Life in Berkeley #2

My grandmother eats an amazing amount of M&Ms ... my aunt is doing very well after her surgery (the staples in her head are totally gnarly) ... I can't believe I leave for Thailand in just over a week ... and I hope to get away one more time before I go. All in all, things are going well.

Whooo hooo!!!

My masters thesis (remember that?) has finally gone to the rest of my committee.

Life in Berkeley #1

I'm happy to report that my grandmother is doing better than expected in Berkeley. Most importantly she is no longer in the extreme pain that she was in a month or two ago. I'm amazed at how little she eats but she seems alright. Her short term memory isn't as good as it used to be but otherwise she is doing well.
My aunt will have brain surgery to have her tumor removed on Monday. She seems remarkably composed and should be home later in the week.
Internet access is still an issue though I just met the owner of the house I've been sitting next to to get wireless. She didn't seem to mind.

California legislature passes bill legalizing gay marriage, AGAIN.

For the second time in three years a bill legalizing gay marriage in California will go to the Governor's desk. It will probably be vetoed again. Although this is infuriating it is also progress. This makes California's the only legislature in the country to approve gay marriage. Massachusetts is the only state where gay marriage is legal, but that was by decree of the courts. Although I agree with the courts and the point that the majority do not get to remove the rights of the minority, having the courts force the issue plays into the Republican Party's fear-mongering about "activist judges." I'll mourn his veto later: it is a good day when gay marriage goes to the Governor's desk.

Thai breakfast

I looked at one Thai hotel that said they have Thai and European style cuisine. This caught my attention: "breakfast is also served with a good selection from, Kellogg’s corn flakes to eggs cooked your way, bacon, sausage, toast etc, tea and fresh coffee."

It doesn't sound that bad, but I thought it was funny.

More traffic in Laramie today than I have ever seen

I have not done a good job of using this space to write about life in Wyoming. As I contemplate my future and consider moving out of Laramie, a distinct possibility next summer, I regret that. One of the things I love about this town is that I can get anywhere on my bike in about 5 minutes. Usually I barely even have to slow down for intersections because there aren't that many people moving around. Multiple times I have walked down the center of my street on my way home from campus or the movie theater (4 blocks away). (The center of the street usually doesn't have the broken sidewalks, the hanging-over plants, or the sprinkler spray.) So today was a little unusual. There was tons of traffic coming down 3rd street today. It is the busiest street in town but often you can cross without waiting for the light to turn. Part of the increased traffic is simply that students are back in town and I had gotten used to walking around town all summer for jubilee days, etc. While it is nice to have the buzz of town and fall and football season again, I guess I miss strolling around without a care.

[I don't mean to undercut my point, that Laramie was far busier today than usual, but I do want to point out, as part of life in wyoming, that this means there were about 6 blocks of traffic. It is still far preferable to the miles of traffic jams I'm used to in southern California.]

Colorado, including Mesa Verde National Park

I visited my sister's family in southern Colorado last week. We played in the creek, hunted for buried treasure at the empty site of a former whore house, saw some old mining towns, visited Mesa Verde National Park, and attended the Dance Party thrown by my sister and her husband's kids and the kids of their friends.

Here are the pictures (taken with my new (and first) digital camera, a Sony DSC W55 with a Carl Zeiss lens):

Colorado August 2007 - including Mesa Verde National Park

It's official: I bought my ticket to Thailand

My love of thunder bites me in the ass

Picture this:
The rain is coming down hard. I realize that one of my roofline gutters is plugged up. Instead of the water coming out the proper drain spout and being led away from the house, it is overflowing the roofline gutter, falling down right next to the house, and puddling up against the cement foundation. When the house is almost 90 years old, thats a problem. First, I pulled my trashcan under the waterfall coming off the roof and then I saw my neighbor pull in. She had a step ladder. Thank god, I thought, I could pull the plug out from the gutter. But it was too short. I stood on the "this is not a step" part of the ladder and it was still too short. So I pulled a bunch of flagstones from my backyard around to the side. Stacked them, first three and then five stones tall, climbed back onto the ladder (now balanced on the paving stones) and again onto the "this is not a step" top most rung and ever so slowly - cause I could barely reach - started pulling branches and pinecones out of the gutter. (Pride salvaging attempt - I did this properly earlier this summer - borrowed a real ladder - got on top of the roof on a sunny day and cleaned both my gutters.) After a few minutes of pulling small handfulls of branches, twigs, and dirt out of the gutter it started to flow properly.

While grabbing the flagstones I had one of those non-flashback moments, when you imagine a hypothetical scene. I could just see my cousin Lauren and me sitting around and hearing a news story about some kid who fell and died when the ladder that was balanced on stones tilted over or the "this is not a step" part broke. What an idiot he must have been, we thought. Maybe not, maybe he was saving his house.

I've unplugged my computer so it doesn't get shorted out by the lightening

(There the power just blinked off and on.) We've had two strikes in the last few minutes that have made me jump. When was the last time you jumped, sitting in your chair, from lightening? There is only about one second of time passing between the lightening and the thunder. It is brilliant.

I love Patty Griffin and this song's title is Rain, so it seemed appropriate.

This just in...

I am procrastinating....again....and.....I can't wait to go to Thailand.

Gays in the military

From the Onion.

'Gays Too Precious To Risk In Combat,' Says General

From the Human Rights Campaign and Reichen Lehmkuhl. He gets off to a slow start but give him time.

Thunder

Southern California doesn't get that many thunderstorms. I've always loved them and they're one of the things I like about living in Laramie. A storm surrounds town now. I can't believe how long some of the individual lightening flashes last...... and then the thunder that builds over time, growing in volume and sometimes shaking the house. 

I keep saying how much I miss the ocean. Its power and size, the feeling of scope you get standing on the shore - I feel at once tiny in comparison to the ocean and also large -  standing on the edge looking out over something vast. It just occurred to me that an electrical storm is the closest I get to that feeling - the feeling of the immense power of nature and of my small size - other than the ocean.

Thailand

I still haven't worked out the dates but I'm planning on going to Thailand with my cousin Lauren this fall. This morning I went to public health here in town for my immunizations. I got four shots, two in each arm, and my arms still don't feel normal again. I also slept most of the day. Oh well, I can't wait...the travel bug is definitely biting.

What to choose

     I'm not completing my PhD now, I know that. Maybe later, maybe not, but not now. I will be applying to Teach for America. A few days ago I thought I would apply as soon as possible, so that I would know what I will be doing next year and could stop worrying about it. However, I recently decided that I want to keep my options open for longer. I will apply to the spring deadline of Teach for America (either way I start working for them in the summer/fall of 2008) so that I can take a longer look into community college teaching. I've long thought that I'd prefer community college teaching over high school and have only been planning the high school route because I don't really know how to enter into community college teaching.

     If I wind up teaching high school biology I'm sure I will be happy. To engage my kids more fully than I could in a community college setting, to be a part of a high school community, to help them at a time when more than academic help may be be necessary...I would find all of those things rewarding. But I'd rather not deal with the disciplinary issues, with parents and their excuses, with detention, with a place that doesn't want me to use the word 'evolution.' I'd rather teach in an environment where I can more fully challenge my students, where the entire proceedings are more adult, where I might get a chance to teach a course in ecophysiology.

     While I continue to work toward Teach for America I will also seek out and apply for teaching internships that exist at a few community colleges (Portland, San Diego, Tempe at least). In these programs interns are paired with a more experienced community college teacher. At first the intern observes and assists, but in the later terms the intern takes most of the responsibility for teaching a full course. It sounds like a perfect introduction to community college teaching.

Fortunately, I know that either way, high school or community college, it will work out.

Part of the reason this is no fun is that I'm choosing NOT to do something

"I'm not going to finish my PhD" doesn't have the same exciting quotient as "I'm going to graduate school in Wyoming." Choosing a negative, thats definitely part of the problem here. I've been lucky enough in life to spend most of my time agonizing over positive choices : who what where when why : to study, to live, to read, to be with.

In all of these choices there has been the implied negative choice: by coming to Wyoming I did not go to Arizona. The negative was in the background. Here: I'm not going to finish my PhD, the negative is in the foreground and the positive has yet to be determined. Some small part of me finds that exciting: maybe something truly unexpected will happen (a movie script, a career switch, the unknown unknowns). But most of me is consumed by looking for the positive. Because when I find it, I won't feel so uncertain.

Distractions and then hope

I haven't been ignoring the idea that I might not complete my PhD. I've been consumed by it and scared of it, so much so that I haven't bean ready to share it yet. Some unconscious damage control? Well, now it's out there. My head has been spinning with thoughts about my future : Teaching, first and foremost. Community college or high school? Trip to Thailand with my cousin? Should I move out of Laramie? I love living in Laramie, but it was never meant to be a long term prospect. Where should I get my teaching credential, if thats what I do? Could I still get in-state tuition at Cal State Long Beach? Teach for America? Do I need to wait tables in order to make ends meet this fall? Maybe swallowing my pride is the cost of going to Thailand for 6 weeks. I do want my PhD. I want to teach biology/ecology at the college or university level, but I just can't right now. I can't focus, the work doesn't self-motivate. I may regret this decision 10 years from now. But when that day comes I will try to remind myself that right now, this just isn't right. If the regret is deep enough, maybe I'll get my PhD then. But not now.

Hence the need for a little perspective. On to the next post and to reminding myself that 1) ending my graduate studies now does not mean I can't return to them later, 2) I've often thought about teaching high school, and 3) even with my PhD I've anticipated working at a community college. Maybe I'll start sooner than I expected.

Some perspective on my crisis of confidence

Erica Murray, a woman with whom I went to college but have not kept in touch, writes:

Miracles

I was in a cab this morning to Logan Airport and my loquacious driver queried my plans to the point where I found myself explaining to this perfect stranger that I was going to France to get my cancer cured.

And, to my shock, it appears that is indeed what I am doing.

Life’s pace, daily priorities, distractions distractions—and I just haven’t given this journey its due psychological, spiritual, or emotional prep. Funny how in speaking plainly to a taxi driver I finally heard where I was going.

Erica is writing about her life and leukemia at http://ericamurray.blogspot.com/





Erica's friend Erik is blogging at http://myyearofnewthings.blogspot.com/. Erik looks vaguely familiar to me but I don't think we knew each other at Oxy. Erik has been digging through his garage and found a newspaper review of a play at SCR in which the reviewer mistook him for Will Farrell. "THEN, on the next page of my scrapbook, there's a retraction that basically says "in last week's review of SCR's Pinocchio, we mis-identified the actor who played the stagehand as Eric Patterson.... I realize I'm about sixteen years too late, but I kind of want to send them a letter asking for an apology for misspelling my name. ("In the 1991 review of SCR's Pinocchio, we misspelled...")"

Reflecting on the high school diary he found:
I don’t know what this string of words says about sixteen-year-old Erik, but it makes me feel incredibly boring, and I wish that sixteen-year-old Erik would just come out of the closet and get laid already.

Much of Erik's blog is devoted to the recovery of his and Erica's friend Uma, who suffered a severe brain aneurysm in January of 2007.
…yell a message to Uma out your window, as loud as you can. Make it as un-PC as possible, because Uma likes it that way.

…even if you read this blog and don’t know Uma…even if you’re just coming across this blog post, randomly—a blog reader passing in the night—please take a second to tell a dirty joke, think a hopeful thought, and send out some love into the ether…

Back to the Winds

[update: I showed up 40 minutes after Enterprise rent a car opened and they had given my reserved car away. They didn't have any others. If they don't have one for me tomorrow I'll be driving my own car - which I don't want to do because of its axel issues and the 15-20 miles of dirt roads I face accessing the site.]
Pics from last time:

First trip to the Wind River Range

Poudre River here we come

We're going rafting tomorrow and I can't wait.

[update: I've never experienced such a time warp. I would have guessed we were on the river for 45 minutes when we were actually rafting for an hour and 45 minutes. What an awesome trip - most of the time we were on level three rapids but we also hit three or four level four rapids. Thanks to Tom and his wife.]