Winter wanderings

Outside of Southern California, it's actually winter. Berkeley was cold rain, dropped leaves still clouding the streets. Olympia was snow, snow that frosted every tree branch and made each building look edible. Vancouver Island is black and white. I've never seen such a monochrome world.

Most likely it hasn't made the news anywhere else, but over the past week Washington State has been deluged by snow storms. As people from outside the state (or my cousin who lives in the hills where such weather is normal) will tell you, it's not the amount of snow; it's that no one knows how to deal with it. To me, it sure looks like a lot. By the time I left, Olympia was under about two feet, at least. But a guy who used to live in Iowa used his tall frame and long arms to gesture, explaining how much is regular for his locale. One winter he saw two snow ploughs trying to attack a drift. One would ram up against it and get stuck, then the other one would pull it out of the snow, again and again.

While the midwest is cool with large dumps of frozen water, the Pacific northwest isn't dealing so well. Snow ploughs seem scarce and people don't seem to know how to use them properly. Olympia's downtown streets were full of ice and slush and snow and made for a bumpy bus ride out on Monday. Sea-Tac airport was canceling flights, trains stopped running and the Greyhound was a lost cause. Luckily, the local bus system was running so I was able to get up to Mt Vernon to visit my mysterious rural firefighting cousin by catching four of them one after the other. In Olympia, people stopped going to work and starting spending time roving in gangs down quiet streets, dragging sleds and looking for steep hills. Cars became more and more buried by the day. The liquor store did good business. I actually saw someone carrying a dead squirrel. I think he was going to eat it.

Ah, Olympia! A magical time of snowfall and fairy-dust frozen rain! I had to run out on Monday morning to catch said buses, so I feel I didn't give an appropriate goodbye to several people who had taken me, pretty much a random New Zealander fond of acoustic folk-pop, into their homes and their lives for nearly a week. The whole town made me seriously happy. Ability to walk places! Working bus system! Little bars and coffee shops! Sense of community! Friendly happy smart people! The number of exclamation marks in this paragraph already is a sign of how gosh-darn-exciting the place was. Maybe I won't go on my sub-culture analysing rant here, but you should know: I believe there is hope for the world. 

So what did I do for six days? Pretty little. Slept in past eleven every day, stayed up late. Saw 'Dreamgirls' of all things, and 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'. Cuddled Orson (a friendly cat with no tail), baked cookies, had long kitchen conversations, expressed amazement at the snow once every ten minutes. It was actually kind of great to be in a town where snowfall like that is unusual. I imagine if I'd been somewhere on the east coast, people would be all bitter and jaded.

I definitely feel like I'll back back in Olympia. For longer. The place sucks you in.

Getting out of there on the buses, I had an amazing run of luck. Every bus seemed to be running, I found every transferring stop, didn't have to wait in the cold too long. It's still one of the most nerve-racking things I find when I'm traveling, unfamiliar bus routes. I think this is due to a childhood incident that my mother will remember. My sister and I were coming back from an art class in Wellington, I must have been about eleven, and my dad put us on a bus to the train station where we would take the train back to our little seaside town. However, the final destination of the bus was not the train station, but a distant Wellington suburb called Eastbourne, about 45 minutes away. My poor little sister and I had never seen the train station stop from that side of the street before, and it was dark and unfamiliar and we were scared, so we stayed on the bus. By the time we passed the roundabout that said 'Petone' in flowers I knew we'd gone too far, so we had no choice but to stay on, all the way to the bus depot where the sympathetic bus driver let us use the phone to call Dad. We eventually arrived home to a very clucky mother. From memory there were hot water bottles. I am now painfully aware how easy it is to miss bus stops, and that in a foreign country it is unlikely that you will find hot water bottles when you eventually arrive at your destination.

Oh yes, I am now technically in another country. This morning I caught the ferry from Washington, where I was staying with a Cairns cousin named Craig. He lives in the country. There was a lot of snow there, and tall dark evergreens, and a grey lake. Cousin Craig kindly gave me some Marmite and pineapple lumps and Chelsea Golden Syrup. I also met his son, who's twelve, a pleasantly awkward age. It's funny, somewhere in recent years I've turned into the kind of older cousin who intimidates younger relatives, possibly the person that you always thought was old and big and you could never imagine turning into.

I'm now spending Christmas in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with very very distant older relatives who are similar to grandparents. Speaking of which, I should go and give my sets a call; after all, it's already Christmas in some countries.

Taking new turns

The weeks since Veteran's Day have gone so fast. Here I am, happy to say that four out of five finals have been completed, and the doctor says the mole on my leg probably isn't cancerous. Less happy to see that the NZ dollar continues to remain about the 54 cent mark. Someone give that thing some coffee! I'm tired of seeing it lurking around down there with a hangdog expression and good words for no one!

The world here is turning greyer and colder and more difficult. This term has really worn down my reserves. The academic in me is turning up her toes and saying she wants to go to bed and sleep in tomorrow, when it's raining outside and so warm under the covers. If I'm here for two more quarters, we'll start back in January and only get a week for Spring Break until mid-June. Then it'll be back to school in New Zealand in mid-July. That route leads to a possible graduation in November, but it also leads to pain, and burnout, and confirmation of the feeling that I'm running through my undergrad degree as fast as I can because I want to get to the cool crisp air of the other side. I know there's no right way to go about school, and I love academics, but life shouldn't be about the next test, and the next and the next until freedom. All these young people I know work so hard, spending their years cooped up in boxes until they're opened up and let loose. To go to grad school where they continue to sacrifice themselves on the altar of academia. I'm not sure how long I can keep going, waiting until I start to enjoy it again. 

Don't listen to me, I'm just worn out and tired and need a holiday. But I did have this really cool idea for a college where you'd study sciences, like biopsychology, and then interpret what you learnt as works of art. Like large models of cells made out of crochet, or films that reflect on some of the ways our brains receive and process visual information, or symphonies based on action potentials in neurons. I saw a photography exhibit down in San Diego where someone had taken close up scientific images of parts of his body and printed them up large. I think he did chromosomes as well. That was pretty awesome.

Also at this school would be this class about dreaming. This idea was inspired by my professor in Human Memory, who is pretty awesome, and written papers on another type of conscious awareness called meta-awareness which relates to "repressed" memories of sexual abuse. Exciting stuff! Sorry, going all psychology nerd now. But this meta-awareness is basically the consciousness we have about being conscious. Like, when you're reading a very boring page of some ancient philosopher, and suddenly you realise that you've been day dreaming for half a page. But you continued to read while your mind was somewhere else! Even though you couldn't process it. So there's an attention that's paid to what it is that your mind is doing, and that's meta-awareness. I hope you know what I'm talking about; it's like a reality check. When my professor was explaining this to us, he told us about lucid dreaming. The idea is that when you're dreaming, your meta-awareness is off in the corner twiddling its thumbs. When you have a lucid dream, it wakes up and starts paying attention. If you want to have lucid dreams, you can help by getting in the habit of giving yourself frequent meta-awareness check-ups during the day. One way to do this is to look at your palm, and check the lines on it. If you get in the habit of this, you'll do it in your dream, and when you can't see the lines (I guess the dreaming mind isn't too great with details) it'll provide a cue to your meta-awareness. So it can wake up (hopefully you won't) and you can start having fun.

Anyhow, at my school, there would be classes about dreams. And for homework, you would have lucid dreams where you went to meet with your professor, and he would give classes. Or maybe not, because dreams about classes don't sound great. But you get the gist (speaking of gists, have you heard about the gist text effect? Oh no... I really need to stop studying...).

Going up to Berkeley again in two days! Food! And flannel sheets!