Category Archives: things I like

Some sounds of New York…

My posting has been a bit thin this week because I didn’t schedule anything beforehand to go up while I’m on this trip to New York City for the Mobility Shifts Summit.  Because I’ve been experimenting with blogposting from my phone, I intended to be doing some on-the-spot blogging as I travel–but that simply hasn’t worked out as well as I’d hoped.  First of all, I don’t find it easy to write blogposts from my phone, even though I have a groovy WordPress app for doing so.  Second, I’m simply being in the moment at this conference, so much so that I’m moving from thing to thing too quickly to write as I go along.

However, the other night as we headed back from a late evening in the East Village, I did pull out my phone and record a few of my favorite sounds on this trip.  The first is a saxophone player in the subway, and the second is the train as it pulled up to the platform (as said saxophonist played on).  My fondness for the NY subway system has grown on this trip, as has my enjoyment of being able to hang my arm out into traffic at any given moment and hail a cab (that would just never happen in LA).  This is only my third-ever trip to NY and I will admit that I wasn’t all that eager to return–I found NY just too large and incomprehensible when I came before.  This time, though, it’s been quite different.  Although I’ve been frustrated (and lost) several times, I’ve learned a lot about myself and about traveling since I was last here.  I’m not afraid to wander streets by myself or to walk a few blocks to get my bearings. And…this city is really starting to grow on me.  🙂

Subway Train

Saxophone Player

short shameful confession #14

Back when I was in high school and had limited mobility due to having recently lost my leg (to cancer), my boyfriends often carried me wherever we were going. It got me there faster than if I were to ambulate myself, and also fed my uber-romantic teen desires to be swept off of my feet by a beau (I will confess that such moments fueled many a Twilight-like fantasy).

But now it’s been years–if not decades–since I’ve gotten a ‘lift’ from anyone (the one exception might be that time a few months ago that a wave was pulling me away from my canoe and a teammate picked me up and carried me to safer waters). I’m rather proud of my ability to get places on my own two feet, so I tend to look back on my years of being ‘carried’ by men as a bit shameful now…

However, a few days ago I got a piggyback ride up the stairs to the second story of my house…and I enjoyed it far more than I imagined that I would. What a sweet feeling it was to trust myself to someone else’s strength for a few moments…

Previous short shameful confessions

storytelling…

I’ve begun various narratives about my trip to Europe and either deleted them or kept them in the drafts file.  I’m finding it hard to write the whole story of that experience and what it meant to me.  Having been burned a bit by storytelling–especially the impulse to create a tidy, pretty narrative out of something that’s complex or messy…it just isn’t working for me right now.  While my trip wasn’t necessarily messy, it was complicated–I traveled with the intention of letting myself experience many things.  I pushed my comfort zones.  I traveled by saying YES and not letting fear stand in my way.  I traveled to make new memories to replace some painful ones.  And the trip was all of those things, as well as a wonderful way to mark my 40 years of life (happy birthday to me!).  It was utterly unforgettable, and deserves all of the flowery adjectives and adverbs that I’d like to attach to my descriptions of it.  But it was also a bit indigestible and my attempts to create a cohesive story of it have failed, or they just don’t say what I want them to–they don’t even come close to being as intense or as real as what I experienced as I traveled.

So I think I may have reached the limits of my storytelling capacity with this segment of my journey.  Or perhaps…I’m learning that some things are simply better left unsaid?

IMG_5034

social media & me

I’m game to try nearly any new form of social media.  I’m Instagramming, Flickr-ing, Google+ing, Gowalla-ing and Color-ing, in addition to the ‘traditional’ forms of Twitter, GoogleReader, Facebook and WordPress.  A few things I’ve tried and rejected–I didn’t care much for Tumblr, for example.  Or Foursquare.  And I rarely consult Goodreads or LinkedIn, although I maintain active accounts in both spaces.  My favorite spots tend to morph over time, too.  At first I rarely Facebooked, but now it’s my primary go-to space because most of my close friends are such avid users and I want to keep abreast of their lives.  Same for Twitter.  But there are some people who are important to me who don’t use social media very often (or not at all). To keep in touch with them I use Gmail, IM, Skype, and/or texting.  But it’s a lot to keep track of these various ways of communicating.  And, with differing levels of privacy, I find that I ‘behave’ differently in the various spaces depending on how open they are.

Though for several months my favorite platform has been Twitter, I find that I rarely ‘follow’ the Twitter feed anymore.  It’s sort of gone the way of my RSS blogfeeds–something to dip into only if I have some time to kill, and I’m never caught up.  Recently I also removed a lots feeds and ‘follows’ from my lists because either I found them uninteresting or I simply never got around to reading their content.  In addition to paring down my lists, I’m also finding myself far more reticent to share as frequently anymore–it’s wearying to have the world know so much about me, and I don’t want to do things simply for the sake of tweeting that I’ve done them.

5 fav LDS women's booksAnd, more than that, I’ve found that one of the primary losses from my life with all of the social media whirling around me, is that I’ve lost time for books (and for poetry).  So earlier today when I was walking the library stacks to retrieve some research-related tomes, I discovered some other interesting-looking books nearby.  Books that I wanted to make sure to add to my nightstand.  So I grabbed those, too.  Sure, I have too much going on right now to be reading a lot.  But at the same time, I don’t want to be the kind of person who isn’t always reading something.  And I never want to be that person who can’t pull themselves away from their smartphone long enough to read a chapter (or two!) of a good novel each day.

What about you, what are your favorite social media sites?  And how do you work to keep your “in real life” experiences in balance with your online ones?

Roll through my chant…

Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive;
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel;
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides;
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar—now tapering in the distance;
Thy great protruding head-light, fix’d in front;
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple;
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack;
Thy knitted frame—thy springs and valves—the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels;
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering:
Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!
For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see thee[…]

Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant, with all thy lawless music! thy swinging lamps at night;
Thy piercing, madly-whistled laughter! thy echoes, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing
all!
~from Walt Whitman, “To a Locomotive in Winter”

IMG_4952

One of the best parts of my trip was that I traveled (and traveled and traveled) by train. I took high-speed trains from Brussels to Avignon, from there to Paris, and also to London and back. I’ve said before that I try to make sure that every single journey I take includes a ride on a train, and this one certainly didn’t disappoint! Some of my train trips even included spontaneous cheese-bread-waffle picnics like this one:


(And because I fear that I’ve spoken far too much about my wine-bibbing on this trip already on my blog, the beverage in my glass will remain unmentioned…but were I to mention it, I might note just how strange it felt to be allowed to drink such stuff on public transport…)

And…as a further indulgence for my train fetish, I also had the opportunity to visit and photograph a few antique cars near an old railway-station-turned-coffeehouse. I’m rather embarrassed to admit just how much I enjoyed that part of my adventure…

for ambiguity


Those of you who enjoy traveling (or dreaming about traveling), might like to take a look at this interview with travel writer and globally-minded soul Pico Iyer. He says of travel:

Iyer: I think the main reason I travel, if I were to sum it up in one word, is for ambiguity. The reason I love travel is not just because it transports you in every sense, but because it confronts you with emotional and moral challenges that you would never have to confront at home. So I like going out in search of moral and emotional adventure which throws me back upon myself and forces me to reconsider my assumptions and the things I took for granted. It sends me back a different person.

I don’t know that I’ve had the kinds of emotional and moral challenges when I travel that Pico speaks of, but I do find that it makes me re-think who I am in my place in the world. And I feel more alive and present when I travel, because of the novelty of place and things–which I relish.

What about you, do you agree with Pico? And/or, what do you get out of traveling?

guilty pleasures…

ranunculus
One of my favorite guilty pleasures is perusing the poetry and interviews in The Paris Review.  I don’t remember how or why I began reading it, but once I did I was hooked.  Recently I was going through some poetry in the online archives and came across this interview with writer Shirley Hazzard.  I especially enjoy what she says about poetry:

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life. It literally and figuratively saved my life, and enabled me to live inwardly. I do not know how people manage without it…

Vladimir Nabokov told his American students that they must saturate themselves in the poetry of their language, poetry in English, in order to develop the ear. This seems to me the most valuable advice one could give to readers or writers. Of course, he did not mean that this should be done with a “purpose” in mind, as if to exploit the power and beauty of great art. Accessibility to expressive language will not come that way. It is an act of love, with implicit humility, and must develop itself. So much of this is intuitive, and intuition itself must be developed from an early age if it is not to languish. Our era of interpretations and explanations and the piling up of convoluted lingo in the academic world–the self-gratification of many a “close reading,” the psycho-sociological overlaying and, often, undermining that commentators apply to works of genius–has been inimical to the nurturing of intuitive affinity and understanding. Much of that arises, I think, from a modern fear of immediacy and of the loss of the illusion of control. Housman’s reference to the hairs rising at the back of one’s neck as one reads a poem remains a test of quality. Such response is individual and cannot merely be generalized, dismantled, controlled.

I love that feeling of “the hairs rising at the back of one’s neck” from poetry.  I know that sensation all too well.  And it’s what keeps me coming back for more.

snapshots of my week…

Last night we celebrated Le Chandeleur, a holiday with traditional religious underpinnings, but for us was a reminder to note the first signs of spring.  After an especially dramatic ‘winter’ at the Remy household, this was a lovely way to celebrate the return of the light.  And as is traditional, we celebrated with crepes (the one below being a ricotta-raspberry crepe, but we also made some equally yummy lemon-curd & fresh strawberry crepes):

The new semester began at Chapman last week so I’ve been far busier than usual. It feels good to have much to do, but it’s also overwhelming at times. Especially when we have major systems fail, as we did the first day of classes (ugh). Fortunately, I’m learning better how to troubleshoot problems with my IT team, and am becoming a better administrator:

[blackbirdpie id=”32138156635594753″]

And to combat stress, I’m exercising everyday, including some paddling on the weekend with my team (Go Imua!).   I also did some impressive weightlifting with friends on Monday and my regular rock climbing stint on Wednesday:

With some of the residual stress from Toby’s death, I haven’t been terribly productive on my dissertation this week. However I do plan to work on it as much as possible this weekend, in addition to visits with friends both new and old. I’m finding that it’s important for me to make plans to look forward to–especially as those seed catalogs come in the mail and I remember (again and again) that I don’t have a garden to prep this spring, nor do I have my wee kitten to cozy up with in my big purple chair. In the past, the garden was what helped me keep death in perspective. When Paul, Sara, Linda, grandma, and Madge died–that garden kept me whole. I am missing that so much right now, because there’s so much hope in every peach blossom bud (and I still simply can’t believe that my peach tree is gone now, but I never have been able to face that patch of bare earth since the garden was razed)…

bud

sublime

Sakura in the Japanese garden

For my friends who are under snow this weekend, here’s a view of cherry blossoms at the Huntington’s Japanese garden last Saturday.

The weather has been so sublime here this weekend, that I’ve spent a good deal of my time out on the water. How about you, what are you up to this weekend?