Coulda woulda shoulda

I should have been in Budapest today.

But instead I am writing. Writing, writing, writing. It's late, but it's coming, finally.

'Tis good, though. I think that what I'm writing isn't crap. Lately that feeling is pretty unusual, I have to say. Actually, I think it might even be good. But it's early to tell.

It's taken me AGES to get through my field data from Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania to the point that I can make heads or tails of it. I didn't leave my house all weekend, and today only went as far as the cable company a few miles down the road to restore my troubled internet service. I filed away about two inches of papers into a three-inch binder, added tabs to six field notebooks, and have been creating indexes for myself. I feel like this is the kind of stuff they don't teach you. An archival methods course would be so handy. I know there are probably more intuitive digital ways of creating cross-referencing tools. But I'm just working with the skills and tools I've got. This is even before transcribing, which will add PILES and PILES to the data I've already got in the form of field notes, photographs, and documents from field contacts.

I've started making a more comprehensive database than I've had up until now, except the one in my head, and realized today that I probably have met at least a few hundred people "in the field" at this point who have something to do with my project. No wonder I feel a little loopy sometimes, and like I haven't had a real chance of synthesizing my life while I've been doing coursework. Thank God I took a semester to do independent study so I could start to process this, a little.

wordpainting

These things I see, I could not create if I tried . . .

A gruff man in a cowboy hat with a lit cigarette hanging in his mouth, sitting with the engine running in his tan metallic long-bed Ford pickup truck with a full load of firewood dusted with snow, waiting outside the cable company . . .

The golden stubs of a corn field poking their stalky fingers out of the thick blanket of white, against the fading pale pink horizon. . .

A weathered red barn, the wood in danger of collapse at any moment, against the stark winter landscape. . .

A tiny round bird resting beside a tuft of snow in the bare stalks of the hedge in my front yard . . .

The morning sight of a lone figure making his way on cross-country skis across the lake . . .

In the afternoon, another with a device like a massive corkscrew, shuffling on foot back from a center point where he has drilled, presumably to test the ice thickness for its readiness to hold the ice fishermen . . .

And then the narrow glimmering fingernail of moon rising in the pale blue arc of the sky at sunset over the cottage when I arrive home.

They are things I drink in every day, images I think I will carry in my heart for life. It is so very beautiful out here.

(Despite the 40 minutes of shoveling the driveway this morning . . .)

Japanese Video -- What to do if Mugged Abroad

Passed along to me by a Hungarian friend through Facebook. Oh, our wonderfully globally connected world is good for something. Apparently posted on YouTube by someone who found it on Kontraband.com.

I'm dreaming of a California Christmas . . . but it sure is white outside.

It is so incredibly snowy here, you would hardly believe it. But we're expecting up to 8 inches in Southeastern Michigan. And it looks like there already nearly that much piled up on the whole world around the cottage. It feels a little like being in a gingerbread house with icing piled up around it.

I've added some posts over the past couple of days to Our Lady of the Woods, a place I envision for environmentally-oriented posts, links to media reports, information about consumption, and so on. It may be artificially segmenting my life to section those things off, but I envision this spot as a little more personal -- not in the sense of more important to me, necessarily, but just more chatty, more about my quotidian life, and far less likely to be of general interest to someone who doesn't know me. Also, I know Mom is deeply disturbed by my Keeper, so this way she doesn't need to hear all about things like that if she doesn't want to. :)

I am sitting here hidden away in my winter wonderland, reading my field notes from Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, in 2006, trying to make sense of everything, and thinking about bonds, partnerships, "sweat equity," and participation in housing programs in Central and Eastern Europe. I love the idea of this paper, but it's going to be hard to pull it together in the next day. I seem to be headed in the direction of thinking about global housing builds as a simulated religious experience for international volunteers, drawing on Victor Turner as well as an outstanding book called Participation: The New Tyranny? edited by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari. I'm also going to be drawing on the readings for a course I took with Julia Paley last spring, on Democracy: Ethnography and Social Theory. Great class, great readings.

Now I just need to pull it all together . . . . and keep my mind calm while knowing that I still need to grade 15 more undergraduate papers, all (75) of the last quizzes, and check off the museum assignments of my students, and issue their final grades by the 20th, as well as writing my evaluation report for AFG and finishing up 22 more hours of field placement work. Luckily I can be writing my report in those hours. But still. That's all I have to do by the 21st. That, and work out the details of my academic planning with my advisor, and meet a professor to talk about prelims and hopefully manage to convince him that it's worth it to work with me even though he's about to leave the University of Michigan.

And my family wonders why I can't fathom talking about when I'm coming home for Christmas. Well . . . Mom, that's why! :( I miss you guys . .

Little saviours

I was really horrified the other night to find that my digital image files on my SM card had effectively disappeared in my struggling to get them to be read in either my card reader or my camera, plugged into my computer via USB. So, it was a huge relief to find that I could recover them rather painlessly with free software called Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery 3.1. It's small, quick to download, and completely free. Consider me a new fan.

The other software that makes my life happier on an almost daily basis is Google Desktop. If you're not familiar with it, here's how it works. Imagine the capability of google for searching the web. Now apply that to all the files on your computer, divided into categories such as web pages you've visited, emails you've sent and received, and documents, images, and other files you have saved on your hard drive. You can set it to include or exclude certain files, like an external hard drive or a certain folder, or whatever. It is how I magically found the photos I thought I'd lost for good, from my trip to Europe in 2003, that I just posted earlier today. It was also really handy two days ago when I decided I wanted to write some prelim questions for Social Work, and knew I had written some previously, but hadn't the foggiest idea where I'd filed them away. When you search, you can identify what particular type of file you're looking for. . . Yeah, it just rocks.

Mom, my first issue of Martha Stewart Living has arrived, with "all the comforts of home". :) Thank you so much. It's nice study-break reading.

I totally covet the high-tech/old-fashioned kitchen on the cover, though I would substitute warm, sunny yellow on the walls and red or blue accents in place of the pale yellow ones.

All this makes me think, though. I finally share the opinion that Martha is rather retchingly bourgeois. Of course, it would be swell to have a hydraulic lift in a linen cupboard that carries a hidden flat-television screen upwards to watch the Daily Show before bed and then tucks it away under a piece of wood that is seamlessly integrated into the surface of the furniture when you're finished with Jon Stewart. But give me a break. Who has that kind of money and space, besides Emily and Richard Gilmore?* Really. Seriously. It's too much.

No wonder everyone thinks Americans are crazy, and we are spending all our money on consumer goods made in China, and making our houses bigger and bigger all the time to make room for all these things. "In my house, all the juices, fruit and vegetable, have to be FRESHLY SQUEEZED." And in mine, Martha, I'll accept nothing less for cream for my coffee than the milk fresh from the bosoms of my ladies in waiting, which they provide right after polishing my silverware, and right before getting on their hands and knees to scrub my grout with a baby toothbrush.

Oh, oh, and you know what else? Her cat is named Vivaldi. Are you serious!? It almost makes me want to get a cat to name it Poulenc or Shostakovic. But that would be cruel, and having an ironically named pet is almost as bad in my book as getting an ironic haircut.

Still, though, I love the gift, Mommy, and I will happily take her magazine with me into the bath, to manufacture desire. You know I need something to get pedantic about sometimes.

*I just made my way through season 6 again, and it made me remember how good The Gilmore Girls was before Amy Sherman-Palladino and husband Daniel left for greener pastures. (What a shocker. The network was withholding a decent contract to them. Seriously, isn't this case-in-point about the importance of good writing to good television. Things went south SO fast when they left.)

P.S. I just got the news in email. My Nigerian payment slip is ready. I am SO EXCITED.

Oh my GOD, I thought this scam would surely be finished by now.