A week ago: Flight notes

Morning

It is not early, but my bleary self is still on Pacific time. I don't make tea at home, but Christine fixes my usual breakfast for me. I purchase tea at the airport, sloshing my way to my seat. Middleaged mess, the graduate student next to me finishes reading Fellowship of the Rings and chats up the blonde college student.

Health note: the acute discomfort of the psoriasis in the morning does fade within two hours of waking. Caffine chasing it away?

Takeoff

The plane circled the South Bay, spiraling up in altitude, as I picked out familiar landmarks. And what a landscape! My heart opens to it as I think of each name: the mountain peaks, highways, bays, points, creeks. Most beautiful in the early morning light are the tawny velvet hills east of San Jose. The crazy folds make me think of loose fabric, the loose folds of skin on a hound. Yet there's something taut and toned about those folds, muscular but not hard.

I love living in this landscape.

The Sierra

Lakes - the dammed landscape - are inky bots on the high granite plane. Some snow lingers on eastern faces, gleaming in the dawn, and the eastern slopes are green, not sere, the melt, perhaps, staving off the effects of the dry summer. We must have gone a bit north of Yosimite: I miss seeing Mono lake's strange reflectivity at the base of the steep escarpment.

Now it's basin & range, mysterious arrays of man made fixtures, and human lines intersecting the fractal bifurcations of water sculpted deltas draining to desert from the hills.

Oh. My. God.

The grad student has essentially elicited a therapy level family history from the college student.

I think the crying kid would be easier to block out. This kid clearly needs compassion and help. But, sheesh.

--- A week later ---

Later, when the conversation dwindled half way across the country, i was able to appreciate the new physics grad student's willingness to just listen to this young woman. She clearly did need to talk to a good friend, and it wasn't clear that there was anyone in her life who was reliable and supportive. He also mentioned his wife as wife a good number of times, a useful signal that his interest was simply being sociable.

My "chatting up" was my own sense of the greater gulf in age between me and he than he and her speaking out.

Reading this and thinking about my reflection on Friday, i recognize that i am trying hard to see me as i am, not the me i have in my minds eye. When i was starting high school, i remember that i couldn't wait to be thirty, and time flew -- especially in the catatonia of grad school -- and soon i had overshot the thirty year old mark. I think i still hold myself in mind at thirty. Despite my sense on Friday that i am at ease recognizing the visible signs of being over forty, the edge in my comment about the grad student chatting up the young woman (who was not, as i imagined, a college student from the Bay area returning to the south east) reveals to me that i am not as comfortable as i think i am.

Audience

Showing my photos to my mom, she exclaimed i ought to find a gallery to show them; while showing her the crochet, she urged something else (which i cannot remember).

I do post to the world : flickr, ravelry, my own blog, youtube, here. I try to find ways to share with my family. (6 x 8 Photo book is currently $20 at Wolf photo, i note.)

I'm not active in finding an audience and it's been on my mind for the past few days, partly inpired by Joe Decker's comment about re doing his website and hiding the majority of photos so that the few photos people look at are truly the best.

Curation take time.

Cultivating an audience takes time.

And then i wonder, why, why should my vision and observation and stories and play demand attention in this time of attention demands? There's some tension in this question, some false premise. I stare out the window and can sense a game being played, imagine a hardboiled egg and the shell coming off in some sensual strip tease, and i'm not sure for what it's a metaphor. I don't need to strip more shell off myself, do i? And i will admit, i'd love the landscape of my imagination to be explored, but i get so lost in that space that i can't imagine acting as a guide.

And that, perhaps, is the best understanding i have: the landscape of my curiosity is so vast, i can barely keep track of where i've been and where i've going. I don't claim it's any more vast than average, but others seem to curate their selves more carefully, sculpting clear public facets.

I think of Joe's <a href='http://digital-photography-school.com/6-winning-ways-to-work-wide">advice about shooting with wide-angle lenses</a>: when framing the vast landscape, there's also foreground detail that needs to be composed. When someone asks me the open ended question of, "So what's up?" my foreground focus turns to time pressure or work pressure, where others naturally turn away (disinterest or lack of a place to engage). I don't have the near ground story that leads into the wilds. I probably get to lost myself to curate.

Quick Log Notes

Drove R-E to work and back yesterday, by way of her mechanic. She moves in a week or so. I regret not being more social and yet simply being both colleague and neighbor may not be enough grounds for a bond.

Christine prickled on a local GIS list. Her prickling was for a good cause, but i obsess about the "self sabotage" such prickling could be. I recognize that i shy away from net-confrontation... and i wonder about gender socialization and the deep motivation i have in wanting to be respected. She is far more the crusader. She is willing to take the risk of being alone, i worry about her being alone.

Mr E slipped out into the night yesterday, after a days of managed outing in harness on the deck, and one afternoon excursion when he stayed on the deck when called. He returned this morning, 6:45 ish, slipping back into the bedroom to his corner of the bed.

I spent last night obsessively updating one of my blogs to the latest Wordpress. Two more to update. I think the behavior was a reaction to the first time i could loose myself in such a task since the days of dyebaths over the Fourth. There's a zone i slipped into, but i resent the time it took. I shouldn't: the zone is a healing place to be. Yet the outstanding Things To Do (upgrading wordpress not on that list) prick my conscience.