Come Back Tomorrow: Photography Edition

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Kate

aka Scenes From The Week Of

Monday I had to go to the dentist to get a couple of fillings done plus a crown. Yes, a CROWN. I guess probably the ultimate sign that you have failed in life and dental hygiene is actually having the tooth pulled, but I think a crown is pretty damn close. Anyway, it was a miserable experience (the first bit of Novocaine wasn’t enough, and the dentist made fun of me for complaining when I could feel the drill — “that can’t hurt as much as THAT THING in your nose,” she said, meaning my nose ring — she is kind of a mean person, I think). I not only spent the entire day feeling like a numb-faced marble-mouth, but I also now have this temporary crown in my mouth that in no way resembles a real tooth and also kind of tastes weird.

Tuesday I ventured up to Atlanta to soothe my pain with some shopping from the Anthropologie clearance racks. I bought two new dresses and caused my debit card to whimper in pain a bit, but all for the good. They are work dresses, therefore necessary and unavoidable. So at the mall, we were sniffing some perfumes at the Dior counter when the makeup artists working there accosted us, picked me out of the group, and basically gave me an entire makeover. It started with the fact that I needed some mascara to show off my “great lashes,” and included some “airbrushing” foundation that turned me into a fresh-faced teenager, a bit of brow filling-in that called to mind the great Brooke Shields, and some, like, lipgloss and stuff. I don’t know. At some point, my friend B. grabbed my camera from my purse and started shooting.

Seriously, check out my brows and lashes. This lady was not joking around!

Wednesday I spent pretty much the entire day lounging on the couch and trying to fight off this mysterious non-cold I have. It’s, like, trying to be a cold, but it just can’t achieve full success. I have commissioned an army of vitamins and fluids and even a neti pot and such. I seem to be holding it off, but the stupid sore throat and random nose-drips linger. I’m sorry, there is nothing worse than a person describing their illness symptoms, unless it is a person describing their dreams. WHICH REMINDS ME! I had this wacky dream the other night….

[Actually, I did have a wacky dream, but I'll keep it to myself.]

Today I spent the day gathered around a conference table with some colleagues for a work training session, but thankfully this conference table happened to be located in the library. After we were finished I had occasion to roam the stacks, check out my favorite sections, and then spend some time in a comfy window chair reading. I realized how much I miss spending time in the library. Ours has a wonderful book delivery service for faculty, which means I can quickly and easily order whatever books I need, have them checked out in my name and delivered to my office. But that means I never go hang out in the stacks! I need to remedy this more often.

In other news, I am participating in Project 365 again this year. I am actually kind of proud of completing the project last year. Last January, I had just gotten my new DSLR, so taking photos was going to be happening no matter what, and a daily photo project was a great way to guide my exploration of the new camera and make sure I was practicing every day. Even on days when I didn’t have my camera on hand, I was able to snap iPhone pictures and managed to get something “on film” every day for the whole year.

The thing with Project 365 is this: every day is not exciting. Every day is not an adventure. There is not always beauty or even interest apparent in each day. The goal for me is not necessarily to take a beautiful photo every day or even an interesting or good photo every day. It is to take a photo every day. A photo, period. Many of my photos are repetitive: dog, food, book, bike, running shoes, bed. Last year, I often only managed a photo as I was getting ready for bed. There are at least 3 photos of my pillow in last year’s set. But there are three hundred sixty-five photos, dagnabbit.

And you know what? Even the most mundane or unskilled or artless of those photos is an interesting memento for me. When I look back on them I remember my year in an entirely different way than I am used to. I am no stranger to the way that writing about my life can preserve and shape my memories, but photography has added to that in an incredibly interesting way. As alive as the moments of my life may be in my own mind, it is another thing entirely to see them captured, in the smallest degree, as pixels.

I look at this as one of life’s situations where the most important thing to do is keep showing up. “Come back tomorrow,” as Mr. Miyagi would say. Some days will produce boring, repetitive photos of my tofu and collard greens and lattes and running shoes. But if you keep showing up for long enough, there may be beauty waiting in the most unexpected places.

Come back tomorrow.

Good Things

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Kate

Friends visiting from out of town for a wedding:

Cocktails

And people happily gathered ’round a table (or two):

Campus views (and a less-humid, clear-blue sky):

Guilty pleasure reading in bed:

Puppydog eyes:

More friends gathered to celebrate two friends’ soon-to-arrive baby, beautiful gifts:

A glass of wine at the end of a long week:

Fun gifts in the mail – a happy mixtape:

As usual, click on the photo to go through to flickr.com for more information.

What good things have you got going on?

Quotation of the Day: Truly a Word Edition

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Kate

To be sure, the sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it, in his own way. But he does not use it up. That happens in a certain way only where the work miscarries. To be sure, the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way that color is not used up but rather only now comes to shine forth. To be sure, the poet also uses the word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.

Und nochmal auf deutsch:

Zwar gebraucht der Bildhauer den Stein so, wie nach seiner Art auch der Maurer mit ihm umgeht. Aber er verbraucht den Stein nicht. Das gilt in gewisser Weise nur dort, wo das Werk mißlingt. Zwar gebraucht auch der Mahler den Farbstoff, jedoch so, daß die Farbe nicht verbraucht wird, sondern erst zum Leuchten kommt. Zwar gebraucht auch der Dichter das Wort, aber nicht so wie die gewöhnlich Redenden und Schreibenden die Worte verbrauchen müssen, sondern so, daß das Wort erst wahrhaft ein Wort wird und bleibt.

- Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 1935.

Cold

Posted on January 30, 2010 by Kate

In what may be my favorite moment of dialogue in all of television ever, Mad Men‘s Betty Draper is being hit on by the naïve young Arthur Case at the stables where they both ride. As she is giving him the brush off, he tells her, “You’re so profoundly sad.” Betty’s response: “No. It’s just my people are Nordic.”

I have been told many times by the smug Arthurs of the world that they know what my emotional state is. I have been nicknamed by my very own mother “The Ice Princess” since I was a small child. If only I’d had Betty Draper’s dry wit in those situations. My people, too, are Nordic.

We are cold people. We are scientists, logicians, phenomenologists, mechanics, engineers, ship-builders, cabinet-makers, fishermen, Alpine climbers, ice-hearted businessmen, snow-shoe hikers, Arctic tundra dwellers. We come from small, rocky islands bathed in a thick grey mist, where preserved fish and ice-cold vodka warm the body from within. We are sailors of the Baltic, the North Sea, the North Atlantic; settlers of the frozen Great Lakes; residents of old misty mountains; perchers on the edge of the cold Pacific. We measure, we analyze, we calculate. Our eyes are the color of ice, of deep ocean waters, of granite. Cold is in our blood.

When my Alaskan cousin sent me an email about Bill Streever’s book, Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places, little did he know that I had already heard an interview with Streever on the radio and had procured a copy of my own as soon as possible. An entire book dedicated to cold, I thought, would be just the sort of thing to have handy on my bedside table for those nights when I felt like weeping in exhaustion after having endured yet another day in a suicidally hot and humid place like the one where I currently live. I could assuage my pain by living vicariously through Streever’s travels and research.

His book details (among many other things) the time he spent in Fairbanks (where my cousins live) studying the patterns of winter there; the cold. Here is what he writes about the time he immersed himself inthe near-frozen waters of Prudhoe Bay:

I go in headfirst. The water temperature is thirty-five degrees. I come up gasping. I stand on a sandy bottom, immersed to my neck. The water stings, as if I am rolling naked through a field of nettles. I wait for the gasp reflex to subside. My skin tightens around my body. My brain — the part of it I cannot control — has sent word to the capillaries in my extremities. “Clamp down,” my brain has commanded, “and conserve heat.” I feel as if I am being shrink-wrapped, like a slab of salmon just before it is tossed into the Deepfreeze.

I had Streever’s words in mind as I prepared to plunge into my tub of ice water after today’s run – - the recovery ice bath I had been assured would prevent muscle soreness the next day. I filled the tub with cold water and dumped in as much ice as I had — I had been making extra and saving it in the freezer all week with today’s bath in mind. I plopped my still be-socked feet into the icy water and carefully slid all the way in, immersing myself to just above the waist.

I felt the cold ache in my feet, the part of my lower body that is the least well insulated with fat. My calves, shins, and thighs were slower to feel the prickling sensation Streever descibes, but as I sat in the ice water I could easily envision the capillaries constricting, the over-worked muscle fiber wringing itself out, any potential swelling prevented before it could begin.

It didn’t hurt. Honestly, the extreme cold I subjected myself to for those fifteen minutes felt like a relief. Whether or not I’ll feel any delayed-onset muscle soreness tomorrow (as would be typical), I can say that the time spent in the ice bath was, strangely enough, a pleasure. It may have been the only time my body stopped actively producing sweat since I moved to Alabama in 2007.

I will no doubt be employing the ice bath after my race two weeks from now. With a hotel ice machine, I may even be able to get enough ice to make it truly, terribly, wonderfully cold in that tub. Ice bath, take me home.

Eating Animals – Jonathan Safran Foer

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Kate

I recently finished Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, and I stayed up for hours thinking about it. I read it with certain expectations about what I’d find (I had already researched animal farming pretty extensively myself) and curious to see how someone who is a novelist by trade (and not, say, a nutritionist or animal rights activist) would present the information.

I wanted to tell you that this book is meticulously researched, incredibly compassionate and thoughtful, convincing, and an engaging read. It is all of these things. But as I found myself approaching the end of the book, as the number of pages in my right hand dwindled and became thinner and thinner, and Foer still had not even once mentioned dairy farming, my respect and admiration turned to disgruntlement and disappointment.

Later I wondered why my reaction to this omission had been so violently negative. Generally I am a big believer in making small choices, in striving to make better choices more of the time, in the idea that even imperfect efforts are of significance. I will gladly cheer on any friend who has a day or even just a meal without meat. In Foer’s case, he has not only become a vegetarian, but he is also spreading the news about this cause in an incredibly convincing, approachable manner. Why was I so mad about the fact that his great case for vegetarianism did not become a great case for veganism? Maybe because it felt like something that is incredibly important to me had been forgotten, neglected, or otherwise deemed unworthy of comment.

Why had Foer left this out? It can’t be because he failed to consider it. He considers seemingly everything else: Foer not only makes the best and most thorough case against eating fish that I have ever read — he resolves a lot of the lingering questions I had even after reading several books that didn’t deal much with this topic at all — but he also gives plenty of time and thoughtful consideration to the case for small family farms and the argument of the selective omnivore (à la Michael Pollan). Foer seems like a man willing to look at all the angles. Why not this one?

It can’t be because there’s any reason why the discussion of dairy is unimportant. The atrocities he chronicles in poultry farming in the cases of both “broilers” and “layers” (eating and egg-laying chickens, respectively), fishing and “aquaculture” (fish farming), and hog farming (almost the most horrific of all) can all be found in the dairy industry and are just as nightmarish and horrific, beyond even our imagination. While Foer wrings his hands about even the most humane cattle ranchers, who still castrate and brand their cattle and necessarily send them off to the slaughterhouse, he spares not a word for their dairy cohort.

I will refrain from giving you all of the details here, though if you are curious about the diary industry, there’s more out there about it than even you or I have time to read, but here’s a starter. After reading Eating Animals, I am 100% certain that Foer was/is aware of these not insignificant issues. If he refuses to eat even the most humanely raised beef, why would he still continue to eat dairy? The only reason I can come up with is the same empty, filler “reason” given by nearly every person I know: Cheese tastes good.

If Foer avoids discussing where his cheese, milk, and butter come from, he is guilty of the same forgetting, the same neglect, against which he argues so convincingly in the book. This frustrates me, to say the least.

On the other hand, Foer is not only making a difference through his individual choice not to eat meat (and not to feed it to his son), but he is making an even bigger difference by putting this information out there. I can wholeheartedly recommend Eating Animals (while at the same time I cannot recommend eating animals) to anyone who’s curious about where the meat on their plate comes from. In fact, I can recommend the book even more strongly to those who aren’t curious about the source of their food. Maybe that’s who needs to read it most.

The book is beautifully written and presents a considered response to the issues of animal farming — both factory farming, which represents over 99% of animal farming, and the increasingly rare practice of small family farming. So go read this book, yes, and then when you’re done, go read about the dairy industry.