Frogs and Ravens

Bleah

I am tired of packing.

That is all.

(Five more days... three rooms to go...)

The Kitty Daddy

The little black cat is getting spayed this Friday, which can't come too quickly for me. Her "boyfriend", a large fluffy orange and white cat, has been hanging around enough that I'm starting to feel like the proverbial roommate whose housemate has an annoying boyfriend who is always staying over being a nuisance. He yodels and chirps endlessly at her, even when she's curled up, trying to sleep. He eats her food. He pees on the furniture. He keeps looking at me with wide eyes, amazed again and again that I'm not fond of him and keep running him off the porch. She mostly ignores him, but sometimes she sets up wailing, calling him to come get some food. Today she nabbed a wren right off the railing right before my eyes, and yowled repeatedly around her mouthful of prey until he showed up; they then disappeared into the bushes to eat it.

If the spaying doesn't do the trick, moving surely will!

Moving and Brooding

Right now I am supposed to be packing. Or working on a book review. Or working on my own book.

Instead, I am blogging and surfing the 'net until my brain falls out.

I'm in a weird, slightly depressed mood, and I'm convinced that I have become allergic to cardboard, marker pens, and screechy tape.

Well, not really. But the thing with each of those tasks is that they require a sustained mental effort, a combination of concentration and persistence, linked up with a tolerance for tedium, yet maintaining sufficient bright intelligence that you can file things in ways that will make sense several months down the pike, and box things up in ways that minimize confusion later.

In other words, it's complicated mental labor as well as physical, and these days I'm feeling stupid and slow.

A huge part of that is no doubt emotional. I just finished reading a book about survival (Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales) and one of the things the author describes is what happens when a person gets lost. One part of the brain gets all spazzed out by the lack of familiar landmarks, and the other freaks out with the need to get somewhere, anywhere, as fast as possible, in the hopes that something familiar will show up. The result is lots of manic running about and becoming more and more lost, while the rational part of the brain clings to the crazy animal that those freaked out emotions have made the lost person become, hoping not to fall off.

I'm feeling somewhat like that. I'm both paralyzed by the amount of work that needs to be done and the anxiety that comes from seeing a familiar home transformed into an empty shell filled with identical boxes, and filled with the frantic, frantic, frantic need to get something done! Now! Before it's too late!

It's not a comfortable feeling.

Plus I am itchy with mosquito bites (at least it is not also hot and humid right now) and bored (because the mind is worn out from overthinking and wants to be entertained in a way that doesn't require thought) and lonely (because D. is visiting his family over the next few days) and... well, I'm just not in a serene mood.

Stupid moving.

Warding Gesture

I hope that the reason that my right eye is tired and achy is a combination of fatigue, allergies, and heat, and not because the iritis has returned.

The poor thing's been weaker and more touchy than it was before then, but it's been a while since it's been this bad. Ow.

Female in the Outdoors Shop

I was reading this post at Twisty's - about a new all-pink airline with manicures and trips to Paris - when I was struck by something that came up in a few of the comments:

The inability of most outdoors manufacturers to understand what outdoorsy women might like.

Here's what I want:

Clothes that fit. Clothes that are durable, comfortable, and easy to care for. Clothes that do not show dirt. clothes in colors I like and that flatter me. Gear that meets the same criteria.

Basically - and why is this so hard to understand? - I want the same gear men have, altered to take into account the differences in my body shape and functions.

I do not want jackets without pockets. I do not want clothes in "melon" or "lime" or gear in "rose" or "lavender" or "clear blue". I don't want equipment that's missing an essential function because that would get in the way of it being small and cute and feminine.

I want clothing in colors like the men have: dark green, rich brown, red, navy, sage, olive, terra cotta. The reason so much of my outdoors wardrobe is black is because it seems to be the only non-pastel color (well, maybe khaki, though that may too be a pastel) that manufacturers bother to make for women. I'm trying to blend in with trees and rocks and dirt, not frolic in an air-freshener commercial.

I don't like pastels, or most clear, bright colors. They get dirty easily, and I look like I'm ill when I wear them. I prefer darker, richer colors - but, my god, do I have to fight to find them in the women's sections of outdoor catalogs and stores.

Ditto bikes, canoes, PFDs, sleeping bags, luggage, hats, gloves... wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to offer women's smaller products in the same materials and colors as the men's? The only reason I can think of that makes any sense is this: while it is okay for women to wear clothing designed for men, in men's colors (hell, most of us have been doing it for years), the converse is not true.

The girly clothes are girly-colored so that men won't accidentally buy them.

Does anyone have a better explanation?

Photo Albums

If you haven't noticed them, look at the pictures in the first column. Each of them goes with a photo album. Click on the picture to see more.

I've recently added new ones, so please, do go check them out.

FYI

If you're a fan of Shakesville, the reason they're down right now is that they're fighting a massive denial-of-service attack. Wolfram is providing some tabs on it; the old Shakespeare's Sister site is another possible source of info.

Update: Mustang Bobby is also keeping us informed.

Out of the Trees, Into the Forest

The past two weeks have been exhausting, but in a good way. I'm finally feeling back on my feet again, figuratively speaking, though it's again more of a pause before the onrush. (Heck, it's not even much of a pause - I'm uploading gingnormous amounts of photos at this very moment, a hugely tedious process.)

While I was at the conference last week (as opposed to the workshop the week before), I finally came up with a way of quickly describing my academic history that satisfied me. Before I'd been using the metaphor of the merry-go-round, as in "I've fallen off the academic". Now, I say that I've "fallen from the tree."

I like this new metaphor because it's much richer, and it seems to do a better job of describing the experience. As I can now think of it, when I was a squirrel in the academic tree of History, I was in the habit of clambering out on various branches into other trees - literature, geography, anthropology, various sciences - but my home tree, the one in which I nested, was History.

Now, having fallen out of that tree, I'm free to explore the forest.

Last week's conference was an exercise in briefly climbing up into a smaller subspecies of the Literature tree, and while there I confirmed both that I was a History squirrel by training, and no longer comfortable in the branches of academic trees more generally. (Perhaps I need a different animal to be my personal metaphor: something that inhabits some trees preferentially, but which matures into a largely ground-dwelling animal in adulthood.)

While the tree was green and leafy and some of its fruit was sweet, and there were other congenial animals to hang out with in the branches, it didn't feel comfortable. Some of the branches were too far from the ground, some of the animals too serious about defending their territory, and the tree as a whole felt a bit stunted, as if it were afraid to grow wild and unruly.

The workshop's tree, on the other hand, was a comfortable habitat. Its name, Wildbranch, is taken from one of the streams in the area, but it works in a tree-sense too. (There is, in fact, a local farm that takes Wildbranch as part of its name, and its design features an otherwise ordinary tree with one graceful, curving branch that spirals up around the moon.) I like the wildness of the branches, the way that the tree feels like it could grow and bend in any direction. At the same time I like the number of cozy nooks, the satisfying nature of the nuts it produces. It's a good place to nest for a bit, to survey the forest from a higher perspective, to hobnob with similar creatures as myself.

I have become a creature of the forest, uneasy in many trees, but able to roam among and explore them as a community, as competition, as possible habitats, some comfortable, others less so. After a long struggle, I have learned to love the view from the ground.

A Quick Note

I intend to get back to blogging next week, after I've recovered from all my travels and before the craziness of moving sets in.  I just wanted to give a head's up to the regular crew that we may be having some new visitors in the next few days, so give them a warm welcome and offer them a figurative chair and snacks. 

New folks, welcome!  A few orienting remarks - some of you may know me by my offline name, but here I'm Rana, so I'd be appreciative if you respect the pseudonym.  I welcome comments - especially wordy ones that open up or continue a conversation (hell, comments are the main reason I keep blogging) - and you can also send me email about things you'd rather not open up for general discussion. 

All I ask is that you read the post first (and make sure you either understand it, or are willing to ask questions about what you don't) and that you read the comments as well.  There are a lot of really smart, interesting folks who comment here (many of whom have wonderful blogs of their own - click on their names to find out) and you should consider this to be the equivalent of a group of friends and colleagues shooting the breeze around a table in an outdoor cafe, on a picnic, etc.  Feel free to listen in all you want; if you wish to comment, be sure that you're joining a conversation, not just grandstanding.  Disagreement is fine, but let's keep it civil, and in the spirit of mutual learning, not browbeating each other.

Now, heck, I've made this sound all grim and rules-y.  Here's the simple version:  be a decent, friendly human being, open to inquiry and new ideas, and pull up a chair!

Update: at the bottom of each post, along with the date, time, permalink (permanent url for just the post), and trackbacks (links from other blogs citing the post), are category links. If you click on one, you will be taken to a page of posts belonging to that category. If you click on "Writing the World" for example, you'll end up with a page of my more essay-like posts about things I've observed in the world; "Daily Doings" consists of posts having to do with the day-to-day mundanities of my life, and so on.

Migration, Rest

In my canvas bag are things for dealing with the weather, and things for dealing with the conference.  Umbrella - one phalanx snapped already by a sudden blow of wind, sunglasses, hankie, lip balm, sweater, hat, a plastic bag - all have made their way into the canvas sack and back out.  Similarly, the bag has at times housed books just bought, books to have signed, the small and the large notebook, the camera, several free-floating pens, a growing collection of change in the bottom, a mint, a chocolate kiss, a wallet.

I migrate back and forth between buildings, between food and words and texts, between the main buildings and the dorms, brain growing full, mind growing tired, thighs cramping from the unexpected exercise.  (I always walk too fast for my legs, trying to avoid missing something, trying to be in two places at once.)  Yesterday the migration slowed to the pace of a palpitating heart, as I tacked from shade to shade at a pace so stately I felt almost as if I was drifting, half dreaming, in a haze of heat.  During the afternoons I bolt from tree to tree, seeking the protection of their leaves like a squirrel, dodging the monsoonal flows pouring down from a thunderous sky, retreiving the broken wings of the umbrella left in the dorm - again.

Finally this morning the activity, mental and physical, overtook me, and I slept through alarm clock and sunrise and breakfast, and ended up welcoming the day over a too-large, too-sweet chai and a bag of coffee cake.  There is still a day to go.