"I was lead astray by artful and designing persons."

The above is attributed to my grandfather, who responded thusly to a question about why he started smoking at the age of 15 - he stopped more than fifty years ago, but I never knew he had started so young. In any case, it's that kind of wit and whimsical speech that I do remember from growing up. Nobody talks like he does.

I had my own small bout of wit this evening - we decided (given that it was a gray and foggy day, with storms to come in the next few days, leading to an atmosphere of tea and lots of soup) to cook the enormous turkey that had been in the freezer for the past month or so. So, the turkey was cooked and it felt like Thanksgiving, but with only three people and not huge appetites, a lot was left on the carcass - so I offered to break down the bird as well as I could  into various plastic containers - one for pieces that were good for sandwiches (dark and white), some for soup, bones in another container for soup, etc. In any case, I have never broken down a turkey before. I was there with my one hand half inside the thing, the other one slippery on a carving knife and I muttered to my dad, "I feel somewhere between a surgeon and a serial killer," which he deemed quite astute for that kind of carving.

A lovely, lovely evening.

Gray Skies

It's slowly turning into evening on a gray day when it feels like the sun was never really out, so it hardly makes sense that it would set. I spent the last few hours sitting in the Companion Bakeshop, a lovely café here in Santa Cruz where it seems to be a requirement that all the workers are young, female, and willowy with drapey gorgeous clothing and stunning scarves hanging gently around their necks. The coffee is from one of the best coffee roasters on the West Coast (in my opinion - Blue Bottle Coffee Co.) and the bread at this bakery is also one of the loveliest parts of Santa Cruz eating. I got myself a loaf of their classic rye bread - all rye flour (usually rye is mixed with wheat, since otherwise, the bread is quite dense - but I love dense bread!) plus some sunflower seeds and caraway seeds - it feels like a brick, and I love it.

When I was at the café, I was working on a presentation that I'm going to give next week up at Mills about the Budapest math program. It's fun, going through my old notes and pictures and trying to decide what's the most important to say or tell or show, what I would have liked to know before going, what would have made me want to apply. It's also neat just to remember being there. It's only been about two months or a bit less since I was there, but it feels really far away. Earlier this week I got to visit with some friends that I knew there, and that was especially cool - they knew me in that context, and then suddenly they were in Berkeley, but we still had all of these Budapest memories in common. Very surreal.

And of all things, right now, I am trying to remember a fact that just won't come to me (yet). Last night, the rolfer told me that I looked just a bit like the main girl in a certain film - and understand, I never get told that I look like anyone. So, naturally, I wanted to look it up when I got home. However, by the time I got home, I was just so thrilled with the intro to rolfing that I completely forgot the name of the film. My brain tells me it was a one-word title, and a name at that - and I think that name started with a G. However, after just scrolling through Wikipedia's list of films that begin with G (yes, such a thing exists), I haven't yet found it. G might be wrong. I don't want to let it go, so I'm going to keep looking!

Holy ****, I just got rolf'd!

Rolfing. Yes, it's a word. I didn't know it was a word a few months ago. Rolfing. By a Rolfer. What is it? Well, where massage is for muscles and chiropractors are for bones, rolfing is for tissues - specifically, the tissues that hold in the muscles. The casing, if you will. The idea being that habitual movement forms our tissues in certain ways and therefore our muscles in certain ways - sometimes for good, sometimes for not so good.

I've had issues with my hips for many many years. Perhaps the word 'pelvis' is more accurate. I've also had a good deal of massage and chiatsu done for someone my age, and had chiropractic work done to try and fix this hip stuff a long time ago - and it never really went away. Sometimes it was better, sometimes it was worse. Sometimes it was so bad that if I were lying flat on my back, I could not sit up directly. I frequently had to roll on to one side and ease myself up that way, since my lower back was so tight and knotted that I couldn't make it bend, curve so that I could sit. When I lie down to go to bed, my lower back usually feels like it's hovering, not sinking in to the mattress with the rest of me.

So, my dad suggested a rolfer. 1. maybe it will help. 2. This is Santa Cruz. And this is such a Santa Cruz thing. So, I went for my first session tonight - one third getting to know the rolfer (recommended by my father's yoga teacher), one third explaining my particular physical problems and her explaining what she would plan on doing for me if I wanted to work with her, and then a very short session of me just getting to know what rolfing really feels like, to see if it will be helpful for me. So, the first two thirds were quite enjoyable - nothing like explaining an ailment you have and having someone saying something new, insightful, and undeniably accurate in response. Not only that, but in just getting to know each other, we realized that one of the dancers that I admired most (still admire - but did so actively when I was dancing so much during high school) was her very own modern dance teacher (Bill T. Jones!!), which was a fun connection. And then - I think she said it ended up being only 12 minutes - of her figuring out what my body was actually doing and me feeling what rolfing was actually like.

And don't get me wrong - it's kind of painful, the same way massage can be. But I swear, I can feel it. She had me stand up halfway through, after she had worked on my right side, and had me tell her what I was feeling. I said that it felt like my right hip was floating. And she said, "yeah. It shouldn't have to be that much work to stand. What your left leg is still doing, do you feel that? " and I responded that my left side felt normal, and she chuckled and said. "Alright. Other side. Let's get you evened out." And I felt like I floated the entire walk home.

A few things I'm learning/realizing.

1. I really, really like that in Santa Cruz, "going to stare at the ocean" or "look at the water" is a completely legitimate way to spend time. And yeah, there are tourists coming through (I've only been here a month, I probably still fit into that category) but I really get the feeling that a lot of permanent residents still do that, too. As I think they should. My grandfather used to make a real art of it - clambering nimbly down the rocks we call rip-rap (enormous boulders or rocks that are real rocks, but fake in the sense that they weren't always where they are now - namely piled up at the tops of the beaches in Santa Cruz up against the cliffs, to help prevent erosion from the pounding waves) with a folding chair under one arm and a mug (not a travel mug!) of piping hot tea in the opposite hand. He'd find a space on the rock shelf flat enough to unfold the chair and he would sit, looking out over the tidepools to the ocean and drink his tea. I remember going with him and sitting on the ground, wondering how he could stare at it so long without talking, without doing something.

2.  I finally learned the difference between highway and freeway two days ago. Probably, most of you know it already, and it was one of those questions where the answer isn't all that interesting but the act of finally finding it out was very satisfying.

3. This probably won't come as a shock to a lot of my friends - I can envision them quite easily laughing at me as I write this, as if this were a surprise to no one but me  - almost everything makes me think of math. And it's not always the cheesy 'graph lines and functions appear, sketched over the image in front of my eyes' the way we see in movies (okay, sometimes it's like that) -- but it's also how cars move on the highway (the way we react to brake lights, the way the effect ripples backwards and how it changes depending on what caused it), and today, the way the sheet of clouds in the sky looked so incredibly aligned, like a razor blade of clouds slicing the horizon, and from underneath it looked so flat that if you could hang upside down from it, you could surf on that wave until you hit the sunset.

4. I miss math. It's only been about a month and a half since I was working with math every day (be it homework or class) but I miss it and it feels very far away. I know I can change that.

There should always be room to giggle in yoga class.

So, I've been dabbling in yoga since I got to Santa Cruz for many reasons. One, there's a beautiful and friendly yoga studio very close to where I am staying (the kind of studio where most of the people look like real people, the teachers aren't scary, and with that distinct Santa Cruz vibe), my father has been quite in to yoga lately and encouraged me in the endeavor, and it's the closest things to dance that I've done in a long time. I've had a small amount of trouble with my hips for many years (a bit of wonky things in the blueprint of my skeleton, but nothing major) and after stopping dance in college and starting working out and running, I realize that I've been doing all the things that make the muscles tight and nothing that helps them learn to relax or even just move slowly and purposefully. Plus, you know, I'm me. I kind of like that meditation/spiritual stuff. I'm not going to become a total yogahead (I made that up) but I certainly have appreciated how good I've felt after the classes I've gone to here.

So, as I think I've mentioned here before, it's also kind of fun to be doing something at which I am a complete beginner. Already at this stage of my life, I'm not starting that many completely new things. Though sometimes I feel a little ungainly and out-of-place, for the most part, I like the experience because almost everything I do can be considered progress from my current state.  So, I go to the beginning level (well, the level 1-2 class) and am learning things like the fact that breathing is more complicated than I thought, and that I don't think I've fully straightened my legs in years -- and learning that a lot of the wonky and amazing poses in yoga take the kind of core strength that crunches just don't give you. It's not the superficial (and I use that word with absolutely no judgement - I mean it in the strictest sense of the word, i.e. surface level) ab strength that we strive for in the gym - it's much deeper and much harder and ultimately the kind of strength that will save all of us with the potential for back problems, which will be most of my generation with all of our laptop-typing and chair-slouching. Basically, I'm learning a lot. And even though I know it's not supposed to be about being able to do the poses- it's about inhabiting wherever it is you are, being in yourself, etc. etc. That being said, it's still pretty cool when you can pull off some of these poses.

So, yesterday, I was in the 1-2 class and we were working on crow pose. Yeah, click that link. Look at this insanity. Also beauty. Also, difficulty. And though it might not look like it and I did not believe it for a while, this pose is not about arm and shoulder strength. It's about that crazy kind of core strength I mentioned. Now, on another good day, I managed to hold that pose for about five seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but boy was it cool! But different days are, well, different - and you notice. We approached this pose in a different way than I have before (different teacher than the other day) and the teacher was encouraging us to take risks, explaining different things to pay attention to in the pose and also on your way to it, and I was listening and trying to do everything and concentrating and getting distracted and all of these things -- and then, look at those pictures of the pose. What does it look like is about to happen, or could at the drop of a feather? Yep. That happened. I fell on my head.

Now, when I heard that clunk and tumbled over like I haven't since playing leap-frog as a kid, I thought I heard a few other clunks around the room, like maybe I wasn't the only one who had actually gone heels over head down to the floor. And then, from my dad next to me and also from the teacher up front ( I swear she had been looking right at me, damn it) I heard just a few soft giggles. "Falling shows a willingness to learn!" she said from the front, smiling, as I unfurled myself and rubbed my head. And surprisingly, I giggled, too. As someone who has had a lot of intense times with shame and embarrassment, she lead the class so well and there was such gentleness in the room around me that I felt the embarrassment for about one second, one long second where my cheeks burned - and then, I decided to try it again, and it was all gone.

Teachers are so important - and it's so cool to see one who's good at what they do. It's a strange thing to compare this teacher to Miklos, one of my professors in Hungary, but they each are very good examples of teachers - leave room for mistakes, put things just out of easy reach so that students have to grow, and be there in a non-intimidating way so that when things happen (including the mathematical equivalent of falling on your head), people aren't afraid to look you in the eye five minutes later.

The sky was stunning tonight.

Emily, at War

A few of you may know that many homes in California experience a very specific problem around this time of the year. even though CA is known for sunshine, warmth, and general laid-back attitude, apparently even the winter sun and warmth are not enough for the ants - and I don't think I've ever met an ant with a laid-back attitude, so that was never going to help. In winter, those tiny little buggers get a bit cold, a bit hungry, or maybe just a bit lazy and they try to get into any warm, dry, well-stocked house that they can manage. This house is no exception.

You'd think, that this year with the drought and the almost summer weather we've been having that the ants would at least not have such a fervor as they have in other years. Precisely the opposite. This year is the worst ant invasion that (according to my father) this house has ever seen.

And let me tell you, this has awakened something in me that I did not know I had. At first it was a little off-putting but not much more to see the tiny line of ants (they really do go marching one-by-one) triumphantly focused on that tiny bit of apple core that unhappily landed on the floor when I overzealously chopped it for a snack. But then, when you find them swarming - and I mean swarming - over the unlikeliest ingredients (dry pasta, a closed box of Kosher salt, for goodness' sake!!) when you open up the pantry in the morning, it becomes more than off-putting.

So what do you do? The first time, you gently wet a paper towel and wipe up the trail, looking in vain for the source of the line as it disappears into the wall. You feel relatively justified in your actions because, as Emily (in this story, you are Emily), you feel no guilt in harming outdoor creatures if they are on your turf, i.e. the house. Indeed, under most circumstances you will not even kill mosquitos outside (okay, unless they are mid-bite, in which case you're in the clear, because your body is clearly your turf). And water and smooshing - hardly a cruel way to kill them.

Except it doesn't kill them. The buggers are stronger and faster than they look and a wipe with the towel leaves them crawling on your arms seconds later, and miraculously, the towel is free of ant corpses. Not cool.

You try hand soap with only slightly better results. And finally - you grab that deadly, terrifying can of ant poison. I grabbed for it much faster than I ever thought I would. And wouldn't you know it - that stuff works. I almost always have to look away when I use it for several reasons: 1. the stuff smells terrifying and the poison isn't for ME and 2. When I watch, I see that its effects are awfully close to that of the cruciatus curse in Harry Potter (shudder) and I just feel like a horrible person. 3. Yes, the chemicals involved are terrible for everyone - ants, people, environment. I'm working on some more environmentally friendly but still deadly options.

But the desire to use that poison is palpable. All of a sudden, I'm muttering "die, die, die..." under my breath as it sprays out over the trails.

Two interesting side effects to this vendetta. Firstly, the most unpleasant: every hour of the day and most hours of the night (yes, even if I'm in San Francisco or Berkeley or the car or Safeway) I feel the creepy crawling sensation and am sure that if I were to look down, I'd find the tiny black bodies moving all over my own. Blechhhhhh!

Secondly, I find myself (particularly in the minutes before sleep) imagining, almost like a macabre parody of the children's movies I used to watch with mice or rabbits as protagonists, the scene in the ant hive - I imagine wounded workers trudging back, telling the tale of the horrible mist that came over them while they were harvesting the food. I imagine  dying ant by the side of the trail as they troop back into the house for more, and the one left behind cries, "Noo, don't! Go no further! Death awaits you..."

Creepy, I know. Still, it makes me smile just a bit. But you gotta do what you gotta do to protect your home.

---

I spared you a picture of these demons. I figured no one really wants to see a picture of swarming ants. You're welcome.

---

To get those thoughts out of your head (I am sorry :P) here is a video that in some ways reflects how I feel when I see a new battle on the horizon. It's also just a good laugh. Go ahead!

Sometimes, you end up sitting in the restaurant at the Four Seasons of San Francisco - a glass of wine offered to you the second you sit down at your individual table, because you happen to know someone who works there (an old math friend of mine). As luck would have it, you even like the music that is playing. There are so many worlds in this one world.

On the drive up to San Francisco today with my father, the road was awash with rain. Finally. (Keeping you posted on this restaurant thing - the tables look like marble but I can't imagine all of them are, because that would be ridiculous. The bathrooms are a collection of tiny individual bathrooms with the name of the hotel/resort embossed on the paper towels by the sinks. Every person that I've talked to (besides the friends of my friend) has called me 'miss' and in the little personal bowl of nuts that was just brought to me, there are curious green nuts that I can't quite figure out - wasabi somethings or pistachios? *crunch crunch* Huh. Neither. )

By this time of the year, there ought to have been around 30 inches of cumulative rainfall in this area. The showers over the last few days have lead to about 3.5 inches. The landscape is reacting so happily - patches of grass in the woods that were shriveled and dull were almost glowing green when I saw them yesterday. So, on this drive up Highway 1, there was more rain and wind than ever. Of course, the ground isn't all that used to the moisture and so it doesn't hold on to it very well - so plenty was on the road, so the drive was plenty interesting.

But to make it even more interesting, we listened to a podcast from Ram Dass (see here), a Harvard professor turned hallucinogenic drug researcher turned spiritualists and guru. And we talked about how some people actually live like that - we talked about how we each, academic as we may appear, think there probably is something to this whole "higher states of consciousness" thing. I know I love math - but my horizons are fairy broad. At sixteen, I attended an incredible ten-day silent meditation retreat. There is something to it, let me tell you.

I digress. The point is, some people live that way . Monastic lives, scholastic lives, lives as opera singers (I watched the Met simulcast of Rusalka this morning - fantastic!) and rockstars, as fishermen and soldiers and stay-at-home moms and diplomats. As people who frequently drink a glass of Zinfandel at the Four Seasons.

The complexity and variety of lives in this world is just one of those things that's a bit too big to understand fully for any length of time. Like the fact that each person's life is as complicated and important to that particular person as mine is to me. Too much to hold in your mind for long - like the spaciousness and infinite-ness of infinity.

--

Sitting alone and drinking wine makes me think, and I chose to write just a little bit as well. My friend's coworkers attacked me with food that I was not allowed to pay for, and there was simply no way I could get through it on my own- steak tartare, delicious olives (served warm....beautiful), curried cauliflower... Not a bad way to spend an evening.

Rainy days are for fire.

Small adventures in finding a job and keeping busy.

1. One of my friends on Facebook recently posted that it might be more accurate to sign off emails with "Absentmindedly,", "Confusedly", or "hungrily" rather than "sincerely", and I quite agree.

2. While muddling around today in the living room I really felt like saying "quite capable at building fires, given an indoor fire place" and "makes a great cup of coffee" were better additions to the 'Skills' section of my resume than the other ones I could come up with.

3. Finally, I secured one -- just one -- tutoring appointment. And, on a high after introducing myself so well and having it all go over so well at a local high school, I promptly forgot where I had parked my bike and wandered around the campus, hoping the person who had just asked me to tutor didn't see my meandering.

4. Rainy clouds in a dry California make for a dramatic looking afternoon sky.

Jasmine Tea with Milk and Honey

I'm sitting in the Tea Shop, the campus cafe at Mills, waiting to visit some old friends. It's quite, quite odd to be back. On the one hand, I feel like a professor is going to come sprinting from the math building, scolding and askin where I've been all semester-- and on the other hand, I worry that an old professor or friend will come up to me and say, "Aell,?you graduated. How come you're here? Why don't you have a job?!?"

And on yet another hand? I can't get over how beautidul this campus is. Or how many vastly different me's walked down these sidewalks during the last four years. Graduation is a blur. I never truly felt a sense of pride in my graduating class, and the pride in my school also took a while, but eventually got there. I wasn't a Mills student. I was a Mills Math student. Those were my people. They really really were. 

-----


I wrote that while waiting on campus yesterday and then some of those exact math people showed up. People I haven't seen in months, and one who I really felt that I met for the first time during that conversation yesterday.

After chatting with them about the problems of the world - both the world at large and our own personal worlds - I went and had another quintessential Bay Area experience and got stuck in traffic. (California driving - it's just not really California unless you hit traffic and then are speeding and getting passed on both sides simultaneously) But after I made it through the traffic, I met up with some people who really were instrumental in my last semester at Mills and the summer after.

We had dinner and spent the night at the place they were house-sitting. It's a house in Kensington, above Berkeley, and was simply stunning. Plus, being dog people, they had their dogs with them in addition to the two that live in that house already. I always forget how happy it makes me to be around animals, but I wasn't five feet from one all yesterday and this morning, and my heart is glad. Pictures of said animals will follow. Don't feel obligated to enjoy them, but they make me very happy.

Waking up and having tea on this balcony - I asked my friend, "Wow, can you imagine actually living in a place like this?" To which, she replied, "YES." That's the right attitude.

One of the equally photogenic dogs - Finnigan. 

Finn interacting with Mack, the cat, who wouldn't take no for an answer last night and subsequently slept directly on top of my chest. I am more of a dog person than a cat person, but when cats purr, I don't suppose there's anything wrong with that. :)

Kamaji, one of my favorite dogs around. We had a lot of great walks during the summer, as you might have seen in pictures.

The sneaky and far-too-intelligent Rosie. Another of my favorites.

 When I woke up (Mack still a-purring - she hadn't moved and apparently neither had I the entire night), I went upstairs and had a cup of jasmine tea with milk and honey with one of my closest friends. That particular beverage will always make me think of these people, this place, and last summer.

Then, after that, I went and had brunch with two other people who were so very important to me while I was at Mills, and we went for a hike in the Oakland hills, out in such fantastic nature that is so incredibly close to civilization but far enough away to feel secluded.  And I drove back so very happy for those people.

I forgot that community that I was part of there. It was really quite lovely to remember.