The weekend, par excellence

Dear Diary,

It's been a busy busy week here, culminating in a wonderful packed weekend of events. I shall review each day and write of their merits, starting with Friday. Thus we begin.

.friday

I slept pretty late, till 11am, due having watched Daily Show clips till around 3 in the morning the night before, after chatting with Dawn and cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier (whose name I just copy/pasted directly because I was not about to attempt spelling his last name) till about 1am. But I am slipping into Thursday's events, so let me get back on track. Friday I worked a little bit more on animations for Lorie Loeb in their sweet new lab room with the dual screen mac station, which I must take some pictures of because it is so sweet. Then I went grocery shopping with my boss and another UGA for various events.

The best part of the day, though, started at 7pm after I took the minivan I reserved from the college's parking/car rental office, as I was chauffeuring people to a fraternity's formal that night. I basically circled between two dorm clusters for 2 hours looking for dressed up people to take to the formal at the DOC House. Then I picked up a friend and we spent my hour and a half off from driving at the formal, eating delicious appetizers and dancing. It was a really nice formal, and they even had a 200 pound ice sculpture of the head of the Sphinx.

Then I had to get back behind the wheel and drive people back to their respective dorms, but it was a pleasant experience because it was a dry formal and I did not have to deal with drunk students. Excellent!

.saturday

Phew. Saturday started at 9:30 with our first dorm breakfast, which is an event the UGAs do as a service to the residents, cooking breakfast for a couple hours, all-you-can-eat for $1. Quite fun, as I enjoy cooking. Afterwards we sat around in the lounge reminiscing on favorite book series, movies, and TV shows, and the others decided it would be necessary to watch Pleasantville very soon. But they agreed to wait for me, as I was heading out to a wood turner a friend had pointed out to me who lived a town over, to see what secrets of the woodworker he could impart to me.

THAT was awesome, hands down. With two friends in tow, we drove to his house/woodshop/gallery, took in the rustic scene, and were blown away by his woodworking masterpieces. Like the geodes and gems he used as metaphors to explain to us the beauty of wood burls, his place was a geode, with a roughly hewn exterior and a spectacular, beautiful interior. The guy's name is Dusty Coates, and here is a small sampling of just a tiny part of his work. Anyway, we were all extremely inspired to work in wood after hearing him talk, and he gave us some scrap pieces of wood to play with. I will definitely be revisiting this guy He's promised to show me his workshop and his lathe!

So, after we finished visiting with him, I dropped my friends back off on campus and went back to the lounge to watch Pleasantville. A great movie with great social commentary, in a hilarious way. And before we knew it, it was 5, and at 5:30 all the UGAs gathered in our boss's apartment for a quick dinner before we were off on our retreat! We had planned this two weeks ago, and it was finally happening! Our head honcho had rented a cabin up near the Dartmouth Skiway for us to stay a night and basically bond as a cluster team. So we all packed into three cars and headed north!

I have to say, the roads north of campus are the most awful roads I have ever had to drive on. It was not good for my car, unfortunately, and we think I might have done something to the muffler, as the car now has a constant loud "purr." We'll see when I take it to a mechanic tomorrow. Anyway, it was otherwise an okay drive, and we parked by the skiway, then walked a little bit back along the road to the trailhead. There was still a good 8-10 inches of snow since we were pretty far north, and the trail was packed down and slick from previous hikers. We went slowly up, skirting the really icy patches and not very successfully crossing streams without getting our feet wet. Thank god for wool socks!

Sunset through birch trees as we finally neared the cabin

In all, it took us roughly 30 minutes to get up the 0.7 miles of trail to the cabin. It was a gorgeous cabin, though, with a woodstove, mattresses in the attic, and lots of supplies and wood.



We were so eager to get a fire going in the awesome woodstove that we neglected some basic rules, like turning on the flue. Thus the fanning and open doors and window to get the smoke out. But after awhile the smoke dissipated and the fire settled down to a nice clean glow. Mmmm, I love making fires! We also lit and hung lanterns and had candles on the table.

Mittened feet on one UGA while her socks dried by the woodstove

After a night spent eating our many snacks and playing Catchphrase and Apples to Apples, and discussions of axe murderers and the ax downstairs being all too convenient, we finally crashed around midnight.

Well, I need to start getting some work done, so I will wrap up our adventure in the mountains, which ended in us slipping and sliding our way back down to the road, another time.

Nature's priestesses

I just found out that my good pal Dawn had bookmarked an Annie Dillard essay on her del.icio.us links; an essay called "Living Like Weasels." Now, I have read Dillard here and there since high school, and she introduced to me a new landscape of writing, and a new way of reading. She infuses nature, personal diary, reflection, science, and religion into her writing in an inexplicably beautiful way.

Reading her work was a full body experience for me, the first time. I've since moved on to other likeminded writers, most notably Barbara Kingsolver, Wallace Stegner, and Wendell Berry. But rereading "Living Like Weasels" was like recalling the feel of a cooling breeze on a mild summer day. It made me both sad, that I have become so far removed from the natural world around me, and inspired to do something about it. It makes me want to take my sketchbooks, paints, brushes and pens and hike deep into some forgotten trail.

How can one not feel that way, with a passage like this?

What does a weasel think about? He won't say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose leaf, and blown.

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular--shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?--but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

To have a weasel's journal...

I can't wait for warm dry grass and tadpoles in ponds. I can't wait for the spring thaw, and the hot summer days after that. Here is another passage, this one from Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, to help you understand:

She sat cross-legged on the floor of the porch, brushing out her hair and listening to the opening chorus of this day. A black-and-white warbler had started it long before dawn, breaking into her sleep with his high-pitched "Sweet sweet!" Deanna could picture him out there, circling the trunk of a poplar, tilting his tiny little zebra-striped head toward the first hints of light, tearing yesterday off the calendar and opening the summer of love with his outsized voice. She'd rushed out to the porch in her nightgown and bare feet, the hairbrush mostly an afterthought lying on her lap. She needed to listen to this: prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.

Can you feel that keening need? A deep, primal necessity no one truly ever escapes. The muscle memory of our ancestors.

I can feel it in my palms and fingertips and feet, aching to dig deep into the earth, to grasp tree limbs, to feel the crisp grass and crunching leaves.

Can you?

Elephants? In Taiwan?

By a most fortuitous coincidence, I got to traverse the beginning of the Elephant Mountain trail (象山) with an uncle of mine. I had stayed overnight at another aunt's house after eating out with a good chunk of my very extensive family, to celebrate the arrival of some more relatives coming back from America. In the morning, my uncle invited me to go hiking with him and his buddies, something he likes to do on weekends. His buddies canceled on him due to the brief bout of rain that morning, and it looked like I would be hitting up the Mah-Jong table with my aunts that afternoon instead.

But, after some more discussion, we decided to go anyway, since the rain had stopped after lunch. So I got my hike, and a treasure trove of amateur-naturalist delights.

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The alternative title to this post would have been "Snail Photo Shoot," given how many pictures I took of these critters

I love natural selection. Who wants to eat bird feces anyway?

A couple eventful days

One day at a time...

Yesterday I went to NTNU to (finally) (hopefully) get things squared away with my scholarship papers. Yay money. Then, because I didn't want to have just gone all the way on the metro to NTNU for that one errand, I decided to walk around a bit. I saw signs pointing the way to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall (國立中正紀念堂) (since renamed the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall), and followed inspiration (and my awesome newly developed sense of direction).
I didn't come in the main gate, but left through it. I entered through the East gate, which is under construction. As a lot of the memorial buildings seem to be...






The Concert Hall to the left of the Memorial Hall (facing the memorial hall), and the Taiwanese Flag in the center of the square. The National Theater directly opposite the Concert Hall is under construction, so I didn't take any pictures.

I really liked the walkway patterns they laid throughout the park. And I also really like this picture.

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So, anyway. Went through the Memorial Hall, but the main hall was closed due to...well, your guess. It was a grey, drizzly day, not optimal for digital camera pictures, but I had fun. I walked to the Memorial Hall metro station (unintentially, I just picked left outside the gate), where a grandfather and (guessing) his two grandchildren were feeding pigeons. I was planning on meeting relatives for lunch, but wanted to explore more, and didn't feel like getting on the metro so soon. I got the general gist of how to get to the Taipei Main MRT from a map by the station and went off down ZhongShan South Road (中山南路).

Took a good 15 minutes or so to get to Taipei MRT, but it was a refreshingly cool, breezy day, so it felt nice to be out and about.

Let's see...had lunch with the fam at a restaurant in the Breeze Center* called..."Japanese Restaurant." But the food was good, so no complaints or snide remarks at my end. We walked around the mall for a bit, before heading back to 2nd Aunt's house to rest.

Then my cousin Ingrid took me to nearby Taipei Arena for a bout of ice skating! Fun, tiring, and I didn't fall. A success! Except for the blisters on both ankles. Now I'm inspired to get my own skates (and gloves) and try to go there regularly. Perhaps I can get some classmates to go with.

Today's adventures will have to come in a future post, because it is late, this post is long enough as it is, and my laptop's getting hot.


*The Breeze Center, according to my cousin, has all the top brand name department stores. Therefore, people often go to window shop, or eat, but rarely ever buy material goods. That day, with my aunts, 2nd aunt said people are surprised the mall hasn't gone out of business. But a few days every year, the stores only open to select people, and that is what keeps the mall going. Hehe...