Back in I-o-way

So, I took Dad's Mustang up to Iowa. Mom decided to come with me, so I took her too. All in all, it was a pretty uneventful trip. Toward the beginning, I was having slight difficulties, but as the time wore on, I got to be much more reliable at handling the car. All in all, it was pretty boring. I rolled into town around 21:30. My roommate, Aaron, was standing outside the building talking on his cell phone, and he helped us load my stuff from the car into the dorm. It took me until the next day to get most of the stuff in the right place. My room is a lot more organized this room, especially since there's no door separating me from my computer desk. We have a couch this year, which is pretty sweet. Aaron got it from GCCF (Grinnell College Christian Fellowship), because he's going to lead Bible studies on Wednesday nights here, and GCCF graciously provides for places to sit for that sort of thing. When it's not Wednesday night, though, we've got the couch for our own use. It makes a great place to read and study. Mom used it to crash before I took her to Iowa City the next morning for a Greyhound ride home.
-So now I'm here and classes have started. Though, it's a weekend, which is nice. Tomorrow I'll do homework, and then probably bike down to Sugar Creek Preserve to look at it in some detail. I've only been there briefly. From what I remember, it seems like a nice forest, fairly healthy (though it'd be healthier if it weren't just an island, and were somewhere where the native vegetation isn't primarily prairie). I'm going to take my edible plants book there and see if I can get to work figuring out what's edible around here. Sometime soon I'll also be re-applying for this year's CERA work, and I think tonight I'll start organizing the year's first krokay game. (Two people have already asked me when it's going to be!)
-I've been introducing Aaron to some of my more peculiar musical tastes (Stockhausen, Revolution 9, Krzysztof Penderecki) and my less oddball stuff (the Mountain Goats, Eels, Cake). I think this is going to be a good year.
-Other note: I've been reading Endgame by Derrick Jensen. It travels along some of the same lines as Jason Godesky's stuff (actually, Jason frequently cites Endgame), but it's more tenable, more exhaustive, and really gripping despite being nonfiction and not plotted. It's got about 900 pages split into two volumes, and I'm on 320, but I'm actually glad that I'm not even halfway through. It means I can look forward to a lot more really good reading. Oddly, the library only had volume 1, so I may have to wait after I finish this volume, since they're ordering volume 2.

I am become Death, destroyer of worlds

Today I finally got my driver's license. Yeah, no really! I was worried I might not get the opportunity, because both the examination stations in Cincinnati were booked until September. But then Dad told me I ought to try the station in Preble County, where he used to live. And he was on the money - it's such a small county, they had an opening for today even though I scheduled it yesterday. Today I drove the car up there, and we found the station, and we waited around for my test. There were a few other people taking their tests, and we talked a little. The examiner was a nice lady. I made it right through the maneuvering - which is what I was most worried about, given the potential for immediate failure by touching a cone - and we moved onto the road. I only had a couple mistakes: one where I took a right turn too sharp and brushed a curb, and one where I forgot to look down the railroad before I crossed it. All told, minor stuff, and when we got back she said, "Well, you can tell you've had three learner's permits, because you're a very good driver." Ha! You all said I couldn't do it.
-We would've had them anyhow, but I'm going to call it a celebration for my success that we had ribs at Grandma & Grandpa's house afterwards. And then I narrowly won a game of Scrabble. I head back to Grinnell on Tuesday. Tomorrow I'll be practicing on Dad's Mustang, which he's loaning to me because he doesn't use it much anymore. It's a stick-shift, and for the longest time I couldn't get a stick-shift to work, but over the last few days I've started getting the hang of it. I have to practice more before I "peak out on my learning curve," in Dad's words. Now, though, I can do it alone.
-I did name the snake, a couple days after I got him. His name is Tenzing, after Sir Edmund Hillary's Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. I sat on my bed watching him climb around the cage for like half an hour one night. He's already really good at it (and apparently pretty enthusiastic). He can ascend about nine inches and then pull himself up from the space between the top of the cage and the screen lid. Which is pretty impressive, since he's only about a foot long. Maybe a little more.

Say hello to my little friend

After about six years of leading up to it, I finally got a snake. Yeah, I did. No, I did! Really.
-Mom and I drove to the All-Ohio reptile Show in Columbus today, and I wandered around there for a while looking for carpet pythons. They were in much shorter supply than I'd expected. I only found three, all priced over $200. I asked if anyone knew of a vendor that had some. In this way, I bounced around to pretty much every vendor in the place, and saw some very cool snakes and other reptiles. There was a guy selling an alligator, and a guy selling a bunch of little turtles anywhere between one and two inches across (maybe less for a few of them). The snakes in the place ranged in size from a-few-inch hatchlings to some that were probably upwards of seven feet long. What I didn't seem to find, though, was carpet pythons - other than the expensive ones. However, a lot of people knew someone or other who bred them, and one helpful woman said she'd look around and we'd trade some e-mails and I'd come back to a show in a month when her friend brought some. I started collecting e-mail addresses instead of looking to buy a snake. It annoyed me that we'd come 107 miles and were going to leave snakeless. But then, as I was talking to a dealer, he asked if I'd seen the baby carpet pythons (he pointed) over there. Indeed I hadn't.
-There were just three, all from the same clutch of eggs that had hatched just four days ago. The guy selling them let me hold them. He checked the sexes - all males. And, they were priced attractively at just $85. I realized I definitely ought to buy one of these. I also realized that my cage would be far too big for the snake at this stage of his life, and so I bought with him a 10-gallon terrarium. I paid, and traded handshakes and e-mail addresses with the guy who sold me him, and then we drove back home. (Incidentally, for all those of you who doubt whether I'll get a license, I drove us there and back. And I only hit two other cars. I'm going to practice at stick-shift with Dad over the next few days, and I'll take my licensing test a few days before leaving for Grinnell.)
-I've now got the snake set up in the terrarium, in my room by the window. I haven't named him yet; that'll probably be a few days at least. He'll eventually grow to somewhere between four and six feet. Here are some pictures.

As long as I'm uploading pictures, here's a bunch more. By the way, I think you can click on all of these to see them bigger.

From when I first got to camp. I took a few pictures of what it looked like around there. This is one of them.

Shot of Boulder Lake, combined with a file photo of my newly-bought hat. I'd just found a feather for it.

A little guy.
Before kids got there, it sometimes got boring. A different guy named Chuck taught me how to get this far. The rest was too hard at the time, and he said he'd teach me later, but he never did.

Josh after a rough day of mosquitoes and sun.

Jag Lake, where we stayed on our training trip.

The guys from the training trip. Left to right: Alan, Bill, Scott, me, Jason, Josh, Ben, and Ryan.

Final day of training trips: a nearby group got "stealthed", which is a different word for pranked. Since we were staying near the camp, some girls on Program Staff took a bunch of junk and left it at their camp, and they had to take it back. The girls took one of their canoes and replaced it with two kayaks, with shovels for paddles.


Bill's trip, my first with kids. L-R: Bill, Charlie, Tyler, Ryan, Alex.
Alex's trip. This is the Presque Isle Lake campsite, adorned by Oliver. Oliver has this story to tell: "I have this neighbor who's so creepy. He has a pond in his yard, and sometimes he goes and catches tadpoles in it. And then he puts them on a circle and puts a nail through their head and spins them, and no matter where it lands, he says," (Oliver uses a high, deranged voice here) "'Tadpoles is the winner!' One night I had a dream where he did that to me, and then he said, 'Oliver is the winner!'" This didn't define Oliver's trip; it was just an interesting, macabre little story he told. Alex and I weren't sure if he was making it up or not; he made some other stuff up.

Sunset on Presque Isle

Alex found a hollow rotting stump to make a chimney. Two amazed campers look on.

Fine trail cuisine.

On Alan's trip, a doe crossed the river right in front of our canoes.

Sunset on Pallette Lake.

Tim's trip. This kid's name is Ben, but after he speared this crayfish with a stick, we strated calling him Grog instead. Respect.

Here I put to use the Creative Tarping skills that Scott taught me when I was on a trip with him. I didn't bring my camera on that trip, unfortunately. It was the trip where we started a fire with a flint rock and a steel poop shovel. Under the tarp are Alec, Ryan, and Austin, and obscured is Sam. They're all the kids on the trip who weren't Grog.

Tim. Do you see the smiley face in the lifejacket tan?

Sports-bra style

These other two pictures are from after camp, at the krokay game I had with some Finneytown friends.

BJ, Rosie, Tara, and Aaron in the parking lot.

I just think this picture of BJ talking on his cellular and gesturing with a mallet is funny. Note also Matt, camouflaged in the left half of the picture in a green shirt.
That's all. Go somewhere else now.

On harebrainedness

This post serves to let you all know that I haven't actually lost it.
-I decided I was going to start sleeping outside. Now, on the face of it, there seem to be several things wrong with this decision. One: People have always slept under some kind of shelter if they needed to, and I already have that exact thing - a house. Thus, I'm not really gaining a new primitive skill. I'm just, you know, sleeping outside. Two: It's kind of weird for the neighbors, maybe. Three: Sleeping outside isn't really a difficult skill to learn. In fact, sleeping as a rule is pretty easy to do.
-Sleeping outside was more of a symbolic decision, arrived at on the spur of the moment in a slight heat of idealism when I was writing in my journal. "Bring on the primitive living skill books," were the words I wrote; "starting tomorrow I sleep outside." Later, I realized that that decision was more a symbolic change than anything. As such, if it's raining, I'll sleep inside. I might start sleeping inside again after a while, but for now, I do like it. It's nice, if for nothing else then because I get some fresh air, and it's also usually cooler outside than inside at night.
-There are some credulous primitivists out there. I found a forum where they hang out, www.rewild.info/conversations . Several of them there have used homœopathic remedies, and one has mentioned that they have a homœopathic doctor. They talk about rewilding language. Now, all languages can express a copula (something is something else - we use "is" for it, though other languages just put the two things next to each other, like in Russian "Это дверь" - "That [is] a door"), and all languages have pronouns like you, me, and him. But after Jason Godesky posted about "E-Primitive", the supposed primitive way of writing in English, a lot of them jumped on the bandwagon. E-Primitive is actually based off of E-Prime, which is English with no forms of "to be", and was conceived by some physicists who fancied themselves philosophers, if I recall correctly. The argument is that only those who feel that they're masters of the world can declare that one thing is equal to another. Or, perhaps, that one thing is never "equal" to another, because everything in the universe is in a state of flux. The rationales are pretty abstracted. But it has an interesting ring to it - rewilding the English language! Becoming undomesticated even down to your thought patterns! And expressing thoughts with minimal use of "to be" does give a measure of improvement. Professor Savarese advises that you cut down on "to be" as much as you can while writing something, because it makes thoughts longer and
less direct. Nevertheless, he used it plenty in his book. The trick is not to use it too much, and when you can, to keep concise by ditching it. See, I used it in that sentence just back there. So, many of them have decided to get rid of the copula in all instances. Others have taken the idea of E-Primitive even farther and started raising the idea of eliminating pronouns - I have no idea what the reasoning is behind that. It sounds good, because it's a new idea, and sounds kind of deep. Eliminate pronouns, and call all things by their real names. Pronouns are a convenience, though: they shorten sentences by giving you a way around saying the same noun every time you mention it. I get the feeling on that board sometimes that, when Jason Godesky writes something, a lot of them don't even bother thinking about whether he might be right; they just accept that he is. Of course, there are some others, I'm sure, who aren't like that. I'd have to say I belong to that camp. I'm not about to start using homœopathic remedies (Head-On! Apply directly to the forehead! - The reason they're still allowed to sell that stuff is that they never say what it's supposed to do, and so the FDA can't say it doesn't really do it). I'll continue using "to be", and Chuck will most certainly always refer to Chuck with a pronoun. I'm going to learn primitive skills, but I'm not going to devote my life to that and no other pursuits. I'm going to look at stuff I read critically, even if it does come from a primitivist source like Jason. Basically, I'm going to learn primitive skills because I think it'll be both fun and useful - perhaps extremely useful indeed.

P.S.! I made a new snapping video. A friend at Grinnell introduced me to the band that made the song.