Campus

Today I was walking to class and took a moment to appreciate the clouds. Blue skies are fine and dandy, but clouds have so much more drama to them. The way they play with light is especially pleasing as well. Here is an especially dramatic picture of some clouds with the Campanile in the foreground.



I force all sorts of metaphors when I visit our huge, subterranean library complex. I like to think of it as a sort of Hades-type underworld, a place not necessarily bad in-of-itself, but where you'll end up sooner or later. It helps that there's a huge spiral staircase, which adds nicely to the "descent into the underworld" effect. Transitioning from studying for two hours on the bottom floor of the pit to going outside is something overwhelming. It definitely feels like re-entering the realm of the living.





There probably won't be so many school groups roaming around campus once the rains start, but they still make me smile whenever I see them.

When We Were Young and Damned Good-Looking

When we were young and handsome and damned good-looking, we didn't have to comb our hair. That was a job befitting only the ocean winds, slick rocks, and salt spray. We knew that stares came in only one variety: envious.



When we were young and confident and damned good-looking, we didn't have to play coy little games. But we did anyway, just for sport. That was half the fun, anyway.



When we were young and lost and damned good-looking, we didn't have to know where we were going. Dead-reckoning got us to wherever we were, and dead-reckoning would get us back. Maybe not the way we came, but the way we wanted to go was where we went.



When we were young and strong and damned good-looking, we didn't let walls stop us. Walls only meant that there was something on the other side worth having. Walls were a sign of the opulent, of people with so much stuff they didn't even know how to enjoy it all. They would never know that you snuck into the garden of their Seacliffe mansion, just to steal their multi-million dollar view of the Golden Gate. They wouldn't notice it. They wouldn't even miss it.







When we were young and starving and damned good-looking, we didn't take multivitamins. Multivitamins meant that you accepted the vision of the future where all food is in pellet form. No, we ate they way the Pharohs dreamt of; only the very zenith of the food pyramid was worthy of our diets.



When we were young and genius and damned good-looking, we didn't study. Essays were plucked from the clairvoyant fog of too many energy drinks the night before deadline. We knew that if we zig-zagged our answers on the scantron sheet, we'd probably get enough right, probably more than most, because, let's be honest, guessing is a skill, and woe to those who never learned to be lucky the way we did.



When we were young and immortal and damned good-looking, we didn't die. Death was an impossibility, more remote than the liquor store across campus. More remote even than home, whatever that was anymore anyway.



We didn't wear bike helmets. We didn't floss. We didn't count our beers. We didn't sleep. We didn't wear underwear.

We didn't forget we were alive.

A Day in the Park

Why do people do drugs? There are too many pleasures to be had in this world for free. Walking hand in hand through the dahlia garden, letting their colors wash over the eyes. Reclining in the grass, watching the clouds soar overhead. Walking through the City with bare feet, kissing the sidewalk with every step.

The Plums of August

These fallen fruits
Found only hard, sterile street.
And now they waste themselves in the sun.

Impressionism

From doctorpon

Bridges

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Mated Pairs

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Two Weekends Ago

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Outskirts of Eugene, Oregon. Friday morning, 5am. Ramon's Mercedes, our diesel-powered chariot of the night, comes to rest in the Denny's parking lot. Ramon gets all you can eat pancakes. Ramon can eat two pancakes. David drinks watery coffee. He sees the free refills as a personal challenge. Tommy and Karyn eat sensible meals.

From doctorpon

University of California, Davis campus. Monday, 2pm. Karyn and I are waiting at the shuttle stop. We will ride the bus for an hour and a half. Our next stop is reality.

Independence Day

If I ever changed my last name, I think I'd have to chose "Freeman."

Some things, even familiar things, feel so different when you experience them as an independent adult.

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Point Reyes National Seashore

I spent the last three days out in Point Reyes with my co-worker Hazel. She'd never been backpacking before, and I was glad to introduce her to my favorite pasttime. She's a bit older than me, and enlightened me a good deal on things like work, writing, good books, and the foster care system. Otherwise, we spent a lot of time in our own mental spaces.

I guess when you only go backpacking with one other person, the experience is much more personal than communal. I feel like we're trained to fear silence in a conversation, that it's the end of the world when we run out of sensible things say. But in some settings, living to that standard only distracts from fully absorbing the surrounding beauty. Sometimes, the sensory, rather than the social experience is more important. It's nice to have someone there to share that with, but ultimately, the thoughts we have in reaction to that beauty are a deeply personal experience.

So here are some images of things that left me in rapture, the experience of which I can't ever fully share.


Morning dew.


Succulents.


Sea cliffs.

Live the Dream

The Common Buckeye

Tommy and I have a motto, and it's "Live the Dream." I think that just about sums up how things are going for me right now.

I have something of a Little Prince complex; I have an insatiable urge to find a corner of the earth and become its guardian. If you're unfamiliar with the story, it's about a little blond boy in a green jumpsuit who's the custodian of an asteroid and the single rose that grows on it.

Well, it so happens that I've become the manager of a native plant nursery on campus, with the main objective of propagating plants for use in restoring the native ecology of Strawberry Creek. It's a job that makes me aware of the ecological degradation in my immediate environment, and at the same time empowers me to reverse the damage. That's a great feeling.

We are humans, and we live in a world of our own creation. Through carelessness, greed, or ignorance, we can very easily turn our earth into a dirty, uninhabitable place. However, with engagement, charity, and education, we can make our surroundings beautiful.

In a sense, these are also the two faces of the student co-op where I currently live. It is a place where someone will bake a mixing bowl-full of chocolate chip cookies to share with everyone else. It is also a place where people throw glass bottles off the roof, if only for the joy of hearing glass break.

Why do I celebrate chocolate chip cookies and detest broken glass? I guess it goes back to my desire for order. Perhaps a good example is a wooden sailing ship. This is an example that a Philosophy major-turned-EMT-turned-carpenter once posed to me.

"Consider a wooden sailing ship," he said. "The universe wants nothing more than to see a wooden sailing go to pieces. Without maintenance, the boards will rot, the sails will tear, and the anchor will rust. In essence, a sailing ship is a symbol of man's battle against entropy, that tendency for all systems to head towards chaos. But instead of chaos, we have order, which requires a constant struggle to maintain."

I don't doubt the fact that the earth is a messy system. But that doesn't deter me from striving to create a planet that is more beautiful and livable than the one we have right now.

Update: I was brushing my teeth when I realized that the Netherlands is my dream country. Almost the entire country is below sea level, which is quite inconvenient for a country that borders the ocean. And so originate the dikes and windmill-powered pumps for which Holland is famous. There's a saying that goes, "God made the earth, but the Dutch made the Netherlands."

Drawing is Hard

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Total elapsed time: 30 minutes.


Damn, drawing is hard. I was talking (internet chatting) with Kimmie last night about the difficulty of reproducing an image of something by hand. I think that the conclusion we came to was that drawing depends more heavily on the ability to observe, rather than the ability to touch pencil to paper. It's easy to think of drawing as this active process full of movement as your pencil glides across the paper. But I think I've realized how much of an internal activity it is; I spend the bulk of my time staring when I draw.

Thinking back, I realize now how much drawing aided me in learning to identify plants. I had this internship with the National Park Service a couple summers ago, and my boss gave me a handy dandy little Write in the Rain field notebook. Even if I made just a quick sketch, the process of drawing still challenged me to make a careful observation and pick out the identifying features characteristic to a particular plant.

I remember this one sketch of a naked lady that I was especially proud of. I spent probably a good half hour on it, but found the result rather pleasing. I wish I had my old field notebook with me right now. I should go out and buy a new one.

Day One

(Interior, afternoon, a windowless high school classroom)
Me: What day is today?
Mister Shimmon: Today's the first day of the rest of your life!

So yesterday I turned twenty. Not quite a monumental occasion in our culture, but it's still a nice, round number. Aesthetics aside, I spent the day quietly, picnicking with the family (my parents, my sisters, and their longterm boyfriends) out at the Berkeley Marina. These are my sisters:

From doctorpon

Hats! Yes, hats are all the rage! If my sisters look a little bit dour, it's because one of them is eating a chocolate (or a chocolate-covered coconut macadamia nut) and the other has something in her teeth. So they tell me. Can you correctly identify which sister belongs to which excuse? For the sake of anonymity, let's refer to them as Sister 2 and Sister 1, going from left to right.

Anyway, it's been some time since I've had "family time," and I'd forgotten how many worlds apart it is from all other social interaction I've gotten used to. I can't believe that that's the social universe I used to live in; it definitely reminds me of all the reasons why I was no good at navigating that social landscape, which as I recall, quite strikingly resembled the surface of Mars.

Sister 2: Happy birthday David!
Longterm boyfriend 2: Happy birthday!
(I extend my hand towards LTBF 2, Sister 2 accepts it, shaking my hand)
LTBF 2: I think that one was for me.
Sister 2: Oh.
(Sister 2 and I quickly hug)

...later...

Mom: I brought bottles of San Francisco tap water for everyone! Here Sister 1, you can use this one. (Mom indicates a Nalgene bottle with a Hello Kitty! sticker on it)
Sister 1: Oh, I brought my own bottle of water. (Sister 1 indicates her aluminum Sigg water bottle)
Mom: Well then LTBF 1 can have this bottle then.
Sister 1: We can share my bottle of water.
Mom: No, no, he can have his own bottle of water, you don't have to share.
Sister 1: No, we can just share.
Mom: Are you sure?
Sister 1: Yes.
Me: I think she's trying to say that she would prefer that they share her bottle of water.
Mom: Okay then.

...later still...

Sister 2: So did I tell you that LTBF 2 and I almost died during our vacation in Oahu?
Mom: Oh my God... (look of unmitigated horror)
Sister 2: We were using the Inside Guide to Oahu and it had this hike "for locals only."
Me: (snicker)
Sister 2: Anyway, for the first part, we basically had to hack through the jungle
Mom: oh my God...
LTBF 2: A machete would have been useful.
Mom: oh my God...
Sister 2: There was 2,500 feet of climb in the first two miles
Me: (snicker)
Mom: oh my God...
Sister 2: Anyway, we get to this jackknife ridge, since the guidebook says to follow the ridge...
Mom: oh my God...
Sister 2: And there's this drop-off on either side of probably a thousand feet
Mom: Oh my God!
Me: Sweet.
Sister 2: You probably would have enjoyed it though, we were right in the clouds. I guess that guidebook had a disclaimer for a reason.

Every family looks bizarre from the outside. They all operate on their own internal logic. Too bad I still have absolutely no clue what the hell is going on.

Post-script: By popular demand, here is a digitally-enhanced photograph of beets. If you haven't had the pleasure of eating beets, they make everything turn red. Everything.

From doctorpon

Wedding Photo

Flipping through my parents' wedding pictures, my eyes were awash in bellbottoms and double-exposures. Then I came across this:

It's my dad and my grandpa sharing a moment of congratulations. For some reason, it didn't register in my mind as belonging to the rest of the corny, posed photos in the album. Maybe it had to do with the general vibe I got from the other photos that had my grandpa in them. I just felt like I could tell that he was grinning on the inside. For the short time that I knew him, I never saw my grandpa smile or laugh. I guess the general impression I got was that this was a man who smiled only when he really meant it.

I suppose that one of the big things that drew me into this picture was the total father-son moment that it captured. Just going by the facial expressions, they could have read (from left to right) as "did you see me make the winning touchdown?" and "good catch." But instead, they're wearing tuxedos (velvet has no place in a bowtie).

Maybe it was just mindblowing for me to think that my dad might once have basked in the approval of his dad, that he too felt the warm glow of paternal love.

Maybe it was how stark the contrast was between these two generations of men, whiskey in one hand, champagne (that would remain untouched) in the other.

Or maybe it was just the ruffles.

Richmond Field Station

Today I got to go out into the field and play Restoration Ecologist. Tromping through fields of invasive grasses, with steno notepad and camera in hand, I had a great time learning to identify native and invasive plant species.

I can't believe how much I miss working outside; I'd forgotten the power of hands-on learning. This is going to be a fun summer.

Juncus phaeocephalus in bloom.

Blue-eyed grass

Killdeer egg.

The City.

Davis, CA

I spent the last two nights in Davis at Ramon's place. It was a nice way to end the year. I rode the train up, and the pacing of train travel helped calm me down after what has been a somewhat hectic academic year, a year that left me practically carving tally marks into my bedroom wall (instead, I wrote blog posts).

Anyway, it just so happened that I showed up in Davis the same day as the Tour of California. Pictured above is Lance Armstrong (!).

After the start of the Davis stage of the tour, Ramon and I ate at Fuji's, an all-you-can-eat sushi boat restaurant. The lunch special cost twelve bucks each and the Asian inside of me made it a personal vendetta to get my money's worth, even at the price of physical discomfort (because what feels better than a good deal?). Pictured above are our stacks of dishes. Mine is the one on the right (!). Ramon is thinly suppressing a look of utter pain. We were getting looks from the other patrons sitting at the counter every time I tried to entice Ramon into eating "just one more" plate of sushi.

(The sushi boat rounds the corner. The tail of a tempura shrimp sticks out from the end of a small roll of sushi, topped with roe and what appears to be coleslaw.)
Both: Oh my God...
Me: Do you believe in love at first sight? Because I do. (Grabs the plate from the sushi boat.)
Ramon: I don't know, you can have this one...
Me: No man, we saw it at the same time.
Ramon: [Sigh.] (Picks up a piece with his chopsticks and barely fits it into his mouth.)
Me: Yeah? Is it good?
(Ramon looks queasy.)
Me: Keep chewing, hang in there. You're more than halfway; you only need to eat six more plates.
Ramon: (With a mouthful of food.) No!
Me: Dude, it'll be easy. Watch this. (Shoves the endpiece into his mouth. The tail of the tempura shrimp barely makes it in.)
Me: (With a mouthful of food.) Holy crap this is decadent. This is why the terrorists hate us.
Ramon: I can't do this.
Me: That's defeatist bullshit, man. (Gesturing with chopsticks.) Now get in there and eat some sushi.

All told, we made pretty good account of ourselves. Between the two of us, we ate twenty plates of sushi, two dishes of fried red bean balls, two dishes of cake, and a dish of oranges.

The bike ride back to Ramon's house was not a pleasant one.

Day 111

"Boom and Bust"


I got high and played some Pictionary(tm) yesterday. My team (the stoned one) was doing pretty well most of the game. Actually, we were kicking ass. We had some telepathy going on. Then someone joined the sober team mid-game and messed with our energy and they made it halfway around the board to catch up to us. In all, we made a good account of ourselves.

But the act of drawing itself was pretty awesome. The lack of an internal critic definitely made it a lot easier to put stuff down on paper, and I feel a rekindled desire to doodle now in my everyday life. Thanks, marijuana!

Day 107

I've adopted a hairstyle that's drastically more monastic than before. That is, no hair.

In other news: Money is a curse. It gives me the impulse to buy ridiculous things. Things like a Utilikilt (video). I guess the appeal really lies in the fact that a kilt offers the comfort and freedom of nudity (from the waist-down, at least), with only some of the social stigmatization.

I mean, I've gone skinny dipping before, and I must say, summer breezes never felt more amazing.

Day 106

As of late, I've been rather negligent in the upkeep of my body. I never imagined that it might be a drag to keep myself adequately fed, bathed, and clothed. I suppose it's a sign that there isn't a lot tying me down in the world when my mortal human body is the most valuable worldly possession I have to worry about. And even then I can't take care of it.

Anyway, there was a point when it got so bad, when my standards had slipped so far, that I couldn't keep to my schedule of alternate showering days. I remember going running in the rain a few weeks ago, and ultimately deciding not to shower. I mean, why waste resources when perfectly good water falls out of the sky? That sounds like a blessing from the gods if ever I saw one. Not only that, but I had to apply the sniff test every morning to not just my socks but every article of clothing I put on, and I started to eat cans of corn as meals in their own right.

Well, before the pellagra could set in, I finally got around to food shopping today after class. I loaded up the bicycle with my cargo buckets and headed on out to Trader Joe's in Oakland. Walking amongst the aisles of vacuum-sealed goat cheeses and individual heads of cauliflower in plastic wrap I suddenly realized that I was out of place. I think I've backslid on the socioeconomic scale, because honestly, that place just felt way too bourgie (excuse my French) for me. Well, at least now I have something to aspire to, a day when I can afford $4 wine.

Waiting in the checkout line (I got caught in the 5 o'clock rush), I got a real kick out of pretending to be a CIA spook by looking at everyone else's shopping carts and making inferences about their lives. For some reason or the other, I was having a conversation today and the topic of job interviews came up. I mentioned that I heard somewhere that this one interview for some CIA position involved looking at the contents of a refrigerator for a set amount of time, and then extrapolating as much information as possible (what does the brand, positioning, and relative depletion of the pickle jar say about its owner? age? gender? income?).

I went for the low-hanging fruit. Here are some of my field observations of people and the contents of their shopping carts:

• Hipster college girls - two buck chuck, bottom shelf liquor, fruit juice, salad mix. More calories in liquid than solid form. Conclusion: It's Friday! Whoo! And we're watching our weight, too.
• Berkeley family; both parents, two children - about 6 boxes of different types of breakfast cereals, a pile of fruit leathers, other family-friendly foodstuffs. Conclusion: Someone's watching a whole crapload of cartoons tomorrow morning and eating a whole lotta Peanut Butter Panda Puffs too.
• Single Asian woman, mid-twenties - frozen pizza, other frozen/instant foods. Blackberry strapped to her waist. Wearing a tucked-in expedition shirt from REI and big, black leather boots. Conclusion: Really busy executive/mountaineer? An alpine lawyer?
• Me - Tub of plain yogurt, various canned beans (kidney, garbanzo, black, cuban), tortillas, organic unsweetened soymilk, goat gouda, almonds. Conclusion: Hippie with his parents' credit card.

Dinner last night. I felt healthier from just looking at my bowl of lentils, cabbage, and yam.

Day 104

So, right now in my closet I'm harboring a host of burbling containers of yeasty anaerobic fermentation goodness. We owe so much to our little friends, the yeasts.

A quick rundown of current brew projects:

• Summer Ale (in the big carboy w/ airlock) - Should be nice and light. I bought the grains from San Francisco Brewcraft, a fine establishment where one might find all things good in the world, given that their main ingredients are barley, hops, and yeast. Whenever I go there, there's always this guy who hangs out in the back corner of the store, sitting in a leather easy chair that groans under his weight, wearing denim overalls with one strap unbuttoned. The other employees refer to him as "Griz," and I have a hard time imagining him in a past life without his silver beard and ponytail. Anyway, I asked for something summery, and Griz wrote up the grain recipe for me. He dubbed it "Lawnmower Ale," wrote the ingredients on a sheet, and one of the other guys at the store measured out the prescribed quantities of grains into a bag for me. Once I got the brew going, I added a whole crudload of dried fruits, persimmons (from my grandma; they were already starting to ferment) and nectarines (sulfur-free from Berkeley Bowl). Prescription: Sip on a co-op roof during an especially golden afternoon.
• Hard Pear Cider (green wine bottle on the left) - Made this one real quick and dirty; it's pear juice + champagne yeast, but in a fancy looking bottle. Also, it's pretty fancy pear juice too (organic pear nectar of ambrosial origins, to be exact). Let's see what happens. Might need some aging. Prescription: Serve during a vegetarian dinner for two.
• Applejack (brown bail-top bottle on right) - A holdover from last semester (Fall 2009 vintage) when I made about 5 gallons of hard apple cider. There was a bunch left over that I didn't have the storage space for, so I concentrated it using the time-honored, pioneer-tested method of freeze distillation. Initial tastings concluded that it could use some aging to eliminate the rather unpalatable rocket fuel taste. Prescription: Toast to the new year on a mountaintop.

So that's what I've got in the pipeline. I think brewing my own alcohol has been a pretty enlightening experience since I first started about a year ago. In that time, I think I've gained a fair understanding of what the responsible consumption of alcohol looks like. It's helped that brewing beer is such a huge pain in the ass (in terms of time and cleanup). So much so that I actually try to enjoy my brew whenever I happen to crack one open, usually after a long day at work (it makes me feel so grown-up). It also helps that my attendance at the Forestry Club Bean Feeds (chili and beer night with the other Forestry majors) have made alcohol tertiary in terms of relative importance to interesting people and good food in my hierarchy of successful socializing. I could fit the times that I've been properly drunk on one hand, and it's always the company that determines how much of a good time I have. I look forward not to the actual consumption of the alcohol I have hidden away in my closet; what I really anticipate are the all wonderful people I'm going to share it with.