25 August 2008
conclusions
My days here are numbered now. I am on my weekend today and tomorrow, my last day of work is Wednesday, and I drive to Claremont Thursday morning. I sort of feel like I'm re-entering the real world after being away for three months. A few exciting things have happened in preparation for this. On my last trip to the Bay Area the other week, I went into an Apple store and bought an FM transmitter for my iPod which was so easy I don't know why I waited so long. My clunky, bulky FM transmitter that I've had for a couple years came apart in early July and I lost a small piece in the abyss of my room here, so for two months I have been without a device to play my iPod in my car. At school this isn't a big deal since I hardly drive anywhere, but here I regularly drive 30 miles to Mammoth and was going on 5-hour drives to Oakland every week for a few weeks. So I ordered one on Amazon on July 11th, but the damn thing (in stock) wasn't to ship until August 11th (??) so I survived with the old collection of burned CDs I have in my car. I got so sick of waiting for Amazon that I canceled the order and realized I could just go to a store in the city and buy one. I cannot describe the feeling of having access to all my music after weeks of the same fifteen CDs that date as far back as Spring Break 2006. I really am a child of the 21st century.
The second thing was that I found my sunglasses. These have been lost since like the second week of June, and I figured they were gone forever and have been driving around in this place of blinding light without eye protection. I learned to adjust, but it was funny, since I drove to Mammoth once a week to buy good-quality cheese and turkey, yet I never once stopped in a gas station to buy a $5 pair of sunglasses. Anyway, they appeared in the office two days ago and I snagged them, since I guess someone else was using them and put them down. Hahaha they are mine again! I washed them off and have been wearing them regularly, although after seeing the Mono Basin all summer in natural light it looks kind of weird through tinted glasses.
The third thing is my cell phone, which died the week I got here (in June). I sent it back to Arizona for my Dad to try to fix, since that's his job in my life. It's taken all summer because he's been busy, but apparently the only thing wrong was a dead battery, so he ordered one, put it in, the thing works fine, and is being mailed to my school mailbox just in time for school, where text messages about dinner and studying are imperative to my social life. So I've spent all summer without a phone and it hasn't been much of a problem. I used the office phone to call home once in a while, and used facebook to talk to friends. The only time it would've been nice to have was when I was in Berkeley three times in three weeks and had to find creative ways to let Eva know I was at her apartment.
The last thing that has happened is that I've started swimming again. My only exercise this summer has been hiking, which has been great; I've gotten quite the tan (for KG), my thighs are like rocks, and I saw so many beautiful places around here. But since there's no gym nearby and hiking takes several hours, I couldn't hike more than twice a week usually (on my days off) and so my exercising was somewhat sporadic. On Saturday after canoeing Lara and I went to (i.e. snuck into) the Double Eagle, a resort and spa in June Lake right near my cabin, and went swimming and then had a really nice dinner at their restaurant with Becky. I haven't swum in three months and had no idea where my lung capacity would be, especially at altitude, and I was happy to discover that I could do more than I could when I first started swimming again in January at sealevel after a six-month hiatus. In a few hours I'm going back there to swim and again on Wednesday evening to prepare for what I hope to be a great, consistent semester of swimming. I forgot how chemically chlorinated pools are. It was a fitting metaphor for my particular transition from summer to fall: all summer I've been swimming in natural lakes, fresh and salty. My legs have been streaked with the natural dry salts of Mono Lake because I went into the lake every week on tours and for canoeing... and for the first time last weekend I was in an artificial body of water full of chemicals that sterilized my skin.
So I'm prepared for life in the real world of Southern California with my FM transmitter, sunglasses, cell phone and my expanding lung capacity.
Things I will miss:
Things I'm looking forward to this year:
It's been a great summer. This was the first summer I've spent away from home, and and the first in seven years where I've been in a place where I could actually enjoy the season (as opposed to Arizona, where it is too hot to enjoy anything). I have great memories and photos and connections from the last three months, and now I'm ready to start the next chapter of the year. It's September in one week.
10 August 2008
badass
So... I got a tattoo!
I was in Berkeley visiting my best college girlfriends and I decided to get one, after months of contemplation. Of course, I called my piercer in Pasadena and they recommended a studio that turned out to be excellent. The tattoo is my favorite poem by Sappho, the ancient Greek poet. It is in the original Greek, runs down my spine and the English translation is:
Suddenly
As a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
love shakes my heart.
It goes about two-thirds of the way down my back, and after looking at it for a week I still love it but I want it to run all the way to my tailbone. So tomorrow I'm going back to the same place and getting a second fragment by Sappho to pick up where this one ends.
I'll post a photo of it all healed up in a few weeks. I'm pretty much in love with it... and I'm already thinking about future ones.
02 August 2008
truth
And it is August. I love the word August. It has this late-summer-heave-of-the-warm-wind-through-the-trees-at-dusk-feel to it. I've never been a summer girl. I love the shift to fall that, depending on where you live, comes in late August or early October, of cooler air, shorter days, changing leaves. I appreciate each season for what it is, but I can't deny that I never mind the end of summer.
Speaking of summer, this one has flown by. I remember being despondent last summer that it was still mid-July and the end of my boring 9-5pm life at home with two - wait, then only one - job was nowhere in sight. This summer has been a 360. Until last week I was completely loving it, all of it. Finally, the close quarters and the drama of small-town life (living, working, sometimes sleeping with people you work with) caught up with me and I needed to escape for a few days. Last Sunday I drove to Oakland and spent two days and three nights with my best girlfriends from college. They are all playing, working or studying in Berkeley and Oakland, and it was so refreshing to be around people who really know me, who have been in my life longer than a few months. We are all having pretty intense summers, kind of like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and I really needed to check in with them, give advice, get advice, be reminded that the world is bigger than just Lee Vining and that my many lives are substantially rich and worthy. I also simply love my friends; they are some of the most wonderful women I know. So I slept at a different place each night, had long deep talks with each of them, went into San Francisco (my first time since age 13), rode BART, hung out in coffee shops and bookstores, ordered wine twice without being carded, learned the lay of the land, and didn't really want to come back.
As much as I love the open space here, I really am a city girl. I love the masses of people, the good and the bad and the beautiful and the ugly all mixed together, shared streets and coffee cups and seats on the train, not to mention using public transportation, overhearing snippets of foreign languages, seeing new people and wondering what their lives are like. I love the endless discovery of new places, of escaping within a city full of people, of choosing whether to be known or anonymous or, depending on where you are, both. I also love that you can slip into a city and no one knows or cares, unlike small towns. This summer has instilled in me a need and love for terrifyingly freeing emptiness, but the great thing about the Bay Area is that Marin County and its 500 acres of wilderness is just over the bridge. I'm not yet married to the idea of living in San Francisco after I graduate, but it is definitely in the realm of possibility. Lee Vining is not.
It took this summer to really figure out what I like, what I want, and what I value. This was really a summer that was all about me, and I have changed, a lot. Not enough to notice, probably, but my internal rhythms have shed their skins and grown new ones. Not just the town vs. city thing, but living here makes you hardier. Dirt roads, blinding sun light, fierce winds, being places where there is not another soul for miles, having no cell phone... you slowly change. But in terms of this week, I didn't really want to come back to Lee Vining on Wednesday, and it took a while to get back into things. I basically wrote Wednesday off; I was feeling weird, people were happy to see me, I wasn't really happy to be back, I was exhausted and had to work all afternoon. Luckily, the progressing days were better: I had a really fun Thursday night at several happy gatherings with beer and music, and I really pushed myself on a hike yesterday morning that proved that you can lose your altitude advantage just by going down to sea level for a few days. I'm mostly back in the LV groove now, which makes the decision I have to make soon even harder: whether to go back to Oakland/Berkeley tomorrow for the second and last time. Everyone is running the marathon tomorrow, and there will be festivities tomorrow night. Keri has the day off on Monday, and along with her sister she is going hiking; something I'd love to do with them. I didn't get to the SFMOMA Frida Kahlo exhibit last time which I really want to see. And now that I have my bearings in the Bay Area I want to branch out alone and explore more. If I don't go I'll stay here and relax, sleep and hike; I do feel like this week has been a (self-inflicted) whirlwind with little rest. But what is the summer for but to do what you want, right? In some ways, I've had a lot of rest this summer: (mostly welcome) isolation from the happenings of the world, little responsibility outside work, watching the world go by from the counter of the store, meeting people who are going off to Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Death Valley, Las Vegas, while I go around barefoot and eat lunch at home on my break. So I think I will go. I also burned six CDs of awesome music from Eva's computer and three are still unlistened to, so that's an exciting road trip prospect. This may be my month of travel, actually: I'm considering going to LA the weekend after this one and hanging out in familiar territory; my friend Mina and her boyfriend Golden are in Valencia so I could stay with them. I'd like to hang out in the city, go to LACMA or the Getty, perhaps go hiking in the Santa Monica mountains, drive over (or take the train) to Claremont and walk around campus. These mini-vacations are exhausting, yes, but also exhilarating. Its just me and my car and my duffel bag, out on the empty open roads, seeing the state in many different ways. So I may be mostly done with Lee Vining. I still work five days a week and still want to hike on the days when I have a few hours of free time, but I am intoxicated with the idea of heading out somewhere each Sunday, even if only for forty-eight hours. People are also starting to leave now, beginning with the birder boys whose birds have mostly migrated already, and soon Natalie and Nick, brother-and-sister volunteers from San Diego, and then the interns start leaving about three weeks from now, ending with me on the 31st.
It's all winding down, and I think one more month will be just enough time to feel like I got it, like I made the most of this experience, and I'll be ready to get back to school. Its weird and great that I feel like I have a home down there now. Claremont is my home. I kind of can't wait for senior year.