Idea Man

First, I'd like to note that yesterday I had a great krokay game with Matt, Aaron, Keith, and BJ. Rosie and Tara came, but they couldn't stay, so it was just us guys. The game could've been better if I'd realized ahead of time that a 12-wicket game would take too long with 5 people. Note to self: only use the 12-wicket course for games with three people or under. Or with determined players. Even so, we all trekked into the woods and I set up the course just the way I always set it up on the hillside in Winton Woods. We played and talked, and let our various personalities resonate off each other like the ripples from five rocks dropped into a krokay pond. Keith kept the woods alive with BUP!!!s. He says he's going to get a third bunny, and name it Chester, or Mister Mellenkamp. Matt has been working diligently at the theater or at college. Aaron's parents keep him busy, but this summer he's making money from that too. BJ says he plans to stick around in Boston when he graduates from college there, because so much more happens there. Remember, by the way, that Matt took Aaron and me to see The Dark Knight on the day it opened. I think I've got myself pretty well situated as friends go, you know?
-Aaron, Keith, and I had some Skyline afterwards. Keith said: "Oh, so I guess you want to go to college and make something of yourself. Loser." It was funnier then, and we decided I should write it somewhere. I'm going to hang out with both of them more this summer. Especially because Aaron owes me $21.50.

-On a different note, Micah today got a treatment reminiscent of Rachael's treatment of Dave. He had a girlfriend, Chi-Chi (her real name is Ernestina, so who can blame her for going by a nickname?), who dumped him a few days ago. She also threw away about $75 worth of gifts he bought her, for no identified reason. That was bad enough, but today he found out that now she's decided to go out with Victor, his second-best friend. So Micah walked around steaming and cussing for a while earlier. I told him she's not the kind of person to get bent out of shape over, and that if she tries to get back together with him (as she frequently does, apparently), to tell her to forget it.

-Quick note, too: I went to the playground by the railroad today, and met a teen girl who had no idea what "wholesome" or "tension" meant. She accused me of being too smart.

-Now, on to my main topic, here. Since I got back from camp, I've been more interested in honing my primitive skills. I think camp acted as a catalyst in that respect. It got me to think, "I could live outside." So now my next step is figuring out the skills I need in order to do that. To that end, I'm going to seriously start beefing up my outdoor knowledge. I'll be reading books about edible plants and shelter and trapping and such, possibly finding back episodes of Survivorman, and trying to find someone more skilled who can mentor me on these things. Of course, all of this is just book learning if I don't put it into practice, so I'll also be spending a lot of time outside, finding these plants that I read about, constructing lean-tos, trying to train information out of animal tracks, and whatever else I need to do. I expect I'll spend many nights outside, especially once it gets a little cooler out. (However, on several occasions, the house has been hotter than the outdoors, so I don't really need to wait much.) Presumably, with the practice I put in and the learning I find, I'll be pretty proficient within not too long. I'm going to set goals for myself; the first one is to have killed and eaten my own small game by the end of the school year next year. I hope to have that one completed well ahead of schedule, so I can keep going pretty quick. After a long time of talking primitivist talk, I'm starting to put my words into action.
-What will this lead to? My hope is that I'll be good enough within a year, or at most two, to start living outside full-time. I don't pretend I'll have mastered everything within that timespan, but I should be able to survive. Once I accomplish that, I'll see what the college thinks about it if I live outside instead of in a dorm. You laugh, but I have to get good somehow, and it's not going to be through thinking about the outdoors while sitting on a dorm bed. I have no idea what Housing's reaction would be to such a proposal, though I was chatting with Ilan (memory jog) and he said that they would "definitely" let me do it senior year. I want to start junior year, and hone everything down. Then, for senior year, I'll see if I can get a group of other people who'd like to come out and try it too. That would make the experience at least twice as awesome, assuming some people actually decided to do it. If I name this endeavor, I'm thinking of GO, for Grinnell Outside. I have yet to come up with a location to stay, but there are a few parks. I'd have to get the permission of the park board.
-To you, I probably sound a bit crazy. That's all right with me, because I know I'm going to seem crazy to a lot of people when I embark on this plan. But, if I become knowledgeable and experienced enough, why not? If I don't, my skills will either never develop, or atrophy. Now here comes the fun part of this entry where I look even crazier. If I get a GO contingent with me, they would make great people to band together with if this Jason Godesky happens to be right.
-Yeah, I'm bringing back that old name. Now, I've gotten a little more discerning since I first read his Theses, and I've gotten more well-read. In fact, I read one of his major sources that he often cut and pasted from, Jared Diamond's Collapse. So, until I read his ideas again with a more critical eye than my reckless primito-optimism allowed me last time, I don't really know what I think are the odds of civilization collapsing. Jared Diamond thinks we'll probably pull through. But if the opposite is true, the handwriting certainly does seem to be on the wall. Our economy, basically, is slowing down. The sub-prime mortgage bubble already burst; now major banking corporations are starting to run into definite trouble, viz. Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. The government's response seems to be much as Godesky predicted. The price of food has started to rise in an attention-getting way, and so has the price of gas. Parallel to that, the American dollar has been getting slowly more and more worthless. This happened once before at the beginning of the Depression, but at that point there was still plenty of oil left, all of it easy for the taking. We're now very much getting into Peak Oil. The Depression era also didn't have to contend with climate change wiping out the occasional city and making crops harder to grow. These things already happening are another contributor to my determination to learn soon and quickly. Civilization may figure out a way to keep going, though it'll have to collaborate better with the planet in order to stay in business much longer (one of the central findings of Collapse). Or, it might implode. Whatever happens, I plan to be ready for it. And maybe even have a group of friends ready with me.

Let's pick up where I left off

It was like 3:30, and I needed to go to bed. But anyhow.
The boys' session ended on July 13th. I subbed in for a guy who was going to take a "convoy" (they call their buses that) down to Madison to drop off a bunch of kids. To get back to camp, I got a ride with a girl who was sent to tail the bus in a car. As we talked, we first learned that we're both from Cincinnati. Then we learned that she actually lives just down the street. Then we learned that she had a friend at Finneytown. And then I learned that her friend is Erin, which is freaky, because there's another girl working at camp who also knows Erin for completely different reasons (same Ultimate Frisbee team at college). The trip went smoothly, because we were practically old friends then. That night, we had the Staff Banquet. Good food. And then I had a day of downtime, off the clock, before I left.
-I got a minivan with some other Milwaukee-bound staffers (actually, they were headed farther via Milwaukee), to the Amtrak station. We sure cut the timing close. The train was scheduled to leave at 15:00, and we got there at... 15:06. And for some reason this one was on time. Damn it!
-Instead I took a series of Greyhounds that left at 20:10 and arrived at 10:00 the next day. That was much less fun than an Amtrak. I had transfers at several different unreasonable times of night.
-But I got home! Mom picked me up, and I told her all about camp. Then I got ready for the other half of my summer. I've got so many fun things I'm going to do. One is starting on Solvejg, my next font. I started that pretty quick after I got home, scanning it in that night. I started pushing pixels two nights ago, and I'm already done with ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST. Haven't worked on anything today yet. I'm also going to be working on my snake cage, and getting my driver's license. Dad took me out to a parking lot yesterday with his Mustang and I started working on my stick-shifting. With some advice from Ben (a fun and fascinating guy I walked to town with), I'm several times better than the last time I tried it. I can now get the car started pretty much every time I try, and my average keeps improving. I can get it moving and shifted while going uphill, and I can start the engine while rolling downhill by popping the clutch. I still have some practicing to do, but I have until August 8th, when my learner's permit expires.
-Furthermore, I'm getting in touch with friends. Keith came over yesterday, the first time I've seen him since graduation, and we swapped stories about our respective years. I showed him all the animals we've accumulated. (We have no bunny, unfortunately; while I was gone, someone left the basement door open and he left.) DUTCHESS! MOCHA! Those are Keith's bunnies. Dutchess is getting old, with cataracts and arthritis, but she's still hopping at age 8½. Mocha is about 5, and still cute too. I showed him our folder of notes that we passed all through senior year, and we just generally had fun.
-Last night, Matt, who works in a cinema, offered me a free ticket to see The Dark Knight. He actually gets four for each release, so we invited Aaron too. And we went to see it today. Micah tagged along to make a fourth. Firstly, it was a spectacular movie. Also, a Manito-wish girl was an extra in it, a cop, but I don't remember her name and I forgot to watch for her. I just enjoyed the movie. Afterwards, Matt had to work, but Aaron, Micah, and I had some Chick-fil-A and then some ice cream. That brings me to now. I intend to finish Solvejg's capitals today, and maybe buy some CDs online. Ta-da, you're all up to speed!

Feds: "Masterson Blog Left in Lurch"

I've been busy, what can I say? I was on trail a lot more after that last post. I ended up with a total of six trips in this whole season: my training trip, two 5-day trips, a 3-day, a 4-day, and another 5-day. That totaled 25 days (the last two overlapped - it was a turn-and-burn). And I had tons of fun. There were just a few things that could make it more fun. One is of course if there weren't a "shoes every waking hour" policy. I mean, they could requires shoes in specific conditions, but instead they just go for zero tolerance. Shoes on even on the softest ground. Yes, I will stop grinding this ax for you guys, but it still did detract from my experience. Another thing is one that they couldn't really do. It's that I'd have liked some time just camping, not having to paddle several miles every day. I'm not too worried about it, though; I got a lot of upper-body exercise. Toward the last trips, I had carried so many canoes that they started to feel light. It was weird. I like being in good shape. The kids were mostly no trouble; they all seemed pretty happy to be on trail, and liked helping out for the most part. One kid talked about sex all the time, and that's about the most trouble we had. The counselors were mostly plenty of fun too. My favorite trip was my last one, with Tim as a counselor; we went swimming all the time, and one day a kid speared a crawdad with a stick, then another kid caught a bass with his fishing pole.
I'm interrupting myself here: I'm going to have to finish this blog post later because it's late and I'm getting tired, but I'll post what I've got here, since I've promised a few people I'd blog tonight.

Due to Unforeseen Circumstances

Due to a complication five days ago, I'm blogging today instead. And that's not going to do any good for most of my audience, because apparently you all left for Crowduck on Tuesday. But, this'll be here when you get back.
-First, I'm going to kind of write what I'm thinking now that you're actually all going to Crowduck. I didn't think too much of it before I decided to come here, but now that you're all gone, and I'm here, I'm feeling down about it. I knew it was going to be a risk coming here, because I wouldn't know if I liked it or not. I think I like it, mostly, but there are those things that bother me. One is of course the shoes, for which you've all been teasing me. There are maybe a few others in the stuff I'm going to write up ahead about my time so far. But there's also other stuff: No matter how fun it is, it's also work, whereas Crowduck is just a complete vacation. And, I don't really know anyone here that well - I've been away from my family so long I'm feeling a bit alienated. Hm. I'm going to run with that second thought a little while. I went off to college, and only came back for a little while during some vacations. Then I finally came back home for the summer, except that then I just left again. Meanwhile, I keep getting thrown into new situations. I wish I had a little more stability, I guess. I'll have that when I get back home, so that'll be nice. I keep thinking it's pretty funny how nomadic my life has become recently: One house to a new house to college to the new house to college to the new house to college to the new house to Camp Manito-wish to all these little campsites every night. I'm going to like being home for a month and a half before college starts.

-Anyhow, I'm supposed to be writing about what I've been doing. So far, I've been on trail 14 days, about to hit the trail again to make it 22. The first 4 were my training trip, which I believe I mentioned already. Then, I did a 5-day trip with a guy named Bill, who's one of the few Williams of my age going with Bill. I admire that. We took four campers out, consisting of two pairs of previous friends. One pair, Charlie and Ryan, had a really interesting friendship built around Charlie yelling at Ryan, and then Ryan making fun of Charlie. Alex and Tyler had a reglar friendship. Anyhow, we did the Trout Lake Circle, which was just beautiful. Bill's been coming to Manito-wish for 10 years, the last 4 of them as staff, so he knew is way around and made the trip run really smooth. We had so much fun. I made friends with the kids through card tricks and other stuff. They think I'm pretty cool. So, I really enjoyed that trip.
-The second 5-day trip I'm a bit more ambivalent about. The first three days were pretty great. Day five was also fine, because it's really just a morning - we paddled in at 9 this morning. But yesterday, day 4, I could seriously have done without. I'll start from the beginning of the trip. The counselor for it, Alex (as distinct from the other Alex I mentioned), is on his first year just like me. We paddled down the Manitowish River the first day, which was awesome; the water is so high this year that we just floated straight down some rapids that we would definitely have to walk in a regular year. The kids were Clay, Oliver, Caleb, Ben, and Will; only Clay and Caleb knew each other before camp, though they'd all been associating for five days in the cabin. They were a pretty solid group. They could all paddle well. The only real drawback was that only Caleb could carry a canoe, and even then only for a hundred yards or so. So, Alex and I had to do all the carrying on the portages. Which was fine, because most of our portages were pretty easy, except for a two-mile one on day 2. And except for yesterday, which I'm getting to. Altogether, though, we made good time on the water, and worked really well as a group.
-Yesterday, we had the Dairymen's Portage, through the Dairymen's Country Club (I believe is what it's called). This is the crown jewel of dreaded portages at Manito-wish. It's four miles long, though it can be broken up into two-mile sections with a paddle in between. So, to start with, we had a sort of warmup one-mile portage from Crab Lake to Round Lake. We just pulled the canoes out of Crab, and then followed a gravel road to a dirt path that came off from the left. Here's the thing: the dirt path didn't match up with our portage map at all. We wandered around for a good hour or so, sometimes with a canoe or two, sometimes without, trying to find a path to Round Lake, but the path disintegrated into the woods wherever we looked. After a long frustrating time, we decided to split the portage into two smaller portages, an alternate route indicated on our map. So, as we were taking the canoes back to go to Little Crab Lake, I noticed: That road goes off in the same direction, and we passed it, didn't we? It turned out to be the right road, clearly. We all turned onto it, having wasted an hour. It didn't get that much better, though, because this dirt road had all sorts of forks, all uncommented-on by the portage map, and Alex had to find his own way. Moreover, Oliver had gone missing, and one of our canoes was still back at the wrong road. I took Clay and Caleb with me, and we finally found Oliver - he had been lagging when we turned onto the road, so he didn't see us and instead went to Little Crab Lake like we'd planned. Perfectly reasonable. He was a little shaken, but all right. I also went and got the other canoe. I left him and Clay to catch up with the rest of the group (Clay had been down the road before, so that wasn't rash), and took Caleb with me to get the canoe. When we got the canoe, we went down the road and promptly took a wrong turn down a blocked-off snowmobile road, walking an extra mile. Finally we came back and found some of the other group, and learned that Alex had found the lake and laid down arrows pointing us to it. So we followed those, and finished the portage. One mile: three hours. I like to call it the Comedy of Errors Portage.
-We paddled briefly down Round Lake, which is round, and came to Rice Creek, and thence took off on our next portage. "Took off" is too strong a phrase. In fact, this was the delightful section known around here as Vietnam. A quarter mile through woods that are completely lacking in trails; the only thing we get to guide us is sparsely placed red (or, confusingly, blue) blazes. Also, the gound is soft and covered with the corpses of trees that gave up, and we have to carry canoes and heavy packs, and of course neither of us has ever been here before. Have at it. We stumbled and fumbled through the mesh of trees, with a lookout ahead sighting blazes, and walked until we found a place. It was very debatable whether it was actually a place, actually. It was just different terrain, covered with hip-high ferns and shrubs, and on a big hill that we climbed up. Still no trail. We laid down the stuff, and Alex and I went off scouting. We didn't see it until I had practically walked onto it, but there it was - the gravel road really did exist.
-Realizing we'd never find the portage entrance again if we went too far, we picked up our stuff from it and carried it to the gravel road, then followed real paths - what a concept! - for the other 1¾ miles to Little Crooked Lake. Not that that was easy, either. Recall that only we counselors were able to carry canoes. Also, figure in a canoe that's about fifteen pounds butt-heavy, so it requires a helper to carry it, and makes the portager's shoulders sink into his sternum. And, we were running pretty low on water. But, we walked. Occasionally we wondered where this fabled turn was, but we always came upon it eventually, usually twice as far away as we had hoped. We were about ready to give up when it appeared that a + intersection on our map had given way to an L intersection in real life, but then I cleverly realized that it was a bend, not an intersection, and we walked the short rest of the way to the creek where we would leave our stuff. And fill up our bottles. Creek water isn't the best, but Potable Aqua kills anything but the taste.
-And then we walked back and did it again with the other half of our stuff. Finally we came to the lake. HA! We're, uh, halfway done with the Dairymen's Portage.
-We stopped at Evergreen Lodge, and a nice guy there let us fill up our water and use his picnic table. The second two-mile half had no Vietnam, but here's the thing: we started a little after 7 PM. So, by the time we got our first half to Boulder Lake, it was 8:15, and then we started off with the other half right around 9. The result - we did half the second load in darkness, using flashlights and headlamps. But we did it.
-We night-paddled to our campsite, which is against the rules, but it's not as if we had a choice. In fact, I discovered that I love night paddling, because it gives me the chance to watch out across a lake to see lightning storms hundreds of miles off. I saw lightning flashing through a sunset that had long gone by us. Above, the stars were perfectly clear. Our campsite was unmarked, but we knew where a marked one was, so we stayed there, in the process waking up everyone already camped there. I think we were entitled to something like that. We stayed up swapping stories of disastrous portages with the other counselor and TA, though we let the kids sleep while we made them trail pizza. They ate around 2; we went to bed around 3.

-So, there's a day. That's pretty much as bad as I expect it to get here. By the way, my grand total for ticks pulled off of me yesterday was 53. Today I pulled in and we cleaned our stuff, and I showered. I was so lethargic. Still am, to an extent. I have blisters on my feet, because I wore my scuba booties for the entire day of portaging. Next time I have a long portage, I'm going to change into my dryshoes first, the other pair that we bring along for in camp. These things are just not for walking a lot. I'm feeling it, and they are too - they wouldn't survive another Dairymen's Portage in one piece. I actually admire them for staying together this long.
-Meanwhile, I've got my next assignment. I have the evening off, and then I'm leaving again tomorrow with friend Alan on a NICE, EASY trip, which will give me time to recuperate, since I'm all congested because of Vietnam and walking so much, or something. After Alan's trip, I'm doing a turn-and-burn, which is where I take my stuff out of one canoe and put it in another, and go off immediately on my next trip, a five-day with someone I don't yet know. I really hope it's not the Crab Lake Circle again. But if it is, I guess I'll be prepared. That's optimism for you.
-Really, I don't hate it here. I only hated yesterday, and there were even parts of that that I liked. Like, when I was a mild hero (mostly it gave me a sense of pride) because I found Oliver. And the night paddle. I'm still having fun. Probably I would rather be at Crowduck, because there are no rules at Crowduck nor any schedules or responsibilities (beyond bringing home enough fish for dinner). But, I wouldn't get paid for going to Crowduck. And, this is good job experience. Every job wants you to list a leadership experience. If I can describe the Dairymen's Portage like I've done here, I'll be hired.
-My feet hurt.

Yep, they do have the internet here

Hello, everybody. I've been pretty busy and haven't written anything, but they do indeed have the internet here, so chances are I'll use a few of my 24 hours off each week to write something or other around here. So, here's the sort of thing I've been up to.
-All us newcomers started off our time here with Wilderness & Water Safety training. That was fun; it entailed learning some techinques for rescuing people from the water, and some other things, and after that we put these new learnings into practice. The thing about that was, winter here ended in early May. So the water was somewhere in the upper 40°s or lower 50°s, probably. Even so, we all survived the training, with the help of the state-of-the-art sauna in the Far South bathhouse. I never knew what the big fuss was about saunas until I tried this one for about the third time. That was the time that I stayed in for the right amount of time, and then I came out and felt so cleaned out. I'll be using the sauna more over the next month here.
-After WWS, we did Wilderness First Aid, more commonly known as WooFA. Manito-wish is a haven for acronyms and abbrevs., some of which get pronounced (usually awkwardly). There's WWS, WFA, the TLC (Trout Lake Circle), the PO (Program Office), OC (Orange Crystals - they're like Kool-Aid) PFDs (Personal Flotation Devices, occasionally called PooFDahs), and a slurry of others. Quite a few aren't actually shorter than the thing they abbreviate. For example, TL has exactly as many syllables as "trail lunch" (and fewer than a simple "lunch"). A lot of these things are come up with on the spot, when the speaker feels that he's running out of time to complete his sentence, I guess. It's a little bit bewildering, and I'm not sure I care for it, but it seems to be here to stay. WFA, to return to my point, was a barrage of facts about wilderness first aid, all crammed into two days, but we ended up proficient enough, and we also got to watch some pretty cool videos about hypothermia featuring one Dr Gordon Giesbrecht, a Canadian known as the hypothermia guru. So that accounted for days 3 and 4.
-The next days were staff training, things about what we do here and how to make a cabin that stays together well, and other stuff. The camp is divided into four age groups, from 11-12 to 14-15. There are also off-camp trips they run, called Outpost and Voyageur trips, that run in Alaska and Canada and other cool places for up to 40 days or maybe more - I don't really know. This is a pretty active camp. People associate with it for a long time. They grow up with it. I don't know what age group I'll be with, but probably 12-13.
-After a few days of staff training, there was the training trip. I'm going to use only first names when I talk about other people here. When there are two who have the same first name, I guess I'll use a number. Fortunately, on the trip all our names were different. It was led by Ryan, who's been here for a while; he led a retinue of seven guys: me, Ben, Josh, Jason, Alan, Scott, and Bill. We're all going to be counselors. The trip took us through several lakes, most connected to the previous by a stream. The weather stayed just perfect for us, and in different ways. One day, it was warm but overcast, so we didn't have to worry about sunburn. Another day, the sun was out but with big, friendly, puffy clouds overhead to give the sky almost a storybook feel. We paddled down the Manitowish* river and over two lakes and saw bald eagles and a beaver or maybe an otter, and practiced our canoeing strokes, and just generally had a great time. At camp we had chili mac and a lot of free time to hang around. The next day we paddled a few more lakes - actually a few more than we were supposed to, and ended up on a simply incredible campsite on Jag Lake. Jag is small, clear, and has perfect beaches with sand and small rocks of all different colors. Our campsite is excellently open, and the wind was blowing into it at high speed just perfect for drying out my wet socks. We all went swimming and loved the place. We ate "Mexi-Fest", which was dehydrated refried beans ("reefers") with rice and chili powder and some other stuff, all in tortillas - delicious. The next day we portaged out of camp back to the Manitowish river, and paddled up it until we got to our campsite for the day, probably less than a mile from camp, on the same lake. We arrived before we even had lunch, so we had a whole day to just goof off there. Fortuitously, there are three campsites just there, and other trips were staying at the other two, so I got to play some cards with Alan and Josh and Lloyd (from the other camp, and he brought cards, good because mine had gotten soaked). One of the camps had too much food, so after we ate our "Chicken Fric" (I guess technically it was fricassee, but not really), we helped them get rid of theirs too. Josh and I specifically did that, because we're always hungry. The only day I didn't like so much was today. It's a bad start when you get woken up by ravens at 6:50 AM. They would not move on! That is, until Ryan got sick of them and yelled some unkind words out the tent at them. We all enjoyed that. For the rest of the day, everyone from those three camps was going "CAAAWGH!" at each other, often across the bay, because those ravens were so annoying and ridiculous and hilarious. The weather had turned really cold, not June sort of weather, but we managed to stay alive okay, and we paddled back into camp at 2 PM after making cinnamon rolls. On second thought: we had cinnamon rolls. Today was okay. We cleaned all our dishes, and got all our stuff back to our cabins, and that brings me to now. I'm on my 24 hours off for this week, as is everyone else. I think I may try the BBB in town (Boulder Beer Bar - I hear they have excellent pizza and cheese curds) tonight, thought it's raining again. Well, I've got rain gear. I'll see if anyone else is planning on going. Tonight ought to be fun. Even if all I end up doing is finishing the book I'm reading while lying in bed.

*The camp name is taken from the river name; the camp hyphenates its name to draw attention to the "wish", for some reason. I think it's kind of stupid, but it's the right orthography, so I'll abide by it. Also note it's pronounced "man-i-too-wish".

Hello!

Anyone still there? All right. Here's a month.
-When we last left our protagonist, he was firmly in the clutch of end-of-year preparations. Music composition, a short story, and more! Did he make it out? Yeah. I did finals, and such. I don't know how well I did yet, because grades don't go up until tomorrow. I don't know if I'll have as much bragging rights as I did last semester. Music and its corequisites were hard and time-consuming, and they also made me sleep-deprived so I couldn't do as well in my other classes. For example, I didn't have enough sleep on one day in linguistics class, probably because I had been doing music the night before until really late—I couldn't say, because I don't know exactly which day it was. But in any case, the professor told us on that day that the exam would be on the Friday before exam week, instead of during exam week itself. But I was so sleep-deprived that I didn't hear her. So I came in on that Friday—sleep-deprived again, incidentally—and noticed a definite air of tension in the room, and only then did I discover that I should have studied. I could have gotten an A, probably, but I got a B–. So that sucks. I may well have gotten an overall B in a class that should have been an easy A for me, given how naturally it seemed to come to me. Music, too, might be a B or so, simply because it was a genuinely hard (and overloading) class. Russian and Craft of Fiction should be fine. Anyhow, enough about my grades.
-I also got the job at Manito-wish—I'm not sure whether I ever put that up here. So, I'm leaving on the 31st, or thereabouts. Hopefully I can take a Greyhound and save everyone some money. However, the nearest Greyhound stop is 30 miles off, in Marenisco, Michigan. (Manito-wish is right up by the northern border. Marenisco is in the Upper Peninsula.) I don't know whether there's any sort of shuttle that brings people there from the Marenisco station on the proper day. I'm going to call tomorrow. If not, it might even be interesting to pack up muy bike in a bike box and ride those thirty miles. Shouldn't take more than two or three hours. Well, maybe more since I'd be carrying a backpack. I'm kind of thinking into the keyboard here. Let's move on.
-Mom took me home from college. She took the Corolla. That was a heck of a tight fit with all my stuff. I try to minimalize, but the thing is I've got all this stuff, and I actually use it all. My bike was the biggest thing we had to fit in. Then there were my boxes of clothes, and my computer, and my box of books, and my assorted stuff that I also actually use. It was basically an avalanche when we got it all crammed in. And tough to see over in the rearview mirror. We made it back all right, though. So I got back home and discovered I had even more crap here than I thought I had. I did a big cleanup, which is still in progress to some extent.
-Also, I've been in real negotiations with Veer on having them sell Newt. It's finally happening; I've even been given a tentative price—$40–50 per style, or $150–200 for the whole 8-style set. I've done extensive work on kerning it, aided immensely by FontForge, and I think it's pretty much ready—all I have to do is put a copyright notice in it. That statement is pending comments on my font from the guy who's working with me to market it. I really hope we can have it all done before I leave, but as luck has it, his department is moving to a new floor this week, so he may not have time to get everything ready. Still, fingers crossed.
-I've also been geocaching some. I haven't done that in years. If you don't know what geocaching is, this should explain it more extensively than I can right here with my amount of patience. So, I've done a little of that, though I haven't gotten back into form. As if I was ever in form. Before I stopped, I had found about seven total. There are dedicated people who have found thousands. So far I've found three more.
-All right, now I'm going to fill the rest of this with pictures.

Jeremy's pillow. It's slicked with grease.

These next six are some pictures from just after a big storm blew through. This is Mac Field.
These are some trees we have on campus.
This is a train coming through the college.
This is the student center—most of the stuff students need is centralized here.

The student center, and also East Campus. And a rainbow.And, the student center plus that rainbow. The spots are water on my lens, I think.
A controlled burn at CERA. The person is my manager there, Larissa Mottl.
Forest burning.
These next six are the progression of the buds on the maples next to the loggia, as spring started. This is just as they were starting to appear.
Now, starting to expand.
A little more,
more,
almost there,
and there: the maple has accomplished spring.
Me, Jay, Eric, and Ben, respectively.
This was of questionable legality, so I will say no more about it.
I didn't know we had Jack-in-the-pulpits on campus, but we do. This was near where we played some krokay.
Nicole and Dan survey the difficult pavilion center wicket.
A squirrel surveys my ball (green, top right).

There are some really nice trees here. This one smelled great.
On the way home, Mom and I stopped at the Machine Shed.
We saw a truck that had tipped. It was pretty cool.
Here's a train that I raced. I won, but then I had to turn, and then I took a picture. It was by where I found a geocache.
I didn't know there was this. I found it while I was lost all over town after geocaching.
We had an interesting day yesterday. A bird fell out of the sky in front of Dad's truck as he wa driving. He stopped and it stayed still long enough that he could actually pick it up. Then he stuck it in the cage with our new rabbit. (Micah found the rabbit somewhere before I got back. It's a domestic rabbit, but after trying, he couldn't figure out whose it was.)
"It's worth two in the bush."
Then, our cat brought in a ground squirrel, unharmed. Dad caught it, and we leashed it and took it for a walk. It didn't like that. Then we let it go.
Micah and I went frogging last night. I caught this one.
Then I flung him back into the pond. The end.

An old-fashioned visit • Flashes of politics • Misc.

It's funny the events that I remember and don't remember to blog. On Sunday, Aunt Ellen and Uncle Chuck came to visit, and I forgot to even give it a passing mention. It was pretty good. They took me out to lunch, though both the Maid-Rite place and The Depot were closed (Sunday and renovations, roespectively), so we had to go to Subway. Still, it was a nice departure from Dining Hall food. By which I mean I really liked finally having a meal that didn't come from there. We talked about lots of different stuff: people they know, politics, the history of Grinnell, my plans for the future. Just sat around eating subs. Then I showed Aunt Ellen around the new developments on the campus, though she visited just a few years ago, so she knew most of the stuff already. That was a little disappointing. But I still got a visit, which is something I don't often get. In fact, I've gotten either three or four all year. It's pretty nice, especially when I get to talk about the history of Grinnell and other stuff like that.
-I'm going to talk to you about politics. Specifically, I don't believe in politics. To believe in politics, I also would have to believe in government. Now, you could call me an anarchist, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. Anarchist just means I'm against government. To get rid of government and replace it with nothing else would not be good for anyone. More accurately, I'd call myself primitivist. I still have more learning to do (and my intro to anthro next year should help fill that in), but from what I know right now, I'll write this.
-I think the idea of a national border is fundamentally immature. "I'm going to draw a line in the dirt. Everything on that side is yours, and everything on this side is mine. If you try to take anything from my side, I'll beat you up." Things swiftly deteriorate into all sorts of poor decision-making processes when countries are based on that principle. Another thing that gets me is how difficult it is to even cross a lot of borders. For example, in order to get into Canada now, it's required that you get a passport. Not only is that a big hassle, but it also costs something like a hundred dollars, maybe two hundred - I don't actually know. It seems like a minimal hassle, but then consider: before there was a big imaginary line there, you needed to prove yourself to absolutely no one when you decided to go that far north. In fact, no one cared where you went. I'll just hang that out there.
-Government gets abused. Mom and I were discussing the REAL ID bill that got passed a few years ago. Boiled down to basics, the plan is to make your driver's license into a standardized ID across the nation. That seems at first blush like just a streamlining. Digging deeper, however, we find that it will also result in a merging of all the states' databases, and will eventually require you to have your REAL ID on you for almost anything you decide to do, so you can prove who you are. Our privacy is protected now by the fact that all the databases that have tabs on us are spread across the whole nation in websites and companies everywhere. When all your identification is unified into one master ID, anyone will be able to find out anything about you. Anything you've ever done that caught an official person's attention, anyplace you've ever been (these IDs will be equipped with radio scanners). It's a cinch that websites or credit card companies will start requiring your REAL ID number instead of other identification. After that, anyone will be able to find your purchasing history, credit score, and heck, maybe even salary based on this one card. I don't know about you, but that scares the hell out of me. Luckily, this bill is being heatedly opposed. However, John McCain is in favor of keeping it in the pipeline. Obama isn't.
-If the REAL ID is implemented, I won't be subject to it for very long. You'll get an Alexander Supertramp vibe from this, but I'll be seceding from the country. Not leaving it, but I'll no longer call myself an American citizen. I won't take part in anything that would tell the government who I am; I would find my own food, buy anything with cash but try not to need to buy anything at all, and generally do my best to disappear. It sounds a little bit insane, I know. But I think living in a surveillance state sounds much more insane.
-What about primitivism? Well, mainly it's about living without needing the support of a vast and unwieldy infrastructure to support me. Currently, if our American civilization were to collapse, I would most likely die. Grocery stores would run out of food within a day or two as people stockpiled goods, and the Iowa landscape offers little in the way of directly usable nutrients. Pilfering crops would only work at the right time of year. There are animals I could hunt, but it's precisely because I lack hunting skills that that would be my downfall. I could find a deer and shoot it, except that I have no bow or gun, and I don't know how to butcher a deer. Same goes for any other animal of any size. It makes me feel helpless when I realize that I'm dependent for my very life on thousands of people I don't even know. I want to take charge. When you go far down enough into this feeling, it becomes clear that you need to know how to do everything you need to survive. It's actually a fairly tall order: We often presume that we'll be able to get some stuff from civilization, but what if you're too far away or have no money or (let's go for the gusto) civilization has imploded? Everything you have will eventually wear out, and you'll need a new one. Then you have to make your own house, figure out how to fletch bows and arrows or make a spear thrower, know how to sew with bone and sinew, and be able to make sturdy tools of stone or other materials. It's not actually as hard as it seems, though. We come back to the three million years, and see that it worked for everyone for that long. It's especially nice when you realize that people formed small groups, rather than having to do everything all on their own. That way you don't have to know every single skill, as long as you know someone who does know it. However, the more you know, the more confident you can be in yourself and in your group. I haven't the faintest idea who would be in my group, but I want to learn the skills. They would make me feel accomplished, and also in control. I want the control of my life. I don't trust the government with it. After all, look at their track record.
-Let's get into the other stuff. Manito-wish has accepted me as a counselor! So, I leave in early June, and come back in July. Unfortunately, that seems to eliminate Crowduck. But, it'll be almost as if I'm there anyhow. The Boundary Waters are really an incredible area. I'll miss you guys in July. I expect you'll miss me too. But I'll still be having fun. Hopefully, I can come next year. Sometime, I'll tell you whether I plan to work at Manito-wish next summer, and then you can conceivably plan next year's Crowduck dates around it, if you want to and if it's not a lot of trouble. I promise I'll play a lot of krokay with you all some other time, and maybe even some poker.
-Also, I'm adding to my list of plans for the summer "Get a driver's license". I'll be able to go back and forth across the immense distances my life now seems to entail all the time. I'll also be able to ferry krokay players around, and buy mice and rats for my snake in Newton, where the nearest pet store is. It's something like 20 miles away. It'd be nice to be able to drive myself to Ottumwa, or other places. Also, really, it's about time. And, if I get it before 2009, it'll have nothing to do with REAL ID.

Planning Ahead

I don't know yet whether I'm going to be working at Manito-wish; they haven't said yet, but he did say he'd let me know no later than Wednesday, which is tomorrow (or technically today). So there are a few ways this summer could go.
-If I get the Manito-wish job, I'll quite likely work the boys' half of their summer schedule, which is four weeks and ends in July. Then I think I'll come back home and work on my fonts for the rest of the summer. If possible, I may also try to get that Hillman warehouse job, and do the fonts after work. The manager has shown reservations about hiring me for a four-week shift, but this one would be five or six, and it also wouldn't include the end of the year and Christmas like the other one did. The reason I wouldn't probably work at Manito-wish all summer is that I wouldn't be going on any trips the second half - only female counselors go with the girls. All I would get to do is take canoe trips on my free time. Which is excellent, but if I'm going to be in the dishroom all day the whole time, and only getting paid something like $208 a week (though with free room and board), I think I'd rather come home and get paid much more and have an opportunity to work on fonts as well.
-Alternatively, if I somehow don't get the Manito-wish job, I'll search right away after I find out for a job copy editing for a local paper, and if I find nothing, I'll fall back on the warehouse. The warehouse is pretty much my all-purpose backup plan.
-Another plan revolves around my fonts. I want to, before the weekend, finally get all the members of the Newt family in working order. I've figured out how to use FontForge for the most part, though I still haven't gotten it to output fonts that Windows will use. I've asked tech support about that, and they were very timely with their last response, so that shouldn't take long. With any luck, I'll have some money coming in from that during the summer. FontForge is a pretty great program, and free, so I think I'll be working with that a lot. Though, TypeTool is a bit more user-friendly, so I think I'll use FontForge mainly for the technical bits and for the brute force things - it has some wonderful features that automate things that take a long time, like making accented characters and then kerning them. Oh, I just heard the sound of you falling on the keyboard bored to death. Let's move on.
-I plan to FINALLY finish that snake cage I've left alone since eighth grade. All I really need is some Plexiglas, and then I can pretty much call it finished. There's an All-Ohio Reptile Show in Columbus on August 16th, just shortly before school restarts on the 27th. So I would finish the cage before that, and then buy* a carpet python there. I think it would be far and away best for me to talk to reptile enthusiasts in person. Websites are all right and all, but I've recently been coming to the conclusion that they really can't compare to talking with a real person. Ever since I retired from the xkcd forums, I've found that getting out in real life is much more satisfying than typing messages to faceless computer people. When you think about it, it makes sense. Only in the last ten years has interaction that involves not physically seeing the other party become so common. Before that, there was telephone and mail, but those were generally a fairly subordinate way of finding out information, and if you had questions you visited the nearest expert on what you wanted to talk about. Parallel to that, in the department of friends, only in that same decade has it become possible and prominent to find out in depth about someone without ever actually seeing them. Pen pals were a fun diversion, but ultimately never ranked as high as friends you talk with. Compare these ten years with three million that humankind has devoted to making friends via actual contact. The internet is an extensive way to make friends, but not a natural one, and internet relationships typically are nowhere near as deep as those with real friends. I'm not saying internet friends can't be real friends, but usually if they start becoming real friends you go meet them in real life (or, affectionately, "meatspace" - if anyone uses that with me in any way besides sarcastic, I will smack them). To me, someone I only see through a small rectangle will always seem a bit unreal. Adding to this, exchanges by spoken language are much more efficient than exchanges by text. Again, they have three million years over the competitor. They're also much quicker and you can communicate in a much more varied way, using your full arsenal of techniques - gesture, inflection, and even drawing pictures if you need to. Text communication has, at best, emoticons. You've probably gathered that I didn't come up with all of this thinking about why attending the All-Ohio Reptile Show is better than visiting herpetologist forums online. I've actually been thinking about this for quite a while, and now I've finally ended up writing it down. (Which is slightly ironic, actually, that I wrote it on my blog.) But to return to my main point, I want to go also because I can pick out a snake based on more than a few pictures, and I can buy stuff without having to wait for shipping. That's one reason I really prefer buying stuff at stores, rather than by the internet - shipping. Can I get a "witness" on that?
-This has become quite the rambling post, and I'm up a lot later than I expected to be. I'll just leave everyone with one final question: did anyone notice that I replaced the four-year-old straight quote in this blog's title with a much prettier curly one? I'm surprised it took me (the typographical purist) so long to do it.

*Actually, I seem to recall either Mom or Dad saying that if I successfully built a cage, they would buy the snake for me. This deal was of course made upwards of four years ago, before I had any significant source of income. It would be entirely reasonable now to insist that I buy it. After all, what else am I gonna do with all this money I earn?

What are YOU going to do with your summer?

Remember Camp Manito-wish? Sure you do. They're the camp that outfitted the GOOP trip at the beginning of the school year. Well, I recently applied there for a summer job. There are two summer jobs that really stick out to me as possibilities: Manito-wish, and the warehouse at the Hillman Group. The thing about the warehouse is, I would be both inside and pretty stationary all day (or, if I ended up on the third shift, all night.) Manito-wish probably pays less (Hillman was offering I think $10.50 an hour - very respectable), but I would be less than ecstatic to get up and work there every day. A thought occurred to me as I was sorting silverware in the dining hall last week. And that thought was: How perverse is it that, to survive, we actually sell hours of our lives for money? In my worldview, that's exactly the same thing as actually selling myself, because I'm giving away bits of my life that I'll never get back. Working is the process of turning your life into crude oil for someone else's consumption. Within the constraints of our civilization, the only way to get out of this macabre system of siphoning off your own vital force is to spend your time doing something you really love doing, and that you can get paid for. That's an opportunity I think Manito-wish may provide.
-Now, my details are a little shaky, because my understanding of the responsibilities of camp employees are based on very short descriptions or, more often, solely on the job title. But if I get to be a Tripping Assistant, I'll be taking something like four trips around the northern Wisconsin lakes and forests, with kids that I can make friends with, and probably peers as well.
-I have a phone interview on Thursday. So we'll see how it goes! Their application process is unusually thorough. I had to write four brief essays, and supply three references who graded me on various aspects of my character, and not only will my interview be an hour long, they're also going to actually call my references. So it's a good thing I picked good ones.

Modi Operandorum

I've been busy, so I've left this blog in the lurch. I'm going to update this, though I probably should be doing homework instead. So, I'm going to write about my roommates.
-Roommate #1 is Jay B. from India. At the beginning of the year, I couldn't stand him. He smoked, in and out of the room, and listened to Kanye West's "Stronger" literally to the exclusion of all other music. More recently, though, I've realized he's actually an okay guy with some annoying habits. He has a modus operandi for music. He finds a song , and listens to it, and no other song. For weeks. Or months. Then he finds a new song. And it starts all over again. He's had about five songs so far this year, none of which I've liked: "Stronger", "Sky's the Limit", some Hindi song, "Do What You Want", and now "Bleeding Love". All of them are terrible. But Jay isn't a bad person. He stopped smoking when I asked him to stop, and now he doesn't smoke in the room anymore.
-On the other hand, I never used to think Jeremy was too bad. We would talk occasionally about stuff. Nothing special. Since winter break, he's gotten really enthusiastic about his girlfriend, who lives in Chicago. Enthusiastic makes it sound cute. It's not cute. He talks on the phone with her for hours, every day. I don't think he's ever said a coherent thought to her. Come to think of it, I don't know if he's ever had a coherent thought. But, they do enjoy talking about sex, and all different kinds of it. Meanwhile, I'm doing homework. The other thing about Jeremy is that his hygiene leaves me baffled. He takes two to three showers a day, and has a vast collection of body oils and rubs and lotions. Yet, he still smells - he smells like his beauty products died and rotted. Worse, his room smells the same way, but stronger. Sometime I'll post a picture of his pillow. It is slicked with grease from a year of going to sleep with skin and hair saturated with oils and creams. Recently, he invited about five black girls into the room for a smoke. (Not of your ordinary cigarettes.) Completely unabashed. When I confronted him, he thought I was being funny. I no longer talk to Jeremy.
-Next year, I'm rooming with Aaron Barker, who like me doesn't drink or smoke. We're rooming in a substance-free dorm. Aaron is nice, unassuming, and a good guy. I foresee few problems. Room draw was just today; we didn't get either of the rooms we really wanted, but we did get a not-too-bad room on the second floor of one of the college's set of new dorms. I won't have the loggia like I did this year, though, unless the people across the hall from us are as dedicated to getting out on it as I planned to be (apparently, it's difficult to open the window), and they invite us. Well, we'll probably be friends with them, so we can encourage them. Friends, that is, with some of them. Because after we put our names down, we looked to see who had taken the two doubles we were looking at.
-One of them is Jeremy.
-Why, why is he living in a sub-free hall? I assume it's because his roommate wanted to, and because it'll be quieter than a regular dorm. You can live in a sub-free hall and drink and smoke, as long as you do it elsewhere. But that doesn't save me from being near Jeremy for another year. At least I'll be in much less close quarters.

Nice day declared

First thing is: I had so many pictures from the cave trip, I realized putting them on the blog would be impractical. So, here's a video.

Today I pulled out my shorts for the first time in several months. I had lunch, and then I played some krokay. Turned out, today was the perfect day for it. Even though it seemed like I was getting a lot of cancellations due to workload, four of us still managed to show up between Noyce and the Forum to take in the first really nice spring day. I had gone scouting yesterday for places to play, and decided there looked like a good place. As soon as I saw it by daylight, I knew it was perfect. I started the course at the higher end of the area, beneath some pines. From there, I dropped it down two walls, one short and one tall. It took a brief detour around some trees and a little shrine to Ganesha, and then came into a picturesque brick-laid pavilion (the center wicket was wedged into cracks between the bricks). The turn wickets were directly in front of a devilishly troublesome pit. Just to keep people guessing, I put the first inbound wicket in a completely obstacle-free area of flat grass. Thence back down to the pavilion, and finally back up two sloping tiers of a terrace in order to get back up the walls to the starting point.
-Man, we just had tons of fun. It was so much nicer today than the winter games were, since we had no snow to contend with. The course lent itself to especially cutthroat playing, with lots of interaction. The other three guys were stuck at the turn wickets for probably ten turns apiece, knocking each other into the pit and all over the place. Having Seth along makes any game instantly a bit more irrational, unpredictable, and hazardous. Even though I got away from the turn wickets far ahead of everyone else, they closed in on me pretty quickly, thanks to a wrong turn I took. I still managed to become poison well away from the others, and took Seth out directly. But in the time it took me to do that, James got out of my grasp and too far toward poison to stop, so I focused on Dan instead. After some uphill-downhill dancing, in which I had to be careful to avoid the wicket placed near the edge of the wall, I finally managed to take him out as well. By this time, James was poison, making today our first multiple-poison game of the year. Neither of us got too close to the other. We both planned our shots to end up far off in case we missed. We both hid for a couple turns around a wooden shelter some people had put up over Ganesha while we were playing. Eventually, one of James's shots left him too close to me, and I eliminated him to claim the win.
-Wow. What an absolutely excellent course. It'll be just spectacular with a full complement of six people. Imagine all the interaction, the multiple poisons! I can't wait. At the same time, though, I plan to get off campus sometime too, for a forest game.

A few days ago, I got an email to the effect that there was a spot open in the kayaking course. Since I have a lot of free time on Thursdays, I biked right on over to it. So now I'm learning to kayak. I'm beginning to have a lot more fun with my life. Dave Zeiss (who's in charge of the GOOP trip) taught it in the pool. We spent the first lesson learning how to recover from flipping over, which is actually not very hard, and learning the basic paddle strokes. I wonder what we're going to do with the rest of the semester, since we learned so much in one lesson. Incidentally, as we were kayaking we saw that it was snowing. When we got out, there was somewhere between a half and a whole inch on the ground. That was two days ago. And now it's nice. I overheard someone talking about Iowa's "schizo weather" today; sums it up excellently.

Some thank yous

This is a collection of thank you notes that I haven't written, or I'm not sure if I've written. If you've given me something or done something for me, and I've failed to thank you, I hope it's covered here.

+++

Dear Aunt Ellen and Uncle Chuck,
I don't remember if I ever thanked you for the book you sent me for Christmas. I really enjoyed reading it, especially because it was real. I could see the people behind the story, not to forget the deer it revolves around. Thanks also for thinking of me at Christmas. Hope to see you sometime again!
[Chuck]

+++

Dear Nana and Papaw,
Thanks for the card. I got it a few days ago, and I've been meaning to write you and say thanks. I guess I don't communicate by post all that often, and you don't seem to be all that crazy about e-mail, so it's kind of an odd mixed correspondence. Actually, I think I'm going to start writing letters by post more often - a lot of personality is lost in the electronic medium. I don't know if I'll send a letter to you any time in the near future, but it's a possibility. Hmm - I'll have to ask Dad what your birthdays are, and maybe send you cards.
[Chuck]

+++

Dear Vinny,
You found my blog all on accident, and then stuck around to give me encouragement during the dark holiday season I had. You didn't have to do that at all, but you did, and I want to thank you for that. It makes me happy to think that someone who was a complete stranger before could be that friendly and sympathetic.
Chuck

+++

Dear Grandma and Grandpa,
I actually already thanked you a couple hours ago, but thanks again for the birthday party and the ribs. They were delicious. As was the cake. Ahh, overeating: as long as it's delicious. I'm realizing now that I have fully half a semester of Grinnell Dining to look forward to - that makes me wish I had savored tonight's dinner just a little more.
[Chuck]

+++

I realize posting these all as open letters seems a bit impersonal. I assure you that I wrote each of these with as much gratitude as if I had written it directly to you. In the future, I'm going to try much harder to keep track and make sure I write thank yous right after the fact. But today I realized I had a backlog, and decided to just get them all done at once.

P.S. Cave pictures still forthcoming.

The bowels of Kentucky

We took a vacation to Mammoth Caves. This account is lifted from my journal.

We got up early and had breakfast at Frisch's. Then we drove. I slept in the car. We had breakfast at "Aunt Bee' Country Restaurant". Then things got more interesting.
-We found Diamond Cavern, and bought tickets for the next tour, which left in about five minutes, so we had to hurry a little. Our tour guide was Jimmy; he had a southern drawl, but despite that he didn't live up to the stereotype and was actually pretty smart. He showed us all sorts of pretty awesome formations as we descended into the bowels of Kentucky. The floor was slick and we weren't allowed to touch anything, but it was still a pretty excellent tour. Everything was brown. The air was moist and the temperature stayed normalized at 58°. The owners had strung lights not just for lighting, but to really emphasize the structures. One light hung behind a strip of "cave bacon", which is a translucent sheet of calcite with streaks of different colors to it. Other lights stuck onto the ceiling next to stalactites bigger than our tour group and collections of infinitely detailed filigree. Flowstones jutted out of the walls and onto our isolated, concrete-paved path. Jimmy turned out the lights for us and showed us what the cave was like when there was no electric lighting - they used candles, and it was pretty darn bland. We walked by a now-defunct altar made out of broken-off stalactites and stalagmites and such (salvaged after people from the area's rivaling caves had broken them off). The trail was sometimes cramped and constricted, and sometimes huge and open. Things you'd never expect hung from the ceiling. In fact, there were three structures - dripstones, I think Jimmy called them - that geologists say cannot grow above one another, and they were all stacked right on top of each other. "What happens in the cave stays in the cave," he said.
-Eventually, past all the frozen waterfalls and illogical rock forms, we hit the end of the line, and turned around. At the time I was a bit unsatisfied, but now I realize - there's not much else I could ask rocks to do for me. It's a pretty special cave all-around.
-I bought some magnetic hematite rocks at the gift shop, and we found a hotel: the Mammoth Cave Hotel, located I think in the middle of Mammoth Cave National Park. On entering the room, I found a sheet of paper detailing a walking trail next to the hotel, so I suggested it. Only Dad and I went; Mom and Micah stayed in the hotel instead and watched Family Guy. We drive two hundred miles and they stay inside not a hundred feet from the edge of what Dad and I think may be a real old-growth forest, at the onset of spring. It boggles the mind.
-The first thing Dad and I did was get good and lost, because that's the only way to have a proper hike. This we did by forsaking the trail and skipping down a scattering of boulders slicked down a steep hillside until we found a brand new trail. We took that one past a few pretty capacious sinkholes. One was probably fifteen feet deep. I think they all drain to a series of caves below, or something. I was barefoot, and the sharp gravel woke up nerves that had been hibernating all winter. We found a little out-of-order cottage, and then picked one of two trails at random at a forking, heading to the Echo River Spring. The forest was pine and cedar, Dad guesses, and really wide and spacious. I could feel its health, even though trees aren't budding yet.
-The Echo River is green and wells up from a spring at the bottom of a deep, green pool. The pool sloshes ever so slowly and silently and we couldn't figure out why at all. There are dead trees growing in the middle of it. Why? We approached it from two different angles but neither offered answers.
-We took a trail that promised to take us to the CAMPGROUND. It ascended the hill we'd descended, through a series of switchback and oxbows. We saw some standoffish deer. "They're Ohio deer," Dad said. "They've got an O on the license tag." At the top of the hill, the trail diverged with no clues, both ways leading off into scenic nowheres. We picked the one that seemed right; it petered out, and we found another one nearby. That one took us through a huge bowl where no roads came, and not even any road noise. Beautiful - but when you're trying to find civilization again, unnerving. Daylight was fading fast. We kept following the trail, and it led us up a hillside to some lights that proved to be our hotel. Mom and Micah were both inside watching the Griffins evade Y2K.
-We spent the rest of the night playing a long, distracted game of Scrabble. Then it was TV until bedtime. My feet are still tingling.

[I haven't written this part in my journal yet, so this is all on the fly.]
We woke up today and packed up our stuff into the truck. We walked to breakfast in the hotel's restaurant, and from there we walked across a bridge to the Visitors' Center. I was taken aback - it was teeming. We found the information desk and the guy told us that the 4-hour tour of Mammoth Cave was sold out until sometime in April, and the longest tour still available for today was the 2-hour New Entrance tour. So we bought tickets for that at noon, and kind of waited around until then. I read a few books in the bookstore part. Mom did crossstitch in the truck, and Dad sat on a bench outside enjoying the fresh air. I think Micah kind of wandered. The tour bus smelled of urine.
-This tour group was 119 people, said the tour guide. As such, it wasn't as personal as the Diamond Cavern one. We got into a line, and all descended one after another down a steep and cramped stainless steel staircase into a shaft about a hundred feet deep. The staircase spiraled around perplexingly, so that we were frequently walking above or below another section of the line. Water trickled through the ground into our giant hole, and through all the dark cavities on its sides. There were stalactites and stalagmites, but not as numerous as they were in Diamond Cavern. This cave had an altogether different character. Or rather, several different characters. After we came out of the shaft, we kept descending through other passages until we came to a huge auditorium - wooden benches set in the rock floor, fifteen-foot rock ceiling. The tour guides gave a little presentation there, showing us the total darkness like Jimmy had, and then we all got up and kept moving. The next section was a dry, open one with no stalactites or anything, a section that had stopped growing. Here, huge rocks balanced precariously over us. There was more maneuvering room in general. One chamber had a big, flat ceiling. The tour guide answered questions from some people there, about mummies found in the cave, and things like that. And we kept walking through the huge, dark, light-brown chambers. Rock tumbles stretched out below us into black depths, and the ceiling was a jumble too, which was different from any other ceiling I've been under before. From time to time we saw things that people had left there. One pile of rocks had an old lantern on it.
-Finally, we came to the last chamber we would visit, another one full of structures. There was the Frozen Niagara, thirty-foot flowstone. There was a ceiling that consisted entirely of glistening stalactites. There was a pillar in progress that, when it comes together sometime in the next few millennia, will be about fifty feet high probably. I enjoyed it all. I breathed the cool damp cave air. Then, abruptly, I found that the trail had led me back out to the bright outdoors. So I waited for the rest of the family, and we got on the buses and rode back to the Visitors' Center.

Pictures to follow sometime.

Train Travel

I've always loved trains. It's kind of puzzling, actually. Even long after I should have become jaded to them, by living not two hundred yards from a track on which two or three go by every day, they still make me happy. So I decided someday I ought to take one to get between Cincinnati and Grinnell.
-I couldn't find a ride who would take me to Cincinnati for spring break, so instead I looked for a ride to Chicago, so I could take the Amtrak from there back home. Looking for this ride coincided with midsems week, so it took some effort to do both at the same time. I ended up sending out an APB to all the students from Chicago in the directory, and asking everyone I knew if they knew anyone riding to Chicago on Saturday morning. My search turned up two cars. Upon trading e-mails, I discovered both were completely full. It would be tmpossible for me to get to Chicago on Saturday morning, and I didn't want to spend the night there. Luckily, I also came across a shuttle going to Ottumwa, Iowa, on Saturday morning, from where an Amtrak could take me to Chicago and transfer me to the Cincinnati-bound train. So I did that instead.
-The shuttle was a small bus driven by a nice old lady; including the two Latina girls who set up the shuttle, there were just three of us. We got to Ottumwa in plenty of time for the 10:09 California Zephyr, and the guy at the desk informed us that the Zephyr would be arriving sometime around 12:40 due to delays.
-I was expecting that. The impression that I've gotten from online recountings is that, these days, Amtrak is pretty much always late. Ben, who lives across the hall from me, had told me he figued the train took about eleven hours to do a ten-hour schedule, and so on accordingly. The Zephyr had come from California, so it was bound to be a good deal late. It'd be nice if the trains could always be on time, but I recognize that that's improbable, giwen how marginalized Amtrak is by all the freight companies. Freight trains are way more numerous, so Amtrak has to yield to them all the time. Additionally, trains have had a sharp decrease in popularity as a means of transportation, so there are fewer and fewer, and delays have to build up instead of being overflowed into the nekt scheduled train, because it would be too long a wait. And then fewer people want to ride, because the train gets a reputation for being late. It's a vicious cycle, and a shame. But I wasn't in any hurry. I wanted to ride almost as much for the experience as I did to actually get somewhere. Lateness didn't bother me. It gave me and Laura and Viri some time to eat breakfast at the 2nd Street Café.
-We came back to the station and waited. Viri slept; Laura and I played some cards, and then she braided my hair, which was pretty nice. As she finished, it was getting time for the train to come. Everyone waiting in the station stepped out into the bright, cloudy morning - it had recently snowed, but all melted - and stood under the concrete canopy watching for the Zephyr to arrive. It came about when the old guy in the booth had said it would.
-I had to take a little stuff out of my huge backpack to fit it into the overhead stowage, but then I settled down no problem. A girl named Alisa was sitting next to me; she and a few friends were coming from Omaha, where they were in grad school. We were on the top floor of the double-decker car. It was pretty special. The first thing that impressed me was the legroom. On a bus, I'm never comfortable. On the train, I was really comfortable. The seats didn't suck; in fact, they were a pleasure to sit in. For a while, I just watched out the window. The first thing I saw from a moving train was a flagpole with waving US and Iowa flags. The scenery was typical midwest fields, mostly - I've heard people complain about ut, but I mean, really Amtrak can't help what the scenery looks like. Actually, I liked getting to see an aspect of cities that a lot of people don't get to see - namely, the area around the railroad. There are all sorts of buildings and other structures there that you just don't see elsewhere. Another thing is that it's nice and uncrowded. The only company you're bound to get is a freight train, passing by on the parallel track. When both trains are traveling at a pretty good clip, this results in a combined relative speed of approximately race car. So about three freight cars a second go by your window, probably less than two fet away from it. That's another thing I like: everything fits really closely around the trains. So as we were crossing the Mississippi River, the big iron bridge support beams rose up close enough to us that, if we could open the windows, we'd be able to reach out and touch them and get our hands messily chopped off, which is why the windows aren't openable, but coming back to my point, it's pretty cool how it's all so precise. It also meant that I could look almost straight down into the brown Mississippi water.
-But I wasn't staring out the window all the time. Mostly I read the books that I've been meaning to read all semester, but haven't found time for. I finished House of Leaves during the trip, and also How We Are Hungry. Until the train ride, all the reading was very piecemeal, taking what I could get. By the way, House of Leaves is definitely something to look for if you want something different. It's also really freaky and pretty unnerving as well. How We Are Hungry is more normal but still not quite normal. It's a collection of short stories, the strangest of which is "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself". It's five blank pages. The rest are real stories, and (incidentally) good ones. I spent most of my time finishing these, not getting done until the middle of the night somewhere in Indiana, after transferring in Chicago.
-When we got to Chicago, we slipped under the city into Union Station, which is a nicely spooky place full of brown-colored light and chamber echoes of trains shifting around. We were late getting there, of course, but the connecting Cardinal train had been held up for us, so we were all able to get onto it if we needed to. When the Cardinal started moving after we got on, the passengers who'd been waiting since 17:45 (it was now 18:15) there started cheering. We traveled about five minutes out, and then waited for freight trains. We did a great deal of waiting. Amtrak really gets the shaft when it comes to right-of-way on the tracks, and it's hard not to get a bit of a sour taste in your mouth. We finally got moving properly fr the night at 19:45. But, as I say, I wasn't in a hurry, so I just read.
-Once I finished the books, it was about 01:00 or 02:00, so I decided to get some sleep and wait for Cincinnati. A couple times I woke up worried that we may have passed it already, but we hadn't. The train was scheduled to get to Cincinnati at 03:17; delayed in Connersville, Indiana, it pulled in finally at about 06:00 and let me off. And Mom picked me up, and we had IHOP for breakfast.

Soup Opera

That's my new neologism. I have no idea what it means, but it sounds intriguingly demeaning and funny. Anyone have ideas?

What's been going on? Well, classes, mostly. I've been trying to talk to more real people, also. That's something I've been poor at recently. There's a girl who invited me to watch Jeopardy! with her on weeknights sometimes, but then I went at 7:30 and discovered that she was three but watching America's Next Top Model. Turns out Jeopardy! isn't on at 7:30 here. It's Central Time, one hour behind, so naturally it's on at 4:30. "Wha?" I realized just tonight that, though I thought I was going to have a pretty easy midterm week, it's actually going to be a ridiculous amount of work. Maybe not ridiculous. Maybe so. It's because I'm in Press. That means I have a meeting to prepare for, which is going to happen on Tuesday. I also have to write a story or write something for craft of fiction and distribute it by tomorrow night. And I also have to become good at playing cadences for my keyboard lab on Tuesday. And I have to become good at sight singing, for my aural skills test on Tuesday. Yeah: it's a lot of work. But after Tuesday, I'm mostly free. Linguistics midsem on Wednesday, which will be a breeze (let's hope that doesn't become a jinx, but I don't think it will). All this basically means that tomorrow and Monday are solid work, and Tuesday is a culmination, and then I'm just waiting for spring break. For which I'm frustrated that no one has offered me a ride yet, despite requests both active and passive. I'm still looking, though.
-I watched a couple movies on the College's dime. No Country for Old Men was pretty awesome, and so was Into the Wild. Except for the dying young and alone part, Alexander Supertramp's looks like an excellent life. Llewelyn Moss's looks a bit less so, what with the being chased and executed by a madman who kills people with a cattle-slaughtering gun. On a vaguely related note, I had Imaginary Week in my journal, and in it I ran off and hopped a train to somewhere in Minnesota (that's where Imaginary Week always seems to end up). I camped in the snow, and later stumbled upon the camp of a girl who did the same thing, though she was in high school and so did it while still going to school each day. We camped together a few nights, but I refrained from taking the plot very deep in the relationship, because it just seems wrong to have my first significant relationship be one I completely made up.
-And, I've been working on Newt (the font), but because school has kept me so busy, I'm still not done. After Tuesday, I should be able to get through with it. After all, in various bits of free time, I've gotten to the last of the eight styles I needed to upgrade. So, once I'm done with that, I'll save it and take it home, or if I have time, I'll fix it up good here, and then I'll put the foreign stuff up on the Typophile Critique page, and then I'll sell it. Huzzah for making money! It seems this process is interminable, but it really is coming close to an end now. After it does, I'll be able to start working on Cyril, and then sell that. It should go for a good amount, since it has such extensive language support. I'm making a Greek for it, and the Greek looks really cool. I also made chess pieces for it. Here, I'll show you.

Edited: I don't know why, but the link only wants to show a picture I have of a guy holding an egg. It might work now.