Category Archives: Misc Life

i do not lack community, and yet…

The Prompt: “Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?” (Author: Cali Harris)

Chances are good that you’re reading this because I tweeted a link or posted it to Facebook. If that’s the case, then you know a little bit about me and how I’m just a wee bit embedded in some virtual communities. [With all due respect to my friend Mark Sample, I claim there's something to community-building and generation through Twitter.] I even wrote an entire post about how social media got me through five years of graduate school (and beyond). From these virtual communities come smaller virtual communities (the ProfHacker community for some time, the DH Answers community, etc) as well as some hybrid communities (folks who go to THATCamp(s) but maintain close ties between events, for example, and physical-world communities (of teachers, students, etc) spill into the virtual world, and so on and so forth. What I’m trying to say, poorly, is that I can look around at any given moment and see a number of communities I can reach out to when I need help, or jump into when I have help to offer.

Really. Name the subject, and I have people who will have my back and I’ll have theirs—regardless of where we actually live, or where we stand in some academic hierarchy, or whatever. I should know, because I’ve had occasion to call on people in several areas over the last few months: personal, pedagogical, professional…all the biggies. And never has my community (whichever it was at the time) failed me. I hope I haven’t failed them.

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making things is pretty much who i am.

The Prompt: “Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?” (Author: Gretchen Rubin)

It would be easy to punt here and to talk about food, because lord knows I love to cook and bake, but that wouldn’t turn out too well because I don’t have an oven here and haven’t cooked (much) or baked a damn thing in six months. And yes, that’s both literal and metaphorical.

I could also punt and say “well, I made a dissertation, and an article, earlier in the year,” because that’s what academic sorts do, but that seems kind of lame, too. While the article is pretty good if I do say so myself, I made it in 2009 and just polished it up a little in 2010. And the dissertation? Well, if it were a cake it would be a lumpy, lopsided cake with too much baking powder. Never good. Not my best work.

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letting go? i’m all over this one.

The Prompt: “Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?” (Author: Alice Bradley)

I have an unfortunate memory—not a single memory, for that would be ok, but my overall memory is wicked good at holding on to things and I find that unfortunate in that it disallows me from letting things go. Even when I want to let things go, there’s that primary source just staring back at me. The things it holds on to for years are those moments of extremes: extremely good things, extremely bad things, in all their vividness. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Yes, please.

I’m sure it’s like that for a lot of people, and I’m sure a lot of people are a heck of a lot better at ignoring or processing the source than I am. But hey, when it comes to analyzing texts (words, images, etc), I’m a professional. If there’s a reason my brain presented me with that memory at that particular moment, of course I must approach it critically and discern the reason for that intertextuality. Right? Right??

Yeah. I’ve started to let that go.

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i am not solitary whilst i read and write, though nobody is with me.

The Prompt: “Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?” (Author: Jeff Davis)

The use of “whilst” is a dead giveaway that the title of this post is not my own. Indeed, it’s a line from Nature, which is a text as close to a Bible as I get these days [someday, remind me to tell the story of the weekend I spent in a convent as a kid] in that it offers guidance for thoughts and actions yet also room (plenty of room) for interrogation. Anyway, this particular bit of Emerson works well for me, as I am always connected to hundreds of people—virtually, of course, via ye olde internet and especially the twitters. There’s a community there, and as communities go it shifts in both shape and size but has a solid core. Taking my community into consideration, I know there’s a group of people consistently interested in what I have to say—just as I’m consistently interested in what they have to say, and we learn from each other, and so on and so forth. I am always talking to someone—usually a group of someones—regardless if they know it at the time, or ever actually hear what I’m saying. In the end, it doesn’t matter; we all oscillate, and catch hold of whatever we want or need as we each pass by.

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i swear i’ve been alive all year

The Prompt: “Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).” (Author: Ali Edwards)

I have some problems with this prompt. First, describing things in vivid detail is not what I’m about. I know, “get in the spirit, dumbass,” but for me the spirit of things is to focus on what’s underneath, and try to work that out in writing.

That being said, most of the moments that stand out for me as being “most alive” involved being with other people, and I’m neither comfortable talking about other people in that regard nor would it be right to do so. So I won’t. But I will note for future reference that I find it more and more ridiculous that I’m such a staunchly INTJ Capricorn when I actually love hanging out with people. But not all people. Maybe that’s where the “I” comes in to play.

Anyway.

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in which the author maintains a skewed perspective

The Prompt: “What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing—and can you eliminate it?” (Author: Leo Babauta)

When I saw this prompt this morning, my immediate reaction was “My what? I’m not a writer. Who cares if my writing falls to the wayside?” Except that’s complete and utter bullshit, and that bullshit thinking is my problem.

Why yes, I did just call bullshit on myself.

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one word? flux.

The Prompt: “Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?” (Author: Gwen Bell)

The word for 2010 is flux. Specifically, the definitions having to do with uncertainty and establishing a new direction of action, constant motion, and constant change. Now, change is good. I’m a fan of change. I’m also a fan of motion.

However.

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Deuce, 2001-2010

This might be my favorite picture of my dearly departed cat, Deuce. She was three at the time, and we lived in San Jose. In this picture, she’s looking out the sliding glass door at the backyard wildlife. You’d never know we lived in a condo in the middle of southeastern San Jose—we had a duck pond (with occasional geese), a resident red-tailed hawk, a plethora of sparrows and nuthatches and other small birds, and of course more squirrels than any one cat could ever handle watching. But, as you can see here, she held her own with that. When we moved to Pullman, she did the 16 hours in the car like a champ, and settled in to three years of watching quail, birds, and squirrels in Eastern Washington. When we moved to Victoria five months ago, she handled the drive and the ferry ride with aplomb—and the border guards didn’t have any problem letting her into Canada.

She had a tough life. Well, that’s not true. She had a really tough kittenhood, and a tough last two hours, and one really bad day in 2006, but other than that she was just about the most-loved cat ever. Pretty damn cute, too.

She came to live with me in 2001, when my cat Toby was in the midst of kitty chemotherapy. During one of our visits, the vet techs called me aside and said something like “so, we have this kitten, and she need to go home with you.” Turns out that one of them had found this kitten when she was a week or so old, covered in caustic and oily goop and thrown down into a storm drain. The vet tech heard the plaintive cries and was able to reach her, and took her into the hospital where they nursed her back to health. She had pneumonia, and some of her hair was burned off from the goop, but she made it. They called her “Butterfly” because the white on her belly was sort of butterfly shaped. I didn’t really see it, and couldn’t really hang with a cat named “Butterfly” (the name really didn’t fit), so I brought her home and renamed her “Deuce”—kind of odd, but you see she looked exactly like my co-worker’s cat, Dexter, who had just died a few days earlier. I couldn’t name her “Dexter II” so “Deuce” it was. And she was happy, and she loved me, and she loved Toby and Max (rest their souls) and she even loved Mini (dorky and dumb though she is). She did not love people besides me, though if you spent enough time with her (like a solid week or more) she would eventually warm up to you. In her situation, I would have been skeptical of people, too.

Today, we were going to the vet to check out her cough. We did that, got xrays, and came home. She took a few steps out of the carrier, had a massive cardiac episode, and died right there on the floor, half in my lap, with me holding her, unable to do a thing except that. Turns out, according to the xrays, that she was suffering from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy—nothing we could have done even if we knew. The stress of the vet visit (which normally stressed her out anyway) combined with the extent of the disease was just too much. The vet said she likely would have had an episode within the week anyway; if it had to happen, I’m glad it happened when I was there.

I’m also glad I snapped this photo yesterday, of Deuce in her normal “hey! let’s nap now!” mode. She looks fine. She was happy. We eventually took a nap.

John Muir: my guy.

A month or so ago, I was walking around in nature and my friend asked something to the effect of “who’s your favorite nature writer?”—and I gave a lousy answer. I think I said something like “Hands down, Muir. Then probably Thoreau. Emerson, I don’t consider him a nature writer. Burroughs probably third then.”

In other words, I gave the lamest most literal answer to a perfectly reasonable question that I could possibly have given. But there’s a reason for that. I’m not used to being asked about my content area, first off, but that’s not my excuse. My excuse is that when I talk about Muir, two things tend to happen: I get emotional and I don’t shut up. At the particular moment I was asked the question, I evaluated the situation and determined it wouldn’t have been appropriate to dominate the conversation for the rest of our saunter. So the lame answer stood. (I have no problem being emotional—I’m Italian. It’s in my blood. I can get emotional over anything—ask me about pizza sometime and see.)

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few weeks thinking about Muir. Not because my friend asked me about him, but because Muir is meaningful to me. He’s a comfort, even, in his complicated, stubborn, ethically-oriented, trouble-with-words sort of way. He reminds me that it’s cool to look for the divine and find it in nature, and to struggle with religion in general—but still to be good. I get him. He’s my guy.

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sauntering for my health

Ten days ago I went for a wee walk at Gowlland Tod Provincial Park—one of Vancouver Island’s bajillion parks. I had plans to go back a few days later and walk some more of the 25km of trails, but then I caught some nasty flu and was pretty much out of commission for a few days. Today was my Saturday—break day. I headed back to Gowlland Tod; my plan was to spend a couple hours on the Timberman Trail and to hit at least one of the viewpoints. I actually hit two of them: the Saanich Inlet Viewpoint (shown first in this post) and the Squally Reach Viewpoint (remaining photos in this post).

Before I go on, I would just like to pass along this tidbit of information: large black Newfoundland dogs, whose owners have not yet rounded the same bend in the trail that the dog has, totally look like bears from 100 yards away. It is at that point that you grab your big stick and wonder why the hell you’re not hiking with a buddy, even though you’ve seen lone people on these trails already, and remember all the prayers the nuns beat into your head as a kid. All. Of. Them.

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