sliding down a pass called the rock garden – on your face, back, side and face in repeating sequence is not as painful as it sounds. i wouldn’t recommend going down that way…but whatever gets you to the bottom.
this weekend i went skiing.
more importantly, this weekend i went skiing on an active volcanoe. i’m not joking. this is, after all, new zealand.
a rotarian at a club i’m speaking at this week extended an invitation to go skiing with his family. his kids decided not to go but i joined him and his wife on the 4 hour drive to mt. ruapehu.
that was fridaynight. saturday morning bright and early we arrived at the slopes…happy valley for us beginners. there they gave me a quick lesson and i made my way back and forth across the mini slope. confidence bloomed. so much so that when the time arrived for me to take my beginners class i got bored and upgraded my lesson to intermediate.
confidence unwarranted i discovered.
my hosts decided that after lunch i should try out the lower mountain slopes – more difficult. this is where i came face to face (literarlly) with the rock garden. apparently my wedge wasn’t wedging enough and the seriously steep incline at the beginning of the run sent me sprawling again and again and again.
toward the bottom i was near tears. not from the pain of landing on my face. or from the pain of rolling over my poles. not from the pain of toppling over my host. (although partially from the guilt of running into him when he already had bruised ribs).
mostly just from frustration that i couldn’t get it. ready to head down and sulk my hosts refused to let me. instead she hauled me back up the lift – we talked about what was going wrong with my wedge and sent me back down again.
the second time was less face time. my wedge looked and felt better and as a result i had less snow stuffed down the neck of my shirt and down my pants. less…not none mind you.
about that time i headed back up for my lesson. one of the weaker skiers, i joined a group of two and we made our way down the same slope. this time it was much slower going (knowing how to wedge – or brake – helps that) but i did almost the whole thing standing up.
never mind the whiteout conditions…we couldn’t see anything but each other…with the horizon blending into the snow seamlessly the feeling is dizzying. but we managed.
i had a few other adventures but i’ll share those later.
Tags: me-ness
another day of bombings in lebanon and isreal, another day of foiled terrorist plots in the uk, another day of atrocities that will never make the news. and i marvel…marvel at the world and all its beauty and all the ways we seek to destroy that beauty.
it makes me sad.
no great revalation there i know but i look at my nieces and wonder what kind of world i am leavcing them to contend with. i think of my friends newly married, creating families of their own and am torn between a sense of sadness and hope.
S was excited last night, caught up in an idea of how he can make his world – the world – a better place. and we talked about it, threw out ideas, discussed funding…and at one point he laughed and told me to slow down, it was just an idea. but for me, the idea – the belief that such a thing exits and could be meaningful is almost as important as doing the thing itself.
almost.
so this morning there was a little confusion on my part…was i speaking or wasn’t i speaking at a rotary club for breakfast. turns out i was…and since i was awake and alert it all went well as far as i could tell. that is what waking up at 5:45 will do for you.
up my retunr…shortly before 9am i managed to talk to a friend online, book my ticket to australia, check to verify the visa is still valid (i applied earlier this year since i thought i’d be heading north then).
so it is a done deal. i am actually going north. of course now that i’m going the weather doesn’t seem quite as warm as i had originally thought…but onward i go…details to follow.
now i just have to pull myself together so i can go to work AND get some study done. this semester is crazy with the amounts of reading i’m doing.
Last night I dreamed george bush was a monster. Not in the figurative sense that I don’t agree with his politics or approach to international affairs, I mean literally a monster. Something scary to look at and terrifying to dream about.
His wasn’t the first nightmare of the night. Lucky me I woke up three times with a start. Once, managing to knock myself against the nightstand. After that one I kind of hovered on the wall – lights out – still seeing images from my dreams every time I blinked.
This isn’t the first night of terror…I’ve been sleeping poorly for a few months now. But its getting progressively worse. The nightmares are newish. Before the dreams were simply wild and realistic. Tiring. A lot like being awake and doing stuff while I’m supposed to be in bed resting, and then waking up to do stuff without having been in bed resting.
Any thoughts on how to banish dreams…or, more importantly, nightmares, would be greatly appreciated.
i have a confession. i used to rant about fox news with only a little bit of proof. i’d seen a story or two before and didn’t like the spin and called them swill and felt happily liberal doing so. and that’s wrong as a thinking person, journalist, and now researcher – i know better.
these days i do.
the reason i know better is that the only “cable news channel” i can get on my non-cable tv is fox news. i strained and strained to get bbc…but neither picture nor sound would cooperate. so late at night when i’m settling in, my only choice is fox news.
initially i watched it out of desperation. then, to rectify my faulty research on the matter of their credibility, and now…now i can barely stomach to look at them for more than a few moments.
i can’t stomach it because what others said and blindly followed is true. they are biased beyond belief. and while i could give a string of reasons that stretch from never seeing a democrat interviewed even when discussing something clearly split down partisan levels to never hearing a dissenting opinion or thought from the cast…
but most poignant to the moment…well that is isreal and lebanon.
in all fairness i didn’t watch a long time…i didn’t have the stomach for it…but i watched the scrolling headline bar at the bottom while trying to drown out the one-sided conversation they were having out loud.
56 isrealis killed. 1900+ rockets launched into isreal.
i watched long enough for the headlines to scroll once and return. and in that journey – not one word about lebanon.
not one word about the children killed by isreal, the women, the men. not one thing about the ground troops from isreal invading border towns. nothing about the decimated cities. the lack of water and supplies or the stunted time allotted to let humanitarian efforts into lebanon to help quell the rising death and sick toll.
somehow none of that was worthy for the scrolling headlines. none of that was necessary for the talking heads to point out.
i’d call them journalists but they aren’t – journalists look for opposing voices to present in an attempt to show a more complete story. fox news is just media…selected images flickering like a flourescent light gone crazy.
andy they have…gone crazy. or maybe they always have been. like some crazy kid on a seesaw with no one on the other end. even children’s games don’t work when they are one sided.
i move a lot…have moved a lot. folks joke around with me and call me nomad and claim that i don’t sit still, but if you trace it back it comes from my family. we were military. i say we were because it is a lifestyle and you can’t really divorce the job from the lifestyle. so when 2 or 4 years were up in one place for my dad…they were up for all of us and we loaded up and hit the road.
with each move you leave something behind.
sometimes tangible…a misplaced toy or broken dish…and sometimes it is much more important. for me it was friends.
i remember when we moved from killeen/fort hood. i spent that last night at my best friend’s house and in the morning when the family was all loaded up in the car they came to get me and i clung to laura until my dad gave me that tone and then i got in the car and faced the back window and waved and waved and cried and cried until we turned the corner and i couldn’t see her anymore.
girlfriends.
despite my tomboyish ways growing up, i still always managed to have some amazing women i my life. amazing minds. amazing wit. amazing creativity. amazing capacity for love. i have been blessed to meet and befriend and love some of the most amazing women on earth.
i say this today because sometime life gets away from me. i pack up my figurative (and sometimes literal) bags and leave on new journies. and the journies are amazing. they fill me with awe at the things i discover about the world…about myself. but journies don’t negate what was before…they don’t erase those important things left behind.
this trip abroad has reminded me how important it is to press my nose to the back window and keep waving…even after i’ve turned the corners. because it is my girlfriends who keep me grounded. they are the ones who let me be spastic and love me all the more for it. it is my girlfriends who share life and love and insanity and sanity with me.
it is my girls, like laura, who find a way not to be left behind…lost…they send letters, encouragement, experience, and love in my direction. and i am stronger for it.
getting food is a pain of course…especially since i am foot and bus bound…but ahh…when it is in my apartment unassembled…just a barrage of parts full of potential…i love food then.
bare.
naked.
but i love it more prepared and cooked. tonight i was starving and lazy. the only help in my state was that i went shopping today. so instead of little to choose from my fridge was bountiful.
and what i came up with…i really should have taken a photo. simple…but oh so delicious it took all of me not to eat what i set aside for tomorrow’s lunch.
lamb mince with onion and garlic, sauted spinach, fresh tomatoes, mixed into cous cous with some sprouting beans (not the same as sprouts…what beans look like as they become sprouts). anyway…it was delicious. i just thought i’d share.
there is an art shop on a major street in auckland that displays paintings and photos outside on the sidewalk to showcase work. one such photo is a black and white of a woman about to feed her child. most prominent is the child’s face but also visible is the woman’s breast. i stop every time i see that photo because i’m encouraged that people will see breastfeeding a child as the healthy and beneficial thing it is.
no such luck back home where i recently read an article about a parenting magazine ran a slightly “tamer “version of the above photo (from what i could tell from the description) on the cover of its magazine. aparently 1/4 of its customers were offeneded.
people wrote in and complained. one woman shredded it.
what diturbed me even more was that some of the complaining folks were actually breast feeding mothers.
bear with me for a moment as i reflect on the number of near naked boobs i’ve seen in my life in both print, tv and internet. i’m not talking porn…i’m talking beer, car and gum advertisements. i’m talking music videos, boxing/wrestling mactches and video games.
one woman actually said that breasts are sexual and that is all there is to it and she would hate for her husband or 13-year-old son to run across a boob they did not intend to see.
where do i even begin…aren’t breasts by design intended to create and disperse milk? sexuality is secondary. in my village in south africa i couldn’t number the times i saw a woman feeding her kid – without a second glance from anyone. there…breasts are utilitarian…now legs…that’s a whole other story.
but i digress. does that mean if her husband and son WANT to see a boob she is ok with that? and then realisitically…does she reallly think her 13-year-old would rather look at a still life of a lactating mammory with a kid’s head in the way rather than shakira’s or beyonce’s…lets be real.
but that is the great contradiction of america. we’ll take our family out to an eating establishment called hooters but berate a woman providing her child with the single healthiest food choice there is.
and it continues…my friend sent me an article about the passage of bill that would criminalize anyone who might help a minor cross state lines to avoid parental consent laws.
i’ll ignore for the moment the arguments for or against abortion and even age restricitions…two other things are sticking me much more sharply.
one, there is no evidence that this is even a problem. one backer of the bill said,
“If they are advertising, then it obviously at least happens,” said Senator John Ensign, the Nevada Republican who wrote the measure. “If it is happening 20 times a year, it is still worth doing to protect those parental rights and to protect those children from being in these kinds of situations.”
that’s like passing a law against kissing chickens cuz you heard someone on the radio say that in boston the young folks run aroun kissing chickens and get chicken-itis…what is it based on?
with all of the problems that are facing the US right now is this really where the focus of our congress needs to be – especially when it is based on nothing more than an attempt to eek away at roe v. wade?
the final kicker:
Those challenging the measure said they believed that the number of those who went out of state specifically to avoid parental notification laws was low. They said Congress should instead focus on sex education and counseling. A proposal to create new pregnancy prevention grants was defeated on a 51-to-48 vote.
we’ll fret and micromanage over the ability of a girl to get pregnant but don’t want to educate her so she might avoid that fate altogether…yeah…contradicitions…
Friday July 28, 2006 – 09:53pm (PDT)
my dad jokingly called me dr. the other day. it is his own personal nudging to think about school beyond school…classes beyond where i am. sometimes i joke back with him, playing with the idea out loud instead of just in my head. but yesterday i corrected him quickly. classes are starting to wear on me, i’m feeling the fatigue of the extra year of classes hurricane katrina and my study abroad have gifted me.
but today…ahh today…today i was reminded why i was so excited to go to graduate school. today i found myself in the midst of lively discussion with probing questions posed by my professor…questions that forced me to reconsider my positions on issues, to consider the complexitiesd of policy, and to examine the effect of politics on all of the above.
and there it was…after a slugish return from my vacation my eyes were once again lit up. instead of dread, i looked at my coming assignments with excitement and anticipation about what they will teach me.
i still don’t know about dr. but my mph doesn’t seem quite so far away at the moment.
i’ve lived in some interesting places. i’ve slept in conditions that vary from the very posh hotel i spent one night in while in switzerland to a tent with 3 inches of water and a soaking sleeping bag in tanzania. i don’t consider myself overly picky. even so…my apartment sucks beyond the telling.
and it isn’t about some glaring issue that would make anyone who came by agree that this is a dump…it is more an accumulation of things.
the mold that is growing up my window sill because there is no insulation and so condensation accumlates at the windows…the cold that seeps into my bones because the heater doesn’t stay on for more than 15 minutes…the lack of light because of the size and placement of my window…and the odd shape of my room.
it makes me sad.
at first i wasn’t sure if i could blame it on my room…too much confounding…but i spent this morning and S’s, without him there, and i felt fine. the day was clear teh sky blue and his huge windows bathed me in light as i typed away. the space all around me allowed me to lounge without feeling confined. and while i can’t say my recent funk has been caused by my moist dim narrow box i can say there is a connection of some sort on some level.
what to do what to do?
monday or tuesday i will move to the room next to mine…its shape is triangle instead of a narrow rectangle…the window is about twice the size of mine and it tends to get light for a longer portion of the day…i’ll see if that helps.
if that doesn’t help…i’ll have to regroup and make a plan B.
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