Days 58-59

What a beauty...


I got back from my work-related backpacking adventure today. That's right, I get paid to go backpacking. I went with 2 co-workers and 35 kids: we were at a severe numerical disadvantage. At several points throughout the trip, there were children dangling about from my arms and legs. Giving piggyback rides is a pretty good cardio workout; it definitely made me feel like my heart was on the brink of exploding.

These are some of the kids I took backpacking. As for insight into each of their personalities, I think each photo speaks for itself.







Some other cool things of note:

We caught (and released) a baby rattlesnake!


We saw a blacksmithing demo (and I made stuff)!

Day 56

Just finished East of Eden. Next up: One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Day 55

Photos from the past couple weeks in no particular order.


The cement belly of the beast that is UC Berkeley.


Sather Gate at night, walking home from the library.


Goats! Near my parents' home in SF, the City sometimes uses goats to clear out the bramble bushes.


Campus landmark: Bronze statue of "The Friendly Football Players."


A critter cohabitating with some modern art.


One of the perks of working at the Tilden Little Farm: eggs.


Spring is here. It's been wet, but the blossoms are coming out and it's gorgeous.


Oh, the joy of collecting GPS data.

Day 54

So, I've been doing some planning. Nothing much, just my usual feverish bout of shuffling through course requirement sheets and the like. I'd say this happens every semester or so. I spend two hours thinking I'm recharting the course of my life, only to change it about three months later.

Well, on this current tack, I've got some goodies lined up for myself. For example, one of the classes I plan on taking is simply titled "Trees." Then there's "Wildland Fire Science," which involves a field trip for a proscribed burn. But right now, I'm pretty stoked at the prospect of going abroad. It seems to be all the rage these days, and I sure as heck don't want to be left out of the fun (my brand new passport is just itching to get its first stamp). Specifically, I really want to go to the island of Moorea in French Polynesia, which oddly enough has a UC Berkeley field research station there. Basically, the deal's like this: I go to French Polynesia, my school gives me units.

The decision was not a hard one to make.

But before any of that fun stuff happens, it seems like there's still a formidable amount of drudgery left to slog through. I still have a good deal of weeder courses left: classes engineered to destroy the human soul. The current gameplan involves me staying in Berkeley over the summer to learn all that there is to learn about organic chemistry. Carbon is such a wacky element.

Day 53

Today was a good day. I met a man named Trinidad. He was about the color and girth of a tree trunk. He introduced himself as a landscape architect working for the Forest Service. He inquired if I was a Forestry major. I think it was my boots that were a dead give-away.

Day 52

This week has been something of a roller coaster ride for me. So much so that I ended up writing an e-mail to Mr. David Hathwell, retired AP English teacher.

I think it's a good exercise: having an audience in mind to scrutinize my writing forced me to pare down my words using to the sharpest analytical tools I have available to me. I ended up answering a lot of my own questions because of the clarity with which I approached each source of frustration. I considered not sending the e-mail to him, since the process of writing itself helped me work through my problems. But I still want to thank him.

Thanks, Mr. Hathwell.

Day 51

There are some things about my job that make it really special.

I work in Tilden Park in Berkeley, and it's Today I was working with these kids that come in on a weekly basis for the Junior Ranger program (ages 9 to 13). They were having a meeting in their clubhouse, which is the park's old, original visitor center. It has the feeling of a ski lodge, with a cast iron stove for warmth at one end of the small, rectangular room. Chris and Colin sat next to each other in their small wooden folding chairs. Colin opened a tupperware full of saltine crackers and offered one to Chris.

Day 50

Today I decided that I want to thru-hike the JMT Sobo (translation: I want to walk from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney, non-stop).

It's something I've wanted to do since I was 13; I promised myself that I'd hike the whole John Muir Trail as I stood on Half Dome, looking over the Yosemite Valley. I think it only hit me today that I've finally accumulated the skills, equipment, and independence to do so in the six and a half years that have since elapsed.

Day 47

Day 46

If I were some sort of tooth-rotting confection, I'd have a brightly colored hard candy shell with a syrupy filling. Of this I am certain.

What you are looking at is a picture of a container that formerly held four pounds of candy beans. Now there are about a couple of fistfuls left. I don't really remember the jar ever really being in an intermediate phase. There was that first day heady day, like the first day of a romance, when I savored the unique flavor of each bean on the tip of my tongue. One crazed glucose binge later, I found myself in an alleyway, an empty jar of candy beans my only companion in this cold, sugarless world.

What will my dentist say? I've been flossing more frequently, mostly out of guilt, in a feeble attempt to reverse the damage. I can see his face now: the hair parted down the middle, the oval wire spectacles, the turquoise rectangular face mask that bobs as he expertly asks yes/no questions about how my life is going. My dentist is one of two Cuban-Chinese dentists of whom I am aware (so grammatical it almost sounds wrong). The other Cuban-Chinese dentist is one of my high school friend's dads. I recommended to her once that they (her dentist dad and my dentist) make an exclusive club.

I suppose they'd have to flip a coin to decide who gets to be President.

Day 45

Today I cashed my paycheck. I promptly went to my nearest REI and blew it all on boots. When I got home, I started reading some reviews on the internet, and the general consensus seems to be that the Italians make a damn fine boot (or at least, the Romanian gypsy children that the Italians hire). Internet reviewers (with handles like "The Kilted Ranger," "Geologist Craig," and "White Mountain Pete") have variously described these boots as "bomb-proof" and "nearly indestructible."

I'm so stoked to go for a walk right now.

Day 43

Today after theater class I got totally lost. The class is held in Zellerbach hall, which is also a working stage/performance hall. The class meets in a subterranean practice room, which we refer to as Room 7. Everyday, I enter Zellerbach hall through the side stage entrance, show my ID at the security desk, and proceed to descend four flights of concrete stairs into the bunker that is Room 7.

When we met for class today, we found that some of our prop furniture (plywood blocks that we refer to as "acting cubes") was missing, so I was sent on an expedition to purloin replacements from Room 317. Let me begin by saying that whatever crazed phantom designed Zellerbach must surely have had quite the affinity for cement as a construction material. Surely, no sturdier hall has ever been built, for even when I was on the third floor, the dingy, gray hallways always gave me the feeling of being underground. The endless twists and turns through the labyrinth's identical hallways and stairwells left me utterly disoriented inside the concrete beast.

After a final flight of stairs, I made it to the fabled Room 317, a strange parallel universe of Room 7. Then began the business of returning with the borrowed acting cubes. It was a good upper body workout. I had a sweat going by the time I made it back, navigating the narrow, claustrophic hallways and their fireproof steel doors.

At the end of class, I had to return the acting cubes, so to save time I tried to use the freight elevator. It finally arrived and I undid the metal latch that sealed the elevator's gaping steel mouth that opened horizontally down the middle and the big steel plates slid away. I loaded my freight of acting cubes and headed for the third floor. It had a pretty creepy aura inside the elevator, what with the graffiti and the rickety clanging noises and the open-air roof, a glimpse of skylight in the distance.

I made it to the third floor and undid the steel latch. I slid the thick steel plates apart and I found myself immediately confronted with a small, bare space: a fluorescent ceiling lamp and a set of double doors, chained and locked shut.

East of Eden completion: 66%

Day 42

I can't quite fathom what it is to play frisbee in college. Everyday on my way to class I pass by Underhill, a large parking structure/astroturf playing field about two blocks away from my apartment in the direction of campus. Today I saw the women's lacrosse (that game with the funny sticks played by the people who didn't make it into ivy leagues) team practicing. Sometimes I see the ultimate frisbee team doing their drills on the clean, green astroturf. It usually seems to involve some permutation of running, throwing, and catching frisbees, all performed with the utmost precision. I tried playing on Underhill, once. The astroturf did not reward my predisposition to make dives.

But the mechanical efficiency of the team doing its drills seemed so joyless in comparison to what I remember from playing with my friends in high school on Friday afternoons, after school was out. To me, ultimate frisbee is the feeling of a muddy soccer field against bare feet, with the faint odor of pot on my friends. It is the feeling of pure machismo: shirtless, chest thumping machismo. It is the feeling of sprinting flat out, cutting through the air with bare skin. It is the feeling of running until my lungs start burning with satisfaction.

I don't think I've quite had that kind of experience for quite some time, now. I sure do miss it.

Day 41

Brontosaurus construction effort: 2 hours
East of Eden completion: 52%
Chemistry midterm: 95%

Day 40

A pretty sweet taxi I saw parked on campus today.

Day 38

He wasn't sure if it was a good idea, but he was curious to know if it could work. No, he knew it would work; he had seen others do it before without a hitch. And they always made it look so fun. Besides, he is much lighter than myself he thought. Combined we are not even 400 pounds. He stood on the sidewalk under the piss-yellow light of the streetlamps, and he knelt to roll up his right pant leg before swinging it over the frame of his mountain bike.

"Okay, get on," he said, and he felt the weight of his friend straddling his bicycle's rack. He gave a push on the pedal and the bike started off with a wobble, which gradually dissipated as they picked up speed. He was wearing the only helmet.

"Hold me by the waist," he said. "I need my shoulders to steer." He felt his friend let go of his shoulders and pinch his jacket by the pockets. They coasted down a gently inclined one-way street. From the light of the passing streetlamps, he could see his passenger's legs swaying as they went over bumps.

"My crotch hurts," his friend said, straddling the metal plate of the bicycle rack. A signal turned yellow up ahead and he gingerly squeezed his mushy breaks. They went over some more bumps. He felt bad for his friend. They rolled through the intersection, passing a car on its right, just as the light turned to green again and he started cranking a little bit to build up some speed.

They started wobbling and he got nervous. He could feel it in the handle bars, the almost imperceptible flits of the handlebar each time they hit a crack in the pavement and shifted the weight of his load that was gripping him by his jacket and swaying with each bump. He thought there was a car behind them, waiting for them to take a large bump and wipe out, so that it could run them over into a mangled pile of aluminum and dumb college kid. A car passed them on their left and his unease grew. He didn't want to look over his shoulder to see if there was another one waiting to pass. He didn't want to accidentally shift his shoulders and drift around in his lane. He focused straight ahead and they followed a straight line.

They rolled up to the apartment and he pulled onto the sidewalk. He was alive.

"Well, that was fun," his friend said. They had made it there in record time.

Day 36

Went to the Morrison Library during my one-hour break. It's quite nice, the Morrison. There are large armchairs with ottomans. I didn't manage to snag one of the leather chairs, but I still got one with a footrest. The lighting is soft enough to take naps, and bright enough to read. The room carries the feeling of a kind of victorian sitting room, with its wood paneling and bronze busts of men with imposing facial expressions. Additionally, scattered through out the room are turntables and there's a big bin filled with classical music on vinyl. I think I'll bring my headphones next time and have a listen.

East of Eden completion: 24%

Day 35

Just got back from the Forestry Club Bean Feed, that most sacred of monthly rituals. The high priestesses and priests of Forestry descend from on high, bearing pots of chili and bottles of honeydew, that the peasantry might rejoice in the passage of another month, and herald the beginning of another. The hot beans and a cold brew were a welcome change from the nightly marathon homework sessions.

Last night I made my way through the first hundred pages of John Steinbeck's East of Eden, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I like the wandering passages that aren't in a hurry to go anywhere in particular.

Day 34

So it appears that I've been invited to join the Exodus out of Facebook, in search of a more promising place on the internet. As I write this from a public computer in the East Asian Library, it sounds like quite the reasonable proposal.

For a start, I can (and usually do) reach the people that I want to socialize with via means other than facebook. Second, facebook is a great way to waste large amounts of time that could otherwise be channeled into activities such as curing cancer or inventing a better mousetrap. Third, the majority of content on facebook is spam. These days, most all of the event invitations I get come from people I only peripherally know.

While these are pretty compelling reasons to not use facebook on a frequent basis, I'll probably keep one anyway. It's a pretty powerful directory in terms of looking other people up, and there's a definite utility to being able to contact acquaintances in a non-threatening, non-committal way. Basically, I think I've come to the point where I've realized that facebook isn't by any means an essential social networking tool, and as a consequence, have stopped wasting most of my free time browsing it. I wonder if the generation that invented the telephone had to deal with this. Anyway, I'm keeping my facebook, unless Ramon gives me a damned good reason not to.

Day 33

It started as a moustache. Everything else radiated out from there.



I had no idea that I was going to draw a mustachioed man in a drug-induced stupor when I stepped into chemistry laboratory today. I think I originally intended to draw either my chemistry professor Dr. Nitsche, or the philosopher Nietzsche, both of whom wear mustaches. I made an error in the perspective of the drawing, causing our friend to end up on his knees in front of his favorite sitting chair. It's a habit of mine to doodle men sitting in armchairs and holding pipes, and most of them come out so-so in terms of perspective. But this time, that mistake led to the creation of something that I couldn't be more pleased with.

As soon as he was on his knees, it all clicked together: now I had a title for the book on the end table (The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley); now I could explain his vacant stare and dilated pupils; now I could interpret his holding onto the armrests as a drugged man's desperate attempt to clutch onto the reality that is rapidly slipping away.

From there, the embellishments just drew themselves. A drinking vessel, knocked over, it contents pooling on the parquet floor. What poison might this glass contain? A caged bird, quizzical in its unblinking, uncomprehending gaze. Is he a statement about free will, a mere object of the creator's whimsy? He does not know how to trouble himself with such thoughts.

Day 32

Strange how a near computer meltdown has left me in a similar mental state. It might be interesting, anyway, to try and live a personal computer-free life. As I type this, the words appear on the screen after a noticeable lag, and webpages take about a minute or two to load even though I subscribe to AT&T's ubernet.

Who knows, perhaps my life will become more productive if I don't own a computer. Unless I end up wasting all of my time with my face stuck in books, that is; the "facebook," some would even say. Today I acquired two such frivolous books of the novel genre: East of Eden and One Hundred Years of Solitude. However did people survive in analog times? Well, we'll see how it goes.

What a technology crisis.