Mustache Money!

Check our the mustache on this guy.  50,000 Colombian pesos is about $15. How excellent, yet slightly disorienting, to be thinking in money with all these zeros tagging along.

Where else can you get 300,000 out of an ATM?

Our hostel (private bath, three beds for us three) is costing us each only $8/night in Cartagena. At a tiny nearby supermercado we loaded up on fresh fruit, cheese, eggs, and veggies for a (wildly delicious sassy-fresh) homemade dinner and spent all of $12. Buying that in Ithaca would have been probably about $50.

"You must really want to go where you're going"

The objective: bicycle trip with my incorrigible and beloved Lady Elise (of Southeast Asia fame), exploring the colorful and beautiful Colombia, going to South America for the first time, being away all of February (using my sacredly saved-up vacation days and taking unpaid leave), revelling in a month of sunshine to escape the Ithaca gray, tapping again into travel-adventure me even though I do have a cat and a dreamy apartment and a job I love. I never want to lose this facet of myself, the one that, through changing my global circumstance, is forced into boldness and bathed in curiosity and where each day becomes a savored epoch.

The problem: its 4:30am this morning and I'm standing there with a giant cardboard box in the middle of the airport floor, my father just driven away, the JetBlue flight people informing me I CANNOT actually take that box on my flight. Under no circumstances. ESPECIALLY to Colombia. Not even with that pleading face.

That screen of puncturing disbelief and panic filled my view for a moment. "Oh my, this IS actually happening." I'm not easily going to go where I want to go today. I wondered how I would respond to this; in a slightly detached way I watched myself in this new drama.

Forming thoughts at 4:30am, completely alone, under the pressure of a looming flight to catch or not...I was facing a traffic jam in my slushy brain. Do I take this flight and ship my bicycle via FedEx? But unable to reach my dad before that flight left, FedEx inaccessible on a Sunday... Do I take this flight and leave the bicycle box behind? That totally would deflate the central desire of this trip...

I was in the midst of studying a hard decision requiring immediate attention that would have repercussions no matter what I did, under a countdown at an unforgiving and graceless hour.

What did I do? I hefted my huge box under my arm, this both beloved and now hated bicycle box, and marched to the Delta airline counter. I explained my pathetic story to the unfazed Mr Delta, "is there ANY chance there is an open flight going to Cartagena today?"  Tap-tap-tap, computering. I waited. And I watched this movie and was pleased to note, from my distant vantage, that the main character was not in fact throwing a hissy fit; its rare that I actually go through stressful things and I was curious how it would be.

And there WAS a flight. I didn't so much think it over, my gut flashed a light that was the closest I'd seen yet to green through the murk, and so I gave myself a small nose-bleed and handed over my credit card. Ouch. This is why people don't purchase flights just 1 hour in advance. I thanked my parents for helping with my college education way back then, so that I could do something extravagant like this, and continued to cringe as they then also charged me extra for the box.

I then noticed a Bossman standing over my bicycle box looking dour, the offending box left in the no mans' land of the ticket area, unawares of how much trouble it was causing. "That's MINE" I explained. "Let me help you move it" he suggested. --"NO" and I waltzed over and picked it up, all oversized dimensions, and hefted it to the counter lightly by myself. "She picked that up like she was superwoman," remarked Bossman. It was the only outlet of my frustration I reasonably had and I was not going to let that be taken from me. I am carrying my own box THANK YOU.

Later:
"How are you," said Mr Security, more cheerful than I see Securities usually. "Its been a long morning, already" I said, amazed that I was somehow articulating, instead of say, roaring. I briefly explained my flight plight and the enormous sum of money I had just spent. "You must really want to go where you're going" he commented cheekily. "I DO," and then added, because in at least that moment I truly believed it: "its only money."  He grinned, "I tend to believe with you on that one", and there was a brief bright moment there before I moved on, a platitude perhaps but also profound. That little human interaction lifted me considerably.

Maybe I could have done something else and saved myself that money. I could wallow in the waste of it flushed to something that could perhaps have been avoided. But more importantly, I choose to accept my decision and charge forth. Its about reevaluating the importance of things. It IS worth that much money to me to have a bright outlook. 

But that moment though, when the air ship has reached velocity and it separates from the gray runway, and my stomach lifts to my brain momentarily, and that childhood wonder upon flying breathes anew, and then gliding up we burst into the light. THAT moment effectively erases all woes for me.

This whole morning has brought me to thinking about the zen statement: that we should expect pain as well as pleasure in this life, not feeling entitled to either. Both will come along in their measure. I can't waltz into an airport expecting my bike to fly free like it did to Thailand, or expect a hunky police officer to rescue it for me from the drug-ridden streets of Rochester. Likewise though, I refuse to live expecting nightmares and turmoil. I want to welcome, as gifts, the hunky policemen and four-leaf clovers when they do happen. 

Reenacting a Scene, or: The Brunch

 

Just about over a year ago, when I made the decision to consent to Cornell’s wooing and move to Ithaca, I wondered what it would be like to live here.  Along with wondering, I had little preconceived settings of what it might be like.  I had a scene in my mind, unsupportedly detailed, the scene which represented What My Social Life Would Be Like, and it was a potluck, people of mixed ages all wearing earth tones, eating curried squash or the like, and talking about wind energy. Also for some reason, in my mind, this was occurring at the little Buffalo Street book store. That’s just how I imagined Ithaca might be.

Because reality is rarely like the churning whimsical creations of the brain, this scene from my imagination hadn’t happened. Until today. Just minus the bookstore.

It was a birthday brunch at an artist’s cooperative space, far enough out of Ithaca that I felt I was on a little journey. 

I love the story of how I became to be at this brunch. Once upon a time this fall, I was out dancing downtown, and with the late-night post-groovin’ munchies, I waited in line (with residual neon green hair from some Halloween function) for some duck-fat fries. A tall woman with short hair caught my eye and her partner reminded me of Peter Watson, bearded and plaid and rugged and I learned later, amazingly, also spent time in Vermont and made cool art creations. Somehow we all ended up chatting; who even knows how this starts, “I like your hair”?, “Amazing fries, huh?”  Some way to reach through the welter of people all strangers and connect with another. We had some good laughs on the same eccentric wavelength and there was such pleasure in connecting with people like this.  

The best part is that the next morning I was waltzing down State St, and happen to notice enthusiastic waves through the window at the State Diner. They were my Miss Tall Shorthair and Mr. Vermont. How wonderfully serendipitous. So I went in and sat with them while they waited for omelets to come out. “How did you possibly see me just walking by?” I asked disbelieving. Oh yeah….green hair.  May have served like one of those irritating flashing beacons atop a lighthouse.

So this brunch was in honor of Mr. Vermont’s 45^th birthday and I was tickled to be invited. We ate eggs baked adorably in a muffin pan, the requisite bacon and mimosas, my massive purple bowl of cinnamon ginger popcorn. “This popcorn has a wear mark in it”, observed Mr. Vermont, as he gestured to the large concave area he’d been scooping from methodically.

We spanned many generations. From a quiet lurking teenager to the hippies gone to seed, the wood worker who had made the beautiful long table we sat around, the table winding naturally with the curves of the wood. I loved being in this old farm house of someone I didn’t know, studying the postcards on the wall (“wait! I’ve also been to that very temple in Cambodia!”), and taking in someone’s kitchen, which is really a window to a soul in some ways. Like the beautiful table, there was a wooden counter top curving naturally with the character of its tree, part knife block as well, all these handles mysteriously protruding from the smooth wood.

I perched on a high chair, another beautifully contoured work of wood, taking in the scene before me reuniting with the one in my imagination. The yellow-grey hippies (one wearing gray camo pants with a grey plaid shirt, all atop crocs) rolled joints and puffed contentedly into the room, people served themselves more hash browns using the machete-recrafted-to-spatula, we swapped snow storm and road trip stories. Sentences starting like, “when I was hiking the Appalachian trail.” We discussed colony collapse disorder and yoga. “Yoga is the gateway drug to The New Age”, said one seeded hippie, making a funny.  “No, yoga is the gateway to gluten intolerance,” said Mr. Vermont and we all laughed.

Amazingly, a statistically unlikely proportion of my friends in Ithaca I met arbitrarily like this. Not introduced through a friend, not met in a class. But random people unconnected, seen at a park or an event, and someone was brave enough to extend a sentence. I have found Ithaca to be a cornucopia of fascinating and engaging and passionate people; people I just itch to be friends with and cannot help being curious about.

Even though I'm not Russian

Here is one of those writings where I've finished a lovely time, and I feel like describing coats and clovers and cheese and cappuccinos and whatever else, and it is just rather self-indulgent.

I may have started in Ithaca, where I now call home, and I may have arrived in Rochester, where I've been stamping around since I was a child. But riding a bus there made me feel the fresh edge of the travel, as if I were almost across seas and unable to speak the language. Just me and a backpack, observing the world, eating figs from my pocket. The power of associations, huh!

Waiting for the bus in the cold, I wore my Grannie's long dark furry coat (this coat my new prized possession, we think it may be as old as my father, my last name stitched into the lining), like a portable nest that fits on my body, and my bah-sheep ear-flap hat. A young man looked at me pointedly and asked me something I couldn't understand. He clarified and I realized I was just asked if I were Russian, in Russian. "Thought maybe you could have been one of my relatives from Russia" he said, a little abashed, but this tickled me so much that we both laughed pleasedly over it. For me, little exchanges like this are just one of the perks of not having a car.

I got off the bus among the tall buildings and cold blowing trash of Rochester, and walked the few blocks to that fortuitous coffee shop, where the most remarkable four leaf clover and stolen bike story was staged (see the entry dated July 5th or 6th, 2014), and amazingly on the way there found two four leaf clovers. There'd been a little abandoned plot of land that someone had thoughtfully covercropped with clovers, and I thought, how brilliant it would be to find a four-leaf clover there. I usually don't find them when I fervently want one, they show up more readily when I'm a little mellowed out, but I still wished I could.  And with no further ado I found two immediately and carried them to the coffee shop and gave one to Mr Barrista who remembered me, and he smelled the clover in a sweet display as if it were a flower, and wouldn't let me pay for my cappuccino. A cappuccino so light and perfectly amalgamated, lofty foam entwined with buttery espresso.

It was the first time in a long time I had walked into a coffee shop and knew no one. That doesn't happen much anymore in Ithaca, even though I've only been there 9 months now.

I met my mother for a ramble about the public market and was squealing over persimmons ($3 EACH in the Ithaca Weggies, but here $2.50 for 5) and buying zatar and soon hefting around no small load to import back into the pricey land of Ithaca.

The traditional Italian cheese shop was one of my favorites; I could almost pretend I was not in America anymore. All the cheeses were unceremoniously set out on the counter--who needs refrigeration--and the lack of prices and sufficient labels was like being back in a hut shop somewhere foreign. I had no idea how to engage with these cheeses, or how to even begin to choose a cheese. So I asked, hopefully, "What's your stinkiest cheese?", and was taken on a fascinating tour of four different types, little flaccid white slabs passed to me by an eager gloved hand. The first was like eating a soft foot fresh from a muggy work boot, with an Italian name I was all good intentions to remember but have since forgotten; the third was the winner...a nose of fresh grass, a little lemony somehow at first, then ending in rich bitter bliss.

The rest of the weekend was being ferried around in the cars of old friends I love dearly, people who have known me over half my life, going from concert to house party, farm house sleepover to cookie making project, cookie party to Thai food dinner....the weekend warming and woven together by food and friends.

What wonder that the magic of travel and feeling somewhere freshly could be combined with the comforting standard of old friends.

Dancing Through Winter. A study in form and function.

These days of flat gray cold leave me feeling flimsily susceptible to weather-influenced soul grayness. I don't reckon I have Seasonal Affected Disorder full blown, but I get that unsettling neutralizing of energy, with gray fading to darkness at 5pm.

I want to live a life of NOT soul-grayness.

I think I will dance my way through winter.

We go about talking and analyzing, and very often this is the default of how we process and move through life. And maybe we do yoga, slow delicious ways of shaping and stretching our physical capsules and processing living.  But dancing, especially the free form type, or adding spontaneous twirls into a contra dance set form, is a completely unrelated and often untouched way of being a human brain and body. Its like a vigorous self-applied massage. Joy in the human experience expressed. Or an attraction and connection with another expressed. The best kind of dance for me--not always accessible but wonderful when it happens-- is when thought and judgement drop away and it becomes an exuberant meditation. Body moving and warm, unstuck and open.

I've been dancing a lot lately. Swing and blues, dance club beats, organized and coordinated contra. God bless you, Ithaca and your venues.

(Or just my kitchen, solo, the Dishes Dancing Blues.)

I can go to these things with or without a partner. I've been here just long enough I can show up on a dance floor Friday night and know people and have dance friends.

Or dancing alone. This was happening Friday for a while on the beating blinking pumping floor and then I overheard somewhere, "You should dance with the hot 80s girl", and wondered who looked like an 80s girl. Then my friend Big Ben, who, amazingly went to college with me back when I had less color and no talking and no style, and he said "I was just told to dance with you". Ha! (Big Ben loves telling people how unrecognizable from my current self I was when he knew me in college.)

Contra dancing was last night.

Contra is a fascinating form, because its the sort of dance that relies less on self expression and more on a moderated structure. Which means it draws all sorts of characters, especially those who may feel a little self-consciousness about the inner spontaneous movement sense, attractive to people who love mathematics and engineering. I say this because I ask my partners what they do, and its very often engineering or complex biological sciences or the like. The swings and do-see-dos that repeat and move the room of bodies along in a pleasing pattern, all to 8-beat lines of bright music. I love it.

Contra is also an amazing study in types of dancers. The following is only a partial compendium, but I wish to share with you a few profiles.

Sweating Ecstatic Men. These are ones so thrilled to be part of this music and movement, they add aerobic embellishments to their dance, working themselves into a joyous frothing frenzy. One asked me to dance and I said yes; "and since I have many shirts I'm going to go get a new shirt," he said and charged off. He changed shirts between every dance he was sweating that much. Stomping like a clogger at every opportunity, hooting "Yeah!" and "Yes!" as the music made a turn to a new phrase. By the end of the night his eyes were wide, his hair like wet ropes on his face; he was so huge and warm and sticky that after going from him to my partner I assuredly transferred moisture. He shouted "YES!" now with a loud quaver in his voice, as if he were transformed with overpowering contra orgasms.

Then you have The Bosses. Old solid men who've likely been doing this for twice my life time. They will spin you in a controlled tight circle, perfectly on beat, never cracking their gravity for a smile, pushing or pulling you to every move so you needn't think. You never mess anything in those dances, floating and propelled in perfect time.

And finally The Young Grinners. College boys, anything from skinny and limp with petrified eager grins, to smooth moving boys who already have shoulders from working out. You both grin with the novelty of all of this, spinning about a room coordinated with all these people and the music.

Ok gray winter: music and endoprhins and Humanity, here I come.

Unexpected Minneapolis

I am in Minneapolis.

Cornell sent me here to join thousands of other plaid-wearing scientists to talk about plants and soil for four days. A conference! And I will be giving my first Big Girl talk at it, all smart gray suit and carefully crafted PowerPoint slides.

Minneapolis is a city, hip and busy, tall glinting buildings, taxis in lines, Saturday night swarms of carefully dressed beautiful people Going Out. I haven't been in a proper city since San Juan, Puerto Rico. And the local folks here don't even consider Minneapolis that substantial. But to me, with the skyways linking downtown buildings warmfully, and the web of bus routes, this place is a metropolis.

Although I had a four hour meeting yesterday, with a team of people who care about cover crop traits and breeding trials, the conference proper hasn't really started yet and thus I have had some gift time to explore.

And, wowza, I love exploring a city.

Fortified with a bus schedule, a map, and a container of water, I set out south of downtown yesterday. I found myself in a city that could have been in Costa Rica or Cambodia. I wandered into Mexican grocery stores, bought a beautiful scarf at a thrift store with no other white people in it, and unintentionally caused a man to brake on his bicycle to ask if I was a model (it's these leather Frye boots, I suppose). Posters of soccer stars, hair places advertising dreadlocks, Super Mercados, a little African store selling thumb tacks next to bulk spices next to cell phone cards. A panaderia where the smell of plump yeasty breads brought me back to my favorite Latin American places. I bought a puffy twist of a bun for my coffee later, likely a third of the price of the pretentious glassed-off baked goods I would find on offer at my gourmet coffee location.  Halal meats. Saddle shops. (Saddle shops? They were the only indication I was in the Midwest)

Then I made it onto a bus and rode into another part of Minneapolis. Leaving Unexpected Diversity Land and arriving in Standard Hip Urbane Area. With the gourmet cooking stores, the North face shop, the hipster coffee, the young people on their sweet bicycles. The kids can ride fixies here because its flat as my chest. I tried on a fur coat in an H&M shop but bought a dress instead. I sat and enjoyed a very good coffee (thanks Seattle for ruining me) and listened to a gray haired couple and friend talk about food additives and complain about the tofu having been fried at a supposedly health-conscious restaurant. "I signed up for a knife skills class..." one said in passing.  Later, talking about travel: "I'm huge in Paris but tiny in Wisconsin", said their decently sized friend. Outside the shop a tiny Honda's license plate read "BIKE_NOIR". 

This morning I woke early, and joined the good Catholics for the last bit of the 7:30 mass at the stunningly grand basilica of St Someone. I went there for the pipe organ. My breath caught in my chest as I entered the space, the ceilings soaring, the windows, the pillars, the organ practically shimmering gold, with the trumpet pipes pointing out towards the sanctuary like guns out a ship's gunnels. My entire skin had an electric current over it when I heard the thick sound fill such the space. Being a Catholic church, only three people sang, but the cantor doggedly put her cheerful voice above the grand beast. I walked upstream against the flow of Catholics leaving during the postlude (a Mendelssohn Fugue), and stood adoringly in front of the organ as it roared. I will always love this.

I spoke with the Organist afterward, he was thrilled to learn I too was one, and the world became tiny when he said he was from Buffalo NY and studied in part in the SUNY system. I asked him his favorite stops ("oh heavens! There are so many!") and he played the 16 foot diapason, rich like hot chocolate; I asked him his best advice: "learn as much as you can about style and always practice technique."

There is sunshine. I wandered around a wee lake in the city, the water rushes expanding the sunshine around them, and am now contentedly thumbing these words out from behind a plant in a busy coffee shop.

Hooky

I played hooky this afternoon. 70 degrees and sunny, the world just hues of gold and burnt gold and golden gold. I flipped down my laptop in the windowless office, climbed into my bike shorts, consumed the last icecream cone of the year, and set off on my bike.

I went east, towards the lands of Hammond Hill State Forrest, the golden corn set against the auburn hills. Glacier carved hills so prominent and jutting in these parts, and heaving up and around them, I could say the same for my legs after a season biking around here: carved by glaciers. For miles it was just me and crunchy floating leaves; the peace of empty roads with no lines down their middles. My favorite is to see a steep bugger ahead, "oh arg", but there's a decline before it, and I can pedal frenzied enough to coast half-way up the other side. Being out here is leaving the bike lanes and the Priuses of Ithaca, entering instead into space and forest punctuated by diesel trucks, baseball hats, and the occasional horrifically tacky lawn display. In East Nowhere I stopped at a farm store and bought cheese curds, $4 said the sharpie-written cardboard sign, all homespun looking with a quaint clip-art on the label of their zip lock baggie and tasting inarguably of Barn. Delicious. The big man behind the counter was so friendly and refilled my water bottles and gave me free apples.

I biked into the woods a bit, just listening to the trees and the wind. I sat on an outcropping of moss tuft and had thoughts. Just to sit in peace and solitude in a forest is a wonderful thing. I highly recommend leaving work and sitting on moss in the woods for a while sometime.

I thought I'd have some nice profound thoughts while I was there in the peace, but all I could come up with was how incredibly good my life is, and how indescribably blessed and fortunate I am. Also, simply looking at a forest floor, with all the colored leaves, weed species, slanting shadows, illuminated by bright sun: the visual information is almost overwhelming, the shapes and colors...especially contrasted with our constructed simplified creations of indoor walls and office desks.

Being in the warmth, in a forest, on new roads: this was like going on vacation, just not with all the logistics of where the next hotel would be. Pedaling and observing the passing-by of it all.

This is what I love best.

I came home at the same time as I would have if I'd been coming out of the office. Back into the students and the traffic. But instead 31 miles later and with the heady knowledge that there is so much else out there.