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.
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.
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