Well, er, it's been awhile. I've come back from my wilderness therapying a changed woman. I suppose I could have dropped stories here and there instead of trying to explain the summer in one quick entry like this, but I guess I don't really need to explain myself to anybody anyway.
But I would like to say that I am a new appreciator of the Arizona deserts...it's hard not to feel like a hoity-toity camper now...I have strong urges to brag about drinking leeches from cowtank water and climbing up steep cliffsides with a fifty-pound pack made from a wool blanket and pack string only to run right into a cactus at crotch level because the moon wasn't out to show it clearly. I never knew I had it in me to survive, um, survival camping.
But however cool bragging makes me think I am, that's not what I really want to relay here... I guess I just want to say before school starts and my mind reverts back to books and email and store-bought bread, that you can learn a lot about people when you're all huddled under the same ragged tarp in a monsoon hail storm (the same day as a 115 degree afternoon). I realized I don't usually see people as people often enough....they're so easy to turn into tools or obstacles--to borrow the Arbinger philosophy, I see them as objects instead of people. But after seeing these brave children face their fears and learn to whittle spoons and flake their own arrowheads and turn a frustrating, disappointing situation into a beautiful one, I think I'm coming to realize that you don't have to go to the Arizona deserts eating nothing but rice and lentils to witness or experience this kind of courage and change.
So I guess that's all I want to say right now, in an effort to restart this blog and re-enter society. I had the opportunity to speak at my grandpa's funeral today and it just confirmed an aching desire to see people as they are because aside from all the distractions and shiny objects and selfish desires that suck away at my time, it's people that are worth living for and being with and I'd like to notice more often the equivalent sacrifices and bravery in the people of my suburban life that I've always overlooked because it lacks the dramatic backdrop of mountain lions and heat stroke. And it'll be nice to live chigger-free for a while, too.
I wish I had the programming skills to set this entry off ala Rocky and Bullwinkle--the bit where everybody is falling and the narrator talks us into watching the next episode by giving us a variety of opposing possible endings...alas, I lack the computer know-how and I carry a weak sack of puns these days, nevertheless, my opponents of today's episode include film director Hal Ashby vs. Lunar Society's spaceman poet, Erasmus Darwin (Charles' grandpappy). Which man is more worthy of extensive research is what I'm asking myself now--is it more ethically enlightening to search out the hippie Utahn who gave us films with Woody Guthrie hitchhiking, Peter Sellers walking on water, and 20-year-old-boy-dating septuagenarians, or would it be more English-major-appropriate to focus on a romance poet who rubbed shoulders with Ben Franklin and wrote about supernovas and evolution and venus flytraps?
Truth: I don't really care. I used to care. But I've become disillusioned to the subtle workings of academic departments--I recall the last few days of my undergrad life when a favorite male teacher approached me and confided that if I ever didn't know the answer to a student's question, to confidently make one up. I laughed then, but in retrospect, I don't think he was referring to questions about grammar, format, or famous people's biographical facts.
Bob Pyle (who votes for Ashby) came to my campus last month and a few of us ate lunch with him. I eagerly recognized his book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide as something I had cited in an 8th grade research paper. I definitely remember copying images from his book for my sasquatch presentation. Pyle's written a lot of nature books (and one coloring book) and he told us half his work is getting his editors to agree with him that his book ideas are good (uh, not all of his books are cryptozoological, by the way).
My point follows that I am sick of acamedic faculty/student paradoxes. Since I was a kid, I've loved religious and literary paradoxes, and the inner truths they vacillate around give me hope and make me wonder. But the paradoxes of academia just irritate me. "Be creative, fresh and new," they say, "and don't be afraid to stand out on a limb." Professors write books about not knowing what the thesis of a work is until after its been completely researched and written out. Have faith! Take risks! they tell each other. But to the grad students they advise to stay traditional, stick with just your mind and archival research, know what your question is before you begin. Oh, and you also need to get a committee of professors with incredibly oppositional opinions to stand behind your paper without surrending the whole thing into their quick, sharp little fingers. This, of course, helps me graduate on time, but in shackles and blinders.
What one wise bearded prof. compliments and encourages, the next balding prof. with glasses points out as weak or impossible. I've been told to can it, to begin it immediately, to sleep on it, and to merely tweak it. "It" being about as vague as "it" sounds. Anyway. Things really aren't so bad. Here's some Darwin (my backup thesis?)--I don't know why I'm complaining...just being in a major where I could even suggest researching hippies or scientistpoets is a real dish:
Roll on, ye Stars! exult in youthful prime,
Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time;
Near and more near your beamy cars approach,
And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach; —
Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field!
Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,
And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!
— Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same.
Finally, some good music I've listened to recently:
(kudos to my friend Beau for a few introductions)
Dry the Rain--Beta Band
need your lovin like the sunshine--Beck
misery is a butterfly--Blonde Redhead
the king of carrot flowers--neutral milk hotel
mambo sun--T. Rex
the River--Springsteen
la primavera--mana chao
the blues are still blue--belle & sebastian
katmandu--cat stevens (an old favorite, coming back)
I've been home from Japan for about six months now, and I guess it feels like I never went at all but somehow learned Japanese in my sleep. I haven't had a chance to share much with anybody other than the family, so I'm going make this first posting a small scene from my experiences away from you all, and we'll see who reads it. Here's a shot from the superbly eerie abandoned carnival on the western coast of Japan, near Kanazawa.Breaking into private property, abandoned or not, isn't exactly white-handbook-approved, but the haunted aura of still-soggy towels hiding under dim locker room benches, Japanese switch grass growing up into the rusting remains of the Tilt-O-Whirl, and being able to push each other on the rides with cobwebs in our hair justified any rule-bending.Elders Moriyama and Petermama had already taken a few runthroughs of the Haunted Mansion, so they led us on a tour with a gimped-out flashlight. Black fabric hung down in long rips, so we'd have to pull them aside like curtains only to come face-to-face with a dirty plastic mad scientist face or the like. The very worst was the last room--a dead woman mummy lying contorted on this long yellow mattress.....her face was the typical scary ghost lady face, with wispy white hairs reminiscent of Indy's Last Crusade scene when the jerk Nazi drank from not-the-carpenter's cup. But since it was midday, and the building partly torn down as it was, the mattress lay mostly in the shadows except for a long angle of dusty light peeking in across her fake skeleton arm. It was gross, is all...it would have been laughably scary in black lights with cheap Halloween soundtracks, but the thing was a thousand times scarier in the noon daylight, with nobody but seven or eight missionaries shuffling their feet around, not talking.Anyway--the Kaga Onsen. Highly recommended for those planning to visit Western Honshu and thereabouts. Check out the empty swimming pool in the back, too. You'll walk through the empty arcade, sidestepping the joysticks littering the ground, and through the locker rooms and out into one of those really nice swimming areas with the pools shaped like shamrocks or money signs or whatever, with big islands jutting up out of them and connecting bridges. You'll probably still be able to see where we dumped buckets of abandoned golf balls to watch them bounce down the recline and into the murky tadpole-infested puddles at the deep end.I'll add info about my life-of-now later...it wore me out to walk through that carnival a second time. I'll see what I can do to post some less irresponsible and わんぱくmission pics, too, just so you all don't get the wrong idea..........
Well, er, it's been awhile. I've come back from my wilderness therapying a changed woman. I suppose I could have dropped stories here and there instead of trying to explain the summer in one quick entry like this, but I guess I don't really need to explain myself to anybody anyway.
