Today I stumbled across Sara Bernard's blog (you can find the link on the side-bar under "Other Blogs" and entitled "Sara") in which there are many pictures of her adventures in Peru (and Haiti), including some of me and others working at PSF. Thus, I've been obsessing about Peru all day...

Still doing tons of reading, though I haven't been taking enough notes to really call it research. But I got 3 of my class books in the mail so far and am itching to dig into those. I realized today that I actually used one of them for my research last year.

EVENTUALLY I will actually write another blog for the Student Architects site (also listed on the side-bar). I have many topics to choose from to write about; my research from last year, my work in Peru, my research now, or my program at school. This is something I should have done over break. I'm gonna be gone the next 2-3 days and then only have the weekend before the new quarter starts. Then the real chaos commences. I'm thinking of picking up a couple more hours at work to save for my trip. And last night Annie reminded me that I can apply for scholarships. DUH. That would make this so much easier. So I need to get on that too.

Its never-ending, but I love it.

Now back to packing for Baker.

Dumb question.

I got about 2 minutes of climbing before Tyler pulled me off the tiny wall in Feathered Friends yesterday. I dunno, he's worried about me falling and re-injuring my ankles or something ridiculous like that. *sigh* he's right though; I really shouldn't push it (and I was climbing in street shoes). But, I'm seriously going insane without physical activity; already sick of push-ups and I've only done all of about 10. Running isn't ankle rehab. What do other climbers do when they are out of commission? Finger exercises? Check. Visualization? Double check. Looking at climbing pictures, movies, books? Check, check, check. Shopping for a crash pad? OH YEA. Speaking of, I am looking into getting an Organic (Organic Climbing Co). All the reviews say even though they cost more, the extra money is totally worth it because they are hand-made to-order with materials from the US and with personalization options based on buyer's color and style preferences. AND supposedly they last longer than most of those big name companies. Any other crash-pad shopping insights out there? One of the main selling points of Organic for me is that the foam they use is soy-based. Trust me, I know there are many many many downfalls to using soy products, but after seeing first-hand the process of making standard foam when we visited Dow Chemical with NYSC, it seems an intelligent trade-off to make in a circumstance. Besides, from all the chemicals they were putting into the machine at Dow I was fairly convinced they were creating their very own Rocky Horror instead of foam. And although Rocky wouldn't be terrible to find next to you on the mattress, I'm not sure his rock-hard abs make the cut for high-ball landings, or even small ones. (And ick, I can't believe we sleep on those chemicals!)

Oh dear...
As you can probably gather, my mental processes aren't working at full capacity so I think I am gonna go shower, eat, then fix up a bike and ride it into town to meet Emily and go to the soccer party. Hopefully my ankles won't mind, and surely the rest of my body will love it. And if it is dry enough, there is no guarantee that I won't stop at the rock wall for a few. Low stuff only, I promise; I just gotta keep my arms up to strength so I'm not totally scrambling when I get back at it full speed ahead.

My ankles aren't fractured!
Which is great!
but uhhh, what's wrong with them then?!
Whatever it is, I am supposed to do lots of stretches and strengthening exercises. Oh, and not climb for at least another month. I just can't re-stress the injury or its gonna keep setting me back. So if I do top-roping only then I can't land on my ankles and I'm good to go. Problem: no top-roping at Evergreen. Solution: Get a month membership at The Warehouse. Problem: I need another person to top-rope. Solution: Who's with me?


Oh, and I need to decide whether I am going back to Peru for Spring quarter, or next Fall. In the meantime, I need to figure out who is coming with me (or not); write my academic contract so I can get credit while working and researching in Pisco; look for places to stay when I spend time rock climbing in Lima.

I've been reading a pile of books since break started, mostly thinking further about appropriate technology and the influence of NGOs. I was also looking through my notes from camp and struck gold on a potential idea. Simply stated, the material inputs needed for the process I am looking into are biproducts that are available in Pisco. I would need to know how to harvest and combine them for this use. But I am no chemist. This is one of the reasons I am considering going next Fall; I could potentially get many of my scientific questions answered at NYSC this summer, and maybe even find someone who is interested in coming with me. Though... I'd be leaving for Peru shortly after camp (hopefully) and its hard to find people that spontaneous.

Another reason I am considering postponing the trip is so I can take a chemistry, or woodworking, or otherwise Pisco-relavent course (on top of the Designing Green design-build program) during Spring quarter.


On a more certain note:
I adore being at home! My family is just wonderful, and I am relishing down-time ...if you can call it that; I'm always working on something. I just mean I enjoy NOT having deadlines pressing down on me 24-7. So, apart from reading and research I have been hand-making creative gifts for my family, and teaching myself how to play the banjo. ^_^ AND I already ordered my books for next quarter which I can hopefully starting flipping through next week.

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our
response lies our growth and freedom." - Viktor E. Frankl

I trust most people I know with my heart... and that continually seems to turn into a mistake. Unfortunately it is the only way I know how to live, and it is something I believe in... to give someone trust until they give you a reason not to, and even then, to do your best to forgive them, or be understanding about the situation.

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but it just keeps getting harder.

"goodness is more important than greatness, compassion is more important than passion."

"sleight of hand can't separate your body from the dirt its standing on today." -Modest Mouse

but I guess nothing can.

Woodworking... 5:30-9:30 Monday OR Tuesday.

Do I dare take on 4 more credits?

Oh, wait. Its only for Spring Quarter. Guess that's a no.


So, Intermediate Spanish is probably a no as far as my skill level. But I could audit Spanish Beginning 2 again, because Arleen is teaching it. I'm sure she'd be cool with that. Sweet, then I can just show up to class when I can. Yes! I shall email her.

And I could take Ballet! Oh, I am so tempted. It is only two credits and it meets Wednesday between when I have class and work (so some of my climbing time...)

Think, think, think.

Oh, I just want to do everything!

"The rose grows thorns so that it can be looked upon but not touched. Yet we who deem ourselves worthy approach it and give what we feel are gentle caresses of love and wonder; we dethorn it and give it chemicals to stave off intruders we are jealous of, and transplant and grow it, and use it to show our own purposes. Though all the while the rose cries silent and dreams of a garden filled with the fragrance and blossoms of its own kin."

I am not only sick of, but also heartbroken by how much neglect, ignorance, laziness, stupidity and irresponsibility we allow to persist in ourselves as individuals.

One of my friends posted on facebook this morning saying "I am the luckiest girl alive today because that cop didn't give me a DUI."
No, she is lucky she didn't fucking kill anyone last night. I don't know how drunk she was, but if she thinks she deserved a DUI, then she was drunk enough to not be driving. I am discouraged about things like this. I'm just starting to wonder if the majority of people just don't think, or if they don't care, or if they just don't realize that being alive in this day, in this country, comes with responsibilities that we must begin considering. And we must also consider that our intentions, and actions, and in-actions, have a profound effect on the other lives we share this world with.

I am empowered to see people here at Evergreen taking responsibility for their roles in this world. Trevor Van Dyke, a fellow writing tutor, is one of my heroes. He is constantly working toward equality in human/human, human/animal relationships. He has bettered himself by removing all animal products from his diet (including honey). He attends and participates in probably daily meetings with such groups as Amnesty International, Student Union, ect. I go to his facebook and the first thing I see is his newsfeed:

well I'm no cook (yet) but I might as well start trying stuff out especially if I want to continue enjoying meals and quit living off vegi pizza, side salads, and mushroom burritos.

Tonight I made
cous cous
with
vegetarian field roast sausage.

I am enjoying it for sure, but there are some conflicting flavors because the cous cous is Mediterranean flavor and tastes great by itself, and the sausage has its own strong flavor --its a bit appley-- so next time, I will switch that up. But the textures combined are enjoyable and since I can't really depend on cous cous as a meal in itself (though I have been) it was good to add a bit of something to it. For instance, protein. YAY.
And if I continue to climb like I have been recently (amazingly, if I do say so myself) then I should probably start keeping track of my diet more closely, especially my protein intake.

Oh, by the way, thanks to everyone who has been providing me with answers to my vegetarian questions. And thanks to everyone who has made me food on many occasions when I was too overwhelmed/weak/tired to do it myself (mainly, that would be Eric!).

the "enemies" are not people.


"the other" does not exist.


the enemy is in ourselves if we allow it to be.

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."

-Edward Abbey


Enemies?

Man, it was great to see Ben (Joselyn) last night. We talked about so much that has been on our minds. And I finally felt like someone understood what I was saying, and really wanted to hear it. Sometimes when I have discussions with people I generally agree with, I feel like I am wasting time, ya know, preaching to the choir. But I guess I really needed assurance this time, that all the crazy things in my mind actually hold some merit. And talking to him helped me believe that. This break has been great for some introspection. I have written so much in my journal now that I have had the brain-space to work through some of what has been building up in there. This is going to be a long blog, but please read it, and do so carefully.

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Ben and I discussed individuality, and how we have all gotten so caught up in looking out for ourselves that we don't remember how reliant we are on the rest of humanity (and all of nature, really) and vice versa. We forget until we look at the stars, and then we think "oh damn, i really am small." But even still, it seems like we don't recognize what that means. It means that all the petty things we worry about in our individual lives are quite unimportant. I don't meant to say we should disregard our individual experience, but perhaps we can creatively use it to affect the collective experience more positively.

I have just been reading people's blogs and tumblr accounts, watching people's statuses on facebook, observing the suicide rate in the country (especially amongst young adults), and I am just sick of it -- that everyone feels so worthless. That people feel the need to be in a relationship, or buy something, or look like someone in order to feel worth anything.

Ben and I were talking about how, perhaps, we feel so useless in what we are doing in our lives that we have to create problems for us to fix. We have to feel needed by something or someone because we don't feel needed in the world. I will come back to this later. There are also problems that we don't necessarily create, but that we allow to perpetuate. People get depressed because of the state of the world, but then it seems we perpetuate that state by not resolving the pattern in ourselves, but instead, seeing the current state as the only option and accepting that it already is how it has to be. But if we adopt the pattern in our self then we only further the pattern and further our unhappiness with the state of the world, and with ourselves.
"X's father has had a hard life; he's seen some pain, and he is starting to drink more. But its damaging to X to see his father getting drunk. And X is so scared by this image of his father getting drunk that X wants to forget it, so X goes and gets drunk too. Then X feels like shit for resorting to that which he hates in order to escape that which makes him upset."

How do we stop this pattern. There is a psychology about people that often makes them emulate what they have always seen. But there was a place where the pattern started, and it can be broken anywhere, and it can be for better or worse. I don't have the answer but I think it has to do with decisions of the individual AND of the collective...

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Ben and I discussed the education system, particularly in the valley, and we noted how unhappy the majority of people here are. There is no reason this has to persist, but it will if nothing changes. We live in a beautiful place where there are so many opportunities for experiential education, and yet we are sitting in a concrete building regurgitating information, not applying it our lives, and feeling utter useless in the process.

One of the most prominent things I remember from my high school is staring out the window of a classroom at a snow-speckled Mount Si and wondering why the heck I felt like I prisoner. "The mountain is right there, it is a beautiful day, why am I inside learning the word for snow in Spanish, when I could be on the mountain experiencing it." Why couldn't we have been learning the word for snow in Spanish while playing in the snow?

It is bigger than this though because we have (maybe not purposely, but definitely) been conditioned to think of school as separate from the real world. How could this not happen when the real world is so disregarded in education? The school couldn't acknowledge the reality of the world. We couldn't even have Homecoming hallway competitions because the school became so collectively afraid of internal opposition. But then we are still encouraged to take the PSAT and try to get the highest score so we can become National Merit Scholars. If you get in a certain top percentile your picture goes right in the main hall of MSHS. Not only does that encourage competition, but it also rewards a certain learning style, or (in this case) the ability to take multiple choice exams, which is completely different than having a particularly good understanding of the material in those exams. So we are also being encouraged to figure out how to best the system such that the school gets collectively high scores, which obviously demonstrates the ability of teachers to teach, and the ability of students to learn from these teachers. That is ludicrous and its a pile of shit. I was looking through my portfolio of work from Earth Science 9th grade and I just about cried. I wasted so much of my life copying key terms word for word from the text book, because if you miss the word "is" when writing the definition for what the mantle of the earth is then you miss the point for the whole sentence. I think I remember the first time we peer graded our key terms the teacher would read the definition word for word and people would ask "what if they wrote it this way instead?" and she would say "was that exactly what I said? If not, then its wrong."

You know what I see here? An expectation that all students will learn the complexity of what something means by writing a stream of individual words, making sure it looks exactly like the book, which is completely false. An expectation that the book is correct and that if we all conform to what it says then we all must be right. Whats really going on? Laziness. The teacher doesn't have to deal with any variation. The student doesn't have to worry about developing their own way to present the definition. Basically no one is using their brain.

Now that's an extreme example, and perhaps the valley is an extreme example in general, but it is my experience, and it is the experience of thousands of students who go through the valley school system (except the lucky one's who were smart enough to go to Two Rivers, the alternative school where you are put in classes not based on grade level or graduation requirements, but on individual understanding of and interest in a particular subject).

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Ok, now I seem to be contradiction myself.

A) We should stop being so caught up in the individual because we get so caught up in our own lives and forget about the rest of the struggles in the world.

B) We need to consider the individual in order to create the most effective and enjoyable method of education.

Yup. Both.



Like I was saying before, perhaps the root of so much of this unhappiness is that we don't feel necessary or useful. We desperately hold on to the boy who made us feel needed and wanted because there is nothing else that makes us feel that way (and then we get so caught up in our own unhappiness that we over-exaggerate the individual situation we are in and forget about everything or everyone else). Even if there is something else that we are interested in, we don't feel empowered to be involved because we have been copying useless things from textbooks rather than honing individual skills and working toward a place where we have the knowledge and ability to be involved, which is the very thing that could give us a greater sense of purpose, and allow us to see how trivial the "drama" really is.

If the ability to find and hone those things that really ignite our souls could be built into the education system, then school and reality wouldn't have to be so disconnected from each other. Students wouldn't feel like prisoners, wouldn't have to create drama in order to have something to work toward, and would probably be happier.

Additionally, there is a sense of community that emerges when everyone's sense of individuality is empowering to them. The person in their own self is happier because they are doing something they enjoy (eliminating the very compensation of self-consciousness that drives the diminishing of others). And because everyone is doing something individual everyone has something to share with one another. And because it is more geared to personal interests they are probably excited to share. This creates interaction and allows for connections to be made. The connections that are made (which in my experience at Evergreen are pretty much endless) will then allow students to see how each of their interests/disciplines/focuses interact and rely on each other. This creates community AND empowers individuals.

In this way it is possible to embrace individuality (which is real and important), without allowing individuality to become petty or SO individual that we forget who we rely on and who relies on us.

(Oh, this is all so very simplified and roughly laid-out, and I know that. I am just drawing the from examples I have been observing recently, most of which surround people ages 13 to 21, but assuredly extends to people of all ages.)

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Read it again:


A Ritual to Read Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep."
-William Stafford

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There is a note to myself in my phone a while back. It says "individual liberty destroying collective liberty." This is something I want to explore further when I pick this subject back up later. It is related to this idea of entitlement too.

I don't think I can continue with these now because I have been writing for hours, there is actually homework to be done tonight, and I need some feedback before I write about this more. So I am hoping that somebody makes a thoughtful response to this post. What has it brought up for you? Do you disagree with any of it? Do you want to talk about a particular aspect in more depth? Anything else?

climbing = joy

Peru = joy

suddenly finding 500 places to climb in Peru = I'm pretty much exploding with joy right now

gonna need to change.

a ritual
a ritual
a ritual
a ritual

a pattern
a pattern
a pattern that others made
a pattern that others made

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

maybe the root of all cruelty
maybe the root of all cruelty

THOUGH WE COULD FOOL EACH OTHER
Though we could fool each other
Though we could fool each other
we should consider
we should consider

it is important
it is important that awake people be awake
be awake
be awake

or a breaking line may
or a breaking line may
or a breaking line may
or a breaking line may discourage
discourage
discourage
may discourage them


if you don't know
if you don't know
if you don't know the kind of person I am
and
I don't know
and I don't know the kind of person you are



a pattern
a pattern
a pattern that others made may prevail
may prevail

if you don't know
and I don't know

if
may
if
may
if

cats are lovely too. i love my cats too.



^_^

everyone feels this
everyone feels this
everyone feels this
everyone feels this
everyone feels this


get up, and go do something else.

...

i miss my dogs.

fuck.
Anger.
[Fuel. I can't wait to climb tomorrow. I am going to be so strong tomorrow.]

I needed a window into your soul, and I found it tonight. It's been out there all along, just hidden.


I want to scream at you. EVERYONE DREAMS THE WORLD TO BE DIFFERENT! Anyone can dream...
Pick yourself up! FIND A WAY!
DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

I can't. say anything. I have to allow you to feel this. I have to let you find your own way...

But I love you so much. I love you so much. I love you so much. I love you so much. I fucking love you. I wish I could feed that to you. I wish I could make you better.

...I know better than that...

How do I get you to hear me?

I don't.