Praise Song for Arugula; a few thoughts on the subject.

A
Ru
Gu
La

Arugulaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
It sounds like a magic spell straight out of Harry Potter.
It tastes a bit like greens, a bit like pepper, and a bit like walnuts.
It grows! So quickly! And so abundantly!
Even in the summer heat. Put the seeds in the ground, and they grow!
Baby sprouts, so rewardingly indentifiable,
Covered with the lace-like veil of row cover, bugs cannot eat you, and you grow!
I will eat you with pasta, or perhaps in a salad with
a juicy pear.

(I am much more sophisticated than bugs.)

I grew you! Or rather, you grew yourself. But I am proud of me for making you possible.
Yum!

P.S. You are also the President's favorite vegetable. He is a very smart man with obviously excellent taste. If he were coming to my house to dinner, I'd totally serve you. And then we'd be eating, and I'd be all like: hey Barack, you like the arugula? and he'd be all like: this is the most delicious arugula i've have ever put in my mouth, except for maybe the arugula my grandmother grew in her garden, but maybe that is just because of the Grandmother Magic. and then I'd be all like: oh thanks. well I grew this arugula. ORGANICALLY. in a COMMUNITY GARDEN. And when bugs were threatening its life, I posted a question on the COMMUNITY Q&A BOARD, and another friendly gardener/community member gave me REALLY ACTUALLY USEFUL FREE ADVICE. So you should give America some more government funding for urban agriculture, especially for low-income people. Like, why does the WI state capitol building have like an acre of grass and fancy flowers and things but a homeless shelter next door where they only can serve processed food? but I would say this modestly and with dignity, and not angrily. and then the president, he'd take another bite of arugula, and after he was finished chewing and swallowing (because of course, Barack Obama does NOT talk with his mouth full) he'd politely wipe his mouth with his cloth napkin that I made myself, look me in the eye, and then he'd be all like: you, madam, are a True American. I wish we had more citizens like you. And then he would make a law that for public money spent on landscaping public spaces had to be evenly split between ornamental things (because flowers and beautiful surroundings ARE important) and edible food, and the food would be given away to food pantries and shelters and people who use food stamps and who live in low-income housing. The food would be delicious and nutritious. And then I would keep that napkin forever, and never let anyone else use it. However, I would totally wash it first before I preserved it, because otherwise it would be a creepy and gross kind of stalker thing to do, and I am not a creepy and gross stalker kind of person. And on my death bed, my relatives would all fight over The Barack Obama Napkin. Except for that I would instruct in my will that they should either auction or raffle it off and give the proceeds to a community garden. All thanks to you, my tasty little arugula; all thanks to you.

The Road To Nowhere Leads to a Bar

J and I rode our bikes out to Lake Mills to visit the Tyranena microbrewery today. It would have been a 60 mile round trip. It was kind of a spontaneous thing - I COULD have spent the day attending a conference all about Labor Organizing, and indeed had been planning to do so until J made the tempting suggestion to NOT spend my day in an oxygen-deprived conference center, but out on the open road getting a workout and exploring a new part of Wisconsin instead.

However, in the spontenaity of the moment, we neglected to consider that we were leaving our house at noon. For a 60 mile bike trip. Bike as in bicycle, not as in motorcycle. Had we stopped for about 6 seconds and put 2 and 2 together to get four, we would have tossed our lights into our gear bag. As it was, it got dark when we had about 20 miles to go. Dark, not "dusky" or "twighlighty" or "dim." Full on dark. We locked our bikes to a convenient tree and called some kind friends who came and got us.

Here are the specs of the trip.

Actual distance ridden: maybe 45 miles.
Beers I drank: 1 pint Scurvy IPA and about 1/3 of our tasting flight. The beers that best fitted with my preferences and tastes were the Hefeweizen, the Scurvy IPA (a not-overly-hoppy IPA that is brewed with orange peel) and the Femme Ameins, which is a version of Tyranena's beloved Bitter Woman IPA with kind of a Belgian Farmhouse style twist.

The Amber Alt was good, too, but I was not overly impressed by the Three Beaches Lager or the Rocky's Revenge Burbon Barrel Brown.

Wildlife seen:
Chipmunks: 20 or so. extremely adorable.
Toads: 3; 2 alive, one not so much.
Catapillars: about 20,000 more than I wanted to see. They are all doing that swarming thing, and that dangling from the tree by a thread thing, so I got a lot of catapillars on me as a rode, which I did not like. I like to touch bugs on my terms, not on theirs.
Cranes: 1. J identified it, and even though I called first baby ducks of the season, first goose pups of the season, first chipmunk of the trip AND all of the frogs of the trip, he pretty much just beat me in Animals: Competitive Identification by like a million points FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. Because seriously, a crane? That's just awesome. I'm not telling him that he won, though.

Interesting people we encountered:
Lesbians riding their bikes from Chicago to Minneapolis: 1
Lesbians who asked me if I was a lesbian: 1*^
Assholes who have no trail ettiquette: 2
Cute dogs: more than 15


*It was actually the same woman.
^It amuses/bemuses me when I scramble people's gay-dar. On one hand, yeay for screwing with binary paradigms of gender and sexuality! On the other hand, I am quite blind to what it is about me that would cause somone to "read" me in this way, and knowing that I have this blind spot with regards to myself makes me uncomfortable.

It's been about 6 weeks, so time for a new post, no?

Today while walking down Bascom Hill, I overheard one dude say to another dude: "...and then someone drank my pee as a chaser, and that just made my weekend awesome."

Well.
Hearing that story did not make my Monday awesome.

But that is kind of ok, because I am so distracted by all the crazy ideas and schemes in my brain that I keep forgetting that it is Monday, and ask people if it is a Friday. I suppose, in a way, the end of the semester is like The World's Biggest Friday, with a 3-month-long weekend coming at the tail end of it.

I've been busy knitting. And playing with yarn that I re-claim from sweaters purchased at the Goodwill. And by "playing" I mean "I am completely obsessed" and by "yarn" I mean "fiber arts in general."

This is how crazy it has gotten: there are specialized wooden tools that help you do things in fiber arts: a niddy-noddy winds yarn into a skein for dying and soaking; a swift helps you wind a tidy ball from a skein; a lazy kate holds multiple balls of fiber that you intend to ply together to create a thicker yarn. Not only have a researched these tools and their uses (and crazy cool names!) I have found instructions for making them on the Internet, and I am going to build them for myself. I already have the niddy-noddy built, and I am currently tweaking the design slightly. Oh yes, I am a nerd. A fiber-arts nerd of the first degree. I won't tell you how many Goodwill sweaters made out of luxury fibers are sitting at home waiting for me to deconstruct. If I did, you might laugh too hard and die of an aneurism or something tragic like that.

Don't die. If you do, who will wear all the crazy stuff I knit with all the yarn I re-claim from those sweaters?

Notes from the depths of my couch...

... and lo, there is phlegm, and I like it not. There is much, much phlegm and I loathe it.

But before there was phlegm, there was Puerto Rico. And Puerto Rico, my friends, was 80 degrees, and sunny, and full of wide sandy beaches and frosty blended beverages. Just like in all the movies about Tropical Paradise(s). We swam, we hiked, we biked, we indulged ourselves with plates of french fries. We dreamed about becoming expats. We went on a tour of the world's most sparkliest bay of biolumenescent plankton. As in, it was dark, we went swimming in a bay, and where the water came into contact with something solid, it lit up and sparkled. Ok, not the water itself, per say, but rather, the teeny tiny little dinoflagellites that live in the water. It was amazing. It was more wonderous than watching the light play off the facets of a well-cut gemstone or than stirring a jar of glitter with a popsicle stick.

school has started, and i have been too sick to go. i am on the mend, for sure (praises be to Antibiotics When You Actually Need Them!) and am getting to that point where i am antsy and cranky and lonely. however, my prolonged isolation makes me trepiditious and aprehensive about all the responsibilities that await me in The Real World. Maybe if I wrap up some of the many projects I've got laying around here, I'll feel more confident about that tomorrow? meh.

accomplishments and creativity

ok, now that I've performed some Internet Magic and gotten my standard blog-writing window back, I have some Very Important News to share with all of you.

...wait for it...

(1) I taught myself how to splice a rope (line in the parlance of People Who Like Boats) this weekend.

(2) Also, I aced the Online Census Taker Qualification Practice Test.

Since I do not live in an 18th century fishing village and my parents no longer own a sailboat, I don't think item 1 will significantly affect my life in any way. However, in view of my current badnewsbears employment situation for next term, item 2 could prove to be a potent catalyst of change. And by change, I mean both the kind you put in your pocket and the kind that makes a difference.... awww....

But basically, adding 1 + 2 in this case makes me reconsider my self-conception. Both accomplishments involved skills, logical thinking, and puzzle solving. Both were somehow immensely satisfying. But even though item 1 resulted in the creation of something that did not exist before, it is not really a creative act, the splicing of lines. Neither is needlepoint- something I've been spending a lot of time on lately and finding (oddly) satisfying. My hands like to be busy. I like to make new things out of other things. The sense of satisfaction is higher when the original things are things that might otherwise be thrown away, like concocting a yummy dinner out of odds and ends, or re-purposing the material in old clothes to make new clothes, but even the basically skill-less process of needle-pointing a (kind of stupid and pointless) needlepoint thingy which will eventually be turned into a throw pillow (which is kind of a stupid and pointless item of home furnishing in and of itself) has been pleasurable, soothing and rewarding of late.

While I'm proud of myself for taking the initiative and attempting the Census Exam, the skills that the exam is designed to test are very basic. So it really is ridiculous to have this sense of accomplishment for totally owning that sucka'. But I do. I feel proud of myself. My brain liked the exercize of being faced with those 28 tiny challenges and solving those problems. None of which required ANY creative or truly critical thinking at all.

Basically, I guess I'm saying that I used to always think of myself as a creative person, but it turns out that I just really like busy work.

Identifying The Roadblocks and Progressing

I'm in this class. It's an interesting class, but I kind of don't care. I haven't actually learned that much new stuff in this class. And the new stuff that I've learned is peripheral to what the actual focus of the class is supposed to be. So I've procrastinated a lot this term, and done Stuff That Is Important to me. Really Important Stuff. Like knitting and watching all of the back episodes of Grey's Anatomy and snuggling the kitties.

And I've just NOW realized that I do not have to feel guilty about this. This is something that normal people do all the time- they make choices about what is important, about how they are going to spend their time, and sometimes, school isn't their number one priority, and even if they are capable of getting an A in a class, they just plain don't want to jump through all of the A hoops and do all of the A work, and they would be happy with an AB or even a B. And they know that when they choose to do this, the world will not end.

Draw from this little anecdote what lesson ye will. I'm going to go make out with my own mediocrity, and maybe paint my nails or something.

Juxtaposition

It's Sunday, and I'm heading to a downtown coffeeshop generally populated by quiet folk getting work done. I, too, need to get some work done. The sun is bright and the wind is brisk, and it's Sunday, so there is free on-street parking, which is a nice variation from the dungeon-ality of the public garage so I emerge from the car directly into light, walk through light, and try to simultaneously absorb the beautiful day and prepare my mind for the darker diligence of the cafe and the lecture I need to write.

An older woman, slight, stands on the sidewalk. Her head is bent, she's wearing all black, and a few wisps of iron grey hair dance outside of the sheer black scarf she's got over her head. She's all alone, and facing the building on my left in some sort of quiet contemplation. Drawing closer, I see it's the cathedral rectory. Is she praying? She appears to be praying. Why is she outside the rectory and not in a church, or inside the rectory talking to a priest or something? I think about how, if this were Bavaria, there'd be a church open for her to reflect in and she wouldn't have to stand out here in the cold. I wonder if she's praying for forgiveness, or if she's praying for the well-being of the local bishop.

The sight of her apparently steeped in some sort of unidentifiable ritual appeals to my sense Romantic fancy, but she's also an anachronistic, geographically-displaced mystery to me here in the pragmatic Midwest, where I've yet to uncover any sort of mystical local lore or myth, apart from an almost-rabid devotion to sports and the fact that People Actually Do Stuff On Easter.

I feel a strong desire to murmur some comment of acknowledgement of benediction as a pass her. Completely innappropriate, as I don't believe in Catholic God, and I'm just assuming that she's even involved in some kind of spiritual act - I mean, she COULD just be looking at the architecture, or studying a certain configuration of light upon the blades of grass in the lawn.

But the moment makes me wish for a world less devoid of ritual and contemplation, a world where it would be possible to expand one's own positive and healing energy towards complete strangers who seemed in need of it... in a way that was sheerly compassionate and humane.

It makes me sad that in becoming part of Middle-Class White America, my ancestors relenquished rituals and other aspects of their specific ethnicities. I wish for peculiarity and a sense of belonging.

I cross the street, and the sun glints on a shard of a green Heiniken bottle. It's like an emerald, like a sign of Shangri-La, like a glimpse of innocent whimsy. I think of the tales of America that circulated amongst potential immigrants in the Old Country- riches abound- all you have to do is stoop and scoop and put them in your pockets. Why is paradise always imagined in terms of precious jewels and wealth? The colored glass in the sun is vibrant, glorious, an intense speck of color against the detrius in the sidewalk crack. I don't stoop to pick it up, but somehow it's the perfect compliment to the pathos and mystery of the old praying woman. Not opposite, not simile or metaphor for, not synonomous symbol, just... compliment.

Overloading on Bliss

There are so many things I've been meaning to blog about lately... wardrobe refurbishing, my odd (to me) love of cosmetics, my new kick-ass blue boots, my wood-working project, etc. Not to mention that I never really gave a full detailed report on the skydiving, which I did, like, 2 months ago, or the Bike The Barns (1 month ago) or my first journey into The Rust Belt of America (2 weeks ago) or my first experience at a country club, and how I actually danced so much at that one party that I have bruises on my feet (last week).

Hold on to all of those thoughts, because right now, in this very moment, I need to focus on the bliss overload that is live music.

Last night I went to a show. Vienna Teng opened for Over The Rhine. I am still riding the high of the electricity they created together.

I grew up on folk music and campfire sing-alongs, with some oldies and classical thrown in for good measure. I went to my first "real" rock'n'roll concert at the tender young age of 13. It was a Christian rock concert, sponsored by my youth group, and I had a terrible time. It was too loud, the venue was huge, the sound so bouncy that it got messy, and my seat was up in the balcony, so not only could I not see the band, but the lyrics and melody were indiscernable from my vantage point. I suppose it didn't help any that I had never heard any music by that particular group before- I just wanted to go because opportunities to go to concerts were very far and few between in my small town. I think it says a lot about my experience that I cannot remember the name of the band even enough to righteously complain about how horrible they were.

Flash forward to high school. I was occasionally in the know about shows that local bands were putting one. When the stars were correctly aligned, and the show was part of an alcohol-and-substance-free festival, I was allowed to attend. I know that one is supposed to be greatful to one's parents for being strict, because it supposedly creates an environment where one can achieve great things. I knew I was not cool enough to be A Music Fan or A Show-goer. I had all the wrong clothes, flat, stringy, mousy hair that fell to my ass, and not enough black eyeliner. In retrospect, all the black eyeliner in the world would not have made me cool enough to fit in in the post-Cobain, wrong-side-of-the-state, small-town garage band scene. Sure, I had fun jumping around, sweating, screaming, and tripping over my too-baggy jeans and untied hiking boot laces in pathetic attempts to "mosh," but that music wasn't made for a girl who secretly daydreamed about playing acoustic guitar and tramping through wheatfields and along abandoned railroad tracks in a sepia-tinted world of wistful nostalgia and flowy, lacy, broomstick skirts and suede and velvet blazers. My head was full of naive romance and dark smoky candle-lit coffee houses. The music of that time and place was angry, pent-up young energy exploding into the lack of community and echoing off of the sagebrush, getting no answer from the bleak november skies as it repeatedly expressed confusion, disillusionment, desperation and disgust. I don't know if that music was making any actual demands or not; I don't remember any of the lyrics or any of the melodies. I just remember that we were all stuck in this place and we all wanted out, because if we didn't get out, the most exciting thing in our lives was going to be sneaking into the smoking section at Dennys, eating greasy fries after midnight.

In college I flirted with the idea of World Music, danced barefoot at marimba band performances in the park, took a West African dance class, stopped spending money on broadway soundtracks, and discovered The Indigo Girls, Billy Joel, and made a half-hearted attempt to collect downloaded mp3s. I also still adored Judy Collins and remeber informing my roommate rather bitchily one morning that it was too early for Modest Mouse or Blondie. Which is to say that I liked what I liked, was very, very Not Cool When It Came To Having Musical Taste. To be fair, I was at least cooler than my then-boyfriend, who loved The Braveheart Soundtrack and Loreena McKennit. I at least listened to music with words! And owned cds by The Cranberries! And Tori Amos!

I still had flat, stringy long hair down to my ass, all the wrong clothes, and daydreamed of acoustic guitar concerts played in intimate coffe-shop settings. Obviously, I attended very few live music events, and only moderately enjoyed the ones I did attend.

In grad school, I cut my hair and discovered iTunes. I had friends who played music I enjoyed while riding in the car with them make me mixes. I made a concerted effort to expand my listening range. I eventually forbade myself from buying any more Putomayo World Music albums. Now that I actually hung out in those coffeeshops I only used to daydream about, I got over my fear of the awesomely hip, tatooed women behind the counter and asked them what was playing when I liked it. I wrote it down and got myself copies. It is, after all, a well-known fact that baristas at independent coffee shops have The Best Taste In Music In The World.

In short, I discovered what it is to be passionate about music, and to have music create passion within me.

I went to live shows and learned what it is like to be reduced to a rapt presence of bliss and joy and adoration. I learned what it is like to have every fiber of my being caught up in the energy of a great performance while the waves of sound caress my ears and reverberate in my aorta. I want to make out with rock stars and be such good friends with musicians that I am thanked with inside jokes in the liner notes.

Rash Behavior

I have a heat rash. It is located on a body part that is Inappropriate To Discuss On The Internet, so I will call it my "groin" because that it what it really is. At one point in time, I may have referred to my rash as "leprosy" because that is way more amusing and far less embarrassing than a rash, which, let's face it, has all kinds of nasty connotations about one's personal hygiene. It turns out, people get REALLY worried when you start talking about the leprosy you have growing on your skin, so I decided stop being embarrassed by the rash and just be amused by it. Hahaha! Isn't this the most delightfully blotchy skin you have ever beheld? Aren't you exceedingly diverted?

The thing about this rash is that it's not just hideously ugly, it hurts. So I tried a lot of different creams and salves on it. Creams and salves that I own because I have ridiculously sensitive, dry skin. Creams and salves that usually make my stupid skin feel better. Guess what? The damn rash did not feel better. So, about 5 days after I first notice the rash, I think, oh, maybe I should just google this. Because possibly some random idiot inside of the computer will have advice that is superior my own first aid training and experience with my own skin. Guess what? There are these people called 'doctors' who write stuff on the internet! They said to stop using creams and salves and to use powder. I did, and my rash finally feels better. I guess everything you read on the internet must be true.