Dear Livejournal:

Hi.

I have not done anything resembling a real-life update in months, and have failed at checking in with lj in general. I'm sorry! I've had kind of a lot going on in real life and in my head, but it's mostly petty annoying things that don't seem worth making an entry about. And then when there was something I might want to post I would think 'Oh, I can't update with that, I still haven't talked about these ten other things!" and then I don't update at all.

So, I'm just going to admit that I will never catch up. Though if there's anything you have been wondering or think I should post about please let me know! In the meantime, let's start with something small: I got a new hat.




It's my favorite, though I am trying to not let my other lovely purple hats feel abandoned.

Inspired by wookiewife who was inspired by gratefuladdict - Two Truths and a Lie. Two stories out of each set are true, one isn't. It's up to you to decide which is which.

Then:

When I was in pre-school, I wanted to be an entomologist. I practiced diligently whenever I played outside. Worms, caterpillars, beetles, ants: I studied and collected them all, protesting when we went in for snacktime and my wiggly new friends were taken away from me. The adults never seemed to understand that they were stopping me from preparing for my future career.

My grandmother taught chemistry at the local university. Mondays she had a lab in the evening, and on some days, instead of leaving me at the preschool late, she would let me go with her. I watched the students take tests or discuss notes while I drew on the blackboard and marveled at the fancy equipment, convinced being a chemistry professor was the best job in the world.

My dream of being a rhythmic gymnast never had much basis in reality. Just to start with, I'd never taken a gymnastics class, and couldn't so much as do a cartwheel. But after watching the summer Olympics when I was six, I was hooked. I practiced with ribbons and ropes for years, inventing my own routines, imagining that some day my secret talent would get discovered.


Now:

My degree essentially prepared me to only be useful when things go wrong. No one wants an Emergency Manager when things are fine, after all. It's a good fit for me, though, because I like to fix things. The only real downside is I start to look a bit ghoulish, when I cheerfully anticipate future crisis. I have to remind myself that when someone mentions they've heard on the news about a potential catastrophe, I shouldn't reply with "I know, isn't it awesome?

I discovered the competitive pole-dancing world only about six months ago, and fell into it fast. Part of the appeal, I suppose, was finding a dance-sport where I don't feel awkward and bulky - just jealous because the other women all have more muscles then me. Now, after adding hours of pull-ups and weight training to my weekly schedule, slowly improving my inversions and handstands, I wonder what it would take for me to be seriously good.

I didn't really start off wanting to be a radio star. I started taking the training class because it sounded interesting, and I thought I might learn some useful skills for podcasting. But spending that much time at the station made it easy to keep imagining what I could do better. Now I'm trying to teach myself journalism, listening to NPR full time, and seriously considering applying for a public affairs show next semester. It's a station with a small audience, of course - but it's a start.

Occupational hazards of my archaeology job included:
Heat. (My first week coincided with one of the worst heat waves the area had seen in years.) Ticks. (Getting tested for Lyme disease is not super fun.) Poison Ivy. (SO itchy.) Thorny briers. (I looked like I lost a fight with a bobcat.) Barbed wire. (Enough said.) Stone fences. (They become a hazard when they're lined with barbed wire and you have to balance on them carrying surveyor's equipment.) Trees. (Seriously. Trees. One day a branch we were sawing through snapped back and hit me really hard in the jaw. Gave me a sore neck and a killer headache.)

We were going over land intended for development. This involved going out with surveyor's equipment and hacking a path through the overgrown and semi-wooded former fields so that we can put in stakes every ten meters, and then digging test pits along that grid. I'm talking about hundreds of test pits. Possibly, over the summer, thousands of test pits. And on a good day, for all the effort, bruises, and risks to my well-being. . . I'd end up with some flakes.

Flakes. Of stone. They're mostly the leftover bits from making stone tools - whatever needs to come off to make a nicely sharp arrowhead or knife. From an archaeological perspective, they're tremendously exciting. Enough to make it worth digging layer after layer - 5 centimeters each - and sifting the dirt so we don't miss even the tiniest pieces.

Sometimes we'd find things in a layer that was occupied in the colonial era. Porcelain fragments, actual silver silverware, window glass, the flintlock off an old rifle, house foundations. It was nice, in a way, to find artifacts bigger then my thumbnail. But they were all so new. Three hundred years, at most. It hardly seemed bothering with.

So it was almost a relief once we got down past those distractions, to the layers of soil that hadn't been disturbed for 500, 1000, 1500 years. Down to where there was nothing but dirt and rocks and - sometimes - tiny stone flakes, perfect enough to make the barbed wire and poison ivy seem worthwhile.

First, you found a city.

I've spent most of my life preparing for the day when I will have to single-handedly rebuild civilization. Well. Actually, I've spent large portions of my life playing Civilization. The computer game. I started with the original version when I was 12, then continued my training with each new addition. There were other empire and city building games, of course, but it always came back to Civilization. After all, no other game could show me quite so clearly what it takes to uplift humanity.

Once my band of wandering nomads has been persuaded to settle down, we can start to explore the area. We'll concentrate on expansion for a while, and once we have few more settlements, we'll be ready to start on an early world wonder. The great wall, perhaps, or the pyramids. It will take hundreds of years to complete, of course, but our cultural superiority must be established early.

We'll grow quickly once we study medicine and sanitation – so I'll have to leave those for a while, until I've upgraded our farms and figured out a way to keep the serfs happy. Making sure I have enough military units stationed in each city will probably help. At least, it will stop widespread riots. And if the people aren't rioting, they must be happy. Right? It's for their own good. No one will be pleased if the protests set us back so much I have to sacrifice a percentage of the population in order to finish that world wonder.

And the military units may come in handy especially if they're more advanced then the ones our neighbors have. My people will be peaceful and intellectual, of course, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be prepared, if only for our own safety. My nation-state can't reach it's full potential if we have rivals nearby, threatening our resources. Sooner or later, they'll become jealous of our wealth and achievements. Better to get rid of them first. Once that's taken care of, the future progress of humanity is easy. Almost too easy.

So next, I'll have to work on our nuclear program. After all, if you set off enough bombs, it will leave the world a mess. Probably wipe out all our settlements, along with any other civilizations too small and distant to bother adding to our empire. But I'll make sure enough people survive to get along on their own for a while – say, as wandering nomads.

Then we'll found a city.

It starts with something simple. I'm hungry. I should see what I want to make for dinner.

So I start looking up recipes. I find an interesting nutrition blog, and then read someone's comment about having cupcakes confiscated by the TSA. I wonder if TSA agents get to eat the food they confiscate? I wonder how people become TSA agents, anyway?

Their website doesn't say a lot about that, but they do have places where they're hiring. One's a town in Alaska I've never heard of - I wonder what it would be like to live there? They only have two restaurants, but according to posts on this message board I find, the pizza one is actually really good. But it sounds like the coffee isn't so good. Can I live in a town that doesn't have good coffee? I suppose I could make my own. I wonder how hard it is to buy coffee beans there? I bet the shipping and handling is a pain.

I wonder if I could grow coffee beans? Can people actually do that? It looks like they can, but you need a tropical environment. I should get a greenhouse. I can set it up to do hydroponic gardening. I like hydroponics. It's a nice word, and it seems very efficient. But it might be hard to get the hang of. I should take a class.

I wonder if I could find a gardening school? Oh, there's a lovely one. They're having a class in 'plant nutrient management' next week, but it doesn't say how much it will cost. Oh, I can't go, it's a Friday, I have the hair appointment. Oh. Also, the school is San Francisco. I don't live in San Francisco. But it looks pretty. I would rather move there then Alaska. They have a lot of coffee shops. Why was I looking up coffee, anyway?

It probably wasn't important. Besides, I'm getting hungry. I should see what I want to make for dinner.

Valentines Day has never been as much fun as it was in elementary school.

Oh, it's all right, as far as holidays go. There's nice decorations and fancy boxes of chocolate. But that can't compare to the thrill of getting to spend school time eating cookies and passing around those flimsy cardboard Valentines. We could collect them and feel appreciated, even loved - and since most people's mothers made them have one for everyone in the class, nobody was left lonely. The biggest worry was avoiding accidentally looking 'mushy' - I sorted my Valentines carefully as I filled them out with classmate's names, making sure the boys didn't get anything too sentimental.

Something changed by sixth grade or so. We all became awkward and self-conscious. Telling someone you liked them was no longer as simple as checking 'Yes' or 'No' on a note, and we didn't get to stop class for holiday parties. Besides, even if we'd wanted to give someone a card saying 'You're special' or 'Have a Sweet Day,' even if we'd dared, we would have shunned the cheap, childish cards that had seemed fantastic a few years before.

So my senior year in high school, when my philosophy teacher announced we were going to exchange Valentines, most of us just rolled our eyes. She thought it was a good time for nostalgia, since most of us would never see each other again after graduation. We didn't believe her, sure either that we'd keep our friends for life or that we could never miss any of our classmates enough for nostalgia.

But the promise of getting to skip actual class and had cupcakes had never entirely lost its appeal, so we went along with her. We signed and addressed Valentines, all flimsy cardboard rectangles with pictures of Disney characters or cartoons we hadn't watched in years. And even though it wasn't a rule anymore, we all brought enough for the whole class.

Ten years later, I've never once had the urge to look at my high school yearbook. But I've kept every one of those cards.

I don't have to watch the news anymore. I have people who do that for me.

Technically, they don't do it for me, exactly. They do it for the internet. But it works out to the same thing. And I'm apparently not unusual in my preference - it seems that now people under 30 get more of their news from the internet then from tv.

It's not that I think crowd-sourced reporting can replace 'real' news, but it does have advantages. For one, it's fast. A story someone sees first-hand can be reblogged or twitted or tumbled or facebook shared, and I'll see it on my feed while official news outlets are just realizing something newsworthy has happened. Of course, part of that is because the official news has to do pesky things like 'conformation.' (Usually. Premature reports of Joe Paterno's death went from a student news twitter to the mainstream sites within minutes, before anyone thought to double-check.) People in large groups can be brilliant, or they can be idiots.

And there are times I want the experts, not an average, everyday view. There are times I want detailed investigative reporting and moving writing, not 140 character updates. But I'm more likely to find them when I'm on a 'social networking' then I am when I'm actually looking for news. I can follow cnn.com, my local newspaper's site, and maybe a few more - if I can stand scrolling through yet another article on what we've learned from this year's superbowl commercials - but I can't read everything. Luckily, I don't have to. I won't miss a good story as long as I know someone who read it, and thought it was interesting enough to share.

And it lets me see news from as many angles as I want. I like news commentary, but it usually runs the risk of giving a one-sided view. Now I don't have to watch one version of a political speech on CNN and wait for the hosts to give me their analysis later, because I can pick my own commentators and see the speech being liveblogged while I debate their observations in the comment section.

I care more when news a social activity, instead of something that is just on in the background. And when there seems to be little going on in the world that isn't bad, I need all the help I can get.

(I started thinking about this after I listened to A NPR interview with the author of a book on twitter. I saw it through a link on facebook.)

I found an article on Why it's better to start your new year in February, which sounds like a fabulous idea to me, mostly because January was kind of useless.

I'm super behind on livejournal - both updating and friendslist reading/commenting. I've just been feeling overwhelmed by a seemingly endless stream of things that aren't really worth talking about, but somehow take up all my time.

One of those things is my grandmother's basement - because she needs a new boiler put in, we've been sorting and organizing stuff. The most recent variety of 'stuff' is boxes of stamps that appear to have been not opened since she moved to this house in 1970, but there's also an impossible amount of books - especially non-fiction and especially textbooks. If anyone has a subject they might be interested in, let me know and I'll save some for you. Or let me know if you think you might be interested in anything else likely to be found in the mysterious cavern of this basement, like shoe-polishing kits from the 50's, or cigar boxes filled with pipes, or bean-bag fruit.

Sometimes I wonder if I could reassemble my life out of all the things I've left behind.

It could start with the small, everyday losses. Receipts I never really looked at, some pencils, loose change. 'Buy 10, Get One Free!' cards for the coffeeshop I like. The paper I wrote someone's phone number on, a magazine I forgot I was reading, matches to all those single socks clogging up my drawer. They slip out of my life one at a time, with so little fuss that I rarely notice their absence.

Then there are the more noticeable losses, the ones I mourned but couldn't fix. A bag I left on the train, a phone that disappeared in the airport. My car keys. An earring that dropped somewhere on my walk, a favorite coat which I last saw in a taxi. Things that stayed lost after I checked the lost-and-found, or made hopeful calls to customer service lines, or retraced my steps.

Then there's the things I walked away from. Things I gave away or threw out when I thought I'd outgrown them, things I never knew I would miss. Books I gave away, later, when I didn't know I'd want to read them again, postcards and notes I didn't realize were irreplaceable. Everything that couldn't fit into a car, when I moved out of my parents house. By now I can't remember what those possessions were, but I remember they used to be mine.

And then there are the intangibles. A story I'd written out in my mind, which never made it to paper. The view from my old apartment. Being part of the neighborhood where I used to live. Plans I used to believe were possible. A job I liked, a language I used to halfway know. Friends I used to have but somehow misplaced, people's names that I've forgotten.

I imagine if they could be collected, brought together again, that I could simply turn a corner one day and find this mirror image of my existence waiting. But I'm not sure what it would be waiting for. Not me, I hope. The person who could own those things - live that life - is someone else entirely, and I think I lost touch with her a long time ago.

I like to think of myself as a kind person. Considerate. Caring. Filled with goodwill towards kindred human beings.

All that stops the instant I get behind the wheel of a car.

Somehow, as soon traffic starts to clog, those other drivers stop being potential friends, admirable individuals, or fellow travelers on this road of life. No, when I see them through my windshield, they're bitter rivals, if not outright enemies. Every single car between me and my destination is keeping me from where I need to be. Each one has the power to carelessly ruin my day.

Which is, when I think of it, incredibly selfish of them. How dare they do this to me? By the time traffic outright stops, it isn't just drivers that are the targets of my righteous indignation. The radio station announcer that failed to warn me. The department of transportation that didn't do a better job planning their roads. Stupid Henry T. Ford and his stupid assembly line - did he even stop to think about the long term consequences of enabling an automobile focused society? And what's wrong with society, anyway, that we allow things like this to happen? We let ourselves lose hours, days, years of our lives, wasted in these metal cages, when we aren't even going anywhere. And we act like it's normal! What kind of monsters are we?

By the time I get to an exit, my misanthropy has usually reached a new all-time high. I find new reasons to hate everyone before I reach the train station - my level of personal offense at those people who stopped in the middle of the road to pick someone up, or that guy who double parked, couldn't be any higher if they'd put up flashing signs explaining that they were inconveniencing me on purpose.

Later, when I take the subway to class, I regret my anger, my uncharitable thoughts. I promise that next time I'll stay calm. I say I'll try the yoga breathing or the stress ball or the soothing music. But I know that the truth is, it's just harder when I'm driving. Liking people outside of a car is much easier - probably because, outside a car, I can actually see them. I can see that the woman next to me is trying to manage three bags of groceries, and the man across from me is reading a book to his toddler. I can see the obviously-lost foreign tourists argue over a map while nervously watching that group of teenagers, and I can see one of the teenagers go over and give them directions in their own language.

And if we stop between stations, and there's an announcement that the train is 'currently experiencing slight delays,' I can see everyone groan, roll their eyes, and go back to what they're doing. No one gets worked up about it. What would the point be? We're all in the same boat - or at least the same subway car.

Not rivals. Not enemies. Just people.

By my third week on the job, I never wanted to see a pile of lumber again.

It wasn't actually the wood that I minded. It was more the fact that people kept expecting me to move it. And sort it. And put it into other piles, and load it in and out of trucks. And cut it into different sizes. And then build things out of it. The building things part had definite high points - for one, they let me use power tools, and I'd very quickly come to the conclusion that power tools were awesome. I couldn't understand how I'd gone my entire life to that point without getting to play with power saws and drills.

Holding huge, heavy pieces of wood into place so that everything could be power-tooled together into bunkbeds was not awesome. But when the nonprofit I worked for moved their volunteer dorm, me and my two weeks of power-tool experience got the bed assembly job. More accurately, I got the piles of wood which had been bunkbeds at the old place and theoretically would be again. Fifty beds, each with twenty pieces, all heavy and up to six feet long. No instruction manual. I'd taken this 'job' - actually a mostly unpaid, full-time internship - because I was excited by the group's public service projects and volunteer efforts, but by the third time I dropped a plank onto my foot, it was hard to work up excitement for anything.

And then I started to actually look at those pieces of wood that I was stubbornly fighting with. Over the next few days, I got to know them. These planks had a long history. They'd been through four or five moves, had several different owners, and each slept hundreds of volunteers. And it was, quite literally, written all over them. Some former sleepers had left the basics - their name, a date. 'Courtney's bed.' 'Adam was here.' They ranged from a 12-year-old, who came with her church from Washington, to reunion groups with college graduation years well before I was born. I saw schools from San Jose State University in California to Johnson State College in Vermont. (They, helpfully, drew a map.) They listed cities and states from Seattle to Maine.

Some left advice, from the practical ("Cab from Bourbon St, $15 + tip") to the more philosophical ("Trust your calling.") Some left song lyrics, some bible quotes. Some gushed about how they were having the best times of their lives. My favorite was more balanced. "Trolleys suck," it said, "showers are freezing. I <3 this city. It's all cool."

I ended up feeling quite fondly towards 'my' beds. I thought of my favorites on later projects, when I was tired and annoyed and had to unload yet another pile of two-by-fours. I'd remind myself that yes, it sucked.

But things were still all cool.

Top causes of death for my area and demographic:
1. Unintentional injury
2. Suicide
3. Malignant Neoplasms (cancer)
4. Heart Disease
5. Homicide

Things I spend my time worrying I am going to die from:
1. That brain-eating amoeba someone in Louisiana got from their Neti-pot. No, I don't live in Louisiana. Or use a Neti-pot. But I did, once, months ago, and that means that if I think about it I can feel the bacteria eating my brain like tiny little piranhas. It's tingly.
2. An elevator door closing on me and cutting me in half. Or just snapping off my arm. I cannot be convinced elevator doors don't cut through flesh like lightsabers.
3. Being patient zero in a global pandemic. This would mean both that I won't have enough warning to implement my extensively researched pandemic-survival strategies, and that I'll have my life and activities thoroughly analyzed by the CDC. And they'll eventually determine that I triggered the disease by eating raw cookie dough or something and the world will be like "WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO US?" and my grandmother will be so very disappointed in me because she told me that raw dough was dangerous.
4. Axe murderers. I don't know why they're worse then, say, knife-murderers. But they are.
5. That girl who crawled out of the TV in The Ring. Alternate fear is surviving the tv-girl by showing deathly-video to friends, then having dead friends crawl out of TV for revenge.
6. My electronic appliances achieving sentience. I try to be extra nice to them when I think of it just in case, but deep down I know that if my Macbook had the opportunity to get revenge on me for not buying it the extended care plan, my life would be over.
7. Being trapped in the wrong place during a zombie uprising. Someplace small, without food and water, so I can't stay long-term, but in the center of zombie activity so I know they'll get me as soon as I open the door. Occasionally when I'm in traffic I imagine all the other cars are zombies and try to imagine how long I would last before I have to roll down my windows and embrace the inevitable. I've started to carry a week's supply of water in my back seat.
8. Giant spiders that want to carry me off to a cave and cocoon me alive so they can snack on me later. I'm sure this happens. I saw it in a movie.
9. Explosive depressurization. You know, like what happens in space if someone sets the wrong controls on the airlock, which I think I also saw in a movie. Except I'm fairly sure this can happen to me in elevators. I try to exhale deeply so there isn't air trapped in my lungs, but that only works for 30 seconds or so before I start to turn colors and the other people on the elevator give me funny looks. I tell myself it's ok, because they'd feel dumb if the door opened and we were actually on Mars.
10. Things getting dropped out of airplanes and landing on my head.

The state of my arteries, though, somehow never keeps me up at night.

Since I've had interesting suggestions from this before, I am once again appealing to my friendslist: Tell me what you think my New Year's Resolutions should be.

While I am thinking of new years, here are my favorite retrospective things -twitter's year in review and DJ Earworm's 'World Go Boom' remix of the 25 top songs of 2011, which is even more brilliant then usual.



I also liked this this interview where he talks about his process and the themes he's seen in this year's songs.

'. . pride and perseverance with songs like Firework and Born This Way that say, 'You're amazing,'" he says. And "the theme of sort of being screwed over and the various reactions to that," like when Ne-Yo sings "Give me everything tonight" and Adele croons about lost love. "I think about it as people's feelings of change and collective devastation."

Which is interesting because I'd been thinking that outside of country, we seem to not have many popular songs lately that are specifically reacting to current events and problems - I can find more from the 80s about factories closing and unemployment then I could looking through recent hits. I'd also noticed the popularity of what I think of as 'Heck yeah, I'm awesome' songs, and how even the 'go out and party' music seems more defiant then lighthearted. But it hadn't occurred to me that this might be coming from the same place.

This was a good year. There weren't a lot of changes or spectacular accomplishments - apart from graduating. But there were a lot of very good moments. Sitting on the floor trying to teach my grandmother card games by flashlight after Hurricane Irene, singing Irish pub songs at 3am in Chile, sitting in the bar in HP costumes with Tea waiting for the last movie, getting near-sunburned at Falcon Ridge folk festival with my sister, seeing Chicago from the top of a giant ferris wheel.

I feel like this is the first year I started to really get better at seeing myself as a competent adult. A competent adult who likes ice cream and silly jokes about dinosaurs and cartoons. It was a good year, and tomorrow will be even better.

So. I graduated. That happened. I have a MPA in Disasterness and have fulfilled my lifelong goal of being able to put a little string of letters after my name. Unfortunately, the process seems to have permanently killed off brain cells. A few weeks ago I was an emergency planning machine, living off stress and adrenaline, finishing five pandemic annexes before breakfast. Now. . . I am lucky if I can make it four hours before I need to go eat brownies and take a long nap.

Fortunately, I don't actually care about anything that might be happening in my life or the world. Because I've graduated. Forgot to do Christmas shopping? Whatever. I have my degree. Cookies burnt? I don't need cookies, I have a Master of Public Administration in Emergency and Disaster Management. Livejournal no longer works on Chrome so I have to use my phone which can't handle the new icon-selection menu meaning my paid account is a waste of money? Who cares! I have a degree! Tsunami headed for Connecticut? . . . that's nice, but it's time for my nap.

Meanwhile, I am approaching the world like these puppies. (omg these puppies.)

Everything is so big and open and full of grass and sunlight and books. BOOKS. I'd forgotten books. They're wonderful! And there are all these new ones - apparently, they kept being published even after I stopped reading things that weren't federal reports and records of historic disasters. Next I'm going to try TV shows. I think I used to like TV shows.

For anyone who is interested, things that I would like:

1. Tips for online entertainment and enlightenment. Web shows, entertaining podcasts, serialized novels, instructional sites. Basically I just want to never have to leave my computer.
2. Recommendations for programs or apps I shouldn't live without, for iphone or Chrome.
3. New lj icons, especially ones made for me personally. Especially one with a drawing of myself.
4. Handmade things. I like pretties. Especially jewelry or things I can hang on my walls.
5. Books. I'll read almost anything, and I like used/unwanted books.
6. Yarn! Especially novelty yarns and things that are soft.
7. Resources or tips for things on my 101 in 1001 list.
8. Anything edible. I especially like chocolate and baked goods, but I am a fan of most foods.
9. If you can, get a flu shot. Because I like all of you better when you're not sick, and herd immunity is like a present for everyone.
10. Donations to The St. Bernard Project. They're an organization that started off rebuilding homes after Katrina, and they're still doing that. They also have programs to support affordable homeownership, train veterans for construction jobs, and run the only free mental health clinic in the area.

If you have a list, link me to it! And for those who missed it, my card sign-up is here.

I was 12 the first time I realized the Beanie Babies would be a problem. My mother had confronted me, brandishing one of my sister's toys. "The tag is off," she said, accusingly. "Did you let her take the tag off? Did you let her play with it?"

I couldn't actually recognize the small frog as anything more then one of the many stuffed animals cluttering up our house, but my mother set me straight. "They're collectors items," she informed me. "It was online. Did you save the tag? Do we have any more?"

Before long I had to clean off most of shelves in my room for the growing army of bean-bag animals. Not the 'retired' ones, of course - my mother put those in some hiding place, not trusting them to my care. But there were still hundreds from the active line, plus five or ten backups of each 'rare' one, all needing little plastic cases and notecards. My room was the one area of the house relatively undamaged by the chaos of small children and pets, so converting it to Beanie Baby storage seemed logical - even when the shelves weren't enough and the stacked boxes made it hard to get into my closet. I didn't need to keep clothes in my closet anyway, as my mother pointed out. I hardly wore most of those things anyway, and then we could use the shelves in there too.

It was only fair, since she was doing this for me. These toys would make me and my sisters rich someday.

One morning we got to the mall at 4am, after someone who worked at a shop there had told my mother there would be a shipment of a limited release beanie we were hunting down. My mother and I took turns dozing in the car, since one of us had to keep watch in case other hopefuls started lining up. By this time our store checks are on a regimented weekly schedule, and mother knows when every seller in the area gets their regular deliveries. I'd have stayed home if I could, but most places set a per-person limit. And if just getting the allowed 1 or 2 or 5 beanies was good, getting twice that many had to be better.

The yearly McDonald's tie-in meant two weeks of eating nothing but kiddie sized hamburgers. "You're wasting food," my mother complaind, when I wouldn't attempt to re-heat the day-old fries for breakfast. We had to go every day, of course - each of the mini happy-meal toys was only available for one or two days - but that wan't enough, because there were hints that the release schedule might not be the same at every restaurant. We drove for hours to hit every McDonald's in the area, each with a seemingly endless line.

I can't remember ever not being a skeptic. I've never wanted to get in on the ground-floor of a trend - I'd rather let other people go first and look for flaws in their logic. I saw the crowds of collectors swarming the fast food chain and did rough mental calculations, estimating how many desperate buyers - just like us - there were nationwide, and couldn't believe anything being sold by the millions would really keep increasing in value.

But I knew better then to tell that to my mother. When the next guidebook came out we had to re-evaluate the collection, and she was outraged to find the one happy-meal toy we somehow missed was listed as being worth $50.

The last time I visited my old home, I saw the beanie babies piled in trash-bags, taking up most of the spare room. I offered to get rid of them for my mother, but she wouldn't let me.

Maybe she still thinks they'll make her rich. Someday.

I love food when I don't need it.

A list of symptoms for dangerously low blood sugar notes that "In moderate hypoglycemia, your ability to communicate, pick an appropriate food, or realize that you should do something to raise your blood glucose level may be impaired." What this means is that I'll tell a friend "I'm hungry," but I really mean that I have a headache and I'm starting to get nauseous and I went a bit dizzy when I stood up, and I should have had a meal four hours ago. But I don't say that.

So my friend will ask me how I feel about chicken for dinner, and I'll look at them like they've demanded I both invent cold fusion and solve world peace before they'll allow me to eat. I don't know how I feel about chicken. I can remember eating it, I can remember liking it, but at the moment, the reason why is beyond me. I don't like chicken. I don't like food. Why should I have to eat, anyway?

I am actually, on a day to day basis, pretty good at taking care of myself. The problem comes when my schedule gets thrown off, for whatever reason, when I am stressed or tired or distracted. If I go past the hungry stage and into the grumpy-with-bad-judgment stage, I can function if I'm pointed at clearly defined tasks but have no ability to make decisions.

I know, of course, the whole time, that the sooner I stop dithering and actually eat something, the sooner I can start to feel better. But it's a distant and unimportant sort of knowledge, compared to the fact that I'm not really hungry and I don't want to have to go anywhere and it's not like sitting still for ten more minutes will really hurt, right?

I can walk in circles around a grocery store and not find anything that looks appetizing. That pizza looks like too much food, the candy bar isn't healthy - and god forbid I not eat healthy - cooking pasta is too much work. I could get the frozen waffles. I've never had frozen waffles, but they somehow look soothing. They're supposed to go in a toaster - I could buy a toaster - but then I'd need to take them home, and I'm not sure I can manage that. It's a warm day. If I sat outside with them for a while, would they defrost enough to eat?

I've seen recordings of tests they do on mountain climbers suffering from oxygen deprivation, where the climbers stumble over simple tasks and mix up words, all the while insisting they're fine. They don't need help, their judgement isn't impaired, they don't need oxygen, everything is perfect.

I've never climbed a mountain. But I'm pretty sure I know what it feels like.

I spent most of Thanksgiving week at zia_narratora's farmhouse, petting the cats and occasionally chopping things while she cooked. Then we had Thanksgiving in sunny Delaware. It was, as usual, delicious.

I love Thanksgiving. And considering that a few years ago the most I would have felt for any holiday was begrudging tolerance, realizing that one can actually make me happy is pretty nice.

I am about 3/4 done with my 101 in 1001 list! I still have space for more, and I need to figure out specifics for some.

( DO ALL THE THINGS )

Also, if you missed it, my card post is here and I want to send you cards so fill it out. Even if you think I have your address.

I have a lot of actual life updates to post about, but the way I've been for the past few weeks every entry I might have made would have ended in incoherent keysmashing. Like, 'I need 40 more hours of doccumented training in this subject by next tuesday, sauhriewunkj.l;mn,' or "The prt of this project we just spent two weeks on turned out to be completely unnecessary aosiudbmabs;a/ld.' So you were probably better off without that.


Anyway. Cards? It seems like holiday cards time. If you would like a card, give me your address! The more the better. And if you have a card sign-up posted please point me at it, since I have not been keeping up with my friendslist very well lately.

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Romance was a lot more dangerous back when the goddess of vengeance would get involved.

Nemesis wasn't about revenge, not in the petty sense. She was, essentially, a personification of the desire for people to get what was coming to them. She was righteous indignation and avenging fairness, counterbalancing undeserved good fortune and arrogance.

So if you met someone really, incredibly good looking and they were too self-absorbed to pay you any attention, you could appeal to Nemesis. "Oh One Who Cannot Be Escaped," you would say, "this guy thinks he's too good for me. He must be punished."

And she wouldn't tell you 'Maybe he's just not that into you,' or 'He's not looking for a relationship right now,' or 'Let's discuss your pattern of being attracted to men who are emotionally unavailable,' because she wasn't the goddess of talk-therapy. No, she was the goddess of retribution, and she would agree that yes, indeed, he must be punished. If Mr. Handsome is inspiring unrequited love, he should know what it feels like. And no one really deserves to be that good looking, anyway.

So then she'd send prettyboy off to fall hopelessly in love with his own reflection, until he starved to death or killed himself or got turned into a daffodil. And so balance would be restored to the universe.

But you still wouldn't have a date.

I've decided to do the '101 in 1001' thing. I'd been thinking about it for a while, but I figure I might as well start now, since most of that time frame also overlaps with my last 2 1/2 years as a 20-something.

At this point I don't so much have a list as an assortment of ideas. A lot of them are grandly ambitious, some need further research, and a few might be mutually contradictory. (If I get a serious professional-type job, I will probably not be able to take several months off to hike the appalachian trail.) For others, I need to figure out how to measure success. (I have a lot that say 'Do more. . . ' or 'Get good at. . . ')

Anyone have suggestions for things that should be on my list? Either tailored to me personally or just stuff you think everyone should do or learn.

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Archaeologists spend a lot of their time trying to discredit and one-up their rivals. The fact that these rivals might otherwise be their best friends is irrelevant, but understandable when you realize the only people who can stand archaeologists when they're feeling bitter are the people they're ranting about.

I figured this out at my first job, when we went to visit the labs at a nearby museum and watched the director and my boss have the academic equivalent of a knock-down brawl. The director pointed out that they needed more labspace then we would, since they covered a lot more area then us each season. My boss said that was to be expected, since the museum's people were practically turning over ground with a backhoe, but he'd rather see his staff be careful. The director tried to show off his intact dugout canoe, sitting in a temperature-controlled tank. Boss pointed out that they'd had that for six years, and still hadn't figured out how to take it out of the water without it crumbling into pieces. So then the director said yes, wasn't it great how he had a big enough budget to get a fifteen foot water tank when he wanted one? And the boss quietly fumed until he took us on a tour of the exhibits so he could point at the placecards and go "See there where it says 'discovered by archaeologists'? They mean me," which I think helped bring his ego back into balance.

And this is about things that no one outside the field will ever care about. It's much worse if you get into an area where the stakes are higher. And in North American archaeology, it doesn't get more-high stakes then finding undeniable evidence of the earliest human settlement. 'Undeniable' is the important part. Re-writing the chronology of North American settlement means fighting with political agendas and religions and international relations and, most of all, every archaeologist who has the slightest hope that one of their sites will prove to be older.

There are plenty of artifacts from the Clovis culture, starting a bit over 13,000 years ago, that have enough evidence to be scientifically unimpeachable. Earlier? Well. You can't prove those butchery marks weren't made by a rockfall. That bone might have been sitting around for a thousand years before someone made it into a tool. That's not a hearth, it's just a small, circular fire that started by itself in a cave. Those radiocarbon dates are inconclusive. As for what the scientific articles call coprolites - human feces, dated to 14,500 years ago, from a cave in Oregon. . . well we don't talk about that if we can help it. There's probably a flaw in their dating. You can't prove there isn't.

Maybe we shouldn't have been so harsh about those butchery marks.

I didn't start to seriously worry until it got dark.

"One more hour!" the driver had cheerfully told us after we stopped for lunch. I wasn't really sure if I trusted him - for one thing, evidence was accumulating that he was actually informing on us to the Chilean government. But I comforted myself with the thought that this probably wouldn't effect his performance as a tour guide. We were going from one coastal town to another, our sixth move in ten days. Our destination looked close enough on the map, but I'd long since given up trying to make sense of distance in Chile. The long, thin country had destroyed my sense of proportion.

Our schedule had said the drive would take three hours, with a stop for lunch, and we would have time to unpack before dinner. Instead it took three hours to get to our lunch. A minor setback, we assumed, as we set out again in mid-afternoon. The driver said one more hour. We had to be close.

Two hours later, we were in the mountains. "This makes no sense," I told my friend in the next seat. "See, we started off here, and were going north, to here. . . the mountains are east. We're getting farther from the coast."

The driver shrugged, when we attempted to get an adjusted time of arrival. "One more hour."

The drive was scenic, but not exactly calming. The two-lane highway had sharp curves, high cliffs, and no concept of guardrails. Trucks transporting cut wood wizzed passed us at alarming speeds, and we passed a never-ending succession of shrines marking the sites of fatal accidents.

Somehow, though, it was worse after dark, when all we could see was the headlights of the trucks. Dinner time had passed. We stopped at a strange, small convenience store, and then passed the same town we had two hours before. Some of us tried to find out why we'd gone so far out of the way, but by this time we weren't surprised when all we got was another shrug, and the promise we'd be there in an hour.

By midnight -- about 13 hours after we'd left on our three-hour-trip - we demanded a rest stop. The driver seemed surprised that we were so insistent, since we were only an hour away. Some people paced. Some broke out the liquor. Some tried to find maps. By then, though, I had settled into a strange, zenlike calm. I no longer believed our destination existed. I didn't expect to ever get there. I knew it was my fate to be some bus-bound flying dutchman, riding the highways of South America until I passed into legend.

So it was almost a surprise when we pulled into the hotel at 3am. Before struggling up to our rooms, we were told we had a bus tour of the city at 9am the next day.

I skipped it and slept in.