Cool things

I can't whip up excellent food given just an idea of what I want to eat; I'm not yet advanced enough to be creative in my cooking. But I can follow a recipe, and I did it the other Sunday, and I made some darn good pizza. It was all from scratch: I made the dough out of some of our 50 pounds of communal flour; I made the tomato sauce from some fresh garden tomatoes we had around (and, okay, some tomato paste). The garlic for the sauce was local, and so were the onions, and I topped it with peppers and tomato slices from the same nearby farm. The cheese came from the store, but you can't win 'em all. This was my first foray into any cooking so complicated, but it turned out awesome. My only regret is that I only made three: they were for everyone to eat during our Sunday meeting, and they were gone more or less instantly.

-My classes have been great. In archaeology last week we collected acorns and processed them into old-fashioned acorn mush, just like the anchaic Californian tribes used to do. It was kind of like oatmeal, but it tasted woodsier, and it didn't absorb as much water, so at the end there was a bit of grit that you kind of had to just deal with. All in all, though, it's a food I would gravitate to easily if I needed to stay alive for a while in the woods. Especially if I had some brown sugar to mix in with it: we tried it prepared several different ways, and brown-sugar acorn mush was the best.

-We rearranged some furniture a few weeks ago here, and ended up with a big space in the kitchen. We wanted to put a table in it, so Nathan and I went to the local Goodwill. There were no tables of that size to be bought, but on the way back, as I drove us along East Street, Nathan spotted a table just sitting out in a yard by the curb. Upon further investigation, it turned out to be a stereo console, vintage 1980s, with an AM-FM radio, turntable, and 8-track player. We asked at the house there, and the people were indeed throwing it out. Now, this thing is seriously awesome, and probably cost a pretty hefty amount when it was new. Nathan and I carried it a few hundred yards back to the house (it wouldn't fit in the trunk), and installed it in its place in the kitchen; it fit perfectly. Inside it were several terrible 8-tracks, such as "Polka Party" and "Chet Atkins: Pickin' Nashville". We couldn't get the 8-track part to work, but oh well, at least until we get better tapes. It also came with a 7-inch record of Jimi Hendrix playing "Gloria". The turntable was confusing at first, but with the help of the included user manual, we figured it out, and got it to really play Jimi, with awesome sound quality. So, not only do we have more table space when the top is folded down, but we now also have a fully functional record player (and AM-FM radio) with a sweet stereo system. Everyone in the house thinks it's pretty much the best thing ever. Lizzie said, "I'm so glad it's a part of my life." So am I. And through this boon, we've also discovered that records gravitate toward a record player: everyone who's heard of our find seems to have some old records buried away somewhere, or know someone who has some records, and they all plan to bring them over to EcoHouse sometime. So the console is also a great community builder! I bought some records at Goodwill for it today at 79¢ apiece: some Beethoven, the Grand Canyon Suite by Ferde Grofé, and Feets Don't Fail Me Now by Herbie Hancock. (Trivia: Herbie Hancock went to this college.) It is a source of great joy.

-A few weeks ago, Ben (you may recall him from previous years) and I walked to the local ice cream place, Dari Barn. He wasn't hungry, but he did say their funnel cake fries looked good. He also admired their little collection of figurines in the window, and, since he has a small collection of gnomes (that is, two), he mentioned that a gnome would go perfectly there. This he said while the girl at the counter was taking my order, and she asked if he would bring a gnome. She offered to make a trade: she would give him an order of funnel cake fries, if he would bring them a gnome later. It happened too quick for him to think, and before he knew it he'd agreed to give them a gnome.

-Well now Ben was in a jam! He didn't have an extra gnome to give out: he only had two, and they were both very close to him. Their names are Miguel and Rudyard, and he hand-painted Miguel. So he would have to find a new gnome, which wouldn't be as easy as it might sound.

-Fast forward to yesterday. I was going to Goodwill to replenish my stock of sweaters, and I decided I should buy Ben a gnome to give to the Dari Barn people. The only thing I found was a terra cotta gnome-shaped candle holder, where you put the candle inside, and the gnome's eyes and mouth glow an eerie color, presumably (I never lit it). I bought that today, and tonight we walked again to Dari Barn. It was much colder than last time, and with a stiff wind. We brought them the gnome, but none of the same people were working, and they seemed pretty puzzled as to why we had brought them a gnome candle holder. They were prepared to accept it, but they weren't nearly as awesome as the girl who'd put Ben into gnome debt, and they weren't enthusiastic about the whole situation. On the other hand, Ben really wanted to keep the gnome. Eventually we decided that he would enjoy it much more than the Dari Barn people, so we ordered with normal money and kept the gnome. Now he's going to paint it too, and name it, and eventually I'll go to his room and find it illuminated with gnomelight.

-Other classes. Well, I can now string together much longer sentences in Japanese, like 『私はきょうごご五時はんごろデービスのがっこうで晩ごはんを食べます』, which means "Today at about 5:30 I'll eat dinner at Davis School." That's some mental practice I did while biking to Community Meal, which is held in the Davis Elementary cafeteria on Tuesdays and is a time for various town and college people to gather and have a good meal together. By "good", I mean "probably better than the school lunches they serve there normally". It's not fantastic food, but on the other hand it costs a voluntary donation of around $1, so I go there. The joys of frugality are many. In stats, we're apparently about to start learning enough stats "to be dangerous", according to our professor. Theories of Culture is going well, for a class that discusses primarily dead guys' theories on how anthropology should be done.

-I haven't investigated it very hard at all, but I'm starting to look into graduating a semester early. What with all the various economic vagaries of the last year or two, it's looking like I'll have to borrow a lot more money than any of us initially thought I would. My thought is: if I can graduate a semester early, that'll save a pretty hefty sack of money for me and the rest of the family. I don't know yet whether it's even possible, but I'm definitely going to look at this option more thoroughly. If I do it, I'll probably look for a job in town for after I graduate, and live in town and take a class at the alumni rate of about $170, so I don't have to leave all my college friends a whole semester early. I do love it here, and I want to spend my full allotment of time here. Also, if I'm going to do JET just out of college, I'll have to wait until the summer anyhow. Further to this point, I've been looking at getting internships in the publishing business. One of the other Press people for this year, Rachel, has done an internship with Sourcebooks in Chicago, so that's one that I know exists and takes people somewhat like me. With my experience, I could probably be an asset to their company, and an unpaid one at that, so who knows, they might jump on it. I plan to springboard myself into making money, so I can pay off my debts as soon as possible. I really don't like being in debt, and I don't plan to be in that condition for most of my life, as much as I can possibly avoid it. Being out of debt will enable me to do what I want rather than what my creditors think are wise choices. We all know, of course, that what I think are awesome ideas are sometimes less highly regarded by the wider population of the USA. Speaking of which: I've been continually too busy to try train travel. This weekend would be a great time for me to do it, except that on Saturday I've got a meeting and on Sunday I have to go to Iowa City and buy some mice for Tenzing. I need to do it soon, though, because it's quickly getting really, really cold, and that plus wind would make for a miserable journey. It looks like it'll frost sometime this week. Next weekend is when fall break starts, but maybe I could use the first Saturday, or last Sunday, of it to finally get my hopping done. It's so frustrating to have too little time. To be fair, hopping a train is a pretty big time commitment: I'll have to drive to a yard, get on, wait for the train to go, get off at the next yard, get on the train coming back, and wait for that train to go, and then finally get off.

-I'm very close to done with my next font, Solvejg, and if I work on it over fall break, I can probably get it done and on the market within the next few months. I've just done some kerning for the roman today, and I'll kern the italic whenever I get a chance. FontForge is so great at helping me kern.

-I like it when I get stuff done. For example, I'm finally having the semester's first krokay game this Friday. Okay. This has been a long, rambling post, but I think you're all now sufficiently updated on my life lately. I'm going to call it a night.

こんにちわ。

That says "Konnichiwa." The reasoning behind this is discussed in ¶2 below herein.

Since the beginning of classes, I've had an empty hole in my schedule. It was originally German, but as I said last week, I wanted a bit more variety, and German would have been the fourth European language I could string a sentence together in. So I tried to take an education course about second language acquisition, which would have been fun, but I didn't have the prerequisite they wanted (intro to education). So I considered doing the language thing this year instead of next, with Hindi in the school's Alternative Language Study Option. But it turned out that would be mostly self-taught, and intensive, and I couldn't audit it, and also I wasn't especially enthusiastic about Hindi. So I thought about Intro to Econ, but it wouldn't fit my schedule like I wanted it to, and I wasn't enthusiastic about it either. Then I thought about something I'd discovered the previous day while chatting with Walter (the guy from camp) online. He's a linguistics major too (and two other majors that I can never remember), and he mentioned the JET program. This is a program wherein (I think I'm getting all this right) the Japanese government pays to bring recent college graduates to Japan from English-speaking countries, mainly the US, and help their English teachers teach English to high-school and junior-high kids. The Americans thus hired are paid ￥3,600,000, which sounds pretty impressive, and not too much less impressive when you convert it to ～$40,000 USD. I'd been thinking about it since I heard it mentioned, and I thought it sounded like a good opportunity to go abroad. I'd talked with my advisor inlinguistics about the remaining two years of my four-year plan, and she'd shown slight incredulity that I wasn't going abroad. She said it was something I really ought to consider, perhaps for fall next year. That was before I discovered JET. I do kind of regret not going abroad this year, but only kind of, because I think I did have good reasons for not going abroad. They were: that I think it'd be a more authentic abroad experience and I'd get a better feel for the culture if I weren't taking college classes while there; that I'm paying for a Grinnell education, so I might as well get what I'm paying for here and go abroad some other time; and that if I went abroad through Grinnell, I would have to pay a Grinnell tuition even though doing it by some means of my own could be a bunch cheaper. JET seems to get around all those problems by requiring me to graduate before applying and by paying me. So, to get back to where this paragraph was originally heading in its extremely roundabout way, I filled my empty course slot with Intro to Japanese.

It's an every-day class, and I added it about two weeks in, so I've had to make up work, but I'm managing pretty well, I think. I've already learned all the ひらがな (hiragana), though some of them come and go, and I'm pretty close to knowing all the カタカナ (katakana). We haven't started learning kanji yet, but I've picked up a few here and there (一、二、三、四、五、八、十、日本、本、円、and 人、which mean respectively 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, Japan, book, yen, and people). I can also pull together simple sentences, like 「わたしのおかあさんは四十四さいです」 and 「このペンは八十五円です。」 And I've figured out how to type in Japanese, which is pretty interesting and not required for the course as far as I know. I'm going to look into finding more programs like JET, perhaps one that could help me hone my Spanish too, but right now JET seems pretty sweet, especially the getting-paid-a-decent-amount part. Although I haven't researched it very extensively. Even if I don't go there, Japanese is still a pretty cool language.

The other really cool thing that happened last week was that some people from the archæology class went to Cahokia, myself included, to see the top atlatlists in the world throw spears with atlatls. It was a pretty casual event, with maybe forty people, and our professor was well known there. He used to be a pretty good thrower, but this year his back isn't letting him throw well. It looks like it should be easy to throw a spear with an atlatl, but we five students who threw were pretty sucky. We were usually lucky to just get the spear into the foam somewhere near the target, while the old hands were clustering one spear apiece, in groups of five, inside the 8-point zone routinely. It was pretty special. We also toured Monks Mound, the largest earthen mound worth of Mexico, which is right across the street from the museum where the competitions were held. From it we could clearly see the Gateway Arch, which I think is across the Mississippi River from there and several miles away. Yes, it's a big mound. The museum there was also one of the most informative, best laid out, keenest, and least tacky museums I've visited, although I don't do a whole lot of museumgoing. They had some weirdly lifelike plastic sculptures there, which (three of us who were together agreed) looked very plastic at first, but after a while of staring seemed as though they'd turn and go "Boo" any moment. When we students threw for the ISAC event (International Standard Accuracy Contest), I shot a 17, and the next morning a 22. To give some perspective, the highest score ever achieved so far is a 97. The veterans were throwing well into the 80s that day.

There's probably more stuff I could write about, but I've got no shortage of work, so that's all for now.

This post is worth 6,000 words

I thought you might like to see what EcoHouse looks like. So I took some pictures. You can click on all these to embigger them.

Before it became EcoHouse, it was known as Stucco House. Note the front yard, which is a prairie. My room is in the foreground, the one with the plants in the window (those are Elissa's). The guy waving from the upper left window is Desi. He thought I was taking a picture of him. Nope, Desi, just the house.

I don't know who made this sign (it comes from last year, when EcoHouse was founded), but I approve of it. However, a girl next door at Dag House (not pictured in this post) refers to us as "Soth House", since the sign is spelled Sigma, sideways Omega, Theta.

The living room is in reality not this dark and gloomy. It's a pretty great place to hang out, especially what with all the recliners and couches. I love reading there.

Our kitchen, featuring Joe. Dunno what he was making there. We have two fridges and lots and lots of cabinet space, which works out great for ten people. It's a pretty active place. I've learned already that if you have a bunch of vegetables and don't know what to cook with them, a good stand-by is stir-fry. Just drop in a bit of olive oil and ideally some garlic, and fry it up for maximum delicion. Elissa's been supplying us with garlic. Vegetables we can get from our CSA (I think it's Community-Supported Agriculture). That's a system whereby we pay some money at the beginning of the season, and then get a fat box of fruits and vegetables every week from a booth at the Farmers' Market. Most other things that we need we can get at the Farmers' Market, or the local grocery store. I've been using lots of Farmers'-Market-originating vegetables, and eggs too.

Elissa's and my room. My desk is the one without the jacket on the chair. The mess is mostly mine, but I'll probably clean it up tonight. The snake cage (far left) has been having trouble containing the snake, but I think I fixed it yesterday, so he'll probably mave out of his interim little terrarium and into his full-time abode soon. You can see the laptop that I'm typing at right now. The little Pet Porter thing below the left side of Elissa's desk contains her bunny Wilbur. He's the biggest bunny ever. Like, respectable-puppy-sized.

Also, I totally made pasties last night. They turned out way better than I expected, given my cooking inexperience. I stuffed them with potato, rutabaga, carrot, onion, garlic, and basil. They turned out pretty bland-tasting, though, which I'll correct next time I make them by adding some parsley from the garden, and other spices. And probably some meat to mine. I haven't been there yet, but I understand that you can buy local beef and chicken at the Phœnix Café in town.

"(I Keep On) Forgettin' to Write" — B. R. Cyrus

No, you silly people. GOOP stands for Grinnell Outdoor Orientation Program. You should remember this, because I did it before, just before I came to college. I even blogged about it: Not once, but twice. It's outfitted partially through Manito-wish and held in the same area where campers take trips. However, this time around GOOP, I was leading it instead of participating in it. I co-led it with a girl from my tutorial, Kate. We had five first-years: Willie, Leslie, Colleen, Jeff, and Julia. Another thing we had is a great time. Everyone was great at paddling, so we didn't need to worry much about getting to our campsites on time. Instead, we preoccupied ourselves with having fun. We played a lot of a game called Contact, which is a word game with complicated but fun rules, and is played by shouting. On our first day, we came upon a rope swing that someone had generously hung out for us on Trout Lake. It hung from a tree that jutted out a good ten feet over the water. By stepping way back onto the shore, we were able to achieve some pretty mindblowing speeds, and I involuntarily busted out falsetto yells of exhilaration. Julia got herself soaked trying to get off the loop of rope. Actually, we all got at least a little wet. But it was worth it. We camped on the Trout River and made delightfully gross mac-’n’-cheese.

-The next day, we paddled downriver and then across lakes for about 13 miles, finally stopping for the night on Island Lake and creating some pizza-like monstrosities that tasted great because everything tastes great on trail. That night, most of us stood on the shore of our campsite and looked out at the stars, which aren't as good as the stars at Crowduck, but aren't too far behind. Willie and Julia goodnaturedly made fun of each other, mainly Willie making fun of Julia's native Hawaii; Colleen and Kate lay on the sand and talked; Jeff and Leslie and I contemplated skinny dipping, but decided it was too cold and we should do it on Pallette Lake later on.

-We got up the next morning and paddled up the Manitowish River. About halfway up, we stopped at a portage take-out to have lunch. A family came down the river and when their small boy sighted us, he shouted, "Land ho!!" Willie called back to him, "You're on a river. You can see land all the time." (But the boy didn't hear it.) In proper canoeing technique, two people paddle on opposite sides of the boat, and the sternsman steers (the two words are related) using sweep strokes and J-strokes. In the family's canoe, all three people were paddling (makes the boat tippy, and crosses paddles); they paddled on the same side, except when the middle-aged woman in the bow would steer by switching sides of the boat. These are the kind of people we laugh at, though not to their faces. They told us the river was pretty low, and that they'd thus "been doing a lot of portaging." Portaging is lifting the canoe over your head and carrying it down a trail. What they had been doing was walking (or wetfooting) the canoe. I laughed more inside. We did walk the canoes upstream, and we got into camp a bit late, but it was a pretty great day. The main problem was we didn't get enough refried beans for our burritos.

-On our last full day, we got up and paddled up the Manitowish some more until we found Nixon Creek. We paddled down that and found the take-out. It's made of mud, which indents a couple inches when you step on it, but holds weight—except in the Black Hole, about a three-foot circle where someone unsuspecting can sink down to their hips. When I couldn't get anyone to stand there, I demonstrated it for them, just for fun. There would be clean lakes later, where I could rinse off. After a few portages, the first one long and the others shorter, we plunked down and camped on Pallette Lake. It started raining lightly, just enough to be ominous. We made spaghetti and then, since we'd been paddling a lot, we had a backrub party. I'm told I'm good at backrubs. It was raining proper by then, so nobody wanted to skinny dip, so we didn't, and it was disappointing. Instead, we all pretty much went right to sleep.

-We woke up cold the next day and paddled cold down Stevenson Creek. On the plus side, the normally shallow Stevenson had been deepened by the rain, and we didn't have to walk our canoes nearly as much. Although when we did, the water was rather darn cold. We pulled out back where we started at Trout Lake at 10:30. Unfortunately, our pick-up wasn't until 1:30, and it was still raining and really cold. After washing Stevenson off us, we set up a tarp and huddled under it (I understand there was some skinny dipping that I wasn't aware of, while Kate and I were setting up the tarp). And then we sat and ate and shivered, and later tossed a frisbee, until the bus came. So that was it for the trip. Now you know not only what GOOP stands for, but what it means.

After a pause of five days in which I didn't have much at all to do, while the first-years got oriented, classes started. I think it's going to be a great semester. I'm in Archaeology of North America; the professor is John Whittaker, whom I knapped with on Fridays last year. He came into the class carrying a spear, and later he invited us all to come with him to Cahokia on the 12th for a gathering of eccentric archaeologists who like to throw spears with atlatls and do other primitive things. I'll be going. I'm also in Theories of Culture, which is an anthro class taught by my linguistics concentration advisor, Brigittine French. And I'm in stats, which shouldn't be too bad. Lastly I'm in German, but I've suddenly become less enthusiastic about learning yet another Indo-European language (I've already studied English, Russian, Spanish, and Esperanto). However, I can't take Chinese (it's Sino-Tibetan) this year, because it conflicts with Archaeology. So I'm going to see if there's anything else interesting from my 4-year plan that I can replace German with*, and then hopefully I'll be able to take Chinese next year. And perhaps even learn a bit of a language in an ExCo. That's the "Experimental College", which consists of classes taught informally by students and other people who want to teach something but aren't professionals. I might try teaching Esperanto, actually. It could be fun. And it's a language that you could actually get a grasp on without professional or intensive instruction.

-As for EcoHouse matters. Well, we've gotten off to a good start. We all get along pretty well together. Rooming with Elissa has proved unproblematic so far. On Thursday, a group of us walked down to the farmers' market in town and bought lots of fruits and vegetables and bread and such. It turns out we probably could have gone without buying the fruits and vegetables, because the two campus gardens—one behind EcoHouse and one across campus—are producing like mad right now. In the kitchen, as I write, we have a zucchini that's about two feet long and fat. There's also a giant rutabaga in the fridge that I hope to use in pasties sometime soon. I think I'll make a small test batch, and then scale them up to make a meal for everyone who wants one. EcoHouse is anywhere from 50 to 70 percent vegetarian, depending on how delicious, local, and humane the meat is that's being offered. Regardless, I've found myself eating less meat, because meals cooked for everyone have to be vegetarian. I've made hamburgers for myself with some probably non-local, factory-farmed meat I bought at the local grocery on Thursday. I bought it impulsively, because I had bread and didn't know what besides hamburger I'd put between it, and I'd also never shopped for just myself before, so I didn't know how my creativity might work out in making food out of whatever I had. I regret buying that beef, but happily, I've learned of a place in town where you can buy local beef and chicken. So once I use this up, I'll get my meats from there. And there will be less or no stigma associated with my eating meat then. As it is, when I've been making my factory-beef burgers, I've felt almost like a barbarian intruding on a peaceful group of villagers. Funny how these things can depend on context—back at home, my making myself a burger was encouraged. I have no intention of going vegetarian. But I do like the idea of knowing where my meat comes from.

-Last night, we had a party here. There was alcohol involved, but I didn't drink in any meaningful amount (I drank a fifth… of a cup of some Iowan wine that Nathan brought). I discovered, though, that parties can be fun even sober, and a good place to meet people. I met, or got better acquainted with, Adam, Aniko, Kane, Latona, Anne-Marie, Evan, and Jumi, all of whom I've never mentioned here before, so don't worry about them unless they crop up later. But perhaps I'll start going to parties this semester. My criterion for a good party is whether you can actually talk to someone there without having to shout over the music. Last night I had to shout sometimes, but I was also able to get away from it in a different area of the house. Overall I'm glad I stayed around.

-Today I did some reading and explored along the railroad tracks with Madeline and met with EcoHouse and then with Bob's employees. In a little while I'm going to play Go. I like the way this semester is looking.

*Another reason I'd like to find a class other than German is that the textbook bundle for it costs $255 and is nonreturnable.

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