Richard Feynman on connectivity

Last night was remarkable in that I wasn't in bed by 10pm. It was Friday and I was out stamping around Cornell and collegetown in the callousness of winter, although winter is not at all conducive to Going Out (GO). First, unless you're an undergraduate girl for whom leg attractiveness is more important than frost-burn protection, you bundle. 

For me this involves my purple puffy coat, a scarf extended and then spooled around my neck, my "bah" hat with fleecy ear flaps which straps under my chin in a manner appropriate for the hat of an infant. Then purple mittens (yes, I am five) and 4-pound boots and by the end of this I'm so encased that I can basically take in no sensory information and I hear my aunt say something in the next room. Muffled like cars driving on deeply-snowed roads. She's saying something to the dogs about Marvin Gay.  

Oh wait, no, how rude of me. "Thank you!" I call out thickly after a dismally long pause, which is the appropriate response to "have a nice day!" 

Marvin Gay. good grief. 

My evening started at the Big Red Barn, the hang-out spot for graduate students. And what looks like a graduate student and behaves like a graduate student, is a graduate student by certain definitions and so I went.

The Big Red Barn is like walking through a field of people, everyone elbow to elbow--sometimes backpacks jutting out creating impasses--talking about their research, being young and smart, drinking $1 beers. All in groups of people they already know. 

I want to be doing this and I always feel a little like an unduly hopeful meerkat, peering around, standing alone. But the first time I went I managed to strike up conversations with a couple different strangers, to my utmost glee.

One was a student from Puerto Rico studying biomedical engineering, amazingly from the same city near which I was staying for my farm and beach visit a few weeks ago. Of all places in the world, and here we were in this crazy barn. We spoke of the same road, Route 13, which is lined with mango trees where you can just pull over and load your car up with roadside mangoes. And then a man from Brazil studying chemistry who told me that I was having a beer in the very same building where Richard Feynman would come for beer himself, and where Carl Sagan would work just across the path. 

And a guy from Italy studying planetary science. I stood there with the dollar beer he'd bought me (I no more than looked at him for half a gaze and voila, was given a beer) and took in his theatre of hand expressions--it may be a stereotype of Italians but in this case the data were affirmative. Hands rising grandly for mountains, thumb and fingers pressed together for delicious, some sort of miserable wave for how cold it was here. We were talking about traveling in the tropics and Mr. Italy, in his description of huge plentiful insects in places warm, formed the international sign for Humongous Big Bug (thumb and forefinger) and rolled out: "The nature is very aggressive!" 

Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Portuguese, oh the languages! What a collection of brilliant minds from around the world, studying everything from planets to soil, all elbowing their way around the din of this space. If you step back and really think about it, all the places and ideas and topics of study represented here: wow.  

People ask where I'm from, and while I can make conversation with pretty much anyone about pretty much anywhere in the world, I can only answer, "Um. Well. About 90 miles north of here actually. A small town you've never heard of." 

Everyone else is from everywhere else. 

The second time of the Big Red Barn was last night, of the heavily bundled me. That place is not designed for Winter: ergonomically challenged indeed. Having a building capacity is all fine and good, but this fails to account for Winter where everyone now takes up at least 30 percent more volume in their outerwear, or at least I do because I dislike being cold. And then that volume needs to be removed and hung somewhere. There are approximately 7 coat hooks for 435 people, the coat hooks, incidentally, situated in the decidedly narrow hall leading to the men's bathroom. And in their slidy-puffiness coats do not stay suspended in bulky aggregation if they are draped atop each other. And so the men were like Jesus on palm Sunday walking over downed pile of coats.

 

So I come into this lively furnace of beer and research and then have to unwind the scarf, pry off the hat, juggle the mittens, and suddenly it's like I'm carrying an armload of laundry and I'm dropping socks and underwear on the stairs.

 

But I found a spare horizontal space above a storage box and stuffed the lot and went mingling. There I found Moustache Nick, who I'd met before, and so was welcomed into the loud fold of his friends and thus they adopted me and we all went out afterward.  So I had dinner with a bunch of plant breeders who I didn't know and had a great time. (another lovely serendipity: found an enthusiastic soul in a similarly-shorthaired woman who went to highschool in that impossible-to-pronounce town of Puyallup where I did my master's!)

Then I went salsa dancing, and with music and moving like that you forget about frostbite and mittens. 

There I was approached by a gentleman in a purple colored shirt with his wife. "This is the third time I've seen you this week," he explained, "and I just need to introduce myself."  I, however, had not been so observant and did not recognize him.  He explained that he'd seen me at the Trumansburg Presbyterian Church (where Aunt Awesome plays pipe organ) on Sunday, then at a seminar about deer browsing and invasive plants on Thursday, and now finally at salsa dancing. "Those are all so disparate that I almost didn't believe it, but no one looks quite like THAT" he said of me.

He was the head of the Horticulture Department.  

So many connections out there in this world! We just have to dig them up. And make more of them.

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.

"Waxed or unwaxed?"

I had a beautiful ski this morning, in this snowy world of freshness.
Except I'd never before gone skiing with an un-pumped yoga ball in a
box or a bag of fine Ethiopian coffee.

You see, I was skiing to the bus stop and carrying my Windowless
Office Survival Kit on my back.

I went to bed last night planning a snowy trudge to the bus stop
(thanks to the logistics of my Snow Bike having been left at Cornell)
but then had the bizarre idea of skiing there instead. But this wasn't
without a few questioning considerations. What if the snow, even
though it seemed plentiful, wasn't thick enough? Would Mr Bus Driver
even let me on with them?

But it worked out quite well indeed, the country road I had to
navigate was mostly devoid of traffic and I enjoyed the roadside trees
draped in snow crocheted doilies. I was blessed to enjoy one of those
times of weightlessness and space before my workday started. Since
Googlemaps, unlike for driving, walking or biking, doesn't provide the
estimated time to ski a given distance, I completely overestimated my
time and arrived plenty early. I skied a loop around the park by the
bus stop.

"Waxed or unwaxed?" asked an older gentleman at the bus stop, and
another young bloke added: "I dig your style." The bus pulled up and I
carefully maneuvered my clacking ski poles and slippery skis--those
long and blundery items--into one arm so I could gracefully tap my bus
pass and enter the bus with my load.

The tips caught on the door and the ski poles slipped and I had to
rearrange quickly but I got on! "Those are a REAL hazard", Mr Bus
Driver said good-naturedly, "so just make sure you don't poke or
puncture anybody." I assured him I would keep them all well-behaved,
and was rejoicing that he let them on with a warning rather than
flatly disallowing them.

Buses are not really designed to accommodate the long unwieldiness of
skis, rather the squishy pliable lumps of human bodies, but I found a
back seat and got everyone threaded in and positioned by the window.

Now I just need to bring a Going Mug of hot chocolate to enjoy
afterward, and all will be quite excellent indeed.

Riding a bus

Since I arrived in the Trumansburg-Ithaca area my car has been parked (save for the first ill advised morning I drove to Ithaca which was not unlike clawing my way up a severely compacted colon).

I like my car that way. (It's ok, Daddy)

Here, there is enough public transportation that I can take the bus to get to work in the morning.  I ride my Snow Bike the 0.8 miles in a few minutes of spikey, awaking, unabashed cold to the bus stop. There I stamp around feeling numb and then rejoice (oh! how something so quotidian can cause such unbridled joy) as the bus curves its way into view.  My bike rides on the nose of the bus as a sort of mistaken bizarre emblem, and I settle on the inside and open my book.

While it takes longer to ride the bus than to drive there in my car, I think of it as intentional scheduled reading time, and for me it is free thanks to a Cornell-sponsored bus-pass.

This bus population seems different than that in other cities, where buses are mainly for those in economical straights; here there is eaves-dropping on conversations about fly-fishing, hiking, video games. There seems to be a veritable bus-riding group of friends taking over the whole back section. It's a rather comfortable feeling in there, the buzz and hum of conversation rather than the lonely silence I'm accustomed to on buses.

And on a bus you can turn to your seat-mate--both of you reading books, both of you with travel mugs of coffee--and ask him if he just might happen to know what a "dirigible" is. Because you're reading Bill Bryson (with his penchant for great words), and you don't have a smartphone, and so you and your seat-mate relish the strange sound of this word and he shares how only just last week the cartoon his children were watching used that word, dirigible. What a splendid coincidence.

The two of you chat in between page-turns. "So you're the die-hard" he comments, voicing what is probably the collective curiosity of the bus about who was the one responsible for that single frigid bike up front.

So now you have a bus friend. His name is Pete.

Much harder to do in a car.

Cornell!

Once upon a time....I looked at Cornell University as a hopeful soon-to-be undergrad (disenchanted by both the expense and the expanse however), applied as a graduate student (turned down; no funding), but now, finally, they are paying me to go there. So I do get to be a part of that ivy league community on the hill in the valley of wine and Moosewood! A Research Technician am I, in the sustainable cropping systems lab.

This was one of those jobs that did not exist, but I met the professor heading the lab this fall; he knew of my background and research interests in cover crops and weeds, and I told him I'd cited his papers all throughout my thesis. "So tell me what you like to do and what you don't like to do," he told me, "we'd like to create a position for you." 

And so I got a job I never applied for.

I say that is pretty great indeed.

I showed up to My First Day At Work yesterday, and was presented with a typed list: "Sandra Wayman's Responsibilities" all numbered out. I appreciated this straight-forward organization, and the items on the list will be challenging without being insurmountable, fun for an agricultural plant nerd like me, and capped neatly at 40 hours per week. None of this working 8pm on a Friday for me, thank you.

What is maybe most exciting is that I will be managing a project on perennial grains. Perennial grains are one of our greatest oppurtunities to really feed this hungry and burgeoning population: most of the world's diet is grain, and having to plow and plant each crop annually is hugely taxing on our agricultural resources. So working on a crop that only needs to be planted every 5 years or so will be tremendous for conserveration.


While this project is nifty and exciting, the building I am working in is not unfortunately: a towering fortress with no windows (save for two sets at hallway end). One could be in this tall tomb all day, not knowing whether it was sunny or snowing. Having finished a season of work in the field, where I was intimately entwined with whether (weather) it was sunny or snowing, I feel like part of my soul is being scorned not being able to see the sky. (call me sensitive; ok, fine: so I'm a plant)  But! In the little alcove by the rare and token windows are a collection of plants, not mild-mannered plants either, and a seat. This is my Plants & Sky Office and my coworkers will just have to look for me there working away on my laptop while I am filling my quota.

My coworkers are mostly graduate students, in plaid shirts and hardy jeans, nerdy (but not the Chemistry Nerdy, the Farmy Nerdy) and sincere plant people and I like them already.

While I wait for my dreamy apartment in Ithaca to become free, I am living with Aunt Singing and Uncle Bass in a nearby town, and their dogs Big Dog, Bigger Dog, and Engaging Cat (see Figure 1). I like this cat very much. Cat and I did yoga together last night, me in downward dog and Cat in flopping cat below. And there was purring. Then Cat leapt, in that effortless grace known only to Olympic competitors and cats, to my dresser and played Knock Things Over.

Aunt and Uncle are being exceptionally kind and letting me stay in their large, beautiful, and very warm house. Oh! If one must have winter, there is no better house in which to have it...  I also am enjoying the contrast of my aunt's kitchen cupboards with my mothers. Aunt gave me a tour of the kitchen, opening doors and featuring the contents, "here's some...stuff. And here's some more...stuff." The canned tomatoes by the plastic bags and its all fine because you don't have to spend time sorting, just as long as it is all visible when you open the doors. Her Tupperware cabinet was my favorite: an act of balanced entropy, the Medium Square resting inscrutably across a Tall Round and you lift it out, and there tips a Small Triangle to fill it's place. You close the door swiftly with a hand to block gravitational forces and go on with life.

My mother's cabinet is a completely different matter. The Tupperware are sets of Matrushka dolls in military rank formation, organized by size and structure: to get at Square Medium you must heft out the Square Smalls and Square Larges--the veritable entire battalian of squares--and then replace everybody. It is an Entropy Free Zone.  I love both woman and their cabinets.

Figure 1. Me and Engaging Cat, whose real name is Bubbles.

Rain forests and Raw pizzas: Mountain life in Puerto Rico

Written Saturday:


This evening I showered with a frog.

He sat there all moist, black bead eyes regarding me, his little pink-
tan body almost translucent and his little lungs plugging in and out
stretching his skin. His toes had little grippy balls at the end. We
enjoyed each others company for a while, then I toweled off and left.

You see, we're at the mountain house bed and breakfast now, staying in
a cabin on the property. I woke up and stepped out of the little
doored bedroom I was sharing, and into what was essentially the rain
forest. The rest of the cabin was so open-air that I could stand at
the kitchen sink brushing my teeth and be inundated by this great
clambering green thickness of forest. Vines, bananas, ferns, epiphytes
(plants growing on other plants), palms....  Any human complaint I
might have had was grasped in this green glory and I celebrated the
diversity of life. Imagine how motivated, inspired, creative we might
be if we could find this intimacy with stunning nature so frequently.

I saw two shooting stars tonight, padding out on the road between the
orange trees, craning my neck into the brilliant display above. So
bright, all these patterns and formations I usually cannot detect. And
the fire flies here! They don't blink! They stay lit steadily for some
time, until they need a breather or whatever, and then they'll turn
off at leisure.

There is such pleasure in sitting back after a day's work in the
garden, watching the light dissipate, and hearing the critters and
chirping frogs begin their endless symphonic chorus of the dark. This
is quite loud. Almost like my ears are ringing or I have some sort of
strange headache.

The tenacious abundance of life! Sun and heat and water and here is
this indefatigable reminder that things yearn to grow and multiply and
exist. And in that they are beautiful.

Riding in the back of a little pick-up truck to load gravel to fix the
potholes in the road, zipping along the mountain side, under banana
trees and citrus. Mr. Owner, our driver, stops besides a mandarin tree
and we pluck a few off and the ride got that much tastier. Like the
tropical equivalent of my childhood joy, decidedly upstate NY, of hay
rides in someones trailer, munching on apples.

Epiphyte: noun. A plant that grows on another plant, epi = "on", phyte
= "plant". Usage: "That epiphyte in that tree is the epitome of
beautiful!"

Epibhyte: noun. When a fire ant bites you on top of a mosquito bite.
Usage: "My ankle now is actually a conglomeration of epibhytes." Also:
"My epibhytes kept me from sleeping well."



This is a bed and breakfast that caters to people with vegan,
vegetarian, raw, gluten free, food-free (heh) diets. The next guests
are raw ("as opposed to broiled or baked guests" quipped Lady Elise;
"I'm Raw" does indeed sound stranger than "I'm Vegetarian") and so
today Mrs Owner brought us down two Raw Gluten-Free Pizzas to try.

Now, everyone has freedom to choose their own eating styles (you can
tease me about my kale and popcorn anytime), but I am of the opinion
that to be defined as "pizza", a thing should include a few key
components. Like a crusty wheat crust. And tomatoes. And melty cheese.
And be hot.

This thing was round, and had tomatoes. But besides that, it was not
at all like a pizza. The crust was made of flax and rice; on top was
chayote (a white, crunchy, and tasteless number grown in the tropics)
and tomatoes and tiny olive pieces. To be considered technically
"raw", food must not reach above 114 degrees F, as at this temperature
some key enzymes are killed. So this pizza never saw the heat of an
oven; instead it rested demurely on the hood of the car in the sun.

And it was delicious. Surprisingly delicious, once I renamed it Flax
Tomato Round. I found myself eating fall-aparty slice after fall-
aparty slice. It didn't feel heavy or greasy or sodden, like regular
pizza might. It was salty and chewy in the right way, a little hint of
garlic and herbs.

And I felt light and airy and not overfull.

Airy indeed. I was soon experiencing wildly voluminous flatulence. I
imagine all that flax and fibre and garlic bobbing directionless
around my gut, blowing happy bubbles.

Foreign language laughter

Ah, the hilarities of practicing a foreign language.

I've never officially studied Spanish, but when I was in Costa Rica
and Puerto Rico about 5 years ago I picked up what I could: chatting
with locals, reading signs, flapping through my Spanish dictionary for
a new noun. I've been irreparably out of practice since then, but
still I'm astonished that once in context no small number of things
are coming back to me. Not that my sentence structure was ever any
better than that of a Neanderthal, but it was better than mute at least.

So I was out in the local grocery store with the girls, and they sent
me to get a bottle of rum from the liquor section. Unfortunately all
that strong stuff was locked in a glass case, so I set off to track
down a store representative. I found two men in tucked-in polo shirts
who were lingering chattily nearby, not seeming to be doing any
shopping type activities. That, with the polo shirts, seemed
sufficient indication. But they didn't have any official name tags or
anything.

"Con permiso", I started ("with permission"--I love this standard of
approaching people or asking for help, the equivalent of "excuse me"),
and then blanked on the correct conjugation of the verb "to work".

"Con permiso, trabajo aqui?" I said.

"Excuse me, do I work here?"

I laugh to think what it might like to have a looming white girl in
funny shorts approach you and ask if she happens to work in this
grocery store.

Nevertheless, they spoke English, and smilingly pointed me to someone
who could help. Turns out I didn't work there after all.