Meine Stadt

I'm in the midst of one of those evenings of physical and mental obstruction. I sit on my bed, having unsuccessfully tried to watch two German language movies. My roommate decorates the house for tonight's "Red" party. I hide in here, frightened of the chaotic preparation. Camping is on my mind, but I have not other outlets. I've tired of trains, language, and playing music isn't even in the running for a potential occupation. How many times can you play the same twenty pop songs poorly anyway? I truly desire nothing more than floating on a lake, and even that is of limited appeal. It must be time to pick up another Tom Robbins book, or some other friendly primary-language novel. I have Saison Dans La Vie D'Emmanuel on my table, an odd Quebecois novel that takes little more than an occasional dictionary lookup. It's sad to waste a little quiet time with so little motivation. The laptop is burning my lap.

back on the computer

I've reverted to the computer lab rat life this semester, taking a GIS class (mapping stuff) and a green urban design course that's pushing me to learn sketchup. I got stuck on some software and programming problems, which reminded me how taxing computer work is.

I was frustrated today because I got little in real work done from my efforts, but I liked the idea of having to work real hard to piece a solution together. It forced some ancillary learning and gave me a new idea.

Learning can be hard--creative software--or it can be easy, such as learning German. You may shudder to hear me say that German is easier than making a map on a computer, but it's true. To learn German I follow a pretty routine formula that I have crafted over the years to learn languages, but I have little precedent for the computer work I'm trying to do other than a wealth of learning experiences on the computer. That reminds me to write in my urbanism and language blogs! Stay tuned, no actually find something else...I'll be a while.

Back on the lake shore

Winter comes to California too. The sky is grey, we bundle, we spend a bit more time indoors. I'm at Pete's Coffee (and Pumpkin Spice Latte) on Lakeshore Ave, perhaps the most humanly diverse street in Oakland and contender nationwide. The diversity isn't just in the faces, but also the exchanges. No dialog catches me off guard, no matter how disparate the accents. No embrace looks out of place; there are a lot of friends on this street.

Even my nemesis, the traffic, seems harmonious here, though it steals 6 lanes and provides barely a weekday bus.

My thoughts are on Wendell Berry's Human Economy versus the Great Economy. A second read of the chapter is clarifying the concept, though my head still spins to sleep while reading it because it conjures the thickness of thoughts familiar to bedtime.

French is on my mind too, and German, old affections and new ones. I want to live simply in a world where it's easier to be extravagent. I fantasize about a train trip to Yosemite, or Colorado, or winter in Québec City.

Today's a study day. The New Year brings new distractions, so I'd better savor the penultimate day of down time.

The trip home

After three and one half months, and nearly as long without writing here, I am crossing from Nebraska to Wyoming. Never did I stop to think of this state boundary; having never been east of Wyoming, or even much east of Yellowstone on its northwest corner, I never give much thought to the vertical strip from the Dakotas down to Texas. I have been to Texas, so I must partially retract my prior statement. Texas, like the East Coast, is an entity unto itself and shouldn't be confused with eastward migrations across toward the Midwest.


When I began my flight this morning I slept for a spell and then readressed my first Wendell Berry book, Home Economics. Having fallen asleep on several occasions starting this book during the school semester, I was determined to be alert for the first chapter today. Already the book has been a transformative experience. Berry describes a plane trip to Ireland as follows: "For me, air travel always has about it an insistent feeling of unreality. I feel that I am where I do not belong, with a totally arbitrary assemblage of other people who do not belong there either...the insistence in the voices of captain and crew that this experience is perfectly ordinary only intensifies the suggestion of unreality" (Berry, 1987, p22).

I know that I don't belong here, but I can't speak for the rest of the travelers who feel right at home with a touch screen at their reach that gives them TV, movies, games, and even the ability to order food from their seat (I got the coffee.) Few if anyone marvels at the snow-blanketed Rockies. Like me they simply check the flight map for progress, not situation.

Reading Wendell on this ride will likely start a life-long odyssey for me, where I bring together culture and nature in the urban and rural setting. Sightseeing with Ellen two days ago, we spoke with a Romanian woman in the North End of Boston and a homeward Greek professor of entomology taking sabatical from his home institution at my alma mater, UC Davis. We spoke to him over dinner at the oyster bar of the famous oyster house near Quincy Market--where I had my first raw oysters, amazingly. We spoke to the woman on the blustery streets as she led us to Paul Revere's home. These were not iPhone experiences but cultural ones that Ellen brought to being with politeness and curiosity. I learned this same lesson from Ross on my Alps trip, and I must admit that it's hard to remember such a good habit.

"But, we carried on anyway"

And then Mr. Ben carries on:

"So, sure, I could just close my eyes. Yeah, sure, trace and memorize." -- You Don't Know Me (Ben Folds featuring Regina Spektor)

Ever since I saw Regina Spektor in concert this song passes through my windpipes daily. She didn't actually sing it in her concert--he does in his--but it was hearing her live that locked it in.

I wander around town and putter around my house singing the same lines over and over again. If you know me you've heard me do it, and requested a refrain. The lines must correlate with something going on in my life, so when I sing the chorus "You don't know me no more" in call and response between Ben and Regina (I change pitches for Regina) I'm never sure if I'm declaring the fact to someone else or myself.

Being in a grad school program in a new city with all new people is plainly about forgetting a bit of my old self and getting to know someone new. Escaping a demon or two along the way isn't a bad idea either. Toward the end of my Microsoft reign in Seattle, when I resigned to my manager, I said to him, "I don't like who I am". That was 2002, and for a long time I have liked who I am. I devolved a bit at the end of the California stint but now here in Somerville I find myself liking who I am again. I don't know if it's walking home from a movie down the pedestrian path on a brisk autumn evening, or making a jackass of myself in the company of 20-something-year-old students at a county fair. Maybe it's sitting at a table at a town's Octoberfest trying to tell people about an intersection redevelopment project that we're doing, where they've driven through the intersection for 50 years and I two times. Could it simply be all these crazy little new things swimming around in my own evolutionary stew that might somehow sometime soon spawn a new slime dripping, hairy, unrecognizable version of me, or perhaps create that missing link between what I am and what I should be?

There are now four plants in my room. I think I have room for about four more. Are the plants timing something of which I'm yet unwitting? What magic will transpire when I set #8 down, or when I host my next dinner party for 40, what happens when I start talking to people who aren't in my graduate program? There's a smell of opportunity here; it smells cold and leafy, and the dimension that matters is divided by a clock. Éparpiller -- spread, scatter, prosper.

Here's an abridged list of my personal todo list:

Investigate gym alternatives
Talk to a prof
Buy clothes -- 2 pants, 2 long sleeve, 3 tees
Check out sports, music, singing, dance
French and Spanish
Greenway, rails to trails, creek restoration
http://www.assnforpublictransportation.org/
Investigate UN Global Studio
Livable Streets Alliance
Think more about cross-training your brain

I left out mundane things, such as paying bills, and this omits my huge list of work todo items. The above mainly represent activity which I'd like to initiate. Some are simply urban planning groups that I want to check out, and I won't discuss that here. The ones that are worth talking about are Talk to a prof, Check out sports, music, singing, dance, French and Spanish, and Think more about cross-training your brain.

Talk to prof
I speak up in my classes, but I'm yet to sit down with a prof since class started. We have a dozen professors for 100-odd grad students and no undergrads, so there's no reason not to take advantage of them.

Check out sports, music, singing, dance
The music, singing, and dance are a preoccupying force. I need to get better at playing music and singing, and I need to once and for all learn how to dance. Luckily one of my housemates teaches dance and has bee teaching our house and upstairs neighbors salsa. I'm hoping the individual attention will finally help me turn over the new leaf. Music and singing are a bit more complicated. I know I want to improve my vocal harmonizing and get better at playing pop on piano and guitar. But I don't know how to do any of them but with CDs or books. That's not a social activity but might at some point allow me to get into some more organized music situations.

French and Spanish
I might as well add German to this. Maintaining and learning foreign languages while in grad school is trying. I don't have the resources to study anymore, what with the grad school homework brain leech.

Think more about cross-training your brain
And now we come to the whole purpose of this post. How do I cross-train my brain? I think about this occasionally and it arose yesterday when I found myself writing a journal entry for my Sustainability class and chose to write about a French Symposium that took with a colloquium on Sustainability. It gave me the opportunity to transcribe a bit of the published program from French to English. It got me thinking, how do I combine my obligatory work with the personal stuff listed above?

It seems logical to start treating my various activities as a web of objectives and outcomes. Let's try some Omnigraffle charting:


Hmm. Is this useful? Probably not, but it gives you idea of what I mean by cross-training. I think it's good to be aware of opportunities to combine objectives into one activity.

Reading my life away

I read, I read. Past or present, it's spelled the same and means the same thing for me. Every hour of daylight I have is an hour for pouring over poorly scanned articles for which I paid 25¢ a page at the copy store monopolist. The first week my goal was to finish all my work and take the weekend off; that resulted in about six hours of weekend work. This weekend, with the help of a cold and my California-origin storage unit arriving, I was easily working every daylight hour. Some of that went to scraping paint off the floor in preparation for my furniture. Two hours were lost this evening in a failed attempt to get my couch through the two front doors that happen to be ninety degrees adjacent and progressively smaller (yes we took the doors off the hinges of those two doors plus that of the upstairs neighbors.) One joyful hour was spent reuniting with my guitar, one of the few items that was not damaged or denied entrance to the house. I now have nothing but eight hours of my grad school job and another 4 hours or so of homework to complete by Tuesday, and by Tuesday there will be another 10 hours of reading to do, and probably some writing and a test to study for. It's not hard, it's numbingly fascinating. I like the readings, but it leaves me no time to even read the newspaper or a good novel.

I'm also being forced to turn down a camping trip this weekend, partly because I'm committed to a bike ride but mostly because I can't spend a weekend away and keep up with the work. I guess that's what grad school is all about. It's funny, I'd be disappointed if it was easy but I'm also disappointed that it's such a time suck. I hope it gets to the point where it's more intense but less time consuming because my brain has developed the ability to compress to a higher PSI.

I also wonder if I really want to become more of an intellectual. Aren't I just ostracizing myself from more conversations and finding myself attracted to increasingly witty and snooty people? Or will I still be able to keep dumbing it down for the masses?

I know I'm frustrated right now because I'm morphing into someone slightly different. My classes are developing my reasoning abilities, the city is exposing me to its culture and physical elements, and my housemates to fashion, parties, and next-generation reality TV (skipping that.) Right now I can't put cogent thoughts together, either in class or outwith. What I get at the end of these two years, besides being older and uglier, will be an intellectual achievement that suits my demeanor, and hopefully a social life that cloaks said suit.

I wish I had a picture of the couch jammed between three doors with five stupefied neighbors crushing plaster and splintering door frames. The poor couch now sits covered on the front porch awaiting its fate. I will certainly miss it. Craigslist feels so impersonal.