2015

2015 was holding my breath. I lived so much this year.

Time passed with a moon dipped in venom, so many friends visiting - Adrienne, Hannah, Will, Sorrel, a Bernie rally attended. I smoked my first cigar and felt sick - stuck with the habit of holding the smoke in my lungs. I got hit by a car while biking, and had too much to think anything of it. I went to a lecture on John Weiners at Harvard at Kelsey's urging, hundreds of miles away in Columbus, Ohio. I got sick. I spent a few days in NH with my coworkers and three dogs. I got told that I was looking exceedingly bird-like. My flatmates and I threw a party and named it "Crunksgiving". I climbed Mt. Lincoln and Lafayette with my father.

each of those is a story, a vignette.  maybe I'll have time to tell them this year.

I read a few books - Cat's Cradle in a burst of "oh! reading in English, I've forgotten!". On Adrian's advice (and my parents as well)  How to Win Friends and Influence People. When I felt lonely with R, I would read his favorite book; 100 Years of Solitude - it went by quick, so did he, the irony not lost on me. House of Leaves, which I had gifted myself for my birthday. Matt then lent me City of Glass. A project started by Hannah and Sorrel led me to read chunks of A Short History of Wine, I Drink Therefore I am; A Philosopher's Guide to Wine, and A History of the World in Six Glasses.

I'm ready to breath out.

kaleidoscope

I keep having words but not putting them together here, like a moving kaleidoscope and I can't quite snatch up the shapes and colors before they disappear from before me.

green glass - I went to the Somerville porch fest with Adian and Margo. We shifted from venue to venue, and with the change in location came a change in population. Old married couples with grandchildren in one place, people in their late 30's at another, those in their 20's and early 30's at a third. It's kind-of perfect though, the idea of a porch fest. People come out and share their own music with the people living around them, using the cross of urban and suburban space: tightly packed houses stacked next to each other -- creating a town-wide bbq-party. Green bottles filled with beer in hand, music dances in the air.

teal strand - I dyed my hair. People keep asking way and I say "I just felt like it" except to Paras to whom I said "whenever I change my hair it's because of a boy" and didn't repeat myself when he didn't hear.


a feather, refracted - we went camping: the boy who used to live in the room I live in now, Therese, Paras, and Amy. I had never gone camping without the supervision of those a generation above me! I had never gone camping without Russians! We snuck around trying to scare each other throughout the day, like real adults. We had about 7 different types of 'dogs' to accommodated so many different dietary restrictions. We pitched a couple tents and didn't get wet when it rained. We toasted marshmallows for breakfast and swam in a lake with ducklings.

a mirror slate - at work, I now only have 32h schedueled per week, and only work day shift, which means I no longer feel like I'm chronically jetlagged. Unless I pick up a shift, I always work on 3South, on of the acute units, like I had asked. All of this makes me much happier, I didn't even realize how much weight had been placed on my chest until it lifted. Two days ago I had a few tears escape my eyes while at the nurses station, in front of people. One of the patients had screamed and called me a bitch, and I also found out that I was almost certainly mandated. Usually I am ashamed when people see me cry, but this time I apologized and it felt okay. "Relax" Cole told me, and gave me a one-armed hug. I didn't get mandated. She apologized to me the next day "you know you are one of my favorite staff! I was waiting for you to come in after yesterday so I could apologize!" I said, yes, thank you, but wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to apologize? Think about what you think will help you to control your temper, before it boils over. "You are right!" she said. We will see.


how many times have I turned the kaleidescope?

ice swan feathers

a few weeks ago Mama and I went to see the show Bad Jews. The four actors were pretty good, and though the characters could be misread as caricaturish, I have met people exactly like each of those characters.
There is a Sabbath blessing that fathers do for their children; placing a hand on the head and saying a prayer. I've always liked that moment.
Mt. Washington with my father and his friend ended in a satisfied fatigue. We drove to New Hampshire and stayed the night in a motel, got up at 5, started climbing at 7. Near the top, the wind blew so hard I was afraid I would get blown off, and we couldn't see from one cairn to the next because of the fog. But it was beautiful; the wind had swept the moist air into ice formations, like frozen swan feathers. 

Matt

I welcome the rain. The humidity and heat have been steadily edging into my brain, with only one brief reprise for a few hours one night this entire week. I welcome the rain, though of course it’s not just rain, we got an e-mail with a tornado warning, and the light just flickered and the thunder was a crack right by my ear.

The semester is off to a good start, but I will write about that later.

The Sunday before I left home, I went to climb Mt. Washington with Папа, Yosef, and his best friend. The peak is at 6,288 ft (1,917 m) and the highest wind recorded there was 231 mph (372 km/h), which was the world record until a few years ago. For me these numbers only make sense when Папа told me that the air is thinner at the top, though unlike many of the mountains he's climbed, I can actually manage this one. The day we went wasn’t too hot or too cold, and there was hardly any wind. Папа  says he has never seen such perfect conditions there, ever. Granted, he has a tendency to climb it when there’s snow. The mountain does tend to attract clouds though, that’s true. 

I hadn’t climbed the mountain since I was nine, and then we had arrived at the top soaking wet from the rain and took the last train down. Last time I remember Папа bought me hot cocoa at the top, which burnt my tongue as I too-eagerly tried to drink it. It was strange arriving at the top this time, because many of the people up there had driven, and we still had ways to go before the end of our journey.This time I bought a banana and stole sips of cocoa from my brother.

On the way down, when there was only about twenty minutes left to go (we had started around eleven in the morning, and it was near eight, the sun was setting) we bumped into two other hikers, an old man and a young man. My dad started talking to the older guy, probably in his 60’s, and we soon left them behind, catching up to the two 13-year-olds that had decided to run off ahead. 

The guy I ended up talking to was twenty-something, from Oxford, MA. Shorter than me, with braces and a beard and he introduced himself as Matt at the end of our conversation. He has a job painting lines on the road. His father and grandfather had done the same, and he likes it, says it pays well. In the winter, he gets laid off and gets unemployment until the weather clears up and he can paint lines again. He was planning on staying in his jeep for night and hiking another peak in the morning. He turned out not to be the adopted Russian son of the 60-year-old man, and in fact had just met the man half an hour ago. The old man had looked slightly confused so he was walking down with him and was going to give him a ride to his car, since it wasn’t on the main lot. We were talking about New England* and skiing came up and he said something about being a loser for not knowing how to ski, which was absurd, and he was looking forward to moving to Maine (his job moves him around, you can’t paint road lines in the same place all the time) because of the solitude and mountains, and how photography allows you to remove yourself from a social scene without actually leaving it. We talked about psychology and orphans and the fact that he likes to go to the Middle East café in Cambridge for music concerts, though he generally shies away from the city (and, it seems, people in general.) 

Eventually my dad came down carrying the old man, whose legs had given way from exhaustion.

Matt went to get his jeep and drove the old man to his car. And that was that, and it left me thinking, yet again, about how narrow a world I live in, and how few people I meet.

*fun fact: when I was little I thought New England was just another name for the USA. The fact that my dad’s map of New England was different from what other maps of the USA did cause a moment of pause for me, even then.