Grunth

They say there's no English word that rhymes with "month". Well, I'm using this fake word.

Oodles of stuff have happened in the grunth since my last blog. For starters, I went on two more trips. The first one was great, because pretty much everything that could possibly go right did. We even had tailwinds for most of the time. I was with a counselor named George and five motivated, reasonable campers with good physical strength. With all the free time we had, we even played torpedo. In torpedo, you take all the stuff out of your canoes, and then split up into teams. Each team has two boat paddlers and the torpedo, which is a third person whose goal is to jump out of the boat, swim to the other boat, and tip it over. So it ends up with the torpedoes pulling at the sides of the boat with the paddlers desperately trying to steer clear of the other boat while also keep the torpedo from capsizing their own. It was loads of fun, even though we did all get wet and cold.

The second trip wasn't as fun. One big reason was that I was just counting down the days until I could get in the car, buy some pasties, and drive to Duluth. I was ready to be in Crowduck. The other big reason was that the counselor, though a nice guy, was really officious. He followed all the rules in the book and then made up some of his own. And it would be bad form for me, the TA, to lead a mutiny against these rules, so I just followed them along with the campers. It was the only trip I've been on where we were expected to scatter the firewood before we left camp each morning, or where we had to bury the leaves we used to wash out our dishes, or where we had to clean our dishes thoroughly enough to pass the smell test. All the rules made the trip way less fun. Another, smaller, reason that I didn't have so much fun was a camper whose last name is, honest-to-God, Stank. He had the severest ADHD I think I've ever seen. While he was paddling, every ten seconds he would stop—lay his paddle down across his lap—and say something like, "Oh my God, look at that crayfish!!" or, "How much longer is it until we have lunch?" or, "Have you ever heard of [rapper]?" Then I would have to tell him something like, "Interesting. Keep paddling." The kid would even stop paddling when he was thinking. And of course he would then complain that we weren't going fast enough. Nevertheless, though, the worst day on trail is better than the best day at work, and we had some fun. That was the trip where I gave everyone classical names. They were IANVS MAGNVS, REGIS MAXIMVS, Joseph the Younger, Joseph the Elder, Sankt Nikolai, and Timothy the Oratorious (that was the counselor—he used to be a DJ). The last night of that trip, as we were coming to our campsite, we heard faraway thunder. By the time we got there, we barely had enough time to set up the tents before it started raining. The kids hung out in the tents while Tim and I made dinner and such. When it was ready, the rain was just pouring. I just thought to myself: "Ten more hours, and then I'm gone, with delicious pasties and a calm drive to Duluth.

And so it was. I drove to Duluth, free of camp responsibilities for the first time in a month and a half, deposited my paycheck, and sat in a bookstore. Grandma & Grandpa arrived later on and took me out to eat. I even got a slice of lingonberry pie from the Norske Nook. And Crowduck had, for my purposes at least, begun.

I think I'll cover Crowduck in a separate entry (or several). For now, I'll sum up: What a great year at Crowduck. We talked around a campfire every night, everyone caught lots of pretty decent-sized fish, I climbed a cliff, and we saw a fox and a flying squirrel. That'll have to do for a while.

So, what have I been doing since I got home? My big project has been finishing the snake cage, which I finally did two nights ago. It's been under construction since July 9, 2003. I searched through my old Garfield journal that I wrote in from 1995 to 2003, and found this entry: "I got wood for building a snake cage today. It'll be a really big cage. When I was at the Home Depot buying wood, they played that 'Silly Love Songs' song by Paul McCartney on the radio. Now I can't get it out of my head." As early as the next month, I was claiming to have it almost done. All I needed to make was the door! Well, now the thing is fully collapsible, it has two levels (one small one at the bottom for hiding, and a main one above it), and it's fully furnished with bedding and sticks and heaters. Tenzing has been enjoying it plenty. Right now he's asleep on a place where three branches join. When he's awake, he climbs all around the cage, just exploring. Finally he has room to stretch out.

The rest of this is about a cop, until the pictures.

One of the odd things that I do is that sometimes, if it's late at night and there's not much else to do, I get on my bike and ride around a little, usually to the nearby train tracks. This seems to make people suspicious, which doesn't seem to make much sense to me: people see cars go by all the time in the middle of the night, and I'm sure some of them go by repeatedly. But when a bike (a much less menacing vehicle with far less room for secrets in it) goes by a couple times late at night, they get antsy. Twice I've had a police officer pull me over and tell me that someone called in about a suspicious person on bike. Another time someone called in because I had biked to a park near their house, but that call I guess I can understand more, since I was "loitering" and the park is technically closed after dusk. This last time, though, was the time I became acquainted with Sergeant Barrigan.

He pulled me over as I was about to go back home, having seen no trains. "How are you tonight?" he asked. "Well, better before I got pulled over." He showed no reaction to this little bit of humor, and asked me for identification. Then he had me turn out my pockets. "This gets more thorough every time I get pulled over for no reason," is what he claims I said, and it's possible, although I don't remember the "for no reason" part. But Barrigan, after I said that, told me he was now going to write me a ticket explaining the reason, and it would cost me $90.

Well, die in a hole, Sergeant Barrigan, was the gist of my thoughts. But I stayed as polite as I could manage. He said that whenever someone says "for no reason", it's the magic phrase that means he should give them a ticket. The ticket was going to be for riding with no lights on the bike. I put on my best contrite face and pledged to get lights for the bike, and even to come by to show them to him sometime. Meanwhile, he construed pretty much everything I said as rudeness. Even though I was more polite to him than I've been to anyone for years, he said I was rude. Eventually he went to write the ticket.

He came back and told me he had decided to give me a 60-second talk instead. The talk was about how I do have rights, but sometimes if I choose to exercise those rights, there are consequences. That was his exact phrasing. I still don't know what consequences he was talking about besides the consequence of getting pulled over and harassed by him, and then given a ticket. He told me I was arrogant and basically overall no good, and then let me bike home. (As I left, I heard him laughing with another officer who'd shown up halfway through.) It didn't take me too long to realize that he was never really going to give me that ticket: all he wanted was to make me grovel. It sounds harsh, probably, but if you had been there, you would know that this guy was definitely on a career-long power trip. He wasn't using his police power to enforce laws in a sensible way, but rather to make himself feel superior to other people.

A couple days later, Dad called the cops because Micah was with a bunch of teenagers and Dad thought he was breaking a law about how many teens can be in a car. Sergeant Barrigan (who's been there at each of Micah's arrests and knows him well) came over, and he was ruder than I'd seen him before. He periodically told Mom, "You're not helping this discussion. Why don't you be quiet." When I came out and tried to say something on Micah's behalf, he said, "Micah doesn't need your help to get in trouble. Why don't you go inside." I only did because Dad suggested I should. He treated us like crap on our own property—except for Dad, because they're similarly authoritarian—and was generally an ass. He played right into the theory I've built: that he's using his badge to make himself feel mighty, and he doesn't care about laws or other people. A few more days later, Micah and I went to LaRosa's and talked with the waitress there about him. He's given a guy a DUI for biking after a wine tasting, ticketed a 17-year-old girl for walking her dog past curfew, and other stuff like that. The waitress agrees with Micah and me, that Barrigan harasses suspects ruthlessly.

He can't be allowed to take out his feelings of inferiority on citizens. So I'm going to write a letter to the Chief about him. I just thought I'd write this down to let you all know about this guy. He's simply a bad cop.

Now here are some pictures. I took way too few pictures while I was in Wisconsin and Crowduck. At camp I took a grand total of three pictures. But, that means a manageable number to put here.

I saw this on the way up to camp.

One of the main products of Boulder Junction seems to be kitsch. This is an item that I like to call the Racist Birdhouse.

Hey, I did a Rubik's Cube, all by myself!

The dirty truth

The boat to take us across Whiteshell

A frog near the Falls

The Falls

Another shot of the Falls

A lake shot from the camp.

Boats

The cliff I climbed. I can't believe I forgot to take the camera up with me.

Goodbye

The cage, finished

And again

(Tracy, if you read this, could you send me the picture with the mouse?)

A few weeks' worth of stuff

Let's get up to speed on what's been happening. I've been here now for what I've just realized is something over three weeks. Besides staff training, I've gone on two trips, both four-days. The first one was just awesome. The counselor I went with was Walter, and over the course of the trip we discovered that we had just about everything in common. Such as: Edward Gorey books, Calvin and Hobbes, linguistics (he's majoring in it; I'm concentrating in it), XKCD, and an odd sense of humor. I also believe he's one of the only people in the world that I could have a "Revolution 9" sing-along with. We didn't remember all of it, but we did sing together: "Industrial output. Financial imbalance. The Watusi. The Twist. …El Dorado." We had campers on that trip too, most of whom were pretty reasonable. They were all fiends for fishing, it seemed. One of them really wanted to catch lots of animals and then kill and eat them. Or just kill them. Another one was this very short guy who said his r's as w's, but managed to carry out an Italian-influenced accent from his Italian upbringing. The effect was that he sounded like a tiny mob boss - which is terribly stereotypical, but in the movies that is what all the mob bosses sound like. Incidentally, a weird number of the kids in Walter's cabin (cabins have 10 kids, and half of them go on each canoe trip) had odd names. Names like Strange, Quaintance, Zak, and Wisdom. I would give you the first names that connect with those, but that seems like a bad thing to do on the internet.
-The second trip, a few days later, was miserable. The weather was the main reason: it was overcast for six straight days here, starting the day before we left, and keeping up for a day after we got back. Also it was unseasonably and unreasonably cold all and every day and night. So the kids definitely had low morale, and we were all wet and cold. Also, the counselor was Jason, who wasn't as interesting as Walter, and seemed not to care a huge amount about the kids or trip. He cared some, but to some extent he seemed along for the ride. I was glad to finish that trip.
-I haven't had much time to myself until today. I had one day off, which I used for reading and walking around. Today I had another day off, and it was one of my favorite days in quite a while. First I read my journal for a while, but then I got really hungry, so I went to town and looked for a restaurant. One wasn't open yet, one didn't serve food (only coffee), and one had a 45-minute wait for food bcause of the Independence Day crowd. Finally, I found a restaurant that I'm really glad I ended up at. I had my first pasty (that's "păsty") ever, and it was delicious. It reminded me that I want to learn to cook; I think I'll look up a recipe when I get home, and make some. Not only do I want to know how to cook so I can make food on my own, but I also keep remembering when I went to Aaron's house (this is Cincinnati Aaron) a few days before I left for camp. His dad was cooking, and he told me, "The reaction of a woman to a man who can cook is just amazing." He illustrated with a dialog:
-" '[Guy voice.] Do you want to have some dinner sometime?'
-" '[Excellent, sort of timid falsetto for the woman's voice.] Uh, sure...... where do you want to go?'
-" 'Well, I thought I would cook.'
-" 'Reeeally? [His eyes light up.] For meeeeee??' "
-I remember these things. Anyhow, after I had that pasty and a cinnamon twist for dessert, I went up to see the parade. That was kinda fun. They had some cool old cars, including one with a horn that went "AHWOOGA", and some Santa Clauses and a fireman on a unicycle. I also found a man selling fruits and vegetables from his pickup truck, and had a dollar's worth of the most delicious strawberries I've ever had. I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back to store-bought.
-Then I drove back up to camp and got ready to go on a wog. That means a trip where I jog sometimes and walk sometimes. I wanted to go find a geocache at Nichols Lake, and then swim in said lake. So I did that, and what's more, I did it barefoot. It was nice to feel the ground under me for the first appreciable time in weeks. The swimming was nice, and I tried to offset some of the farmer's tan that I've gotten recently. I don't go barefoot in forests too often, though, so on the return trip my feet were a bit tender, and I was happy to get to camp and stop walking. I drove into town and got an Italian beef sandwich at the Ice Shanty, which is one of those places with a walk-up counter that you order from and then you eat outside. An Italian beef sandwich, apprently, is just like the girl at the counter said: it's like an Arby's sandwich, "only better." It had some pepper and spices on it, and I got it with jalapeños. I had dessert, and then came back to camp. Then I watched the fireworks across the lake with a bunch of other people on the waterfront steps. And finally, since it's my day off and I hadn't done it for a while, I came to the computers and wrote a blog for you all. And now it's over.

Diatribes [Updated]

I thought I'd take a moment to share a couple diatribes I've written in my journal. These two both happen to deal with how kids are raised. I had a third one that wasn't about kids, but I can't remember what it was right now. If I remember later, I'll put it after these two. 

1

[I had been reading The World Without Us on a Wednesday at a park that I go to sometimes, pretty near the house.] 

    As I was finishing the book at 6, a gaggle of parents and their preschoolers came by. The parents herded all the kids, with varying success, into playing various kinds of soccer games. It made me really sad, and I'll tell you why: preschoolers shouldn't be herded. Organized sports are almost certainly way down on any preschooler's list of fun things to do, but these parents were giving their kids a grown-up idea of fun, and reprogramming them to think of it as actual fun. I would much rather see kids that age running around aimlessly, preferably ina forest with a friend. What I saw was the acculturation of the suburbanites of 2030. Next time I see something like that, I may have to give someone a stern talking-to. I may make a point of going there next Wednesday at 6.

2

[I had just finished a doctor appointment. This one has a cuss or two.]

    Before I came back, I went to Toys “Я” Us to buy a Go set. But they didn't have a single one in the whole store. Seems wrong. Especially given that they had Hannah Montana hand sanitizer. I never guessed Toys “Я” Us would be the base of so much Trendy Green shit, but I saw “Earthopoly” (Celebrating Earth… one turn at a time!); either a board game or a video game somehow related to the Planet Earth series on Discovery Channel; and even some Gorilla Snacks made of all organic ingrediendts and then processed and packaged in five times as much plastic as necessary. It advertised that organic food is “great for the environment… and great for kidz [sic] too!” All this horseshit was in the same store that sells every unnecessary, gaudy, batteries-not-included piece of creativity-inhibiting schlock known to man. The woman in front of me in line was buying her son of about four years a plastic jackhammer that broke up plastic rocks. I estimate he'll play with it for four minutes before he chucks it in his toybox never to be seen again. These things come in all the different models that toy company executives can imagine, and yet despite that abundance, not one set for a classic game of intelligence that's endured since its invention in China thousands of years ago. I didn't mean to write such a diatribe, but that place nearly made me ill.

So, that's all. Maybe I'll remember the third thing soon, and then I'll put it here. Until then, have fun with these.

P.S.: Ah, I remembered it! This isn't one I've written down before, so I'm writing it now for the first time.

3

I've noticed that, whenever I think of something that took place in, say, the 1930s or before, I think of it taking place in black and white. I never really thought about this before, because it never really caught my attention. After all, before 1930, the world was in black and white, right? But now I've realized that the very way I think about the past has been shaped by the history of film. It was suddenly jarring for me when I saw this early color picture of Leo Tolstoy taken in 1908.

A diatribe usually blames something on something, and blaming my misconception on something else might seem a bit excessive. But I don't like it, and I'm pretty sure it's not my fault, so I'm going to blame it on the fact that in this society we get so much of our information about the past from the media and so little from other people telling us about it. I'm just thinking about the pre-Columbian days of America, and considering that it never would have occurred to the people then to imagine their ancestors in anything but full color. Whereas it's taken me until now to even notice that I'm thinking of the past inaccurately. It's not something that makes me really angry at society, but it did weird me out to realize that society was inhabiting my brain so deep down and without me even noticing it for so long. So I suppose what makes me more angry is how deeply my mentality is shaped without my permission or knowledge. It bothers me.

FOAN • Names

I lost the eBay auction on which I was going to buy the phone I wanted. It was a Motorola Motofone, and it was cool in several ways. One is that it has electrophoretic paper instead of an LCD display, meaning it's perfectly visible in broad daylight, because light illuminates it, rather than competing with the light it makes. Another is that the battery life was phenomenal. The coolest, though, was that I found a video of someone tossing one from a third-story balcony onto blacktop and then having it run over with a car repeatedly, and the phone worked fine afterward. 

-But, as I say, I lost that auction. So instead, Dad and I went to RadioShack and I bought the cheapest phone they had there. It's nothing special, but it takes calls. Well, I assume it does, because I haven't gotten any yet, because no one who knows my number has called me yet. It's summer; why would they need to?

-I looked at my phone number. The last four digits are 7628, but I decided I prefer to think of them as Sn-Au (Tin-Gold). Before I figured this out, I looked at the last five digits, which spell PROCT. I asked in my Facebook status whether that should stand for "proctor" or "proctologist". One of my friends said it's actually "Professional Connecticut". Then he said it's tough to make a living as a professional state impersonator, but it's easier with the smaller states.

-I set my answering machine message, too: "Hello, you've reached Baskin Robbins, the home of 31 flavors. If you can name 31 flavors in 31 seconds, you will win 31 dollars. Start now."

-I'll be using the phone sparingly, because I have a pay-as-you-go plan. Under this plan, the first time I use a phone on any day costs me a dollar, and then ten cents a minute. But it's only a dollar once a day, and if I don't use the phone on a day, I don't lose a dollar. I've barely used it so far.

The rest of this blog will be about names. A lot of this is copied from a journal entry I wrote last night at about 4 AM, so it might be a bit disorganized. I got to thinking about them more when I came across J.R.R. Tolkien's Wikipedia page last night. It has a copy of his signature, and when I saw it, I thought, "Man, that's way cooler than mine!" 

Mine looks like it was created by a sixth-grader—because it was. The only significant change to it since I was in probably middle school is that I added a crappy flourish at the end. It looks like a supremely messy Nﺴﺱl Dﺱ) Bﺴﺱll.  I'm a font designer! My signature should be memorable and awesome!

-Then I got to thinking, some of the reason that I haven't put a whole lot of effort into making a cool signature is probably that I'm not particularly enthusiastic about my name. My first two names are from the Bible, a book I haven't even read. They don't say anything in particular about me or anyone I'm related to or anything I've done. My last name is a little better, but as far as I know it just means "Bone Hill". Dad says that's its etymology, but Mom maintains that no one really knows. 

-I think a lot about names. Mainly it's about names for potential kids of mine, but sometimes about alternate names for me or things I need to name. The main problem I come up against is that almost all of the names we have in English are from other cultures, cultures I have no particular connection to. I'm not Jewish, so why do I have two Hebrew names? Likewise about a lot of names I think about. I look mainly at the name's meaning and the way it sounds. But I remember reading once that "Björk" is just the straight Icelandic word for "birch", and that Icelandic names are often transparent like that. And then, after I discover a meaning, I wonder, What reason do I have for putting that meaning in that language? I have no connection to Hebrew culture. I don't even know much of anything at all about German culture, which is apparently where the Charles of Chuck Masterson comes from. (I made that up because it sounded cool. It still does, and I still like it, but I bet if it were my real name I'd start thinking about it like I have with my actual name. I'd be using it a lot more, and thus thinking about it more. For example, who's this Master that I'm supposed to be the "son" of? Dad's an environmental services manager, so ho has underlings… but I don't think he'd call himself the Master.)

-A tradition I like is the Native American one—and I'm sad to say that I have no idea which tribes this includes—of earning a name. Kids have temporary names. When they come of age, they're given a name that has to do with them, and it's a name in the native language. Like (and I don't know many examples) Tahca Ushte, which means "Lame Deer". I read a semi-auto biography of him once, many years ago. Someone he mentioned was a guy whose name translated to "Man Afraid of His Horse", which sounds embarrassing until you learn that it means he's such a fierce warrior that other people are afraid when they see just his horse, even if they can't see him. Or Goyaałé, which means "One Who Yawns". They all have a story behind them. 

-I came up with my hobo name a while ago, and that's one that I like. I won't put it on here, because I'm trying to be a bit more responsible with my identities vis-à-vis the internet, but it has the characteristics I mentioned. It's made out of two words of my native English, and it describes me, and it even plays on a phrase to add more to the identity. It'll feature prominently in whatever alternate name I come up with. I don't know if I'm going to follow any sort of traditional "first, middle, last" formula with it, but if I do, it'll be one of those names, probably middle or last.

-I think what I'll do is wait until I take English Historical Linguistics next spring. I'm going to enjoy that class. I'll learn about old English naming traditions, and about their words, and I'll come up with something or other. Possibly I'll figure something out sooner. 

-What am I going to do with a new name once I figure one out? I don't know. Start introducing myself to new people by it, start signing stuff with it. I just want to come up with something that means me. It's not Mom or Dad's fault, since they could hardly foresee what sort of person I would have been when they were naming me at my birth. If anything, my slight unease with my name has to do with our naming traditions, which aren't as personal as the Native one that I was talking about. And with English, which seems to have an inferiority complex as far as forming new things out of native roots. (Almost all the new words we make up are from Latin and Greek roots.) I could go on and on. I love talking about names and etymology. But if I feel like going on and on, I'll come up with something more organized first. In the meantime, I'll close this entry out, and go think about signatures. 

Holy Toledo.

How did this happen? Was it because I left? It just seems like Micah is trying deliberately to make himself impossible to deal with.

-A few days ago, just before I came back from college, Micah got caught by the cops again, this time for buying weed. He's on house arrest and has more hours of community service to do. Meanwhile, he's under the strictest supervision he's yet had. Mom is staying home with him all the time. The thing is, she's in no state to deal with Micah. She's trying to recover from her thyroid issue, and her nerves are basically shot. So now Dad has started staying home too, as of this week. 

-Up to now, Micah has gone through three different schools. After Finneytown, he went to Wyoming, and then when he got in trouble he went to Dohn Community High School. That's where he stands right now. It's a sort of e-school, where he takes online courses and online quizzes. He goes to a building downtown some days. I'm not sure how it all works. He's upstairs working on quizzes now. 

-A while ago he was at church with Mom and found an iPod Touch on a table and brought it home. He says it wasn't theft, because he just found it on a table. Apparently, if you can't see the victim, or if the victim is forgetful, it's not theft, in Micah's conception. Mom found out about this, and was planning on returning the iPod to the church's lost and found or something, so the owner would be able to get it back. Just a few minutes ago, while I was downstairs here, Micah and Mom apparently got into a heated discussion of the iPod. At some point, Micah threw the thing on the floor and it broke.

-I don't know if he broke it because he was infuriated that Mom would give it back after he painstakingly stole it, or if he just threw it in a flare of anger and accidentally broke it. Either way, it was one more in a long line of inexplicable, infuriating things that he does. I can almost figure them out, but usually not quite. Mom and Dad are at a loss.

-Mom and Dad understand Micah on their own levels. Mom understands him as her son, who she loves more than anything, but who is going through some sort of hard time. For Mom, Micah is someone who takes all the love she gives him and then in return just goes and gets in more trouble with the law and does things like throwing the iPod. Dad understands Micah as a screw-up, who, no matter what, always seems to make the worst decision, without regard for the consequences. I try to understand Micah as he understands himself. I haven't figured it out yet, though. As near as I can tell, it's something like this:

-I should be allowed to do what I want to do, because this is my body and my self. The law and my parents shouldn't have any power over me, because they're not me. I also like hanging out with my friends, but since my friends all think like me about their rights, no one likes them—or me—and everyone tries to keep me from hanging around with them. I've screwed up a lot, but that doesn't invalidate my rights. But because I've screwed up, everyone seems to be against me. And I need to make them respect me, so in order to get back to their level, I have to assert myself and be really independent. When I do my own thing and it works for me, people will respect me.

-I'm still working on how Micah thinks of himself. I'll try and figure him out this summer. In addition to all the other stuff I'll be doing. I wish I had two summers for all the stuff I'm doing.

P.S.: We have kittens here! Awwwwwww… kittens.

This weblog is about cellular telephones

Unto now, I've been happy not to have a cell phone. My rationale for this was that cell phones are annoying and cost money that I could spend better somewhere else. Also, I liked being unreachable—for example, if I were out walking in the woods, I wouldn't want to talk with someone on my cell phone, because that would ruin the experience. I also always get annoyed when I'm talking with someone and they get a phone call, and talk to that person instead of me, who am currently with them in real life, and I didn't want to be the guy who does that. And after all, before the 1990s people got along just fine for centuries going to college without cell phones, so I should be able to just as well, especially since I've got an advantage over all those previous decades in that I can use email too.  But I've been coming to realize that it doesn't work quite like that. It's hard to get along without a cell phone because society has morphed to make them the first means of communication that people think about.

-For example, it seems—at least in college—that people don't honor meeting times anymore, or even think about meetings in terms of a certain time, especially if it's just two people meeting. They just ask your cell phone number, and say they'll call you and figure out when to meet. No one sets a time for hanging out anymore, as I imagine they did before cell phones. They just call someone and say, "Wanna hang out?" When I tell someone I don't have a cell phone, it throws them off, and I get the feeling when I'm setting up a meeting time with them that it's something they haven't done in a while. And since people always have the luxury of changing a meeting time, they probably don't think as hard about whether they might have some sort of conflict. It's all well and good except when they're going to meet with me, and then realize they're going to be late, and so I stand there for several extra minutes, puzzled and wondering whether I misremembered the time. 

-It also seems like, now that there are cell phones, people don't use other forms of communication with quite as much dedication. Over the last few days I've been trying to get in touch with Eric a lot to figure out when we can do another of our awesome exploits, but I've been writing to him with email, and out of probably six or seven emails that I've sent him, all of them asking for a reply, he's replied once. I just have to find him face to face, and he doesn't go to any meals, so it's caused me to have to delay our exploit. To sum up, it's annoying not to have a cell phone, because everyone else has one and it seems like it's the only way they talk to each other anymore.

-So I guess this summer I'll get one. Probably a cheap one, without a lot of features that I won't use, and probably a pay-as-you-go thing. I'm not real happy about it, but I've concluded that people just can't deal with it these days if I don't have one.

-It's been finals, so there's not a lot to say—I've been writing papers and stuff. I've also been (as you've seen) planning an exploit, but that's for another entry. I'm coming home this Friday, approximately. Then I'll do fun stuff until it's time for camp on the 11th. Then I'll do camp, which will be all sorts of fun, and then I'll drive to Duluth and do Crowduck, and then I'll work on fonts and do other fun stuff again. Wow, I just condensed my summer into one sentence. It'll be way more exciting once I get to it. I've been hanging out with people a lot, including Elissa, since it'd be good for us to get to know each other before we start living together. She has lots of plants. And likes tea a lot. I told her I have a feeling she's going to donate a lot of tea to me next year. She said probably so, and to the rest of EcoHouse too. I have this thing about tea: I drink a fair amount of it, but I've only once paid directly for a teabag, and that was last summer. Instead I get it from the dining hall; or from a stash in the building where Larissa's office is; or from Bob's when bags of it get separated from their box, which makes them unidentifiable and thus unsaleable; or from catered events; or from friends. Next year I expect I'll get an even better variety of tea, and still never pay for any.

-Oh, a couple weeks ago, I was snooping through file cabinets in Bob's, and in one of them I found a big Quaker Oatmeal canister full of CDs. I ripped a bunch of them onto my computer. Got some Radiohead, Barenaked Ladies, Die Toten Hosen (which is German for The Dead Pants), System of a Down, and some bands with interesting names: The Afghan Whigs and The Alphabetical Order. I like that around here you can just happen upon about a hundred hours of music. Too bad a lot of it was scratched beyond repair.

Failures (a prelude)

Watch for the sequel to this post, entitled "Successes", coming out sometime in the next year or so.
I've been a bit bummed, because for the second straight year I've abjectly failed to find a girlfriend. Luckily, I've also figured out why I haven't been any good at it in the past, and I've changed what I needed to change.
-Last year, the reason I failed was pretty clear: I made the internet my home. I'm sure I've written about this before, but the problem was that instead of doing something after my classes ended, I would go into my room and read crap on the internet until I had to do homework. Basically, if I wasn't in class or doing something else that I had to d, I was very likely reading the internet. It was a problem. As I went through the year, I kept discovering the problem again, and writing in my journal that today was the day I would stop spending so much time on the internet. But I would always end up there, because I hadn't realized two things. One was that I needed something to replace the internet with if I hoped to stop using it, and the other was that it was an addiction. I realized the fist of these things toward the beginning of this year, when I resolved to spend more time with real people instead of the internet. Sometime around winter break I instituted a one-hour-a-day policy for myself, wherein I was only allowed one hour per day for internet, except emails and blogging and chatting with Mom & Dad, because I kind of had to do those things. If I went over, I took the extra time out of the next day's hour. It worked pretty well. It's taken me until recently to actually call it an addiction. I noticed that I was consistently going over my hour, and I had built up a backlog of about two weeks where I should be free of the internet. So a couple days ago I decided that for the rest of the school year I wouldn't use the internet, except to check emails, write the occasional blog, and chat with Mom & Dad if one of them caught me while I was online. The first two or three days of this have worked so well that I think I'm going to make it permanent. I'm just going to accept that I can't use the internet for just a little while. It always snowballs into longer than it should, no matter what I try to do, and it's been interfering with how much time I have to dedicate to real-life pursuits. Which is why it's an addiction, and which brings us back to the matter of girlfriends.
-This year my failure was a combination of things. One thing was that I spent the whole year barking up two trees that were both the wrong one. C. worked at camp with me, and so I naturally assumed that since we both went to Grinnell and worked at Camp Manito-wish, we must have a good deal in common. Now, the other thing that came into play was that I hadn't renounced the internet yet, or replaced it effectively with something in real life—I hadn't joined any student groups or anything, nor did I hang out with friends except at the dining hall, and if I came home and successfully made myself leave the computer closed, I would just end up doing something else in my room to pass time until bed, like reading my journal or thinking about napping. That meant that I didn't hang out with C., or people who knew her, much; and so I didn't realize until after I'd spent a whole semester getting to know her that she was, as my roommate put it, "a party girl". She's nice, but not right for me.
-At about the same time, I was coming to know M., who's very outgoing and excellently strange and doesn't plan her life around parties. So after winter break I started trying to get closer to her. But because I wasn't hanging out with her, or her friends, very much, it took me a long time to catch her at a time when I could find out what her thoughts were on romance in the near future. As it turned out, she wasn't looking for someone when I was looking for her. But because I still hadn't gotten out of my fairly small, rather male circle of friends that I've been eating most meals with since I got here, I couldn't think of anyone but M., and she had suggested that she might change her mind in the near future, so I just kept thinking of her.
-Finally, though, I've started hanging around with more people, sitting at more than just one table, and above all I've given up the internet and plan to replace it with real life. I talked with M. a couple days ago, because I had never spilled all these relationship woes to anyone before. She agreed with my thoughts on why I got nowhere these two years. Then I told her I was getting to know more people, and was starting to form vague ideas of where to go now that M. herself was taken again. She asked who might be on my list of candidates. I told her a name, and it turned out we both thought the girl I'd mentioned could perhaps be a good person to go for. So now I have a direction, even though it's a vague one, because I know fairly little about this girl yet. However, I also know I'm not going to just sit around and hope something happens for me. I'm going to make it happen.

-Other stuff: I've been customizing my laptop. I now have a keyboard that allows me to type —em dashes— and –en dashes– and ¼frac½tions¾ without even flinching, and I can also go all föréìĝñ on a moment's notice. And I've bought an upgrade to my font-making program. And, I'm finally doing something I should've done long ago: I'm consolidating my computers, so I don't have to take my big unwieldy (and recently, very slow) tower back and forth between here and Ohio all the time. I'll keep it around in Ohio, but mainly for historical purposes and as a backup files repository. Oh, and I've been (poorly so far) making moccasin-sewing string out of sinew, and working on my bow, and other fun stuff. Such as hanging out. I did a good deal of that yesterday, and some more today. I'm becoming happier. And that makes me happy… so basically, life is looking nice.

And Grinnell gets weirder

So, my plan for next year was to live at EcoHouse in the spring and some dorm in the fall. I needed someone to switch out the room with - so that I'd be living in it in the fall and they'd be there in the spring. When I sent out an email to all the people going abroad in the fall, I got a letter back from the organizers of Food House, a project house like EcoHouse but devoted to food (cooking it, getting it locally, growing it) instead of ecology. They needed one extra person in the fall. So I agreed to that. However, the project houses hadn't presented their proposals to Housinge yet at this point. When Food House did that, they didn't get the 12-person house they wanted, but rather the 7-person house. I volunteered to be cut, because shortly before that, I had gotten an email from an EcoHouse person who had just gotten an internship that would extend from summer into the fall and leave a vacancy in EcoHouse in the fall. I offered to fill this vacancy. The interesting part is that that means I'm living with the person who would've been her roommate, Elissa.
-This is possible because this year Grinnell decided to make some areas of campus gender-neutral, and all the project houses are included because they only have one bathroom per floor. Gender-neutral means they don't ask the genders of the people applying to these rooms. It's meant to accommodate people who choose not to identify as either of the two widely accepted genders, but it also means that in project houses we're free to do pretty much whatever we please regarding rooommates. She and I are both cool with the whole thing. She sent me an email asking if I would have problems with various things, such as clothes strewn about, and I didn't, and she had no problems with any of the things I came up with that I might be liable to do, such as strew clothes about and have a pretty large snake cage. We've got a double with bunct beds and windows facing west and south for lots of sun. We both agree that it'll be fun and interesting.
-The snake cage is going to be one of my summer projects. It's already put together, but now I'm going to take it apart and put it together again with screws instead of nails, so I can take it apart and put it together quickly for ease of transportation. Tenzing's getting pretty big. When I got him he measured about 15 inches. Now he's about 29 inches. What I've heard about carpet pythons growing fast was true. Meanwhile, I think he's now longer than the longest dimension of his terrarium, so it's getting time for me to move him into the big cage. I think he'll enjoy it. Certainly there'll be more room for him to explore, and he'll have a better hiding place (the entire 6-inch-tall space beneath the bottom shelf).
-Another of my summer projects, I'm thinking, is going to be working at Manito-wish again. I definitely liked it. My only issue was with having to wear shoes all the time, but I think if I can find a comfortable pair of watershoes that are nicely vented and not too constrictive, I should be fine. I'm going to have to go to an outdoors store sometime before I go to Manito-wish, so I can get a nice lightweight sleeping bag and possibly some other implements. These would be handy not only for Manito-wish but also for a bit of wandering around the country that I might do sometime this summer. The part of camp that I'll be working ends on July 18th, but I've already been given the go-ahead to leave a few days early to go to Crowduck. All I have left to do is accept the job offer email that I've been sent. I think I'll do that tomorrow.
-Our books have been steadily getting done. We just sent the last one to the printer, so we should have proofs soon, and meanwhile the other two will be arriving within not too long. I'll bring copies of them all. We at Press certainly got our stuff together this semester and got the books put together much quicker, although it certainly helps that we're dealing with a competent company now.
-That's about all I've got, besides this:
-Mom, I really hope you start feeling better soon. It has to be the worst feeling ever to be held captive by your own brain's chemistry. It'll be better, soon or eventually. Take care of yourself. I wish I were there so I could help you through this. Just know that I'm doing fine, and I'll be around soon, and I'll be able to spend some of the summer at home.

Well,

Basically I've been working and reading a lot, except for some notable exceptions. The reading was for classes, and the working was mainly on the books we're making this semester. Book design is fun, but it can get tedious, and I don't think I can convey any of the sense of fun by writing about it. I'll just settle for this: We got to use so many fonts for the fantasy book! We've sent off two of our three books to the printers already, and the next one we're doing this week. These printers are far and away more competent than the company we worked with last semester. That company was, apparently, staffed by lobotomized dingos. The liaison who always got sent out to deal with us was really nice, but despite having been in the printing business for a claimed 29 years, he routinely gave us numbers that were completely wrong, lost things, couldn't understand for the life of him what exactly we wanted to print even after we made it repeatedly and abundantly clear, and once accidentally mailed something to himself that he was supposed to have at our meeting. Let that be my first lesson in dealing with incompetents, and let the present be my first lesson in dropping them like a bag of fish heads. As for how they stay in business, we think they probably hardly ever get contracted to make artsy stuff like ours, but rather for brochures like you'd get from a power tool company.
-This weekend I went on a camping trip. I biked with three friends, and five other friends drove, to Rock Creek State Park, seven miles away. Such a fun ride. When we got there we set up tents and then made a campfire. Someone had forgotten the marshmallows, so a few people went back in the car and got those and some beef and such. We made beans and hamburgers over the fire, but the grill was set too high off the pit, so it kinda took forever. As we grilled, we discussed who would be picked off first when the camping trip turned into a horror movie. The group decided it would be me, since I was competent - I would have figured it all out, but then I would be killed just as I tried to warn everyone else. (I was the competent one because I set up the campfire and fixed people's bikes on the way and had a multitool.) We sat around the fire and talked, until Max decided it was time to start the Festivities, with a capital P. (Yeah, it's college.) Only five people partook of these Festivities, and afterwards I'm quite sure that I had just as much fun as the people who had. Unfortunately, instead of playing some sort of game (I was hoping to play my first game of 1000 Blank White Cards - there was a guy who'd played it before, and somehow both of us had brought index cards, even though he wasn't planning on playing it), we all just went to bed in the big giant tent. But we all lay there for like an hour making each other laugh. Madeline and I had a long conversation in Spanish, although unfortunately we couldn't tell secrets in it or anything, because one person there was from a Hispanic family and another was in my Spanish class. Oh well. At one point I could have sworn I heard a cow mooing outside the tent, but we all remained safe.
-We woke up the next morning very cold. Tired, we had breakfast and packed up our stuff and tried to warm up without our fire. We bikers biked back, but it was nowhere near as fun as the trip to the park, because the wind that had been with us was now against us and probably twice as strong to boot. My lips are still very chapped. Even so, I would rate myself "Completely Satisfied" with regards to the camping trip in general.

-Now here's the part of the blog that's not so happy. The financial crisis has been hitting home harder and harder. When Teva bought Dad's company, they liquidated all his stocks, and that caused him to have to pay something ridiculous like half of them in taxes. So it looks like we're going to be poor for an extended period, and furthermore I'm going to have to take out bigger student loans.
-What do I think of it? Honestly, I'm resolving to take it in stride. I already knew I was going to have student loans, and have to work for a good while to pay them off. I asked my roommate how long it takes the average person to pay off student loans, because he knows this sort of thing. He said it usually takes ten years, because you're not paying off very much of them with each payment. I plan to pay off as much as I can with each payment. You may not see it now, because all my expenses are being paid for me (by my parents and by my future self), but I'm a very frugal person. I spend as little money as I possibly can, and I plan to keep going like that until, for one reason or another, I no longer have to worry much about money.
-I don't economize because I hate to do it but I know I have to; I economize because I like to live simply and make stuff myself and take care of my own needs as efficiently as I can. I think one thing that led me to act like this is that I started thinking of purchases in terms of how many hours of work it takes me to pay for an item. For example, to have lunch at Subway, I work a little over an hour in Bob's ($7.25/hr). To buy a textbook, I may have to work upwards of ten hours - and since I work eight hours a week, that's over a week of work. When I find a job that pays better (I was going to say "When and if", but $7.25 is pretty close to minimum wage, so I shouldn't have much trouble beating it), small purchases will take fewer hours, but I'll still be leery of big ones. On a related note, I think being a hobo could be a pretty fun way to spend some time. I'm not being driven to desperate measures with all this frugality that I talk about. I would have done this stuff anyhow - it's just that now it seems more appropriate, and it'll put me ahead of the credit-card-maxing, Aéropostale-wearing pack.
-So Mom, don't cry over my economic situation. I'll make everything work, and once I'm out of college I plan to start giving rectangular Christmas gifts commensurate to how much you and Dad have helped me in life. I appreciate the fact that you're giving away so many of the dollars that you've earned to put me through college. Don't worry about me, because I'll be fine as soon as possible after college. If you can, keep your teacher retirement fund - even if it is small - and use it to help you retire, because that's why it is where it is.
-Meanwhile, because it's good and also because you're getting to the point where you don't have much choice, I'm encouraging you to be frugal. Think of stuff in terms of how long it takes to earn it, versus how long it might take to earn a cheaper similar thing, or even to repair an old one. Look around for stuff you can start selling. I'm thinking of selling off my coin collection, but I also note that precious metal prices are going up, and I want to take advantage of that as much as I can. I have some gold that I bought when it was something under $400 an ounce (¼ ounce for I think $97) back when I was so into coins. Gold is now somewhere near $900 an ounce, and it's been over $1000 in the last year. What kind of stuff do you have lying around? Dad, don't feel obligated to keep the Kawasaki around on my account, if that's got any bearing on why you want to keep it. You've already given me a car. Everyone, start cooking dinners more and eating out less. I guarantee you'll feel more like a family, and you'll save money, and you'll be healthier. And Mom, learning how to cook well will give you something to do with all that time you don't know how to fill. Websites are websites. Cooking connects you with the family and the real world. I think I'm going to stop now, because I'm starting to feel like I'm lecturing on how to be money-responsible, even though I don't have what you might call experience on that front. But, don't worry about me. I'm resourceful.

Busy Week / Musical Note

It just seemed so wrong to work on schoolwork over spring break. So I didn't, much. I did write five pages for a 7-page paper that I've sinced finished and turned in. And I read a little. So when I got back, I had to do work more or less continuously until now. What did I do? You're about to find out.
-I decided that after all I'm not going to go to Granada. I guess there are two main things that made me decide it. One is that I really like Grinnell, and I wanted to take all the courses I could here. The other is that I feel like if I'm going to see a country, I'll get a more thorough experience if I'm not trying to take college courses and experience the country at the same time. Hopefully I'll go see another country someday. Such as Spain. Or perhaps I could go see Lake Baikal in Russia, or the Amazon - those would be cool too.
-I finally ran out of time to vacillate, and had to declare my major. So I declared anthropology. I should note that I'm also majoring in indecision, so it's quite possible that I'll change it sometime before I graduate. I am decided on the fact that I'm going to declare a linguistics concentration soon, and stick with that. I'm looking forward to some anthro courses, especially the Archaeology of North America course that I'm taking next semester. And the anthropology-linguistics course, which I think is next spring or so. Some of these are ones that I might not have had time to take if I had gone to Spain. I do know that I would've missed out on the Archaeology of North America course. I'm okay with my decision.
-I started laying out the fantasy book. We have a title now: it's called The Captives' Quest. Layout work is nice and relaxing, because you don't have to think a bunch when you do it.
-I didn't sleep much.

I wrote something on Facebook, and I thought I'd put it here too.

I'm going to collect here the bits of music that always give me an involuntary spasm of being amazed. There aren't many so far, but I'll add to this with comments whenever I find another. [The comments thing is for Facebook. Here I'll just put them in my next entry.]

1. Gustav Holst, The Planets, Mars. The moment is about 6½ minutes in, depending on the performance. All the chaos, built up the whole time by the 5/4, yields into a long, warlike chord held by what sounds like the entire orchestra in fff, and then—here's the part—the strings come in with a low note, and bend it up to their own long chord. That bend does it every time for me. Sadly, few orchestras play it that way—most play it as two separate notes, which just has no magic at all. I don't know what the name of the orchestra is that plays the version I have. I wish I could help you with that.
This uncredited performance has it.

2. Flobots, "Handlebars". The climactic verse where the song's protagonist, who has been becoming steadily more corrupt and perverse for the entire song, shouts out,

And I can end the planet in a holocaust
In a holocaust
In a holocaust
In a holocaust
In a holocaaaaaaaaaaaust!

And an entire crowd screams in unison behind him. And suddenly we flash back to when he could just ride his bike with no handlebars, and that's the end.
The music video enhances it even more.

3. Jean Sibelius, 2nd Symphony, Movement 2: Andante ma rubato. This entire movement comes close to that breaking point, but the spot is right at the end. The movement leaves room for you to breathe, or hold your breath, while you listen, and is painted with minimalist strokes of bright color. At the end, the orchestra has been getting quieter for a few minutes, and is winding down for the next movement. After a silence, the basses crescendo from nothing. The trumpets join them, and together they slowly go to two or three f's. Then they stop in mid-air, they wait silently for you to move to the edge of your seat, and the trumpets blast their final three notes, falling away to nothing to let the srings quietly end the movement.
The movement is 15 minutes long, so it's in three parts here. You really ought to listen to the whole thing. The conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, is feeling the music too. At one point he has tears on his face.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Qik note

On my way back to Grinnell, I saw
-A place called "Qik N EZ".
-A truck that had skidded partially off the road and was blocking one lane.
-A truck from the Batesville Casket Company that said on the back, "Please drive safely - Heaven can wait". I wanted to take a picture, but I couldn't get to my camera from up in the front.

Bowing, Arrowing

Today I overslept, and then I picked up Aaron's brother Jeremy to go make bows and arrows with Mr Lorenz. Jeremy is still at Finneytown Secondary Campus - the poor fellow - as a senior. Mr Lorenz is the sole French teacher and the coach of the academic team, and in his spare time he makes bows, arrows, trebuchets, and other assorted awesome stuff. If you'd like to picture him, he's the tallest person on the Finneytown Secondary Campus, and he has light brown hair, and no one I know has ever seen him in a mode other than happy. I drove us to his house, although I managed to take us many miles in the wrong direction first. I've got the driving thing fine; the next hurdle is navigation. I actually don't think I'm that bad at navigation, it's just that Cincinnati is complicated in places. I do take the blame for going west instead of east. Anyhow.
-We got to his house, and went into his small backyard, where he had a table full of tools, a garage full of wood, and a few rock benches with more wood. He has a lot of stuff. He picked out a long stick of yew for Jeremy, who apparently had discussed earlier with him what kind of bow he'd like to make. Then he picked up a piece of walnut that he'd vaguely started working with, and showed me what to do with it. I started working on it with a planer, shaving it down to the right shape. With the planer it was some painfully slow going. Then he gave me a drawknife he had, and the work magically disappeared. I had the general shape of the bow fleshed out pretty soon after that, and then I spent a while fine-tuning it with the planer. Meanwhile, Jeremy sat on a Schnitzelbank and hacked away at his yew stick with a machete. Interspersed into all this bow-making action, though, we had fun. For example, we got to meet all the little Lorenzes. I think they're 11, 6, and 5. The 11-year-old was Seth, who was working on a bow of his own. The others were his two daughters, who are pretty darn cute (and like to talk a lot). Also, he got pizza for everyone for lunch, and we ate that. Also, when I went to use his bathroom, I discovered that he has the old style of toilet with the tank up above and a pull cord to flush it. Basically, he's awesome. We also made a few arrows today. I gave him one of the arrowheads I've been making on Fridays when I'm not too exhausted to go knap flint, and I used another to make an arrow for myself.
-Unfortunately, there were too few hours in the day, and we didn't get to the end of any bows. But we're going to go back next Saturday and finish the job. We didn't finish the arrows, either, because the glue holding on the flights (feathers) would've taken too long to set. Instead, Mr Lorenz is just going to fletch them all himself (he's making a few with regular metal points), and they'll be ready when we come back. Hopefully next Saturday will be enough time to finish these bows, because I do look forward to having a self-made bow. How awesome will that be?
-That's about all I've got for this post. Before you go, I want to mention this: Mom's been feeling pretty poorly lately. Mom, I hope you feel better as soon as physically possible, and everyone else, wellwishes are appreciated.

Everybody, we need to start blogging again.

And it has been a while, too. It's been a busy few weeks, the last ones before spring break, resulting in oogobs of work piling up. Actually, it wasn't all that bad, because most of my professors seemed to think we were probably being overloaded by our other professors, and so they compensated by giving me a lightish workload. There was only one class that had a whole bunch due - my sociology class, for which I had to do a 4-page paper and a take-home exam within a week of each other. So there was only one night where I stayed up really late. I ended up going to bed at 6:15 AM that night. So I got about one REM cycle, which is better than zero. The good thing is that I get two weeks of spring break, but the bad thing is that I have a 7-page paper to write sometime before I get back in town. I'm going to make a sincere effort to get that done before this weekend, so I don't have to think about it later.
-What other stuff happened before I left? Oh, here's one. I got accepted to live in EcoHouse for my second semester next year. EcoHouse is a college-owned project house whose residents strive to make as little impact on the environment as they can while being college students also. This isn't Trendy Green stuff, like "Put in compact fluorescents!" and "Recycle a little more!". It's well-considered actions that do more than just make the residents look Green. For example, EcoHouse is big about buying local foods to as great an extent as possible. A couple people last year actually went on a 100-mile diet, where everything they ate came from within a 100-mile radius (except for a few little things like coffee and sugar). I don't know what they ate (corn, corn byproducts, corn derivatives, corn extracts), but they didn't ship in every meal from halfway across the globe. Relatedly, there's a garden out back, which we're expanding 44% for next year, and which will grow tomatoes, squash, various spices, pumpkins, lettuce, carrots, cabbage, and all sortsa other good stuff. The garden is fed with compost from the house's meals, which the EcoHouse people cook themselves a good deal. There's one meal every week, Sunday evenings, where the whole house gets together and cooks a meal and then has a meeting to talk about how the week went for everyone, and what chores still need to be done, and what debts need to be settled, and so on. The house has been renovated to be more water- and energy-efficient: low-flow toilets, sinks, and showerheads; an energy monitoring system and soon some window quilts to keep warm (or cold) air in. I think I'm really going to like living there.
-Press has started working on its projects for this semester. We have three: a set of postcards from around the college, a book of photography of subtropical animals (the photographer went to Costa Rica and Florida for a college thing), and a fantasy novel that takes place in the land of Insanity, and whose protagonists are two kids who were a little bit too crazy for Reason, so the elves snatched them away. I'll be sure to bring everyone copies. They're all fun.
-I visited the Amana Colonies with my intentional communities class. Our professor is pretty much the premier scholar on the Amanas - in one of the pieces he gave us to read, a guy wrote about them, and cited Professor Andelson almost exclusively, except for a newspaper columnist from the 1800s. So we had a good and informative tour, especially since Professor Andelson teamed up with Lanny Watts of the Amana Heritage Society. (I just looked up how to spell Watts, and in the Amana Heritage Society I only found references to Lanny Haldy, so I don't know exactly Watts up with that.) I bought some Millstream root beer, and it was very tasty. At first I didn't think it was all that great, but it grew on me. I like that it uses real sugar, not corn syrup.
-I worked at CERA a few times. Once, our manager Larissa ("our" being mine and Jacob's - he's an EcoHouse guy who works there too this semester with me) had an owlet with her, because someone she knew had found it on his farm, injured. Larissa was keeping it at CERA for a while because it was closer to where she was going to take it eventually, a raptor rehabilitation place. It was a very cute owlet. Owlet! If you're ever depressed, Google for pictures of owlets. I just did it, and I think they're even cuter than kittens.
-I also worked at Bob's. One night, there was a big party in the lounge next door. One very drunk guy came in while I was playing 碁* with a friend in the dining area, and he asked if he could get some water from the tap. I said sure, so he went over to the sink. After a few moments, he called over to me, "It's not working." "You're maybe turning it the wrong way?" I told him, and went over to look. It transpired that he had been trying to use the soap dispenser.
-I've also started training to be a leader for GOOP next year. You may recall that I applied to be a GOOP leader last year, but I didn't get in. This year they kind of couldn't refuse me, since I worked at Manito-wish last summer. It looks like it'll be fun. I'm definitely looking forward to it. We've only had one training session so far, where we talked about blisters and sunburn and CPR and such. Unfortunately for my Spain trip, the two don't look like they can both happen next year, and I have to say that I'm probably going to side with GOOP. However, Aunt Irene, I did appreciate you sending me that letter that you wrote for Leah. I do hope to go overseas sometime, but it looks like I might not do it for a college semester. I guess that'll leave me room to do something a little more unstructured, which may well give me a better opportunity to experience the culture anyhow. Maybe I'll even do the stereotypical college-student thing and go backpacking around Europe for a while after I graduate - who knows.
-And, I'm going to be turning twenty in six days. That, to me, is really weird. I wrote something about it in my journal a couple days ago:

Speaking of which, that's something it's hard for me to reconcile myself with. In eight days, I'm going to be twenty. Teenagedness will be behind me forever. I suppose I won't have actually changed, since life is continuous and not broken up into discrete decades - "The Growing Up Decade", "The Rebellion Decade", and now "The Forming-Your-Life-and-Career Decade"** - but it still feels mighty weird to be coming up on a new tens-place digit. Twenty! I know I'm not allowed to yet, but I feel old! If all goes typically, I've already lived a quarter, maybe a fifth of my life! Holy hell, I only get to do this three or four more times before I keel over and croak! I should probably stop that now, all the morbidity, since I'm only turning twenty. But it feels really weird, and I wanted that on the record. It feels alarming, too. That's a word I needed.

I haven't done much with my spring break yet. I'll put up bulletins as it goes by. A few fun things are definitely going to happen. Meanwhile, since I was looking at my journal, I'll put out something else I found in there:
-I dreamt that I was going to do something dangerous on my bike, and that I knew I might lose a leg doing it, but I did it anyhow. I did lose a leg, the right one. So did a woman named Ida Mose, and a guy I didn't know. We commiserated.

*That's "go", but I like to use the Japanese character, because it's hard to confuse it with the verb "go".

**Followed by "The Parenthood Decade", "The Mid-Life Crisis Decade", "The Working a Lot Decade", "The End-of-Work and Free-Time Decade", "The Last Hurrah Decade", "The Rest Home Decade", the "Extra Innings Decade", and any following decades would be part of "The Your-Days-Are-Numbered Era". This is purposely a very pessimistic classification system. I'm sure things look much better from down the road a ways.

A walk in the park • Rendezvous • Misc.

I do like my Saturdays. Here's what happened on the 7th, taken from my journal.
-I got up about 1130 and had lunch. I was going to invite [my friend] to come along geocaching, but I couldn't find her. It's just as well - I'm probably the only person on campus crazy enough to go through everything I did today. I got some water and such ready, and then around 1330 I took off for Jacob Krumm Preserve.
-The biking went pretty smooth until I turned onto the gravel road - then I discovered that "gravel" was really a euphemism for "mud covered with gravel". But, I found enough purchase on the roadway to get to the preserve. Pretty uneventful. The roads were so wet because it's been melting the last few days, in volume. The gravel road at points had a creek running alongside it in the drainage ditch.
-I entered Jacob Krumm Preserve, and found the trail. The first cache I looked for was supposed to be on a grassy hill scattered with tiny dead-looking trees, but I searched under every tussock and found nothing. So I moved on to the next one.
-It was easy to find when I got close: just a peanut butter jar in a log. I noted that it was getting wet on the ground as I moved on. I came across a field with a huge dirt mound and a wooden tower in it, with the trail bypassing it to the left, and a "fire lane" trail going approximately to the tower. I took the trail, but then it turned out to be a stream - no kidding, a real stream with a real current. I slorshed across some slushy ice to the field I'd left, and quickly found the geocache at a post of the tower I'd seen. There were kids playing on the tower while their dad looked at something through binoculars from the top. I moved on, because I also found a trail that wasn't actively flowing.
-This led me to where the trail comes near the railroad line. There was supposed to be a cache there, but no such luck, or at least I didn't see it. There was a bridge, over Sugar Creek. Sugar Creek was creeking right along at a good clip, coming out from a tunnel beneath the IAIS. Every few seconds a good-sized chunk of ice would float by. The water was dirty, cold, and roaring.
-I moved on, to the West Loop of the trail, which circles a big pond. To get to the West Loop I had to slog up a big hill covered in snow that had half melted, so that with the push-off part of each step I would sink down an inch or so. It got maddening. But I kept walking (my feet steadily getting wetter despite my water-resistant shoes). The first cache on the West Loop is hidden somewhere on a big dirt mound by a little stream, but the catch is you have to walk through solid bramble to get there. It was the thickest bush I've ever whacked, and practically every plant had thorns. I mentally composed the cache log: "For this cache: A curse on you, and your children, and your children's children, unto the seventh generation." It was pretty damn bad - and when I got there, it was too covered in snow for me to find anything. So I bushwhacked back to the trail, mystifying a group of girls who were walking past, and moved on.
-I finished out the trip with two easy caches, one in an oak tree and one in a dead log near the parking lot. As I moved between those two, I saw a bunch of guys ice-fishing. Apparently, despite three days of thawing, the ice is still 18 inches thick.
-Krumm is rich with potential krokay courses. I'm getting krokay up again soon, and maybe we can play our first new game there. We'll see how the weather acts. If it stays as squishy as this, Ill probably wait a week. I'd comment on the beauty of Krumm itself, but I caught it on an off day, with all the ground a giant bog and no leaves on anything. Despite that, I guess it's a pretty nice place.
-I walked the road back to my bike, and (now with a tailwind, on the gravel road, but a headwind on the highway) biked back to town - stopping briefly at Arbor Lake to see if there was little enough snow for me to find the cache I missed the other day. (No.)

Other stuff!
Eric, Ben and I have been exploring the campus more. A couple weeks ago, we found an unfinished room underneath one of the buildings here, with no floor. If you weren't careful to step on the joists, you could fall straight out into outer space. That's not true. There were no joists, only a rolling landscape of a spongy white architectural substance that I couldn't identify. But there was also a tarp and some teabags and a coffeemaker and Christmas lights and a note.
-The note was addressed to whoever stumbled across this place. It said feel free to take some cookies - though there weren't any just then, we discovered - and to please not disturb anything. It was unsigned.
-So Ben and Eric and I wrote a note back. We told these people that their hideout was pretty sweet, and asked if they'd like to see more awesome places on campus. We suggested that we meet sometime, and said we'd check back in the future for a reply.
-A few days later, we checked and there was another note, saying they'd be very interested in seeing what we'd found. So we left a meeting date and time, and waited for them to approve of it. When we got their next note, it said, "Your proposed time and place are agreeable to us. Come alone and come unarmed." It was signed with an angry face and a devious face, and in a P.S. there was a happy face.
-We met in one of the theaters at 11 at night. Ben, even though he had proposed the original meeting date in the first place, had lamely decided not to come, because it was his birthday and a bunch of his friends had come over to have a party. So it was just Eric and me. Also, the theater was in use - some fool group was having auditions there. Luckily, it wasn't 11 yet, so we waited around, exploring to see what was locked and unlocked tonight. At about 10:55, we peeked in the back of the theater to hear the auditioning people closing up shop. Ha ha! So a few minutes later, we went up to the catwalk and started waiting for our contacts.
-Unfortunately, there was no light in the theater, so they wouldn't be able to see us when they came in. Instead, we went down to the stage area. While we were remarking on how good our timing was, Eric gestured to his side. There was something there in the darkness. But I couldn't make out what it was. It looked like someone sitting, but it also looked like an empty Adirondack chair. Eric called out quietly: "Hel-lo?" No answer. I was trying to decide if there was a person there, trying to psych us out before busting us for being in the theater after hours, but Eric asked, "Are you who we're looking for?" and the brightish area in the darkness said, "Yeah."
-We moved into some light. There was a guy and a girl, both first-years and neither of them people we'd known before. We introduced ourselves, and then talked about our various escapades of the past and planned exploits for the future. As some of these were probably faintly illegal, I won't describe them now, but suffice it to say that we gained a mutual respect for each other. It's hard not to respect someone who has a grappling hook and has used it - they had. We toured the building, but found doors annoyingly locked. Eventually we walked together to wherever we were going next. All in all I couldn't ask for a whole lot more out of a Wednesday night. Eric and I even got to go to Ben's birthday party and harass him for being lame.
-I've been working at CERA again, so that's cool. So far it's been a lot of database-entering stuff, but it'll get more exciting. Relatedly, I've also applied to live in EcoHouse next school year. EcoHouse is a college-owned off-campus house that aims to minimize its impact on the environment by conserving energy, buying local foods, composting, growing a garden, and other stuff. Doesn't that sound just like me? Well, I hope I get in. I think my odds are good - I talked with a current resident (a guy in my intentional communities class, the Jordan who took me back to Ohio once last school year), and he said a lot of people wanted to live there in the fall because they were going abroad in the spring. Since I'll be going in the fall if I go - another topic I'm going to address in a moment - I have a good chance of being picked to fill up an empty slot, I think.
-About Granada.
-I've applied, but that application was just to the Off-Campus Study office here - I haven't sent anything to IES yet. I'm still not totally convinced that I want to go. There are definitely advantages to going - I should know; I had to write an essay about them for the OCS office. My Spanish would improve immensely, for starters. And I'd see a corner of the world I'd never seen before. Experience a culture I've never experienced. See the sights around Europe and Morocco.
-But I like this continent a lot. Everyone I know lives here, and I know how to do things here. If I go, I'll also be gone for a whole quarter of the time that remains for me here after this semester. I like this college. All the classes teach me a lot, and I've made some great friends. Whereas in Spain I don't know anyone, and a semester probably wouldn't be enough time to get to know anyone too well. Also, next year, I inherit the leadership of Press. I like running Press, and it would also be left a bit fragile if there were only or two people next year, neither of whom have much experience with it, to run the whole thing. So, essentially, the decision about Granada comes down to stuff I like a lot versus stuff I might like a lot and that I might never have a chance to do again. I'm still quite up in the air. If I decide to stay here, my room draw number guarantees me an excellent room for the semester I won't be at EcoHouse - it's 29, out of about 1500. If I go to Spain, I'll see Spain and my Spanish will get very good. It's tough. My decision is due on April 1st. Who knows but that I might do what I did when I was deciding between colleges, and decide on the day the decision is due.
-Well, this has gone on long enough. Your dinner is probably getting cold, so I'll let you go. See you in a few. But before I go, I should congratulate Tracy & Dan again on Cammy Marjorie Troxel's arrival. Congratulations! The fun is just beginning.

What I Did

I've decided Saturdays are my days for doing something awesome, every week. I've got several things queued. But this last Saturday's was just excellent.

I made a moai. Moai are better known as "those Easter Island heads". To make it, I used a huge pile that the snowplow had made, and whittled it into this using a hatchet and a crappy plastic snow shovel I borrowed from Security. I worked on it for a couple hours Friday night, six hours or so on Saturday, and a little more on Sunday. I had forgotten since last year that snow sculpting is some of the most physically draining work there is, so at the end of the day my muscles and bones were telling me, "Damn, you must have really accomplished something!" I love working really hard, because when I'm done, I can eat dinner three times. But for now, I love it once in a while. Maybe I could be persuaded to like it more often, but only for money or if I end up learning woodsman-type skills from it. Okay, so now I'm going to give you a sense of the size of this thing.

That's right. Eight feet tall, I'm guessing. Fear it.

Since I'm putting up pictures, here's one of my roommate.

He's halfway between having his hair parted on the left and having it parted on the right. I had just discovered that he's parted his hair on the left every day of his life since first grade except once, and he decided to try it out differently since we were discussing it. We were talking about combing because I had just given my hair a thorough combing for the first time in… uh… (long, awkward silence). I don't know when I last combed my hair before today. I just let it do whatever it's going to do, usually. But I like to do something with my hands while I'm reading, and I had a long reading today.

Maybe I'll take a shot with a better background later, so you can see my hair in all its glory. It's sort of all over the place in this picture, but you'll notice it's not tangled like it was before. This is taken by the roommate pictured above. He's a photographer for the college newspaper.

Next Saturday? I'm thinking either geocaching or bowdrill fire-making. I'll probably do the geocaching first, so I can find a fireboard and other pieces of wood for the bowdrill. I'll keep you posted.

Also, Grandma & Grandpa, I got the ginger snaps, and I've been enjoying them for the last two days. Mmmmmmmmmm. I had forgotten how much I like coming back to the dorm and being able to pick up a ginger snap whenever I want one.