New Semester!

So I've been at school for several weeks and you haven't heard very much from me. I've only posted one real blog post, because blog posts for people who don't know me have to have fancy things like a point, and probably some witty asides and a dash of advice. I have several drafts, but many are season-specific and one will be entirely about my chicken.

Meanwhile, I have a chicken.

Her name is Gurgly Darling Isabel Smartypants Sicken, but usually I call her darling, and she is sleeping (or trying to) in my room right now. During the day she has her own coop isolated from the other chickens because she has a contagious respiratory ailment. That's also why I'm taking care of her -- the primary chickenpeople need to stay clean to be with the other chickens. The chickens belong to the Department of Environmental Studies (but really they belong to Mary Claire) and Jeremy and I take care of them too.

This is Isabel:

 ... or will be when I go find my camera, etc., etc. Right now I'm just waiting for Commando to be over so I can bake cookies shaped like nephrons, and I'm not too keen on moving.

Speaking of nephrons, you know my classes if you've read my official post, but not how I'm doing. Plant ecology is fantastic. The others are interesting, too, but it's tough having three classes one after the other and no specific work time. I much prefer having an hour in between two morning classes, and maybe one on Thursday, but that's not how it worked out and ecology is worth it. Anyway, chemistry and biology are fine. I need to devote a little more time to them. And by a little I mean a lot.

But there is the couchboat, and good books to read and new friends to talk to and a class to teach (also going very well). There are chickens to take care of and projects to work on (dyeing with goldenrod, pressing flowers, sewing a fleece hat ... eventually, maybe building a solar panel with Jeremy?!? Stay tuned). There are cookies to bake -- speaking of which, my dough is chilled and commando is over, so I'm going to go into the kitchen and bake some renal cookies. Yummmm.

I've been wanting to post more often lately, and I'll aim for twice a week, so you can expect one. (See what I did there?) I hope you are all well, and as happy and busy as I am.

Love,
Your delinquent blogger

Some Transient Thoughts

This is the first time in awhile that I've had such a good day that I felt the need to tell y'all about it. It's not that I haven't had good days, of course, but there is a special quality to days requiring blogging -- it has to be good in enough different ways that no one person experienced the whole thing with me, or the urge to share has a natural ground. Also, if it was truly terrific, it probably lasted late into the night, at which point I am going to sleep and not blog -- so it can't be truly terrific. It also can't end right before dinner. All this conspires to make required blogging rare, and usually it is a matter of conscience. (I am convinced my memory and my conscience are in cahoots. I forget to blog so I needn't feel guilty. Memory, conscience, I'm onto you guys ... Wait, what was I talking about?)

Of course, any day loses something of itself in translation, and the more I think about it the less spectacular this day was. Well, it doesn't have to be. At least it's not traffic, right?

I just watched a movie with my friend Charles called Goya's Ghosts. It was not very much about Goya and not at all about ordinary ghosts. All you need to know is that it was about the Inquisition. In the end, the only happy character was insane. The overarching question: what does sanity even mean in an insane world? Sometimes life is grotesquely absurd.

What makes a day is the mood of a moment. I had a perfect one walking back to Keep just now. Charles and I were walking back to north campus when my friend Mia caught up with us. As we were all walking together, I caught sight of a gorgeous spaniel across the lawn. I looked for a good few minutes before I realized I knew her, and her owner. "Steve!" cried Mia, to the owner. "Erie!" cried I, to the dog. Erie and Charles hit it off immediately, and as she jumped around us and snuffled our stomachs I noticed the first flakes of snow.

Snow! I am probably the only person left on campus overjoyed to see snowfall. The narcissi, it turns out, can fend for themselves, and the delicate unfurled crocuses have had their day. So I welcome it without reservation. I looked out the window just a moment ago and found my view obscured by snow. I looked back just now, writing this sentence, and the sky was clear.

I could probably draw some important lesson from absurd weather about the vagaries of life, but who cares? Change is so constant it is useless to begin. Just before I began this blog entry, the sun came out and I rushed outside to experience my first sunlit snowfall. I stood in the parking lot and laughed like an idiot and thanked God and hugged a tree. Sometimes life is deliciously absurd.

The Examined Life

Dear readers,

I apologize for not having updated recently. I have been awful. It's not quite true that I haven't written for you since the third, despite what my blogger page claims -- hop over to the Oberlin Blogs if you haven't seen my latest post. (You can find it here.) I've also been writing at the blog I have to keep for my Spanish class. Any blogging energy I have usually gets channeled into one of the two.

You all deserve a spectacular update, but I am just taking a break from studying for biology so the information can sink in before I review it again, and I haven't much time right now. I just took a psych exam and felt really good about it, which might have something to do with the fact that my friend Charles and I studied for more than six hours altogether (only one of which was last night -- aren't you proud?).

I hope to feel just as good about my bio test, but I'll have to spend a lot of time on it in the next two days! I also have a Qur'an exam on Thursday. We got our last ones back today and I am happy with my grade, but the single essay questions could be anything, so I have a lot of reading to do.

I'm actually looking forward to the tests (what? Must be spillover from the psych test) but that's not the best part of my coming week. Early Friday morning, I'm flying to Hartford to mentor at the PeaceJam Conference. I'll be sure to write all about that on Monday once I have some room to breathe. For now, sorry for not updating earlier, or more often, or longer, or ... well. Anyway, ciao! Much love, readers!

The Man Himself

I was just about to start this blog entry on another subject entirely when my professor, Jafar Mahallati, swept into the room. I immediately titled it, wrote the first sentence, and closed the laptop. This is just that kind of class. In fact, every class this semester is that kind of class, and I figure it's high time to tell y'all about them, starting with Mahallati's.

It's an intro to the Qur'an class, and we've read maybe a dozen surahs and chapter upon chapter of exegesis. I am enjoying it more than I thought I would, which is saying something -- I was looking forward to this class. I see my God in Allah. I don't mean that they are historically, according to the Muslim tradition, the same God. That's part of it, but it's not it. The scripture resonates like an echo in an infinite room. The translations have preserved only fragments of the poetry of the original Arabic, but it is enough. Qur'an can be roughly translated as "recitable," and it is meant to be memorized and internalized. Reading it in English is beautiful; hearing it recited in the original Arabic is transcendent.

Perhaps I will delay explanation of my other classes and instead obey my own title. Mahallati was Iran's ambassador to the United Nations at the end of the 1980s and helped push for peace between Iran and Iraq. (Of course, he didn't tell us that -- we've been snooping.) His first lecture was an hour-and-a-half long summary of pre-Islam Arabian culture and the prophet's life. He used no notes. Since then, the lectures have gotten more abstract and wandered freely between the centuries, as we fiercely scribble down concepts and occasionally thumb through our Qur'ans. I wish I knew Arabic, so that I could write down the terms in their original forms as well as in phonetic transliteration. The Arabic is much more elegant.

Anyway, I might add a nice little conclusion paragraph later but now I've got to go help cook. Life and theology are both messy this way so maybe I'll leave it be.

A Scrumptious Birthday + A New Blog

After a pretty average weekend, I had a great Monday and an even better Tuesday. You can read a little about last night on my new blog, here ... assuming you read Spanish. (You can also use Google translate.) The blog, as the header declares, is an Oberlin course blog for my Communication and Conversation class.

I've been up to so much lately, I don't know where to begin. It snowed over the weekend, fairytale flakes that danced in the air and coated us as we stood laughing. Monday was Peter's birthday (which, together with work and other pesky side effects of having a life, prevented me from blogging), and we walked down to the Arb with a pizza tray to try and sled. Well, the sled idea was a bust. It did make an interesting shield for the ensuing snowball fight, and even a semi-successful catapult. Our gifts to Peter included candy and self-restraint -- we resisted telling the whole co-op it was his birthday, for which he was grateful.

Last night was cake night! I gave him coupons for six more weeks of winter and a cooking tool of his choice. (Suggestions included a garlic press, a scalpel and a garden rake.) Hannah made him a Peter doll from materials from the free box. It was adorable, and also had no legs. Our cake ended up sticking to the bread pans we made it in, but we dug out all the pieces and made mountain cake. It was wonderful. Life was wonderful. I'm going to biology now. More later, maybe.

Impulsive Decisions, now with Three Times the Adventure

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! In honor of the holiday, I have a confession to make. I acted a little impulsively a few days ago and made a decision I may come to regret. I acted out of panic, but I feel my actions were justified. I hope that you, readers, will agree.

All right, all right, tense yet? I got a job washing pots for Campus Dining Services. The job offers the best pay on campus, although it is less than I earned for sitting on a beach and watching the water. I had my first shift today, and although the work is harder, it is also less meaningless more meaningful.

The orientation wasn't much: a friendly coworker grabbed me an apron, showed me the pot sinks, and resumed working. My experience as an OSCAn probably didn't have much bearing on my job performance -- experience doesn't matter a whole lot when it comes to scrubbing grease -- but it did help me feel more at home in the kitchen. (OSCA has taught me WAY more important things than the nuts and bolts of crewing. More on that in another entry.)

The job was also much easier than I had steeled myself for. Most of the time, a once-over with the scrubby pad and thirty seconds in the sanitizer was all the utensil needed. (With a dip in water in between, of course -- our soap and sanitizer neutralize each other, so it's important to rinse.) There were a few difficult pots, but scrubbing a CDS pot to perfection takes maybe a tenth of the work it would take to make a Keep pot look good. That's not to denigrate Keep. Our pots and pans are sanitary and more than clean enough to cook in -- the fact that our stainless-steel equipment is black on the bottom and in most of the corners is simply not relevant. But in CDS, the stainless steel is practically stainless.

Not to mention, the sprayer sprays. I am told that other co-ops also have sprayers strong enough to blast away food instead of giving it a gentle shower, but I haven't seen this wonder for myself. The sinks are also big enough to lay a cookie tray flat. No more sloshing sanitizer up and down! I never mind in Keep, but I would have felt silly playing in the sink in Lord/Saunders.

But no matter how nice the equipment is or how good the chefs' cooking smells, my job is just a job. It pays. That's all I care about. At Keep, my job matters. Every one of the pots I scrub might be the pot a head cook desperately needs to feed us all with scrumptious lentil soup. (In fact, we only have one of each pot, so it's just about guaranteed to be needed.) The stacks and stacks of shining trays can't compare to Keep's blackened ones, on which are served homemade cookies, Friday pizza, and -- once -- caramel. At Lord/Saunders, some disembodied Entity owns the sinks, the stoves, the spoons, the potwashers. At Keep, the potwashers belong to ourselves, and the kitchen belongs to us.

My job is a good one, as jobs go, and I feel incredibly fortunate. I'm working to pay off my loans faster, and at the end of this semester, I'll probably find a better job and never look back. Elsewhere, kids younger than me are doing worse work for less pay and looking forward to a future of more of the same. I am growing in leaps and bounds: learning how to think, how to work, how to be kind. I am loving Oberlin, pot sinks and all, and running into the future on light feet.

Speaking of kindness, and of food, I received lovely Valentine's Day wishes from many of you. Thank you! And thank you, Nana, for the chocolate-dipped pretzels and caramel mix. They're delicious, and as always, a hit.

Convenience

I'm sitting at a Mudd PC to write this, having faced an all-too-difficult dilemma: should I choose to work at a first-foor PC, with a stubborn keyboard but a sublimely ergonomic chair, or a ground-floor Mac, with a responsive keyboard and a boring office chair? I chose the chair, so if I've skipped some letters, blame it on my spine.

Any life which features this dilemma is a very luxurious life.

And in fact, I feel deliciously pampered. Nobody is wearing my socks, for instance, and nobody wants rides anywhere, which is just as well since I haven't got a car. I'm walking everywhere I need to go -- a step down from biking (my chain rusted over) -- but a step up from driving for sure.

Not everything is so convenient. As iDLEC,* for instance, interim looks to me like a vast and stormy sea. Last night, for instance, myself and several other Keepers began dinner crew at eight o'clock because no one had done so at seven. Then I feared and fretted because nobody had signed up to cook lunch today.

At 10 this morning, David volunteered and turned out one of the best stir-fries I've ever tasted -- a rare and dangrous compliment at Keep, where we have stir-fry at least twice a week. That, plus pasta, a rich tomato-veggie sauce, and cucumbers dusted in salt and dill. The lunch was stunning. Almost everyone wanted seconds.

Let me stress, too, that the makeshift dinner crew, unlike othr interim crews, was not made up of people who had planned to spend an hour scrubbing pots and cleaning counters. They were sitting in the lounge, enjoying a lazy evening before the first day of classes. Nobody was exactly thrilled about crewing. But they stepped up to the plate anyway. This is the worst and the best of OSCA. And I would choose community over convenience every time.

I do, of course, miss my family. The feeling is exacerbated by Keep's resemblance to a household in the best and the worst of ways. But that's another post entirely. Ciao for now.
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*Interim dining and loose ends coordinator -- more on this later, after my first discussion.