Life on M

Breakup

2011-07-12T16:01:00.003-04:00

Blogspot and I have decided to end our relationship.

This has been a tough decision for both of us. We've been together since I was at university.

Dan introduced me to Blogspot one day at work. We had a few times running past one another, we had an off and on slightly uneasy friendship for those first few months. We got along, but we didn't think of one another all that often. Rare were the times when it would run through my head that I ought to drop a line to Blogspot and see what was up.

When I went off to Mongolia, we talked quite a bit. Our relationship became important, necessary even, to my survival. Blogspot became a solace for me. But, when I returned home, I quickly found myself too busy to really fulfill any of the promise of our budding relationship.

In Korea, once again I found myself in Blogspot's arms. Being there I felt safe. There was someone to talk to, a place to think and share and learn more about myself and who I was. I like to think that was when we really found each other.

After I came back to America, Blogspot was still with me. We were really close at that point and I thought to myself "This is it." I didn't have any thoughts of any others. Sure, I had that affair with Signal Boost, but in my heart I knew Blogspot was the one for me.

But, then things changed and it's not quite the same anymore. We talked about it and decided that we weren't quite right for one another anymore. It doesn't really like how I've changed and I don't really like how it's changed.

So we're breaking up. I'm moving over to wordpress. Find me at Life on M: Wordpress Edition!

Like

2011-07-01T10:33:00.010-04:00

I like someone.

This is very hard for me to say in any way. The first time I liked someone--liked them in that way people use the word in sixth grade, all nervous and concerned--I was about to tell my best friend when, out of no where, she said to me "Don't you think [that person] is weird?"

I mutely agreed and shoved the fact I had a crush on that person down inside of me and tried to forget about it. It, in this case, being my feelings that had become, in my mind, "bad."

With that idea squared away in my mind, I entered adolescence with a general inability to talk about people I was into. The end of my first relationship was met by private confessions from many of my friends that they never liked my new ex in the first place. What followed were crushes I viewed as inappropriate, bad or downright abusive relationships, and an overarching, ever growing discomfort with my own feelings.

Being able to say to someone "That Carly girl, I totally dig her" or "Kyle? Man, I have such a crush on Kyle," might not be the most important of social skills. They're not the content of conversations that really matter, in theory, but there is this cultural idea of the normality, the soft necessity, of being able to have these conversations. Every teen sitcom has some sort of open conversation about how into someone some other character is--usually with the bearer of the feelings being on screen at the time. Years of living with friends, open conversations, and a not insubstantial amount of alcohol got me to point where, through veiled discomfort and mumbling, I can admit to a friend that I like someone.

I can't do this with my mom.

However, I've reached a point where, thanks to the advent of parents on IM, I can chat with my mom about such things. This is something else I feel I -ought- to be able to do, even if there isn't justifiable utility behind it. I mean, justifiable utility beyond "My mom is interested in my life, loves me, and has way more experience than me so sometimes she has useful things to say or important notes of distinction to share." I mean, having found my father, and successfully having managed twenty-seven years of marriage so far, counts for something.

(Ida--also known as my mom--on the right in Provincetown. That's right, my mom liked P-town before it was cool.)

My mom, in case you don't know, was ridiculously cool when she was younger. She went to Woodstock. She saw "Stop Making Sense" live. My mom once had Michael Bacon play guitar in her living room. Michael Bacon! She's been through her share of crushes, dates, relationships, one night stands that become good stories when you're older, and this aforementioned marriage thing.

(That sweet convertible in the background? It was my mom's.)

I can't actually stress enough how important the fact she is my mom factors into the equation of me telling her things. She loves me. She cares. She's full of infinite understanding and forgiveness. I could tell her I was in a poly relationship with a straight drag queen, and dating a lesbian with a coke habit and she would be right there, reading articles about poly relationships, checking out the drag queen's videos, and giving me advice on how to help my lesbian girlfriend overcome her coke problem.

Which ties in very well to my next point: Someone gave my mother the internet.

I talk to her on it, which is great and has made a huge difference in the openness and comfort of our relationship. However, she is not just armed with a screen name for instant messenger. My mom comes with a Facebook account, a blog, a linked in profile, and a twitter. She has great google skills and an uncanny ability to follow links and search across mediums and networks to find whatever she wants to find.

And my gods does she find things.

My nervous admittance to her that I like someone easily drops me into a world where she is commenting to me about things they say on twitter, her looking at photos, and her even going as far as to make up nicknames for this person she hasn't even met yet. She asks me about how they're doing, or tells me about what they're doing.

A conversation with my mother might go like this:

Mom: I was watching this documentary with your father and they were talking about how plastic bottles are washing up on the shores of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area and causing some damage to the reefs there. Johnny McScubaface tweeted about a research trip they were going to go on out there, is their team still going to go?

Obviously, the above comment is a work of fiction. I mean, my mom's nicknames for people aren't like "Johnny McScubaface" at all. They're more like "Kyle Kyle Crocadile" and "Carlotta." (These are also fictional, but I could totally see my mom calling a Kyle or a Carly names like these.)

In one sense, this makes me regret opening up to my mom. On the rare occasions I see her, she'll wait until we're alone and then say "Tell me about that person you like. How did things work out with that? Did they not?" and I'll cringe and mumble away the conversation. Some realistic part of me is recognizing that this is one of the few ways I let her into the personal aspects of my life. As a child, she was there for everything and it was inescapable. Now, she sees the public and gets the pieces I pass on to her. Now that she is no longer literally dressing me every day or comforting me when I cry, these bits about who I like are the most intimate details I can pass along. They're secrets she gets to have and share that I don't--and frankly wont--give to most anyone else. It's a point she can connect to me with and something she can hold as her own, a rare thing even she gets to keep from my dad.

Plus, everyone loves gossip. And--I love you mom--her life isn't exactly the non-stop party-fest it was when she was my age. My life isn't the non-stop party-fest hers was when she was my age. In some sense, I assume that she gets a thrill when I proffer late night IM confessions or awkward mumbling. The excitement of meeting someone new, and coming to be attracted to them, has been replaced in her life with the commitment and love that comes from being married for twenty-seven years.

(My mom is the one wearing white.)

And even if it makes me feel a little awkward and embarrassed, lots of things do. I'm adjusting to being a person and learning to share is part of that. Besides, talking with her will probably never be as bad as the time NN turned to look at me and then, in a gleeful and accusatory tone: "Is that a hickey?" She cracked up while I turned bright red and people around us made noises about how they were "trying to be polite."

Omiyage

2011-06-29T11:21:00.007-04:00

In 2005, I became involved with a British guy. Involved seems to be the right term, reflecting back on it. Unspecific and indeterminate. We'd met because he had been coupled with a friend of mine. We'd chitter away at each other. We'd talked around their breakup. He was, to some extent, my friend, but I didn't think about him very much.

Then he offered to bring me some Irn Bru.

I don't remember how I first heard about Irn Bru. It had something to do with SS, that's all I really remember. JV was into it. Somehow I got some, tried it, and became attached to this bright orange soda. I probably loved it because it was impossible to get in America and I liked being difficult. I drank Brainwash and Jolt. My heart jumps at the mention of Moxie. I don't actually like soda, I dislike the feeling of the bubbles, but endlessly I get excited about these seemingly hard-to-get drinks.

The Brit's offer of Irn Bru was received warmly and ended up being the starting point of our (brief) affair. It was also the second omiyage someone gave me.

Omiyage is one of the Japanese words for souvenir. According to the teachers I had, omiyage are souvenirs with some implication about being specific to the place you visit. The idea that I got is that they are something the area is known for--e.g. Hershey, PA and chocolate. This is specific to something the region makes, not just something evocative of the region--e.g. the Eiffel Tower and Paris. I guess it doesn't really count as a souvenir if the person is from the area, but it felt that way to me. It was a special thing I couldn't get at home.

At some point in time it became such that you could get Irn Bru in America with the advent of the internet. I've never done this because of the aforementioned not actually liking soda. Something about Irn Bru coming from far away makes it special.

My parents were the ones who taught me that food makes places special. They might not have set out to do this, but it's what happened. My parents always enjoyed trying different foods and eating out, so trips had a tendency to highlight what made an area culinarily special. Certain things we'd only ever eat when we were at other places--Klondike bars belong to Florida heat and my grandparent's chest freezer. These were all personal experiences. I knew I could go buy a klondike bar anywhere, I just never did.

I was first introduced to the differences in snacks and junk back in middle school, when I mailed a box of oreos and a bottle of Snapple to New Zealand. A friend of mine there knew how much junk food varied by country and wanted to try these crazy American sweets we talked about with such high regard. While I was sending Hershey's to South Africa and Denmark, I was being mailed Kinder Bars and "proper" Cadbury chocolates. This sort of idea carried when I began traveling myself. The first time I left the country, it was to England (I'm not really as much of an Anglophile as I'm letting on). I brought back Jaffa Cakes and Irn Bru. My trip to Eastern Europe involved me returning with poppy seed cakes. When I left Mongolia, I stuffed handfuls of Super Kontiks into my shoulder bag. Once my dad bought me a box of soft pretzels to take back to university, and more than once I acquired canolis from the Termini Brothers. In Korea, MM's dad sent him a box with Tastykakes and Peanutchews inside. Visitors from PA regularly bring me Yuengling, and I have, in turn, brought people Yuengling when it was available to me and not them. Someone I know always asks for Jaffa Cakes whenever they hear about anyone even being close enough to England to buy some.

While real food ties itself to memories and meaning, junk food seems to fit into the food as symbolism in a special way. This has more to do with the consistency of the product--and it's branding--than the actual quality of the product itself. I prefer Sam Adam's White Ale over Hoegaarten--which is realistically a better beer. No one makes blueberry pie like D does, truthfully only his blueberry pie fulfills a certain part of me, while every sip of Yuengling drowns me in a sensation of happy memories and melancholy nostalgia. Blueberry pies taste like blueberry pie--unless they're D's blueberry pie and then they taste like winter in Pgh. Yuenglings taste like summer and Pennsylvania and the smell of grass and porches and the first time I had one with DA when we were sweating and dying our hair. Thinking about blueberry pie is pleasant enough, but since there's no simple iconic brand, or product, recognition. All Yuenglings are the same as the first one I had with DA, and looking at a bottle--or even really just thinking about it--gives me something concrete to latch on to.

I don't know what Irn Bru tastes like. I remember being fifteen and being into weird soda, but Irn Bru doesn't taste like being fifteen. As a symbol, it really belonged to JV. To him it was about being even younger and trying a drink quite like it with his friends: their sharing an elicit, highly caffeinated, overly sweetened, overly dyed soda. Still, I relish in drinking it—and having a source of it.

My newest source of omiyage Irn Bru--they appear periodically over the years as friends coming to America or going on trips to the UK--brought me two 500mL bottles the last time he was in town. I plan on passing one on to JV, so he can find his moment of youth and summer in the sticky orange sweetness. I'll probably just mix mine with whiskey.

Photo one by BentleyCoon, CC-BY-SA.

Photo two by ella_marie, CC-BY.

Photo three by harunire, CC-BY-NC-SA and exempt from my CC-BY-SA license.

Photo four by richardland, CC-BY.

Photo five by sonnett, CC-BY-SA.

History

2011-06-21T16:40:00.003-04:00

America's Great Bro Presidents have included

George Broshington
James Monbro
Martin Van Broen
James Brocanan
Abroham Lincoln
Rutherford Bro Hayes
Brover Cleveland
Teddy and Franklin Brosevelt
Woodbro Wilson
Barak Brobama (or Brorak Obama)

Future

2011-06-14T09:11:00.006-04:00

There are things I believe will happen. For some of them, my belief is nestled in things that have happened to other people, to my friends, to my parents, to me. Some of these things I believe are based on statistics and what I know about people in general. A lot of them are based on nothing other than feelings.

I believe I will get hit by a car while riding my bike.

I believe I will get seriously injured at least once more in my life.

I believe some part of my body will be permanently changed in a way that negatively affects my quality of life.

I believe I will ride my bicycle up a hill quickly.

A steep hill.

A long, steep hill.

Some day I will move cities again. At least once.

I believe I will be a writer. I won’t just be a person who writes. I will be well loved by my fans and well respected by my peers. Someday a teacher will teach something I wrote. Someday I’ll meet a kid who loves my writing and I’ll tell them something deep and meaningful.

I will have a fight with the boy I like. It’ll be a big fight, the kind that involves screaming and yelling and crying and maybe even throwing things. I will storm out. I will curl up on someone’s couch that night where I will cry and cry and cry. I will ask myself what I did with my life that got me to that point and why I did those things. I’ll wonder if this is it and if things are over. I will wonder what I am going to do and who I am going to become.

And then things will get better.

I will buy a property and live on it. This will not be a perfect place—it will need work. I’ll do this work with my own hands. I’ll ruin things and cry and consider calling someone to fix it, but instead I’ll call my dad and he’ll help me figure it out. He’ll be thinking about retiring and take this as cause to do so. He will let his company run itself and live with me for a month or two or three. We will work on the property together. We will run wires and fix pipes and put up dry wall. He’ll miss my mom and the dog and they’ll come up. My mom will paint the walls bright colors. She’ll take pictures. One day, I’ll find her crying. She’ll hug me and bury her face against my neck. I will push her away and lean my head against her chest. I will hear her heart beat and pretend, just for a few moments, that I am seven again.

Someday, I will live near my best friends. We’ll see each other often. They’ll come over for dinner and we’ll go out for coffee. We’ll sit outside and go for walks and talk and talk and talk. I will babysit their children, who will preface my name with “Aunt.” They will wrap their little arms around me and hug my neck. When they’re older, I’ll tell them dangerous stories about their parents that will make them laugh. My friends will scowl and then relent and smile. We’ll drink beer together at their kids’ birthday parties, and every year we’ll wonder how we still get away with it.

I will have kids and stare in amazement at them and how they grow and change. The theme of my writing will shift away from post-modern pain, self-sufficiency, and the search for self-identity. I will no longer write things that can be truncated into “boy meets girl.”

I will continue to try and do the things I’ve always done, even though my life will no longer resemble what it was at twenty-four. My friends will help me with my children as I helped them with theirs and they will be the ones called Aunt and Uncle. We’ll try harder to not let our kids know we drink beer at their birthday parties. We’ll sneak out for 'us time' and pretend we weren't doing things we were, and say we were doing things we weren't. We’ll watch the shows we used to watch and listen to music we used to listen to and our kids will shake their heads and call us old and we’ll wonder how we got old.

I will get old and my body will change even more. The years I’ve been mean to it will catch up and things will be harder. My skin will become too loose and my tattoos will look funny. I will need to sleep more. I will be slower. I will be mad at myself for these things, but I will push and push and push and keep trying. My knees will hurt and I will get them replaced. I will not look like Helen Mirren, but I will try. I’ll do yoga and swim.

I will live to be over a hundred.

I will enjoy being over a hundred. I will go to places I’ve never been before and see things I’ve never seen before. I will wonder how I became so old and I will be amazed that there are still so many things I’ve never seen before. That there are so many things I still don’t know. I will wonder if I can ever see or know everything I want to see or know. I will realize that I won’t. I will become okay with this. I will become okay with the idea of dying.

Cupcakes

2011-06-11T19:39:00.002-04:00

"[Cupcakes] would be a big change in direction away from Open Source."

A boy said this to me. Naturally, I told him that they could be open source cupcakes. I mean, after all, we made that Debian Cake. That's like open source cupcakes. Yeah.

I spend a lot of time in my personal life talking about 'free' and 'open source.' We toss around words like 'transparency' and 'commons' as though we are jugglers and they are on fire. I spend very little time posting about it on the internet.

In the urban legend currently known as The Neiman-Marcus Cookie Recipe, someone buys a recipe for "two fifty," thinking it will cost $2.50. They learn it is $250 and then, in anger, share the recipe with everyone they can.

Today, recipes are easily available and widely findable on the internet. Epicurious has a red velvet cupcake recipe from the Magnolia Bakery, which I've never heard of before, but they have a lovely looking pie on their home page. Conde Nast, owner of Epicurious, claims reserve to all rights and maintains that none of the content on Epicurious can be "reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast Digital." This particular recipe comes from "More From Magnolia: Recipes from the World Famous Bakery and Allysa Torey's Home Kitchen," the copyright to which is held by Allysa Torey. Ms. Torey reserves all rights, including those of reproduction in the whole or part in any form."

But, you see, this is wrong. At least, that's what my lawyer tells me.

There are two parts to a recipe, the ingredients and the explanation.

The recipe itself is a "mere listings of ingredients." (U.S. Copyright Office - Recipes. Updated, November, 2010.) In the case of the Neiman-Marcus recipe, we have:

# 2 cups butter
# 4 cups flour
# 2 teaspoons baking soda
# 2 cups sugar
# 5 cups blended oatmeal
# 24 ounces chocolate chips
# 2 cups packed brown sugar
# 1 teaspoon salt
# 1 (8 ounce) Hershey Bars (grated)
# 4 large eggs
# 2 teaspoons baking powder
# 2 teaspoons vanilla
# 3 cups chopped nuts (your choice)

This list of ingredients is not copyright protected. What is copyright protected, however, is the story about how to make the cookies--the "substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration" that tells us what to do with this list of ingredients. (U.S. Copyright Office - Recipes. Updated November, 2010.)

In this case, we have:

Measure oatmeal and blend in a blender to a fine powder. Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla. Mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder and soda. Add chocolate chips, grated Hershey Bar and nuts. Roll into 1 inch balls and place 2-inches apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 375° or until golden.

I'm leaving that unattributed, but I am assuming that someone wrote this, someone holds the copyright to it, and my posting it without permission may actually be illegal!

In short, the ingredient list, totally okay. The directions, they belong to someone.

We can take any recipe we want and post the ingredient list anywhere. If we want to post the fancy explanations, we need permission. And there are people that supply that. Open Source Food--a product of random googling--maintains a copyright of content on the site, but comments that recipes are available under a CC license "where indicated." It's up to user discretion.

Recipes I post here generally are released under a CC-BY-SA license, meaning that you can reproduce it however you want, as long as you say where you got it from and also share your reproduction in some similar manner. This isn't to say that my recipes are so fabulous you should share them, merely that you can.

But they are pretty good.

Cooking communities come up in conversations about open source communities. In these communities, people share their "blue prints." They tell you how they made something, how you can make something, and you can take these blue prints and modify them, change them, and use them. These activities inherently encourage modification, adaptation, remixing, and sharing. I take lots of recipes and make them vegan. People leave out salt, or replace coriander with cumin. They add garlic. People take these blue prints and turn them into their own. They share the changes they have made, in comments or in original postings.

Cooking communities, despite their lack of knowledge of copyright law, truly are participation driven groups that encourage collaboration, personalization, understanding your tools, manipulating them, and sharing them. They are totally all about free/libre/open-source.

(1) Free Cake courtesy of paulproteus, CC-BY-SA.

(2) Chocolate Chip Cookies courtesy of Vicci, CC-BY.

Parenting

2011-06-08T11:22:00.008-04:00

I am not now nor have I ever been a parent. Someday I may be a parent. If I am a parent, I'll give my kids wacky names like 'September' and they'll hate me for it. I'll make them trek down to Arizona to visit their grandparents, where they will have to hike in the heat and sun, and watch awful movies with plots like "Were-panda terrorizes small town swim team." I will make them be vegans--or at the very least vegetarians--and force them into those little seats on the back of a bicycle that would have made me cry when I was younger. I'll blog about them.

One of my coworkers came in late today because she had a family moment. Her daughter found the collection of baby teeth she'd stashed away. Her daughter patted her on the arm and whispered: It's okay, Mom, I know the Tooth Fairy isn't real. As the first thread of childhood broke and innocence and -belief- began to unravel, my co-worker (as I imagine it anyway) felt her face go slack as she realized what was happening. Her daughter looked into her eyes like gold and assured her it would be okay, even though my coworker hadn't said anything.

Then she tweeted about it.

Assuming that such a thing must exist, I googled for "parenting 2.0" and got 17,300,000 results in 0.17 seconds. The University of Minnesota, I learned, is conducting a study on the ways parents use technology. There are parent blogs. There are communities for all kinds of parenting.

In theory, so I am told, back in the day you had kids and you learned how to take care of them either by a) helping to raise your own siblings, b) your parents, c) your neighbors, or d) luck. Now we have this internet thing, and there's all this -community- and -support- out there. There are people who blog about what happens, people who run Q&As, support sites, and a lot of interaction for parents who are at home, at work, away from their kids, or just about any other circumstance we can conceive of.

There are also actual new approaches to parenting. Parenting 2.0. It's not just about tweeting what your kid does, but it's about interacting with them through the internet.

Google Chrome gave us this advert video that gives an example of creating a digital archive, replacing the baby book in a private way. One of the Mormon housewife blogs I read, without shame!, is a more public account of raising a baby. One of my childhood friends wrote her first online letter to her child.

People I call 'friend' have been having children since I was somewhere in high school. At this point, they were all older friends. Then people my age(ish) started having children, usually in unpurposeful manners. Only recently did my friends begin to have children on purpose. With two more weddings this summer (one already out of the way), a vast majority of my friends will be partnered legally and not just functionally. With those who have been together for some time turning their talk to children, I have become very aware of the way technology is impacting parenting. With the communities, with the record, with the tweeting.

The aforementioned DA, whose child SA just got their first online letter, is creating a permanent, public record of who SA is. This is no longer reserved for celeberity and disaster cases. Much like how anyone can become well known in their own right(2), leaving permanent trails of themselves on the internets, anyone can also do that to their child.

With minimal effort, you can find my livejournal (started in 2001), which holds notes of me I am now ashamed of. There are pictures of me dating from 2002. My grandfather's obituary. Things I've said on mailing lists and discussion forms. My very first internet post to a guest book of a website I made in fifth grade that I now look at, roll my eyes, sigh and say "well, I was like twelve."

When I first googled myself, all that turned up was the guest book post. Then there was my grandfather's obituary in 2002. My brother's blog. Then more pages about my brother, with whom I share a last name. Now it's mostly me. As I slowly do more on the internet, there is more of me spread across it.

In ten years, maybe not even, SA will be making their own mark on the internet. In twenty they will be a person on it in their own right, fully formed and completely autonomous. My friends' children--my theoretical unborn children--will not just be digital natives the way I am, they will be digital creations, digital lives. In spite of what they tell me, I am an immigrant. My childhood has been, in small bits, retroactively added to the internet. I spent my formative years on it, growing, leaving marks, but I was not raised on it. I was not born into it. SA is a digital native. Ivy is a native. Lorelei is a digital native. The children whose births we can see online, whose parents blogged about pregnancy and took pictures that they posted as the weeks went by and they grew.

Those are the digital natives. And they'll never be able to escape it. It'll be as much in their blood as WG says post modernism is in his and mine. It'll be in their blood the way love is in my mother's and rebellion is in my father's. It'll be something that becomes so inherently a part of them, they don't notice it was every any different.

(1) This image is me as a baby. I look more or less the same.
(2) I'd like to welcome all hundred of you who show up each week.
(3) Photo by Eric Fleming, CC-BY.

Engine Driver

2011-06-06T11:58:00.001-04:00

“I read your blog. It’s good.”

Periodically I hear this from people. I offer up the URL like a sacrifice, a present, when I meet new people. When I’m going to meet new people. From a deeply psychological perspective, it tells more about me than anything else—how I present things, I how I share things. I like to think that a literature student could take this and make comments about my life and who I am: the mix of egotism and self-deprecation shows that she doesn’t believe herself to be deserving of the praise she believes she receives, but believes that praise to be accurate nonetheless. She is uncomfortable with various aspects of her life, but feels an obligation to share them anyway. She tries to be polite and maintain boundries even when she objectively fails to do so.

The fact of the matter is, even while I think my blog posts aren’t great, I think Life on M is good.

And that’s always a bad sign.

There’s a certain type of egotism in deciding to call yourself a writer. In one sense, there’s an admittance that your ideas, insights, perceptions, or just ways of sharing these things is somehow unique, wonderful, or deserving of notice. I have something so worth sharing that not only will I share it, but that I assume people will read it and ought to pay me for it.

For one summer I called myself a writer. It was a struggle that took years and faded away quickly. In applying for a Fulbright—a thing I was denied for those of you following along at home—I had to publically and repeatedly declare I was one. In moving to Somerville, I came under the costume of being a writer. For four glorious months of my life, I did a lot, which included writing. I rode bikes and cooked. I learned and read and watched and changed and researched and wrote and wrote and wrote.

In middle school I wrote my first real story. It was about a physicist who created a black hole that was slowly consuming the world.

It wasn’t very good.

By eighth grade I wrote my first novella, an eighty-five page. It was cleverly titled “Destination: Unknown.” It was about Andromeda Benton, the boarding school attending daughter of the lost adventurer Orion Benton, who got pulled out of her universe into an alternate reality that had been created for the purpose of staging a contest merely known as The Hunt that occurred once a decade. The Hunt was a scavenger hunt, effectively, across what appeared to be the grounds of the school Andy attended. While people put together teams that trained for years, she was accidentally thrust into it, a solo adventurer who just wanted to get out. It was dangerous. People died and got lost and there was magic inherent in the universe that changed the Hunt. There was a story that followed it that I only wrote half of.

That summer, 2001, I also wrote a play about someone dying of Hep C. I was a morbid fourteen year old.

In the fall of 2001 I pushed out my first “serious” short story, which talked about a young American writer going to the French Riviera in the wake of WWI, where she fell in love with a female dancer. She left the dancer once someone bought the novel she’d written. I remember getting it back in English class. My teacher had given me a B+. “You didn’t follow the assignment,” she told me. “But it was well written.”

I justified to her why it actually fit the assignment, but she and I both knew I was reaching. I got that response a lot in school—I didn’t follow the assignment. Instead, I would write these sprawling pieces as loosely tied to what I had to do as possible.

In high school I came up with Major Arcanna, and have been tweaking and revising bits of her as time has gone on. The first six issues are written up, undrawn. Anatomy of a Revolution was a graphic novel I penned my first year at university about a post-second-revolution America and the political nonsense that occurs when revolutionaries try to run a country. It starred Zwei, a former revolutionary turned politician who was tired and aging. In chapter one he is betrayed by his wife, who was a rising star in the former regime. When the wife goes on the run, V goes after her. Only known as Valkyrie, V is the body guard/right hand man/confidant/former best friend of Zwei. There were dull moments of people talking about politics, and lots of flashbacks and broken story telling.

At university I wrote a play as I struggled with defining myself as an academic and not a scientist, as I had once hoped to be. I started writing Reinventing Mary Jane, which was a comic about Mallory Jameson, who became the girlfriend of the young superhero Fireproof. The comic was ditched for a novel that became Against the World, staring Liz Peirson and Max Romero which still sits, lacking a climax. I wrote a novel and a screenplay that was my coming to terms with the inevitable breakup between the Artist and myself. They’re a pair, telling the same story in two different forms. Shortly after that, I plugged out a nameless screen play that was just another love story, picking up on a trend I’d been following in which endings don’t exist. I always liked the end of it, where the two leads lay in bed together holding hands, looking at each other. She says “This is pretty good, isn’t it?” and he says “Yeah,” before they jump out of bed to take care of their child—the implication being that this moment picked as the end was merely a breath mark in the story of their relationship.

In Korea I wrote two screenplays, All’s Fair that was renamed as “Things Other People Say About You and Me” that was then scrapped and turned into something else entirely, resulting in, I guess, two screenplays with similar plots and the same characters, but different stories. “Zombie Summer,” which was a coming of age story about a boy who believes in zombies that don’t really exist, was sketched.

Once I came back to America, there was my summer of writing about the culture of freedom. I plotted out another comic series which pulls at my mind and begs to be written, but it doesn’t have a single issue yet, just story arcs. I’ve started two novels in the mean time, one serious piece of lovely trash about Evelyn Harris, who has to go save her boyfriend Harlan Locke, and an unnamed piece about the unfortunately named Kalinka Herschoff and her struggle with figuring out who she is. The former strongly reflects on the problems I have with teen romance books, the latter my own struggle to define myself. The former, I recently, realized, begs for a companion piece—something I guess will need to be attacked in book two. In my current project, Evelyn adventures for her boyfriend, and doesn’t do it alone. I find myself needing to consider how people adventure for themselves, and how they do it without having their partner accompanying them.

Throughout most of this, I never called myself a writer. I wrote, sure, but I wasn’t a writer. It made me cringe when people would talk about a group that included me and said “As writers, we…” I detail my ten years at taking writing seriously, outlining various projects, mostly for myself to help me remember, but in part because I find it ridiculous how anyone could see this and believe I am a writer. I’ve published nothing: I’ve sent a few short stories out at various times—one I wrote about communism in China, another about baseball, vinegar, divorce, and flying faster than light—but they all came back with rejections. I never sent things out seriously because my shorts weren’t good enough. No one was enthusiastic about putting together films because I find it impossible to write a screen play shorter than an hour. But more than that, it’s been years since I’ve submitted anything, and I was lying to myself when I said that it might be good enough for publication. It wasn’t—and logic tells me it still isn’t. Instead, I sit on my pieces like a miser or a dragon with gold. I chug along and pick pick pick at the trashy novel, waiting until it’s finished enough I send off letters to agents trying to sell it to them.

The thing I find most absurd about my fear driven reality is that I want to be a writer. I’m not one now, but some day, I tell myself, I will be one. Some day someone will read one of the things I’ve written, think it’s good enough, and give me a contract that I sign, thereby making it so I am, officially, a writer.

And I really think it will happen.

This whole bundle of emotions and thoughts, racing towards a land of fantasy, is lined on a path that makes me not just slightly uncomfortable, but more than a little nauseous when I think about it. My fight against calling myself a writer, is powered by all of the self-professed artists, musicians, and writers I’ve met who produce nothing, sell nothing, and share nothing. The ones who are bad. I don’t want to be this person, who calls themselves a writer but never makes a sale. I don’t want it to come out that, in truth, I’m not very good. I don’t want to spend years of my life trying to be something that I’m just not going to be.

I am not a writer: I write. I am not a knitter, or a biker, or a baker, cook, researcher, musician, educator. I am a person who knits, bikes, bakes, cooks, researches, plays music, and teaches. I think of it this way not because I am a person with many facets who refuses to be held down to a single one, but because I am not as into or as good at any of these things as people I know who identify by them.

In living in a world where I can “be anything,” being something is hard.

Over the weekend, a friend of a friend was in town. He asked me about why I moved out of Philadelphia, if I still think it’s so great. I told him that if I hadn’t left when I did, I never would have. I told him that leaving was important to me, because I wanted to be something else than what I had been: I wanted to be a writer.

Bikes (Not Bombs)

2011-06-03T09:12:00.017-04:00

Or “Why I am riding in the Bikes Not Bombs Bike-A-Thon.”

I like to say that one way to get someone to care about something, is to have them care about someone who cares about it. Even though Bikes Not Bombs is the place everyone I know talks about when it comes to buying a bike, very few of them actually care about it in a way that would draw them to action. Except for IR. She's the reason I care about Bikes Not Bombs, and in order to talk about it, I need to talk about her.

IR met AL and came over our house a few times during this awkward period of some new friendships where you, or at least your friends, wonder if it’s going to be more than just a friendship and the two parties involved see quite a bit of one another. She didn’t feel quite like a real person those first times I saw her. A short girl hailing from St. Petersburg, IR was nearly impossible to actually talk to and demonstrated one of the strangest senses of humor I’ve ever seen in a person—a literal translation of Russian word play into English with little room for any other window dressing. Every word out of her mouth tied to another in a linguistic trick that left me doubled over.

She told me about when she was younger--like a kid younger--and met the daughter of one of her parents' friends. That girl, she said, was the most amazing person to little IR. She was beautiful and brilliant and interesting and when she said she was going to go to Boston, little IR realized that it too must be beautiful and brilliant and interesting and vowed to go there one day.

Eleven years later IR seemed to provide herself as my first real proof that a member of our little lost generation can have a home that they were not born into. She's more a part of the city than other people I know who are vocal about their love of it. She's involved in the community. She's involved in biking. The first time IR talked about biking, I was a little surprised.

Russian women, they joke, have two phases of life: when they are tall and thin and gorgeous and when they are short, plump babushkas. She skirted past the first phase. Rather than moving in that begrudging way archetypical babushkas move—resentful of their bodies for shrinking their vertical ways and growing in their horizontal ones—she motors around with the same sense you see in their younger counterparts. All of the bike people I'd met, to that point, had been slick ropey people, all sinew, skin, and dense, wiry muscles. IR didn't -look- like the other people I knew who went on long, endless bike rides.

When a boy I foolishly liked inspired in me the idea that it would be good to bike out to North Adams to go to an art museum, she countered with a proposal involving staying at the house of a flower farmer and getting a ride with him back to Boston on Tuesday.

“It’s really the best way to go there and back,” she said.

IR, you see, is a bike master, but she’s thoroughly unpretentious about it. One day we watched someone on a robin's egg blue single speed brush by us. She sighed at them and said "That's a shame, that bike frame is not a good frame." She didn't sound like she was making fun of the rider, more that she felt sorry they didn't have a better bike. She knocks out sixty mile trips as though they're nothing. She knows more about bikes than most of the people I know--and the people I know know a lot about bikes.

When she asked if I wanted to go to BNB for a tour, something she nervously broached and then quickly added that they weren’t going to ask me for money, I said of course. In spite of how many people I know swear various forms of allegiance to BNB, I'd never been there.

It was early on a Saturday morning when I first went to BNB. We’d both been up late the night before, so AL and I were suffering to stay awake as we made our way over there with IR and a friend of hers, EM.

We sat around a table with a bunch of other sleepy people, poking at muffins and coffee. We shared stories about what bikes mean to us and about us riding bikes. We all felt a little emotional when the tour actually began.

The tour wasn't just of their physical work space, a converted industrial space that feels one part science museum with its colored, grated walks, one part work shop, and one part home. We did make our way around the Hub, as they call it, and see the different parts of it, but mostly we were given a tour of their programs and philosophy.

We were told about people in the Earn A Bike program, both in the general sense and specific stories. We learned about the girl whose parents hit her. The boy whose cousin was shot in an act of gang violence, and how he didn't do anything about it because he was asked not to by the people at Bikes Not Bombs.

The essence of stories about the people in Earn A Bike and Girls in Action--a girl specific Earn A Bike program that also focuses on things like female empowerment--is that if you teach anyone how to do something, they form a better sense of self. Movies like Wasteland, that chronicles the work artist Vik Muniz did with catadores in Jardim Gramacho, and Born Into Brothels, which focuses on photography done by the children of prostitutes in Calcutta, focus on art as the medium of this change. But, in truth, we learn that giving anyone--younger people or older people--an activity and a community of members who respect them and who they can respect in return, will have similar results. In some cases it's art of music. Mad Hot Ballroom, one of my personal favorite documentaries in this genre, is about a ballroom dance program in the New York City Public school system. During the film, we get to see how one of the students goes from assuming he is going to die before he’s an adult to having plans to become a dance instructor. Sports are a classical example of people forming a strong sense of sense and a sense of belonging—especially with team sports. The 2005 documentary Murder ball mostly proves to us that even U.S. cripples are totally badass. However, there’s a scene in which a depressed young veteran is dealing with his combat driven amputation and he is introduced to the idea of wheel chair rugby. He is sitting in the Mad Max style wheel chair and, gleefully, bumping it into things as he realizes for the first time that his whole life isn’t ruined. There’s still paraplegic rugby.

There are lots of flavors for this kind of empowerment. There’s rowing programs and sailing programs. Science and music and math and art. People dance and play games. there are so many programs, initiatives, and projects—so many good ones.

At university, I spent some time holed up ignoring all organizational pleas for help because there were just too many of them and I didn’t know who to give my attention to. I just felt –bad- that they were asking for money and I had none and I thought they were all good. For some reason, after hearing about the youth work at BNB, I found myself thoroughly emotionally devoted to the cause. I structured a practical reason later—that bikes are longer lasting. This isn’t just about creating a sense of belonging or community or feeling good, it’s not literally about saving lives on a scale beyond the occasional individuals: it’s about sustainability—a word we love to toss around. When you fix a bike up, you know how to fix a bike. You can fix other people’s bikes; you can fix y our own bike. When you have a bike, you have a means of transportation (and joy) that you just need yourself to make go. If you can fix that bike, you don’t need anyone else for it. Completely and totally, it’s yours. Having something that really is yours, especially when you’re younger, is rare. BNB doesn’t just give youth a renewed sense of self, it gives them a thing they can take away from it and share.

But that all came later. I was driven by the tear wrenching stories and my own deep emotional attachment to my bike (the artifact and the concept.) I was unable to remove myself from everything I got out of it and wishing very deeply that everyone else could have that too.

There’s more than just that. There are the International programs where people go places and help other people. It files the same idea of sustainability and creation—not just throwing money at problems, but giving people tools to help themselves. Ability Bikes is a bike shop run by "disabled" bike mechanics in Koforidua, Ghana. The people there share the same stories of finding self-respect—and a way to support themselves—through bikes. Maya Pedal doesn’t try to get gas or electric powered machines to function as water pumps or corn mills in Central America, instead it creates human-powered bicycle based machines to carry out these tasks. They’re not as quick as their otherwise powered brethren, but they will work even if you run out of oil or the power goes down.

Bicycles are beautiful machines. They are, ultimately, simple, even though we dress them up in fancy ways. They work, even though no one seems to quite be sure why. They are powerful and amazing, not just because of what they are physically, but because of what they can be or mean to people.

Bikes are happiness, power, independence, freedom, joy, fun, hobbies, toys, objects of fascination, friendship, ecologically friends, inspiring, transportation, love, and so many other things I can’t think of them all right now.

And that’s why I am riding in the Bikes Not Bombs Bike-A-Thon.

Image 1 is me, not IR, and is by Christine Spang, 2010, CC-BY-SA
Images 2 and 3 are shamelessly stolen from Bikes Not Bombs
Image 4 by Chris Baskind, 2011, CC-BY-SA

Birthdays

2011-05-24T11:22:00.004-04:00

If I used multiple word titles, this would be called "Why I Fail At Friendships and Other People Are Awesome."

I fail at long distance friendships.

I'm bad about sending e-mails and letters. I fail at talking on the phone. I'm even pretty mediocre about IM.

But man, do long distance friends make birthdays awesome. Facebook exploded with birthday wishes, genuine comments and not just idle "Happy birthday"s forced with minimum emotion. I got e-mails and tweets and IMs from people I rarely talk with.

By the end of the day, I was able to survey the people I've filled into my life, the wonderful people who have taken up places in the world where, no matter how long since they last talked, they reach out and say "Happy birthday."

Strangers

2011-05-22T11:56:00.000-04:00

Jeremy R. Maunus
Jennifer J. Matthies
Peter R. Surdel
Tina L. Stolz
Ronald Auicello
Daniel A. Creserman

These are people we currently have mail for. I know none of them.

Snapshot, 06

2011-05-18T16:38:00.001-04:00

The first thing I did when I got to Russia was buy a bottle of Irn Bru.

Age

2011-05-15T10:47:00.003-04:00

When I turned seventeen, I wasn't ready to be seventeen. My mom told me I could be sixteen again if I wanted. Age, however, isn't like a suit. You can't shed it. You can lie about it, you can pretend it's something else, but in the end it is what it is.

Age is also a number, but it's less of a social construction than other things. The planet really does revolve around the sun and, in a few more days, it will have been twenty-four revolutions since I was born.

I'm not ready to be twenty-four.

Twenty-four isn't old. It's only one more than twenty-three, and two more than twenty-two. It's twenty-one more than three, which is the first age I remember being. In a sense, I'm going to be twenty-one, if I only count the years I remember.

My grandfather died right around his birthday, which is today. My mother was born thirteen days and some number of years after he was. My birthday is some number of years and less than thirteen days between theirs. I think about this every year, as the month of May ticks by and I feel an impossible, inevitable, inescapable threat of being older.

I don't know what scares me so much about age, but I am terrified by it. I am struck deeply with the fear of the numbers changing. I don't mind getting older in a day-to-day sense, and that's really what counts. I look at myself in the mirror and have accepted that my hair will turn grey and my eyes will form lines. Creases will form on either side of my mouth. I will stop being older and I will be old.

But, plenty of people have done this. The ones that haven't have died. The ones that have have died.

That's sort of how it works.

While I didn't mean to muse on my own mortality--I intended to write about baking blueberry pie last night--I found myself thinking about my grandfather and my own age.

B, my grandfather, grew up as a Jew in Baltimore. He joined the military. He accidentally became an officer during the war and married an Australian woman. He was so old by the time I met him that I grew up with this idea of untouchable age. He died around his birthday in 2002. He was never quite a real person to me, I was too young to really understand death and too young to really understand that he existed.

Only recently has my concept of object-permanence grown to a point where I understand that people are real: before I met them, they had lives not just stories, when I don't see them, they still live. But he had a life that I could only experience through my tendency to wander around his house and look through drawers and boxes. I used to take everything out of them and try to put it back exactly as I found it. There was a section of the house full of nice things. I liked to sleep there. They had statues of trees with quartz instead of leaves. They had a large Japanese cabinet set full of china that I was scared to open, but did anyway when I thought no one else was around. He and my grandmother kept cookies around, seven layer cookies usually. I think he liked them, I don't remember.

I can't really tell you a single thing he liked, aside from his family, and I wasn't always sure he liked that.

When I was younger, I thought he and my grandmother were going to get a divorce because they fought all the time. It seems silly, I guess, to be in your mid-eighties and get a divorce. I asked them this once and then they stopped fighting when I could hear it. I don't know if they still did fight, but I never heard it anymore.

After his first stroke, but before he died, he gave me his wedding ring. It was the last time I saw him. I didn't know what to do with it or how to take this. My mom told me to give it to her, that she'd keep it for me, and I resented her for that for years. When I got older and got it back, I wore it as a necklace. Suddenly, it was sweet that I kept it with me. I resented her for that too.

My birthday is equally marked by my own birth as it is by my grandfather's death. So far, I have had more death-free birthdays than ones where death is so obviously next to me, but these will soon be out weighed. It's already been nine years. I expect I'll live for at least six more.

Era

2011-05-02T11:31:00.005-04:00

My freshman year of high school, I was sitting in second period World History class when the principal announced that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. My teacher, who also taught a current events class, explained to us it was likely the work of a terrorist group like Al Qaeda.

We got out of school early and I spent that afternoon in the park, lying on the jungle gym and staring at the sky wondering if this meant everything had changed. In my mind, I saw fighter jets zoom overhead. I wondered if it was possible for war to come to my home.

It didn't.

The next few years of my life were marked by a discussion about life in a "post-9/11" world. There was fiction discussing how it was different. There were adults on the news or other talk showed telling me things were going to change.

I didn't notice these changes, but maybe it was because I grew up with them. Airport security got tighter. The government got bigger. Not all of these changes had, as far as I could see, anything to do with what happened in 2001.

The word "terrorist" became our horror. It replaced other words I didn't know because I was too young to know them. I took history classes at university and, to me, it was just replacing one set of terms with another. England became Europe became Asia became Russia and Cuba became Middle East. King George III became Hitler and Mussolini became Mao and Kim Il Sun became Castro and names I never knew became Bin Laden and Hussein. The Monarchy became Nazis became communists stayed communists became terrorists.

For almost ten years, for a theoretical generation, Osama Bin Laden was a villain, a scourge. He was a symbol just as much for us as he was for Al Qaeda. He was something we were told to rally against.

When this started, when I first heard his name, I was fourteen. I was sitting in class. I was just starting high school and working on figuring out who I was. Yesterday, I was twenty-three. When the news broke, I was sitting in a bar with people who have come to define my life. I was explaining that I'd gotten a job offer over the phone, but I wasn't ready to acknowledge it was real until I had a paper offer or an e-mail address [from the company] or -something-.

I came to adulthood between the years of 2001 and 2011. Last night, nationally and personally, an era ended.

I am an adult and Bin Laden is dead.

Fan

2011-05-01T11:21:00.003-04:00

Every now and then, there is a post on Post Secret that fits in this vein. "I have decided to kill myself after X comes out."

Most people I've talked to who are suicidal to varying degrees don't respond to emotional trauma with plans of suicide. Rather, they have a drawn out plan that relates to a specific life or cultural event, either for them or someone else. After I turn thirty. After my parents' fortieth anniversary. After my best friend's wedding. There's a forethought, either selfish or selfless, that the event is so important it either needs to be experienced or they don't want their death overshadowing the importance of it.

Of these, the ones I find most interesting relate to cultural events. "I want to see the end of Lost" (no longer valid). For years, there were "I want to know how Harry Potter ends," and with the book series ending those thoughts were transferred to the movies. I first heard someone say something like this in 2000. A t the time I was younger, harsher than I am now and my immediate thought was 'Well, that's ridiculous.'

Now I don't.

When I'm biking and it's really hard, I look somewhere ahead of me and I say "There. When I get there, I will rest." I know I won't, but I say that, as though I can convince myself of the obvious lie. I focus every part of me on getting to that spot until reaching it is the only thing that matters. When I get there, I pick a new spot, like I knew I would in the first place.

Eventually I get to a part where it's easy.

Most people I know do this with their lives, especially when things are hard. They pick a point, somewhere, and they go to it. That point can be in time or a goal that they have to work towards, but it's something. It's a singular thing they can focus on. It's a hope they can tell themselves.

I need to struggle now, but once the last Harry Potter book comes out, I can finally rest. I can finally give up.

And even if they're not lying to themselves the way I lie to myself when I say I'll stop when I get there, they then have time to find something new. They have time for things to get better. They have time for things to change.

I have no statistics on people who say this or do this. I have no idea how many actually kill themselves and how many find something new to live for, but I like to think that they pick a new point and refocus their vision. "I'll wait till i get there," they'll say. And then, one day, they'll be on top of the hill they've been struggling to get up and just coast down.

Soup, 01

2011-04-09T11:31:00.002-04:00

I just got my wisdom teeth taken out yesterday. By evening, I was really hungry, in pain, and wanting to take my pills, which I had been informed out to be done with the aid of food.

This list of "good foods" wasn't especially helpful. The things on it I can eat include mashed potatoes, cooked or canned fruits or vegetables, cranberry juice, and soft bread. I mean, I was well aware that I can eat way more than that, but I still found it a little disheartening. I guess "cooked [] fruits or vegetables" is a broad category that contains most of what I eat, but still.

In spite of my fondness of smoothies, I'm not a big believer in just blending things arbitrarily--and right now I don't especially trust the rest of my grinding teeth to do their job since it kinda sorta a little bit hurts to just bite down at all. This puts me back to "things that are, by their nature, supposed to be soft, creamy, blended, or mashed."

Scanning the kitchen post-extraction, I saw the massive amount of starting to brown leeks and I knew what had to happen.

M.'s Post-Surgery Potato Leek Soup!

Some oil
1 Large leek
1 red/orange/yellow (bell) pepper
1+ carrot(s)
3 cups water
1 cup almond milk
1 cube bullion
4 small potatoes
1/2 block tofu
Pesto (optional)
One nice friend.

Step One: Take a hot pot and throw everything up to, but not including, the water
Heat pot. Clean and slice leek. Add oil to pot. Add leek to pot. Clean and slice pepper. Add pepper to pot. Clean and slice carrot(s). Add carrots to pot. (I was hoping the pepper and carrot would make it all a pretty color. I don't think I quite used enough to accomplish this.)

Step 2: Add everything down to, and not including, the tofu.
Once the leeks are soft and maybe a little goldeny around some edges add the water, almond milk, and bullion. If you're impatient like me, you can smash the bullion into pieces or use powered broth stuff. Or use broth instead of water. You get the idea. Add the potatoes. Wait impatiently until the potatoes are soft.

Step 3: Will it blend?
Throw the tofu in and turn the pot off. I used extra firm tofu because it was in the fridge. Take what you have and put it into a blender. Blend until smooth. If you used more carrots or pepper than I did, it will hopefully be a lovely orange color. Mine was not.

Now, here's sorta where the pesto comes in. My tongue, still numb, couldn't taste very much, so while I could get hints that it was super yummy, I couldn't get that so well. I thought about adding salt, but just threw in a bunch of pesto we had. You can use whatever you want here to make it taste better. I recommend at least adding salt and pepper, but the pesto was great.

If you're actually using this as a post-dental surgery option, then eat one large ladle/one small bowl of it and wait an hour before eating another since they recommend small/frequent meals over larger ones.

The nice friend is there to reassure you in your drug induced state of paranoia that you're not actually dead, this is not actually some boring afterlife, that your tongue will stop being numb -eventually- (Note: It still is!), that even though no one is home, the house is not infected by some strange monster, and that he still loves you.

I recommend taking this opportunity, if you do not live alone, to put off cleaning up or asking your roommates to do it. If they're like mine, they're pretty nice over the whole thing.

Iceland, 05

2011-03-23T12:17:00.004-04:00

One of the things we did in Iceland was, as a group, construct an ongoing list titled "Reasons [Our IRC Channel] Should Move to Iceland." Here is that list.

Hot springs running from the tap
You can have a pony!
The Icelandic word for "computer" is literally " number oracle"
Icelanders are so communal
There's a spanking [and candy] holiday
The people are great.
Swimming laps in outdoor pools in January.
Their ISPs won't let us buy a proxy, they'll give us one for free "as a small contribution to whatever you're doing." That's trust.
Harsnyrting!
The tallest mountain is a glacier.
Facebook app for Icelandic genealogy.
Golden Circle
AURORA!

Illusion

2011-03-20T09:53:00.000-04:00

The walk of shame is a cultural treasure. Around university campuses, college towns, and neighborhoods occupied by twenty somethings all over America, Saturday and Sunday mornings are not marked by yard sales, church bells, and bike rides--they are marked by these lost souls in last night's clothes going home, shamed or proud of last night's licentiousness. The walk of shame may be a cab ride, a bike ride, a trip on the bus, a drive, or even an actual walk. It merely refers to the trip between where one ended up crashing and where one lives. As an undergrad, we would sit at the windows and rate walks of shame.

I have had two proper walks of shame in my life. They were misbegotten.

You see, as an undergraduate, I was rather boring. Sure, my friends and I threw parties that crowded our apartment. People would leave with stories to not tell their parents. These were good times. But, you see, I never went to other people's parties. I had a rule: Don't get wasted outside of the apartment.

I didn't enforce this rule on others, but I did use it as a guiding force in my life at school. I just didn't go out and get to the point where I would be wasted enough to warrant a walk of shame because I didn't want to have to find a place to sleep. I liked having things at home because, once I was done, I could curl up in my own bed and sleep. In the morning I could make myself, and anyone else, breakfast. I could go about my day as normal.

I lied. I've had three walks of shame.

The first was my super-senior year at university. At that time, I went up to Squill every Friday night to play Rock Band with some friends. We'd drink about a fifth of rum (I was twenty-one at the time, so I can say this) and whatever else we found if we decided it was necessary. Once we finished playing Rock Band, we'd put on movies or anime and all pass out. I kept a toothbrush there, and usually brought a clean shirt. My day would start from Squill, rather than having it be a pickup note to the phrase. One Friday, I was going to the theater, so I had on heels, a dress, and makeup. After the show, of course I went to play Rock Band. In the morning, I walked home. I hadn't brought any clean clothes.

On the way home, I found myself walking towards someone I knew. We made eye contact for long enough to mutually acknowledge that we were both there. We quickly looked away.

Wait, there's at least two more in there. Let's say five.

Sometime after that, there was a Carnegie Mellon party. Any more details are not relevant. I walked home in the morning. In a bridesmaid dress. There had been no wedding.

In Korea, I had what felt like a walk of shame. I didn't do anything that makes it a proper walk of shame. I was wearing normal clothes, but I did smell strongly of tobacco and alcohol.

When I first got to Korea, I made contact with a friend of a friend, L, who took me out with her group of friends. We followed a fairly traditional Korean night out: dinner, norebang, dancing. At the norebang, it got late. When forced to make a decision about getting home that night, or condemning several-hours-in-the-future self to a 5am train ride, I did the right thing and picked hanging out more. We went to a club in Hongdae, a university district, where someone L knew was DJing.

This was a misbegotten walk of shame. It appeared, to the outside observer, to be such a thing. However, it was not.

After moving to Boston, I went to a party at an MIT house. In the morning, I biked home. People who were there will tell you DH fell off the roof, when in reality he climbed down to find his glasses. In the morning, we sat around eating hummus and bread, using each individuals memories to construct a complete story about what happened.

In October, I went to Pittsburgh for a wedding. It was the first of my university friends to get married. After the reception ended, I met up with D. D, with whom I made Arduino cookies. D, who I lived with as a suburban house wife. D, who co-hosted those Rock Band nights with N. He picked me up from the wedding and took me home.

We watched a lackluster Japanese movie and some anime. We played with the cat. We drank the alcohol that had been there, untouched, for so long. He put something else on and we both fell asleep. In the morning, he drove me home. I was still in my clothes from the wedding.

Most of the time I spent with D is this sort of secret joy I have. Those are some of the memories I am least willing to share with others, as though they are somehow more real or more special when they are mine alone. I don't want to give them up, in the same way I don't want to give up so many of my memories of AS. Most of these stories, these little walks of shame I have had, skip out on the most important details. I don't talk about how DH ended up on the roof in the first place for his glasses to fall. I don't talk about why I was wearing a bridesmaid's dress or who I was with in Korea. I don't talk about the show I went to, or who I was with, what happened when I arrived to play rock band, or what happened afterwards. I display these stories not as stories, but as facts. The details that make them worth remembering aren't details I want to share.

Sometimes I do this thing where I write someone a story. These are stories from my own life. When I give them to someone, I stop telling it. In a way, it's no longer mine. Similarly, once a story passes from my experience into the public domain of experiences, it's appropriated by the people I've shared it with. Now, in turn, they can share it. It becomes something for everyone.

None the less, I look at these memories and realize that at some point I will have to share them. What makes these people in my life special, the reasons I love them, are these moments, the little parts of these people that shine through and come out from our small interactions. These moments define the people I care about and by sharing them, by merely writing them down, I--selfishly, egotistically--give these people small chances at immortality. In my own head, this is something I think they deserve. I think they ought to exist, in some sense, forever through these little bits of who they are--who they were--to me.

PAX, 01

2011-03-14T19:12:00.025-04:00

tl;dr This is about booth babes at PAX.

I have so much good to say about PAX. My memories of it will be about learning to use a Kinect, the way developers looked me in the eye and explained, with glee, the learning theories they used in the creation of their games, the dissonant way it felt when almost everyone I could see had a fist in the air changing "We have control! We keep you safe! We are your hope!" But, before I get there, I have something else to talk about.

I arrived Friday later than I wanted to. I was determined to see the keynote. I ran up the stairs to the main theater, not noticing anything between where I was and where I wanted to be. I confused the poor people around me in line as I took off my rain pants in line. It was only after the first two panels of the day that I had time to look around and really see what the layout of the BCEC (Boston Convention and Events Center) was like.

Right by the front door was a booth(?) for Bioshock. It was set up for people to take their picture with this giant monster breaking through a brick wall. There was a woman in pseudo-Victorian clothing--all corsets and velvet.

The first thing that ran through my head wasn't about how cool it was. "Aren't booth babes banned at PAX?" I asked myself.

I remember when PAX announced that they would have no booth babes. This was, I think, their first year. I spent about twenty minutes looking for the original announcement before giving up. I thought this was pretty neat and promptly forgot about it. I remembered it, standing in the large entrance. I wondered if the policy had changed. Listening to the people around me talk, it sounded like booth babes were still banned.

I'm not sure if Bioshock girl counted as a booth babe. She was pretty well dressed, and I have a soft spot for cosplayers. But, she wasn't really a cosplayer, she was a professional model in a costume. I wasn't sure how this made me feel. I filed this under "things to think more about later" and went to meet up with JL, who drove down from Michigan with some college friends. He told me about the Sprint Girls who, according to him, were wearing dresses down to -here- with hems up to -here-.

Down in the Expo Hall, I got to meet all sorts of people. Booths at PAX, and booths in general, seem to fit into overlapping categories in terms of staffing.

Booths staffed by members of the company
Booths staffed by professional models
Booths staffed by volunteers
Booths staffed by all (or mostly) men
Booths staffed by all (or mostly) women
Booths staffed by people in uniforms or costumes
Booths staffed by women in uniforms or costumes and men in regular clothes

(I'm not going to talk about gender inequality here, even though it is tempting.) I met some developers and producers. There were hobbyists and enthusiasts. Community managers and paid models, usually referred to as 'booth babes.' When I checked out the Kinect booth—which was really like a multibooth with different people staffing different games—one of the Frag Dolls (sponsored by Ubisoft) was there teaching people how to play games. A very nice Harmonix employee regaled me with stories of how much he loves games (and Pete and Pete), before giving me a BA(1) Dance Central t-shirt. They had people who worked for the company in regular clothes and Frag Doll Cadettes, which I think are very similar to a professional model.

In 2010, Penny Arcade conducted a survey (2) on their No Booth Babe policy. The results included the following comments:

Things we’re going to formally message in our “booth babe” policy:
Rep needs to be trained/educated about the product (81%)
Anything that is considered “partial nudity” is banned (43%)
However, cosplayed characters are allowed to wear revealing outfits, assuming it is true to the source game (68%)
No messaging that specifically calls out body parts (47%)

I'll -assume- this is, basically, the official policy--I couldn't find another one. “Reps” need to be trained, have some clothes on or be cosplaying, and not “call out specific body parts.” I'm not sure what that last one means, so I will ignore it.

The booth babes at PAX fit into these guidelines. I saw the Turtle Beach Girls, the Frag Doll Girls, the Sprint Girls, the Duke Nukem Girls, and the Dragon's Nest Girls. All of the girls were knowledgeable. Most of them liked games, including the ones who were representing non-gaming products. Even the Duke Nukem Girls, in their sexy schoolgirl outfits(3), came from the company Charisma +2, a modeling company specializing in “True Gamer Models.” They were, I hear, knowledgeable and excited to be there.(4) (Photo is probably not actually a booth babe, but I couldn't find any CC photos of ones.)

However, a lot of people were still upset about the presence of both the Duke Nukem Girls and Booth Babes in general. PAX released an official statement on March 11 concerning the Duke Nukem Girls using their twitter stream, conveniently named Official_PAX.

Our bb policy is cosplay of ingame chars is ok. We checked it out and asked DNF to cover up a bit but otherwise it's within our guidelines.

While I didn't see any covering up, they were actually well within their rights as per the policy and release dsurvey results—68% of people surveyed said they didn't mind scantily clad booth babes as long as they were in costume. In fact, in general, naked people don't bother me that much. In fact, scantily clad people outside of beaches don't bother me that much either. I've seen music videos. I've been going to conventions long enough to see more than my share of underage girls showing off what their mama gave them. (In the sense of full disclosure, I will admit that I did in fact cosplay in short skirts and short shorts at cons when I too was underage. And when I was eighteen and had a positive physical self-image. That's another story.)

Still, something about these “professional models,” as Mike Krahulik called them in an e-mail, felt wrong to me. I spent a lot of time thinking about what. I wanted to write about PAX in the context of booth babes before going on to talk about all the great stuff. In order to do this, I had to unpack how I felt. My feelings, I realized, are much like the double rainbow—no one knows what they mean.

I believe that there is something wrong with having booth babes at PAX. I want to find a way to make this argument properly—based around facts, flowing through connected points, and reasonable. I don't want to rely on the outraged objections people were making, because I don't think they are true, don't feel ready to talk about them, or don't think they were valid arguments. I looked at the things I don't agree with and tried to find something I do.

1) I wasn't uncomfortable by the clothing booth babes were wearing. (This is is where I talk about sexy clothes in public.)
Aside from the Duke Nukem girls, everyone was pretty well clothed. The Sprint Girls and the Turtle Beach Girls were showing some leg, but honestly it wasn't any more than I was used to seeing at the gym in college. (Girls wore some short running shorts at the gym in college.) The Duke Nukem Girls, while ridiculous (sorry, I couldn't find a CC-licensed photo), were okay from a policy perspective. These school girl body guards are, I hear, present in the game. The girls there were, as far as I can tell, honestly excited to be there and not in a way that made it seem like they “had daddy issues” or were being taken advantage of. The Duke Nukem Girls bothered me just as much as all of the other Booth-Staffers-For-Hire.

2) I can't talk about the objectification of women in this context. (This is the section on feminism.)
Booth babes, people say, objectify women. They pander. They treat people like they are idiots. I know a lot of people who have strong responses against the sexualization of women in contexts like gaming. Hell, a lot of them have strong responses against the sexualization (and exploitation) of anyone in things nearly any context. I don't feel ready or educated enough to talk about any of these publicly. People have been making these arguments for years and there are still games with girls in sexy schoolgirl outfits and booths with girls in sexy schoolgirl outfits (not that there is anything objectively wrong with a plaid skirt). These arguments aren't working. This isn't just about women; even if there were booth bros—yes, even if someone was dressed as post-Crisis Tim Drake Robin—I wouldn't feel as though this was okay.
Some people I talked to regarded the idea of “booth bros” in this context as a way of neutralizing the field. “Guys get something, girls get something, and guys who dig guys get something.” However, other people emphasized that for them this didn't solve the actual issue. They still saw it as institutionalized inequality—not just because there would be booth babes and then booth bros to keep the people-who-dig-dudes quiet. In fact, it was argued to me, that reinforces the idea that they are unequal. It was explained that the root of the issue here was that it reinforces an overall societal view that people aren't equal, women are not as competent as men, it is okay to sexualize women in a blanket way, and that men need to be pandered to in this way in order to sell them things. It's an argument I can see the reasons for, but it's not one I find especially compelling concerning booth babes at PAX. It's not the visceral reason booth babes bother me. And I don't know enough about it to make a good argument from that perspective. Also, I don't want to see my five readers (Hi, Mom and Dad!) turn this into a flame war over feminism, as often seems to happen in these cases, because of reason a) Upon greater reflection, it could be an intellectual reason why I am bothered by booth babes, but it is not currently a visceral one.

3) Who's to blame? (This is where I express confusion over Penny Arcade's comments.)
I feel like I would have been less bothered if there had been no actual anti-booth babe policy. I would have just thought “look, there goes big companies being jerks again.” There was an official policy that allowed some behaviors and “professional models,” but I couldn't find it--only things that alluded to it. The survey on which the policy was based, and the revamp of the policy, took place in 2010. In 2011 Mike Krahulik said that they were "not allowing booth babes" at PAX.

4) This isn't about free speech. (This is where I sound kind of crazy.)
One pro-booth babe argument floating about was that restricting booth babes is restricting free speech. It's censorship. Censorship, in all forms, is wrong, right? I am going to say something that I think isn't entirely true: Advertising is not art. Booth babes are advertising. They are not art. I actually think some advertising is very close to art, some of it arguably is art. But saying you can't advertise in a specific way is, I believe, fundamentally different than actually censoring. No one is saying they can't loudly market their product, just that they can't do it with hot girls. I mean, isn't that one of the points of PBS?

5) Maybe it is about pandering. (This is where I get to my point.)
This is where I landed after considering everything else, trying to narrow down what actually bothered, and still bothers, me about the booth babes.

For me, PAX was a chance to get back in touch with the gamer I used to be. I got to try out games! I got to dream about a fantastical future that will likely never be where I have a 360 and can play Bastion, Bioshock, Fallout, and all those other games I haven't gotten to play in years but dreamed about. For the first time since we got rid of our television in college, I really knew what was going on in the world of video games! I was at PAX to be involved with video games. (And to see The Protomen, but we'll talk about that in The Future.)

I didn't want to feel like people were trying to sell me something—which they obviously were—I wanted to feel like people were excited about their new game and they wanted to talk to me about it, teach me about it, and let me try it out. I wanted to know why it was special and cool, what new things it did, the ideas put into it. I didn't want to feel like a walking consumer, even though that's kind of what I was. At least in the eyes of some people.

Advertising is a very tricky thing. In the early 20th century, Edward Bernays completely changed the way we view advertising. Before him, advertising had focused on what was good about products. It explained the features of a car or a shampoo. In short, it was boring.The New York Times called him the “father of public relations.” He took advertising into the streets with campaigns like Torches of Freedom, took advantage of the suffrage movement, turning cigarette smoking into a point of freedom. Bernays was instrumental in creating a world where we are not people, we are consumers. From him, and people like him, advertising became the all consuming experience we have now. It's not just about selling a product based on the product, it's about selling an experience and belief of a life surrounding the product. From explicit advertising we see telling us how great a game is, to which cars were the Autobots in the post-2000 Transformers movies, advertising is all around us. The bags containing the programs at PAX were stuffed with advertisements, and the book itself was funded from the adverts in it.

We are constantly being exposed to advertising. Arguably, the Harmonix panel I went to was a form of advertising: it convinced me that the Harmonix people are pretty cool and that if I am going to spend money on game related things, giving it to them might be good. The expo hall can be looked at in two ways: it is a haven of advertising, or it is a place to learn about and experience new technologies and games.

This is one of those tricky areas where I have to ask about the role advertising has at places like PAX—it helps fund the event and basically, in various forms, creates most of the content. I fall back on the wise words of Dr. G. Alec Stewart when he said to me “M, sometimes intentions matter more than the outcome.” Exhibitors go to expos for the sake of drumming up press, garnering attention, and convincing people to become consumers of their products. However, the approaches they take, sharing things versus pandering, are what matter when looking at how advertising fits into events like PAX.

Booth babes and cosplayers are a good case for looking at how intentions matter. Cosplayers are, unintentionally, advertising. They are advertising themselves, their skills, but they're also walking advertisements for the things they took inspiration from. However, they are choosing the designs they use and the way they present themselves. People who dress scandalously in the real world, the world outside of expos, do this too, but they choose it. They aren't choosing it for pay, they're choosing it for themselves.

Professional models at these events turn something people do because they love it into something people do because they get paid to. The professional models are choosing to do this—in some cases in part because they too love games—but that doesn't change the fact they are getting paid to be the advertisement.

Not everything people choose to do is okay. We as a society believe it's not okay to kill and eat someone, even if they're cool with it. Similarly, while we as a society have a sort of mocking treatment towards kinky sex--and an open admonishment towards it in the public sphere--we recognize some people do this at home when we don't have to see. We take an almost parental approach of "if I didn't see my child do this bad thing you say they did, then I will assume they didn't do this bad thing." At some level, in this equation, people -are- being used in a public space.

And that bothers me. This isn't what it's supposed to be about.

John Drake, over at Harmonix, tweeted on the issues. He said:

Dear #PAX exhibitors – as a gamer, fellow exhibitor, and dev, any use of booth babes is not in the spirit of pax. No excuses. It's bullshit.

(Brought to you by the Twitter Feed of @johntdrake, who I would like to say very nice things about based on this tweet, but I'm afraid I might run into him some day (because he appears to be local) and then have to fess up to this fact.)

Mr. Drake is right. As I like to think about it, and I might be very wrong, PAX is about video games. It's about nerdy things. It's about community. It is about the things that connect a bunch of wildly different people to one another. It's a chance to have people get your shirts from obscure webcomics. It's a chance to try out new games. It's a place where it's okay to talk to a stranger, to ask to get in on a game, or to offer to share a cookie. (Okay, maybe not the last one.) It's all those wonderful things about being a geek or a nerd that make you feel happy inside.

There's nothing actually wrong with professional models demonstrating products or manning booths in general. However, it's “not in the spirit”of this particular event. A portion of the community doesn't seem to want professional models, of any type, manning booths at PAX. Instead of following through with an outright ban, this grey area has turned the community against itself rather than allowing it to focus on what really matters—the community.

Professional models are like everyone else: some of them are wonderful, some of them are jerks. They have just as much a right to earn a living in their chosen profession as anyone else. However, in the context of PAX professional models are a symbol. For some people this symbol stands for objectification, being a minority—an often less respected minority—within their community, unwanted sexualization, or fighting over what many feel are unreasonable expectations of women. For some it stands for treating fans like they're idiots or nothing but bundles of easy to manipulate hormones. For some this stands for inequality, or the creation of negative environments.(5) For me, it stands for people forgetting that this isn't supposed to be about blatantly selling products—-it's supposed to be about sneakily selling products by making me feel welcome and convincing me to try out your awesome games. They represent a community forgetting itself.(6) Professional models stand for many things, just in this case those things don't seem to be very good.

(1) In 2009, Penny Arcade ran a survey about gamer demographics that had a sample size of 38,350. In 2010, when they did their booth babe survey, it had a sample size of 6,313. Since 69,500 people officially attended PAX East 2011, I actually think that sample size is kind of pathetic. I -think- it would be pretty cool to have a few demographic/preference related questions attached to the ordering form as a middle skippable step. (I don't think participation in such things should be mandatory.) It could include such wonderful questions as “What kinds of events are you most excited about?” to help with room allocation (which the forums seem to think was a problem), and “Should 'booth babes' be banned outright?”

(2) Bad Ass

(3) okay, I get why it's sexy, and I do love plaid, but the emulation of school girls in that context seems a little strange. See some article somewhere about how men like women who remind them of young girls

(4) The application for Charisma +2 includes questions about gaming that request fairly detailed answers. Model profiles have them talking about their gaming experience, and a whole lot of them include cosplay shots.

(5) In writing this I got a lot of criticism for not wanting to talk about gender politics, so I decided to mention them in the footnotes. I was told a story about a Harmonix game designer who would sometimes man their booth. She said she gets told "oh, I'll wait for
one of the guys who actually works for the studio to come back" when working events. I was told this story with the implied message that things like booth babes—and the depiction of women in games, movies, society, etc—leads to these sort of perceptions. While there are women in male-dominated fields, those women are treated as though they as less competent or somehow “not real.”

(6) Why I think PAX should ban booth babes in 140 characters of less: The people who actually suffer by not having booth babes are the booth babes. More people seem to suffer with them there.

Note: I am still intending on attending PAX 2012. I just wanted to talk and think about how I felt concerning booth babes and this seemed like a good way to do it. PAX was pretty amazing. I think that if the community really doesn't want booth babes (or booth bros) at PAX 2012, and are vocal about it in a constructive way, than there won't be booth babes in 2012. In my experiene, PA guys, while sometimes appearing to be jerks, are -generally- pretty good about making people feel welcome. After all, Mike Krahulik said “We want PAX to be a place where everyone feels welcome...[and] contrary to what they might think, I'm not a complete asshole.”

Photo by Fristle (Michael Myers), http://www.flickr.com/people/fristle/

Writing

2011-02-24T18:55:00.004-05:00

Talking about writing is something that's hard to do without sounding extremely pretentious. There are different ways people write. Some people plan. Some people are methodical. Some people write out whole plots, do character explorations, and nail down fine points. Some people do research, not just for details, but to look at how they want their story to go: how do other stories in this genre go? How does pacing work? Some people try to come up with ideas and some people are delievered ideas by their minds.

Some people set out to write--they try to write. Some people just write. There's something to be admired in supposed dedication; there's something to be envied in the supposedly intrinsic talent of some people.

Sometimes, I sit down to write determined to write. I plan and plot and contrive. I do research. I make outlines.

But sometimes, sometimes I become this manic monster. I no longer feel like a person; I feel like I am posessed and suddenly nothing else in the world matters, nothing else is important, and not writing makes me ache with a depression and longing I can't imagine ever falling in love with anyone or anything else.

Right now I feel the latter way and I write this to try and center myself, to try and create an excuse for my poor show at work, my poor show among friends, and my poor show at blogging.

Past

2011-02-21T00:40:00.013-05:00

When I was in high school I knew this guy, SS. SS had a King of the Geeks thing going on for him. Tall, distinctive bouncy walk that CC described recently as a "hunker," (though not in reference to SS). He would wear bright Hawaiian shirts and you could tell it was him even from over a block away. He had more games than everyone else I knew combined.

I used to go to church with SS, even though I was (and am) agnostic, unable to believe in anything that doesn't have evidence I can experience. I believe the sun will rise tomorrow because I have experienced it so many times. I believe my parents love me because of how often they have told me. I believe in things presented to me simply. That is to say, I didn't believe in his god because I never had proof of it presented to me simply. But then I never had proof against it presented to me simply either.

Church was a brilliant spectacle. It was a small Baptist church with a pastor who had an undergraduate degree in theater. She put on shows for us. We talked about simple, basic things. We sang. After church, which I rather diligently went to every Sunday, I'd spend a bit of time talking to MP--SS's mom who would also go.

At that point in my life, I spent a lot of time at SS's house, talking to him, hanging out, playing games, fighting the cat, poking about the garden, being really ridiculously hot during the summers, and trying to talk to MP and MS--his other parent.

MP and MS really brought out everything that was awkward and teenage about me. They were some of the few people in my life who I -really- wanted to like me. I wanted them to refer to me with affection and amusement--the way they described someone to me as "brilliant and completely unaware of this fact," smiling as they said this. Around them, I'd fall over words, I'd not know what to say. Other adults--who were really just people to me--would find me charming and talkative, but around MP and MS, I would stutter and stumble over every syllable, sentence, and concept.

You see, SS's parents were cool.

Really, really cool.

I -dreamed- about being as cool as they were when I grew up. I would fantasize about this the some way some people would fantasize about their wedding or college. In my little fantasies I would be an equal and I was just as cool as they were.

On Friday night, they were in town. Politely, they invited me to a little party they were having. This blew my mind.

The last time I was in Philadelphia, I tried, rather actively, to see them and it never quite worked out. After returning to Somerbridge, I emailed MS and he never responded. Being the bundle of insecurity I am, obviously, I concluded, they didn't like me, or want to see me, or talk to me. These fevered visions of them sitting down in the morning to have coffee haunted me when I let my mind drift too far into thinking about how I didn't see them. MS would say "So, m. called. She's in town." MP would frown--a formidable sight--and say something like "What's she up to? Still a talentless, awkward hack?" And MS would nod. "I think I'll just say we're busy," to which MP would nod and then comment about something wonderful in the paper.

Of course, I knew this isn't really what happened, but I worry anyway.

On Friday night, I stood by their door, my pants wet and grit stained from the ride over.
MP let me in and explained a series of photographs they had on display. She sat down while people came to talk to her. MS sat in a chair and then stood, needing more of himself to tell us about his new book, about their research trip to Moscow, about a book he had just read. I just stood there, listening to everyone else, sitting and chatting, holding their wine glasses while I drank watered down limeaide.

It brought me back to being in high school, when I first met MP and MS and realized I wanted to be these people when I grew up. Friday night I realized I still want to be these people when I grow up. These wonderful, wild people with this wonderful, wild life. Much like in high school, I found myself unable to say anything interesting or contributive. For someone who likes to play at writer, I sure fail at communicating. I'm just -bad- at it. In my mind, I have little optimistic voices play over the New Yorker profile that will be done of me some day. In it, the writer will talk about how they were surprised when they met me: how someone who writes so brilliantly, who so cleanly evokes the spectrum of emotions, capturing a wonderful new reality of new ideas and humanistic understanding, can communicate so poorly when being asked questions. They'll talk about how I ramble on senseless things, telling other people's stories I can barely relate to the topic at hand. Breaking down into long awkward silences that are then punctuated by my inane explanations of what I had just been saying.

Other than being awkward, which I did a lot in high school, I listened, which I also did a lot in high school during the time I spent around MP, MS, and their friends. I listened. I listened to the way they both tell stories, the way they share information. How every word is not only meaningful, but usually brings a strong image. As they talked, I was able to, for a brief time, see the world from where they stood. I desperately wanted to be part of their world, a part of this thing and these lives that come together in ways I used to be a part of.

When I left, after a few late snippets of personal discussion and hugs, I biked home feeling strange in that way when you're just not sure how you feel at all.

Assignments, 01

2011-02-14T13:25:00.003-05:00

My whole life my father has given my brother and I assignments. For me, these are usually lists or paragraphs to write. Occasionally they have been to learn how to do things. When I was younger, my father made a list of things for me to learn. I have been working on them since then, focusing on different ones at different periods. I still can't do three pullups in a row.

The most recent called for me to make a list of every place I've been. This is difficult, in one way, because it requires first deciding what "having been there" counts as, and how specific one should get.

At this point in my life, I've spent about a day in Amsterdam, between the handful of times I had layovers in the airport there. But that doesn't count because I've never actually been out of the airport. There are other places I've been, that I say I've been, that I saw very little of, or small sections. Philosophically, I wouldn't say I've been there, but in casual conversation I would say I was there. Then there's specificity. I've been to South Korea. Do I say South Korea or do I list the places in South Korea I've been to? I've decided to make these personal decisions on a cast by case basis. I don't count Hull, MA because we sat at the beach for an hour and then left. I do count Lowell, MA because we wandered around for a few hours. I'll make a separate list of places I've biked sometime.

This list, annotated and without real dates, is in reverse chronological order, as best I can do. I hope my parents and friends can help me add dates at a later date. For places I've been to several times, I've tried to list it in reference to the first time I was there. There are likely gaps.

-Reykjavik, Iceland
-Highland, MD
-New York City, NY
-Lowell, MA
-Salem, MA
-New Hope, PA
-Songtan, South Korea
-Seoul, South Korea
-Suwon, South Korea
-Los Angeles, CA
-Santa Clara, CA
-Marin, CA
-Medford, OR
-Yelm, WA
-Salt Lake City, UT
-Louisville, KY
-Cambridge, MA
-Somerville, MA
-Chicago, IL
-Berlin, PA
-Irkusk, Russia
-Ulaan Ude, Buryat, Russia
-Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia
-Saen Shed, Mongolia
-Hohhot, IMAR, China
-Beijing, China
-Phoenixville, PA
-Pickney, MI
-Clarkdale, AZ
-Kent, OH
-Salzburg, Austria
-Zagreb, Croatia
-Wein, Austria
-Various places around the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas, MI
-Filey, UK
-Providence, RI
-Valatie, NY
-Boston, MA
-Pittsburgh, PA
-Sedona, AZ
-Phoenix, AZ
-Baltimore, MD
-Ft. Lauderdale, FL
-Washington, DC
-Space Camp and Space Academy, FL and AL
-Williamsburg, VA
-Savannah, GA
-Poconos, PA

---
There's a jumble before this. Before these were years that included driving out to Dillon, Colorado, trips to North Carolina, which set up going during Spring Break at school, trips to Florida, which also set up going there for Spring Break. We went to New Hampshire, my family that is. I don't remember the cities. My aunt lived in Riverton, NJ and I've been there countless times. I visited another aunt in Punxsutawney, PA once. I've skipped things, like the time Dad took us to the Baltimore Aquarium when we were really little. The trip to Boston, and the trip to DC, we took as a family for just the evening. We've been to Brigantine, NJ for family reunions. I grew up in Philadelphia.

There are other things I didn't know what to do with. There were a lot of places I visited for a few hours when driving around the US. I only counted the ones I stayed at for at least a day. I don't know what to do about the Transsiberian, but I feel as though it needs to be mentioned. There was the drive I took around Arkhangai and Overhungai with the M.Y.U.C. psych department in the summer of '08.

There are upcoming trips. New London, CT this May for a wedding. Seattle, WA this June for another. I haven't really been to either of them before. There's the vast list of places I want to go and the equally intimidating list of places I want to go back to.

Whenever searching my memory for places I've been, I found myself unable to remember factual details of the trips. I can't list itineraries, what happened when. I could not draw a time line. Instead, I remember things that happened in no particular order--being the volunteer in a fake trial in Williamburg, walking around in that tricorner hat I begged my parents for. Walking down the steps of the stone walls in Savannah. Wandering through Baltimore, JHU's campus, at the exact same time AL and KG were there. I remember driving up on Salt Lake City and how like a flower it bloomed. I remember outrunning a storm in Punxsutawney and hiding with my grandfather from the rain at his house in Florida.

I remember getting out of my car in Oregon, walking to the river, and falling in love.

My father says try to stay in the present, even as you recall the past. I don't think I'm lost, I don't feel lost, but right now all I can think of is that river.

Wimp

2011-02-11T15:32:00.007-05:00

I am a wimp.

Saying this always gets interesting responses from my friends. I say it out of a mix of self-deprecating humor and honesty. I -am- a wimp. I apply this terminology to different situations.

"I'm a spice wimp."

"It's cold and I'm a wimp."

"I bike -super- slow right now because the roads are icy and I'm a wimp."

There are innumerable situations in my life during which I look around myself and can only mumble out what feels like an obvious truth: I am a wimp.

This is, of course, not true. Not entirely. I am a wimp in comparison to my friends. At university my friends, my beautiful friends, with their ability to eat foods spiced for Indians, would devour food that merely tasting caused tears to well up in my eyes. They would move quickly across the ground in the winter, making their way across ice. In Korea, my friends could drink more than I could, ate things I couldn't bring myself to try. They could -stand- longer than I could. Since moving here, everything about my friends feels so much more than me. I slowly skid, nervously, over the hard packed snow, dodging patches of ice and walking my bike while my friends fearlessly pedal forward. BT recently asked me if I wanted to go hiking sometime, something I would love to do, but BT is -so- hardcore. He hikes up mountains in winter. He biked up Mount Washington. I concede that while I would like to, I can't exactly keep up. When I walk across the ice and one of my feet slip, when I almost fall but stop, when my bike shakes and skids my body goes cold and then a rush of warmth starts somewhere in my stomach and uncomfortably spreads across me making me cringe and shake.

As a child, I fell a lot in traumatic ways. This instilled a fear in me that ruled my life, that dictated how I acted reaching down from my root desires to seemingly inconsequential details. I would cry as my parents tried to get me to ride a roller coaster. I cried at the mere prospect of going skiing. Hiking off a clearly defined train made me grab for someone's hand. When I would wake up in the middle of the night, if it was really dark, I would scream. Over the years, my fear, how wimpy I am, has transitioned from affecting every aspect of my life to mostly managing the large decisions and overall driving forces. I ride, and enjoy, roller coasters now. I still creep along ice, gritting my teeth and hoping I don't fall.

Whenever I bike with my friends, I feel like a wimp. MH and MM biked across Long Island into NYC in one day. I've met a bunch of people who did the Seattle to Portland ride (two-hundred miles) in a day. My friends climb hills and zoo ahead. They lean down into their drop handles and let themselves fall.

I lightly press my breaks, controlling my fall.

Biking home the other night, I climbed Spring Hill. The roads were clear enough, and it was late so the road was empty. But I was climbing. My front gears are stuck in their hardest position, so I knocked the back gear as low as I could without rubbing the chain against the derailleur. Pushing, slowly, wavering my way up the hill. It wasn't as hard as it was the first time I ever tried to go up Spring Hill, but it wasn't the easiest. My muscles ran out of oxygen and lactic acid built up as, struggling for energy, as aerobic processes became anaerobic. My lungs burned from the cold air that didn't seem to do anything. At the top, I crawled over the last ridge where I turn off the main street onto my street.

After I carried my bike up the stairs, I got ready for bed. Looking in the mirror, I though "this is what a wimp looks like."

Poe

2011-02-08T14:36:00.003-05:00

When someone is alive, we call the day they were born their birthday. After they die, once years have passed and the people who knew them are all dead as well, we call it the anniversary of their birth. On the anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe's birth, fans pay homage at his grave. There was one fan in particular who, for sixty years, would leave three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac where Mr. Poe is buried.

However, this tradition appears to be over.

At some point in time, man came forward and told people he was the "Poe Toaster." He goes on to say that it was something conceived of as a marketing strategy, a promotional ideal. Or at least, it started out that way.

According to the Fox News article, some people around the Poe House arranged for the Poe Toaster the first year, and since this time someone -became- the Poe Toaster in the same way a victim becomes a superhero--it becomes necessary, as far as they see it, to become something that is a work of fiction.

When the TSA added their full body scanners, someone I know told me a story about a professor they had. Their professor, they told me, was visiting the USSR, hanging out with a Soviet mathematician. When the professor left, they smuggled a manuscript--Kepler, or something Greek--out of the USSR. They took a microfilm and wrapped it around their thigh.

D.B. Cooper hijacked a plane, stole two hundred thousand dollars, and then jumped out of the plane over the stretch of land between Seattle and Portland. He has never successfully been identified. Several people have claimed to be Dan Cooper.

These stories add something to our world. The unknown hijacker, the daring academic, the mysterious visitor are all part of a strip that lies between reality and fantasy. They give our world unexplained depth. They give us wonder and, in a sense, they give us hope.

As a culture, we love these stories because they tell us that there is more to the world than we see, that there is more than is easily explained, and that normal people can do extraordinary things. Not even just that--but that these crazy things we read about and hear about can be perpetrated by anyone, a normal seeming person who might be your neighbor, your coworker, or your friend.

And that's pretty great.

Cake

2011-02-06T16:15:00.009-05:00

I made my first vegan cake last summer. I was visiting pika, an "ongoing experiment in cooperative living" supported by MIT. That is to say, officially, it is MIT student housing. Friends of mine who lived there were cooking dinner and invited me along. We made a cake, a six minute chocolate vegan cake. The recipe, I think, is from Moosewood. It wasn't a very fancy cake. It wasn't hard. It wasn't advertised as vegan, it simply was a chocolate cake. It just so happened that it didn't call for eggs or butter or milk. The chocolate was easy to handle, the cocoa powder was vegan, finding that isn't especially difficult. Six minute chocolate cake is so easy, KM once made it all by himself. He'd never made a cake before.

Sometime after my first vegan cake encounter I landed myself in a Columbia University dorm for a week. Somewhere in there, I learned that the dorm had a functioning kitchen in the basement--an experience nonexistent in my dorm experiences. Obviously, this meant we needed to bake a cake.

What ensued was some interpersonal angst over what kind of cake we should make--the ingredients necessary for a carrot cake recipe we had were too ridiculous to procure--and help from a local whose parents were kind enough to lend us mixing bowls, spoons, and other kitchen parts, we set down to make a cake. The six minute chocolate cake recipe came out, except this time we didn't use chocolate. We also didn't use vinegar.

Six minute chocolate cake works because it has vinegar and baking soda in it. After everything else is mixed together, the vinegar is added and swirled around. The reaction, that same one that I still delight in every time, makes the cake fluffy. Vinegar also helps hold everything together. I don't know how, but according to the internet, it works. I've used it in cookies since reading about that, and it seemed okay. Without vinegar, and with no one looking, I scoured around the kitchen hoping. Instead, I found some lemon juice. I shrugged, poured it in, and hoped for the best. To compensate for this, I poured in an extra half-cup of oil. It allowed me to finish up the container, rather than leaving a stray half-cup of oil floating around Columbia's campus. It was such a scaled up version of the recipe, I hardly thought it mattered. We (vegan) iced the cake and put some strawberries in a stylized Debian Swirl.

I tried.

The cake was devoured. The vegans, as they always do, lit up upon being told that the cake was vegan. The non-vegans didn't ask, and only afterwards expressed surprise, and sometimes disbelief, that the cake contained no eggs.

To this day, AP claims it's one of the best cakes he's ever had. He had had a lot of beer that night, but I am still pleased with this. Whenever I make a cake, he slips in that I should just make one like I did that night in New York.

Iceland brought more adventures in cake baking. I made the first non-vegan cake I'd baked in months. It was CC's birthday, and MZ, her husband, really wanted her to have a cake. An angel food cake. He and I took turns beating the egg whites stiff. The flour there, a little grainer, a little more flavorful than flour here, made a good basis. The cake had collapsed by the time people ate it, but it still seemed good. The vegans, some six of the group, lamented the loss of a cake eating opportunity, but knew there'd be future cake. Since we had acquired a box egg replacer (which as far as I can tell is potato starch, tapioca starch, and some other things that are preservatives or decaking powders or something), we decided to experiment.

Up until this point, every vegan cake I made was based on the Six Minute Chocolate Cake recipe. It's a great recipe, but I lamented--and still do--the loss of all the lovely cakes I used to make. Egg replacer claims you can beat it stiff, but until Iceland I had never actually had a box to experiment with. My life has been, generally, devoid of things like sponge cakes and lady fingers, pound cake and macarons. Those little almond squares. Cheesecake. All of those things I used to spend hours trying, and failing, to make perfect, whipping and beating, mixing and stirring, were gone. So, I put the egg replacer to a test.

I made a regular cake recipe, using egg replacer instead of eggs.

Unlike a lot of other amateur vegan bakers I know, I rarely look for vegan recipes. I usually look for recipes I love, recipes I grew up with, and try to change, tweak, them into a vegan equivalent. With this supposedly magical egg replacer--and I was skeptical, I mean, it's just starch--I could try an older recipe I knew.

Of course, this meant Julia Child.

Recipes I make don't really all come from Julia Child. Some are family recipes. I first learned to cook using Chocolatier magazine, Captain Cook's Cook Book (for kids!), a collection of recipes from World War II, and the Fannie Farmer Cook Book. While those books (well, not Chocolatier magazine) set me up for being able to cook meals at home, Julia Child has so far not let me down when it comes to wowing my friends and impressing people with the delicious magical taste of French cooking and lots of fats.

I think I double or tripled the base recipe. I almost never make a basic recipe anymore.

½ cup of rapeseed (canola) oil
1 ¼ cups of sugar
3 egg replacer eggs
2 tsp Vanilla
1 cup coconut milk
3 tsp baking powder
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt

Mix. Bake at baking temperature (350 or "about 175 on the dial") for 30-40 minutes. The decision to use coconut milk instead of almond or soy milk was based in fats. The original recipe calls for whole milk, specifically whole milk. Soy milk or almond milk didn't seem quite heavy enough. The cake was crumbly and delicious.

Picture 1, from This Is Chris.Com. Our cake looked something like that. But it was bigger. And not as evenly iced.

Picture 2, Picture 3, Picture 4, and Picture 5, by Asheesh Laroia, and are licensed CC-BY-SA