New York, New York

At the end of the school year, once I got all my projects done and I was free and clear, I did some fun stuff. I went on two camping trips. One of them was at the end of an 18-mile bike trip to Newton, Iowa, with my friend Ethan. The weather was perfect that day, and I finally got to exercise my legs after making them stay tame and asleep for most of the semester. I got all the way there with no problem except that I was slowing down toward the end. Ethan's a cross-country runner, so he was fine the whole time. We camped in a farmer's field, hidden by rises from view of the farmhouse or the nearby road, and tested out a woodburning camp stove that I made this winter out of tin cans. It toasted our bagels rather nicely until we ran out of sticks. We were disinclined to burn the undoubtedly chemical-ridden cornstalks on the ground. In the morning we got up and I went to the train yard and saw only the back end of the morning train as it left. So, sadly, I had to follow Ethan, who'd left about 45 minutes earlier, back to the college. On the way, my bike broke a lot and I had to walk it up the hills. But there are few things I would rather have done than gone on that trip.
One such thing, though, might have been the camping trip I did the night before it, because on that camping trip I was with a girl. We lay in the grass and looked up at the stars. About this no more will I say. It's just a shame that we had our first and only camping trip so late in the year. I mean, classes were already over. Now it's summer and I won't even be back in college until next January.

To the present day: I finally got everything worked out. I'm leaving for New York tonight by Amtrak at 3:29 a.m.. Then I'm staying with a guy I know from college, Darwin. He's a first-year and works for the newspaper. That's his given name. I'm staying with him for all but 16 days; I don't know where I'll be then, but I have 24 days to figure it out starting when I get there. I also emailed the company I'll be working with, and got my first assignment, one that I'll have done when I come in for my first day of work. I believe it's about the same thing as I'll be doing for most of my time there. I'm given a novel that was submitted, and I have to report back about it and say why they should publish it, or, far more likely, why they shouldn't. I also write a rejection letter about a paragraph long that the company sends to the agent who submitted the book for its author. And then I get a new novel. I don't know how many novels I'll be dealing with per week. I'm working two days in the office (Mondays and Fridays) and two days from home (Tuesdays and Thursdays). Which means I'll have free time. I'll use some of that on a side job that I'll get—I'm still planning on trying out being a bike messenger. I imagine that if I do that I might want a little time to get used to the city before I go asking for such a job. People have told me that New York is incredibly hostile to biking, but I searched online to verify that, and I found that an agency of some sort ranked it as the 8th most bike-friendly city in the nation out of 50 that it examined. So maybe I'll do okay.
I think I'll have fun in New York. Park Slope, where I'm staying, is supposed to be a really nice part of Brooklyn. Apparently Prospect Park has plays in it just like the more distant Central park does. And other fun stuff. I'll have plenty to explore there. I don't know quite what to expect there, but the 5 million people there must be staying for some reason. I imagine it's pretty bearable, even though Dad says, "I'd rather chew broken glass than go to New York."
I've also had a fun, oh, five days at home. I caught up with Aaron and Keith and we went out and acted like loons on Thursday. I'm not sure, but I think Keith probably always acts like a loon. What's a good example quote from that day? We passed a large woman on the street and Keith said, "That's how I like 'em! Large and afraid of their own shadows!" No one could figure out why he compared her to a groundhog. I doubt he knew.
I also got to go out to eat with Grandma & Grandpa at the Grand Finale, which was delicious and too much food. Grandma gave me some ginger snaps to make New York a bit more tasty. I've been reading a little, and spending time with the folks. But it's really not much time to spend here. Micah and I didn't even get to take a creekwalk that we were going to take—but we're going to do it in August.

By the way, I'm out of school for the longest I've been out since I was four years old. Fun commences tonight with my Amtrak journey. People say I'm always talking about things I'm going to do in the future, and I don't do things in the here & now. But I did those camping trips, darn sure, and now I'm going to the most active city in the country, where I'll never lack for something fun to do. I do have fun, and now that I have eight months of time with nary a college obligation, you'd better believe I'm going to be having tons more.

Further evidence of my insanity

No, I don't believe I'm actually going clinically insane. But from the perspective of normal people, it must look like I'm just trying to find all the possible ways there are to be very, very strange. What's really going on is that I keep finding things that look like they'd be a lot of fun to do, and deciding that life is finite and I ought to do them while I can. The latest thing that this means is polyphasic sleep. This isn't something you're likely to have heard of, but it's an interesting concept, and one that's been put into practice. The idea is that, instead of sleeping for eight hours out of every 24, which is an entire third of your time, you follow one of a few different sleep schedules that people have worked out that manage to give you just as much energy and wakefulness, but require as little as two hours of sleep. It sounds insane and impossible, but there are lots of people who've successfully made the switch to one of those schedules. There are three main ones, but actually there are just two, because I can't find any evidence that the third one's been adopted successfully by a real person. Suspend your disbelief for a moment while I talk about them, and then I'll get to what you'll be thinking at that point. So, the first one, the one that was invented first, is called the Überman sleep schedule. It consists of taking six twenty-minute naps, spaced exactly evenly throughout the day (and night). One problem with this is that it only allows you to be awake for 3h40m at a time, before you have to take a nap. You can take naps in all sorts of weird places, but it can get inconvenient to have to nap so often (and you have to follow the schedule to a tee), so another sleep schedule evolved. This one is called the Everyman schedule. You sleep four hours as opposed to the Überman's two, but it's a lot more workable around normal daily schedules. It consists of a three-hour "core sleep", and then three twenty-minute naps spaced about evenly through the day. (The third schedule is the Dymaxion schedule, supposedly followed by Buckminster Fuller and not successfully by anyone I've read about since then; on Dymaxion you take four evenly-spaced thirty-minute naps, which allows for more flexibility because you've got 5h30m between naps. But like I say, it's apparently the chimera of polyphasic sleep, in that no one or almost no one has done it.)

So right now the obvious question is, If you're only sleeping a quarter or a half of what normal people sleep, why don't you get unbelievably sleep-deprived and turn into a quivering pile of goo? The general theory goes like this. In monophasic (eight-hour) sleep, you go through several stages of sleep, which go something like Stage 1, then 2, 3, 4, back to 2, then 1 again, and finally the important one: REM sleep. That's the kind of sleep where you dream, and it's also the kind your body needs in order to feel rested. In the polyphasic cycles, you get your body to skip past all those other stages and go right into the REM you need. There's an alternate version of the theory that says you still do go through all those other cycles, you just blaze through them at lightning speed—but the difference isn't too consequential. And you can in fact get REM sleep on one of these schedules; I've read lots and lots of sleep logs ("plogs"?) by people who've done this, and they definitely report dreaming.

The tricky part is adjusting to the new schedule. You can't just go straight from monophasic sleep to the Überman schedule without a bit of jarring. For at least the first week, and more often for several, you're not getting that REM yet, because your brain hasn't come to terms with the fact that sleep isn't going to last as long as it used to. You just kind of wake up in Stage 1 or 2. Sometimes you feel refreshed, but it's maybe just as likely that you'll feel like crap. This goes on. Also, you have to regiment yourself really well when you're in the adjustment period. If you take a nap an hour late, you'll get thrown off for several cycles and get set back. If you sleep through one of your alarms, your brain will try to reset itself to monophasic mode, and you'll be set back. But if you manage to keep it up—and all the sources I've read say it takes a lot of willpower—you make progress. Gradually you stop feeling so tired. In the later stages of adjustment you might feel some "brain fog", as a few people describe it, that knocks you down to maybe 80% of your normal intellectual functioning. And then somehow after about a month you've adjusted completely. You're on the Überman schedule, and you have six extra hours in a day. Or if you're on Everyman, you have four extra. And that's like gaining another quarter or third of a life, for however long you can keep up your nap schedule reasonably well. People who adjust to Überman report feeling like time has gotten a lot slower, like everyone else is moving in slow motion except them. And they also say they have, strangely enough, more energy than they did with monophasic sleep. It's not as pronounced with Everyman, but it's still there.

So, as you've guessed by now, I want to try this. It won't be for a while; right now I'm thinking I'll try starting this winter around Christmastime, when I'll have a month until school starts and nothing terribly important to do. I haven't decided which one I want to try yet. What I've got in mind is starting out trying Überman, and then if it turns out I just can't do it, I'll fall back on Everyman. And once I get to school, I'll have no problem doing all my homework and having fun too. As it stands I tend to have room for only one of those, and they both seem to me crucial parts of college, so I'd love to be able to do both.

Since I'm waiting so long to start, I guess I could've written this closer to the actual start date, but I've been reading a lot about it lately, so I figured I might as well. Not much else to report for this last week. We had one of our book releases for Press, the cookbook, and our other two are tonight—the first one's in half an hour. Also I wrote a lot and didn't sleep much. I think I'll be able to sleep a little more (still in a vaguely normal way) starting now. Also I'm going to be going on maybe three camping trips, so that'll be fun.

Okay, see you again soon.

Would Buy Again

I think I have evidence that the time is ripe for me to start writing my book. I found the time—where, I don't know—yesterday to leave some seller feedback on some books I bought on Amazon. One of them was this year's 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said Page-a-Day Calendar. I said a little before 2010 started that I was done with this calendar, because it just wasn't as funny to me as it used to be. But I had to buy it anyhow, because the authors emailed me after I wrote that and told me that one of the quotes I'd emailed them had made it into the calendar. It was from our dining hall here, and it said,

TODAY'S BREAKFAST PASTRY

TRAIL MIX MUFFINS

*CONTAINS MUFFINS

Clearly, they meant to say "contains nuts", but they sure didn't. The other book I got was Relearning to See: Improve Your Eyesight—Naturally!. It's exactly what it sounds like: a book that tells you ways to sharpen your eyesight without the aid of glasses. In fact, what little of the book I've read so far rails against glasses pretty hard, saying that they're bad for your eyes in a variety of different ways. The main one is that when you look through glasses, your eyes don't have to work to focus right, and they get lazy and after you wear them awhile you find that you can't see as well without them as you could before you started wearing them. This claim is backed up with evidence, as is pretty much everything in the book. It's not a vanity-press thing put out by a pseudoscientist quack (although the author's name is Tom Quackenbush); it's a compendious 500-plus–page book full of technical diagrams and foldout eye charts. For this reason I haven't yet read even past the background into the part that actually tells you how to improve your eyesight. But once I do, I'll definitely keep you all updated on how I'm doing. Frankly, I'm not happy about the idea of wearing glasses, and this book sounds like a pretty legitimate way of making them unneeded without an expensive surgery that uses lasers to cut my eye. (Think about that description and tell me if it sounds like a good idea when you read it. I haven't found this in the book yet, but I've read reviews that said the book is against LASIK-type things as well, because they amount to having your current prescription permanently emblazoned on your cornea.)

Anyhow, the point I was going to make was that I wrote seller feedback for both of these books. You know, saying whether the seller was prompt and the package got to me on time. But instead of that, I decided to spice it up a little bit.

Review number one: "Not only did the calendar arrive instantaneously, appearing on my desk with a small 'puff' sound after I clicked the button to place the order, but the pages had been edged in fine gold leaf. The ho-hum standard cover art was gone and in its place was a 3-D hand-done painting of a metallic dragon destroying a zeppelin. If you ask it nicely, the calendar will also read itself aloud. Would buy again."

Review number two: "This book arrived just in time for me to use it to defeat my arch-nemesis in hand-to-hand combat. I threw it at his face with a supersonic swirling motion and the power of one hundred thousand papercuts overrode his miracle healing power just long enough for me to jab my poison spur into his secret weak spot below his sternum. Thank you to the delivery woman and to this seller. Would buy again."

These are why I say it's probably high time for me to start writing stuff. I have some things planned. First off I need to write something for myself, a kind of essay that lets me clear up to myself what I think about primitivism and civilization, what my standpoint really is, what's reasonable. If I didn't hate the word "manifesto", I'd call it a personal manifesto. That's something I've wanted to write for a while, although I don't expect anyone but me to find it fascinating. I'll probably end up putting it here, and maybe I'll turn out to be wrong about whether people besides me will like it. The other thing I plan to write is a novel. This is roughly the same novel that I've been wanting to write since about eighth grade. I've started writing it four times now, each time better than the last, none of them really usable. I figured out the problem with the latest one, which is the one that I started writing in National Novel Writing Month (November). I didn't really know who the characters were. There are two main ones, and they both basically thought the same and did all the same things and did them only to push the plot forward. Also, they were both pretty much me. I still don't have a firm grasp on them, but I at least realize that I'll need one. Probably in order to get a hang of writing characters, I'll rewrite a short story that I wrote in my Craft of Fiction class. That one had a pretty flat main character as well. Part of that is that the point of the story is how very, very flat he is—probably "lifeless" is actually the best word—but I'm sure I could make him seem more real even at the same time that he's lifeless. And the rest of the story could seem more real too. And it could just straight-up be better written.

The writing will take place while I'm on trains and waiting for trains and hitchhiking and regular-hiking and all that stuff. I would start while I'm in New York, except that I want to go to a wilderness skills school before I start writing the book. Not only do I want to know these skills, but my characters will definitely need to have a grounding in wilderness skills. So I guess in New York I'll focus on my short story, the one about Tim, and maybe my personal writing thing too. Probably some of it will take place on top of buildings. This is a recent addition to my plans. It started when I found out that a couple people I knew a little bit, but not much,* like to climb buildings in their spare time. (Let's call them Shortstuff and Ninja.) I invited myself to their next excursion, and we went downtown. We went to the back of a foppish bar where yuppies buy drinks, and, with no prelude, Ninja climbed up it: on top of a dumpster, up a shed connected to the building, and progressively up architectural stairsteps until he got most of the way to the top. I was right behind him, and when we got there, Shortstuff—she had a hurt leg and wasn't climbing today—took a picture of us, and we climbed back down. Incidentally, this was broad daylight. We wandered around town, then started heading back to campus. On the way, we found another short building and climbed that, and then when we got back to campus we climbed the arts building, without even really trying very hard to be secretive.

After this outing I realized how well climbing buildings would fit into my plans for next semester. I've read a lot online about the parts of a train journey that don't take place while you're physically on a train. One part of a trip that you have to consider is where to sleep, and a lot of people online agreed: if you're in a city and don't want to be seen while you sleep, and you can't find a nice forest in a park somewhere, and you don't want to pay for a motel room (which will always be a given for me), you can just climb on top of a building. No one will ever look there. So I've been practicing more with Shortstuff and Ninja. Lately, we climbed a bunch more buildings, and we're hoping to climb yet more that we ran out of time for. One of our excursions will probably end in one of the three potential camping trip that I might be going on before I leave town. It's going to be a pretty well packed two last weeks here. And then I'll be out of school for eight months. That's a pretty interesting thought. I'm about to embark on the longest stretch of free time that I've had since I was four, and it'll be considerably freer, too, since when I was a toddler I could hardly roam all around the country and climb buildings and hike mountain trails. I suspect that while I'm doing it, I'll discover that I'd prefer to live my entire life like that. And, barring physical limitations, anything is possible with the right mindset and willpower. So anything is just what I plan to do.

*Not the same people I climbed up the arts building with once before.

Francis Thicke for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture

So, since my last post was so long, I guess I decided it counted for two or three weeks. But I suppose I should write again.

-To explain the title, I'll say that maybe my favorite thing that happened in the last few weeks was that EcoHouse got Francis Thicke (pronounced "Tickey") to come to the college and give a talk about agriculture. He's a former Washington bureaucrat turned farmer, and he's won a slew of awards, none of which I remember, but they sounded impressive. At the talk, he confessed that the old political urge is pulling at him again and he'll be running this year for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture; the election is in November. He gave maybe the most coherent and informative PowerPoint presentation I've yet seen at this college. Here's what I take to be the upshot of his political stance (with the caveat given to anyone who stumbles across this while searching for his name that I'm in no way associated with him and if I misrepresent him it's only my fault). He believes that Iowa's current system of agriculture is flawed because it's based so heavily on consuming oil, which is a nonrenewable resource, which is another way of saying it's a finite resource and it's going to run out sometime. To give an example of how it now depends on oil so much, look at how feedlots are operated. The feed comes in from corn farms around the state, which each of course use lots of oil and chemicals to make their crop productive. Then when it gets to the feedlot it's hauled to the troughs by truck. Contrast Francis's personal farm, which he told about in his presentation: his cows graze pastures that require little maintenance, and they're rotated so that they don't graze the same place every day and the pasture has a little time to recover. All that needs to be moved is the cows themselves, which he accomplishes by opening the gate: they're smart enough that they know to walk through it to the taller grass. The ground is fertilized by their manure, whereas in feedlots it's collected into enormous pools, which contain way more manure than can naturally biodegrade, so instead it gives off toxic chemicals. Also, Francis's pasture has plants on it year-round, so that when the spring thaw or a big rain comes, the topsoil doesn't all flow into the nearest river. This could be done on corn farms too by the use of a cheap cover crop that starts growing just before winter, then gets frozen, then grips the soil so the thaw can't take it away. And what about when you need to plant? Plow it down; it dies, and rots, and turns into nutritious compost! You can plant corn in the same pass when you're flattening the cover crop. The flattener goes on the front of the tractor, and the seed spreader goes on the back.

-This seems like such common sense, but the current system is to grow as intensively as possible using as high technology as possible, and that's screwing up our water and our corn and our beef and, come to think of it, everything. I was already excited for Francis to get into office after the presentation was over. Then he came for his planned visit to EcoHouse, and I asked him what the incumbent's policies are like. He told me that the current secretary, Bill Northey, thinks the best example of what Iowa's farms should emulate is a chicken farm somewhere in, I think, the northeast part of the state, that has 2 million chickens in it. These chickens, I'm sure, are being kept in the most inhumane of conditions, and the factory—that's all I can think to call it—must be terrible for everything downstream or downwind of it, not to mention the places where it gets its chicken feed. The conflict here is the present against the future. Northey's definition of good agriculture is whatever is the very most productive today; Francis's definition is farming that results in a good product and keeps the land usable for long after the current day, without having to rely on chemicals that damage the environment and oil that not only does that but also will start getting expensive and scarce.

-Francis and most of the EcoHouse people and some visitors talked about agriculture for a while, and then he gave us some delicious cheese from his farm, and then he left.

-At some point after I got back, I totaled up how many pages I need to write for my final papers. They added up to about fifty. I'm done with ten of those now, but I still have to write 7–10 for Philosophy of Language, my half of a ten-page collaborative project for English Historical Linguistics, my half of probably fifteen for Archaeological Field Methods, and twenty all on my own for Sustainable Development in Costa Rica. I should probably start making a dent into that as soon as possible, like, say, tomorrow. I wonder how far I can get this weekend.

-My first two weeks back were about as insanely busy as you've probably now come to expect my weeks to be, mainly because Press had to send this semester's books to the printers last Friday. Actually, that date turned into Monday. But now the projects are almost completely in the hands of the printers, instead of our own overfull ones. I just have to go to the post office tomorrow, and then wait. What are we publishing? you might ask. Well, we've got the sequel to last year's fantasy novel The Captives' Quest, called In Pursuit of Reason. And we've got a cookbook that'll mainly be of interest to students, because it's sort of college-oriented, but in any case it's great-looking and tasty-looking too. And lastly we have an awesome book of slam poetry. These are all going to be So Cool.

-Lately, I've had what seems to be free time, an almost completely foreign concept to me. It's been maybe the first time in a month that I've had time to work on things that I want to do. I haven't had much of it, mind you. I've spent it reading fun books and, lately, inking a font that I want to work on this summer. With the free time I'll have this summer (I'm only working four days a week at my internship, two of them from home), I think I might be able to create two now font families, and maybe even put Russian letters in one of them. Greek, if I'm feeling really crazy. I haven't released a font since my first one, and that was two Decembers ago.

-Which brings me to what I'm doing this summer. I didn't get the internship I applied for in Chicago. (A bite of the thumb to you, Sourcebooks, Inc.) That made my decision between Chicago and New York pretty simple. But there's still a decidedly not-simple problem awaiting me, that of finding a place to sleep in New York City. I haven't gotten that quite solved yet, but I have written to an acquaintance who has a friend who needs someone to fill space in her apartment this summer. The acquaintance, by the way, is the girlfriend of one of the guys who founded Press way back in 2006 and then ran off to New York themselves upon graduating. So I'll have at least a vague sort of connection. I also know a few people here who are New Yorkers. So I'll have friends around town. Also, the rent for this apartment is $910 a month, which seemed just ridiculous to me when I started looking for places, but now seems to be around the low end of what I could hope for. This is a lot more expensively than I like to live, but I justify it by saying that I'm getting experience that'll make me money in the future, and that I'll get a good amount of money from the fonts that I'll be designing. Oh, also: even if I allow a preposterous $1000 for food and miscellaneous stuff per month, living in New York will cost probably less than a quarter of what a semester here costs, and I have one less semester here to worry about paying for (or saddling Mom & Dad with). So I guess I'm okay with going to New York for the summer, although it's still a little daunting, especially since I've never been there before, and actually I've never lived inside a city, only in suburbs. But I'll be close to Central Park, so I might actually see more greenspace than I see in Cincinnati, despite being in the middle of the biggest city in the country. That'll keep me from going nuts.

-That's about all the interesting stuff I have, unless you want to hear about my lucid dream. I'll try to be brief about that. If you're not familiar with it, a lucid dream is one where you realize during the dream that you're dreaming. Once you realize this, you can control the dream, and experience what it's like to bend physics around, or meet fictional people, or other really fun stuff. I've been trying, with varying amounts of dedication, but always with practically no success, to have a lucid dream for years. There are ways to help yourself achieve them. One way is writing down your dreams to find themes that you can use to try and identify dreams. Another way is through "reality checks", which are where you look at something that would probably be off-kilter in a dream: like a digital clock (I hear they usually show nonsense, and rarely show the same thing if you look at them twice), or your hands (which will often not have the right number of fingers). The idea is that you check this stuff whenever something vaguely weird happens while you're awake, or whenever something reminds you of a dream, and then you'll be in the habit of doing that all the time, so you'll at some point do it while you're dreaming too. I use the hands one, since my watch is analog. A few mornings ago, I was with a girl from college in my car in Cincinnati, and I started it up without using a key. I thought that was odd, so I checked how many fingers I had, and it appeared to be eleven. So I looked at them and willed one hand to have four, and two of them absorbed each other, and so I decided to go flying. I did that, although I wasn't very good at it yet, so it didn't feel as real as it could have, and it was also jerky. But I did fly around, and visit an enormous slab-shaped city built into the clouds by means of long metal legs like the kinds that power pylons have. It was supposed to be Heaven, but it didn't look like a very fun Heaven. After not too long, I lost control and woke up. Hopefully I'll have another without having to wait several years, and I'll be able to control it better. I'll keep you posted if anything interesting happens.

Faux Toes

So, I finally got my pictures uploaded. Since I've got so many, I'm taking a break from what I usually do, which is putting them here, and instead I'm going to send you a link to the Facebook album I made out of them. Facebook assures me that you can get to the album even if you don't have a Facebook page, just by clicking this link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2036941&id=1414170006&l=f4913f4d51.

You may also be interested in this album, which includes pictures of the whale that I made back in winter: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2036939&id=1414170006&l=6c656ee812.

And I'll put one picture straight onto this page. It's stitched together from a video of me jumping off the rocks at the chorro, so there are three of me in it:

Enjoy!

Trip

Hey everyone. I've had to write about this trip so many times by now that I should be ace at it. I wrote about it in my journal, and then in my field notes, and then in my transcription of my field notes, and I'll eventually write about it in my final paper for the seminar. Well, anyhow, here goes.

The trip started at 4:00 in the morning on Sunday, March 21. I had stayed up the whole night before, instead of trying to sleep for what'd probably be about two hours. Also I had to get lots of stuff in order. Like a person to feed my snake. So anyhow, I took my stuff to the shuttle-bus at 4:00. I was the first person there, and eventually everyone else showed up and we drove to the Des Moines airport. There were fifteen of us.

-We bailed out of the buses and checked in onto the airplanes, which left at about 7 in the morning. I hadn't flown since I went to D.C. in eighth grade for the Spelling Bee, so I wanted to make sure I was paying attention. I try to keep a sense of wonder for things that are wondrous, and despite how commonplace it's become for a lot of people, you have to admit that flight is a pretty wondrous thing. People since the beginning of humanity dreamt of flying through the air like birds do, but it's always been only a dream, until very recently. I live in a very short span of history where it's been possible to look down on the landscape from where normally only birds could do it. So I looked down intently at Des Moines. But then we went into a cloudbank and my lack of sleep caught up with me, and I woke up as we were coming into Houston. After our layover, I slept through flight again until we got to San José. Then I had to get off the plane and be hot.

-From the airport, a bus picked us up and took us to a hostel in the city. It was amazing to watch the bus go down the streets, because the traffic of Costa Rica is so much more chaotic than the traffic of the US. The bus had a much narrower lane to drive through because the streets were so much thinner, and we seemed to change lanes roughly once a block. I was impressed by the talent of our driver. Anyhow, we got to the hostel, which looked like any other building front along the street, and had a gate. We climbed up to the second floor, and checked into our rooms, which had weird doorknobs that weren't really knobs. And then we hung out in their courtyard, which is one of the more delightful places I've visited. It's just a nice enclosed space, with a swimming pool and some tropical plants and an abundance of hammocks. It's quiet and peaceful and a great place to just sit and relax. I enjoyed it immensely.

-We had dinner in San José, led to a restaurant by Nathan, who studied abroad in this city for a month or so last year. I noticed something peculiar: practically every storefront was open-air. Even the McDonald's we passed had no wall on the front. You just walk in, no bothering with a door. I really like that the climate allows this. Although I have to guess that if it ever does get significantly cold, a lot of people shiver, because there's no real way to heat most of the buildings I've seen in Costa Rica. After fooling around in the courtyard for a while, we went to sleep.

-We got up the next day and another bus took us to our home for the next two weeks: El Silencio. That's about a 3½-hour ride away from San José. It's a town of maybe five hundred people with no paved roads, and about a half-hour's drive away from the nearest one. I hadn't concretely expected anything, but even so the town was completely different from anything I'd envisioned. For one thing, you can walk from one end to the other in about two minutes. There were chickens and dogs walking all over the place. All the houses were way smaller than any house I've ever lived in, but here, they seemed just the right size. None of them had driveways. There were cars, but more than that, there were mopeds and bicycles galore. I saw all this as the bus drove up to the albergue—the lodge—at the top of the hill at the end of the town.

-The albergue is where most of the tourists stay, although not in the building itself, which is actually a restaurant. There are six cabins off to the side, and a few other buildings, which will probably be cabins soon, or maybe they already are. The albergue is a really nice place, I'd like to let you know. It's got a counter for ordering drinks or food at one side, and the rest of it is floor space with nice tiling and no walls around it. There are tables made out of sections of trees, and using cut and polished branches for the legs. We all gathered around at a conglomeration of three of the tables, and had food and drinks. Juan Carlos, who would serve as our guide for the coming fortnight whenever we needed a guide, came to the table and started telling us about the community.

-It was formed by people invading the land of the United Fruit Company in the early 1970s. The UFC had left the land fallow and untouched for years, and a group of poor people came and started building houses on it. They got evicted, but they came back again under cover of night, and eventually after several more evictions, the company struck a deal with them to sell the land on the installment plan. Not long after the town was established, the cooperative formed too. It's called Coopesilencio, named after the town. Currently there are 40 people in it. The cooperative owns 1000 hectares of land, which is split up among several uses. The biggest one is their African palm plantation, which they harvest and sell to Palma Tica, a company down the road a ways that then turns it into palm oil. Palm oil goes into stuff like vegetable oil and cosmetics and all sorts of stuff. Besides the palm they also have a bunch of forest—old-growth and reforested—in the nearby mountains, and some pasture for their dairy cows, and of course the town itself. Near the town is the Río Savegre, which I've been told was rated the cleanest river in Latin America, or one of the cleanest (according to a different person).

-We got assigned to our host families. Mine live right next to the supermarket, which is the size of a somewhat overgrown convenience store. They're M. and F., which conveniently can stand for their real names—which it seems polite not to use on the internet—or for Mother and Father. They have some kids, the oldest 31 and the youngest 14. The oldest son is now an agronomy engineer working in the south of the country on the Panamanian border. Their daughter, somewhere in the middle of this bunch at 17, is studying to become a doctor. They're a really nice family.

-The next morning we got up and met at 7 am, because people do things really early here to avoid the heat of the day, and got the grand tour of the place by Juan Carlos. He showed us to their big organic garden (about 5 hectares), their offices, their school, and their soccer field, which was where all the kids were that day, due to it being International Day of Sports. That meant we competed in a sack race. I took second!

-We had lunch and then kept the tour going with the dairy, the chicken farm, and the palm plantation, and rounded the day off by going for a swim in the Savegre. When we climbed out of the water and put our clothes back on we were nice and worn out. We distributed ourselves to our host homes, and had dinner, and eventually slept well.

-The next day we started our volunteer jobs. Evan and I were working on the palm plantation, the most rigorous of all the volunteer jobs there. Juan Carlos took us to the right spot on the plantation with his moped. I went first, and while he got Evan I just kind of stood there in the early morning shadows and mist, listening to the sounds of the harvest and looking at what was happening. The impression I got was: "BOOM! THUD! BOOM! THUD!" The workers would use a hook on a long pole to cut down an enormous leaf, about ten feet long, and it would fall to the ground with a BOOM. These leaves made a mockery of every other leaf I've seen. They must weigh fifty pounds, or more. They have aggressive half-inch spikes on the stem. They are serious leaves. After cutting one of these down, the worker would get the hook up over the fruit growing at the center of the top of the tree, and cut it down too, and it would fall with a THUD. The fruits are even more scary than the leaves. They're about the size of a beach ball, only they weigh up to a hundred pounds and have longer spikes than the leaves poking out from between all the coyoles that make up these composite fruits. It's like a raspberry you'd find in Avatar.

-So I worked on this process. Mainly I got the leaves out of the way. For the palms to grow right, they need a space of bare soil for 2 meters around their trunks. So I cut the leaves in two with a machete I was given, and moved them to piles between the trees. I cut a fruit down too, but only one. It was slow. The stems of the leaves and the fruits are both about six inches thick: they don't intend to be cut. I had to have several goes at it.

-Evan and I a less intense job next, picking up the coyoles that fall on the ground and putting them in sacks, and then watched another intense job, which was loading the fruits onto the trailer that's pulled through the forest by a tractor. The workers jab a big spike (chulo) into the fruit and toss it in. That's darn difficult, because the fruits are heavy and painful to hold (what with their spikes). There weren't enough chulos for us to load too, but we would've been slow. We in America aren't used to such hard work.

-Lunchtime is about the end of the day for this job. So we walked home and had lunch and then we had the afternoon free. That was our time to do interviews. I could talk about interviews, but frankly, they were probably my least favorite part of the trip, because academics just felt so terribly out of place there. Suffice it to say, we did interviews for most of the afternoons of our trip. They were sometimes awkward, but they were the bread and butter of the academic part of the trip, so we had to do them.

-M. or F. would cook me dinner, depending on who was home. A few days in I learned that F. is actually the president of the cooperative, which I wasn't expecting. When I learned that, he was away at some sort of conference in San José, and I didn't get to interview him until a few days later. After dinner I'd usually head up to the albergue and have some drinks with the rest of the class and we'd talk about how our projects were going and about our volunteer jobs and our families and how much fun we were having. Later, I started going to the pool hall before I went to the albergue. I had some good times there, and won more games than I had a right to, by what I can only attribute to luck. Well, luck was what gave me a winning record. Without it I'd probably have been about even. Maybe a little under.

-On Saturday the class took a day off from being academics and took a bus down to Quepos to check out all the beaches. So we got to spend a day being regular old tourists. For example, we walked down a trail to get to the beach, and despite how many gaggles of goofy-looking tourists there were standing around and taking pictures and listening to their tour guides, there was actually still some wildlife around. We saw a sloth with a baby clinging to her belly. That was a little bit magical for me. And a little ways before we got to the beach, a bunch of monkeys jumped through the branches overhead of us. I took pictures of everything, but I still can't find the cord that connects my camera to my computer, so once I find that, I'll make a big pictures-only post with all the stuff that's been sitting in the camera since I last knew where the cord was. We found our way to a beach and just swam and felt the waves. An iguana sat in the sand near our stuff, unconcerned. A mammal that I've never seen before—we think maybe it was a mapache, although that appears to mean "raccoon"—came and begged for food from a guy who'd been there for a little while.

-We hung out there awhile, and then had lunch at a restaurant near the shore, and then split up and did whatever we wanted for a while. I went to a beach with enormous waves and let those roll over me while I thought of phrases to put on a handy list that people could print out and carry with them to Spanish-speaking countries. The list would be called "Completely Useless Phrases". It would include such phrases as:

• Yo estoy aquí. ("I am here.")
• Los robotes no tienen emociones. ("Robots have no feelings.")
• Monté una morsa al trabajo. ("I rode a walrus to work.")

Later I found Mary, a classmate, and she helped me out with some more. We'll get this list finished someday.

-Eventually we had to head home and eat dinner and such. But the very next day I went with Dean's family to the chorro. Chorro means "waterfall", but more specifically it means a waterfall that's about 40 minutes' walk from the town along a gravel road. I didn't realize it was so far, or that it was more than something pretty to look at. It wasn't just a nice waterfall—it was one you can swim in. There are two pools linked by what I'd call flumes, rather than waterfalls, because they're more horizontal. The first pool is where you jump in, and it's maybe five feet deep. To get to the second pool you climb down through the rushing water over slick rocks and jump in. It's about fifteen feet deep, and hemmed in by nice steep rock walls. Dean's host brother, about 18 years old, showed his climbing prowess in scrambling up the farther wall wet-footed, disappearing into the forest about twenty feet above the water, and coming out at a bit of a platform that overlooks the pool. He overlooked it for a moment, and then did the only logical think to do next: he jumped. At that moment I knew I needed to do it too.

-I couldn't get a handle on the route he'd taken—I learned later I'd been approaching it from the wrong angle—and so he showed me an alternate route. To lower yourself down to the platform, you hang onto a sapling. That set the mood. He jumped first—"¡WUUUUUU!"—and then the stage was set for me. I stood there for what felt like about five minutes, but according to the video was only a third of that, telling them, "Tengo que prepararme" (I have to get ready), and looking at how far away the water seemed to be. And then, well, I flew. While I swam back to where I could stand, I was reminded once again of how very awesome life can be.

-The next week, we only worked until Wednesday, because Thursday was Maundy Thursday, the kick-off of Holy Week. Holy Week is big news in Costa Rica, big enough that you're not even allowed to sell alcohol anywhere in the country on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. On the three work days I had that week, I worked on the organic garden (the huerta) with Ami (a classmate) and the guys who are in charge of it. We did stuff like hauling logs and hauling sand. One day we whacked fresh-cut logs repeatedly with truncheons that one of the guys cut for us with a machete, so that we could get the bark off the logs so they could be used for construction. They were building a simple shelter out of logs they had cut the very same day. It'll be the huerta's new visitor center. In the afternoons we all did interviews, so many of them that a fair number of people in the town got sick of them. But they were mostly good-natured about it, and knew that we'd be leaving on April 2nd and then they wouldn't have to answer any more annoying questions. One guy I interviewed gave me the ultimate souvenir: an alacrán, a scorpion, that he made himself entirely out of copper wire. I'll put up a picture of that too. And after dinner we would meet in the albergue, I having won pool games (sometimes), and talk about stuff.

-Thursday was our last day. We relaxed, or did a few last interviews. Also we had fun. Some of us went to the chorro. I flew off the platform again. So did our professor, who apparently has done plenty of this sort of stuff before in his previous anthropological fieldwork, because he didn't hesitate at all. Another person jumped, a girl from Belgium who came along with us to the chorro. We sat around in the water. It rained a little, and for the first time in a long time, we didn't feel stiflingly hot. It was definitely a worthwhile way to spend the afternoon.

-On Friday we packed up in the morning and took a bus back to the hostel. It felt like such a brief stay in El Silencio. I barely got to know people, although I did have some pretty fun pool games. But we didn't have any time left in spring break, and so the hostel beckoned. Unlike the last time there, I had nothing pressing to do (like reading about the community in preparation for going there), so I just chilled out. Most of us had pizza for dinner, a nice change after having rice and beans with a side of meat for pretty much three meals each day. We played some Bananagrams and some cards, and talked. I read two Jack London stories in a book I found, one where a man dies and one where a man survives. I didn't want to break the tie, but there were three stories in the book, and I had yet to think of anything better to do, so I read the other one, in which a man dies.

-We got up the next day and flew up over the clouds and back into the United States. Evan remarked that flying doesn't feel so much like traveling, because there's no feeling of movement. I said it was more like getting into a seat, going into Purgatory for a while, and arriving as if by magic in your destination. Which in this case was Houston, and then Des Moines, and then back to our dorms here at college. It felt strange to be back and have access to the internet all the time and stuff like that. I'm still not a hundred percent reacclimatized.

-I've been writing for a really long time now. I bet I have, like, a ten-page research paper here. I'm calling it quits until I figure out the photos.

Leavin' on a Jet Plane

So, in a short three hours now, I'll be leaving for Costa Rica. I'm looking forward to it but at the same time dreading it. Here's why for everything.

-It's not going to be a two-week party. Our professor has said numerous times that it's going to be hard work, because the whole time, we'll be working on interviewing people and listening to them casually in order to find out stuff about our research questions. My research question goes, "How do conceptions of sustainability affect land use in the cooperative?" The cooperative is a little one in the town (pop. about 370) where we'll be staying; it's been around for some 40 years or so and they grow Indian palms on it, for palm oil for export. There's also a huerta (a farm for foods for people there to eat) and a dairy and a tourist restaurant and some other neat stuff, but the palm plantation is their big money-maker. Each of us will be volunteering every morning, starting about 6:00, on one of the various operations they have there, and then finishing at noon.

-I'll be on the palm plantation, working to pick up the palm fruits (or whatever other work they've got going on—I don't know where in the season they are). That's fine, totally fine. What's got me a little more worried is that while I'm working I'll also have to be asking people what they think of the chemicals that are used there, and water quality, and ways the coop has improved the land since it got started. And then after lunch I'll ask other people, in interviews that I schedule with them. I just realized as I was typing that that I don't know how I'm supposed to go about scheduling those interviews. I'm sure things will become clearer to me as I go along, but I feel adrift right now. I tend to feel like that a lot in this class, because it's not technically an anthropology seminar, but rather a Global Development Studies seminar that I can get anthro credit for, and I never took Intro to GDS. I've kept up, even if I sometimes felt like a dog chasing a bus, and I figure I'll still keep up.

-I'm given to understand that when we're done with our afternoon interviewing work, we'll have some time to chill out and do fun things like go down to the river and swim. We'll each have a free day where we can go to the beach that's a shortish bus ride away, or go to a zipline, or raft down the river. These are all reasons I'm looking forward to the trip. Put simply, there are going to be opportunities to have lots of fun there. It's just that we'll be doing a lot of work. Hopefully I'll get into a stride and the work will feel less like work and more like just casually asking people questions.

-I wonder what'll happen on my birthday. Probably something fun. Like Dan did, I'll be turning 21 in a country where it doesn't matter a whit (Costa Rica's drinking age is 18), but I'll probably still have a drink or something.

-I should talk about the last two weeks. As you probably expect by now, they were full of lots of work. I also started looking into a different internship that's not the one I interviewed for in Chicago. It's at a New York company that publishes indie, radical books. I found out about it from one of the guys who founded Press back in 2006—I called him up because I remembered both of those guys had had internships in publishing somewhere. The company is pretty small and runs in significant part off of volunteer power, so I got offered the spot without needing to interview. That made my options look different all of a sudden. I could work with this company that makes books that I'd enjoy reading a lot more, and probably get to do more different things than I would in Chicago, but I'd have to figure out a place to live and a way to pay for that place to live. Or I could stick with Chicago and do lots of proofreading in a building that's fairly nice inside but situated in a faceless office park next to a suburb that has no qualities, and live for free in a house with a full kitchen. I called up the New York company the other day and found out more about what I'd be doing there. It breaks down like so: about 75% of it would be reading submissions and deciding whether or not the company should publish them, and drafting acceptance or (much more likely) rejection letters. The other stuff would be either administrative stuff like sending packages, or checking proofed copies of manuscripts against the copies going to print to make sure the changes all got in. (Apparently they get their proofreading done by freelance proofreaders. This is an occupation that I didn't know existed, but I'm all of a sudden interested in it, because I love proofreading stuff, and I think I could be really good at it, and as a bonus I could work from home, which cuts out the commute. You may hear more about this thread of thought in the future.) I feel like I should know more about the company before I would presume to reject people who want to have their work published by them, but at the same time, I've gotten fairly good at trawling through the submissions that we get at Press and picking out the good ones and predicting which ones will get axed at our meeting. The woman I talked to in New York told me I should take a week or so to decide, since she knows I've got logistical stuff to think about and that I had just then for the first time heard the description of what I'd be doing. We'll see which way things swing. It still, of course, depends on whether or not I get the spot in Chicago—they haven't written me back yet (shame on them).

-What else? Not too terribly much. I made jarred cinnamon spiced peaches with the Food Preservation Society, and I met the people I'm going to be learning to watch birds with in the student-taught birdwatching class. I messed up some deadlines but amazingly there were no long-term repercussions for me because of it. Today I discovered my passport was missing from my lockbox, so I tore up my room looking for it for two hours, and eventually found it in one of the least obvious places it could've been: under my bed, all the way back to the wall, draped with fallen cobwebs. That was pretty unnerving, though, since I would've missed the trip and probably failed the seminar. And now I know that things aren't always in a common-sense place. As near as I can figure, I left it on the floor when I was filling out some sort of driver's-license form or something, and it got kicked all the way back there. Or, it got claustrophobic in the lockbox and contorted its way out to go make friends with the dust bunnies. Oh, and before that happened, I rediscovered what it's like to have free time: I got a lot of work done on my font last night (more than in the last several weeks together), and I found some really cool stuff on the internet, for example this page written by a guy who lives out in the woods and this video about a guy who built not only his own cabin but his own cabin-making tools (check out the other two videos about him on that page, too). I'm looking forward to at last having meaningful amounts of free time this summer. Neither internship will be a full-time job, and even if they were I'd have time for fun stuff anyhow. I'll probably finish another whole font this summer besides Solvejg (which I still hope to finish before the school year is out), one that I like called Walleye. And I'll do a lot of exploring wherever I am, and I'll have lots of fun, because I refuse not to. I enjoy my future, and I'm going to enjoy it even more when it's my present, which won't be too long now.

-Speaking of which, the three hours I mentioned earlier have now shrunk to two, so I should make sure there's nothing else I need to do before I leave to take the bus to the airport and get out of Dodge. I might find the internet sometime before I get back, but if not, I'll be back on this blue screen with the dots in two weeks. See you then!

Whoof!

It seems like every semester the workload here gets a little bit more ridiculous. This makes sense, really, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to have no free time. Although I've also signed up for a lot mer interesting time-fillers than I have in previous semesters. This last week, the student-taught crocheting class started up, and within the next couple weeks, the birdwatching class will start up too. I think the second half of my semester is going to be way more relaxed than the first half. Before spring break I still have to come up with a bunch of questions to ask of the people who live in the town we're studying (where there's a cooperative called Coopesilencio). My research goal is not at all clear yet, and it needs to be. That's what these next two weeks are for. Man! Time is going by so fast! The last two weeks were filled with lots of work too; the week before last, I was a bit screwed over as far as time goes because I had to read through the entire fantasy novel that Press is publishing, and that took pretty much the whole day, and so I didn't get any homework done. And last week was just constant preparation for the big debate project in the Costa Rica seminar. That led to some frustratingly sleep-lacking nights. But I think our team did pretty well in the debate. If you're interested, the topic was whether or not countries should try to be self-sufficient in food production. Our team had to argue that they shouldn't.

-I also did Imaginary Week in my journal, which you may recall is where I choose one week in February and make up a fictional week and write about that instead of what really happened. This year it involved me grabbing hold of a slow-moving train on a whim, intending to jump off after a few seconds, but not being able to get off, and having to go all around the midwest trying to get back to the college. It was fun, but it took up a lot of time that I didn't really have. Jeez, again with the too little time.

-How about something different? It's getting warmer; that's something. Oh! I built a whale out of snow. I guess I should get those pictures off my camera and put them here. [Several minutes later.] All right, well I can't find the cord, so I'll do that later. This is turning out to be a pretty boring post, so I'll get right down to what's been interesting me most lately.

-I talked last week with a guy named Drake, who told me about some ESL teaching things he's heard of that aren't JET. I wasn't aware that there was anything comparable to JET, because I figured the Japanese government was the only one filthy-rich enough to bring over college grads just to have a native English speaker for pronouncing words. That's probably true, actually,but these other programs aren't done by the government. One of them is called CELTA (which I mentioned in a comment on the last post), and it's a different concept: instead of applying for a placement somewhere, you just get a certificate for teaching English, and then everyone will clamor to hire you wherever you go in the non-English-speaking world. The other one, though, is the one that's got me yet more intrigued. It's a program called TESLK, Teach ESL in Korea. When I found their website and started reading it, I was enamored right away, because it's so much more personal than the JET Program ever gave an impression of being. (If you'd like to compare: JET, TESLK.) It starts out with a jolly introduction by the guy who started the program; he tells you his name, whereas I have no idea of anyone's name in JET. This guy and his small staff of other interested people work personally with every applicant to pick a school somewhere in South Korea that's a good match for them. You can apply at any time of the year and there's no bureaucracy to cut through, at least on the American end. I just did all this reading last night, and I'm already starting to lean a lot toward TESLK. It looks so much more enjoyable all around. And South Korea is an awesome country! I knew so little about it, but then I checked out Wikipedia. South Koreans invented metal type over 50 years before Gutenberg did—and this while they were still using Chinese characters, no less! And while North Korea has pretty much languished under its dictatorships, South Korea has gone from being third-world and ruled with an iron fist to being a fully modern country with a democracy and education and a great quality of life. South Korea is where Samsung and LG are both based. Also Daewoo, Hyundai, and Kia. Not that all these companies are good things—for example, for my debate I learned that in 2008 Daewoo made a shady deal with the government of Madagascar to take about a third of its arable land for basically no money, and they were going to plant a lot of corn there, until there was a coup in Madagascar and over 100 people died and the newleader of the country canceled the deal—but just saying: South Korea's a pretty solidly developed country these days. And the money? TESLK's website says that I could easily save up 1,000,000 won a month, by being just a little frugal, and they're actually probably being a lot less thrifty than I would be in their calculations. (Today, that's $878.) They say the cost of living is around 400,000 won, because the school you contract with pays your rent, and they allowed about 600,000 of the estimated monthly paycheck of 2,000,000 won for something vaguely labeled "entertainment"—something I'd probably do a lot cheaper than they've figured on. $10,000 over the course of a year or so doesn't sound like all that much when you compare it with the JET Program (you get a gross salary of about $39,000, but you have to pay for your housing), but that's probably around the minimum of what I'd save, and also Japan is (as a lot of people have pointed out to me) not a cheap place to live. So, we'll see what I think about these things in the months to come, but for the meantime, TESLK looks like a pretty sweet option. Pretty sweet indeed.

Exciting things

The first exciting thing I wish to mention is that the publishing company I'm hoping to intern with has gotten back to me again and said they're now starting the process of looking for an intern, and am I available for an interview? Hey, my first real interview! It looks like it'll be early March, so I have some time to practice and get myself looking nice. The Career Development Office here has a service where they'll actually do a mock interview with me and give me pointers based on that. So I guess I'll be going to Chicago for a little while soon.

-The next exciting thing is my off semester. I've been gradually planning it out to be the most awesome thing I've done quite a while. I'm making a list of things to do that are things I wish I could do during college but that I never have time for, and other things that I just generally want to do. I figure if I've got four months to do pretty much whatever I want, I should seize them and do, well, pretty much whatever I want. My list isn't very long so far, but I've been asking friends for suggestions. Here's what I've got:

-I want to start out going around the US, probably working at a few different WWOOFing places across the country. But above the WWOOFing places, I want to go to a wilderness skills school. There are several of these scattered across this country, and I'm still yet to figure out which one I'd go to. (I actually only remember the name of one, but that one is headed by a guy who seems to be a bit questionable, from what people on the internet say about him, and from the strange way he writes, like a really exaggerated stereotypical Native American. There are others.) I know some wilderness skills already, but I've never put any of them into practice in real living, and there are also a lot of skills that I don't know. The one that I want the most help with is how to identify edible wild plants. I have a book on that, but it's really tough to learn that subject from a book, and there are very few plants I've actually tasted. For transportation around the country, naturally, I want to use trains. For all the talking about trainhopping that I've done, I've never actually succeeded at it. So that's one of my goals for the coming semester. I may also try other means of transportation: hitchhiking, long-distance biking, or something I haven't thought of. I want to avoid driving.

-Once the weather starts getting a bit nippy up here in the States, I'll head south. At the moment the country I'm thinking about going to is Ecuador; I talked with a guy here who WWOOFed there, and he said he enjoyed it a lot. It's not quite free, but $20 a week is a pretty nominal fee, just meant to keep the farmers from going broke feeding you. Also, if I decide to go bakpacking there, hostels are $5 a night, and buses go all over the country for $1 an hour. Ecuador, he informed me, uses the US dollar; all the Sacajawea dollars that you don't see here are floating around in Ecuador, where it's pretty much the only kind of dollar they use. I still may change my mind on the country; Costa Rica is still a solid option. While I'm there I'll do farm work and possibly a little backpacking too, so I can actually see the scenery. The guy who told me about it has a pretty awesome picture of himself looking out over a broad rugged valley covered in bright green trees and reaching off through fog to a horizon of mountains. That sounds like something well worth seeing. Hopefully, I'll be able to turn in my JET application without coming home first, because they're due in Late November; I'll probably get the application done as much as I can before leaving the country, and then mail it super early in case of postal mishaps, and keeping a duplicate, and staying in contact with any relevant people, like Professors 浅岡 and 山田. Maybe I'll even be able to get it done entirely, in which case I can just entrust it to someone here in the States to mail it on a certain date. I'll probably get to work on it during the summer. I guess it won't take a huge amount of time. So, after having fun in Ecuador, I'll put 43 degrees of longitude between me and it, and have Christmas, and then wait for my last semester of college, which might seem pretty boring in comparison.

-The way I see it, this coming semester will be an education of a different kind for me. Here at college, I've lately been feeling like I know a whole lot of things, but a great many of them are things I'll never use: Frege's symbolic system of logical representation; the postmodern critique of ethnographic writing. Of course, I'm still learning some things I genuinely like knowing, and some other things that'll actually come in handy. A lot of the things that'll come in handy seem to come to me from outside of classes—for example, I've signed up for an ExCo (Experimental College course, taught by a student, who I haven't actually met yet) on crocheting. And I'm learning how to cook and how to be economical here at EcoHouse. (I made some great scones yesterday, and that chili I mentioned at the end of the last post turned out great.) On balance, I'm definitely glad I came to college, but four years is starting to seem a little excessive. That's one reason I'm glad I decided on 3½ years. Next semester, though, I'll be learning things college can't teach me. How to eat well in the wilderness. How to grow crops or harvest them. How to interact with people who don't speak my language, in a foreign country. How to stay inconspicuous on a freight train. I'm looking for a bit more intangible an education, too. I think I'll take along very few books when I go, and instead of reading I'll do, or make, or enjoy the scenery, or talk with people I meet, or write a book or two, or think. I hadn't even thought about an off semester until last fall, but now that I have one, really I wouldn't trade it for anything. This time of my life is irreplaceable, and I'm extraordinarily pleased to have the chance to jump up and wear myself out exhausting (but only for the moment) the list of awesome things I can think of doing. I'm twenty years old, I have my vitality, and I'm itching to experience life outside of what I've been doing, sitting in a dorm room, reading books full of the hypothetical, theoretical, and forgettable. I have four months to do something that I'll never forget. So I'm pretty excited about getting started.

Changes / Feeling Real

First off: a change of plans. I'm officially approved for accelerated graduation, so I'll be done after seven semesters. But, I'v known since I applied that I may hav to re-evaluate which semester I'm taking off, since there's one particular class (Ethnography of Communication) that counts for both anthro and linguistics, and I need to take that to finish out both of those fields of study. My advisor is the one teaching this class, and she told me she'd let me know as soon as the anthro department had decided which semester to offer Ethnography of Communication. Turns out, it's spring 2011, which means that insted of graduating next December as I'd planned, I'm graduating in May with everyone else, and taking a leave of absence for fall 2010. That's when I'll be doing my traveling. This actually werks out better for me in a few ways: One, the JET program's application is due in December sometime, but they'll want to contact me all between when I turn it in and when I actually leave for Japan (assuming I get in). So, I'll be a lot more available in college than I would while traveling all about the tropics at places with sparse postal service and little cell reception and rare internet. Also, I'll hav another chance to take Japanese 102. I took 101 last semester, but this semester, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't fit 102 in, even tho I was just trying to audit it—it conflicted with too many different classes that I needed too much. So this way I'll be able to learn some more Japanese before setting off for Japan itself. Meanwhile, though, for this semester I'm going to be going to Japanese Table (日本語ランチテーブル), which is a thing where, on Tuesdays, Japanese students and professors get together at lunch and speak Japanese. That'll keep me from getting too rusty—and, bonus, the Japanese department pays for it, so I get to keep a lunch credit, which I can use to get an OutTake (bag lunch) and supplement my dinner. This college positively akes to give you free food. There's no reason to spend lots of money on food here if you can get off the meal plans. I myte start going to Spanish Table too.

Next up is something that I'v wanted to do for a long time, and I'v finally done it. The story is adapted from my journal from a cupple days ago. If you don't think about meat much, it myte seem a bit graphic, but it's nothing more than any meat-eater should hav to be able to think about without getting squeamish. Dan & Tracy, I believe you can handle it too. I've changed the names for anonymity (and I figured I myte as well change them to something more interesting than "John" or "Larry".)

(Background: Erasmus, a guy I know, has been trying for the last week or so to catch rabbits for food. He's into older-time subsistence practices like I am, but he's done more with actually putting things into practice. I told him to let me know if he ever caut one.)

It turns out catching rabbits is a real, possible thing that peeple can in fact do. One of the traps Erasmus set caut one today, and he called me via Zoltan's phone. He asked that I bring his BB gun from his house. So I drove it up to the north edge of campus. He showed me where he'd put the unsprung trap, and then we wauked to the one with the rabbit: behynd the bleachers at a snow-covered field. As he had forewarned me, the rabbit had bluddied itself up a little trying to get out of the trap. But, it was still alive and kicking. We agreed that a deadfall would hav been much more humane than these live traps, but they wer the only ones Erasmus had. We considered where to kill it and figured behynd the announcement stand would be the most inconspicuous place. He took the trap there and pointed the BB gun at the confounded rabbit's hed. "I'm sorry, rabbit," he said. "Thank you for giving your body to me." And he shot it cleanly. It was tenacious, so he had to shoot it again, but it soon stopped—kicked its legs a few last times and went still. "I think that's it," he said. It was a tense moment. Then we put it in plastic bags.

-We had a heck of a time figuring out where to clean the cage without getting questioned, but we found a shower. (He pointed out that in some places, what we wer pretending to be doing—showering together, altho we didn't really try to make it look like that—would be way more unacceptable than what we wer actually doing. For example, in Mississippi.)

-We set the traps again, in a new place (the place he'd shown me erlier, we decided, was too public), and then we took the rabbit back to his house. It was dinnertime and everyone (seven peeple) was there, and reactions ranged from Amelie's delyte that Erasmus had finally caut a rabbit to Rosamaria's horror and not wanting to think about it. Everyone was pritty unanimous that we shouldn't clean the rabbit in the bathroom upstairs. So we took it—and the computer that we wer using to watch YouTube rabbit-skinning how-tos—into the basement. By now Nikolai was with us too, one of Erasmus's frends. We got a bucket and figured out how to get the meat out of this compact, furry package.

-Erasmus took the first step, with Nikolai acting as meathook, and cut off the hed, which involved lots of twisting. "This is vaguely grotesque," he said. Before we could get the skin off, we had to take off the feet, which involved more twisting. I took off one of the forepaws. It felt really strange for a moment to be turning a joint so forcefully the wrong way—it was against all my previous experience of good things to do with limbs—but this was a new thing entirely, and I got the paw off. They're so tiny, the forepaws! I never realized that.

-We took turns peeling off the skin section by section, and finally we got it all off. Nikolai had to leave before we wer quite done skinning it, so it was just Erasmus and me from there. I acted as meathook while Erasmus carefully cut open the abdominal cavity and pulled out the innards. Another thing I didn't know is that they're so organized—they all come out at once, without taking any meat with them (well, some of them are meat themselves, but you know what I mean). And we wer left with the carcass, empty of everything but meat and bones now. It's the first time I'v ever seen an animal go from living thing to meat, and now I know what it looks like—where everything is, how you take apart something whose goal is not to be taken apart, how it becomes something you can use, something you can eat. Thank you, rabbit.

This event made me feel like a fully legitimate member of the food chain for the first time since I started thinking a little more in-depth about meat a while ago. Some vegetarians say they don't eat meat because they can't stand the idea of killing an animal; some meat-eaters eat meat but probably wouldn't be able to actually kill an animal if someone asked them too, and myte insted become vegetarians. Now I know that I can stand to eat meat even with a very clear knowledge of where it comes from. It makes me feel a little more real, I suppose.

-One last thing is that I got my first official eye exam today, since I hav to send in an optometrist-completed review of my syte to the BMV to renew my license by mail since I'll be in Costa Rica on my birthday when it expires. I've known for a while that my far-off syte has been getting a little blurrier and that glasses myte be handy. That's not something I' m particularly happy about, but I can deal with it. I'm not going to be wearing them much, probably for driving and maybe classes, but I'll hav them around. Once I actually get them I guess I'll poste a picture. While I'm tauking about eyesyte, a few more thauts. I'm pritty shure that the reason I'm blurring out at far distances is that I'v been studying too much with my eyes focused up close on print for so many hours a day. Since I realized that, I'm trying to hold books a little farther away and keep the lytes up and not squint so much, but another thing I think about is that when I go outside it's not only enjoyable but also an investment in my eye helth. And, there's also this thing I'v red: http://ranprieur.com/me/eyes.html. It's from a guy, Ran Prieur, whose blog I visit every once in awhile, read a bit of, and then usually forget about for a month or several. He's somewhat primitivistic, in that he thinks our present society is fundamentally unsustainable. I'm not shure about all the particulars of his philosophy, since I don't read his stuff all that often, but when I do read it, it's usually pretty good. The thing I linked to is about recovering eyesyte. Basically, he argues that if your eyesyte is deteriorating it's probably due to focusing on things up-close a lot more than humans used to do, and a way you can werk toward solving the problem is by looking off into the distance. Ordinarily I would be a bit more skeptical, because Ran Prieur has said he's really interested in pseudoscience and likes it a lot, and I don't take so charitable a view of it. But he got results, and it's hard to argue with those. He stared out the window for three days on a long train trip, and says he took a whole diopter off of his prescription in each eye. I don't remember what his further progress was like, and I'm not going to reread the piece ryte now because I need to get to the store for some ingredients to finish the chili I'm making, but it's interesting. All ryte, bye!

Cartoon

Every once in a while I draw a cartoon in my journal. I havn't been doing it as often as I used to—there are only two in my whole current 600-page journal, and I'm 520 pages into it. But here's one I did a few days ago. Click on it to see it full-size.

-I'll explain a little bit first. These cartoons are based on a karacter I came up with when I was in, oh, fourth grade, called Chicklet. Probably a lot of his appeal to me then was that he's easy to draw. Over time, more karacters hav joined the strip, which is good, because it's tuf to carry out a strip with just one karacter. Each one represents someone I know. Aaron and Keith bothe hav one based on cartoons we used to draw in classes when we wer supposed to be doing other things that wer too boring. Keith's is a chameleon, a spin-off from his strip The Chameleon Brothers. Aaron's is an orb with eyes. The only one that makes an appearance in this strip, tho, is a snake that's supposed to represent Micah, for reasons I'v forgotten by now. He drew cartoons, but none of them wer snakes—I think I may hav asked him once what kynd of cartoon he'd like me to use to represent him, and he picked a snake. If I fynd some more good cartoons, I myte scan those in and post them here. One of the volumes of my journal is still in Iowa, but I have the other three big ones (plus the small, old one) here in Ohio.

This has been an uneventful week. I'v been reading, and (while the snow was around) sledding, and werking on my font, and stuff. I'm going back to Iowa this weekend. I'll hav lots of fun stuff to tauk about this semester. The latest news is that the assistant manager of Bob's is stepping down, and I myte take his place—I havn't decided yet, since I don't know all that it entails. I'll also, assuming this program is still underway, be volunteering to teach English to immigrants in ?Cedar Rapids, most of them Somali. And of course I'll be going to Costa Rica. I'm definitely excited about the near future. And the future after that, actually. I'm all sorts of excited.

asf.

(That's English for etc. and short for "and so forth")

I guess I'll just copy journal entries about Christmas. I'll try to condense a little, since there wer two.

Christmas Eve:

I was tired all day today. But I still enjoyed it, of course. Around 11w Mom & Dad and I drove up to Oxford with our presents, altho I forgot to bring one of Mom's. Dave's and Dan's clans can't be in Oxford tomorrow (other Christmases are afoot), so we basically did Christams today. Joe was there, so we all shot the breeze with him and ate crackers with salami and played the Christmas pool tourney. I finally had a decent showing in a tourney! I beat Dad and Grandpa to make it to the third tier of the bracket. But I ended up out against Joe, and I didn't fare well in the losers' bracked. I still got to play way more than I hav before. Dan ended up winning, coming from the losers' bracket. Cammy and Tracy wer around, Cammy hamming it up and being cute.

-At 5 we opened presents, because Dave's clan was going to be late, and Mom & Dad and I had to leave by 6 to make it to Micah's visiting hour.

• Dad got Mom a jogging suit.

• Grandma gave Mom the fried grasshoppers.

• Grandpa gave Dan a handheld variable-speed spindle sander—Dan's ben asking for it for five years, and it was the last obscure tool he needed, and now he won't know what to ask for.

• Tracy got me a calendar, and, more impressively, a great calligraphy set with several nibs and lots of ink. Yeah! Oh, and parchment paper.

• Dad got Grandpa some Glenlivet, but actually I don't think that's opened yet.

• Everyone got Cammy baby stuff. Mom sewed her several bibs and a blanket.

-And then, in a little of a hurry, we all got delicious food such as vegetarian lasagna, and said goodbyes until tomorrow, and took off to Talbert House. Now I won't know what the Sierras think of the journals I gave them!

-Talbert House was deserted. None of us could figure out why no one else—at all— was visiting these kids on Christmas Eve. Well, Micah came out. I had no idea what to expect from him, since Dad was there, the first time they've ben around each other for at least a month. Turns out, Micah has found something besides anger in him! Dad tells me they got him good and detoxed, finally, after a long time of his hed being full of kemicals, and now he's apparently pretty much back to his old self, as far as I can tell. Which is really just super. We tauked about terrible Talbert House food and moovies and books. Micah's also started reading. There's not much else to do in there, he reasons, besides clean his room. He says he has probably the cleanest room; all the other guys' rooms smell like "old dog biscuits". I offered to take him to see Avatar on one of his home passes before I leave, since he's ben wanting to see it and now he's level 1.4, which is one sublevel under 2.1, and level 2 means home passes each weekend. …

Christmas:

We all overslept until 10, which is when we wer supposed to be at Talbert House to pick up Micah. We got there a haf-hour late or so, and drove strayte to Oxford. On the way up we thaut of peeple who have unmistakable voices [list to follow at the bottom of this blog], like Morgan Freeman, Gilbert Gottfried, and Fran Drescher.

Got to Oxford, and it was nice. I can only imagine how nice it must'v ben for Micad. We had some leftovers for lunch and sat around tauking. Eventually, since everyone who was coming was alredy there (our family, Joe, and Grandma & Grandpa), we opened presents (again). I got mostely clothes, but also a pretty sweet wheeled suitcase from Grandma & Grandpa (Micah got one too), and a Subway gift card from Dave & Cº. Mom got me plad and a lether jacket. She loved both of her gifts from me the Snuggie and the bike, and she was particularly amazed by the bike. I wrapped it by drawing a picture of it on a tiny piece of cardboard with an asterisk that said "See back yard for details". Grandpa got Grandma a Snuggie too! And a dozen bottles of wine. Dad got tin snips and shirts, and that's about all I remember.

-So then we went back to sitting around and tauking. Actually, I went downstairs, and played pool with Joe. I even beat him once! We tauked, and then Dad came down and he joined in. I played Dad and beat him twice out of thrice. A little erlier, Grandma, Joe, Micah, and I sat at the table and tauked about prison and legal stuff. Joe told some pretty nasty stories from when he was "in the pokey" (as he always said it) in 1991–92. Some crazy stuff. I think it made Micah feel better about being in "prison lite" and more dedicated to never having to do real prison time like Joe's.

-Until dinner, Joe, Dad, Grandma, Mom, and I played Scrabble (with Joe and Grandma on a team). Then we ate prime rib, and told what we wer thankful for. Dad said he was thankful to hav Micah within hugging range more often it the near future, which was nice. It's ben a great Christmas, I'd say.

-We sat around once more, this time digesting, finishing Scrabble (I won), and waiting for Mom's birthday cake. Not long after that, we had to get going to get Micah back at 8; on the way back, I let Micah browse my iTunes and we lissened to lots of System of a Down.

I think that's all for journal entries that I'm going to copy. I've hung out with frends a bit since then, and red lots of books. I'v also ben writing my own book, which is something I mentioned a couple months ago. I had to stop partway thru November, but now I'm back at it. I won't have it done within the space of a month, I don't believe, but I'll hav an appreciable amount done by the time college rolls around again. It's alredy 49 pages long, and it'll be longer soon. The with-frends stuff I'v done is playing pool and other fun things. For example, Keith and I went to Marshmallow Lake, which he says looks way weirder when it's not covered in snow. It's not actually a lake. Rather, it's apparently some kind of squishy, white clay, and when you stand on it, it bounces up and down, as if you wer standing on a marshmallow. I couldn't tell Keith anything new about it, since it was covered in snow and mostely frozen, but I did detect a bit of bounce underfoot while I stood on it. He says it's downhill from a water treatment plant, which could explain it.

-Yesterday I did my latest snow sculpture.

And now I'm going to put some more pictures up. I just dumped a bunch of them off my camera.

These four are from something my frend Ben and I did in the theater. We suspended a bucket from the rafters.

We did it by going on the catwauk. We used some other rope to slide it so that no one could reach it from either part of the catwauk,
and hung it too hye for anyone to reach,
or to jump to.

These are from something I did with some other frends, whose names I won't mention. We clymed a bilding on campus. Using a grappling hook.
These are the two frends in question.

And this is the bilding. We clymed up it in stages, mooving up each giant stair-step in turn. They're each about ten feet hye.
Then we took pictures of the view.


And had fun with long exposures in the dark nyte. ("hi"!)

Some train pictures. This one is a goste.
This one is two hours erly, because this was the day of the Iowa-wide 16-inch blizzard, and Union Pacific wanted to miss that if they could. The result was a rare daytime winter train thru college.
I thaut this was a pritty trippy effect. I got it unintentionally by following the train's motion with my camera.
This isn't a train, but rather a bowl of delicious egg drop soup I made for myself.

2 cans of chicken broth (or was it one?)

3 eggs, beaten

2 green onions

ginger

other spices to taste

Put the broth in a saucepan and turn the heat on hye. Slice up the onions and put those in, and also add some ginger. Pepper is good too. Once the broth is just about boiling—very hot—stir it around so it's swirling in a circle. Before it stops mooving, dribble the eggs into it. They'll congeal in the heat and form noodles. Then you eat it, and it's delicious.

Christmas pictures. I hav more on Facebook, so here are a cupple key photos, featuring first the undeniable star of the show, Cammy.

And also a rare syting of the Oregonian Joseph outside its natural habitat. Plus a little winey on the bubbly.

Here's my snake's injury, for those of you who heard he got injured. It looks bad, but it was way worse. All the area of pink skin you see was an open wound. Now it's pretty much all sealed up, and we'll both just hav to wait until he sheds a few more times and the scales cover the area again. He can move his tail now, which he couldn't do directly after he got the injury (I think he burned himself on something), altho he's not very flexible in the area of his body where the sore is. Hedward of the pink skin is a scab that hasn't fallen off.
I just thaut this was precious.

And lastly, that list of peeple with unmistakable voices.

William Elliott Whitmore (singer who comes to the college)

Ralph Stanley (bluegrass singer)

Tay Zonday

Jane Kaczmarek (Malcolm's mom, Malcolm in the Middle)

Richard Nixon

Roseanne Barr

John Goodman

Morgan Freeman

Weird Al Yankovic

Gilbert Gottfried (Zazu)

Fran Drescher

Mitch Hedberg (late comedian)

Michael Clark Duncan (John Coffey, The Green Mile)

Johnny Cash

Jenna Elfman (Dharma)

Ellen DeGeneres

Barry White

Redd Foxx

Louis Armstrong

Jim Gaffigan (comedian)

Fred Rogers

George W. Bush

Dolly Parton

Michael Jackson

Elizabeth Devlin (singer, came to the college once)

Judge Judy

Stephen Hawking (I choose not to view this as cheating)

Craig Ferguson (Mr. Wick, The Drew Carey Show)

John Madden

Robin Williams

Michael J. Fox

Phil Hartman

Paul Harvey

That's all. You can stop reading now, finally.