Post-Script to the last Post: Are You a Cat or a Dog?

While I was thinking about isometrics (people = doughnuts), it occurred to me that there is non-structural relatedness as well. I may be shaped like a doughnut, but in spirit, I am a cat. A cat and not a dog. However, I am married to a dog. My heros are both cats and dogs.

Here's the isospititual connection between me and cats. We love to sleep, especially during the day. We love seafood. Waking up is disturbing and perplexing, often requiring a huge body stretch and a good long ponder before we know where we are. We're easily distracted. Any moving object is cause for investigation. We find birds interesting. Loud sudden noises make us jump. Dogs are fun forms of entertainment for us, but can be annoying, especially if they make loud noises or wake us up too suddenly. We like to be petted and touched under the chin. Our hearing is hypersensitive. We're our own boss.

Of course, not everything is equal. I'm not partial to licking my own butt. In fact, I couldn't do it if I tried. Arthritis in my neck, an aversion to bad smells, common sense protect me from it. Also, I don't walk on all fours, hang from the curtains, or plop myself onto other people's open books. Minor differences in habits, but we are the same in spirit.

Yet I married a dog. An early riser, who can snap awake and be instantly eager for conversation. He's a working dog breed, most contented when focused on practical physical labor. Not quite a border collie, because he lacks neurosis, but highly intelligent like that breed. He likes treats as a reward for hard work and good behavior. Generally good-natured, but will fight to protect his brood. Likes to bark and occasionally growl just to remind those around him that he could kick everyone's ass, but simply chooses not to. Snores and farts in his sleep. Definitely an Alpha Dog.

Differences? Again with the butt-licking.

Olympian and Doughnuts

It's Olympics time and it seems obvious to write about one of the Olympians I've admired: Olga Corbet, Nadia Comăneci, Bonnie Blair, Joan Benoit. But I don't feel like it. Probably because I'm adverse to doing the obvious. Wouldn't want to be droll. Maybe it's that the appeal of these women is so clear that it needs no elaboration. They are great athletes. Period.

However, these particular four were also ground-breakers. The first backwards somersault on the beam ever, the first perfect ten in Olympic gymnastics ever, the most decorated winter Olympian ever (until just last week, still the most decorated woman), the first woman's marathon gold medalist ever. Ever.

Intense focus on one thing. That's what fascinates me about these women. How do they do that? How do they get up every morning (super early) and do one thing all day long and still love it, love it more for having been so focused? I lack that ability and I admire what I lack. That much is becoming obvious (obvious: from the Latin ob {in the way} + via {road}. No wonder I don't like it. I like a clear path and loathe obstructions). But admiring what I lack isn't a form of self-flogging. I like being easily distracted. I was always the day-dreamer starring out the window at school, taking everything in and pondering it all. My sensory filter is not fine-grained. I rarely can block out my surroundings or give zen-like focus to one thing. I suck at meditating. But my lack of focus enables me to notice connections and subtleties other people (those super-focused types I admire for their super-focused talents) might miss. When I was studying mathematics in college, one of my favorite courses was topology. What I took away from the study of shapes and transformation of shapes was that seemingly unrelated things might be relateable. One just needs to find the function (the way, the via) to get from one thing to the other.

For example: people are like doughnuts. Why? Because humans and doughnuts have one hole. Humans have a complicated surface, but we're all doughnuts topologically speaking. Not those gross jelly-filled kind, or fancy fritters, just your basic old-fashioned. From pie-hole to A-hole, it's all just one hole (see diagram).
Maybe that's why I loathe the obvious. I need an unobstructed road, no obs in my via, if I harbor any hope of getting anywhere ever without being tantalized by the tangential.

Oh, I Have A Choice?

Sadness and loss. That was probably the real bond with Calamity Jane. Not all the misanthropic bravado. I've picked heroes whom I either look up to or see eye-to-eye with. Calamity and I were eye-to-blurry-sad-angry-eye. How does one crawl out of protective armor and does an eye-to-eye hero help or hinder the escape?

Hinder. Here's why.

I had found someone who solved her sense of loneliness, vulnerability, and sorrow by being a bad ass. This had great appeal to me in my teens and early twenties, living on my own as I did. Back then, I never cried. I never revealed weakness or need. And I slew any and all who tried to finger their way past my defenses. I was a. . .select a metaphor:

• Hermit crab
• Brazil nut
• Saguaro cactus
• Armored knight
• Oyster
• Chocolate-Dipped soft-serve from DQ
• Cowgirl with a revolver and whiskey breath

Anything soft on the inside, hard on the outside. That was me.

Though not all those hard-out/soft-in possibilities are alike. Some, like hermit crabs, will die if they are separated from their outer shells for too long. Other than the occasional times they swap shells and for one split second show their pale, exoskeletonless rears dragging behind them, hermit crabs stay protected. But an armored knight can chose to shed his metal suit, set it by a walk-in fireplace in a big drafty castle and go on to live a happy life. It's a matter of choice for the knight. And the cowgirl.

Bonding With Calamity Jane

In my early twenties, in college, my self-esteem and sense of personal belongedness to the human race at such a low, I looked to Calamity Jane for guidance. What did I get? Seldom bathe, swear constantly, and always wear pants. When encountering humans, retreat to the woods. Shed all feminine trappings and be one of the guys. And work quickly through your allotted boxcar of whiskey.

Calamity Jane, we shared a name and a genuine loathing for frills. I bought this postcard on an aborted road-trip to the Grand Canyon and kept it pinned above my desk, a little persona, pissed off, poorly dressed, and clearly ill at ease. Like a tiny mirror.The up side? Next to her, I felt glamorous in my scotch-taped glasses and Norma Kamali trench coat. But I was pretty sure that had I lived on the Western frontier in the 19th century, Jane and I would've been bar room buddies:

"Hey Calamity Jane?"
"What Plain Jane?"
"I've been thinkin'"
"About what?"
"What?"
"Thinkin"
"What?"
"Been thinkin'"
"About what?
"No you, you dim light"
"Why're thinkin about me? And you don't have to be such a horse's ass!"
"Yur a horse's ass!"

A brawl ensues.
The smoke clears.

"Calamity?"
"Plain?"
"Hand me that whiskey."



That was then.

Field Work for the Agorophobic

I read once that the reason so many nature writers were men was that nature writing demanded solitary excursions into the field and women weren't comfortable with that. The world outside was too hazardous for women to venture out unchaperoned. I challenged that assumption when I was younger, often going out on my own, nothing but a notebook, watercolors, pen and a camera to keep me company. I was one of the brave, like Dorothea Lange, like Georgia O'Keefe. I cherished the images of these women sitting atop their old cars, out in the middle of nowhere, doing art. As a younger woman, I traveled to other countries alone, wandered empty desert roads alone, lurked about looking for places that moved me, that had not only natural beauty, but the beauty desolate abandonment creates and that I have always found alluring. Unnoticed beauty, the kind that hard living and loss can give to a human face or a landscape.

But then. But then, what? Perhaps I lost my reasons for wandering. Home for me used to lack permanence, lack warmth, so I traveled. But over the years my wanderlust has been supplanted by a contented kind of nesting. I got married, bought a house, had kids, got pets, planted a garden. Staying put had both purpose and reward. And the world outside in the mean time became more terrifying. My family genes carry in them code for restlessness and reclusivity. I always thought I had only the itchy feet gene. To my surprise I am slowly retracting, like a hermit crab into her shell, using my home to shield my soft and vulnerable parts.

Here's the challenge. How do I do the field work that I have always loved without leaving my house and garden? I have developed a skill set and passions well-suited for back-roads and empty deserts, but I can't just pack up a knapsack and head out the door anymore. Who will clean the cat box, wake the children, cook dinner? I like taking care of my family. Abandoning them is not an option. And for the past year I have been seasick for reasons doctors haven't yet ferreted out. I grew up by the ocean, was a SCUBA instructor, have been sailing plenty of times, and only twice got seasick (once on a ferry from Santorini after a week of living on bullion (my big fat Greek diet) and then having Greek men blow tobacco smoke in my face for ten hours while the boat pitched in immense swells; and then on the Great Barrier Reef in rocky seas, after watching the Captain barf over the gunwale). Now I live in the desert, hundreds of miles from salt air or surf, and I am constantly seasick-- nauseous, off-balance, dizzy. And my ears ring like a squeaky fan. It's all triggered my recluse gene. So what to do?

So far I've begun macro studies of plants and critters in my garden and other nearby places. And I've started this blog. Problem solved?

Taking Pictures

I'm officially stumped, hitting a wall. Vacation is over and I'm back to work and time just seems to evaporate. So this will probably be short, what with the dogs barking and the freezer repairman clanking in the kitchen not ten feet from my desk. Going back to work always puts me in a different mind-frame, as if my thoughts have to relate to my job. Writing should be work-related writing, about scholarly things that other people, scholarly people, would deem worthy. It's a real kill joy.

On my own, I can stop thinking about what other people would think about my thoughts. They're just there and I can enjoy them, or move on to other thoughts. So, I'm trying to figure out how to have an independent thought during the semester and how to make time to write them down.

As an ease into this awkward transition, I chose to write about photography, so I can mostly use pictures and let the words take a siesta.

Lately, I take pictures of plants up close. Its a way to see the familiar in a new way, like the poppies in my garden. Everything I know about plants changes when I move in close. When I first met the camera, it was just a tool for capturing memories or documenting work. No art, everything at a human scale, like the eye sees.

I admired the work of Ansel Adams, because he could get so much of the landscape into one image. He captured the immensity of the American West and I loved that.

Then I found Dorothea Lange. She seemed to do for human tragedy what Adams had done for the beauty of the Western landscape, but not by grabbing a big image, rather by moving in to reveal the immensity of the human soul. She also seemed less encumbered by the photographic equipment, compared to Adams who always lugged a large format camera into the mountains.

She used a medium format camera or a 35 mm. Sometimes using a camera with a lens that could capture images 90 degrees from straight, so she could appear to be photographing something other than her true subject. Her photographs convey her unobtrusive nature as a photographer. I also tend to move quietly and can often go unnoticed in the world. Sometimes it feels that there are the people who live life and those who watch the film. I'm a watcher. It's not that I'm a lazy couch potato. It's that I feel as though there is a script to life that no one bothered to give me, so try as I might I always feel outside the action. So I watch. . . and take pictures.