Kristen's Observations, Musings, and Rants

10000 Cookies = 1 Turkey

2012-02-06T19:59:00.000-08:00

I have this cool application on my phone that helps me makelists, which is handy because I love to make lists. One of my co-workers told me that hergirlfriend keeps a list of lists she needs to make, a habit I find equal parts disturbingand awesome. I’m not QUITE thatneurotically organized, but I find that making lists helpfully transfersinformation from the 3-dimensional scatter of my mind to a tidy, linearstructure that makes things much easier to process. My phone application has the added benefit ofproviding a check box with each item, so that when I buy it or complete it Ican check the box and it either goes completely away or deflates to a fadedgray ghost of its former self and drops to the end of the list. But this is just a high-tech improvement onsomething I’ve always done—a handwritten item on a list can be crossed off witha definitive stroke, which results in the same gratifying measure ofsatisfaction. I have to admit that I’vebeen guilty of adding items to a list that I’ve already completed just so I cancross them off and get that little jolt of productive glee.

Organization and productivity measurement are two bigreasons why I keep lists. The third isthat my memory sucks. No matter how manybrain cells might seem to be engaged any particular particle of acquiredinformation, it’s a fair bet that a week or two hence, without some trigger torevive the relevant brain cells, that particle is going to be buried beneath animpressive pile of subsequently absorbed minutia. It might bubble to the surface again someday,but chances are it won’t be at the opportune moment, like when I’m at whateverstore sells the thing I needed to remember to buy, or when I’m talking to thenext door neighbor whose name I couldn’t recall properly for the first year ofour acquaintance. It’s Jan,incidentally, and I know because it’s now on my list of names I really need toremember in order to keep from looking like a dumbass. The other great thing about my phone list appis that no matter where I am when I decide to commit something to what hasessentially become the annex of my memory, chances are good that my phone iswith me. In the days of pen-and-paperlists I was forever needing a way to remember to add something to my list,which was at home or at work or someplace I wasn’t at the time. So I’d write on the back of my hand with apen--just one letter or two that would serve to trigger the memory when I wasreunited with my list. This generallyworked pretty well, although I’ll admit that I occasionally wondered, “what inthe hell is that ‘w’ for? after a few hours had passed. And even if I remembered, there was theinevitable questioning (in pretty much the same words) from anyone Iencountered, because apparently this isn’t a common way of communicating withoneself. But whatever, it worked. Usually.

Now my ever-present phone serves as a virtual hand uponwhich to take notes, and the results have been rewarding. Besides “to-do” and grocery lists, and the aforementionedlist of names I need to remember, I keep lists of movies and books peoplerecommend to me, coffee brands I particularly like, and random reminders, like howmuch weight I SCUBA dive with (10 lbs) and whether to order the porter or thestout at Barrio Brewery (the stout).

I also keep a running list of stuff to write about when Ifeel like writing but haven’t been inspired by a specific topic. Sometimes I’ll be at work when a good topicwill occur to me, or driving to Phoenixor some other situation where I don’t have the time or the ability to flesh outan idea in words. So I’ll log it into myphone, and then when I’m inclined to muse further I’ll refer back to my list ofideas. There are a few things on thatlist that have been there for a long time, and I’ve pretty much given up onever having a whole blog post of thoughts about any one of them, but usuallythere’s something that piques my interest. Unlike the ‘w’ on my hand though, I’m rarely so disassociated with theoriginal thought that I can’t figure out what triggered it in the first placeuntil this morning, when I checked my list and considered the entry “10000cookies = 1 turkey.” What the hell doesthat mean? I entered it, to be sure, andbecause my phone tells me these things I know it’s been a couple of monthssince I edited that particular list, but really? It’s like the dreams I used to religiouslyrecord upon waking when I was in high school and then have absolutely no memoryof dreaming them, or of writing them down, when I reread them monthslater. But those were dreams, which bydefinition exist as shadows unless we award them conscious consideration—andjotting something down in the first few feverish moments of wakefulness whenyou’re 15 years old doesn’t really count as conscious consideration. 10000 cookies = 1 turkey actuallydoes sound like something you might dream about, or be told that you uttered inyour sleep by a snickering spouse the next morning. I’m sure it was something I glanced at in anewsfeed, or heard on the radio, and probably around Thanksgiving, since that’sthe standard time of year when turkeys are discussed. Was it that there are the same number ofcalories in 10000 cookies as there are in one turkey? That doesn’t seem very likely. 10000 cookies is a lot of cookies, and I don’tcare how big your turkey is, it can’t have as many calories as a giant pile of bakedsugar-bombs. Plus, what kind of cookiesare they? Some cookies have morecalories than others—there’s hardly a standard cookie calorie measurement. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, thatit’s true—that 10000 cookies have the same number of calories as oneturkey. Who cares!? I don’t eat cookies anyway, and although Ihave been known to eat small parts of a turkey, I’m certainly not going toconsume a whole one before it goes all rotten or rancid or putrid or whateverhappens to turkeys when they’re not consumed within a reasonable period of time. So the personal relevance factor is out thewindow, and generally that’s what attracts me to a random factoid in the firstplace. Nutritionally speaking, I tend to be muchmore interested in protein content, and you can’t tell me that 10000 cookieshave as much protein as one turkey, unless they’re turkey cookies. I wonder how many turkeys it would take tomake 10000 turkey cookies? OK, nowthings are starting to get interesting, but again I’m not seeing the originalpull of this idea. Maybe it was some foodconspiracy thing—like processed turkeys are spiked with a lot of sugar? I don’t think you could fit 10000 cookiesworth of sugar into a bird unless it was an ostrich or a cassowary. Turkeysare bred to be big these days I know, but not THAT big.

So that’s what I’m left with—a bunch of questions aboutcookies and turkeys, and no idea what I was so interested in that I recorded itfor all eternity in my phone. It’spossible that I’ll wake up in the middle of the night sometime and proclaim “Ofcourse!” after my subconscious ties the appropriate threads together onceagain, but it doesn’t really matter. Ifthe point of my list is to give me things to write about, 10000 cookies = 1turkey did the job. And then some.

Spinach

2012-01-16T19:33:00.000-08:00

Recently I went to a triathlon club meeting that featured, as its speaker, an ultra runner. I’m labeling him an ultra runner even though he’s done a fair number of ultra distance triathlons too—based on the content and delivery of his stories, and the timing of his most maniacal eye-glittering, cycling and swimming are distant runners-up (no pun intended, I swear) in this man’s sport priorities. Even though I think ultra runners are every bit as crazy as endurance triathletes, if not more so, I personally find their temperaments much easier to relate to. In my experience, ultra runners tend to be less concerned about things like heart rate, exact mileage, and high-tech accessories; and more attuned towards things like the scenery and…I guess I would call it the spirituality of their sport. Now again, I’m not suggesting that I can truly understand anyone who thinks the next logical step after completing a 50 mile race is to sign up for a 100 mile race, but I usually “get” the ultra runner’s inclinations towards simplicity and towards running for the pure joy of running, rather than running in order to tick off some checkbox on a workout plan. So when someone asked this ultra runner what he listened to on his iPod, and he replied that he never runs with an iPod, I wasn’t surprised. Nor was I surprised when he elaborated—taking great care to be diplomatic in his choice of words—that listening to music just distracts him from his running experience.

Well, here’s where my “oneness” with the ultra runner starts to unravel. I run with an iPod all the time, and I don’t run 100 miles, or 50 miles, or even 20 miles, except on very rare occasions. I think being distracted from even the 5-mile running experience is a fine idea, although it is true that I only listen to music when running on roads, not on trails. But when I got up the next morning for my usual Tuesday road run, I thought about what the ultra runner had said, and I decided to leave my iPod behind.

And that’s how I came to be musing on spinach at 5:45 on a Tuesday morning. It turns out when you don’t have the rhythmic beats of Green Day to wrap your brain around, or pretty cacti to look at, your mind ends up riffing on some pretty weird stuff. I was actually on one of my favorite parts of the run when it all started—the short stretch of bike path along Alvernon Rd. that cuts behind a police substation that looks like a giant rusted ship. The path hugs, on its other side, some sort of retention pond that attracts all manner of birds, and it’s not uncommon to see vest-clad birders lurking about in the pathside weeds with their binoculars and their life lists. Along this stretch, even though you’re just a few yards away from the road, you get a few seconds of pastoral pleasure as you lope by the ducks and reeds. The pond is somehow affiliated with another basin on the police station side of the path, which I’m pretty sure is some kind of water treatment arrangement. I’m also pretty sure that the pond smells exactly, precisely, and overwhelmingly like cooked spinach. I’m not crazy about the smell of cooked spinach early in the morning. It doesn’t smell like victory at all--it pretty much smells like ass. So now I’m loping past the ducks and reeds a bit faster, gagging just a little bit, and rather than try to figure out what actual vegetative/effluent phenomenon is scenting the spinach cloud, I’d rather consider the myriad and particular nooks that spinach occupies in my cerebral cortex. And so, for a couple of miles, I do.

My earliest memory of spinach (is it too weird that I have one?) is of how much I used to hate it when it was served at lunchtime in kindergarten. I have a very clear mental video of my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Wessinger, munching away on HER spinach across the table from me (I don’t know if today’s kindergarten teachers are required to dine on the same food as their 5-year-old charges, but God help them if they are), and wondering how she didn’t barf it all back up while at the same time trying to devise some way of disposing of my own spinach without being detected. I was probably never truly successful at this, but I know I wrapped the offending mushy lump in my napkin every time it appeared on my putty-colored, sectioned tray. Do they still brightly encourage kindergartners to “clean your plates?” More ominous words than these three were never spoken on spinach day. My mom tried to serve cooked spinach at home, I’m guessing just once, before relegating it to the list of “threat foods” along with broccoli and beets (as in, “if you don’t clean your room, you’re only getting spinach for dinner!”)

I've always found it interesting how different raw spinach and cooked spinach are in just about every measurable way. This is actually kind of true for a lot of vegetables, and without exception I prefer the raw form in every case. Raw carrots? Awesome. Cooked carrots? Mushy. Raw celery? Pretty good (especially with peanut butter on it). Cooked celery? Mushy. And disgusting. Cooking vegetables lowers the pitch of their flavor and renders them spineless. It also reduces them to a fraction of their former size, which can be very confusing if you're at all precise in your measurement of portions. Raw spinach leaves are good in salads and even just by themselves with a little salt sprinkled over them. They're super-good for you and, if you can get past the sensation that you're eating a handful of leaves (which you are), they're pretty innocuous. But when you throw them in a pan, or a steamer, you get instant slime city. That the consistency of cooked spinach is just like the consistency of rotten spinach is never lost on me, and although I have acquired a grudging tolerance for cooked spinach over the years, it's far from my go-to vegetable.

My mom recently made spinach chips, which is by far the weirdest incarnation of spinich I've encountered. She arranged spinach leaves on a cookie sheet, spritzed them with oil, sprinkled them with spices, and then baked them. The resulting "chips" were crispy, and actually tasted pretty good, but they were also as delicate as butterfly wings. More delicate, in fact, resulting in spinach splinters all over the floor--and your teeth--no matter how deliberately and carefully you tried to eat them. My mom said they were a pain in the ass to make, and I can attest to the fact that they were a pain in the ass to eat. Thus, the spinach chips did not make a second appearance.

You're probably starting to wonder how many more spinach vignettes I can produce, but fortunately for both of us, my run is rounding its last corner and I'm closing in on my house. My experiment in iPodless free-associating is drawing to a close, but I have a few steps left to consider how much like eating my spinach the experience has been. Good for me, right? But nothing like dessert.

Frog Hunt

2011-12-24T10:37:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about traveling is listening to the animal night sounds endemic to different locales. In Hawaii, where I grew up, there isn't much active at night--or at least not much that makes noise. The sound of the wind rustling in the coconut palms transports me right back to the eighteen years of nights I fell asleep in my room with the louvered windows open to catch the cross breeze, and there were crickets, for sure, and the occasional staccato chirp of geckos under the stairs, but nothing like the orchestra that signifies the rainforest or the African savannah or even St. Louis, MO, where I learned that the "summer nights" setting on my Sharper Image soothing noise generator really does correspond precisely with an actual ecosystem. Who knew? Actually, I've heard that since I left the Islands they've developed a rather vexing problem with a tiny invasive species of frog--something that makes a huge and disruptive noise despite its diminutive size. This is something I feel I can relate to tonight, as I listen to the rhythmic peeping of hundreds of amphibians on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where I'm spending the holidays. I've seen the frogs from whence the noise emenates, and can attest to the fact that, despite the strength of their far-ringing chirp, most of them are less than an inch in length. Peter, who is six, insisted on leading a frog hunt after dinner, so, armed with flashlights, we set out to the edges of the lawn where ginger and heleconia ring the manicured grass. The frogs are everywhere--it's not really even a challenge to locate them. It wasn't even a challenge to locate the frog I've had it in for all day, the one who kept me awake last night peeping plaintitively outside my bedroom window despite my best attempts to drown him out with closed windows, air-conditioning, and earplugs--in that increasingly desperate order. As I lay in bed, wondering why on earth I could still hear the damn thing, I longingly imagined finding and relocating him but, as it turned out, even my most optimistic fantasies didn't predict the ease with which I would eventually complete this satisfying task. When I (having left Peter and Jack studying a lizard on a banana tree) rounded the corner behind my thatch-roofed hut, there he was, perched right at the meeting of my shutters, throat inflated, mid-peep. His light brown body contrasted sharply with the white stuccoed window ledge, and he was so proud in his territorial display that he didn't even flinch when I reached for his tiny, defiant, translucent form. His belated escape leap landed him squarely on my forearm where, unfazed, he posed for several photographs before flinging himself to the grass at my feet. But once again, I effortlessly scooped him up and carried him to the opposite end of the property, depositing him in what I hoped was a grove of trees appealing enough to prevent him from making his way back to my window. We also saw a caterpillar, several lizards, and a millipede on our nocturnal nature hike, but nothing was as satisfying as finding that frog, believe me.

Oceans

2011-10-20T18:22:00.000-07:00

I consider myself sort of a connoisseur of oceans. Is that an arrogant thing to say? Probably, but that rarely stops me from staying stuff. I'll admit there are a lot of oceans I haven't seen--the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, the Indian Ocean. I've also never seen the Salton Sea, which isn't technically an ocean at all--just a sad, sick lake left over from one of California’s more egregious water manipulation schemes. I actually really want to visit the Salton Sea for reasons I can't quite pin down--it resonates in my imagination in a peculiar way despite all the horrific descriptions I've read about bird corpses and stagnation. I guess the reason I want to see it is the same reason most people have never heard of it—it’s a mostly forgotten piece in a somewhat dark chapter of our history. And I find myself drawn to stuff like that. But now I'm on a tangent, as usual, so let me try to swim back to shore.

I grew up in Hawaii, which means that my proximity to the ocean rarely exceeded a mile before I was 18. In the summer we always went to visit my grandparents for three weeks--they lived near Seattle on Puget Sound, which isn't technically an ocean either, but it's connected to one and it's pretty darn big so I'm counting it. I'm also aware that the ocean it's connected to is the same ocean that Hawaii is in the middle of, but my point tally here does not refer to quantity of oceans visited, more like quantity of total time spent ocean-adjacent. So then I went to college in Los Angeles (which, by the way, is where I learned that usage of the word "adjacent," in the real-estate listings where "Hancock Park-adjacent" is used as a sneaky euphemism for "Mid-Wilshire crap-hole,") where at least I was close enough to the ocean to visit it on weekends. But after that I moved to Tucson, which has nothing to do with oceans, or really water of any type, at all. In fact, sometime during the first few months I lived there, I developed sort of an ocean-withdrawal syndrome, by which I mean that I got mopey and weird and opted to blame it on "oceansickness," a word (and condition) I made up, which I should clarify is derived from "homesickness," not "seasickness" which as you know is something else entirely--instead of PMS or endemic moodiness or any one of a number of problems that no one would take seriously. In any case, a well-meaning friend suggested the following method for getting my ocean fix: look at the edge of a mountain range against the blue sky and pretend it's a satellite photo of a coastline. The sky becomes the ocean, and, presto...you're in a good mood! Yeah, it worked about as well as you're imagining. But he was a nice guy.

In Tucson I started having ocean dreams, which I'm pretty sure was my subconscious's way of asking me what the hell I was doing in Tucson on a nightly basis. I would call these dreams "recurring" except that other than the general ocean theme they really didn't have all that much in common. Sometimes I'd be floating around at Waimanalo Beach in the pristine turquoise water, sometimes I'd be clinging to a piece of driftwood after a shipwreck in blackness with sinister sea creatures nuzzling my legs. Fleeing from tidal waves, bodysurfing, scuba diving, pretty much every manifestation of oceanic activity you can imagine, I dreamt. I would wake up feeling either calm and comforted or gasping for air in my humidity-free, one-bedroom desert apartment with a view of that stupid satellite-photo mountain range, and I'd wonder how I ever got so far from the sea.

The thing is, I really love the desert too. And living in the desert is much more compatible with my low-paying profession, so I don't waste a lot of time scheming to get back to the ocean on a permanent basis. OK, yeah, I do harbor this sort of Jimmy Buffet-style retirement fantasy, (minus the singing, which I do not do in fantasy or reality) but given the global warming crisis who knows where the oceans will even BE by the time I retire, and maybe if I'm just patient I can stay put in Tucson and it'll all work out anyway. In the meantime I just savor the benefits of desert life (to be expounded upon in another entry I'm sure) and make sure that my vacation plans include regular pilgrimages to seaside locations.

But like my crazy aquatic-themed dreams, seaside locations are infinitely varied. At this precise moment I'm sitting in the bay window of a house in Mendocino, CA watching flocks of pelicans fly by (accompanied in my head, for some reason, by that music from Apocalypse Now) and the waves crash against big dark rocks. This particular manifestation of the ocean is a bit of a rip-off, and by that I mean that it's all pretty looks and no follow-through. And by THAT I mean that any ocean you can't swim in without risking life, limb, and thermoregulatory equilibrium just doesn't float my boat--although I guess it would literally float my boat just fine. Until it smashed it against big dark rocks.

My former spouse, with whom I used to travel here regularly, said he could easily live in this town. Of course, this sentiment wasn't rooted in any sort of reality--if you've ever perused real estate listings in Mendocino...well I'm guessing you haven't so I'll just tell you that Zoogirl and Horse-boot man didn’t have the means to live in Northern California, except maybe in a chicken coop in some scrubby little inland enclave. But even in the parallel universe where I could afford a Mendocino mortgage, I still don't think I'd be content to call this ocean my home. It's cold here, even in the summertime, and foggy and damp, and you can't swim in the ocean. Or you could, but unless you were abalone-diving or had something to prove, you really wouldn't want to. This ocean is like the brooding guy you had a crush on in college--all that churning and danger makes for fine viewing across the quad, but any attempt at intimacy ends up with you smashed up against those jagged rocks again. Not that I'm still bitter about that.

But don't get me wrong--I'm still moved by this stretch of tortured coastline. It's just interesting how something with one name can manifest itself so differently in different places. I guess it's like those ocean dreams I used to have, and still do--although not as frequently as the desert has finally started to displace the ocean in my veins.

When you drive from San Francisco to Mendocino, there's a spot where you emerge from the Redwood forest on the 128 and suddenly have this sweeping view of the ocean. It would be dramatic anyway, but for me there's always this feeling of comfort and reassurance, like when your lips have been chapped for the whole afternoon and you finally get home and put Carmex on them. The sea here is complicated and strange and totally different every time you look at it, but it’s also always the same. And I could probably go on and on about it (like I haven't already) but now its time to go back to the desert.

People often ask me if I miss living in Hawaii, so I'm often compelled to defend why I don't. I miss Hawaii, don't get me wrong, I just don't miss living there. If you know me, you've probably already heard my list of reasons, so I'll just repeat the one I'm thinking about right now, which is that because I tend towards restlessness, Hawaii gave me a pretty severe case of island fever. Everything non-tropical is five hours (and a few hundred dollars) away by plane, which makes spontaneity (and/or financial solvency) a bit of a challenge. When I left Hawaii for college in L. A., it took me about 48 hours to decide I never wanted to move back. It wasn't the magnetism of higher learning that caused me to turn my back on the Homeland, it was the siren song of the midnight road trip. I know the idea of throwing a bag of chips and a six pack of Mountain Dew into someone's crappy Toyota and sputtering off into the night isn't exactly revolutionary, but for someone previously trapped within a 20 mile radius from the hospital of my birth, it was like heroin. Most of the time we didn't even have a specific destination, but in those days of criminally inexpensive gasoline just driving aimlessly along the interstates was often a more fulfilling way to spend a Friday night than clutching one of those red plastic cups filled with cheap keg beer and listening to sorority girls out-shriek each other. Even now, almost 20 years later, there's something magical about being on the road, especially at night, and especially in California. There are these long stretches of absolutely nothing and then, nestled in a foothill valley, the warm yellow-orange glow of some town you've never heard of which probably looks run-down and ghastly during the day but as you slip by it on a warm evening it glitters sleepy-secret and ethereal. And then suddenly it's gone again, and you're back to nothing but ghostly green highway signs and exit roads that disappear into indeterminate blackness. For some reason I never get tired of this. During the day I don't get quite the same feeling--I'm too distracted by outlet malls and traffic (where are all these people going, anyway?) but it's still sort of liberating to think that you could just drive and drive and end up someplace completely different from where you started.

Goin' to the Zoo...again

2011-09-27T16:47:00.000-07:00

There are people who don't have anything better to do with their day than come to the Zoo. I'm not talking about some days, I'm talking about EVERY day. Once upon a time it was free to get into our Zoo, and as I understand it this attracted every drunk and/or transient individual within a 10 mile radius. After years of stepping over the passed-out carcasses of the City's wayward souls, Zoo staff somehow convinced Mayor and Council that a modest admission rate would go a long way toward keeping the riffraff out. Although this has in large part been the case, we still get our share of drunk, disorderly, or just poorly behaved Zoo clientele. We also have Zoo groupies--they're the ones who spend an entire day at the Zoo. Then the next day, guess what? Zoo again. And the day after that? Hey how 'bout the Zoo? You get the idea.

Admittedly, there are worse ways to spend your time than cavorting with the lions and bears, and I think some of the Zoo's ultra-frequent patrons just like the shaded walkways and the intimacy of our exhibits, which allow you to get really close to stuff. But some of these people honestly seem less interested in the animals, and more interested in the staff, and that's where things get a little weird.

So, the other day we put out our new tiger, a female we'd recently acquired from the Bronx Zoo. It must have been a slow news day in Tucson, because our somewhat perfunctory press release was met with disproportionate enthusiasm by the local media, who turned up in force to film Sita's first foray onto exhibit and to interview our animal curator, and me, and the 6 year olds gathered in front of the exhibit, and anyone else they could find. It was actually a really fun morning, and everything went according to plan (which primarily means the tiger didn't freak out and cower in her night house, or climb out of the exhibit and eat a Girl Scout). But I did sort of wonder what was up with the bald dude in the black shirt who I kept seeing--the one chatting up the photographers and the visitors, first on one side of the exhibit and then the other. He finally cornered me between interviews and I found out what was up with him...more than I ever wanted to know. He was, like the tiger, from the Bronx, and had in fact spent every day of the previous few months AT the Bronx Zoo, watching Sita the tiger in her old digs, and then wondering where she went, and at this point I start to wonder, like you're doing now, if maybe he's FOLLOWED her to Tucson, but I don't ask because I really don't think I want to know.

Now Bronx Guy wants to tell me about how much he loves the Zoo (which is great), and how often he intends to visit (which is a little unsettling), and a bunch of loosely related stuff about his firefighter friends in the Bronx and how they could have gotten him into the Bronx Zoo for free (which is sort of garbled and unclear), and then back to how much he loves the Zoo (which is, at least, safe ground again.) My head is starting to hurt from all the nodding and smiling, but I can't quite figure out how to shake this guy. Fortunately the cameraman from Channel 4 wants to talk to me about doing a live weather remote, and Bronx guy wanders off, muttering about firefighters who love the Zoo, or something like that.

Three hours later I'm back in my office when Rusty and Chelsea come in, and they're both laughing about Bronx Guy, who has by now introduced himself to every member of our staff, and invited half of them to come back to the Bronx with him. I consider being offended that I was not among those asked, and decide against it. Groupies sound a lot better when you’re not the rock star.

And Stay Off My Lawn!

2011-04-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

I am really trying to accept with grace the fact that I am growing older. I mean, duh, we all are, but the process really does seem to intensify as you close in on 40, which I am in the process of doing. I'm certainly not thrilled with my increasing population of gray hairs, or the fact that my swim-goggle induced raccoon eyes hang around for a lot longer than they used to, but I try not to get hung up on stuff like this—I honestly think that people who fight the aging process often end up looking weirder than those who just ignore it. I'm pretty lucky that my lifestyle has protected me—at least so far—from some of the other hallmarks of aging, like the slowing metabolism and the aching joints. Those will come I'm sure, but they'll have to catch me on the run.

Actually the sign of my approaching old age that is becoming the hardest to ignore has nothing to do with the breakdown of the body—it's my increasing inability to tolerate people who are younger than I am. Little kids are ok, and even teenagers don't really bother me, but undergrads and 20-somethings drive me completely insane. Not the ones I know—as I'm in the habit of choosing my friends on the basis of merit—I'm talking about the armies of young “adults” with whom I come into fleeting contact in my daily life.

Tucson is what they call a “college town,” so as you can imagine, the city is pretty much crawling with college-aged nightmares and their recently graduated, similarly aimless counterparts. They swerve around me in cars that cost a lot more than mine, alternately yammering into their phones and adjusting their giant sunglasses. They descend in droves on every cool bar and restaurant within a 5 mile radius of the University, rendering these places uninhabitable to the rest of humanity. They're very loud and dramatic, they talk in public about things that have no business being talked about in public, and many of them act drunk even when they're not. Did I behave like this when I was their age? Probably. But now that I'm old, I find myself wondering when kids became so damned inconsiderate.

It's bad enough when they're an anonymous, if annoying, presence in the general public sphere. But every once in a while, despite my best attempts at avoidance, one comes buzzing a little too close, and forces me to engage. I have recently learned more than I ever wanted to know about the most vapid young people from autobiographical monologues that I can't escape because of some poor decision I made—like going to the group run without an ipod. Hey, I'm glad you've made a “very serious” decision to forgo drinking and staying up all night in favor of training for triathlons, and that you've already completed Gate's Pass bike repeats, a four-hour brick workout, and numerous zone-5 run intervals this weekend, but you don't have to keep repeating this in slightly different ways for five and a half miles. I get it, you're here, and you're obsessive. What do you want, a medal? It's 6:30 in the morning, shut up! Where did today's youth get the memo that it's a good idea to talk about yourself, endlessly and exclusively, to relative strangers who are (in a way that would be telling if you were paying any attention at all) trying to ignore you?

I have a well-documented intolerance for vacuous people of any age, but the older ones I at least feel sorry for. The young ones don't arouse any pity in me--or if they do I can't sense it underneath my urge to punch them in the face. I realize I should be cutting the young ones some slack, on the assumption that they will mature into intelligent, perceptive human beings given a few more years of life experience. But I'm just not convinced it'll happen, since they are--as a group--much more obnoxious, oblivious, and entitled than we ever were.

Do I sound like your grandparents yet? Yeah, that's how I know that I'm old.

Ragnarly (2011)

2011-04-19T14:41:00.001-07:00

The problem with getting involved in competitive athletics is that, like the heroin user, you often end up on on a persistent quest to up the ante with regard to the distance and types of events that you do. Wait, now I'm mixing my metaphors--do I want to go with drugs or gambling? Doesn't matter, you get the point. While exercise may be less disfiguring than heroin, and less expensive than gambling (as long as you're not a cyclist), it definitely brings with it the risk of making impulsive and increasingly bizarre decisions to which only an addict of one sort or another can truly relate. When we decided that participating in a 12-person Ragnar team wasn't challenging enough, and that reducing our team by half was the obvious solution to that problem, we embarked on a journey of pain, anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, and isolated vomiting that blurred the line between reality and metaphor for a grueling 29 hours, 47 minutes, and 13 seconds. And it was awesome.

If you don't know how the Ragnar relay works, you can either visit their website at http://www.ragnarrelay.com/ or read my last post. These types of distance relays are becoming increasingly popular as the word of their unique blend of fun and misery spreads, and the good folks at Ragnar are adding new races as fast as they can fill them. I'm not sure what the ratio of 12-person to 6-person teams in any given event is, but it seems to be great enough that Ultra Teams, as we're called, are treated on the course with a combination of awe and derision. Of course, that's if people notice the signifying color of your race number—there were a number of instances where I almost felt as though I needed to defend myself out loud when being passed by some sprightly runner who was only in the first mile his or her leg, as opposed to my 6th or 7th. But it doesn't matter, right? Oh, who am I kidding, of course it does.

Our team of six was almost exactly the same team in our van from the year before (which was, in 2010, half of our total 12-person team), except that one of our former runners was now driving the vehicle, and we had acquired another runner—female—whose presence launched our team squarely into the co-ed division. To be co-ed, a team has to be at least 50% female, and here's the kicker—if a female gets injured on the course another female has to make up her mileage. This detail caused me quite a bit of concern in the weeks leading up to the race, as Julie struggled with a foot injury that threatened to affect her performance at Ragnar. I realize there's no “I” in team, but if Julie went down in the middle and couldn't complete her mileage, there was gonna be a whole LOT of I in our team, and I just wasn't sure I could run any more than the 28ish miles I'd signed up for. But Julie was quite determined that she'd be able to finish, one way or another, and if there's anyone who can make good on a claim like that, she's the one.

Here's a tip for those of you already itching to sign up for a Ragnar race: unless you are either Job-patient, or a relentless procrastinator, do not volunteer to be the last runner on your team. Crossing the big finish line during your final leg is fun, for sure, but it's totally not worth the first eye-gouging 10 hours of the race when all you do is sit in the van with your blood congealing and your muscles lying around uselessly and watch your teammates tear up the course. Oh and then there's another period of torture from around sunrise the next morning until early afternoon, when each of your teammates staggers back into the van after completing his or her last run, and you sit there some more, now with blood congealing and muscles lying there mostly dead, unable to celebrate or breathe that final sigh of relief because you know your last shift is still to come. I'm sure some people can suffer these hours with optimism and grace, but I'm also now sure that I'm not one of them. Lesson learned.

But then again, I didn't actually choose to be the last runner. Julie was going to take that spot, and had taken it the year before so ostensibly knew what she was in for. Then, just a few days before the race, we discovered (quite by accident, which was a little disturbing) that the course had changed, and that consequently the mileage for some of the runners had changed too. My mileage, for example, had dropped to 24, and Julie's had increased to 29. Fueled by a combination of discomfort at running an “Ultra” race that didn't even consist of marathon-distance mileage, and guilt that our injured runner was now supposed to run 5 more miles than I was, I offered to trade spots with Julie. After careful consideration, and after poking her foot a few times in the spot that was causing her pain, she accepted. In the end, the switch was for the best, I think, even with its hardships. Julie's last leg was a monsterous tangle of hills, and although she struggled with it, she did fine. By that time I was having trouble with both my Achilles tendons, and if I'd had to take those hills I think I would have ended up walking—or crawling—most of the way. As it was, my final run was about as close to pancake-flat as I could have hoped for, and although my tendons were pissed off, they didn't rupture or tear or explode or any of those scary things Achilles tendons can do. So it all worked out.

Given the conditions—six people, 197 miles, one van, no sleep—it's kind of amazing how few things DID go wrong. Probably the most concerning incident occurred as a direct result of that same course change, which increased one of our team members' first run length from a somewhat daunting 14 miles to a totally ridiculous 17 miles. When Michael (Runner #5) finished that run, he was not only wiped out from slogging away for over three hours, but evidently he'd eaten something that didn't agree with him, and spent the next few hours battling periodic bouts of—I have to say—very polite and unobtrusive barfing into various disposable containers. Between these, he sacked out on the middle seat of the van and tried to sleep off whatever in the hell was wrong with him. But it became obvious before too long that even if the nausea passed before his next run, he wasn't going to have enough fuel or water in his system to get through it safely. Ever the team player, Michael offered to complete his mileage at a safe and reasonable walking pace—but the thought of waiting for him to WALK 7 miles was more than the rest of us (and particularly I, who as we've already established suffers from clinical restlessness and was also the runner directly after Michael in the rotation) could bear. So Julie came up with a plan wherein she would complete 3 miles of Michael's leg directly after her 6 mile leg, and I would jump in early and do 4 of his miles before my 7. When actually faced with the extra-mileage fate I'd anticipated with such dread, thinking of Julie's injured foot in the weeks before the race, I was surprised to find that I was actually kind of enthusiastic about taking on an even greater challenge mid-race. Don't ask me what that's about. I guess at some point, when you're already facing a big heap of wilfully-chosen pain and suffering, you just kind of say “go ahead, pile it on.” And so we did.

Sometime in the night things kind of unraveled—not in any dramatic or unusual way, just in the way that you'd expect giving the circumstances. Everyone got really tired, and everyone's legs hurt a lot, and we all just sat around scowling and trying in vain to get some rest. The hours from midnight until about 6am were the worst, and I remember thinking a lot about what a stupid idea this was, and how I was DEFINITELY never doing it again.

But then it started to get light out, and for some reason that made us all feel a little better. And one by one, people started finishing their last runs, which made THEM feel a lot better, although it didn't really do much for me. I tried to sleep a little bit, even going so far as to declare my intention and insert my earplugs, but as exhausted as I was I couldn't seem to manage more than a few minutes of an ungratifying semi-doze, so I gave up and focused instead on worrying about my Achilles tendons, which were both singing an ominous lament. I had, at this point, run 22 miles—a distance not achieved since I ran a marathon in 2004, and even then achieved only with intermittant walk breaks. I'm still not sure whether it's “easier” to run that kind of mileage in one fell swoop, or with a few hours of recovery in between—particularly when that “recovery” entails sleep deprivation and van entrapment. Either way, I still had 11 more miles to schlep, and whatever level of discomfort my Achilles were feeling at that point would no doubt increase by one-third plus whatever appropriate algorithm applies to the breakdown of tendons after 22 miles of repeated pounding.

Which is why, when discussion resumed about whether Michael should run his last leg, I was all for it. Technically, after sitting out one of his runs, Michael was not supposed to jump back into the rotation (so sayeth the Ragnar Race Bible). But by now he was completely recovered, and not one of the rest of us was inclined to respect the rules at the expense of our screaming leg muscles, so we pulled him off the bench (this is strictly figurative—we definitely expected him to get his own ass off the bench), and back into the game.

When I took the last handoff from Michael (who ran quite admirably), it was with a mixture of emotions ranging from excitement (that we were almost done) to dread (that both my Achilles would rupture, showering tendon and bone fragments all over Fountain Hills) to annoyance (that my teammates were stuffing their faces with popcorn and cookies while I still had work to do). But all of this settled into a semi-dazed acceptance as I found my rythym, and set off down a concrete path that meandered alongside a well-landscaped condo complex. My ankles hurt, but not terribly, and as the miles went by nothing seemed to be getting any worse. I passed a couple of runners, then a couple more, and before long I was feeling pretty good. This was actually the first run I'd done during daylight hours (another reason to avoid being runner #6!) and it was nice to look around and see what the rest of the world was up to. The course loped through a series of parks and other “green” areas, and although I'm not crazy about running on cement (the most unyielding of running substrates), I liked being on this path instead of on the streets. Really the only thing I missed was my team—I had instructed them to just go ahead to the finish, but now I was kind of sorry that I hadn't demanded their cheering presence on the course. It would all have been a bit lonely, except for the fact that I was running just ahead of a woman whose team, named “More Cowbell,” kept popping up along the path to seranade her (and me, by lucky proximity) with enthusiastic clanging. The anticipation of their next impromptu concert kept me from obsessing about my ankles, which would perform their own (much less inspiring) clanging concert every time I encountered any sort of incline. Fortunately there weren't many of these, and they were all of the rolling, golf-course variety, but I still had to slow down and shuffle both up and down every one I traversed.

And so I continued like this, without further incident, until I reached the blessed finish line. My teammates, stiff and sore and without the benefit of 11 miles of momentum, did kind of a half-assed job of accompanying me on my 20 yard sprint to the finish (don't ask me where that little burst of energy hid for 32.9999 miles), but eventually we all lurched over the line and into the frame of a group photo (posted below) that I later would have no memory of having posed for. And that's when it happened—all the pain and fog and misery of the previous 29 hours 47 minutes and 13 seconds lifted, and it suddenly became THE BEST RACE EVER. The mind has a tremendous capacity for blocking out suffering, doesn't it? But c'mon, I ran 33 miles. And just watch, I'll do it again.

Ragnar Del Sol 2011
Tucson Desert Heat Ultra Team:

Fred Magana
Marjanne Schnarr
Geoff Swanson
Michael Ellerd
Julie Stark
Kristen Metzger

Driver/Mascot: Mark Stark

Ragnarly (2010)

2011-03-12T17:11:00.000-08:00

For want of a last sentence or two, this piece about the 2010 Ragnar Del Sol Relay (now over a year old) never got posted. I am still working on my review of the 2011 Ragnar race, but I stumbled across this and thought I'd use it as a placeholder until I the next one gets finished. Hopefully that won't be in 2012, but I'm not making any promises.

***

Generally I sign up for races that sound like fun. But I’m not gonna lie; sometimes I sign up for races that DON’T sound like fun, or they sound like less fun than misery, or like it could be a crapshoot either way. We could probably spend some time digging for the roots of this strange masochism, but I don’t feel like it right now, so let’s just say that I like to do things that other people think are crazy because people think they’re crazy and leave it at that.

If you don’t like to run, a lot, or you don’t like staying up all night, or riding around in a van with seven other sweaty people and their discarded running clothes, or spending time on the side of a cold, dark highway in the middle of nowhere , you might think that signing up for the Ragnar Del Sol 24 hour relay is a little crazy. My co-workers thought it was crazy, my family definitely thought it was crazy—actually most of the people I know who weren’t doing the race themselves thought it was crazy. There’s just not a lot of middle ground on a race like this.

The way this thing works is that teams of twelve people (or teams of six people, but we’re not going to talk about how crazy THEY are) sign up to complete the 200-ish--mile course by running three course legs each. Six people get in one van (or a Suburban or a Ford Explorer, but we’re not going to talk about how crazy THEY are), and six people get in another. The first van’s runners run six legs of the race, each leg varying in its mileage and difficulty; while the other van’s runners rest or eat or pace anxiously at the next van exchange point. Then the vans switch and it’s the other runners’ turn to rest or eat or pace or whatever. You end up running once every 8-10 or so hours, and completing between 13-23 miles total depending on how clever and/or coherent you were when selecting your running slot. They don’t let you switch around or swap legs with someone else, although if you’re sneaky you can totally get away with it--it’s just not very Ragnarly of you.

Back when I signed up, which was sometime last fall, Ragnar seemed like a distant speck on the horizon. It’s easy to be enthusiastic about something so far away, so I gamely helped my intrepid friend Julie scrape together a team of other masochistic runners from our triathlon club network. The line “everyone I know who’s done this race says it’s the most amazing thing EVER!” got a lot of positive response, which is weird because although true, it’s really not very specific. Nevertheless, within several weeks we had a complete team of twelve enthusiastic runners. High fives were exchanged, and deposits collected, but then a week later we were down to eleven again, then back up to twelve, then eleven, ten, nine—runners are an unreliable bunch, not because they’re inherently unreliable but because they get injured on a fairly regular basis. So Julie and I spent most of February exchanging a series of panicked emails about stress fractures and achilles tendonitis, and didn’t Mike say he knew a guy who knew a guy, and somehow we ended up with twelve healthy runners by race weekend.

It turns out, for those of you thinking about running a 200-ish mile relay, that the running is not the hard part. The hard part is organizing twelve people and their accompanying food and running gear, procuring two 15-passenger vans, and schlepping the whole mess four hours north on a Thursday evening. By the time we got to the Prescottonian, which is what, I’m not kidding, our hotel in Prescott was called, it was almost midnight. The good news was that the six people in my van didn’t have to wake up early the next morning to be at the start of the race; the bad news is that although runners may not be inherently unreliable, they are inherently incapable of sleeping in. Still, it was nice to enjoy a leisurely morning and take full advantage of the Prescottonian’s make-your-own-waffle station before loading up and heading to the first van exchange point.

It was weird to have very little communication with the other half of our team, and thus know very little about what went on during our “off” periods. Cell phone service is, maybe not surprisingly, a bit spotty along the lonely highways of Northern Arizona, so we checked in when we could and beyond that just had faith that Ryan, their last runner, would come tearing around the appropriate corners on schedule, ready to hand off to our first runner, which was me. This worked great at the first van exchange point, where we arrived early and refreshed, with plenty of time to stretch and chat with the other teams’ runners before go time. However, it turned out that our “running schedule,” painstakingly put together by teammate Kevin using what we thought was a combination of algorithms, coefficients, and coordinate geometry (I just pulled those terms at random from a mathematics website, did I fool you? It would’ve fooled me, but that’s not saying much) was actually “pulled out of his ass,” as we discovered somewhat later. Actually we discovered it when we were roused from a rare and fleeting moment of sleep in a hotel in Wickenburg (disappointingly NOT called the Wickatonain) to be informed that we needed to be at Exchange 18 in twenty minutes, rather than the one HUNDRED and twenty minutes that we had originally planned. So we grabbed our bags, splashed water on our faces, and dashed out the door. Because we’re so freaking fast, we arrived at the exchange almost on time. Because we’re so freaking stupid, we arrived at the WRONG exchange almost on time, and spent another 18 minutes wondering where in the hell Ryan was. But what’s a 24 minute lag in a 24 hour race, right? It’s not like we were in the lead.

Other than this minor glitch, everything ran like clockwork (more or less) for most of the race. My first 4 mile leg was easy and fast and fun; and my second 8 mile leg was dark and a little cold, but not nearly as lonely as I’d anticipated. I’ve been thinking about how to describe the moments spent trotting along SR-79 just after midnight, with the other teams’ vans rumbling past and those angelic course volunteers materializing every half mile or so to offer human contact and encouraging words, but can’t seem to capture the clarity and the chill and the ethereal darkness in a way that does it justice, so you’ll just have to trust me on that one.

But then again, while I was having this transcendental running experience, up ahead on the road something much darker and more corporeal was taking place. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that dumping hundreds of runners on the shoulder of a dark highway engenders a certain risk; but with all the lights, and reflective vests, and support vans you’d hope that both drivers and runners would be extra cautious and that never the ‘twain should meet. But unfortunately, despite all the precautions, a runner who had finished his own leg and was crossing the highway to hand water to a teammate was hit by a vehicle not associated with the race. We were caught in a long backup of support vans and stopped runners while the helicopter came and the police closed the highway to conduct an investigation. The rest of the runners in our van never did their nighttime legs, and we were all sent back to circumvent that section of the highway and reassemble at a later exchange point to restart the race. It was very sad and a little surreal, and I desperately wish it hadn’t happened.

This was a difficult change of plans to report to our groggy teammates, who were as clueless about our adventures on the course as we had been about theirs. We gave them directions to bypass the closed highway, and set off towards the meeting point ourselves. The drive seemed to take a really long time--I’m not sure if that was because it was a long distance or because by now it was 4:00 a.m. and 19 hours into race. But we got them to the reset exchange point and more or less oriented, sent them on their way and then went off in search of breakfast, and more importantly, coffee, which had been an all-too-rare commodity in the greater Wickenburg area. By now we were on the outskirts of Phoenix, a.k.a. “civilization,” and thus were able to procure Starbucks, pancakes, and a sink in which to take a sponge bath in the same suburban corner mall.

The weird thing was that I wasn’t that tired, or didn’t feel so at the time. As I’m trying to piece things together now, it’s clear that not all of my neurons were firing properly, but considering I’m usually terrible at staying up all night, I think I did pretty well. We got to our last van exchange point in plenty of time to explore the high school at which it was located, and to discover that other, more experienced teams had flung sleeping bags on the floor of the school’s heated gymnasium like so many natural disaster refugees. Our unwitting teammate Geoff, meanwhile, was sacked out in a parking space next to the van. I’m not sure I could have slept if I wanted to.

But before long Ryan came tearing around the corner, and I was off for my last leg. Gone were the peaceful highways, replaced by the crush of suburban humanity and traffic lights. I had to stop at three of these in 3 miles, which, in combination with some really impressive hills made for the hardest of my three legs despite the shorter distance. Traffic lights on a race course totally suck.

After I ran, the rest of my van-mates got their last legs in, and we met our other six teammates just short of the finish line to run Julie in. It’s weird, as I look back on this I’m not sure I will have convinced anyone why this race is so cool, but that’s part of being a runner I think—at some point you just have to accept that most people think you’ve lost your mind.

It gets worse though. Not only was every one of our team members gung ho to sign up again for next year, but a few of us are thinking seriously about doing the race as a 6-person team.

Irony Takes Another Holiday

2011-01-16T12:58:00.000-08:00

This blog post was supposed to be about the cruise I went on with Andy and his family over the holidays. It was going to be funny--hilarious in fact--but I can’t write it now. If you’re reading this around the time I post it, and you don’t live in a cave, and I tell you that I live in Tucson, you probably know why.

Last week I was looking for some company on a bike ride, and Julie needed to get in some training mileage, so she offered to put something together for our group of friends on Saturday. I've thought about this a lot--the way a series of seemingly random occurrences or decisions leads you to where you are. Julie had a coached swim session that she wanted to fit in before the ride, so we met at 10:00. Julie had also recently learned that her husband Mark has somehow gone upwards of 30 years in Tucson without eating at Beyond Bread (something of a local institution), so we met there, at the corner of Oracle and Ina, in order to remedy this oversight with a post-ride sandwich. We've never met there before, and never as late as 10:00am, but there we were. Andy and I arrived on our bikes from his house, several minutes late as we always seem to be despite our best intentions. But it didn't matter, because our friend Lowell was still sorting out his gear, chatting with Eric as he pumped his tires and adjusted his shoes. Mark went into the Safeway to use the restroom and came back out. I briefly considered doing the same, but I didn't.

I used to live in L.A., so I know what gunfire sounds like, but I've never heard this much at one time. Plus, it was just after 10:00 on a sunny Saturday morning in a Safeway parking lot in a good neighborhood, so there was no real context for what we were hearing. Still, it was very close, and that caused us to half-crouch behind the truck we'd been lounging against, but it's not until people started running towards us from the front of the store shouting “Gun!” that we really started scrambling. Hopefully you've never had to think about this, but it turns out that the only footwear more useless than stiletto heels in an emergency is a pair of road bike shoes. My brain did this quick calculation about the wisdom of hobbling through the open parking lot in those stupid shoes, and instructed me instead to dive behind the tire of Mark's truck with Julie, which I did, and then spent the next eternity imagining a crazed gunman materializing around the front end of the truck and shooting us both. We were never, as it turns out, in any immediate physical danger that day, but I'm here to tell you that it doesn't make any damn difference when you don't know that.

Julie couldn't reach 911 on her cell phone, probably because dozens of other people were already on the line with them, but she was able to help me stop hyperventilating--at least a little. Time slowed down, and everything got really quiet, except for the slapping sounds of a few pairs of feet running this way and that. A lady pulled into a parking space in the next aisle, the nose of her car facing the truck we were huddled against. When she started to get out we yelled at her to get back in, and she did. Then we waited some more. Finally someone ran our way saying that it was over, that the gunman was down, and we ran for it, in those stupid bike shoes, over to the Beyond Bread store where the rest of our friends were.

We heard later that it took 10 minutes for the police to arrive, which I guess sounds about right although there's nothing like pure, primal terror to muck up your temporal structure. When they did arrive it was organized as clockwork--they had the scene and the whole parking lot taped off in no time. At some point it occurred to me that we were now inside a crime scene, but I still wasn't able to process much else, or figure out what to do next. Mark, who not only has more presence of mind in a crisis than I do, but is also trained in emergency first-aid, took off towards the Safeway to see if he could help. He arrived just as the police were arresting the gunman, who had been incapacitated by--I was going to say bystanders, but I'm not sure if you could call them that. Even though this kid had targeted Gabrielle Giffords, who was holding a meet-and-greet in front of the store, he clearly meant to take out everyone in the vicinity. You probably know all this, but I heard it first from Mark when he returned to where the rest of us were still standing, confused and in shock, across the parking lot. He told us that six people were dead, and that Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in the head, and that this kid had planned to do a lot more damage than he'd been able to. At the time I remember thinking that this couldn't all be true--that Mark was probably pumped so full of adrenaline that his observational skills were playing tricks on him, but as the day went on I was amazed at how every detail reported by the media matched that first raw report.

The paramedics arrived just after the police did, and the helicopters landed just minutes after that. We stood in the middle of it all and watched people descend on the scene with the growing realization that this wasn't just some isolated local tragedy, but something bigger that we had somehow happened to brush against, like winning some twisted lottery. At some point we realized that the media would arrive next, and that we, standing around not doing anything crucial, would be sitting ducks for their attention. We also realized that with the vehicles now firmly behind police lines, no one would be driving away from this parking lot anytime soon. The police weren't letting anyone in, but they were letting people walk or bike out if they hadn't actually seen the incident occur, which we thankfully hadn't. So we rode away.

That's really the only part of the story that's mine to tell, the rest you saw on the news or heard from someone else. I'm not going to try to wrap my words around the social or political or moral implications of what happened that day, because there's been plenty of that and you're probably more exhausted from it than I am. I will tell you that I've had a hard time dealing with something so random and violent happening very close to me, and from those moments when I thought my friends and I might be harmed. The ubiquitous rehashing of the story on the news (which I couldn't stop watching that afternoon, for reasons I can't explain) didn't help--every time they pulled back to a wide shot of that parking lot I could see the truck that I used as a shield. Then the truck started showing up on the national news, which was even more disturbing and surreal. But here's something else I will tell you--there are a lot of good things that happened that day too and I am enormously grateful for them. Those people who wrestled the kid down and got his gun away from him are amazing, and I'm not using that word lightly. The response from emergency officials was efficient and organized and saved a lot of lives. The employee at Beyond Bread who came outside and talked me down when I was in visible distress--I don't know who she was, but she totally rocks.

It's weird how different Tucson felt last week--it's starting to fade by now, but people kind of huddled together, the way we did in the parking lot, to comfort themselves and offer comfort to others. Some other good things happened in those following days: the local hospitals and the City of Tucson offered free crisis counseling to anyone who wanted it (yeah, I totally went); President Obama came to Tucson and gave a kick-ass speech; and my friends, who I've always known were awesome, reached a whole new level of awesomeness by offering me the kind words and love that I needed more than I ever have.

Yesterday was Saturday, a week since this all went down, and in the morning our group met for another bike ride. It wasn't the first contact we'd had—all of us had been calling and texting during the week just to check on each other—but being together again in a (different) parking lot felt significant somehow. We don't usually hug each other when we say hello, but we did today. And then we had a great ride.

Bad Girl

2010-11-14T13:08:00.000-08:00

I am a bad girl. I don’t mean that in a porn kind of way, or a delinquent kind of way--although one could argue the latter, given that I should be doing schoolwork right now instead of writing a blog post. No, what I mean is that I’m pretty sure I’m missing some small piece of the edge of one of my X chromosomes. Not enough of a piece to make me give a crap about football or fast cars, but a piece big enough to contain some essential girl-related qualities like a maternal instinct and an appreciation of spa services.

I have also recently acknowledged an aversion to--nay, a phobia of—clothes shopping. A couple of months ago, Andy accompanied me on a mission to obtain some new clothes for cooler weather, which we think we might actually experience here in Tucson one of these days. Andy is a fabulous shopper, with a taste for high-quality items and a high tolerance for interaction with people whose only purpose in life is to sell you stuff. (He also likes football and fast cars, so don’t get any ideas). I, on the other hand, am prone to shop only at places that feature a do-it-your-own-damn-self atmosphere, and from which I can emerge with a pile of basic apparel items that cost less in total than most of the shirts in Andy’s closet. It’s a system that works for me, in general, but admittedly does occasionally result in my hating every article of clothing that I own. Hence the field trip to the mall back in September. I loathe the mall. I avoid the mall—all the malls—under all but the most dire of circumstances. But this time I reluctantly submitted to Andy’s enthusiastic offer to provide moral and fashion support, and off we went.

Although the trip ended with a measure of success, the part I remember most was a terrifying detour into Banana Republic. I know, right? Who gets intimidated by Banana Republic? Me, that’s who. Helpful Tina (or Katie or Rhonda, who the hell remembers) latched onto me like a cancerous growth, asking what she thought were helpful questions, and what I thought were thinly disguised attempts to undermine every last shred of confidence I had when I walked in the door. When she got to “OK, well what’s your style,” I pretty much lost it. “You’re looking at it,” I replied, with what I hoped was enough disdain to disguise my primal urge to run out the door. She surveyed my t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops and for one brief magical instant assumed the exact same look of utter helplessness that I had on my own face, but then quickly composed herself and brightly escorted me to the flare-y pants rack. Really, Tina? Really?

I was thinking about this shopping trip again recently when I experienced another moment of utter panic triggered by a situation that fell far outside my comfort level on the girl-o-meter. In my adult life, I have avoided groups made up exclusively of women, from sororities to book clubs to the Tucson Tri-girls, many of whom I know for a fact are perfectly fabulous individuals, but are quite scary to me in quantities larger than 3. Just as groups of boys are prone to default to boy-topics, the talk amongst groups of girls can rapidly veer towards fashion or cosmetics or breast-feeding without warning. I'm not saying that it always does, but it CAN, and that's enough to keep me perpetually on edge. Being in the midst of a bunch of dudes feeling like the odd one out is totally fine, in my book. But to get that feeling coupled with the existential puzzle of WHY I can’t/won’t/don’t know how to participate in these gender bonding rituals is really unpleasant.

My super-cool friend Julie invited me to do a race with her, which usually wouldn't give me any reason for pause, except that it was the ominously-named Women's 1/2 marathon. (If 3 women make me nervous, you can probably extrapolate the effects of 3,000.) Still, a 1/2 marathon is a 1/2 marathon, and I like doing races with Julie. Plus, what were they gonna do, make me sign an afadavit swearing that I would race in a cute outfit and fabulous hair? So I signed up, and then proceeded to semi-ignore the flurry of emails feverishly promising me pre-race fashion shows and a finishers medal with a removable charm that I could cherish forever as a souvenir of my Big Day. Now, I will admit here that I wholeheartedly support any event that gets even one woman off the couch and onto a treadmill. I think it's awesome that more and more people are participating in endurance running and triathlon, and I know that some people, particularly women, need a nurturing environment to offset the dread and self-doubt that inevitably accompany that first foray into competitive athletics. But I can pretty much promise you that I'm not going to remove my finisher's medal charm and wear it around town.

As race day grew nearer, I got a little nervous. Not about running 13.1 miles, which I was quite looking forward to, but about the fact that Julie was no longer going to be accompanying me to the pre-race expo and packet pickup, owing to a business travel conflict. I'm not crazy about expos in general, with their enthusiastic product-booth-staffers trying to lure you into their materialistic clutches, but when I walked into this one I knew right away I was in for a rough ride. First of all, I have never before felt underdressed at packet pickup clad in shorts and a T-shirt (my "style," remember?). But for some reason, maybe because we were in the tony town of Scottsdale, my fellow runner girls were shopping the expo in full makeup, hair, and those weird tops that look like shiny upside-down drawstring bags. On a Saturday! Also, pretty much everything in sight was pink. The Susan Komen booth was pink, obviously, but so was the running skirt booth and the pretty headband booth and the other running skirt booth and all the other booths. The race shirts were pink and the schwag bags were pink and there were a bunch of pink balloons tied to everything just in case you weren't sure whether this was an event marketed to women. Although my lizard brain was pretty much already out the door, I forced myself to do a complete circuit of the expo--kind of like when you try to conquer your fear of snakes by locking yourself in a room full of snakes and letting them slither all over you. I even tried to make myself buy a pretty headband (OK, it wasn't pretty--it was black with silver skulls on it), but then I reminded myself that I always run wearing a hat. So that didn't happen. But it did help me spend about 20 minutes at the expo instead of the 20 nanoseconds that I would have spent there otherwise. And I thought that was probably some kind of personal fear-conquering-accomplishment, and so I left feeling only half guilty at not being a better chick. The other half of me, incidentally, was wishing Julie was there, because she really loves running skirts.

I don't know how to be a better girl. And to be honest, I'm not sure that I want to. But if I could have a superhero accessory, like Wonder Woman's invisible jet, I think I would choose a cloak. And I think it would be pink.

Namibia

2010-10-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve been back from Namibia for over six weeks now, and I’m beginning to come to the realization that if I wait until I have a pristine and comprehensive travel post before committing anything to this site, it’s just never going to happen. So I think I’ll start posting the pieces I wrote on the plane home, and at odd moments between work, triathlons, and chipping away at the never-ending pile of schoolwork that follows me everywhere like Pig Pen’s dust cloud. If the result seems choppy or incomplete it’ll probably offend my perfectionist tendencies, but my guess is that no one else really cares. I still can't figure out how to embed multiple photos into these posts, so if you want to see pics they're at: www.namibia2010.winkflash.com

So without further explanation or apology, here are my reflections on the trip that I took to Namibia in August of 2010, along with 20 other students, for an Earth Expeditions summer field course in pursuit of my ever-elusive Masters degree.

P.A.N.I.C.

One of the best things about my trip to Mongolia last year was spending a couple of days in Beijing before my class started. I also remember that at the end of the trip I was so exhausted and worn down that I wanted nothing more than to get home as efficiently as possible. So I figured I'd do my pleasure traveling at the beginning of this trip as well, and I threw my lot in with a group of eight other classmates interested in exploring Namibia for a few days prior to the start of the class. Craig, the one who first proposed the adventure, likes to nickname everything so he dubbed our group “PANIC,” for “Pre-class Adventure Namibia something something”—I don't even remember, but I do remember hoping that the name was ironic and not descriptive, especially since there were nine of us in the group which seemed, quite frankly, like a lot of cats to herd. Our plan was to rent a big van and drive out to Swakopmund, a small town on the coast that is known, and you can Google this, as the extreme adventure capital of Namibia. Our itinerary beyond that was a bit vague, but there was some pre-trip discussion of sandboarding, kayaking, and/or a boat trip to check out seals and flamingos. All this sounded pretty good to me, drawn as I am to any activity involving wildlife, the ocean, or sliding down things at high rates of speed.

You wouldn't think that collecting nine people over three meeting places with no internationally capable cell phones would go smoothly, but it did. And somehow we jammed nine people and all our luggage into a 10-passenger van with considerable ease, and set off for Swakopmund, a 4-hour drive along a well-maintained two lane highway adorned with occasional baboons, warthogs, and giraffes. I was really glad I hadn't volunteered to drive, given that Namibians drive on the opposite side of the road (if you've ever traveled in a country where this is the case, I'm sure you've also experienced that persistent amnesia about looking left instead of right when you cross the street, and almost being subsequently and repeatedly flattened as a result), and the fact that any of the animals above could wander onto said road at any time, without warning. I suppose wayward animals could present themselves as roadblocks anyhere, but something about colliding with a warthog bothers me on a whole different level—and I don't even want to think about plowing into anything bigger or more exotic than that. Anyway, Craig and Misty bravely volunteered to navigate our ship, and we were all grateful for it.

Swakopmund was absolutely nothing like I expected. My recent trips to Asia had apparently resulted in my forgetting that not all foreign cities are chaotic and/or polluted. Swakopmund sits on the edge of the Atlantic ocean like a palm-tree studded postcard with beautiful beaches and well-kept streets and buildings. Namibia was colonized by Germans, then run by South Africa before its independence in 1990, so the vestiges of German and Dutch influence are still very much woven into the fabric of the town. But it also feels like Africa, with the sand dunes of the Namib Desert looming just outside its edges. Lisa had arranged our lodging guided mainly by the principle that every hotel in town claimed to be full except for the one we ended up staying in. That sounded a bit ominous, but the Princess Rupprecht turned out to be quaint and charming, if a little quirky. It used to be a colonial hospital, but now it seems to double as and old-folks home AND hotel, which means wide doorways and lots of elderly residents cruising around with walkers, which is a little weird but certainly not a problem. When we walked into the lobby we were greeted by the proprietor with “Ah, you must be the Wiggins family!” Again, a little weird, but not a problem—we all kind of liked the idea that our group of similarly-aged adults, most of whom had just met that morning, were instantly members of Lisa's family.

OK, I realize that many of you may not have plans to visit Namibia in your lifetime. I don't necessarily approve of this, although I do understand that 36 hours of travel isn't for everyone. However, I think it's important to inform you that sandboarding in Swakopmund has now broken the list of top five awesomest things I've ever done. It's freakishly simple—you strap on a helmet, lie down on a thin piece of pressboard treated with (I'm not kidding) floor wax, lift up your feet, pull the front of the board off the sand, and rip down the dunes at speeds up to 60mph. It's INSANE. If you drop the front of your board you end up with a big mouthful of sand—certain members of our group can attest to this, and if your board turns and you fail to use your feet as corrective rudders you end up rolling down the hill—certain members of our group can attest to this too, but there's really no danger of serious injury. One of our group is a snowboarder, and chose the stand-up option, which looks way more badass in the photos but achieves nowhere near the same speed and thus is vastly inferior to lie-down sandboarding in my (now) semi-expert opinion. Whoever turned this activity into a business is a genius.

Our boat ride the next morning was also very cool (although quite frankly, sandboarding is an impossible act to follow). We headed down to Walvis Bay and cruised out among the seals, dolphins, flamingos, and pelicans. It felt a little Disney-esque out there—maybe it was the legions of other boats, or maybe it was the fact that several of the wild seals have become habituated to leaping out of the water and onto the deck of the boat for fish treats. That seemed like a bit much for me, but everyone else loved it and no one got bitten or slapped or whatever the heck seals do if they decide they don't like you, so I guess it was fine. I was enthralled by the flocks of flamingos in flight, which are goofy-looking and beautiful at the same time, and the giant pink and white pelicans, which are a lot more attractive than the muddy-colored ones I've seen in California and Mexico.

I could have stayed in Swakopmund for a lot longer, but the responsibilities of studenthood beckoned us back to Windhoek, so we fired up the blue van and hit the road on Saturday afternoon. Our goal was to get the drive done before dark (unlit roads + charismatic megafauna = bad news for everyone involved), and we would have made it too, if not for the Welwitschia. What the hell is Welwitschia, you ask? I sure wish I could tell you from firsthand experience. Here's what I know: it's a plant, native to Namibia, found nowhere else, and the source of considerable national botanical pride. I also know that it's somewhat unattractive—Linda's Lonely Planet guide described it as resembling scrawny wilted lettuce. The Lonely Planet guide also described the process by which one must obtain a permit to access the area in which welwitschia can be found, but I guess we missed that paragraph, along with the part that details the 87 kilometer detour on an unpaved road required to reach the aforementioned area. The several hour adventure that ensued will always be one of my fondest memories of this trip, but at the same time I recognize it as one of those stories that just won't be as uprorariously funny to anyone who wasn't there. So I'll just let you know that we did NOT see a welwitschia plant, but also that no one was jailed or injured despite it not being at all clear at some points that this would be the case. And it was the one and only time when it seemed PANIC was aptly named.

Asian Hangover

As I mentioned before, after last year’s adventure in Mongolia and China, and two weeks in India in 2008, I had forgotten that not every non-western city is a teeming, polluted mess. I don’t say that to offend anyone, merely to note that large Asian cities (or at least the ones I’ve visited) seem to take all the difficult aspects of urban dwelling and amp them up to a degree I had never seen—or imagined, quite frankly—before visiting that continent. A city-phobe to begin with, I was left cold (and congested) by the harrowing hours I spent dodging all manner of vehicle and sucking down all manner of toxic particulate in Ulaanbaatar, Beijing, and…pretty much everywhere we went in India. Even though I visited cities in South Africa and Zambia in 2005, I guess I had blocked out the comparative calmness of these locales (probably with toxic particulates) and was thus anticipating a similarly Asian-style urban nightmare in Windhoek and Swakopmund, Namibia. But this is where the chorus of angels comes in. Although I have no doubt that there are less than savory elements nestled in these cities (as any other around the world) everything we saw was clean and safe (or at least safe enough), and the biggest threat to our livelihood was the fact that we couldn’t remember to look right instead of left for oncoming traffic before leaping into the streets. Windhoek (the capital of Namibia) is, as I was informed by my seat-mate on my JFK to Johannesburg flight, a suburban feeling city with a very small downtown; and Swakopmund is barely a city at all—just a picturesque seaside town with wide streets and lots of palm trees.

I was surprised also, although maybe not in the best way, by the infrastructure in Namibia, which was much more modern and comprehensive than I anticipated, based on my previous travels. I’ve described before my discomfort with the homogenization of the U.S. and how it threatens the charming regional differences that make travel so enjoyable. In the same manner, being able to find ATMs and convenience stores SO easily along the highways and in the small towns in Namibia seemed kind of like cheating. This was also the first international trip that I kept in contact with my world back home—at least when we weren’t camping out at CCF. Usually I tell my loved ones to expect no word from me until I get back to the States—a lesson learned in Zimbabwe when one of our group melted down because his expected access to an internet connection was denied by rumors of a presidential coup (I guess in Zimbabwe those rumors regularly shut down all modes of communication with the outside world), and he couldn’t send a promised email to his partner back home. “No news is good news,” are usually my parting words as I board the plane for distant lands. This time, however, I took along a small notebook computer and suggested to my loved ones that while no news was still good news, actual news might in fact be forthcoming. And it was, although I did feel again like I was cheating. You can decide for yourself if total immersion is the right way to travel, or if it’s just as admirable to post a Facebook status from your hotel after an afternoon spent sliding down sand dunes. My jury is still out on that one.

The Eating Game

Namibia is a lousy place to be a vegetarian. For one thing, its hot, dry climate is less than optimal for growing plants of any sort, so you really just wouldn’t end up with a cornucopia of vegetables on your plate. But even worse, in my opinion, is that you’d fail to discover something pretty gastronomically astronomical, which is that African plains game is some seriously good eatin’. The first night we were in Windhoek at the Roof of Africa hotel, Misty, Jim, Lisa and I decided to venture out for dinner instead of eating at the buffet in the lobby. So we set off down the street until something caught our eye. Choosing your restaurants this way is a total crapshoot, I realize, but in this case we got lucky and wandered into a place called Joe’s, which we later found out is quite well renowned in town for both its beer selection, and its game-rich menu. I have to admit, even this adventurous eater was a little freaked out by the abundance of dishes featuring springbok, kudu, ostrich, and zebra…animals I am accustomed to thinking of as my zoo friends, not my dinner. And I also have to admit that that night I ate cannelloni—not so much because I was freaked out by the meat selection than that it’s what I was in the mood for. It was fine, nothing to write home about, and maybe that’s all I would have had to write on the subject of exotic meat consumption if it hadn’t been for the biltong store. Biltong, in case you hadn’t heard, is basically the African equivalent of jerky, although you can read about the subtle differences here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biltong if you’re so inclined. We were driving to Swakopmund on the B-2 highway and stopped to get gas at a very modern looking Shell station. I’ll write about Namibian infrastructure somewhere else, but suffice it to say that I was surprised, as we pulled in, to see a very first-world-looking coffee shop, gift store, and the aforementioned biltong establishment across the street from the more anticipated ocean of canvas African woodcarving booths. Eager for a chance to stretch our legs, and to buy some postcards, we piled into the gift store--except for Craig who disappeared for a few minutes and then bolted through the gift shop door holding a couple of paper bags and announced, “You gotta check out the MEAT store next door!” His enthusiastic review compelled us to pile next door immediately to admire the acrylic bins of dried and cured springbok, kudu, and various other zoo friends. The woman running the place was super-friendly, and extremely liberal with the samples. So we all (including me, who was already tired of my trail mix snacks) left with paper bags of something, passing them around as we walked. And that’s what hooked me. I’m not really a fan of the processed beef jerky you can buy here in the states (although I’ve had the fresher stuff and it’s definitely better.) But this was something else entirely. I lack the culinary vocabulary to describe it in any meaningful way, so I won’t, except to say that it was pretty awesome.

So now, having overcome the minor psychological barrier (and having verified that none of the species of animals being served were endangered), I ventured further with my carnivorous experimentation. Over the course of my trip, I sampled kudu, oryx, springbok, and eventually zebra (which I had the hardest time with because three of them live within a few hundred yards of my office window). And every one of those was leaner and more flavorful than almost every cut of beef I’ve ever tasted. I can’t really compare it to American game, like venison, because I have traditionally shied away from eating it (it’s a Bambi thing, I guess) in the presence of other options. I suppose now I might decide to rethink this. It actually takes a lot to get me really excited about food, since for some reason I’ve always considered food more as fuel than as experience. But I had two meals on this trip that got my attention, so I might as well tell you about them.

The first revolved around the fresh oysters we were served on our seal cruise in Walvis Bay. This is kind of a weird thing, since oysters aren’t endemic to Walvis Bay (the boat captain told us that--don’t worry, it was not already in my repertoire of intellectual trivia). Instead, they farm Pacific Oysters right there in the Atlantic Ocean, with spat (aka baby oysters) imported from Chile. They house the oysters in suspended nets to keep them in the warmest water and to prevent them from getting some nasty oyster condition (involving polychaete worms, yech) that live in the mud on the bottom. This seems like a lot of trouble to me but I have to say, I’ve sampled quite a few oysters in my time, and these were of a significantly higher caliber. We slurped them from the shell while sipping champagne (try saying THAT10 times fast) on the deck of the boat, which sounds quite fancy but was really rather incongruous given the flocks of fleece-ensconced tourists and squawking seagulls circling the boat, making the oysters …well, the pearl in the oyster I guess, if you’ll excuse the redundant metaphor.

The other best meal of the trip, which I think I’m gonna say was in the top five of my life, occurred the evening before, at a restaurant in Swakopmund. The place itself was a bit odd, heavily German influenced and doubling as a museum. The nine of us were seated at an enormous round table in a separate room (having cleverly made a reservation upon the advice of our hotel proprietor, who informed us that EVERYONE in Swakopmund eats out on Friday nights), amid a clutter of paintings, clocks, and curios. It was just one of those evenings that was really cool—I was surrounded by good friends (despite the fact that most of us had met the day before—traveling is funny like that), warm atmosphere, and red wine. And, lest I forget the point of this paragraph, walnut-encrusted oryx medallions with a beet salad and some sort of homemade german pasta. I’m doing the Homer Simpson drool thing right now as I remember it. An oryx, by the way, is the animal featured in the photo above—magnificent in life, and magnificent in medallion form. So I’m really glad I got over my initial timidity about charismatic animal consumption, which I think is a good general policy for international travel. Unless you’re in one of those countries that eats monkey brains.

Accommodations

The great thing about these summer field courses (as distinct from the web-based courses we take in the spring and fall), is that you actually get to meet some of your fellow students in person. People just don’t represent online the same way they do in reality, and it’s always interesting to find out what your cyber-acquaintances are REALLY like. Namibia presented me with another group of adventurous, like-minded friends who were a pleasure to travel with, and I’m not just saying that because they might be reading this. It’s a good thing, though, because these courses are a pretty intense way to spend nine days, and if you had to deal with a bunch of jerks and morons, you’d probably gladly risk wandering out alone on the savannah to take your chances with the leopards. But more than good company, this confluence of classmates also gives you the opportunity to compare notes on EE trips, gaining valuable information to use when deciding where to travel next year. All the courses are pretty much the same, with regard to general theme and intensity, so really you’re finding out the crucial details like what kind of animals you can expect to see, and how rustic the accommodations are. Mongolia seems to be generally considered one of the most hard-core, a badge of dubious honor given because you don’t get to shower for a week. I’m not sure what the cushiest trip is, but I know in Trinidad we had indoor showers AND actual beds for the whole trip—and we never had to room with more than one other person. That’s like the Ritz in EE land, given what I’ve seen since. Anyway, Namibia falls somewhere in between, with one night of tent camping (or sleeping under the stars at the watering hole, if you’re into that), and six nights of shack sleeping. Actually until last year, I’m told, Lightfoot camp at the Cheetah Conservation Fund site was all tents, but sometime between the summer of ’09 and this summer they built 10 concrete boxes (can a shack be concrete? I never thought to question this) and thus upped the luxury level by a degree or two. Don’t get any ideas, there was no electricity or running water in our shacks, and we still shared our living quarters with birds, spiders, and the biggest gecko I’ve ever seen. But having actual walls and a corrugated metal roof protected us against the worst of the Namibian winter chill (also leopards), which was pretty nice. And we had bunk beds upon which to lay our sleeping bags, which was also pretty swanky. AND there was occasionally hot water at the outdoor showers, which was downright opulent. So the fact that I couldn’t sleep the entire trip was probably due to my own neurotic weirdness—heck, I can’t sleep at home half the time either.

Etosha National Park

Most people go Africa in search of big game (to shoot either with a camera or a shotgun, depending on how they feel about big game). There's something exhilarating about seeing animals in the wild that you've only ever seen in a Zoo or on television. For me, the appeal comes from seeing the animals on their terms rather than yours. Just after we got settled at CCF (which you’ll read about below), we loaded up the bus again and headed to Etosha National Park, a 9,000 sq. mi. protected area in the Northern part of Namibia. It took 4 hours to get to the edge of the park (4 hours being the magic length of pretty much every drive we did in that country), and another several hours to traverse the interior to our destination, Halali camp. Once inside the park we started seeing exotic wildlife right away—giraffes, springbok, ostrich, and a big herd of elephants crashing around in the brush. Even though we were on a bus, we seemed to have sufficient access for great wildlife viewing, although our efforts to visually comb the grass along the side of the road for leopard or lion were in vain, at that point. Inside the park boundaries you aren't allowed to get out of your vehicles, except at the designated, fortified campgrounds, lest you come face to face with one of those large predators without a protective, automotive metal shield. It's sort of a strange phenomenon for those of us accustomed to freely wandering the wilderness, setting up camp in a random clearing, and letting nature lap at the edges of our temporary home. But here, “nature” refers to frequent visits by hungry leopards, rather than the occasional sniffing around of a curious racoon, so it's a guideline well respected. The campgrounds, it turned out, offered plenty of opportunities for unguarded wandering—along with gift shops and swimming pools. Rubbing elbows with tourists on safari vacations was a little bit unnerving to me—again I'm guilty of using Mongolia as my measuring stick, where we probably saw fewer than twenty other people during the course of our trip. I had read that Namibia has the second lowest population density of any independent country (after Mongolia, coincidentally), but we spent a decent amount of time in places where that population is concentrated, so it never really felt like we were the only ones out there.

The draw of the camp (I mean, besides the gift shop and swimming pool) was a watering hole that had been improved with an elevated viewing area so that people could safely stake out the area on a long-term basis without getting eaten by something. The infrastructure surprised me again—it was kind of like an outdoor movie theater, covered and benched, and when we got there there were already scores of other travelers camped out with their binoculars trained on the pond below. And, I'm not kidding, there were floodlights that came on after the sun went down so you could see the nocturnal animals coming to the watering hole too—it was quite a setup. For the first hour we were there, just up to sunset, exactly nothing happened. But after that things gradually got more lively, with African wild cat and two black rhino emerging from the bush for a drink. I hadn't seen rhino in the wild before, so that was pretty exciting for me. Rhinos are so cool.

CCF

The subject of this summer's Namibia course was Big Cat Conservation-the role of predators in the ecosystem. So we spent the bulk of our time at the Cheetah Conservation Fund site—you guessed it—about 4 hours away from Windhoek. CCF, which you can read about here: http://www.cheetah.org/?nd=home was founded by Laurie Marker, a woman well-known in the Zoo world (if not more generally) as a pioneer female biologist and conservationist. She started working with cheetahs in the 1970s, and moved to Namibia in 1990 to try to address some of the major threats to the big cats in the wild. She's pretty amazing, I have to say, both as a conservationist and a businesswoman—CCF has its fingers in a variety of successful partnerships and projects, and raises enough money to fund a surprisingly elaborate operation. In Namibia CCF owns 30,000 acres of land, and in addition to protecting all the species native to that space, houses cheetahs that have been shot, or orphaned, or injured in the wild. Some of the cheetahs will be reintroduced to the wild when they have been rehabilitated or, in the case of the orphans, taught to hunt for themselves. Other animals that are not expected to be able to reintegrate into a wild habitat are used for education or public presentations that highlight the amazing adaptations of these cats. CCF is a tourist destination, a research center, and a training ground for commercial farmers, whose ability to coexist with cheetahs affects the survival of this species. One of the most interesting presentations we saw during our week was from one of these farmers, who spoke about several common perspectives among the farmers whose livelihood depends on the safety of their livestock. The goal of CCF's training program is to turn the farmer who flies around in his microlight every morning, looking for cats to shoot, into a farmer who manages his livestock in a way that discourages predators from paying any attention to his animals. Common strategies include keeping native game on the same land (since cheetahs will recognize game as food before they will go after cows), and using Anatolian Shepherds as guard dogs. CCF breeds and trains these dogs to keep watch over livestock, and then adopts the dogs out to farmers. It's actually pretty amazing how many projects CCF oversees, protecting cheetahs with a variety of different strategies.

So there was a lot of learning, which is the point of these courses, but there were also several opportunities to dazzle us with unique experiences—ensuring that we would all go home insisting that the long days, long drives, and rustic accommodations were well worth the price of admission.

The Cheetah Run

One of the most amazing things that we got to see during our time at CCF was a demonstration of the cheetah’s speed, which you’ve probably heard or read can reach almost 70 mph. CCF does a “cheetah run” every morning, where they tie a meat-scented lure to a cable and pulley system, and use a generator to whip the lure around the edges of one of the large cheetah pens. The cheetahs chase the lures, and you get the idea. Most visitors watch from the outside of the pen, but we go to actually go inside and stand along the running track—so that the cheetahs passed within about 10 feet of us as they ran by. What looks amazing on TV is even more dramatic at close range, and even though cheetahs only reach their top speed for a few seconds (and in this enclosed space are really only doing about 50 or so mph), it can take your breath away.

For those of us who work at zoos, particularly conservative zoos that don’t permit any human/exhibit animal contact, the idea of getting in the same pen with a cheetah takes a little getting used to. I have seen cheetah demonstrations at other zoos, and know that cheetahs are much less aggressive than other big cat species, but something about my Darwininan wiring makes me really anxious about getting up close and personal with an animal that could rip me to shreds. But if ever there were cheetah experts, one can find them at CCF--they know which cats are safe to line 20 EE students up near….

Cheetah Feed

…and which ones are better viewed from the safety of a truck. Towards the end of our stay, we had the opportunity to accompany some of the CCF staff on a cheetah feed. The cheetahs at the outer edges of the property are those most likely to be returned to the wild, and in fact several of the cats were getting close to their reintroduction date when we were there. As part of their wild re-training, they are switched from a captive diet of donkey meat to a more wild-simulated diet of oryx (mmm…oryx) and kudu. And rather than eat from a pan or plate, the cheetahs are encouraged to chase their food. So one of the intermittent steps in the reintroduction training consists of driving a truck through a pen containing a few different cats, and hurling hunks of meat off the back for the cats to pounce on after they’ve chased the truck for awhile. There was only room in the back of the truck for six of our group to participate in the actual meat-hurling, so the 20 of us had to draw straws for the privilege. I, of course, did not draw one of the lucky straws, but as I am totally unfamiliar with luck—at least the kind associated with gambling and straw-drawing—I’ve long since stopped being disappointed about stuff like this. The consolation prize for the rest of us was to ride in a safari truck BEHIND the meat truck, and to watch the whole thing play out from there.

I expected this experience to be moderately cool, but nothing like the exhilarating ride that it was. Watching five cheetahs weave and dodge behind the meat truck, then one by one leap on their meals and drag them off to the side, was beautiful and primal.

This is usually the part where I riff on where I want to travel next summer, but I find myself in the refreshing position of having no further travel obligations for my Masters program. Don’t get me wrong, I will still be a slave to the books until December, 2011; but because I went to Trinidad with EE in 2006, I scored a few transfer credits that I plan on exploiting to that end. So for next summer I’m thinking palm trees and drinks with umbrellas in them. The floor is hereby open for suggestions and invitations.

Homecoming

2010-06-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a week-long visit to Hawaii for my 20th high school reunion. Visiting the place you grew up, especially if you haven't been back for a few years, is always a little weird because things look different and you don't quite feel as though you truly belong there anymore. I got used to that feeling sometime in the mid '90s when I realized it was no longer possible for me to say “aloha” or “mahalo” without feeling like a tool. My pale skin and out-of-state drivers license earned me the tourist treatment from sales clerks so many times that I eventually got over the urge to defend my native honor with some pseudo-casual comment about how much things have changed since I lived here for 18 years. And did I mention that I lived here for 18 years? Yeah, I did, mahalo very much.

But man, things have changed! Once upon a time, it was virtually impossible to find healthy food other than in tropical fruit form. Did you know Hawaii is the state with the highest per capita consumption of Spam? Yep, look it up, it's a fact. Also probably true, though undocumented, is that the most prevalent type of salad is macaroni. You'd think that all this tropical weather would make people want to eat light, but there's a pretty wide cultural streak of grease running right through the center of those islands. And I'm not gonna lie, whenever I visit, I can't wait to binge on all the heart-stopping comfort foods I associate with home (I freaking love macaroni salad, btw). But after several days, all this gastronomical glory starts to become a bit tedious, and it's time for some carrots. But healthy eating was never really encouraged in my Hawaii of yore, so the best option at this point used to be to go to Safeway and pick up some of the generic, mass-produced food you find at Safeway, and call it a day. What's that? You say there's now a Whole Foods at Kahala Mall? Well there’s the kind of change I can get into. I know Whole Foods caters to the snobby, high-end foodie set, but dammit, I am that set. I won't pay for cable or internet service, but I do think it's probably a wise idea to shell out a little extra for stuff you put in your mouth. So yeah for Whole Foods, and the dozen or so other health food stores that have sprung up in my absence.

I bring up Whole Foods because Shimi and I were going to go there to pick up something for lunch, having tired (at least for the moment) of white rice and sauce-drenched meats. The funny thing is that we never got there, because right next door was a new place serving custom salads—and not the macaroni kind. A custom salad fast-food place in Hawaii? Talk about heart-stopping. I got something with spinach and seared ahi, thereby allowing me to feel like I was participating in the local food culture without sacrificing my arteries for the privilege.

The other thing that was funny about the Whole Foods expedition, and the other obstacle to our actually finding out how much food costs at the snobby, high-end foodie store (given that an ordinary loaf of bread at Safeway currently runs, I'm not kidding, around $6.00), is that all the rules for way-finding in Hawaii have also changed in my absence. Or maybe not the rules so much as the points of reference. Despite having practically lived at Kahala mall as teenagers, our intuition was failing to help us navigate the Starbucks and Jamba Juices with any measurable success. So we swallowed our kama'aina pride and asked a well-dressed Asian couple for directions to the Whole Foods....only to be informed that it was, you know, right next to Chili's. Seriously? Since when is there a Chili's at Kahala Mall? There followed a confusing discussion in which we learned, rather like learning of the death of an old, estranged friend, that Chili's replaced our beloved Yum Yum Tree, which had the world's dumbest name but really good pie. C'mon, does Chili's have really good pie? Actually it might, I don't know, but I suspect not. Dammit!

This same estranged-friend-death feeling resurfaced quite a few times during our trip. The Burger King we used to go to for fries when we missed the bus home is now one of those trendy frozen yogurt places. The Pantry, dark and dingy convenience store of my youth, is now a spotless 7-11. And, this one kills me, the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center in Waikiki is no longer a dark jumble of cheesy tourist souvenir shops and tiki-torch festooned, overpriced restaurants, but a glowing pantheon of chain stores and chain restaurants (still overpriced) that looks lifted directly from the Las Vegas strip. The people lounging on the sidewalks there were still tourists, but not the bermuda shorts and camera kind, more the jet-setting, designer-handbag kind. Plus, I didn't see a single hooker. What has it come to?

Oahu's slide towards good old, U. S. of A. homogeneity is probably a lot less depressing for those who have had, up until recently, to contend with daily life on an island thousands of miles away from the nearest Whole Foods. But what's the point of spending hundreds of dollars on a plane ticket to go somewhere that looks like everywhere else? Actually I know the answer to that. But if they ever figure out a way to put a Chili's on the beach at Waimea Bay, I'm done.

Look Out Below

2010-03-24T17:23:00.000-07:00

Ever since I was a kid, I've had recurring nightmares about planes falling out of the sky. The details are always different, but there's inevitably a plane above me, and it's definitely coming down, and I can't figure out which way to run in order not to get crushed by it. I know, sweet dreams, right? The weird thing is that I'm not afraid of flying, or not really, although a couple good jolts of turbulence get my heart pounding pretty hard. No, I'm much more skittish about planes flying overhead, particularly if they're loud, or low, or creepy looking or coming from a strange direction. Somewhat inconveniently, considering this phobia, I live in Tucson where air traffic is so frequent as to be unnoticable—or at least unnoticable to people who don't think about planes falling out of the sky. It's not like I run for cover every time a 747 cruises by at 35,000 ft--for that I'd be seeking professional help instead of musing about it here. But the nearby presence of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base ensures that there's always a ready supply of nerve-jangling aircraft flying low enough to keep me on my toes.

The Zoo, where I work, is right in the flight path of the Base, which means that on some days those behemoth cargo planes lumber about 15 feet over my head, and on other days the fighter planes rip through the air on their way to...wherever the hell they go. Military aircraft rumble and whistle and shriek their way all over this town, and even if they weren't the source of my subconscious (and conscious, for that matter) discomfort, they would still be really annoying. Try giving a tour on the tarmac next time you're at the airport and you'll get an idea of what my workday is like when the good folks over at DM have a busy flight schedule. Sometimes even when I'm safely (or so I think) ensconced in my office I am jolted by a building-shaking flyover of something that is either way too low, or way too big, or both. My co-worker Rusty always runs outside, like a 5 year old, to see what it is. But I don't even want to know, as long as it doesn't end up pinning me to my Herman Miller Aeron chair for all eternity.

Indeed, in most cases, it's the sound of the planes that sets me off more than the sight of them. Loud noises offend me anyway, and the less natural the sound the more offensive it is (someday I'll write a manifesto about jet-skis and snowmobiles, but that's for a different time.) Planes have all kinds of sounds that are loud AND threatening, which ranks them pretty high on the sinister scale. I'm not crazy about the rumbling sound of low flying aircraft, but I'm even less fond of that descending whistle that I know perfectly well from all those Bugs Bunny cartoons means that something is about to fall on your unsuspecting head.

One day I was driving south on Alvernon, heading back to work from some errand, when a pilot flew his jet straight up into the air over the base, stalled out, hurtled back down towards the ground, and pulled out of his death-defying plunge somewhere below my field of vision to soar back up into the sky. He repeated this maneuver several times, the aeronautical equivalent of donuts in the parking lot, while I watched, incredulous and—quite frankly—rather pissed off. Is this seriously a military sanctioned activity? (OK, I've now written three different disparaging sentences about testosterone to follow that one and deleted them all, since I know that most people reading this are probably thinking “Cool! I wish I'd seen that!” Bah on all of you.)

I guess I should mention here that in addition to my workplace being way too close to aero-ground-zero for my taste, my house, bought just last year, is right here in the same vicinity and the same flight path. This is no one else's fault but mine, as I knew perfectly well what I was getting into and even had to sign some document along with my mortgage papers affirming my awareness of the nearby base and probably absolving me of my right to sue the government if some wayward A-10 plows into my kitchen. Sometimes I think about the confluence of all these factors for a little too long—the recurring nightmares, the accumulation of work and now leisure hours spent in a high risk area—but then I decide that this is a really dumb thing to be thinking about if I want to sleep at night. Which, in the end, I do, even if it means risking those dreams.

Fear

2010-01-30T20:22:00.000-08:00

There’s a lot to be scared of in the world if you set your mind to being scared. If you’re not sure what to be scared of, you could turn on the news for your daily laundry list of things to fear: recession, terrorism, socialized medicine, falling into a raging river, being murdered, abducted, eaten by a shark, or mauled by a bear.

There’s also the borderline pandemic disease du jour—remember SARS? Bird flu? We were all in imminent danger of perishing from one of those…until we didn’t. I don’t know if it’s the American media or media in general, but the alarm has been ratcheted up so high for so long that I can’t believe anyone even listens anymore. All our local newscasts reference the big scare of the moment and end with “…could THIS happen in Tucson?” Sure, it could, but it won’t. It never does. It doesn’t happen again anyplace else either, whatever it is; it just gets replaced by some other bogeyman the next day.

I am by no means the world’s most fearless adventurer, but I have traveled a bit and spent a lot of time in the great outdoors. All the bears I’ve even seen have run away from me (except for that one that ran towards me, but it turns out it was only to get up the tree that was between us) and all the sharks I’ve seen have been almost rudely indifferent to my presence. I’ve lived by myself in non-gated neighborhoods, hiked down near the Mexican border, been within 6 feet of a lion in Zambia, and ridden my bike on the Santa Cruz riverpath before the sun was up, and I’m still here to tell you about it. If I avoided HALF the activities that make my mom nervous for me, my butt would have grown into the couch by now (speaking of scary). And of course it's not just my mom--if I took all the time and energy other people spend worrying about me and matched it in my own head, I’m quite certain I would wither into a little pile of dust on the floor. I mean, I’m not talking about drag-racing down unlit highways or mainlining heroin—just regular stuff that doesn’t require a rider on your life-insurance policy. Stuff that’s just too cool not to do.

One of the things I try to work on, in the interest of self-improvement, is being more patient with people. If you ask me, I’ll tell you up down and sideways that I’m fascinated by how other people’s minds work, and that I truly understand that everyone is wired differently. I’m not lying when I say this, but sometimes I have trouble internalizing the fact that people see the world differently than I do, and that this is actually OK. As a result, I get sometimes get frustrated when people solve problems differently than I would, or interpret situations differently, and I have to give myself a little lecture about how great it is that everyone’s different and then I sing a couple of verses of Kumbayah in my head and it’s all good.

But I’ll tell you, my system breaks down when people make decisions based on fear. I just don’t get it, and I never will. The world is so huge and amazing that sometimes I freak out a little over how I’m ever going to get to all the things I want to do in my life--my bucket list wouldn't actually fit in a bucket, let’s just say that. But what if I were scared that I could be kidnapped in Rocky Point, or that the cold June currents of the San Francisco Bay could suck me out to sea, or even that this stupid cold I have could turn into pneumonia if I don’t stay in bed and drink soup for a week? Hey here’s an idea, how about I worry about that stuff if it happens, and not before then. Sometimes I say that I’d rather be eaten by a shark than hit by a bus at Broadway and Craycroft, and that’s absolutely true…well, as long as the shark doesn’t take his sweet time about it. I don’t want to scare you (and yeah, that’d be irony), but bad stuff can happen anytime and anywhere, no matter how careful you are. So you might as well do what you want, and hope the sharks aren’t hungry that day. ‘Cause you know what? They’re probably not--or at least not for you.

I Scream, You Scream

2009-12-06T17:04:00.000-08:00

I heard somewhere that dentists have the highest suicide rate of any occupation. I have no idea if this is true, but it seems plausible given the frustration that must be inherent in that occupation. I mean, imagine having to do your life’s work through an opening three inches wide…wouldn’t you have to fight a near constant overwhelming urge to turn peoples’ heads inside out?

I never heard what occupation has the second highest rate of suicide, but I recently decided that ice cream truck drivers must be pretty high on the list. I don’t mean the Schwann’s guy, who delivers frozen dinners as well as delicious ice cream treats, I mean the ones who drive the converted postal vans covered with stickers and primer paint that warble kids' songs in creepy minor keys. If being chased by screaming children all day long weren’t enough to send someone over the edge, I’m convinced that sinister music MUST have some cumulative damaging effect.

We didn’t have ice cream trucks in the neighborhood where I grew up. I don’t know if that’s a Hawaii thing or if my neighborhood was just vendor-unfriendly, but if Jenny and I wanted ice cream we had to haul our butts a half mile down the road to The Pantry, which was a convenience store that carried all manner of child-pleasing delicacies along with Primo beer and motor oil. In my youthful world, ice cream trucks belonged to the same fantasy-land as snow days and road trips, and I really don’t think I suffered any for the oversight.

But in some karmic balancing act, I am now getting every bit of ice cream truck exposure that I missed during my childhood, which is what got me wondering about ice cream truck driver suicide rates and, ok I’ll be honest here, homicide rates as well. The problem is that the Zoo, where I work, is in a City park, and that the building I work in is in the part of the park that has evidently been identified by ice cream truck drivers as prime prowling ground for the target demographic. So whenever the weather is nice, or at least not medically dangerous, the ice cream truck is out there lurching along, playing a Virginia Reel/Mexican Hat Dance mash-up or whatever other ominous tune best announces the arrival of Astro Pops and Drumstiks. I never actually see children flocking to the truck, but that might be because the music makes me immediately fling myself into my office or anyplace that mutes the worst of the racket.

Somehow I worked at the Zoo for about 11 years before I reached my breaking point, but now that I have, I’m at a loss about how to manage my frozen treat vendor anxiety. And I’m pretty sure the ice cream truck driver knows he’s got my number, because several weeks ago he FOLLOWED ME HOME. Ok, maybe that’s overstating it a bit, since I now live less than a mile from the park, and there are a ton of kids in my neighborhood, and I had actually been home for a couple of hours when he showed up. Perhaps he’s just extending his radius in a completely rational, economically savvy maneuver that has nothing to do with me. But I’ll tell you, I hear the plinking notes of Pop Goes the Weasel, and I’m just not so sure. Just. Not. So. Sure.

Things Unconsidered

2009-10-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

I’d like to say that I ride my bike to work every day, since I live a mere 1.5 miles away from my office door. But I can’t say that, because it’s not true and I don’t like lying in my online journal any more than I like brutalizing the environment by not riding my bike to work every day. Most of the time though, when I drive to work, it’s because I swim BEFORE work, and there’s no way I’m riding my bike River and Dodge at 5:30 a.m. Sorry environment.

Anyway, when I’m in the car on my way to the pool I usually listen to NPR, and at some point on my drive I usually hear a promo for the Diane Rhem show, a show that I’ve never actually listened to. In fact, up until very recently, I sometimes turned the station when the promo spot would come on, because Diane Rhem has this halting, quivery voice that is almost impossible for me to listen to. I always assumed she was about 100 years old, and that NPR had employed her for decades and was just keeping her on the air out of politeness until her expiration, which really, from the sound of her voice, couldn’t be too far off. In these promos she was always preparing to take on some topic or other that was quite interesting to me, but I couldn’t take the Grandma Simpson thing enough to ever actually tune in. I’m not going to record the details here, but suffice it to say that I have had many an early-morning uncharitable thought about Dian Rhem, and why on earth NPR thinks it’s a good idea for her to be on the air, long journalistic career notwithstanding. You can’t be ugly on TV, at least not when reading the news, and you shouldn’t sound ugly on the radio. Right??

Now at this point most of you probably don’t know why I’m going straight to hell (or you only know about some other reason that I’m not discussing today), but it turns out that Diane Rhem is NOT 100 years old, and that her quivery voice is the result of a neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which f—s with your vocal chords every time you try to speak. I don’t know what kind of treatment she’s had for this strange condition, but on the menu of choices are such palatable procedures as “Botox injections in the larynx,” and an operation that “cuts one of the nerves of the vocal folds.” Charming, huh? And there’s no cure for the disorder, so in the end Diane Rhem has to fight pretty hard to have the voice she has, which is the voice I was disparaging in the last paragraph, and every morning in the car. Dammit!

The funny thing is that now that I know this, her voice doesn’t bother me anymore. No really, it’s true…when I heard her this morning I actually found myself listening to what she was saying instead of rolling my eyes and turning the station on the rickety old lady. I guess my own neurological tangle has given Diane Rhem a sympathetic pass.

Now, you might ask why it’s OK to make fun of old people and not OK to make fun of people with spasmodic dysphonia. I guess it’s really not, but since we’re all going to get old, taking potshots at age-related quirks just seems like fairer game.

Until it happens to me.

You CAN get there from here!

2009-08-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

I have been having a hard time explaining to people why I’m so excited about the newly renovated and re-opened underpass that connects Tucson’s perpetually patchouli-scented 4th Avenue with its more variously-odored downtown. It doesn’t help that the vast majority of Tucsonans are quite literally afraid to venture downtown, whether because they imagine that parking is scarce (it’s not), muggers lurk behind every lamppost (they don’t) or that half the streets are ripped up because of some construction project or other (this I will concede, but it’s a stupid reason not to go downtown).

I used to live downtown, in a nice quiet residential neighborhood that was close enough to walk to some great restaurants and bars, but far enough not to have drunken clubbers lurching across your front yard in the middle of the night. Usually. When I first moved there, in 2005, the 4th Ave underpass was still open in its original form, which featured a claustrophobic, coffin-like atmosphere, a constant overhead drip from an unknown source, and the choking odor of beer mixed with urine. Dimly lit, the underpass provided little benefit other than a way to cross the train tracks without getting mowed down by a locomotive, and the motivation for a little speed if you happened to be running through it. Everybody hated the 4th Avenue underpass until the City closed it down to renovate it. Then it became a noticeable absence, an inconvenience, as you were now compelled to use the 6th Avenue underpass (no friendlier, in my opinion, and further removed from the best parts of each side of the train tracks), or the snake bridge, which yes, is a bridge that looks like a snake and therefore inordinately cool, but is even further away from where you want to go unless your destination is the car wash at the corner of Broadway and Euclid. Which it rarely is, especially if you’re walking.

It took something like 2 ½ years to renovate the underpass, which might seem like a long time, but they really had their work cut out for them. There was a lot of infrastructure to add, and the goal was to make the corner where the underpass meets Congress sort of a “gateway” to downtown, so they wanted to put in new traffic lights and crosswalks and make the whole thing visually attractive…and of course they couldn’t rip too much stuff up or the trains would fall in a hole. They were also laying rails for a streetcar, which will help shuttle students from the UA campus downtown to spend their money and exercise their fake IDs in a wider radius. I have to say that for a Tucson construction project things seemed to click along pretty efficiently, and there were often crews out working on weekends. I kept an eye on the project the whole time I lived downtown, but I ended up moving before it was done, and thus won't be reaping the full benefit of the eventual finished product. Nevertheless, I still think it’s cool that Tucson has finally finished one of its major downtown revitalization projects, and when I heard it was opening again last week, amidst considerable pomp and circumstance, I resolved to witness the historic moment. I even got permission from my boss to leave work early so I could participate in a sort of “runners parade” through the underpass as part of the opening ceremony. It was unspeakably dorky, but I did it anyway.

And what a cool day it was. Well, not literally, in fact it was over 100 degrees at 5:00 p.m. when our group of runners trotted through the underpass, but there were crowds lining the side of the road and vintage cars in the road, and it was just a big party in what felt for a few fleeting moments like a big city. The project planners had said that the sidewalks in the new underpass would be wide enough to send a marching band through, and sure enough there WAS a marching band (the Brazilian beat-influenced Batucaxe, another underappreciated Tucson treasure) performing in the well-lit, clean (for now), wide, non-dripping underpass. I’m not sure what other purpose those tarmac-like sidewalks will serve on a regular day, but too much of a good thing is better than too little, as far as I’m concerned.

If I were still living downtown, I would use that underpass regularly on my running route to the UA campus, and to visit the bars and coffee houses on 4th Avenue, but I’ll have to resign myself to weekend forays and keep trying to get everyone I know in town to sack up and support our City center instead of complaining that nothing goes on there. It does. I promise.

Oh and incidentally, that photo above wasn’t taken on opening night, but the night after. Can you see THAT guy in your boring suburban neighborhood? Didn’t think so.

The Invertebrate Project

2009-07-28T12:48:00.001-07:00

At some point it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to get any better at nurturing things. I’m not great with kids, distinctly sub-par at animal care, and plants would see me as the grim reaper if they had eyes, and if they did not immediately shrivel up and die when I walked in the room. Fighting this unassailable fact for many years only led to additional carnage, so I decided to accept it and I now instead expend my energy avoiding situations where I am called upon to take responsibility for other living things.

Visit my house, and you’ll see what I mean. I love Arizona, and one of the reasons is that you are actually encouraged not to have plants in your yard. Instead you might consider a mosaic of different colored gravel, which requires neither watering nor fertilizing. In my backyard I have a perfectly manicured cactus garden, which was not manicured by me but by the home’s previous owner. Cactus is my idea of the perfect plant, because it just hangs out happily without any sort of attention whatsoever. In my front yard I have a large mesquite tree, which does need trimming from time to time, but I got a guy who does that. There are also some bougainvillea bushes that don’t mind being ignored for weeks at a time, and two citrus trees that do. Those citrus trees are the wrench in my landscape plan. So far I have not failed them completely, but their shrivelly appearance makes me thinks that they know their days are numbered. They need water twice a week! How annoying is that?

Inside the house, all the plants are silk. I got my plant-killing genes from my mom, and many of my silk plants from her as well. I wish the citrus trees were silk.

Somehow I have managed to keep two cats alive and generally happy for almost 13 years. I attribute this to brilliant pet-product inventions like the automatic cat feeder and the 1-gallon water reservoir. So if I forget about them for a couple of days? No problem! I’m just kidding, actually, since I could never forget about them. Then again, that’s mostly attributable to the fact that they follow me around meowing when they want something. If plants did that, it would probably extend their lifespan too.

There’s just one battlefront on which I just can’t seem to admit defeat, no matter how many times I prove that I’m just not worthy of the fight. About three years ago I decided to start a worm composting bin. I’ve actually wanted to do this for about ten years, but didn’t really get inspired until I visited my friend Alix in L.A., whose worm bin was a healthy, earthy, vermicomposting miracle. Tucson is a lot drier and hotter than L.A., but after making some calls to the local botanical garden, and finding out that the internet’s Acme Worm Farm actually had a worm supplier in Tucson, I decided that I could do it too. So I ordered a worm bin, cleverly named the “Can-o-worms,” off the internet, and picked up a ½ lb. paper sack of worms from Tom French, my local worm supplier. When I went to his house to pick up the worms, he gave me a guided tour of his backyard full of low, wooden-framed worm beds. There were a lot of worms there, and they all seemed able to survive Tucson’s searing summer temperatures with the help of some shade cloth and, as Tom later instructed me, frozen water bottles buried in their dirt. My plan at the time was to keep my worms indoors, having been assured that they would neither escape (as long as they received food...I read one hilarious and horrifying account of a couple who left their worms alone and hungry for so long that they made a break for it and ended up all over the apartment), nor smell. Unfortunately I was unable to make this argument convincing enough for my husband at the time, and the worms were banished to the front porch. As summer unfolded and the temperatures climbed, I worked harder and harder to keep the worms from baking to death. This is when I called Tom and learned about the water bottles, which I froze every night and tucked into the dirt every morning. This seemed like a little more maintenance than the literature described, especially the part where I had to wash worm slime off the bottles every evening, but the worms seemed to like their bottles and I chalked it up as another slight inconvenience of desert life, like sunburn or $200.00 A/C bills.

But then one morning a terrible thing happened. I guess the heat just got too intense, because when I went out to switch out the bottles (by this time, yes, I was rotating twice a day for 24-hour ice-coverage), I was greeted by a bin full of dead worms. Not all the worms were dead, but most of them were. Hundreds of dead worms are pretty disgusting, in case you’re wondering, but more than disgusted, I felt…well, a little heartbroken, actually. There was a certain amount of feeling for the worms themselves, who may or may not themselves feel the discomfort of baking to death in the desert sun, but I also felt like a failure. Who can’t keep some stupid worms alive? Me, that’s who.

I declared an emergency and brought the remaining worms inside, where they endured nothing more harmful than the withering glances of my ex-husband, who seemed to take their presence personally. After a while I got tired of defending them and brought them to work, where they were at least tolerated if not loved.

Time passed, but instead of replicating and consuming and producing and all that other great stuff they were supposed to be doing, the worms got a little lethargic and skinny, and their dirt bedding seemed to decrease instead of increase, and I really couldn’t figure out what was going on. I tried different types of food, different moisture levels, pretty much everything I could think of. Still no improvement. So last week I dismantled their bin, dumped most of the old bedding and any dead worms I found, and transferred the handful of survivors to a new pile of fresh coconut fiber bedding with some slightly moldy cucumbers and banana (always their favorites) to welcome them home.

And I just realized this story doesn’t really have an end, but maybe that’s for the best. The worms actually look better already, I have to say, and by that I just mean they look a little fatter on average and they move around a lot more. It remains to be seen whether my worm project will result in total success (not likely), limited success (which I can live with) or resounding failure (which I’m not sure my fragile ego can take). Luckily for the worms, they are much more charming than those stupid citrus trees.

My Asian Adventure

2009-06-28T15:46:00.000-07:00

Three years ago I went to Trinidad with a program called Earth Expeditions, which you can read more about here if you're so inclined:

http://www.earthexpeditions.org/

Basically the trip was a graduate course in conservation education, which was great except that I wasn't really planning on using the credit I got from it for anything in particular. But then last summer I got word that the EE program had launched a masters program based on these field courses, and so now you could get a degree by completing three international travel courses plus some online courses, plus a bunch of other stuff lest I make it sound easier than it is. I have long suspected that it might be a good idea to get a masters degree, and this program was the most reasonably priced, relevant to my job, graduate program I had run into yet. So I applied, and got in, and set about planning my course for this summer.

Why on Earth Mongolia?

My first choice of countries for this trip was actually Thailand. I didn’t get into that trip, but it ended up getting cancelled because of the political instability there, and all the participants got jammed into other trips at the last minute, so it’s just as well. Mongolia was definitely high on my list, mostly because of its complete randomness--who goes to Mongolia? The answer is me, and the 20 or so other teachers and zoo educators from across the country who are participating in the program this summer, and who would become my travel companions for the week. I also scheduled a day in Beijing on my way out, mainly because I wanted to use my frequent flyer miles and United wasn't going to let me get to Mongolia on the dates I needed. But I figured this was the universe's way of telling me I needed to see the Great Wall too. So I made plans online with another woman in our group (whom I hadn't met yet) to meet in Beijing and explore together.

I kept a journal in Beijing and Mongolia, but a lot of the stuff in there is sort of specific to the course and wouldn't really be palatable to anyone else. So I took excerpts from that, added some overviews and stories, and have stitched it all together. I will probably flip back and forth between present and past tense, which I hope isn't too distracting. A lot of this is being typed in the Bejing airport on my loooong return trip layover. And with that, here's what I thought of Beijing and Mongolia:

Chinese Character

Journal entry: 6/12/09

Beijing is not what I expected. I mean this in good way, because what I was expecting was chaos and noise and unbreathably polluted air. Instead, I stepped off the plane on a beautiful, clear day into a cool, quiet, totally spotless airport terminal that I think was just built last year to accommodate visitors to the Olympic games. The only thing that’s a bit disconcerting are the ubiquitous masks that everyone is wearing to ward of H1N1 flu. When the plane landed they wouldn’t let us off until a trio of “health inspectors” came aboard and took everyone’s temperature with what looked like the price scanners they use at the grocery store. Inside the airport terminal they herded us all through some other scanners, pulling aside the occasional random unlucky soul for further health screening. This all seems sort of silly, given the mildness of the H1N1 threat (in severity, if not in rate of transmission), but I guess that whole SARS thing got them a little paranoid. In any case, I’m glad that neither I nor any of my fellow passengers had a fever.

I’m staying at the Forbidden City Days Inn, which I think is a funny name—very East-meets-West. The hotel is totally acceptable, if not luxurious, and seems to be in a safe and convenient part of town. I am rooming with Katie, one of the other women in my Mongolia class, who got here a couple of days ago. She’s already done a tour of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, but we went walking all around both of them this evening so I could at least get the snapshot tour. I actually feel OK, maybe just a little tired, but I want to be able to enjoy the Great Wall, where we’re headed tomorrow. I can’t wait.

Journal entry: 6/13/09

So, if the Great Wall of China isn’t on your list o’ things to see in your lifetime, it definitely SHOULD be. I guess most visitors to Beijing go to the section of the wall that’s the closest, but we went to Badaling, which was about a 40 minute drive from our hotel. It’s supposed to be better preserved, and less crowded. We took a little cable tram, like the ones at Disneyland that I used to love, up to the wall from the bottom of the hill. It’s so green and lush there! It’s weird though, that despite all those trees the only birds I saw were crows and magpies, whereas I would think every songbird for a thousand miles would be hanging out there. I also think it’s weird that they have crows and magpies in China. It seems like everything there should be exotic and different, and those birds seem so…pedestrian. I mean, it’s the other side of the world, right? They should have stuff like the shaoling warbler and the xhuping wren. I just made those up by the way, so if I just swore at you in Chinese I apologize. Anyway, it’s a gorgeous spot, and we hiked along the wall through the watchtowers where the Chinese soldiers used to hang out, watching for Mongol invasions. I wonder what they did to entertain themselves? Talk about a remote location way up on the hill. While we were there a thunderstorm rolled in and we had to hide out in one of the towers until it stopped raining. In the meantime Katie had Jeff, our tour guide, teach us Chinese swearwords (speaking of swearing in Chinese…). In return we taught him to say “douchebag,” and educated him on the subtleties of its application. International relations are fun!

Stepping out on the Steppe

On Sunday, we flew from Beijing to Mongolia. Our group met in the airport at Ulaanbaatar (the capital of Mongolia), although a lot of us were on the same flight from Beijing and had met at the gate before we left China. The group turned out to be a really cool bunch of people, many of whom I hope to remain friends with, and maybe even see again on my next EE trip. About 14 of us are in the masters program, and so will be traveling again next summer. The program tends to attract adventurous types, although there really is a range. Still, if you sign up for a trip that requires you to bring a sleeping bag, you have to know that 5-star resorts are not on the itinerary. However, even our first night in a hotel in UB, although it was on the itinerary, turned out not to be on the itinerary after all, and we headed directly from the airport out to the pallas cat research site. A pallas cat is a small wild cat, sort of like a lynx, that lives on the Mongolian steppe. They've been hunted for their pelts, and have been victims of accidental poisoning from rodenticides used by humans to control the enormous populations of gerbils, hamsters, voles, marmots, and other burrowing creatures of the steppe. As a result, there aren't too many cats left, and the group studying them is trying to learn more about their reproductive habits so we can better protect them in the wild and maintain a healthy captive population in zoos back in the U.S. The camp is located just about literally in the middle of nowhere, because that's where the cats hang out. The accommodations were pretty basic--a cluster of gers (those round, tent-like structures that are generally referred to a 'yurts' by Americans--more on that later), two latrines dug for our visit, thoughtfully hidden beneath nylon tents, a hand-washing station (bottled water on a stand) and a solar shower under another tent. We teamed up 5 to a ger and settled in for four days of cat-tracking, conservation discussion groups, and various other activities relevant to doing graduate work in conservation education that I wont bore you with here, except to say that it was exhilarating and exhausting, and we didn’t get much sleep. This was partly a function of overscheduling, but also related to the fact that the older you get, the harder it becomes to sleep on the floor. Throw in jetlag, chilly nightime temperatures, and our Mongolian hosts’ habit of hawking up creepy stuff from their throats at all hours, and you start to get the idea. Another problem: our ger started smelling distinctively like dead rodent after the second day, which was also a barrier to comfortable sleep. We looked all over for the source of that smell, but it wasn't until we moved out that we discovered the offending creature--its hard to describe where he was exactly, but suffice it to say that its proximity to my sleeping head was much greater than I would have liked.

Cat Tales

We had been told that we might not actually be able to see a pallas cat during our visit, which is the frustrating reality of animal tracking. But this turned out to be an unnecessary warning, and actually a bit of a joke, because a litter of pallas kittens had been rescued just before our arrival after their mother was killed by...something...I'm not sure what. There was a bit of a language barrier between us and our Mongolian biologist-hosts that contributed to a number of similar mysteries during our trip. In any case, the camp was raising these kittens until they were old enough to release back out onto the steppe, and twice a day they were brought out and fed little rodents that the researchers caught for them. Watching the feedings was hilarious--the kittens were so cute and looked so cuddly right up until the moment a gerbil was dangled in front of them, at which point they bared their teeth and pounced and ripped the poor creature to shreds. We never got tired of watching it, which I know sounds a little gruesome but you need to trust me on this one.

We also got to see adult pallas cats in the wild, as it turned out, since the biologists had been successfully tracking several of them with radio collars. All I personally ever saw was the disappearing backside of an adult cat as she darted out of a cave after being "encouraged" by our guide (and if you're wondering about the motives of biologists who claim to be hands-off but seem perfectly willing to prod the cats from their dens, or allow 20 American teachers to frolic with pallas kittens at feeding time, you can rest assured that I am wondering along with you, but it's hard to question these things out loud when you get to frolic with kittens, you know?) Another of our sub-groups, purely by luck, actually found and caught, with a shoelace and a jacket no less, a cat that wasn't collared yet. They ended up letting it go because it wasn't a male (and therefore not currently needed for their research), but they got the whole thing recorded on video and showed it to the rest of us that night.

Even aside from the feline adventures, our first few days of steppe life were truly amazing. Unlike in Africa, where you can’t even dart behind a bush to pee unaccompanied lest a lurking lion devour you, in Mongolia you can wander freely in relative safety. I really should have brought my running shoes, as it turned out, but in their absence made do with darting up one or the other of the endless hills around our camp whenever I had a spare few moments. Without the inconvenience of trees or other impediments, I didn’t even have to bother looking for a trail, and with views unobstructed in every direction I never worried about getting lost. And the frequent hikes were essential in order to offset the copious amounts of food we encountered at every meal.

Please Pass the Yak

I can’t really offer an expert review of the common Mongolian diet, because I think our hosts were trying to impress us, but I think our meals were representative of some general trends in Mongolian cuisine, foremost that meat and dairy are the two main food groups, followed by cookies and Nutella. OK, the cookies and Nutella may have been another effort to placate the Americans, but the meat was authentically omnipresent. In fact, if I don’t see a chunk of beef, (or lamb or goat or whatever other animal we may have unwittingly consumed) for a month, I'll be perfectly happy. Same goes for the cookies and Nutella, especially at breakfast. Will someone please bring me my running shoes??

Say it, Don’t Spray it

In Mongolia, they speak Mongolian, which I'm sure doesn't surprise anyone. What surprised ME was how much Mongolian sounds Russian, and how little it sounds Chinese. When it's written, it's in Cyrillic letters, and they don't really even have a way of writing in the letters we use. Consequently, whenever we asked one of our hosts to spell a word for us so we could figure out how to say it, it would be different from the way someone else had spelled it. Also, it's really hard to make those Russian/Mongolian sounds with your mouth when you're an American, so many of the hilarious exchanges between us and our hosts involved them repeating a word, and us enthusiastically mangling it back to them. Many in the group learned to count to five, in addition to the words for hello, goodbye, please, and thank you; and considered it a major language coup.

Ger-rrific

We quickly learned that in Mongolia, the round, tent-like structures we were staying in are called gers (pronounced "ghairs"), not yurts. Yurt is evidently a Russian word, whereas ger is Mongolian. So when you're reading about gers later on, you can picture yurts. We named our ger at the pallas camp Gary (as in Gary the ger). Our ger at Hustai resort didn't have a nickname because we were only there for one night, and our ger at Moilt camp was called "the barn" because it smelled like one (and I will take that over dead rodent any day!) I became very fond of gers while in Mongolia, and I, who almost never buy souvenirs, now have my very own miniature ger, destined to be a dust collector on my coffee table. But it makes me happy every time I look at it.

Horsepower

Our mode of transportation in Mongolia was a fleet of Soviet inspired grey vans that look like they could withstand just about anything they might encounter, except maybe the vehicular equivalent of a fashion show. We quickly became acquainted with the relative merits--or DE-merits, I should say--of each. The one with the green curtains, which was immediately christened the "Shag Wagon," seemed to have a direct line from the exhaust pipe back into the van. The diesel fumes, combined with the accompanying heat, made for a less than pleasant transportational experience. The van with the grey seats rode particularly rough, and didn’t have a back bench seat so fewer people could fit in it. Fewer people generally meant less fun playing the "pop culture knowledge game" (better than watching the road, trust me), so this van was also avoided. That means that every ride meant jockeying for a coveted spot in "Supervan," recognized by its attractive turquoise and yellow upholstery. Supervan seemed to be hardier than the other two, good at climbing hills and less prone to breakdowns.

The roads in Mongolia are either about what you'd expect, or more primitive than you'd expect...depending on what you expect. In Ulaanbaatar, the capital city, they are potholed and rough; everyone drives aggressively and lanes are merely a suggestion. But just a few kilometers out of town (see, I can use the metric system too!) the asphalt disappears and what you get in its place is two parallel dirt tracks through the grass that disappear off towards the horizon. These tracks, it turns out, are also a suggestion, since it was often necessary to bail off the road for reasons that were sometimes obvious (giant herd of slow-moving sheep), or were clear only to our Mongolian-speaking drivers. It doesn't really matter though...on or off road features about the same amount of jouncing and jostling. In fact, later in the trip these vans will be renamed "The Shermans" for their uncanny commonalities with the Sherman traps used by our pallas cat researcher friends to first trap, and then stun by shaking, the gerbils and mice caught for the pallas cats' meals. By the end of the trip, the phrase "gerbilled in a Sherman" referred both to the fate of the rodents and the fate of our group members every time we embarked on a journey in those vans. If you haven't either been thrown out of your seat, or had your head smashed violently into the ceiling, you haven't experienced a Sherman on the steppe.

On the third afternoon at the pallas cat site, we had our greatest Sherman adventure yet. Some Mongolian conservation officers came by to let us know that they were about to go on a wild horse chase, and did we want to come. One of the takhi, a.k.a. Przewalski's horses, a.k.a. the other reason we were in Mongolia, had strayed out of the Hustai reserve and onto the unprotected steppe. When this happens, in order to prevent breeding with domestic horses or getting shot by someone with a penchant for horse meat, the park staff shoots out on their mopeds (yep, mopeds--so much for the romantic vision of the herder on his horse) and rounds up the wayward animal. But today this poor horse really got the full treatment; an ambush by two mopeds and three Shermans. We found him on a hillside and kind of semi-encircled him with the vehicles--he took off towards the reserve and we chased the mopeds who were chasing him. At this point the roads, such as they were, became irrelevant, and off we went, careening across the steppe after this horse. I've never seen an animal run so fast, and can you blame him? Only slightly less impressive was the performance of the Shermans, led of course by Supervan, who skipped and skittered over the steppe in hot pursuit. By the time the park rangers let us know that our "help" was no longer necessary, we were all thoroughly bruised and battered, but also thoroughly exhilarated by our adventure.

The other obligatory Sherman experience evidently involves spending part of your journey on foot after the van has either run out of gas, overheated, or become stuck in a river...all actual occurrences on our trip. If you're REALLY lucky, all three of these things might happen on the same trip, as it did the day we drove from the pallas cat site to Hustai. We set off innocently that morning in the three Shermans and a bonus green jeep that belonged to the staff at the cat site. Our trip was supposed to take a couple of hours "if we could get across the river" and a couple more if we couldn't and had to go around the long way. In most countries I've been to, a river might be spanned by, say, a bridge, but in Mongolia you just kind of pick your spot to slosh across and hope for the best. Supervan (which I was in) went first, and made it all the way across with no problem even though the water came clear up to the headlights. The green jeep went next, and got stuck right in the middle of the river. Everyone jumped out of the two remaining vans and waded out into the river to help push the jeep, but it was pretty thoroughly wedged in the mud. The driver of the Shag Wagon decided to go for it, and got almost all the way across before getting stuck as well. Then there was this flurry of activity all at once: Supervan took off for help (we had all by this time climbed out to watch the action), the grey-seated Sherman darted successfully across the river, and the Mongolians rigged a tow rope to it and tried to pull the Shag Wagon (success!) and the jeep (failure!) out of the river. Meanwhile a bunch more people waded out, and once they got the pulling and pushing synched, the jeep finally lurched over to the other side. When they opened the doors about 300 gallons of water came out. I was really glad my luggage wasn’t in there.

Eventually Supervan came back (I was never clear on what sort of "help" was being procured...maybe it was just a ruse for some other errand, although other than a few gers and herds of livestock there wasn't much around), and we were on our way. But the jeep wasn't sounding so good, and it wasn't long before they had to pull it over to try and dry it out. Meanwhile, the Shermans were starting to drop like flies--we picked up the occupants of the Shag Wagon and jammed them in with us after it ran out of gas, but that only lasted about 20 minutes before we coughed to a stop as well. Evidently our unscheduled takhi chase from the day before had thrown the gas plan off course, and I can tell you I did not see ONE gas station outside of UB the entire time we were in Mongolia. So the grey-seated Sherman plowed ahead to bring back gas from Hustai (not that there were gas stations there either, but they have some sort of supply system that probably involves gas cans in a shed), and the rest of us hiked along the road for about an hour until the newly filled vans came from behind and picked us up. All in all, the trip ended up taking about as long as it would have if we'd gone around the river, but at least we got to stretch our legs.

Seven Nights, One Shower

Hustai was really different from the pallas cat site--less dusty, way more green. After four days and nights without showering, we were really excited to reach the Hustai "resort," which didn't exactly have all the comforts of home, but did have running water and electricity. We were still in gers, but these had beds and an overhead light. But best of all, there was a bar! So we cleaned up and ordered beers and sat on the deck of the main building...until a GIANT SCARY DUST STORM came out of nowhere and drove us all inside. It was really weird and dramatic, and it wreaked havoc all over the resort, breaking stuff and knocking out the electricity (dammit!) Fortunately we were used to living without it, although I had really been looking forward to charging my camera battery.

After the dust blew through, it started to rain and got really cold. It rained all night, causing me to wake up every hour in dread that we were going to have to finish out the course in the freezing rain. Evidently on the trip last year it rained every single day, and EE isn't exactly known for calling off the outdoor activities because of weather. I can live with a little rain, but temps in the 40s are more (ok less) than I can handle gracefully if I'm wet too. Amazingly though, when we woke up the rain was gone and the air was clear and beautiful. It was cold, but sunny, and we set off for Moilt camp under a beautiful sky.

The camp was set in kind of a grassy bowl up in the hills. The Shermans backfired ominously a lot on the ride up, but made it there without additional incident. Our accomodations were gers again, which I had by now learned to love, especially the ones that have beds in them. I could pile up the sheets and the wool blanket and my sleeping bag and stay warm through the night despite temperatures that dropped into the low 40s. Yeah, I could have stood some warmer weather, but we found that lots of clothing layers make the consequences of not showering for another 4 days somewhat less dire.

Horsepower, Part II

This second half of the trip was focused on the takhi, the only truly wild horse species in the world (did you know that the American mustang is not truly a wild horse, just a domestic horse gone feral? I didn't). The takhi in Mongolia have been reintroduced after being declared extinct in the wild...an example of how captive breeding can sometimes save a species.

We had also been warned that we might not see takhi, which also turned out to be kind of silly. We spent a long (cold, early) morning watching a herd graze serenely on a hillside, and it was amazing how close we were able to get without spooking them.

This camp also had great impromptu hiking, with views that seemed even more spectacular than the ones at the cat site. It’s really hard to articulate the vastness and solitude that exists in Mongolia, or why it appeals to me so much, but there is, and it does.

Back in the Ulaanbaatar

As a consequence, it was pretty hard to return to Ulaanbaatar, where we spent the last afternoon and evening of our trip. Although we were initially thrilled to experience paved roads again, the choked city streets turned out to be as bouncy as the steppe--with the added non-benefits of pollution and noise. What can I say, I'm just not an urban fan. We toured a Buddhist monastery, which was cool, saw a 'cultural show,' which was also cool, and ate at...wait for it...a Mongolian BBQ! I'm totally serious. It was exactly like Mongolian BBQ in the U.S, but with more Mongolians. Oh, and also goat, horse, and sheep stomach meat in the buffet. I went for the tofu.

I'm glad we only spent 14 hours in UB, and I was ready to come home at the end of the trip. Should you go to Mongolia? I dont know. I'm thrilled that I did, but then again, I love getting as close as possible to the middle of nowhere. I like climbing hills and looking for animals and camping in gers. And that's Mongolia.

Sadly, this blog doesn't let me embed photos in appropriate spots, but to see my Mongolia photos, you can go here (password = sherman):

http://mongolia2009.winkflash.com/

Kid Stuff

2009-04-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

People often talk about how great it was to be a kid, which I think is completely ridiculous. Maybe I was just a lame kid, but I don’t remember childhood being all sunshine and rainbows, although there were a lot of those since I grew up in Hawaii and they have sunshine and rainbows pretty much on a daily basis. But I was a worrier as a kid, and self-conscious, and way more timid than I am now. I took things very personally, like when it was brought to my attention that I had “boy’s shoes” or “ugly teeth” by the kids in my kindergarten class. The aforementioned shoes immediately ended up in the back of my closet, and the teeth, well, I kept my mouth shut until the 4th grade when it was time for braces. (Then I kept it shut until the 8th grade when the “ugly” braces came off.) Now, I will deliberately choose boy’s shoes if they’re more comfortable, and you can fuck off about everything else if you don’t like it.

But back then it was a seriously bad day if I was picked last for a team, laughed at for giving the wrong answer in math class, or caught with a booger on my nose. And that was just the small stuff. When I was probably about 8 or 9 years old, I caught sight of a headline in the newspaper that said “HOW DO WE TELL OUR KIDS ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR?” Mission accomplished, newsholes. I was primed for an ulcer the day I heard that we had bombed Libya, which I had never heard of but figured probably had nuclear missiles aimed at my house.

Other things that scared the hell out of me when I was little included stock footage of peoples’ roofs getting blown off in hurricanes and those miserable TV shows like “That’s Incredible” or “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” that specialized in creepy paranormal occurrences. For years I was POSITIVE that on my 13th birthday I would be visited by the first in a series of poltergeist-induced door slammings and/or dishes flying out of the cupboards and smashing on the floor. If you don’t get the reference, perhaps you weren’t aware that poltergeists tend to become active when there is a teenage girl in the house. I know this either because “That’s Incredible” told me, or that stupid movie “Poltergeist” did, and it got etched on my brain for eternity.

What bad things ACTUALLY happened to me as a kid? Freaking nothing. I had awesome parents, went to a great school, had good friends, and got to spend every weekend at the beach. So what’s with the years of sustained, low-level dread? I have no idea, is the answer to that, but the good news is that with enough life experience I eventually snapped out of my powerless funk and quit worrying about inevitable doom. The crises of my current life might be stuff I wasn’t even aware of as a kid (fortunately I never saw the headline reading “HOW DO WE TELL OUR KIDS ABOUT AUTOMOBILE MAINTENANCE COSTS?”) but at least I have the confidence to trust that I can manage whatever comes at me. Unless it’s a poltergeist, ‘cause that shit is SCARY!

Grounded

2009-02-21T14:30:00.000-08:00

Criminally sedentary for most of my childhood, except for a brief swim team stint as a ten-year-old (doomed by, in addition to my basic lack of dedication, a terrible habit of waving to my parents mid-stroke during races), I inexplicably took up a whole pile of sports as an adult. The most recently acquired is triathlon, stories about which tend to make the eyes of the non-athlete glaze over or water with despair. Before that it was running, (same problem), and before THAT, hiking, which I'm hoping is more universally relatable. My favorite quote about hiking comes not from Sir Edmund Hillary or John Muir, but from David Duchovny's character in the episode of Sex & the City where Carrie visits an ex-boyfriend who's voluntarily committed himself to a psychiatric institution. Duchovny, the ex-boyfriend, invites Carrie on a hike, and gets one of her signature, withering, city-slicker looks in return. He looks around, leans in conspiratorially and says, "I'll let you in on a little secret I learned in here: hiking…is walking."

And hiking IS walking, or a least it starts out that way. I first hit the trails in Arizona with my then-boyfriend Bob, who shepherded me through the unfortunate but obligatory trial-&-error rookie period. Here are some things I learned: Don't wear jeans on a hike. Don't try to remove those little gold cactus spines with your fingers, unless you want little gold cactus spines in your fingers until the end of time. Don't hike rocky trails in tennis shoes. And when it comes to investing in hiking boots, you get what you pay for.

My current boots are $200.00 Lowa backpacking boots, men's size 7, and it took me lots of blisters and numb toes to get there. Normally I don't admit to paying that much for anything that touches the ground, but I’ve actually owned these boots for almost 10 years now, so if you amalgamate the $200.00 over that time period, things start to sound more reasonable.

But now you might be wondering how the same pair of boots have held up over 10 years (or you might be wishing I'd written about triathlon instead.) The truth is that these boots hiked the vast majority of their mileage during their first year, when I was guiding hikes at Canyon Ranch. After I learned how to follow a trail (sort of), and where to place my feet became instinctual instead of a constant negotiation, Bob somehow convinced me to quit my office job and start hiking for a (very meager) living. This turned out to be a crucial fork in the road of my professional life--all those soul-crushing office jobs you may have heard me refer to in other stories suddenly became a choice rather than a predestined life course. And suddenly the idea of working until retirement didn't make me want to fling myself off a bridge anymore, which was good because I couldn't always afford the gas to get to a bridge in the first place. Thank God the Ranch hired me to hike, despite my complete lack of any sort of qualifying experience other than the ability to walk. And thank God that hiking is walking.

The only reason that I'm not still a hiking guide is that I found another job that sings to my love of nature AND offers a living wage with benefits. I actually tried to do both for a short time, but the non-sustainability of working 7 days a week revealed itself in a reduced capacity to stifle wise-ass responses to the prissy Canyon Ranch guests on my hikes. Since I clearly needed sleep more than I needed to be paid to hike, I threw in the scented Canyon Ranch towel and shoved the Lowas to the back of my closet.

Which is not to say that I didn't still hike, just that it went from 5 times a week to once a month, then a few times a year, and then less than that. I took up trail running (thanks again, Bob) which turned to marathon, which turned to triathlon, and the hiking boots made ever more occasional appearances.

But I still love those boots like most normal women love their most recent purchase of...whatever shoe designer is hot right now...like I would even know. When I pull them on, my feet settle into all their well-worn indentations, and my hands perform their intricate lacing pattern from memory. The boots are heavy, and it usually takes a little while to shake that feeling of dragging concrete blocks around with my feet, but after a few steps on the trail the boots feel lighter and right, somehow, like they know they're back where they belong.

I found another purpose for hiking along the way, and it’s the one that pushes me out on the trail most often now, when the rest of my life is crammed with work, running, cycling, and swimming. If I am upset, confused, or troubled about anything, getting out for a hike helps clear my head. It's better than therapy or drugs for me (I wouldn't actually know about the drugs, but it's probably safe to say that), and I credit hiking with getting me through some sticky times.

Last November I hauled out my boots to climb up to Atascosa lookout, which is when I realized that I won't be able to ignore the inevitability of sole separation much longer. At my current rate of use, I should be able to maintain the status quo for at least another year, but then it will be time to let go. I could have them resoled, I suppose, but there so many other alarming signs of wear that it might not be a particularly sound investment at this point. One of my friends once had a pair of shoes he loved so much that he held them together with duct tape--to the point where eventually I don't even think there were shoes under there. But that's not really my style, as it seems like a very public proclamation of one's inability to roll with life's changes (or a suggestion that the wearer of said shoes lives in a cardboard box.)

Still, giving up my boots won't be easy because they mean more to me than hiking boots probably should. They carried me all the way through the big identity crisis of my young adulthood, and a couple more identity crises after that. I've lost other things in my life, and I'll tell you this with conviction; some of those things just can't be replaced. But my boots will have to be, because the hiking trail is where I undergo my most effective healing, and good healing needs good shoes.

2 bedroom, 1 1/4 bath

2009-02-16T14:22:00.000-08:00

The house I just bought has a fully plumbed, operational toilet in its totally detached, one-car garage. I don’t mean a second bathroom, I mean a toilet. There’s a sink there too, but it’s one of those laundry sinks that one commonly finds in older homes next to the washer/dryer hookup. The toilet sits next to it, in full view of god and anyone who pulls into the garage. If that doesn’t strike you as weird, I’d love you for you to email and tell me why.

My friends have offered several theories on why the toilet might have been installed in the garage, all of them plausible but oddly unsatisfying. It could be that because the house only has one bathroom, maybe someone got tired of being repeatedly locked out in times of need. Another possibility is that the garage was considered (and hopefully ultimately rejected, given its lack of insulation) as a guest house. Some of the guys think it’s there so that the man of the house didn’t have to suspend his garage-workshop activities to walk 30 feet to the toilet in the house, although I can’t imagine someone that lazy would be inspired to outfit said garage with a makeshift restroom.

I’ll probably have the opportunity to ask the sellers about the toilet before the deal closes, but knowing the answer will probably be a little disappointing. Or maybe not…my first house had a room with an electrical outlet in the middle of the floor, and a little turret built into the roof right above it. It turned out that the first owner had been a pipe organist, and that was the only way his pipe organ would fit into the house. I couldn’t have come up with a story that good on my own no matter how long I lived there.

I am always drawn to older houses for their character and quirks. New houses may have smoother walls and shinier faucets, but they rarely have mysteries.

With apologies to Jeff Goldblum

2009-02-08T06:10:00.000-08:00

Last fall, I house-sat for a friend of mine who has seven cats. Ok hold on. I shouldn't have started with the cats, because that's not what I'm planning to talk about in this post, and I bet now you have a few questions that are just going to have to wait. But what I was inefficiently getting to was that while I was there, I found a bark scorpion on his kitchen counter, which is really cool but also a little scary since they can really mess you up if they sting you. This one didn't sting me, or any of the seven cats (which is actually pretty amazing, since it would've been a long journey from any of Eric's doors to his kitchen counter, and given the cat-per-square-foot ratio, you'd think that the chance of an inter-species encounter would be quite high); it just looked at me and waved its tail around a little bit.

People tend to make certain assumptions about you when you work at a zoo, two of which seem to be (according to my experience) that you are a walking encyclopedia containing every minute fact about every species of animal that ever existed; and also that you feel personally responsible for the well-being of every lost dog, injured squirrel, or abandoned bird that turns up in someone's yard. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of zoo employees who possess one or both of these traits, just that there are some of us who exhibit neither. And, frankly, I'd rather disappoint you here than when you call me for advice about dropper-feeding the baby quail you found behind your barbeque.

Still, despite my cold, dead heart, I really don't like squishing things. Actually maybe this isn't really that paradoxical if you consider both of these tendencies part of a larger strategy of non-interference. I won't splint a squirrel's leg and nurse it back to health, but I also won't break the squirrel's leg in the first place--at least not on purpose.

But here's where it all breaks down: I hate flies with a fiery intensity that consumes my soul. I can't really explain it, but that's often how hatred goes, right? Flies didn't kill my father (at least I don't think they did), nor do they keep me from achieving my life goals. I'm not that concerned about them being dirty, landing on excrement, or being drawn to dead bodies, although I suppose none of those things really help. But flies linger around my face, which is not cool, and they buzz my eyelashes repeatedly, which is even worse, and for some reason they often land right at the spot where the part in my hair meets my forehead and walk around in circles there. And I cannot begin to tell you how much that disturbs the balance of my universe.

I dislike this particular phenomenon even more than some of my other least favorite sensations, like when someone jams their thumbs into your ribs, or squeezes the two sides of your leg just above your knee. Why people even do this, or why trying to articulate how much I hate it often makes them do it again, will forever remain a mystery, but it doesn't matter because the fly thing is worse.

On the other hand, while you cannot, (at least without consequence) squish the rib-jammer or the knee-squeezer, you CAN squish the fly. It's probably better, though not thoroughly necessary, to wait until he's off your head. And I, who will squish neither scorpion nor cockroach, neither spider nor centipede, will squish a fly--and his entire family, given the opportunity--with no remorse.

Flies can't KNOW this, but it often seems like they do. They're very fast, and good at anticipating your attacks with those little multifaceted eyes they have. I am not good at squishing them with my bare hands, although this probably saves me quite a lot of unpleasant fly-gut removal. Similarly, I am not terribly skilled at squishing them with a magazine, unless it is of a particular size and heft (the magazine, not the fly). Fly-swatters really do perform as advertised, but they are rarely available when I want them, since it never occurs to me to want them when I'm at whatever type of store sells fly-swatters. Also, when I was very young my mom ranted enough times about how disgustingly dirty fly-swatters are (probably because I tried to eat them) that I'm consequently hard-wired as an adult not to really want them around in general. Except when there is a fly on my forehead. You see the problem here?

Someone taught me a trick that seems to work for other people, but not for me. The idea is that when a fly lands on a flat surface, you hold your hands, palms facing each other, about a foot above him and a foot apart. He sees your hands with his little multifaceted eyes, and flies directly upwards. You clap your hands together, and presto...dead fly. I've been trying to test this method all weekend, as I am staying in a house that seems to attract flies...well...like flies. Actually it's because there are sliding glass doors in the living room, the weather has been idyllic, and my cousins don't hate flies as much as I do. Ever heard of a screen? The cost of enjoying the great outdoors from indoors is ten billion flies in the house, and, theoretically, lots of chances to test this method of fly-slaughter (hey, rhymes with fly-swatter!) But I can't get it to work, mainly because the flies seem to know what I'm up to and refuse to land anywhere besides on my head. Marinka got it to work on the first go-round, but that still leaves us with approximately ten-billion-minus-one flies. She needs to get to work.

I just realized that I never finished the scorpion story that started this whole thing off. There isn’t actually much more to tell, except that after I got over the initial shock caused by the sudden appearance of the scorpion, I caught him with my patented cup-and-magazine-removal method and transported him safely (though not without some additional irate tail-waving) out into Eric’s yard and deposited him with his thousands of sting-y friends.

A lot of trouble for a scorpion, right? Yeah, well, they eat flies.

Underdog

2009-01-28T20:02:00.000-08:00

If I asked you what your favorite animal is, what would you say? I pose this question to people, usually kids, quite often in the course of my perky zoo banter. There are millions of recognized animal species on earth, but generally people's favorite animals tend towards what we in the zoo industry refer to as "charismatic megafauna"...the big, showy, or impossibly cute animals that inspire evening news stories and endlessly forwarded YouTube video links. I can pretty much guarantee that any program our Zoo offers with primates or big cats as its subject matter will sell out with astonishing speed, while the spaces in our anteater and bird classes languish a bit longer (but of course still sell out in the end, 'cause we're that good).

Everybody loves a tiger and a chimpanzee, but who loves a tapir or a banana slug? If you've been reading this blog carefully, you probably already know the answer to that, but it's me...I do. Don't get me wrong, I think big cats and primates are just swell. But honestly? I don't get that obsessive passion that people exhibit over cheetahs and chimps. Jane Goodall, for example, is a complete mystery to me, although I admire anyone who spends that much time on anything, since I can't commit to an Ironman or write anything longer than a blog post.

I suspect that my predilection towards the less glorified members of the animal kingdom is yet another manifestation of my tendency to seek the novel and original, leaving the roads more traveled to the unimaginative masses. Ah, but now I've put my foot in my mouth again. It's certainly not my intention to offend my lemur-loving readers, because lemurs need love too. But like that homely kid in the back of the class, the marabou stork generally doesn't get the attention he deserves when he's surrounded by majestic baboons. (OK, I don't think that simile really worked, but you can't blame me for trying.) I had a serene marabou stork moment, once, when I was in Zambia in 2005. It was right around sunset, and as our safari truck rounded a corner we were treated to the mesmerizing spectacle of a huge dead tree filled with storks; their long, downward pointed bills silhouetted against the orange sky. There must have been 15 or 20 of them in this one tree, just sitting there quietly enjoying each others company, or waiting for a corresponding reunion of pythons to materialize for dinner, or whatever they were doing. It was one of the most arresting and visually resonant moments of a trip filled to bursting with giraffes, elephants, and lions. And I've never looked at Tricky Dick, our Zoo's marabou stork (I didn't name him) quite the same way again.

What does it matter, right? We humans, as a species, are not obligated to lavish equal attention on each of our fellow creatures. But I'm thinking about this now, as the primate-themed sessions in the conservation conference I'm attending soar into the double-digits. I am actually here with the specific charge of identifying new projects for our Zoo to partner with, but I just can't help noticing that the primate, cat, and elephant projects have dozens of sponsors already, not to mention the undivided attention of the same roomful of people who dozed through the prairie chicken session yesterday morning. And where are the banana slug researchers? They didn't even bother to show up.

And that's where it matters, I think, even though conservation efforts for one species generally have a positive effect on entire ecosystems and affect untold numbers of related species. Every animal is here for a reason, and every animal has as good a story as a gorilla or a tiger...you just sometimes have to look a little harder, or watch a little longer, to get it.

The kind of post I can finish

2009-01-16T21:22:00.000-08:00

I want you to know that I really try to balance my blog entries so that they’re not ALL about things that annoy me or cause me to snort with derision. I’ve started about 17 earnest entries about the fabulous time I had in Belize over New Years, diving among dazzling corals, basking in the tropical sun, and drinking basil martinis with some of my favorite people in the world. But for some reason, these entries all start to trail off into cliché and banality, then I lose interest and they lurk around in their half-baked form on my computer until the end of time (or until I upgrade to a new computer and it won’t recognize my old Word documents…whichever comes first).

Maybe I should just admit it….the stuff that really gets my journalistic juices flowing is the stuff that drives me crazy, inspires condescending judgment, or otherwise makes me go “hmmmm.” I can usually tell when I need to write about something to get it off my chest…generally it’s when I’ve already shared it repeatedly with Jennifer, my trusty sidekick at the Zoo. Jennifer has the magical ability to appear sweet and nice and innocent, while hiding her own catty tendencies until such time as I (or someone similarly caustic) provide the like-minded and therefore safe audience she needs to display her true colors. I admire her restraint, since I clearly don’t have it myself. I also appreciate that not only does she not look at me funny when I share some horrible thought with her, she often agrees with me, and sometimes even beats me to the punch.

So this morning I commiserated with her, for possibly the 40th time, about how occasionally I am annoyed to the point of internal violence by things that have no business annoying me at all. I can’t explain, control, or rationalize them in the least. In my defense, before I share a couple of them with you and thereby sully my golden reputation forever, I would like to point out that I am not in the least bit annoyed by things that many other people get all hot and bothered over…I rarely get road rage, mind when people cut in line, or freak out when someone steals my credit card number and goes on a shopping spree at Wal-Mart and the dollar store. Not to say that I enjoy this stuff, just that I can let it roll off pretty easily. Que sera, sera, right? It is what it is.

And that’s the mantra I repeat to myself to try and keep my blood from boiling every morning when I pull into my parking place at the Zoo and there stands Angel, the aptly named cleaning man, who has been spotted scrubbing doorjambs and wiping down our chairs when we’re not sitting in them. The man who regularly spends most of the day in our education building, single-handedly (and quite effectively) removing the residue of hundreds of screaming children from these hallowed halls. But here’s the thing, Angel’s employer does not see fit to provide Angel a key to the janitor closet, let alone the outer gate to the building. So when I’m the first one to work, which is often (and no Jennifer I don’t mean anything by that), I have to escort Angel through the gate, go upstairs to drop my stuff, and then immediately take my keys and go back downstairs to let Angel into his closet. What’s the problem here? I’m going into the building anyway, and eventually I have to unlock all the downstairs doors, so why does it matter that I’m forced by this totally agreeable man, with whom I have absolutely no beef, do it right away? I don’t know! But it matters, and not just a little bit. You’d think that over time it would matter less, but no, in fact it seems to be getting worse. In fact, I think the fact that it annoys me so much has started to annoy me more than Angel did in the first place.

OK, I’m only going to tell you about one other thing, because just writing about this is getting me all worked up. But I can tell already that I’m going to finish this entry, and soon, so I’d definitely onto something here.

I’m living at my mom’s place right now, as many of you know, and in general this is working out quite well. She takes good care of me, and I treat her way better than I did the last time I lived at home as a teenager. The big threat to our arrangement is all wrapped up in the TV. We both hate watching live television because of the commercials, so pretty much everything we watch is on DVR. Mom’s in charge of the remote because it lives on the table next to her chair, and that’s fine. Well, it’s fine until each commercial segment ends. If you have a DVR you know this, but it’s really hard to stop fast forwarding at the precise nanosecond the show starts, because there’s a bit of a delay on the remote. So usually you overshoot by a little bit, and that’s just the price you pay for getting to skip the commercials. But instead of just giving up that first line of dialogue, or more often just the opening shot, my mom has to stop the recorder, rewind back into the last commercial, and hit play again…just so we can get the full impact of that panoramic scene-setter. And every single time she does this I have to close my eyes and go to my happy place to keep from leaping across the room to strangle her. My self-control is admirable, I must say--I’ve never even given an incident one of my passive-aggressive slightly sarcastic observational quips (like “gee mom, that opening shot is really important to you, isn’t it”). No, I just sit there and quiver, and regularly express my preference, when consulted, for shows on HBO (no commercials— hey, I’m nothing if not a creative problem-solver).

Now, if you’re thinking “Wow, that’s just not a big deal,” I have to agree with you wholeheartedly. It’s NOT a big deal, which is why I’m so perplexed by my own reaction. Same thing with the janitor closet…I am surprised over and over again by my disproportionate rage. But that’s me, irritated to the point of blog-self-therapy by an Angel, and my mom. It is what it is.

By the numbers

2008-12-21T20:35:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, when I was at happy hour with four engineers, it occurred to me that I know a lot of engineers. This wouldn’t seem worthy of note if I was an engineer myself, but I am not…so very, very not. My grasp of the English language might be considered above average (at least I hope so, or I’m probably really killing you with this blog), but my grasp of mathematics, and science--other than the 4th grade level life science trivia that I use to skate by at work--is pretty abysmal.

The problem (no pun intended) started in the third grade when I missed the day we learned about subtraction, and borrowing, with the help of toothpicks. Would that I had known this was on the day's schedule…whatever malady I had could not have been worse than the domino effect engendered by my missing this important foundational activity. Mrs. Tornbaum, my intimidating and wrinkly third grade teacher, tried to catch me up when I returned, but her toothpick-free remedial retelling failed to penetrate my third grade brain, thereby dooming me to a life of numeric insecurity.

Things hit the bottom in the 8th grade, when my mom got a phone call from my 8th grade math teacher, whose last name escapes me but whose first name, I remember quite vividly, was Dottie. Dottie was concerned because I was on track to fail her math class. I was concerned because I don’t like to get in trouble, and because being scolded for mathematical incompetence by someone named Dottie seems particularly cruel. The real reason I was doing so poorly in her class probably had more to do with my energetic habit of passing notes back and forth with Shimi instead of focusing on formulas and theorems, but the result was the same, and the revelation of my poor performance to my parents led to an miserable series of private tutoring sessions that frustrated me to tears, but at least got me through my remaining semester with Dottie. After that, things improved marginally, probably not because I knew any more or tried any harder, but because Shimi ended up in some other class.

The great thing about being spectacularly bad at something is that protecting your dignity compels you towards creative methods of avoiding the activity in question. Sometimes this is impossible--in college, despite my best attempts to “test out of it” (yeah right!) I was forced to limp painfully through my lone core math class. (It was statistics, taught by a very nice gentleman with a very thick Hungarian accent. Other students complained about not being able to understand him, but as I was used to all math lectures sounding like Hungarian funeral chants, I didn’t really mind. Plus, he taught me to always remember how to spell the word phenomenon, which I would explain but it’s too phonetic to make any sense here). But after that, I was free to spurn math (and science, which I had by now figured out was just applied math--sneaky sneaky) in favor of 18th century poetry and Italian painters of the Renaissance. So I did.

In one of my many English classes I learned about irony, which is my very favorite language device (followed closely by synecdoche, which is a cooler word, but a bit more obscure, and also hard to remember how to spell). People misuse the word irony all the time, and it is a testament to my linguistic nerdiness that this drives me crazy. What drives me crazier is that irony is a difficult concept to define, and works better when illustrated by example. Here are some examples of NOT irony: running into your best friend at the grocery store (a coincidence), deciding to bet it all at the last instant and winning (a lucky break), and anything in that Alanis Morrisette song (just a series of unfortunate events, set to an unfortunate melody). Here is an example of irony: Last year I, math’s anti-hero, designed a tour for middle schoolers that centered around how we use math at the Zoo, and why it’s so important to cultivate a strong math background if you want to succeed in the animal-care field. Man, I love giving that tour.

What I don't love is Sudoku (which I'm convinced is a less appealing way to pass the time than gouging my eyes out) and trying to figure out how many miles I've run on the Rillito river path when I don't have my Garmin on. Nothing makes simple addition more annoying than trying to do it while running.

The other thing I don't love is when I go out with a group of people and the restaurant won't split the check, and we have to figure out what everyone owes on a scrap of paper that looks like the Rosetta Stone. Cash and credit cards start flying around, we're still trying to have conversations, and everyone is jockeying not to be the one stuck with the tax and tip that someone else forgot to add. It's enough to make an English major cry.

Been there? I find that surrounding myself with a cadre of engineers really reduces the chance that I'll have to add or subtract anything (although restaurants are a great place to find toothpicks).

And then of course there's the fact that engineers are so much fun!
(yeah, yeah, I know you guys read this...)

Here, now

2008-12-20T16:54:00.000-08:00

One of the things I try to do more in my life is to be fully present, to really experience things as they are at that precise moment instead of thinking about what I have to do later that day, my workout schedule for this week, or what that cryptic email message REALLY meant. But I say “try to do,” because I’m really quite horrible at it. My brain moves from one subject to the next like a hummingbird, feeding just long enough on each to sustain its frenetic pace. My body doesn’t usually want to slow down either—it’s uncommon for me to sit still for longer than a few minutes unless I’m writing, or watching something particularly riveting on television. Reading is problematic for me, even though I love it, because so few books succeed at pulling me completely out of my head. Once I start thinking, I remember something else I think I should be doing, and it’s all over. I don’t know where all this energy comes from, or why it seems to be increasing as time goes on, but there it is.

I think this is one of the reasons that I’m so drawn to running—it’s like a slow-release valve for pent-up energy. Or at least the physical kind—it’s still difficult to pin my brain down, although I have to say writing these posts sort of helps with that. But when you’re running it’s not such a great idea to try and be fully present in the moment anyway, or you’ll spend a lot of time thinking about pain. So once I have pointed my body in the appropriate direction, and programmed my feet for a rhythm of rising and falling, I usually just let my mind free-associate at will. Left to my own devices on a run a couple of weeks ago (by my fleet-footed companions whose tiny forms disappeared off the horizon a mere 5 minutes into our “group run”), I thought it would be amusing to make a list of all the random, disconnected thoughts I had during the 7 mile course. Of course, the idea is a bit of a non-starter, given that I don’t carry a pen and paper on my runs, my memorization skills are horrible, and the very existence of such a list would probably influence my thoughts anyway and muddy up the otherwise pristine madness that constitutes my inner landscape.

(Now, here’s a perfect example of the very phenomenon I’m writing about—I have just been totally distracted by an internal celebration triggered by my use of the phrase “inner landscape.” The term is what I’ll cite, if you engage me on this topic, as the primary reason I didn’t go back to this therapist I saw once during my divorce. She used it, I disparaged it…and now I’ve stolen it AND appropriated it for use without irony. This seems like some sort of emotional breakthrough for me, although it’s probably just a reflection on the more unsavory, hypocritical side of my character.)

You’re just going to laugh when I finally get to the tiny incident I started to write about in the first place, since it’s now warranted three full paragraphs of convoluted backstory. Basically what happened was that I was driving to the gym last week at 5:15 a.m, and the window in my car was down because my mom has our thermostat set to crank the heat up in the house sometime around 4 a.m. for some reason, which causes me to overheat alarmingly as I gather my stuff for the day and stagger out the door. I pulled up to the stop sign at the corner of Player’s Club Drive and Anklam, and stopped to look for other crazy people driving around at 5:15 in the morning. To the left, over the Tucson mountains, was this amazing full moon, just setting over the jagged peaks. And then in that same instant, through the open car window, I heard a train whistle off in the distance. The confluence of the moon, and the train whistle, and the dark cold froze me at that stop line, breathing and listening and feeling the glittering chill on my face, until a car swept around the corner behind me and its glaring headlights in my rearview mirror cracked the moment open, and sent me on my way.

Happy holidays and stuff

2008-12-16T10:08:00.000-08:00

Around the holidays I am even more acutely aware than usual of my allergy to sentiment. Well, not all sentiment, but hollow sentiment, or sentiment for sentiment’s sake. Here’s an example that will encapsulate it better than I’m doing right now: it’s what’s expressed by a card from someone that has a pre-printed message in it, and all they’ve done is sign their name. I understand that there’s something thoughtful going on here with the picking out of the card, and hey, maybe Hallmark really DOES say it better than they ever could, but a tree had to die for that card, man, and it seems like you could jot down an original thought or two to balance out the universe. Or at least to convince me that the card is really for me, and not for someone else who “makes the season special!”

My sentiment-related problem with the holidays has mostly to do with obligation. This time of year, you’re SUPPOSED to buy presents for people, or send them cards, or bake them cookies or peanut brittle or fudge. You can refuse to do these things, but people will still do them to you, causing you to lie awake at night wondering if you are going to hell in a handbasket, or just regular. I really do like most of the people in my life, but I don’t see how a massive outpouring of generic goodwill gets that across in any truly meaningful way. Over the years I’ve devolved from giving out candles and picture frames to sending cards (always with a line or two of my own, at least), to a Christmas-eve e-letter and hopping a flight to Belize. And as far as I can tell, I have just as many friends now as I did back then. So it’s my problem, I guess, for feeling guilty—which is usually the way this sort of thing works.

The other day I was walking through the Zoo and I stopped to watch the giraffes necking. With giraffes necking doesn’t mean kissing, but that’s only because their necks are so long they can actually DO something with them. The male and one of our females were all wound up together, just leaning and snuggling and looking very sweet. Maybe they were just cold, or itchy, but they looked happy to be just where they were, and with each other. And THAT’S the kind of sentiment I can get into.

The Clampett pile

2008-12-14T15:06:00.000-08:00

I had been planning to write this piece before I saw the column in Newsweek about the Appalacians and their inhabitants, and how much they resent their characterization as "hillbillies" or those awful violent people in Deliverance, or as the Clampetts (under 30 and unsure of the reference? That's what Google is for!). It wasn't my intention to write anything insulting about the Appalacians and their inhabitants, but I WAS going to write about something I refer to as a "Clampett pile", and although I'm sensitive to slurs I think I'm going to take that plunge anyway. So I apologize to the Appalacians and their inhabitants, and that's the end of that.

One of the many personal paradoxes I can't resolve is that while I'm not afraid of dirt or germs or bugs, I rather prefer to live in a space that's free of extraneous clutter. I am periodically seized with the urge to throw away vast quantities of stuff I don't use. At the same time, I tend towards the practical and the frugal, and would hate to find myself in the position of having to buy a replacement of something I'd thrown away during one of my pruning sprees. It's actually a wonder I'm not institutionalized, but that's a subject for another post.

In order to resolve the dueling forces of my insanity, I am sometimes reduced to removing items from my immediate circle of vision, which generally means putting them in the garage, or if they're bigger, out in the side yard. And this is how the Clampett pile is born.

If you don't have some sort of a Clampett pile, you're either better at follow-through than I am, or you have a lot of crap in your house. On the other hand, if you have a pure, actual Clampett pile of old rusted refrigerators, bedsprings, and cars on blocks in your front yard...well...I don't really know what to say about that.

The Clampett pile at the house I shared with my husband was sad without being entertaining. It had about ten outdoor stacking chairs we bought at Home Depot and then replaced with nicer chairs, a wagon we used to collect brush when we had a yard big enough to accumulate brush, and the headboard off the first bed I bought that wasn't a futon. Oh, and the hammock stand we kept trying to pawn off on Robert and Sara but they kept refusing to take, probably because they were afraid it would end up in their own Clampett pile.

The Zoo has a Clampett pile too. Actually the Zoo has a lot of Clampett piles, but the one that caught my eye the other day contained a giant replica of Noah's ark that conveniently disappeared when we built the new aviary, and the coin-operated bulldozer that sat outside the fence at our education building construction site to distract Zoo guests from the giant hole in the ground where the air-conditioned room with the hedgehogs and snakes used to be.

My mom’s house, where I’m living now, doesn’t have a Clampett pile. This is because her homeowner’s association doesn’t allow them. While this is probably a good thing for the asthetics of the neighborhood, it seems to defy the natural order of accumulation. As a result of this restrictive anti-Clampett clause, every closet and cabinet in my mom’s house is stuffed to bursting with items just howling to be let outdoors. I’m honestly not sure how much longer the dam can hold.

The best Clampett pile I ever saw though was in Kajaraho, India, behind one of the museums I visited with Clay. Where to put the priceless historical and religious relics that don’t fit on the elegantly lit acrylic shelves inside? In a jumble out back, of course!

It seems like we could probably just take all the items that exist in these piles, well, with the exception of the Kajaraho pile maybe, and just throw them all away without anyone losing anything really important, or even having an awareness of the loss. But aside from the really scary thing that would probably happen at our local landfills as a result of such a scenario, there’s something psychologically rich about the purgatorial state in which we insist on keeping certain of our material goods. There’s the stuff we want, and the stuff we don’t want…and then there’s this other stuff. And, I don’t know, maybe we wouldn’t want to throw that away. Or not just yet.

The imperfect circle

2008-12-10T16:56:00.000-08:00

As a self-proclaimed master of efficiency, I am often saddened at blatant manifestations of unnecessary circuitousness. I am also aware that not everyone likes the big words (and bonus points for you if you got the irony there) so allow me to rephrase: Why go from point A to C to D to E and then to B when you can get there directly?

I’m still embroiled in the name change project, btw, which is why I just got off the phone with John Hancock Life Insurance, who might as well just call themselves “You Can’t Get There From Here” and be done with it.

Maybe it’s my fault for attempting to dodge the Customer Service Representatives by submitting my request via email, but since they have the option on their website, I thought I’d start there. So this morning I got the most typographically ghastly response you can imagine, instructing me to “pls contact customer Serv at 1-80-387-2747 for the appropriate forms to be sent.” Damn. OK, so I call and navigate through the inevitable labyrinth of electronic options (several of which try to direct me back to the website but no way, I ain’t falling for that again), then chat briefly to Jackie, who just wants my policy number so she can transfer me to Donna, who finds out I need a name change and sends me to…yeah now I’ve stopped writing their names down…who gets my email address so she can email me the forms. What?!

I don’t know—stuff like this can make you mad, or just can just hang your head and sigh, and then write about it on the internet.

What this (sigh) blog says about me

2008-12-10T10:04:00.000-08:00

There are two types of people in the world (yeah I know this is a glaring overgeneralization but bear with me for a minute) - those who pick one thing and stick with it through thick and thin, and those who abandon ship the minute something better comes along. I think most of you at least suspect in which group I cast my lot.

I could get all psychoanalytical about this phenomenon, but for today it's just how I'm going to explain my second online-journal-jump in a month. Despite this site having the word "blog" in its address, I can't help but admire its minimal advertising, simple layout, and dammit I think I just like it better than my old site. Plus I'm still mad at Livejournal about the name change thing.

So this is a test, because I think whenever possible it's best to look for sharks before one abandons ship. Maybe that makes me a third type of person. Ah well, another day.