Never

Manic Hypergraphia

"Once one determines to write, one no longer confronts experience directly. It becomes 'copy', recyclable in stories, articles, essays, poems. True, nothing in a skilled writer's life is wasted. But there is something mildly - and sometimes more than mildly - gruesome about collecting experience for one's work the way a certain kind of person collects grievances...[but] the pleasures of composition are like few others: certainly none that I have known. Constructing well-made sentences, in which words and thought appear to make a seamless fit, causing the small but intense light of insight to click on, can only be compared, I should imagine, to the delight of dancing faultlessly to one’s own choreography."

Does anybody still read this thing?

Hey Boulder/Denverite Kids!

My friends Sean and Kevin are having a graduation party at their house this weekend. It's going to be huge. You should come. It also might be my last chance to see many of you, since I leave for Istanbul a week later. Again, I say, you should come, and bring your friends.

When:
Saturday, May 12 @ 10:00pm

Where:
950 34th St.
Boulder, CO
(Close to 30th and Aurora, nearish to Willville.)


"Oh nightly nights of ratcheting debauchery how graduation invokes thee. A celebration lest we forget these years, to toast some form of finality. Think not, were done, just come cause this is gonna be the shit." - Sean

Valentine's Sucks So Let's Party

Hey any Boulder/Denver kids who still read this journal. My friend Joanna is having an ultra kitschy Valentine's Sucks So Let's...Party at her house tonight. There will be some beer and some heart candy and people will probably get drunk and decide to play Spin-the-Bottle, as these things tend to go.

I'll be there from 10pm or so. If I haven't seen you yet (or even if I have) and you like beer or heart candy, drop by 950 34th St. (Near 30th & Colorado.) Call for directions if you need them and don't know how to work MapQuest. Hope to see you there!

Hey Folks,

First: Hi! Yes, I'm alive. And still at McMurdo, for about another month.

Second: It occurs to me that I haven't posted here in ages...and that it's possible I won't pick this journal up again for a long time, if ever.

However, I started a new blog a few months back. I know a few of you have stumbled across it already. It's mainly to keep in touch with my grandparents, and is fairly innocuous for that reason - but if you're interested in keeping up on my Antarctic adventures or any of my subsequent travels, feel free to check it out:

frozenfoxtale

I'm generally not 'friending' too many people back, just because I don't have a lot of time to spend on LJ and will soon have even less, so what I do have, I mainly devote to staying in contact with my 'real life' friends and loved ones from home. Still, it'd be nice to hear from everyone and hear what you've been up to lately.

Hope you've all been having a good year. :)

Where has my dear Miss Jacqueline gone?

Well, it's official! I'm Wintering. I signed a contract last week to be the General Assistant at the Heavy Shop through the end of August.

I'm pretty excited, it's going to be a great job and an awesome experience. However, this means I probably won't be back in the States until Spring or Summer of '07 - I'm planning to put my return airfare credit toward a Round-the-World ticket and spend nine months to a year traveling once I get off the Ice. Hopefully I'll be able to see some of you in non-Boulder locales during that time. (Especially those of you that, y'know, don't live in Boulder anyway.) But I'm going to miss you all regardless and hope you'll keep in touch.

I'll be checking my e-mail semi-regularly during the Winter, since we won't be able to receive or send any paper mail once planes stop coming in. If anyone is still planning to send me anything, it'll need to be in Christchurch before February 25th in order to make it down. Address it to:

Rebecca Crane - WINTEROVER
McMurdo Station
PSC 469 Box 700
APO AP 96599-1035

and they'll make a point of getting it on the last mail plane.

Thankyou thankyou thankyou to everyone who's sent cards, letters and e-mails. They totally make my day.

Hope you're all well and warm.

Here's some seals (and me with a funny look on my face):

Summer has come to McMurdo, and with it, Daisy Picking Season. Seeing as there is no species of daisy native to Antarctica's volcanic-ash-and-permafrost soil, "daisy picking" is a euphemism for trash collecting. Specifically trash that, having frozen into the ice over the past winter, now begins to surface all around town during this short period of thaw. (The bright and balmy 38 degree weather has folks out playing frisbee in t-shirts and flipflops.)

The station must look clean and shiny because summer is also the season when the sea-ice softens enough for an icebreaker to cut a channel all the way to McMurdo - established here because it's the Southernmost point in the world accessible by ship - making way for distinguished visitors in the form of Senators and other funding sources, cruise liners bearing the kind of tourists who can shell out $30,000/person, and most importantly, Vessel - the annual resupply ship which brings in the entire stock of provisions, construction materials and liquor for the following year (and takes out the previous year's tons of waste and recycling.)

On New Years Day, our freshly de-daisyfied town square aka "Derelict Junction" will also host Icestock - an outdoor music festival featuring local talent and the famed McMurdo Chili Cookoff...

( Antarctica - 'It's a Harsh Continent' )

Hey Kids, Happy New Year from way Down Under.

("Never worry that the world might end today - it's already tomorrow in New Zealand Antarctica.")

Don't worry, this doesn't herald my defeated return to LiveJournal. I just wanted to wish you all well for the New Year, let you know that I miss you and hope you're having a good holiday season, and send reassurance that I haven't frozen to death or anything.

(Although I see Aug's been posting "dispatches" from me occasionally. ( Replies. ))



Anyway, Antarctica's amazing, intensely beautiful and fucking strange. It's full of surreal juxtapositions and counterintuitive paradoxes that make it like bootcamp for living with cognitive dissonance... And no, I haven't seen any penguins. But I did see some seals, Antarctic starfish, and lots of skuas. (Not to mention quite a few Kiwis - in good weather, their base is about a twenty minute walk from ours.) The work itself is great - demanding, but not unpleasantly so, plus I work with really interesting people and it's so nice having a job with hours.

I live in a tiny cardboard box sized room in a dorm inhabited primarily by FNGs (first years aka "fucking new guys") called the "Mammoth Mountain Inn". My roommate is a cool girl named Lisa who's down here as a General Assistant (entry level job that involves a lot of shoveling snow), but works as a climbing instructor in the world and is mostly trying to network with the Field Safety and Training department in hopes of someday coming back as a mountain guide. I've been "not-dating" a boy named Eric for a couple of months now - he's a mechanic from Portland and he's kind of a cynical disaffected punk kid, but he makes me smile. I went to Snow School last week, which is a two day training course in snow camping and cold weather survival skills. I got to build and sleep in an igloo-type-structure and eat ridiculous amounts of chocolate.

I haven't had nearly as much time to read or write as I was anticipating, but I've been volunteering at the town library, doing some cross-country skiing, and learning to swing dance, speak Russian, and survive on significantly less sleep than I'm used to. Round-the-clock daylight wreaks havoc on your circadian rhythms, and that combined with the work hours and the weather means everyone down here is, at least to a small degree, chronically hypothermic and sleep-deprived. It's a lot of fun though. The people are great, the vistas breathtaking, there are some pretty good parties, and the Catch-22esque bureaucratic antics of the NSF/Raytheon are endlessly entertaining.

Little stress, lots of laughs, epiphanic moments of various amplitudes, and the food's not terrible...although I miss fresh vegetables, cooking for myself, and stars. Still, I'm looking into extending my contract through the Winter.

I'll try to upload a few more pictures when I get the chance, and I'll post some excerpts from my paper journal in another entry for those who are curious about what it's like down here.

I hope you're all doing well and keeping warm, and that the upcoming year is your best one yet. I'll see you when I see you.

Frozen Foxtale, Over and Out.

...Scratch that calling you tomorrow thing ... because I'm going to Happy Camper! Two days out of town, and we get to build igloos and sleep in snow shelters etc etc. This is actually a required training for everybody whose job might ever take them outside of town. But for us poor Janitors and DAs who never have any work related reason to go somewhere that we could possibly get stranded and freeze to death, Happy Camper counts as a boondoggle - so I didn't think I was going to get to do it. But apparently I am.

Rebecca has been volunteering in the library in her meager free time. She writes:

Oh man, you won't believe what I just found. I was digging around in
the drawers of the Librarian desk, trying to find a pen, and I came
across the Library Logs for, like, the past 20 years. I mean, nobody's
really used them much since the advent of mass e-mail at McMurdo, but
there's Records as far back as Winter '86 - and in addition to listing
how many people came in and checked out how many books and what got
catalogued where/when etc. ... There's all sorts of little personal
anecdotes and comments about the weather and the food and jokes and
poems people wrote while they were on duty and ... Just freaking awesome
stuff. I meant to reshelve a bunch of books, but I got so caught up
just reading these things, that now it's nearly 9...

. . .

"April 12

What a welcome!? My first McMurdo Library Working Experience, not my
first Library Experience, mind you, and certainly not my first
experience... None of my "friends" let me know how COLD it was in here,
and here it's 2.5 hours later and I discovered there's a blanket on the
sofa. Keeping warm here is a task in itself. Only 2 visitors so far -
but it is a gread day outside and hey, if I wanted to be cold, I'd
probably go for a walk rather than wander through the library, too. Got
a request for a book about Stocks and Bonds! Ha!

Well, gotta get back up and jump around again before I freeze to death.
- JP"


"15 April '92

I'm still here. Not one soul has passed through the door - except me of
course. If I had not read your paragraph Jeanne I would not have known
there is a blanket on the couch - I'm freezing and I'm glad to see that
blanket!

Oh, that wool blanket is calln' my name! 'Oh Todd! Oh, Todd!' Yessir,
there's nothin' like a blanket to cure the Freezin' Blues!

- TS"


"17 April

Dear Treasured Coworkers,

Because you are, each and every one of you, more precious than gold to
me, I have undertaken the task of locating installing a small space
heater so that you all may endeavor to undertake your labours in comfort
and serenity. To say nothing of the fact that I was pretty damned cold
myself. In spite of the attempt at making, at least the space under the
desk, comfortable, only four people came in.

Maybe we should try sex?

- Eric"

Bye kids!

Whoa. Circadian rhythms are crazy. I'm always amazed by how much much better I'm able to operate at, say, Noon after I don't sleep than I was to operate at 6 or 7 am that morning - despite being hours more sleep deprived by the time midday rolls around - just because my body/brain are more used to dealing with that as a time that I'm awake.

I had this wacky Biopsych professor once who argued that humans might not actually physically slash mentally need sleep, that it could just be an evolutionary hangover from a period of prehistory wherein it was necessary to ensure that humans would spend the darkest and most dangerous part of the night curled up safe in a snuggly cave somewhere, so as to keep them from being out and about to get munched on by sabretooth whatnots. He believed that if you just reprogrammed your Circadian cycle, basically through about six weeks of brute-force retraining, you could essentially "break the habit". He claimed, himself, to sleep only four hours a night.

Granted, he also wore dark sunglasses while lecturing because he claimed that the classroom lights were too much for his eyes, and he adamantly held that the most significant and psychologically trackable differentiating factor between any given human beings was whether they were cat people or dog people...

But anyway. I just finished everything, cleaned out my desk, am about to clean out my computer and then I'm going to go dive headfirst into another exciting episode of Life As Rebecca. Maybe I'll catch a few Z's during the commercial break, but maybe not.

Me while making tea a minute ago: Mrrrglfrjsngd... I've been awake since 9:00 yesterday morning. In the last 48 hours, I've had less than four hours of sleep and consumed the equivalent of about two meals total, but I have ingested more alcohol, caffeine, nicotene and amphetamines than I do in an average week, scrambled, walked, climbed and tumbled all over town and back, and now I have to keep myself awake for at least another five hours. All for good reasons and so worth it, I'm not complaining. In fact, I'm reveling (when I can keep my eyes open.) But it's obviously taken a toll on me physically and ... basically, damn I could use a massage. Haha, yeah. Anyway.

The Internet: Also, today is the Holistic Health and Wellness Fair in UMC 235 from 11am to 2pm. There will be free massages and acupuncture on site, plus Student Wellness is giving away gift certificates for more professional acupuncture and massages for you to use later on.

*blink* What? Reality takes such consumately good care of me sometimes it verges on being just plain silly. I mean, seriously. "Oh, by the way, Today is Free Massage Day!"? Whiskey tango foxtrot? I don't know what I do to get this kind of shit happening all the time, but ... wow. It's days like this that I almost wish I believed some kind of Creator spirit just so I'd have someone to be grateful to for all the overwhelming and seemingly random goodness.

Anyway. Indescribable night. Well, okay, not entirely indescribable, but the kind to be (smudgingly) described in paper journalspace, because it was the kind of good that I want to keep just for me. Soverymuch...yeah. Now work (tying up loose ends), lunch with Everett, nap, and Wicked with Jackie. Neat.

Hanging out with three of the most brilliant people I know, but much more importantly, three of my very favorite boys in the entire universe, drinking and arguing about pop music. It's entirely possible that I couldn't be happier.

Threw my 1920s Cocktail Party themed going-away gathering on Friday night at the Driftwood House. Preparations were hectic but fun and involved dozens and dozens of white candles and flowers, art nouveau posters, creatively draped lighting, jazz music, strawberries, good cigarettes, champagne and coffeecups. Got to play dress-up in my Great Grandmother's actual Twenties pearl jewelery and be surrounded by all sorts of awesome, beautiful friends in pinstripes and fedoras and various other expressions of glam and glitter. I think Best Dressed must go to Joanna for her Art Deco and Southern Comfort ensemble, and to Travis because, well, damn.

Aside from the silly shinyness, I can't express how much good the evening did me. I especially can't express it now, because I've got to run to meet August and Ted so I can go watch them rockclimb. But ... Oh, I don't know. More later. Click click click, like tumblers falling into a lock.

Ohmygodtheuniverseissofuckingawesome!

ohemfuckinggee.

So ... Hm.

I think the imminence of the leavingness just hit me full force. Seriously? Less than two weeks.

I got an e-mail from Josh today. I like Josh.

It's overwhelming to realize that I can't begin to fathom the fundamental motivations of anyone I love. I haven't come close to even understanding myself.

Thirteen days, one hour, and twenty-two minutes.

I'm so tired.

Oh. Huh. Apparently it wasn't Joyceanism that was exhausting me, it was being made out of sugar and spice. (That, or Joyceanism has discovered some very clever way to make my lower back ache as well.) Urgh. Pardon me while I go curl up in a ball of spiteful irony and die. Moan. Shiver. Whine.

Joycean Being is exhausting. Inspiring and stimulating, yes, but fucking exhausting. This is no aspersion, just an observation. Deeper down the rabbit hole.

On a completely unrelated (haha) note:

CRACADME% - Rebecca describes what is positive about a career in academia: Never having to be a manager or employer. I'm so uncomfortable with the idea of being in any position of authority wherein I'd be empowered and expected to "discipline" other human beings, especially adult human beings. Such positions include but are not limited to the role of manager, parent, and teacher employed at anything preceeding the college level. The thought of having people work for me weirds me out. Even having Dustin doing data entry for me at work weirds me out. I'm not really sure why. Probably part of it is that it seems like an overwhelming amount of responsibility that I can't imagine ever deserving or being able to carry effectively. Part of it is that I'm, like, obsessed with people being able to trust me, and I don't imagine it'd be possible to ever entirely, genuinely trust someone part of whose actual job description was to pass judgement on you, regardless of how much you might like them otherwise.

Basically what it comes down to is that I want a work environment wherein I have colleagues and collaborators rather than employers and/or employees. Yet another criterion to keep in mind, in addition to the "intellectually, creatively, and ethically challenging/fulfilling" thing. The problem here is that the more I think about this, the more I'm setting myself up to be discontent with any "career" outside of, basically, academia or art. I'm not an "artist" and academic jobs are v. hard to come by. And then there's that "soul selling" issue.

On the other hand, I could always make a career as a dishwasher in Antarctica.

Speaking of which, I am really looking forward to the fact that there are no flies down there. Goddamn flies. Everywhere.