wockerjabby

2009-07-02T12:44:00.002-04:00

summer!

last night I was lying on the grass in prospect park thinking about how many layers of nature & construction there were on each (front/back) side of me. I was faceup and above me there were mosquitoes, gnats, frisbees, bats, branches, leaves, clouds, airplanes, satellites, stars. beneath me: grass, soil, rocks, electric cables, subway tracks, water mains, sewer lines. you could feel the little quakes from the F train making its right-angle turn between the 15th street and 7th avenue stations, the rippling soundwaves pushing through the air from the bandshell, and the restrained electricity charging the clouds overhead. all at once.

I completely get nature, I do, but the city is where I feel connected to the planet.

2009-06-17T05:54:00.002-04:00

today is the day. --- it's funny, when I write that, I hear two things in my head:

if you go down in the woods today, you'd better go in disguise... today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.

and georgia hubley crooning, today is the day. today is the day I think of you.

-- anyway, today is the day my students take their earth science regents exam, the state-mandated standardized test that determines whether they learned enough with me. in some cases it determines, albeit only partly, whether they will ultimately be allowed to graduate from high school. the kids already took the performance component of the exam, a perfunctory lab exercise in which they identify some earthen objects and draw ellipsoids representing a variety of things (earthquakes, orbits, what have you). they tore it up on the rocks & minerals, and if nothing else we can walk away from this year confident that my little group of concrete jungle kids know the difference between something igneous and something sedimentary. but the rest is all still up in the air.

for weeks I've been waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about this test. (I'm not the only one. the history teacher was apparently lecturing his girlfriend in his sleep about what she needed to study.) do birds know that there is a day when they'll have to shove their babies out of the nest, to fly or flail? or do they just do it when the time feels right? do they look at their broken fledglings, the splay-leg babies with crooked feathers, and dread the day their inadequacies must be put to the ultimate test? or are their tiny brains too stunted and conditioned by the cruelties of nature to care?

(it's six am and I've already been up for a while)

it kills me not to be able to sit next to the kids during the exam. not the kids who cut class or defiantly told me that I could bleed review materials and they wouldn't read them, necessarily (although I want them to succeed anyway). but the kids who know all the answers, but are so insecure that they need verbal confirmation before they'll commit anything to paper. the kids who know all the science, but get tripped up because they don't know the meaning of abundant or range or variation or vertical or apparent or features or... words, standardized tests are such a minefield of words, and I can hardly blame the kids for wanting to tiptoe away in the other direction. but to me the answers left blank are like the places where the most destruction is already done. I'm mixing metaphors here and I think they're verging on the inappropriate.

to keep myself from violating the laws of standardized testing conditions, I will sit down at the start of the exam for my ritual taking of the regents. first I zip through it by myself to test my own expertise -- my second year teaching I got a 99, which was upsetting, but taught me a lesson about the nitpickyness of the scoring procedure -- and then I go over each question to obsess about the degree to which I adequately covered its content. there's always one or two things on the regents that are worth a seemingly huge amount of points relative to the size of their share of the curriculum. like the infamous sand dune question of 2005 that has resulted in thousands of hapless high school students learning about wind erosion for no real reason in the four subsequent years.

and then finally I take the test as if I were my students, collectively, with all their odd conceptions and vocabulary quirks and tendencies to skip reading the important parts of the questions. that way I won't cry as much later, when I'm grading their answer booklets.

when I run I go through a sluggish phase towards the end, after three or four miles, and I have to force my feet to keep moving, dragging myself along in a slodgy jog so I won't lose my momentum. that's how it felt in the classroom for these weeks in june, just forcing ourselves towards the finish line, one labored step after another. but once I'm within a half mile of home, I lean forward, headfirst until I'm almost falling over, and my stride gets faster faster to keep up. that's today. today is the day we lean into the wind, jump out of the nest, and do our best not to fall.

it's weird how much I can hate these standardized tests and still find them so thrilling. all it really comes down to is this: I love my students. I want them to come out of this feeling good about science. I want them to win this stupid game, even if it is stupid.

2009-05-25T23:27:00.003-04:00

on some level I still think this video post thing is a terrible idea, but it's so easy! I recorded this at about 9:30 this morning right after I got home from my park run, and clearly I haven't managed to use it as a writing prompt, so what the hell. at least my mom will be happy to see me.

a few addendums:

1. if I ever do this again I will shower and change first. yeesh.

2. much like the dictionary, I don't have a consistent pronunciation of the word "banal." about half the time it's british-y, like here, and the other half of the time it rhymes with canal.

3. my favorite smell in the park is along one of the bridle trails, between the zoo and the nethermead. you run along and it just smells normal and woodsy, and then suddenly you get hit by a surge of sweet honeysuckle scent. it's like a little firework of fragrance.

4. it's easy to like the smells of the park, of course, but I also really like the smell of the city in the heat. the asphalt-bricks-concrete-metal-subway steam-cooking oil smell. every city's is a little different; the air of new york has a tang of sharpness in the summer that I've never smelled anywhere else. in boston the smell is more wet and mellow, like a cucumber.

5. when I was in seventh grade I thought the illustration on my shirt, with the girl and her cue reflected in the yellow ball, was very cool. I drew my own version of it but with ned hall, the main character of richard russo's the risk pool, instead.

things being what they are, I can't guarantee that it won't be another month before I manage to put something up here. (the last day of school is june 26.) if you're not disgusted by microblogging -- I sort of am but that seemingly hasn't stopped me from doing it -- here are a couple things you can look at for more frequent updates:
- my twitter feed, which shockingly dates back to 2006!
- my tumbl...whatever, which is almost entirely pointless.

(I almost just posted this without embedding the video! good job, brain.)

2009-05-02T20:30:00.003-04:00

today I was at school after all the other saturday school teachers had left. I wandered into my principal's office to ask her something and she said, "why are you still here?"

I said, "well, my subject takes so much physical prep time that I can't really do that and also do all the bulletin boards and filing and stuff during the week."

she said, ".... ohhhh."

I love that she cheerfully okays all my purchase orders -- I recently spent as much on rocks and minerals alone as I would bet the rest of my grade team has spent on all their supplies for the entire year -- even though she obviously hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about what I must be doing with them!

after the kids left this afternoon I got out the hot plates and made fresh ice. I threw a bunch of homemade sandstone against the floor so it would break into nice angular fragments, then cleaned that up and set them out along with the beakers, bottles, funnels, flashlights, marbles, rulers, hand lenses, reference tables, and filter paper for monday's lab. (physical weathering.) I photocopied 77 labs, warmup slips (or do nows or starters or whatever you want to call the thing you make the kids do the second they walk in the room because bell-to-bell instruction is required even if you don't have bells!), and homework assignments. I still didn't get very far with the bulletin boards, to be honest. I stapled up the six best rock classification thingies the kids did onto my classwork board and that was about it. I haven't even taken down the old projects on the hallway board yet.

all our bulletin boards have to be updated with brand-new work & stuff because our school quality review is this week. so they are actually just a tiny bit of the big picture of insanity that is my school right now. (do you non-NYC teachers have to do SQRs too? are they run by bafflingly british people?) I like talking about data and whatnot so I am feeling relatively sanguine about my role in everything, as long as I can get those silly bulletin boards finished. accountability, rah rah rah!

ps I've decided that it is more productive for me to spit out whatever comes to mind instead of pretending I will write about it someday. hence this sort of post. I hope it does not offend you.

2009-04-27T22:10:00.003-04:00

I wrote this on monday:

I'm feeling pretty good about life tonight after leaving my classroom all prepped with materials and photocopies for lab tomorrow, and getting home in time for a twilight jog through the park. my kitchen isn't exactly clean but as long as I'm washing more dishes than I'm dirtying, I'm preventing a hostile takeover in my sink. right?

now it's wednesday and I'm almost out of clean laundry so the kitchen sink is no longer a housekeeping priority. I'm pretty sure the rest of my post was going to be something about how I'm unable to conceive of large outdoor spaces as private property in spite of the amount of my childhood I spent running around outside. or something like that. but I have a very large amount of work to do instead. so it goes!

2009-04-17T15:51:00.002-04:00

c.c. the cat died peacefully this morning after eighteen good years. he was a chatty, personable guy with a loud purr and a bit of a swagger. in his old age he was allowed to sit at the table and eat off the dinner plates. the last time I saw him was over the winter holidays, when he decided to share our sugar cookies.

goodbye, ceecer. my family will miss you.

2009-04-16T14:21:00.003-04:00

today was an interesting day because I carried a stack of one hundred dollar bills around with me for most of the afternoon.

when I was in elementary school -- and bear in mind, as you read the rest of the this sentence, that elementary school in cambridge went all the way up through the eighth grade -- I opened my first checking account with fleet bank. because I was not even fourteen yet there were no fees on anything, ever. I deposited my babysitting money and, much later, my HHMI stipend money, and watched the tiny interest payments accrue penny by penny. about once a week I withdrew a small amount of cash from the atm -- always, always less than half of what I had deposited, a personal finance rule I followed dutifully until I moved into my own roommate-free one bedroom apartment, where my monthly rent alone was more than half of my paycheck -- which I was allowed to spend on used cds or magic cards or vhs copies of the first season x-files episodes.

at some point I started collecting first day covers, which are still stored inside their plastic slipcovers in two giant binders, presumably in my parents' basement. at another point I decided to buy cable for the family television -- entirely for the purpose of watching science fiction shows, I have to admit; have I become significantly less geeky since high school or did scifi peak in the nineties? because now all I watch with any consistency is the daily show, on hulu -- and every month I mailed off my checks and saved the invoice stubs in my filing box.

(I am making myself sound like a wicked fun teenager right now, am I not? I also stayed up until 2 am every night eating toaster waffles and playing star trek trivia on AOL!)

anyway, the bank account served me well and then I went to college, where I joined the credit union that everyone belonged to, and then I graduated from college and moved to new york city and opened a bank account with the bank that has a branch on every freaking corner, including the corner at the end of the block where I lived in midwood. (it also has a branch across the street from the subway stop nearest my apartment now.) in the meantime, fleet had merged to become bankboston and later was bought by bank of america. I left the old checkbooks in my drawer and never used them, but I didn't quite get around the closing the account. it was, after all, free to leave it there.

last week I transferred the contents of my savings account, minus a token bit to leave for continuity purposes, into my checking account. then I wrote a check for that entire amount, went a bit cross-eyed over what I was about to do, tore it out and handed it over to a lawyer. (this is a whole different story and one I can't really tell until I know what the end is, which I don't at this point. it's nothing bad, just uncertain.) after doing a little math and realizing that I would be left with about forty dollars after that check was cashed, I decided it was finally time to bite the bullet and collect the remainder of my high school earnings.

when I closed the account I was expecting the teller to print me a cashier's check or something along those lines. but no: she opened a drawer and counted out a frightening number of large bills, hundreds and then a fifty and some twenties and a ten and some singles. (if I'd had two more dollars in the account I think I would have gotten at least one bill of every denomination, so that was a missed opportunity for a fun happenstance. oh well.) plus a little handful of change, which struck me as a bit comically absurd. all told it was not a huge amount of money by any means, about a month's salary, but certainly more cash than I've ever seen in real life before. It felt like something that people do in the movies, right before they run away to a foreign country and assume an alternate identity.

it was amazing, too, how despite the heaviness of that money in my pocket, it felt like free money that had come from nowhere. it had no obligation to buy me groceries or pay my utility bills, and there was so much of it right there in my hand that I could do anything I wanted! I could walk into a store and pick out anything I wanted and just hand over a wad of cash! I could throw it into the air and leave it to be collected by happy children! (except, in park slope, that would be... stupid.) I could take it home and hide it under my mattress! I could run away and live in hotels for a week!

instead I allowed myself to buy one grapefruit popsicle. then I took the rest of it to the bank, where I watched all the bills disappear into the atm, one by one by one, flickering like a the pages of a flipbook showing benjamin franklin sitting very, very still.

2009-04-11T14:07:00.003-04:00

so I worked nonstop for six weeks straight and then I chaperoned the world's longest field trip (well, just two days, but it felt like an eternity) and then I went to germany:

and I didn't even bring any grading with me! more soon.

2009-03-26T23:32:00.002-04:00

the other day one of my students asked me, "rabi, why are you always so happy?"

if it had been someone else I might have rolled my eyes or laughed. but because it was one of the kids, I smiled and said, "well, I'm always happy when you see me, because I like my job!"

right now as I sit here under my pile of grading, surrounded by things I should have taken care of weeks ago -- unopened bills, unwatered plants, unfilled prescriptions -- that sounds utterly laughable. always so happy. ha. but I meant it at the time, and I'll mean it again tomorrow. if I didn't, how else could I justify working from seven in the morning until eleven at night, every day, after day after day?

(somehow even with all that work I'm still wretchedly far behind on grading.)

I do realize that this is one of the whiniest things I've ever posted publicly. I apologize. if I weren't a complete and total stressball I would at least try to make it poetic whining, but no.

2009-03-05T06:15:00.004-05:00

AMNHaiku

glowing globes reveal
chaotic ocean currents
push of a button.

blue red pink red red
cold and hot anomaly--
steadily warmer.

a happy surprise
solar can (em)power us
one hundred percent!

squid and whale admired.
kids caressing amphibole.
field trip: successful.

(bad haiku are more interesting than a post that says, "I don't even have time for complete sentences right now," yes?)

2009-02-21T20:46:00.003-05:00

check it out: ugly boots in action in vermont! this video is mostly of rick and sarah's sheep, but stay tuned all the way through for the pups and cupcakes. needless to say I had a lovely visit.

2009-02-20T19:26:00.001-05:00

on my long train ride yesterday from soggy new york to snowy vermont, I contemplated the ugliness of my snow boots. it's not that they're offensively garish or clashy or any of the other things that usually qualifies something as ugly in my book. they're just black snow boots, with laces and velcro straps that tighten around the ankle. but they are... ugly. they're utilitarian, inelegant, masculine, a bit on the militaristic side. I got them as hand-me-downs from my younger brother several years ago, enough years that his feet were only slightly larger than mine instead of nearly twice as big, the way they are now. nonetheless they are the kind of boots that a teenage boy would wear before he has begun to worry about being stylish.

this is the first year in a while that we've had enough snow hanging around on the sidewalks for me to need to wear my snowboots out and about, instead of just when I'm playing in the park. I was chagrined to realize that, when forced to wear the black combat-ready clompers to school, I wished I had a prettier pair. not necessarily a girly pair of snowboots. just one that was not so ugly.

worse, I realized that what was really stopping me from buying new snow boots was not so much my environmentalist convictions -- consume as little as possible -- but that I couldn't really afford them. like everyone else in the country, I've been working a little harder to pinch (or stretch?) my pennies this year, although for me it has less to do with the collapsing economy than my perhaps-foolish decision to live alone in my two-bedroom apartment after the summer departure of my housemate. so now, to keep paying the rent and the bills without draining my savings account, I don't buy new (even secondhand, new-to-me) clothes or shoes, particularly when I have perfectly functional if unattractive things in my wardrobe already. if my students have noticed that I wear the same pair of jeans three days a week, they haven't mentioned it.

anyway the upsetting aspect of this isn't that I wish I had different boots. my boots are fine. but the thought that I might have just gone out and gotten new ones, just because I wanted them, is bothering me. I think wanton consumption is wrong yet I could have convinced myself that it was somehow justified if my boots were too ugly.

I do understand why people are worried about stimulating the economy. I don't want working class families to be hurt by layoffs and the inability to pay for actual necessities. but I hope that, as we collectively find that we can no longer afford to buy new stuff left and right, we decide that we actually don't need that stuff. and I hope that in working to rebuild the economy, we are smart enough to realize that we have to base it on something beyond material goods. we can recondition ourselves to believe that ugly, used, warm, waterproof boots are perfectly wonderful, and then spend our money on things like train tickets to snowy vermont, where they can be put to good use.

2009-02-17T08:29:00.003-05:00

I'm on vacation! at least in the sense that I don't have to get up and go to school every day. yesterday I made color-coded lists of things that need to get done. I made my dissertation list day-glo orange in the hopes that the color would give it some urgency. then I took my lists and parceled them out across the week, so that each day (except friday when I will be visiting friends and sheep) has a rainbow to-do list of its own.

I didn't put "update wockerjabby" on any of my lists which sort of means right now I'm doing something I'm not supposed to, but I was hoping it might happen a little more organically. even if that means some short entries. it's weirdly tiring carrying around all the things in my head that I would like to write about but don't have time.

right now, however, I am off to "print & mail franklin mint form," to actually get the money out of the credit union account I haven't touched since I graduated from college in 2003. there's a to-do list item I've been failing to cross out for years.

2009-01-31T22:15:00.003-05:00

the kids were only in school from 9:15 to 12:45 this week, for standardized testing and final exams, so I spent a fair amount of time alone in my classroom. at some point I decided it would be funny to record myself...

... I can't imagine it's particularly interesting to anyone who's not either a teacher, a student, or my mom. but I was amused to see how much time I apparently spend climbing up on things. that's me: professional paper-wrangler and chair-climber. best job ever!

2009-01-17T22:29:00.002-05:00

it was difficult, after a day spent huddled in layers of fabric and fleece, to crawl out from under my blankets and brave the cold air just for the sake of a forty-minute elliptical jog at the gym. once there, of course, I was glad I went, glad to feel the heat radiating from my bare arms and the sweat collecting in the hair at the nape of my neck. the worst thing about a sedentary day is that you don't get to feel your body working.

I brought the newest new yorker with me and glanced back and forth between it and a basketball game while I ran. (basketball is one of the few sports I find intrinsically boring, which tells you something about how good this nyer was. the article on breastfeeding might have been interesting if it had gone anywhere beyond what anyone with even a passing interest in workplace feminism has already red. but it didn't.) lately I've fallen into the bad habit of reading the author's name at the end of each poem before I decide whether it's worth reading and this month I was startled to see the name of my freshman year english professor after the anticipatory emdash. I read the first verse and laughed because it sounded just like how she talks. this same person who called my eighteen-year-old self "outrageous and compelling," nearly ten years ago, talking to me from the pages of a magazine I've been reading almost my whole life. is it a small world or have I just failed to look beyond the horizons of my hyperliterate upbringing?

(then again. I often feel that I've failed to live up to that particular part of my culture, seeing as how I tend to skip half of the new yorker and probably thirty percent of harper's every month. and when I get JEM I rarely read beyond the table of contents.)

at the gym, the other nearby television was showing cnn's coverage of obama's arrival in washington by train. the font they were using made it look as though the caption advertising "the inauguration of barack obama" said "the inauguration OR barack obama." as if we could only have one or the other; either a new president or the barack obama we have now, the one we have placed all our hopes and faith in, the one who's going to pull us back from the brink of disaster.

and both obamas can't exist, of course, because the fantasy savior obama is different for everyone, and so will disappoint everyone in a different way. what I am most hopeful, and most nervous, about is the possibility that science will once again be seen as a valuable, meaningful way of knowing, not just that weird and kind of annoying way that certain people think. a way of thinking is so easily dismissed, like an opinion you can just disagree with if you don't like it. my greatest wish for the future of my government, the future now entrusted, for the first time, to a person for whom I voted, is that it will be reasonable in the most literal sense of the word.

(I also hope that obama will learn to stop starting his otherwise-respectful replies with a dismissive "look." because, look, you sound like a patronizing ass if you do that. don't you think?)

as we approach the second semester of the school year, we've begun to look at our students' credit and regents (standardized test) accumulation with more solemnity. and, to be honest, fear. it is a frightening situation. I won't bore you with the details, but the upshot is that our twelfth graders (who do not yet exist -- I am currently teaching the founding class of students at our new school, who are now in the eleventh grade) may not take either math or science. I understand why; the state requires only three years worth of math and science credits, and they could run out of time for credit recovery in the subjects that our government has deemed more important. low graduation rates will hurt us in a number of ways, so on a practical level we have to do everything we can to get out students to graduate on time. on a philosophical level I think this is absurd; if I had begun ninth grade with the same deficit in skills that my students have, I would have needed much longer than four years to be ready for college, much less adult life.

on an emotional level it breaks my heart to think that my school will buy into that mentality that says that science is somehow less, less useful, less worthwhile, less fundamental. when I was interviewing the principal told me up front that they had not made science a priority, and I knew and understood that -- when you are starting a school, much as when you are starting a career, you can only do so many things well at a time. but when we see science as a collection of facts, or as the purview of the wealthy, overeducated, and hyperliterate, we lose one of the most powerful and beautiful aspects of our humanity. we lose a way of knowing. not the only way, but one that is distinct from any other. without that way of knowing, we are less than we could be.

I don't want less for my students, or for my country. I want more.

it took me long enough to write this, in fits and spurts between meals and work and football games, that it is now time to go to the gym again. this time the afc championship is on so I don't think I will need to bring a magazine.

2009-01-13T22:19:00.001-05:00

(hey, when is someone going to invent that brain-to-text device?)

2008-12-31T01:34:00.001-05:00

what is there to say at the end of a year like this one?

I'm glad the days are getting longer again, at least.

2008-12-19T05:18:00.004-05:00

bixbite update! this is overdue so I finally gave up on the idea that I'd have time to write out the whole rest of the saga. here's your quick and dirty video substitute:

a few additional notes:

1. the real triumph of the vet visit, aside from the four grams, was that bixbite's red blood cell count is back up to normal! it's very apparent in her behavior, too. she never would have been able to climb up on top of a cage last week.

2. when the vet clipped bix's toenail to draw blood for the test, bixbite reached down with her beak and very systematically shredded a strip of skin off the vet's thumb. I was both mortified and delighted (sick birds don't put up that much of a fight). the vet was bleeding all over the place and laughingly chided bixbite for trying to contaminate the sample.

3. we took another car service to the appointment. our driver was from senegal. he was very taken with bixbite and asked to see her multiple times when we were stopped at traffic lights. in French, he told her that she was a beautiful african bird and that he was from africa too.

4. after her good showing at the animal hospital, I decided bix could rough it like a normal city dweller and take the subway home. she was not amused. the trains must seem obscenely loud when you're not used to them. I rather enjoyed walking past the sidewalk christmas trees and the giant wreaths on bloomingdale's with a little blanket-wrapped bird slung over my arm.

5. this video has the least flattering screencap yet. why do they always end up that way? also, I need to stop telling my pets to say hello to the computer. I sound like a broken record. (is there a modern-day equivalent for that phrase? digital audio doesn't skip unless you tell it to.)

2008-12-10T21:46:00.002-05:00

I left school early on monday so I could take bixbite to the vet. we took a thirty-dollar car service ride over the brooklyn bridge and up fdr drive, to one of new york city's fancypants animal hospitals. (if you want a real avian specialist, it's sort of hard to avoid the fancypants route.) I said, "lovebird, no energy or appetite" and they whisked us in for an emergency appointment. bix was so exhausted that she didn't even move her little feet when the technician picked her up to put her in the scale. they just dangled, tiny toes curled under, like the feet of dead, featherless ducks in chinatown windows.

bixbite weighed 26 grams. less than an ounce, or as much as a single steel-tip dart. she had some internal bleeding in her intestinal tract. the tech took her away for an x-ray and blood tests, but before too long the head of avian medicine came back in to tell me that bixbite was too anemic for the tests to be done safely. "her hematocrit is less than ten. that's... almost incompatible with life. I'm surprised she's even standing." so I agreed to have her admitted to the intensive care unit, at a rate of one hundred thirty five dollars per day, not including the actual medicine. I signed a release form saying I knew my pet had a good chance of dying and that I didn't want any extreme measures taken to keep her alive. (you can't really do cpr on a bird anyway.) I told the doctor that I didn't need to be called right away if it happened in the middle of the night. it could wait until morning.

after I left, thinking I had just agreed to spend hundreds of dollars so that someone else could watch my bird die, I took the train back to brooklyn and wandered around greenpoint until my own toes were too cold to move.

as it turned out, though, I was spending tens of hundreds of dollars so that someone else could save my bird's life. bixbite, it seems, is worth more than forty dollars per gram. some people pay over twice that much for pure cocaine, so I guess I can't complain about how crazy expensive bix has become for something that fits in a pocket or a palm. she stayed in the incubator for 48 hours, getting twice-daily drugs and tube feedings to help bring her weight back up. the doctors called me after each feed to report that she was looking perkier -- "she even got a little feisty when I gave her the last syringe!" one vet said proudly -- and ultimately, despite the cause of her illness remaining a mystery, decided she could come back home.

I picked her up along with three small vials of medicine and the world's smallest syringes -- she gets 0.02 ml of three different drugs, to help her fight infection and to stave off any more internal bleeding. the total volume of all the medicine she will take over the next week is barely enough to fill a thimble. when the technician brought her out in her carrier, she was sitting on her perch, peering around with bright, wide eyes, looking both utterly adorable and nothing at all like the sick, spent bird I had brought in two days earlier. I should have known better than to think that anything about bixbite was incompatible with life. after all, this is a bird who was born crippled and survived a motherless infancy.

she's not all better, not by a long shot. she's still seriously underweight and has to work hard to climb around her cage. it seems like she's having trouble keeping her body temperature up, so I rigged a desk lamp and a pink light bulb into a little heater for her. she's way more tame and easy to handle than she would be if she were feeling like herself; even the most personable birds don't like having strange substances forcibly squirted into their mouths, but bix barely tries to resist.

still, it's heartening to see her sitting on her favorite perch again, playing with an empty seed hull or gobbling up her dried peas and corn. she looks worn out but optimistic. I'm trying to do my part by believing in her. my scrappy, stubborn little refusing-to-die bird. thanks for all your thoughts and good wishes -- we both appreciate it.

2008-12-07T18:23:00.002-05:00

bixbite, the avian co-star of the video below, is having a tough time this weekend. yesterday I found her huddled under the newspaper at the bottom of her cage, seemingly too weak to get up. she didn't protest at all when I scooped her up, and her feet were cold and floppy, wrapped around my fingers with such a feeble clutch that I could barely feel them. I sat on the floor next to the radiator with her cupped in a little fleece nest made from the sleeve of my sweatshirt, holding a palmful of seeds for her to eat. she did eat, but it seemed to take so much effort that she couldn't keep her eyes open for more than a few bites. she kept lying facedown in the dish. I thought she might die right there in my hands.

she didn't. after she seemed to warm up a bit, I put her back in her cage, where she continued to peck at her food, slowly but surely, until the dish was empty. after that she had enough energy to climb around her cage, hanging out on her favorite perch and going to get the occasional sip of water. she still looked tired, but much more alert and content. I checked on her a few times during the night and found her sleeping near the the top corner of the back of her cage. this morning she seemed almost back to normal, just a touch woozy, and I was mystified but hoped she was out of the woods.

tonight, although she doesn't look as bad as she did yesterday, she's still clearly exhausted. it seems like she can't control her legs and feet very well. she is spending most of her time sleeping on one of her lowest perches, I think because she can't really climb up to her favorite spot near the top. a few times I saw her try to pull herself up with her beak, but she kept sliding back down the bars of her cage, catching her already crooked wings on her dishes and toys. it's heartbreaking to watch her look so defeated and helpless.

I'll call the vet tomorrow. (if she makes it that long.) jasper is totally fine, which makes me worried that bixbite's trouble is somehow egg-related. I couldn't feel anything hard inside her abdomen, but she could be losing calcium even if the shell isn't solid yet. I don't really know, though. she's never been as good about eating her fruits and vegetables as jasper and poppy. I mixed some vitamins in with her seed tonight, but it looks like all she wants to do right now is sleep.

the irony, I suppose, is that, like a sick child who only wants to cuddle, bix has never been sweeter than she is now. instead of running away from me, she curls up willingly in my hand. instead of screeching, she twitters quietly. she's always been somewhat broken, with those malformed feathers on her flightless wings and her disfigured, frankensteiny toes. but before now she's never seemed particularly vulnerable. my poor baby bird. I hope she's okay.... but right now, I have to say, my hope feels a bit hollow.

2008-12-01T21:23:00.003-05:00

ready for an internet cliché? look, it's my animals!

just doing my part to decrease the signal-to-noise ratio out here on the web.

2008-11-26T15:07:00.001-05:00

when I brought the houseplants inside for the winter, I left the succulents and the last of the container garden out on the balcony. the eggplants gave up right away, turning shriveled and brown, leaving their immature fruits to wither on the vine. but the stubborn cherry tomato kept making new green buds, all of which ripened and reddened until the neglected plant was laden with tomatoes. they stayed perfectly pert and plump, even after the leaves were completely desiccated.

last weekend, when the cold snap left the season's first frost on my window panes, I decided I ought to harvest them. they fell off the vine and into my palm at a single touch, and every last one was frozen solid. I had a bowlful of tomato marbles. they were actually pretty tasty. I ate them one by one while they were still frozen.

the vegetables at the greenmarket were icy too, covered in little crystals that marched up and down the ribs of squash and the veins of collards, hid in the wrinkled leaves of cabbages and brussels sprouts, and gave an incongruous sparkle to the dirty sweet potato skins. I splurged on half a pound of concord grapes, because I couldn't resist them in bite-sized popsicle form.

* * *

the only thing that's in my freezer right now is poppy's lifeless little body, wrapped in a towel and tucked in an ice cream bag. tomorrow I'll pack him and his favorite toy into my insulated lunchbox, which I hope will keep him cold on the train ride to cambridge, where a small grave awaits. I know this isn't the normal thing to do with a bird on thanksgiving, or maybe ever. but it's the right thing to do for poppy. he belongs in the backyard of the house where he lived for eleven years, the same backyard that was the only place he ever saw the outdoors. and whatever else I feel this thanksgiving, I am truly thankful for the chance to say a proper goodbye.

2008-11-20T21:07:00.000-05:00

time is not my friend.

2008-11-11T13:35:00.002-05:00

yikes. I just deleted two half-finished posts because I'd left them sitting for so long that they no longer seemed relevant, much less interesting. (plus, "half-finished" is a generous assessment of their completeness.) let's see if I can sum each one up in a single sentence for you:

a) I don't play rugby anymore, because I decided with some regret that the number of head injuries I've sustained has reached its limit, and now I'm trying to figure out how to preserve the athlete part of my self-identity.

b) my attempts to ride my bicycle to school have been somewhat thwarted by leaky inner tubes, but they did lead to an otherworldly evening spent walking home through the hasidic community in south williamsburg on one of the last days of sukkot.

there. you didn't miss much.

2008-11-04T20:31:00.003-05:00

election day from rabi w on Vimeo.

a few other thoughts:
1. I can't remember ever seeing the word "epic" in a nytimes headline before.
2. it wasn't intentional to have india.arie singing "there's hope," but once I realized it was already in the background, I had to use it.
3. this video nonsense really is a lot easier than writing stuff down. I hope you guys were serious in your enthusiasm.
4. I am, in fact, hopeful.

5. 11:01 pm I VOTED FOR OUR FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT WOW WOW WOW