I love the Internet. When you do searches on certain search engines, they will give you suggestions of where to go, mostly pointing you at places to buy things. So when I did a search for a bread icon on AltaVista, it suggested:
Extend Your Search for bread:
Shop the web for bread
Find bread and millions of other cool items at eBay!
Refine your search for bread with LookSmart Categories
Search for a job and win $10,000 at JobsOnline!
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Alex Hessler has put up some pictures of our trip to Death Valley. Boy haz some photo skillz! In addition to the great shots from Dirty Sock, I’m really fond of this very hep one taken atop the Stovepipe Dunes. When I get mine developed, provided the sand in my disposable camera didn’t scratch the film, I may put some up too.
I awoke this morning in Death Valley. I had been dreaming that I was training a dogsled team along with a little girl with dark curly hair. My mushers were a mismatched bunch of terrier mutts from the local pound, and I was going to attach them to a tricycle. (It was the most stable carriage I could find.) Before I awoke I had run them once, attached to the back of the tricycle, and capsized.
I think this has something to say to me about my recent attempts to live up to the praise of my fellow VISTAs and “be a leader.” I think I should heed well. Aside from that I don’t know what the dream was about. The little girl was Elana Scherr, I know that much. I went looking for her at her parents’ house the other night at quarter to ten expecting to take her swing dancing. All of this could really have used a little more planning.
* * *
Shortly before Christmas I started panicking about being home in Pasadena. The holiday was proving a weak imitation of its former self– Dad only browbeat us into listening to his Little Drummer Boy Extended Remix tape once. The pink flamingo nativity scene was well cached in the basement. Nobody seemed to mind. The glittery piney tree and the Christmas morning waffles with their array of syrups were too weak to absorb the shock of seeing my once-mighty grandmothers bereft of their former spheres of influence for the first time. All of my family seemed in overdrive, stuck to their computers and other machines. When I found my father plugged into his browser on Christmas Day, I snapped.
Get out the map, get out the map and lay your finger anywhere down, the Indigo Girls sang in my head.
Califorrrrnia. I feel the fog which hides all but the tops of the hills at night in Morro Bay. I see the pewter color of Lake Cachuma in a storm. I shin up an oak on the dun hills of San Luis Obispo. I wanted all of this again, and I wanted out of the abandoned wreck of my childhood. I asked dad for the car.
My ambition was cramped by the date of my return flight and my New Year’s plans, but it’s all right. Sylvie and Ariel had been debating whether or not they were going to go on their usual trip to Death Valley with their friends, and we decided to make that our road trip instead. We found two nearby places on the map that looked interesting too, and swore we’d visit them as well: “Pikacho,” which in the end proved to be too far off the track to Death Valley, and a spot that was identified as “Dirty Sock” on one of our maps but didn’t show on the others. (I had high hopes we’d hear some shaggy old legend about the Dirty Sock silver mine, or cowboys who’d stop through some saloon between the Valley and the Sierras with unusually dingy footwear.)
Winter is a good time to visit Death Valley. It’s mortally cold at night, but during the day you can wear shorts. We spent half the first day at the Stovepipe Dunes. The tallest dunes are as high as any Massachusetts mountain, and pointier. The sand acts like heavy snow, so you get kids up there with sleds; we got there just in time to scare off a troop of boy scouts by taking off our shirts and swearing like sailors. The effect of being barefoot and higher than almost anything else in sight, yet completely safe from falling, was exhilarating. We yelped and thrashed and threw each other off the peaks. Our pockets filled with sand.
In the afternoon we hiked Redwall Canyon to do a little bouldering. The combination of gravelly footing and handholds crazed with jagged scallops presented a challenge. I was sure I was going to slip and turn my palms to hamburger. Still I made it up to the highest point I could see, alone. There were plants up there growing with no water and no dirt. In the canyonbed below, Sylvie and her friend Ari sketched while some of the boys sang harmony. When they stopped, the air carried no vibration at all.
The stars that night looked so crowded I was bewildered when they didn’t bump into each other. There are things you forget when you live in a city: the number of stars, your own physical strength, how still air can be. How nature is bigger than you, and, try as you might to cheat it, it still plays by its own rules until you lose.
Today there was a hike up Ubehebe Crater, a stop at Scotty’s Castle, a visit with some well-kept ponies near a gas station. We went about an hour out of our way trying to find Dirty Sock, making elaborate plans for cooking and photography when we got there. Finally a park ranger gave us directions and we made our way out onto Owens Lake, scanning the roadside for signs.
Dirty Sock is unmarked by any sign. It consists of two round craters filled with water, garbage, and scabrous algae, one of which is apparently a sulfur spring. We didn’t want to stick around to cook our hash browns, because the spring emits a nauseating smell (hence the name). We have satisfied our curiosity now. Hopefully we have also quashed yours: there is no reason whatsoever to visit Dirty Sock. One less place for us all to track down as we sate our wanderlust like ticks on the fatted calf of California.
from a family trip around the West, junior year of high school
…Montana has always seemed to me to be a big grey area, the border of the known universe, the last bits of accessible territory on a Nintendo game, further from the sun (well, it is), and therefore constant clouded winter. I felt this wakeful hibernating dormancy at being there– I wanted to sleep but at the same time go further, into Canada and to the North Pole, or at least until the ocean physically stops me….
Yellowstone is the sky factory– all the steam rising from the geysers and fumaroles must make enough clouds for the world….
Drove, drove, drove, etc. Tetons fantastic. (I’m really tired of all this snow-mtn.-trees-coldness thing. I’d like to finish off my scalding California summer, thank you very much.) Had trouble dealing with death at lunchtime. Eyesight seemed an illusion for a second there.
Cleaning the house. Cleaning cleaning cleaning. Mixing Pine Sol and Windex and Drano and Kleen-King bleach-laden scouring agent without regard for my safety. There isn’t a drain in this house which isn’t clogged. Nothing like getting down there with a rag to remind me what a wreck this house is. Either the upstairs bathtub or the wall over the kitchen sink is leaking, and the yellow and brown dripmarks it is making are indelible now. I didn’t bother with them. I have this immature hope that if I let the house decay the money will appear to repair it. It’s more likely the woman I housesit for will come home, blame my Lady-Godiva hair for clogging the drain, and boot me unceremoniously into the ninth circle of the NYC housing market.
Everything is pretty well cleaned, though I did succumb to the usual rule that the amount of work there is to be done expands to fit the amount of time available. I read about a fifth of the first Harry Potter book today in one sitting. I hadn’t intended to do that at all. The more tense I get, the more I procrastinate.
With the TV in the dining room, I’m watching plenty. The other day over IRC, I got in a fight with an IndyMedia volunteer in Canada about TV. I made my usual argument, which is that you have to watch TV to know what most Americans are thinking about, seeing as the average American watches 3 hours a day. In response he didn’t take the tack I’ve been hearing most often lately– which is that we don’t care about the average American, the average American is utterly beyond hope– but rather told me that every minute I spend watching TV could be spent bettering the plight of the human race. Naivete to make your head spin. I countered by enumerating the hours each day I spend bettering the plight of the human race. (I calculated it a while ago: my life is currently made up of 33.3% helping better the human race through suffering government bureaucracy, 12.5% helping better 27 third-graders, 12.5% helping batter anarchists at the IMC, 20.8% sleep, 8.3% train travel… the remaining 12.6% is mostly spent writing, I guess, or just using the computer.) He came back with a schedule almost identical to mine, replacing third graders with college students. Still I think my point holds: I devote plenty of time to social change, and I’ll be damned if I let some stupid hippie tell me not to have the TV on for the half hour I usually watch the Simpsons while I cook dinner. The man was wasting my time, so I logged off IRC.
Since then I don’t know what to think. As I’ve been making Christmas ornaments and leaving the TV on for longer and longer periods, I’ve remembered that TV really is awful. Commercials are getting more and more insidious and cocky. A nightly news show actually made me cry the other day. I can’t stand the monolithic finality of the way anchors talk about this fscking election.
And then there was Saturday Night Live. Apparently one of their new bits is a warmed-over Wayne’s World knockoff starring a dreadlocked, pot-smoking Hampshire College student who does a show via webcam. (The writers are jizzing all over themselves– This will appeal to those plugged-in, logged-on Gen-0 audiences, no problem!) It’s not that the kid looks like a Hampshire College student. He actually introduces himself as a Hampshire College student. (“or,” he says, “as I like to call it, Hempshire College.” [cue my-greatest-dream-was-to-grow-up-to-be-Mike-Meyers grin])
I’m going to try not to be petty about this, try not to make too much of the fact that the kid has two roommates (completely inaccurate for Hampshire, where 72% of students have single rooms), or that he and his roommate act like complete drunken boors (there’s an allusion to shaving off their other roommate’s pubic hair and gluing them to his face.) The writers were reaching for new shorthand for the teenage clown-next-door. Hampshire’s always been an easy target.
But this is why I hate the mainstream media. HATE. The public image the president of my alma mater has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair, at the expense of retaining good teachers, gets trashed in a forum it can’t pay to enter. All this for the sake of bolstering the careers of writers who at their peak will probably produce the next “Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo.”
There are thousands of humorous, pathetic, quirky, inspiring, thoughtful stories to be told about Hampshire, and in time we will tell them. Hampshire is home to some dumb things, like students trying to compost in open bins in a dorm hall, or dogs eating 100 tabs of acid and jumping out windows, but if nothing else students are never, and I mean never, unimaginative or cruel enough to shave someone’s pubic hair off and glue it to his face.
Unless it’s consensual and agreed upon as an enjoyable prelude to mutual orgazm.
All that aside!: Fsck you, Lorne Michaels. You’re using cheap gimmicks to try to shore up a business that should have died with Gilda Radner and John Belushi. You’ve got plenty of money without devaluing my diploma. Fsck off. I’ll eat your children.
* * *
Two things occurred to me recently which seem pretty important. The first has to do with the kids I’m teaching: I don’t think I really understand the nuance of the tone of some of the black and Puerto Rican teachers towards the kids, though I have picked it up in desperation, trying to find what works. I think this dictatorial tone sounds very different coming from a young white woman like me. More than one kid has told me I don’t give them respect. I forget, I forget that I’m a white person. I forget that people around me may not understand how easily I code-switch– if I were in France, I’d be speaking French. I am picking up the pout in the speech and the double negatives, even in speaking with the staff, and that may be a very, very bad idea.
The other thing comes from reading Joyce. I put down Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man years ago, ostensibly because I found it boring, but in truth I was feeling like I was missing something. Now I’m reading Ulysses, and finding it makes plenty of sense. I’ve shied from intellectual challenges since I graduated from Poly. To some extent this has to do with how guilty I felt about going to Hampshire, seeing as my grandmother disapproved; she is after all the ultimate authority on college worth.
But then, I think it has to do with having gone to Poly too, and spending my childhood knowing I wasn’t the best in class. I think I lack confidence to attack projects which require a lot of intellectual work. I only started to think of myself as smart in the past few months. Watching these kids struggling through their third grade work, and having a few adults whom I respect (OK, one of them may have been trying to get into my pants) praise me on the brains front, I feel like I can “come out” as smart– smart relative to the rest of the world, not Poly.
I don’t know. Maybe I thought of myself this way before and I’m just forgetting, or seeing it in a new light. I remember agreeing with Len Glick when he said I didn’t suffer fools lightly. But Hampshire people… well, I always figured their problem was they weren’t trying very hard, as opposed to actually being stupid. I don’t know that I think anyone’s stupid. I have great faith that a lot of the narrow-minded and logically deficient people I meet just had bad educations.
Regardless, understanding Joyce bolsters my confidence. He’s the toughest read out there, and if I can handle him I’ve certainly accomplished something. Now if only I can keep that confidence up enough to sustain me through the rejection of a few novels, I’ll be ok.
In which everyone acknowledges their debt to Frank Zappa.
Do not be so eager for the end of the year 2000. The planets are in line. The statue has cried real blood, and the people of the village are exclaiming. And at the very least, it will be another ten years until it’s this easy to calculate how long ago something happened.
The dust bunnies could not be helped.
Clementine season. I spend hours peeling not only the chilled outer scale, but also the zest, the strings, the inner membrane until all there is left is sacs of juice. I have eaten half a crate in three days. My nails are constantly yellow with pith. By Christmas even the idea of citrus will turn my stomach, just in time to return to California. Now, though, I scrabble off the layers, abandoning housecleaning and reading and hours that could be spent with other people just to put that floral memory of oranges on my tongue.
New teacher in our afterschool class. Under his direction the worst of them lined up, fell silent, chastized each other for breaking order. “Are you still our teacher?” they kept asking me, sizing up how much it would take to drive me away. They know they can do it, but they went to talk with a new student instead. The new teacher threw handball with them, his whippy body a giant echo of theirs. The winter light sent grey regrets: I snow soon. A plane passed overhead. I’ll be in California in two weeks. Suddenly I felt very very out of place.
* * *
At lunch a friend told me he was unhappy with his home life. I have a dozen eggs I bought three weeks ago, he said, and I’ve used maybe three. Certain indicators: eggs, greens, mail, laundry; a canary off its feed, the roommate neglecting messages.
* * *
Juan did math with me at his side today. Other boys were showing off counting in binary (Hey! FOUR! ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT! I keep telling them not to take these numbers in vain…). I guess their enthusiasm was just too much to bear. Every time I spoke I worried Juan’s face would crumple and he would yell “Why she BOTHERS?!” to the other teachers. I held my breath. He made his own jungle of weird sixes and tangled eights, extracted the right sums, and calmly found his way out of again. I tried to hold myself the way he was sitting. I tried to anticipate the next move, to become unforeign. It’s like taming a wild animal, I keep saying, like coming close to a rabbit or coyote.
* * *
I’d like to ask you about your last name, and I’d like to tell you your lips are inviting: a drinking fountain in Barstow. I can’t keep my own away. But I can’t just do that. You don’t do that to someone you don’t usually talk to.
* * *
I think maybe I should give up on people.
* * *
A miracle: there was a yellow light in the oven instead of promotional literature and racks in their original plastic wrap, and Ms. L. was smiling. Maybe I won’t have to report the principal to the newspaper for wasting taxpayers’ funds after all. (Or maybe I should hold out until he puts microscopes in the science lab and opens the door of the unused TV studio.)
Leave it to MIT students to monitor their laundry machines on the web. This system was apparently created so students didn’t have to trek all the way to the machines only to discover they were full. Hampshire comp sci students are now working on a similar system, having discarded an earlier webcam idea. You go, geeks.
