I was supposed to be reading...

I've been trying to dry our laundry without a dryer lately. This is both easier and harder as a laundromat patron. It's easier because it saves me a LOT of quarters and time sitting at the cafe next to the laundromat. It's harder because it feels strange to cart wet laundry through the streets and up the stairs to my apartment.

This means that I only have 30 minutes or so to wait while my laundry washes. Unfortunately, my new laundromat (the one I recently started visiting, the one that has a hand lettered sign in the window that says "New Owner and He's CUTE!") plays daytime television very loudly. I actually have a hard time not getting mad in there just because of the fear/shame-based shows, so I started going next door, to the Robinwood cafe. Once, I got a spinach pie there and it was really delicious. I'd looked through their entire four page menu without finding much vegetarian, and not much that I was excited to eat (they have breakfast all day, but I try not to eat factory farmed eggs) when I spied (under desserts!) a spinach pie. Turns out the owners are Greek and the Spinach pie is fantastic!

Today, I started my wash (I added Cocacola to one of the washers to deal with some olive oil stains. My sister told me it would work. The clothes are still on the porch, so it remains to be seen.) then headed to the cafe. Since I'm broke, and I'd bought the coke there, I sat at a table with the half-full coke and asked for water to drink while I read.

I heard the young, enthusiastic waiter plugging a show he was playing tonight at Spontaneous Celebrations, a community center near my house. Then, I heard him talking with an older Greek woman who runs the show at the cafe, possibly an owner.

Woman: What will you wear?
Waiter: Jeans and a Tshirt. Normal stuff.
Woman: Do you play songs? Nice Songs? _______________

(Now,in that blank spot, I thought she said "like, musical?" But the kid (who knows her better and was actually in the conversation seemed to think she said "like disco". I'll never know which it was, but it works both ways.)

Waiter: Like disco? I tell you every time. It's hard core punk. It's fast and loud.

I returned to my reading about how school systems can build schools to teach higher order thinking skills for a moment until...

Waiter: When it's recorded, people say I sound Japanese. (guy is white)
Woman: Japanese?
Waiter: yeah.
Woman: What do you say? What are the words? Are there lyrics?

The waiter then very sincerely explained what the songs were about. But that was so sweet that I didn't write it down. He also explained that they had made their own posters, t shirts, cassettes (?) and cds and then given most of them away. The woman was not very impressed with this business plan and told him so.

The whole time, I must point out, "Your song" by Elton John was playing in the background.

Running Hot and Cold

I woke up in Providence today. I spent the night at friends' house (they live in a trick or treating-er neighborhood than we do. When I arrived yesterday afternoon, I was wearing a t-shirt. (Z and I take our bikes to the train, then ride the train to PVD, then ride another 15 or 20 minutes to our friends' place in Cranston.) I couldn't believe how warm it was "kids won't have to hide their costumes under coats tonight!" I thought.

Then, by the time we went trick or treating (there were two kids there for us to accompany, because it's kind of creepy to wander around as just adults) I needed my Mork and Mindy vest. (I also had gloves... I dressed as a cyclist who didn't wear a helmet, cursed to wear one and a lock around my neck for all eternity in a very gory, morbid morality tale of a costume.) The children we were with were dressed as a princess strawberry and a slice of pizza. The elder (about 6) was chased down the sidewalk by a man in coveralls and a mask wielding a chainsaw. The kid was wicked scared, but blessedly he was scared shitless in that wonderfully Halloween fun way. It's a fine line to walk and it's heartbreaking when we accidentally fall over that line into trauma, but we managed it as a group.

Today, cycling to the train station, I was so cold I had a headache that started at my ears, went into my eustatian tubes and froze my brain. I wore every stitch of clothing I had plus Z's jacket, and I was still cold.

Once we returned to Boston (and I put on some smartwool) I was cozy again. My ride to work was mild and pleasant. I stayed a little too long though. Even though it was only 5:30 when I left I needed my lights. Though the temprature had dropped, with my winter riding gloves and my vest I was warm enough.

Sitting here today, though, in a house that smells of roasting pumpkin, I am really warm!

Ups and downs. I guess I shouldn't complain.... soon it'll be almost all cool all the time.

(In case you cant' tell by my general lack of content for this post, I'm going to try to blog every day this month along with a lot of other cool bloggers. I wonder what it will be like!)

(I'm also taking an email class this month from a Buddhist teacher and author I've learned a lot from, Cheri Huber. I wonder a lot about that too!)

Welcome back, October!

This was the status of a friend who is a Libra like me.

As I wrote the date in my journal this morning, I felt a familiar pang of "October already?" In other years, I've made banal comments to strangers and coworkers about how quickly time goes, how hard it is to believe, how wistful I am about the whole thing. Working with very young children really exacerbates this sensation. Sometimes I'll look at a photo I took just a month or two ago, and be stunned by how much the child has stretched out, her face taken more shape, her vocabulary and physical strength increased in that short time. Children are never disappointed that time moves on.

Today, when I wrote the date, instead of feeling time hustling me forward, I cheered it on a little. "Yes!" I thought. "Go to bed, 2010. It's nearly time for you to be done." This has been a rich, full year (and it's not even over yet!) but it's also held a lot of pain for my family, friends and I. So I'm not clinging to it today, or bemoaning it's passage, I'm embracing the natural process of falling away. I think about the darkness in the evening, the chill in the wind (not today... not this week, actually, but I swear I got to wear wool socks once in September) the apples and squashes piled on my table and I am happy. I'm like a bear going sleepily into hibernation, a rose dying back, just ready for the wind and snow and darkness to come. Then in a little while, I'll be ready for the sun again, and for a new year to begin.

Yeah, awesome, go...

My commute to work is about 4.5 miles and a good chunk of that is on two bike paths. There are a few exciting parts where I have to pass through busy intersections, but mostly it's cake. There are excitements of another kind, however, now that I commute at odd hours. I used to be heading out around 7, or 7:30 or 10 when lots of people were going to work. Now it's later, around the middle of the day when everyone is pretty mellow.

The first episode today was when I was heading very fast down a big hill. I saw an ambulance parked by the side of the road and an odd tableau came into view. Two EMT's stood, looking down with their arms folded at a man on the ground. The man on the ground was wearing only spandex shorts and running shoes. He looked like he was lounging because he was leaning back on one elbow, gesticulating high in the air with his other hand. Lastly, there was a cyclist, helmet on but unbuckled, bike against a nearby tree, also looking down at the man but more exasperated than the EMT's. I didn't have time to make up much of a story because I went by them as quickly as I could. My guess: a crash of some kind between runner and cyclist, but everyone but the shirtless man thinks that he's ok. The shirtless man feels that there's been an injustice.

Later that afternoon, as I was biking home, there was a guy walking his mountain bike up the short hill to the BU bridge. He kept wandering from side to side so I couldn't quite make it around him. I "ding-ed" my cheerful little bell to let him know I was coming around the outside of him. He growled at me "uh... Yeah! Awesome, go!" as I passed.

I passed the place where I always look for a deer by the road (I've seen her there twice) and was barreling through some trees that border a soccer field on one side when I saw a 13 year old girl in soccer clothes, standing around looking vague by the side of the bike path. Then, right as I came even with her another girl in a matching kit stood up and pulled her shorts up in one movement communicating "I just finished peeing outdoors" then saw me and said "Oh!" and I laughed out loud HARD.

Thank goodness Fredrick Olmstead worked so hard to keep these lands available to the public!

140 characters or less?

I recently friended an old high school friend from high school. He sent me a message "catching up" the last 15 years in a few sentences: NY, wife, baby, new album. Then he asked, how about you "Give me your life so far in 140 characters?"

I have to imagine that 140 is the max for a tweet. (I do have a twitter account but have tweeted a handful of times about 3 years ago... weirdly, I still get emails that people have started following me on twitter, many of whom are strangers. It must be very dull for them.)

Anyway, it's very difficult for me to do this sort of thing in any time. This has been a particularly challenging year, which somehow colors my experience. I started out and then took it back about 100 times. My deepest fear when I was an adolescent was being misunderstood. I didn't cut my hair short, or pierce my nose, or listen to Ani Difranco because I didn't want people to be able to write me off and put me into a box. In the same way, as I stared at my computer, excited to be in contact with an old friend. At first I liked the challenge, like a Haiku.
I gave up. I posted more than 200 characters:

"I live in Jp with my husband, Zak. I teach and I learn in equal parts. It’s been a challenging year, but I’m really blessed with a great community. I find great joy on my bike, in the woods, on my yoga mat, knitting, and in a glass of well-crafted beer…but not all at once."

A blog like a post it note.

It's hot here.
Sometimes unbelievably hot in our second floor apartment.

We just finished a whole month of World Cup madness that included so many wonderful house guests.

I'd like to blog again, so I thought I'd start here... listening to Girlyman, cleaning the porch for some vegetable grilling, looking forward to some new work and generally feeling kind of smushed. I'm going through another one of those periods where I'm sustained by music, wandering through old albums and revisiting old versions of myself, putting new ones on repeat like an adolescent.

Encounters on the T

"She must have him over a barrel."
The guy had entered the subway car and thrown his jacket over the railing that holds up the hand rail near the door where I sat. He spoke to me as though continuing a conversation we'd been having already which should have clued me in, but I'm a total sucker for a fantastic opening line.
"Who does?"
"Elena Kagan...Obama! Why else would you give someone a job with no experience?!"
"She's got tons of experience, just not any experience being a supreme court justice! You can't blame her for that!"
The guy argued amicably with me for a few minutes (another red flag in this city) and I enjoyed the conversation. After a moment though:

"We've got to be very careful. You never know. You never know. They have..." (at this point he started pointing to his arm with his finger).
"They have applications. They have cloning and viruses. You never know. You have to be very careful, really see who she is! They have robots they control."

Since we'd been talking loudly, I knew that the rest of the people around me on the train all had the same realization I did at the same moment that I had it. The difference was that I liked the guy, and had a lot of practice making conversation with folks with ideas like his, so we kept talking. I have a hard-won habit of "do not confirm or deny" when it comes to ideas that don't match my reality in a serious way from the old days at Angeline's, so we gently switched topics whenever he brought up technology this way. I asked him some questions ("How do you get to be a mastermind?" and "How do you know..."
He told me about a guy in Bethel, ME who burned down all sorts of places; houses, cars, fire stations but who did it for the money and then used his money to buy himself a gas station. He told me a little bit about his wife, who had something in common with this fellow. They were both masterminds who took all the money and hoodwinked the people around them. At one point, a guy across the train said "I can't believe I'm hearing this." in a very dramatic way. When I looked across the speaker had his head in his hands. My new friend told me about people who want to get into your conversation, about how they're probably stoned or hungover from the night before. Right before his stop, the man asked me what I do, and I told him "I teach little kids." He had to get off soon and he started talking fast "Take them to the Apple Store. Show them Tips and Tricks. They need the Tips and Tricks. Teach them about each of the applications! That's what they need to know!" Then the door shut.