the hunker down years

When I was a kid, not sure how old, I think the summer between 3rd and 4th grades before we moved overseas, I was visiting my great grandparents’ house in Wells, Nevada. I loved that house and still have dreams that take place there from time to time. I remember the eat-in kitchen so well (the nerve center of any home, right?), and how the main bedroom had doors to both it and the living area (or maybe it was another room...my memory is fuzzy all these decades later). The house was sort of circular in that way. During this one particular visit, with my brother and some of my maternal cousins there as well, I took a break on the couch in the living room. At one point, my face turned toward the back of the couch, I could hear someone at the doorway wondering out loud if I was asleep. I stayed quiet and still for some reason, pretending to be asleep, I’m not really sure why. Did I want them to try to wake me up? Did I really want to be left alone? Either way, the end result was that I missed out on dessert and, insatiable sweet tooth that I was and still am, this experience/memory haunted me for years. Why didn’t they at least check to see if I was truly asleep, whispering in my ear that dessert was ready. Just in case.

I’d kind of forgotten about this memory until recently because it just seems like such a perfect metaphor for middle age reflection, looking back on the potential of your younger self. I've spent most of my adult life mostly happily moving from one opportunity to another, embracing the hummingbird analogy before Liz Gilbert described it as such. Somewhere along the way, I think it was probably during grad school, I felt like I was finally finding my focus. I wanted to make more and better art. I wanted to show and maybe even sell my art. I wanted to help others develop their own creative practice. I wanted to teach. And I've already written on this blog about all the things other than teaching that I've done over the past 15+ years since grad school and my postgrad teaching fellowship ended.

I've been at my current day job nearly five years, the longest I've ever stayed in one role. The past year has been pretty stressful for various reasons. Concurrent with all this, I started contemplating just what was it I wanted to be when I grew up, and that lead me back to teaching. My goal out of grad school was to teach at the college level (hence pursuing the MFA, terminal degree for studio art), a dream I mostly abandoned after two years of applying to full-time gigs (I turned down a couple of adjunct opportunities because the pay was less than the cost of the part-time childcare needed to make the schedule work, which is a topic for a whole 'nother blog post). I started to wonder, now that I’ve been around elementary, middle, and high school kids because of my own growing children, if maybe teaching at the middle or high school level was what I wanted to do, after all.

At the beginning of the last school year I started volunteering every Monday morning in my daughter's 5th grade art class. I explored local single subject credential programs as well with an eye on teaching high or middle school art, in that order. To be honest, I wasn't super confident I'd still have a job after February, but when my role survived three rounds of layoffs, the April deadline for application materials, which would have required volunteer hours at a middle or high school, something I didn't have already, were simply too much for me to squeeze in on top of a full-time job and everything else. I decided to shelve the idea until this summer and hunker down a bit longer, counting my blessings that I still had a job that I've enjoyed enough to hang around this long.

But then my daughter's art teacher told me about a program to increase the number of art teachers in the county, teaching while pursuing the Career Technical Education credential. At last, I thought, I'm about to benefit from this thing I've heard about before: serendipity! I was accepted into the program, with a couple of weeks of professional development this summer and the program beginning in the fall, with the one significant caveat that in order to actually enroll in the program, you have to have a CTE gig lined up by the end of summer. If it sounds tricky to find a teaching job before you have the necessary credential, it is! I found ONE qualifying position in Alameda County. I applied, interviewed, and visited the school site to give a demo lesson over the span of just three business days. I then waited to hear back. And then I waited a week longer than I was originally told. And during this time, I started to secretly wish for rejection. Sure, part of this was fear—it would be a big transition and a big paycut and I was nervous about both—but part of this was legitimate hesitation that, while potentially a way to get back to teaching, this particular role wasn't really what I wanted to teach, and probably not worth such a significant life change. And I'll never know if I would have been offered the position since I withdrew my application at that time. Because what I've only recently come to understand about myself, and perhaps this is the downside of the lovely hummingbird analogy described above, is that I have a really hard time saying no when personally asked to do something, even if that thing isn't quite what I want, because I'm either seduced by the potential that opportunity represents (I'll do this thing I don't really want to do because maybe it'll lead to something I do want to do!) and/or I don't want to let someone down. (I missed out on dessert once, I'm not going to miss out on it again!) I also had to honestly reckon with the fact that part of what was seductive about pursuing this opportunity was, wow, what a great story it would be to find my way back to teaching after 15 years! I was so excited to finally prove to all my doubters that I wasn't actually a lost pigeon after all, to prove to them as much as to myself that the hummingbird approach works, that there is a pot of success at the end of the rainbow of failures.

Alas.

So here I am, early summer break, recommitting to my day job. I was honest with my manager at the time when I felt the transition was something I might actually pursue since there was a lot of potential movement internally as well and I was having a hard time faking it. But to be honest, I'm not sure I’d do that again. I thought they might fight to keep me; they did not. I felt rushed to make a decision because, frankly, they seemed eager to develop a transition plan. And I get it. In my performance review a few weeks later, which I wish was more than a 30-minute Zoom meeting that I could reference because now I’ve forgotten the exact language used, the sort of “if I can be honest with you” feedback, after otherwise mostly positive feedback, was that I should really think about what I want from this role in the near and not so near future because at times I seem a bit noncommittal, a bit wishy-washy about projects and potential opportunities that have come my way over the past few months. I should probably consider being a little more like a jackhammer (those were not the words/analogy used, of course, but in keeping with the typically rambling themes of this blog post).

This feedback had me shook for weeks. On the one hand, I feel like I’ve been working so hard for so much of my life, getting my first real job the summer between junior and senior years of high school, working three jobs my first year after high school, while attending community college full-time, barely able to pay my minimal expenses, and continuing to work 20-32 hours a week during the 5 ½ years it took me to finish my bachelor's degree. I worked throughout grad school, first in retail until I was eligible for more creatively aligned, campus-based roles like teaching assistant, studio monitor, and other opportunities more tied to my longer term goals post-MFA. I worked for two non-profit arts organizations simultaneously between college and grad school and took a really similar job to these after grad school, after my micro biz that I’d worked so hard to start and grow fizzled after I took a break with the arrival of baby #2. I accepted my current day job after failing to monetize any of the projects, podcast included, that I worked on between my former day job and this one. It was initially part-time and delightfully unrelated to anything I’d done before, allowing me time and mental energy to continue to push creative projects forward (until the pandemic started just six months later and I transitioned to full-time about a year after that). In short, I thought I'd made it pretty clear that yes, I'd like dessert, even if it means waking me up...if you get my meaning.

Anyway it’s just weird to feel like Sisphyus pushing that boulder up the hill for nearly three decades (it's a tired but apt metaphor), albeit in an at times haphazard way, only to be told you seem a little like a tumbleweed leaving your fate up to chance and circumstance. Not even a hummingbird, an actually super focused and incredibly hard working bird that eats WHILE FLAPPING ITS WINGS for crying out loud, who honestly isn’t that much different than a jackhammer if you really think about it (and a jackhammer isn’t even a bird so maybe not the greatest analogy after all, Liz!). 

On the other hand, she (my manager...and maybe Liz, too) was not entirely wrong, either. Has nothing changed since that time I pretended to be asleep on the couch? Am I just waiting for someone to notice me and care enough to nudge me awake, to present me with some delectable opportunity to devour? Did I not learn my lesson that if you wait for someone to tell you dessert is ready, to nudge you awake, you might miss out? Or is it just hard to talk about future interests and goals—where do you see yourself in 3, 5, 10 years—when you'd rather just be making stuff. 

In my newsletter update from late June I briefly wondered, if you remove the idea of passion central to Gilbert's hummingbird/jackhammer thesis, are folks like me more like tumbleweeds. And maybe the tumbleweed has gotten a bad rap as an essentially dead plant rolling around wherever the wind takes it. Maybe there is some beauty in the way that, unafraid of change, it lacks roots, frees itself from attachments, and opens itself up to opportunities to move and keep moving, slowly breaking down so that its seeds can be released as it moves. Maybe, if I’m a tumbleweed, I just haven’t yet come to rest so that my spores may germinate. Maybe I’m taking this tumbleweed metaphor too far (just be grateful I didn't use the word moist).

All metaphors aside, the events of the past couple of months jarred another memory, this one of Another Mother Runner’s Dimity McDowell’s post from September 2013, which I read when my own kids were just 5 and 7 months, when I reopened my Etsy shop thinking business would slowly pick back up just in time for baby #2 to start part-time daycare in February of the next year (that did not happen…I ended up being a full-time stay-at-home parent for longer than I’d planned and eventually got a “real job” I was never very satisfied with right around when baby #2 turned 2...it was not an easy time). That line that Dimity’s mother says to her has stuck with me all these years as it had stuck with her then: This is not the easiest time of your life. Put another way, these are perhaps, for many of us working parent (creative?) types, the hunker down years.

Many days I find success in focusing on the positive aspects of my current role: decent pay, autonomy and flexibility, the ability to work from home in my backyard office/studio surrounded by foliage and critters, working with truly great people, occasional travel, and, while in tech, for a company that I do believe in, especially, not surprisingly, the more niche creative things folks are doing with our products. But some days, I'm not gonna lie, I feel like Katy Caboose, defiantly striving for greater creative fulfillment and ready to fling myself off my rails and high into the trees at any moment. "Head in the sky," indeed.

land of fire and ice and soup and bread

Last week the family and I went to Iceland! It was, in a nutshell, amazing. We opted to stay in Reykjavik and did day trips from there (versus driving the Ring Road, which would have required a few more days - maybe an extra week - that we didn't have). Here's a slide show that condenses the week into 50 images over about a minute and 15 seconds. And here's what we did:

We flew to Iceland from Oakland via Seattle on Saturday evening, arriving in Keflavik at 9:15 am on Sunday. I wasn't very impressed with Icelandair, provided with just one beverage for the entire flight, and no free food, not even a bag of pretzels. On the other hand, the country on the whole seems pretty kid-friendly/centered, with the 11yo the only member of our family to receive a snack box and a little goody bag including a sleep mask and a small puffin stuffie. Everywhere we went her ticket price was less expensive than the adults or, in many cases, free.

There are a handful of rental car companies located at the airport, but most are a short drive away. Not unusual, but the way you find the rental car shuttle was unclear and chaotic, with tired travelers milling about near the exit and drivers coming in holding up signs with the rental car companies listed. So it took awhile to get our rental car after landing but we enjoyed hot coffee/chocolate while we waited (it was cold and windy!). 

From there we drove straight to our Airbnb in Reykjavik, our host allowing us to check in early. After settling in and freshening up, we walked 15-20 minutes into town and saw all the key sights, sharing a couple of sandwiches from Plantan Kaffihús on the way: Hallgrímskirkja (and up the tower for the views!) the Leifr Eiricsson statue out front, on down to the harbor to see the Sun Voyager sculpture and the Harpa concert hall. We walked back to the Airbnb via a grocery store to pick up breakfast and lunch items for the week. I could have easily fallen asleep at that point, but we rallied for dinner at Loving Hut. I didn't make it to the midnight sunset that night but I was awake again around 1 am and took a quick video of the light outside and - the weirdest part - the birds chirping.

On Monday we did the Golden Circle day trip, albeit in a sort of noncircular way since we had lunch reservations at Friðheimar, a restaurant in a greenhouse where they grow tomatoes year-round. The all you can eat tomato soup and bread there was probably my favorite meal of the week. The tomato soup was brothy (as opposed to creamy) and a bit sweet. The bread was amazing and there was coffee included after. Otherwise, we spent time at Þingvellir National Park (free that day because it was Iceland's National Day!), Geysir Geothermal Area, and Gullfoss. After a quick detour at Secret Lagoon (I'll write more about this later), we made our way back to Reykjavik via Kerið Volcanic Crater and a late dinner of veggie burgers at a hot dog joint in Selfoss (the sun may set at midnight but, as we quickly learned, most of the restaurants still close at 9 pm). 

It was about 10 pm!

On Tuesday, we headed to the South Coast, stopping first for a quick pic, Oaklanders that we are, next to the Hella sign. From there we continued to Hvolsvöllur to check out the Lava Center. We ate PB&J sandwiches on the way to Sólheimajökull, hiking to but not on the glacier (you need the right gear and a guide for that and in general we opted for things we could do on our own to manage expenses and maximize what we could see in a week). Thank goodness there was a Hungarian street food vendor there in the parking lot because it was another late dinner of pizza back in Hvolsvöllur after a visit to the Reynisfjara black sand beach and Skógafoss on the drive back. I would have liked to check out one more waterfall (Seljalandsfoss, the one you can walk behind!) and the old plane crash but we ran out of time.

On Wednesday we'd booked tickets to the Blue Lagoon. Our plan to drive a bit less that midweek/mid-trip day was somewhat thwarted by the detour caused by damage to the road to Blue Lagoon due to the recent eruptions near the fishing town of Grindavik. We drove over relatively recently cooled lava and steam to get there, which was pretty wild. The Blue Lagoon caters more to non-Icelandic visitors and is pricey but I felt was totally worth it. And if anyone in your group is squeamish about the customary communal shower sans swimsuit, I would recommend it over a more traditional/local lagoon like Secret Lagoon or really any of the pools. But if you're OK showering with strangers, you'll have a lot more options for a warm soak during your time in Iceland. More PB&J sammies on the drive back to Reykjavik, where we spent the rest of the day searching for cats and secondhand Icelandic sweaters and popped into plant-based Mama for dinner before walking back to our Airbnb.

On Thursday we headed north to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula (we'd changed our itinerary a bit due to the rain all week...it was mostly dry up north on Thursday!). A bit more driving than I'd like before the first stop (and again at the end of the day), but in the end all that driving was worth it. We did a little hiking around Kirkjufell mountain and waterfall (yes, we had PB&J sandwiches for lunch; no, we did not climb all the way to the top of the mountain) before moving on to the Vatnshellir lava cave via a brief pit stop at the Snæfellsjökull National Park visitor center. After the cave, we hiked to and just inside the Rauðfeldsgjá Gorge, then backtracked a bit to Hellnar Church and an early dinner (more soup & bread!) in Arnarstapi. Final stops on this part of the itinerary included Búðakirkja (Black Church) and the seal colony at Ytri Tunga beach. 

I was pretty tired of driving by this point in the week but Friday being my son's 16th birthday we gave him the option of having a final full chill day in Reykjavik (museums! more cats! more food options!) or stick with the plan and head to the Westman Islands (Vestmannaeyjar) by ferry. He opted for the latter and I think he made a fine choice. It's about one hour, 45 minutes of driving to the ferry and since we hadn't made advance reservations, while there was no problem getting seats we did have to wait until the literal last minute to know if we'd be able to take our car there and back. Hard for me to imagine now my original idea of renting bikes to explore the island. It's not very big but it is hilly and was pretty cold and crazy windy that day. I was very happy we had the car, after all! After a quick snack at Vigtin Bakery we drove to the first of two spots for a brief hike and attempt to see puffins. No luck at the first stop, though the views were amazing, but we did spot puffins from a distance (and some flying pretty close to us) at the second spot. From there we made our way around the island to the Eldheimar Volcano Museum to learn about the 1973 eruption that added to but also buried part of the island and then hiked the Eldfell volcano we'd just learned about. After that we had dinner at Gott before taking the 7:30 pm ferry back to the mainland.

On Saturday, we had a few hours in Reykjavik before we needed to head to the airport so we squeezed in one museum (the Saga Museum), explored nearby Þúfa, and had lunch (more soup & bread!) at the plant-based restaurant at the Nordic House on the University of Iceland campus. Returning the rental car went much more quickly and smoothly than getting it a week earlier so we had plenty of time at the airport to check out the duty free shopping and buy some sandwiches for the flight to Seattle. The first flight was uneventful; I read several chapters of Alicia Kennedy's No Meat Required and watched Bullet Train, which I enjoyed, then tried to watch Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, which I did not enjoy, and fell asleep for a couple of hours instead. We had a nearly 4-hour layover in Seattle which, due to delays, extended to over six hours in the Seattle airport. We could have flown almost all the way back to Iceland in that time! We did get a meal voucher out of the ordeal, however, and enjoyed a second dinner at P.F. Chang's. We were all so tired by the time we finally got home around 2:30 am but managed to get a few more hours of sleep so jet lag hasn't been too awful this week. Yesterday was the first day I didn't wake up at 4:30 am and feel dead tired by 5 pm.

In summary, Iceland is a truly magical place and I highly recommend a visit if you can swing it. This was definitely a bucket list trip, as they say. One thing we briefly considered after reading about it is planning a trip to mainland Europe with a one or two-day layover in Reykjavik. I'm glad we devoted this trip to Iceland only but that's an option if you ever find yourself in that situation, content with visiting the capital city and maybe one day trip. We created a pretty detailed itinerary for this trip, inspired in part by a combination of Rick Steves, one of Neal's coworkers who'd done the ring road a few years ago, and, just for fun, an AI-generated itinerary, combining all of those and our own research into a schedule that we mostly stuck to, adjusting for weather and not getting to one or two things each 11-12 hour day. We all wore hiking boots every day and had our rain layers for, well, rain, but also waterfalls, hiking into ravines, that sort of thing. It's a very active, rugged place and while we were pretty well-prepared for everything we did, I was a little skeptical a couple of times, coddled American that I am, I guess, about the safety of some attractions, like the stairs to the top of Skógafoss, or the hike into the Rauðfeldsgjá ravine, scrambling over wet and slippery rocks with huge chunks of ice dangling precariously overhead (okay, maybe not all that precariously...I'm sure they melt slowly over time but what if a chunk broke off and fell on your head?? It could happen!). But that's part of why it's all so magical and it was refreshing to get out of our comfort zone a bit.

happy MTBirthday to me

My one-year mountain biking anniversary came and went a couple of weeks ago. 

At Six Sigma Champs; final race of the 2023-24 season.

I started this post on the one-year anniversary but am just now getting back to finishing it. One year ago on May 23rd I went on my very first mountain bike ride with my son's head coach and a few other team moms for a moms' ride. I didn't even own a chamois! We met at the pump track in Oakland's Joaquin Miller Park, practiced some basic bike handling and MTB skills (level pedals, anyone?), and rode down Bayview and back. 

Then in June, I joined my son on a birthday ride at his request. My son, as I've mentioned a few times over the course of my newsletter, now a rising high school junior, fell in love with all things biking after riding the trails at Wente during a summer camp between 8th and 9th grades. He came home wanting to ride our local trails but we collectively knew nothing about mountain biking, here or elsewhere. Fast-forward a few months, he started high school, where he discovered there was, conveniently, a mountain biking club/team! A total lifesaver/game-changer. We all learned a lot that year!

Kudos to Coach Jen for having the foresight to properly document this moment before helping me back up to Sunset trail in JMP

Anyway, during my 3rd ride a week or so after my son's birthday ride, I crashed for the first, but definitely not last, time. But I kept going. I've since become a NICA Level 1 coach and try to make up for my lack of MTB skills and speed in other ways: helping with fundraising, setting up a swag order for t-shirts to match our jerseys, and putting together an end-of-year team photo/collage. Need a sweep? I got you! Picking up mountain biking has been one of the most humbling experiences of my life so far. Every ride challenges me physically and mentally in a way no other physical activity has and I see in myself and our student athletes how that carries over into other areas of life, even to areas where the potential risk is less physical but maybe equally scary.

When my son was a toddler I took him to Music Together classes. The philosophy there seemed to revolve around the idea of modeling. You don't force your toddler to participate, you model participation, and eventually they see how much fun all the adults are having and want to join in themselves. Before you know it, they're sitting in your lap singing along, shaking a tambourine. Not only did it work for Music Together classes, but I remember thinking then and a few years later with my daughter, what a great overall approach to parenting. Not that we should strive to be perfect role models, but what better way to teach your kids to do something or behave a certain way than to model that behavior yourself, right?

In this case, I like to think my son was modeling for me how transformative something as challenging, but also super fun, as mountain biking could be. Every Sunday adventure ride his first year I'd find things to do during the three or so hours they'd ride - hiking, shopping, eating - but part of me wondered what it would be like to join them on their climb up Mount Tam. And then I did! And it's been such a joy and honor to ride with the team over the past year.

At our final preride of the season I took a silly little tumble sideways down a hill and aggravated an earlier shoulder/clavicle injury. I took a two-week break - and honestly I was exhausted in all the ways after a particularly busy April & May - but yesterday I went for a spontaneous solo ride and had so much fun. I still feel a bit like I don't belong here, but I'm kind of used to this feeling and I've learned to embrace what it means, harking back to a newsletter update where I pondered how well creative advice might work for an MTB newbie like myself (or anyone new to really any activity). I'll re-list them here:

1. Accept that you are a total amateur.
2. Don’t be embarrassed.
3. Have courage.
4. Start now.
5. [X] is not about understanding…or mastery. It’s about doing and experience.
6. Develop forms of practice.
7. Work, work, work.
8. Get lost.
9. Redefine success.
10. Keep going

These are phrases you see a lot if you think or read much about creativity, but I think they work equally well for more physical stuff. And turns out I'm not the only creative person into some form of cycling (Lisa Congdon and Austin Kleon, to name just a couple, plus Caroline Paul's recent NYTimes OpEd about her mother's bike-riding). So maybe there is something to this synergy between creativity and cycling. Looking forward to doubling down on both over the next school year.

In the meantime, happy summer to those who celebrate early, like Oakland's public school system, and may you find the joy in whatever you're up to over the next few months.

the blogger in me

as seen in the Color Factory shop, an experience I wrote about here

On Sunday this blog turned 18. Leading up to October 2005 (a year that included marriage, a cross-country move, and the start of grad school), I'd been manually updating my website at the time with some regularity, but sadly, I didn't think then to archive that material in any way (it may be saved somewhere but that was several laptops ago). It was the earlyish, more ephemeral days of the world wide web. Here are my top 18 posts of all time:

1. pay for it: The first time my family encountered lice, not long after the Hamilton craze began, I wrote a parody of Wait For It. It is my most-viewed blog post of all time.

2. & 3. Up next, two posts about the making of my podcast, here and here. I wonder how much of the information in the second post is already obsolete? I guess I'll find out if and when I revive the podcast for season 2!

4. Fresh from the Makery: Eli's Bedtime, in which I wrote about the felt bedtime chart I made for my then ~3yo son. I still have it although I've since repurposed the stretcher bars (the chart is rolled up and stored in my studio).

5. book deal dreams, in which I recap the first of two years of "unemployment-by-choice" between August 2017 to September 2019. Still no book deal.

6. Another "fresh from the Makery" post, this one about the Mothers Cookies inspired felt ornaments I made.

7. Always surprised to see how many views this Makery project has: recycled denim coffee cozy.

8. This was a fun project: embroidered summer constellation flashcards. Want to make some of your own? Click on and save/download the images (4 total) at the end of this post (it may take some trial and error to print them correctly front and back so apologies in advance that I can't help you there).

9. I wouldn't be the first one to liken running an Etsy shop circa early 2010s to having your own personal sweat shop but here I bemoan the downsides of the paper punches I used in a lot of my wedding invitation designs at the time, with a totally unrelated Britney reference thrown in for good measure.

10. On a similar note, in this popular (relatively speaking) post I describe the steep learning curve that was the Yudu (I still have it although I haven't used it in years). So insane to look back at those pictures and recall that I started my micro-biz in a 2-bedroom apartment I shared with my husband, toddler son, and two cats.

11. The felt Android phone cozy (version 2.0)!

12. Tie-dye crayons, another project from the Makery. This project is such an easy crowd-pleaser and a great way to use up all those little crayon pieces.

13. Faux swirl lollipops using pipe cleaners for one of the fussier invitation designs I dreamed up during my Etsy days. I mocked up this design for my son's 3rd birthday party.

14. If I ever go back to school to get my PhD my dissertation will be about The Last Unicorn. This post is really just a plot synopsis but the older I get the more I think I understand why I thought about that movie so often while working on my MFA thesis. It's on a long list of possible blog topics I keep so perhaps I'll write more about it here one day (and yes, another Britney reference in that title).

15. That time I opted to quit after years of grit and spent a lot less time on my Etsy shop/micro-biz in favor of a "real job." 

16. During my Etsy years I trained for and ran the Oakland marathon and as part of my fundraising efforts I raffled off various items that were donated to me by fellow, mostly local, Etsy shops. Why the item I raffled off on the 9th of 12 days is my 16th most viewed post is beyond me but here it is.

17. I never did sell or get these items back from the store I'd sent them to on consignment, the first and last time I tried out that arrangement.

18. Finally, not unlike #16, a random post from the pandemic diaries: week 12, during which we broke quarantine to go hang out in the desert.

Now for those constellation flashcards I promised you - enjoy!

the dead hand of the past

Nope, it's not a horror flick to kick off the month of Halloween. It's a line from The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, a book I mentioned finishing recently in last week's newsletter. It's an example of climate fiction (or "cli-fi") set in the not-so-distant future. So many of the fictional events in the book—heat waves, flooding, etc.—have happened in the last couple of years this past summer as extreme weather events, made worse by climate change, break records that were themselves records only a year or two prior. There is a glimmer of utopian fiction in there, too, though pretty late in the book, in my opinion, and as will likely happen in our reality, things get pretty bad before they begin to get better.

I wanted to highlight a few moments and quotes in the book in keeping with my "mostly vegan" category of posts on this blog. But first, a local reference, as some of the book takes place in California, like the chapter that opens with a character visiting the Bay Model, "a giant model of the California bay area and delta, a 3D map with active water flows sloshing around it." I've been to the Bay Model only once, and relatively recently (August 2018) given I've lived in the Bay Area for most of the past 26 years. 

Photo of the Bay Model by Neal Grigsby

Otherwise, there are a handful of quotes that are so poignant, so relevant to our current moment, sadly validating for folks like me, frustrated by the lack of urgency around these issues as I observe things around me, even in so-called progressive Bay Area. 

"Of course there is always resistance, always a drag on movement toward better things. The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change. So we don't change, and one hard thing now is to go through a time like that, like ours during Paris, two hundred days of a different life, a different world, and then live on past that time in the still bourgeoisified state of things, without feeling defeated."

Or this one, about the cult of growth above all else: "This was the world's current reigning religion, it had to be admitted: growth. It was a kind of existential assumption, as if civilization were a kind of cancer and them all therefore committed to growth as their particularly deadly form of life." Man, do I feel this one lately. Grow, grow, grow, when really, we should be way more focused on maintenance and stewardship of what already exists around us. The relentless pursuit of growth so often prevents us from doing the right thing on all levels: personal, political, commercial.

So what is plan B? Where do we go from here? "Big parts of it have been there all along; it's called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It's as simple as that."

As simple as that. Later in the book, Robinson goes beyond the basics to write about dignity: "This is what I think everyone needs. After the basics of food and shelter that we need just as animals, first thing after that: dignity. Everyone needs and deserves this, just as part of being human. And yet this is a very undignified world. And so we struggle. You see how it is. And yes, dignity is something you get from other people, it's in their eyes, it's a kind of regard. If you don't get it, the anger rises in you."

A still from the 1964 film adaption of 'The Masque of the Red Death' directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price

Perhaps one of the most chilling references, though, is to Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, the syndrome/avoidance being one pathological reaction to "news of biosphere collapse." Robinson writes, "the syndrome is thus an assertion that the end being imminent and inevitable, there is nothing left to do except party while you can." A "bourgeoisified state of things," indeed. We saw this in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, when we abandoned earlier efforts to reduce single-use plastics, for example, in favor of supporting take-out operations at our favorite restaurants whose survival was suddenly threatened by folks staying home. And I get it, and I was happy to do it, but it's beyond time to return with urgency to tackling the greatest existential threat to humanity. (Or how rich folks escape to their lake cabins when air quality in the Bay Area from wildfires reaches unhealthy levels.)

It's a dark read at times, especially if you actually care about this kind of stuff. But I was urged along with the promise of a glimmer of hope by the end. And it does turn toward optimism, eventually. Regarding the Paris Agreement: "weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable. The greatest turning point in human history, what some called the first big spark of planetary mind. The birth of a good Anthropocene." Let's hope.

P.S. just for fun, I, a fan of being on time, love what Robinson writes about punctuality in one of the final chapters: "What is it but a regard for the other person? You are saying to the other person, your time is as valuable as mine, so I will not waste yours by being late. Let us agree we are all equally important and so everyone has to be on time, in order to respect each other." If I was a college professor, I would share this quote with my students at the start of every semester.

P.P.S. another sort of out of context gem, on playing music, he writes: "music was adults at play." Love this.

P.P.P.S. Finally, a bonus pic of me and my daughter at the Bay Model. We were there for an event that also included, apparently, face painting. Imagine prioritizing her generation's future over our present day desires. Imagine that.

have we met?

About two and a half years ago, our two normally indoor-only cats, Penelope and Wolfi, slipped out the back slider screen door that wouldn't always latch properly (getting a new screen door was one of the first things we did after the ensuing dust settled). Long story short, we were able to woo them both back in within about 15-20 minutes, but Wolfi (our now 5 year old male graybie) stayed out a bit longer than Penelope (~10 year old female white/tabby) and by the time we got them both back in, for reasons still a bit mysterious to me, even after lots of research into this, Penelope started attacking Wolfi. She was displaying signs of what I now know is referred to as feline nonrecognition aggression. If you live in a multi-cat household, you might have experienced a little bit of this when you bring one cat home from the vet, especially after an extended stay for something like surgery or a dental cleaning. Typically, one cat becomes the aggressor and will react aggressively to the unusual scent the other cat brought in from outside, home from the vet, etc. We got through that episode in about five days, give or take, and I always meant to write about it but I never did (I don't write about my cats super often here, but I have from time to time over the past nearly 18 years of blogging and two pairs of cats, plus some volunteer favorites and foster kittens). Well, it happened again last week and, fresh on my mind as it is, I thought I'd finally write a little recap here.

First evening pre-separation, Penelope ready to pounce if Wolfi comes out of hiding.

There are tons of resources on the internet about this phenomenon and the reintroduction process (the same process you follow if you're introducing a new cat to your resident cat for the first time) that you might have to follow to reestablish peace in the house. So this is more a journal entry of what we've experienced, both episodes following a pretty similar correction course. Step 1: I hate to say it, especially if you live in a small home, but you're going to have to separate the cats and keep them separate until you can safely reintegrate them with less and less supervision. Given we're renting a very small house at the moment while our house is renovated (almost 4 months down with about 2 months to go, fingers crossed) I tried to avoid this for several hours the first evening until, by about 1 am the next morning, it was clear none of us was going to get any sleep unless I did so. But I should back up here to describe how we think this episode began...

On Friday morning, in the middle of a bit of a heat wave, I woke up early as I do most days, fed them, opened a few windows and the kitchen door (keeping the security/screen door closed, of course) and then proceeded out front to the detached garage to do my morning workout. At some point while I was out there the neighbor's cat two doors down, who visits our back yard quite often (I should add that we're renting the house next door to our house during this transition), came right up to the kitchen screen door. He always gets a reaction from Penelope but never to the point that she transfers her aggression to Wolfi. That said, I think she's become a bit resensitized to him over the past four months given he doesn't venture over to this temporary rental yard nearly as often. Even though this initial episode on Friday morning was brief and both cats calmed down after we closed the door and kept an eye on them for a couple of hours, something triggered them again on Sunday evening (we still don't know what) while nerves were clearly still rattled. So separate them I finally did, with Penelope in our bedroom, along with a spare litterbox and extra food and water, and Wolfi free to roam the rest of the house. I slept on the couch so he wouldn't meow at the door/in the hallway and wake everyone up. Penelope was pretty content in the room, although it did get harder and harder to slip in and out of that room without her escaping into the rest of the house as the reintroduction process progressed. (This separation, with Penelope in a bedroom and Wolfi in the rest of the house, works well for them given their very different energy levels and it generally seems like the recommendation is to keep the aggressor cat, Penelope in our case, in a separate room rather than the other way around.)

Step 2: After the initial separation, you want to basically give them time to decompress and just generally chill out.  So don't do much initially until they've both calmed down. The part I always forget at this stage after they've calmed down a bit is what Jackson Galaxy (aka The Cat Daddy) refers to as "no peeking!" They will pick up on each others' scent but they should not be allowed to see each other at this stage. At mealtime you can feed each cat on either side of the door, getting their bowls as close to the door as they'll allow without showing any signs of aggression. For Penelope and Wolfi, we were able to put their bowls right next to either side of the door pretty much right away but you might have to start a few feet from either side of the door. What you're looking for is getting them as close to each other as possible (again, with the door closed initially) without any signs of aggression. If you move the bowls too close and one cat starts hissing, just move the bowl a bit further away from the door. At each mealtime try nudging them a bit closer to the door (moving what Galaxy refers to as each cat's "challenge line").

Step 4 (see below for Step 3): From there, after a day or so in our case, we introduced the visuals, with barrier, basically opening the door just an inch or two with a human on either side to be sure they can't access one another or push the door all the way open. If you move too quickly or accidentally let them have access to one another prematurely, you may have to start the process all over again. Give them lots of praise during this phase. Gradual baby steps are key here. You can also repeat this process throughout the day with treats. My cats like dental treats, meat tubes, and, of course, cat crack: tuna juice.

Looks like she's hissing but she's just mid-meow. She actually did pretty well, all things considered.

A minor wrench in the process this time around is that Penelope just happened to have her annual vet visit scheduled for day 3 of this process. Not ideal given this is a pretty common feline non-recognition aggression trigger in and of itself! I worried it would be like pouring lighter fluid on an active fire. Initially I considered canceling but it would have been hard to do so, the vet being closed on days 1 and 2. I also thought a medical once-over was probably not a bad idea since the trigger event(s) was a bit less obvious this time around. I was pretty sure it wasn't any medical reason leading to her sudden aggression toward Wolfi but I wanted to be sure. And the vet visit turned out to be pretty successful and helpful. Penelope did well, all things considered, and the vet recommended Feliway, which we now have in the kitchen, some gabapentin for both cats, temporarily, and a possible switch to Royal Canin's Calm food for the long-haul, considering how reactive Penelope is to outdoor/neighborhood cats, which is, of course, not something we can control.

I didn't love the gabapentin. I'm glad we had it and suspect it probably did help keep both cats calmer during the reintroduction process, but it felt like sedating the cats just so they'll get along. Penelope was weirdly affectionate (not a bad thing, of course, but also not typical for her) and Wolfi was just really sleepy (also atypical for the 5 year old cat who thinks he's still a kitten). I want them to get along, of course, but I don't want to alter their personalities. That said, I'll save the remaining gabapentin for future vet visits and if we have another episode like this one. By now I'm giving her 50/50 calm food with her existing food because I'd just opened a new bag. I'll probably transition her fully because it's definitely not going to hurt and it may very well be helping.

Step 3 (scent swapping can be done pretty much shortly after step 1/the initial separation and throughout the reintroduction process): Aside from swapping bedding back and forth a few times and a room swap on day 3 or 4 (the idea here being you're helping them get reacquainted via scent), we basically lingered at the visual access with barrier stage, along with extra treats, until Friday morning (one week after the initial trigger event), when we both had the day off for the long, Labor Day weekend, and could allow some access sans barrier with constant supervision. 

Reunited and it feels...tolerable!

Step 5: And they did pretty well! I was a little worried (and exhausted) because while visuals with barrier were going pretty well, there was randomly one time when Penelope hissed and growled as did Wolfi (kind of unusual for him...he typically just backs off). I wasn't feeling terribly encouraged and I was tired of sleeping on the couch. Literally. And while things felt a bit precarious on Friday and into the weekend, by Sunday/Monday I felt comfortable leaving them unsupervised for short periods and they seem mostly back to normal, which is to say they're tolerating one another, now, a week and a half later.

Step 6: At this point, once you've successfully reintegrated them without barriers but with supervision you want to be sure you're doing what Galaxy refers to as EPL: eat, play, love (tons of videos about the [re]introduction process on YouTube and I recommend Galaxy's book Total Cat Mojo as he goes over this process in detail about halfway through the book). We should all be doing this with our cats every day, of course, but it's good to be extra intentional at this precarious stage to ensure longer term success. Distract them with food—a positive experience for most cats—then be sure to redirect some of their energy with play, and of course give them lots of love and praise for their congenial attitude toward one another. 

Thoroughly pooped and ready for the long weekend.

Fingers crossed we either never go through this again or, at the very least, have a couple extra tools in our toolbox to utilize to ensure this process goes equally smoothly in the future. And once we're back in our house we'll at least have a little more territory for each cat to claim as their own. Which is obviously the main reason we've added a second floor. Naturally. As any cat guardian will understand!

here and there

I mentioned in my last post that I recently read—finally—Michael Pollan's A Place of My Own, and, as I wrote then, "thought a lot about my MFA thesis while reading it. I've been thinking about the book again now as we have recently embarked on a pretty ambitious home renovation project (redoing some stuff on the first floor and adding a second floor)."

The book made me think about my MFA thesis because Pollan directly references the Parthenon, which was the subject of my installation (as part of the research phase I was awarded a travel grant to visit the Parthenon in Athens, the Elgin marbles in London—fragments of the Parthenon removed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, in the early 1800s—and the full-scale replica in Nashville, Tennessee): "The drawings that followed demonstrated how the same 1:1.618 ratio pops up all over the place in architecture and nature: in the elevation of the Parthenon and the wings of a butterfly; in the façade of Notre-Dame and the spiral of a seashell." But also because Pollan more broadly discusses the concepts of here and there. My thesis was originally titled Neither Here Nor There; I eventually changed it to What Lies Between Here and There (as explained here; you can read all of my thesis-related blog posts here).

"About a memorable building we will often say 'you had to be there,' which is just another way of saying that the experience of the place, its presence, simply couldn’t be translated into words and signs and information; the Here of it can’t be communicated There."

I find it hard to believe now, this book originally published in 1997 (my thesis show opened 10 years later), that nobody on my review board ever made the connection or recommended I check it out. I wonder how it might have influenced my thesis...

Fast forward another 15 years and our home addition/renovation project is fast approaching the midway point, knock on wood (forgetting now if the contractor told us the halfway point is generally when they do the sheet rock or the stucco but both are scheduled to happen in the next few weeks; that said, we still have 3-4 months to go, and that's assuming all continues to go relatively smoothly). Pollan again:

"All the life and soul of a place … depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the pattern of events which we experience there—everything from the transit of sunlight through a room to the kinds of things we habitually do in it."

This also makes me think about my latest body of work, so much of it about this very phenomenon in a house that became our everything—home, work, school—during the pandemic, a house that we've partly destroyed in order to expand, our "pattern of events" temporarily displaced and none of us in the house to observe the "transit of sunlight" throughout the changing space each day. 

In terms of the process, for anyone who's just generally curious or a glutton for punishment and considering doing something like this themselves, in Oakland, this all started over two years ago with the feasibility study. That's essentially the city saying yes or no to your project. Oakland Planning & Building departments get a bad rap, but I've heard other Bay Area cities, like Piedmont, for example, can be even more difficult to work with (think about it like an HOA...much easier to add a second story to your home or remove a tree in front of your house if you don't have an HOA and that is one difference between Oakland and Piedmont). From there we worked with an architect via a design firm to create the drawings needed to submit the permit application to the city. That process was shockingly expensive and took about 6-7 months, from feasibility study to the public notice phase to submitting our application to the city.

Things slowed down even more at this point, part of the delay on the city's end (for months they had the incorrect address attached to our permit application...?!?), part of the delay on our end (busy start to the school year and holidays, plus pausing to decide if we really wanted to commit to staying in Oakland, figuring out how were we going to pay for it, and selecting a contractor). Long story short, our application was submitted in January 2022 and approved in May 2023. The contractor got started shortly after. 

Our neighbor's indoor/outdoor cat. He has lots of cameos on my critter insta.

To our 1100 square foot house we purchased nearly 13 years ago, we're adding a roughly 650 square foot second story and, since we had to fully move out, also renovating some stuff on the first floor (main and half bathrooms, removing all wall-to-wall carpet and refinishing the hardware floors underneath, replacing the kitchen backsplash, repainting, etc.). It's been an interesting juggling act of taking advantage of this opportunity to update things while we're temporarily moved out versus, as our contractor keeps saying, "death by a thousand cuts."

I could write more—and perhaps I will one day—about how surprisingly difficult it's been to observe the initial demolition, in particular (we were lucky enough to snag the rental next door just as our neighbors were moving out, about a month before we had permits in hand), or how this house I've now called home over 3x longer than anywhere else I've ever lived. And as..."extra" as Oakland's been the past few months, it will be not only financially foolish but also really emotionally difficult to ever leave this house, something I never understood before and never really thought I'd experience.

P.S. It only took me three months but I finally put up some prints and such in our longterm temporary rental. Above is is a quote of Pollan's from another of his books in my to-read stack—The Omnivore's Dilemma—illustrated by Narwhal Design Ink.

P.P.S. The newsletter is back! I'm maintaining the blog here for longer posts, like this one, and the newsletter for weekly updates, news, lists, links, etc. I'm also taking a break from social media (pretty much down to just Instagram anyway but shocking how much time I was spending on that one app) that may very well be permanent. I miss seeing what folks are up to but the cons have greatly outweighed the pros lately. Continuing to update my blog and reviving the newsletter feels very one-sided but social media has become a pretty poor substitute good for actual human interaction and while it feels like going backwards to go forward, I don't think my IRL social life benefits much from the Instagram version (there was, I'm pretty sure I'm remembering correctly, a No Stupid Questions podcast episode that touched on this idea of substitute goods applied to social media but I can't for the life of me remember which one. Great podcast, though!).