The incomparable voice of a Common Loon on an Adirondacks lake

Lately

It is a rare afternoon alone in my apartment, and I have finally found my way back to the good old blog. I have missed this. Grad school does like to get between you and your hobbies, doesn't it? Things I like about grad school:

1. The ecologists at UCSB are a lovely bunch.
2. I get to be outside for "work."
3. I am "doing something with my life."
4. I am kept busy.
5. I am pushing myself to new academic heights.
6. I am working toward my goal of acquiring 70% of all knowledge.
7. Santa Barbara is beautiful. I love the natural beaches and above all the look of the mountains on a clear day. Or how they turn the best purples and blues at sunset.
8. I joined an intramural soccer team! And we get to play on real grass!

Things I am less keen on:

1. I miss (really, really, really miss) being able to get around without a car. These days it almost feels like I'm under house arrest. We should get a car, and we're slowly looking into it, but one doesn't have lots of extra funds to bandy about on a grad student's salary.
2. I am unbearably homesick for Berkeley. For knowing where everything is, for there being cool things in walking distance of my apartment. I miss being able to go to see music. I miss playing music at all, which I could do here, but I don't -- it almost feels like an activity attached somehow to my life in the bay. And above all, I miss my friends. I am making new friends here, which I am pleased about since I'm not generally good at that, but it's nothing like having old friends.
3. I don't seem to do art anymore. I feel like I've lost some of my favorite parts of me there. And most of my stress releases.
4. Lots of people have been dying lately. Suicides. Three so far this year. Two in one week this March. That brings me up to nine suicides and attempts of people I know or knew. That is a lot. And it doesn't become passé after the third or fourth time. Even if the routine of it becomes familiar -- the shock, the guilt, sense of closeness with the survivors -- the weight of each one seems to snowball. This time the suicides were people I had met and was looking forward to getting to know. I am finding that that has made it harder to grieve. The one guy in my department was supposed to take the Ecology Written Exam with us. He came to our first reading group meeting, and he seemed so cool and intelligent. I remember feeling excited that he'd be there to help us and that I'd get to know him better. His advisor had moved to Switzerland, and he was going to sit in with my lab and join our seminar. And then he was gone. I didn't go to the group session the set up with the counseling center since I felt awkward nosing in when everyone else had known him better. I'd gone with my office mate to help clean out his office earlier that day so we could donate the rest of his books to the department library (or something), and I offered to carry back his binders, but my office mate who is normally so cheery and upbeat couldn't bear to see his handwriting and decided we'd grabbed enough. I could tell he was experiencing this all in a much more personal way, and I felt as if I'd be co-opting their session to battle my old demons. I may still ring up the counseling folks for myself, but I feel a little embarrassed.
5. I know Hawaii is glamourous in theory, but I find myself dreading going there. When I'm up to my ears in shrubs or getting slapped by a tree branch, I'm pretty happy. I have a sense of purpose when I feel like I know what I'm doing, but I do not find it beautiful. I don't like needing to move or find a subletter every three months -- since apparently I'm spending two of the next four quarters there, and not consecutive ones. I don't like being separated from Matt for the three months before our wedding. I don't like that he moves back to Berkeley each time I go. Honestly, the logistics of it all make me question my commitment to ecology. Being there doesn't feel like being in a tropical paradise. It feels like being stranded on what I believe is the most isolated chain of islands in the world.
6. My grandmother is due in for a surgery. She's either 85 or 89. I believe it's open heart surgery. I felt like such a pansy with all my inner turmoil over having my wisdom teeth out last month when the worst thing that could have happened was losing my sense of taste. And her doctors aren't sure she'll survive the surgery. She is the last grandparent I've got left. Being so close to the end seems to have made her cheery, appreciating every moment. She went from thinking she wouldn't make it to the wedding to be close to her doctors and take it easy to being the first to book a hotel room. She's an hour away, and I rarely see her.

Dinosaur toes

The gooseneck barnacle is pretty much my new favorite animal. Though, I am disappointed that they are not commonly known as dinosaur toes. Wikipedia said it has something to do with geese maybe having evolved from these things. What? Maybe I read that wrong...

On giving the appearance of having computer know-how

xkcd has mapped my thought process exactly. You too can now be a computer wizard!

Things you should know

It's true, I have been terrible about getting the word about, but OMG I am engaged! It's kind of hard to wrap my mind around, especially when I'm living alone in this new place and everything about life is so new right now, but one of these days I'm going to have to get better about saying fiancé instead of boyfriend. Maybe when we get our engagement rings.

So, holy toledo! There is a lot of planning to do! I haven't really done much of anything, but my sisters are excitedly sending me links of pretty wedding dodads and invitation artwork or finding friends of theirs who want to make my wedding cake and only charge me for materials. I signed up for That right away. Hell yeah, man. She can make whatever she wants for that price.

Wedding gown browsing has been a little trickier. Of course anything I really love costs 3-4x what I want to spend. I'm ok with looking a little more casual than the norm dress-wise, especially if it means I have more $$$ to spend on accessories and what not I will actually wear again, but, my god, anything calling itself a wedding dress costs way more than it needs to you. Case in point: there was a dress on Etsy that came in a variety of colors (red, black, white, etc), and the white one cost Hundreds of Dollars More than the red or black one even though the material was the same! That's what I call highway robbery! I want it to be obvious in pictures that I'm the one getting married, but other than that I don't need to be super fancy. Here are some outfits I've liked so far...

Gauchos heyo

I'm just starting to get settled in here in Goleta, the town cuddling up to UCSB, where I start classes tomorrow.

Thank god for our inaugural EEMB (my department) retreat for first years and anyone else who feels like coming. It was so(ooo) nice to get to meet my girls (there is one guy out of the eight of us) before orientation day. Seeing familiar faces in our lab safety training on Monday really gave me the warm and fuzzies. So far I love everyone in my cohort and all the other grad students (at least the ones who come to socials with booze!). Even the faculty are great, especially my advisor. Santa Barbara is no Bay Area, but it feels like the right place to be.

Eg. I have been wanting to learn to knit so that I can make socks, but I don't want any more scarves, and I don't want to spend months making what turns into a lumpy sweater. And what do they have but a beginners knitting class specifically for socks and slippers! It is a sign. I think I might be the first one registered.

The apt. is still mostly empty with cardboard boxes strewn about, but I have a desk, a bed, internet, a couple of bookcases, and two posters up, so it works.

They told us at orientation that we have the highest voter registration rates of any school in the US. Berkeley is second and our rate is twice theirs! I was pleased about that.

California-bound

Suddenly it is my last night in Hawaii.

Hawaii. Where to start.

The first five weeks here, I helped out with the experiments my advisor and her post doc in Hawaii are working on. We're looking at grasses that invaded burned and unburned parts of the dry woodland in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. It looks like after 20 or so years, the grasses might finally be declining (because annual grasses don't hold as much nitrogen as the woody shrubs and trees they replaced), so part of our research involves trying to figure out the best strategy for restoring this part of the park. It probably isn't possible to get rid of the grasses, but we're hoping that as they decline, we might be able to reintroduce some of the native trees and shrubs.

For my birthday (on which I turned the big 3-0), everyone in the lab helped me start fieldwork on my own project, in which I am trying to figure out what sorts of plants some of our native and invasive nitrogen-fixing (meaning they can get nitrogen from the air, unlike most other plants which need to get it from the soil) trees promote and what sort of habitats they tend to inhabit. Sounds simple enough, but it involved a lot of twigs in my nose, woody wet willies, dirt in my eyes as I crawled under stands of four types of trees to see what-all was going on down there and cuts all over my hands and up my forearms as I thrashed through thorny invasive lantana (a plant more than happy to get all up in your grill).

I've been working seven days a week, up to ten hours a day, to get it all done before I head back, and, as of right now, all I have left to do is ship my samples to California before catching a plane back to the Bay myself.

It's still hard to believe I'm here as a part of my real life. Everything here is so different -- the landscape, my social circle, my diet, my weekend activities, everything.

This is a typical weekday: Wake up at 5:30am. Make lunch. Make/eat breakfast. Drive through a gorgeous forest full of ohia trees, ferns, and ginger to get to the lab in the national park by 7am. We load our packs for the day and drive about 10 miles out to our field site in the dry woodland. Park and hike 15-60 minutes to our starting spot. Draw a transect line or a 5x10m plot and count and measure everything growing along or in it. Hike back. Drive back to the lab by 3pm. Unload. If I've been working on my own project: set out the day's soils to airdry in paper bags, weigh yesterday's litter, grind litter and leaf samples and pack them into coin envelopes. Head home to shower around 5pm, eat dinner. Try to read a research paper or catch up on emails/find an apartment/sort out which classes to register for/&c. Fall asleep at 9:30pm.

This is a typical weekend: Saturday sleep in till 6! Eat breakfast, catch up on email. Drive (~30 miles) down to the Hilo Farmers Market to get lunch and produce for the week. Maybe swing by Richardson's beach park for a little snorkeling. Go to KTA for the rest of my groceries. Go home, eat dinner, watch So You Think You Can Dance, fall asleep. Sunday sleep in till 6 again! Drive/walk (depending where I'm living) to the Volcano Farmers Market for bananas, eggs, bread, other produce. Drive (~70 miles) to the Kahuku Unit of the park for a hike -OR- drive down Chain of Craters Road to see the petroglyphs -OR- go back to the lab to work. Shower. Eat. Sleep.

I think I am doing ok at this being a grad student thing, but I am still terrified of Even More Change. Eg. moving to an apartment I've never seen in Goleta, starting classes, moving away from everyone I know for an Indeterminate Amount of Time. At the very least Matt will be coming down in January. I take comfort in that. And people say you can't technically fail out of grad school before it starts. I am excited to live so close to the ocean -- just a short walk from a butterfly preserve and ocean bluffs. I am curious to meet what will be my new grad school friends. But I guess a little piece of me isn't totally convinced that what I'm about to do will necessarily be better than what I'd been doing (the unsustainability of my lifestyle notwithstanding). Life is pretty good in the Bay. I hope Santa Barbara and the Goleta scene will rise to the occasion.

Ok, this is what I am worried about: becoming boring, turning into a stress monster, disappointing my advisor (and making her regret taking a chance on me). But seriously, I don't want to turn one-dimensional just because I am becoming an expert in something. Also, I am sad that I don't know when Matt and I will live in the same place for an extended period of time again, but I know that at least will happen.

Fear of trains

I sent my twin apartment scouts on a little adventure this past Sunday, and we have emerged victorious! I'm no longer going to be homeless in Santa Barbara!

As of September 6th, I shall be the proud inhabitant of what I hope will be a darling 1 bedroom apartment in Goleta in a complex with a pool, jacuzzi, sauna, and LAUNDRY! The kitchen is miniscule, but it has a dishwasher -- by which I don't just mean a sink and two hands. The only troublesome thing is that train tracks are visible from the apartment, as in 50 feet away, but I think it will be just fine. Trains are better than freeway, drunk undergrads, and airport noise. I can't wait to plunk my stuff down in there and throw a party!

SO GLAD to have that settled.

Anniversary

Today marks 365 days of bliss with the best gentleman a gal could ask for. Every day for the past long while has made this the longest relationship I've ever been a part of, but today seems a particularly good landmark and vanguard of what I hope will be many more anniversaries. It feels so regal and adult of me to be able to celebrate the completion of a full trip around the sun in the presence of such a stellar human being, when before I could only measure my time with someone by counting orbits of the moon around our small earth on five fingers. It's as if the stars are aligned, and I can feel the hand of the universe warmly nudging me along. I have so much to be thankful for.

Hawaii-ho

More words later. For now, some pictures!

This is where I work!
It can also look like this.
Sometimes we can see the ocean.
Flowers of the native tree Ohi'a lehua Metrosideros polymorpha, one of the species we work with.
This is Kilauea crater, the volcano I live on. It's still active, and you can see it glow red at night.
Mauna Ulu, the growing mountain.
Looking into Mauna Ulu crater.
View from Whittington Beach Park.
Kilauea Iki.
Wet forest.

According to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, a baby named Gauge Danger Smith was born in Hawaii today. Danger really *is* his middle name.

Parisian dreams

82-18

I will admit that I have been on a not-terribly-subtle campaign to help Matt decide that he does in fact want to move to Santa Barbara conmigo in the spring, and it may be working! All of this missing him while he is in Europe is paying off!

Orchid rescue: success

Were you aware of it? vol. 38: It's not a weasel, it's a martin

Man with dead weasel accused of Hoquiam assault

HOQUIAM, Wash. (AP) — Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into a Hoquiam apartment and assaulted a man.

The victim asked, "Why are you carrying a weasel?" Police said the attacker said, "It's not a weasel, it's a martin," then punched him in the nose and fled.

The attacker was apparently looking for his girlfriend and had gone to her former boyfriend's apartment Monday night where the victim was a guest.

KXRO reports he left carcass behind.

Police later found the suspect arguing with his girlfriend at another location and arrested the 33-year-old Hoquiam man after a fight.

He said he had found the martin dead near Hoquiam, but police don't know why he carried it with him.

A martin is a member of the weasel family.

**Courtesy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

I feel this merits a theatrical reenactment.

Another look at it

This one from the New York Times.

The End of the Jihadist Dream
By Ali H. Soufan

TO the Qaeda members I interrogated at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere in the aftermath of 9/11, Osama bin Laden was never just the founder and leader of the group, but also an idea. He embodied the belief that their version of Islam was correct, that terrorism was the right weapon, and that they would ultimately be victorious. Bin Laden’s death did not kill that idea, but did deal it a mortal blow.

The immediate reaction of Al Qaeda members to Bin Laden’s death will be to celebrate his martyrdom. The group’s ideology champions death for the cause: Songs are composed, videos made and training camps named in honor of dead fighters. Bin Laden’s deputies will try to energize people by turning him into a Che Guevara-like figure for Al Qaeda — a more effective propaganda tool dead than alive.

But it won’t take long for Al Qaeda to begin wishing that Bin Laden wasn’t dead. He not only was the embodiment of Al Qaeda’s ideology, but also was central to the group’s fund-raising and recruiting successes. Without him, Al Qaeda will find itself short on cash — and members.

Bin Laden’s fund-raising (especially through his connections to fellow wealthy Saudis) and his personal story (his decision to give up a life of luxury and ease to fight in a holy war) had brought him to prominence during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and later secured his position as Al Qaeda’s leader.

He further cultivated that image by trying to model his ascetic life on that of the Prophet Muhammad — by dressing similarly and encouraging his followers to ascribe divine powers to him. Bin Laden regularly hinted at this when discussing Al Qaeda’s strikes against America and his ability to withstand Washington’s wrath.

Not only has Al Qaeda lost its best recruiter and fund-raiser, but no one in the organization can come close to filling that void. Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, who will probably try to take over, is a divisive figure. His personality and leadership style alienate many, he lacks Bin Laden’s charisma and connections and his Egyptian nationality is a major mark against him.

Indeed, one of the earliest things I discovered from interrogating Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Yemen as well as Guantánamo was the group’s internal divisions; the most severe is the rivalry between the Egyptians and members hailing from the Arabian Peninsula. (Even soccer games pit Egyptians against Persian Gulf Arabs.) While Egyptians typically travel to the Gulf to work for Arabs there, in Al Qaeda, Egyptians have traditionally held most of the senior positions.

It was only the knowledge that they were ultimately following Bin Laden — a Saudi of Yemeni origin, and therefore one of their own — that kept non-Egyptian members in line. Now, unless a non-Egyptian takes over, the group is likely to splinter into subgroups. Someone like Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American who is a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is a likely rival to Mr. Zawahri.

Bin Laden was adept at convincing smaller, regional terrorist groups that allying with Al Qaeda and focusing on America were the best ways to topple corrupt regimes at home. But many of his supporters grew increasingly distressed by Al Qaeda’s attacks in the last few years — which have killed mostly Muslims — and came to realize that Bin Laden had no long-term political program aside from nihilism and death.

The Arab Spring, during which ordinary people in countries like Tunisia and Egypt overthrew their governments, proved that contrary to Al Qaeda’s narrative, hated rulers could be toppled peacefully without attacking America. Indeed, protesters in many cases saw Washington supporting their efforts, further undermining Al Qaeda’s claims.

But we cannot rest on our laurels. Most of Al Qaeda’s leadership council members are still at large, and they command their own followers. They will try to carry out operations to prove Al Qaeda’s continuing relevance. And with Al Qaeda on the decline, regional groups that had aligned themselves with the network may return to operating independently, making them harder to monitor and hence deadlier.

Investigations, intelligence and military successes are only half the battle. The other half is in the arena of ideas, and countering the rhetoric and methods that extremists use to recruit. We can keep killing and arresting terrorists, but if new ones are recruited, our war will never end.

Our greatest tool, we must remember, is America itself. We have suffered a great deal at the hands of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and we will never forget those killed in attacks like the 1998 bombings on United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 2000 attack on the Navy destroyer Cole, 9/11 and the service members killed since then in the war against Al Qaeda.

Many terrorists whom I interrogated told me they expected America to ultimately fold. What they didn’t understand is that as powerful as the Bin Laden idea was to them, America’s values and liberties are even greater to us. Effectively conveying this will bury the Bin Laden idea with him.

Ali H. Soufan, an F.B.I. special agent from 1997 to 2005, interrogated Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.

On the death of Osama bin Laden

My sister found this article that does a good job summing up my reaction to last night's news.

Chris Hedges, speaking at a Truthdig fundraising event in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, made these remarks about Osama bin Laden’s death.

I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin Laden was killed, Bob [Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer] wanted me to say a few words about it … about al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told ... me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naive about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.

But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11—and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha—is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.

And the killing of bin Laden, who has absolutely no operational role in al-Qaida—that’s clear—he’s kind of a spiritual mentor, a kind of guide … he functions in many of the ways that Hitler functioned for the Nazi Party. We were just talking with Warren [Beatty] about [Ian] Kershaw’s great biography of Hitler, which I read a few months ago, where you hold up a particular ideological ideal and strive for it. That was bin Laden’s role. But all actual acts of terror, which he may have signed off on, he no way planned.

I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the whole rise of al-Qaida is that when Saddam Hussein … I covered the first Gulf War, went into Kuwait with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, was in Basra during the Shiite uprising until I was captured and taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard. I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard. Within that initial assault and occupation of Kuwait, bin Laden appealed to the Saudi government to come back and help organize the defense of his country. And he was turned down. And American troops came in and implanted themselves on Muslim soil.

When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.

And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about it in the Jugurthine wars. And the only way to successfully fight terrorist groups is to isolate [them], isolate those groups, within their own societies. And I was in the immediate days after 9/11 assigned to go out to Jersey City and the places where the hijackers had lived and begin to piece together their lives. I was then very soon transferred to Paris, where I covered all of al-Qaida’s operations in the Middle East and Europe.

So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. And we had major religious figures like Sheikh Tantawi, the head of al-Azhar—who died recently—who after the attacks of 9/11 not only denounced them as a crime against humanity, which they were, but denounced Osama bin Laden as a fraud … someone who had no right to issue fatwas or religious edicts, no religious legitimacy, no religious training. And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are.

We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.

And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind of frightening death spiral. So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know its intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become the monster that we are attempting to fight.

Thank you.

Bad Project

I'm going to be a f*cking ecologist

I'm heading to UCSB in the fall to work with the best ever advisor on a PhD in Ecology!!!!! They're even giving me a year of money to start!! I'm overwhelmed with excitement and terror! But a good kind of terror..

Dunno yet if I need to start in Sept or June, so I can't entirely make plans, but I just know I will know soon. And It Feels So Good. I can at least start visualizing my life.

It's almost 3am, so I should get to sleep, but HALLELUJAH!

Still waitin'.