we are the people.

i dreampt i was a kite last night,
soaring above the east field.

"If you imagine the 4,500-billion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long."

"why is it like this to such an extent?
even if we die, we want to die outside!
time and again, we return home,
but time and again we come back out.
not a single person doing this,
but a whole generation."
-dagongmei.

my 2 anthropology professors are neighbors.
they grade my papers next door to each other.

heather:
-is from astoria, oregon.
-escapes natural disasters right before they occur
(earthquake in christchurch/tsunami in japan).
-studies relationships between humans and fish.
-doesn't get along with her mother
(she gave up her career and is now a bitter woman).
-changed her major 8 times
(geology, religious studies, etc etc then finally anthro)
-speaks fluent japanese and explores the notion of
"serious" play in race-bending kimono dress-up games.
-enjoys indoctrinating little japanese girls
(as well as our class) with feminist thought.
-brings us cookies so we can deconstruct gender binaries
(provides vegan alternatives as well).

nancy:
-is chinese, was born in taiwan, and moved to louisiana.
-has connections with every restaurant in bhutan.
-thought it would be a "fun little adventure" to
travel from beijing, through mongolia, to moscow
on the transsiberian express when she was 22.
-conducts self-criticisms that are reminiscent of
the struggle sessions from the cultural revolution
(a popular past-time of the sent-down youth).
-likes to show us graphic videos about surgeries that
lengthen knees to promote height growth.

a fwagile game.

idle idle idle protect the nest.
i love the illustration books at the bookshop santa cruz.
i always go and write down the names of the artists &
then look at their sites and set their pictures as my computer background.

must.write.these.papers. :-O

"This little piggy went to market.
This little piggy stayed at home."

"i imagine that yes is the only living thing.

listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."
-ee.

fairy lights are shining above my head.

i hope i befriend orcs and elves.

a burst of blue one morning.
this moment was so worth the 4 month wait.
may gasped in horror when she discovered her

plants were infested with aphids.
we went outside and scavenged for ladybugs in the grass
and let them loose on the leaves.
they feasted happily on the little green bugs.

CAFE BRASIL

sprinkle some cornmeal on it.
ahh sigh yee.

"wouldn't it be cool if we found wild berries?"
*two hours later*

"be a little deer. i'm a little horse today."

my sister and i went on a four hour walk through

the woods in "pogo-nee-kee" (pogonip).
we brought some snacks:
seaweed, potato chips, mocha marble trail mix,
& a mexican chili covered mango lollipop.

I am "tickled by the absurdity of it all."

fleeting ghosts & faithless translations.

i keep finding rotten vegetables in our fridge.
leaky, dripping, oozing, odorous
puddles of expired onions, spinach, cucumbers.

just wanted to wander the city.

walking down a path and slowly remembering
you've seen this road many times
and realize its where the white gate leads.

"we are living today in an ethical wilderness
-a wild, untamed, unpredictable landscape."

Odilon Redon
(April 20, 1840 - July 6, 1916)

"if they censor pictures I can just imagine what they do to the text"

amen to that.

abandoned carnival.

no clowns, no candy, no cars go.

so long, farewell.

have you ever watched a seagull try to hang

onto an empty cheeto bag, in a sad attempt to

fend off the other seagulls who bite

& harass him to the point where

he drops the bag into the ocean?

"stories have to be told or they die, and when they die,

we can't remember who we are or why we're here."

-s.m.kidd.

UC Summer Camp.

hmmmmm, it is may.

i went to the school farm again today. it's my new favorite place.

a pretty angry chicken.

quails go es a scamperi ng

at a strawberry justice festival.

i visited the school farm for the first time yesterday.
imagine the setting of the secret life of bees mixed
with pride and prejudice in afternoon lighting.

avocado groves, maine-looking houses,
cows, chickens, fields of salad.
how can there exist so much beauty in one place.

also,
"before you embark on a journey of revenge,
dig two graves"
~honest tea.

(confucius)

i am overwhelmed right now.

i must go. i will go. i am going.

XI'AN WORLD HORTICULTURAL EXPO.

behold, the first flower i've ever grown from a seed.

i've named her fleve(flower eve).

people could never be vegetables;
even artichokes have hearts.

"Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar actually want to listen to your feelings. Yours and those of the rest of the Internet, that is. In 2005 they wrote a program that would scour the blogs of the Web for sentences containing "I feel" or "I am feeling," every 10 minutes. The result is a gorgeous spattering of colorful interfaces to choose from, detailing cross-sections of global intimacy suited to the specs you wish to isolate."

CLICK HERE>> TO FEEL.

jill and i made
~*~CAKE POPS~*~

i woke up (rather late) and checked up on the plants this morning.

i rummaged through the leaves and noticed there
were all these premature little flower buds!

here is the rainbow coleus.
i have never once successfully planted something
and have it actually bloom flowers.
alas, i am no longer a black thumb.

s---e---w---i---n---g.
i love sewing. i've wanted to sew again for so long.
i turned in my midterm paper on china's one-child policy
after finishing it 9 minutes before class started.
(i defended it and & discussed how it has empowered urban women
& cleared up some misconceptions about it)

then i spent all afternoon sewing in a grassy crater.

she has a joey pocket(kangaroo inspired)
filled with lavender. marsupials are strange.
the fetus crawls out of the mother kangaroo's vagina
and into the pouch when it is only 2cm long.

sore throat. fever. light headedness.

computer crashed.

blue screen of death.

re-writing midterm paper.

-if all else fails, keep calm and carry on

(after some hysterical panicking of course)

i was too early for class today, so i

searched for this "chadwick garden"

that everyone always talks about.

i finally found it after wandering around

the merrill provost's backyard by accident.

there were bee boxes in the garden.

i stood on the slope and watched hundreds of

bees hovering in the air being swept into

warm wind currents. buzzing little particles

in wonderful afternoon sunshine.

imagine a garden that lies in a thick valley of redwoods.

it is pretty hidden, which is a good thing.

i clicked "next blog" and the internet god took me
to a random blog that belongs to a girl in indonesia
(home of the floresiensis).

i flipped through some pages and looked at pretty pictures.
then i saw a picture that packard
(ex public art teacher) drew.
what an eerily small world..

if all goes as planned/hoped,
i will be 2955 miles from antarctica
by this time next year.

happy easter!