Surf film festival

Spent the weekend at the New York Surf Film Festival. It was amazing--there were some really fascinating and beautiful films shown, and honestly, it takes a lot to keep my attention through many surf films. I lose interest pretty fast when all I'm seeing is guys ripping huge airs cut through with shots of babes on the beach in tiny bikinis. What was cool about the NYSFF was that many of the films are really story-based: the characters come first and the gratuitous surf shot come second (or third, or fourth, or barely at all). That's not to suggest that the movies aren't about surfing, because the ocean is always there, underlying the different characters' motivations. Not one of the people featured would be the same if they were a hockey player or a musician; surfing is not an interchangeable facet of identity, it is integral and imperative.

More on this later--details, maybe actual reviews, etc. I've got to go work through some thoughts right now. I've been both inspired and completely derailed this weekend, as I was forced to a) realize that I've been a totally pathetic surfer over the last year and b) see that there are people who are actually making their lives work around surfing and doing good in the world and c) question why I'm spending another year in school, absorbing information, while I once again kind of skim past doing anything. So yeah. Lots to process. I want to go surf right this second, but it's kind of flat.

Well then. OK, brain, let's go sit somewhere quiet for a while and think this through.

This is beautiful. And it's in a public train station! Public art+ethereal textile work? I am so in.

It reminds me a little bit of this, from the MOCA WACK! show, which I saw while I was still in college (note: the piece looks sort of dingy and unwieldy in the photo; in real life, the tension in the crocheted ropes was absolutely perfect, and sort of exhilarating). There were some amazing textile pieces there--the most famous one was this, and I don't remember who did the rest. Anyway. Craft can be art, man. Craft can be art.

the sky was grey today

...and I thought of this Pettibon watercolor. I had a conversation with a professor/colleague the other day who had lived in Vancouver and then Berkeley for a long time. He basically told me Southern Cal surf was a pitiful excuse for real surf, and the only place to be a serious surfer was above Santa Cruz.

I freely admit: I don't really like big surf. I'm happiest when the swell is a foot or two overhead, and since I'm small, that really doesn't need to be a very big swell at all. Any more size than that and I start to spend as much time being a little bit (sometime a lot) scared as I do having fun, and that's just dumb.

I suppose that most of the things I do I do because they're a little bit scary, though. I don't think I've ever made the easy choice in my life, but a wave like this? No way. Never.

(Speaking of patterns one has entered into for one's whole life: this study has been getting a lot of airtime lately. I haven't gone through the science of it yet, but...anecdotally, it feels about right).

listless

It's not even as hot here as it was last month, and I am completely wiped out. Alexandra and I are sitting in our apartment, overheated, drinking iced tea. I'm supposed to be working. I can bear nothing more than staring at the screen.

What I wouldn't give to go jump in the water right now...

(answer: almost nothing. I would give you nearly anything I own, besides maybe my guitar, my computer, or my surfboard, if you would come rescue me from this ungodly heat)

also, as an antidote to melancholia

More on this later, but I'm fighting some serious melancholy right now. If only these Steven Powers murals were on my train ride home...

You know what? Never mind. It's enough that I know they exist. I'm glad they're on someone's train ride home.

topography

I love topographical representations; two-dimensional maps, three-dimensional structures, etc. My advisor at Lamont has worked a lot on answering the question of how people interpret spatial representations of the natural world--how do we read maps? Why is easy for some people to translate lines and marks into hills and mountains and valleys, and why is it hard for others to do so?

Spatial reasoning ability in a population, like other basic skills or abilities, falls out in a normal distribution. Unlike with basic math or reading, though, there are very few systems built into the educational framework designed to help kids develop their spatial skills (though of course, the efficacy of the systems designed to identify and help struggling kids with math and reading is debatable/sometimes ineffective/socioeconomically divided, etc).

I was always good at reading maps, but I find myself struggling to do more complex mental gymnastics now, as I try to layer information on top of information in my mental maps. If the atmospheric circulation system over Antarctica is doing (fill in the blank) now, and we change (x factor, way the hell far away), then...thinking in four dimensions is hard.

Instead, let's just look at these pretty things. An amazing topo necklace. This, from the PS1 show.

oceans, personal or otherwise

"Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans... An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completly dreamless sleep."

-John Steinbeck, The Log From the Sea of Cortez

and

“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”

-Werner Herzog

I spend enough time in the ocean, dressed as a seal (e.g. wetsuited, sitting in the surf zone) that I feel as though I should be more concerned about sharks than I am. It serves essentially no purpose for me to worry about all the things that could hurt me when I paddle out; it won't change my behavior, just make me more anxious. And really, I don't need any more anxiety in my life. If I get chomped, I get chomped.

Happy shark week, all.

amazing.

I'm a total sucker for graphite, and for photorealism, and for minerals, so these blew me away. I only wish I were in San Francisco to go see Marissa Textor's work in person at Park Life...I'll have to go look at some other awesome art to fill the void. I saw this the other day and LOVED it, and last weekend I hit up the "Greater New York" show at PS1--any suggestions for something I should see this weekend?

starting again, perhaps?

I last wrote on this blog nearly a year ago. Since then, I've learned a lot about: the global carbon cycle, dead zones, helium, and how acids digest rock; I don't get lost on the NYC subway; I have failed to finish putting up pictures on the walls of our apartment.

More on all these things later. For now, just a few thoughts.

1) the last 5 recipes I've made from food blogs have been major failures (maybe only minor failures, but since I'm cooking so infrequently these days, they feel worse by ratio/comparison).

2) I miss the west coast terribly. New York is a wonderful place, and I've loved being here this summer (I'm not sure I can in good conscience say that I loved being here during the fall/winter), but I think part of why I've loved it is that I leave nearly every weekend. And because I'm at Lamont all day long, my actual city-time is pretty minimal. So what exactly is it that I've loved? Evenings with friends, our rooftop, biking over the Brooklyn Bridge when the moon is out? Yes, yes, and yes. But I've loved surfing on the Cape, sailing on Lake Champlain, and skateboarding the parking structures of MIT more. My summer is filled with moments of total awesomeness, most of which do not take place in New York.

That's totally fine. I'm really happy right now, and I'm lucky that I can leave to go do the things that I love to do. And I know that there's a reason I'm here; it's not like I'm just hanging out here for the hell of it, I'm working my ass off to learn stuff so I can be a better scientist, thinker, and writer. Totally legit.

So why do I keep having pangs of intense, visceral homesickness for places that are not even my original home? I think about Portland and I want to be there so badly I could cry. I think of LA (Seal Beach, Laguna, even Claremont, for heaven's sake!) and feel as though I will fly away like a pile of dust unless I get in the water to surf Trestles, Sunset, County Line. I even dream about running the ridge--3 miles straight uphill into the San Bernadino foothills, in the blazing sun, a slow shuffle all the way until I crest out and see the smog-filled LA basin, then another few miles of arm-flailing steepness downhill. I loved that stupid run.

I guess what I'm wondering now is whether I'll miss my life here when I leave, because I know I will leave. Or rather, what small pieces of my life here will I miss, and will they grow in size and importance to drown out the annoying bullshit that screams so loudly now? Will running at sunset on the West Side Highway block out having to commute 1.5 hours to get to my stupid lab? Will eating dinner on the roof with Alex cancel out the panic I felt for 6 months, as I tried to catch up to all the other 1st year grad students re: earth science background?

Anyway. What I'm trying to say is that I'm happy, and I'm engaging in a dumb, useless project of trying to compare my happinesses of the past: Pomona, Portland, Hawaii, Brown Ledge. I suppose what I should do is just file this as a good time in my life and leave it at that, no?

Note: the photos are two happy times from the last month or so--top: Breene, sitting in front of his, Justin's, and my skateboards after an epic skate sesh in Boston. bottom: the view of Mallet's Bay (Lake Champlain) that I woke up to on my birthday. Brown Ledge is like a quarter mile to the right out of the frame.

Honolulu

We were out in the country for a week with no internet. It was awesome, and the surf was good.

Now we're back in town, there's a little swell, and it looks like there are 500 people out in the 5 spots I can see from our apartment (Suicides, Graveyards, Tongs, Ricebowls, and Old Man's).
We're 11 floors up, so it's hard to see, but Ricebowls is a couple feet overhead on the sets. Hopefully we'll find some corners!

Lost Angeles

I get a lot of incredulous looks from people when I tell them that I love LA, but I'll stand up to the haters--LA is great. It's wierd, and awful, and apocalyptic, and a disaster, but it's also vibrant and close to everything I love (surf, deserts, mountains, books, really awesome food, I could go on...). It's full of strange people who think they're normal. It's ecology is fascinating--there are vernal pools filled with threatened freshwater shrimp-things next to the runways at LAX! There are pockets of coastal sage scrub that persist in the face of all sorts of invasive species, as houses are built and torn down nearly on top of them! And god, the wetlands, the coastal ecosystems, the islands...

Anyway, I didn't mean to wax rhapsodic about LA just yet. I'll save that for the next few days here (though it's supposed to be 108 tomorrow everywhere but the coast, so I might be changing my tune quite shortly, once I've actually remembered what summer in SC is like).

But I don't know. At this point, LA feels more like home than anywhere else. I know it better than Boston, I like it better than most places I've been, and I can surf all the time--and unlike my dad, I don't get sick everytime I go in the water, which is nice.

I meant to post this like 2 weeks ago, so it's going up now, without revisions--more later!

I guess this is the beginning

So, I forgot that I had a blog for a while! Now, though, I've left Portland, and I'm suddenly feeling very...uncentered, I suppose. A little lost. In times of confusion, I think writing everything out helps me clarify it all.

This will be the blog of my experience throughout my 2-year-long masters program at Columbia. I don't start for a few months, though, so in the meantime--this is a blog of the interim.
I've spent a really horrifying amount of time in that "interim"-type life stage in the last year, finding myself in transit, or waiting to move somewhere, or filling time as I look for a job. Interim periods are strange, stagnant times, when I've got nothing to do but think about myself and fill time. Last August, when I got back to California from Hawaii, I spent nearly two months waking up late, surfing County Line all morning, half-heartedly studying for the GRE's, and calling people in Nevada for the Obama campaign. Then, in Portland, I was unemployed, then underemployed, then...I don't know. Just a little lost for a while.

Now I've left Portland. I'm back in California, with Gabo, playing college-tour chauffer for two weeks, before I head to Honolulu for a few weeks with the family; after that, I fly back east to move in with Alex in Manhattan!

See? When I write it out, my next month or so seems less terrifying. Which is a good thing, because I tend to let things snowball and become much scarier than they actually are.

Anyway! On to happier thoughts! What have Gabo and I been doing, anyway? This is yesterday, in SF, below the Golden Gate Bridge. We were going to walk out onto it, but the whole thing was thickly coated in fog. We went to the Mission to eat tacos instead, which was a great decision.

Gabo finished his lacrosse camp today, so tomorrow we're starting our travels (loosely based on visiting colleges) in earnest. More updates soon!

What a wonderful week.

Man, I haven't had a week this awesome since...I can't even remember. It's been a long, long time.

A sweet hike in the gorge on Sunday, the beach yesterday (the foggy beach, which J. commented looked like that scene from Spirited Away with the train and the lake, etc), and another--ANOTHER--gorgeous, hot, sunny day today.

We woke up, lay around in the sun in our apartment for a while, ate some oatmeal, biked over to the park to play tennis, biked around collecting ingredients for lunch and margaritas, and now we're well on our way to total sated-ness. One margarita in, happy hours to hit all over NE (we're thinking 5th Quadrant, that unnamed bar on Williams, maybe Amnesia or Por Que No so we can compare margaritas...), a picnic in Laurelhurst later...the Blazers game at 7...

This is what we have taken to calling "fun-employment," or in our case, "funder-employment." Yeah, it sucks not to have any money or a job that I can be excited about/proud of/not want to burst out laughing when I tell people where I work, but whatever. I'm going to grad school in the fall and it's going to be a crazy, hectic two years; it's finally sunny here, and I've had a pretty awful couple of months; dammit, I'm going to enjoy anything I can get. 

Mmmm. Margaritas. My mom makes the best--not kidding here--margaritas ever, and thank goodness she has shared the beautiful knowledge with me, because I really think I like good margaritas better than any other drink I've ever had. Plus, once at school I was sick and down at Seal Beach, at Abuelito's, and he told me to a) have a shot of tequila, b) eat a jalepeno, and c) suck on some lime, and between those three things, I would kill any sickness that was in my body. A margarita encompasses two of those things--tequila and lime--and we'll just forget about the sugary triple sec that could provide so many little bacterial colonies or whatever I've got in my throat with food for weeks.

Why can we forget about them, you ask? Oh yeah, because J. made pad kee mao, otherwise known as spicy death noodles, for lunch, and there's enough capsaicin in a bowlful of that to take down the Death Star, let alone some wimpy lingering virus/infection/whatever I have. Our eyes were watering and noses running, I'm not even exaggerating. And J. loves spicy things. And he'd used half the thai chillies called for in the recipe!

The best part? He made about 20 pounds of it, so we're going to be eating leftover spicy death noodles for the rest of the week. Or month. Or year.  See the picture at the top of this post--we're literally going to be eating this foreeeever.

Anyway, here's the link to the recipe--I suggest you use a quarter of the quarter cup of thai chillies called for, so 1/16 of a cup or about 1 tablespoon. You can always add more spice later. You can't get your mouth back from the burning fires of spicytown without gallons of milk and some screaming.