it’s the sound of wetness

hmmm – i seem to be back into a habit of doing things recently.  i’ve been relishing the repetition of my recent life to a degree.  when i say this, i don’t mean the predictability of my life currently – my previous post atests to my dislike of these patterns.  no, i like the repetition – the repeating of certain ritual acts that lend comfort to my day.

i’ve been waking up an hour earlier than i normally do during the week and spending time being awake in my flat.  i do the dishes, i eat breakfast, i watch democracy now, i do the laundry.  i’ve found this a form of meditation as i prepare myself for the day.  i have – for so long – thrown off the covers and rushed to work.  this left me feeling unhealthy so, by and large, i’ve given it up when i can.  maybe it’s the repetition of the movements i make in the dish sink or maybe it’s the anticipation of the sun rising over the eastern mountains that i see from my window – each day until the solstice, i count the shortening minutes of the day as the sun takes longer and longer to creep into the still, cold air of the valley, much like my truck groans as i turn it over in the morning.

and i’ve taken to writing letters – real letters – every sunday to someone new.  so far there have been two sent and i hope that many more will follow in their wake.  letters care about people – emails don’t.  so i’m trying to show that i care.  i love a cup of coffee, a table with the view of the street, and a piece of paper heading to someone i care about.

with all of his admiration of my repetition nature, i’ve been trying to do something that i wouldn’t typically do at least once a day – just to “do something that doesn’t compute,” as wendell berry would say.  it has been as simple as getting ready for bed only to stay up and make grape jelly or turning off on to a road i’ve never driven before and attempting to get to where i need to be by a route i’ve never experienced.  the juxtaposition is amazing.

it’s still raining – more water than i’ve seen in a long time has been dripping from the grey sky and that feeling of wetness has returned to my feet and has brought its brother the chill to my fingers and hands.  but it’s great to see a dry landscape drink so much and then swell to accept more.  where i live is a vibrant experience and i will miss it if i ever leave.

the signs of a time

it’s raining again in san francisco and i’ve found myself struggling with wet emotions that i haven’t seen in my neck of the woods for a long time.  i found that, at times, i have a desire to disappear – not because i am unhappy, but rather because i would like to look at things from a more detached perspective.  perhaps from there, i would be able to see things more clearly than i see them now.

i’m good and that’s good.  work is fine, though i find myself wanting to be less settled in routine and the predictability of my current working life.  i am due to be finished at the end of this month, but there is a chance that i’ll stay and take on a new role.  i don’t know if i will – right now i don’t know anything about where i’m headed for the next year.  the new job would be great and i would learn a lot/move forward with a lot of potential for new experiences.  but i fear the milk has soured and i need something different.  i’ve been plagued by restlessness and thoughts of the adventures that i’ve withheld because of my seriousness and my sense of commitment to those other than myself.  this has been my perpetual burden my entire life and i’m not sure how to shake it.  perhaps acknowledging it and challenging it is all that i can do.

my hair is long and i thought about the tips the other day.  they are the hair that i had when i still lived in indiana.  i thought about how hair is a history of your life that you carry with you.  i think about cutting it sometimes, but i’ve committed to make a life change when i do so.  for now, i have to contemplate what change would signal the need for chopped hair.

ashley and i are good – navigating the uncertain seas of our lives.  she is unhappy in her job and has committed to quit as of next spring.  with my job uncertainty and her departure from the current gig, we are even less certain about how we’ll ever live so that we don’t have to coordinate weekend drives for visits.  nothing is certain, but we’re enjoying the time as we have it.

more and more, i miss people in my life but i’m not sure who they are.  i guess i miss a connection that i never really had.  is it possible to miss a figment of your imagination, of friendships that you never really had.  i guess i miss deep connection with people that get me.  i don’t know if i have that after a couple disappointing interactions with people that i saw as close friends.  not so much those people being bad friends, but rather me realizing that they don’t really know anything about me and – perhaps – don’t really care.  i’ve found that i provide a caretaker role for a lot of my relationships and rarely is someone interested in how i am.  i have a few people that truly seek this understanding and i appreciate this; unfortunately, they make me aware of how many people don’t embody this compassion and push me further and further away.  i’m sure that i perpetuate this in my behavior and i hope that i can end this was soon as i am able.

no apologies on this post – i’m feeling a bit isolated but it will pass.  perhaps it’s the rain – perhaps i should just open the window and let it fall, knowing it has its purpose and it will pass in time.

a long time gone

well it’s been over four months since i’ve posted anything on this blog. in those months, i found myself spending more time deleting spam comment than actually contemplating what i would write about. i dropped off the map – the radar went dead. in a way, i was happy – the blog was a link to something that i’ve been growing increasingly more tired of: technology.

this tiredness is only due to the essence of technology itself. perhaps equally to blame is the fact that i exist in a partially computer dependent workplace.  this is especially so as we move into the colder and wetter winter months when the garden and farm are sleeping.  so i spend my time in my office doing random bits – typically on the computer.  so when i lock the door behind me, i rarely want to sit down and express myself via keyboard.

however, what is more is that i am content doing other things that push writing a post to the bottom of the free time to-do list.  i’ve been jumping head first into reading my permaculture design manual, spending time with ashley, making cakes, working on my truck, scheming a pottery wheel, designing a home climbing wall, actually securing a home (so now you can all come visit), planning a chicken coop, applying for the mendocino master gardener program, making necklaces from found natural objects, planning the gardens, spending time with my most lovely interns, and generally living a personal life that incorporates more “doing” and less “describing.”  i know that a balance is possible – but at the moment i prefer to lean more toward the former than the latter.

so this is my  apology for being less available in any major sense – blog-wise, phone-wise, e-mail-wise, and letter-wise.  i’m making a new effort with the final weeks of the new year.  this will be easy with all my free time that i’ll have in the next two weeks.  i’m at home in noblesville until the 30th, so don’t be a stranger.

until next time (hopefully not another four months)….

so here’s something strange…

it seems like everyone that i have been romantically involved with in the past, save one or two people, is married or in the process of getting married.  just this last two weeks, i have found out that two past partners are getting hitched.  i haven’t had that many romances [around six over the last nine years], but of those that i have had four are either engaged or married.  i’m not bummed out or anything like that – they are all amazing women and the fellas they are marrying are certainly just as amazing.  it’s just one of those “getting older” things – people are at that age where getting married make sense.

and i suppose that it’s strange because of where i am right now – namely, being very, very far away from anything close to marriage.  it has been about three and a half years since my last long-long term relationship – one that approached the topic of serious long-term commitment.  a relationship is so foreign to me right now that i can’t truly appreciate someone getting married.  i’ve been focused on my happiness for so long that i have to work at thinking about someone else being part of it for the rest of my life.  not that i’m pessimistic, it’s just very foreign.  i’m definitely at a point where a relationship would be awesome and i feel like i’ve been out riding fences for too long.

it’s funny to think about the people that you love intensely for a time in your life and then lose touch with.  i was doing the dishes several days ago and i thought about all those moments when i was with someone – lying in bed and thinking about how long i would know this person in this context.  it always seemed like it would last forever.  love and romance is really amazing.

i’m a dangerous driver

this morning i realized that i always want to fall asleep while driving.  it gets quiet in the car, the music is humming quietly, and the lines on the road pass in measured rhythm.  often it’s a struggle to keep from nodding off.  i also think that it’s because i so rarely drive these days and the whole process is about as boring as any process could be to me.  i could be jumping out of the willow tree into the pond or building a soap mold.  but nah, i’m in a car and i’m completely zoned out.  usually i have people that i can talk with about whatever there is to talk about.  but this morning, after waking up all my car mates from our cuddle puddle in the backyard of my friend’s house, everyone was stone silent or sleeping on the ride home.  i had to consciously tell myself not to fall asleep.  we were in sebastopol for a bocce tournament and a all-round evening of merry-making.  i suck at bocce.  we lost in our first tournament game 9-0.  luckily i wasn’t bothered due to some delicious sangria that doron provided. 

so what are my options?  not drive – drink coffee/red bull – drive a bit and then take a nap.  i’ve tried them all.  but maybe the answer is just preparing myself for it to be really boring to drive for several hours.  i dunno, cars are stupid anyway.

technology and i

since i’ve been in california, i’ve really started to lose touch with anything tech.  i hardly ever use my computer.  my camera is packed up more often than not.  i watch no t.v.  i lost my ipod on the train out here and never really cared that it was gone.  i think its because there is so much else that i do on a daily basis and because there are so many people doing so many different things around me.  to sit down and write a post or even an e-mail has become incredibly boring.  this is good in that i could probably get rid of most of my technology tomorrow and be alright.  i’ve been turning my cell phone off for days at a time and not missing it.  it’s bad in a way because i’m more out of touch with the world beyond hopland than ever before.  must achieve balance!

but on the up and up, i finally figured out the problem in communication between my camera and flickr.  for the longest time, i would shoot photos in high resolution but would lose quality when i uploaded them to flickr.  through controlled experiments, i’ve found that iphoto is the problem.  if i put the photos on flickr right off my camera, there are no troubles.  but when i upload to iphoto and then to flickr, it gets all small.  so the plus is that i can address the problem from here and get back to shooting photos.  the downside is that most of my old photos are only on iphoto and can’t be restored to their original bigness.  but i guess i don’t really need big photos for everything.

now it’s off to oakland for the permaculture convergence!  yah whoo!

bees, broken computers, and the south pole

well i got an alternate position in to work at the south pole.  i guess that’s the ideal setup for me right now because i’m not sure what i want to do come october.  a few nights ago, we watched a movie called “why we fight” about war and the development of the military industrial complex.  raytheon - the company that does the south pole jobs – was mentioned specifically as one of the major armament industries behind the wars that we fight.  sure, they make burgers at the south pole, but they also make bombs and are major supporters of the current wars in iraq and afganistan.  they should be – they make money off of them.  so here’s the crux:  i could use raytheon as a means to get down to the south pole and to new zealand.  but they would be using me equally so to do a shitty job for four months and i would be putting energy into a company that thrives to a large part on the destruction of life, violence, and the active perpetuation of war.  my conscious and my ethics say that i should bail on the antarctica things all together.  the other thought is a conversation that i had with my friend benjamin the other day.  we were talking about the state of the world (peak oil, the crash, etc.) and how it throws good people in to a ethical dilema.  in a way, i am opposed to flying these days – or even excessive travel – in that it consumes a massive amount of fuel.  flying to antarctica and the the countries following it would be contributing to a problem that i am working to solve.  on the other hand is the fact that i want to do this travelling and adventure-making, even more so now because i might not have the option for international travel in a post-petroleum world.  so here we are:  selfless or selfish.  on one side i can be part of the solution by not participating and stick around here to learn more about how i can do more to be a force for change, but i have to give up on that adventure.  on the other hand, i can just put my ethics on hold for a bit and travel while i can, even if it pushes that much deeper down the hole of societal crash – not to mention putting off my education for post-crash education a year or two.  right now i’m torn, but i’m leaning for the decline.  i don’t know though.

 and my laptop died.  about a week and two days ago, the harddrive tanked completely.  i took it to the mac guys in santa rosa and they are in the process of putting a bigger hard drive (100GB) and recovering all my non-backed up data.  it’s going to be a pricey fix, but i thought about two things right before i green lighted it.  1.) i don’t know anyone that is here or that i’ll be seeing soon that would be able to salvage all my photos, music, documents, etc.; 2.) i wanted to save my machine if possible because i read an website about what happens to trashed computers.  i could have said fuck it and saved for a newer and cooler macbook pro (esp. since i have a fancy new job and no rent to pay – or anything to pay for that matter).  but i thought that i’d keep one less computer out of a hazardous waste dump.  but i’m paying for it.  hopefully it’ll be worth it.

this post is somewhat of a bummer.  here’s a good thing.  i took a bee keeping class last weekend and it was awesome.  we have a hive here at the center and i’ve been learning to take care of the bees.  i don’t really care about getting honey out of the deal – i just like the process of beekeeping.  and i’ve been trying to plant the garden and farm accordingly.  one of the interns is really into bees as well and we’ve planted buckwheat, which the bees love.  its pretty awesome and important since bee populations have been crashing.  given that nearly all of our fruit and vegetable food is dependent upon bee pollination for existance, i’ve been talking up keeping bees.  you don’t have to eat their honey – you can if you’d like – but it’s more like providing habitat for an endangered species of animal.  with all the shit that we put into the environment – pesticides, herbicides, pollution, etc. – it’s the least we can do to take care for the buggers now and again.

gold to me

it’s funny to experience transitions in perspective.  for instance, what is size?  when i lived in noblesville, i thought it was a “small” town.  there wasn’t a lot to do and i alway found myself wanting more to be going on all the time.  now i’m in hopland and noblesville seems like a far off land of constant activity.  hopland is, approximately, 815 people strong and takes about 5 minutes to walk through.  not at all bad – i really like it.  there aren’t many options so there are never any hard choices.  it’s just funny how we create definitions what things are.  again, what a “small town” is for instance.  as for an update:  all is well.  work is constant in the garden and on the site in general.  the cherries are more and more ripe each day and we’ve been feasting on artichokes.  i’ve got some wheels now (thank you ms. ashley) and will be adventuring out more and more.  i’ve decided that the oak dotted hills that roll through mendocino county – covered with wildflowers, tall grasses, and large boulders – are perhaps some of the most beautiful and peaceful things i’ve ever seen.  i suggest you visit to see for yourself.

walkie walkie talkie talkie

ehhh – yeah. well this last weekend i went to bloomington. i worked all week and then woke up on saturday to two inches of fresh snow and an hour drive ahead of me. i was planning to go to ari’s street medic training course but found myself laking motivation to commit. but i sucked i up and drove down with the understanding that i could turn around at any time without judging myself the lesser.

i got there about 45 minutes late, but right on time. everyone was late so i didn’t miss a thing. all and all, it was an awesome experience. sure it was 10 hours on saturday and sunday – all sitting in wooden chairs in a harmony classroom. i had to get over a couple things. first was my stereotypes of the punk culture. i have no problem with punk kids, just as i have no problem with any other scene. i just get a little hung up on how serious people take their persona in any scene. this is especially true for punk kids geeking out on protest street cred. there were more than enough “action” names thrown around with corresponding bandannas covering faces and radical jargon. i guess i would have probably felt the same at a FFA training with everyone trying to be the coolest farmer in the circle. but i managed to remember that i was there to learn and not judge people. it’s instinctual, but it still bothers me when i catch myself doing it (by the end we all dropped our efforts to impress – myself included – and i appreciated everyone there) second, i had to get over the whole fear of learning a new thing that i’m not immediately good with. there is a lot of memorizing involved with medicine. each illness or injury has a different set of symptoms and treatments. i think i took about 4o pages of handwritten notes and i plan on adding more. finally, i had to just get over being there for both of my days off. it sucks to go without a day of relaxing.

but i learned a heap and feel inspired to actually be a street medic. on sunday, we did some great role plays (with fake rubber bullets, padded batons, “pepper” spray, “tear” gas, and arresting officers) to put it all together. my running buddy and i sucked really hard. all of our protesters were pepper sprayed and then we were pepper sprayed while trying to help them. i have to say that i wanted to punch the teacher who were being the police. but i learned from my mistakes. another awesome result of the weekend was my comitment to get my CPR, wilderness first responder, and wilderness EMT certifications. it will be a serious investment of money, but i see it as valuable and there are more than enough courses available in norcal. i’d love to be able to handle any situation that comes to me.

i also got my kombucha up and running again thanks to bergs. it’s brewing away right now in the kitchen. i also heard an awesome band called catfish haven and found out that neil hamburger will be at rhino’s this coming sunday. i know that some people love neil, but i’m not quite sold so i don’t know if i’ll be there. until next time, boo yah.

on the road.

right – it’s been awhile.  good news: travels have been great – beautiful friends, beautiful landscapes.  bad news:  it’s going to be a bit longer.  i fly home tomorrow night and will try to update ASAP.  love and miss you all.