My Life Up Till Now, Part 3

(Welcome back once again! This recap of my recent life and times began here and continued here.)

Time passed uneventfully until one Sunday in April, when I hiked up to a secluded spot near the Civic Center and sat on a log for a long time, looking at the bugs and leaves and trees, and enjoying the calming energy of nature. I daydreamed about living somewhere closer to open natural space, maybe even in a log cabin in the mountains. Afterward, I went to Whole Foods to get some groceries, and I saw a poster on their bulletin board from someone looking for a new roommate. "Less than a mile from amazing hiking trails. We can see deer from our balcony! Quiet, peaceful space." They'd included pictures of beautiful open hills.

And that's how I came to live at Redwood Glades. The ad was right on: I can reach the following sights with about a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment:





I don't have pictures of my room or my housemates, but I do have a picture of one of my most exciting projects since moving in — making lasagna:


So anyway, now I live in Fairfax, where you can count on passersby to take pictures of you when you need them:


Ta-da! I have no doubt that this photographic series has answered all your questions about my life. I think this last photo sums it all up nicely: I'm happy, I'm healthy, and I'm wearing blaze orange pants.

love,
Jonathan

My Life Up Till Now, Part 2

(Welcome back! This recent-life recap began here.)

Later in August 2008, I went to the Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock desert, where I practiced the art of foot massage in a six-hour dust storm:


...and visited astonishing outsider-art buildings:


(Note the caption "Love is Real" at the bottom left: when I saw that I got all weepy.)

In the fall, I studied massage at the Diamond Light School of Massage & Healing Arts. Here's a picture of our class, all full of joy on the last day:


Massage school was challenging for this bookish type, but very rewarding. I learned a lot and met wonderful people. I didn't do enough practice hours to get my certification, though; perhaps sometime soon I'll get my healing hands back into in the habit.

For Thanksgiving, I took a trip to Los Angeles, which is when a friend gave me the 2000-era digital camera that these pictures are taken with (his dad bought it for a dollar at a garage sale). They turned out pretty awful, but you can still tell that Southern California is pretty:


Apparently it is the place to go for thoroughly rusted cars:


And we passed by squalid cattle fields that stretched on for miles and stank up everything. Poor cows! You can barely see them but you can tell they're sad:

For the next major holiday, I flew back to Minnesota, where I took a great picture of my mom:


...a not-so-great picture of my dad:


...and a pretty surreal picture of my friend Heise:


He looks like he's a demi-god about to open the book of my fate, but it's actually just a menu at Perkins.

I whipped out the camera on the drive up from the airport, as well. Here is an enticing display at a rest stop in St. Cloud, suggesting that you...


Outside, some snowy park benches were enjoying the sunrise:


Toward the end of the trip, after a blizzard, I caught a lamppost looking dapper in its fresh new hat of snow:


I took Amtrak all the way back to San Francisco after the visit. Here's a picture of my train in Minot, North Dakota, with one of the many Amish passengers:


When I got on the train, it was 2008, but when I got off, it was 2009. Happy New Year! Luckily I found people to share over-priced beer in the lounge car at midnight.

(Stay tuned! Things have happened in 2009 and you will not want to miss them.)

My Life Up Till Now, Part 1

At last, I return to the blogosphere! My sister's blog has inspired me to write more about my adventures, even though they're not as exotic or as well-photographed as her Nicaraguan exploits. If you haven't checked out her site, I implore you to click the link in the previous sentence posthaste.

Now that I have developed some long-languishing rolls of film, I can bring you all up to speed on the past two years, in a snappy photo-documentary format. As we progress through this three-part series, see if you can distinguish between the three different types of equipment used:

(a) Disposable cameras bought at Walgreen's
(b) Nine-year-old digital camera (from the year 2000, baby! — the Edsel of digital cameras)
(c) Other people's digital cameras (photos stolen to fill in gaps in my poorly documented life)

In July 2007, I found an affordable single-bedroom apartment in San Rafael, which allowed me to shave half an hour off my bus commute and live by myself. The apartment building had a great name — La Casa Grande ("The Big House"):


It was basically low-income housing converted from one of the oldest buildings in San Rafael, a hotel built in the 1860s. So one of the selling points was its unsettling lobby and entrance, which always reminded me of The Shining:



Unfortunately, I never saw any ghosts there.

In March 2008, I visited a friend in New York City. I didn't take many pictures, but here are a couple to prove I was there. These don't prove much, because I'm not in them, but you can tell they're mine because I love libraries...


...and parks!


Overall, New York stressed me out a lot. Whenever I realized I was surrounded for miles and miles by metropolis, I got claustrophic dread. It gave me a new perspective on why it's so difficult for so many people to have a meaningful connection to nature and wilderness.

That August I had a near-miss with everyone's favorite pastime: jury duty. I didn't get picked, luckily, and the upshot was that I got to visit the beautiful Marin County Civic Center, the last building Frank Lloyd Wright designed. I was pretty delighted with it. I loved all the circles built into the design: the round windows, the many archways, and the golden spheres decorating the balconies' overhangs. This gorgeous seat of government is also famous for starring alongside Ethan Hawke in the movie Gattaca.

I don't have any wide shots of the whole thing, but here's part of the facade:


...and a shot of the roof, blends in with the sky:


I really liked the spire in the center:


The top floor has a sun roof:


...and they even fit trees inside:


Outside of the cafeteria is a paradisiacal garden and fountain pool:


...complete with ostrich sculpture:


Have I mentioned how rich Marin County is?

(Stay tuned for next week, when I continue to explore the photographic delights of the year 2008. What's the rush, right?)

"I VOTED"

My best friend in the third grade had a copy of "The Death of Superman," the series of comics in which Superman fights an implacable man-machine to the bitter end. On the cover of the collection was an extreme close-up of Superman in his death throes. His head is thrown back and his eyes squeezed shut as he yells in rage and agony. Next to Superman's bared teeth, my friend had stuck a big, red "I VOTED" sticker.

For some reason, I have never forgotten that image, and it is what I think of every election day — the most powerful man in the world on his last legs and thundering like Marlon Brando: "I VOTED!!!!!"

Finally, a wee Burning Man post

Hi everyone,

I'm sorry I haven't posted anything about Burning Man since I got back. The trip definitely gave me a wave of energy, inspiration, and new things in my life, a wave which swept me up andhas kept me spinning (aka, away from tasks like blog-posting and emailing) since then. Also, one of the new things in my life is a massage therapy training course, which is rather time-consuming and exhausting — but it's great for me, as well.

In general, Burning Man was amazing, though full of internal frustration and general discomfort for about the first 2/3rds of it. Being there is like being on a different planet: you're in the middle of a desert made of semi-toxic dust and surrounded by tents, RVs, a wide array of creative camps, and almost everyone is wearing bizarre costumes, doing unusual things, or just existing in an off-kilter space due to the unusual substances coursing through them. It throws you for a loop until you get the hang of things, at least it did for me, since I like to have a solid sense that I have the hang of things.

It's so hard to know where to begin to describe something like Burning Man. The good conversational standbys seem to be the weather highlights: on Saturday we endured a 6-hour dust storm. It lasted from just after noon until just before dusk, and covered everything in our camp (including the insides of our tent) with dust.

The second dust storm was after the "Temple burn" on Sunday night, as crowds of people were walking back to their camps. Our group got separated when I stopped to give some people a pack of cigarettes I'd found earlier that day, and we almost lost each other. We reconnected, admired an amazing art piece made of glowing dildos (that's right, dildos), and ended up crashing at a camp called Deep Heaven. It had tons of futons, pillows, and blankets, and Kim and I stayed there all night while the dust storm gradually lessened. We skipped out to pee on the playa every couple of hours, and eventually watched over our pillows as the sun rose. It was heavenly!

One of the fabulous parts about Burning Man is the spontaneous connections that can happen. In Deep Heaven we talked to random people, including a boy called Oliver who was there by himself. He was originally from Malaysia, had only been in the U.S. for 9 months, and had come to Burning Man all by himself, hitchhiking from the airport with his tent. He needed a ride to Reno to catch his flight, so he helped us break camp that afternoon, rode with Kim to Reno, and we offered him a place in our hotel room to sleep that night.

Well, I'm out of time, but at least one story made its way out! Here are some links to pictures my campmates took:

Pics from Kim (our fearless leader, 11-time Burner, beginner of a national skipping movement in the 90s [see iskip.com] and the publicity manager at the press):
http://tinyurl.com/64d7t3

Pics from Michael (an out-of-body explorer and intuitive reader who I befriended through a submission he sent to the press.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7187847@N02/

Pics from Ryan (one of our campmates, fiance of my friend Tracy, who's a cover designer at the press, a painter of beautiful naked fairy ladies on pieces of driftwood, and all around sweet lady)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30294573@N02/sets/72157607169243924/

Just Another Day in Pants Publishing

Here’s Jonathan on an ordinary day at the office:


But then: a coworker!



“Jonathan, could you give me your pants? I need to ship them to the proofreader today.”


“Certainly!”




Another job well done!


Happy Birthday, Zdanna!!

Burning Man

(We interrupt this long-stretching serial for a word of update from our author.)

This Wednesday I take off for the Nevada desert for Burning Man 2008! What the heck is Burning Man, you may ask? (Or, if you know something about Burning Man, why the heck would I want to go?) Summing it up is a notoriously difficult task, especially for me, since I've never been there before, but here goes: Burning Man is a wild combination of extreme wilderness camping, an anything-goes carnival, an art gallery, an experiment in grassroots community, and a fully functioning city.

About 50,000 people will camp in the desert and share their art, ideas, and gifts, and explore and participate with others. It sounds too huge to be true, of course! Here's an aerial view of Black Rock City (the name of the camp as a whole) in 2006:

http://www.sciy.org/MAINPAGEPHOTOS/BurningMan06.jpg

Perhaps I'll have a bit more time to talk about it before I go, but for now, here are some pictures that might be worth 10,000 words:

Amazing art and architecture:

http://www.yowazzup.com/blog/images/burning-man-trucks.jpg
http://mark.marroe.net/images/2006082801074829_DSC_3406.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/244705379/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/1387293639/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/1387322943/
http://majorlycool.com/media/1/20080314-burning-man-festival-art.jpg
http://www.celebratebig.com/burning-man/burning-man-2007/burning-man-crude-awakening.jpg

Theatrics:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/1388211186/

Large structures are burned:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/1388264884/

...including the eponymous Burning Man (burning not pictured here!):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/244717431/

Beautiful scenery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/1388130636/

...and dust storms:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/241261114/

Bohemian living and marvelous attire:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/1387138689/
http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/1ds-10/burning-man-rabbits.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/1388228600/

And all-around goodness:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cofi/1387131731/

You might also be interested in these links, of an art/psychology installation, and of a "village" (large group of people camping together and collaborating on a large project, in this case a temple) that a friend of mine will be camping at:

http://www.mindsshrine.com/theMindsShrine.html
http://www.entheonvillage.com/

If you want to learn more, check out their website, or Wikipedia!

http://burningman.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Man

Under the concrete and through the hills, to changing the world we go – five-hour tour part 2

(Continued from last post)

The trail to the mall feels really off-the-grid: it runs parallel to the freeway, maybe a hundred yards away, next to fenced-off grass fields and under a couple of overpasses. It doesn't go straight to the mall; I have to either walk my bike down a dirt road or climb through a hilly area lined with dirt-bike trails, and then walk through a construction area set up for the workers who have been doing an addition for Costco, which has stretched on at least a year so far.

I've never seen anyone else on the path. I have seen, however, starling nests tucked into the crevices where the overpass’s struts meet the overpass’s underside, and some thirty starlings swarming around the nests, looping in and out of them and chirping crazily. They seemed a little worked up. I was worried they’d start dive-bombing me from three stories up, but I don’t know how common dive-bombing is among starlings, or among swallows, which these birds could just as likely be. I don’t know the frequency of dive-bombing among any smallish gray birds. Let’s face it: I don’t know much about birds in general.

I lugged my bike into the little hilly area because I knew there was a tree at the top that would be good to sit underneath. I would eat my burrito and watch the sun set, or, if not watch it set completely (because I was impatient, and because it would be darker by then), at least watch it slope toward setting. Sheltered underneath a tallish oak, surrounded by amber grass, and facing the crimson sun head-on, I felt like a 18th-century oil painting of a Hispanic-food-loving Wordsworth dallying in a pastoral scene. It was pretty idyllic.

Except for the pile of styrofoam packaging and trashed electronics – television, VCR, and radio – that was only yards away. Wordsworth would not have seen anything like that. The mall and its parking-lot moat sat stout and gray nearby, and motorcycles roared on the freeway, but hey, what can you expect from this planet right now? I was happy I could still eke out a bit of wonder from nature’s soft touch.

Now that I’m writing this, it reminds me of another time when I sat under a tree. I was a student at Carleton College, and it was autumn, and the tree above me was bursting with beautiful colors. I was reading Walden. My friend Laura came up and said “What are you supposed to be, an admissions brochure?” I can’t say I hadn’t noticed how perfectly collegiate I’d felt sitting there, and perhaps a friend’s self-aware sarcasm was the cherry on top of my own self-aware contentment.

Back then we read important books and tried to think of suitably important things to say about them to justify our feelings of our own importance and the way these important books would surely be formative to our even-more-epically important future lives. Am I sounding jaded here for no good reason? We’re still important. We’re all important. We’re essential, even, Bill Plotkin would say, “to the world’s flowering.” But it’s harder to maintain that feeling of importance outside of the intensified bubble of potential that a liberal arts college creates; it’s often easier to play down that feeling, the feeling that you were full steam ahead on the way to changing things and being somebody. After all, most people you meet in “the real world” have never been given the luxury of feeling important.

(To be continued once again)

Boy embarks on 5-hour tour, buys rice cooker, shirts — Part 1

I forgot my wallet at work on Thursday.* It had all my cash and my ATM card, and I had a writing group meeting today** at a cash-only cafe. I could have gotten by at the cafe by buying a cookie with quarters, but then I might not have had enough quarters left to do some laundry today. So no problem, just go get the wallet, right? The downer is that my office is in Novato and I live in San Rafael, 30 minutes away by bus, 45 if you count the walk to and from the bus. These are the puzzles I get to navigate as a car-less fellow in Marin County.

Luckily, I have a bike! A bike, a bike, many would give their kingdoms for a bike. A bike, a need for exercise and for my wallet, and a need to buy some things from Target were the perfect combination to get me out of the house and up to Novato yesterday.***

It takes a little less than an hour to bike to Novato, and it's totally worth it. Physical exertion is invigorating, and who knew? Somehow I missed the bus on this fact until I was about 21, or else no one ever told me, "Hey, Jonathan, exercise feels good!" The message I remember most clearly was "Stop playing video games! Get outside!"

This is part of the reason I'm car-less, because I need exercise but I've never gotten into a habit of exercising just to exercise. The last place I want to go is a fluorescent-lit gym with lots of other sweaty people in workout clothes. Everyone says no one pays attention to you when you're at the gym, so don't be self-conscious, but all my workout clothes come from Goodwill, so I kind of stand out wherever I go. So anyway, if I don't have a car, I have to walk to the bus or bike to the bus or bike all the way wherever I'm going.

To make a long story short, I get to the office, let myself in, and turn off the alarm, feeling a bit sketchy the whole time. I drink water, stretch, call the nearby tacqueria and order a burrito, and fool around on the Internet a bit (I do this whenever it’s convenient, because I’m the only 20-something in a 15-mile radius without an Internet hookup in my apartment. Can you tell this post is all about the things that make my life unusual?) I re-set the building alarm, pick up my burrito, and head for the trail that connects Bel Marin Keys (the area where I work) with the Vintage Oaks mall.

To be continued… Even though it’s already been continued… But I hope that breaking it up will prevent your Google-shortened attention span from short-circuiting (I know mine would be at this point - I only got through half of the article about Google I just linked to...)...

* By “Thursday” I mean Thursday the 3rd.
** By “today” I mean Sunday the 6th.
*** And by “yesterday” I mean Saturday the 5th. Time gets away from me pretty quickly out here.