abirdisnot | Recent Entries

The role of the griot in West Africa seems remarkably similar to that of the scop amongst the Anglo-Saxons. Cool.

Went to the Wishkah and had a really good time. Spending time with family, who I appreciate so much more as time goes by, floating down the river in an innertube, etc. I was gonna write all about that. Maybe I will later. I should.

On the way back up to Vashon I stopped at Cabela's. Got some stuff which I'm happy about, but it also ruined my mood, so much so that I was crying in the car a little while later.

It makes me angry, and it hurts, the male-dominatedness of things, the bullshit of things.

All these useful, comfortable men's clothes, and then the women's section where there's like brightly colored cotton t-shirts with cute necklines and decorations. In an outdoor superstore. Why the fuck would I not just go to Target?

All the men's camo, I'm wandering around in there, getting disoriented, trying to find my way back to the women's hunting gear ghetto along part of one wall. No piece of clothing is in my size.

Picking up some books. One about turkey calling. Opens up saying, "Someone might sound like an expert the first time you hear calls coming out of his or her mouth," and I was hopeful, but after that it was him him him.

Some other book about back-country hunting, suffused with macho crap. Literally no acknowledgement, anywhere, whatsoever, with any word or on any page, that hunters are anything but a bunch of "guys" who dream of that trophy buck.

And it put me right back into the whole alienating Earthwalk experience (not saying it wasn't, you know, good overall, but it was certainly alienating to be in that environment for months). Reliving and replaying the stupid shit people said. Arguing back with them in my head. Reasonable, cold and sarcastic, telling them to fuck off. Over and over.

And I cry and it feels like weakness, it feels like *I'm* the one with the problem. Yes, I do have a problem, and that problem is misogyny. And it's not my damn fault, and if it hurts to live every day of your life knowing that you are the other, that you are the object, not the subject--if you are on the radar screen at all. You are never talked to. You are talked ABOUT, when you are mentioned at all--if that hurts, it fucking SHOULD, if you have eyes to see with and a heart to feel with. It WILL, if you're a sentient being who experiences that.

I'm trying to remind myself that those reactions are okay, that it's in fact reasonable and expected that you would be hurt, be affected. We've been conditioned to think, all of us, women, people of color, queers, etc., that if something hurts you it's YOUR problem for being so sensitive about it. You know what? The people saying that, they don't HAVE to be sensitive about it.

Oh, but they are, they're touchy. They're a hell of a lot more sensitive than you, in your way, because you know what it's LIKE to hurt. To know there's no way to win an argument. To choose to walk away and keep your mouth shut, and steam about it--or to confront it, knowing it will likely go bad, you'll be dismissed, they will show their continuing ignorance and no indication that they will learn or change. That if you get upset it's somehow "your fault" for being too confrontational or picking on "every little thing." When you are SUBJECT to that every little thing.

Oh, if I brought it up, every time some misogynist shit gave a ping on my radar, gave a little adrenaline blow, like a bb pellet. Oh, how you'd accuse me of nagging. And it WOULD be incessant.

Anyway, they're touchy. The men, the white people, the cis people. It just hurts them soooo bad, the suggestion that there's something they overlooked, some shit they don't understand, some shit they don't care about that they should. Their poor feelings.

You are scary to them. They rule the world, and when we raise our voice, use a sharp word--use soft words, even, bringing up what they don't want to hear--they flip the fuck out.

There was some study.

Teachers in a classroom would carefully call on boys and girls in exactly equal number. Put a little tick mark down on their notebook, something like that.

After a couple days of this the little boys started complaining. The teacher was calling on the girls all the time! Ignoring the boys!

No. But it feels like that, doesn't it. Our equality feels like that, it feels like YOU are being overrun. No, you're just not in a vacuum any more. Feel that air? Your world has lost its center. There's the danger of things NOT BEING ABOUT YOU anymore. And maybe that's scary because that's all you know. How do you survive, in that world where you have to fight to be treated like a full person? How do you survive for one damn conversation? You can't. Your coping mechanisms kick in and la la la you're back in white person land, or male privilege land, or whatever, where you can CHOOSE not to care, where you can actually NOT CARE if you want to.

I learned a trick. Lie on your back, put your legs straight up in the air. Get a friend to hold them like that. Just rest your legs against them. Close your eyes and count to sixty.

By then, your legs have adjusted to that place. That feels normal. Your friend lowers your legs, and it feels like they're dropping through the floor. Bending all the way around behind you, down down down, how can they keep going down like that?

Oh, that elevator plunge. It's a shock, isn't it, even the slightest taste of what it's like to be on this level. Just one hint that you don't matter, all the time.

So yeah, I'm reading a lot of blogs about racism and such. I have to, for my own sanity. (My own issues aren't that of being subject to racism, but the experience of oppression--of being frustrated, denied, overlooked, talked ABOUT by the other as though you are the other, of knowing your very struggle makes you weaker in their eyes--has commonalities. Lately I've been reading more about race. Getting all agitated in my head, trying to break down my whiteness and SEE it. When you're privileged, it's all transparent.

Maybe because sexism is more "triggering." It cuts deeper because that's the one that hurts me. I can feel passion about racial issues but it's not so close to the bones.

Read some blog post about sexual violence. Obama and his peace prize, how one of the losing candidates is this doctor in the People's Republic of the Congo, helping rape victims who are horribly mutilated. How this woman, reading about it, felt sick for days. Literally felt ill as though she had a fever. She said in her post how rape and the terror of rape hurt all women, even those who have not been raped. And it's so true. I have never been sexually assaulted, but what it does to me, knowledge, images, stories. Animal fear. Fight or flight.

For me, it's always fight.

I started reading Temple Grandin's "Animals In Translation," which I've been wanting to read for a while and never got around to. I'm very interested in cognitive psychology and the senses. How do different animals experience the world, sensorily as well as in more abstract ways?

Glancing at the coffee table, I saw a newspaper headline: AROUND THE ILSE: A young swimmer goes the distance.

The ilse? This jumped out at me right away. I'm a copyeditor, and I notice little things like that.

I don't think it's because I have copyediting experience that I notice these things. Rather, I think I was always prone to noticing them, and that's what drew me to copyediting or made it easy for me.

Temple Grandin talks about how she, and other autistic people, and animals, do not think verbally. Many people do; I sure as hell do. Ever since I was young, I would see a sort of page in my head, constantly. Black on white text, just like in a book. When I talk, when I hear words, when I think in words inside my head--I also "see it" in text.

This is useful. It's often a memory aid. But it causes difficulties as well.

For instance, I'm pretty good with languages (foreign ones, that is), but when they have a different alphabet, it's very hard for me to remember new words, recall what I've read etc. Very hard. If I do remember them, it's certainly going to be spelled out in English letters somewhere in my head, in addition to remembering their shape in the original letters. The transliterated spelling might still predominate.

It would be interesting to immerse myself for a long period in a place where everything (or the majority of things) was in another alphabet, e.g. Russia, Japan, Israel.

But the reason I started writing this post: Grandin talks about "inattentional blindness." Basically, us humans are very bad at noticing things we're not expecting to see. It's not that our eyes are incapable of perceiving the visual stimuli, it's that we don't notice or remember it.

There's a famous experiment in which participants are asked to watch a video of people playing basketball. They're told to count the number of passes a team makes. So there the people are, staring at the screen and carefully counting in their head.

About halfway through the video, a woman in a gorilla suit walks on to the middle of the basketball court, pounds her chest, and walks off.

About 50 percent of participants did not notice the gorilla at all! It's not that they noticed it but didn't pay it much mind. They were asked, "Did you see the gorilla?" which would be enough to prompt someone's memory. No, they really did not perceive it at all, because they were so focused on counting the passes.

In other experiments, people come into a room to fill out a form. Halfway through, the experimenter ducks behind a bookcase, and a completely different person emerges--different appearance, different clothing, etc. Many people don't even notice the switch.

I think it would be interesting to see where the threshholds are, with that. How different do the people have to be--and in what ways--before someone notices?

For instance, I suspect that if a man went behind the bookcase and a woman came out, people would notice, because they put "men" and "women" in different categories upon meeting them.

I suspect that the same would apply if the two people were of different races. And if, perhaps, one person was of regular stature and one person had dwarfism, that probably wouldn't go unnoticed. (But if BOTH people had dwarfism, etc...)

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True. I can totally read this. And YET I am also prone to picking out typos (as are many people, I expect. It might just bug me more than average. Or perhaps all of us who notice just keep the annoyance to ourselves for the most part.) So what's up with this?

On the one hand, there's inattentional blindness. I'm expecting to see certain words and phrases, so maybe it stands to reason that I'd see what I expect, and not notice typos. But no, I do.

I wonder if this is because I see the words in my head, and the fact that what I read doesn't "match" the appearance in my head is immediately striking?

I think it would be interesting to do experiments on this.

Vashon drama.

I want to do some landscaping on our slope--the property behind our house is pretty steep and mostly covered with ivy and I wanted to put in native plants and stuff. Mom and I already hauled a couple of bales of hay up there for an archery target.

Also, our septic system is on its last, uh, legs, and we're trying to get someone to do something with that. So we hired a surveyor to come out. "Oh," the neighbors said, "be sure not to hire so-and-so, he's terrible. But so-and-so was the surveyor and we'd already called him.

And he came back with these crazy fucking results. Like for instance, the corner of our house isn't actually on our property, it's on our neighbors'. However, the shed right by their house that the residents there have used for decades IS our property somehow.

G, our neighbor on the other side, does not own the property his house is on, but he does own the water in front of him. Or some shit like that. Somehow we don't own the property directly behind our house, but something all slanty that goes up the slope. I dunno. Those were his results at least, based on a reconstruction of god knows what from back when there were different trees and different roads. So we're not happy with that, but he insists he's going to officially register it with the county anyway.

On top of that and numerous other ridiculous red-tape things too numerous and exasperating to go into here: a week or so ago we received a letter. Some archeologists invited us residents to the Burke Museum to talk about their project they just got a grant for, the Manzanita Beach Public Archeology Project.

I thought it was really cool and fascinating and I looked through this book they had that had old Lushootseed names for areas around our house. One area translates as "the place where monsters are," and another is something like, "the place that is cuddled on both sides." So that's awesome and the local languages own and it was really cool to read about it.

But also horrible. The anthropologist a lot of that manual thing was based on did his work in like the 1920s, and of course his informants were local native people. There was one extremely old man who was one of his important informants, who lived with his even older wife, who was crazy. In 1919, they died of starvation, in West Seattle. They were that poor.

They used to live on land around here. Until some white guy tricked him into signing something, giving the man the property in exchange for one dollar.

There was a village, of the Puyallup people I think, quite near our house as well. A very large longhouse, more of a fort, really--the channel narrows here and it would be a good place to cut off any invaders who were coming through on canoes.

Then in the 1850s or 1860s some white people burned it down, so that the Indians would have to leave, and they could take their land.

The lady who told the anthropologist this was quite old, when she spoke to him. She had been a girl, maybe 12 or so, when people were still living there; it was a sort of winter camp. Later she was sent off to a school for Indian children, the kind that's meant to take away the territory inside you. If they spoke a single word of their own language, if they were caught, they would be locked in a dark closet.

And here's these white people, myself included, living there now. It's there, the record, the drawn maps, the stories in plain printed text. And it's so clear, that taking, and so recent. Right. There. Where that dot is, I know the view from there. They had a name for it, names for every spot along the shore, based on long familiarity. Beautiful To The Eye, one is called.

I could talk about the kids, down for the summer, their bikes strewn across the dusty gravel road. The kids build structures out of driftwood and jump in the freezing water. It's July, and there were fireworks. Our neighbor sells them in town, we got a bunch including a few parachute men that float down after the explosion.

Our parachute man landed in the water, and I had wanted to give it to my niece and I was afraid of something eating it or getting tangled, so I put on my suit, scraped my feet on the algae and barnacles on the last corroded steps of the stairs off the neighbor's dock, and went out after it. Maybe twenty yards. But I was glad to turn back and reach shallower water again, glad to be near the stairs--my breath was thick and hard to pull in, the cold does that faster than you'd expect, even though it's been hot, so hot that in the dark, the cement bulkhead was warm as I sat to rest.

They clapped and cheered my name, when I lit those small fireworks. Nothing impressive, one bright ball at a time shooting up and then dying, white light crackling in a fountain and making a loud noise.

I could talk about this neighbor and that neighbor, the ones whose family has been here a few generations, the ones who just moved from California. Local details, local drama that absorbs you only if you live here.

"Oh, no," the archeologist laughed, when we asked about artifacts, who finds them, what happens when they do. Do they belong to the tribe? "They're not interested in the land."

By which she meant not that the Puyallup people didn't care, but that they knew any attempt to recover their land was hopeless, that they needed to focus on other battles instead, like disputes over shellfish harvesting areas. "They know that the state it that 100 percent. There's no argument about that."

That man had his home stolen for a dollar, a dollar that went quickly. That village burned, and someone must have raked the blackened ground, had the slope graded, said, "Here's where the new house will be."

Now, on any private property, any archeological objects discovered belong to the property owner. If the archeologists want to take so much as a bag of dirt off your land, you need to sign over a deed to it. That's the law.

If I found an old tool, a carved bone earring, it would, legally, belong to me. How could it be mine? We are on this land like the crust on a wound.

This is just fucking classic. A response to a Sociological Images post containing some really jawdropping examples of cultural appropriation:

I know that my ancestors were still in Europe when the British colonists were killing innocent Native Americans, so I don’t think I’m “mocking them” or celebrating their deaths in any ways when I wear “Native American inspired” clothing pieces.

Sort of like how none of my ancestors actually owned slaves in the antebellum South, so it's fine if I dress in blackface.

I have family living in New Mexico on Dad’s side. I frequently receive handmade purses and jewelry. When I visit I buy numerous things: dresses, silver jewelry and linens for my mother. While I get the whole reason for this article, I can’t get why you frown upon people who wear clothes from different cultures? The thing my family likes most about traveling and seeing new places is buying things to show for it. My house is cluttered with art, glass pieces, clothing, and furniture from different countries and cultures.

Ah yes, ye olde showing your profound respect for and understanding of other cultures by going on vacation to where they live, buying "exotic" shit, and decorating with it.

Banning culture from our wardrobe would leave us all in this lapse of unoriginality they we are constantly trying to stay away from... But if you like it…wear it, just know where its from and what its history is.

See title of journal entry.

If you read this and don't understand what's wrong with it, then... I don't even know where to start.

See also this blog, Native Appropriations!

* * * * *

As a digression, I always feel uncomfortable when people (myself included obviously) try to point out how something is unjust by comparing it to bigotry against a different group. Usually, the comparison seems to be with racism against black people in America.

Why does this bother me? I'm not really sure. Maybe it's because it's fucked up that you'd have to analogize clear bigotry in order for people to recognize it's bigotry?

Maybe because the way in which different groups are oppressed is unique, and therefore it simplifies oppression and the way in which different kinds of oppression interact? Maybe it stops people from really thinking about how the thing being compared is problematic, and why, and the whole context of it?

Maybe it's because a sort of white-vs-black idea of racism seems to be the rhetorical default when people in America talk about other isms, which I feel

a) brushes past the reality of black oppression. It implies, "Everyone [i.e. "white people," probably] recognizes that African-Americans have been racially oppressed, and of course we know that was wrong, which is why I can use it as an example! Maybe someday people will be equally enlightened about other civil rights issues. Post racial society we have a black president blah de blah," when racism against African Americans is still so much a present reality.

b) brushes past the fact that there are other minorities as well who experience oppression, and that race in America is more complex than black/white.

Thoughts on this?

Last night at about 1 am I checked my email to discover I had class on Friday, and over the weekend. WTF? I assumed it was something I'd forgotten about, and duly got up a few hours later and travelled there from Vashon. I couldn't really have called anyone, because it was 1 am, and would be too early to call people when I had to be leaving.

So anyway, I wasn't supposed to go, but since I came, I got to stay anyway. We practiced turkey calls. I'm practicing on a wingbone yelper (a turkey call which is made out of turkey wing-bones, put together in a sort of pipe shape), and trying to figure out how I can get a really high pitch.

Later we tried venison liver and heart. The liver was alright, and the heart was pretty good. Having never eaten organ meats, I have an aversion to the idea (which of course is totally irrational, but food aversions often are), so while I was eating the heart I sort of had to keep telling myself it was okay and not to be grossed out.

There was also had a duck to be breasted out (e.g. have the breast meat removed). So I watched someone do that, and got some idea. I am used to cutting up birds for specimen purposes but not for game meat purposes, so I have to adjust my idea of what the process is, because the ends are different and the "products" being sought are different. It's much easier to skin the duck for game purposes, because you don't have to worry about getting the skin in one piece.

I was allowed to keep the skull, and spent some time cleaning that out. The duck was a northern shoveler, and so she had a really fascinating beak, with these baleen-like structures on the upper and lower bill. I want to figure out how to preserve the... outer coating of the beak, as well as the skull. For now, it's in the freezer, as are the wings.

I ate the two teeny drumsticks in a soup.

I suck at soup. It was edible, it was fine, but it was more like... some stuff (duck bits, potatoes, onions, celery, nettles) in hot water than it was like soup, if that makes sense.

My cat really enjoyed licking the duck bones.

I'm watching some PBS support-us telethon, the one about the Ed Sullivan show, where they show all the music groups with their awesome and awesomely terrible outfits. It's so screwed up how nowadays it's considered remarkable if a singer is actually... capable of singing decently, live, in front of an audience. Because most of them are faking it with Autotune or whatever.

Some country music singer was being touted on the radio today, and they made much of the fact that it would be just him there! With his microphone and guitar and voice! With a couple of backup musicians!!! Imagine that.

On a not really related note I am soooo into Project Runway. Oh em gee.

So the last couple days of class have been pretty awesome.

On Monday we skinned skate wings (these guys, the "sting ray" fish. I don't know if these guys had "stingers," but they sure as hell had denticles--these rows of extremely sharp cat-claw looking things along one section of the top side of the wings. Which would cut you up no matter how much you tried to be careful).

That was really cool, and I saved a bunch of the skin because I want to try tanning it! I will just have to figure out how.

Then we went to Cougar Mountain and harvested nettles. They are at a perfect stage right now, tiny and tender and delicious. Yes, they are delicious. Only now do I understand just how delicious.

After gathering a large basketful for use in class (like, laundry hamper basket sized), we filled up our own gallon ziplock bags for personal use.

I had heard about the benefits of nettle tea as a hair rinse, so it was my plan to do that with them. I got them home and put them in boiling water for a few seconds, with the idea of freezing them for later--blanching them briefly will stop the enzyme action from going on, ensuring that it doesn't keep on maturing in your freezer.

When I got them out they smelled so good that I immediately started eating them, first with my bare hands, and then on a plate, while I watched RuPaul's Drag Race. Oh yes indeed, it was a good evening.

They prickled a bit on occasion--not a nettle-sting prickle, though--I think it might have just been the roughness of the hairs, or maybe I could have boiled them a few seconds longer.

I'm not sure how to describe them--comparing them to spinach comes to mind, because you can cook spinach greens as a pot-herb, but it's not exactly comparable. They're just rich and delicious. And have lots of iron and protein and vitamins. I really recommend it.

My dad didn't quite understand how the stinging properties of nettle worked, and wanted me to wash the pot out really carefully, lest, I dunno, the sting juice get all over things and sting us? Nettles sting you because they're covered with hollow hairs--especially on the underside of the leaves and the stems--which are connected to glands containing formic acid. The hairs act like little needles, injecting the formic acid into you.

Luckily this is easily destroyed by just boiling the plant for a few seconds or more. Mine can't have been in there for more than 15 seconds, and they were fine. If you don't want to get stung while harvesting, take some gloves and scissors.

* * * *

Tuesday, we made and ate lots of delicious nettle foods. First we just had the greens boiled, with a sprinkle of parmesan cheese. Then we made a couple of pizzas, one with the traditional sauce and cheese, plus some nettle greens on them, the second a vegan one with nettle pesto which was SO FREAKING GOOD that I am going to make it tonight and have it on pasta.

Nettle pesto is easy:
A buncha cloves of garlic
A cup of olive oil
Some salt
As many nettle leaves as will easily blend up in your blender with those things, maybe 1/2 to 2/3 full.

We also had nettle ale, which is pink, and sparkly, and kind of sweet, and does not actually taste like ale. But which is very good. I will try to convince my father to make a big batch of it. I may go out harvesting today.

* * * *

What else? I went to The Nock Point the other day and finally got my arrows. I highly recommend them (they're in Montlake Terrace). They didn't just hand the arrows off to me--they cut them to length by actually measuring my draw length, then had me shoot them in order to see whether they flew well. They didn't--they were too stiff for my bow's current draw-weight--and so they replaced them with some excellent and probably more expensive arrows for free, then checked to make sure THOSE were shooting well.

So I got some shooting practice in, and some tips. I was a bit nervous because I'd never shot at that distance (20 yards), let alone in front of someone, but it went okay and I didn't miss too horribly. YAY I LOVE MY BOW, now I just need to get a hay bale or something and set it up.

I am the only woman in a “primitive skills” program, where we learn basic survival and life skills techniques, the use of local plants, and primitive hunting and fishing methods. When I first found out that all of the 7 other students would be men, I was a bit trepidatious. It’s only just now that I’ve begun to understand clearly—clearly enough to articulate—what it is that makes that difficult and stressful.

We stayed after class yesterday, to do some work around the instructors’ property, in exchange for dinner. I stayed inside while several of my classmates went out to begin work hauling brush, chopping wood, etc. I still had to finish stripping the feathers from a lovely pintail duck—I am interested in working with dead animals, for lack of a better phrasing, and I’m especially fond of birds. Then I began organizing books and materials in the classroom.

I admit, I was reticent to go out there and help everyone haul brush and chop wood—something I have little experience in—while a couple of my classmates have been arborists for years. I grew up urban and middle class, and never had to chop firewood. Even though I live on Vashon Island now, where many people heat their houses with firewood over the winter, most people just buy cords of wood. It’s not like we have enough land or enough trees back on our property to make firewood out of.

None of my relatives or recent ancestors have had to do this shit, in fact. My parents are scientists, my grandmother and aunt accountants, my brother a lawyer, my grandfather an oil company executive. Before the binge-drinking, before he lost everything, before he turned to the things he really loved—carpentry, working with his hands, camping and fishing. I see myself in him, in that. His father didn’t plan that for him, didn’t want him to have to work with his hands. And here I was with my masters degree, all set for a job writing papers and reading papers, learning the language of academic wankery, playing the tenure game. I don’t want that. I want to make things, I want to look at the world.

Finally I was done with the books and the magazines, there was nothing more to do inside, and it was a little after 4, so I figured I should go outside and start working there. I dimly felt the real cause of my reticence.

Four of my classmates were splitting a large section of maple tree, for use in bow staves. I had never seen a log split before, and was interested. The sight of a wedge, of an axe-blade, being driven deeper into the wood, the crack growing outward strike by strike until it reached the edges.

“Who’s next?” said someone. They’d all had a turn, so someone suggested me.

As I mentioned, I’d never split wood before, never had a reason to. Well, actually, one time I was at a party, a friend’s property in Toledo. They’d been chopping firewood, and I wanted to have a try, feel what it was like, get some technique down for the day when I’d be living in some cabin in the middle of nowhere. I whaled on that thing for half an hour and it never split, the wood was so hard and knotty.

My friend’s husband couldn’t do it either, had already given up on that one. Eventually I gave up too.

So after taking some advice on stance, etc., I began to hammer the wedge into the trunk, swinging the axe like a croquet mallet. Bending partway over that way made the muscles of my back tired. After a minute or so, I paused, laughing, “Ow, my back.”

“Come on, do it for girls everywhere!” And that annoyed me at the time, but I just rolled my eyes, muttered, “Shut up,” and set it aside.

Thinking about it on the drive home, it began to bother me more and more. I didn’t quite know why, until I realized he’d put his finger--very precisely--on why it can be unpleasant and frustrating to be the only woman in my program. Or, more generally, the only woman—or one of very few women—or the only woman I personally know—interested in and involved in certain fields and activities.

It’s because I’m not just another student. I’m “girls everywhere.” That’s a lot of responsibility, you know?

My performance is a reflection not on my own capabilities, on my own talents and areas of inexperience as an individual, but on the capabilities of women. If I fuck up, if I suck at something, especially one of the things more typically done by men, it doesn’t simply mean that I made a mistake or I’m not terribly good at something. It means that women are less competent at whatever it is.

I, of course, don’t believe that, and nor should any sensible person who thought about it for more than a second. But I am aware that it is perceived that way. That I somehow become the ambassador of womenkind, and the representation of all women’s capabilities. It’s a bit of a burden, you know, representing several billion people.

I think of all those women who were the only ones, the first ones. Like Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to go to medical school. What pressure that must have been. If she fumbled, all eyes were on her, ready to conclude that women were inferior at whatever the task was. That she didn’t really belong there, that they’d been right all along, that women shouldn’t be involved in medicine. She couldn’t simply be a mediocre student, she couldn’t make a big mistake, show reticence, uncertainty—while her fellow students could stumble, joke, be ignorant, turn squeamishly from the first sight of an opened cadaver, and it wouldn’t mean anything about anyone except themselves.

I admire the women who did those things, and their strength.

But I did not choose that role, and I do not want that mantle. I did not come to the program to enlighten men, to be a good example of my sex. I am came to learn, and to do things I’m interested in. I am not “girls everywhere.” I am one woman. And if people are going to infer things about Women—or “Girls”—from whatever I do and however I do it, that’s really their blindness.

Yeah, I wish I could believe that.

That I’m apart from that judgment and that role. I’m not—not in the eyes of others—and there are two halves to identity: how one sees oneself and how one is seen. But I’d like to change my own mindset, at least, because that’s the only one I have much control over. To abandon the ambassador badge and just do things I like. To be uncertain, be inexperienced, perhaps even to suck at things without feeling like I’m letting down the whole goddamn sisterhood, without feeling like I somehow set women back, in the eyes of the men who surround me.

The word “girl,” too, I don’t really identify with. As alien as this adulthood thing sometimes seems, my childhood is farther and farther behind me with every day.

I like country music. Always have, though it took me a while to embrace it. In fact, those are the only radio stations I listen to. I flip back and forth between like, 4 different ones, depending on which songs I like the best.

My first country music memory is of listening to Hank Williams' "Move It On Over" on a cassette tape in the car, during my family's multi-day road trip from Seattle to Yankton, South Dakota. I have the vague impression of dry hills around us, maybe one of those disturbing winding mountain roads, where the edge seems to be about an inch from your tires. My dad caught me playing air-guitar to it and lip-synching along, and laughed at me.

During middle school my friends were into "alternative" music, as it was called then. I lied and said I was too, and gritted my teeth while 107.7 The End or 93.3 KUBE played, then switched to the Oldies station at home. I mourn the loss of 97.3, KBSG, which I listened to for as long as I could remember. It played rock and roll and "classic rock" from the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. The first sign of decline was when they started playing funk and disco. Now whenever you turn to 97.3 there's some sort of boring talk show on. Or something. I can't even bear to listen to it that long.

I also still harbor profound resentment over the loss of Classic Country 1090. That was the best fucking station, and then one day I turn and it's Air America. >:( Damn liberals stealing my classic country music.

Which brings me to my point: I'm very liberal. Most country music fans are not. This leads to frequent feelings of alienation.

For instance, I sometimes have to rapidly change the station when certain songs come on, like the one with lyrics about global warming denialism, or how the Mexicans are invading our borders, or how the liberals are stealing Christmas.

As a matter of fact, all those lyrics can be found in one song.

In the first verse alone.

Then there was the time when I caught part of a morning talk-show, the kind that plays during prime commute hours, where the DJs chat, share funny news items, occasionally remark on traffic or the weather, and play a few songs. One DJ was saying how his church was sponsoring this program, where a family from a third-world country was going to be staying in his house for a week, and they were going to teach them all about American culture and the true meaning of Christmas.

And the other DJ goes, "You know, I respect you and all, but this just goes to show how incredibly different we are. I mean, I'd never do something like that."

So I'm thinking, "Good, glad I'm not the only one, the other DJ also thinks it's icky to fly an impoverished family halfway around the world in order to foist Santa and Jesus on them."

I should have known better. He continues, "Because I would never let a family from a third world country in my house!"

My jaw dropped and stayed dropped for a while.

Part of me wants to write a letter or something, say something like, "I realize what the primary demographic of country music is, politics-wise, but I'm a country music fan who doesn't hold those views and in fact disagrees to the point of finding them offensive. It's understandable that you'd continue catering to the primary demographic, but just so you're aware, it doesn't represent all of us, and it makes me feel alienated. It's actually to the point where I change the station when stuff like that comes on."

But I'm kind of afraid they'd be like, "Fuck off, liberal, you're not one of us anyway." Because there's a big current of proclaiming a certain identity and set of values in country music. "Red Neck Woman," "Small Town USA," "I'm A Little More Country Than That," whatever. Which I don't mind, and I don't find that alienating, despite growing up in a white-collar, liberal west coast city environment. Maybe I just don't think that valuing a rural, working-class existence and close-knit communities necessarily has to go in hand with, e.g., believing Muslims are terrorists.

So anyway, there's being a liberal country music fan.

And there is also being a liberal who likes to shoot guns, and who has an interest in hunting. I had a recent experience at Cabela's, and I'm thinking it's the kind of thing I'll experience a lot of in the future.

Cabela's is kind of an outdoors/hunting/fishing equipment mecca. Ginormous, filled with taxidermied animals and aquariums, a "gun library" containing used firearms, an archery range, etc. It kicks ass; there are like 26 stores around the country (maybe others too?). So um, I was looking at the handguns (I don't really like rifles). I enjoy shooting, though I have done little of it. I keep bugging my dad to go to the range with me. And this woman comes up to me, in her 50s, maybe early 60s, friendly face. "I couldn't help noticing you're so interested in the handguns, I think that's great, you don't see that a lot with someone as young as you," she said, or something to that effect (which also made me wonder how young she thought I was?).

She was purchasing her first gun. She'd had guns before, just never gotten one for herself, and she leaned over the case and showed me what she wanted, a Ruger, started describing it to me, had the boy behind the counter take it out. I held it, looked in the chambers, etc.--it felt nice in the hand. "And it's small enough to be readily accessible, which is important," she said.

Which is the first sign that we don't see guns the same way.

Because I can't say I really have a problem with strict gun control. I mean, sure, I'll take advantage of the lax gun control laws to get me a gun, cuz I like guns, but I don't think gun control is some outrageous infringement on The Rights Of Man or something--nor do I think it remotely necessary, in most parts of this country, to carry a handgun on oneself all the time for self defense. This is not the Wild West.

(I was reading this book that contained portraits and interviews of American gun owners, where they answered the question, "Why do you own guns?" And one man was saying, "Say there are two banks. In one, everyone is carrying a gun on them. In the other is a sign outside saying No Guns Allowed. You're in an area where there's a risk of robbery. Which bank do you feel safer going into?" And I'm thinking, "Uh, the one without all the fucking guns in it?" Though of course his point was the opposite. Yes, I would love to be in a bank where there's a robbery scare which then turns into a massive, multi-person shootout. As opposed to one where someone presses a silent alarm, the robbers leave, and the police catch them a few blocks later.)

Anyway, the woman then says something like, "This country has really sent us a wakeup call, this is going to be more and more necessary." And I'm like, "....Mmmhmm..." (Oh god I hope you're not talking about Obama.)

So, yeah.

Any of you have the issue where you're involved in something which puts you in the same camp as people whose opinions you find really distateful? I'd like to hear about it, as well as any advice you have for keeping my sanity.

[Modified from an email I wrote my brother because I am too lazy to totally rewrite everything!]

We're doing archery, which is soooooo coooool, and which I love. I think everyone does (8 people in the class including me). I'm still, you know, sucky, but I've improved dramatically, and considering the amount of time I've spent shooting at a target (very little) it seems like a really big improvement.

Today we selected our bowstaves, the long pieces cut from young trees which we will be carving into longbows. The order of selection was based on a number draw, and I was 7 out of 8. D: But I couldn't be happier with the one I got anyway.

One of my classmates just bought a bow at Cabela's (a huge hunting/fishing supply store, they have them scattered around the country, and it is like a mecca for people into that stuff with insanely cool taxidermy*...I haven't been there yet, we may go on a field trip :D) and it's pretty sweet. The bows we're practicing with are pretty inexpensive, hard to break bows out of plastic or fiberglass or something, so that we don't fuck up a good bow during the period of time we don't know wtf we are doing. The draw-weight on these bows is like 25-30 pounds, which is pretty light.. to give some idea, minimum hunting weight in this state is 40.

The one my classmate got is 45 pounds and it's totally sweet--the way the arrow flies, how fast it goes,, and the sound it makes when it hits the target is clearly different (even though we are shooting from just like 15 feet away). Even 45 pounds is hard for us to draw, the bow's owner has a hard time drawing it back and holding it without his arm shaking, and I can barely draw it back all the way. I will have to step up to the plate though, because I want mine to be about 45 pounds so I can use it to hunt with.

Oh, and to give even MORE of an idea, and to make us sound really pathetic, I was reading about English long-bowmen, the guys who would like shoot arrows from hundreds of yards away and pierce armor, and their bows' draw weight could be like 180 pounds. WTFFFFF I don't get how that's humanly possible. Skeletons of those archers have like really deformed arms and bone spurs and stuff. Oh my god HOW.

* * * * * * * * * *

Today we also watched this insane, awesome video Frank (our instructor) had. It's like newsreel shorts from the 40s, black and white with really cheesy narration added over it. It's about these 2 brothers, the Willem brothers, who live in the Mojave desert. It starts out with them driving around their insane... car/jalopy thing, which is like a crude cart-jeep thing with an open top and zero suspension, driving it offroads, over all these ditches and uneven ground and practically bouncing out of the car.

At the bottom of the desert is this dry lakebed, and they "ski" and toboggan down the sand slopes. Sometimes they "waterski" by holding on to a rope attached to their moving car. Which then has no one in it, and is trundling merrily across the desert. So how do they stop it? They fire an arrow at like a 3-inch wide target, which hits this switch they've rigged up and cuts the ignition.

One time the guy goes to fire at the car and stop it and his bow breaks in half. Cue him throwing it down and them frantically running after the car.

Which goes over a ginormous cliff.

They get to the bottom and start it up and it still runs. :D

So yeah, it's the best video ever, and that's only the beginning. The other segments have them crawling up a cliff face in order to trap a bobcat in a net and haul it away with them (why I don't know), shooting increasingly small objects off each other's head (down to like a die and a button), shooting BLINDLY over a hill in order to hit someone's hat on a blanket (and doing it of course), shooting through rings tossed in the air and pinning them to targets, etc. Someone really really needs to put this on youtube.

The style of shooting they are doing and the style we are learning is called instinctive shooting, which means that you don't sight down the arrow or anything, you keep both eyes on the target and just... shoot it so much that you develop the hand-eye coordination to know where it's going to go, like throwing a ball. In their case EXACTLY where it's going to go, to like a square centimeter. It's awesome.

So anyway, in the afternoon we made a tincture from cedar needles, which involves shredding cedar needles, pouring in a bottle of everclear, and shaking it up and letting it sit a couple weeks.

* * * * * * * * * *

Also, here is what string slap looks like, when you don't wear an arm guard (string slap being what happens when you release the bowstring and it hits your arm as it springs forward).

So uh, I'll be better about wearing an armguard now. This is totally happening because I SAID, the other day, that I wasn't having a problem with string slap. I mean, I almost didn't BUY an armguard last night when I went to a sports store. I also bought some arrows--one of which I shot over the target deep into a brush pile, dammit--and a partial glove.

I needed a glove, because although we have some, they are all huge, and make it a lot harder for me to shoot. So I got the "youth" size one, which fit my fingers snugly.

Unfortunately, as I realized today, the wrist strap also comes down to like... the middle of my palm. So I'm gonna have to alter it. In the meantime I'm just... wrapping the strap around my palm.

Oh my god camo lingerie, wtf.

There are thongs.

And a lot of pink camo underwear. What that is supposed to blend in with I do not know.

That's all for now, folks. Next weekend is a survival skills workshop and then we're digging for razor clams.

I posted about the harbor seal pups on facebook and it was so sad to people it made them cry. So I felt a bit bad, that certainly wasn't my intention! To me, it was sad, of course, and I felt solemnity and sympathy for the animals, but I also viewed it as, you know, "part of nature." The majority of pups don't make it. I don't know that there was anything particularly sinister about their deaths. I guess to me dead animals are at least as interesting as they are sad. :P

I did leave offerings of shells and berries by their heads, which, a friend said, did make it better. It does, somehow--what a human thing.

* * * * *

We've been continuing our work with archery, going out to practice shooting every day. I still suck but do feel progressively more comfortable with the bow, and am confident that we'll all end up good shooters, as Frank seems to be (confident in us, I mean, though also of course a good shooter). I wish we had more time to practice, though! I have a bow that I got for a present when I was like 9 or ten, I'll have to find it and practice. I'm curious about what the poundage is...the ones we're shooting on are about 25, and they are "kids' bows," so I'm hoping mine is that too.

Instinctive shooting is hard, just because you need to build up a lot of experience, muscle memory, etc., to figure out where the arrow is going to go.

This time, at least, I did not let the string slap against my inner arm. I have a bruise from last time. The even bigger bruise is at the bottom of my shin, where the bowstring cut across it as I practiced the step-thru method of stringing.

We've been continuing our work on cordage. On Monday we learned how to do reverse-wrap, 2-ply cordage. I find it actually really fun and soothing, and intend to continue working on cordage making during class. So far we've tried dogbane and saltwater sweetgrass. I've got some dogbane stalks to practice on--I am working on making a fairly fine thread.

Karen showed us splicing yesterday, and I didn't pay close attention because I thought I understood it. Then I went to do it, and was like, "...wait." A bit of internet-searching (there are quite a few primitive skills blogs and sites) and thought and I got it, though.

My cat was very interested in the bits of cordage twirling around.

Here's how reverse-wrap works. (If you look at a piece of 2-ply twine or string, that is probably what's going on.) You've got two strands, and you twist them in one direction and wrap them around in the opposite direction. Once they're twisted together, the opposite tensions keep the string from unravelling. This made sense to me as this is the method of making a rope-braid in your hair. :P

There are 2 "directions" of cordage twisting, and usually a culture will have one or the other. Archeologists can even use this as a means of determining the provenance of an object. The most common one is "z-twist," which is the direction you will get if you're doing the twisting with your right hand.

I think most, or even all, human cultures are right-hand dominant, is that true? If so, I wonder what's up with that.

The other one is "s-twist," which of course is the opposite direction. Apparently Haida people use this method (as well as weaving in the "opposite" direction to many other methods), but they are amazing fiber-craftsmen, so maybe it's us who are backwards. :)

This is premature, but I thought maybe I would make cedarbark clothing/textile items for my term project. Karen seemed to think this was a great project idea, and another student knows where I might be able to obtain a large quantity of cedar bark off a downed tree.

Another idea I had was to make (small-scale) shirts out of nettle, after the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, where the heroine does just that. Because the more I think about it, the more I think there are problems with that story, namely that you don't have to weave with *fresh* nettle, and therefore the project doesn't have to be torturous (but then again what's a Hans Christian Andersen tale without major masochism?). Well, I suppose she was trying to do it as soon as possible.

Stayed up too late playing Earthbound on an emulator.

Got out of bed when my mother announced there were 2 dead harbor seal pups on the beach.

One had had its head and upper torso eaten away, revealing the skull minus jawbone (which someone found elsewhere), and the other was pristine.

They were pretty young--it's late in the year for them to be that young--and emaciated. A hip bone was visible, when healthy pups are incredibly fat.

My mother knows a bit about these things, because she used to volunteer with seals back in the '70s. There would be a lot of "orphans," who weren't orphans originally but would become so, when well-meaning people saw the "abandoned" pup on a beach and picked it up. (Their mothers go away to hunt for long periods of time and come back to nurse them).

Supposedly these guys were at an age to be weaned, although they looked pretty damn small to me. Probably siblings, as harbor seals have 2 pups and they looked of similar size. So maybe they just couldn't make it on their own. Late in the year. Lots of them die anyway.

Still it felt ominous, what with the thousands of birds starving and dying on the coast, in the Sound. Hundreds of surf scoters. A thousand loons. They think it's because of brown algae blooms, the toxins they make.

My mom contacted a reporter about the seals, in case she was interested. "Did they have any bullet-holes?" she asked.

Bows

We've begun the preliminary stages of bow-making. I am really psyched. So far we have just discussed some of the basics, e.g. materials and tools. We will be carving wooden longbows from staves. I'm not yet sure what kind of wood I'll be using, because we don't have the staves--we will be selecting them through the "number in the hat" method.

You can make a bow out of just about anything, including lumber boards, it's just a matter of the property of the wood and how you may have to compensate for it in the carving, how it will be affected by ambient conditions, how long it will last, etc.) Osage orange is a much-preferred bow material, although there is very little of it around in Washington State, and what there is was probably brought over and planted by someone.

Yew, of course, is the traditional English longbow material, though our instructor doesn't much care for it; he likes vine maple.

We'll be using "character wood," meaning things with knots, twisty grains in places, etc. The idea is that a) they're cool-looking, and b) if we can make a good bow out of "character wood"--as opposed to something with a perfectly straight grain--we will be able to make bows out of anything.

We've begun to practice stringing bows and shooting stances. I thought that stringing the bow would be pretty easy, but uh, it wasn't. The fiberglass bows we were practicing with were a bit trickier than our own bows will be, because there's a sort of plastic ridge where the nock fits onto the tip of the bow that you have to lift the string over. But I did it.

I have a bow made from I have no idea what that I got as a kid--I am curious as to what the poundage will be (the fiberglass bows Frank had, which I suspect are significantly bigger than mine, were like 25-30 pounds; legal minimum for hunting in WA is a bow with a 40-pound draw). I want to practice stringing that.

As for shooting, we will be doing "instinctive style," which means keeping both eyes open and focusing on the target--basic hand-eye coordination, the same way you accurately, say, throw a ball--rather than sighting down the arrow.

Because I have done some fencing, and because the foot placement is similar, I keep shifting my weight onto my back foot, something I'll have to overcome. [1]

* * * * * *

Dandelion and Dock Seeds

As I touched on, on Monday we went to a park in Issaquah to do some harvesting. It was quite wet and muddy, and the path was flooded in a couple of places, making it necessary for us to pick our way around the edges or balance on logs. Since my boots were ostensibly waterproof, I plunged in. And only one foot got a little damp.

We harvested dandelions and dock seeds.

According to Karen, dandelion greens are actually best in Fall, though most sources will tell you that they're best in Spring. And they're still a good Spring green, but they are better after those plants have gone to seed, and then sent up new leaves again in the fall rain; they tend to be less bitter.

Dandelions are a familiar plant, but there are many look-a-likes. Things to keep in mind when gathering:
--Dandelions have only a single stalk, which does not branch, and a ring of leaves at the base.
--Dandelion leaves may vary a bit in shape--some are more serrated than others, for instance, but they will always be [i]hairless[/i], on both sides of the leaf. Many similar species will have fuzz or hairs on their leaves, and can be distinguished from dandelion in this way.
--Don't go for the older leaves; they can get leathery and more bitter. Bigger isn't necessarily better here.
--Be nice to the plants, don't take every leaf off.

Later we made dandelion pesto, from blended-up dandelions, walnuts, olive oil, and parmesan cheese. It is still a bit bitter for my tastes; I will have to get used to that and expand my palate.

As for dock seeds, those are a good fall and winter food, because they will remain on the stalk for a long time. They can be very easily harvested by just running your closed fist up the stalk and stripping the seeds off that way. They don't have a very strong taste, but they are nutritious, and can be used like a grain, ground for flour, etc.

Some pictures from GIS:

Dock seeds on a stalk:

A bunch 'o dock seeds in someone's hand:

As you can see, they are pretty small, but numerous.

The actual seed part is hard to see there; the seeds have three leafy-looking "wings." You can crush them all up and winnow those parts out, or just grind it all and get some extra fiber in your diet.

We mixed ground dock seeds with equal parts flour and made crackers out of them.

I had never made crackers, and it was fun, and they were certainly a great deal better than store-bought. Making crackers is pretty simple--mix up flour, a little bit of oil, some salt, and some water, enough so that the dough sticks together, but it shouldn't be very moist at all. Then you roll it out thin, cut it into desired shapes, and stick it in the oven for about 12 minutes, watching to make sure they don't burn.

The end.

This has been a busy week. This weekend we had a "Backyard Blacksmithing" workshop, taught by Howard Schwartz. We learned how to make our own small forge for about 50 bucks (you can, for instance, get a cheap hair dryer and use that as your "bellows.")

Choice quotes by our instructor included: "I carry at least three knives with me at all times. And that's in the city!"

In his day job, he's a criminal defense attorney, and he basically just taught himself this stuff.

We made knives out of files. This involves filing the file into the appropriate shape, after annealing it (heating it and then sticking it into vermiculite to let it cool slowly; this softens the metal so you can work with it), then heating it up in the forge (which was essentially a metal bucket filled with cement and charcoal) to cherry-red and quenching it in oil. If you are lucky the oil catches on fire.

The filing was by far the most time-consuming part, and I was worried that I wouldn't finish mine before we moved into the heat-treating phase, but I did--some finished much earlier than I did. Our whole class was ahead of the typical schedule, and, apparently, was not as frighteningly stupid as some previous classes, who would do things like attempt to reach into the fire (yes, with their hands) in order to adjust their red-hot piece of metal.

Once this was done we stuck the blades into boiled antlers, for the handle. Mine was so pithy that I could just shove it on to the tang with my hand; others had to use a mallet, and even then couldn't necessarily get it all the way on.

Apparently, instead of soaking antlers for about a month so that they become soft enough to do this, you can just boil them for about half an hour. They also do not smell disgusting this way.

The next day we made sheaths out of leather; I finished sewing mine today.

Oh, and we also made flint-strikers. Again, out of files (this time thin round ones). This was fun, because we got to pound the metal with hammers, twist it with pliers, etc. I would like to play around with red-hot metal some more.

Anyway, if it wasn't clear, a flint-striker is the piece of steel that you strike against a rock, in order to make sparks, with which you light a tinder bundle and start a fire. We practiced this a bunch, and I got 2 or 3 individual sparks over... a long period of hitting steel and rock together. I continued to practice with a few people after it got dark, and then, attempting to pull a chair over to sit down on, I tipped over the motor oil we'd quenched our blades in. I felt both stupid and guilty about this, but most of it ended up on the pavement, and we cleaned it up, removing the oilified soil.

Yesterday we started late--at 11:30 instead of 9, because we had had very long days that weekend; Saturday was 7:30 am to like 9 pm, and Sunday was just as early--and Karen made us some acorn and elk soup, from the acorns we harvested earlier. It was really tasty, a good fall thing. Mmmm, elk.

Anyway, for the remainder of the day we made elderberry jelly, from elderberries we harvested last week. Elderberries are a useful food source, though some guides will say otherwise--they have hydrocyanic compounds (think "cyanide") in the seeds (and other parts of the plant), which can be toxic, but which can be destroyed by cooking or drying the berries.

Keep in mind that many other domestic food plants also have these same toxic compounds in their seeds--apricots and apples, for example. In fact, there may be a relationship between their toxicity and the fact that so many are food plants for us--those hydrocyanic compounds serve as insecticides and also deter grazing animals. However, humans can easily make the plants edible by cooking them. So if you raise plants with this toxin in them, they are less likely to be eaten by other animals, and you'll get a greater yield.

I want to make crepes and put the elderberry jelly on them. :) Karen suggested cattail pollen crepes, which sounds awesome (they become bright yellow and the cattail pollen gives a rich, nutty flavor), but, wouldn't you know it, I don't have any cattail pollen. And it is nowhere close to the season to gather them.

Today we practiced making fire, with our flint strikers. And I did it!!!!! I was so proud. I was having a hard time with the pieces of obsidian and something-else that I had--you need a sharp edge to strike the metal against, so Frank brought out a piece of English flint, went over to the end of the yard, and struck off a bunch of pieces for us. They were glorious, so sharp and they keep an edge much longer than obsidian, which is crumbly. Some of the pieces were beautiful, too, and had green mossish stuff on the other side. We also took a few smaller shards which can be used as blades.

Anyway, the very first time striking against flint, I got a spark. It took a rather longer time to actually ignite something, though.

You can't just strike the sparks right into tinder, because... well, good luck. Let's put it this way: Frank, our instructor, is excellent at this method of fire-making. All he had to do was hit the steel against the rock a couple times, and voila, flame. ( And I think he was actually disappointed, because he didn't make it work in one. He says that should be our goal.) But he has never managed to make a fire by getting the sparks into tinder.

What you need is char-cloth, which is... cloth that has been charred. This can be made by heating up strips of cloth in a tin with a hole in the top, so that they char but don't combust. You hold bits of char-cloth against the rock, near where the spark emerges, and with luck the spark will go into the char-cloth and a little ember will get going. At this point you can put the char-cloth into your tinder bundle, and fire happens!

I rule. Of course if I get cocky about it I will probably never make it work again.

Today we also worked on our herbariums a bit (pressed plant samples), and then gathered stinging nettle. A lot of stinging nettle. For cordage, mostly, because they aren't really good for eating at this time of year, but are perfect for cordage.

My fingers are all tingly and numb and the numbness is moving up my hands. D: Supposedly they sting even worse in the spring.

I will try to include pictures in the future, some of my classmates are snapping pictures incessantly and there is talk of a group flickr account. I hope this journal is of interest to people, it's really hard for me to know how coherent or interesting this sounds, in this format.

My dad's response, when I told him I made fire today: "Good."

I cannot mess with my knife for another month, because it still has to set in the handle. Aw.

Yesterday we went out on a harvesting field trip. We harvested stalks of a plant called dogbane, also known as "Indian Hemp," which is excellent for making cordage. We also harvested some black elderberry, just by the side of a road. Near the bottom of a slope, by a barbed-wire fence, was a long-dead skunk. It was pretty much dessicated jerky-like hide, some hair, and the skull. I took the skull and am going to bury it so that it's cleaned off.

We also gathered white-oak acorns. On the trip over, there were delicious acorn muffins, made from acorn flour from the acorns we shelled (i.e. smashed open with rocks) the day before.

This weekend we are learning basic blacksmithing. We have been cautioned to avoid synthetic clothing when standing near the forge, so that we do not catch on fire.

I am kind of preoccupied with dead animals. That probably sounds fucked up. I view it as an outgrowth of my love for animals, fascination with anatomy and biology--I often spend time daydreaming what it would be like to be another animal, imagining myself in their body and doing their activities--and desire to be close to them. Because wild animals are wild and don't want anything to do with you, you can in some ways know them more intimately when they're dead. Know their physical forms, of course. Their behavior is sort of...limited at that point, unless you count flopping around as a behavior. Or scratching you with their very sharp talons post-mortem.

Also the human fascination with death, eternity, etc. My poetry manuscript deals with specimens, the ethics of preservation, and so on (and how preservation also works with regards to memory, art, etc. I dunno, it's still taking form). The paradoxes and moral ambiguities and complexity of dealing with animals, alive and dead. Because I am very concerned with the ethics of it all.

In the PSAP (what I will call the Primitive Skills Apprenticeship Program for convenience's sake), we are instructed to have respect for the lives we take, to give thanks. I am more at the point where I am trying to find it acceptable to take them in the first place, to not feel guilty, to feel as though I deserve it at all, than of thinking I'm somehow entitled to take what I want from nature.

Similarly, a number of years ago I tried to take an Avian Specimen Preparation Class--preparing dead birds for as research specimens for a museum--and couldn't do it. I did not feel comfortable dealing with birds that may have been collected (i.e. killed for the purposes of having them as specimens) rather than salvaged. I think I was vegan at this time, I was vegan for a number of years as well, starting when I was 16. Now I'm not even vegetarian. But I do feel guilty about it!

Anyway, I got over that and took the class a few years later. Found it fascinating and satisfying, but frustrating as well, due to my slowness. I ended up dropping the class, because I was having "personal difficulties" at the time. Shortly before leaving Ann Arbor I started doing avian spec prep again. Which I should have started doing as soon as I arrived, dammit!

Now I am doing it yet again for a 3rd museum. My skills are improving. It's interesting to see how every place has their different techniques and idiosyncracies.

When I mention this to people, they often say, Oh, taxidermy!

What I do is not taxidermy. What I do is skin a bird and put a stick with some cotton in it, then sew it up. The bird does not look remotely alive. If you are lucky, it looks like a dead bird. With cotton eyes. Taxidermy is considerably more elaborate than that.

You will hear more about my adventures in specimen preparation. And maybe, with luck, my adventures in taxidermy. I want to call around and see if anyone needs an apprentice/assistant, but I am kind of intimidated about cold-calling.

As I mentioned the earlier entry, I am enrolled in a "Primitive Skills Apprenticeship Program", where we learn traditional hunting and gathering skills.

Classes have just started, as of October 5th. I'm enjoying it very much, and am already learning a lot. One thing I like about the program is its very hands-on nature--we will not be learning about these things in theory, but putting them into practice, going out on trips to harvest things, and making things with them later.

I have studied these skills before, but in a book-and-notes sort of way. It's hard when there's no one to show you and no one to practice these skills with--you'd have to have a kind of motivation or learning style that I don't think I possess.

I was always obsessed with nature as a child--who knows why this is. My brother never seemed to have a particular interest, though we both had the same scientist parents, the same trips to Discovery Park and the zoo.

Starting in, I think, about sixth grade, I started to constantly daydream about "running away to the woods." I was inspired by books like "My Side Of The Mountain," where a kid runs away to the Catskills and lives in a hollow tree, and "Julie of the Wolves," where an Eskimo girl (so called in the book, I know this is not the preferred terminology now) lives with a wolf pack. I longed so much to go to a place that had never been touched by humans, that was completely wild. To go to the earth like it would have been before humans even existed. I felt that humans were destroying the earth, and was angry about it--I felt that the best thing would be for us to stop existing entirely. I can hardly express the beauty and the poignancy of my visions, love, and longing for that connection to nature.

As much as I longed to do this, I'm not sure that I truly believed it was feasible for a modern person to have those experiences. Then when I was 12 or 13 I took a summer class at the University of Washington. It was held in the Parrington Building, which at the time was painted pink, and which was the place where Theodore Roethke taught. I should mention, my mom introduced me to Roethke when I was about 9, and he became my favorite poet, and I started writing poetry myself.

I should really post some of my "early works" that I recently found again in a drawer. One is called "The Contrast," and starts something like, "Light is no savior from darkness/For darkness needs not a savior from." It sounded totally...pretentious isn't even the right word, I don't know what the right word is. But my expression was completely sincere.

I recently wrote a lyric essay which is told from the perspective of myself at different ages. And, really, I found myself having to tone the diction of the narrator's voice down, because it would not really be believable as like, a six year old. I really did talk and think that way though.

Anyway. We went out a lot to the Arboretum and such, and read numerous books. Saw some films, too. That course had an absolutely immeasurable impact on me, and some of those books still remain my favorite. Some included "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Life of a Cell, The River Why, and The Tracker (we also watched movies like Koyyaniqatsi, and one I forget the name of, a very 70s film where the last remaining patch of nature--in a floating space biosphere--is about to be destroyed due to lack of interest/funding. One of the crew members kills everybody else off in order to prevent this, and then goes insane and starts playing card games with robots. At least, that's what I remember.)

This last book was especially significant for me. It is the autobiographic story of a young boy (and his friend) in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, who are taught primitive skills, tracking, and awareness by an old Apache Indian man. The boys in the story were living my dream, doing what I thought was impossible. I knew then that I would eventually have to learn these skills.

I'd check out books on edible plants from the library, local guides, Euell Gibbons books, and lay on my stomach in our overgrown dog kennel, looking at plants in our yard and trying to find edible ones.

Blah de blah, school happens, life happens. I should mention I went to the Early Entrance Program at the UW and started college at 15, also of course an important experience. My first class was a tree ID class. :) I'm a person who is avidly interested in lots of things. I'd "forget" my connection to nature, how important that was to me, and then be reminded, promise I'd be more connected. Repeat.

After my MFA program I was looking for something to do. I didn't know what the fuck. I was considering joining the Peace Corps, teaching English in another country, moving to New Zealand and trying to do conservation work. I don't really want a job with paper and words, because I don't enjoy it that much and because I'm afraid it would burn me out, writing wise, to do that for a living. I want something hands on. Like, I would love to be apprenticed to a trade. I have had so many enthusiasms for different careers I never did. Actor, bodyguard, etc. Now I want to be a taxidermist.

Anyway, I googled and found this program. I wasn't doing anything else, had no attachments or obligations (it is a nine-month program), it was always something I had wanted, if not needed, to do, and the right time seemed like now.

For some context:

About 3 years ago I left the Seattle area, where I was born and raised, for Ann Arbor, Michigan to pursue an MFA in poetry. Now I'm back, because a) I am enrolled in primitive skills classes here, and b) King County contains spare rooms in my parents' house, where I can stay, because I am broke and unemployed.

In this program, we are learning about ethnobotany (native plants and their uses for food, medicine, and utilitarian purposes), primitive hunting and fishing methods, and all the skills that surround them. Some of my friends expressed an interest in hearing about what I was up to, so I thought I'd start this blog as an account of it, as well as other things going on in my life. Writing, art, thoughts, things I find fascinating, etc.

My interests: I have a lot of them. I am a big nerd who has to struggle to keep from excitedly foisting random bits of information onto people. My obsessions can shift around a bit. Current big interests include writing, of course, biology (especially birds and bugs), language, taxidermy, and visual art. For some reason I recently got a big desire to make visual art.

The public entries will likely be the redacted version. If you want a more intimate or detailed version, comment so I can give you access. (Uh, I probably will not, unless I already personally know you.) I am new to Dreamwidth and not really sure how that works, like if you actually need a Dreamwidth account. I don't think you do?

Let's begin.

Warning: I can be verbose and digressive. If you have suggestions about how I could break this up or arrange it to be more readable, let me know. I'm not really satisfied with this blog design.

And please, if you read my blog, let me know! Comment anonymously or something, I really want to know whether people are even interested in the first place, and who/how many people are reading it.

More recent entries are towards the top. This is post-dated so it will show up first.