September 2003 Archives

I walked to work today, for the first time since March or April. The air was crisp and cool when I left the house, and though work is a couple of miles away from home, it was a lovely walk -- very grounding -- and it reminded me why I really like walking to work.

I made mental notes of the things I wanted to share about my walks to and from work, but I've forgotten most of them already. Here are the things I remember:

• I saw both the sunrise (oriens) and the sunset (occasus) today, though I effectively recorded neither. I got a couple of lovely dusk photos that I'll post sometime.
• Every sunrise that I see is special to me, if for no other reason than that I'm so seldom up and out of the house that early in the morning.
• As I rounded the corner past the miniature store (a store full of miniatures, not a store in miniature), I saw three birds lined up: a white pigeon, a grey and white pigeon, and a black grackle. I was going to take their picture and entitle it "greyscale," but they flew off too quickly.
• I far prefer exercising when I feel like there's a real-life benefit to it. Like getting to work.
• Any shortcut is a good shortcut, as long as Rachel isn't mown down by oncoming traffic.
• I break my walk into conceptual thirds, the divisions being made at major intersections. I have no idea where the boundaries for geographical thirds would actually lie.
• There's a garden on the way that I adore. The flowers are healthy and in bloom, as though it wasn't just summer and all the flowers in Texas didn't just fry. It's beautiful, with native plants and succulents all mixed in together, and the most wonderful spectrum of color. It's attached to a house with a real, traditional front porch, with an actual porch swing, and if the effort were made, one could easily fit two or more porch swings on that porch. There's a screened in side porch, as well.
• "we are our experience,
  our experience is what it is of;
  we are that."
  
• There was a little girl, no more than a toddler, playing in the yard of a day care. She called out to me, "Come here!" but I waved at her and kept walking. I have very strong opinions about adults hanging around day cares where they have no child enrolled and have not been specifically invited.
• It's this walk that reminds me of the color collage that I meant to put together in the springtime and never did. There are flowers of every possible hue on my path.
• The best thing about my path to work is the Taco Shack. Their potato and egg tacos are my achilles heel -- I can never resist them. And they sell Sweet Leaf sweet tea, which is liquid crack in a bottle. Really.
• When I got to work this morning, the elevators were broken, so I had to climb 107 stairs on top of the two miles I had just walked. My legs felt like jelly at the top.

Prologue: Humor me, will you? For the sake of averting Google searches, let's say, henceforth, that I work for ReallyBig U, and that my primary responsibility is maintaining a ReallyBig System. Got that straight? Very good.

Can I just say that there's nothing like the sinking feeling of hearing the words, "There've been people looking for you. I think there's something wrong with RB System," when sliding into work at 8:25.

The good news is, it wasn't my fault that the system was broken, not that it helped matters. The bad news is that it wasn't actually my system that was broken, so I couldn't do anything about it. Thank goodness for quick system staff.

The better news is that the system was back up and running smoothly by 8:55 or so, and I got a couple of thankful e-mail responses for my quick work in fixing the system. Err, yeah.

Good lord. Webpage? What webpage? I don't have a webpage.

Okay, yeah, I do. I forget about it sometimes, though. So what've I been up to? Here's a quick recap.

I went to a hummingbird festival in Rockport about two weeks ago. It was lovely. I took a great sunrise picture on the way. We spent a lot of time watching hummingbird banding, and we got to see a rufous hummingbird, which is very unusual for Texas. They normally live up in Oregon. I've got pictures of that stuff, and I'll post them sometime. Maybe.

More interesting to me than the hummingbirds themselves was a book of photographs that I saw in the arts and crafts area of the show. These photos were taken during a wildlife photography contest sponsored by the Coastal Bend Land Trust, which is part of an effort to encourage land owners in South Texas to balance environmental and economic interests. Those details aside, the idea is for a photographer to team up with a land owner, and then to take glorious pictures on the land owner's ranch over the course of a few months. The thought is incredibly appealing to me. The fact that my friends and family haven't physically restrained me when I've mentioned buying snakeproof boots strikes me as odd, to say the least. Then again, so is the fact that I'm talking about buying snakeproof boots.

There's more to it than that. I'm thinking perhaps I'm having an early-to-midlife-crisis. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I wasn't particularly shocked by the death of Johnny Cash a week and a half ago. He's been in poor health for years, and I never listened to his music much anyway. But I have to say, I found the video for his cover of NIN's Hurt to be stunning. Simply stunning -- simple and poignant. I've watched the RealMedia version of it fifteen or twenty times. If you haven't seen it, go watch it. And then watch it again.

I intended to write something profound and meaningful about this day, but I find myself just feeling thankful that the date is almost past. September 10th and September 12th are infinitely more innocuous than the date that falls in between them.

I'd like to recite some heartfelt platitude that would resonate with someone else on this day, but I find that all the heartfelt platitudes have been ruined for me over the past two years by those who would use them toward an end with which I cannot and will not agree.

What I will tell you is this: on this day of memory, I feel cheated. It is petty and selfish for me to feel this, but in the interest of full disclosure, this is how it is. For the twenty-four years that preceded that day, I lived with the steadfast belief that people are fundamentally good, and that no matter what difficult problems we faced as a country or as inhabitants of this planet, we would eventually be able to solve them -- perhaps not in my lifetime, but someday. By the time I went to bed that night, I could no longer hold onto my firm convictions that in the end, everything will turn out alright. Everything did not turn out alright that day.

I have lived an incredibly privileged life. I've been taught of hubris from a young age. The unsinkable ship sunk in 1914, we were told, and yet no one ever imagined that the indestructible towers could ever be destroyed. It is privilege which breeds hubris, for only we, the privileged, can afford such pride. The turmoil in other parts of the world was never more than a blip on the news or a headline on the page. I didn't ignore it out of hatred; I ignored it because I didn't understand that for other people on the planet, things don't automatically turn out alright in the end.

Today, I looked in the mirror, and for the first time, I noticed the tiny crease of laugh-lines forming at the sides of my mouth. I'm certain they weren't there two years ago. It's a tiny change, to be sure, but it is a permanent one. The changes I've seen in the world -- the changes I've seen in myself -- are less subtle, but just as long-lasting.

[Insert obligatory apology for not updating in freaking forever here.]

Suffice it to say, someone has apparently found me worthy of responsibility, and I have hence been buried beneath it. It's all job stuff, and you don't really want to hear about it any more than I want to write about it. Instead, I'll annotate some brief points, then direct you to my photolog.

• Claudia's been back in Texas for a couple of weeks now. I'm still readjusting to being something other than a hermit. I may be readjusting until May, but I'll keep you posted.
• My friend Feithy and her Kidlet moved back to Canada last week. It's all very sad. Kidlet entrusted me with a silver music box, which I'm to send to him sometime soon. There's a short story waiting to be written there about the treasures of ten-year-old boys, but I'm not ready to write it yet.
• The Texas summer is finally starting to cool off a bit. I survived it fairly well this year. Granted, we didn't have three weeks of weather over 100F, but it was hotter than last summer. I went swimming in my Dad's pool the weekend I picked Claudia up from the airport and realized how much I missed it. There's still time for swimming before the weather gets cold, but I don't know yet whether I'll be able to make the time myself.
• JournalCon Austin is coming up in just over a month. I've got a bunch of things to do, partly in preparation for being a panelist at the conference. JournalCon panelists are supposed to update their journals or weblogs more than once a month, aren't they?
• I don't mention her very often, but my friend Paige is too cool. She even updates almost daily. She's articulate and witty and funny, and I host her right here on waterlilies.org. So go read her.
• I posted several pictures today. Some of them are so woefully old that I am ashamed of myself, and you should be, too. Austin Elvis, for instance, was taken back in June, right after I bought my new Nikon digital camera, before I went to Europe. I posted Backlit several days ago, but it and Austin Sunset were taken at the end of July, on an outing with my photography class. For the record, though, Night-blooming and Moon Shot were taken today.
• Looks like I'll be going to a hummingbird festival this weekend. If the weather is nice and the hummingbirds are beautiful, I'm sure I'll wish that I owned a tripod. No idea what happened to my video camera tripod over the past six years and four moves.