wockerjabby

2008-07-22T18:30:00.002-04:00

on the mornings that I work in bed-stuy, I walk up washington avenue to the C train. near the corner of fulton street where there are two churches across from each other (plus a western union and a bodega, of course), I always see the same man rolling his wheelchair up the street. both of his legs are amputated at the thighs, and when he leans backwards even the slightest bit, the front wheels of his chair come off the ground. he moves like this, two-wheeled, up and down the street with his chair straddling the yellow divider line painted on the asphalt. sometimes he seems to be going somewhere, wheeling with a destination in mind. other times he just spins in aimless little twirls while cars fly by on either side of him.

I can't tell whether he's fearless, totally confident that he won't get hit, or if he just doesn't care. or maybe he's being intentionally self-destructive. how many days can you spend playing in traffic before you get hurt?

people keep telling me that I'm handling things well. what with the going to work every day, I guess, although I mostly feel like a robot accessing the same subroutines over and over again. (what do you think your students learned? how can you tell? wait for silence. wait for silence. ...I'm mentoring new teachers.) when something unexpected happens I have no idea how to respond. people talk to me and I can tell they're speaking english, but I'm not sure what the words mean.

at home I feed and walk the dog, eat cucumber slices for breakfast because there's nothing else in the fridge, watch too much television, and go to bed without doing any work. I make careful stacks of all the mail that comes addressed to tom. I don't write my dissertation's introduction chapter, much less my IRB proposal. sometimes I write the letter to my advisor explaining why I haven't sent her the conference paper that's due on august first, but even that is only in my head. I water the plants in the container garden and harvest the occasional clutch of cherry tomatoes and try not to think about how delighted tom was when their flowers first turned to fruits.

so I'm not saying I'm hoping to get hit by a car. but sometimes I'm not sure if I'm handling things or if I'm just spinning my wheels in the middle of the street.

2008-07-19T09:33:00.005-04:00

dear everyone,

i'm sorry if i've been a bad friend. if i've ignored your emails, seemed unwilling to smile at your babies, if i didn't follow through on the things i promised to do, i'm sorry. if i failed to buy you a wedding present or stopped returning your phone calls, i'm sorry.

i don't want to make excuses and i hate how utterly banal this is, but i also need you to know: the boy i adore and cherish and love has ended our partnership, and i am... shattered. heartbroken; everythingbroken.

and i'm sorry if you already know this and have to keep watching me reveal it in gradually more public arenas. i'm sorry if you didn't know. i'm just so sorry that this is reality. i think some part of me is still expecting to wake up and find out that it isn't.

i am sorry that i can't explain it to you or promise that i will be fine again soon. i'm sorry that i can't even quite understand it myself and i'm sorry that i can't bear to say anything bad about thomas. i still think the world of him.

but i needed you to know. and now you do.

rabi.

2008-07-05T08:09:00.001-04:00

(my schedule is too full.)

2008-06-17T14:02:00.003-04:00

I'm sitting on the couch right now, waiting for my computer to finish running some file conversions so I can pull them up as sources in my data analysis program, listening to the little crunch and rustle noises that tiny parrots make as they shred things. poppy is on my lap, wrestling with the subscription card that fell out of the most recent new yorker. he just turned seventeen years old, which means it's been sixteen years and eleven months since he came to live with me. I was about to turn ten years old, still had my crooked pre-braces teeth, still had a giant snow white poster over my bed. (I know. what?) he was a little fledgling fuzzball, still had a black stripe across the top of his beak, still slept in a cozy corner on the floor instead of balanced one-footed on a perch.

today he is old. his feathers don't always grow in straight after a molt, and his bright green back has slowly become patched with yellow. when he perches on a shoulder or on the edge of a cereal bowl, he doesn't sit up as straight as he used to. he hunkers down on his haunches so that his tail is splayed across his back claws. he takes more naps during the day, and spends a lot of time fluffing and puffing out his feathers. he is a happy, spry old bird-man.

(he's also great entertainment for preschoolers. one night when I was babysitting I let the boys play with my phone, and they discovered this little clip of poppy playing with the drawstring on my hood. now they ask for it regularly:)

bixbite is sitting inside a box of tissues on the windowsill. small, nesty places are her heart's delight, which I guess is the bird equivalent of having a large shoe collection? she's a girly-girl bird, always finding someplace soft and dark to snug herself inside. right now she's cuddled up in the corner of the box, but she keeps stretching her neck out to nibble on the cardboard, tearing little bits off to pull inside and tuck around her breast like tiny treasures.

jasper is as antisocial as ever. while poppy and bix hang out with me in the living room, he's sitting atop a shelf in the kitchen, communing with soem pots and pans instead.

2008-06-12T22:59:00.002-04:00

in the united states, rising fuel prices have so far meant mostly that we pay more for groceries and for transportation. I will admit that, as an herbivore and a non-driver, it hasn't affected me much at all so far. cereal is a little more expensive, but now that it's summer I eat more fruit than grains. the price of my favorite soy yogurt recently went up forty cents. our electric bill is about six dollars more than it used to be, for the same number of kilowatt-hours.

in the rest of the world, things are far, far worse.

the truckdriving strikes in spain and portugal have caused an airport to run out of fuel, and markets to run out of food. people in haiti and bangladesh and egypt (and so on) are getting violent over high food prices. in manila, drivers are rioting in the streets. people are dying in the clashes between strikers and rioters and police and bystanders. farmers are fighting with riot police.

in 1999, the price of oil was sixteen dollars a barrel. SIXTEEN. five months ago it hit one hundred dollars. now it's almost one hundred forty.

is this peak oil? I don't know. but the fact that my government, and my culture, are pretending that they know for sure it isn't? waiting for the oil bubble to burst, for the economy to rebound, for prices to fall, for life to go back to normal? is scaring the wits out of me.

2008-06-10T15:00:00.003-04:00

so the news, for those of you who don't read my password protected stuff over at livejournal, is that I have a teaching job for next year. I had a lot of offers to choose from, and I weighed my options pretty carefully, which felt almost unseemly in a way. who am I, after all, to decide that a school isn't good enough for me? and yet that's what I did, over and over and over again.

the school that I chose feels like a near-perfect fit, except for the annoying commute -- it's in brooklyn, but the fastest way to get there on the subway is to go in and out of manhattan -- and the more I think about it, the more happy and excited I am. I thought I would feel more remorseful about putting my academic life on the backburner, but so far all I can think about is how much freaking fun it's going to be to finally work at a school that values the same things I do. plus, as the first-ever earth science teacher in the building, I get to buy a bunch of brand-new equipment. can you imagine? globes that aren't falling off their axes! mineral samples that haven't been worn to nubs! maybe even an overhead projector?

my students, who will be in eleventh grade, are mostly from bed-stuy and east new york. before I made my decision I spent a day tailing them through school, listening to them talk about oil spills in their science class, watching them grade each other's work in algebra, and serving as the sole audience member to several read-aloud performances of death of a salesman. they are fantastic, of course. they have already informed me that they don't want me to assign them any homework, ever.

2008-06-04T08:15:00.003-04:00

hi! I know I have a bunch of stuff to catch you all up on (though maybe it is only in my head that the internet cares about how I learned to tell the difference between the becraft and new scotland rock formations?), and I feel like I should say something about obama, but right now I'm completely preoccupied by my hatred for this pampers commercial:

(huh -- until I looked it up on youtube, I didn't know it had music or that salma hayek was the narrator. I've only seen it at the gym, where everything is silent and subtitled.)

seriously, this commercial is so distasteful to me that I can't even appreciate the cuteness of the multicultural baby parade. it's not that I object to people buying vaccines for "the world's babies in need," although if you read the fine print you will see that what you are actually buying is a tetanus vaccine for a pregnant woman, so I think the spot is deliberately misleading in that regard. and as much as I question the goodness of capitalism, I don't have anything in particular against corporate charity programs. (given that every vaccine costs all of five cents, I myself would rather give the money directly to unicef.) it's just... is it me, or is the message of the commercial, "if you buy stuff, you can be a Benevolent White Savior!"? because that's really what it looks like. which really makes me feel kind of ill.

am I overreacting? I think teachers are a bit sensitive to this phenomenon because of the whole (also stomach-turning) hollywood mythology of the young white woman who comes in and tames all the wild brown students, thereby saving their lives. but this commercial truly is playing off a nasty, self-aggrandizing story we tell ourselves. it's the same story that says international adoption is a selfless, noble thing to do, and that poverty in developing countries has nothing to do with our habits and choices here in the united states. it's not a true story, but it sounds good, I guess.

there's also something about the way "the world's (mothers) and babies in need" are dressed and filmed that feels a little exploitative. like how they are all wearing fancy native outfits, and how the mothers are only allowed to look at us from over their shoulders, while the babies can reach out to the Benevolent White Savior. it's all very fetishistic.

the song -- which is being marketed on itunes with the word "pampers" in its name -- is also terrible, but only because it is terribly vapid.

I should really stop watching television.

2008-05-18T15:23:00.002-04:00

much going on; much less motivation to write about it.

I'm working on getting a teaching job for next year. I considered but failed to pursue the possibility of teaching general science on a part-time basis, so I guess that means I've made my decision as far as the research assistantship goes: not a particularly high priority. I don't know how many full-time earth science positions I've applied to, exactly, but I'm in the middle of the interview process at three schools, and have been offered jobs at two others. when I write it out like that it seems like I should be able to relax about it, but I'm still feeling awfully stressed about the whole thing.

the other thing I'm supposedly working on is my dissertation proposal. I'm at that awful stage where I know ninety-five percent of what I'm going to write, and just have to sit down and write it already -- but the other five percent is taking up all my mental energy and making it hard for me to see the big picture. it's like trying to write the thousand words for a picture puzzle that's missing a handful of pieces from the middle. I'm almost positive I know what the finished puzzle will look like, and it's unlikely that any description I write will turn out to be wrong, but the little hole is making me doubt myself anyway.

on thursday I'm leaving for a ten-day geology field trip. this is a good thing, and I've been looking forward to it all semester, but the timing is... imperfect. ten days in the woods and mountains, away from wifi and cellphone signals, when I'm supposed to be sending updated drafts to my committee, and when principals are going to be telling me whether or not they want to hire me. argh.

on the plus side, our container garden is doing well despite the temperamental weather. the basil is getting bushy; the soybeans are sprouted and waiting to be thinned; the peppers have little white flowers; the yellow blossoms on the tomatoes have given way to fat green fruits; and we have four new pots of herbs growing on the office windowsill. we still need to start the lettuce. maybe our laziness will pay off when our csa farmer has harvested all his tender greens and started delivering eight ears of corn a week, and we'll still have organic salad growing on the fire escape.

2008-05-05T08:10:00.002-04:00

yesterday was sort of miraculous, wasn't it? all that forecasted rain and gloom but instead we got this lovely springy sun. thomas and I rolled out of bed and into our running shoes for a jog around the park, early enough that the morning fog still hung across the treebranches and the birds were singing to each other across the meadow. we had planned a container-gardening day, which by necessity would take place on the floor of our apartment, but when we'd counted out our already sprouted seedlings and realized that we would have space for some extra plants, tom decided we should visit the botanic garden on our way to pick up some more seeds. so we walked up crowded, sun-drenched eastern parkway to the garden, then went winding our way down between beds of velvety pansies and unruly tulips to the garden shop. back at home, having had our fill of flowers, we spread soil across the floor and set our vegetables in rows to be potted. when we put them outside, just in time to catch the last rays sunlight before the earth turned too far eastward, we found that basil plants already had a few leaves to spare. we ate them chopped and sprinkled over the gnocchi puttanesca that tom made for dinner, and even though the nighttime darkness had settled in, I myself could hardly have felt sunnier.

2008-05-04T10:42:00.002-04:00

what not to say when you're trying to get a girl's phone number

"you have a boyfriend? is it serious?"

"you're in a serious? long-term? relationship? you look like you're twenty-one!"

"so, this guy. you trust him?"

"well, I'm sort of seeing this girl, but I don't really know if we're dating."

"yeah, we played ping pong together but now she keeps blowing me off."

"see we have this whole instant message conversation, let me show you on my phone."

"yup, I have lots of girls' phone numbers. I kind of collect them. heeheehee."

"oh, this is your stop? I mean I was going to get your number too--"

2008-04-29T14:21:00.004-04:00

we're in that magical patch of our short coastal springtime when it's never too hot or too cold or too humid or too sloppy to go running. I've been doing a random five-mile circuit through prospect park three days a week, most recently skirting around the back of the rose garden before shuttling down -- literally; the park straddles the harbor hill moraine -- through the midwood and around the peninsula of the lake before returning northward via a long sprint up lookout hill. every log and rock poking out of the lullwater was transformed, shiny slick and lumpy, by the turtleshells of sun-catching red eared sliders. when the wind kicked up it sent showers of crabapple and akebono cherry blossoms into the air, pattering against my cheeks and catching in my ponytail. I don't consider myself a runner so much as someone who generally enjoys being in motion, but there's no denying that these springtime jogs are among the most pleasurable of my exercise habits.

between my runs and wednesday and friday of last week, the park completely transformed, as the trees leafed out and shed their petals. that one day of awkward in-between growth, when they're covered in splotches of wilted flowers and looking shaggy under an uneven coif of floppy new leaves, is such a tidy little adolescence, and it reminds me of what I love about teaching high school students: they're like trees at the end of april, working hard to replace their frenzied and florid blooms with green baby leaves that will unfurl to let them drink in the sunlight. after two years working only in other people's classrooms, the last of my kids are about to graduate from high school. some of my first are about to graduate from college. I can't believe we're all so old, so grown, even in this springtime stage of life.

* * *

while I'm here, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's been responding and making me think (and talk) more completely about my environmentalist outrage. it's good, and you're all great. want to come sit in on my dissertation committee meetings?

2008-04-20T21:23:00.006-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about why I try so hard with all this small-footprint stuff. not why I do the things that are easy and habitual and fun, like eating the greenmarket vegetables that I carry home in a string bag, or taking the stairs instead of the elevators. those kinds of things are their own reward. but why the things that make my life more difficult without giving me any apparent benefits in return? like paying extra on my energy bill so that con ed will pass my money along to some wind farm in the mountains, or keeping buckets of compost on our kitchen shelves instead of throwing potato peelings and kale stalks into the garbage. or hunting through musty and usually overpriced thrift stores for a pair of pants to replace the ones that will soon be too tattered to wear to work, when I could just go spend thirty dollars at old navy and be done with it.

it's honestly not because I think personal action makes a difference on any meaningful level. yeah the ocean is a multitude of drops, but how much does that matter if the government has a wave machine? I want to be optimistic, but I don't believe we are getting out of this one. I do believe that no matter what we do at this point, the average global temperature will keep going up and the ice will keep melting. it's just a question of how much, how fast, how hard it will be for us to adapt, and whether we adapt in a way that works for the long term. and I think that at this point, whatever is going to happen will happen regardless of whether I eat drive-through mcnuggets or container garden tomatoes, and whether I ride on a bicycle or in a hummer.

but it's precisely because the problem is so much bigger than me, than my life, that it feels so wrong to contribute to it. the carbon dioxide molecules for which I am responsible, like all anthropogenic co2, could easily stay in the atmosphere for thirty thousand years after I'm dead. long enough for 900 generations of my descendants to be affected by it. and while I don't think my efforts to curtail the impact of my lifestyle on the global environment is going to mean much during my lifetime, the cumulative effect over thirty thousand years just might be worthwhile. in the meantime, hopefully the local environment will be a little better for it, and I'm in rehearsal for the day when maybe all the doomsday predictions come true, and we have to cook our homegrown food in solar ovens.

the urge to just reject it all, to completely disengage from our broken materialistic society that won't let me wear my patched jeans and recycled-tire shoes to work, can be pretty overwhelming. I don't actually buy into that as a solution, though. if I've learned anything from stories like into the wild, it's that going off on your own is the one way to guarantee that no matter how little you take, you give absolutely nothing back.

so instead I'm working on a selective rejection policy. for example, what I really want to do with my forthcoming economic stimulus payment is refuse it on general principle. the economy is in bad shape because oil is getting more expensive, and food is getting more expensive, and we're just beginning to see -- not even to pay, but to see -- the true price of cultivating a consumption-based culture in which disposability is an added value. it seems to me that the solution to this is anything but buying more stuff, and that the economic stimulus plan is almost guaranteed to make things worse in the long run. so I absolutely refuse to stimulate the economy. (this morning tom and I went trash-hunting to find extra containers for our little vegetable garden. do you think eggplants can grow in an old construction boot? maybe that's kind of gross.)

originally I was just going to stick that $300 in my savings account, but I started to feel like that was somehow disingenuous. it's not really my money, you know? I didn't earn it. I didn't ask for it. I think it's a bad idea for the government to give it to me. it's not like I can't use it; my yearly salary is small enough that I qualify for the earned income tax credit. but at the same time, it's not like I'm going to starve or go homeless without it.

I think, in lieu of keeping my 300 dollars, I'm going to plant 300 trees. reforestation of a tropical landscape seems like an all-around good thing for the planet, the atmosphere, the climate, and hopefully even some human beings. what do you think? I'm open to suggestions. (and by the way: happy earth day.)

2008-04-14T21:35:00.003-04:00

check out this set of clear, succinct graphs that outlines how food prices have changed over the last three years, and how that just might be related to ethanol production here in the united states. (it might also be related to my urge to kick politicians in the shins when they act like "energy independence and the environment" are the same thing, or like "homegrown biofuels" are something to be proud of.)

be sure to scroll down to the last one to see how, as usual, the world's poorest people stand to get the most thoroughly screwed as we americans cling desperately to the belief that driving an suv to the mcdonald's pick-up window is some kind of god-given right. ugh.

2008-04-07T19:53:00.004-04:00

self-defenestration

last thursday, tom and I both left for work via fire escape.

the front door wouldn't open because the bolt, which had been acting finicky for a while, got stuck. tom rattled it and poked at it with screwdrivers and knives, but it wouldn't budge. we called the superintendent and woke him up -- we could hear him rustling about overhead, presumably getting out of bed and finding some clothes to put on -- but even with people attacking the bolt from both sides of the door, it stayed resolutely locked. it was sort of creepy being trapped inside our own home, even if our captor was nothing more than a bit of stubborn, malfunctioning metal. the space between our walls seemed to be narrowing. then tom called through the door to tell the super that he was going to climb out the window, or else he would be late for teaching his first class of the day.

I was relieved to see that the fire escape ladder was functional, although so heavy that it nearly tore tom's arm out of his socket as he tried to lower it to the ground. since I was little I've had a weird, terrified fascination with fire, and I've often pictured myself trying to flee a burning building only to encounter a broken fire escape. usually the ladder is rusted or otherwise broken and won't slide down. sometimes the entire metal assembly comes tearing off the wall, crumpling and melting into a mangled cage for the people trying to escape. so our successful egress was reassuring.

my family used to conduct fire drills -- now that I think about it, I'm not sure what the relationship was between them and my pyro-fixation -- and I still remember the plans for escaping from each of our homes. in the farmhouse, my second-floor bedroom window looked out over the roof of the porch, and I was supposed to climb out and slide down until I could drop off the edge to the ground. in the next house, my bedroom window was positioned directly over the spigot for the garden hose. I still remember what it felt like to climb backwards out the window, scraping my flat eight-year-old chest across the lip of the casing, stretching my left toe as far as I could until it hit that tiny bit of metal sticking out of the wall. then I could turn around and jump.

when tom was on his way down the ladder, we were still in the seven o'clock hour, and the sidewalks were deserted. I left forty-five minutes later, in front of a curious audience of commuters en route to the subway. "just practicing," I said, before waving to the super to let him know that he could pull the ladder back up. (when I got home that evening, though, I was glad to go in through the front door.)

2008-04-03T22:44:00.003-04:00

on my last day in baltimore, which was luckily also the day it wasn't cold and rainy, I left the inner harbor and walked past camden yards before turning northward into a meandering loop that took me well outside of tourist-land. I was quite conspicuously out of place in my conference clothes, and honestly in my complexion as well, and I got several not-so-innocent offers from would-be tourguides. (one guy asked if I wanted to get a cup of coffee with him, and when I said, truthfully, that I don't drink coffee, he seemed so delighted by this little quirk that he walked with me for three blocks so he could hear the whole story of how caffeine makes me a crazy person.) I had already committed the downtown area map to memory, at least enough that I would know where going in any particular direction would eventually take me, so I declined the company and wandered alone, with my narst nametag hidden in the pocket of my pea coat.

I can see why baltimore isn't on a lot of my-favorite-cities lists, but I just like being in a place, existing somewhere on a normal human scale, moving through a city in an ordinary way. I sat on the floor of the library for a while, walked through quiet neighborhoods where cats watched me through their rowhouse windows, navigated through the crowds of people outside a cluster of ninety-nine cent stores, and felt well situated. housing projects and public schools look pretty much the same no matter where you go, right? baltimore is tangibly hardscrabble, but not unhappy, and its nickname doesn't seem as ironic as I had been led to expect. it helped that there were magnolias and apple blossoms and freshly bloomed tulips everywhere, like brilliant little gifts from the unfamiliar latitude.

not too long after I returned to the hotel, we piled into the car and headed home to new york city. we were chasing behind a rainstorm, so that for most of the drive, the road was wet even though the sun was beaming golden late afternoon light through the car windows. the spray kicked up by passing trucks sent the constituent wavelengths of that light splaying out in concentric arcs, and for several dozen miles we were driving through clouds of rainbows.

at a rest stop alongside the new jersey turnpike, while my carpooling companions went to buy soft serve and sprinkles, I inspected my stockings in the bathroom and discovered a run stretching up from under my right heel to the back of my knee. I'd already patched up another hole with nail polish, figuring that it didn't matter as long as it could hide under my skirt, but even I can't justify walking around with my stockings visibly unraveling. so I took them off, left them in the trashcan on top of a pile of damp paper towels, and traveled the rest of the way to brooklyn with my feet bare inside my mary janes.

2008-03-30T23:40:00.002-04:00

hey, so, I'm in baltimore and it's sort of thwarting me. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out where the interesting neighborhoods are when I'm in a new place, but I'm not getting much of an intuitive feeling from the charm city here. do any of you know the inside story here?

I'm at a conference, my third in two weeks, so I'm starting to get a little burned out on sitting in windowless rooms with ugly carpets. today during the first session, while some important people were talking about earth systems, my phone started buzzing in the pocket of my jeans. I pulled it out, saw that it was my dad, and tried to slide it back into my pocket. in the process of doing that I somehow hit the speakerphone button and suddenly my father was addressing the whole room: "rabi? rabi?" so I hung up on him. number one daughter!

(actually he thought it was pretty funny when I called back later. but that's a good indication of how slick I tend to be in these professional environments. as in, not at all. it's a good thing I'm usually likeable in the long run.)

2008-03-23T18:21:00.002-04:00

we sort of skipped easter around here, due to a confluence of things going not-according-to-plan, and instead spent the day at home watching movies in between bouts of schoolwork (me) and housework (tom, who is currently vacuuming the empty seed hulls out from under the birdcages). it's not a big deal, I guess, since the whole resurrection thing is definitely the part of the jesus story that makes the least sense to me, and eschewing eggs takes most of the art-project-fun out of the holiday. unfortunately my tonsils have taken it upon themselves to compensate by doing their best egg impression -- swollen to the point that I don't particularly want to talk -- but otherwise it's been rather nice.

this morning tom made us some purple farina (with blueberries) and fried ham for breakfast, and after he went out to do some work at school, he brought back a sandwich from 'snice for us to share. (somehow this has been my third 'snice meal in five days after not having been there since early last summer, but I'm not complaining!) so we split some edamame and sesame peanut seitan during part one of our science fiction triple-feature. we had to turn the tv up extra loud while the birds had their afternoon twitter. I suppose this post doesn't have much of a point except to record the fact that today was a nice day, and we were both here in it together to make it nice. and now tom is coming over to enlist my help in replacing the mop head, so therefore, this is enough of a recording. happy easter.

2008-03-16T13:50:00.004-04:00

I'm on spring break this week, which is weird for me because it's been three years since the last time I got one, thanks to the complete lack of synchronization between teachers college and the department of education. I finished up the work I had been doing in school classrooms at the beginning of march, handed off an overstuffed binder to the PI last week, and now have nothing to do. except to write my damn dissertation proposal already.

I've been doing a really excellent job of avoiding the writing aspect of that task so far. since the beginning of the fall semester I've made huge amounts of progress in my thinking and my planning, but not so much in committing anything to paragraph form. I have pages and pages of flowcharts and concept maps, a sprawling diagram taped in pieces to my office wall, and enough outlines to fill an entire book with bullet points. when I try to write about any of those things I quite reliably end up with, truly, a bunch of nonsense. clarity, structure, flow, style: all absent. it's pretty unusual for me to struggle so much with the writing process and for a long time I didn't know how to deal with it. I finally decided that part of the problem was not knowing what the end -- the third chapter, the methods chapter -- was going to say. so that's my job for this break: figuring out exactly what my options are and laying them all out so I can make a decision. in outline form, of course.

so far I've done at least as much thinking about food as I have about science education. I spent almost one hundred dollars on groceries over the weekend because I'm so excited about having the time to actually cook dinner every night. normally there are at least two or three weeknights when I have to eat my dinner out of a tupperware container, so the prospect of five evenings in my own kitchen had me wandering around the supermarket in a happy delirium of meal planning. last night we had fajitas with chocolate mole and lemon-cilantro cashew cream, followed by homemade pineapple sorbet. for saint patrick's day tonight we'll have colcannon with skillet cabbage and carrots. (apparently, since boiled dinner is out of the question, I've decided to celebrate my irish heritage with the letter c?)

in a strange fit of spring cleaning -- usually my seasonal possession-purging happens in the fall, when I'm annoyed that my clothes are suddenly taking up so much more space in my drawers -- I decided to get rid of some old college notebooks that had been cluttering up the office. I had been keeping a fat little journal tucked into the back of one of my desk drawers, full of the stray thoughts I had written down during my second and third semesters at college. I was more than a little surprised to see that, aside from frequent lamentations about the pain of doing physics homework, my eighteen-year-old self spent a lot of time obsessing over food. there was page after page covered with plans for what I was going to eat in the coming day. it was pretty depressing because the lists were full of things like "bagel with hummus" and "peanut noodles" and "banana with honey." did I really go four years in which the only green things I ate were salads and steamed broccoli? no wonder I was so cranky about it.

so, what I've learned from my spring break so far: being preoccupied with food is fun when you are in control of your own consumption, but is a recipe for psychosis when you're at the mercy of even a decent dining hall. note the total lack of anything related to psychometrics or statistics. this is just one of the reasons that I think devoting a whole year to writing my dissertation is likely to end badly, in spite of what my adviser thinks. I can't even handle four days of vacation without getting woefully off track.

2008-03-08T15:52:00.004-05:00

living in the anthropocene

want to see something that blew my mind recently?

this is part of a figure from a cover article in gsa today, exploring the question of whether humanity has made a big enough impact on the earth to constitute a new geological epoch, something that could be identified and distinguished in the geologic record. the part that blows my mind is the skyrocketing anthropogenic denudation rate. I'm so used to thinking about how we've sent our carbon dioxide emissions off the charts -- to the point that it was actually funny when I saw a lecture in which the classic graph showing the near-vertical spike in atmospheric CO₂ was editorialized by the climatologist with a little note: what have we done!? -- that the sheer magnitude of it has ceased to impress me. but here, the rate at which we're stripping the planet is shown to be even more starkly exponential. and beneath that, a pretty clear indication of the driving force behind that increase. (zero population growth, anyone?)

but that, alone, isn't what made my jaw drop. after all, if you've ever seen pictures of open-pit mining, you know that we humans are not shy about cutting huge chunks out of our planet. and it stands to reason that more humans would take more, bigger, deeper chunks.

I just didn't fully grasp what more and bigger meant.

an order of magnitude. that's the point where, if I were a cartoon character, my eyes would have popped out of my head and splattered against the computer screen.

you know, I'm not always able to convince myself that there's a reason to believe we live in a particularly sensitive or special point in human history. people have always been on the lookout for the coming apocalypse, right? yet, so far, nothing has happened that's big enough to seriously disrupt the upward swoop of that population curve. but living through the immediate aftermath of a transition to a new geologic age? that feels a lot more significant to me than being here to see the turn of the millennium. not to mention a lot scarier.

[both the figure and the text in this post were taken, and slightly modified, from Zalasiewicz et al., 2008, linked in the first paragraph.]

2008-03-03T11:16:00.003-05:00

apparently I have turned my website into a photoblog, I have lots of things to write about but it seems I would rather spend my time making cupcakes edition.

2008-02-23T18:08:00.004-05:00

there. that's what the park is supposed to look like in february. none of this pollinating-the-flowers nonsense.

when I was growing up I used to think that I could never live in a place where it didn't snow in winter. little did I know that my childhood home would become one of those places by the time I was grown. two years ago we had a record-breaking snowfall in new york city, the weekend before valentine's day, but since then there have been only a handful of days when the ground has been hidden under a layer of white. I still don't know how to process the passing of winter without it; cold days are insufficient to make it seem like winter, though they are still plentiful enough, even as our planetary average creeps upward. winter needs snow for the way it changes the light, changes the directions from which we see the world. as it's falling it erases all the borders and corners, makes everything heavy and sluggish, thickens the optical depth of the atmosphere so you can't even tell where the clouds end, much less the sky itself. like being on the inside of an eggshell, all edgeless and pale. and later, when the clouds have been pushed along on the prevailing northwesterlies, leaving the snow to reflect the sunlight back up and sideways at us, it's as if our egg has cracked and we are hatching out into a sharp, blinding world. all the points and hard lines on fenceposts, bare tree branches, fire escapes, and icicles at their most crisp and definite.

that's what winter is supposed to be: a long incubation with little punctuation marks of periodic hatching; preparation for the true rebirth of spring.

so I'm happy that we have snow, finally, and that it's lasted through at least one sunny day. I like it best when it's falling, though, because it transforms the human landscape as much as it does the physical one. in the park, the population gradient increases dramatically as nearly everyone clusters around the hills and open fields, which will later be marked by sled tracks and angel prints and congregations of snow people. if you leave the meadows and head for lullwater or the battle pass, you see only dogwalkers or people on cross-country skis or maybe the occasional family that has gotten interrupted en route. (two small children, sitting in a blue plastic sled, one leaning over to feel the snow while the other wails inconsolably, holding a bloodied apple in her mitten. "bad time to lose the first tooth," says her mother, as if to apologize for how incongruous the crying seems in the midst of all this quiet snow.)

it's charming, really, how we are all so hope-springs-eternal when it comes to winter. how so many of us keep sleds and skis and snowshoes in our tiny city apartments, in homes without basements or attics, just in anticipation of the possibility of snow. this weekend was the first time in over a year that I've worn my snow boots -- which are actually my little brother's castoffs, and hence are the ugliest, manliest shoes I own -- but I wouldn't dream of getting rid of them. in case I need them for one precious afternoon a year from now, you know?

2008-02-18T21:33:00.002-05:00

hello little february bee. shouldn't you be dead or hibernating?

2008-02-11T07:06:00.000-05:00

recently I left a comment on andrew's blog in which I said, "I should do a whole post about biofuels." it's something I've been meaning to do for a while, because I've been growing more and more frustrated and anxious about the way politicians talk about ethanol, as if they think that makes them good environmentalists or proves that they are conservation-minded. I think science -- real science, not industry-funded science -- has been inching steadily toward the conclusion that it is a poor solution to both the climate change and energy dependence problems since well before the presidential campaign got seriously underway, and it makes me a little queasy to think that the person I vote for in november will be gunning to increase production of "homegrown biofuels". (homegrown! sounds so wholesome, doesn't it? yuck.)

(turn around, little consumer!)

anyway, it seems I don't have to write that post anymore, because over the weekend the media exploded with the news that biofuels could cause major problems without solving much of anything.

[here are the abstracts for the papers in science that have catalyzed all this coverage:
land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt; use of u.s. croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land use change.]

I'm not really complaining that it took publication in a prestigious peer-reviewed science journal before these stories got major media attention. but of course people have been talking about these, and lots more, problems with biofuels -- especially ethanol -- for quite some time. if you really want to get into it, check out all the posts on biofuel over at the oil drum. one of my recent favorites explores the potential for biofuel production to cause starvation rates to increase. this is a problem that goes beyond the climate, certainly well beyond our national security. who says to herself, "I need a family in india to die so that I can drive to work today"? hopefully no one. all the more reason to make sure we don't end up doing it by accident.

are all biofuels bad? most likely not, particularly in cases where they are made from materials that would otherwise go to waste. but you know what's unequivocally better? using less fuel. or capturing solar power directly, instead of using photosynthesis and then a whole bunch of processing to do it for you. the real problem isn't that we don't have enough oil. it's that we want our finite planet to provide us with infinite resources. you don't have to be a math genius or a physics expert to see why that's going to be a bad plan in the long run.

sixty years ago, this wasn't a crazy idea, or even a visionary one. it was plain and simple patriotism. why is it too much to ask for my president to understand that?

2008-02-04T15:38:00.000-05:00

speaking of trust, and hoping you won't be harmed by other people.

it's late on a sunday night but the subway platforms in times square are all mobbed. the giants have just defied even their fans' expectations to win the superbowl, and the city has been stunned into a euphoric trance. college students run in and out of traincars hooting and chanting; drunken couples waltz sloppily around a busker playing something resembling the NFL theme music on an accordion. and while I am leaning against an i-beam girder next to the stairs, someone creeps up behind me and leans over my shoulder.

it's that first moment that sends my adrenaline rushing, I think, more than anything that comes later. the moment when I spin around and see that this person who approached me with such easy familiarity is a strange, possibly high, possibly crazy man. he is ungracefully rangy, slouching so that despite his height I barely have to raise my glance before I am looking him straight in the eye. those eyes are pale and lashless, with cloudy irises and watery rims that make them reminiscent of dirty dishwater. he seems to be lacking color overall. whey-faced and crowned with a scraggle of curly, towy hair, he looks like a half-made marionette that has yet to be painted or strung up properly.

"want to come celebrate with me?" he doesn't smile at all, but in a nervous reflex, I smile back when I decline.
"no, that's okay."
"you look like a tough girl. I bet you could beat me up."
"yes," I agree, stepping backwards.
"you're a wild girl. I want to tame you."

all these words are delivered flat, low, with a total lack of affect. so I'm actually surprised when he reaches out and grabs me by the forearm to pull me closer to his face, his mouth, his tongue. for some reason I am very aware of his tongue and the way his breath flows around it like clouds across an airfoil.

I twist around and yank my wrist out of his grip. his fingers clutch at my sleeve and for an instant I think I should have tried to throw him off the platform and onto the empty tracks. instead I turn around and raise my voice for the first time.

"don't. touch. me."

I'm startled by the sharpness of my words. it's as if they are compensating for the fact that I am otherwise unarmed. tiny knives flying at the speed of sound.

I walk away, weaving between all the rest of the strangers in their sweatshirts and giants jerseys, but he's following me, still right behind me, still telling me what he is going to do to me. he can smell me. he will sniff me, he will lick me and bite me. NO, I say every time. no. no. I don't turn around.

what is wrong with everyone? do they think this is some kind of lover's quarrel? why aren't they stopping him? what if he follows me onto the train? what if he follows me home? the police stations are marked on the subway map. I can make him follow me there instead. leave me alone. leave me alone.

now he is right behind me with his colorless hands grabbing my back and his colorless arms wrapping around my shoulders and his colorless hair bristling against my temple and his colorless voice snaking into my ear. you're going to be my bitch, he says, you're going to be my wild pussycat and I'm going to tame you I'm going to fuck you in your pussy I can smell you so you can never get away. it's all toneless and unmodulated, as if the words are meaningless to him, as if he's depending on my reaction to see what it is that he's said.

so I turn around and force myself to yell -- amazing how hard it is to do this, how desperately I want not to draw attention to myself, even at this moment -- so that I'm really addressing the rest of the crowd. "you don't know me," I say, "and I don't konw you and I don't want to know you. so go away. now."

and now, with everyone watching and two big men starting to walk in our direction, he does go away. he goes loping up the stairs, walking the wrong way against a swarm of people that must have just emptied out of the crosstown shuttle, and then he disappears. I hope I haven't sent him off to search for another girl. but the crowd is closing protectively around me, the accordion has started to play a lively polka, and the train is coming, so it's too late to run after my would-be assailant and test my prediction that I could beat him up.

"the city sucks," says tom, when I tell him later, when my adrenaline has ebbed enough to let me cry. but really, of all the places for things like this to happen -- and they do happen in all places -- I think the sleepless heart of new york is one of the best. because it's a place where you're never alone.

2008-01-28T21:44:00.000-05:00

I've recently started babysitting for a family with two little boys. I wasn't looking for an extra job, and they weren't looking for a long-term employee, but when I watched the boys one saturday so their parents could take care of an emergency situation out of town, it went so well that they decided to make it a regular thing. I always like kids and I can certainly use an extra eighty dollars a week, so it's been nice all around so far. the boys are four and two years old, both squirmy, towheaded, and obsessed with astronauts.

by any quantitative measure they don't know me well at all, having spent perhaps twelve waking hours with me so far. they call me "rabi the rabbit" because when I talked to their mother on the phone for the first time, she asked about my name and since people around here often assume my name is ravi, I said, "r-a-b, b like in bunny rabbit." (the two year old actually just calls me "wah-bi wab-bih!" -- it always has the exclamation point at the end because he likes to run up and shriek it at me while he throws his head back and grins and does this little wriggle of joy.) the four year old still has to show me around and help me find things like the laundry hamper (under the clean-diaper basket) and the baby shampoo (hidden in a corner behind the bathroom door).

and yet, at bedtime, they both cuddle up to me, one on each side, and hold on until they fall asleep. tonight, while I was lying in the darkness and listening to the last few songs on the lullaby cd, I looked down at them -- the toddler tucked into the curve of my right arm, his older brother curled over so that he could lie with his head on my stomach, both of them heavy with waiting dreams -- and I felt overwhelmed by how much trust they had in me, the stranger in the spot normally occupied by their mother. I could be anyone, but they let me snuggle them to sleep. how long do they get before they are forced to outgrow that?

* * *

when I moved into this apartment building, twenty-two years old and living by myself for the first time, my father told me to always look around the corner when I came down the stairs, in case someone was lurking in the alcove between the lobby and the trash yard. he didn't say, "because you, a young and smallish female by herself, are the ultimate target," and in return I didn't roll my eyes too hard. and the truth is I still do it, a quick glance over my shoulder as I reach the bottom, into the shadows that are always empty. no one is ever there waiting to grab me.

property thefts have been on the rise around new york city lately. I come home after dark most nights, so I do what I can to make myself less muggable. I take my ipod off before the subway reaches my stop. I turn my phone's ringer to silent and tuck it in a pocket where I can get to it if I need it. I have my housekeys ready so I won't be standing outside my apartment trying to dig them out of my bag. I cross the street to be on the same side as the other commuters, or to get away from clumps of teenage boys, feeling guilty as I imagine how hurt some of my former students would be if they thought I wanted to avoid them. I watch my shadow so that I'll know if anyone is getting close to me from behind, but I throw the occasional look behind me too, for show, to prove that I'm aware of my surroundings. these things are habits, and I do them without dwelling on them or thinking that I actually will be attacked if I don't. but I still feel bad for walking through my own neighborhood making a show of how much I don't trust the people who share it with me.