Personal projects for my last half-semester of undergrad

1) Sustainable bedtimes. Like, between midnight and one. That would be great.

2) Do my part to strengthen the feminist presence/visibility on this campus  by a) calling attention to misogyny and male entitlement where I encounter them, and b) offering feminist analyses of the stuff that comes up in our studies and in our lives.* These are my last classes here, ever, so I can be as outspoken as I like without a thought for the consequences of gaining a reputation as "strident" or a "feminazi."

3) Make it to at least one céilí. Anyone in the Chicago area interested in coming with?

*issues other than the ordination of women and gender roles in marriage, because those have been abundantly treated

2011: Intentions

Concrete things like "exercise more" or "procrastinate less"—I would rather deal with those on a more immediate basis than make year-long resolutions. When you look back on a year, you look for wide impressions, landscape views, and that's how I prefer to look over the coming year as well. 

My wide intention for the year is to risk more. Especially:

To do more things that I'm not certain I will succeed at or enjoy.
     Simple enough; another assault on the dreaded inner tyrant Perfectionist. Less hesitation, bolder ambitions, more attempts, more new things...more messes and failures, and more learning.

And to lower my guard a bit.
     I sometimes hold bad grudges with people I know, and I can keep friendships with new people at a superficial level almost indefinitely. But trust will never not be a risk, as long as people are imperfect—and when I do not trust enough, my friendships stagnate and I start to feel very lonely, and it's no good. Yet how to stop being afraid of the pain of being hurt by a friend? I suppose it's like any other emotional fear: If you wait to act until it's gone, you will never move, so you acknowledge it and then you make your way through it.

I am not going to let myself simply hold my ground this year.

Life list item #19: Eat a mangosteen

I have wanted to eat a mangosteen for a long time, because author and all-around awesome lady Justine Larbalestier frequently and passionately sang their praises at her blog.

I finally got a couple this summer at my produce market, with stickers informing me they'd flown all the way from Thailand. (Sorry, ozone! I won't do it again!) They have very hard outsides, and white, pulpy, squishy insides (or at least, this is how mine were by the time I ate them). I wasn't so much a fan of the texture of the innards; it made me think of aliens, but the flavor and the juice were lovely. Sort of pineapple-y.

My parents thought by the name that it must be a half-breed fruit, the lovechild of mango + something else. Nope. It is its own fruit.

I have a bunch of other obscure tropical fruits to eat on my life list (which I have been needing to rewrite for a while...the items are nice, but not all of them still compel me). Odd me.

Do they have mangosteens where you live, slash, do you have a favorite odd fruit?

Summer list

go swimming in the Bay.
attend a Critical Mass.
read The Awakening, The Second Sex, Inkheart in the original German, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and Orthodoxy.
go gliding with my papa.
go swimming beyond the surf at Laguna.
attend a Bikram yoga class (~104 degrees).
submit poems for publication.
explore an abandoned building.
get acquainted with Photoshop.
resocialize Austin Scarlett.
review French grammar.
make bread from scratch without any help.

What hopes and goals have you for this summer?

Life list item #15: ATTEND A PROTEST

On March 21st, I joined hundreds of thousands of other protesters in Washington, D.C. at a rally and march for immigration reform.




I heard so much Spanish and saw so many different flags, but there were a ton of US flags as well.



There were many families with children. One speaker thanked the parents for bringing their children along so they could see all these examples of people engaged as activists.



It was a thirteen-hour bus ride there and back. The contingent from my college left Saturday afternoon and drove through the night. We attended a prayer service in the morning, marched, and then got back on the bus and drove through that night, arriving back in Illinois in time for Monday morning classes.



It was too exhausting for me to call it fun, but it was worthwhile. I felt proud to be there.















Links:

• New York Times coverage of the march
• Why reform?
• Goals for immigration reform
• My life list

Conclusion on ze summer goals

- read three plays by Shakespeare [Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Much Ado About Nothing]

- plan and save for a trip to take later this year [Australia! One month!]

- take a good portrait of a stranger with permission

- make vanilla frosting that is neither too thin nor too sweet

- read one book in another language [the German translation of The Horse and His Boy]

- buy a waterproof camera and take some pictures underwater [did so at the beach in Laguna at the beginning of August]

So the only one I didn't get to was the vanilla frosting challenge. But that was a conscious decision at the end, because I remembered that...I don't actually like frosting very much.

Bedtime stories

A bedtime story is not necessarily a cozy story with a happy ending. It is not necessarily a story with any ending.

But to be suitable for bedtime, a story must have a flavor you can't forget. It needs rich images, strange or beautiful. It needs to enchant you, to be something that you read before sleeping because you hope it will stain your dreams.

Also, it must be a story that can be told and listened to as well as read.

I've been working on a family of my own bedtime stories this year, as some of you know, and at the same time have had the idea of an Etsy store rattling around in my head for quite a while.

So [here's the exciting part] I'm planning to put these little stories together in a chapbook that I will list for sale online.

Watch this space for further news.

Eeps!

These are far-off plans

credit
First step towards living in Greenland: learn Danish.

Progress report [summer goals]

- read three plays by Shakespeare [read Othello and The Winter's Tale, reading Much Ado About Nothing]

- plan and save for a trip to take later this year

- take a good portrait of a stranger [with permission; sneaky portraits don't count]

- make vanilla frosting that is neither too thin nor too sweet

- read one book in another language [reading the German translation of The Horse and His Boy]

- buy a waterproof camera and take some pictures underwater

Things I really want to do before I die

I intend to keep adding to this list.

1. Explore an abandoned building.
2. Work in another country.
3. Spend the night in a library
4. Become vegan. [DONE: 1/2017]
5. Spend a while in Greenland.
6. Become competent with a sewing machine.
7. Cultivate a hobbitish quantity of foot calluses.[DONE: 4/2010]
8. Dance a treble reel.
9. Learn to ride a motorcycle.
10. Watch the world wake from a balcony in Paris.
11. Be published.
12. Learn to taste the difference between bad wine and good wine.
13. Snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef.
14. Dance at a céilí.
15. Attend a protest. [DONE: 3/21/10]
16. Meet all of my bloggy friends.
17. Be mistaken for a Dutchwoman in the Netherlands.
18. See a new country or a new part of the U.S. every year.
19. Eat a mangosteen [DONE: 5/13/10]
20. Walk through the subway tunnel.
21. Learn the dance from the "Love is Battlefield" music video.
22. Try a durian and a rambutan.
23. Spend a spring in Russia.
24. Become comfortable asking strangers for their portraits.
25. Kayak in Iceland's Westfjords [ideally while I'm there with this program].
26. Take a Bikram yoga class.
27. Make pasta from scratch with Amanda and her nonna.
28. Drive the remainder of Iceland's Highway 1.
29. Visit Svalbard.
30. Drive a Smart car.
31. Stay at a convent/monastery.

If you've posted a life list, drop me a link!