Name Navigation

Nina Simone is singing its a new dawn and a new day. On the cusp of a new year, I'm also listening to Nina the Navigon. The neutral, ageless business voice of a dashboard mounted GPS system has been directing our recent travels. My brother decided to name this Christmas gift. Even while trying to generate a clever name to add to our collective brainstorm, I recoiled. Even after meeting lovely and amazing folks who also happen to have nature names, I always felt uncomfortable about the concept and disliked having to use their name in a sentence when talking to someone that didn't know them. Even after realizing that nature names, or any act of renaming yourself, is an important and understandable act I still get that slightly uncomfortable feeling in the presence of the self named. This same feeling struck about a week ago when I realized in a Mediterranean restaurant that my mother has a bellydance name. The restaurant's dancer sensed my mother's interest while traveling around the tables. She discovered my mother shared a love of the veils and the jangles and asked what her "name" was (apparently all dancers have names). "Samira" mom replied as casually as though it was her given monniker. None of us knew about Samira and none of us expected her to join the performance. Samira made us proud.

After some extended car time on I-95, I'm glad we've named this device so generic it seems to be in every other passing car. I'm less thrilled with the actual name given the association to the Pinta, Santa Maria, and the subsequent desecration of North America, but its not mine to name. Her voice tells us to take a bypass we usually skip. We disagree with her. It is hard not to ascribe gender and name to this vocal passenger. The Navigon system says we should take I-895 doesn't flow as much as Nina, why are you telling me this? Are you sure this is right? Like a loyal canine companion, Nina unflappably readjusts when we don't do her bidding. She's just as even in the redirection. There's no, I told you so's if you go your way, even if its longer and trafficky. 

I'm a laggart. It took me a long time to get a cell and I still don't text. I just got my first, very own, no hand me down laptop. I'm not on Facebook. I didn't feel the slightest pang of jealousy when my brother opened the Navigon. Last night, on a dark road, I read scrawled directions to a friends house as the car passed street lamps. Not exactly Nina's clear display and crisp voice but you can't crumple Nina and toss her into the recycle bin. I proudly tossed the little scrap paper when I was done. The visit was over, I was going to bed. 

Dim Black Friday

Black Friday. Literally dark in the windowless bathroom for the fifth time today when I remember the light switch isn’t working. The power went out this morning. And stayed off all day. Heavy snow on the lines. Already feeling under the weather and literally under the non working power lines, it was a good day to observe the alternative version of the Friday after Thanksgiving: Buy Nothing Day. Between reading and resting it was time for desk cleaning and paper sorting. Piles of catalogs. Despite signing up for 40pounds.org and other junk mail opt out sites and not actually ordering anything, some retailers persistently announce the arrival of each season (or it seems, semi-season; e.g., midsummer sale edition). I decided to call these catalog hogs directly to get my name off the most frequent mail box offenders. During these calls, in the dimming kitchen, on black-no-electricity-buy-nothing day I felt like a true celebrant of anticonsumerism. I’ll still get all their glossy holiday best as it usually takes a couple of months for the system to process this type of request. But it always feels nice to take a step away from the junk mail—whether literal or figurative—that tries to clutter our lives.

Old Blue Hubbard

There’s a turkey sized blue Hubbard behind the mountain bike, balanced atop a pile of camping gear, in the shadows of skis and paddles. Thanksgiving seemed the most apt day to eat this warty, awkwardly cute, largest of the harvest, cucurbit. But how? A chain saw? The best suggestion on the internet came from a profile about an older couple that grows large quantities of large winter squash and throws an annual processing bash, literally smashing the hulking hubbards onto the sidewalk to get them open. A friend wisely suggested a Samurai sword. I surveyed the asphalt in the our mountain town alley rapidly filling with slushy snow while people in Manhattan watched Macy’s. The alley was a solid Plan B. We sharpened the largest kitchen knife in preparation. The squash teetered on the counter. It seemed a dangerous affair, no task for the clumsy or tipsy. Guided by a steady hand the knife worked from the margins to the center, a slow but manageable task, akin to watermelon slicing. Recipes recommend roasting the halves open side down, but I like watermelon cubed and ready to eat, and took that approach with the squash. The bite sized chunks are more versatile, easily to mix in a bowl with olive oil and fresh ground salt and pepper, and presumably roast faster. An hour or so later and the squash bites with their browned tips and edges sizzled in the oil and melted in the mouth.
Thankful for the Harvest and for the Hubbards!

two kitchen tables in America

Last night's debate showed that while there's more than a couple few Americas the candidates are attempting to appeal to, there may only be two kitchen tables in America.

Around one table, people have the stomach to discuss the government's role in the decline of the American dream. They're willing to try solutions, even if the policies are more cod liver than caviar. For dessert, these folks politely spoon humble pie as they accept their culpability in the situation.

Around the other table ever larger portions of denial are served up with an apron, a smile, and a wink!

pro-life, against McCain-Palin

I’m pro-life. I’m also pro-choice. To me pro-life means being in favor of the things that are necessary for life to exist on this planet: breathable air, drinkable water, and a stable climate. Sarah Palin’s version of pro-life includes shooting wolves from helicopters and ignoring the climate changes that are killing polar bears, destroying coastal villages, and powering deadly hurricanes.

A lot of us pro-life, pro-choicers also support family values. We believe in taking responsibility for yourself, your family, and being an informed, involved member of the community. Unlike Governor Palin we don’t expect the government to provide our housing or pay for our growing family’s travel expenses or to fire annoying in-laws. In order to maintain healthy families with strong values our fights involve access to child care, health insurance, and education. In this economy devastated by eight years of Republican administration, too many of us are fighting to keep jobs and homes. Ms. Palin didn’t have to burn too many bridges when she fought for more of our tax dollars to go to Alaskans or for more oil drilling. She figured correctly that you can’t burn bridges when you’ve got a bridge to no where.

Whether you’re pro-life and/or pro-choice, as Americans, we’re lucky enough to have a choice this November and should take that privilege seriously. Before casting a vote perhaps we should ask ourselves, what is the impact of our choice on the lives of others and our own?

strawberries for pumpkintown

The first fifteen of my fortysomething mile trip from a hill in Pumpkintown, South Carolina to a Whole Foods on a highway is dotted with signs advertising knives and produce and local peaches. It is possible to purchase less savory items, but my locavore’s eye is attuned to all things edible. In late March backroad produce stands feature boiled peanuts (plain and Cajun style), double yolk eggs, the occasional greens, and raw milk. Depending on which road you take, you can pick up strawberries. Local, fresh strawberries! These tantalizing, ruby treats embody a classic omnivore’s dilemma. Giddy from calculating their food miles (less than 10!), I momentarily forget their sordid, chemical past to indulge in their ephemeral promise of the taste of summer. Instantly sobered by their lack of flavor, I ponder possible causes (growing technique? timing of harvest? variety?).

Most of the Whole Foods journey is littered with signs for everything I don’t want to eat offered by a bevy of restaurant chains I don’t wish to patronize. Lunch counters serve up meat & three (side dishes) & copious sweet tea. Hamburgers for $1. I can’t think of a single item in Whole Foods that I’ve bought for one dollar. Then again I’m not the type that can put one apple in my basket. I push a cart. It is mounded with food because I’m not as good as I’d like to be at living off of local eggs, a bunch of roadside collards or mustard greens, and boiled peanuts during the lean months.

I am slightly obsessed with food and am a bit of a food hoarder. Fortunately I am also an avid mountain biker, paddler, and hiker. I sometimes wonder whether my outdoor pursuits fuel my food preoccupations or merely enable them. It is my love of food, appreciation of the growing process, of quality, taste, of the experience of eating, and the urge to support growers that try to do the right thing in a hard business that brings me to this contradictory experience that is Whole Foods.

While I am grateful for the access to organic, healthy foods that this large grocer provides, foraging in the gleaming aisles obviously can’t compare with time I’ve spent in community gardens and on organic farms, or learning to eat to the rhythm of the markets when living in Lyon, or even rooting around for the last of the fall apples in the dustiest, dimmest produce shack in South Carolina.

My latest trip to Whole Foods felt a lot better. The unease, the underlying sense that this isn’t how we who are fortunate enough to have choice and opportunity should be eating (e.g., buying collards from California in the Carolinas), was assuaged by knowing that soon I’ll be eating more connected to my bioregion.

Tis the season for farmers markets and roadside stands. Tis the time for Victory Gardens. Grow your own and weed your way to independence from fossil fueled foods. We revive an abandoned community garden with peppers and tomatoes and lots of basil.

special topics in optical physics

Lasers shoot like pinballs across a train set of glass and mirrors and tunnels of different sizes and positions. Plastic of the kind that used to separate freezer cases keeps the table top display protected. Contrary to the exciting DANGER signs pasted on the doors and positioned around the interior, the laser's are off. My friend pulls back the plastic flaps to allow a closer view. The end result, he points to one area the way one might to indicate which end is up, is the rainbow display created by the intense beams.

A high schooler accompanies us on the lab tour. He might intern for the summer. I know I learned that light is separated in waves back in physics class and that our eye can only see certain kinds of light but I can only imagine creating a rainbow with Crayola's. Maybe the kid is thinking the same thing. I'm stuck. I can't see how all the little pieces of glass, painstakingly polished at the workbench next door and then lovingly arranged like a Hummel collection will produce a rainbow with a story. These researchers see more than just Roy G. Biv when reviewing the printouts. Every beam shot through each substrate (usually a gas...why gas?) tells a story. What doesn't have a backstory these days?

Somehow fluids are involved. Microscopic ones. Even though I yawned more than was socially acceptable due to the dim, laser friendly lighting pre coffee, I was paying attention. Trying to leap from microfluids to their medical applications: a new test for diabetes. There were other applications at work in this space the size of a two car garage. Something to do with defense, though that was confidential, and even if I was privy to the details, they'd be lost on me.

Our friends generously shared the place where they spend many of their waking hours, the kind of place requiring many more hours accumulating knowledge in order to function there. Where does the urge come from to move beyond the tentative steps of a high school lab intern to the rocky expanse that is the study of science to the demanding terrain entailed in the pursuit of original research.

My understanding of this place was dimmer than the lighting but I left with the charge you get when you're around people who are engaged with their work, who have a passion for something complex and relatively obscure, who are looking so intensely beyond themselves that you want to take in the view.