Virtually Home

You, reader, are lucky. You're lucky because you get to view my low-light, scratched-first-gen-iPhone-camera-lens photos of The National. What a boon. The show was epic. It started out with a set by Other Lives, who looked puzzlingly familiar to me all night long until they walked off stage and someone near me said the word "Kunek". And then it hit me. I'd seen Kunek perform during Welcome Week, my freshman year of college, at the union. I was trying to figure out when at Austin City Limits 2010 I'd caught their act. But they didn't look that familiar. Other Lives sounded great. The preponderance of musical instruments they brought with them looked like a parody of a stage set. A veritable obstacle course. Every member of the band played at least two instruments in every song, though the average per band member (if you exclude the drummer from the data set) was probably closer to four. They had everything, from guitars and keyboards to bells tied to deer a...

On Sunday, I ventured into the vacuous gap between Norman and Oklahoma City to attend the Pete Yorn and Ben Kweller concert at the Diamond Ballroom. It was my first time at the venue. On first arriving, one is struck by the gravel parking lot and the vehicle-swallowing potholes one must traverse in order to access it. The building itself looks exactly like it was designed to be a skating rink -- cinderblocks with blue diamonds decorating the sides, long and low, with "DIAMOND" spelled out in white lights above the entrance. The tickets mistakenly said the show started at 8, and a mystified opening band called The Wellspring started at 7:30 despite the bare handful of people that were present. It was their last night on tour with Ben Kweller and Pete Yorn, and the guys had decided to prank them by covering their instruments in some kind of powder. At the moment they started playing after having described this, some techies ran back out and dusted the drumset again. The drumm...

Okay, readers. If there are any of you out there who haven't abandoned me or keeled over dead from the impossibly long wait, here's the deal: I am going to blog now. I was putting off blogging non-sequentially, since I still (and this is pathetic) have yet to finish my narrative on winter break in the neotropics. So here goes. I am blogging non-sequentially, and I don't care who knows it. My hope is that by writing about spring happenings, life will return to this blog. If only the weather would cooperate, this idea of renewal would feel complete. Jacob and I have been tossing around this idea of camping for a while now. Springtime inspires me to be outside. I really can't remember camping often, if ever, as a child. I presume this is probably because my brother and father went camping regularly with their Boy Scout troop and were probably pretty bored of it. Anyway, one weekend at Devil's Den, Arkansas last spring is the only conscious memory I have of camping. ...

It has not escaped me that I have so far failed to update you, faithful reader, on my winter break Central American extravaganza. Since returning, the real world has rather rudely made its presence known, and I've not really had much time to think about the rather daunting number of photos I took, or the somewhat impossible task of relating accurately what happened while I was away. Here goes anyway. I woke up really early. Painfully early, after not having actually achieved any modicum of deep sleep. I finished packing, drank a cup of coffee (little did I know it was going to be my last cup of real coffee for nearly two weeks) and Dad drove me to the airport in the cold, pitch-black predawn. I waited in the longest security line ever witnessed at Tulsa International (by me, anyway). Three people, on seeing my passport, asked me if I was going to a mission trip. Because clearly anyone who would deign to go to another country must also be proselytizing. Is there anything more co...

Departure day. Fail to sleep, rise at 5 a.m. The coffee maker is gurgling. Leaving for the airport in a few minutes, and dreading commercial air travel. Hopefully all will be well. I will be sans telephone and internet for two weeks. See you in 2011, hopefully parasite-free and with many photos to share.

Last Christmas season, I had undertaken a fabulous holiday journey that started at my friend Tom's house in Poole, Dorset, England. After a horrendous number of setbacks that made me believe I would never make it to Tom's, he picked me up at the train station. We had some great times, in a house full of kittens and new friends. We drank a lot of cider, and walked to the grocery store in the freezing rain singing Tilly & the Wall at the top of our lungs. A year ago today, I left Tom's house to meet Rachel in Geneva, Switzerland, where everything was cold, beautiful, and expensive. We traveled to Lauterbrunnen and Zurich, too, and encountered such difficulties as coin-operated showers and respiratory illness. We met up with Hunter in Paris and spent several days in a shuffle of hostels and holiday crowds. We saw an anniversary light show at the Eiffel Tower and met an excellent Danish couple under the Arc de Triomphe at midnight. Hunter and I went on to Berlin and c...

I have been invited to participate on my first real field trip, which is exciting on a level about on a par with the way I used to feel about field trips in elementary school. My boss at the museum happened to have teamed up with some other biologists at OU to teach a seminar class on the flora and fauna of Belize this semester, only to have none of their students elect to go on the research trip during the winter break. And so I get to be the token undergraduate among four professors and two grad students working on various research projects. So far, I've really only been given a packing list, a brief lecture about the history of the Mennonites that colonized most of the country, and a warning about botflies. A cursory Google search of botflies brings up a bunch of horror stories about larva picked up in Belize developing in tourists' scalps, along with sarcastic comments about how the infested person might have gotten them. In case you're wondering, yes! We're goin...