A Certain Impatience

Okay, first of all, disclaimer, many things are going well, my week has been full of texture and clarity and not so much stressiness and despair. So, hands up for goodness for all of that, and I am grateful for it.

But still, right now, I fell a certain impatience.

I wish I was already an important member of the Art Center. I wish I already knew the folks in this town and their histories. I wish I was already fit and a recreational weight lifter. I wish I had already adjusted my diet and was the right percentage of fat and muscle.

I wish I already had a best friend here who speaks my language and understands me as my whole self, all my different selves, so I can just speak in my own language and not have to translate or edit and he understands everything, and I him.

I wish I already had tables, outdoor furniture, a little outdoor table, filing cabinets, an iron, a vacuum cleaner, a little writing desk. I wish I had already had many people over for dinner to use all that furniture. I wish my house was already warmed.

I wish my stupid taxes were done and that the dishes in the sink had already gone through the dishwasher and dried and had been put away in the cupboard, ready to use. I wish my oil was changed, teeth cleaned, eyes checked. Hair already grown out. I wish I had a hair straightener to try and experiment with that I could then give back with no penalty.

I wish my July paycheck was already in the bank.

I don't know who my boss will be - as of Tuesday next week I will have no boss.

I wish I knew how hot it was going to get.

I wish I had someone who would just call me - "Where are you? Okay, well, I'm here, so I'll see you there in a bit, and then we'll go the other place and then home, okay?" Those kind of conversations. So I had to remember to turn my phone off in public places so as not to disturb anyone, because otherwise they would have called me ten times.

I wish I'd already read certain books.

I wish I'd already figured most of it out, and made peace with it.

Tonight I'm feeling a certain impatience.

Reinstalling The Printer, or Proof That You're Never Too Old For This Help-Desk Instruction

"Have you checked that it's plugged in?"

Getting a bit ridiculous

Here are some more things that have made me homesick:

- the little weather widget on my computer that says the temperature in Sydney (currently 15 degrees)
- seeing a shopping bag left over from last Christmas, and thinking, "Ah, yes, it'd be Christmas at home right now," but it's not, of course, what it is is summertime here, about one month into it, which if it were summertime down there would be the end of December.
- the TV series Underworld which my very thoughtful friends taped for me, the whole series, and sent for my birthday. The worst homesickness-making parts are the station announcements for Channel 9 at the start and end of each program. Wish they'd left the ads in too, but they weren't to know how much I'd like them right now.
- lamest one of all - at work I was checking some invoices to make sure they had the right purchase order number on them, and in order to remember the numbers while I looked back and forth between the documents, I broke them down into smaller parts. Our PO numbers have eight digits, and so to remember them I broke them down into two groups of four. Which is exactly the configuration of an Australian telephone number. My brain hadn't processed an eight-digit number in two lots of four since I left Sydney, but just the process of doing it made me realize what it reminded me of and I got all goopy and sad, again.

Paternalism manifests itself in different ways.

Today I drove out into the country to have lunch with a friend who has a weekend cottage. Once you get off the highway, the drive to her place goes on country roads that meet at right angles and bank around curves and rise and fall with the hills.

It put me in mind of country drives in Australia - Southern Queensland, inland from the Gold Coast; Northern New South Wales, on the way to Cassino; Cessnock and environs in the coal fields around Newcastle.

One thing that alarms and positively terrifies me here are the motorcycle hobbyists who don't wear any protective gear. They ride around on weekends on these gigantic noisy Harleys with oversized engines, with no helmet, no leathers, just t-shirt and jeans, and often they have a girl on the back wearing even less, shorts and thongs usually. But Wisconsin doesn't have a helmet law because it would impinge on these riders' freedom of choice to ride with the wind in their hair, and faces and elbows and knees and etc. They don't seem to realize how easily a big bike can go down, and how quickly and horrendously pavement and speed can mess up their bodies and lives. I always drive very carefully around them, cringing.

But then, in contrast, today I was driving fast on country roads and remembering how terrifying it usually is in Australia, on those narrow two-lane roads around Dungog and Kurri Kurri, with the locals racing around blind corners in their panel vans exceeding the recommended speed limit by 20-30%. Today the roads were not terrifying at all, and most of the time I was going 60 mph at least (which is 100 kph in the new money). Why was this so? Because the Wisconsin road department has smoothed out the dangerous curves and levelled the big dips that caused blind crests, and keeps the pavement in tip-top shape all the time and has the lines painted clearly and all intersections sensibly marked from a long way off.

They don't make laws to make the Harley riders wear helmets, to protect them from themselves, but they do take care to make the roads really really safe, to protect all of us from each other.

Notes scribbled after Art Walk

to blog:

Summer green, not spring green, bluer sky & diff smell [ed. note, see previous entry].

(The photo of how hi the sun was at 6:40 pm)

Dallas A. Peace Be Still - any sculptor rejected by Robert Schuller of the Crystal Catehdral is alright by me. [ed. note - this is an exhibit at the Appleton Art Center of local sculptor Dallas Anderson, who did two prominent public scuptures in Appleton and Neenah of kids playing in water. I thought his work was going to be a bit boring and twee, but it actually had quite a bit of range. "Peace Be Still" was an unfinished sculpture of the 12 apostles stuck out in a boat when a storm blew up. In the bible story, Jesus walks across the water, says "Peace. Be Still." to the wind and waves, and the waters calm and the apostles all make it back okay. Dallas Anderson was the staff sculptor for the Crystal Cathedral but Robert Schuller cancelled this project and let him go because of the violent emotions displayed in this piece. The apostles are wonderful studies of tension and worry and struggle - some are pushing against oars, some are being buffetted helplessly by the wind, some are clinging helplessly to the boat's sides, and one sitting right up front in the prow has his chin in his hands and is the very picture of paralyzed worry. This is a very powerful piece and displays a broad range of human emotions and states. I gazed at it for a long time in admiration, and I want to go back and have another look again.]

Dementia art & a video w/songs - nightmare vision of senior activities being like preschool. The old lady I want to be - look the despair & absurdity the face, get beyond it so I can laugh at it & be amused, keep living amused at it (was looking at prize-winning Hosta leaves in jars while I was thinking this).

Summer Green

When the snow first melted, the grass was a very particular, vivid sort of emerald green. And when the leaves finally came out on the trees, in whatever it was, like late May, they were that same emerald colour so the whole world was this vivid jewelbox green. And I realized why there's a town called Spring Green just outside of Madison, it must be in tribute to this wonderful Wisconsin phenomenon.

Just about three days ago, it changed to summer. Everything is now a darker green, like an old leaf, a spinachy colour instead of a jewel. I noticed it one night when I left work (in the bright sunshine, the sun ridiculously high in the sky for it being that late at night), there was a different feel to the breeze and a different smell, a kind of spicy smell.

Summer is when I always came to Wisconsin in my childhood, so the place I remember was permanently like that - that same green colour, humid heaviness in the air, spicy smell, insect sound.

When it was still spring here, the world was like an adolescent - leaves and grass like a big summer, sure, but amorphous and still a bit unformed. Trying hard to be a summer but new at it. Now, the season has finally matured into itself. It's like the season has graduated from college and landed a good job on the production staff of a national news bureau, working out of New York City. It's like the season has a photo of it's new, confident self in the college Alumni Bulletin, still a bit fresh of face and babyish of cheek, but it knows itself and is confident in its accomplishments.

Surprised by Powderfinger

I have all kinds of things to blog about, but just now I was listening to my The Vines channel in Pandora, and was unexpectedly caught by the sound of my lost past. The second song to play was "Waiting for the Sun" by Powerderfinger, off their album Odyssey Number Five, which I think was released just as I was moving away.

I hadn't even heard that song before, but the sound of Powderfinger is the sound of Australia.

So much so that when I lived there I didn't even like them and used to turn the radio to a different station when they came on Triple J. A few times when they won first prize in the Triple J annual Australia Day Hot 100 competition, we'd turn off the radio while the winning song was playing.

But here, but here, you don't ever hear Powderfinger. It startled me in its beauty and familiarity. And here I am weeping, from homesickness triggered by a sound. And when you actually give into the homesick feeling and let yourself weep, it actually doesn't feel so bad, the feeling has a round beauty to it.

I miss you, Australia.

Goose family

Outside the window on the path by the lake I can see the goose family. The little goslings were just brown and grey balls of fluff at first. Then they were a little bit bigger brown and grey balls of fluff. But this morning, suddenly, they have the coloring of grown-up geese. White bellies, strong black stripes, grey feathers on their back and head, no baby down any more. Grown-up geese in miniature. Soon they will be all big and part of the flock (gaggle), and I won't be able to tell which ones are the babies.

You are my Ticket Album

In the back of Rolling Stone magazine is often an ad for a leather-bound Ticket Album, for preserving all your tickets to rock concerts, festivals, etc.

I long ago decided not to keep tickets - it was one particular move, possibly as far back as Boulder, when I realized if I kept compiling them and dragging them around, how big the stack would be. I chose to just remember the concerts instead.

But still, sometimes you wish you had a big paper archive to go through. I was reading an article just yesterday on Buckminster Fuller who about mid-way through his life began the Dymaxion Chronofile, in which he kept all his writing and notes but also his dry-cleaning bills. It was a paper record of his life, and in the end contained more than 200,000 items.

Today I was cleaning out my wallet and found a great collection of items. Because I have been travelling a bit the past two weekends, the receipts and things reminded me of other places. I thought again, wouldn't it be nice to have a big archive of these things to go through and have them spark recollections, but then I came on a better idea - throw the actual receipts away but list them here. This is in a way my Dymaxion Chronofile, but because it's digital it doesn't take up that much space, and because it's on Blogger.com, Google will look after it for me, even if I keep moving around.

So, here are the receipts from my wallet.

There was a red ticket that said "Admit One" - I think this was from the little movie theatre in Menasha when I went to see the really interesting Finnish film called The Man Without A Past.

A receipt from Villa Pizza for one slice and one medium sized drink. Couldn't not for the life of me remember where this would have been, but looked closer and saw Denver International Airport. My parents had dropped me off at the door this time, tired from the anniversary party the day before, and I had grabbed something to eat before getting on my plane to Milwaukee. Because this meal was caught in between doing other things, and because I wasn't with anyone, it hadn't registered in my memory at all.

A receipt from Piggly Wiggly in Platteville, Wisconsin. (For those not from this part of the country, Piggly Wiggly is probably the premiere grocery chain in this region. Despite the name and the funny sign, it's quite upscale and well-stocked.) This was when I was visiting all my cousins, after we went for pizza to their favorite pizza place in Platteville. Two cousins were getting wine to take back to the house, to sit on the back porch and drink (which turned out to be really fun). I at the same time went in and got a bottle of one of my favorite Aussie reds, to take back to my Aunt whose house I was staying at.

The weirdest thing - a coupon for money off on a pack of cigarettes, some weird unpopular brand. These coupons spit out automatically from cash registers after you pay, triggered based on the stuff you've bought. I find them annoying and baffling - "I want to buy this brand of shampoo." "--0h, then here is a coupon for some different kind of shampoo, that you don't want. No need to fall over with gratitude to us - you're welcome! Honestly! We're happy to do it!" I think this coupon was from a trip to Walgreen's drug store during my Denver trip. Cigarettes? Honestly. And what do you suppose triggered it? Some whitening toothpaste? Breath mints?

Last thing, actually in the bag itelf, was a receipt from Zacateca's Mexican Restaurant on Wisconsin Ave, and I couldn't remember at all when I would have been there, because I'd been wanting to and thought I would have paid attention. The bill was for $17, so I thought it was probably me on my own. I had to look at the calendar to remind me, and then I looked more closely at the receipt - it was n Neenah. I hadn't noticed the name of the restaurant, but had been there with a colleague for lunch one day. Now I remember.

My homes are a long way from each other.

Headline on the Sydney Morning Herald homepage (right there on the very first page):

"No sign of floods receding: Rising floods swamped the centre of the US city of Iowa."

Um, that'd be, state of Iowa.

On Romantic Love

Sam De Brito was again talking about Helen Fisher, the Anthropologist who defines love into various states based on neurochemistry and neurobiology. And a friend of mine has been thinking about love so I was talking to him about it too.

Helen Fisher describes Romantic Love as a craving for the other person's particularity. You have a desire to be with only that person in particular, and you love everything about them. One of her more revolutionary claims is to define this state as not an emotion but a motivation. Like hunger.

And that sounds right, doesn't it? When you feel romantic love, you desire and delight in the other person's particularity and you crave it like you crave food where you're desperately hungry. But of course, in this case that hunger can never be fully satisfied, because the only way to satisfy it would be to meld completely with the other person and become one with them. Which we can't do because of our essential separateness.

Which leads us to what Sartre said about love and alienation. "Love is the desire to annihilate the Other's Otherness," he said, and that desire is doomed because we are all essentially separate and alone.

So that's why romantic love is so torturous, and can take hold of you so completely. But even though it's doomed because of our essential separateness to each other, it can also feel sublime. Because it is so wired into our neurochemistry, in its sublimity and awfulness, is it an inescable part of being human, and therefore worth celebrating and wondering in?

On Slobbiness

This weekend is like the weekend after Final Exams are done. I have no groceries, all my clothes are dirty, and my living room is strewn end to end with things that are just lying when they fell when they stopped holding my interest.

Also, I've been staying up way past tiredness doing things like read all the comics on XKCD.com, hitting "Refresh" on my Gmail and Facebook homepages, and watching three episodes in a row of The Dog Whisperer.

But I do realize that it was ever thus. I got a message recently on LinkedIn from a work colleague that I haven't seen or talked to since I left that job, which was in January 1999. She asked how I was and I mentioned that my boxes are still not unpacked, and she wrote back, "If I remember right, you didn't like unpacking boxes at the best of times." She knew me just after a move from Newcastle to the Central Coast, and thinking back I remembered - the office was the main problem. I have a photo of me sitting at the computer amidst such chaos that it looked structurally unsound, I think there was a mattress kind of wedged in and half-suspended on all the boxes and desks and computer boxes and whatever that was in there. And yes, thinking back, it did stay that way for a really long time. My recollection of the house was when it was cleaned up, but we were there for three years and it was clean perhaps only in the last one. So I was probably complaining about that way back then, and for the whole time she knew me.

In that house also, our fridge was too big to fit up the stairs so we kept it downstairs just inside the garage. In the morning you'd have to open the garage door with the automatic opener we kept upstairs, go out the front door, down the stairs, underneath the patio across the mud and grass, in the garage, open the fridge, take out the thing, then across the mud and grass again back, up the stairs, in the door, and etc., and to take the thing back to the fridge you'd have to do the whole circuit again. It reminds me of the film Little Miss Sunshine, which I've seen the second half of a few times recently on HBO. The Greg Kinnear dad character is following a business plan which includes the rule "Winners never quit." And they don't - they careen across the country in this van they have to push-start, and survive adventures which would cause any normal person to turn back. Any normal person wouldn't have tried to do the trip in the first place, which is kind of the point of the movie. You get used to things, you work around them.

I gaze to my right and see a scene that I might photograph and post somewhere and call it "Still Life With Belongings, Feb-June 2008". There is a stack of boxes that are just where they fell on a day in early February, more or less untouched since then (except for the heroic efforts my sister made when she was visiting on the books and kitchen stuff). I can sit here at the computer for hours and hours, and weeks and months, and not notice them, but they do bug me. Once they get sorted out my memory of this place will be of it all settled, as it is of the Killcare house. But in reality, I have to admit that for the bulk of the time I'll be living here, most of the time it will really be like this.

new world record

The focus right now should all be about my birthday, which is tomorrow, and I should be feeling festive and celebratory. Here's something to celebrate - it's 10:09 pm, and I don't remember a single time today until just now that I had even one thought about S., my ex.

Remember when I found it cause to celebrate if I made it for a whole minute after waking up? If I didn't think about him until I was half-way through brushing my teeth?

What a milestone for my past self. She never would have believed we'd get to this point, but seriously, all day today it's like I was never in that relationship at all, I forgot all about him. So, with patience, yes, you can get over it.

Thought I would take a second to write that down.

What is that?

What is that desire, when having an experience, to have a particular person there who you can show it to?

This used to happen with my sister - I'd move to a new place but felt like it wasn't actually real until she came to visit me and saw it too.

Maybe it's just the desire for some small acknowledgment that you're not the only human being left alive on the planet and everyone else is just a hologram.

But we know the trick of that, which is that even when you get the person there beside you and you show them the thing and you experience it together, there's still no way to prove that they're not a hologram, and that you are in fact the only human being left alive on the planet.

Cue the Police, "Message in a Bottle"....

p.s. for my logic friends - if you put parentheses around everything after the "not", it works out

Red And White

OMG, OMG, OMG. I just discovered my new favorite place. There was a wine shop over near the Kohl's where I went a few times to pick up a bottle of this and that. A colleague at work told me they sometimes have events and stuff, and I signed up on their website but haven't heard much. And then they were moving. It turns out they were moving to the end store of a strip mall just down the road from me, technically I could probably walk there. Wine bar in walking distance - sounded cool, so when construction started, and then I saw the landscaping start to go in, and trucks outside for days in a row, I was watching closely for the opening day.

I thought of dropping by a few different times, but tonight I actually did it. I wasn't sure if a wine place would be appropriate for a girl on her own just stopping for a drink after work, but I dared myself to try it. "Just try it," I dared myself. "If it's really not the kind of place you do to drink on your own, just buy a bottle of something for the stockpile at home and walk on out again."

It's such an unlikely location - more or less in the parking lot of a Best Buy. But in this kind of town (in this kind of country), you can just never pick where you going to find a little oasis of wonderfulness.

You walk in. There is a couple at the bar, three people at a high round table, little square tables in the back. There is atmospheric jazz, and although you can look out on the hot sun, freeway ramp and a parked trailer, inside you are transported away from Highway-side Wisconsin. The bar is a lovely red marble. The wood trim is black. The waiter is smiling at your and holding out a menu bound in sturdy black leather, with a selection of whites on one page, reds on the other (reds first, that's important), that shows that they actually know what they're talking about. Behind is a fridge/dispensing mechanism with bottles perfectly positioned before and between, that shows those reds are being attentively kept at precisely 54 degrees. (or I might have that number wrong, will have to check next time I'm in).

I sidle up to the bar and say, "Do you have a list of whites...by the glass?" In the ellipses I commit to sitting down there, and getting out my New Yorker to read if I need to (which I would have done at Starbucks which was the other option but their outdoor chairs aren't in the sun, not that that mattered in the end). He tells me I can try anything I like. I order a Pinot Blanc from somewhere in France, and a tiny sip comes - I realize this is to try, not to order. I do, and it tastes of pear, as the menu suggests, but it's too peary for me, so I decide to try another one. I end up with a full glass of a Sauv Blanc from New Zealand, a Marlborough one that's not actually on the menu, but it does the trick on the first hot summer day - citrussy, crisp, dry but flavorful, just what I was after. I order some cheese and crackers too, and get enough to feed a family of 6 for several days. Fortunately they let you take stuff home, in this land.

A few more people arrive and the waiter is serving them and walking from side to side, seems to greet everyone or attend to them right at the moment they have a question.

He's left the menu for me to peruse so I never do get the New Yorker out (a prop, camouflage). I decide to try to memorize everything on there but just keep reading the top Riesling over and over.

And then I notice the most important thing. They're serving the wine in Reidel glasses. These are the most wonderful wine glasses in the whole world, and people who use them in their restaurant show that they know what they're doing. Reidel carries a different glass shape for every grape out of which they make wine, and I did a test one time during the brief period that I owned some of these (they break if you look at them funny, it ends up being a very high cost per use), and it does make a huge difference. If you drink a Cab Sav out of just whatever glass, it tastes good, don't get me wrong, but if you drink one out of a Reidel Burgundy-Cab Sav glass, it's just a different experience altogether. From the moment you put your nose near it you are having different and more textured and robust experiences (to borrow a word from a co-worker that was just the right word in a meeting today). And these folks not only have a very wide, varied and interesting wine list, with all the trendy things from Chile and Argentina as well as a selection of Aussie and New Zealand stuff to make me feel at home, they served everything in Reidel stemware. OMG.

The place emptied out, the people sitting outside on the deck didn't need much attention, I was getting through my paid-for glass, and I started asking the waiter questions. The first question was why cheddar cheese in Australia has crystals in it but in the US not, did it have to do with pastuerization, but he didn't know that. But the next questions were all about wine, and I started tasting little tastes of things. I would ask about two Pinots, and he would tell me which one he liked better, and then he would give me a little glass of both, so I could compare, and then we'd talk about it at some length.

And of course we got on to the story-of-life, how-did-you-end-up-here conversation, which is always so interesting. Turns out he went to the CIA because he loved to cook as his mother taught him to, but he hated kitchen work, and transfered to Baking and Pastry and loved that, so now he does wedding cakes, what would you say, freelance, and works at this new wine place.

We had a great talk, I tasted lots and lots of great wines. I was appreciating my previous education, in that absolute world center of ambitious wine-making, Australia, and in that center of revolutionary modern cuisine, downtown Sydney.

It was also great to have such a good outcome from one little brave change of scenery and experiment.

Flibberty Gibbet Language School

This morning, when it seemed like my web site was only a few minutes from launching, I was walking in the hallway and passed a colleague who asked me how my weekend was. I mentioned that I'd driven to the south-western part of the state to where my father comes from. And on the way back, I said, "we got into some rain, we ran into a storm just this side of Canberra."

"Canberra?" he said.

"No, not Canberra. I was thinking 'Capital', and so the word for 'Capital' came out. Madison. The storm was just this side of Madison."

I blamed my mistake on the fact that my brain was addled from the web site relaunch. But it really did feel like the right word when I was saying it.

Midnight Festival of the Bullet Point

This time I'm happy and doing this - world first!

• New web site! A big project got finished and my new web site launched today! It was a long, hard road, and many people seemingly did their best to make sure the project would be unsuccessful, but it's up, and it looks beautiful. I haven't clicked on every single link, which I feel bad about, but I will get to them, and wasn't my boss just telling me I need to trust my suppliers? I was thinking back on how long I've been working on this project, and I think the first time my predecessor said "You're going to have to redesign that web site next year, you should be working on the RFP", I think it was my second or third day there. So, this is a big accomplishment, and should make my life much easier and more normal, hereon in after.
• I have told the story to a few people today that once in a job interview back in about 1999, someone asked me what I liked about this job, managing web sites, and I knew right away, I said, "Publishing". I said, "I love it when I can email my Mom and say, look at this!" So today represents my favorite thing about my job, because I emailed her right away.
• Remember the storm I wrote about yesterday? Today there is video online of houses breaking in half and floating away, in flood areas just north of where we were. I was out in it. Much of Wisconsin is a disaster area. Not us, but we were right out in all that rain yesterday.
• Having just been to such an iconic house, so important to my past and the memories of so many other people (my Grandmother's house, pretty much untouched from what I remember), the sight of houses breaking in half and floating away down a river hits me all the harder. But, as my cousin said on another subject, they are just material things. Your own material things are much harder to lose than someone else's, but they are still just material things.
• I don't want to go to bed. It's only Monday night, it's past midnight, my typical aim is to wake up at 5:15 and do morning pages, but now I might have sabotaged myself so deeply that I won't even function properly if I sleep until 7. Why am I awake? Excited about the launch, somewhat. Maybe a little bit at sea and wound up from not having masses of stress on me, as I have had for a number of weeks now. Haven't been eating well or exercising, so the usual causes. Have done many things lately and haven't had time to just sit and process - knit, or watch cable all afternoon, or get lost in a New Yorker or a book. So, this weekend.
• It's my birthday on Thursday but I don't have anything planned. Anything birthday-related. I should just be brave and plan something.
• Preoccupied.
• All those sites I check before I can go to bed - what am I looking for? Sydney Morning Herald, including Sam De Brito's blog. Facebook, endlessly. Astrobarry. Free Will Astrology. Salem Tarot. Cute Overload. Sydney (nearly) Daily Photo (although I don't check that one very often any more because it might bring on an attack of homesickness). I check these sites over and over again, refresh, refresh, refresh, every night before I can go to bed, and tonight it carried me way past bed and I'm into the hours of self-sabotage - only Monday and up past midnight on a work night. What am I looking for?
• Someone to tell me to go to bed, probably. I'll pretend y'all have. So goodnight, sleep well, see you tomorrow.
• (I'm glad you're all here for a crazy loon that needs to talk, just talk, no matter if anyone is listening or not.)
  

Stormy

Where I come from is a large, flat plain in the middle of a continent. Unlike Prague or the towns of the Alsace, it was never marauded by the armies of rival empires on either side. Well, maybe the native peoples who lived here before European settlement could say that, but since European settlement is hasn't been re-marauded, it's all just Middle America.

However, it does come under regular attack, not by army hordes, but by extreme weather conditions. If you've been paying attention you know that we in Wisconsin just survived the worst winter in about 100 years - both snowiest and coldest. Now the snow has finally melted, the dumb daffodils have bloomed and gone, the flowering trees are all in leaf, it hasn't dipped below freezing in, oh, probably a whole week now, the corn is coming up, Memorial Day has passed, and it's summer. Which is tornado season.

This weekend I drove with my cousin down to my Dad's hometown which is in the south west of the state. The weather was alright when we drove down, although it was overcast the whole way, but when we stopped near Belmont to go to the bathroom before arriving (so as not to cut into hugging time when we got there), there were black clouds gathering ominously.

When we got to the first house full of cousins, they had the weather service radio on and there were regular alarms and warning announcements. By the time we got to my Aunt's house the weather report had superseded regular programming on even the network channels, and the weather map showed angry red and yellow blotches moving across our county and to the east. The meteorologist came on and showed how two storm systems were twisting around to collide with each other and he showed little rotating circles on the map to show where funnel clouds had been spotted. The Madison news reporters were sounding all a little hopped up and edgy, I think because this perfect storm was headed exactly the way of their studio. Where we were, the wind blew up and rattled the trees around and it rained hard, but passed, and in the evening it was actually a bit nice, cooler and less stickily humid. We sat out on the back porch drinking wine and talking about continuously variable planetary transmissions, until big drops started to fall at 11pm and the cousin who hadn't been drinking wine ran me home.

Today before we left there were only green patches on the tv weather map (flash flood warnings), not yellow (severe thunderstorms) or red (tornado), the storms on their way from Iowa seemed to be heading north and south of us, and so we thought we'd have a good run back to Appleton. However. Just at the point on the 151 where you turn north, we found ourselves beneath a big black line of cloud that was the leading edge of a storm heading south. There was lightning ahead, hitting all the way to the ground, every minute or so. It started to rain. The sky turned that green color that they had just been talking about, that usually means either tornado or hail. We drove into the rain. It was windy and coming down in sheets, there was water washing over the road in the far lanes going the other direction, it got so you couldn't see the taillights of the car in front. I was trying to be responsible and calming and in charge and was looking for just a country road we could pull into to sit until the storm passed, but my resourceful cousin spotted a roadhouse across the highway, so we did a quick turn and drove over to it. We parked right by the door but even from just running the distance between the car door and the entrance we got soaked.

We ended up playing darts for about an hour, and sitting around playing paddle with the other folks there, until the rain eased up enough to head on. We had done the right thing stopping, even though we were late getting home.

Summer weather in the Midwest is treacherous. It just blows all the way across - Nebraska and Oklahoma to Iowa, into Wisconsin, across to Indiana which is underwater tonight, to Ohio and even New York State. Rivers break their banks, big lakes of water stand in the cornfields confusing the cows who stand huddles up the hill wondering how to get to the barn. Wind and rain sheets whip windshields of people who have to drive that way to get somewhere. Clouds are so dark you can't tell if it's time to get up. Street lights come on in the middle of the day. Sirens, beeping warnings on the weather radio, red maps on the tv news and edgy broadcasters. I'd sort of forgotten about this part. When I lived here before I was always younger than 14 and someone bigger than me was always responsible for worrying about the weather, making decisions and figuring everything out.

Three more months of this, and then it will snow again. It's not Prague, but this place takes its own kind of courage and fortitude to live here.

Girl Needs a Hug

Remember only a very few short days ago when I was rhapsodizing about my wise boss? How he offered to coach me not to try to do everyone else's job so I don't end up killing myself? And all of a sudden I felt loved and supported and safe at work?

Yeah. Yesterday he called a special meeting of all of his direct reports, a mysterious meeting with no agenda, no subject in the meeting notice. Gathered us all together, and told us he's resigning. He told us the whole thought process, starting a year ago when he starting thinking about what his next career move would be, and going through all the different considerations of family, place to live, opportunity, what he's leaving behind, etc. This was all to support what he said first, that he's not leaving because of anything at our company, he's only going because it's a great opportunity, and it's the right time in his own personal life to make this kind of change. Because of all the detail, I completely believe him, and I'm grateful that he shared so much with us.

But today, suffering the slings and arrows of all the politics and toxic personalities around the office, and worried sick about my big project and whether I'll be able to bring it off or not, I started feeling very sad. Like a little kid who misses a parent, like a kid just off to college for the first time. Abandoned. Orphaned. I wonder who my coach will be. I really need someone at work who I can go to when I feel insecure and vulnerable, I need some safe arena where I don't have to keep up the professional front and broadcast only good news and "wins". Who will that be?

Maybe I should start looking around and recruiting someone now. Maybe someone not in a direct reporting line?

Anyway, so what I did was take myself to the Starbucks at the Barnes & Noble, my happy place, and I had a tall soy chai and she didn't even ask me if I wanted a larger size (trainee), and I didn't even read anything, I just looked out the window, felt sad about my boss, had arguments with toxic co-workers in my head, and chilled out enough to be able to go back to the office, knock over a few tasks, and realize the ones I couldn't do were not my fault.

Still, it would be good to have a hug.

The Internet Is Other People

As one of the next steps in the project I want to go back and re-read my Sartre. The screenwriting book is validating the Existentialist themes that life has no intrinsic structure, but people create their own story through their choices and actions.

However, Sartre is so bleak regarding human community. Sure, we're all essentially locked in our own consciousnesses and ultimately alone, but what with all the interactive networking technology that so characterizes the current age, might his dictum "Hell is other people" not be ready for an update?

When I think about Sartre vis a vis human community, and I think of the themes of the contemporary world (not so long after Time Magazine put a mirror on its cover and made "You" the Person of the Year), the update I think it could use is one that includes existence through the network. World of Warcraft, Second Life, YouTube, Facebook and all that. And that even more fundamental insight that behind every web page and email address, there is another human person.