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The highly emotional, silly, sarcastic, pompous, graphic, blasphemous, human, and utterly unscientific ramblings of a truly scattered brain.
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Thursday, March 16, 2006
The Road Not Taken
In the chill evening light, I mount my bike for a rush-hour ride into the city. Dusky, waning light bathes the world in an energetic final glow, sihouetting the trees that are no longer starkly bare but softly airbrushed nude with millions of unseen buds.
It is a lovely ride through the evening bustle, against traffic and through the energy of a world in a state of flux: from work to home, from home to personal places, from day to night, from winter to spring. I too am in a state of change, from laying low at home to a social evening, from graduate school to the larger world, and moving along the road at a comfortable pace.
I reach the glass castlements of Kendall Square just about dark. The hotels, laboratories, office buildings all gleaming and reflective wherever they are not warmly brick or industrial steel coolness. Waiting to hang a left on Main Street near the whimsical teetering cement, brick, steel, and glass fairy palace of science that is the Stata Center, I remember a time twenty years ago when I would not be caught dead here after dark in an unlit world of crumbling tarpaper factories and tenements, vacant lots, and giant holes in the ground. At least I would have feared being caught and made dead.
I turn just before the Post Modern world yields to the sinuous disorder of the Charles river, right where the subway station used to be, and fight a bitter headwind for the last couple of blocks. Locking my bike I look out over the windswept expanses that divide Cambridge from Boston, the river reflecting the remaining solar embers in the sky like the glass on the buildings. I enter the building remembering the last time I was here, a time when I was still a materials engineer and I wanted to attend a talk by my former boss.
Pulling off my helmet and gloves in the elevator, I reach the sixth floor where the banquet rooms reside. The elevator doors slide open and I am frozen in suprise and frozen in time. Two signs greet my gaze: one, with a left arrow, points to a meeting of ASM International, the organization I last came to this place meet with. The other points to my dinner with the Harriet Hardy Institute for Public Health. This unexpected metaphor offers up two options. My past is that way. My present and future? Head this way. I head down the hallway to the my new world along the path I chose.
It only gets more tangled from there, because my past and future share a restroom. I walk down the hall and greet former classmates in attendance in the other room, as well as some ever grayer professors I have studied with. Converstations in the background, be they about materials technology or public health, all make sense to me. But I have little or no interest in what is going on in that other room. I know who I am now and I know where I'm going.
I tell Dave about my metaphorical evening, and he thinks back to the last time he was in that building. It was the wedding of a friend. A friend who was marrying a woman who would later be the financial manager for my unit (and the unit of others at my meeting) when I was at Harvard.
The world implodes sometimes, little bit by little bit. I'm sure I could think up a materials sciency explaination or metaphor for why it is so, if I really cared to go down that road.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
She foams the milk to put in her coffee.
He sits in the car, listening to AM sports radio.
They're gettin' old.
Together.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Fickle Muse
She comes and goes, seemingly at will. Spins my fingers in neat tapping patterns, driven by the wind and molecules of speedy caffeine. Then she leaves of a whim, gone on holiday or travelling off to regions far afield.
I think numbers and formulae scare her, chasing her from the dusty corners and eating all her time rations. Numbers put into pictures, numbers put into words, numbers that numb her, icy, cold and souless.
In like a wave, out like the tide, then back for another round of another moon.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
300 Pound Watermelon
$5.99
I rap them gently, searching for one that sounds
like a thumped chest or a hollow soda bottle
I used to buy these melons straight from the farm
A penny a pound, maybe two ...
$5.99
For this they should weigh at least 300 pounds!
(150, adjusted for inflation ...)
But we are both 3000 miles away
Picking up my AC chilled bauble
Transfing it from cart to car
Yellow, but not flat on the bottom
And caked with sandy dust
In the privacy between vehicles
I press nose to dirt and inhale
The heat and dampness of a muggy evening
Pull me to its home
I hear the sound of wade rain sprinklers
In quiet early morning hours
Giving it life in the fields
Of a dusty desert place
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Theater of Sheep
I have never involved myself in this type of conversation as I feel nothing gets accomplished by it. I have to strongly agree with _____, leave the hiring to the professionals and let the children get the education they deserve.
Such reads a post from the local school list. A group of parents, who are also professional educators for the most part, actually noticed that the hiring process in our city is messed up and disorganized in a way that has a strong negative effect on our ability to compete for the highest quality teachers. As a result, they are organizing to get the system in line with it's own policies and with the systems in other districts - and possibly get more local school control and parent input in the process. Vacuously barbed responses like this makes me wonder if I am raising my kids in the right place.
Is this just more evidence of how strong the influence of organized crime was in this city? A non-democratic force so insidious that people don't even seem to know what it means to be an American anymore? Perhaps this is the very "cultural backgound of Massachusetts" and not the "liberalism" touted by Rick "sanitarium" Santorum that is the basic underpinning of the clergy sex scandal? Don't say that about father McFeeley, he would never do a thing like that. Shhh - let the priests take care of it. Don't make waves ...
Spooling up the .mp3 player and singing along with the Housemartins here:
"Sometimes I get so angry with the simple life they lead,
The Shepherds smile seems to confirm my fears.
They've never questioned anything, they never disagreed,
Sometimes I think they must have wool in their ears!"
Every time educated parents and lifelong-learning artisans and craftspeople begin to challenge certain wastful, harmful, unprofessional, or just stupid aspects of the school system or other government institutions in this city, we are suddenly told that we are all "out of line" for "bickering" and "making waves". Contained within this is the invetible "just who do you think you are to question" response. It would be one thing if people like this just brayed to themselves about not wanting to get personally involved. Yet challenging the system seees to stir and embolden them, if only to advocate strongly for enforced apathy. Seems we people just don't know our place.
Well, lady, well behaved women never make history. Well behaved men don't either. Do you really think that all those ill-behaved colonists who lived on these lands, who fought and died for our system of government - do you really think they fought and died so they could just hand over their tax money to "professionals" and let it be at that? Fought and died so that the convenience of consumer government could be ours today? Do you really think later waves of immigrants left their homes and families and all they knew because there weren't enough professionals in their home countries to take their money and do as they saw fit? Were meetings held in Faneuil Hall in Boston so that patiriots could rally their compatirots with a rousing chourus of Jello Biafra's "Give me Convenience or Give Me Death!"
Right. Sure. Slap the pockmarked face of the Ukranian president, poisoned in his ultimately triumphant bid to create a democratic government in a country controlled by organized crime. Slap the face of Nelson Mandela while you are at it. Or maybe, just go live in Russia - modern Russia - which is now run by the mob because the people were so well conditioned to keep their places and not make waves in the era of Communism.
The infamous House Unamerican Activities Committe first got it's start fighting the Mob and the KKK for a reason: organized crime and terror syndacates deprive people of liberties. The KKK did it through fear - the mob through peer pressure to keep your head down and know your place.
As Bob Marley sang "if you know your history, then you know where I'm comin' from". Too many people have fought too hard - and are still fighting too hard - for representitive goverment of the people, by the people, and for the people to conveniently leave matters of public taxes and public institutions to hired hands. Put simply, it's unamerican.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Hook, Line, and Sinker
The boy stands on the shore of a small pond, elderly relative on a bench behind. Surrounded by cars, cellular phone towers, tall buildings and wearing logo clothing, he is undistracted from his ancient practices. Methodically, he takes globs of bread from a bag, rolls them into a ball, and embeds a metal hook in them. The hook is attached to a short length of line, attached in turn to a stick. He hurls these bread baited balls out into the pond and waits for the stick to jerk. Loaves for the fishes.
My younger son Ian watches him intently as he pulls small yellow, black, and silver fish from the pond. He asks questions like "what kind of fish are these" and "what kind of fish do you want" and "what do you do with the fish" and "why do you let them go" as the boy removes the smooth hook and releases them into a pond. Nicky stands nearby, yawning dramatically.
I let Ian watch. This is the kid whose lips rarely touch a vegetable, yet gets primally fascinated and irrestibly involved in gardening activities. He's clannish and local in the extreme, prone to baser reactions of human interaction. If it is a fundamental traditional human activity, from drumming to temporary tattooing to farming and fishing, the boy is there.
After a while, I tell him how I used to fish when I was his age, how I got my own pole for my 6th birthday and used it with special jigs called spinners. Spinners were shiny and really really cool because they would spin as they were reeled in slowly and drive crappie and bass absolutely nuts. I tell him how I used to have surf casting down to a science where I would land a fat ocean perch on nearly every cast. Fishing, for me, was an art form.
It was also something I did because I had to. Sure, I enjoyed being near the water. Yes, it was good to be able to contribute to the family. It was also good to spend the kind of quality time with my dad that most girls I knew never knew. But, like sewing and berry picking and raking filberts and many other industrious activities of the Northwest working poor, fishing for me was rarely true leisure or sport. Damn enjoyable work, but work all the same. Needless to say, like sewing all my clothing or fixing my own car or other vestiges of childhood poverty, fishing is not something I go to any length to do any longer.
Ian wonders how fish get from the hook to the table. I tell him in graphic detail that has Nicky on the thin edge that separates fascination from disgust. Ian is undeterred, asking how fish you catch taste. How do I describe it to a kid who knows fish best as neat breaded sticks soaked in ketchup? Before I know it, he has negotiated rights to Nicky's neglected fishing pole and is laying plans to catch us a feast the next time we go to Oregon and can fish with Grampa.
If he is serious, we will handle it in due time. It has been a long time since I took up a rod and reel and dragged in dinner by the gils. A very long time since I whacked off the head and tail, gutted, boned, and roasted something I caught. Not that I don't dream of fresh ocean perch and fishing, at least since I started applying for post-PhD jobs on the northern California coast. Past, primal, traditional, and human.
Someday, in that same grand tradition of the generations I will proudly say to my son as only a mother can: "you caught it, you clean it".
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Testing 1,2,3 ...
There is some indication that these jokers may have gotten their act together, "discovering" and fixing bugs that I tried to tell them about a year ago ... Being ahead of the curve can really really suck sometimes and make you look a little insane until others catch up and get it! Hope gets eternally dashed.
I have tried the chat line types of blogs and verily they sucketh. Maybe I will give this another try, particularly since I have a kayak now
I've been kicking around ideas when I'm out on the water, paddling through the sky above and the sky below on a calm day. Stay tuned.
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