Octyl Methoxycinnamate and the immense edifice of memory – Jun 4th
Starting in college, I spent significant and special chunks of my summers and spring breaks outdoors. I led backpacking trips, canoed and rafted, and taught rock climbing. Whenever summer rolls around again, I think back to all those trips, all those adventures.
I think sunscreen must be like perfume and deoderant; once you find a brand, you stick to it. Thanks to my mom, I have had a mostly-endless supply of Skin So Soft SPF 30 with Bug Guard as far back as I can remember.
The sunscreen smells a bit of citronella, and every time I rub it onto my face, neck, arms and legs, as I do every day before I get on my bike and ride to school, I get vivid glimpses of memories from those summers. It’s the stuff I wore every weekend when I worked in western Colorado [jpg], Orcas Island, and Squamish, as well as countless weekend excursions. I had it on, rubbed right down to my toes, when I dumped the raft somewhere in Lodore Canyon, on the Green River.
Skin So Soft was with me every time I took a group of incoming Whitman students out in the woods or up in the mountains as part of their orientation. The college organizes weeklong “Scrambles,” student-led outdoor trips, and along with good friends I led trips to the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area (what a wonderful name; one day we hiked to the middle fork of the Salmon River, where the boatmen on a passing raft, pre-occupied with the bikini of one of the campers, ran themselves right aground); Nevada’s Ruby Mountains [jpg] (10 miles wide, 100 miles long, and well over 10,000 feet in some places, the Rubies are a spectacular, high, mostly arid place); and Idaho’s Sawtooths [jpg], where we rode out a magnificent thunderstorm near Toxaway lake [jpg]. (I returned to the Sawtooths [jpg] and hiked in from a different location for my honeymoon.)
I was wearing the stuff when I fell and dislocated my shoulder at Vantage, Washington, and when I was eaten alive by no-see-ems while climbing in Naturita, southwestern Colorado. No-see-ems don’t just bite, they take out chunks of flesh, and Bug Guard didn’t help me that day. It was gruesome.
Some of the strongest memories come back from the summer that I split between Squamish, B.C., and Orcas Island, Washington. Along with a co-leader who became a good friend, I taught rock climbing to troops of middle school students. We started on Orcas, spent a day learning knots and safety, then drove north, through Bellingham and on to British Columbia, to Squamish—called Canada’s Yosemite, sometimes—where the Chief towers over the narrow valley. We climbed every day—every day it wasn’t raining—in the bluffs nearby. When the sky was clear, it was a glorious place to be, and my routine was simple: Wake up, breakfast, hike into the bluffs, set up ropes, and climb.
There is a physical and mental reward to rigging ropes. In most cases in the bluffs, bolted anchors at the top of the climb make for easy top-roping. We had a ready-made set of webbing and carabiners to anchor to most of these. Even in such cases, there was a nice tactile routine of checking safety lines, clipping to anchors, retying knots, and hanging ropes. In other cases, anchors were absent, and we slung webbing around tree trunks and slotted cams and nuts into the granite. These anchors were an enjoyable puzzle: Finding the right piece of gear and fitting it to the rock, adjusting lengths of rope and webbing, and testing it carefully before committing to use it. It’s technical, tactile, and intellectual at the same time, and is a pleasure distinct from the mental and physical challenges of the actual climbing.
I gained a quiet confidence that summer, deeply satisfied by the sense of skill I developed and enriched by the friendship that came with learning those skills alongside my co-leader. Seeing our campers push themselves amplified that reward many times over. (And with freaky adolescent strength-to-weight ratios, our campers often needed just a dose of confidence and technique to make up in spirit what they lacked in experience.)
I’m embedded in different routines now, routines that are certainly rewarding, but in different ways, ways that feel less profound most of the time. Every time spring rolls around here in Tucson, I find the sunscreen and remember summer. Looking back now, those years of summers came to an end with my months at Squamish and Orcas. I miss the long routines that I established in those seasons, when the beginning of summer meant something new, and the end was marked by a backpacking trip, another adventure in a new place.
I wonder what the pitch was like – Jun 2nd
Sometimes, the jokes just write themselves, and sometimes they’re written by eager and earnest marketing grads.
The Tickle is like a Tap, but with more control. Instead of just a quick vibration, the Tickle’s duration and way the Tickle comes through to the recipient is determined by the sender. By simply pressing a button on the mobile phone, vibration is sent. The user controls the vibration just like they control the motor of a blender using its pulse function. The pattern of vibration is whatever the sender chooses. When in Tickle mode, holding down a button causes vibration on the other end and letting go stops it. You can develop your own secret Tickle language with your buddies to communicate silently!
Um, stimulating ideas, there.
The proper mocking of this is either in the “secret tickle language” or in the whole, you know, vibrating and pulsing bit. I can’t decide.
(Via Jonas Luster)
In: technology · Comment
Social economy – May 31st
There’s some neat news in the Textpattern community in the past week. Textpattern author Dean Allen and techie Jason Hoffman unveiled TextDrive, a platform intended to provide hosting for Txp and other php-based software. But the real news is how they launched it, with financing from Textpattern users who paid $199 up front in return for lifetime hosting with Textdrive. The user community responded quickly, fronting Textdrive with 200 early adopters and nearly $40,000 in just about three days.
The serendipity of this kind of event isn’t lost on me; this kind of community financing is a close cousin of the local currencies that I’m studying in my dissertation; earlier examples include Deli Dollars and Farm Preserve Notes, which allowed small businesses unable to obtain conventional loans to generate their own financing through the goodwill of members of the community in which the businesses were embedded. Similarly, Textdrive’s “VC200” have an interest in seeing the venture succeed, and they’ve expressed their intent to be a part of that outcome. Over at Ruminate, Chris Lott has a few more comments, and Tucson’s own Pixelmonger, John Banks, signed himself up, too.
Me, I hesitated too long, already burdened with the problem of sharply-reduced summertime income (there’s something in there about water and stones) and a set of credit cards in precarious balance due to a summer full of travel and the need to continue eating. But I’m still kicking myself for not throwing in; I’ll certainly take a close look at Textdrive when it officially opens up for business and offers hosting to those of us who were too timid early on.
In: technology textpattern · Comment
Dumb enough to think he'll get away with it – May 30th
Given the logic with which some students work, this must be some kind of corollary to the google cheating strategy: When you do get caught, it’s their fault for not catching you sooner. I’m sure his parents are very proud.
In: school/work · Comment
Mucho mojo – May 30th
If Elvis and JFK were alive, what would they want to say to their families? What would they regret about their lives? Could they drop the hammer on the soul-sucking mummy haunting their decrepit nursing home?
Bubba Ho-Tep, which we rented tonight from our favorite local movie store, takes on all these questions. (And, how are Elvis and JFK alive, anyway, and why are they in nowhere, Texas? Any why is JFK black?) While it has a few creepy moments and a couple of brief bits of action, Bubba Ho-Tep isn’t gripping as a monster movie. But what’s really fun and frequently oddly touching about it is the way it presents Elvis (played channeled by Bruce Campbell) and JFK (Ossie Davis) as old men who know their time is just about up.
Seriously now, don’t let the proximity of “Bruce Campbell” and “oddly touching” throw you off. The movie is smart enough to play these two completely straight. There’s no wink and nod that “Elvis” and “JFK” are just senile old men, and there’s just barely a hint of the if-chins-could-kill of many of Campbell’s roles. Elvis has a bad hip, fears he has cancer, and is treated like an infant by the staff. JFK has a sharp suit and a genuine red phone, but sees infirmity coming. Both of them are lonely and thinking of the things they might have done differently throughout their lives. When the mummy shows up they see their last chance at dignity.
The film is a lot of fun to watch: Although Elvis and JFK take themselves seriously, there is plenty of humor. Watching Elvis threaten to put his moves on the mummy (awkward kung fu posturing and all) is a kick. And, in the moments where Elvis and JFK reflect on what went wrong and how they wish they could have been better parents, well, you really believe in their regret. As Campbell says in the “making of” bit, it’s just about the best Elvis-mummy-redemption flick around.
Extras: I’m not much for buying DVDs (though as a Blue Blazer Regular I do have my copy of The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension), but the commentary track with The King on this one might make it worth the price. Campbell watches the movie as Elvis. He talks about indigestion, noisily eats candy bars, and reminisces about his old movies. (“Never had any naked ladies in those old movies. Pretty psychadelic, though, I tell you. Here, watch this; this is where it starts to get really spooky.”)
Also, this is the first Bruce Campbell movie that Heather has managed to stay awake for. There may be hope for her yet.