The Click In Your Head

My gloves dyed my fingers black. That was probably going to be a small forgotten detail about the day I finally convinced myself I could plummet down a mountain on a snowboard instead of my trusty black atomics. What else... what else could I forget... the too too young instructor that reminded me that I might be able to stand in front of someone someday and share the things I know too... learning the rules goofy and then finding halfway down the hill that I was a regular gal after all... being tumbled hard and hearing myself whoop in the midst of it all. The resolute click in your head when you can finally leap from the fear of the unknown into the substance and specificity of real life.

I'm pinning that click here. "Click". See. Right there. I need to remember that click. Hmmm... what else from the past few days?

I made it back to the 6 mile run last night. "Click"
The nighttime ferry ride. "Click"
The moonlit field of orange sea pens & the orgy of onchidoris bilamellata on Vashon. "Click"
Finishing Home & learning again how well Marilynne Robinson can pierce my soul. "Click"
Finding myself cast as a minor role in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg again and watching the twisting kaleidoscope of meaning change around the end stop of forever. "Click"
Eating strawberries in winter. "Click"
Living in and around the lyrics "the silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky"... "Click"
Reading Bukowski in French and really seeing the verb tenses for the first time. "Click"
Finding myself - finally - learning the fingerings on the last page of the Nyman tune. "Click"

Resolution: To Know & Do in 2009

Science can tell us so many things. How strange and macabre it is, therefore, that so much sophisticated data and analysis produces so little action and will in complex societies. How morbidly odd that we can study a thing unto its death and learn so little from its destruction and demise.

The Puget Sound’s own mobius strip of self-assessing brilliance neutered by the lassitude of political economy was wonderfully illustrated for me this November at the COSEE workshop at the University of Washington. That wonderful event (among many other eye-opening things) introduced me to the Keil Lab’s Aquatic Organic Geochemistry spice analysis efforts: http://depts.washington.edu/aog/spices. Aquatic Organic Geochemistry has the potential to tell us just about anything we want to know about a society based entirely on the remnant compounds found in its water supply.

Keil Lab shows off both the grand scientific magic at our disposal as well as the grave irony of our sociopolitical ineptitudes by telling Puget Sounders more than we could ever want to know about—specifically—our localized addiction to artificial vanilla. (Who knew? Puget Sound really is just one big Starbucks vanilla latte.). This was told to the COSEE audience with a wry and knowing smile from Lab Director, Rick Keil. A smile that invariably brooks the question—“What about those other things? You know… those bad things? What can you tell me about those?”

And, Keil’s wry and knowing response? “Nothing.” He can not tell us more because, if he were to reveal evil, local governments might become obliged to regularly monitor for or—even worse—do something to combat that evil. A financial burden they can not bare. And, apparently, there have been regulations put in place to dissuade too much law-abiding “citizen science” in that particular arena of waste water treatment and analysis.

And, with that knowledge, I despair. There is so much we do not know. So much we can not do. I wonder how much destruction promised by those two truths will be born out of having had the opportunity to KNOW something and simply looking away.

Seattle Snow White

Seattle softened and slowed over the holidays this year. It became an urban wonderland dampened and demured by an unusual abundance of snow. The lengthy hill next to my abode turned into a neighborhood cardboard-box & trashcan-lid luge ride where - depending on the time of day - the differing local cliques overran the hill: erudite university professionals and their families, pre-holiday break cheerful frat boys and girls, the Jewish Huskies from the Chabad house nearby. I think my neighborhood may have actually bordered on becoming a realio trulio "community" for a few pristinely snowbound days. (Amazing what happens when you can't drive away... and are forced to WALK places nearby to sustain yourself!)

I danced/slid/spun/walked all over the place on Christmas eve. Watching the world glow with manmade light... bumping into giant goofy snowmen... listening to off-the-wall Holiday music being played that eve on KEXP. I was so content with the mellowing flow produced by that white barrier of slow and sleepy Hydrogen and Oxygen. So hard to be a green grinch when all you see in Seattle is white white white.

Now, the holidays and snow have passed and it is time to dance/slide/spin/walk away into the New Year. The past two weeks have put a smile on my face. I must say... so far... so very very good.