morals

my alarm clock has a “daylight savings” button. instead of changing the hour twice a year, i can do the significantly more convenient and hit a button. all it costs is an entire button. how can a human being design such a thing and sleep at night? am i the only one with a conscience? this is what happens when we are allowed to advertise: whole button-functions are created so they can be bullet-pointed on a box.  this alarm clock is also solar-powered… it tends to stop working at night.

staying out of the valley has not made me a better person.  let’s note that down for posterity.  when i try to make this decision in the future, i should keep in mind that its hard to con productivity out of a self that feels cheated.  today i scavenged together a halloween costume (i am a climbing plant!), went to lab in costume (lots of freshly picked ivy involved), and then climbed at the gym in costume.  the lab trip was mostly me eating left-overs from yesterday’s lab party. so! now to work? harder than it looks.

in other news, my empathy bruise is almost gone. it came, left, left implications. i get a real pleasure from pretending i read meaning into these kinds of things. or, more accurately, i like a good story and will believe one just in order to tell it. so, therefore, i think i noticed this mark on my arm around the same time he fell off the rock. i’ve never experienced this kind of black and blue. there is a single, hard, white point at the center. i don’t remember hurting myself — i’ve been climbing only crack — nothing sharp or pointed to catch me. he was bleeding out of the same forearm at the same time. i wish humans were able to transmit pain this way. sometimes, i know they can.

draft car

some small updates:

i) There are complications with getting my barn, red. I think the landlord, along with the rest of the world, is trying to trick the innocent. But as an innocent, I can’t be sure. While roommate Lisl and I decided to play it safe and give up on the house, small worms of regret were eating my liver. Once we figured out how to take a calculated risk and keep a little hope on the side, I was instantly happy. Lesson: I am averse to being risk averse. I will not take the safest bet (poor oxen, wagon on the river!) and I need to take the time and figure out how to launch for what I want with passion and humility. The alternative: waffle until last minute, pretend you’ve decided not to jump, then go head first.

ii) I wrote a paragraph on tea leaves in the sink and rejecting more of my mother’s dogma. WordPress ate said paragraph (its first word-meal — much better track record than livejournal so far). This is a place holder (mental, physical). I may replace it.

iii) I rode into work on a windy Monday behind a road biker. I drafted him early and stuck close. The wind howled loud around us; his matching spandex flashed in the glassy sunlight. As two connected, precariously balanced points, we weaved through the daily grind on the rest of the pavement. I ran into lab after this commute — red, damp, feeling I was moving twice the speed of the co-workers. I want him as my ride every morning.

iv) My weeks are journal club, seminar, seminar, journal club. At the beginning of this week I felt hit by the idea of application. Honestly, science has slowly been draining of meaning. I’ve been less excited about ideas and more intent on asking “why do we care?” and “why does this matter?” Am I less hooked by the abstract? Is this a growing process? What should I do tomorrow? After Monday, I’ve been looking at all the talks in this other light. If I can’t find the motivation, should my science focus switch to medicine? The idea blew me over. After figuring out some stem cell details, this girl was able to advise a change in bone marrow transplant regiments. Instead of a single dose, a series of smaller operations will work better. I imagined how she changed the course of lives. But nothing is that simple.

el capitain tv

i spent the weekend climbing with four beautiful french people. Their melodious voices made interactions with any ameri-cains seem limited to exchanging grunts. i admit i enjoyed myself. my sentence structure is slowly breaking down into something heavily influence by direct translation from the european. i enjoy it!
language aside, the trip included both good climbing and good climbs. i felt i was comparing the past to the present… but to a tolerable extent. on friday i got a letter from him. i read it in the sad way reserved for letters with four stamps and international ink marks. given that kind of start, i think i was able to move forward admirably.
this weekend, talking and talking about big wall and climbing strong, i think i moved one realization step closer to that goal.

in season

i love rain in palo alto. more than the east cost allows, it feels like a holiday here.  i’ve always wanted to feel this way about rain.  not a daily sky chore to wash the window, this rain is a smear of shimmery lip gloss on the smooth pink lips of california’s smile. well, maybe only in LA. this rain is a special occasion — everything smells like eukalyptus and the elegant shapes of the trees become more elegant.  the leaves lie more form-fitting.

i can’t wait for winter in california; i’ve always needed this relationship to the cold and grey skies. in december lisl and i should be moving into the barn.

finally green

stanford shipped in palms from the palm reserves. they stand with their tops in a pony tail. they look like onions on proud sticks. they look like russian church domes with a stem. somehow, stanford is still building tall outside my research windows. i stare out, daydream, think small thoughts about doing nothing in lab all day. with classes and meetings and the free pizza, all i have to do is kill an hour between calendar marks and try not to be too obviously idle. i am obviously idle.
chris chan hosted a slide show for the stanford alpine club. she is exiting grad school because her summer on the rock wall taught her what is hard. she can’t climb down and live our non-genuine grad school life. i don’t know if i can, either. so i’m on a slow cruise. i am weekend-focused. on saturday i climbed 13 sunny pitches. i tried my best. i slept with the stars. i know i’m sad because i feel sad when i drink. after beer “this is what I want to feel,” i think.

real real goodbye

i must be sick of writing this by now. maybe this is the last installment any of us have to sit through. we celebrated his plane flight with a picnic in a cactus garden.  using one fibrous, fallen yucca for a shady bench, we asked each other questions like “what is the question you find most difficult to talk about.”  we had the same answer.

the day before, i was at his goodbye party and sat in the symbolic middle seat between him and jana — drank from both cups.  i wonder if anyone caught the image.  subconsciously at least, i think. at the party, where i was the only person no one had seen before — the only person who knew him for less than a month — i was asked if i were his sister. where did i come from? how do i fit into the world? i think we have this automatic closeness that she was trying to explain.

the strange part is that i don’t feel him gone. i’m still thinking up questions i want to ask. the strange part is that it is possible to communicate indefinitely over the internet. theoretically, we can chat on google for years. i don’t know if it makes sense for me to direct my energy and attention this way. there is a calculating part of me that wants to say he can’t have both. but he probably can.

let’s build ourselves a fire

when all else fails, one can always put jenny lewis on in the kitchen and be sad.
today is real goodbye.
we’ve been spending two hours a night on the hood of his car, listening to the warmth at our back and looking at a streetlight. this is our version of creating a house for roaming conversations.

middle of starting

as he pointed out, yesterday was the first day out of three weeks that we didn’t see each other. it went well. i drove some classmates to Monteray, where the department is having the annual retreat. They introduced us to everyone. My summer position professor presented the data i generated. I picked my next project. Overall, my scientific self was engaged and rewarded. Compared to my other self, though, she is small and bordering on see-through. I also didn’t start a single conversation that i wanted. Tonight I’ll try to change this. The problem may have been the robot-like movements of my peers. After the poster session, the “fun time” of the evening was playing Rock Band. Humans look like zombies when they take up the fake guitars and hit the keys at the screen. I don’t understand this two step removal from reality. Our ancestors would have looked at us and laughed. Or laughed with horror. What kids used to do for real we emulate in the most realistic way possible. Technology stretches and bends over backwards to put us closer to the most mundane reality. Wii fit? Next is fake watching of fake TV. We’ll look like zombies of zombies.

stanford camp

yesterday was free barbeque and free alcohol and an awkward mix of accents between the foreign students and the overly-smooth americans.  i can’t talk to anyone from this continent.  instead, i learned about mumbai, the long robes in cambridge, the state of the roads, the first thing you notice when you come to america.

when i came home sunday night, my roommate had one box left to unpack.  and we had a record player, a rice cooker, and an electric keyboard.  this last box was full of items carefully wrapped in newspaper.  we took turns pulling out large glass bottles and small wooden spoons, a chess set and five teapots. her aunt had put all this in storage.  it felt like a relativist’s post-consumer version of a nondenominational christmas celebration.