End of the Year

This will probably be my last post of the year. I just got back to Dallas from St. Louis. The holidays were different this year because I was with the family less and the other cousins were gone from the main events. Though we stayed a day less than we thought, I was able to see Jeska more than expected. She met a bit of my family and I chickened out of meeting most of hers, though it sounds like it probably would have been a fun tipsy time. Seeing her in person after a year wasn't very awkward at all, which I take to be a good sign. I gave her a mix and took her to a fancyish French restaurant. It was in an industrial-looking side of town, like where the steel mill and soup kitchen would be, but behind the dull brick facade are lofts and Franco, the upscale eatery. We sat on one of the window benches so we looked like nobility eating and looking down upon the other diners. After a cheese plate, we shared a Moroccan vegetable stew and duck with potatoes and beets. If we could eat food like that every night, I'd be willing to sit in the window seat like a restaurant couple fixture. I also spotted a Mark Twain look-alike dining there. Then Jeska took me for iced cream where all the pretentious 20-somethings like to go. I don't think I've ever been with someone as openly interested in possessing me as her. It will be hard to wait the two-and-a-half months to see her during Spring break.
Oh, yeah, I also got a speeding ticket right when I entered Missouri. It was my first one and I didn't know what all I was supposed to say so I didn't get a warning. Basically cops just sucked some life out of me right before the holidays; I've never needed a cop before, they've always just been a hindrance.

Notes

Today I'm going through old textbooks to see about selling them to Half-Price Books and I found some notes in one. Here are a few:

Land taken from the Amazons and abandoned is being reclaimed, not by the same species but still serviceable habitat. Amazons aren't as fragile as thought.

Why are beaver dams good and human dams bad?

Do man-made lakes shift the weight of the world? Water that should be flowing isn't, thus weight.

Would there be life on Earth without a moon?

Culture is human adaptation.

Water on Earth may have come from comets hitting during early formation.

Lights

I still keep seeing those lights and atmospheric iridescence. Usually they're just points or spheres that appear, but I just saw a crackling of light almost like plastic wrap used on caramel apples shining in parts of the folds. It was in the corner of my vision so I turned my head to see it full on and it was gone and there was nothing there that was remotely reflective. Things are going on within my eyes. I feel like I'm breaching into something.

Holidays

I still feel uncomfortable with holidays, like they're a disturbance in my daily life. My gut says no and I'm just not able to bring myself to go to a friend's house to eat. I think it might have to do with knowing the people. If I have met and talked with people during a normal day, I probably wouldn't hesitate to be with the family on a holiday. I can't join in a holiday and meet people for the first time while eating their food and such. Yes, I know people probably don't mind and it's part of the holiday but I'm still put extremely on edge by it. There are so many things about holidays that agitate me, and I have the feeling that they are actually things about me that agitate me. I'm still to rigid about some things.

Muses

It's good and true that disturbance and emotional overflow are keys to creativity. Words, only the right ones, flow easily at these times because there is only time for the truth - if just the truth at that time. However, this being lightly touched upon, one cannot exist for any extended time in this particular state of creativity; one needs periods of peace. Like a plane in a strong storm, the wind can slowly peel plates away until the frame remains, and is too peeled away; like a sand castle in high tide, the water can touch and take a few grains at a time, melting the whole away. We must be careful with ourselves, as people and muses.

Dandelions in Winter?

I message Dandelion and she doesn't message back, but she reads the blog. Why don't you message back?

The Furnace, The Human Body

As humans, we stoke the fire which keeps our bodies moving, like coal to a train. I am the furnace which produces no soot, no accumulation. Logs are added to the stone bottom and they catch and vanish, leaving no trace. While it is not good to gather too much soot without sweeping the furnace out, it is equally not good to have so efficient a furnace that there is no residue. Without the residuals of fuel, there is little pay off, like putting money in a bank without earning interest. The soot from a furnace, after all, goes on to nourish a garden and bring further growth and prosperity.

Hospice

Jeska's mom was moved to a retirement home today for hospice purposes. Apparently it's more of a status than a place and retirement homes are good for it because someone can be on hospice for days or weeks on months. Just stopping at that broad thought, I had this idea about a person around my age who just signs up for hospice because, after all, we are all dying just at different rates. So the person goes into a retirement home and has adventures or something. It has a very Woody Allen/Curb Your Enthusiasm feel to it. Not that I mean to make humor of a serious event or anything.

The Setting Sun

As the winter sun went around the planet today, the sharpness increased and hit the buildings and trees and fences. It was a sharpness in light and in shadow; the light being brighter which caused the shadow to seem stricter. Everything had a light and dark side, down the middle, and the tips of trees (where the branches become very thin) appeared frosted like white specks. The scene looked like an example of chiaroscuro in some painting; something I don't want to forget but that a camera cannot capture.

Another View

Everything in the world, apart from humans, is innocent. There is no desire to harm for harm's sake - the world is like a barb, able to move forward but to try to go against the grain brings pain. For example, poison ivy doesn't want to cause discomfort, it is people that want discomfort placed onto us. Our lack of understanding or knowledge or will force us to harm ourselves. It causes a person to rub a plant the wrong way or treat most animals as if they were harmless attractions. It's true that animals and plants develop behaviors or mechanisms to help with survival, but it's up to the forces that act on them if the threat of harm is even necessary. I don't know, this was a before sleep thought last night and I'm just now writing about it so it doesn't seem as clear. I won't write pre-sleep thoughts as I get them, though, because it would keep me from sleep.

Finally the Week Ends

Even though it's just Thursday, it basically feels over; I even watched my weekend movie tonight instead of waiting. It was Blindness and I really liked the music and story, even though most of it was disconcerting. Then I started getting all these Sean Connery James Bond movies. He's my favorite.
Devin, Brandon, and Matt came for the week and left this morning. They did a lot of camping this time and browsed the city on their own. They went to the Sand Dunes and told me the condition of it during the Fall. It's really interesting how many faces that place has. We ate Beaux Jo's and they would have passed it over without even knowing it. That's the one pizza place everyone is told to go to when they first come to Fort Collins. Basically, we just had nights together because of my schedule, and we drank good beer (even though I usually hate it) and smoked their strange St. Louis weed and wild dagga and kratom and lots of stuff, and watched crazy kung-fu movies. I really didn't get to study for my weed test as much as I should have, but I feel pretty good about it - maybe a B. I really studied for the first test and only got an 89, but that was over more material. So now I'm totally pooped and I wasn't able to get the car totally fixed like I had hoped. Unfortunately when Autozone read the computer they cleared the lights, so I have to waste gas waiting for it to reset and turn back on so I can take it to the Toyota dealership. I don't understand machines, but I like using them.

Wolf Day

Today was a wolf sort of day. This is different than a Fox Day because it lacks underhanded intentions. Other than that, they might be very similar. Essentially, in every class today, I've felt physically sore and tired, like my body was a spring. And there was electricity in the feeling that set the hair on my body upright. I kept in a crouched position waiting for each class to end and this was especially trying in composition, waiting as the teacher explained things multiple times as if we were idiots (something which really grates on my mental state). I had the recurring daydream of transforming into a wolf and leaping out of class and running, just running, never looking back. It's a sort of physical vigor I don't feel often, something I imagine the spiritual use of the datura plant causing. I guess it has just been too long a period of sitting, staring at powerpoint presentations.

The Killer's Spirit

Today I practiced my killer's spirit/intention. On the way back to my apartment I saw a couple ravens, big ones, picking over garbage in the street. I walked toward them and made a hiss sound and they took off but only a foot away, as most big city birds do. Since they weren't in my way I kept on for my apartment, but noticed they were staring after me between pecks at the garbage. So I looked at them and stared in a particular way, more with thought then a physical change. Both birds went alight quickly, all the way to a distant tree where they still looked after me.

I recall reading about different ways of seeing and nonverbal communication, probably in a Castaneda book, so this was a neat experiment.

Baths

What I like about baths is the effect of the water over my body, the pressure and absence of pressure. I breathe in and my chest rises above the water and my hair falls like limp seaweed on shore. The cold and limp hair weigh together as a blanket holding me down. I breathe out and my chest falls below the water and my hair is puppeteered upward, the faint blue of the water cast over this tall-grass prairie growing on my chest.

A Boring Girl

"You're very conventional, aren't you? You should try to see the light in the things you shadow, and the dark lines that accentuate your light."

Today in composition we were going around the class describing the topics we had chosen, several of which would become group writing assignments for the rest of the semester. I thought more taboo topics would be picked since it's a "writing arguments" class, but I was the only one. Euthanasia.
People were generally interested in what I said, since several noted so online, likely because it's such an open-ended subject. But sitting to my right are two or so girls who entered on the first day of class sighing and talking about how much they already hated the class. So every time my topic was brought up in class discussion, one of the girls would say to the other, "that's such a depressing topic. I could never work on something like that for the rest of the semester. It makes me feel depressed."
I wanted to say something like: "I wasn't aware you became depressed so easily. Should we worry about you?"
It's unfortunate how conventional and boring some people can be. I say this due to a half semester of sitting next to her which I cannot fill this blog with. But this is the common view, death is a bothersome thing to talk about, especially with children who think they live forever. I mean I plan to live forever too, just not out of fear of the next adventure.
And then I remembered a quote which I would have repeated to her if she had a longer attention span:
"let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed and as beautiful as life..."

New Mix

The shortest serious mix I've made. I wasn't sure if it was complete, but I think it probably is. I heard one other song I wanted on it, but forgot exactly which song that is.

http://8tracks.com/walking_daydream/i-want-your-attention

"I Want Your Attention. . . and affection."

01 Pilote - Turtle (Bonobo Mix)
02 Flight Facilities - Crave You
03 A-ha - Take on Me
04 Divinyls - I Touch Myself
05 Katie Herzig - I Want to Belong to You
06 The Whitest Boy Alive - Don't Give Up
07 Lykke Li - Little Bit
08 Mathemagic - Sequin (extra)
09 Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You

New Job

I came home last night and saw an email from the lady I met with about the job. Today I filled out paperwork finalizing my acceptance and now I have a job! I'm getting in at only $8/hour, but they're letting me stay at ten hours a week. Previously, since they were hiring me hourly instead of work-study, they were going to cut the hours down and probably pay less. It may be possible to get a pay raise (since lab techs usually get ten an hour on campus) next semester, but I'm not holding out on it.
So the job is with the short grass step LTER network, and I basically am sorting bagged samples collected this last summer. Rather than just grasses and forbs, I have to identify what the specimens are and sort them by warm season, cool season, etc. I start early Monday morning and they're already getting a key for me so I can work alone at some point after training. How fast!
I don't like having to be in class only all the time, and wish I could just go out and get a job already, so this is a good median.

Wyoming and Back Again

Friday morning I left with some people from the Range Ecology club to Wyoming where a professor-turned-assessor was doing private land monitoring and restoration. Friday our group looked around and got some of the natural history of the area and began learning some of the prevalent species. Saturday and Sunday we participated in monitoring riparian areas by doing cross-sectional plant community and land type descriptions followed by green line descriptions in the same fashion. Roy, the land assessor, showed us his transect method which involved 100m tapes and triple nested quadrats. The paperwork he used caught the data in the same way as the Southern Plains Network, but felt much more vague in the presentation, which I suppose is different because of the how the land is being used. It wasn't so much a study as grasping the area and figuring out how to make it more useful to cattle without detriment to land.
Unfortunately, one of the bigger guys in the group turned out to be a snorer and his bellowing woke me up multiple times in the night. Since we started with breakfast at 6:30, I didn't get much sleep. Tonight I hope to finish my work quickly and try to catch up again. I think after this week things will slow down a bit, which will be nice.
Wednesday I have a meeting with someone involved with the Short Grass Steppe-Long Term Ecological Research center on campus. I had heard about a lab position which involved learning characteristics of Northeast Colorado plants and the categories they can be separated into; so it's a lab job that seems to come directly after field work. It's a work-study position and the university has given out all that money, but the lady there wants me to come in to chat and then show me the lab. I'm not sure if it's a job interview, so I'll have to wait and see. It's a small weekly hour requirement but I've felt swamped as is with my classes and clubs. Extra money would be nice, though.

Good Phrasing

I really like the way this sounds so I'm putting it here to make it easy to find.

"I've thought about it and since you aren't able to decide between he and me, we must be evenly matched. I don't know what to do, but I don't like the idea of waiting on you if this is what you think because it probably won't go anywhere in that case. This doesn't mean I wont be waiting, I've been waiting my whole life; it just means I'll be waiting for nothing in particular."

New Mix

http://8tracks.com/walking_daydream/i-ll-miss-you

01 Album Leaf - Airplane
02 Yo La Tengo - Our way to fall
03 Caribou - After Hours
04 Cary Brothers - Blue Eyes
05 Charlotte Gainsbourg - Dandelion
06 Coconut Records - The Summer
07 Ray Lamontagne - For the Summer
08 Eric Clapton - Wonderful Tonight
09 Iron & Wine - Love And Some Verses
10 Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues
11 Coldplay- Talk
12 Death Cab For Cutie - Brothers On A Hotel Bed
13 Counting Crows - A Long December
14 Foo Fighters - Next Year
15 Pheonix - Long Distance Call
16 Robert Francis - Where You Came from
17 Kings of Convenience - Until You Understand
18 Helio Sequence - Shed Your Love