It's snowing! beneeci'!

ben-nah-ah-chih -- Arapaho for 'it's snowing'. This picture is from two days ago, but right now the scene is very similar -- gloomy half-lit slate-gray sky, tiny flakes falling outside the window. I'm building a humongous snow slide on the back deck with the jittery overload of energy that results from never doing anything other than sitting in front of a computer screen moving squiggles around all day. As soon as I add the current snowfall to my slide-to-be heap, I'll post a pic of that too. Another several inches of very dry snow have fallen -- some of it fine, some fluffy, all magical somehow. The glory of snow days in elementary school must engrain such strong happy associations in our minds that even an extra hour of commute time doesn't sour the joy at the first sight of white through the blinds in the morning...

Momentum of Mediocrity

My stomach twists again at another decision to join the faceless
the maze of fences in my backyard --
the soccermom utopia of my neighborhood --
the constant disappointment that we can't afford some new unnecessary thing --

This is not what I believe in.
This is not what I work for.
This is not who I am.

When does the weight of compromise become too insidious to ignore?
When did I agree to a lifetime indentured to posessions I don't believe in?
How do I cancel that contract without losing the one who makes my life worthwhile at all?

I don't;
I swallow it again.
Leave the television on.
Leave.

Dahnsin

Dahnsin -- Ghanaian for dancing -- but the kind that requires (or exhales) continuous innovation, that seems more near abandonment of self than choreography. The last two hours I spent dahnsin to Zimbabwean music complements of Zivanai Masango, a very talented and bright-smiled singer and musician who lives in Boulder, a very good friend of a very good friend of mine (Banana, the also-brightly-smiling woman in the picture). It was the sort of music which can be resisted for only a finite period of time. It was in a coffeeshop on Pearl Street and the sweater that made perfect sense given the freezing temperatures around here became embarassingly drenched with sweat by the end of the night -- but I feel so alive, so entirely refreshed, that strangers thinking me on the verge of cardiac arrest seems but a small price to pay. Since it was at a coffeeshop I was not expecting to be swept up in such an exhilerating wave of energy and joyousness, not at 9pm on a Thursday night, but such is the magic of Zevenai's gift -- and Boulder's culture, in which giving oneself up to near-spiritual joy in complete public is not only acceptable, it's contageously encouraged.

Banana refers to it as Couple World -- the strange vortex of inertia that keeps people in a relationship (particularly a marriage, of which she is a veteran) at home every night when there is so much life to be lived on the other side of the comfortably closed door. My life practically reversed in that regard when Brian and I became a unit, since pre-him I spent most of my time amusing (some would say distracting) myself with the unending stimulation of caffeine, adventure, and the more incriminating common companions of both. Part of the Couple World Vortex stems from the contentment of knowing my warm sweet loving cuddly husband is waiting to hold me on the couch, which just has to be a good thing -- but given time, that part that can only breathe on a dance floor starts to strain against another night exactly like the one before and the one to follow.

I suppose the restlessness that has motivated so many interesting experiences is both an asset and a liability. For tonight -- that pulse of life, that exhileration -- Banana, Boulder, and the entrancing rhythms of Zivanai Masango overcame the intertia that keeps my spare time in a rerun, and I could not be more grateful.

hé'ih'iisíisíico'óótonéí3i

This one word means ´Somehow they had already caught sight of him.´I love the fact Arapaho can cram that many ideas into one single word. Here´s the breakdown:
hé'ih'iis-
indefinite past perfect tense indicating that the event happened once and was completed at some point in the distant past, and that the order of the word´s parts will be reversed from how the same idea would be said in common speech; this corresponds to ´had already´in the translation
-íis-
how; combined with the last part of the word, this makes it mean ´somehow´
-íico'óóton-
for something alive to discover something alive; this limits the options for the ending that can come next
-éí-
the more important living thing(s) is or are doing something to the less important living thing(s)
-3i
they; refers to the more important living thing(s), whether they are acting or acted upon; in this case they are acting, which you know because the morpheme before was -éí-
-the last two parts together, éí3i, means it is an ´iterative´tense, which combined with the ´how´gives the connotation of the unknown in the word ´somehow´

Had this same sentence been in a conversation instead of a narrative, the order of the parts would be reversed, and there would be no special marker to indicate that the people acting were more important than the person they were acting upon, although all the other information would still be there -- the person (which means I, you, or he) and number (we, you all, or they) of actors and acted upon, as well as whether they´re alive and whether they´re involved in the conversation. If you change any one of those things, the word changes too, and some things will change differently according to whether or not you changed something else too.

Since the pronunciation is dictated by the sequence of sounds, the parts would sound different in conversational speech too. This means the same idea would be communicated using what would sound like an entirely different word according to whether it is a story or a conversation. Pretty much everything is like that; a single part of a word (a morpheme) may always mean something like past tense, but where it comes in the word and how it sounds changes according to whether the sentence is in a story or a normal conversation and whether it´s a postive statement, a negative statement, a command, a question, something you aren´t sure of, and on and on.

Because Arapaho has very few sounds, a lot of morphemes sound identical to boot. English does that too -- you can blow an exam, a boxer may land a blow on his opponent, you can blow on soup, in speech at least something can be blow the table, which sounds almost identical when said naturally. Just like Arapaho, English speakers also know which blow we mean according to the other words around it. The big difference is that we have 26 letters -- 5 of which, the vowels, have 12 different pronunciation options that differentiate meaning, like telling the difference between cot and caught, which gives us a total of about 33 sounds to use to make our words distinct. Arapaho has half that many sounds to work with, with an extra difference being the high or normal pitch in which the vowel is said -- and the result is that tons of words sound exactly the same and can only be understood once you know what the stuff around it means in the specific order it´s in.

My point: learning this language is like learning Martian. If only a European linguist had documented the complexity of Native American languages before it was decided that natives had the minds of children, that linguist would have been utterly convinced that only a very complex mind could decode such a sophisticated system -- and our fathers´fathers´fathers would have been amazed by their intelligence and wisdom. Then Thanksgiving would have been remembered as the feast to thank the wise natives for smartening up the stupid Europeans who´d kept dying until they were taught everything they needed to know, instead of becoming a celebration of excess, laziness, and America´s self-proclaimed right to God´s Blessing.

My less preachy point: this is why I won´t be finishing the translated conversational database by the end of this semester like I promised to. I can´t remember the multiplicity of rules well enough to even identify what I should look up to find the translation (in the same way if you wanted to know what ´bought´meant you´d need to already know that the dictionary listing is under ´buy´). So this is my excuse for not getting an A in my PhD class this semester.

And given all that -- Yay that the linguistically gifted Native Americans were willing to help the linguistically far more simple-minded visitors survive, and Yay that Americans have managed carving out paid holidays that consecrate excessive eating and watching football.

The Eternal Contract

Two years ago, Brian and I threw a 3-day party to celebrate our marriage since we could not afford a real wedding. Our friends' wedding presents were the cost of their lodging and a whole lot of their time, particularly the very generous many who took care of logistics like location, decoration, food, ceremony, music, and sufficient places to sleep for all 35 of us. We rented one huge house in Breckenridge for 3 nights and everyone took a hiatus from life to come relax and be happy. Since we had no money for a family wedding, the tint of the celebration was distinctly less white than most weddings are. It made for some really great memories (or lack thereof), specifically involving (or failing to involve) the hot tub and the fire pit.

Today is Brian's 34th birthday, so as a birthday present to him I am framing what I promised and hanging it in the bathroom by the TV (where it is guaranteed to be read many times a day). For the same reason I'm posting it here -- if you read this and then we all hang out and you notice I'm failing to love him in every way I can, by all means please point it out. :o)

Brian,
I promise to be a loving and faithful wife, to comfort you, to be patient with you, and to be gentle, kind and honest in good times and in bad.

I promise to respect your right to define yourself and to help you become the person you want to be.

I promise to hold you every night before you sleep and to kiss you every day.

I promise to remember you are first and foremost my friend, and to love you with my whole heart in every way I can.

Fetch

Life gestures to me in his eyes
beckoning me to movement
eager and expectant and critically alive

He pounces again at the ball
to remind me
how perfectly he's behaving,
how politely silent he
fixes his level gaze
hard into mine

He makes me put down my book and
engage
so now with sticky fingers I
cannot recapture the current
of the poetry

He plunges again --
I must put down the pen and live --
so the poem ends

dissipation of the beloved

the raging of frustration
when no words can give it boundaries
that fury that the endless effort never meets the
endless need

I orchestrate my martyrdom
supine for crucifiction
immobilized by anger I
can not afford to feel

because a mind I live for
does not see I would give anything
does not see betrayal senseless
does not know me for myself

frustration now is anger at the atrophy of sense
so this leather is a comfort in my masochistic punishment
but not enough
not spent enough
for her to trust I care

Daunting Days of Winter

I recently discovered at least 2 people have actually read this blog, so I am now inspired to post some of the terribly much I've written. Here's a poem I wrote when I was 15 about Autumn's end.

The summer days are over, now,
And I must face with dread
The strenuous and lengthy months
Stretching far ahead
So I will think now only
Of flowers, Spring and birth
And look with calmly happy eyes
On Summer’s faded mirth.
-- Fall of 1990

Breathing Cinder

Breathing cinder, pulse to ashes,
ashes, slip to Autumn sky --
echo, blood, through silent hillsides,
endless moment
stop to sigh

-9/17/06

Trips across demographics

I apologize in advance for the weird formatting of this blog post. I can't get Blogger to let me design the page how I want, or to de-link these blue underlined bits and all that jazz. I guess I should give up and learn Dreamweaver so I can design my own from html up. In any case, please try to disregard the spatial weirdness. If I don't just post this the way it is, it may be months before I get anything else up here. Sorry. And now the post:

August was a whirlwind. Spanish Camp found Kelson and me in Santa Fe, New Mexico, traveling around as if we were really in Mexico learning vocab off flashcards.


Two days after returning we left for a roadtrip to upstate New York, where Maddy and Tucker fell in love with the Adirondack lakes.

We went to an amazing wedding at a vineyard in western New York on the way home. Three days after returning home from from the roadtrip I flew off to see a good college friend be married in a Buddhist temple. The reception was amazing -- endless sushi at a prestigious sushi and jazz club in Berkeley. The day after I got back, the semester began, and it's been the normal sprint ever since. My classes are great -- Diachronic Linguistics about the history of language and an independent study to learn (and learn to make a database out of) the language of the Arapaho on Wind River Wyoming. I carry around flashcards now too. No reason to waste time waiting for the bus.

Truth and Love in 10th Grade

Flipping through my old notebooks I just found a poem I wrote at the age of 16, before the intense stuff that re-wrote my world in senior year. I have very few poems from that time remaining, but they show an endearing naivety, a fearless vulnerability I am suprised I could articulate (or even still had) in 10th grade. There is no date on the paper, but there are several clues to the time of its origin: the leaf imagery makes reference to a day I spent sitting under a golden-orange maple tree while I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull to a boy with whom I was deleriously in love (the 'dark eyes of Youth' are his). The literary style also strongly reflects the poets I adored -- the Meaningful Capitalization of Dickenson and the Whitmanesque ruminitive feel and diction of it all. The proudly striving confusion is another strong clue, since that paints the backdrop (and ocassionally the foreground) of adolescence. The name in the byline was mine when I wrote it.

Feel free to share the poem with anyone, as is always the case -- I can't seem to get up the gumption to submit my writing anywhere, so my childhood dream of professional publication seems about as distant now as it was then.
______________________________

Youth in question...
Peace and panic brothers...
Death, dream, romance --

I cry to understand, but the dome of night can offer only echo.
I strive to understand, but failure drenched in exhaustion seems my final companion.

I call to you,
but Learning to Love reveals itself
Petal by Petal
As a mystery feuled by the glitter of tears.
Ah, peace!
Ah, me!
What am I but the flight of a fallen leaf,
Unfettered but unfree...
I call to him,
and Night in the dark eyes of Youth
has intrigued the song of my spirit.

Unto the sky I send again my trembling demand --
I seek Freedom --
I seek to be Free --
(And the rustle of the cracking leaves seems a simple laughter to the
rain of my confusion...)

That which is Truth, I follow you.
That which is Love,
I sing your pain complete.

-Maryanne DeHart, 1991

The Wedding Frosty

On May 25th, 2005, Brian and I did something not often done over lunch hour: we got married. We hadn't even discussed it that morning -- it came up over email, the suggestion to up and commit already, in the form of an Affidavit of Common Law Marriage provided by a health insurance site. I sent him an email at about 10:00 in which I suggested half-joking that we print one out and just do it -- and he took me up on it. We had lunch at the cheapest place on the Hill, the legendary Tra Ling's, before going to down to the Clerk & Recorder's Office. In Colorado there is no requirement for a judge or religious person to officiate, and one is legally married with the $8 document recording fee. It's trippy and I'm glad more young people don't know about it, because it's extremely easy to do.
We did take a slightly long lunch, because we went to Wendy's for celebratory Frosties prior to going back to work. I didn't feel very well so I didn't start it, I just stuck it in my freezer. I usually didn't feel well at work so I didn't eat it the next afternoon or the next, and I eventually decided to just save it for a year like they always do with wedding cake. It lived in a ziplock marked "Wedding Frosty" in the freezer and it moved houses with us -- then we threw a party for our 1st anniversary and everyone was invited to taste it.

A word from the wise: never, never eat a 1-year-old Frosty. The taste makes one think of the black, tarrish, dirty heaps of snow that survive in really big cities, basically wet frozen crunchy mud. Getting married over lunch hour, however, I can recommend very highly.

Tumnus Grins Again

Every Spring this happens -- the long slow drag of darkness that typifies Colorado winters (in my mind and in my circadian rhythm) finally burns off like mist in the sunlight... the sound of birdsong outside my window greets me before the intrusion of the alarmclock can jar me out of my dreams, and I awaken with energy and optimism. It is always a great relief, the coming of Spring.

This little smiling fellow is Tumnus, a faun drawn for me by a children's book illustrator named Michael Hague whose daughter I knew in high school. Michael drew Tumnus in pencil and painted him on the title page of a children's book he'd published, which he gave me for graduating from college. It makes me very happy that it was the thought of me that inspired this little fellow -- a sprite this mischevious and utterly joyful... to be the cause of his creation can only be a matter of honor. Today is May 2nd and Tumnus is awakening agains omewhere in the deep quiet of my psyche, awakening with a grin and a wink to the wet green world.

Happier Things Coming

I got a job for the summer! Yay!

I'll be writing an XML database to help preserve the Arapaho language. There's a website about the Arapaho project right here:
http://www.colorado.edu/csilw/newarapproj2.htm

If you go to the 'Language' tab at the top and click around in 'Archives' you'll find exactly what I'll be manipulating: spoken Arapaho conversations, very short ones, that I'll tag by part of speech, link to the sound file, and put in this platform-independent database that anybody can search and use. It's perfect preparation for Adventure Linguist research, the conservation of endangered languages -- yet another fascinating career trajectory. The cool thing about language documentation is that little-known languages in need of rescue are usually in distant, remote places -- so if I get experience at being useful in saving them, maybe I'll get to go to distant places and do interesting things AND get paid for it. Sounds worth trying for to me...

Felgeroth and the Spartans Fly True

It is the end of a tiring week.

With the help of Melissa Dawe, I managed to write a program that makes little birds fly after each other, but not into the sun. The golden leader Felgeroth follows my direction through the mouse icon. The little bird pictures change if the bird is flying left or right, following its leader.
Melissa found the pictures on the web, converted them to bitmaps, standardized the color of the sky and the background of each bird bitmap, made a golden bird by some photoshopish alchemy, made reverse images so the birds could flip around, and gave me a lot of advice and encouragment to do it. It feels like such a triumph.
Kelson named my leader Felgeroth on Saturday morning when I was teaching him how to write in C++. He saw my assignment and asked if I would teach him to program, so I accepted the challenge. It took some swift gymnastics to translate computer programming logic metaphorically into something a 14 year old boy could relate to, process and remember, but it was a great excersize for me. He understood and asked attentive questions, and after a little he sat there and typed in the commands, copying and pasting and paying attention to detail. It was really quite fun. I can't wait to show him the program in action.This is a gorgeous gnarled old tree Brian and I saw on our hike with the puppies last weekend.

Maddy is bringing out a whole new, vicious side of Tucker.

This is a crocus planted in our front yard. Spring is springing -- it even rained yesterday.

Sleepy Sunday with Mom and Kelson

This Saturday I had the luxury of spending the night with Mom and Kelson here in Boulder. It was very relaxing, finally having a chance to play The Farming Game with Kelson and to play double Solitaire with Mom. I am currently showing Mom how to make a Blog, mostly as a means of procrasticanting about the computer programming homework I'm supposed to be doing. It's important in my opinion to keep in mind why we bother working so hard; peace, respect, love -- what makes it all worthwhile. If we don't make time to remember what it's for, our motivation loses fuel, and life becomes nothing but exhausting. Yay for Saturday...

Happy Pi

We just finished the 7th annual Pi Party -- today is actually March 16th, not March 14th, but the party had to wait for a Friday. I've got this weird thing with Pi; the number fascinates me. I first started thinking about it when I read Carl Sagan's Contact, the ending of which differs from the movie version. I think I've sort of misremembered this over time, but the ending of the book involves a message written deep in the digits of Pi, when represented in binary in a matrix of a certain dimension -- something about a perfect circle of ones in a field of zeros. This hidden message in Pi is the alien's real proof that he's telling the truth, because a message in the number Pi would imply an engineer of physics itself. Sagan was an athiest as I remember, but this idea that another species could somehow design and alter the primary rules like that -- that's hard to imagine. Pi is mystical to me because it is an unchanging ratio, continuous, static and yet forever undefined value. I love the fact that it shows up in so many places. Mostly it's a deep admiration for the constancy of it: in a thousand years someone will throw a stone in a pond and the wave it creates will have a circumference equal to Pi times its diameter. That and it's a cool bar trick.

The picture is of Chet, Brian and myself in a chair lift last fall, probably at the Breckenridge ski resort, I think taken last October. We've been up in the mountains tons lately too so I thought I'd post this. I love these two.

Bavarian Postcard to Self

Self-

Remember the lake halfway up the Zugspitze where the mystic fog swallowed up the islands? As you read these words, whatever immediate concerns dictate your mood, remember that they are tiny and brief compared to the scene on the mountainside. Think too on your next journey, but know that the thick of distraction is good solid adventure too. The As on the screen are not worth weeks of wanting to cry, so step it down if you get there, and replaying conflict or hostility just prolong the injury so don't do that either. You have what you have searched the world for right there right now -- peace, respect, love. Value it and enjoy it -- you made your life this way, and it will keep beign satisfying if you keep making it so!!

-From Bavaria over my Christmas vacation

Hooky on the Bus

By means of celebration, I am playing hooky while on the bus, going (as fast as I can) from class at CU to my home in Westminster. Normally this time is part of my homework time – I usually edit the very engaging PhD dissertation of my fantastic friend Melissa unless I have some pressing homework which I will have no other time to complete. Point being, this is an hour I spend on obligation, and writing a blog entry is a luxury.

But it’s a luxury I’ve earned.

I just finished presenting my term project for my graduate Linguistic Phonetics class. I stayed up until midnight last night finishing it and had to take meds to get unconscious afterwards, so I am exhausted this morning – which amusingly enough ended up being a good thing, because I was too tired for my autonomic nervous system to trigger the uncontrollable trembling that always accompanies public speaking for me. Translation: I was rather involuntarily relaxed, and I spoke a bit slower. That was a good thing because this was the most ludicrously convoluted system of sound conjugations of any language assigned to students; having finally finished it, I feel it a bit of a complement to have been chosen for this particular presentation. There were about 10 phonological rules, many of which only applied if certain other rules applied, many of which undid (or redid) the action of the rule before... in order to explain it I obviously had to understand it with no human to explain the complexities to me, just a book whose sentences I read again, again, again. I wrote tables of examples for each rule, explanations for each change in each word in each sequence… The fact that this paragraph has become tediously boring is undeniable proof that my fellow students must have been as fatigued as I was by the end. I’m done, though, and I’m certain I did as well on it as I could. It feels like June.

This last week I have not gone to my job, rather only attended classes and done homework every day. I planned to do this as a means of spending as much time as possible with our new puppy, but it ended up being a lifesaver in an unanticipated manner – I had fallen quite behind in homework in the darkness of a brief but incapacitating depression, and I was utterly overwhelmed (and terrified by it) a week ago, but now I feel like I can do it again – perhaps even to the caliber of which I am proud. I need to develop strategies to maintain functionality when the force of fear and sadness derails my ability to think; there is an amazing professor in my department who used her work as a haven from the emotional devastation of her husband’s death, who immersed herself in her intellect to minimalize the inescapable constancy of sorrow, and her example gives me hope I did not think existed.

Real Life and Practice Kids

That last post was, unsurprisingly, nearly a month ago. Life resumed with the furious pace to which I am now somewhat resigned -- I'm taking lots of classes, working a lot, and having a hard time dealing with my Mom's advancing Parkinsons Disease. I've spent a good deal of time unable to function myself, just wandering around trying not to cry, involuntarily composing poetry full of roses and books about dying. Distraction, frequently in the form of a hot tub under the stars, has become a very valuable commodity.
We are considering a new addition to the family whose presence is certainly quite the engaging distraction -- no, not a kid, but another practice one. She doesn't have a name -- we've gone through a number and haven't found the right one yet. She's a mini Aussie like Tuck is but she's bigger -- or she's certainly going to be -- and she's called a black tri, whereas he's a blue merle. We have until Friday to decide whether or not she's our dog waiting for us to find her. It's mostly Tucker who is the problem -- he doesn't quite realize that we're doing this so he can have a friend. He seems to see her in a much more characteristically brotherly way -- as competition. He'll always be my first baby... and the idea of investing countless hours of training in another one is utterly daunting!

Having missed it the first time...

So there's a problem intrinsic to trying to document an adventure while you're having it: time. You can either be seeing things you've never seen or writing about them.

I am now back at my happy light in the cold den of my sprawling house, having finished not only my entire trip, but the endless trip home and a day of sedentary recovery as well. While I was on the train during travels I did type up some text, and everywhere I brought with my little pencilled journal, so I'm now typing that up too -- but I have no coherent story of the rest of my days. For the sake of efficiency, here's what came after what I've written about on here so far:
1/6/07, Saturday, Train from Paris to Munich, saw historic buildings in Munich, went to City Museum to learn about Nazi Reich history and see a zillion weird OLD instruments
1/7/07, Sunday, Guided bus tour around Munich, rest of the day at the Dachau concentration camp
1/8/07, Monday, used a car in a carshare program to drive to the Real Disney Castle, Neuschwanstein, at the foothills of the Alps (though they're not called foothills and they're not exactly hills -- more like the mountains just START, no transition -- and we hiked around a lake
1/9/07, Tuesday, relaxed and did more stuff in Munich, bought presents (mostly for me), went to see Eragon dubbed in German1/10/07, Wednesday, took train across countryside south to the Alps, took train and gondolas to the top of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany -- saw a disarmingly gorgeous lake in the fog1/11/07, Thursday, took Munich municipal transit as far south as possible to the 550-year-old Andrechs monastery and brewery in a peaceful little town, hiked through wet forests, saw the gorgeous Ammersee lake, bought chocolate; upon returning to Munich went to see the Olympiapark designed 35 years ago for the Olympics; climbed the hill there that is made of war detritus to see the glittering panorama of the city at night1/12/07, Friday, left Bernd's at 8:15 to take subway to airport, flew 10 hours across ocean to Dulles in Washington D.C. -- disembarked to accompany my luggage through customs but they screwed up and the whole flight's luggage took an hour to get to the place where we were supposed to take it through customs, so I missed my scheduled flight to DIA; finally took my luggage through and went to United's next departing flight for DIA, waited on standby, was the last standby person selected, went out to plane -- ended up being the exact same frigging plane I got off of two hours earlier; dozed sorely until Denver where Brian picked me up and brought me home to two dozen roses and a good night's sleepSo we get back to me sitting under my Happy Light, a full-spectrum lamp I use to regulate my circadian rhythm -- which helps to make me tired when I should be so I can sleep without chemicals and wake up with energy. It is wonderful to be back to Brian and free refillable water in restaurants, but I could not be more satisfied with these last three weeks. I'm halfway through typing up my handwritten journal so I'll probably make a long entry with that whenever I finish it. Rupert Brooke wrote a poem a hundred years ago that expresses the feeling of the daily grind when adventure and intensity have become the norm:

A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming at the verge of strife --
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

And then came the puking part

I forgot to describe the sickness part. I only went to one of the famed restaurants in Paris, and Jose ordered something he'd not had before -- boeuf tartar, forgive the spelling -- and it laid him out for two days. I tasted it. It looked like completely raw ground beef marbled with fat and the texture matched that, though it tasted a little cooked. We went there for lunch and we were all happy and healthy until Jose slammed awake at about 2am the next morning and sprinted unsuccessfully for the bathroom. I never had it as badly as he did, and it only got me the next afternoon while I visited Florencia's art studio.
Here is how I spent about half my time in Paris -- on a mattress on the floor of the bedroom of Jose and Florencia, my hosts, watching old movies on my laptop and having interesting conversations. We made it out of the apartment for two sets of whirlwind sightseeing, each set about 3 or 4 hours long, and in this fantastically efficient way we managed to knock out the stuff I really wanted to do: we went to Victor Hugo's house, to the Notre Dame, to the cafe where Hemingway and Fitzgerald hung out (which is now too ritzy to serve coffee in the evening, prefering the wine clientelle), and to the Eiffel Tower. Because we only went out at night, all my pictures of paris, with the exception of the ones at the grave yard I visited alone, are taken without flash, at night. I didn't mind terribly much not being able to spend days canvassing art museums in the traditional manner of a visitor in Paris; traveling necessarily implies digestive upset in life as I know it, and this way that experience was gotten overwith in the presence of a good friend with whom I wanted time to converse anyway. One of his friends, a fellow musician studying at the conservatory for which Jose lives in Paris, brought me roses to make me happy, and I because something near deliriously so.
It was a powerful experience to be around such amazing investments of human effort and time. The Notre Dame took 300 years and legions of architects and craftsmen, but the streets are lined with such herculean achievements. It is very strange as a product of the New World for me to walk avenues that were walked two thousand years ago by consciousnesses just like mine. It gives one a sense of... both of obligation and of meaning; if the people before me had burned their lives just sustaining them like I usually do, then there would be no sculpture, no massive feats of cooperation and resources. If I don't bother doing something more than providing for myself and consuming, then when I am dust, I will have missed an opportunity to improve what the next centuries inherit. The sense of meaning is born because I do have the option of creating something that will last, and affecting a woman walking past 1000 years later.

Puking in Paris

1/3/07 Jose’s Apartment, Le Marais area, Paris

Drinking a 33cl Coke in the cold little apartment of my hosts Jose and Florencia, the Brazilians I knew and enjoyed so much in Golden, Colorado. The floor is a red concrete or something that similarly communicates the hard January weather outside, and my native accustomedness to central heating is proving an annoying liability. There are books in four languages about art, music and philosophy lining the walls, and a stained-glass translucent contact paper over the windows that separate us from night on the sidewalks outside. I did not know until this morning that the average height of a building in Paris is six floors, or that the average width of the streets is a third the height of the buildings that line in (or really just seems to be) – for that matter I was expecting to at some point be able to photograph my first step on Parisian earth, but because it is not allowed to walk on grass planted in the squares, I have not yet encountered any earth I am allowed to step on; my definition was going to be ground not placed there, ground not synthetic like street paving or stone – but I think that was a naïve expectation, a result of my having grown up under endless Colorado skies with prairie stretching to eternity.

I am surprised also that I can miss my love so much and still be having such a fantastic time here. The clock on my computer remains trained to the days as they pass for him – it says now 3:51pm, so he is sitting (as am I) in front of a computer screen in a building in a city. I think of him often here – when Jose and I were walking tonight along the stone path that lines the walls of the River Seine, with the Notre Dame towering her impossible Gothic detail into the night above, Brian’s absence was as tangible as his presence should have been. Instead he sits now under florescent light with his charts full of tiny squiggly lines rolled up around him, most probably wishing he weren’t working, but by doing so making it possible for me to have the exquisite luxury of being here. He is the ally I never thought I would have, and that knowledge does not leave me.

Frankfurt to Paris, pictures to come

1/1/07 Von Frankfurt Nach Paris

In the Frankfurt Hauptbanhoff, the main train station, specifically seat 71 in car 267 of train 56 to Paris Est; now rolling backwards as it seems the remainder of my trip will be. The sky is a steely gray and it matches the metal, glass and concrete city to the T. Over the Main River now, pronounced ‘mine’, which is significantly narrower than the New River by Blacksburg. Most of the trees here are deciduous, meaning bare now in early January, and the thick wet air reminds me of leaves on the ground in the Virginia woods. Bernd has made the point that the Virginia climate and wilderness are very like those here in Germany.

The only colorful thing in the city itself seems to me to be the graffiti, which I personally find cheerful – identical in every respect to what rebellious teenagers do in every country I’ve visited. Bernd has told me that all big cities were mostly destroyed in World War II, and that all the ‘old’ city centers were rebuilt to reflect what they originally had been. The history here is simply unfathomably long to my American mind; I just walked out of the cathedral where the emperors of Germany were crowned, the kings of the kings of regions, before the New World was even known to exist by people on this side of the ocean.

The trains are bright red, clean, and very much on schedule. I have not paid for one of the express ones, but nonetheless the houses and woods outside flash by; I’m under the impression even slow trains go 150 km/hr, which at 1.6 km/mile is near 100 miles an hour.

I’ve finished the part of my trip with Bernd’s parents, and I’m going now south to Paris to visit Jose, his girlfriend Florencia, and hopefully Ricardo as well. Perhaps I shall unfold my map of France and guess the cities as they pass. At the moment all I see are fields of close-cut cultivated green on one side, highways with a dotted line separating oncoming lanes (as opposed to the double yellow line with which I’m familiar) and what look like factories, smokestacks billowing white into the slate sky. It is perhaps nearly time to trade my German dictionary for my French one, to get out my Paris guidebook. I’ve six hours on this train, perhaps 3 more with light to see countryside – I suppose I’ll stop writing and gaze out the window for a while…

A new Pledge of Allegiance for the New Year

Today Bernd and I had just finished walking through a castle built (the first time) about 900 years ago, and we were headed down the river valley back to his parents' house when the conversation somehow came around to the American custom of saying the Pledge of Allegiance in schools every morning. I personally disagree strongly with the custom, and most people I've known from other countries find it disconcertingly indoctrinating; people from countries with dictators in their recent history have told me that it reminds them of the propaganda and brain-washing techniques used to keep the populace subdued. If you've not been in a school for a while, it might surprise you too to see it -- even in the hallway people walking will freeze, assume a formal position (hand over heart) and stare up at the nearest flag or the blank wall on the other side of it before solemnly chanting the folowing phrases:

I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the United States of America
And to the Republic for which it stands:
One nation
Under God
With liberty and justice for all.

My primary objection is that it's firstly a promise to remain loyal to a symbol and a symbol is objectively meaningless, which makes its connotations variable and temporally weak. Swearing lifelong loyalty to a nation (which is obviously the intent of making kids repeat this statement 5 days of every seven, 9 months of every 12, for 12 years) is a very dangerous act too -- Martin Luther King Jr. stated beautifully that it is our moral obligation to defy those laws which are unjust, so promising to eternally support a human institution implies obeying the corrupt as faithfully as the wise, and blindly following the malevolent into their cruelty just as quickly as the kind into their generosity. The Nazi Reich is an excellent example of why this is such a bad idea -- few Americans remember (or ever knew) that Hitler was elected democratically before his power crept into the bitterest and most dangerous insanity, and the progression was slow enough that the normal people (possibly kindhearted, possibly intellengent, precisely like you in your humanity) simply went on promising loyalty, went on following and supporting the system they'd chosen as it slowly descended into treachery.

I decided to compose a pledge I could support, though of course I disapprove of asking people to mindlessly repeat any statement, whether or not they agree with it, without asking them to evaluate it for themselves first. The rhythm leaves something to be desired but I think I'm fairly satisfied with the ideas. Here's my version:

I pledge allegiance to the ideals
Of the United States of America:
To think before believing,
To consider all consequences,
And to act -- today --
With kindness and respect for all.

By ideals I mean the standards of behavior that allowed our nation's foundation to be as strong and benevolent as it originally was, not -- clearly -- the underlying principles of the choices we make now.

There, then, is my pledge for the new year -- my New Year's Resolution -- and if you do me the favor of holding me accountable for my promise, I will thank you. To think before believing, consider all consequences, and to act -- every day -- with kindness and respect for all.

Happy new year!