim, hike, lift weights, do yoga, and get a full 8 hours of sleep, I maintain a layer of padding all over, especially on my stomach and hips. No matter how much I tell my D-cup breasts to get smaller, they just hang there and get in the way, those uncomfortable globs of fat that draw unwanted attention, which I would happily reduce to half of their size or less. I don't snack or eat lots of unhealthy things or fill emotional holes with food, and I am active. I am a healthy person, strong and decently fit, but this body I have is not my own. I have a very womanly hourglass figure for which I get a fair amount of attention from men, but I have never, ever felt like a woman. In my mind, I am not woman, and not really man either, just someone with a strong, fit, capable body with little body fat and no curves. Some people can change their bodies in drastic ways, like training two hours every day (or longer) or hiring a good plastic surgeon. I could kill myself at the gym and restrict every ounce of food I eat like an Olympian, but even with less body fat and more muscles, I cannot escape the physiology, like my short stature, knock-knees and wide hips, that will always betray my gender, and I am limited in my physical abilities by my asthma. Part of it may be my desk-job lifestyle - I'm sure I would prefer a more physically active job, but while I have student loans and a yearning for intellectual stimulation, working full-time in a job that fulfills my need to constantly move my body is not a viable option, doing it part-time will not suffice, and I don't want to wear my body out prematurely.

My angst is not inspired by those beauty magazines, which I don't read, nor by the models, actresses, and the women in my life, all of whom I admire for their talents, personality, quirks, and unique beauty. I don't look in the mirror and say, "I am fat" or "I hate my body." I don't feel pressure to be skinny, I don't think that I am unlovable because of my body shape, I don't feel that I am less of a person for how I look, and I would certainly never take on anything so drastic that could damage my body. I know that I am not a large person and that my size and weight is considered average and healthy. It's not vanity, it's a genuine physical discomfort. I don't look outside the way I feel inside, and my efforts so far to shed the padding that makes life often physically uncomfortable have been mostly unsuccessful. I need to find a way to connect my inner self with my outer self, to accept what I am and find a way to move past this. Unlike the other obstacles I have surmounted, this is not just a struggle with my mind, that abstract and intangible entity; there is a physical dimension to this project, and I fear that like many other women, it may be something I work on my whole life. But I figured out ways to work through other issues, and I'll figure out this one too.

Moving away, not moving on

2011-09-17T13:12:00.001-04:00

Two weeks from today, I will be on the road on the way to Boise, probably somewhere on I-70 in Pennsylvania. How did seven weeks turn into 14 days? And how did I accumulate so much stuff in my little bedroom? Reality of the move is setting in. After two years of being out West in my mind, I invested in my DC life over the past 9 months, and now I'm not ready to leave. Despite the noise and traffic and crowds of people, despite the annoying public transit commute and lack of parking, despite the high prices for just about everything and the difficult dating scene, I love it here. I love my friends, who are fun and funny, smart and varyingly intense, who work too much but know how to have a good time, and who have accepted me despite my stupid jokes, inappropriate conversations, occasional retreats into my introverted lair, life indirection, geeky pursuits, general lack of fashion sense, and overall casual awkwardness. I've been told that I'm easy to be around, so maybe that's why they continue to let me tag along.

I love that everything is at your fingertips here, including food, art, and music from just about every ethnicity or culture; movies, theater and dance productions big and small; celebration of LGBTQ culture; wonky political/scientific/global discussions; museums of all kinds; and colorful people. DC can exhibit that well-ingrained East Coast conformism, it's true, but there seem to be enough non-conformists that escape is possible. Speaking of escape, I love that in just a couple of hours, one can drive to the coast, the forests, the mountains, other big cities, and farmland. This is the place for explorers. If I were a big-city girl, I would happily plant roots and stay here forever.

But I don't have the mental or emotional energy for a place like DC. I seem to have inherited a touch of the anxiety disorder that plagues my family, and I'm sensitive to sounds and smells. Sensory overload is something I know well. Although I can ignore the daily noise and commotion of a big city, it wears on my soul. There are too many options in a city like this - how do I choose among all of the fabulous restaurants to find one place to eat?! How do I decide what to do on any given Saturday evening?! How do I connect with new people among all of those rushing to and fro? Cursed with a love of all of these things and a concurrent inability to choose among them, I have accepted that it is time to transition to a slower pace of life, rather than fork over cash every month for the anti-anxiety meds that would enable me to better cope with the constant assault of the cityscape. So I'm moving away, to a place still hopping but calmer, still interesting but not overwhelming. My heart will still be in DC, a place that draws ire from many Westerners. I fully became the person I am while living in DC, so I can never move on completely.

First impressions

2011-09-08T08:37:00.001-04:00

I've been in Boise for three days, looking for a place to live. I didn't really take to the city right away. It reminds me of a smaller Salt Lake City, but aside from the downtown area, there's not much going on. Plus, it just seems gritty, scrubby. My initial reaction was resistance - "I don't want to live here. What did I get myself into?" But a meeting with my new coworkers reminded me of what I'm getting myself into. Instead of struggling through economic theory and picking through farm-level data, I'll be nerding out on riparian habitat and stocking levels with a bunch of easygoing sciencey folks who joke around all the time. This sounds wonderful. So, determined to get to know (and eventually like) Boise, I went for a morning jog along the Boise River greenbelt. It was bugging me that I couldn't really pinpoint why I was resisting this place. It's not lush or diverse or exciting like DC, but it's also not noisy and crowded and expensive and dangerous like DC. Boise is different from the Midwest and East Coast - lots of people have tattoos, piercings, and funky hair. Bikes are ridden for transportation. Clothes are used as personal expression, not as a tool for fitting in or showing off. The fancy beers here have DC happy hour prices; the other beers are way cheaper. These are all good things. It's scary moving to a new place, but Boise seems nice, comfortable enough. So what was my problem?

Then it hit me while I was jogging. Everything in the Midwest and East Coast is lush and green. We're talking deep green, like you can smell and taste the chlorophyll while walking down the street. And the sun is yellow, like an egg yolk. It's so bright in the summer that you almost want to hide from it. As someone who is happiest wandering around a forest all day, this seems safe and normal. Plus, it's all I've known. But Boise is not lush. There are tons of trees (the city name is derived from "les bois", which means "the woods" in French) and the grass is green (although it's so dry in the summer that without watering, it turns into a brown mass), but the green isn't as deep and the sun is paler, though still warm. It's dustier here. But there's beauty in that. It's less intense. Even though it's been in the 90s since I got here, the warmth is comfortable. Nature doesn't knock you down in Boise, it just hangs out, like the foothills lurking on the northeast side of the city. I didn't take to Boise immediately because it wasn't begging me to like it. It didn't get in my face or show off for the masses. This city will let me figure it out on my own time, no rush. It's a relief after three years of bracing against the barrage of sights and sounds in the big city. So, okay. I'm moving to Boise.

I'd rather be a talented musician than a fast runner

2011-08-21T11:00:00.001-04:00

We are not athletes in my family. We never played on any teams or had piles of rackets and mitts and shin guards lying around. We like music and books and food and stimulating conversation and corny jokes. I suppose I'm the most physically active member of my family - even though I always hated gym class and have a mild case of asthma, I took dance and horseback riding lessons; I played softball for two summers (the highlight of my brief career being the one hit I got off a pitch instead of a toss-up; my own father later struck me out as home plate umpire) and played one game on a soccer team; I played beach volleyball in Chicago one summer and kickball on an intramural league one year in grad school. I go on long bike rides, hikes, runs (sometimes), and I swim laps. I do yoga, lift weights, work the elliptical machines, and perform any number of different kinds of crunches on a regular basis. I'm not very good or fast or skilled or strong at any of those things and the scale never seems to budge no matter how much I do any combination of them, but I do them because I enjoy them, they relieve my stress and anxious tendencies, and they give me something to do instead of being bored.

Hence the RunStock 5K I ran last night with my friend. It's not just a road race, it's a race around the Quantico Marine Corps Base, accompanied by random bands along the route and the School of Rock students performing at the finish line all evening. I had fun running the race, I shaved more than two minutes off my total time without training much beforehand, and I felt good for pushing myself. Races are a blast - there's something about running through the empty streets with a bunch of other random people that really gets my adrenaline pumping. I may have done well based on my personal achievement, but let's face it, I'm not an athlete. A woman carrying one small child on her shoulders and leading another child paced me during the first part of the run, when I was really pounding it out. They finished only slightly behind me. No, I am not a fast runner.

But I don't really care. After sprinting through the finish line and grabbing my mini bottle of water and my chocolate chip cookie (the only way to refuel after a race, in my opinion), I meandered over to the stage, where a small girl, perhaps 9 or 10 years old, with long straight hair, a flannel shirt, and denim shorts, was belting out a Joan Jet song while her slightly older band mates were accompanying her on guitar, drums, and keyboard as professionally as any cover band I've seen lately. These kids were rocking it! On stage! In front of a bunch of hot, sweaty strangers! How cool is that?! I didn't care that I had run 3.10685 miles in 34 minutes. I was so jealous of those kids on stage. Me, jealous of a girl singing a Green Day song about masturbation and smoking pot that was released when I was 14 years old. She was probably not even born yet.

School of Rock of Greater Washington DC states, "Since 1998 the School of Rock has been saving rock & roll, one kid at a time. We've helped thousands of kids learn how to rock, and develop a lifelong love of music." (I'll ignore the punctuation errors in those sentences because rock n' roll don't need no stinkin' grammar.) They provide a combination of private lessons, group rehearsals, and real live gigs to teach students (ages 5-17) about not just playing an instrument or singing but also performing on stage. There's even a summer camp for a more intense learning experience, and they have also added an indie band program for students who want to write and play their own music, not just cover the classics. It all sounds pretty rad to me. Can I go back to being a kid, just to participate in something like this?

I guess that says a lot about how my upbringing has influenced me: I'm okay with not being an athletic superstar, but it kind of kills me that I don't have the musical chops to master an instrument and perform for the masses. Guess I'll have to stick with belting out the tunes along to the radio and playing some serious air drums at my desk.

Musical interlude

2011-08-17T21:33:00.002-04:00

Just in case that Rolling Stones/The Sundays song isn't planted firmly enough in your brain:

And a classic that should have been conjured up immediately:

Wild ponies

2011-08-17T21:24:00.001-04:00

My office moved to a new building this week, so I got some much-needed time off. I used the past two days to check off a few things on my bucket list: go camping one more time, go to the beach, go to Assateague Island to see the wild horses. I stayed at a tent camp site in Assateague Island National Shoreline, a park that straddles the Maryland/Virginia border on the Delmarva peninsula. Camping is only allowed on the Maryland side, but one can walk along the beach all the way, and the scenic drive from Assateague to Chincoteague (on the Virginia side) takes about an hour through the countryside along the bay. The Chincoteague area includes a national wildlife refuge and NPS visitor center and some longer hiking trails. The road to Chincoteague passes by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA visitor center, where tall satellite dishes and other massive equipment stand at the ready. Assateague is the more commercialized area and receives more traffic and visitors. Chicoteague is quaint and quiet, although don't believe the signs - "historic" Main Street is dotted with the same schlocky stores meant to draw business from people who just want to sit on the beach and spend their cash.

Anyway, before this trip, when I thought of wild horses, I imagined the song "Wild Horses" by the Rolling Stones (although the version in my head is the one sung by The Sundays) accompanying some pintos frolicking on the beach, their manes and tails whipping around in the wind. You probably did too. But alas, my friend, these horses seem neither wild nor exotic. They look like regular horses, grazing along the side of the road and trudging through the salt marsh. Sure, they're beautiful, but they're even less scared of people than the white-tailed deer in Rock Creek Park. And their poop is everywhere. Other "wildlife" common throughout the island include some pushy gulls that laughed too much at me while I tried to pitch my tent, some cottontail rabbits who peek out from behind the brush, and a fawn that ventured up to a large group on the campground and took food from their hands while their Jack Russell terrier sniffed at its feet. But there are also some shore-specific creatures, like the Atlantic mole crabs, who skittered to rebury themselves after each wave washed them out of their hiding spots, the various other crabs that burrow into the sand, the evidence of which can be seen at dawn when their empty burrows dot the shore, a green heron watching carefully from the salt marsh, and the shorebirds that dig the crabs from the sand for a tasty crustacean meal. Red-winged blackbirds flit among the grasses and some falcons circle high above.

I had hoped for some peace and solitude on my two-day retreat, but alas, even at midnight with the bright almost-full moon reflecting off the water and at dawn with the orange ball of light rising in the pink sky from some clouds along the horizon, people were still up and about. I had my own little piece of dune, but solitude was nowhere to be found. Even so, it was freeing to direct my own vacation, to move in my own little space, to let the shore envelop me for just a few moments when I was there and nowhere else.

Finding your way

2011-08-14T08:51:00.000-04:00

Last week, I ordered a road atlas of the United States and a road and recreation map of Idaho. They're big books with glossy covers, and each state page in the U.S. road atlas comes with one of those fancy code things that will give you extra information online when scanned with a smart phone. The perfect blend of old-school traveling and modern technology. I've been yearning for a GPS unit for a couple of years because they make going anywhere so much easier, but there's just something special about doing it manual-style. I like printing out my Google maps directions, or better yet, writing them down on a discarded envelope or scrap of paper. I learn so much more about a place when I drive in the wrong direction and have to backtrack, or when I try to figure out how to get somewhere using a new route and usually end up going in a circle or taking the much longer route. GPS units get you where you need to go, but they take the fun out of it (although admittedly, having Snoop Dogg tell me to take a sharp left makes it more interesting).

There's just something exciting about sitting down with a map, looking at the roads squiggling across the page, thinking about how to get to another part of the state or the country. Atlases have that grid that tells you how many miles it is from one city to numerous cities in the U.S. and Canada, plus a map with traveling times noted for segments between cities. One can turn to any page, say 93, and learn where Pierre, SD, is located in relation to Sioux City, for example. Some states take up two pages, like Montana, others four pages (Pennsylvania), and others less than a page with room to spare (Rhode Island). And each map shows you all of the little towns in between your starting point and your destination. Using an online mapping system is just not the same. This is hands-on, pull-to-the-side-of-the-road, find your next destination while sitting in a diner, kind of traveling. True, the atlas can't redirect me around traffic or warn me that the Chesapeake Bay Bridge toll is $12 each way (yikes!!!), but at least I'll know where I am, even without Internet access, and that's the first and most important step in any adventure.

LIfe is what happens when...

2011-08-04T21:59:00.001-04:00

It's August. It's been hot and dry, more so this year than most others. The parched leaves are starting to float from the trees, the sun rises a little later and sets a little earlier, and the back-to-school sales are ramping up.

More than two years ago, I said, "August is when we start making plans." At the time, I was hoping to move 1,700 miles away to be closer to the one I loved. But as August came and went, the Universe and I had different ideas of what those plans would be, and everything changed. Last year, there were no plans to be had. The roulette wheel was still spinning, the marble still circling, not ready to drop into place. But this year, there are plans, and they include Boise, Idaho, and a job where my skills will be needed and used. This was not the number I had bet on. I was looking at pretty little 26, the California way of life, and 48, rainy Oregon with the cool coast. Or maybe 24 (New Mexico) or 30 (Colorado) in times past. Boise, good old 18, was an impulse bet, and Lord knows, those always seem to be the ones that win for me. Before researching the place, I knew only these things about Idaho:

Napoleon Dynamite was filmed and set in Idaho. I liked that movie more than I thought I would, but it was still weird.
During the weirdest car ride ever, I was the only passenger in a ten-passenger van on a five-hour drive from Salt Lake City to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The driver was a very tanned man wearing diamond earrings, short shorts, and fake fingernails, who chewed tobacco and drank energy drinks the whole way. The route took us through southeastern Idaho, and as we neared the Wyoming border, the brown rolling hills gave way to the most incredible, beautiful forests and crystal clear rivers. I still regret not taking any photos.
Last summer I met a woman my age who grew up in Boise. She told me that it's hot in the summer and cool in the winter with not a ton of snow. That was news to me.
Many Idahoans hate wolves. A lot. The Governor wants to kill most of 'em dead. I understand both sides of the story, but since I'll be working on issues related to livestock grazing, I'll leave it at that.
If you want outdoor adventure, Idaho has it: skiing (which I don't do), hiking, biking, fishing (that one random L.L. Bean fly fishing lesson just might pay off), rafting, kayaking, and more.
Idahoans grow lots of wheat and potatoes, and the rivers teem with salmon and trout.
Lots of people have lots of guns in Idaho.
Plenty of Idahoans really don't like the federal government. At all. (eep...)
My mom makes the corny "Idaho? No, you da ho" pun every time someone says Idaho.

Since accepting the job and asking around, I have found that people who have lived in Boise have absolutely loved it. A DC friend introduced me to her friend in Boise, an Izilwane writer lives and works in Boise, and friends sometimes find themselves in Boise for work. So I won't be alone. After wanting to move West for more than two years, it feels weird not to have to want it anymore. I'm not quite ready to leave DC yet, so I'm gonna live the hell outta this town before I go. 'Cause Boise sure ain't DC. Which is kind of the point.

Don't go alone into the wild

2011-07-09T14:09:00.001-04:00

Last night, I watched Into the Wild, a movie about a young man who ditches his worldly possessions and opts for utter freedom by hitchhiking around the country and eventually settling into an abandoned bus on a hilltop in Alaska. He intends to subsist off the land entirely by foraging for plants and killing his own meat (assisted by a bag of rice he could cook when nothing else was available). He leaves home and ditches his family because of his emotional pain from his rough (yet socially advantaged) upbringing, and he wants to just be alone. He tells someone that experiencing nature in all its glory is the ultimate way to live, and that being with other people is unimportant. And yet, the bulk of the movie is about the bonds he formed with other people while hitchhiking around the country - people he came to think of as family.

The movie is based on a true story, originally written by Jon Krakauer. Christopher McCandless (aka Alexander Supertramp) really did this, and he eventually starved to death in his Magic Bus in Alaska, dreaming of returning to the family he tried to escape. This reminded me of the National Geographic series I blogged about here, in which a man attempted to live on his own in the Yukon Territory for 90 days. He made it to day 50 before calling for a plane to come get him and bring him home. He wasn't able to subsist by hunting or foraging because, just like in McCandless' experience in Alaska, there were fewer animals to eat than expected, and it was pretty difficult to figure out what plants were edible based on a guidebook or notes taken from an expert. He also really missed his friends and family, in a way he just couldn't shake.

The moral of the story here is that we are not capable of living on our skills and wits alone in the wild. It may be incredibly tempting to get away, to test yourself to see if you can survive in a situation in which you are utterly alone, to experience the full extent of what nature has to offer without the intrusion of civilization, and to just be on your own for a while to escape the stresses of interpersonal interactions. But don't do it. Even if you're a skilled hunter, trapper, fisher, or wild plant expert, it will be harder than you expect to feed yourself. Even if you figure out how to provide food and shelter for yourself in some blindingly beautiful location, one in which you gasp for breath each morning when you awaken, you will realize that no matter how much you struggle to deal with other people, you will discover crippling loneliness at some point. You will yearn for company to share the beautiful views with, and you will ache to tell someone every time you triumph or fail in your survival endeavors. Being alone sounds great until you are actually alone, and then you will hope for even the company of strangers. Don't be inspired by these fools who take to the wild alone. The only reasons that native societies ever survived are because they had ancient survival knowledge passed down to them and because they had other people to share the joys and burdens of said survival.

Musings on a summer Sunday

2011-06-26T16:29:00.001-04:00

On immortality: The State We're In
If they ever find a safe way to enable people to live forever (or at least much, much longer) with a good quality of life, I'll be the first to sign up. I'm scared of what happens during and after we die, but what bothers me more than that is the fact that I'll miss all of the amazing things that will happen after I die. Which, God-willing, won't happen for at least fifty years. Speaking of which...

On religion: Canaan Baptist Church billboard message of the week: Honk if you love Jesus. Text while driving if you want to meet him.

On urban wildlife: Speaking of the church, a couple of pigeons have nested in its circular window near my bedroom window. Sometimes I can hear them cooing to each other in the morning. It sounds kind of naughty, like when you hear your neighbors being intimate, but it's also exciting to know another family is getting started.

On food: To make a kickin' pasta sauce, mix mashed sweet potato with roasted red pepper soup, heat, and serve. Works well on whole wheat pasta with cooked French lentils and sauteed spinach and mushrooms. Diced chicken sausage works well too, if you desire something meaty.

On education: Having a teacher who is actually engaged in students' learning takes a class from okay to great. I'm taking a field studies course, and knowing the professor actually cares whether we learn makes me want to work harder, and it will help the ten weeks pass quickly. Which they will anyway, because it's summer, and summer always goes too quickly.

On indoor gardening: It's not as easy as it seems. Broccoli needs the cooler temps of the indoors, but it gets super buggy. Pole beans grow really tall, and there's no good way to support four little plants - everything is either too big or too small. Someone must make trellises for indoor container gardening, right?

American Chestnut Land Trust

2011-06-06T18:14:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I headed out to the American Chestnut Land Trust for Vine Vindication Day. Sounds intriguing, right? It turned into a morning of chopping at bittersweet vines, an invasive plant that winds its way through wooded areas, covering and eventually smothering any trees in its path. The South has kudzu; southern Maryland has bittersweet. Both plants were brought in to provide ornamental decoration and have since taken over wherever they're found. In addition to cutting the vines down, we pounded cartridges of an herbicide into the thick stems or roots of the vines, close to the ground. This method kills just the targeted plant so it doesn't impact surrounding foliage.

The American Chestnut Land Trust (ACLT) manages between 3,000 and 4,000 acres, some of which is owned by the Nature Conservancy and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. The land was previously owned and farmed by both white and African-American farmers from 1886 through the 1930s. The American chestnut trees on this land survived the chestnut blight, and the land trust owners decided to honor these trees upon starting the trust in 1986 by naming the land trust after them. The nearby Parkers Creek Preserve has been designated a Maryland Important Bird Area by the National Audubon Society, and the Calvert Cliffs, along the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, are home to the endangered tiger beetle, rare plants, and fossils from organisms that lived in the ocean along the bay from eight to eighteen million years ago. The ACLT maintains fifteen miles of hiking trails and offers guided canoe trips on a regular basis.

That warm Saturday morning, we made good progress in cutting back vines in one small section of forest, freeing some paw-paw trees in the process, but there is a lot of land and a lot of vines that will grow back under the hot sun and humid air. Sometimes it feels pointless to even try. As we drove the little truck along the trail back to the trailhead, I glanced at the small cleared section and sighed at the futility of it all. But then I walked along the shore with Liz Stoffel, the land manager. We watched tiger beetles skitter across the sand, listened to the waves quietly lapping, and watched the clear freshwater of Parkers Creek flow into the salty bay. Liz gave me a fossilized shark tooth that probably came from the cliffs just down the shore, and I thought about all the creatures that had come before the boats and homes arrived, and all the creatures that depend on this protected space to thrive. The trees we freed from the entangling vines help anchor the soil and the other plants to this fragile land. Cutting brush and killing vines helps ensure that this land remains protected, which is so important when all the land around it may someday be bought up and developed, thanks to the beautiful views that the land trust protects.

Humid thoughts of hazy days

2011-05-28T20:28:00.002-04:00

I fully intend to post soon about the vine-cutting work I did for a land trust in southern Maryland last weekend, but summer has arrived early in all its humid glory, and with it, my yearning to do as little as possible. It's a neat land trust and worthy of some good words, but it will have to wait a few days, when cooler temps, or at least some ambition, arrive back at the homestead.

In the meantime, I wandered over to the used bookstore today to acquire some fictional reading for these lazy days of summer. As a kid, during summer break, I would lie in bed or in the Papasan chair on the porch outside my parents' bedroom and read all evening and late into the night. I would begin reading after dinner, and suddenly it would be 10, 11, midnight. At the library, I would pick out stacks of books reinforced by plastic tape, which crinkled and cracked every time they were open, their spines bent back farther and farther with each read. Once in a while, we went to the bookstore to pick out a fresh novel, usually the latest one in the series I followed. I also plucked books from the shelf in my family room, though I never saw anyone else in the family reading them. My mom often gave me her books when she was done reading them, and as I finished each chapter, I imagined what she had been feeling as she read through those words.

These days, I opt for nonfiction much more often; when I do look to fictional tales, the classics often get passed over for something more timely. Some of my favorites have been written by the French, Mexicans, Africans, Iranians and other Middle Easterners, and Indians. If I can't visit these places, hampered by my limited funds, at least I can experience the world through their tales of family, work, politics, life, love, sadness, food. Some people read cheesy romance novels by the pool; I prefer the works of Parisians to transport me to that wonderful, flowery, romantic place, the top of my list for international travel.

Used-book stores are fantastic places. Bestsellers, classics, new books and old, all mingle on the shelves together. No strategic placement, nothing ordered based on sales data or rankings or anything like that. The books are there only because of the locals who bring them in to be resold for half their list price (or less). I pull out books at random, free to be less choosy because the financial investment is lower and thus less risky. The four books I chose today are by Balzac (my French fix, which I'm reading first), William Faulkner, Annie Proulx, and Kate Atkinson (the only one of the group of which I've never heard). I have officially renewed my seasonal membership in the Deadbeat Club.

Landmark Years and the Dallas Zoo

2011-05-19T20:08:00.002-04:00

I visited the bestie down in Dallas this weekend to celebrate her 30th birthday. Whenever I tell someone I'm going to Dallas, they screw their face up in distaste and ask, "Why Dallas?" I'd probably do the same thing to anyone in my position - Dallas gets a bad rap, probably for some pretty good reasons - but I'd go anywhere to visit with my girl, and we actually find really cool stuff to do there. When I was there in October 2009, we went on a bike ride around the lake and hit up some art shows in people's homes along the way. This time, in addition to spending more than an hour in the used clothing store and shopping in some cool stores, we went to the Dallas Zoo.

According to my friend, the Dallas Zoo pales in comparison to the Fort Worth Zoo, but since we only had a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon and Fort Worth is a 45-minute drive from her place, we stuck with the hometown zoo. After using the women's restroom near the Large Mammal Building, which looked like its graffiti had been there since the '80s, we wondered what exactly our $15 admission was paying for. We wandered through most of the Zoo North section, where I impressed my friend with my knowledge of some of the animals (yes, I know my wood stork and my hooded merganser, thankyouverymuch), after which we realized that it was already practically closing time. But as I know from volunteering at the National Zoo, visitors usually get a little leeway to make their way back up to the entrance. So we made a break for the Wilds of Africa, which was an excellent choice. The new Giants of the Savanna exhibit features a sprawling savanna made to look like the Serengeti, sectioned off for each of the different species. We got up very close to the warthogs, penguins, lions, and giraffes - and I mean CLOSE! The viewing area for the giraffes is set at eye-level to the animals, and they can walk right up and let visitors touch them. I've never been that close to a giraffe. It was really cool. Their heads are much bigger than they look from afar. The whole exhibit was very well-done - the elephants have a ton of room to roam, and during the day, the giraffes can join them. It really feels like what I imagine Africa must be like.

Some parts of the zoo may definitely need some work, but I have to say, I almost liked it better than the National Zoo. Blasphemy, I know. I saw a whole lot of animals at the Dallas Zoo that I never even knew existed. The National Zoo has a fantastic conservation and education program, but I was familiar with a large percentage of the animals there already when I visited for the first time. The Dallas Zoo lets you get very close to the animals, and they exhibit some very different animals there. To combine the best of the two zoos would make for an amazing facility with the opportunity to reach a lot of people and do a great service for global biodiversity.

As for the landmark birthday my friend was celebrating, it made me think back to my 30th. A year and some later, the advice I would give to anyone turning 30 is to spend the first 8 or 10 months reflecting on what you always thought you would have accomplished by that point. Then, about 2 or 3 months before your 31st, throw it all out the window and say To hell with it all! Then do whatever you want because you realize that it was all a bunch of bull, that your life is actually better now for not having done those things, and that the pressure is off because you already screwed up anyway so you might as well have some fun. The 30s are the time in between acne and menopause (tell that to my skin...), when you finally lose that baby fat and have the money for some real clothes to flatter that new figure. It's a time of transition, of discovering new things about ourselves, letting go of some of the baggage we've been carrying and getting on with the next stage of our lives, and eating German chocolate cake for breakfast. It's a lesson about how we never stop learning. I hope that my friend's big year is full of positive transitions and exciting new projects.

First Ascent

2011-05-01T22:15:00.000-04:00

The first hike of the season was yesterday at Sky Meadows State Park in Virginia. It was a good day for a hike - cool with a warming sun. The plan was to hike the Potomac Overlook trail to the North Ridge trail to the South Ridge trail, but as should always happen on an outing like this (and in life, really) I took the advice of my inner compass and opted to hike farther down the gravelly Boston Mill Road and start with the South Ridge trail instead.

The South Ridge trail is two or three people wide in most places, and much of it winds through meadows or a mix of meadows and trees. At the overlooks, oversized benches offer respites from the continually uphill climb, where soaring long-winged raptors can be seen floating the thermals through the valley over cows in pastures and crop fields, and grasshoppers can be heard sproinging through the tall grass (one of my favorite sounds). The upper part of the South Ridge and the western part of the North Ridge are more wooded and the trail is rockier. The breeze rustled through the trees, the whooooosh amplified by the still-bare branches. The dogwoods were in full bloom, their flat white flowers fluttering, creating bright flags among the foliage. The redbuds bloomed too, their tiny pink flowers dotting the woodlands with color. Recent rains have left the forest floor muddy and small rivulets carved canyons into the trail. Pipevine, zebra, and eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies darted from flower to flower, lapping nectar and seeking mates. The electric blue of the pipevine is breathtaking, and the flash of unexpected orange dots under its wings delivers a second punch. Woodpeckers tap-tapped and unidentified chirps called from a hidden perch.

I started up the North Ridge trail past the rushing stream, but that inner compass pulled me back to the Gap Run trail, which winds along the stream downhill back to the gravel road. So much water rushed through the stream that it could be heard high up in the hills, echoing off the valley walls long before it became visible. It flushed down through the valley and splashed over, under, around and between rocks and logs, carving new paths that weren't there after the last rain. This is how it begins. Maybe some day this unnamed stream will be as mighty as the Potomac River, or perhaps it will trickle quietly from the earth, no starting or ending point in sight, just small clear pools between exposed tree roots. Yesterday, it overflowed its banks and spread out over the trail and in all directions. The saturated ground was squishy, the grass and fallen leaves doing little to provide stable footing. It is mostly peaceful here, except for the airplanes that occasionally fly overhead and the stream of people out for a Saturday hike.

Yesterday's hike was only three miles or so, but the steep hill climbs and the admiration and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich held me back. After almost three years here, it doesn't feel as special as it once did. Forests are everywhere here - people live right on the edges of them - and they generally look the same - same trees, same wildlife, same nearby road sounds. Humans have conquered this land, mostly. The trees seem to hold their breaths most days, standing guard against the next subdivision. There is little wildness here, just managed sanctuaries from civilization. The earth here is cognizant of human presence.

But don't be mistaken. Despite its commonality, the forest is a magical place. This land may now be a part of the human landscape, but we will never totally conquer it. Sometimes, it conquers us. We need it to remind us of our fragility, our innate hopelessness in our fight against mortality, so we can appreciate the fact that we are still here.

Celebrate the Earth

2011-04-21T21:18:00.000-04:00

Today is John Muir Day. If you have watched any episodes of the Ken Burns national parks series or read Muir's writings, you have a sense of what a special man he was and how much we have to thank him for. Our country wouldn't be half of what it is today if Muir hadn't inspired Teddy Roosevelt and others of his time to set aside these wonderful lands for all of us to enjoy in perpetuity. This week, entrance to national parks is free, so take some time to visit a national park near you and give silent (or spoken) thanks to Muir for his contribution to humanity and to the planet.

Speaking of the planet, tomorrow is Earth Day. It's not just a day for the hippie crunchy people to give out reusable bags and teach people how to compost. It's a day to remember that we are but one of many living things on this floating orb in the middle of the universe and that we owe our lives to the air, water and food that Earth provides us. We should treat it better than we do. We should tell other people to treat it better. We should help other people tread more lightly, and we should take a moment to savor what we have, for we are squandering a little more every day. To whom much is given, much is expected. We have all been given the Earth to do with as we please. We should be doing much more to ensure we take only what we need and leave the rest for others. Better yet, we should put in more than we take, for the best gift we can give future generations is something greater than we could ever hope for ourselves.

Earth Day is for everyone. Find your own special way to celebrate.

Transported

2011-04-16T23:05:00.001-04:00

The jasmine plant on my bedroom window sill is blooming. It smells sticky sweet, like fried dough coated in floral-infused honey, or a marzipan candy. I imagine that I am in the courtyard of a small home in the Fertile Crescent on a warm night. I wear a wide, full flower behind my ear, and I am wrapped in soft cloth the color of eggshells, embroidered with iridescent olive green, rose, and gold thread. My companions and I lounge atop the cool sand on plush chairs beneath strings of lights as we sip sweetened mint tea or red wine and nosh on dried fruits, almonds and bread. Full trees within this walled arena rustle lightly in the soft breeze that offers brief relief from the dry desert heat.

Maybe it was never like this in this land, even before the days of sectarian violence and talks of nuclear weapons, but jasmine's intoxicating scent conjures up imaginary worlds where life is as succulent as the flowers and the sweetness lasts longer than the ephemeral blooms.

Like I need an excuse to cook...

2011-04-09T08:42:00.001-04:00

In case you hadn't heard, we just narrowly averted a shutdown of the federal government, the first time it would have happened since 1995/96. As a gummint employee, I would have had a forced furlough, which means all the fun of free vacation days without the fun of getting paid for them. Given that the weather promises to be near 70 degrees and sunny this coming week, you can imagine that I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. I was envisioning sleeping until 8am (so late!), eating a leisurely breakfast, going for a swim in the local indoor pool without having to fight the weekend lane hogs, hiking in some state parks, reading a book, basking in the sun, and cooking some new recipes. This last activity has some practical implications as well as just being fun: I've been going to the gym during my lunch hour, and my post-workout lunch has been half of a turkey sandwich and a salad. But the traditional salad, greens with tomato, cucumber, maybe some crumbled cheese or sunflower seeds, is just getting old. It's spring, and I need some springy salads to repower me for the rest of the afternoon in my work cave.

Luckily, cooking is an activity that I don't need to be jobless to do - in fact, I can afford some nicer ingredients when getting a paycheck. Plus, all those warm sunny days likely mean that my kitchen will be largely ignored, not embraced. So I hit up a recently discovered website (food52) to find some yummy salad recipes. I love this website. They feature the most interesting, appealing, different, and simple recipes that look fresh and tasty, appropriate for a grown-up palate but not fancy or snooty. It could have something to do with the design, too. I'm a minimalist, and this site is just a white page with just the right amount of embellishment, plus the text and recipes whose photos speak for themselves. It kind of annoys me that they're regularly featured on HuffPost, only because I don't want hordes of people to be tromping all over the site. I want to keep it a little bit secret. (I guess the cat's out of that bag now, eh?)

Anyway, if all goes according to plan, I will be making a creamy cucumber salad, potato salad with fennel and shallot relish and bacon, radish and pecan grain salad, and shaved Brussels sprouts salad with red onion, lemon, and pecorino. There might be something with carrots in there too. I have most of the dressing/seasoning ingredients on hand, plus I get to try out some veggies I don't eat often (like radishes and Brussels sprouts, which I will generally eat if placed in front of me but don't exactly pine for). Plus, they're easy to make during the hot humid summer, when one can't possibly imagine using fire for any reason other than to toast marshmallows during a camping trip. Now to find some recipes that utilize the herbs from my windowbox garden - lemon thyme, basil, Italian parsley, and oregano.

I love spring.

Mucking around

2011-03-20T14:33:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I headed out with some of fellow nature-lover meetup folks to get our hands dirty with some labor down at the Suitland bog in Suitland, Maryland. We started with an introduction about the bog from a park ranger from the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission as we walked from the parking lot down to the bog, which is fenced in from the surrounding residential areas. In the 1930s and '40s, botanists had amazing foresight to develop extensive collections of the bog's flora; in the 1960s, the area around the bog was mined for sand and gravel, which greatly affected the bog itself. In 1975, the M-NCPPC purchased the 20 acres where the bog is located, fenced it off a year later, and completed a botanical inventory and hydrology study in the following two years. In 1980, the Commission constructed a boardwalk and began interpretive programs and hikes to educate nearby residents about this fragile area. More than 40 species of plants recorded in the bog since 1901 have been designated by the Maryland Natural Heritage Program as rare, threatened, or endangered, and more than 20 of those plants remain today.

Technically, this bog is actually a fen - bogs are fed by rainwater, and fens like this one are fed from groundwater. A thin seep of water emerges from somewhere slightly upslope and there's a small area of standing water near the boardwalk. At this time of year, most of the plants are still dormant, although a few maples were starting to grow buds and the magnolia trees remain green year round. The big draw for this bog is the carnivorous plants. Massive tufts of purple-leaved northern pitcher plants grow throughout the bog. At one point in the bog's history, someone planted them there because they mistakenly thought they were native to the area. When they were brought in, common pitcher plant mosquitoes and midges stowed away on-board. They're the only two insects that aren't affected by the pitcher plant's digestive juices, and they actually help keep the plants healthy by disposing of the leftover insect bodies and other detritus. The thread-leaved and spatulate-leaved sundews are native to the area, but we didn't see any.

We weren't there to just gaze at this rare wetland, we were there to work. Taking care to avoid the stands of poison sumac, which love wet or flooded areas like this, we cut and pulled small shoots of asters, maples, and greenbriers that threatened to take over by crowding or shading out other types of native plants that the rangers are trying to restore to the area. At some point, the pitcher plants will be pulled as well, but we didn't have enough time to really get in there and dig them out. The peak blooming times for the bog plants are May through August, which are also good times to see foxes, turtles, songbirds, and hawks that live in the area. I'm hoping to get back out there again sometime to do some more maintenance work, check out the bog in full bloom, and maybe even pick up the trash left by people who walk through the forest and meadow surrounding the bog.

Abracadabra

2011-03-05T16:30:00.001-05:00

You wouldn't think that early March in the city would be a magical time. It's cool and wet and sometimes grey, and there's still road salt crusted on the curbs. But oh yes, it is magical indeed, because life is starting to emerge. Daffodils spill down the hill along Rock Creek Parkway. Small pink and yellow flowers bloom on trees behind the gas station on 14th Street and along the highway. Purple flowers carpet the yard outside a small house in Falls Church. White flowers poke out through the dead leaves in the park. In three weeks, the cherry blossoms will be out in full force and the city will be alive. Just three short weeks 'til spring. Magic.

Taunting God

2011-02-23T21:49:00.000-05:00

The church next door posts clever messages on the board out front every week or two, enticing people to come to church and strengthen their commitment to their faith. Today, the message read something like, "If you continue to use my name in vain, I will make your rush-hour commute even longer." I said out loud, laughingly, "God doesn't have the power to do that." Then I clasped my hand over my mouth and gasped a little, afraid that God had heard me doubt those powers and would decide to show me just how wrong I was.

I'm not a religious person. My belief in a higher power consists mostly of a sense of something much much larger than myself. "God" is the somewhat-tangible version of that, which I usually conjure up only when I'm feeling helpless and like to think that someone else out there has a hand in what happens in this world. It keeps me from feeling utterly alone. My rational brain says that "God" is what we make up to explain the things we otherwise can't explain, but my metaphysical brains says, "What if God really can affect even silly things like commutes? What if God can mess with us?" Since we can't know for sure, at least not in this life, I prefer not to take any chances. I'm sorry, God, for doubting you. For taking your name in vain. My rush-hour commute may be quick and easy these days, but there's plenty else in my life to mess with. Please don't. Thank you.

I get one every year

2011-02-11T22:14:00.000-05:00

If I'm lucky. I'm talking about my birthday, which is today. I've reached the age where I avoid answering the question, "How old are you now?" because I'm still incredulous that I am this age. From now on, I will answer with the age I feel, rather than the actual number of years I've been on this planet. So today, I am 26.

In any case, it's been a great birthday. Last night I went to the Morcheeba concert at the 9:30 Club with two friends. It was a good show, but I guess I'm so used to high-energy shows that a band with a more chill vibe just doesn't make the cut. They put on a great show though. In my next life, I want to be a bad-ass black woman with a fro-hawk and buff arms, like Skye.

Today, I went to the Baltimore aquarium and had lunch at a local cafe down the street. It was a sunny, not-too-cold day - really, one can't ask for much more on a February day north of the tropics. Last year it snowed a bajillion inches and the year before, it was 70 degrees and super windy. Today's weather was pleasant, unobtrusive. What a birthday should be. And I spent it in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, in the Amazon rainforest, and in Australia. Very cool. The night ended with some tasty Ethiopian food with a few friends. When they sang the happy birthday song to me in the small, crowded restaurant, the bartender turned down the traditional music/CNN playing on the speakers and instead blasted a recording of the happy birthday song. I'm sure my face was bright red. Tomorrow, I will be partying it up with some other friends in Annapolis. Every year, I swear that I will celebrate on one day only, dammit, but it still turns into a multi-day affair anyway. I'm okay with that.

The bigger news this year was Egypt's liberation following the stepping down of 30-year president Hosni Mubarak. I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't follow current events in that country because I figured they were one of the more progressive Middle Eastern countries and were therefore not a cause for concern. In any case, it's wonderful to hear that the Egyptian people have been heard, and I hope that the transition to a better and freer country is peaceful. It is worrisome that other countries like Iran are clamping down on their citizens in order to prevent the same thing from happening there. In other words, don't get your hopes up about the rest of the region following Egypt's lead. This may be the relative calm before the storm.

Freedom

2011-01-30T17:12:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I took my ten-dollar Groupon and headed over to the Newseum. And thank goodness for the Groupon, because in a town full of free museums, I wouldn't pay the $21.95 plus tax it normally costs to go otherwise. The Newseum is run by a non-profit organization, so I can see why they need to charge something for admission, but I find something wrong with the fact that a museum celebrating one of our basic freedoms costs so much to get into. Apparently the Newseum costs a ton for upkeep, so maybe they should work on reducing those costs so that they can reduce the cost to visitors.

Enough ranting. The Newseum is a really cool place. I already had a strong appreciation for journalism, thanks to my fine undergraduate journalism education, but I think the museum packs so much history and culture in that even the most curmudgeonly, anti-media person would find something there to appreciate. The admission ticket is good for two consecutive days, and it would really take that much time to really read and watch all of the content. It gives you a different perspective of the current events that have impacted our lives - I remember how I felt as a regular citizen during 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, but seeing how the media reported on what was happening was fascinating. For example, have you ever thought about how newspapers in New Orleans continued reporting and publishing without electricity, or even offices? They figured out a way to pick up and move the whole shop so that they could at least publish an online version. They managed to resume printing a dead-trees version within days (or a couple weeks) after the hurricane. The stories of reporters from both of those tragic events are so moving, and their perspectives make you think about them in ways you hadn't considered as a news consumer.

Here's a dilemma for you to ponder. Say you're a reporter, and you're covering some tragedy. It's your job to provide an objective report of what's happening in front of you. You know that stopping to help people will insert you into the story and keep you from reporting objectively. But these people need help. We're all human after all, and it's possible that no one else will come by later to help them. What do you do? The 9/11 and Katrina stories and the gallery of incredibly moving Pulitzer prize-winning photographs show how journalists dealt with that dilemma, sometimes with good outcomes and sometimes with lasting regret.

Thankfully the Newseum isn't just about the tragedies; it also showcases the history of journalism in the U.S. and around the world and celebrates pop culture in the media as well (see: the Elvis exhibit). Martin Sheen tells the history of the freedom of the press in the U.S. (That man was born to be the voice of American history, wasn't he? I would believe anything he told me.) A giant map on the wall shows the levels of freedom the press enjoys in each country around the world. Guess what: the press in most countries are either partially free or not free. We may despise the things that people in the media say or do in this country, but the freedom to say or do those things is rare and precious. Just as we are free to say what we wish, we are also free to not listen to things we don't like or don't agree with - something that we should exercise more than we do.

Speaking of which, do you know the 5 basic freedoms in the U.S.? Most people can name freedom of speech and freedom of religion - do you know the other three?

Aural memories

2011-01-17T09:53:00.002-05:00

I'm trying to recreate the music mixes that carried me through workouts past
I should have written them down
I should have backed them up
But I didn't
and now they're lost on an old iPod
recycled
gone.
So I create new playlists
dredge my memories
wrack my brain
trying to remember the songs that were connected
in what order.
But some songs appeared more than once
so I connect them to memories
like treadmill running and elliptical trudging at my old gym
or the 8K I ran through the streets of Chicago.
But that was many years ago
Many playlists ago
So I do my best. Maybe new memories will jog old ones
or maybe the songs will re-mingle and I'll have new connections to re-remember
when I have to start all over again.

Blow my mind

2011-01-07T21:09:00.000-05:00

I have discovered the WNYC Radiolab podcasts. There have been other podcasts that have caught my attention for weeks on end, like WUNC's The Story, as well as everyone's favorites, This American Life, Science Friday, and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. They're fun and entertaining, but eventually I grew weary of listening to people's tragic stories, Science Friday can be a little dry sometimes, and WWDTM's formulaic format gets old after a while. I still love This American Life, but it only plays once a week. Radiolab provides hours of entertainment and about subjects that I never gave much thought to. Jad and Robert dive deep into every subject they cover, wandering on tangents that are only loosely related to each other, incorporating sounds and ideas that round out each story. This isn't just people talking, this is a sonic journey. And it blows my mind.

Last week, I woke up early and went to the gym before work. At 6am, I hopped on the bus in the cold darkness and listened to the podcast that came out a full year ago about animal minds. As I walked four blocks from the bus stop to the gym, I listened to the hosts and guests tell the story of how a group of divers cut fishing nets away to free a trapped blue whale off the coast of San Francisco, and I teared up as they described how she swam up to each diver to thank him for helping her. It was amazing and moving, and the rest of the hour-long story was just as smart and moving.

Yesterday, I listened to the podcast about words while I walked to work under a vanilla sky, and as Jad and Robert talked to various people about language and about how acquiring language changes how we think and live, I realized that I was beginning to think about my world in a different way. This is not just about seeing something in a different light or learning something new. Radiolab creates a new world for me. I find myself utterly fascinated by ideas that never even occurred to me before.

Seriously, check it out. Go to the website and watch the videos and check out the extras. You won't be disappointed.

Ahoy, matey!

2011-01-02T16:11:00.000-05:00

January 1st is a good marker for people to use to start anew, but without the concept of a calendar system, it's really just another day that happens to occur soon after the winter solstice. Life is cyclical, so lucky us, we get lots of opportunities to start over. Even so, leaving 2010 behind feels good. I can't help but think that 2011 will be so much better, and not only because my birthday this year falls on 2-11-2011, a nice neat number. I bought a Salvador Dali wall calendar for my bedroom and a calendar of tall ships for my office. I've been thinking about Dali a lot lately after having a few weird dreams set in landscapes that would make any Surrealist painter proud, so glancing at his artwork every day feels fitting. The calendar was made by a European company, so the week starts with Monday, not Sunday. It also denotes the holidays for a number of other countries, including Japan. Turns out that my birthday falls on Japan's National Foundation Day. As for the tall ships, I wanted something totally random to hang in my office cave, and I like tall ships, with all of their masts and sails.

It seems like every year, I spend time thinking about what I'm going to do in the coming year, how I'm going to improve myself, which interests I'm going to dive into. But not this year. I'm not making any resolutions or goals. This year, I don't care. At all. And that makes me very happy.
----
Today was a neat day at the zoo. I got to watch the rainbow boas being fed. They each get a dead rat that has been frozen, thawed, and warmed slightly. Not so exciting for us humans, but when the keeper wiggles it around a little, the boa (which eats only every few months) snatches it up, coils tightly around it, and slowly gulps it down through its long body. After a holiday season full of hearty food and a little too much beer, eating like a snake sounds about right these days.

After my shift, I wandered up to check out the lion cubs, who were all outside with their mothers on this cool, damp day. Good God, are they cute. Whoa. Serious kryptonite. Combine the curiosity of kittens with the rambunctiousness of puppies and the exotic draw of the African bush and you get seven African lion cubs in a park in the middle of a big city. Sorry, panda-lovers, these guys are way cuter than Tai Chan. Whoa.

Breakfast on the bus

2010-12-15T19:39:00.000-05:00

This December morning is magical.
The thick yellow sun, heavy like a runny yolk, rises above the buildings
poked by the bare branches
spraying light up to the puffs of clouds.
The trees grow woody nodes where their leaves once hung, protecting them from the cold wind
that shuffles leaves and litter and snow along the sidewalks.
There's peace here, buried among the coats and mittens and holiday madness
like the feeling of toast and eggs, sunny-side up
getting a start on a quiet day.

Life is a bowl of...roasted vegetables?!

2010-11-28T18:27:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about a conversation that my cousin and I had a few weeks ago, about people who feel "called" to do something good - people who believe that they are "special" and will somehow change the world. Some of those people will become Tom of Tom's Shoes, or Bill Gates, or the Cousteaus. But most of those people will, at some point, be forced to accept the fact that This Is All There Is. That the next big thing, which they believe they will create, is not just around the corner. That life is just a bunch of trials and errors made on a treadmill that get us mostly nowhere. Those of my generation might be tempted to partially blame the movie "Dead Poets Society" and its mantras of seizing the day and letting loose a mighty yawp for inspiring such a (delusional?) can-do attitude. What, then, of rumors about how the boomer generation, so idealistic in the '60s and '70s, sold out for a pension and a station wagon? Are dreams of changing the world just delusions to get us through our youth, and does maturity mean accepting that we're never going to be a star?

What a thought. Is that true? Do we all reach some point at which we must admit that our loftiest of goals are just dreams that keep us moving? Or do those who succeed do so because they possess some innate quality, and that if we dig deep and find that special quality within us, we too can make a real difference? Or perhaps, a third option: maybe not all changes come in the same size. Maybe even small wins can change the world. Maybe we must accept that our lives are exactly what they look like, and not what we dream they should be, but that doesn't preclude us from doing something good anyway. A recent study found that people who daydream are less happy than people who are focused on the present. But if we don't dream, do we have any chance of getting what we really want?

A quote from this morning's tea: "Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think." -- Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (often attributed to French essayist Jean de La Bruyère)

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I made roasted cauliflower again today. If life was just roasted cauliflower, I would be okay with that. Well, that and leftover pizza...

Pierced

2010-11-25T21:36:00.000-05:00

How can two holes make you feel whole? And yet, they have. My ears were first pierced when I was very young; I don't remember a time when I couldn't wear earrings to make me feel like a girl, to embellish my dress or stand out in a crowd. I don't remember the punching of the second holes, but after a time, I let them close up in the middle, a visible hole without an exit. This year, I punched them through again, first with diamonds, then with birds that look like whales. I contemplated a third set but couldn't get up the nerve at the mall to face the gun. Lately, I dreamed of holes in odd places, and when I woke, I couldn't imagine not having them. So yesterday I went for it. I walked into a tattoo parlor, paid my fee, and let a heavily tattooed, earlobe-stretched man stick needles in my lobes and fill the gap between the birds that look like whales and the cartilage fold with blue gem-topped stainless steel studs. They were sore last night; today they feel fine. Twenty-four hours later, I can barely remember a time without them.

November Prairie

2010-11-16T19:59:00.000-05:00

I went to Chicago this weekend to visit my family. I didn't go to the place I grew up, nor to the place I lived for three years, nor to my mom's first apartment, which felt like home the minute I walked into it, nor even my mom's condo, which no one lives in right now. Instead, I went to the house in the suburbs that my mom's boyfriend bought. She lives there now. To many of my friends, going to visit their parents is "going home". To me, it's just going to visit my family. Home is where I live.

Chicago may not be home anymore, but it's still the place that wraps around me like an old familiar blanket every time. On this typical November weekend, it was warm one day, then rainy and grey, then chilly with a bitter wind. When the sky wasn't grey, it was bright blue, the yellow sun low in the sky, on a long angle to the land. The sad, bare trees were a shock compared to the mostly green with orange tinge here in the Mid-Atlantic; all I ever remember of Chicago are the leafless trees, the grey sky, the blasting wind. Summer doesn't seem real; Chicago in my mind is perpetually November.

My mom lives down the street from a forest preserve. Despite the chilly air, we walked the dog along the paved path that winds around a lake and passes through wooded areas and tallgrass prairie. Geese and gulls flock to the lake, but we didn't see many other birds. Since my family moved to the city, I haven't spent much time in the suburbs, and for the first time ever, I recognized the forest preserve as part of the native landscape. Before humans took over, the woods and the prairie, like the ones in this preserve, spanned the land, and now I felt a closeness to it that I hadn't felt before. I heard it whisper its secrets, sigh its November sigh, and hunker down for the winter.

Turning point

2010-11-10T20:57:00.000-05:00

Okay, so it's been a rough year. Things didn't go our way, and we've been a brat about it. A breakup, a missed job opportunity, internal turmoil over a milestone, troubled mind over troubled times, those things are small. They leave small wounds that heal quickly, and they'll likely return in other forms in the future. They are not a lost job, a bankruptcy, a serious illness or injury, the death of a loved one, homelessness, natural disasters, a mugging. Those are all things that people around us have experienced in the past year. Those are things that leave lasting marks.

We are fortunate, after all. We have homes, jobs (some of us), our health, and people to lean on. If some of those things are not to our liking, some day, they will be. Or not. But if we have them at all, we are lucky. So no more whining. No more mulling over said difficulties. Life is just life, and as long as we open our eyes each day, life will keep going. Tragedies will occur. If we are lucky, they will not happen to us.

Give it a try

2010-11-09T21:26:00.000-05:00

I like cauliflower well enough. I'll eat it anytime it appears in a dish or on a veggie tray or in a California-style mix of frozen vegetables. But I haven't made much of a conscious effort to cook with it. Unlike its cruciferous cousin broccoli, it just doesn't excite me. But recently someone (I don't remember who) wrote that anyone who doesn't like cauliflower should try it roasted - it will change how they think about the vegetable. So I gave it a shot. I bought a large, solid head of cauliflower, cut it up into medium-sized florets, drizzled it with canola oil and a healthy sprinkling of garam masala, and roasted it in a 350 degree oven for...a while. Maybe 30 minutes? Until it gained that roasted brown color and a few edges started to look burned. I ate it with homemade red lentil/split yellow pea curry and brown rice. Twice. Tonight, I just finished off the remainder of the cauliflower, cold, right from the fridge. And let me tell you, the person who recommended roasting cauliflower was right. It changed my world. The cauliflower itself became sweet and tender and velvety in the oven, and the sweetness of the garam masala, which contains cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom (among other spices) gave it more depth and richness. Roasted cauliflower will definitely be a go-to for future Indian dishes, and I'll have to try it with other spices as well. Maybe spicy, with zucchini, corn, and black beans in quesadillas? Layered in a lasagna? Pureed like mashed potatoes? Do you have any favorite cauliflower recipes you can recommend?

Color me inspired.

The Classified Ads Section

2010-11-07T20:30:00.001-05:00

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Smart, talented, accomplished copy writer seeks gainful employment in the Kansas City area. View samples of award-winning work at http://jessiwithrow.carbonmade.com/.
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Start-up nonprofit organization seeks writers, editors, photographers, and videographers to contribute and edit content for online publication focusing on culture and biodiversity. Visit www.izilwane.org for more information.

Sanity restored

2010-10-31T09:59:00.000-04:00

Yes, I attended the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear yesterday. It was great. Everyone was polite and fun and friendly. It was basically a live, three-hour Daily Show/Colbert Report Variety Show. Which is exactly what I figured it would be. I never expected this rally to be anything but entertainment. Everyone who pontificated on the meaning of the rally before it happened and thought it would either hit the mark or be a disaster clearly has not watched Stewart and Colbert in action. Or they just don't get it. Either way, yesterday was hours of entertainment, with a not-so-subtle message that politicians and the media reinforce stereotypes and play on our deepest, darkest, irrational fears to acquire and maintain our attention. I thought Jon Stewart's closing address went on just a smidge too long and came off as a little too preachy, but I appreciate and agree with his sentiment. Like many other aspects of modern society, we have latched onto new technology and new process that gives us ever greater access to all of the information and opinion we could ever want, but we didn't stop along the way to figure out how to use it for good and not evil. Like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, we got so excited about what we created that we didn't build in a function to control it. I don't think politicians are bad, and I don't think that people in the media are bad. I think that our collective ADD has gotten the better of us, and lacking the time or mental agility to process every bit and bite that comes our way, we let the shortest and flashiest pieces capture our attention. To change that, we have to come at it from all directions, make a concerted attempt to alter the way we operate in many different aspects of life.

Jon Stewart's intention for the rally was to say, "I think that all this extremism, perpetuated by both the media and our governmental leaders, is destroying our country, and I want that to change", and to show that there is a critical mass of people in this country who agree with that statement. As Stewart said yesterday, "If you want to know why I’m here and what I want from you, I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted. Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine. Thank you." Stewart's message wasn't one of any political or religious persuasion, but rather an attempt to recognize the dark path we've wandered down and turn us back in the other direction, toward something that presents the better in all of us, not the worst. That he did it through humor makes it all the more genius.

It's been too long...

2010-10-27T22:14:00.002-04:00

...since I been out West. In the mountains. Among the mule deer and magpies. Where the wind blows between craggy snow-capped rocks and waves the tall grass below an unremitting sky. It's this West where I found myself, met by the Front Range around every corner, pulled down a long road and humbled by the grandest rock temples in Utah, bowled over by brown rolling hills and bubbling mud pots in Montana, beckoned by a nightly loon in Wyoming. I've been to many places where the birds and the squirrels, the flowers and the trees, the sun and the moon have captivated me, left me breathless and sobbing, but only in the West do sorrow and joy feel futile. There, one can stand in a spot away from the roads and neither see nor hear a trace of human presence. Were it not for the clothes on my body and the pack on my back, I would not know when in time I stood in that place. It may as well have been thousands of years in the past, or perhaps many eons ahead. It matters not what I feel for those places, because they do what they have always done, and they will continue doing so long after I am gone. My presence in that place counts for nothing besides the blades of grass my feet have bent down and the warmed air that has been expelled from my lungs. Standing in the open, exposed to the blue sky and the dry wind, I discovered the bold outline of my self, without any tree or building to blur the edges. And when I left that place, a part of me stayed behind, waiting to be reclaimed some day.

That's what the West does. It leaves you aching for more, just a piece to hold, to remember. But like an unrequited love, the sky and the open land don't care about you. They don't need you. They do what they do, and you just get in the way. It's a reminder that we are nothing, we are part of the Earth, we are but one more speck that will pass by this plot in the continuum of time. And still we try to save the Earth, to save ourselves indeed.

New project

2010-10-24T22:02:00.001-04:00

Remember how I said a while ago that I was going to try to use my writing skillz more? Well, it turns out that my editing skillz may be more valuable, and I've found a way to put them to good use. Back at the end of August, I saw a post on the High Country News employment page about a start-up nonprofit organization looking for writers, editors, and photographers to contribute to a webzine (or e-zine, as they called it) that covers issues relating to biodiversity and culture. I contacted them and committed to editing a couple of pieces that they were getting ready to post. Then they realized that I could really edit, not just for grammar and spelling, but for style, content, and structure as well, so I got bumped up to Senior Editor and have received mucho kudos for my skillz (which clearly I am not exhibiting in this post, but whatever). The same thing happened back in high school, when I joined the student newspaper and they made me an editor after the first issue. That's when I decided to go to journalism school. Because as it turns out, no matter what else I may be interested in or enjoy doing, working with words is what I do best. And I love the challenge of molding an article into a piece that's clearly written, compelling, and informative, while maintaining the writer's voice and style. That's what I'm doing for this new organization, and I'm interacting with some fascinating people in the process. Go to www.izilwane.org to see what some interesting and talented people are working to protect these days.

I don't mean to get a big head about my craft. I don't want to sound like I think I'm some Big Shot just because I know the difference between "its" and "it's" and whether to spell out a number or use a numeral. I'm not trying to brag. It's just that, in counting up everything I have attempted over my thirty years, I realized that I have failed at a lot. That fact is something I just recently came to terms with. I feel like a big fat loser in my current job - in my current life, really - so being reminded that I'm good at something has saved my soul. I can't do algebra or calculus, I don't know much about economics or agricultural practices, I can't run a mile in less than ten minutes or ski or draw or raise a lot of money, but I can work with words, dammit! I'm learning a great deal about wildlife conservation that I couldn't get from a university course, so working with Izilwane is supplementing my education as well. And who knows, maybe it'll lead to a cool new adventure.

Making a mockery of Congress

2010-09-26T10:46:00.000-04:00

On Friday, Stephen Colbert testified in a House Judiciary Sub-Committee hearing on Protecting America's Harvest. Arturo Rodriguez, President of the United Farmworkers Union, had appeared on The Colbert Report to talk about the union's new campaign, Take Our Jobs, to increase awareness of how hard farmworkers work to pick, package, and ship our country's fruits, vegetables, eggs, and meat, as well as the plight of the many immigrants who come here legally and illegally to do these hard jobs. People complain that these immigrants take jobs away from Americans, so the union's campaign encourages people to at least try to do these kinds of difficult jobs. As Colbert proved on his show Thursday night, during which he showed a clip of him working on a New York farm, immigrants are not taking these jobs from most Americans. Most people do not want to work on a farm. It's really hard work, for very little money (most farms are, in fact, not profitable), and it has to be done year-round in all kinds of weather. The number of farms in this country has been steadily decreasing, as have farm income and the number of operators for which farming is their primary occupation. (See some stats here and here.)

Colbert appeared in front of the subcommittee committee in character, although he submitted a more serious written testimony for the record (go here and click on Colbert's name to view his written testimony). (For the record, most people, including government officials, often submit a written testimony that is different from the one they present, mostly because they only have a few minutes to present.) He was awkward, annoying, rude, and opinionated, just like he is on his show. Some people didn't get it. Others thought he was making a mockery of Congress. To those people, I say: Have you seen Congress lately? They don't need a TV personality to make them look foolish - they do a fine job on their own. Plenty of celebrities testify on the Hill, but we generally don't hear about them or the causes they're supporting unless we read the Washington Post celebritologists or pay close attention to the causes they support. Colbert made a fool of himself on purpose because he knew that would draw attention to the issue. Toward the end of the hearing, he was asked why he was interested in the issue.

"I like talking about people who don't have any power," he said. "It seems like the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come here. . . . And at the same time, we invite them here and ask them to leave. . . . I don't want to take anyone's hardship away from them [but] migrant workers suffer and have no rights."

Let's hope this is not the last we hear of this important issue.

For the record, I thought he was hilarious. I don't know how the people in that room kept a straight face.

Fall Melancholy

2010-09-05T09:49:00.001-04:00

For some people, the deep dark winter is the saddest time of year. For me, autumn is the most melancholy of seasons. Already, the angle of the sun is lower. Mid-morning is the day just getting its bearings, not the searingly hot magnifying glass of a day that is already many hours in. The evening hours feel a little more urgent as we lose sunlight the quickest of any time of the year. It may still be hot, but there's a sense that the joyousness of summer will soon end. I have a feeling that this autumn may be even more melancholy, because it marks the end of a summer I didn't really get a chance to appreciate. It was just too hot, and this year has been just too hard. I've been looking forward to fall with the hopes that it would bring cooler temperatures and a sense of peace, but with the coolness this weekend came a yearning for hot, but less humid, weather. A yearning for what summer should have been.

The one aspect of autumn that I do enjoy is the beginning of a chance to start anew. I'm not religious, but I've always loved Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, because it signals a time of reflection that lasts through the Gregorian New Year (January 1st) and on to my birthday in February. Perhaps it seems odd that Rosh Hashanah is actually a solemn holiday, but I get it. You can't start anew until you mourn for the mistakes you've made, regret that you didn't spend more time with the people you love, didn't do enough of the things that fill your heart with joy. You can't do better until you know what you've done wrong. This year I'll have some extra time for that - Rosh Hashanah starts sundown on September 8th, which is earlier than usual. It's been a really rough year. Boy am I ready to start anew.

January, February, and March are difficult for me because I'm readying myself for the brighter days ahead that take too long to get here, but it's October and November that pull at my heart. The waning daylight, the rain and the wind, the coolness of the air, make me want to crawl into bed and pull a sweater over my head. Maybe this year will be different. I'll use my slow cooker more. Play outside more. Spend quality time with friends more. Get an early start on beginning anew.

Abandoned

2010-09-01T19:51:00.001-04:00

Earlier this year, my mother moved out of her condo in the city and into a house in the suburbs. From photos, it seems like a lovely home, in a lovely area, and she was able to put in a pond and a garden, like the one we used to have when we were all a family. She's much happier now, but her home is not close to either of the train lines that transmit people around the metropolitan area, so when I visit, I will either have to stay with friends in the city and somehow schlep out to see her, or stay with her in the burbs and schlep into the city somehow.

After this weekend, my brother and sister-in-law are moving from the same city in which my mother lives to a city on the other side of the lake. They will have better jobs, a cute house, a cozy life, but if I want to see them, I have to fly into another city and schlep a few hours by car to their fair home.

Next week, my father is moving all the way across the country. When I moved home from college, I lived with him for 8 months. When I went to grad school, I lived just two hours away. For the past 18 months, he has lived just a few hours by car from me. My visit this weekend to celebrate his 60th birthday will be the last time I can visit any of my family members without having to get on an airplane and endure a long schlep.

My family has been scattered for years. I went to college, then my brother went to college. I moved home from college and my mother moved out of the house. I moved up to the city and my father moved to the South. I moved to the South and my brother moved to the city where I once lived. I moved a couple states north, then my father moved a couple states north of me. Now, three of us have moved yet again. The four of us are different-colored juggling balls, and the hands that catch us keep repositioning. But I'm the one who's been trying for 18 months to move from here, and now I'm the only one who doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Very soon, they'll all be so very far from me, the one who tries the hardest to maintain relationships with everyone else. They all have significant others, companions with whom they share their lives and their homes. I am 30, and I have a roommate and a cat and an apartment that leaks.

What a dismantling year it has been.

Write on

2010-08-27T19:24:00.000-04:00

I work in an office where a lot of economic analysis is done by people with very advanced degrees. I spend most of my time reading and writing god-awful technical papers about economic opportunities and trade-offs and production practices and blah blah blah. My technical writing is terrible. I think the only reason they hired me was because they thought I could write (I certainly can’t do statistics very well!), but pretty much everything I’ve written for them has been edited and rewritten until I don’t recognize it anymore. It has made me forget that I am a writer. It has made me dislike writing.

But recently, I’ve received kudos from a couple of people for my non-economics writing. I’m tempted to blow off my mother’s compliments, because whose mother doesn’t love everything they do, but her comments were more than just “you’re a good writer”. She complimented my style in a your-blog-post-reminded-me-again-that-you’re-a-good-writer kind of way. Anyway, it meant something to me. Then, my professor thanked me for writing an exemplary research paper and asked if he could use it as an example for future classes, and it reminded me of other professors who made similar remarks, including my eighth-grade English teacher whose recommendation to become a journalist sent me on the path I eventually took. Maybe some of those comments were offered following exasperation at the lack of writing ability my classmates have exhibited. Some people are just really bad writers; I certainly have no right to judge them, because I am horrible at math in the same way that some people absolutely mangle full paragraphs. But I’ll acknowledge that perhaps I have a way with words, and I definitely enjoyed writing all of those papers.

So I take back some of the harsh words I’ve said to myself recently about how I followed my English teacher’s advice to become a writer, the seemingly easy way forward, rather than push myself to become a scientist, just because no one ever told me I was good at biology. The fact is that I love both writing and science. Even though the only science I currently write about is informative but boring as hell due to the style requirements of the reports I write, I feel connected to the science writing community. I don’t have to give up on writing just because I’m trying to become a scientist. Rachel Carson was a journalist and a writer, and even though she didn’t have a PhD, her work spurred on the eventual ban on domestic use of DDT and led to other environmental research and activism in this country. She was just the first of a really long list of people who have found ways to effectively communicate with the masses on scientific topics. For evidence, head to the blogosphere and marvel at the vast array of sites where scientists write about the latest news and research in their field. Then take to Twitter and Facebook and watch scientists and non-scientists alike share those ideas with everyone they know (or don’t know).

I kick myself often for getting a degree in journalism instead of biology. (What I should kick myself for is not taking enough science classes in college.) But that’s the past, and now I’m taking science classes, so it’s all good. The point of all my rambling is that my goal from day one has been to make a difference in this world. I avoided jobs in journalism because I thought that being an environmental scientist or a policy maker would have a bigger impact. I think I still have that bias, but I’m realizing that with all of the ways to communicate that didn’t exist eight years ago when I finished college, it doesn’t have to be either/or. The combination of the ClimateGate discussion, the global climate change dialogue overall, and working with a bunch of mathematicians has made me realize that we really need more people who have a science background and can effectively communicate information of a scientific nature to people without any scientific training at all. I don’t know that I can dedicate my life to sitting in front of a computer typing articles and reports - I’d rather be in the field restoring wildlife habitat or otherwise making place-based natural resource management decisions - but I promise to put my communication skills to good use in this blog and in other ways that educate people about the natural world and inspire them to protect the plants, animals, soil, water, and air on this rock we call home.

Close encounters with wildlife

2010-08-08T21:50:00.001-04:00

Today I hiked a portion of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. I parked along Virginia State Road 601, picked up a blue-blazed connector trail, and hopped on the AT into Shenandoah National Park and up to Compton Peak. I've read "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson a couple of times, so it was fun to actually step onto the trail. According to the trail markers, I hiked about 10.5 miles, but I think some of the markers was wrong - according to them, it's one mile from the trail head at VA-601 to the park boundary. I beg to differ. No way is it really just one mile. It's definitely 0.7 miles from the trail head to the point where the connector trail meets the AT, and I think the distance from that point to the park boundary is more like 1.5 or 2 miles. So by my count, my hike was more like 12 miles, which would make it my longest hike ever.

And what a hike it was. It was great - not-too-hot, not-too-muggy weather, all shaded, not too buggy. The connector trail is narrow and countless spiders have spun webs between trees and across the trail, so I grabbed a long stick and waved it in front of me to avoid getting facefulls of web and spider. Anyone watching me from afar might have questioned my mental fitness, but it worked pretty well. I was able to get within 15 or twenty feet of three deer, which was pretty neat - deer may be pretty commonplace around here, but there's still something wild about meeting them face-to-face. I'm a little concerned about the fact that they weren't the least bit afraid of me, but perhaps that's what happens when humans and wildlife live in such close proximity. I also spied a number of swallowtail butterflies and one luna moth that had been dealt a fatal blow to its wing. It was huge and looked like its features has been painted onto delicate silk.

Swallowtail

Luna moth

I also had one close encounter that left me briefly shaken. As I was trekking along, I came across a coiled black streak next to the trail. It rattled. I quickly took many paces backward. Some people are terrified of meeting a bear in the woods. I'm not one of those people, maybe because I've only seen a wild bear from my car window, or maybe because bears cannot really sneak up on you. If a bear wants to attack, you know it way ahead of time. Snakes are different. They're fascinating animals, and without the prospect of an injection of deadly neurotoxin, I would have sauntered closer for a better look. Thank goodness for the warning rattle. Regardless of my fascination, my big hiking fear is coming across a venomous snake and getting bitten before I have time to realize what's going on.

Thus was my dilemma today - tempt a timber rattlesnake by trying to zoom past it on the other side of the trail, risk serious poison ivy by detouring through the dense woods, or wait it out. I took a couple steps into the woods and decided not to attempt a detour. I tossed rocks and large branches toward the snake, hoping to spook it into slithering off into the woods. I took a few steps up the trail to assess whether a pass was possible, and the snake rattled again and coiled back. Crap. (Note to self: take some wilderness training courses.) After a few minutes, I decided on a fourth approach: pile some big sticks and branches in the middle of the trail, so if the snake attacks it would have to get past the branches. I tossed a few branches into the middle of the trail, took a deep breath, and walked very quickly past the snake, as far away from it as possible. It made a racket as I passed, but it didn't strike. Whew.

I may not have been bitten by the rattler, but I was bitten by the AT bug. I would never dream of attempting the full trail, but the little thought in the back of my mind about maybe backpacking a couple of sections one day has turned into a bigger "I think I'll start trying to plan an AT weekend for this fall" kind of thought. We'll see.

On the way back to the highway, I stopped at The Apple House for a pork BBQ sandwich and a sample of their homemade apple cinnamon doughnuts. Pretty tasty. They smoke the meat right there, but I have to say I was a little disappointed at its lack of real smokiness. But with a pickle spear, some coleslaw, potato chips, and a bit of bubbly root beer, it made for a restorative post-hike meal.

But yeah, I'll be sore tomorrow.

Everything is broken

2010-08-05T21:14:00.000-04:00

In true Ikea-furniture form, my dresser, on the decline for many months, gave up the fight recently. The bottom of the top drawer has fallen and my clothes have slid into the drawer below, which independently fell off its tracks, an unfixable plight. The middle drawer hangs off-kilter, as if an earthquake had jostled the whole unit. The contents of the middle drawer are folded in a cardboard box across the room. The contents of the top drawer just slide down the broken drawer bottom, and every time I want an article of clothing, I have to pick through the debris.

My iPod, which doesn't hold a battery charge for more than a day or two, also refuses to play newly added music when on shuffle. It just plays a random mix of songs from the same 5 or 6 albums, mostly the ones I've owned the longest. My digital camera often forgets the date, and when I use the digital viewfinder, the batteries drain quickly. Our Internet fizzles out at least one day a week, and sometimes it's out all weekend, thanks to bad wiring in the apartment.

Last summer, someone put a dent in my car. Not an oops-I-bumped-your-car kind of dent, but an I-whacked-your-car-with-a-baseball-bat kind of dent. The perils of street parking. I haven't gotten it fixed yet, and I worry that people judge me. I'm the girl with the rusted dent, because I don't have the cash to fix it, and therefore I am less cool or grown-up or something.

I've had my bed for fully half of my entire life, and over time, it has accrued a canal down the middle, where my singular body has worn it down. No amount of mattress flipping or foam padding will remedy the problem, and I often get out of bed in the morning just because I'm too uncomfortable to lie there any longer. Some of the knives in the set I bought a few years ago have lost their handles. My plates and mugs and bowls are chipped. My favorite wine glass set has been reduced to one sad glass.

In my mind, I have a nice life, with nice things. My dishes match, and I cook yummy food with good utensils and sharp knives. My car is admired for being in great shape despite being eight years old, and its color is lovely. My camera takes beautiful pictures, my iPod broadens my musical horizons, my bed cradles me to sleep each night and I wake feeling rested.

I made a choice to live in a newly renovated unit in a convenient location, thinking that I would have a nice life. But all it has meant is that my money goes to my rent, not to fixing or replacing all of the broken things in my life. I know that having nice things doesn't necessarily lead to true happiness. I know that they're just things, and that I'm fortunate to have them at all. But having old, broken things is not inspiring. I love entertaining but I don't want to serve my guests on my chipped, mismatched dishes. I'm embarrassed to show anyone my room, or God forbid, have them sleep in my bed. It comes down to quality of life. There is no shame in liking nice things, especially if having them makes it easier to spend more time enjoying the things that really matter, like dinner parties with friends, great shots of wildlife on a hike, music that makes a moment, or a personal space that just makes living more comfortable.

Breaking the cycle

2010-07-25T08:17:00.000-04:00

Last week, while catching up on my This American Life podcasts, I listened to a story from 2008 about Geoffrey Canada's work in Harlem. He had noticed that the things most middle-class, suburban parents know about raising children were nowhere to be found in inner city families. He wondered whether the secret for breaking the cycle of poverty could actually be teaching inner city parents about raising and educating children and providing children better educational experiences. So, he started the Harlem Children's Zone. In 1997, HCZ brought programs to a 24-block area in Harlem, and the project grew to 100 blocks in 2007. Today, the project serves more than 8,000 and 6,000 adults and includes Baby College, which works with parents and their newborns, Harlem Gems, a preschool program, and the Promise Academy, a public charter school. The organization also provides programs to help people manage their asthma and fight obesity. When the first kids in the program took their assessment tests, they ranked above the state average, which shows that the program could be working. The hope is that the kids in these programs will graduate from high school, perhaps go to college, and delay parenthood until they are financially and mentally ready to be parents. And when they do become parents, hopefully they will employ the same child-rearing techniques their parents learned and used.

The program is old news by now - Sunday Morning featured it last year, Geoffrey Canada was on The Colbert Report, and while preparing the FY2010 budget, President Obama proposed including $10 million for the 20 Promise Neighborhoods program, which will replicate the HCZ program in 20 cities across the country. But it's worth talking about again and again, because this new model could be the approach that actually works for fighting poverty.

For more information about the program and its success, start first with Act One from the Going Big podcast, and then read the book written by the podcast's narrator, Paul Tough, called Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America.

Old Missouri adventures

2010-07-19T17:01:00.000-04:00

I'm in St. Louis for a conference this week. It feels strangely good to be back in the Midwest. I was worried that I hadn't brought nice enough clothing, annoyed that I was all bloated from the long heat wave and high humidity, insecure about my general lack of trendiness and my clothes that I worry scream "Limited Budget!", because that's how I generally feel in DC. Then all the St. Louisans got on the MetroLink to go to the Cardinals game, with their comfort-food Midwestern bodies (not necessarily fat, just normal-looking, not anorexic like on the East Coast) and their lack of being overly concerned about appearance. Then I felt better. Like I was home, back in a place that's much simpler.

The conference just started today, so I had much of the weekend to spend with old friends. Saturday night I got together with a friend from college who just married one of my Chicago friends - a fun merging of two worlds. Among the things we did that night was a trip to Ted Drewes, the best frozen custard place around. It's so good, Alton Brown visited it a few years ago during his "Feasting on Asphalt" series.

Sunday, we took a trip to Columbia, the ol' college town and home of many memories (some of which I'd like to forget), to walk around campus and visit with some other college friends who have had two children and conceived a third in the five years since I was there last. Their kids are great, and they are great parents. If I could be absolutely guaranteed that my children would be like that, I might give more consideration to becoming a parent myself.

Anyway, even after seeing the big changes on campus, around the downtown area, and in my friends' lives, it's nice to know that some things are still the same. I got quite nostalgic, feeling like I was back home where I belonged. My college friends and I joke around in ways that people on the East Coast don't seem comfortable with. Something about Midwestern sensibilities and the openness that comes with growing up in communities where people really get to know each other and talk about the things that really matter. It's too bad that Missouri is "fly-over country" to people on the East Coast, because I think the social and political atmosphere in this country would be different if Midwesterners weren't just seen as hoosiers, rednecks, farmers, or any of the other stereotypes that prevail. Being out here has just further solidified my need to get away from the Beltway. I never thought I'd get burned out on Washington DC, but after two years, it's happened.

The funny thing is, as much as I really love Missouri, I can't see myself moving back here. Why? There are lots of opportunities for outdoor recreation. There are Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and plenty of other organic/natural food options. According to my friend, there are few farmers' markets, which is puzzling, but not really limiting. There are young people who are professionals, smart, active, interesting. There is art, music, good food, plenty of good beer and wine - all things I enjoy. It's just not in your face like it is in major metropolitan areas. You have to look a little harder, and you have to drive everywhere. Perhaps my biggest concern is that I am a bit of an eco-snob. Yes, I'll admit it. People in Missouri are not necessarily eco-snobs. That kind of culture just isn't prevalent here. I was the silly hippie in my college days, and I'd be the silly hippie again if I moved back. For that reason alone, I was never fully content out here, and I just can't do that again. So, Missouri, I love you dearly and I promise to come visit more often. But I'm sorry, I just can't stay.

Missing the river

2010-07-08T21:16:00.000-04:00

I just finished writing a paper for my class about a natural place that's special to me. I chose the Katy Trail/Missouri River in Missouri. It made me really miss the river. I haven't been back to Missouri since a brief trip in 2005, and I haven't really connected with the place since my week-long adventure in 2003. When I was in college in Missouri, I used to ride my bike on the trail along the river, seeking out solace and answers from the crunch of the gravel under tire and the slow whoosh of the muddy water echoing off the bluffs. I also wrote for a local newspaper about the management issues associated with the river and the threatened and endangered species that biologists were trying to protect.

This fall, it will be ten years since that semester at the newspaper. Knowing what I know now about watersheds, natural resource management and policy making, I wish I could go back and redo that semester. Rewrite those articles and write some new ones as well. Investigate more. Talk to more people. I was a budding environmentalist those ten years ago, and all I knew was that I wanted to protect the animals, but those darn corn growers and their barges got in the way. I didn't understand just how complex the issue was, and I didn't know what questions to ask. I didn't know how to be a journalist.

Writing this paper reminded me of how special that river is, and how much I enjoy writing when I can be a little creative with it. Government reports are not the least bit creative, I can tell you that much. I've been doubting my writing skills lately, and in fact had forgotten how much I enjoyed writing until now. Rachel Carson was a writer and a scientist, and she recognized that she had a special role to fill by writing about environmental issues in a passionate way that moved people to take a stand against pesticides and pollution. I still haven't found my role, still haven't figured out how I can have an impact. I just have to remember the river and hope that if I can keep my boat upright, eventually it will take me where I'm supposed to end up.

Savory summer

2010-07-05T09:36:00.001-04:00

I resurrected my pepper plant, which I planted last year and harvested one small red pepper that was promptly mixed in a stir-fry. I kept it alive all winter, unwilling to trash a plant that seemed to be hanging in there. This spring, I added some organic fertilizer, gave it lots of love, and placed it on my fire escape to capture the sun's rays and hopefully a passing pollinator or two. It worked - I now have two peppers bulging out from the tall plant stalk. Every day I cheer it on, hoping that even in this ridiculous heat wave, I can have fresh, homegrown peppers in my fajitas instead of the $3.50-each store-bought kinds. I wish I had planted more veggies in my container garden this year. I got kind of discouraged after last year's flop, but maybe I'll try again for some cooler-weather goodies.

Speaking of fajitas, I marinated some chicken breasts in Whole Foods' brand Santa Fe marinade for 12 hours, then pan-cooked them whole. What a difference it makes. I cannot remember ever making such flavorful, juicy chicken. The garlic and herb flavor is tasty too - the last batch of chicken I made with this flavor turned into chicken salad with grapes and walnuts. I used to be against marinades but they just make life so much easier. And tastier.

Some other recent concoctions:
green bean and carrot salad with rice vinegar, toasted sesame oil, dried red pepper flakes, and salt
savory egg noodle kugel with shredded zucchini, mushrooms, and lentils (next time, with ricotta too)
smoothies with frozen spinach
sugar snap peas from the farmers market (perfect just as they are, no concocting needed)

It's hard to find inspiration to cook in this ridiculous heat, but as long as I'm going to be cooped up inside with the A/C blasting, may as well get creative. We'll see what this week's bounty brings.

Discoveries

2010-07-05T09:10:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, I joined a large portion of my family in Hilton Head, South Carolina, for some beachy time and good eatin'. So much good eatin'. After five days I felt like the snake that ate the alligator, except I didn't split in half like the snake did. To work off some of the food we ate, my brother, sister-in-law, and I took a couple of afternoon trips to check out parts of the island that existed before the golf courses and touristy resorts moved in.

On one afternoon, we went to the Coastal Discovery Museum at Honey Horn. The house on the property showcases a history of the island, both natural and human, and included an exhibit of photography from around the Carolinas. The house sits along some salt marshes, and visitors can wander along a trail through the property that winds past some boardwalks overlooking the salt marsh, small gardens, some bee hives, an old barn, and even a native historical site that is being rebuilt. It was hot and muggy and totally made me miss North Carolina. We were there at low tide, and in the flat areas along the marsh, fiddler crabs scurried everywhere like roaches, the males waving their one giant claw to woo the ladies. We saw some herons wandering through the grasses and heard other birds chirping everywhere. A green anole scurried along a tree near us, and the butterfly garden was aflutter.

The best part for me though was when my sister-in-law and I saw a bluebird fly onto a low branch nearby. Neither of us had seen a bluebird in person before, and even though I'm the nature nerd of the group, we were both equally awed. I am always wowed by nature, but there's something so special about seeing nature through the eyes of someone else, especially if they're not the type to get excited about things like that.

The next day, we went to the Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge. Again, hot and muggy, even early in the morning. We were hoping to see some gators, but no luck. We did see about a gajillion birds at Ibis Pond. I couldn't get any good close-ups because I realized after the fact that the super zoom on my camera only works when I turn on the digital display panel, which I don't use because it soaks up battery power. I brought my binoculars, and it seemed like my brother and sister-in-law really enjoyed getting to see the birds way up close through them. Unless they get into wildlife watching or hang out with me more often, they might not get to do that very often. I recognize that not everyone feels the need to experience nature as much as I do, but I hope that the experiences they had those two days made a difference to them. It gave me a new perspective on my volunteer work at the zoo as well, where most visitors will just walk through the exhibit without much afterthought, but a few might take away something meaningful from what they learned there.

Last weekend I hiked through Little Bennett Regional Park in Maryland, where I discovered some other new things, like the crayfish in the stream that eyed me and then scurried under a rock when I bent down to wash my hands after lunch. And the white-tailed deer that snorted and whined as it high-tailed it away from the trail I was walking on. And the giant red-headed woodpecker that startled me when I was too busy examining the map. I caught a quick glimpse as it flew by, but I didn't have enough time to see enough of the bird to identify it. Shortly afterward, I realized that the woods in that spot was particularly melodic and lamented the fact that I had spent too much time looking and not enough time listening to the sounds of the forest, so I sat on a bridge for ten minutes, just enjoying the sounds. Which unfortunately included road noise as well.

Summer

2010-06-27T16:18:00.002-04:00

It's hot. At or above 90 degrees just about every day for the past three weeks. Weather this hot, humid, and hazy is like the winter snowstorms, except it doesn't shut everything down. You can't really go outside for long periods of time without running for a temperature-controlled environment. In the winter, you know you're supposed to sit still, conserve your energy, and crochet or read or snuggle, so it's not so bad to stay inside. In the summer, you know you're supposed to go out and play as much as possible, because the days are long and everything is green and blooming, which makes it even more frustrating that the weather is unbearable. I can't even stand being in my exhibit at the zoo because even though it's slightly cooler than the weather outside, it's still just as humid (or worse), and therefore not really an escape from the heat. Instead, I'm stuck at home, daydreaming of the lush, cool, green forests and scenic shores of the Pacific Northwest. I've never been there, but I imagine that they're fantastic.

I've been daydreaming about Oregon lately while exploring professional opportunities there, but I also just started taking a course online through Oregon State University, so I'm in a sort of mental classroom out there. Yes, more school. When I finished grad school, the folks in the office where I did my work-study swore that I'd be back in school in a few years. At the time, I said oh hell no! but I'm eating my words now. I'm in the program that I should have been in all those years ago, when I opted for a degree in an "easier" field instead - I'm going for my Bachelor of Science in Natural Resources degree with a focus on fish and wildlife conservation. Two weeks into my first class and already I'm loving it. Online classes are great because you get to meet people in all different stages of their lives from all over the country. And you can do the work in your own time. So as long as I have to be stuck inside when it's hot and humid out, at least my coursework will keep me busy and engaged.

And come August and September, when all the back-to-school excitement starts up, I get to be a part of it again. Maybe I'm not buying things for my dorm room or eating in the dining halls, but I get to crack open my books and learn some new things.

Otherworldly

2010-06-06T21:35:00.000-04:00

Over Memorial Day weekend, I flew out to Salt Lake City, and rode down to Moab, Utah, with some friends for a weekend of tenting in the desert and hiking through the Mars-like terrain of Canyonlands and Arches National Parks and other scenic lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

I love camping. I wish I could spend my days sleeping in a tent, cooking food over the fire, and hiking around the area. I can't imagine much that would make me happier. The smell of campfire and sunscreen thrills me to no end. I think I'm secretly a holdover from our caveman days. However, there are some modern conveniences that I could do without during camping trips, but I don't think I'd want to:

S'mores, made with dark chocolate. A must-have.
I usually sleep with a Thermarest, which does the job but is rather narrow and not nearly cushy enough, so if I sleep on my back, my arms fall off the pad, and if I sleep on my side, my hips get sore. That's part of the fun of camping though, and it feels tough and rugged. For this trip, my friend supplied me with a real blow-up air mattress that covered the entire floor of my two-person tent. At first, I thought, "lame! real outdoorswomen do NOT sleep on air mattresses." But let me tell you, it was awesome. I am a changed woman. For car camping, I'm going with the air mattress all the way. Outdoorsy cred be damned.
Crocs. With socks. For the record, I think Tevas/Birkenstocks and socks look just fine too.
Aluminum foil. It makes the perfect packet for a wide array of foodstuffs to be cooked on or in a fire.
Here's where I admit that I am a foodie. Camping should not keep you from eating a tasty, well-prepared meal. That includes salmon fillets cooked on said foil over the fire, foil packets stuffed with chopped veggies and seasonings, dutch oven cobblers, chilis, and pancakes. Sure the usual burgers, hot dogs, bacon and eggs are tasty, especially after a long day on the trails or a cool night in the tent, but I kind of prefer fresh food to go with my fresh air. I recognize that this may not be feasible for backpacking trips, but it is indeed possible to eat chicken, snow peas, and rice with pesto sauce cooked over a camp stove in the Yellowstone backcountry. All it takes is a little preparation beforehand (cook and slice the chicken ahead of time, make and package the pesto, throw in some boil-in-bag rice, and pick snowpeas from the garden).
I'm not a big drinker, but wow, a cold beer tastes really good after a long day on the trail. I also really don't like whiskey, but a sip or two right after a hard hike is strangely refreshing. It washes away all the nasty sludge that accumulates on your tongue when you're huffing and puffing along switchbacks that wind straight up the side of a cliff.
Good friends with absurd/wacky/hilarious stories and some outlaw country music. No camping trip is the same without them. Many thanks to my Salt Lake crew for the awesome weekend!

Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip:

Weekend pursuits

2010-05-22T19:40:00.000-04:00

Some good things to do on a warm spring weekend:

Visit the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md. Take a guided or self-guided canoe trip around the bay, attend a seminar, go for a hike or a bird-watching trip, or talk to one of the scientists about the work they're engaged in to rehabilitate the Chesapeake Bay. Try to catch the yearly open house for additional fun and activities, including live music, a tutorial on raising bees, BBQ, a tour of the bay on a research boat, and an up-close look at a horseshoe crab.
Go for a bike ride on the Washington & Old Dominion trail. Park at a lot on the trail and ride west, farther than you think you should go, then coast downhill the whole way back.
Make southwestern turkey meatloaf with 2 lbs ground turkey thighs, breadcrumbs, 2 eggs, cumin, garlic, chili powder, oregano, chopped red pepper and red onion, corn, fresh cilantro, and tomatillo salsa. Top with avocado. Eat with a side of roasted butternut squash and mixed wild rice. Then share a cupcake with a friend and watch an uplifting movie.
Drink some Goose Island 312 Urban Wheat Beer and read an entire issue of Outside magazine in front of an open window while listening to the cars slosh in the rain on the main street below.
Engage in some serious snuggles with a very snuggly cat. The ideal time is 5:30am, when said cat is ready to get up but you are not.
Go to REI during a sale and spend way too much time shopping and much more money than you had intended. Then dream about all the cool things you'll do with the stuff you just bought.

Repeat as needed. Doing any or all of the above activities will make going to work on Monday even harder, but it'll be worth it.

Gulf Coast Environmental Disaster

2010-05-01T07:42:00.000-04:00

It's really tempting to get on my high horse right now and laugh in the faces of all those "Drill, baby, drill" enthusiasts, but those feelings are far eclipsed by feelings of sadness for all of the wildlife that will be impacted by this awful disaster. The Burdr website has a great post about all of the birds and bird areas that are at risk from the oil spill. I'll post other great resources of information as I come across them. Let's hope that out of this tragedy comes a new approach to energy development and usage in this country and renewed efforts to protect the fragile Gulf Coast ecosystem.

Simple things

2010-04-25T12:19:00.000-04:00

It's been lovely in DC lately: sunny, warm, dry, but full of pollen - an outdoorsy girl's worst nightmare. I've been itching to play outside for weeks now, but between my allergic reactions to all the tree sex and the side effects of my allergy medication, I've been miserable. And then, a mixed blessing: the weather forecast has called for a rainy weekend, which would wash away the pollen (yay!) but be, alas, rainy. I decided to brave it anyway and headed down to Prince William Forest Park in Virginia. It's National Parks Week, so I didn't even have to pay the $3 to get into the park. The last time I hiked through the park was last July - I was training for my first backpacking trip and couldn't find anyone to come with me, so it was also my first time hiking alone. And by alone, I mean alone. Judging by all the spider webs strung across the trail, no one had been there for a while. Aside from being constantly worried about getting spiders all over me (although I like to look at spiders, I'm not a big fan of them crawling on me), it was a ton of fun, and so gorgeous.

That time, I hiked a good portion of the South Valley Trail, so yesterday I headed out on the North Valley Trail. The only problem with the park is that very few of the trails are loops, so you have to think strategically about where you park so you can hike out and back. Other than that, I love this park, mostly for its simplicity. On a damp spring day, everything smells like wood, which there's lots of. It reminded me of being in the woods at Camp Windego in Wisconsin, the overnight girl scout camp I attended for two weeks each summer from ages eight to thirteen. There aren't any mountains to hike up, no challenging rock scrambles, no tricky creek or river crossings, and no fancy valley overlooks. The South Valley Trail has some steeper hills because most of it is a little more upland, but the North Valley Trail mostly just meanders through the woods alongside Quantico Creek. About midway through on the North Valley Trail, a steep drop draws the boundary between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain, and below the boundary, the simple and undramatic Quantico Falls is little more than a shallow creek running over some hard volcanic boulders.

The great vistas of Shenandoah and the Smokies are breathtaking, it's fun to challenge yourself on steep hills and serious switchbacks, and the parks in Virginia and Maryland are hotbeds of unique geologic formations, but sometimes, it's just nice to wander through the forest. I didn't see any deer or beavers, or even any amphibians (too cool out) or birds (they were mostly high up in the tree canopy, though a woodpecker's rat-a-tat echoed across the creek), and the vegetation was mostly deciduous trees, and that was fine. The rain held off and the air was fresh, and after being trapped in a windowless office for days on end, a simple hike felt like the best thing ever.

Save Our Animals, Save Our Tails

2010-04-03T13:28:00.001-04:00

There's definitely some truth to the saying that once you start paying attention to something, suddenly you see it everywhere. Following my ten-day, life-changing vacation out West, I made a promise to myself to build my knowledge of plants and animals. For as long as I can remember, I have always been fascinated by nature, but when I got to be a teenager, I thought it was nerdy and I did NOT want to be nerdy. It's always been with me though, and it turns out that the cheesiest thing inspired me to fully embrace nature once again: I flew Frontier Airlines home from that vacation last August. The tail of each plane in the fleet features an animal commonly found in the West. That vacation changed me for good, and my sadness at leaving the West was tempered by the thought that I was being ushered home by one of these animals. (As it turns out, Republic Airways bought Frontier and wants to rebrand the airline without the animals. Frontier workers rallied in Denver last week with the call of "Save our Animals, Save our Tails!" to help save the brand.)

Anyway, after that trip, my passion for wildlife conservation was renewed and I realized that I needed to take a more hands-on approach. It started with volunteering at the zoo, where I have had a chance to learn a great deal already from the dedicated keepers and wildlife specialists. Last weekend I got my new binoculars and went birding in Rock Creek Park, where I saw a northern flicker, a red-bellied woodpecker, a bunch of chickadees (Carolina?), two tufted titmice, and a bunch of gray birds I haven't been able to identify. Without the binoculars, I would have just seen a whole bunch of robins and lots of birds I couldn't identify because they were too far away, and I would have walked on without much thought. It's amazing how being able to see high up into the trees or hundreds of yards away changes how you think about the world around you. Who knew that the little nature preserve in the center of a big city could be so diverse?! I think about that diversity every time I see a different species of bird for the first time, just because I'm now paying attention. The melodious little bird by the bus stop: northern mockingbird. The colorful pair of ducks in the creek: wood ducks. The bird swimming in the tidal basin with its body submerged and long neck gliding through the water: an anhinga. The black ducks swimming in the bay near Old Town Alexandria: scoters (I think). With the help of my bird guide and the website enature.com, I've been able to marvel at how many different kinds of birds live in this concrete jungle.

All of this wildlife lives in and depends on the Chesapeake Bay watershed, one of the most polluted watersheds in the country due to agricultural runoff and urban pollution. If more people paid more attention to how many different animals live in our neighborhoods and were more aware of how our cars and plastic bags and chemicals affect those animals, perhaps they'd be more inclined to support activities and policies that reduce our impact on the watershed. That would mean fewer chemicals in our food, cleaner air and water, even more wildlife. Now that it's spring, there are plenty of opportunities to help, including the Potomac River Watershed Cleanup on April 10th and the Earth Day river cleanup and celebration hosted by the Anacostia Watershed Society on April 24th. It's important work, and saving our animals by cleaning up our city will indeed save our tails as well.

Speaking of diversity, go check out the Life series on the Discovery Channel, which airs new episodes on Sunday nights and shows reruns throughout the week. (Warning: the linked website starts to play a video as soon as it opens.) Today's nature programs are far superior to the ones I watched as a kid. I thought I had seen it all, but this show has featured some of the kookiest, coolest, cutest, most amazing animals that we would probably never see otherwise. If this doesn't make you appreciate the wonders of nature, nothing will.

Alone in the Wild

2010-03-28T12:55:00.000-04:00

I just watched the reruns of the National Geographic four-part special "Alone in the Wild." In the show, Scottish outdoor explorer Ed Wardle sets out to survive alone in the Yukon Territory in Canada for three months. It's a boyhood dream of his that he's finally getting a chance to live out. He brings the very basics - shelter, rations of rice and oats, cooking supplies, an ax, a fishing pole, and a shotgun (plus some other minor necessities). He does a practice run in June for 6 days, meets various outdoor experts to learn what plants are safe to eat and to do if a bear attacks, then sets off in July for the main event. He has a tracking unit that he uses to check in once a day by pushing either the OK button if he's okay or the SOS button if he needs help. His activities and thoughts are recorded on video via a small camera he can hook up to his pack while he walks.

The first few days are grand - it's beautiful, he manages to find things to eat, he's enjoying the peaceful environment and the challenge of surviving. But as time goes on, he struggles more and more. Canadian law prohibits him from killing the two moose and one caribou he sees, each of which would easily have fed him for a few weeks. Law also prohibits him from shooting ducks out of season. So he's left to subsist on the two porcupines he finds, wild berries and other plants, and fish from the river and lake. His whole existence becomes focused on finding his next meal, but food is hard to come by in the Yukon. Small animals are few and far between. The salmon he expected to start spawning soon don't show up. Wild leaves and tubers provide far fewer calories than he needs. And to top it all off, he's constantly terrified of being attacked by a bear.

Not every day is bad. On the clear, warm days, when he's found something to eat, Ed's spirits are high. He set out to do something extraordinary, and the successful day he's having proves that he can survive in the wild. But when he is cold, hungry, tired, scared, he cries a lot. His loneliness and frustration get him down. He questions why he took on such a difficult challenge. He keeps reminding himself to be strong, but the mental challenge proves to be too much for him sometimes, especially when he already faces physical hardships. After 42 days, he receives food, airlifted to him from nearby, because he realizes he's just not able to subsist. That seems to be the beginning of the end. Loneliness and food deprivation take over. If he had been allowed to kill even one of the moose or the caribou, he may have made it a lot longer. But perhaps the law proved to be a blessing in disguise. Ed follows the cardinal rule of camping: don't give bears any reason to take an interest in your campsite. Butcher and cook animals away from your site, and hang all your food in a tree far out of a bear's reach. The fish, rabbit, and porcupines Ed caught were easily placed in a bag and strung up for the night. But where do you store a whole moose? What do you do with three weeks worth of meat? A bear surely would have taken an interest in Ed at some point, and things could have ended far worse than they did. The laws meant to protect wildlife protected Ed as well.

I think we can all relate to Ed on some level, wherever we choose to take chances and live out our dreams. When times are good, when things are going our way, we feel strong, like we can conquer the world. Building a fire and catching a meal can be incredibly fulfilling, and they help us live another day, but what does it mean if we have no one to share those successes with? And facing challenge after challenge with no success can leave us feel beaten down, especially if we have no one to lean on. What finally pushed Ed past the point of no-return is when he pulls out the letter his girlfriend wrote for him and the photographs of his family and friends, and he realizes that his dream means nothing without the people in his life to share it with. On day 50, emotionally drained and physically weak, he decides to return home. It's a conflicted decision for him. As he says after being picked up from his site, it's hard to go out and live your dream, only to find out it's so difficult to do. But still, he feels uplifted by the fact that he made it for 50 days, on his own, in a beautiful place where most people would love to spend even just a day or two. He lived out his dream, proved he could make it for more than half of the time he had planned to spend in the Yukon, took a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something extraordinary.

Challenges can make us appreciate the small things in life, especially when those challenges occur in nature. Back in the hotel room in Whitehead, Yukon, Ed shoots his final minutes of video. After 50 days in the wild, the tv, the coffee pot, the refrigerator - everything in the room - seems needless. Once you can find happiness sleeping in a hammock and eating food cooked over a fire you built yourself, the modern amenities in life seem so unnecessary. I know I have felt that way after returning to civilization from a camping trip. It's a nice reminder that fretting over the small things, the unsuccesses and the struggles, is pointless, and that having people to share life with make all the difference.

Women and Green Jobs

2010-03-17T17:55:00.001-04:00

The Green Economy Post had this interesting article on March 9th about how the green jobs push may be leaving women behind because they may need child care and they may not have the ability to do hard physical labor - much of the green jobs created with stimulus money have been for renewable energy development. But this idea contrasts with the discussion of late all over the Internet about the growing movement of women in agriculture, a field that one would argue is the oldest green job out there. (I, myself, mentioned the agriculture-as-green-collar-job thing here.)

This past Sunday, the New York Times had an article called The Femivore's Dilemma, about how women for a long time had shunned homemaking in favor of entering the workforce, both to provide income for the family and to seek autonomy and personal fulfillment. Being a stay-at-home mother, doing the cooking and cleaning, managing the home, was seen as so 1950s. But women are once again returning to the home to garden, raise chickens and other livestock, can food, and create self-sufficiency, and indeed personal fulfillment. I like this quote from the article:

"My femivore friends may never do more than dabble in backyard farming — keeping a couple of chickens, some rabbits, maybe a beehive or two — but they’re still transforming the definition of homemaker to one that’s more about soil than dirt, fresh air than air freshener. Their vehicle for children’s enrichment goes well beyond a ride to the next math tutoring session."

One point made in the article is a question that many of my friends, both male and female, have been asking as we enter the workforce: What is this all for? If given the opportunity, many of us would buy some land, set up some buildings, and start a farm. Women abandoned the domestic arts because they felt hemmed in, as though sewing and cleaning were occupations they attended to because they felt they had few options, and they sought out meaningful experiences in the workplace. Now, we're all feeling like we just go to our jobs because we have to earn money, and we think that work with tangible results, like farming, cooking, canning, quilting, can be more meaningful. Perhaps some day we'll find a happy medium.

Perhaps it's just coincidence, or perhaps there's something else out there driving the discussion, but the topic of women in agriculture is hot right now. The DC Environmental Film Festival, which starts today, features a film on March 20th called "Ladies of the Land". The Women in Agriculture national conference is next Wednesday, March 24th, in Baltimore, MD. The book Farmer Jane, about thirty women who are making a difference in sustainable agriculture, has been getting some press lately because it comes out May 1st. Why the recent focus on women in farming? Or have we been talking about it for years without much notice? Does Michelle Obama's involvement in food and nutrition have anything to do with it? What do you think?

Filling holes

2010-03-14T01:19:00.000-05:00

It's been a rough couple of months. Remember all the happiness I posted about those many months ago? I've had the rug pulled out from under me, my well-laid plans now a pile of rubble. (Sorry for mixing metaphors.) So now I'm just figuring out what to do with myself, trying to pick up the pieces and put things back together. It's not that I walk around in a daze or wail about how awful things are - most days are okay and the lovely weather here in DC has been a curative. And I'm so thankful that I have a home, a job, food, fantastic friends, my health. I have the things I need. It's more like when the wily coyote devises an elaborate plan to catch the roadrunner and puts it all into place, but before he knows it, he's just gone off a cliff and hovers in mid-air, looking at the ground hundreds of feet below, wondering how he got there. When faced with a situation like that, all you can do is accept where you are, let yourself fall, and hope that when you hit the ground, you can pick yourself up and start devising a new plan.

Staying busy is key. While trying to figure out how I got here and what to do next, I've been focusing diligently on my work, a satisfying endeavor. And I've been filling the holes with nature. I volunteered to participate in a lion behavior watch at the zoo - they're introducing the two female African lions to the male African lion with the hope of starting a new pride at the zoo. So far, the male has been shy, wary of the two older females who giggle secretively in the next enclosure over. Last weekend, I got to see them up close, three feet away from the fence separating the humans from the felines. It's an indescribable feeling to stare into the eyes of a wild animal, seemingly as tame as my kit but much bigger, with much more ancient souls. It was like looking back in time, to a place when we were all a little wilder. Tomorrow is my first practice run. I'll report back with any worthwhile notes or thoughts.

Now that spring is springing, I'm looking forward to some local wildlife watching. I just ordered my first binoculars, some Nikon Ecobins at a steep discount from REI - I'll report back what I think of them after they come in and I get a chance to try them out. Already the air has started to fill with the cacophony of birds returning from their southerly winter vacation. There's really quite a diversity of birds in this city. Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I only ever knew of a few bird species: robins, cardinals, the mourning doves that nested in the evergreen tree outside my bedroom window, and some others that I never bothered to identify by name. Here, I've only really noticed the house sparrows and starlings, plus some robins and cardinals. But a few weeks ago, I saw what I suspect were some black scoters in the bay near Old Town Alexandria, and last Sunday, as I waited in the warm sun at the bus stop on a busy street, I took in the melodious song of a male northern mockingbird in a tree right above me. It sounded so joyous, chirping to the other neighborhood birds, bathing in the sun's rays, mimicking the street noise. A female northern mockingbird appeared a few days later on a fence further up the road, and it reminded me of the bird I saw in Meridian Hill Park during Snowmageddon. Hearing the raucous chirping each morning makes me miss the North Carolina bird symphony I enjoyed during the two years I spent there, and it makes me yearn for a quieter home (meaning less street noise) where I can enjoy daily encounters with local wildlife.

The next few months will be tough. Losing something you loved so deeply can be achingly sad. A lone mourning dove perched on the roof outside my window the other day, and its gut-wrenching hoo-hoos perfectly expressed my pain. It's best to take each day as it comes and figure the next day out when it gets there. Hopefully the soft sunshine and the cheerful chirping can buoy my spirits, at least until it gets a little easier to breathe.

Noteworthies

2010-03-14T00:28:00.000-05:00

I signed up for the feed from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition a couple weeks ago, and since then I have opened up my Google Reader inbox almost every day to find a well-written post about interesting things happening in the world of sustainable ag. As a member of the agricultural policy community, I have really enjoyed reading thoughtful pieces from people who are actually affected by national policies. Seriously, go to sustainableagriculture.net and check it out. They posted some excellent recaps from the Ag Outlook Forum last month, and the two posts this month about beginning farmers and ranchers are worth a read as well.

While we're on the subject, check out this interesting article from The Atlantic about local foods at Walmart. The store has been the symbol for much of what ails society, but it's hard to ignore the strides the company has taken in the past few years to improve its sustainability. I still won't shop there unless I really have no other choice and it's an emergency, but in many areas of the country where the only store around for miles is a Walmart, providing a market for and access to fresh, possibly local food, is a good thing. Let's hope the company is really committed to taking their local food initiative a step further and isn't just stealing marketing opportunities from local producers.

Agricultural Outlook, Part 2

2010-02-20T00:46:00.001-05:00

In the afternoon, I attended two sessions. One was on bioenergy, which is one of the Secretary's priorities, but quite frankly, I'm tired of the topic. The good news is that at least people are thinking creatively about how to produce energy from biomass; the bad news is that there's always going to be a loser in the food vs. fuel vs. climate fight, and mitigating that loss is an ongoing battle.

The other session was on sustainability and the food system and featured USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, the Keystone Center's Sarah Stokes Alexander, Ferd Hoefner from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and Brian Snyder from the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. Here's a recap of their presentations:

Kathleen Merrigan is the USDA's new face of sustainable agriculture, and she was the star of the forum. She briefly discussed the USDA's new program Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food (KYF2) and then took questions, deftly and diplomatically addressing skepticism from some farmers. The greatest success of this program, and of the USDA(and the federal government) in general, is that there is now a national conversation about food, nutrition, and community. The fact that some people in the agricultural field are questioning ideas about sustainable agriculture means that the message is being heard throughout the country, and everyone is now encouraged to engage in the discussion about what food production and consumption can, or should, look like. More on this in a minute.
Sarah Stokes Alexander talked about Keystone's Field to Market program, which is a collaborative stakeholder group working together to develop a supply chain system for agricultural sustainability. This project addresses the concerns raised earlier on the plenary panel regarding transparency and industry-wide dialogue about how to make every step in the chain more sustainable. Members of the stakeholder group include grower groups, conservation organizations, agribusinesses, food and retail companies, and academia and research organizations (more information and a list of members is here)
Ferd Hoefner discussed the farmers market promotional programs and raised questions about what policy can do to create new markets and provide greater access to existing markets. A number of people asked questions about loan guarantee programs in their state.
Brian Snyder brought up the idea of a sustainable foodshed that could follow watershed boundaries. If that were the case, people here in DC would be actively engaged with folks all the way through Pennsylvania and New York State, since we're all in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Many of the vendors at farmers markets in DC come from Pennsylvania, and since we're on the receiving end of many of the negative watershed impacts, it makes sense that we should be actively engaging our northern foodshed neighbors to ensure that their practices improve our watershed conditions. Brian also pointed out that most of the farms in the U.S. are small farms that make less than $50, 000 a year in gross income - not enough to support one person. But CSAs can change that, and other techniques like SPIN (Small Plot INtensive) farming, can help small farms make more money without acquiring a lot more acreage.

(More thoughts after the jump)

Lots of interesting sustainable farming ideas were discussed on the first day of the forum. I almost forgot it was a government-sponsored conference. One thing I mentioned above, and which I really took to heart, was the fact that in addition to the dedicated sustainable agriculture advocates nodding their heads in every session, many farmers, ranchers, and agribusiness folks were expressing their skepticism. This is a new tack for the USDA to be taking, and they worry that sustainable agriculture approaches won't be realistic for their operations. They worry that the USDA is going off-course, chasing foolish yuppie notions of food production and consumption. Farming is hard, indeed, and most of the government bureaucrats in DC have never lifted a pitchfork or driven a plow. I'm sure many people of progressive thought and action would shake their heads at these old-school hold-outs. But everyone who works in or advocates for sustainability in food production systems needs to listen to these concerns. Some people in agribusiness will never be convinced that they should be doing things differently. The farm lobby has stalled many versions of legislation because they fear that new ideas will lead to their demise. But maybe they have some good points. Maybe they can tell us things that only farmers could know. The Keystone Center is on the right track by engaging even those from the likes of Monsanto who would fight against the rising tide of sustainability.

That said, skeptics need not worry too much. USDA caters to everyone, which means that agribusiness concerns will always carry weight within the Department. Farmers, large and small, won't be forced to reduce their tillage or stop using chemicals or put all of their livestock out to pasture, however much those things would improve human and environmental health. The word forum means "A public meeting or presentation involving a discussion usually among experts and often including audience participation." Addressing issues of sustainability in this Outlook Forum gave everyone the opportunity to discuss different ideas. Whole Foods' Walter Robb mentioned that the company doesn't tell people whether or not they should buy non-GMO foods; the goal is to be able to provide customers with enough information to make choices about what they buy. Even if farmers at the forum don't make any changes after hearing these ideas, at least they know what policy makers and consumers are concerned about, and they know what they are competing with. Change comes in baby steps.

Agricultural Outlook, Part 1

2010-02-19T23:47:00.001-05:00

Yesterday and this morning, I attended the USDA's Agricultural Outlook Forum. Conferences are great, not just for the networking opportunities, but also for the chance to take a step back and think about the bigger picture. What are our goals? What is our vision for this field? Who are our inspirations? What mistakes have we made that we can learn from?

The opening session featured overviews of the agricultural economic and trade reports and some pep talks from the U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, the Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services Jim Miller, the USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, and the Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. There was a lot of back-patting, a little bit of hand-wringing, and a strong call to students and budding farmers to embrace the future of agriculture and contribute to efforts to revitalize rural America. Some of the students asked some great questions in the day's sessions, and they really stood out as honored guests at the forum.

The plenary panel titled "Sustainability, Stakeholders & Customers: Achieving a Healthier & Secure Future" featured Nina Federoff (Advisor to U.S. Secretary of State and USAID), Fedele Bauccio (Bon Appetit Management Co.), Richard Schnieders (Sysco Corp.), and Walter Robb (Whole Foods). What a great panel! These are the ideas that really struck me most about each presentation (after the jump):

Nina Federoff talked about changes in science and technology that will allow the U.S. to close the nutrient loop between plants and animals. She referred mostly to the integration of aquaculture and agriculture systems, but as a farm volunteer in North Carolina, we saw this integration first-hand on farms that used the waste from their chickens, goats, and cows to fertilize their rows of vegetables. One farm also started from scratch with the land: goats cleared the brush and woody undergrowth, then chickens scratched up the soil, gobbling up fat grubs, tearing up roots, and mixing in their waste. A number of years spanned from the introduction of the goats to the first sowing of seeds on this small farm, but it shows how land use changes can be done sustainably on a small scale.
Fedele Bauccio discussed the company's journey from generic caterer and campus dining service provider to a food services provider with an envious sustainability record that incorporates local foods, organics, and higher farm worker standards. One of the greatest challenges that any business faces, and which Fedele grapples with daily, is the lack of transparency in food production. Companies like Bon Appetit often run into great difficulty in purchasing products because they can't trace individual items back to the farms on which they were grown. Both Fedele and the next speaker called for better transparency in all aspects of food production so that they can assure their customers of quality and sustainability. Bon Appetit runs one of the dining halls at Duke - I remember it being a little more expensive, but leagues better than the boring pizza/burgers/iceburg lettuce stands in some of the other halls on campus. Plus, it features some excellent ethnic flavors.
Richard Schnieders recently retired from Sysco, so he was speaking from his own personal perspective, but he brought a lot of light to the idea of a more sustainable supply chain through life cycle assessments, local or regional aggregators for shipments, and integrating the large and the small farms to create not just a linear supply chain but a circular value network that incorporates consumer preference into food production. And he, too, called for better transparency, which will lead to better decision-making at all points of the value network.
Walter Robb didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about Whole Foods (full disclosure: I'm a dedicated Whole Foods shopper), but I hope he educated some others in the audience who don't know as much about the company's philosophy. Yes, Whole Foods can be more expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Yes, CEO John Mackey is a wacky guy, but he's worked hard to make sustainable food a mainstream idea and contributed greatly to the movement to get consumers to think more about where food comes from and what the true costs of production are. Unfortunately, Whole Foods perpetuates the stereotype that quality, tasty, local/organic food is a yuppie concept, which these days, Mackey isn't helping to debunk. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, and Walter didn't say much to dispute it. However, he did mention a cool school lunch revolution taking place thanks to Renegade Lunch Lady Chef Ann Cooper. Check out her website, her blog, and the project's community page for more info.

The first half of the day was an eye opener, especially because it wasn't directly connected to my current work. However it renewed my passion for sustainable agriculture, which I had lost touch with in this urban winter wonderland. The sun is higher in the sky these days though - it doesn't blast directly into my south-facing bedroom window as much anymore - so it must be almost time to prep my container garden. Further thoughts about the conference will come in the next post, but let's just say for now that I was pleasantly surprised at the forward-thinking nature of a conference hosted by a federal government agency. Even the other tracks featured speakers from many different areas of agriculture and policy and ideas that until recently were not discussed in a government setting.

Everything is as it should be

2010-02-11T08:43:00.002-05:00

Today is my birthday. Last year on this day, it was sunny and 70 degrees outside. I'd never experienced that kind of weather on my birthday before. The days afterward in my 29th year followed suit in a similar fashion. A great deal of the past year was like that - an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. This year, as a special 30th birthday present from Mother Nature, the DC area broke the record for the amount of snow in one season with a couple of small storms and three big storms: Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, and Snoverkill. In total, 54.9 inches. That's more like it for mid-February.

Thirty is a big age for people. It's the line we draw in the sand for ourselves. "By 30, I will be doing _______." "By 30, I will have _________." "By 30, I will have made something of myself," whatever that means for each of us. I'm not sure I ever had those kinds of tangible expectations. I dreamed of the same things most people dream of: the home, the family, the job. Well aware of how I change my mind so often, I knew better than to be too specific about what those things would look like. Which is a good thing because at 30, I'm still living a nomad's life, still trying to figure out what home, family, and job really look like to me. The only time I freaked out about still not having those answers was after watching "Julie and Julia," in which the character Julie freaks out about not having those answers and cooks her way to 30. Then I remembered that we shouldn't feel something just because a movie tells us to, and I got over it.

Now, at 30, I'm still fumbling along, a little wiser and much happier. The only picture I had of myself as a 30-year-old was that of a confident woman, smart, accomplished, who above everything else, knew herself well. Since I was a teenager, I couldn't wait to be 30 because I so looked forward to knowing myself and feeling comfortable inside and out. Now, I don't care about not being settled down, not achieving whatever measures of success people are supposed to have achieved by this age. Because I achieved the goal I have always seen as more worthy than whatever I could use to measure myself against others. I feel like the woman I always wanted to be. I accomplished the task of growing up, of getting through the wrenching teens and the tumultuous 20s and making it out alive and relatively intact. I wouldn't take back any of what I've gone through in my life, but just thinking about it all makes me exhausted. And that's been just the first 30 years of this wild journey.

So now it's time to do something with it. I still feel lost, as much so as I always have, but maybe that feeling never goes away. At least now I have a compass and I know which direction to head: Westward from here, but never far from myself.

Birdwatching in the city

2010-01-30T10:07:00.018-05:00

I put a bird feeder out on my fire escape earlier this month. For a while, the only thing it collected was snow.

Then, last Sunday, we saw some birds crowded around its little ledge. They ate all of the bird seed in three days - Wednesday evening, I came home to an empty bird feeder. So I refilled it.

Friday evening, it was empty again. I was going to wait until after the snowstorm to refill it again, but this morning, the birds sat on the fire escape railing, staring eagerly into my window.

So I refilled it again, and now I get to watch the snow swirling around while a bunch of hungry house sparrows snack on seeds as the feeder twirls in the wind. Kind of like a birdfeeder-go-round. I pulled out my Field Guide to Birds of North America and identified the males and females.

The cat, however, seems mostly uninterested.

Sensory overlap

2010-01-14T20:24:00.001-05:00

Synesthesia: from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), "sensation"—is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

0 = clear 5 = black or navy blue
1 = white 6 = orange
2 = yellow 7 = grey
3 = green 8 = maroon
4 = purple 9 = black

January = white or vanilla sky (soft pale yellow and thin light blue)
February = deep plum
March = rusty orange
April = pale pink
May = deeper pink
June = sky blue
July = real blue, sometimes white
August = soft red
September = golden
October = dark grey
November = orange
December = pine green

Brainstorming

2009-12-28T21:30:00.000-05:00

Some things I love, in no particular order:
nature
outdoor activities
outdoor activity gear
wildlife
kids
food
writing
planning events
telling people about nature
art
sustainability
books and magazines
helping people do things better
learning about other cultures
technology
cooking
volunteering
creating

How do I turn these things into a career?

Peace on Earth

2009-12-25T22:11:00.003-05:00

Last week's Snowpocalypse in DC kept people from their last-minute consumerism, held up travel across the region, and gave the federal government a rare snow day. The snow began Friday night and didn't stop until early Sunday morning. It blew sideways at times.

It blocked our gate so we couldn't get out.

It piled up on the fire escape.

But it was glorious, because for days, the story on tv, in the newspapers, online, was about the storm. We forgot about the health care bill, the ridiculous politics, the big sales on unnecessary stuff, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and focused on what was real, what was right in front of us. We helped each other wipe snow off our cars, we walked to neighborhood bars and puppet shows, drank hot cocoa spiked with Bailey's Irish Cream and Mint, had impromptu snowball fights, and engaged in spontaneous romping. We didn't go anywhere we couldn't walk to, and we spent the days and nights with friends and family, wrapped in sweaters and boots and scarves. For two days in DC, there was peace and love, which is what the holiday season is about, after all.

Nature is so cool

2009-12-12T17:17:00.000-05:00

The past six months have included a whole lot of soul searching, after realizing that yet another fork in the career path may not be the right one. After thinking long and hard about who I am and what I want, I went back to 10th grade, when I wanted to be a marine biologist or a zoologist. I have always loved animals. My first word was kitty. I used to read all of those kids' encyclopedias of nature. I wanted to work at a pet store or the zoo or volunteer in the Plants and Animals room in high school. I watched hours of nature shows on PBS and the Discovery channel. I even wrote a letter to Jack Hanna (he wrote me back - I still have his letter). But science was hard and writing was easy, so I strayed toward environmental and travel journalism instead. I guess I thought being a wildlife biologist would be somehow "not cool" or too touchy-feely, but I've still managed to do a fair amount of writing about animals over the years, from articles about endangered species in the lower Missouri River to wildlife fact pages for a conservation NGO. And I still nerd out over random nature facts - on a first date to the aquarium years ago, I happily showed off my knowledge of pitcher plants and my ability to quickly spot animals in their exhibits.

I recognize that switching to a biological science-related career at this point would mean more schooling, and I haven't ruled out getting a second degree. But in the meantime, I aspire to become one of those people who really knows their stuff when it comes to nature and wildlife. So I'm volunteering at the National Zoo and ramping up my knowledge of local wildlife, starting with birds.

And let me tell you, spending three hours on a weekend afternoon talking to people about the plants and animals in the exhibit is bliss. I'm at the Amazonia exhibit, and there is lots to talk about - two floors full of fish, turtles, amphibians, birds, mammals, plants, and more. The best parts are when I get to talk to kids who know SO much about nature! They're as jazzed about it as I was when I was a kid, but I was so shy that I would never have engaged a stranger in a conversation about anything. But these kids know a lot, they're so curious, and they love learning. It's great talking with adults too - they're just as interested as the kids, and equally wowed by all the cool stuff they see. No matter what kind of mood I'm in when I walk down the hill to the zoo entrance, by the time I walk back up that hill on the way home I'm buzzing with happiness.

I could go on for hours about today's volunteer session, about the funny things the animals did, about the rare two-toed sloth sighting, the new bird, the funny fish face. And it's so fun to share that with the visitors who leave behind their cynicism, their adultness, their moodiness, and revel in the amazement of nature.

Speaking of which, I am grateful to the many people out there who share their love and knowledge of wildlife with the world through their blogs (and let us know about it through social media outlets). It's great to see such a strong community of writers and photographers out there, spreading the word that nature is fantastic and reminding us that we all need to pitch in to protect it. Keep up all of the great work!

Fallen by the wayside

2009-11-01T10:35:00.000-05:00

I've been neglecting this space. I receive and process all of my information now in Facebook- or Twitter-sized snippets. I have lots of thoughts about important things, but other people get to them first, so I fear that what I would say in this space would now sound old and trivial compared to their well-thought-out postings. The growing season is nearly over, and my one pepper and one pea was all I harvested, and I have no other projects aside from trying to figure out what I want to do professionally and then finding a way to do it in Colorado. So all I can think to post in this space starts with I, I, I, and nobody really wants to read that.

But I'll atempt a thoughtful post anyway, because lately I've been thinking about relationships and egos and judging other people. A few years ago, lost in the trauma of some mid-twenties turmoil, I judged some close friends and pushed them away. I decided that my own turmoil was enough to bear and didn't want to maturely address my beef with them. One friend managed to put up with me anyway and we patched things up, and now our friendship is as great as it ever was. Another friend accepted my rudeness and let me pull away, and so we lost many years together. We recently patched things up too, or at least started to, but now we have a gaping hole of years to fill back in. As I'm rounding the corner toward 30, I'm finally able to understand where I was, let go of the ego, and get back the things that meant so much to me for so many years.

People do this all the time. They get in fights with friends, push them away, seek them out to reconnect. It's all a funny dance. We think it's okay to push friends away because we have no legal ties to them. Our relationships are fungible, disposable. But these friends I blew off are like family to me. They are my sisters, if not by blood, then by soul. Kicking them out of my life for good is just not an option. We met in college and bonded during some of our most formative years. We started our journeys together at the beginning of our adult lives. You can't just throw that away.

If that's the case with people we've known for less than half our lives, what then of the people we've known our whole lives? Of people to whom we are biologically connected? We may not like these people at times. We may disagree with their world views, we may feel we have little in common with them, we may not understand their actions. But they are family. We are obligated to care for each other, to look out for each other, even when we can't stand each other. We are more than just floating souls, we are clan. We are kin. So what then of some people who choose simply not to care about family members? Or worse, those who choose to hold family members hostage for their prior actions, for their bad choices or their life struggles? How can you choose to simply give up on parents or children, on siblings, on aunts, uncles or cousins, who care for you no matter what, because that's what family does? How can we choose to hold our friends, or our egos, closer to us than we hold our family?

I say this as someone who is part of a family in which we were just four people living in the same house, going four different directions. It's not a judgment, just an observation. I believe that my parents felt the same way about their upbringings, and we were always going different directions from other parts of our extended family as well. We were all always disconnected. But we're family. We share some of the same traits that can be traced back through many generations. We are alike in ways that we didn't develop by spending time together, because we only just started spending time together. Like it or not, we are connected for life and death, and we will pass these connections on to our families for generations after us. So how can we take such trivial matters as such serious slights? Isn't it our duty to just grin and bear it for now, because these things too shall pass?

It makes me sad that my entire extended family isn't close like some families are (or seem to be). Perhaps it's more like, we don't try to stay connected. I'm just starting to get to know my cousins, who are all closer with the other sides of their families, and I feel like we missed out on so much. I learn about the drama in the family of someone near and dear to me, who may likely be my parter in creating a new family some day, and I see how it parallels the current drama in my own family. And I yearn to patch things back together as well as I can, because I can't wrap my brain around the idea that if we don't like what a family member is doing, that we can just push them away and leave them to their own devices. That we're not obligated to try to help them, or at least try to understand them.

So no, neglect is not an option. If we don't like something, if we're not happy with the way something is going, rather than try to find something to replace it, we try to fix it. We have no choice. When you are deeply connected to someone, the labor may be long and difficult, and often expensive, but a cheap new replacement is just not the same.

A new place for an old sculpture

2009-09-10T21:49:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago I met up with a friend at the National Harbor. I went there expecting to hate it, all Disneyfied and such, but it was actually quite nice. A little empty, since many of the storefronts have yet to become occupied, but it seems like a lovely place to spend an evening.

Remember The Awakening, that sculpture that used to be at Hain's Point? The one we were dismayed to learn had been removed? Its new home on the National Harbor is pretty cool.

The photos, taken on my little camera phone, don't really do it justice, but it looks especially neat at night.

Kids can still play on the statue, and it's a moving image from just about everywhere on the Harbor.

Brought to you by the letters F and P and the number 30

2009-09-08T21:56:00.004-04:00

A while ago, some fruit flies infested the apartment, likely thanks to some garbage we waited a little too long to take out. The flies attacked and killed the pea plant, or at least they contributed to its demise. White-hot sunshine and 90-degree days also contributed. All I got was one pea. Oh well. It tasted like heaven. The flies have also attacked the zucchini plant, which has yet to produce anything more than cheery orange flowers. Perhaps I should have pollinated that plant with a cotton swab or something. It's hanging in there, but I'm not optimistic.

However, the cat grass still grows, the parsley is hanging in there, and the basil is so sweet and tender that I mix it with tomatoes and mozzarella every chance I get. There's not enough yet for pesto, but perhaps that will come soon. The biggest news is that I have a pepper. A solid green pepper is growing on the plant, with pretty white flowers promising more peppers in the future. The whole plant smells like a pepper. If I can make a real meal with peppers from my lame little container garden, I will consider this little endeavour a success. Maybe I will stuff them with quinoa, mushrooms, red onion, and herbed feta. Or maybe I will melt them into a giant pot of stew with white beans and zucchini and chopped tomatoes.

Which is good, because I'm turning 30 in five months from Friday. It wasn't a big deal until Sunday, which is when 30 was everywhere. CBS Sunday Morning was celebrating 30 years on the air. A car dealership on Route 1 in Maryland was having their 30th annual Labor Day sale. In the year she turned 30, Julie Powell taught herself to really cook by working her way through Julia Child's cookbook (I drooled my way through "Julie and Julia" Sunday night). I hadn't thought much about 30 until Sunday, when the world reminded me of the olio of experiences in my past that haven't amounted to much. Nothing noteworthy, anyway, just a grab-bag of opportunities through which to grow in some way. Kind of like my motley crew of windowsill greenery.

So now this pepper means something. It's my opus. If I can grow one measly little pepper in my little apartment in the city, I will have something to really show for my 30 years of life. I will have grown a plant from a seed, coaxed it to bloom in the bright afternoon sun, nurtured its fruit, and nourished my body with its harvest. It's a little thing, really, this pepper, but growing food is not such a little task. I don't think you can really preach about sustainable food systems unless you've actually grown any of your food yourself. Growing your own food, even one vegetable or herb at a time, changes you. Computers and cars, work deadlines and gym memberships, they are all nothing when you realize that you can pull your own food from your own dirt, aware of the miracle of life you have created.

I has a pea pod

2009-07-07T22:06:00.002-04:00

The container garden is creeping along. My pea plant has produced one pea so far. When it became apparent that the pod was not going to get any bigger, I plucked it from the vine, popped it open, and ate the one pea inside. All that work, all that time spent mulling over it, and it took me 10 seconds to eat its fruit. But oh, it was good - as fresh as it gets, and extra tasty because I grew it from one dry pea to a 14-inch vine in a clay pot in my bedroom window. Actually, I find it a little funny that it went into the soil as a pea, which grew into a plant, and produced another pea, this one edible. And now there are two more pods growing, likely helped along by the stinky organic fertilizer I gave it. Hopefully each pod will grow more than one pea. In the meantime, I will have to enjoy the bounty of sugar snap peas from the farmers market - little gifts from heaven. There is just nothing quite like a handful of fresh sugar snaps. Oh, if only the season were longer...

We have some other harvestables in the windowsill garden as well. The parsley is growing strong, the basil has sprouted but hasn't gotten much taller and the cat grass is tall and half-chewed by the cat. The zucchini plants have exploded out of the container and many flowers have bloomed, but as the seed packet warned, the first flowers are usually male and produce no fruit. Fingers crossed that we get some girls in that pot soon. The pepper plants have finally started to grow taller - I think they like it hot - but no sign of fruit anytime soon. Maybe in the next month. So, no feast for me this year, but this was just the beginning of my experiment. Knowing I can grow a pea pod in my window sill gives me hope for acres full of peas in future residences, and perhaps this season I can eke out a couple of meals worth of zucchini, basil, peppers, and parsley. If nothing else, this endeavour has reminded me of just how amazing nature is, that we can put some seeds into some dirt and grow something that will nourish our bodies and souls.

Le Tour

2009-07-07T21:35:00.004-04:00

It's Tour de France time again. I've been watching the race at work in the background, and I'm a little torn because I'm cheering on team Garmin Slipstream, and yet despite all attempts to the contrary, I can't help but cheer on Lance Armstrong's comeback on team Astana. I didn't want him to do well. I wanted him to let the young guys take on the tour, a passing of the torch. I was slightly smug about his 10th place overall standings through the troisieme etage - still a good showing, all things considered, but still behind some of the Garmin upstarts. In today's team time trial, a challenge that doesn't appear every year in the Tour de France, Garmin took the lead, losing two racers early on but eventually clocking in with the fastest time, with two other teams to go. All this despite Phil Liggett's assertion that they surely couldn't keep up the pace and finish with the fastest time with only 5 of their 7 racers (I think this has to do with both some laws of physics and a team player mentality - I'm still learning about racing strategy and such). At the first checkpoint, Astana and Garmin had the same time, but Astana was really booking it because a fast final time would mean that Lance could take the maillot jaune (yellow jersey the stage winners wear) from previous stage winner Fabian Cancellara on team Saxo Bank. Astana had to finish at least 41 seconds faster than Saxo Bank in order for Lance to take the jersey. In the end, Astana finished ahead of Garmin Slipstream (rats!) but only 40 seconds exactly ahead of Saxo Bank. I wanted to send an "in your face" to Lance, but in the end, I admit I'm a little disappointed for him. He's an amazing athlete, no doubt about it, for a 37-year-old or otherwise. If he does well in this race, maybe he'll call it quits for good (at least as far as the Tour is concerned), and focus his efforts on raising money for cancer awareness and spending time with his family. And as for Garmin, I was worried about Lance stealing the spotlight, but after their strong second place showing today, the press won't be forgetting about them anytime soon. Ride on, boys. Ride on.

By the way...

2009-06-25T20:14:00.002-04:00

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is one lucky guy. The next few news cycles could have been all about him, and now they will be about Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson instead. Hopefully after the flurry settles, the good people of South Carolina will not forget that their governor up and left them for five days without a word, possibly using some state money for his jet-setting get-away.

Who's bad?

2009-06-25T19:29:00.003-04:00

I never owned a Michael Jackson album, but many of my youthful memories include his music. I remember watching the video for "The Way You Make Me Feel" on my uncle's 72-inch television, way back before anyone owned large-screen televisions. I remember watching hours of VH1, back when they played music videos 90 percent of the time, and I saw the making of the Thriller video/mini-movie multiple times. VH1 also showed "Moonwalker" often, and for some reason the dance with the Elephant Man always stuck with me. As someone who loves to dance vicariously through others, I can't even count the number of times I got chills watching him, especially in "Smooth Criminal" when they do the leaning trick. In college, we had the mock dorm room that all the tour groups got to see, and we used to play Michael Jackson's music loudly in the hallways when the tours would come by. The digital morphing in the "Black and White" video was groundbreaking. It's sad that MJ got so weird over the past number of years. He was a legend, without whom none of modern pop music would exist in its current form.

MJ's death will likely overshadow the fact that today is the 25th anniversary of the release of Prince's Purple Rain album and the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon. We're getting older. The new generation is stepping up to the line now that the oldies-but-goodies are fading away into the ether. As an almost-thirty-something and thus too young to really remember the height of MJ's and Prince's careers, I likely have no right to lament this fact, but I can certainly sense the torch being passed. It started when Madonna and Britney shared the same stage. Until his recent run-in with the law, Chris Brown was being hailed as the next Michael Jackson. Who will influence the next 25 years of music? Who will lead the way to legendary status? Or in the Internet age, have we moved away from kings of pop and such? Where do we go from here?

RIP, Michael Jackson. There never has been, nor ever will there be, anyone like you. Thank you for all you have given to the world of music. May you spend a peaceful existence in the next life. May people remember not the demons that tortured you later in life, but your genius, your legend, your talent, and your kindness.

Firsts

2009-05-27T22:20:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago marked my one-year anniversary of finishing grad school, and in just a few weeks, I will mark my one-year anniversary in DC. I think this has been the fastest year yet. Standing on that mountaintop a year ago really did change everything. It's been quite a year. This is the first time I have lived in a city on my own, without my parents less than six hours away by car. And thus, the first time I have really, truly felt like an adult. It only took 29 years to get there.

I rode a motorcycle for the first time, despite my secret fantasy life as a biker babe. It was really scary at first, and now I can't wait to do it again.

I watched my younger brother marry the love of his life and start his own family and career.

In November I danced on my fire escape in the nation's capital when our first African-American president was elected. In January I huddled in the freezing cold on the National Mall to see him sworn in. And in May, I stood on the other side of the fence as he wished my mom a happy Mother's Day. Only having a conversation with him would be cooler.

I was active outdoors all winter long, unlike every winter past that was too hard and bitter to walk four blocks to the gym. Granted, DC winters are not like Chicago winters, but I definitely learned the value of fleece tops and wool socks.

This spring, I made my own yogurt, grew my own veggies, and roasted my own chicken. Cheers to being even more self-sufficient. I also joined the 21st century with a flat-screen HD LCD television and a brand new laptop computer.

I embraced a challenge at work and came away feeling much more prepared, capable, and confident. I learned to stop pushing pushing pushing for world change, opting instead to focus on creating a meaningful life for myself and seeking out the little ways that I can make a difference. I changed my diet, upped my weights at the gym, and lost six pounds, and for the first time that I can remember, I actually like my knees.

For the first time since high school, I fell in love. Real love, requited, reciprocated, gut-wrenching love. Who just happens to live 1,700 miles away. He inspires me to try even harder to be the best I can be, to let go of fear and embrace opportunity. He is my better half.

All of these things are wonderful. They bring me closer to the person I really want to be. Aside from the first real vacation I have ever taken without any family, I can't begin to guess what the next year will hold. All I know is that life seems to get better as I get older. I wish that life could be so good for others. I know so many people who feel such pain, and I wish that the warm rays of the sun would shine on them more often. I feel so blessed, so thankful for the life I have been given the opportunity to lead. Most days, I can hardly believe it, and that is definitely a first.

City living: riding the bus and growing some goodies

2009-03-29T22:09:00.003-04:00

Lately I've been relishing the characters on the bus, a sort of in-your-face to those who think the bus is for the proletariat. Last week, a little old woman was standing in the middle of the bus preaching in Spanish. I don't know much Spanish, but I assume it was preaching because I heard the words "padre" and "santos" a number of times. Yet she was so confident and happy that I felt strangely comforted by her. I was actually sad when she got off the bus. Until yesterday, the crazies were mostly like that - unobtrusive and occasionally amusing. But yesterday, an older man with a neck brace in a wheelchair got on the bus. The driver had to help him onto the lift and push him into the wheelchair spot, and when she turned him around I could see patches sewn on his shirt about the Vietnam war and a particularly lovely one that said something to the effect of Jane Fonda being a "traitor bitch". Yeah, it was that kind of morning.

The man was obviously drunk or otherwise under the influence and spent most of the bus ride shouting obscenities, the only coherent words from his mouth. Until he looked over a guy sitting in a seat nearby, listening to his iPod. The bus driver had already threatened to kick the drunk veteran off the bus for his language, but she stopped the bus and made him get off immediately after he started shouting at the iPod guy and ramming his wheelchair into him. Wow.

At first I felt shaken up. I was already kind of tired and not in the mood for some crazy guy to ruin my morning. But then I thought about all the sad people featured in that show "Intervention" who deal with addictions, and I pictured this drunken vet as he probably used to be: a young man who was just living his life until he got drafted into the army, sent to some strange country, injured, sewn up, and sent home. Left to his own devices, perhaps ignored by the overwhelmed and underequipped VA, to deal with his pain the only ways he knew how. And I felt sad. Because 40 years ago, this man surely did not think he would end up this way, shouting at strangers and complaining about his war wounds. I hope he has someone to take care of him. I hope he at least has someplace to call home. After he got off the bus, a woman on the sidewalk started talking to him, and it left me with some hope that she would at least get him to a safe place where he could sleep off his buzz, get some food, perhaps move on, forgetting the stir he caused that morning.

He didn't ruin my day after all. Upon returning home, I inspected the container garden I had planted last week. Plastic and ceramic pots resting on wide windowsills, taking up the cat's sunny spot, filled with Organic Mechanic potting soil and some courageous little seeds. In the living room, mesclun greens, zucchini, and peppers bask in the sun, while rye grass rests in the bathroom and dwarf peas greet the day in my bedroom. The rye grass was first, its pointy blades poking straight up through the soil. In another week, it will be ready for attack by the cat, giving my spider plants a welcome respite from dear kitty's munch. The mesclun greens were next, although different varieties germinate at different times, so although it looks like clover right now, someday it will be a salad. And now, the timid pea shoots are pushing the soil aside, emerging in the afternoon sun. I've been putting frozen peas in many of my dishes, so the idea of plucking those fresh little globes from my bedroom window for a breakfast delight of scrambled eggs with mushrooms, peas, and cheddar cheese, topped with roasted red pepper and artichoke dip and scooped up with toast, is almost too much to bear. I can hardly wait.

The squash and the peppers take a little longer to germinate. I've been hoping to plant carrots, beets, and tomatoes as well, so once I know my current plots are alive and well, I'll tackle the root veggies and needy tomatoes next. I was so worried that nothing would grow, and instead the bounty is just beginning. Photos to come soon.

A loss of public art

2009-03-27T20:29:00.002-04:00

Last month, a dear friend and I trekked out to Hain's Point, which is in East Potomac Park. It's a peninsula of sorts, with the Washington Channel on one side and the Potomac on the other. The east side provides lovely views of some large houses and Fort McNair; the west side is a great place to watch the planes land at Reagan National Airport. At the end, in the middle of a big field, is the reason we trekked out there, carrying bags of goodies from the Whole Foods salad bar at 5:30 on a Saturday evening: The Awakening, one of the few things my dear friend missed after moving away from DC. It's a giant sculpture that rises out of the ground, providing endless opportunities for climbing and admiring.

Except that it was gone. No scar in the earth from where it was dug up, no plaque commemorating the work of art, and nothing except some old wintered grass left in its place. We were saddened. Apparently the National Park Service had long ago lost its permit to keep the sculpture there, and perhaps the artist found himself so strapped for cash that he decided to sell it to a developer in February 2008. So now, The Awakening emerges from blocks of pavement in a new mixed-use development on the southwest shore of Maryland's peninsula, another tourist trap.

Why didn't the National Park Service fight for the sculpture? Why haven't they replaced it with other artwork, something else for people to admire on a sunny day? We suspect it's because Hain's Point is not a tourist trap. It's not easily accessible by metro train or bus. There are no fancy restaurants or hotels nearby, just a scrubby golf course and some nice playground equipment. On that chilly Saturday afternoon, we were a couple of white faces among a diverse crowd of latino and black residents of DC and nearby neighborhoods who were picnicking, fishing, and flying kites. If anyone deserves public artwork to admire, it's the people whose income taxes (exorbitant in the District) keep the metropolitan area afloat during times when fewer tourists can afford to flock to the better-known memorials and museums. DC doesn't need more concrete playgrounds like National Harbor, it needs more community involvement. And it needs to support more artists, without whose creativity and hard work the city would be just another slab of asphalt. Please, National Park Service, bring public artwork back to East Potomac Park.

Going back in time

2009-02-23T18:49:00.003-05:00

Recently, I have read items from a couple of books about current events and culture that were written either before September 11, 2001, or just after George W. Bush took office but before the Iraq war. I would love to call these writers and have lengthy conversations about how they now view what they wrote then, given what we've all been through. Because what they wrote then makes no sense now. It's like watching a movie or tv show filmed before 9/11 in which anyone can walk through the automatic sliding doors of the airport and right up to the gate, ticketed or not. Remember those days, when you could wait for you loved ones' airplane to pull up to the gate in the chairs usually reserved for passengers, instead of on the cold tile next to the baggage carousel? It may be such a little thing, but it reminds us of how much has changed in these 7 and 1/2 years.

One of these books I've been perusing is "Partly Cloudy Patriot" by Sarah Vowell. One of the reviewers uses the word 'droll' to describe the book, and droll she is. She has a lengthy chapter about the election in 2000, and her comments meld with the chapter about Al Gore to contrast the bumbling foolishness of the president we got with the egghead president we actually elected. This chapter was written just after Bush's inauguration, and she couldn't possibly have guessed what would ensue. In any case, this was all put in the context of the horrors of high school, in which the jocks rule the school and the nerds get teased and ridiculed for their inability to do pull-ups in gym class. Sarah pined for the day that nerds would run the world.

Now they do. And as much as our country has changed from the beginning of Bush's presidency to the end, it has changed doubly in the month since then. A country run by propeller-heads - if they can fix what's wrong, we may never go back to brush-cutting plain-talkers again. I shudder to think about what could happen if we get this wrong.

Cruel joke (and revolt of the parentheses)

2009-02-03T21:08:00.003-05:00

Aside from a short jaunt off the wagon, I've been vegetarian for about 3 and 1/2 years (although I still eat sustainably raised and harvested fish, eggs, and cheese). It was mostly for environmental reasons, but also an attempt to maintain a healthy diet. (Do M&M cookies count as a food group?) Being vegetarian leads you to learn to make really weird meals out of things that shouldn't go together but have a complete array of vitamins, carbs, and proteins, so you shove it down and don't share with others for fear of the dreaded "you eat this?!" look. But despite my salads with beets and fennel, despite my oatmeal with protein powder and flax seeds, despite my scrambled eggs with mushrooms and peas (YUM!) and my 4-times-a-week gym habit, I couldn't lose weight and often felt gross enough to wish I could wear sweatpants to work.

Enter a dalliance through the local chain bookstore one Friday evening, in between a boring workday and dinner with friends. The Buy one Get one Half off shelf called my name. On it, a book called Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type. Grammar wonk that I am, I refuse to read anything that has a number instead of a word in the title, and am far less willing to read any diet book whatsoever. But I might have just fulfilled my Recommended Daily Allowance of said M&M cookie food group, and thus, the guilt won out, so I picked it up and glanced inside. And what of this blood type diet? What do my platelets wish for me to consume? No wheat at all (except for Ezekiel bread, which is not a loaf of baked flour at all, but rather a living thing itself, apparently) and no corn either, no coffee (wha?!), no dairy (blasphemy!), no peanut butter or other legumes (okay, now this has gone too far). Alas, my veggie burgers and tofurky (main ingredient: wheat gluten), gourmet Trader Joe's-type snack crisps, lentil soup, corn tortilla'ed fajitas, have all been working against me.

Instead, meat. Meat, meat, meat. Bison and chicken and fish (oh my!). Many of my beloved fruits, veggies, and nuts are still okay, as are most beans and some other types of grains, like funny little quinoa. But basically I should be eating like a caveman. The "highly beneficial" foods include: meat (no pork), the gamier, the better; dark leafy greens like kale, chard, collards; almonds, walnuts, flax, and pumpkin seeds; berries (but not strawberries, those acidic little rascals) and other red fruits; artichokes, broccoli, sweet potatoes, red peppers, and other such roughage; pinto beans and black-eyed peas. Basically, a lot of the foods I already eat, but not some of the foods I always thought were best for me. Green tea is the new caffeine, vodka is the new taboo (I never liked it much anyway).

Here's the best news. Chocolate: okay. Beer and wine: okay. Sushi (with brown rice): okay (in fact, more than okay. Enter the kelp/seaweed food group). I think I can do this, if I can just get over the fact that raising animals for food is an eco-no-no. The famous favorite ag advice folks say to cut out the meat, eat less animal, plan a night of meatless meals. And here I am, chowing down on bison jerky and chicken stir-fry. It will be hard to slice off the cookie-and-muffin section of my food pyramid, but the franken-bread and quinoa helps. The book seems to be pretty scientifically based, from what little I remember from high school biology, but I'm still skeptical. However, it's been 10 days, and I feel better. No obnoxious diet-devotee testimony here, but my stomach feels better, my skin cleared up a little bit (pure coincidence, I say. There's a mega zit waiting to take over my chin, I can feel it). And I feel more satisfied when I eat. For what it's worth. I vow not to eat cow, and I promise to purchase my meat from the farmers markets and Whole Foods. There might be some cheese involved though. Feta, goat cheese, mozzarella, you better hide.

The caveman diet: all of the flesh, none of the fashion.

Coming round, full circle

2009-01-28T18:59:00.004-05:00

"On a short, dead-end street lined with low-income apartment complexes, a garden grows. Almost-ripe zucchini and tomatoes hang from tall plants. The compost heap looks tidy and fertile. Weeds are nowhere to be found, thanks to upkeep by a few dedicated gardeners who can finally breathe a sigh of relief. They get to continue sowing the soil for many more years."

I wrote those words more than 8 years ago for an article in the Columbia Missourian about the Community Garden Coalition. (It was so long ago that the article isn't in the online archives anymore.) I got kudos in the daily staff email from the Editor-in-Chief, who said that I had managed to made even a garden sound interesting. (Maybe because gardens are interesting!) I was so proud - little old me, getting a shout-out from the chief.

Well, it has happened again. I scrolled down Grist's front page to find this posting: Food and the Beloved Community by Grist's ag guru Tom Philpott. It's about community gardens and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., a speech given at the Duke Gardens during an MLK Day of Service event. It caught my eye because I read Philpott's column very often, but also because I had just signed up for the Rooting DC 2009 conference about community gardening, and had also talked with someone today about the civil rights and discrimination issues that the USDA is dealing with. So imagine my surprise when the very first line of the Grist piece, the note before the text, references the organization I helped start! Back in the day, Farmhand was just a bunch of stressed out students shoveling cow poop and cutting brush. The students who took over as Farmhand leaders have done some fantastic work this year, far better than I could ever hope to have done. I'm so proud that this little group has made such an impact that a Grist guru would participate in such an event and write about it in an internationally read and respected forum, no less! Another shout-out from the chief, free publicity for a deserving and accomplished group of students, and inspiration to keep working for change.

Shakespeare in Prison

2009-01-11T19:12:00.003-05:00

I just watched the 2005 Sundance documentary "Shakespeare Behind Bars," about a group of prisoners at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in Kentucky who have formed a theater troupe and present Shakespeare's plays to fellow inmates and family members. This was after listening to "Act V," an episode of NPR's This American Life about a Shakespeare troupe in the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center that is part of the Prison Performing Arts program in Missouri. The two programs initially piqued my interest because I'm a big fan of Shakespeare's work. Of the many things I learned in junior high and high school, the classes that still stick out in my mind are the ones in which we read, nay, dissected A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, sifting through the words to understand not just the letters and sounds, but also the context of the lines and the inner motivations of the complex and tragic characters who said so much beyond those words. Shakespeare knew human nature well, and he understood the very real, very complicated situations he put his protagonists in. Which is why it is very a propos for prison inmates to be reciting Hamlet and The Tempest.

It was so moving to listen to the inmates in both shows talk about their experiences, what their life was like before being locked up, what they wanted to do when they got out (if they were eligible for parole). A few in the Sundance documentary even talked about the crimes they had committed. These are people who are demonized in cop shows, and yet you forget that they're criminals when you hear them working with the program leaders on a particular line of the play that they're trying to crawl into. You root for the ones who have been in prison for many years and are up for parole hearings soon, and your heart falls when you learn that they have been denied parole, deferred for 5 or 6 years, even though they have played leadership roles in the troupe and in the data lab where many of the inmates work. Aside from the diversion that play practice gives them each day, the inmates participate because everything else about prison life is so dehumanizing (daily strip search, anyone?), but when they're performing, when they're interacting with each other and with Shakespearean scholars in a scene, everyone is on the same level. Everyone is a complex human, examining their own nature and comparing themselves to kings and queens, sons and daughters. So many people say that they fear public speaking more than they fear death, but perhaps to these inmates, many of whom have stared down death, facing their inner demons may be the scariest thing of all. When a person has led a life influenced by poverty, broken homes, and abuse, how terrifying it must feel to dig down deep, expose their vulnerabilities through words written 400 years ago that they can often relate to, and perform in front of their peers. To do such a thing and receive overwhelming praise must feel so empowering.

According to the Luther Luckett website, the annual cost per inmate is more than $16,000 of the taxpayers' money. That's a year of college tuition. It's just under the January 2008 poverty line for a family of three. At an average inmate population of 1,073, that adds up to a very large operating budget. We're spending this much money on people who will be locked up for 20 years or more, but what are we doing to keep them from coming back, spending another $16K on them for each year that they return to a life of crime? The Warden Tom Daily, at the beginning of the film, wishes that the inmates would just put the prison out of business by returning to the outside world and not giving the courts a reason to send them back to jail. How many wardens feel, as he does, that each day of an inmate's life should be spent preparing them to leave?

Fast food guilt trip

2009-01-10T11:02:00.003-05:00

I never thought I'd devote this much interweb space to fast food, but then I came across this great piece on Grist about the Whopper Virgins. I had only ever seen the tv commercials, but the actual website has a longer video about the international taste test. The writer makes a better point about food and the United States' role in world cuisine and nutrition. After you watch the videos on the Whopper Virgins website, check out this 20-minute piece from Mark Bittman. Then go get yourself a real meal, preferably home-cooked with fresh ingredients. Don't do it for the environment. Do it for your tastebuds.

Playing with food

2009-01-04T22:55:00.003-05:00

Food combinations you may not have thought of that may change your life:

~Salad: mixed greens, diced cooked beets, crumbled goat cheese, sliced fennel bulb, artichoke hearts, balsamic vinegar, olive oil. Emphasis on the fennel. Add tuna or other fish and use honey mustard dressing for another variation.

~ Breakfast: one scoop Berries and Whey protein powder, 1/2 cup quick cook oats, 2 tbsp. toasted flax seeds, 1 cup water. Tastes like the strawberries and cream instant oatmeal packets, yet much better for you. Substitute sliced almonds or walnuts for flax seeds.

~Broccoli slaw: buy it prepackaged or make your own with shredded broccoli stems and carrots. Use liberally. Good with chopped cucumber, tomato, and cottage cheese.

~Trader Joe's Roasted Red Pepper and Artichoke Tapenade: Great on veggie burgers and in pasta.

~White Bean and Basil Hummus: almost as creamy as alfredo sauce when thinned out, but much better for you. Also incredibly addictive when used as a dip with chips.

~Almond butter: sorry, I still think peanut butter wins this one. But almond butter is a healthier option and can do anything peanut butter can do.

~Snack: Greek yogurt, toasted flax seeds, honey. Add fresh or thawed frozen fruit, jam, and/or granola. Substitute agave nectar for honey for a low glycemic index kick.

It's a fine thing we do here in this city

2009-01-04T21:28:00.002-05:00

Working for the federal government has its perks, among them being the ability to do good for the nation and the world. But let us not forget the roles we play in our local ecological setting, for the extirpation of one can mean the loss of a whole lot more. As Sasha and Malia Obama prepare to start classes in their new D.C. private school tomorrow, may the Obama family not forget that although the international cameras may be trained on their every move, they are now residents of this fine city as well. And so, Battered D.C. Awaits Arrival of a Presidential 'Partner'.

A new year, another reinvention

2009-01-04T20:42:00.005-05:00

On December 29th, 2001, during a pensive trip home from college for an abbreviated winter break, I made some pretty big decisions about my life that set me on the path that led me to where I am now. I have come to refer to it as That Fateful Day. Since then, I have considered that my personal new year, a chance to look back during a time when it's cold and dark and slow and everyone is readying their resolutions to proclaim two days later when the ball drops. Each year, I have found myself pining for variations on the same themes, but due to recent developments in my life, I find that I have reached the end of my list with most of my goals checked off. So what is there left to say? What can I pine for now? The usual things that other people ache for: money. love. lose 10 pounds. get a new hobby. buy a home. Time to start doing the things that people do when they stick their toes in the mud and let it ooze up over their feet. For many years, I spent this Fateful Day looking both backward and forward and I didn't stop to think about the very space I was in. So maybe that's my new goal: try to perfect the things I'm doing right here. Among those will be rediscovering my creativity, which surely means another change in direction of what I put on this page. I'll be learning how to use my camera to its fullest extent, seeing things differently through its lens. Like:

My dear kitty is, of course, a supermodel in her own right, and lots of digital space was filled on two photo shoots with a sunbeam. Not to brag or anything, but...

There will be more resolutions and new mottos for a better way of life, but those words may be couched in new promises and deeds, for we only do what we can with the things that each day gives us. Something to consider: if you don't precisely articulate your conscious desires, your unconscious patterns will come true instead. So cheers to living out our conscious desires, come what may.