Gone to Italy
Tomorrow is a holiday, and it’s been described to me as "The Day Mary Got Pregnant with Jesus" holiday. Don’t ask me how this is logical, considering Christmas is not exactly nine months away, but I think religion is not necessarily logical in the first place. The thing I DO think is logical is the fact that on any holiday, there is lots of traffic if people don’t have to work.
And since J got next week off, we’re driving to Italy. Tonight. At around 1:00 AM. Because J wants to avoid the traffic and heaven forbid if J gets caught in traffic. And if my boyfriend gets caught in traffic, fire will shoot out of his eyes, ears, and mouth due to road rage almost as deadly as my sister’s. And the Fates help you if you are from Deutschland and you are driving too slow in front of J.
Now, it’s time for me to sleep, and dream of the country where all males of any age will stare as a woman passes by simply because it would be against their culture not to.
Sports I Didn’t Know Were Actual Sports, and Sports I Didn’t Know Were Olympic Sports
Actual Sports:
1. Synchronized high diving. I knew diving was a sport, but I had no idea there was a version where you had a partner and you both did the exact same thing at the exact same time.
2. Men’s field hockey. In high school, I don’t remember the guys playing field hockey. And in college, I don’t remember there being a team. I’ve always thought field hockey was the high school version of handball.
3. Handball. I thought the only time this game was played was when the gym teacher ran out of ideas of things for kids to do. The other version is kickball, which I haven’t seen in the Olympics.
Olympic Sports:
1. Kayaking. This doesn’t really surprise me, but what does surprise me is that I don’t think rock climbing is an Olympic sport.
2. Badminton. At first I thought this was a weird version of tennis. Then I looked closer and actually said out loud, "Are you kidding me? Badminton is an Olympic sport?" This makes me completely ignorant, because again, the only times I’ve ever seen badminton played is in high school, or in the backyards of various houses during lazy Sunday barbeques.
So yeah, I’m watching the Olympics. I don’t watch much of the ball games, but the sports that fascinate me are the odd ones, like archery, or judo, or gymnastics. Archery because it’s the one out of two sports I excelled at in high school (the other being karate), judo because it’s a martial art and I love martial arts, and gymnastics because when I was 14, I took gymnastics for three months.
I looked up what sports were in the Olympics, and was surprised to learn that tug-of-war was considered an Olympic sport at one time. I also had to look up curling, as that’s something I’ve never heard of.
Happy Birthday Dad!
When I was a child, the one place to bring Dad for his birthday was Red Lobster. It’s a seafood restaurant chain in the Northeast, and probably the ONLY seafood restaurant in the small city I grew up in. So it was a treat to go there, even if as a child I was scared of eating seafood and would order a steak. One time right after I turned 21, we went to Red Lobster, and I had my first drink with my parents ever in my life.
It’s a mark of Mom and Dad’s good parenting skills that I still drink less than my parents. So that’s why they have my sister, who actually can keep up, shot for shot, with the parents. There’s a picture of that somewhere, my sister and father, clinking glasses together before they down that Grey Goose (vodka). [There’s ALSO a picture of my sister and dad sleeping at the dinner table at a cousin’s wedding reception because both of them drank some alcohol, but that doesn’t have anything to do with Dad’s birthday, it’s just damn funny.]
I think one of the most endearing memories I have of my Dad is the time he bought us children a pet rabbit from the pet store. At this time, the most evolved pet we’d ever had was fish. But one afternoon one of the parents found a wild baby rabbit in Mom’s gardens and we decided we could keep it. Unfortunately, it died overnight, and my sister and I cried and buried it. Dad felt bad that we had to deal with a one-day pet, and then deal with its death, so he bought us to the pet store and purchased a white, adult, fluffy rabbit. The family kept it in the garage, because everyone was allergic to it. When I cuddled it, twenty minutes later I began wheezing and needed to have medicine. I’m not sure what my sister’s allergic reactions were, and Mom refused to touch anything that hadn’t been autoclaved. Because Mom hates dirt; and all animals, and the planet itself, are all DIRTY.
Well, after one week, the parents decided that all the allergies were killing us. My sister and I were heartbroken when the parents decided to return the rabbit to the pet store. But we went with Dad to return it, feeling like life was unfair that we had to be allergic to pets. [Later, it turns out, no one is allergic to dogs, and we get one.] So Dad parks the car in the immense, acres-big parking lot, and we spent a sad ten minutes in the pet store. Rabbitless, we all come out, and wouldn’t you know? Dad forgot where he parked the car. I didn’t know this at the time, since I was about seven or eight years old, but Dad has this habit of losing his car.
The thing about the pet store is that it’s in a mall, and every entrance out of that mall looks the same. The same row of the same trees, the same parking lot design, etc. I think we all walked about two hours looking for the car that day. It was a good day to get lost, as my sister and I were probably worn out already from losing the rabbit and too tired to freak out over losing the car. I remember that Dad was a soldier this day, dragging his two sad little girls for two hours all over the parking places of that mall. It wasn’t such a happy day, not for any father. But Dad kept his shit together and eventually we went home.
Years later, it’s a damn funny story, and Mom enjoys telling it. And I’ve got other stories of Dad, but I’ll save those for later. If Dad’s anything like his parents, he’ll live another 30 years, and I need all the stories I can get.
Happy Birthday, Dad!
Living Life With Words
Now I have 8,380 words. Some have just flowed, and some of them I had to squeeze out, word by painful word. Those times, I take a break, reading on topics I can extrapolate into my story, such as this one, this one, this one, or this one. Everyone says that in order to write, one must read. That in order to make music, one must listen to it.
But writing is SUCH a time consuming process, it is a big, huge brain consuming process as well.
Here is why it’s time consuming: I edited one single paragraph ten times in one day. There are other paragraphs I’ve done this to, but I’ll start with one thing and days later, end up with a different thing. I’ve erased entire conversations after I’ve written them, because later on I felt that the scene didn’t need to exist — it didn’t add anything, was a waste of space, and could be incorporated into a later scene. I’ll read a 15 page article just to learn one thing I can add to my story (meanwhile I’m learning a lot). Two pages will pour out of me, but then two hours goes into editing it. Then, the next day, I’ll go back to previous pages, to edit again, to struggle for the right words. If none comes, I’ll just write and the story pushes itself forwards. It’s two steps forward, one step back. And I don’t even know if this is good writing.
All the while I’m thinking that I can’t stop because I NEED to write. I don’t want to preach about anything, that’s not my purpose. I just need to write, and right now I need to tell a story about the future. After this is over, maybe then I’ll need to tell a story about my life, or a story about history, or whatever.
I just need to write. Or else my brain will explode.
Two Instances in Which My Boyfriend Carried Me on His Back
1. While crossing a stream to get to a climbing area on the other side. I didn’t know we had to wade across water higher than our knees, so I only had hiking shoes with me. But J was wearing sandals, and carried both me and my backpack across the stream, getting his pants wet in the process.
2. When I was too drunk to walk down a steep hill, in the forest, in pitch black, after we attended the Forest Festival. The whole town was in attendance, but they all used the normal trails to get back home. J wanted to use a shortcut, I couldn’t see one damn thing, was drunk as hell from vodka and beer, so he carried me down the hill in pitch black darkness. This night is rather fuzzy, but I do remember being on his back, feeling like the earth was spinning too, too fast. I’m a shitty alcoholic — I can barely handle a drink and a half.
Reality into Story
I wrote another 1500 words, which is about 4 pages. A short novel is 70,000 words long; but I don’t have a length goal as long as I keep it between 80,000-100,000 words. But the topic is getting interesting for me.
More than a year ago, I read this story about a Superbaby. I’m not sure what the current status of the child is, but it’s an interesting story about what genetic mutation can do. Then there’s the huge current issue with genetically modified food — in Europe in general, people are more against it. I haven’t heard a scientific reason from anyone here why it’s bad (and the best way to change my mind is to give me a scientific reason), but people here prefer food that’s not been tampered with in that way. And then one night, this documentary came on TV, and I had to cringe, because it started off with this Southern California radio host who was talking about "designing ourselves" with genetics. On the surface it sounds nice, because then everyone can daydream about re-making themselves, or designing their children.
So, what if in the future, we got what we wanted?
Wild Mushrooms
Wow, I can’t believe it’s August already! I had a full weekend, which will provide me with posts for most of this week, and lots of pictures of it also. However, I did not do any climbing at all this weekend due to the very humid weather. When it’s not been raining, the air has been extremely damp and hot, which makes the rock slightly wet. So we came up with other things to do, one of which is to hunt wild, edible mushrooms.
Mushrooms like to come up when the weather is damp and not too cold, not too hot. The best times are when the ground has enough water to make your socks wet if you’re not wearing waterproof shoes. Just after a few rainy days is nice, or in a generally damp environment (there is one benefit to all this rain — the mushrooms). J and I went out Saturday and some of Sunday; I found the most obvious, large "Parasols" and J found, for his very first time, a bunch of chanterelles. Chanterelles are hard to find, I’ve only ever found one in my life on a mycology class trip; finding them is like finding a pot of gold — they’re pretty tasty, so everyone else is after them too.
A "parasol" mushroom. Latin: Macrolepiota procera.
J’s chanterelles. Latin: Cantharellus cibarius. I wasn’t sure these were chanterelles, because there is another mushroom (called the False Chanterelle, Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca) that is similar color, same size, and same shape, but tastes bad. J had to ask his mother for a positive ID.
Yes, we found seven of them! If you walk enough in the forest, you’ll come across them. We went to two different woods for all of these, and gave two of them away to a friend.
Ever since I took that mycology class, one of my favorite things to do is walk through some woods to look for mushrooms. What’s great about these big ones is that they’re easy to spot (I found two of them from the car when we were driving down the road), and huge — so if you find two, you can cook them for whole dinner. I told J that I should tell my parents about hunting their own mushrooms, simply because those mushrooms are just sitting there in the woods, like they have a sign on them saying "FREE DINNER."
Really Writing Now
The silence on this blog? I’m focusing on the beginnings of a… book? A short story? So far I’ve got eleven pages of… well, I’m not sure. It might end up being a very bad novella, since I’m combining some rather funky genres. However, considering all the modern sci-fi/thriller/spy/supernatural shows out there, who knows? My bad novella could be end up being someone else’s favorite book.
Or it might end up interesting to me. I’m so far happy to be able to inject a little reflection into the protagonist, to give detail about environment, to describe and show instead of just telling. But at the same time I worry a little that I’m boring. Oh well, that’s what first drafts are for, right? Also, I’m editing as I go along, so it’s been a slow eleven pages, but it’s been two days of actual writing. If a normal book is 400 pages, then I’ve got room to play.
However, the flooding creativity is giving me a forceful focus. When I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing, plot, characters, research. I guess it’s like making music, or cooking, when you’re in the middle of creating something, you don’t want to stop in the middle.
The thing is, I have no exact idea of the ending, so I hope I don’t lose steam before I finish. But the crazy thing is, I’m writing something, I’m writing fiction.
I Use My Camera Sometimes, Pictures from the Weekend
Breast Enhancements for Bridesmaids
As a future bridesmaid, I’m glad that I never have to do this:
Two weeks ago, Health Travel Guides, a medical tourism company, exhibited at the Dallas Bridal Show for the first time. “We received 30 requests for quotes among the bridal show attendees — mostly for plastic surgery such as liposuction and breast augmentation,” said Sandra Miller, the company’s chief marketing officer. “But also many for cosmetic dentistry and inquiries for providing quotes for bachelorette getaways that will feature beauty treatments.”
I can’t believe how crazy the whole wedding thing can get! Article here.
Designing Woman
Wow, I haven’t thought about fonts and graphics and the placement of them in… years. But today I decided that I’d throw out a couple of sample design invitations for my sister’s wedding, and lo and behold, I am now on the way to designing the entire invitation package. Woot! I think if it weren’t my sister I’d be less excited.
Confession: I Love Onions, But I Hate Olives
In the past three days I was nursing a really tiny, small cold which basically is all sore throat, post-nasal drip, and painful lymph nodes. This was a good time to be sick because whenever I looked out the window, it was either about to rain or raining. There was even one straight 24-hour, wind-howling, white sheets of horizontal raining that made me think, Hey, how did I wake up in Florida for hurricane season? And the reason why I probably got sick was that I got stuck standing in the rain Sunday, when I caught a chill.
Ever since I was little, I couldn’t get enough of onions. I loved whatever dish my mom cooked onions in, and I would always pick out all the onions to eat. I love onions on the grill, onion in pizza, onion in pasta sauce, raw red onions in salad; it’s a miracle to me why I never told anyone I had this particular love of onions. Usually I’m vocal about what I like and not like. (I think the ONLY place I don’t like onions is in bagels.) Maybe it’s because I always thought it’s not something people really like. To me, everyone seems to treat onions like they treat background noise.
So while I was home, I knew there was some yummy red onions in the fridge, waiting for me. My favorites! I chopped up three! of them, sauteed them in butter and red wine, and carmelized them. And I ate it all, with the single stuffed bell pepper I had left over from the day before. Eating that much onion did not make me love them any less, in fact, it was the first time in my life I ate onions because of what they were and because I loved how they tasted. I’ve never heard of anyone eating onions just by themselves. It seems like they always have to go with something else, but the majority of those onions, I ate on their own. And I loved it! Am I strange?
Now here’s where the answer to the above question is definitely YES, as I now confess that I hate olives. I’ll pick them out of any Greek salad, pizza, or pasta sauce; I won’t drink alcoholic beverages that require olives. J loves olives and he thinks I should, too, but each time I try a piece, it always tastes like gasoline would taste. One small piece of olive would burst a flavor not only on my tongue, but through my entire head, as if I went to the gas station and took a big inhale while I pressed my nose into the gas nozzle. My eyes would water, my head would start to hurt, and I’d desperately look for anything to wash my mouth out — water? bourbon? bleach? lye? I don’t care, I WANT THAT AWFUL TASTE OUT OF MY MOUTH.
There was one time in Greece when I was waiting to eat dinner with J and friends, and the friends had extra bread and dip on the table. So J and I were appetizing; one time I took a chunk of bread and dunked it in this dark dip that looked like it would be sweet. (Maybe it was onion dip?) I crammed the bread into my mouth and immediately spat it back out because the dip was AWFUL. JUST. PLAIN. HORRIBLE. Greasy, tasted like paint smells, gahhhh! When I asked what was in that dip, the answer came back: it’s olive dip. Yes, I even hate olives in Greece.
When I was a child my parents always told me not to be picky, but as an adult I realize that EVERYONE is picky to some extent. My father rarely eats non-Asian food, for instance; he also has a favorite flavor coffee, favorite flavor ice cream, he enjoys seafood, and likes onion and garlic bagels (which is fine by itself, but onion & garlic bagels make OTHER non-onion, non-garlic bagels in the bag taste like onion and garlic, hint, hint, HINT). My sister has certain favorite foods of the year (but sis has always loved rice and shrimp), and my mother prefers sweets. So I take comfort in knowing that my tastes are my own, and there’s nothing wrong in loving something strange or hating something well-loved.
Intelligence in Fiction
An excellent article about writing (spy) fiction by Charles McCarry:
Over the years I have come to think that the act of writing - and, I suppose, of painting or sculpting or composing music or any other art -in some way unlocks and throws open the doors of the mind, so that the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious flow together and become one. The conscious mind is the policeman, insisting on structure and commas and periods and moving the crowd along. The function of the other two parts of the mind - the mischievous ones - is to keep the copper on his toes and the reader interested.
When in his 90s and working on his last play, George Bernard Shaw, perhaps the least superstitious writer of his or any other time, said that it was pointless to ask him what the play was going to be about because he had never known the answer to that question in regard to any of his works. His plays wrote themselves page by page, Shaw said. Characters and plot and the words themselves appearing as if by magic. He never had a clue about what the characters were going to say or do or how the thing was going to come out till he got to the end and all was revealed to him.
MUNI
For anyone who’s ever, ever ridden public transportation in Berlin, Vienna, or London, you know that when you ride public transportation on SF’s MUNI that IT SUCKS, at the very least half the time. If you live far from the middle of downtown SF, then it sucks almost 100% of the time. Why? It’s unreliable, consistently late, consistently slow, and you can’t really get accurate updates on when the next train is coming or if there are any problems in the system that’s causing the next train to not show up and you to be half an hour late for work.
I suppose the only people who would call MUNI great is if they came from the middle of the Kalahari, or if they grew up in a city with NO public transportation to speak of. Here, the idea is that something is better than nothing. I grew up in the suburbs outside a city with little to no public transportation, but eventually even I recognized that if Berlin can make trains run every 6 minutes and ON TIME, then what’s the problem with MUNI? If I don’t have to know German to ride anywhere in Vienna, then why is it so hard to ride MUNI when I know the language?
And c’mon, even on a small Greek island consisting of mostly hotels, tourist traps, clueless vacationers, and roudy, bling-blinged locals, the crazy Greek driver on his crazy Greek bus was exactly on time and didn’t make any weird, 20-minute, random stops along the way that MUNI does.
So, when I found The N-Judah Chronicles (and this particularly shitty day), I had to laugh, because I’ve been there. I’ve been there when the M-train system completely shut down at West Portal for 40 minutes, and all the passengers had to switch to buses that would take us to all our stops, at 8:30 in the morning (yes, I was late for work). And then to be late half the time because the M-train system just can’t get its act together enough to have a train show up at a certain time, each day. Sometimes, TWO trains don’t show up like they’re supposed to, and the third train is SO full of people you can’t get on. I’ve been there.
Plus, imagine trying to get exact change for each ride. No, you can’t use your bank card, and no, you can’t use paper money. They only take metal money. Yes, you have to change that $1 paper money into a $1 coin. And the real fucked up thing is? Half the time, the change machines don’t work!
If you want a monthly pass, well, they don’t sell those at all the train stations. I rode MUNI for years and I still don’t know which stations sell what. The monthly passes are sold in certain drugstores and corner stores around the city. Which stores? Well, that’s random. The Walgreens Drugstore near the Powell St. Station won’t sell the tickets, but the Walgreens 10 blocks up near City Hall does. So, imagine trying to remember to stop at ONLY CERTAIN drugstores that sells the monthly pass — for a few days per month — so that I don’t have to look for exact change every day. MUNI lives in the 1950’s, and it runs in San Francisco, the mecca for technology.
Sometimes I get the feeling that other countries think the States is so much… I don’t know… cooler, especially when I look at the teenagers and young people who try to learn American music, American styles, American phrases, American this and that. And I want to say to these people, dude, forget that Christina Aguilera. Go ride on your U-Bahn. Appreciate that it comes every 10 minutes, not every 100. Appreciate that the train really comes when the signs say so. Appreciate that your train won’t just stop in the middle of the journey for 20 minutes. Appreciate that your social system takes care of your country’s crazy people so that none of them jumps onto the tracks and causes a shut-down of the city’s public transport. You know what I think is cool? Your U-Bahn fucking rocks.
Disadvantages of an Elite Education
Thought-provoking:
My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.
Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.
But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.
If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.