A day in the life. (Or: Once I Studied Dirt and Now I Have A Job)

(written Friday) 

I started my day yesterday, climbing out of a fire escape, clutching a muffin in the inaccurate grip of my mitten, an expansive view of the glowing edges of the world framing the silvery snow. I'd had a night out with Mr. Programming and Miss Piano and had stayed in their third floor apartment to avoid a late-night slog back to Trumansburg.

It was a beautiful morning. I am learning to coexist with winter.

I'm also becoming accustomed to my work life at Cornell. Although it is still a bit of excitement to see names which I had been typing into my thesis, (“Mohler et al in 2001 found that cover crops blah blah blah,”) and now I am passing these names in the hallways, as plaques by doorways! And in some cases, I am writing emails to these names, as I am now working on projects with them.


That day at Cornell I signed myself up for an InDesign class (because I knew nothing about it, save that cool people use the program and create beautiful graphic materials) and Professor Boss had told me I'd be creating a newsletter and formatting an extension publication. And learning is great, especially when the class is payed for, and I left all eager to DESIGN and MAKE things. 

I was also working on editing someone else's work, very different indeed than elbowing around words I myself had written. Even though I may not know exactly how to say what I'm trying to, the amorphous what I'm trying to say is at least contained in me. With someone else's writing, the amorphous what is something else entirely. The sleuth-like nature of this, the puzzle of it, of editing this quite rather drafty document about no-till soybeans. Here is a sentence. It is saying something. Where should it belong? What is it REALLY saying? Has it been said already? It’s like taking Lego's spread all around the room—all of them useful colorful informational legos—but they certainly comprise no building. And I’m trying to stack them and build something. It's actually really fun and I'm enjoying it.

I was also editing a case study describing a farm with 240 cows: and I had this amazing Farming Game de ja vu....being 12 years old and playing the Farming Game (Klassens! This game would entrance us for entire days), a board game where, as a farmer, you can buy little flat cattle stickers, plant little corn stickers, and move around the board through all 4 seasons. I thought about how in real life 240 cows are no small matter, but if typing about them or farming-gaming them they seem quite easy-going indeed.

Later that day was a Cheers With Your Peers event in the plant science building, some sort of initiative to get plant researchers out of their greenhouses or window-less offices and socialize with each other. I asked Mr. Coworker what this might be like. "Well I've never been," he said, "but it's probably where people stand around drinking beer in little groups, talking about their research, with people they already know." Oh good: I know nobody.

So I went.
I wasn't sure what to expect there, still being so starry eyed about the league of Cornell and all that. But it ended up being a rather home-spun affair, about 15 people, where you rifle through a cooler for a Saranac, then drop the suggested donation of 2$ into a coffee can with a hole chopped sophisticatedly into it's plastic lid. There was a bag of chips, too.
Amazingly--thanking the gods of social luck--I was not left sitting solo; my lead was a moustached plaid man I recognized From Somewhere and the recognition was mutual, but bewildering, so we played the Ven Diagram Game of how we might have overlapped in the past.

Turned out we'd chatted one day at the Geneva pub when I was playing server there this fall.

And then somehow I found myself conversing with....the chair of my department. Somehow in the shuffling around of coffee can and Saranacs and the opener, a conversation transpired. About Thailand, corn, and office space. So I met some peers!

Later that evening I went up to Grannie and Granddaddy's place, where I felt not unlike a minor celebrity: there was a nice piece of silver on the table and a miniature bottle of Champagne and wee cocktail shrimps. And lemon meringue pie for dessert.

I will preface the following by saying my Granddaddy was a dentist, not a lumber jack, and there are people still in this town whose tooth-work has not failed them even 30 years later.

With utmost specificity Granddaddy cut a slice of lemon meringue pie, inching a small knife painstakingly along the slice, then reaching for another tool--the spatula--and delicately extracting the slice from the round. A few hours later he directed it onto a plate and then reached for his forceps and plucked half a dozen crumbs from the pie pan and added them to the side of the slice. He took his drill and carefully bevelled the edges. "Hurry up!" said Grannie (while some speech has been a bit of a struggle for her recently, she had no trouble with this pronouncement) and the two of us laughed. Finally he surfaced from this delicate surgery and administered the plate to me. Then he dove back into his pie trance and another 4 months passed and a second piece came into existence.

Taking forever, doing nothing, very carefully. 

Then I remembered the glories of a cruise they took me on as a child and how there I learned about key lime pie for the first time and while I didn't realize it then I certainly do now: I had a beautiful and fortunate existence as a grandchild of theirs.