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pina_la_nina
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Interests: "A friend who visits you without some moonlight in his or her travelling bag is too busy. When you see such a friend, ask him or her, 'Do you have some moonlight in your bag?' That would be a bell of mindfulness." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh from Cuckoo Telephone
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Member Since:
10/12/2004
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| The blogger formerly known as pina_la_nina will now be blogging at: http://fluorophore.wordpress.com/ Welcome! | | |
| Hello, and long time no Xanga, from my new digs. It's warm-chilly here, the lab inside is sort of bunsen-burner and chugging compressor hot but the windows are open and the cove outside is seaweed strewn and a crow is fussing out there in the pines. The fog is sitting heavy on the water, turning my horizon across the water from pine dark into a mist blue Neverland. The characters in my life have become mountains and trees and the brook that sits down the hill from our little house in the woods. Augusta and I check in with our favorites each morning - we have to drive through the gap between Dorr and Huguenot Head, one of the loveliest stretches of road I've ever known in my life - to get to town. Each day we look to see what the mountains are doing. Lately Dorr's been getting married - she wears her veil, sometimes draped across her shoulders, sometimes just high on her head. Yesterday Augusta says, she was getting washed, to get ready for her wedding. Yesterday she was running in rivulets, waterfalls all around her, thin and thick, white washed, like lacy sleeves. Today she and Huguenot Head were both in veils - two women, Augusta says - marrying each other. We have one neighbor, well, one human neighbor, that is, who is itinerant and comes for a few days every other week. When she's home Augusta is at her door daily, like each day is Trick or Treat day, like she's Red Riding Hood and it's a glorious adventure to bundle up and rush over in the dark to carry some muffins. Once while she was home, she asked Augusta about her friends and Augusta announced that "the brook is our friend!" and she smiled and nodded, because she too lives by the brook, and she knows to walk down along her and see what's changed lately. Our brook is a series of waterfalls, low flat ones, with jutting flat rocks criss-crossing the banks. The kind of rocks and the kind of racing water that makes you want to be a lizard and lie still there and think about moss and maybe sunbeams and very little else. We've gone ice smashing there already and we have high hopes for some summer basking - off in the future. So this is life. Or a small slice of life these days. I'm also fond of the quiet hours when the morning is beginning and when the fog is not so thick and I can watch the mountains opposite and see what color they've chosen to be for this sunrise and have my tea. I wish those moments would last. The truth is, life, as a functionally single mom, is sort of short on sitting down and vegging moments. We are moving around a lot more than we ever used to - moving out bodies I mean. Walking here and there, trips to the library and the market, hikes up the faces of these mountain friends of ours, piggyback rides along the sandy beach looking for kelp to feed the urchins. It's good but it's very immediate. When Augusta falls asleep, so do I. I feel sort of alive in a different way - not so thoughtful, not so allowed to dawdle or reflect, but just to mostly be. And so I miss writing. But I also like me more, I don't have time not to, I suppose. It feels good but it also feels like something is missing, like I can't quite wake up. Except when I'm with Augusta. | | |
| September rolls around and it just feels so snuggly - time to get out the sweaters and quilts - time to play rugby (ok, not really snuggly) - time to drink hot tea and fantasize about homemade cider doughnuts.
It's been chilly all week which just kind of exacerbates this back to school feeling in the air - the feeling that it isn't too freakish that the stores have Halloween decorations up (then you do a calculation and think - wait, we still have two more months, stop me from buying candy now) and I get wicked nostalgic. And start using dated words like wicked.
We're ramping up for Augusta's premier as a Kindergartner, or well, I am, inside - and trying not to let it show too badly. She's proto-psychic when it comes to my mood though, so it's pretty darn hard to keep anything from her. Last week our bunny died, our first family death, and Paul and I fretted and called each other frequently all day trying to map out a plan to break it to her. He dug a hole and found a box for Callie, then wrapped her in a blankie in anticipation of Augusta's process for understanding and coping with her bunny's death. And then somehow I got home from work before he got her home from preschool (I suspect he was stalling - took her to the library or some such all the time pretending everything was cool).
So when they arrive I give her a hug and say "I'm so glad you're home!"
And she says, "Mom, why are you sad?"
I was completely unaware of actually being really sad, kind of reflective and a bit apprehensive maybe, but inside there was real sadness and she plumbed it right out of me instantly. It made a good segue too.
Well, "Callie's dead, sweetie." I said.
She paused for a moment, trying to wrap her head around that. "Let me see!" she said, a mixture of James Herriot to the rescue, and morbid curiosity.
We sat for a long while, a really long while, in the yard while she held Callie, petted her body and tried to figure out what was wrong, why this just felt different, how she knew that she'd never wake up.
"She's not inside," she mused, "but I feel her bones, she still has bones inside." How what is inside us, is inside us in a dimension that isn't physical. That inside has a myriad of meanings and one can depart without any scars, no bones broken - just gone. Empty, but still full of bones.
Kindergarten. We got a list from her new teacher of supplies the class will share, exactly how many ounces of glue they expect from me, how many boxes of presharpened pencils, and I got seriously verklempt there in Target, and was suckered into buying a backpack decorated in this guy  - and um, well, he sings too. Dude, the way I was feeling at that moment she could have probably gotten me to whip out the credit card for a new car or something insane, not just a 7 dollar backpack. That sings... and sort of clicks and mutters to himself. Paul was appalled.
Um, I should mention that the guy on the backpack is lacking disturbing (or any) genitalia, in case you were wondering.
Righto. Anyway, what *is* it with being a parent that brings on this flood of emotion from time to time? That we live two lives at once - if not more. we are parent, but we're also the kid we were too, the kid we perceived ourself to be, the kid without the cool backpack, namely. I see her heading off to school and I'm trapped in a sort of freakish time jello where I see myself wading into the mosh of teens on the first day of 9th grade, everybody duded up in their coolest best new outfit (which if we must go there, this being in the mid 80's was awash in neon puff paint). I see the little jean skirt I picked out, see the sweater, see the bad perm - like I'm in Dumbledore's penseive (oh man, geekorama reference, sorry. We just watched the Goblet of Fire, Augusta sustaining massive crushage on Harry Potter, which carries her through much gore and spookiness.) Come on - can't you almost smell 9th grade? Smells like Teen Spirit. Or Love's Baby Soft, bubblegum and sweat, more to the point. And in my school there was always that undercurrent of manure, but hey.
So I'm subjecting my 20 something coworkers to an onslaught of teen me music. Stay tuned for The Smiths. Cue the Cure. I don't think they get that this is my response to kindergarten, to backpack shopping, to the bunny's dying, to it feeling like rugby out but my hip hurts like an old lady's (probably thanks to rugby, now that I think about it).
I'm not ready. I know it's only kindergarten. I know this is as it should be. But Lord knows, I'm not ready. | | |
|  | Currently Watching
12 Monkeys
By Brad Pitt, Madeleine Stowe, Bruce Willis, Ernest Abuba, Bob Adrian, Vernon Campbell, Michael Chance, Carol Florence, Nell Johnson, Simon Jones, Bruce Kirkpatrick, Joseph Melito, Joey Perillo, Bill Raymond, Jon Seda, Irma St. Paule, H. Michael Walls, Wilfred Williams, Rozwill Young
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Ages ago, years and years, I was on a train heading home from work and the snow blew in so heavily that we had to all get out and get on a fleet of little yellow school busses. I don't know about you but generally in my world of illusion, a double decker diesel with its own rails to itself seems a heck of a lot safer than even the brightest of those perky somewhat Fisher Pricesque "cheese busses" (as my city friends tell me they called them, because, yanno, they're yellow). But throw in a massive blizzard and apparently the equation is reversed? Yeah, I don't think so.
None of us did. Nor did any of us commuters dig the fact that we were now jammed wooly scarf and briefcase to parka inside the thing. We fogged it up in there, standing room only, waiting to die - the way I rode up and down Togo, minus the chickens and nursing babies, and plus this monolith of snow out there.
My seatmate was a woman about my age - we'd actually lunged for the same seat, having spied each other on the train before disembarking. It wasn't so much a chemistry thing as a desperate hope that should one be snowed in, or pinned in a dying position overturned in a snowbank somewhere, you might have something reasonably interesting to talk about. And that you wouldn't get felt up or breathed on by someone who'd been hitting the Pabst Blue Ribbon on the way home.
It started off well enough, considering the circumstances. Amazing how good really the weather is as an icebreaker, so to speak. Fear of death even if a nice universal, non-controversial topic, remanisances over school busses past, that sort of thing. Then she asked me what I do.
And what I did then is much what I do now - which everybody here already knows about ad nauseum. Right? Right? You all remember exactly, I'm sure. Something... sciencey. Cool. In a lab, with yeast. Genetics. Take away random genes and see how well they get on without them, kind of leading to ponderings about what that gene might do. And take lots of cool pictures with awesome microscopes.
Except the difference was, back then, I did that to plants.
Interestingly enough (to me anyway) in our lab at that time, about 7 people, over half of us were vegetarian. My boss was a Buddhist, and a fresh convert to plant genetics, having been an acclaimed young drosophila researcher, he switched to plants after the guilt of tweaking around with fruit flies ate away at his conscience. If there was one uniting quality to us all, collected as we were from various nations - only 2 of us were from the US - was that we were a guilty bunch. We mutated DNA with trepidation, we dabbled lightly in the footsteps of the Lord, and we were as cautious and thoughtful in doing so as we could possibly be. Not to say that we didn't sometimes pass around a small plant, profoundly screwed up in terms of its axis of symmetry, and marvel at it. But we were not, I think, prone to taking any of this lightly.
Plant genetics is strikingly still a fledgling lab science, compared, if you will, the heady and sophisticated world of yeast genetics. Techniques are still fidgety, failure rate, just in terms of figuring out how to figure out which gene you've mutated, or getting the critter to express a bit of the DNA you made and want it to, is very high and while lab science in general requires a thickness of skin and an almost moronic resignation to failure, plant science doubly, triply so.
Plus there's the whole money thing - namely that funding from the government is pitiful. Worse than. Agribusiness owns plant science in the US, and they apparently have both sticky fingers and deep pockets. But if you're working in an academic lab, you're poor, believe me, and you're poor on purpose because you're choosing not to be in Agribusiness. Because the Monsanto's of this world creep you out. Because it's not about money for you, it's about science, about knowledge and the unknown, and the beautiful dance of how one string of DNA causes a ripple that wriggles and jiggles and transforms into a breathtakingly complex creature. Because you never stopped asking "why?" "But...how?" Because you thrill on astonishment, and you lose yourself in puzzles. And because plants are, if anything, a more infinte pool of mysetery than animals ever will hope to be.
And so you're trying to explain all this while unwrapping the snow-wet scarf that's both strangling you and covering your neck in sweat, while your seat-mate is wiping back circles of fog and peering out at the great grey beyond that is likely to kill you both and suddenly, visibly, she's pissed as hell at you.
"You're mutating plants?!" and she's getting really agitated. Scary agitated. And she's talking about how evil Monsanto is and you're trying to be all like "yeah, tell me about it" but she thinks you're them. She doesn't get it, doesn't allow for any distinction, because genetically modified crops are contaminants taking over the world and you eat them and you die.
I tried to explain that we worked on a poor cousin of a tiny weed that blooms early in the spring and that nobody notices, nobody can pronounce, and whose stamen you have to use a microscope to see.
She was so disgusted and so outraged-out that she turned to the window and her cold circles on the glass, refusing to speak to me again and when the bus eventually rolled, upright, into the train station parking lot, depositing us to our various fates, she was lost in the shuffle and I never saw her again.
The summer after the one that followed, I was in Mexico, working on transgenic potatoes, trying to undertsand why they propagate so poorly by seed, when the greenhouses where I used to work were set on fire.
My good friend lived with his wife and two small daughters in an apartment on the grounds, over the room where we stored seed. They could look out their window and see the Earth Liberation Front people spray painting their walls in graffiti and torching the glass houses. He emailed me days later about it.
I thought of all this listening to NPR this past week, an eco-terrorist group in California has been targetting researchers, picketing their houses, mistakenly planting bombs on elderly neighbor's porches, and proud of it. Reminds me of the pro-life folks who stalk doctors home and shoot them, toss bombs in clinic letterslots.
Because, I'll grant you - we don't have a dialogue, in this, or in most countries. Because we've ceded essential things in life - the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the water out of the tap, who gives us care when we're sick - to faceless monopolies, and behind every brand name is a wall of ignorance. Where did this come from? Who grew this, who picked it, who wove this, who glued this, who cooked this - what's in it anyway?
And to most of us, ignorance - of the baseline things that make our lives work - is scary, it's unnerving and faceless feels soul-less. Maybe?
Maybe I'm trying to rationalize here, trying to understand the motives of the people who try to harass and kill people who do the kinds of things I do. Trying to wrap my head around people who accept that scaring witless, maybe hurting two little girls, is an acceptible collateral damage in the war against corn.
I don't know. Maybe it's just one more big mystery. If two snowbound peers, squeezed in together on a slow moving bus, desperate for conversational fodder, can't manage to communicate about this - can there ever really be a dialogue?
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| Anybody catch that article in the NY Times Style Section (of all places) about the apparent hot new trend in lesbians these days? That would be: becoming a man.
I find it hard to believe that this is a fad, or a "style" but hey, if it's in the Times as such, it must be, right?
Anyway, it followed two couples, previously lesbian couples, one with a child, one without, and what it felt like for both partners when one decided that she was ready to make the gender switch. In the couple with a daughter this meant a breakup - the mom (interestingly it was not the one who'd just given birth who decided to ditch her bio-gender - does birthing make you feel more at home in your body? At peace with womanliness?) didn't want to continue on in coupledom with a man, being a lesbian and all. The other pair managed to tough it out (and legally get married now) and remained philosophical about the event and about the resulting gender questions.
Among the questions: does becoming a man mean you're going over to the Other Side (presumably the Evil Side) the side with all the advantages in life. Selling out as it were, to not just take the easy road in terms of being hetero but in snagging the cultural biases, hiring/salary/status that men enjoy? Many disgruntled lesbians who perceive their ranks as being culled by this transition seem to think that's a yes.
Which leads to questions about allowing these new men to remain in girls only schools and colleges, even to attend women only events, festivals, the like. And if you do cut them off, when exactly does that happen? At the name change, at the hormones, at the surgery?
Surgeries. Which prompts me to wonder - the man prominently photographed for the article looked like a very attractive, very male guy with a handy set of pecs, only subtly shadowed in the mastectomy scars (which ring the pecs, almost like an emphasis to the musculature) - and yet he confesses to lacking the cash and gumption for the "bottom" surgery. Meaning that although he now defines himself as a man, has lost his long time partner as well as his breasts, name and former identity he lacks a piece of equipment that most bio-men I know would be rather miffed about doing without. I wouldn't go so far as to say that men define their masculinity by their penis, but come on, most of them are rather fond of their own and seem to like to make sure it's in proper working order. In the novel I'm reading right now one of the men (this is however a woman-authored book so she might be off base here, but maybe that's partly why this is on my mind) is taking an antidepressant, which lifts his spirits but not, ahem, other parts. And the decision as to whether the ability to orgasm is worth his entire mental well-being is one he seriously debates. I'm not saying this is how all men would be, given the circumstance, but Viagra hasn't exactly been laughed off the shelves either.
So what makes a man? What makes a woman? And is it possible to be a gender traitor (any more than, say, Ann Coulter has done) or a sexual orientation traitor? And isn't it a rich world that we now have all these options, a richness of choice in the world of identity? | | |
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