Face Coverings in Minnesota: A How-To

'Tis the season where my 25-block walk to work becomes increasingly difficult. Some may be following the headlines about a bit o' frozen precipitation hitting the Midwest - true indeed.

The snow is like a fine dust - I can't help but think it must be akin to the dust that covered Oklahoma in the 30's during the Dust Bowl. It's very, very light but covers everything and is so dry that it's not icy but blows around and amasses in big drifts that are knee-deep in some places.

'Tis the season of a spilled drink on the sidewalk whose ice cubes stayed frozen and the drink inside froze in a puddle around it. And as for face coverings...

I suited up this morning for my walk (it's not even really cold yet, they tell me). I covered the bottom half of my face with my scarf and in a move of brilliance, remembered to grab my sunglasses for eye protection. Once I got outside and started stumbling around in the snowdrifts, my glasses immediately fogged up because I was breathing into my scarf. Then, of course, the fog on my glasses froze and I couldn't see anything, at which point my next step plunged my foot into a mid-calf deep snow drift. Luckily, not being Minnesotan, or at least not hating the winter with passion yet, I found myself laughing uncontrollably at myself. I quickly learned that it just takes the right technique. One must breathe into the lower fold of the scarf and the glasses stay fog free.

'Tis also the season of neighbors! So many people were shoveling their walkways. I said hello, buenos días, and thank you, to at least 6 people this morning. (Normally, I'm lucky if I exchange a greeting with one other person on my way to work.) And it's fitting to thank those who shovel their walkways - I realized it's like parking kindly or letting someone with fewer items go ahead of you in line - it's a contribution to the public good. We were in solidarity together, making our way through the snow: at intersections, people taking their turn preemptively were kindly tolerated - once you start, you can't really stop easily driving in the snow. This all lends credence to my theory that people in more extreme climates are kinder to each other. Or maybe just Minnesotans are nicer than SoCal-ians. (Have you noticed my love for sweeping generalizations about large populations of people? Now matter how ill-advised and unscientific they might be, I just love making them. Bear with me.)

Ta-ta for now, stay toasty!

Something to write home about

There have been so many reasons to blog...many a blog entry has been composed in my head and then washed away by the lapping of everyday to-dos and "I'm late"s and the like.

I've been to Chicago and New York, two significant stops on my Great American Cities tour. And we've had Halloween and Thanksgiving, two significant holidays in the autumn-winter holiday accumulation of spirit and festivities.

And I've also just been informed this last week that my internship is indeed ending when I go home to California in late December. So the Great American Job Search also commences.

But the real thing I'm writing home about - the real piece of edgy, newsworthy news is that my stuffing was a hit. Of course it was a hit by virtue of a combination of factors that were largely out of my control (J lent me slivered almonds and cranberries, L lent me walnuts, the Midtown Global Market didn't have any sage, and Ze Chef let me use all this delicious salty, olive oily French bread left over from a crostini event). But all that aside, Ze Chef said he tried mine and then ate more of the stuffing left over from the K family Thanksgiving, and he said the latter didn't even taste like stuffing anymore. Wow. Big compliments from Ze Chef. I also made tiramisù (wrong culture) for Thanksgiving, on par with the challah (wrong holiday) that I made for our office potluck to welcome in the new environmental lawyers that moved in.

So again, the horizon spans in front of me, open, waiting. (It bodes well for higher frequency posts here, if nothing else.)

Home New Home

My posts are becoming less frequent. This must mean my life here is feeling like less of an adventure and more of...more of a life? But it is indeed a good one.

The rough spots emerge now and then, but there are clear signs of awesomeness in many aspects of my life here. Like the following:

1) I just moved into a new place tonight and I'm living with some awesome people. Some I haven't even met yet (one who has worked at the Fat Duck in Berkshire, England) but their interests range from good food to Tibetan Buddhism to yoga to the connection between US aid and poverty in Africa.

2) It snowed yesterday!

3) I have a sleeping bag to sleep in tonight (rather than just sheets, which is all I had when I got here) and this is a very good thing. It is below freezing outside and I have my doubts about whether the inside temperature is actually much warmer than the outside temperature. I feel like I'm camping in the Sierras.

4) I have a very good friend who helped me move my stuff today! And who I went to check out the Saint Paul Art Crawl with tonight. And who I ate Ethiopan food with. And who's not just Minnesota nice but is genuinely awesomely nice.

5) Tomorrow I'm seeing a friend drum in a West African dance performance. Which I will probably want to join after seeing it. And this same friend is competing in the Solar Decathlon on the Washington Mall that's going on between 20something universities in the US and world to build a solar-powered house that competes in ten (hence decathlon) categories in a DOE-sponsored contest.

6) And there are so many other reasons that I'm blessed.

More to come soon though --- check back for a posting about the exotic variety of Minnesotan English, Somalis in Minneapolis, and the Mini-Apple.

Love to all,

Robyn

Inglourious Basterds

Bursting out of the theater --- into the warm womb of summer air outside. Safe. Whew. Or...? Can't get a ride home, will have to bike. The darkness, ragged breath, shallow in my throat, I'm gasping for air. University Avenue --- traffic courses by to my left. A noise, pat- pat- Colonel Landa of the S.S.? No, a jogger. Deeper breath, stay calm. Can passers-by see the terror in my face, my mouth messily gaping? By the stadium, I gulp breaths of light, of air ---

Running across the field, family killed by the S.S. Laughing in the smoke of the theater.

Intestines still twisted around my gut, trying to relax. The intercampus transitway stretches out in front of me, the hot, summer air turning to ice, the empty road at once a snow covered path in an alpine forest, the truck crossing the roadway a vehicle of war, carrying prisoners. A light up ahead, now nothing. Now another, blinking towards me --- friend or foe? A sloppily dressed college student, riding hands free, talking on his cellphone. Movements in the grass alongside the road are bunnies, enemies in the race for survival.

Crossing the main road, nearly home, but foiled by road construction --- will have to go the long way, unless I cross the tracks. Up the rocky path, through the bushes --- But a vast and many-membered monster stands in my way, obstinate, cold, silent. Between the train cars, bullets fly. I dodge them and follow the vacant roadway up and around. Tarantino clenching my stomach, quickening my heart, squeezing my eyes shut so tight. Wait at the light and cross on red when no one comes. The smell of manure at the fairgrounds is like home and I can breathe a bit more now. Smooth pavement and a sense of college campus security. Now clean laundry smell from Married Student Housing hits me and I'm nearly there, and I've nearly shaken Landa. The blood and scalping still jump out as I'm rolling into the alley, easing off my bike, and....the...terrible...magic...is...gone.

It was just a movie.

State Fair Mania

Full moon, chocolate dipped key lime pie on a stick, a trip to Lake Wobegone with Garrison Keillor, an East Tennessee band called Quicksilver complete with dashing fiddler, deep fried cheese curds (twice), giant squash, grilled chocolate sandwich, tiny donuts, Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal showing us youngins how to rock, deep fried green beans, raspberry chocolate wine ice cream (twice), Princess Kay of the Milky Way butter busts, baby calves being born on the big screen, and eww, swine flu. All this and more at the Minnesota State Fair. Princess Kay Butter Busts! (Yes, scary.)

After volunteering at the Sierra Club booth this morning, and popping over to Minneapolis for a couple of hours of work, I spent the rest of the evening at the fair for a last hurrah. It ends Labor Day and I've already been three times, which is plenty (my body chimes in "Please, stop the fried-food assault!") Garrison Keillor was at the Grandstand tonight --- my first time seeing Prairie Home Companion in person. A highlight (besides the handsome fiddler from Tennessee) was Garrison's song about September in Minnesota, about this year, this particular State Fair, exactly tailored to what's happening right now. It reminded me that art and song and poetry move us through transitions, render them more than mechanical and chemical processes that produce new seasons, different colors of leaves, cloud formations, weather patterns, and animal behaviors. They become cultural because they are infused with meaning, even as little as a song that was sung about these processes. "Nights are getting cooler, school is beginning" Keillor sang, and to accompany the music, my years of memory bound up with September and the crispness of the air and smoke out of chimneys was that feeling that transition is upon us, that newness is imminent even though it's not the newness of spring. Fall is indeed nipping here. Today was warm, like a last attempt at summer heat, but a good one.

(Notice GK's red socks in this photo.)

I feel nostalgic about the newness of school that September used to bring. There is a new newness now --- an anything-is-possible newness. We just got word that both H and I are welcome and wanted longer than our original three months here in the Twin Cities. They'll have us until December if we'll stay, which is a great honor from my perspective, and very exciting. I think it casts uncertainty on the prospect of applying to graduate school but maybe I can manage in spite of working full-time. So far, the job has been incredible in terms of coming into working relationships with extraordinary people. We work with people who have impressive experience doing community organizing, handing out big money in the world of grantmaking, and rubbing elbows with other such money-tossers and project-launchers.

The prospect of staying into December is also exhilarating for the winter that everyone's been ominously warning us about. I have to inform them that there are indeed parts of California that get snowed on and I grew up in one of them. But then I concede that it doesn't really get that far below zero so this really will be a new experience for me. And will give me just the excuse I need to buy a beautiful winter coat.

Oh yes, and even swine flu struck here, but don't be alarmed, folks, it's under control. (It's not all that comforting that we live two blocks away from the fairgrounds but I understand swine flu isn't the big monster it's reputed to be.) Three brothers in the 4H barn came down with it, but everyone seems pretty civilized about the whole thing (every who was passing out frisbees and disposable fans are now passing out hand sanitizer).

In other fair news, this is a big fish sculpture made strictly of garbage found in the Mississippi. They were building it at a workshop along the bike path I ride on and I was betting it was headed to Burning Man, but lo, it appeared like at great spectre of human consumption, risen to remind us of the detritus our lives so frantically produce. Will we take heed, great Garbage Fish? Stay tuned...

Big Labor Day weekend full of festivities coming up and I'm hoping to make lots of food. More news soon.

My Commute

Sunflowers in community garden with Somali neighborhood in background. This is a view from the bike path between Franklin Avenue and the Cedar-Riverside light rail stops.


Frank Gehry is following me. Sort of. (The Weisman Art Museum, complete with hip bike racks).


Worker-owned bike coop, the Hub.


Remnants of fallen 35W bridge (remember the Minneapolis bridge collapse?) taken from the upper level of the Washington bridge



Wine and molten lava chocolate cake at the Happy Gnome

Getting cultured in the Midwest (Or Various Dairy Products That Will Be Available at the State Fair)

Much cultural enrichment has been had in the last week. The Twin Cities are right there on par with those grand metropoles (plural of metropolis is what?) like Tokyo or Amsterdam, but there are two of them!

H and I and the adopted fam went to the Walker, the Minneapolis art museum, and enjoyed a whole slew of beautiful treasures, like Tre ragazze alla balconata by Michelangelo Pistoletto, pictured below. One of my favorites was a nice little mystery: a series of picture frames filled with only the photos from world newspaper articles from April 20th, 1978 and the name of the newspaper. They all had the same photo of man (Aldo Moro, former Prime Minister of Italy) holding up a newspaper article that asked "Moro assassinato?" Behind him is a (probably red) flag with a white star that says Brigate Rosse, the Red Brigades.

The story behind the image is quite involved, but the piece gave nothing but the relative sizes of this image in newspapers all over the world, and as you glanced at each frame, you began telling yourself the story, trying to fill in the blanks (Is that guy Moro? Is he with or against the Red Brigades? Was there a rumor he had been killed?) But what the piece drew to my attention was the emphasis that gets placed on certain stories in certain countries. In this newspaper it was a tiny blurry photo, and you couldn't see what was written on the banner behind him (kind of like the image I found, ugh). In the next, it was huge, and "assassinato" was shown clearly in the newspaper Moro is holding.

H and I returned to the Walker Sunday to see the sculpture garden. We had stunning weather over the weekend --- as much as I tried, I couldn't stay in my slouchy mood. I loved the arbor especially, and thought of seeding rudbeckia (a.k.a. Black Eyed Susans) with Theo at the Homeless Garden when a little sign reminded me that that's what I was looking at.

The Syringa Tree which we saw Sunday at the Jungle Theater was a one-woman autobiography of childhood in South Africa during apartheid. It was incredible...as soon as the actress came on stage, I remembered she would be alone on stage for the next 90 minutes and resigned myself to a lack of variety. How wrong I was. Her diction and pronunciation, her body language, her disposition morphed suddenly into distinct characters throughout. The main storyteller was the author at seven or eight years old. The actress and the playwright must have studied with great scrutiny the movements and musings of oodles of kidlets to execute the Elizabeth's character as they did. I actually wanted to blubber at the end but had to be satisfied with quietly sniffing and wiping tears in the final 20 minutes.

So because I'm building towards great cultural enrichment, tomorrow begins the Minnesota State Fair, complete with deep fried cheese curds, Princess Kay of the Milky Way butter busts, Garrison Keillor (who I'm going to see September 4th!) and other deeply enriching experiences. But first, Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal tomorrow. Culture indeed!

Oh yes, and work is going very well, to let anyone know who's interested. I'm learning about the delicate business of relationship management in the non-profit world with funders, community organizations, allies. And just because it's non-profit, don't make the mistake of thinking it's all rose-colored glasses and kumbaya......oh no. There's intrigue, drama, romance, and...scandal. But not so much in my office. We're pretty much all holding hands and giggling like school children most of the time as we make our pivot charts and plan to take over the world. Until next time, wishing you all sweet dreams of food on a stick.

August 22

I'm trying to make my posts a bit shorter and perhaps more frequent. Here's a first go.

New friends. New ring. Shining sun. Good day.

An Average Weekend with the S Family

I don't really know how to begin describing our weekend with three Mexican shaman women. M and S had given us notice on Friday afternoon that we'd have some guests from Mexico, which wasn't surprising considering S's competency in Spanish and history of organizing in Nicaragua and other parts of Central America (sí, ha estado en El Salvador también). But when we got home, we found out M and S hadn't met these people either. A friend who's into agricultural sustainability had had something to do with a convention on sacred plants in the Mdewakanton Dakota territory....and the short story is that she asked M and S to host some visiting healers, all from different parts of Mexico.

In between massages and discussions of collective consciousness, the highlight of the weekend was a ceremony that these three women held near the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers (have I mentioned I bike over the Mississippi every day?!? I can't get over it! Makes me want to mark twain...) So the ceremony involved burning copal in incense burners, asking permission to do the ceremony to the guardians of the four directions, sounding shells, and singing..."que florezca la paz, que florezca la paz, que florezca...." We repeated that line over and over again, each time changing what we hoped would flourish: las tradiciones, la amistad, el amor, even las ciencias (science). Prudently, the river patrol didn't intervene because clearly it was a sacred moment and that would have been SO not politically correct. It was very beautiful, and ALL in Spanish. It was a whole weekend of Spanish! And my Spanish crawled out from the dusty spot on my mental desk where I had pushed it aside and put on a good show.

The first night they arrived, there was a fourth healer, Lalo. He had to leave early the next morning so he said, "We didn't give everything away at our convention...if anyone needs any healing, you can tell us and we are here for you." And then he added, "And even if you don't tell us, we can tell you," following that with a mischievous giggle. He looked at my right eye and said that my right side was the one that needed a little help, and that I should be careful of my kidneys (have I not being paying extra attention to them lately, Mom?). Nothing is wrong now, but of course I ought to avoid sweets and floury stuff and concentrate on preventative measures, which is all I can think about since he told me, naturally. But it didn't put me off...on the contrary, it was like having my palm read.

How are we so lucky to be housed with these people who have amazing connections with all sorts of progressive, creative, and dare I say revolutionary life stories? It's baffling and wonderful. Of course they invited their other friend, the Mexican American poet-organizer to take them for a spin at the mall on Sunday while the S constituency went off to the Minnesota countryside for a family gathering. I didn't really think I could live in a cooler place than my Santa Cruz digs, but lo and behold...Mexican shamans??

It's been a welcome distraction from my lack of a social life. I'm thinking of joining a book club around here to meet folks and taking language classes (any language will do!) since this is the first time in my adult life that when I go home I leave my work where it belongs and my mind is free in the evening. Je voudrais apprendre français!

So far people seem so nice here, all smiles. I have even been out on a "date" with a friend of a friend who's actually my age --- who took H and I out to a hopping bar with her fiance and some friends. I even got a number, yeah baby. (Of someone named Molly, who may invite H and I to a birthday party, how cute.) But there is SO much going on in this huge metro area that we want for nothing as far as events go. It's just a matter of conserving enough energy after a day of armed combat with Access and other such brilliant programs, and during the forty-hour work week in general...

Beh, this is getting long. I'll post again soon, but that's the haps for this round. Thanks for reading, my lovelies. And a big hug and kiss to Grandpa and Liz who I hear have become readers!

The Bicycle Tire Thief

Greetings from the/(a) heartland! It feels so....so...AMERICAN here, but in a good way. People say "sow-nah" for "sauna" (okay, that's Finnish) and they grow lots of corn and there's more sky than land though there's plenty of land. I ride over the Mississippi River on my way to work! There are even tornado sirens that let you know you should go down into the basement and wait it out because someone's seen one coming. Tornadoes. The prairie, even.

My internship with PTP has just begun. I even have a PTP t-shirt now, which means that in some fundamental way, I belong. We're organizing a training that starts Sunday for community organizers from London, Tennessee to Oakland, California on framing and messaging, which essentially helps people scrutinize the way they deliver the messages they're trying to spread. It's been a whirlwind of logistics mostly, but it's deeply satisfying to have something concrete and simple to work on before the real fun begins. Which may involve me actually going out on a few limbs, trying things that I haven't done (i.e. who am I to be put in charge of anything relating to "information architecture"?).

I'm considering buying a camera (yes, perennially stingy me!) for all the fabulous things I'm seeing. For now, I can only hint at their allure and mystique.

Bike racks shaped like bikes, a Calatrava-looking bridge, a beautiful mosaic outside of a beautiful co-op grocery store, a street name Minnehaha, and the Mississippi River, of course.

They've realized a dream of mine in this city, the number 2 bike city in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau. A co-worker told me she's not used to biking on trafficked streets because their are so many bike paths! One solution to the perpetual biker-motorist civil war is making two separate --- if not completely, mostly --- sets of roadways. This is unlikely to happen in places where there isn't a great deal of motivation and passion to combat the inertia, the status quo of road domination by vehicles. So my conclusion, of course, is that in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are full of motivated, passionate cyclists. So I'm happy to be here for this reason too. Today, I biked with co-workers H and L to Common Roots for an after-work beer along the Greenway, a bike path built along an old railroad route (the tracks are gone, of course). It's clever because it passes through the important areas of the city but not on the car routes, and it's below the roads, with the train tressels arching above the path. And just in case one hasn't yet had their fill of wild, Minnesota raspberries, the path is lined with them.

So take heed, all you aspiring bike cities: convert your unused railways to bike paths! This does of course attract the aspiring bike thieves. Today, as H and I left the office to grab our bikes and go, a distraught fellow biker with helmet in hand looked sadly at her frame, locked to the stand outside of the office and missing both tires. So I will be bringing my dirty bike with enormous mountain bike tires into the office henceforth.

For now, I'll have to settle for photos I found on the web, but I may just find a camera soon! I bet there's a rowdy bunch of Minn-SP Freecyclers around here.

Je vais dormir!

The Twins

So what I should be doing at the moment...this is always the preface of a blog entry, although soon one of the shoulds will actually be write in a blog (not this one).

I'm writing from Saint Paul, Minnesota, a place I never thought about six months ago.

It's breezy outside, but warm enough for me to need to blow cool breath on my fingers every few words I type. As I began, what I should be doing at the moment is refining the day's intensive anthropological field notes that I took during the first two days of work at my internship at the Progressive Technology Project. These notes are nonexistent but I have made a lot of observations in my first two days. What an exciting place to work! Exciting in a low-key way now. But in a big way if you think architecture and engineering --- the building is completely green, with a rooftop garden complete with a huge solar array, recycled glass ceramic tiles in the bathrooms, low-flow toilets, efficient heating and cooling systems, and a very stylish industrial look (strangely similar to the HQ of my other office in SF).

Instead, I want to reflect on what it's like to be here in MinnesOWta --- this place that is both part of my home country and more foreign to me than at least one foreign country.

First, I'll just give a few key details and elaborate on my experience in a later post. I'm staying with the family of the former director of PTP and they've been extremely welcoming and comfortable with us so far. I say "us" because another Santa Cruzian is here with me, interning with the same org. We have our own rooms in this big, beautiful house that used to be a boarding house, at one time housing 18 people. There are three stories, plus a basement (um...did you say there are tornadoes in Minnesota??). Two kitties come included, Iris and Katie. The worst problem we've encountered so far is TOO MANY RASPBERRIES! And I was sad about leaving all that beautiful fresh produce at the Santa Cruz farmer's market.

That's all for now. So far so good.

O

It's like what Bill Grace said all great leaders have. Obama's sincerity comes from his awareness every time he is in public, but probably when he's in private too, that he is the face of something that is much bigger than him. How else could a leader stand there and not collapse from the love and the pressure and the intensity of such a mass? He has to call upon this awareness often, remind himself of this greater force behind him, constantly recall that he's just a man with a message. But he knows it so well. He knows is SO WELL that he is only there because of the power of us.

There are four days between now and the day we can kiss the last eight years of leadership (or rather, fear conditioning) goodbye forever. I guess we're susceptible to a bit of post-election depression if we think Obama's our magic pill. But whatever happens on election day, the movement has already begun. The beauty of his campaign is that so much has emerged already through the nationwide movement to elect him. It's such a perfect campaign --- he's already won without even winning by stimulating our collective imagination.

When I see McCain speak, I see a generation passing on into history. I see a man out of touch. I see a strategy that's finally failing. Joe the Plumber wants to install environmentally friendly plumbing! Joe the Plumber is starting to realize that black and white is just what you see when you're so far away from reality that you can't distinguish all the beautiful shades of gray. Joe the Plumber is trading in his Red Bull for some Kombucha. Okay, maybe that's last one is just Joe the Plumber from Santa Cruz. But I'm ready to accept the challenge of some real leadership in our country. It means that we who have been unhappy can't be unhappy and inactive anymore because we're done hoping for some legitimate politicizing.

Throw Me a Scone!

There's something kind of amusing and kind of lonely about hanging out with non-native speakers of English all the time. After 2.5 weeks in Ireland, I've finally met my first Irish person yesterday. Giovanni lives with Alexandra (from France) and Louise (from Ireland), but the latter was MIA ever since I got here until this past weekend. I've spent time with a good number of Italians, French people, my one friend in Cork who's Belgian, and even an Omani!

Of course I'm overjoyed at all the cultural enrichment, but do wonder if it wouldn't be a bit enlightening to meet an Irish lass or lad while here on the Emerald Isle. Of course I've seen and heard real, genuine Irish people on the street here in Cork, but without frequenting pubs, and I've yet to be in a pub so far (blast!), it's not easy to chat anyone up on the street. Plus, being acutely sensitive to anti-American sentiments, I am trying to pick up attitudes appropriate to an urban European environment as I normally do when I'm abroad. It doesn't seem to be all that common to chat with someone you're waiting in line behind, or to make much conversation with strangers. I suppose this is true in San Francisco too, but maybe less so.

This weekend, Giovanni and I went to Galway to stay with Giuseppe and Maryam, an engaged couple of non-Irish people who are making their living here. We ate fabulous Omanitalian home-cooking including risotto with a tomato and tuna sauce with Omani curry spices, delicious fluffy pancakes, and sort of Mexican fajitas (guacamole à la Robyn) and enjoyed their company. Sunday we went to County Mayo to Ashford Castle, and after a long walk around the immaculately manicured grounds, our stomachs began to growl. The Italians, the Omani and I circled around the castle that houses a five-star hotel and equally ranked restaurant and caught a glimpse of the basement kitchen through ground-level window. I offered that we should just scurry over to the window and ask for a quick bite to eat or two: "Hey, why don't you throw me a scone!" Ha ha haha haa, and I found myself laughing alone and then beginning to explain my clever little play on words. But such explanations never do justice to humor. I shouldn't have expected them to throw me a bone, so to speak. So I recount it here, in hopes I can share my cheesy line with some native English speaker.

Similarly, later that evening as the four of us were preparing our internationally inspired fajitas in a kitchen too small for two, Maryam complained that Giovanni and Giuseppe were kicking a bottle that was on the floor as we all shuffled around each other in the famous too-small kitchen-and-too-many-people-in-it dance. I quipped, "At least they're not kicking the bucket," and made my own buh-dum-bum-chhhhhh to underline my stupid humor. "What, at least we're not kicking the bottle?" "No...to 'kick the bucket' means....ahhh, nevermind." At least I'm amusing myself.

Far West

I like to see only the silhouettes of people at sunset. They become not full people but shadows of what they were during the day. I can be alone with myself. At most I see a hand hanging out someone's open window as they sit in their vehicle to watch the horizon and the falling sun. Other runners become a pant, a face that flashes back into dusk as quick as it came. People on bikes shrink down to a flashing light and a bike tire whir and they're gone too. Surfers squeege by whose boards reflect a streetlight. My shadow moves in next to me as the car lights pass by. The world seems to simplify into sounds and dark and light. Here at dusk there's no future to worry about tomorrow's phonology assignment and no past. Just me and the fading sun. Me and snippets of conversation from other people's worlds. "The fact is, in my opinion..." Me and my sweat, my knees, my spit. "And she said, 'Don't be shy...'" Me and an expansive ocean-sky. "If Barack Obama is candidate for president...whole new opportunity for the rest of the world..." It's just me and my fading headache. As I turn back towards my house, my shampoo, my dinner, my phonology, the dark part of the sky is left and what remains of today's sun is a pale memory on the horizon behind me. A woman pulls up her underwear after peeing beside her car in the dark. My mind is quieter and as I pass some of the silhouettes again that I passed on the way out I realize I can't avoid recognizing someone. The lights seem brighter as the dark gets darker and it's easier to make out the features of passersby. I suppose my obscurity is less certain too. I even have to shield my eyes like I did from the bright sun today to discern the path across the open field back to my house. Here I am.

Next Stop: Eireann

I'm cold! I'm writing from overcast Cork, Ireland. I'm a bit dazed after a quarter of always having something hanging over my head, of never being able to catch up. I was able to take it in stride and accept that I wouldn't be able to actually catch up, knowing that I was still a good student and that the work I was doing was good.

I was swimming around in future soup a lot during this last quarter, not sure of what to grab on to (a PhD program? But in what subject? A master's? Where though? Should I stay in California? Should I change course from linguistics to equality in education? Would a higher degree linguistics be in line with my values about social justice and equality? Would it separate me from the real world? Could I do anything practical with it?) but thinking it was probably best to grab onto something. In the end, I decided not to apply to graduate school this year. Imagine: for the first time in my life, I will do something that I devise interesting or worthy of looking into rather than just taking the next obvious step that my scholastic career so far has molded me, has indoctrinated me to take. And even that seemed like too gaping a precipice to drop right off of, so I will be turning in one application. It's for Teach For America, a program whose goal is to supplement the deficiencies of rural and urban public schools whose students are years behind in literacy and math standards. It sends students with bachelor's degrees to these communities to become actual teachers for two years. Students like me, with no formal or informal training as teachers, who may have majored in biology or linguistics or history of consciousness as is possible at Santa Cruz or best yet, education. There is an intense and rigorous summer training, followed by two years of classroom practice.

I'm reading a book by the founder of Teach for America, Wendy Kopp, who, like me, was evaluating her future options as a senior a Princeton in the late '80's. She wanted something meaningful to work for rather than to go to a two-year business school just to get rich. I guess it's fair to say I'm not exactly worried that my alternative options are just to go get rich, but I am concerned that they might not be meaningful. Or rather, I think time off doing something real and practical could set the stage for a meaningful degree in something I believe in, and would help me figure out EVERYTHING that I don't know, which is most everything.

Hark, I think I see the sun! And by contorting my body at weird angles, I think I might have spied a tiny corner of blue sky from the window of Giovanni's apartment, one among many in a complex not designed to bring in the little natural Irish lighting that might poke through the clouds now and then. I am reticent to say that this is a dreary city, but suffice it to say that this is a city with friendly people, fighting not to be dreary against the very stiff odds that the omnipotent weather imposes.

This is Day Five in Cork. I have been volunteering half days at the Oxfam Fair Trade shop on French Church Street, and it's been a very good way for me to spend time while Giovanni is at work. It's fair to say I've met more non-Irish people than Irish, but I've met a few of them too. I price and count things that have arrived, I restock the shelves, I work at the cash register (often causing it to stop working when there are more than five people in line), and I drink divine hot dark chocolate from the shop down the way and chat with Esther, the Belgian manager, and other volunteers. Many of the other volunteers are international: French, Italian, etc. Others are Irish, and despite the difficulty I have in understanding many with really broad accents, I'm having fun meeting so many people and actually talking to a few for an extended period of time. It's nice to travel when you can manage to find real opportunities to meet local people.

It's been a quite international experience so far. The first night I arrived, Giovanni and I went to dinner at his friend Giuseppe's house, another Italian who's girlfriend is from Oman. There were also two other couples, the recurring them being Italian male, international female. The other two girls were Dutch and Serbian. It was a lovely evening, especially since the two Sicilians cooked pizza and pasta al forno for dinner!!

I'm going to step out now that the sun has unabashedly begun to shine outside the window. I can't miss the occasion! I would like to see the University of Cork on a day like today. Pictures will be posted soon.

Next week, Giovanni and I will go to West Cork hopefully, and perhaps Kerry, and Wicklow for Christmas. Maybe we'll even make it to Galway before he starts work again!

I only know how to say "buses" and "potato" so far in Irish. I don't know how far that will get me...

Bella Ciao

It's a great moment in the history of the world right now: women are going to be the positive change in the world. And we're going to do it with love. After all, it's women who pay back their loans and who are creating mini-revolutions in peripheral nations. It's women who have been silenced but who are beginning to spotlight the value different kinds of discourses, and present new kinds of dialogues. Women are the innovators: this is true in language use in most societies. It's my understanding that postmodernism shares many parallels with historically feminine ways of conceiving the world: is it not true that there are many truths, that each person has access to multiple ways of conceiving of the world? Ursula K. Le Guin recounts an experience she shared with a group of women discussing theory. One woman said, amidst arguing and verbal jabbing, "Offer your experience as your truth," to which the women markedly shifted their style of dialogue. Le Guin remembers

"When we started talking again, we didn't talk objectively, and we didn't fight. We went back to feeling our way into ideas, using the whole intellect and not half of it...not claiming something: offering something. How, after all, can one experience deny, negate, disprove, another experience?"

And indeed, this is what postmodernism is about, to the extent that I understand it. It's about the lack of an absolute reality outside of our individual perception of it: it means there can be contradictory truths, even for the same individual at different moments, in different circumstances. I wrote about this before, remarking on the strangeness of the fact that if I could have a conversation with myself from one day to the next, or one year to the next about my deepest convictions, I might end up arguing bitterly about TRUTH with my own self!

As Le Guin's "mother tongue", or the language historically associated with women that does not require distance between the speaker and the subject, or the so-called objectivity of the speaker, begins to be reevaluated, revalued in spheres besides the home, there will be a cultural shift, a social change, a transformation. In Le Guin's words, "It is a language always on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song." Not oppressed silence, but a silence that listens, a silence that speaks.

When I hear men talk about feminism with disdain, defensively, I want to have the presence of mind to have a discussion about what good it is doing us ALL. Surely men suffer the imbalance in society as well: the cultural norms that require stoicism and emotionally constipated strength cannot benefit those who identify as men in our world. Of course Le Guin is not silent on this issue: many men aren't allowed to speak this mother tongue, or don't learn to speak it. "At home, to women and children talking mother tongue, they respond with a grunt and turn on the ball game. They have let themselves be silenced, and dimly they know it, and so resent speakers of the mother tongue; women babble, gabble all the time...Can't listen to that stuff."

Amartya Sen wrote a famous essay on the 100 million women that are missing in the world. Sen claims that given equal access to food and healthcare, the ratio of women to men would be 106/100. This is nearly the ratio in many industrialized countries, but it is not because of wealth or so-called "Western" cultural values. It's a matter of the economic empowerment of women, which can take many forms. In matriarchal societies, the ratio tends to be nearer to 106/100, even if the region or nation is poor or non-Western, such as Kerala in India. Amartya Sen won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. When women are given the means to become economically independent, there are more women! And it is perhaps necessary that many societies began to recognize women as not just assets to their communities as procreators, but as economic actors who bring home the bacon.

There are a couple of organizations that are empowering individual women by connecting them to donors from wealthy nations. Small donations of $25 can help a woman in Bangladesh or Belize or Uganda start a small business enterprise, and after she pays it back, the money is recycled to help someone else.

Namasté Direct
http://www.namaste-direct.org/index.php
Kiva
http://kiva.org/

Are you with me, sisters? Are you with me, brothers?



The excerpts from Ursula K. Le Guin come from her 1986 Bryn Mawr commencement address. The information cited by Amartya Sen is from the New York Review of books, "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing", 1990.

Delicata, spaghetti, acorn, butternut...

I rode my bike home today after a long, warm day of classes on campus. The second summer has arrived: in long jeans and with a sweater and scarf in my backpack, I was definitely unnecessarily loaded down.

Coming down from campus I feel like I'm part of the new wave of commuters, or I hope that's what it is. Often there's a fleet of four or five bikes that ride down Bay Street together when I leave campus around 6:00 or 7:00 in the evening, and it's like we have a microtraffic situation next to the two big lanes. We have to watch out for each other. Some fly by others, edging into the right lane of car traffic, donning little white earphones, dodging quickly through a red light if it seems safe enough.

There's nothing like the smells of Santa Cruz to make me remember how alive I am: just today I caught great whiffs of bay leaves, then strong coffee wafting out of a house below Mission followed by a cloud of marijuana that lasted half a block, then eucalyptus, and finally the wet salt of the ocean when I got home. Our house is full of different kinds of squash, and we're enjoying our veggies that we get weekly from the campus farm. We've made zucchini-crusted pizza, salsa with organic hot peppers, tomatoes, onions, and cilantro, delicata squash pasta with parmisan, and lots and lots of greens. We have too many onions to know what to do with them all, and hot peppers coming out our ears. Fall is so generous with its delicious veggies in coastal California. Recipe suggestions are welcome!

I really expected an anti-climax after getting back from my year abroad in Italy, but it's been quite the contrary. My daily life has accelerated into a blur of lectures and microwaved leftovers and dips into the pool, with occasional bouts of sleeping. I'm no longer a stranger in (such) a strange land, nor am I a rookie in college. I thinking learning how to use my elbows in Italy (that is, becoming pushy-er) and repeating the routine of classes at Santa Cruz for the third time have given birth to a new, often more self-assured me.

I'm evaluating all a manner of possible options for next year, including starting a masters somewhere in California in some interesting subject, taking an extension class from Santa Cruz while I find some direction, working on an organic farm temporarily (also known as WWOOF-ing), or trying to find some sort of job in the City for a year before I continue to grad school.

Despite the fact that I have two midterms Thursday, I am not yet waxing poetic this evening...I have so many ideas that strike me during all the lectures I sit through in class, and yet by the time I get home with eyelids drooping and fatigue in my brain, I am empty of all those thoughts. Somehow, I must perservere through the week, especially this one...I am on a mission to think of the best Halloween costume ever. Ideas are welcome. Alla prossima...

Santa Cruzing

Here I am in Santa Cruz again. I meant to write more immediately after my arrival in California but now is as good a time as ever. In fact, it's an ideal time, especially because I should be studying. So of course the impulse to write is back.

I think now that I'm here I have time to absorb all the things I thought about and learned and came across while abroad. And I'm realizing things that I didn't even know I learned, or that I always thought about but didn't think I was working on them, consciously or subconsciously. Maybe it's just seniorhood: all things fall into place when you are on top of the heap. But not necessarily. Not that anything is clear of course. Who knows whether this time next year I'll be in Ireland wiping down tables or at the Monterey Institute of Language or in Santa Cruz trudging on through the master's program or starting over with urban studies in some other university or going out into the real world "to get pissed off" to eventually come back to school.

I'm back to yoga, back to the redwoods, back to the OCEAN (not the sea!), and back to belonging where I am. Yes, I certainly enjoy the fake world right now. Here I have an ocean view and a social life and a purpose and a routine.

For now Italy is in my daily consciousness as fascist history and as Primo Levi and as my memories of the nooks and crannies of Bologna.

It's funny...here majoring in Italian Studies one could construct a whole identity based on being interested in a foreign culture. In Italy it's a bit strange to walk around on the street and major in that reality. How do you explain to people you're interested in what they live and eat and breathe? Just like the fish in water metaphor: could you tell a fish you major in water studies? Would it be able to conceptualize water? Certainly Italians can conceptualize Italian studies, but I wonder if they get the feeling they're being examined.

Until next time (I have a pressing assignment),
Robyn

So the unthinkable happened.

I bought a teal top. Not that I'm going to let this blog degenerate into a space for me to carry on shallow discussions between my id and ego about my clothes. But to those of you who might understand the gravity of this moment, I would like to say cheers to my year abroad for turning me from a teal-hater to someone who can begin to appreciate the whole color spectrum in its complexity and even sport it.

It's been a while since I've blogged. Months, more precisely. And the reason? I stopped studying! I would always blog right in the middle of studying for a big test...those were inspired moments, moments when I need to be working, not blogging of course. I'm always blogging in my mind though, or at least writing. When I think about how I would write about a place or an experience, maybe the thoughts come out more clearly, they get organized into straight-ish lines and they behave in an orderly manner. My experiences become richer too, when I think about them in writing.

This morning was the first time I realized I might actually be sad to leave at the end of the year. Nancy, my dearest Nancy, is leaving for Portugal as we speak and from there will go home to California in September. I also said goodbye to some other girls from the program on Friday night at aperitivo (going out for drinks and munchies before the regular dinner hour).

My experience hasn't been monumental or earth-shattering this year. It felt in some ways like a regular year at college...I know some people on my program managed to see every capital in Western and Eastern Europe and Northern Africa, saw the sights and posted new pictures of themselves with ever changing backdrops every weekend on Facebook. I didn't have that whirlwind experience, and in some ways I'm disappointed that I didn't travel to all the places I was counting on visiting. In other ways though I'm perfectly content. It must be said that I traveled enough for my own tastes and spent quality time where I did go. But also I really feel like I know Bologna. I feel as at home probably as any student who moved to Bologna to go to school. I also have had nice dinner parties and I've learned to make a million new dishes this year. I've spent time with Giovanni's family, even during some rough moments. Maybe the fact that I've been having this sort of everyday experience made me think I wouldn't be so torn to leave this place.

But saying goodbye to Nancy this morning over tiramisù and watermelon was enough make me realize that it's is really the beginning of the end. Just as I miss some pretty simple things from last year like my little Parisian making weird food with too much tabasco sauce and making fun of her or turning off the light and giggling with Jessica and Beatrice (said Parisian) for another hour, or catching up after a long day with Francesco, I think I'll miss simple things from this year too: cheese from my cheeseman ("E poi?"), running with Nancy in our cute little ugly park, eating good food and laughing it up at Giovanni's apartment with Jo and Giulia, piadinas at La Tua Piadina, living a stoplight, two homeless guys, and a couple bars away from Giovanni, and a score of other little things. I guess the truth is that simple doesn't mean meaningless...quite the contrary actually.

I'll miss Nancy being just a piazza away. I'll miss the sort of lifestyle that allows students to have a social life but still renders them independent and studious. I'll miss being able to call Giovanni on the phone because again, we're going to have to spend another year long-distance.

I have been traveling a bit lately...that's another reason why I haven't written. I took a couple of trips in Tuscany in May and got to see Amanda Cook there and meet her grandma! I also took some day trips to the beach and to Urbino, where Raffaello was born. I went to Prague with Nancy at the beginning of June! Came back for less the 24 hours, went to the end of the year party for our exchange program (looking forward to getting to know the new Italian banana slugs in the fall!), and then took off for a two week trip in Sweden and France.

In the Czech Republic Nancy and I also got to see Karlovy Vary (aka Carlsbad, sister city of Carlsbad, California) where we got massages and a sauna at a world renounced facility. We went to Plzen where lots of beer comes from, and Karlstein Castle. I ate amazing potatoes and fried cheese (that's still digesting down there with my deep fried candy bar from the fair four years ago) and drank actually tasty beer (never liked the stuff before, despite my persistence in trying it) Amanda showed up there too...you would think all of Europe is more compact than the space between Santa Cruz and Berkeley.

In Sweden I got to see two former banana slugs: Hanieh and Pelle! Giovanni and I stayed with Pelle in Lund so we got to see the university there, Malmö where Hanieh is from, and Copenhagen which is just a somersault and a big bridge away. The Turning Torso building by Santiago Calatrava was super cool...kind of reminds you of the Sundial Bridge in Redding, California by the same fellow.

We also went on a canoe trip with Pelle and his girlfriend Ylva --- I had always wanted to do an overnight boat trip! And now I want more! It was beautiful and relaxing. Then we stayed in a boat (as in the boat was our hostel) in Stockholm. Think bunkbeds, space economy, gentle rocking, and shared bathroom. Good times though. The Nobel museum was stellar, and there was an architecture museum that we spent a good two hours in (and there was only one room). "Why didn't I study architecture?" I like to ask myself on occasion. Sweden is the land of delicious whole wheat bread and yummy pancakes for dinner and people who speak English better than me (better than I? just kidding...)

From Stockholm we flew to Marseille (which we didn't see much of) and then made it to Grenoble, where Amanda who I hadn't yet gotten enough of, studied this year. She introduced us to amazing pastries and lovely hiking paths and a delicious quiche. We took a day hike and also took a day trip to Lyon. I had already been there but it was nice to retrace the steps I took five years ago now, and also see things that I hadn't before.

Perhaps if you've gotten this far, my blog explosion is wearing on your patience. But I'll wear a bit more to finish this off with food news. For Nancy's festa yesterday, we had a veritable feast of delicious things. Eleonora had made farro (or spelt) with tomatoes, arugula, and cheese, as well as a delicious tiramisù. Nancy made fruit kebabs and brought watermelon....mmmmm. I kind of got carried away and wanted to try to make two dips. Tzatziki is the Greek one with yogurt, cucumber, and garlic which was too garlicky but good. Amanda had given me this awesome recipe for zaalouk, a Maroccan cooked veggie salad of eggplants and tomatoes with paprika, cumen, and parsley. That was delish and even the Italians liked it! Then we had a tomato and cucumber salad with zesty lemon dressing and I attempted a quiche like the one we had made at Amanda's in Grenoble but with spinach, ricotta, and feta. Last of all, because the peaches are so amazing right now I made a tiny peach crisp but ate most of it myself.

I'm off for now, but pretty soon I start summer camp in Reggio Emilia. Happy summer to all and to all a good 4th! I'm going to Paris then...more soon.

The Unplanned City Metaphor

Being monolingual for most of my life and then speaking another language is like walking into an unplanned city. Before leaving the "old city", the feeling that I generally understood the world was everpresent and lead me to think I understood things I never fully did, like the concept of mortgage or the word paradigm and lots of others. Maybe I understood most the words out there, but I never understood some compound concepts, but even that misunderstanding or lack of understanding never took me off balance. Whether I knew these random things or not, life meandered along tranquilly, with normal bumps and stress and more freckles or less freckles.

Just like I thought I knew Yreka inside and out. I could get anywhere in town, I know where I like to go and don't like to go, but I haven't been inside every building in town. I don't know how the water system works or many other things, but I trust that it does. And it does. The City works and I live my life, and we are mutually ignorant of each other, the City and I. I see shops and restaurants come and go, but I don't know anything about bigger mechanisms behind the movement of the city, the way it changes and the direction it's going. All the other cities in my life are relatively similar to my hometown, and they change but mostly for me their role stays the same. They are the sidewalk under my feet, and neither of us really considers the other in much detail.

Just as I never question my own language, and my own ignorance never reveals itself to me. I use the words I need most often, and I assume complete comprehension.

And all of the sudden, I'm in a city that's not planned. It's not planned so it's unlike everything I thought I understood, but still works of course, and perhaps is planned but in such a different way that I have to start from scratch to begin to understand how it works. I'm in a city that isn't following rules I remember now in retrospect unconsciously following. And as I begin to learn the rules, my age and my maturity help me question bigger processes...once I understand one simple mechanism, I see that there is something behind that that's bigger, and perhaps behind that again, until I get to a point of sometimes being able to understand more about my new city than I did about the old one.

So then I start to remember my own roots, and question the rules that I followed without being aware of them, wondering how my city began and what networks run through it, what evolutions it has sustained, what revolutions it has seen. I begin to understand things I never did in my old city, and in my native language, just because I question things here and learn concepts I never learned in my language, so to feel complete I need to translate them back into my own deepest network of understanding, which is English.

But it is still an unplanned city to me, and I'm often lost, and it doesn't have the kind of map I'm used to using. So I get used to being lost and always finding new shops or new restaurants, and I begin to accept my role as a perpetual foreigner in the unplanned city. But sometimes I have more lucid moments than the natives of course, just like outsiders to my City probably have. They'll of course never know my City like I do, but I'll never know my City like they do either.

I don't know if this metaphor is well sewn together. I kind of see it like a patch on a pair of pants that's half falling off. But I'm studying the history of Urban Studies in Europe and I had a revelation that united my two favorite disciplines at the moment. I actually envisioned speaking English as being in a small compartmentalized room and beginning to speak Italian as walking into a giant empty bubble where you could lose touch with the ground and of which the boundaries were sort of unclear. (What actually happened was that my housemate Mario was explaining something to Nicoletta and Vittoria and I understood before they did. And I got to thinking how weird it is that sometimes a non-native speaker could pick up on something before a native one could.) And those things to me translated into planned and unplanned cities because guess what........my oral exam for storia dell'urbanistica moderna e contemporanea is tomorrow!!!!! So of course it's time for a long, involved blog entry.

So in the real, concrete world, I went to Spain to vist Granada and Madrid in the middle of March. It was fun, pictures will be posted soon!