Salvation in an Orange Sticker

Looks like my truck will be sporting Macalester colors. Small price to pay for the solution to my previously mentioned parking woes. A simple call to my building manager produced a plethora of options, the cheapest being a trip to city hall with my lease to acquire a parking permit exempting residents from the parking restrictions. It just happens to come in the form of an orange sticker. Combined that with discovering the closest access point to the awesome Twin Cities bike path system & life is grand. Hopefully I'll be able to keep the use of my car to a minimum this summer.

In other news (literally), I found this editorial in the NY Times on American pre-occupation with multi-tasking interesting. Looks like I'm not the only one who questions what the hyperdrive system we're all quietly installing on life is doing to the quality of it. Enjoy.

Let's I.M. as You Read This by Carolym Curiel

Atrocities Against Humanity

On a completely different note, who possibly thought it was a good idea to make all the street parking around a densely populated residential area restricted?

2 Hour Parking
9am - 4pm
Monday - Friday


How can one possibly achieve a proper state of unemployed sloth under such conditions??
Sleeping in past noon becomes endangered by a $34 fine, not to mention simply lounging around the apartment in ones underwear all day. Well, I guess there's the choice between risking a parking ticket or indecent exposure on that one...

More practically, how am I going to bike to the U of MN for my 8am - 11am class?

Balancing ∞

Its amazing how easy it can be to become totally submerged in life with someone you love. At least it has been that way for me since I’ve returned to the Cities. Exploring life in the new, intense context of us has been enthralling & challenging. This, obviously, has a lot of up sides. What is love if not, in part, a desire to be with a particular someone and making them happy? I also chose the new quote to banner this page with a reason. Balance.

In some ways the loneness of the Peace Corps is also one of its advantages. At the end of the day, or the week or the month; at the end of your solitary rope, you have to face up to the realities you have put yourself in. If your new community hasn’t fully embraced you after your first tentative “Ngay omajem?” you have to figure out why & keep looking for those with whom you can develop some amount of camaraderie. In the same vein, if your day isn’t fulfilling to you personally, emotionally or in regards to your work you are confronted with that reality constantly. There are few places to run & hide. Most of those are within yourself & they never hold up long. Trips to visit other Volunteers are also always brief. In its simplicity everything comes into sharper focus. Your work blends into integrating blends into leisure activities even blends into your running regime. One of the most striking lessons I learned was how much community & other people really do draw one of those fine lines between sanity & hell.

So what do you do when all of a sudden merely sitting on a couch talking with someone you love about whatever banal topic is of the moment overwhelmingly fulfills those desires of community & human interaction & leaves you fulfilled for the day? The day has been a success! My relationship with Bridget is improving and deepening and constantly moving towards the point a more natural existence as us. Its not always easy, but it is always exciting & engaging & the most worthwhile & important thing I could be doing with my life right now.

But I speak of balances. Only the lucky (or maybe only the dim or un-ambitious) are every able to approach & deal with life on reality, one aspect at a time. While I still hold life with Bridget is the most important & exciting part of life right now it is far from the only part. For instance, take the concept of that lucrative job so I can continue paying my bills my Dad keeps reminding me about every time we chat on the phone. Or more simple pleasures & goals of continuing to run & get in shape for frisbee season or getting back into climbing. None of these things happens overnight. Plyometric jump training is neither easy nor short, nor necessarily that much fun, but skying someone 3 inches taller than you 8 weeks from now certainly is. & to stretch to timeline out even farther, now is the time to really be putting in the work researching grad schools to find the best options & to start working on applications while I have the luxury of far & distant deadlines & can really focus on the substance within that freedom.

While pursuing one particular worthwhile endeavor might not constitute hiding from the others it can definitely develop overtones of that as the rest of life begins to breakdown around the edges from lack of use or engagement.
Damn. I need to get a job.

One Month At a Time

Despite the fact that I have a wireless capable laptop and am surrounded by coffee shops with free internet it seems to take me longer to post here than it did in the Philippines. I guess I have had a few things to take care of this past month and life has the ability to be just a tad more fast paced & busy this side of the Pacific. What are you going to do?

So the past month:
Last time I posted I had just arrived from the Peace Corps to a slightly chaotic home base with my parents in Michigan. They are in the process of moving to Kentucky with my Dad’s new job so life has been rather crazy at home. I was there for most of the month sorting through old boxes cleaning out the random clutter that can build up to surprising proportions since middle school. Sorting & organizing life becomes much more interesting when periodically, sometimes on 4 hours notice, a complete set of strangers wants to wander through your abode and have you not there while they do it. I’ve never packed in such a neat & orderly fashion in my life (& hope never to have to again).

Besides generally helping around the house I also took a brief sojourn up to the Twin Cities to start apartment hunting & to see Bridget. That was a very successful trip, though it was extended as Easter plans in Iowa with my brother got nixed by a untimely tornado that made quite the mess of his town. He escaped unscathed but had to put in a lot of overtime getting the bar he works for up & running again.

The last excitement of my pre-move existence was a trip to Kentucky with my Mom to see the new house & to check out the area a bit. We went down for “Thunder Over Louisville,” which I’m told is supposed to be the biggest annual fireworks display in the States. It was ridiculous. They closed down one of the bridges over the Ohio river and had a string of launchers on the bridge and the main fireworks were shot off of two barges, one on either side of the bridge happily synchronized with each other. It was quite the show. I spent most of it wrestling with my internal dislike of fireworks. Ever since I started working for ASP watching that much money fire up into the sky for some interesting lights & noises has never appealed to me. I found two interesting mental moves that helped me enjoy the show more. The first is the fact that being angry.upset with something isn’t really a useful emotional reaction unless you’re in a position to do something about it. Those fireworks were going to go up anyway and I certainly wasn’t in any position to even voice an opinion on it let alone suggest they do something else with all that cash. The other realization is that (at least in this instance) the entire show is privately supported. Someone, a lot of someone’s, out there seem to believe that this extravagance is somehow economically viable for them to support (most of the supports were corporations as far as I could tell). I’d like to argue with economics, but I’ll wait till I finish my basic courses on the subject this summer to broach that concept.

I’ve been officially located in Minneapolis now since May 3^rd. Over the past week & a half I’ve mostly been concentrating on seeing Bridget, getting my apartment settled, & trying out for Sub Zero. Alas I was cut from Sub Zero yesterday so now I suppose I should replace that particular aim with… say… finding a job? Should be a good time. I’m hoping to find some sort of lucrative night job (either bartending or waiting tables) which would allow my days to be devoted to both classes at the U of MN & finding some more meaningful volunteer work. There are plenty of options around the Cities for both of those, so now I just need to get a handle on what’s out there & start knocking on doors.

Hopefully now that life appears to have started to settle down a bit I’ll post more regularly. That is, of course, assuming I continue to have anything worthwhile to say on a regular basis. They tell me its supposed to be spring here, but its been in the 30s & 40s the past few days & threatened to snow so I certainly hope its warmer wherever you happen to be. Enjoy.