thursday is sai baba day.

back in Delhi. get off the air china plane (no individual tvs, surly flight attendants) and it smells like India. Walk to the check in, board the escalator and almost immediately get tangled in the melee at the bottom. 2 hours later and we're checked in after much jostling and general disbelief. Ah, India. No matter how many signs proclaiming that this situation is temporary, it's hard not to believe otherwise. Yesterday we wanted to see Om Shanti Om, a real bollywood movie right here in India with SRK, number one hottie. We ask for help and a kind toothless Indian gentleman and a woman whose Indian accent sounded suspiciously like Smita's directed us toward the number 500 bus. "This is in very nice area, you should go there. It should take half hour." We board the bus and toothless man reappears through the window, "this seat is for senior citizens only" he smiles and gestures. Boards the bus and gives us plenty of directions, at one point lightly slaps my cheek, for being a rapscallion, I guess. The story rolls on: throughout the night we manage to miss 3 movies, take 5 rickshaw rides, be in the same mall as Aamir Khan (whose presence causes all movies to be cancelled), get dinner for free from some sai baba fans on the side of the road, have a rickshaw breakdown, switch rickshaws to ride with someone who mysteriously speaks japanese as well as english and hindi and finally make it back to where we started right as the final movie is beginning only to be told that no bags are allowed in the theatre. no lockers, no submitting to a bag check. we collapse into hysterics as our japanese speaking friend ushers us back into the rickshaw for the final ride of the evening, home. No wonder Indian fiction is so damn good.

totemo iidesu-nee!

Saturday night- 8pm. just checked in to brand new capsule hostel, slightly disappointed that capsules are not actually enclosed tube-like structures, rather, they are nice little mini-rooms. I am experiencing a twinge of sadness to leave Kyoto, a place that rapidly zoomed to the top of my list. I love the teeny tiny bars piled on top of each other in unassuming buildings off alleyways that we spent three nights exploring, staying out till 5am on a wednesday and finding people on the streets even as we made our way home. The zen temple that has a 700 year old garden filled with moss and carp so contemplative that they stay completely still. The bike path along a river that is visited by cranes and crossed on large turtle shaped stones. The best meal I may have ever had made in an unassuming restaurant, with food so fresh and delicious that sometimes I laughed when I first tasted it. And real live geishas. I glimpsed two luminescent figures whiz by in a human pulled rickshaw and saw one exiting a job in the Gion neighborhood, where tea houses have played host to wealthy men being entertained by geishas since the 18th century. The combination of history, beauty, energy and care in every thing I have experienced here makes me love Japan more and realize how my outlook has changed since I was 16, when I first came here. Its nice to know that I had some inkling that this place appealed to me in a special way and now that I have grown up I can appreciate the style of living here and wonder if 16 year old me had some special insight. A question I am sure I will continue to ponder as I re-explore Tokyo for the next few days.

Fukuoka

In the Apple store using free internet. It is the Christmas season and the decorations show it. My Japanese is terrible, no surprise there, but I have fun reading what I can and trying to remember basic stuff. The boat was a nice 40 hour ride, lots of reading, very little interaction with others, little movement, some karaoke. Japan is so nice and orderly. The sushi is delicious and so fresh. Fukuoka is filled with fashionable people, canals, interesting architecture and lots of vending machines. Ok, off to explore.

pictures?

that's the horse head we shared a ride with.

Me next to a typical Mongolian religious thing that if it wasn't 7am after a night bus ride i could be more eloquent about.

mongolia, take 2

here i am in erlian, a soul-less border town that seems to fade into endless desert. unlike last time i was here i know when we leave and what to expect when we get into beijing, which is nice. being back in china means no more mutton, but i know i haven't strayed too far from mongolia since a guy next to me is looking at porn online, dirty pictures with the mongolian flag in the background. ah, the complicated nature of national pride. i just tried to post some pictures, but it made the computer shut down so you will have to make do with my words. some mongolian highlights:
- gers look boring from the outside, canvass structures often plopped down in the middle of nowhere, but it turns out that the insides are generally colorful and warm (if there's enough coal to make it through the night).
- there are not a lot of roads in mongolia. even the drive from UB to Kharkorin (the past and future? capital) is done mostly off road. this is generally delightful, except that sometimes you feel a little adrift in the middle of a desert with camels, yaks and sheep roaming around with seemingly more direction than the vehicle you're in.
- our last ride from Kharkorin to UB included the 3 of us, some mongolians who immediately busted out the beer for the ride, a horse head that came into close contact with my bag (hopefully while frozen), lots more meat in bags and a two hour ramble through town before departure to pick up people and their meat.
- there are a few national mongolian songs and they are played everywhere all the time.
- life in a former soviet semi-state is way different than other places that i've been. most obviously due to extensive vodka consumption. life seems more open than in China, you can access what you want on the internet and nothing is deemed "too sexy" for TV, but there is also not the same feeling of hope and opportunity.

more to come, hopefully with pictures at some point.

mongolia

we are here. after many many hours of sitting on a non-moving train around the china/mongolian border, lots of driving through moonscape, too many nasty toilets/holes to talk about and an introduction to new alphabets, we have made it into another country. so far we've holed up with foreigners and protected ourselves against the cold.
Alex almost lost her mind while riding the train and I did what I could to keep her from plotsing, kvelling, or getting agata. But I didn't do very much except for having enough power on my ipod to watch one episode of 30 Rock. As we sat on a ledge outside the train station (we were locked out of our train for a couple hours) the screen kept getting covered over with sand and I had to brush it off. Apparently Mongolia is a desert. But a cold, windy desert. Another suprising fact was that the town we were stalled in (Earlian (sp? - we are entering the portion of the trip where I can't spell the places I am visiting.)) is a shopping destination for people from Ulan-Bator. This is surprising since for us at least it was an 18 hour train ride to get there.

Getting kicked off the computer now....ttyl.

chengdu and bac

we've seen pandas, pimped some rickshaws with foreigners, climbed mount emei and seen pictures of the faux chinese dalai lama at the top, slept in a monastery, seen a very large carved buddha from a filthy beach, missed seeing jane goodall in two cities, eaten thanksgiving dinner and gone to "the bus bar" in beijing- a camoflaged trailer in a parking lot with a land rover bar- oh yeah, and we're off to mongolia at 6am. see you post-detox.

i climbed the great wall!

i thought that the great wall was just going to be a long walk, wrong. jane and i chose to go today which happened to be too foggy to see anything outside of the wall (which is actually good, if i could have seen what i was about to climb i may have just sat down and cried). by the end, after being lifted down from one of the towers by jane and some polish dude (each with a leg in hand) and climbing down another one with a number of onlookers coaching me on the footholds i was happy to reach the end, where it was snowing. besides the fact that it may have been a more challenging climb then i was ready for, it was fabulous to occasionally find myself alone on the wall, sans tourists and hawkers. scarily enough, as the bus got back onto beijing roads, jane and i could both feel the pollution. i am ready for chengdu and environs!

ni hao!

shanghai felt alternately like chinatown, brooklyn, and an amalgamation of american cities with tall buildings. now we're in beijing, after one of the nicest train rides ever, although i could have done without the chinese ballad muzak. we now know the words for rice, the numbers 6-10 and vegetable bun in chinese. we also do a mean reenactment of the announcer on the shanghai metro.

Cool Things I've seen in Portland

• really tall bikes. I asked someone how he got on his (multi-colored, earth flag, anti-war stickered) tall bike today and pointed to his step. someone else told me "faith."i didn't actually see this guy, but plenty of people who look like him.

• weird cars. people like to decorate their cars with tiles and little alien figurines and other bizarro things. so many people, so many crafting opportunities.
  
• international rose test garden! Portland is also known as "Rose City" strange, there must be one nickname for every 25 people in Portland, but this one makes sense since roses grow everywhere and are nurtured. see how happy i am about roses?

• Next to the Rose Garden is this serene Japanese Garden, complete with Yoko Ono inspired wish tree.
• these people like Japanese gardening too, but they have a lot to learn.
• Finally, this is what nerds do on their day off...

Welcome to Bridge City

here is the view from the Burnside bridge on the way to Voodoo Doughnut, best donut shop ever.
here is my new hip haircut.

that's all i've got for now.

I am a bike commuter. That's right, I have joined the ranks of thousands of Portlanders. I read bike maps, I follow bike routes, I hang out at the bike shop and I get passed by lots of people on much fancier road bikes whose legs are ready for hills. Helmet on!

Dance Party USA

Last night we went out. It seems that the 22 other people I'm here with are party animals, and it's nice since we spend about 12+ hours a day together in classes and doing field games and walking the streets talking to people about voting, so sometimes you need to not be talking about politics. Or if you are, you should be playing red state v. blue state flip cup on July 4th, which miraculously ended up in a tie! America wins!

Anyway, I walked the handful of miles from my home to downtown Portland last night and am constantly impressed by the greenery all over the streets and the cats running around. Portland feels like a variety of small towns linked by some big bridges and car busy arteries. Downtown is weird and gritty and the homelessness hub of Portland as well as where the hip clubs and Voodoo donut is, awesome local donut place. It's very bizarre. I think that's all i can do now since I am in class. More later.

Viral Marketing

Doesn't that sound fun? I think it does! I've spent a bunch of today working on it in a collaborative group, I wonder if any of it will work. It does mean that I spent over three hours sitting in an office kitchen and I feel a little funny. Things continue apace. Portland is beautiful, I took a nice walk around the nice neighborhood of Historic Irvington in NE Portland yesterday evening. The well kept lawns were blooming in a way that would make natural lawn types happy and there were lots of big dogs lounging on lawns just lapping up the cool weather. Everyone here seems happy and I'm working on getting used to that. I guess more to come.

So it begins...

I'm back from my two day crash course on PolitiCorps, it was fun and we learned lots of things about health care, rethinking democracy, campaigns, leadership and where we're all from. Admittedly, I have spent so much time at this point making new friends and keeping the old that I feel a little sick of it, but yeah, I'm 22 so hopefully I will get over it soon. It still hasn't set in that I'm in Portland. Since I seem a little stuck, here's a list of things of interest I've learned over the past few days:
Don't sleep with each other! (from two different people)
The US is in 7 trillion dollars worth of debt and 1 trillion seconds ago was 3000 BC. Just to put it in some perspective.
Ultimate frisbee is fun, but will probably be more fun once I'm not scared to get near the actual frisbee.
Our government needs to be dramatically overhauled to better fit our society, and that overhaul is a real possibility.

I have internet now, and Portland has lots of free WiFi, so hopefully we'll meet again sometime soon.

Keep Portland Queer!

I'm here. Getting here was long and filled with tears, snot on my shirt and watching a burned copy of Sicko (thought provoking movie, I'm interested to see how people react to it). Portland is green and it smells good. People are good at DDR. The nickel arcade has lots of games. I liked to ride around on a bike, it didn't seem scary at all. Hannah's downstairs neighbors- a gay 50 something couple of David's- spent all of last night yelling at each other and to each other and breaking EVERY piece of dinnerware that they own. Sample conversation:
David (wearing Nag Champa in his hat): "I hate my father! I hope he suffers!" SMASH.
David (wearing yellow sweatpants and a cowboy hat): "I think we've broken everything we own."
Nag Champa David: "Mikasa."

more to come...

Last Day of Work

There were certainly some times this year that I didn't think I would make it through, or that I saw Portland dangling before me like a carrot, urging me to keep going, but it's hard to understand that feeling now. This whole week I have happily, if not somewhat guiltily, exchanged packing time for friend time: sharing a 40 outside rather than sorting the trash, rocking the "Jewish Favorites" section (Siman Tov, to be exact) at karaoke instead of returning home at a reasonable hour and giving my favorite dog tummy rubs while avoiding taking my boxes to UPS.

Strangely, I was re-reading earlier blog posts (if I don't, who will?) and thinking about my fear of religion when I first got here, and, specifically, people forcing their religion on me and I realized that what I have actually experienced is far more nuanced and not at all as overwhelming as I'd feared. Then I went to the dermatologist. In our 10 minutes together he wished me blessings, he asked the big guy to watch over me on my trip to Portland and he was quick to clarify that while he'd called some NYC Drs. melanoma gods, he meant it with a small g. I have never been so happy to leave the doctor's office.

Happily, interactions like that have been the exception, not the norm and in Vermillion I have met a multitude of creative, kind, interesting, funny, self-sufficient and surprising people. It is truly a special place. Possibly the center of the Universe and certainly an excellent place to have experimented with living outside of my East Coast Liberal norm, mostly because I was able to adapt to the Small Town South Dakota Liberal norm with ease. I will back for Labor Day weekend and look forward to a stream of Vermillionaires rolling through the streets of New York with me in the not too distant future.

Packing and Parting

It seems like the memories of leaving are somewhat indelible. Leaving my home in Hyderabad, I stayed up all night dancing with Miranda while she folded clothes until the car came and she and the remaining students stood outside crying and waving as the all-too-appropriate Ambassador spirited me away.

When I was leaving for Hyderabad I spent my last minutes frantically run around doing nothing useful while Ethan and Adam threw all of my junk into garbage bags and then helped me stuff them in the overfull van to the horror of Marin's mother. On the way home we preceded to get lost in PA and remedy it by eating an animated dinner at an anywhere-USA restaurant somewhere deep in anonymous America.

Leaving Ithaca for the last time, Smita and I shamefully (well, the shame is mine) ditched out on Patrick's valiant cleaning/recycling efforts and sweatally drove off along the Southern Tier. Gotta love that tier. We took goofy pictures in small towns and ingested enough iced coffee to fuel a mini-emotional breakdown on the veranda of a Cracker Barrel in Indiana.

This time I'm trying to take a more pragmatic approach, absorbing the community and the scenery deliberately, but without being overly dramatic. A good distraction was making post-modern (I really need to learn what that word means) collages out of old magazines that I will not, I repeat will NOT, idiotically mail to myself to be thrown out later. Hopefully other activities will continue to distract me from the act of leaving.

Clay County

This weekend, my last as a Vermillion resident (tear, seriously), was jam-packed with Clay County exploration. Kicking it off with a night camping out at Amy's house, next to a creek, under the stars and with many tail-less animals running around, Nick and I made it our business to see and be seen in Volin, Irene, Wakonda and Lake Marindahl. Not to mention a quick dip in the Mighty Mo. After going through so many small towns where streets seem to run as they wish and an open store on Main St. on the weekend is a triumph, our return to Vermillion felt like a re-immersion into civilization. Moving back to a city right now feels pretty intimidating. Here is your virtual tour of Clay County:
These towns contain a few old gems, like this bank building that hearkens back to an ancient time. Well, maybe just a time when small towns had their own well-stocked grocery stores on Main St.
The mulberries are getting ripe.
Lake Marindahl seems to come from nowhere. In the middle of softly rolling grasslands is this gem of a lake. Quiet and serene. Near the lake we stumbled upon the Broom Tree Retreat Center. I got a quick sense of being deep in a fundamentalist heartland, something that I don't often feel. Upon examining their website, I think I was overreacting just a little bit, but I guess my conditioning runs deep.
South Dakota boasts an abundance of service and convivial organizations such as the Lions, the Eagles and the International Order of Odd Fellows. These clubs are mostly made up of a rapidly aging population and their membership is widely shrinking. I don't know much about the community in Irene, but I enjoyed this sign for their American Legion.
Irene is proud of their new sign. I wish I wasn't missing the rodeo. I hope this taste of rural SE So. Dak whets your appetite and has you clamoring for more. Nick and I hope to be hired soon by Google to bring their new StreetViews function to a new venue.

Wind

It is quite serious here these days. Trees down, branches strewn around, and the ever present feeling that something is going to land in your eye and you are not going to like it. Yesterday Nick, Lu, Jewels and I took a long walk down to the river. Everything was green, the river which is generally a trickle seemed full and the tall prairie grass looked very appropriate in the wind gusts. I love the little things that trigger Little House on the Prairie memories.

In other news, this makes me happy. I haven't yet attended a Church of Stop Shopping Event, but I've heard about them for years, and appreciate their efforts to bring attention to the malling of NYC. Relatedly, the World Monument Fund published their 2008 list of endangered places, and Main Street Modern, USA is included. It seems that Main Streets are also threatened by the pull of the big city. This is something I've been thinking about (inconclusively) all year. Hopefully I'll move to Portland and find that they have the answer to keeping communities vibrant without too much gentrification, but I know that's a pipe dream.

Finally, here is a really neat photo essay about how families eat for a week around the world. It seems natural to include a short update about my no-corn-syrup experiment. To be honest, soda is hard to refuse and I've been finding myself buying diet soda because there's no corn syrup, but obviously there are other bad things, so it seems like a pretty lame move on my part. The other thing I haven't been able to refuse is ketchup, which is essential in some ways and has corn syrup as the second ingredient. As I had thought, the trick seems to be planning ahead and reading labels, things that I should theoretically be doing anyway. If I were to stock up on a few essentials and make sure that I have corn syrup-free snacks and condiments on hand, it wouldn't be too bad. Sometimes this makes me angry since it shouldn't be so much effort to find food that doesn't contain something that is bad for you. Also, it was interesting to notice (although not surprising) that in England things that contain corn syrup here, don't there. Gotta love ag policy.

Country Roads

May be my favoritist thing ever. Driving along gravel roads in the country after hanging with friends and a crazy fire-hating sparks-eating dog as the sun gradually disappears feels like the antithesis of city living and a medley of everything I've enjoyed about living in SoDak.

Oh yeah, and this article about the future of space is both incomprehensible and extremely frightening.

Fish: Gefilte and Raw

This weekend marked my much-anticipated Sioux City Day! Nick and I hit up some of the stinky city's hot spots including: Congregation Beth Shalom, a local foods market, the mall, and Fuji Bay sushi restaurant. We also ventured across the bridge to Nebraska hoping to find a flea market, but instead finding a main street filled with so many Mexican and assorted Asian stores that I felt like I was in East Austin, or Queens.

Sioux City has a very gritty feel, and the stench of meat processing plants definitely adds to the aura of hard work and slight downtrodded-ness. Despite that, I was really impressed by how much interesting stuff there is to do, even if the sky is black and your time is dotted by periodic downpours. The Jewish community was kind and welcoming and made me miss home (a little). The sushi was absolutely delicious and reasonably priced. The local food market was housed in an old firehouse and felt slightly haphazard, but had a great variety of foods (mustard gift pack!) and a very Iowan enthusiasm for keeping things local that hasn't quite migrated across the South Dakota border yet. The mall was... a mall! But I did some necessary summer shopping, so there you go. And I bought Seed Magazine at the Barnes and Noble which provided some fascinating and well designed reading about China and space, among other relevant scientific topics.

Back in Vermillion it was a typical weekend of bingo, chicken coop cleaning and half-hearted room tidying/packing. I CANNOT WAIT until the time that I do not have to move once a year. Although, judging by my previous packing misadventures, the longer I stay, the more impossible it is for me to get my stuff out. This year I do not have the option of toting any belongings in garbage bags, so hopefully I will be better than I have been in the past. Hard to believe that a year ago Smita and I were wrapping up our post-collegiate mini-road trip and I was flying home from Chicago with a garbage bag filled with random items, scissors and trash that had ripped and was being carried in a Dunkin Donuts bag. When will I learn?

Bingo didn't help me win the big bucks, but it did provide me with the opportunity to feel like I was glimpsing into another universe where even the colors feel like a step back in time. The International Order of Odd Fellows hall, where Bingo is played, has the operation down, complete with cordless mikes for the callers and roving board checkers. I was impressed, can you tell?

From London With Love

I spent this past weekend traveling to London and back via: Omaha and Chicago. Lots of traveling which sort of sucked the life out of me in a way that I wasn't really prepared for, but well worth the trip nonetheless.

Whilst in London I hung out with my 87 year old Nana, making food, eating food, watching golf, being amazed by her apparent distaste for organic foods (she bought an organic broccoli once, it wasn't good), and giggling as she pushed her way to the front of the line because of her "stick" and generally hurtled around North London. I also visited my 92 year old grandfather at a nursing home which could have been better, but very easily could have been worse. It was interesting to see a home filled with old Jewish Brits and staffed by people from all around the world. It sort of made sense with what I saw around North London in general, some very British people walking alongside lots of Muslim women with their heads covered and people who seem to be from Africa, South Asia and other places that feel fairly un-British.

This isn't new, but it is always surprising to see how culturally diverse London is and how much I feel like I've crossed an ocean to get there. Since I started traveling there when I was 8 I have always felt like there is so much closer to the rest of the world than here. Even when my "here" meant NYC and not Vermillion, SD. It makes me wonder how the world is going to change/is changing all the time due to the movement of people. This is really not something new, but when Sioux Falls, SD has Iraqi refugees coming to live and small towns all over the midwest are filled with pockets of new and different communities, what is shifting in those places? Since London and Britain in general has always felt so much more stead and traditional than here it gives me another little window through which I can explore the world.

Luckily I was able to discuss and debate these thoughts with Adam, my American friend with the Cambridge-educated perspective. Note: Cambridge British and Jewish working-class British are not the same thing. All in all, good trip, but I am happy to sit still for a few weeks before I jet off again to a longer and more frightening adventure.

One Year Out

Graduation was a year ago this weekend, in honor of the momentous occasion I offer you some thoughts:

The oft-mentioned “real world” is a hoax. During the past year I have come into contact with many people who occupy this mystery place; people who have worked at my job longer then I have and have been thinking about their health insurance for years, but for the most part, we newly graduated masses continue to look at the world through our collegiate lens. University life is still our paradigm. When I’m hanging out with my older friends I often catch myself referencing college life and feeling silly, young, inexperienced, nostalgic? We recent graduates reminisce about our hours logged in the library and pine for the place we learned to call home while shyly examining the world around us. (Note: working at a University during your first post-graduation year may intensify feelings of confusion about where the University life ends and real life begins.)

Exploring is challenging. After graduation I realized that there were so many parts of Cornell and Ithaca that I had just touched on, or had taken a really long time to find (ex. Walking down the Cascadilla gorge and following it along the creek to Gimme! Coffee). I thought that by moving to South Dakota everything would be an adventure, but I’ve found that I need to be vigilant and not just sit at home watching TV and chatting on the phone. I’ve refined what I think of as exploring, including hanging out with new people, biking around new places and doing things when I want to even if I don’t have someone to do them with. I think I can always do better, but I’ve been working at it and hope that exploration doesn’t one day take a back seat to constant office work.

Writing when you’re not in school is hard. I miss thinking new things and communicating them in an interesting way. Emails, blog entries and press releases are not the same as academic papers. Sometimes when a smart word like “conceptualize” sneaks into my conversation (as in: Liz Lemon radically re-conceptualizes comedy) I get pangs and want to lock myself in a library and come home hopped up and chatting to my roommates about all my ideas. That said, I am not quite ready to head back to school yet. But look out, this blog ain’t slowing down anytime soon!

Experiment

I have been thinking of experimenting with eliminating Corn Syrup from my diet. I was thinking it would be difficult, but make sense since it would be a logical continuation of my rants against ethanol and corporate agriculture (if you've missed these, be thankful). I started to poke around the web to find others who have done it and instead found people who were engaged in much more challenging experiments such as eating organic for cheap and the now-ubiquitous No Impact Man.

I am not a huge fan of these sorts of experiments, since they are definitely gimmick-y, but it can't hurt to try to make small changes in my own life without starting to compost my own poop. Although I can't wait to start composting my food wastes once I live somewhere that feels semi-permanent. I've been making an effort to eat more organic, more local and be more mindful in general of what I'm buying, but I haven't been as deliberate about it as I'd sometimes like. So, after a year in South Dakota where the diabetes rate is something like one out of every six people and a trip to the dr. who strongly suggested eliminating all high fructose corn syrup from the diet, I am going to see what I can do. I'm hoping that I feel some sort of difference, but in reality, it may be a bust. I'll keep you posted.

In other news, last night I had a dream that reminded me of when I was taking my anti-malaria medication. I am headed to London this weekend to see my grandparents for an amazingly short period of time (in reality) and dreamt that my flight went through Mongolia. This made sense. Once in Mongolia I realized that I could just hop on a later flight and called up my friend Leigh to hang out with her for a few hours. We hung out in her apartment and had a nice time until I panicked about getting back on the flight and we had to run through a field of dirt and yaks as the sky blackened because a dust storm was approaching. I made it back to my gate and immediately felt bad because my Nana was probably wondering where I was since I was hours later then expected without a phone call or explanation. Then I realized that I'd left my pounds and oyster card in Vermillion and felt like a schmuck.

I guess I'm anxious about traveling. Or just really itching to visit Mongolia?

On the Verge of Rain

It's been on the verge for two days now, do you know what that can do to a man? I've been getting pains in my knee, I wonder if the two are related. Summers aren't made for working, as I may have mentioned before, they're for lounging and exploring and drinking and chatting. Too bad I have a desk job.

I just found out through the grapevine that a certain friend of mine is just a few months from receiving security clearance from our illustrious government. This makes me think about things that I've received in my capacity as a federal employee. An unhealthy obsession with my cuticles. An intimate relationship with the internet. A developing allergy to the indoors (for realz, the eyes have been mad itchy). An aversion to conference calls. The company debit card, which I still need to keep receipts for to justify to accounting.

I hope it rains already.

The Great Outdoors

I spent a lot of time outside this weekend, although most of it was sitting down. Camping in Yankton which mostly entailed drinking beer, playing bags (some standing), watching food cook, roasting marshmellows (does getting up to replenish my marshmellow supply count as standing?), croquet (definitely included standing), rowing around, and sitting by the water. All without getting sunburnt! I have been camping four times in my life, including this weekend, and they were all essentially car camping. The Lewis & Clark campsite might take the cake for least separation between campsites, as in, no separation in the form of trees, bushes or even that much space. But it was great regardless, so I guess that the powers that be in the SD Parks Department have hit the nail on the head. Or something.

Inspired by our adventurous camping excursion, Nick and I did some more wandering on Sunday. A visit to the illustrious Spink Cafe, a very small town cafe where Jr., the owner, loves Elvis and fried food. Everyone knows each other and I was happy to be wearing my Centerville hat, since it seems to provide coverage from the sun and some SoDak street cred.

We took the backroads to Union County State Park. I always love passing this little bit of topographically interesting and very very green land while on the Interstate. Backroads are even more fun for exploring and made me realize for the millionth time how many layers there are to each place and how impossible it is to really explore a variety of places to their fullest. Just next to the interstate, the roads take you past farmhouses and fields and through tiny towns that may or may not still have any inhabitants. Southeast South Dakota always seems so much more beautiful on the little roads, almost shockingly so. Oh yeah, and Jewels liked it too.
We ventured even further afield to Iowa, where I was swept away by a wind powered school and a short visit to the ice cream capital of the world.
Unfortunately there was no ice cream to be had there because it was graduation, an event so important that even a world capital has to take a breather. Look out East Coasters, I may have found my calling as the official rain gauge of Akron, Iowa.

Delicious Nettles

Lots of fun things this week interspersed with some not so fun things (yay for crushing my phone!). It turns out that stinging nettles with garlic, soy sauce and intense amounts of organic olive oil are fabulous. and actually, it wasn't just Vermillion that went nettle crazy.

The Farmer's Market/Community Gardening opening was a success! The kids went crazy for Amy's Art Seeds creation. Oh kids, they're so cute until they don't stop talking and you want them to, or they get bossy, or demanding, or whiny. Anyway, they made cute things and played in the garden.
After the garden celebration I tried fishing. I have to admit, sometimes my city kid-ness is overwhelming, my ability to sit still is close to zero and my intolerance to bugs is overwhelming. Regardless, Nick and I had a nice time watching our fishing rods get caught on things in the wild and crazy Vermillion river, putting nightcrawlers on the hook (for some reason, I didn't think about worms having blood, ew) and watching a loooooooong train pass by.
By the way, my Centerville Tornados hat and crazy earrings are probably two of the most exciting things I've ever found in the Civic Council and I have worn both everyday since purchasing them. Gotta get my SoDak gear on!
Sorry that it's not the most exciting train picture in the world, but it's owned by Warren Buffett. Does that make it more exciting? Maybe not.

By the by, I spent two hours yesterday ripping a wire fence down off an old chicken coop. Take that NYTimes I think I'm so cool because I have a coop in my house. Whatevs.

A Study of the Mundane

This may or may not be an interesting concept, but I'm sure that my parents will love it, so the rest of you can suck it up. Unfortunately all I did today was run errands, but maybe it will provide the insight into my life that you wouldn't get from talking to me because no one wants to hear about running errands, but let's face it, we all do it. Sometimes a lot.

I pick up my bike and head over to Jones' Food Center to pick up free polenta from Jozef for tomorrow's big Farmer's Market/Community Garden opening.
Polenta + Stinging Nettles = Delicious? I certainly hope so. At least I found these, notice the name...Post-Jones' I head over to the Coffee Shop Gallery. Having one of those moments where I feel like I live in 1957. Why do water towers make me feel like that when every town has them and NYC's look so much more old school anyway? And I meet Lu who is grading students portfolios for English 101. Watch as she fails those crazy students. When she says eight pages she don't mean four! Check it out, she's got a grade book, and she didn't get it in no teacher store!
I didn't stay too long because I had a mountain of clothes to fold. Seriously, it was sort of scary. Don't I look sort of scary?
And now, something totally not surprising, my room is a pig sty.
But not any more! Check out the meta blog.
Anyway, off to bbq and go to jazz night.

interesting map

I think that google greatly overestimates my swimming abilities. Also, interesting that the most direct route from Vermillion to London takes me through Boston and France. Who knew?

In other news, I've found the source of the cheesy smell in my portion of the office. Thy name is coagulated fair trade hot chocolate remains. Yum. My future looks messy.

more pictures

This picture got passed around at my goodbye party at work yesterday. i may as well put the pedal to the metal and share it with the whole world.

Taken at Al's Oasis in South Dakota. If you have driven across the country, there is a very good chance that you ate a buffalo burger here. If you have lived in South Dakota it is almost guaranteed that you have eaten a buffalo burger there. And maybe you hung around the area after dark and maybe you went to a small town bar in Reliance, SD where you met an older man who likes to tell raunchy jokes such as:
older man who has spent all day working outside -- "How do you cut a fart in half?"
bemused girls from Vermillion non-verbally to each other -- "can we get out of here NOW?"
older man -- "wear a thong!"

picture city

This is a picture of me mega loving the Community Garden. Actually, it's a picture of me doing my weird "Alex takes a picture and flinches because she hears her mother yelling to smile, but not like that" face in front of our awesome signage. How great is this sign?!? You can sort of see the plots in the background. We're going to have an opening party next week, so i'm sure there will be more pictures.

Also, some people wonder what I learned from Warren Buffett at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting. I don't want to give out any hot stock tips here, so I'll just leave you with this.

it's May!

to celebrate, here are some things that I like - -

• how people in South Dakota lift a finger when they pass you on the road. I especially like it when older people do it from their pickups, but I do not like it when young whippersnappers ignore you because they are on their cell phones.
  
• being a cat person. I can really see myself getting into this.
  
• how food looks when it's arranged interestingly on a bbq.
• drinking chilled wine when it's warm out.
• using public spaces in a personal way, i.e. walking around a church in Omaha barefoot because I stayed there with a bunch of USD student volunteers this weekend.
• bloody marys at Happy Hour!

can you tell that I want to be outside?

A Day in the Life

10am:

- checking out gawker, grist, gothamist, the nytimes, the argus leader, treehugger and the cornell daily sun

- moaning about students who don't listen and in general stink

- wrote a letter of support to a local organization for a grant they're writing

- emailed the future community gardeners of vermillion to set up a meeting

- realizing that what I am wearing looks insane and should not be allowed

-wrote email

-looked for errors in data I entered previously

-ate a cookie

11am:

- wrestled with the U.'s inane reimbursement policies

- Emailed former boss and remembered the good old days in a ramshackle building that has since been torn down for new development. Although this development (Calatrava transit hub) may possibly be cool.

- Approved students Action hours.

- Sent parents ideas about greening our apartment. I'm sure they were thrilled.

- Added items to my calendar on Outlook in an attempt at being organized.

-Reorganized the data-entry process for PVB info obtained through NYCServ.

-Prepared a cost-benefit analysis of switching all ticket-writing agents to handheld electronic devices.

-Felt myself up. I think I'll have a six-pack by the end of the summer.

I may have exaggerated a bit on a couple of them.

Obvi. Come on Jane, keep it real!

OK, then just re-list what I sent at 10. But keep the last one.

Nooner:

Not a single phone call or student this hour!

- emails to try and set up kids classes in the Community Garden this summer

- email to person thanking them for grant and making sure I don't have to do any more intensive "grant reporting"

- began to write press release about last week's event (whoops)

- ate lunch, tofu stir fry with veggies (consumed between 11:55am and 12:03pm because I am essentially 76 years old)

- read grist obsessively

- Finished looking for errors in my previously entered data. Didn't find the mistake.

- Worked on sheet tracking all changes in projections for my agency revenue sources.

- Daydreamed about ultimate and what I'll have for lunch.

- Peed twice.

Two:

- went home for lunch where I had a fun phone call with Elizabeth even though she refuses to realize that there is no such place as "Dakota"

o talked to Smita and somehow managed to branch out of our accent even though we started with it

- ate rice cakes at my desk

- corresponded irritatingly with students

- felt sleepy

- played with my hair

-I ate lunch (also tofu stir-fry) and stopped at Ralph's Discount City to pay my respects before it closes and search, to no avail, for cheap flip-flops.

-I checked my email. I found out the exciting news that

1) My friend Julia is moving to the Upper West Side!

2) I made the ultimate team that I tried out for last weekend (but shhhh, I'm not supposed to know yet)

3) UCB will be holding their funniest show ever this Wednedsay, Thursday, Friday and again next week.

-Work continues apace.

Jane says...

as part of our attempt not to be lazy and instead actually do something, here is Jane's list:

Pavlov's 20something:

After a year of un-education, these are things I never thought I would
have done.

1) Devoted more time and energy to Ultimate Frisbee than to work or
academic endeavors.
2) Taken 3 sculpture classes, back to back to back.
3) Move back into my mom's house but still spend more time with my dad.
4) Not taken even one graduate school admissions test or made any real
plans to go.
5) Instead, plan to travel for at least six months to all the places
I've never been, starting in January.
6) Become someone who plans events with friends and co-workers and
sometimes likes to play host.
7) Be in a long distance relationship with a guy who lives in Brooklyn.
8) Not really taken any steps to pursue my dream of being paid for being funny.
9) Be busy all the time. Feel like despite the low stress and
relatively easy hours of my job, I don't have time for much more than
the basics (6-8hrs sleep, decent food, the gym, semblence of a social
life).
10) Own a big-screen tv. Spend less than a couple hours a week watching it.
11) Still check my email 14 times a day. But now nothing comes.
Exhibit the symptoms of classical conditioning.

Things I’ve done this year that I would not have predicted at this time last year:

1) Biked around. A lot. And loved it.
2) Expanded my vocabulary to include such words and phrases as “pancake feed,” “prairie,” “Gayville,” “grain elevator” and “service-learning.”
3) Made karaoke a part of my repertoire.
4) Felt like the wind hitting me had surely come unimpeded from the Rockies.
5) Driven a 12 passenger van filled with people and luggage. On the highway in Oklahoma where everyone is a speed demon. And on the streets of Omaha where no curb went un-rolled on. And through the dark roads of Kansas where each bridge is meticulously numbered.
6) Gardened. As in, jumping on the shovel, getting down and dirty, not putting some seeds in a pot, gardened.
7) developed extensive relationships with a cat and a dog. Seriously, entire conversations have transpired.
8) walked through the South Dakota and North Dakota Badlands, and fell in love with both.
9) talked about abortion ad nauseum with strangers and friends alike. (well, honestly, I kind of knew that was going to happen).
10) Sailed on Lake Michigan.

Gayville- the hay capital of the universe!

last night I joined the throngs at Vermillion High School to watch the grand march. What is a grand march? you may ask if you were not brought up in South Dakota or the surrounding region. I should start by saying that last night was the Vermillion prom and the grand march is exactly the kind of event that mortifies me to think about: every prom attendee goes across the stage with their escort while their friends, family and assorted others clap endlessly. if nothing else, it was an interesting way to check out high school fashion style (bright and sometimes slightly inappropriate). also, we got to check out the prom scene in the high school (caribbean nights themed) which is always a thrill.

after prom we headed to Gayville to listen to a bluegrass band at Gayville Hall. we were the youngest people in the audience by at least two decades (at least!), but it was a fun show nonetheless. Gayville Hall used to be a country store and has lots of old kitchy signs and interesting paintings. it felt very old school south dakota, like everyone was headed back to the farm after their night in town.

unlike everyone else, we went out again after the show. to my friends house in Gayville where we played settlers (of catan- for the uninitiated), played with their kitties, looked at pencil sharpeners and learned how to skateboard. all while drinking a delicious bloody mary. if only earth day wasn't rainy and unpleasant, this would have been a perfect weekend.

friday's haiku

rolling around Verm
glimpse Nebraska's gentle hills
rise past the river

new approach

no more whining, just unabashed wit, insight, and creativity. or so Jane and I hope. we are beginning an experiment, that's more than enough information for now, we'll see how it goes and provide updates- as necessary- along the way. i just finished an impromptu hard core bike ride today, well, hard core for me, so pardon any missing words or bizarre comments. anyway, without further adieu, here is the first installation of the Klondike Project (real name tbd).

IN THE NEWS - - Chinese Satellite Kill Challenges U.S.
Almost two weeks ago the Chinese blew up a satellite that they had previously launched to prove that they have the capacity blow up satellites (and presumably missiles). This frightens me for a few reasons.

• China scares me. Seriously. Shouldn't it scare you? as a US colonel says in the article, "Despite official statements about its 'peaceful rise,' China aims to challenge the internationally recognized sanctity and neutrality of the 'commons,' those areas like international waters, airspace, cyberspace and space itself."
  
• The satellite shattered by China caused extensive debris, bringing us that much closer to an atmosphere so filled with junk that space exploration will be hindered for 50 years. China isn't content polluting its own countryside and exploiting Tibet's extensive natural resources, but it also is working towards making the atmosphere too polluted to get through. OK, so it's not all China's fault, but it's pretty incredible that in the past 50 years we have created almost enough debris in the atmosphere to disable space exploration until the debris completes its cycle of coming back to Earth.
  
• The general idea that our atmosphere is cluttered by satellites that are helping governments spy, helping google take pictures of the earth and helping me send gr8 txt msgs 2 my fave frnds makes me want to be a Luddite.

i hope you learned something new here today. if not, sorry.

national volunteer week

has been getting me down. while i think that volunteering is important and clearly part of my job (all of my job?) is to encourage volunteerism, i prefer to think of it as a road to something else and in vermillion, i think it mostly stays as volunteering. this weekend was Step it Up and we had a nice little event here, interesting speakers (i love learning about recycling) and neat things to do, but there were only about 30 people who came through. i don't think all the blame can be placed on "vermillion" but i definitely feel like people are more likely to serve a meal with their church group than they are to take a stand for something. this bothers me.

in other news, i have been spending lots of time reading outside. i think that it's fair to say that i don't like anything as much as i like reading outside. hooray for that.

spring springs again!

last night i watched An Inconvenient Truth again. watching those glaciers melt and break apart is enough to freak anyone out. luckily, tomorrow is the National Day of Climate Action and we are going to have a rocking festival-esque celebration in Prentis Park. we'll see if anyone shows up, and if they do, how many have driven from very small distances away. fridays make me pessimistic. you know how in college fridays are for lazing around the quad and pretending to do reading in the library, but always being home before 5pm, apparently that's not the way it works in life. they are the worst at work. quiet and lasting forEVER. this is what i look at:














luckily, i got to leave work early to attend a reading by Susan Power. she is one heck of a dynamo and really spruced up my friday afternoon. her short story collection, Roofwalkers, was something that i read a few months ago before going to the American Indian Center in Chicago and her writing greatly enhanced my understanding of that community. today she was mostly just really cool, although i'll admit that i was a little distracted because i was REALLY looking forward to this:

i will continue to work on picture uploading. and as i like to say-- formatting is not my forte.

stolen bike

my bike got stolen today, from right under my nose! i leave it unlocked (like other people leave their cars running when they pop into the supermarket) and it got stolen from right outside my office! had i been more vigilant i could have watched the perp take it. douche. i called the campus police and they came over (immediately) to take a report. as i filled in the required information the police officer- who must have been about 19- called my drivers license information into headquarters. "yes we've got an alexandra- a, apple l, larceny e, eggplant x, x-ray." no lie. luckily i didn't have a record, or a parking ticket, cause USD woulda had my number. literally.

funny that the last place i showed my license was in jail in ithaca visiting a friend/acquaintance/person from the past. makes you think about your relationship with the man when you have to interact with them. much nicer to casually wander in and out of their presence than it is to be under their thumb. hopefully the USD police will find my bike outside someone's dorm today and i will be able to continue my happy cruising around town. i guess i shouldn't have spent so much time at work looking at the Community Cycling Center website and daydreaming about biking around Portland. i love when foreshadowing works out.

help!

community garden is dug up. a fun (dare i say, funky?) intergenerational crew of Vermillionaires have made insane progress on the garden. we have a list of people ready to roll, we have 20 plots ready to be planted and it seems like i will be eating tomatoes from the garden any second. i wish it was still spring and not snowy and depressing. blargh.

ithaca was snowy, but not depressing. it is scary how many places can feel like home. i saw the perpetual grad students, the ABC waitress who thought 111 osmun was a sorority (harsh), more hippy babies than you can shake a stick at, the ice cream and soup guy, that dude with long blonde hair and spandex shorts and the guy who spends his life in CTB, he was the same but with a spiffier haircut.

ok, people. i have been told to take more pictures and i'm working on it, but i am open suggestions on how to make this more interesting. my life isn't as boring as i make it out to be, i swear. seriously, i am taking suggestions.

places spaces

biked below the bluff today. it is like a different world down there. the vast majority of Vermillion exists above the bluff, far from the reaches of the mighty Missouri and slightly less mighty Vermillion rivers. originally Vermillion was settled by the river, but after a rather unfortunate flood, the decision was made to move it uphill.

if you bike down Broadway- the original Main St.- you see train tracks which carry grain and hay trains that are 80+ cars long and positively hulkingly large structures of farming equipment. it looks like it should be explored. i've become so comfortable in Vermillion that it's almost jarring to be reminded that this is still farm country.

on Friday my yoga teacher had an art show that began with a 45 minute yoga session that she had designed to move the group through our chakras. it felt important to have so many people together doing yoga. funny, because many of the yoga classes in nyc or at cornell have bazillions of people in them all the time and it would be unthinkable to be the only person in class (as i was once here), but this gathering felt good. i love events that reclaim spaces, shifting them and helping you reevaluate.

as the weather changes and it becomes clear that this is the winding down period of the year i am very conscious of experiencing all there is to experience in SD. yesterday i sat in the coffee shop reading for awhile and watching these adorable kids who i'd never seen before and today i biked past them as i came back from the supermarket, a certain i heart verm moment. more to be documented...

spring is springing!

There has been a lot of whining lately, mostly originating from me, but it is nice out and I am happy and figured that this was a good time to blog about it. I hate the internet, and the word blog, yet am irrevocably attached.

Two weeks ago I went to Austin, TX with a group of South Dakotans for an Alternative Spring Break (woohoo!) trip. Besides the important service aspects and traditional group bonding moments, I have to say that Austin rekindled my love of coffee. Specifically the act of lazily drinking outside of a hip and cool cafe with people who are wearing funky clothes (and I don't mean H&M funky) and drinking out of Mason jars. The hippy element of Vermillion is much appreciated and definitely existing, but you don't get the same overarching sense that there is a creative mass of people out there discussing and thinking and creating. Maybe that is unfair, and I am NOT knocking Vermillion, after all, there are just 10,000 people here, but I have to say that it made me extra special super excited for my upcoming trip to Ithaca.

Austin and Ithaca are actually pretty similar- smallish (or small feeling) hippy towns, with amazing greenery and dramatic gorges (or gorge-like places). What Austin doesn't have gorges it makes up for in dinosaur footprints, real live ones that you can stand in while contemplating brontosauri strolling through the river bed. That is seriously neat. I also felt a sort of kinship between the Rhizome Collective, an organization that serves as a living space and a sustainable educational center. It was like a mix between Common Ground (the collective I stayed at in New Orleans) and the Eco-Village in Ithaca.

Anyway, I am looking forward to stroll down by the Vermillion river- a spot I just discovered and am more than a little excited about.

new blogger sign in! new content! oh, happy day.

Since my last post I have traveled far and wide- from a tour of homeless organizations in Sioux Falls to baby orangutans in Omaha and everywhere in between (read: crab pizza in Yankton)- oh, have I got lots to talk about.

Last night I went on a tour led by the coordinator of the Homeless Coalition of Sioux Falls with other USD students and faculty who are participating in our Alternative Spring Break trips. We went to a shelter that houses people for up to a year, moving them up through the ranks until they get to live in their own room, paying some rent and being responsible for saving money and working. It was an interesting place and reminded me of volunteering in New Orleans and living in the Common Ground housing. It is a good way to visualize how hard it would be to live so publicly for such a long time. It is really challenging to sleep in a room with tons of other people and go to the bathroom with them and shower with them, etc. We also drove around a bunch of places where people usually sleep and congregate, partially for independence and partially because no shelters can house couples. It was also interesting to hear the people who work with the homeless talk about them, they care so deeply and work so hard, but there is something weird to me about being responsible for someone else. Watching them make bad decisions and trying to stop it, etc. I guess that's why I'm never going to be in social work.

In other news, the Omaha zoo is O! so incredible. Bridget and Lindy and I rode down there for President's Day and spent the whole day oohing and aahing at all the adorable animals. They have an indoor rainforest and an indoor desert and an aquarium and gorillas and baby orangutans (did i mention those- so cute!). Since the last zoo I went to was the crappy and offensive Hyderabad Zoo, it was nice to see this one that is so well maintained and focused on education. It was just overwhelming to think about all the species that exist and how we're systematically destroying their habitats. Oh, humans, when will we learn?

In Vermillion we're working hard at starting a community garden. It is fun to go to meetings and think about summer and start something that has so much potential, but it makes me sad about leaving. Especially when I realize that the weather won't always be this annoying and actually it would be nice to stay for more of the summer. All for now.

things that make me mad

in no particular order:
- i fell on the ice twice on my way to work today and then it was too windy to go outside during lunch.
- the south dakota legislature will be introducing a new abortion ban with exceptions for rape and incest. read: abortion may very well get banned in south dakota this time around. what a waste of time and money, i just wish this state would get itself known for something innovative politically, like dealing with the environment or local food rather than bullshitting about with abortion.
- speaking of bullshit- vermillion's school district received $15,000 of homeland security money to put in stupid "security measures" such as bullet proof glass for the security guard. um, when i develop some sort of crazy disease because i had to breathe in toxic wtc air for months when the government didn't want to admit to the truth, i will remember that.

luckily i'm not mad about everything. yoga was today, complete with hysterical yogi conversation re: the proper form of cleanse. i'm going to read my writing class people's pieces now and write comments.

lots of things

but I don't feel like writing them all. luckily, i'm taking a creative writing class, so I can just put things up from class. This is a haibun, look it up on wikipedia:

Lansing

Thinking of you I see us talking- there we are tumbling around our dorm, our campus, our city, up and down hills at a breakneck pace with arms flailing. Anxieties (mine) and ideas (yours) pouring out like revelations. Once a week I would sit on my couch waiting for you to appear in Jeffrey, the most ramshackle car on the road, looking forward to us coasting past campus, past the mall, until we reached the kind of serenity that the Finger Lakes are famous for, planning out our lessons along the way. At the facility we signed in, surrendered our possessions and waited for the guard to buzz us through the door. Then we waited for the adolescent girls to be filed into the library, each in their uniform of navy blue sweatpants and a ratty matching tee-shirt, we would explain the lesson after they got settled. Motion shifted- each movement, each piece of paper, each pencil was carefully accounted for by the guards- but the rhythm in each student’s writing was encouraged and shared. Oftentimes that was all their pieces had-- rhythm at the expense of expression, movement absent feeling and context. When class was over the students would line up again, not going back to their rooms until they were still, some of them sneaking in goodbye waves to us. Some weeks we would drive back along the lake, looking out over it as the sun set, windows down, speakers blaring, students’ papers being lifted by the wind.

road dips and rises
the bright orange sun falls on
Lansing behind us

internet works at home!

I left (a short trip to Chicago) and came back, again. It seems like I've been doing that a lot. Chicago is a great city, yet another place tempting me to move there. I didn't realize that Chicago had eco-city pride, but apparently it is making a name for itself as a green place. It seems like there are a lot of ideas there for green business incubators, etc. which is always interesting to learn about since I feel like there is a never ending supply of green things to learn about.

It turns out that I enjoy the power trip of being in charge of other people (I was leading 7 USD students and a faculty member through Chicago), but I think I have a lot to learn about how to get people to reach their potential. I can't really put myself in their position sometimes, like, why be on this trip? What are they looking for? I guess in that way I could do better, but I like that everyone listens when I talk and I get to design and implement something so clearly.

Tired now, and cold because it is SNOWING and sticking out there. I am going to enjoy my last day of no work for what will probably be a long time.

back in So. Dak

Sojourn to NYC is over and I am currently back in Vermillion, sitting at the Coffee Shop, syncing up my new iPod and having Kelsey help me take the knots out of the scarf I am knitting for my dad. I was scared for awhile that I would leave NYC and freak out, wishing that I still lived there and wondering what the heck I'm doing here, but honestly, I'm liking it here. Inspired by Lindy (I know, I know, we're linked!) and my dad's many comments, I am back to the blog.

Last night I went to a home basketball game in Gayville-Volin, go Raiders! It was pretty atrocious. I saw kids with tattoos of the Budweiser logo and, tragically, the Michael Jordon logo. Tragic because the kid was not a great basketball player and his team has not won a single game this season. Add that to the list of tattoos not to get.

my iPod is all synched up with almost all of my music in the world and I have 28GB of free space. Anyone have CDs?