200th post

I thought about doing some kind of epic "200" list for my 200th post, but that seemed like a lot of work for a small payoff. But then I thought, 20 is kind of like 200, except... pleasingly small.

So, I bring to you:

20 things I want to do (in no particular order) before I write 100 more blog posts

1. read Infinite Jest again, this time in chronological order.
2. submit a poem to a literary journal, just for fun.
3. gain greater guitar skills. this is actually going to happen, unless I somehow manage to write 100 blog posts in the next 3 weeks.
4. go to an NHL game, try not to feel guilty about the violence of the game, etc.
5. read The Brothers Karamazov; attempt to build a friendlier relationship with russian literature.
6. go on a date. ...one recent trip from harrisonburg to bethesda included a conversation between 4 women on the merits of online dating. which was hilarious, I tell you what, but a less creepy option might be to find a guy from hyattesville to go with me to a poetry reading at busboys and poets.
7. make pumpkin soup in a pumpkin. this also will happen, thanks to The Housemate.
8. memorize another Eliot poem. 
9. meet Christian Wiman. this will never happen, but a girl can dream.
10. go to a political protest. surely something interesting will happen near me before I reach 300 posts.
11. sleep a lot. this will definitely happen.
12. make something edible with The Housemate using the foraged acorns. hopefully be pleasantly surprised.
13. get a pet. a turtle? give said creature a name relating to particle physics (charm? lepton? yes.)
14. send more mail. this is not altruistic. I would like to get more mail.
15. go to an art museum. maybe after the government un-shuts itself.
16. visit baltimore & hopefully run into the crazy americorps people again. oh, and hopefully NOT get lost.
17. gain public transit skills. DC Metro, I'm looking at you.
18. start a fiction-writing group? this probably will not happen, given my neuroses about my writing + how busy all my writing friends/acquaintances are. 
19. re-henna my hair. or something.
20. grow an avocado tree. seedling. whatever. it's in the works.

on elephant ears & gregory orr

How badly the world needs words.

Don't be fooled

By how green it is,

How it seems to be thriving.

"Willow" rescues that tree 

From its radiant perishing.

How much more so then 

When you name the beloved.

-Gregory Orr

A year later, the Elephant Ear plant is still growing.

Thia and I named her Ellie when we got her last year at the Relief Sale.

 

She had quite the personality.

This weekend I got to re-pot the baby plant growing out of the roots. 

So! My fifth year in a row of attending the Harrisonburg Relief Sale. :) Gosh, it's nice to feel the sense of belonging that comes from running into seven of your old professors, from mad-dash hugs from 8-year-olds, from seeing familiar faces scattered throughout a crowd. 

I don't have enough words to explain how it feels to hear people start to clap as the bidding for quilts pushes above $1000. How it feels to imagine the money going to help relief efforts in Syria, or to support my friends working for MCC in Colombia and Nigeria. 

I'll just say that it feels good.

--

I'll also say that  planting the baby elephant ear made me think of potential; all that space in the pot for growth.

I'm thinking that maybe I'll just call the baby plant L. Like "Ellie," and also - like a reminder, maybe; like a prayer for L who is working, still, in Colombia.


did the beloved die?
yes and no.
only really ceasing
when we cease to care.

...which is to say:
helping the beloved
to be reborn
by writing and reading
poems.

which is to say:
we have an urgent purpose.

which is to say.

-gregory orr

the view from Thia's front porch

yes, it's true; the world is beautiful

a handful of change

"I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But...who gets excited by a mere penny?

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

It is that simple. What you see is what you get."

-Annie Dillard


Some pennies from the last 24 hours:

*my brother texting me about hockey
*seeing the praying mantis perched on the truck at the end of my street
*signing up for a CSA with The Housemate and picking out a week's worth of fruit & fall veggies
*listening to anais mitchell in the car; the setting sun lighting the beltway all orange and gold while the shenandoah song was playing
*facebook conversations with friends in florida and mississippi and pittsburgh
*listening to This American Life as I'm working (yes, I am still working...)
*listening to all the international scientists discussing my country's government. (ha. hahahaha. ...ugh)
*acorn squash for supper


well! I feel much more cheerful about my life after making that list. feel free to add pennies to the comments below...

5 signs you're part of generation y

1. you have a blog.

2. people follow you on Spotify.

3. you are weirded out by #2, but not enough to make your playlists private.

4. you go to a cabin in WV with college friends and feel a sense of shock when you realize no one in the whole group has a smartphone.

5. your thought at that moment of realization was I should put that on my blog. 

It was definitely one of those "ask and you shall receive" moments.

I mean, except for the way that I didn't ask, exactly.

* * *

A few weeks after starting my job, a got a postcard from a friend. He said, "I hope you are feeling like your adult, real world life is fulfilling and challenging..."

I just so happened to receive that letter on a day when I felt those things, but I answered him something like this: "Last week I was afraid I was wasting the only life I have, but today is better. I think all my angst was a result of a headache and too-little sleep."

Funny how that matters, I told my friend. It makes me think of something C.S. Lewis wrote, that how good we are is more dependent on what we ate for breakfast than we like to imagine.

* * *

There was this book I read when I was a kid, a funny sci-fi story where a girl gets trapped in a virtual reality game and can't get out. The whole story is about her efforts to escape. Near the end she starts crying, and that's when the game lets her leave.

Because it was designed to be hard, but not that hard.

* * *

The past few weeks have felt so, so difficult. The work that The Housemate and I are doing isn't hard, exactly, but it's technically quite challenging, and requires hours and hours of highly focused concentration. My project has had a lot of road bumps. There's been a lot of - hm, how to say it. A lot of not inconsequential issues for me to learn about and deal with; the anti-vibration table being mis-aligned and causing mechanical stress on my cells, air bubbles in the solution exchange system, cells sticking to the coverslips, the cell-culture room overheating. Etc.

And my personality is such that I am nearly always much more likely to try to sit and reason/work my way out of a hardship than ask.

* * *

One of my lab mentors got back from a work trip last week and came in yesterday to help try and solve some of my technical issues. A few minutes in and he said, "Well, this is obviously not working right," thumping on the anti-vibration table. He shook the Farraday cage and tugged on some cables, and a few moments later said, "Alright. I think I fixed all your problems."

And he was right.

Today the woman who is overseeing my project stopped by my little cave. "I heard S___ solved the problem, hm?" she asked. "The table, right?"

I nodded.

"I never would have thought of that," she said. "Huh."

* * *

Okay, so what am I even trying to say, all these scattered shards...

The past few weeks the Big Boss has been telling me, "Emily, you have to ask questions." And I would get so frustrated, because I felt like I was. I would ask, and I would try to apply what I learned, and nothing was working.

But I think I wasn't asking the right questions. I wasn't asking the right people. I wasn't chasing down the question, knocking on every door I could.

* * *

On Monday morning I woke up with a stiff neck. I must have slept in a funny position or something. So Monday and Tuesday I was in pain. Tuesday evening when I was biking home from the NIH campus, I was thinking about how it was probably actually dangerous to be biking, because I couldn't turn my neck.

I was frustrated with work. Stymied, confused. I was in pain. I was tired. My life felt very hard.

I find it is less easy to be optimistic and joyful when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak. Less easy to find fulfillment, meaning.

* * *

This morning, during lab meeting, I just got this lovely sense that it isn't supposed to be this hard. 

You know, I didn't actually end up asking the right question, ever, but the problems got resolved anyway. I told the Boss tonight that today was the best day I've had yet.

* * *

Maybe what I'm trying to say is this -

this whole week I've been thinking about that phrase ask and you shall receive. 

At work, that means - well, it means work, yeah? (Usually, at least), it means chasing people down, asking variants of the same question over and over again, it means reading scientific papers and trawling through the vast recesses of the internet.

This morning, though, the bone-deep sense I got that things aren't supposed to be this hard... it was like a lesson in grace. Imagine if God was waiting around for us all to have the right question. I, for one, would never get anywhere.

No, instead it feels like sometimes God is just ready to open the door to abundant life even if we barely have the energy to crawl up on the porch. 

melancholy; memory; a writing exercise; feeling that "thirst for the goodness I do not have"

missing Harrisonburg achingly. today, sitting in the lab, I had a sudden, sharply clear memory from last fall, of eating supper in the park with my home group from Early Church.

the sun setting. running down the hill with S, holding J; he still just a baby. D with a chicken in a crock-pot, and the kids telling me about butchering it. biking there and back, food in my basket; the corn salad, maybe? (how happy it makes me to realize I contributed enough times I can't remember what I brought).

oh, I thought today, like pressing on a bruise, J will be talking now, maybe. I wonder if K & J have trained Edison out of jumping on the kitchen table and chewing up their books. R will be pulling out her winter sweaters, now, and wearing them to church. 

---

all I want right now is to sit in my tree on the hill behind EMU, the time and space and silence to write.

---

there are tall trees lining my street in Bethesda, and in the evening, when I am either biking home or walking up from the bus stop, I sometimes stop and look up at the leaves. the way the sun sets, the lay of the land, the hills, the location of the buildings in the neighborhood to the west means that the setting sun lights up the trees from underneath. they glow, the bark turning orange and the leaves lined gold.

---

how to love the place I am in:

---

"...time is always time,
and place is always and only place,
and what is actual is actual only for one time
and only for one place,
and I rejoice that things are as they are..."

I can't remember, anymore, if I ever wondered if Eliot was being sarcastic, the first time I memorized this poem.

But then again, I was 19. I took everything seriously.

ugh! to get out of my head!

"...and pray to God to have mercy upon us
and pray that I may forget
these matters that with myself I too much discuss
too much explain..."

it's like I'm trapped in an irony spiral. stop. analyzing. now.

---

(it's quite possible that I shouldn't have read Candide right before graduation.)

---

Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time. Love for the
earth and love for you are having such a 
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expecting
to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers which, with this thirst, I am
slowly learning.

-Mary Oliver

all the science

The Housemate and I had a bit of a disagreement tonight on whether or not Voyager 1 escaping the heliosphere is worth being excited about. I say yea, she says nay.

She says that if we put energy into solving issues on earth, maybe we could actually solve some problems. Here. On Earth. 

Right, I said, but it would be even better if we could get all the people who think so much about pop culture & the VMAs to think about science instead. So then we could learn about space and solve some problems here on Earth.

All commentary aside, I'm pretty excited about Voyager. Just think of it: a tiny spacecraft nearly 12 billion miles away from earth, 36 years into a mission and still going strong. The first man-made object to leave the sun's sphere of influence (but not the solar system; feel free to fight that myth with fact, haha).

Isn't this pretty cool? (picture from Voyager 1)

or, y'know, just... pretty. oooh. (Voyager 2)


Some facts:

Launch

Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. On September 5, Voyager 1 launched, also from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket.

Planetary Tour

Between them, Voyager 1 and 2 explored all the giant planets of our outer solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; 48 of their moons; and the unique system of rings and magnetic fields those planets possess.

Closest approach to Jupiter occurred on March 5, 1979 for Voyager 1; July 9, 1979 for Voyager 2.

Closest approach to Saturn occurred on November 12, 1980 for Voyager 1; August 25, 1981 for Voyager 2.

Closest approach to Uranus occurred on January 24, 1986 by Voyager 2.

Closest approach to Neptune occurred on August 25, 1989 by Voyager 2.

Most Distant Spacecraft

The Voyager spacecraft will be the third and fourth human spacecraft to fly beyond all the planets in our solar system. Pioneers 10 and 11 preceded Voyager in outstripping the gravitational attraction of the Sun but on February 17, 1998, Voyager 1 passed Pioneer 10 to become the most distant human-made object in space.

The Golden Record

Both Voyager spacecrafts carry a greeting to any form of life, should that be encountered. The message is carried by a phonograph record - -a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages.

Present Status

As of September 2013, Voyager 1 was at a distance of 18.7 billion kilometers (125.3 AU) from the Sun.

Voyager 2 was at a distance of 15.3 billion kilometers (102.6 AU).

Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at a speed of about 3.6 AU per year.
Voyager 2 is escaping the solar system at a speed of about 3.3 AU per year.

There are currently five science investigation teams participating in the Interstellar Mission. They are:

1. Magnetic field investigation
2. Low energy charged particle investigation
3. Cosmic ray investigation
4. Plasma Investigation (Voyager 2 only)
5. Plasma wave investigation

Five instruments onboard the Voyagers directly support the five science investigations. The five instruments are:

1. Magnetic field instrument (MAG)
2. Low energy charged particle instrument (LECP)
3. Cosmic ray instrument (CRS)
4. Plasma instrument (PLS)
5. Plasma wave instrument (PWS)

One other instrument is collecting data but does not have official science investigation associated with it:

6. Ultraviolet spectrometer subsystem (UVS), Voyager 1 only

citation:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.html



In other news, more science!

http://www.nature.com/news/insect-leg-cogs-a-first-in-animal-kingdom-1.13723