blood’s a rover

Well, that’s that.

After five years and 200+ credit hours, my bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering is complete. I’ve been asked several times during the last couple of weeks how it feels to be finished, and I’ve been finding it difficult to describe. I’m glad to be done, obviously, but other than working a couple more days a week and not having any homework, not a lot has changed.

One thing that suprised me was how emotional Brianne and I would be about this portion of our lives being over. Like making a fist for an extended period of time, there is a great relief associated with finally releasing that stress. I know that Brianne feels the same.

Speaking of Brianne, she has gone above and beyond any reasonble expectation of being a capable partner and good friend. I say this because, without her I would not:

have a degree in a lucrative field that I truly enjoy.
be finishing five years of school debt free.
have the opportunity to travel all over the world so soon and for so long.
have a ride home from work.

The list goes on. Speaking of the trip, it’s coming up scarily fast. Every time I think about its imminence my heart plunges into my stomach. We have so much to do in the next four months, but I was too busy worrying about school to notice another big project -the trip- creeping up from behind, ready to pounce. Deadlines are like the raptors of the human psyche- they work in groups to surround and then suprise you. I think this may be the reason I’ve been feeling such an odd mixture of anticipation, apprehension, and restlessness of late. Having just finished school, I’m excited to begin applying what I’ve learned and taking on more responsibilties at work, but that drive is limited somewhat by the fact that I’m only going to be there temporarily. It’s like I’ve watched enough of a movie to pique my interest when suddenly an intermission card appears that will last for over a year.

Not that I’m complaining. Our trip is going to be absolutely incredible, and anyway, Brianne’s intermission has lasted much longer than mine will. We only had a year together before the “get and stay married project” was hijacked by the “send C.J. to school project”, and now that it’s done we have a lot of catching up to do. For the first time in a long time, we can go for walks, cook together, and talk (or not talk) for hours, any night of the week and every weekend. Soon enough we’ll be together without any distractions, exploring the imperfect Eden that this world has become until the raptors of responsibility appear, the intermission ends, and we’re forced to start planning for the future again.

Since the Summer of 2000, I’ve taken nearly 10,000 digital photographs. I’ve printed about 12 of them. Based on the wheezing, vibrating state of the computer where all of my images are stored, I’ve decided it is time once again to archive them. While doing so I went through and collected some of my favorites for presentation here.

This set focuses on closeups, which I tend to take a lot of. I find closeups to be far more intimate and rewarding than even the prettiest landscapes. When I photograph a beautiful place, the resulting image is usually fairly close to what I saw in person, and that’s just the problem- nothing is revealed by the act of photographing it. By contrast, closeups of the most ordinary things are often bursting with details that I had never noticed before. From stars in the sky to pollen on a petal, beauty, complexity and order are everywhere you look; the scale is totally irrelevant.

I hope you enjoy them.

Continue Reading…

Since the Summer of 2000, I’ve taken nearly 10,000 digital photographs. I’ve printed about 12 of them. Based on the wheezing, vibrating state of the computer where all of my images are stored, I’ve decided it is time once again to archive them. While doing so I went through and collected some of my favorites for presentation here.

This set focuses on closeups, which I tend to take a lot of. I find closeups to be far more intimate and rewarding than even the prettiest landscapes. When I photograph a beautiful place, the resulting image is usually fairly close to what I saw in person, and that’s just the problem- nothing is revealed by the act of photographing it. By contrast, closeups of the most ordinary things are often bursting with details that I had never noticed before. From stars in the sky to pollen on a petal, beauty, complexity and order are everywhere you look; the scale is totally irrelevant.

I hope you enjoy them.

Last weekend we attempted to tame a portion of the chest high field that has developed in our backyard. While I happen to consider lawn mowing, like leaf raking, to be a rediculously pointless activity, our work did yield the treat of seeing (and handling) four different garter snakes. No snakes were harmed in the mowing of our yard. But the roar of the mower does tend to flush them out into the newly shortened grass, where they lie motionless, waiting for us to pass. Being the curious monkeys that we are, we stopped what we were doing each time this happened to investigate.

Of the four snakes that we found, two had a white stripe down their backs, one had a yellow stripe, and one had a red stripe. The one with the yellow stripe was the largest and its belly was the pearly blue of the inside of an oyster shell, and green tinsel appeared to be woven throughout all of their skins. The one with the red stripe was the smallest, but that didn’t stop it from lunging at me while I was holding it. And not at my hand, either, at my face. I bet it’s pretty annoying to have your only defense seem cute to any animal larger than a pencil, but it was cute. That snake had no real teeth, but it did have heart. Maybe it was trying to gum me to death.

To a good friend of ours, the very idea of touching a snake is revolting, but I feel a strange affinity for them. Instead of being slimy as many people expect, they’re dry and silky, and their movement is as fluid as any animal I can think of. Most vertebrates have lots of awkward joints and angles, but snakes are just vertebrae. They range in size from two inches to thirty eight feet, and are found in every continent on Earth except for Antarctica. More importantly, they’re found in my backyard, and probably in yours, too. Why not try to catch one and see for yourself how cool they are? In any case, you won’t be able to avoid them for long. Come August, they’ll be everywhere.

Last weekend we attempted to tame a portion of the chest high field that has developed in our backyard. While I happen to consider lawn mowing, like leaf raking, to be a rediculously pointless activity, our work did yield the treat of seeing (and handling) four different garter snakes. No snakes were harmed in the mowing of our yard. But the roar of the mower does tend to flush them out into the newly shortened grass, where they lie motionless, waiting for us to pass. Being the curious monkeys that we are, we stopped what we were doing each time this happened to investigate.

Of the four snakes that we found, two had a white stripe down their backs, one had a yellow stripe, and one had a red stripe. The one with the yellow stripe was the largest and its belly was the pearly blue of the inside of an oyster shell, and green tinsel appeared to be woven throughout all of their skins. The one with the red stripe was the smallest, but that didn’t stop it from lunging at me while I was holding it. And not at my hand, either, at my face. I bet it’s pretty annoying to have your only defense seem cute to any animal larger than a pencil, but it was cute. That snake had no real teeth, but it did have heart. Maybe it was trying to gum me to death.

To a good friend of ours, the very idea of touching a snake is revolting, but I feel a strange affinity for them. Instead of being slimy as many people expect, they’re dry and silky, and their movement is as fluid as any animal I can think of. Most vertebrates have lots of awkward joints and angles, but snakes are just vertebrae. They range in size from two inches to thirty eight feet, and are found in every continent on Earth except for Antarctica. More importantly, they’re found in my backyard, and probably in yours, too. Why not try to catch one and see for yourself how cool they are? In any case, you won’t be able to avoid them for long. Come August, they’ll be everywhere.

I realized recently that there exists exactly one moment in each person’s life when the amount of time that they’ve lived becomes greater than the amount of time they have left to live. Seen another way, at that moment the number of memories you have is more than half the number of memories you will ever make. Since people rarely know when or how their life will end, that moment is almost impossible to identify, but the unavoidable reality is that everyone has a half-life. Assuming that a person values each moment of their life equally, passing that invisible mark means that the past suddenly becomes more valuable than the future, and each passing moment only adds to that disparity. It’s not that strange of an idea, actually, since most people do begin cleaving to life more desperately the closer to death that they believe themselves to be.

I think this view also explains nostalgia. From the standpoint of a young child, the experiences they’ve accumulated (hopefully) represent just a tiny fraction of the experiences they will ever have, and this ocean of possibility is a deep source of excitement. Add to that the fact that during childhood, most experiences are new experiences, and the situation becomes even more enviable. Everything is reversed for a person in the twilight of their life. To them the future is more like a pool in a desert, slowly and steadily evaporating. I suppose a person can’t be faulted for focusing on what they had instead of what they have left, or wanting to remember what they had as a bit prettier than it actually was. In fact, wasn’t I just doing that? Childhood can be an exciting time, but it’s also filled with all kinds of uncertainty, disappointment, and frustration. Although the promise and possibilities are appealing, childhood involves a dependency and powerlessness that I would never want to relive.

Interestingly, the word “nostalgia” was coined by a Swiss medical student in 1678 to describe the condition of severe homesickness he’d seen in soldiers stationed in unfamiliar places. Translated literally, it means “longing for one’s homeland”. The Spanish decription of the same condition, “el mal de corazón”, means “pain of the heart”. However it is described, everyone knows the feeling. But I think that the contemporary usage of the word nostalgia, meaning a longing for an idealized past, comes primarily from a desire to dampen the sense of regret that creeps in over the course of one’s lifetime.

Maybe nostalgia is inevitable. Maybe it’s a psychological necessity for an existence preceded by void and culminating in death. But I wonder if there isn’t some way to keep nostalgia at bay, to resist the desire to look forward with trepidation and backward at an illusion. Perhaps the best strategy is to maintain the awe of childhood far into adulthood by continuing to accumulate new experiences, and to recognize that when a person finally does look back, it is the decisions made today that determine the regrets they’ll eventually be living with. It’s almost as though we owe it to our future selves to provide the genuinely beautiful memories we’ll be relying on when there aren’t many memories left to make.

I realized recently that there exists exactly one moment in each person’s life when the amount of time that they’ve lived becomes greater than the amount of time they have left to live. Seen another way, at that moment the number of memories you have is more than half the number of memories you will ever make. Since people rarely know when or how their life will end, that moment is almost impossible to identify, but the unavoidable reality is that everyone has a half-life. Assuming that a person values each moment of their life equally, passing that invisible mark means that the past suddenly becomes more valuable than the future, and each passing moment only adds to that disparity. It’s not that strange of an idea, actually, since most people do begin cleaving to life more desperately the closer to death that they believe themselves to be.

I think this view also explains nostalgia. From the standpoint of a young child, the experiences they’ve accumulated (hopefully) represent just a tiny fraction of the experiences they will ever have, and this ocean of possibility is a deep source of excitement. Add to that the fact that during childhood, most experiences are new experiences, and the situation becomes even more enviable. Everything is reversed for a person in the twilight of their life. To them the future is more like a pool in a desert, slowly and steadily evaporating. I suppose a person can’t be faulted for focusing on what they had instead of what they have left, or wanting to remember what they had as a bit prettier than it actually was. In fact, wasn’t I just doing that? Childhood can be an exciting time, but it’s also filled with all kinds of uncertainty, disappointment, and frustration. Although the promise and possibilities are appealing, childhood involves a dependency and powerlessness that I would never want to relive.

Interestingly, the word “nostalgia” was coined by a Swiss medical student in 1678 to describe the condition of severe homesickness he’d seen in soldiers stationed in unfamiliar places. Translated literally, it means “longing for one’s homeland”. The Spanish decription of the same condition, “el mal de corazón”, means “pain of the heart”. However it is described, everyone knows the feeling. But I think that the contemporary usage of the word nostalgia, meaning a longing for an idealized past, comes primarily from a desire to dampen the sense of regret that creeps in over the course of one’s lifetime.

Maybe nostalgia is inevitable. Maybe it’s a psychological necessity for an existence preceded by void and culminating in death. But I wonder if there isn’t some way to keep nostalgia at bay, to resist the desire to look forward with trepidation and backward at an illusion. Perhaps the best strategy is to maintain the awe of childhood far into adulthood by continuing to accumulate new experiences, and to recognize that when a person finally does look back, it is the decisions made today that determine the regrets they’ll eventually be living with. It’s almost as though we owe it to our future selves to provide the genuinely beautiful memories we’ll be relying on when there aren’t many memories left to make.

Brianne and I worked at Erath Vineyards last weekend, helping out in the tasting room and around the winery for what is traditionally one of the busiest weekends for winetasting throughout the Willamette Valley. Erath’s staff was helpful and welcoming, and although Brianne is not planning to work regularly there through the summer, we both wish everyone at Erath well and plan on to stopping back periodically to document the most crucial moments of a typical growing season. The passing of month can make a huge difference in the condition of a vineyard!