Wolfgang Pauli

So, there's this character in my novel who is a scientist. A physicist, to be exact, though she is in love with her organic chemistry professor...but I digress. She's still in college, but she's a true scholar of physics...which is so, so, so not me that it can be hard to make her sound legit. I took Physics for Poets at Vandy and barely got a B.

She's reading up about Wolfgang Pauli's exclusion principle. I would prefer to have her reading Pauli directly, but since I'm not sure that the man ever actually wrote a book about his Nobel-winning principle, I figure it's safer to have her reading about him. Because that someone has to have covered.

I picked Pauli and his exclusion principle out of a web-page full of scientists and their discoveries because I think his could tie thematically in with my book. (Remember? There are no accidents?)

So I've read the exclusion principle definition about five times, ignoring those scary equations, and this is what I understand: he explained why things don't sink into things, but light and radiation can pass through. Like, we can stand on the ground and not be squished together, because we are separate because of the quantum way all those protons/neutrons/electrons move, but light and radiation can pass through because they're different. I don't know why, exactly, but something to do with atomic structure, perhaps. But anyway, that's what he did.

I could have referred to my bookmarked wilkipedia definition, but that right up there is honestly what I retained after five re-reads.

She had to be a physicist.

And what do physicists do, precisely? Things in labs? Because she wants to go to graduate school for physics and bless my little humanities heart, but I have no idea what she might do there--besides wear a lab coat and hold test tubes.

just so you know

So.

The novel cometh along. I'm planning to be done with a good solid complete draft by February.

I'm getting an article published in the local paper-- it's an interview I did with a mad crazy woman who's written a memoir and now wants to be best friends with me. I am getting paid.

The features department at the local paper might be offloading articles during their busy/supplement times onto me. They say they will, but the proof is in the assignment, so we'll see. I'm also in talks about profiling local and upcoming artists for the local paper's entertainment paper on a regular basis, which would be most fab. Again, we'll see.

On my way back through Nashville on Monday, I'm meeting with my uber-cool friend Danielle and this communications whiz she's working with, because they might possibly want me to profile this woman, which I could do from Oxford. Keep your fingers crossed.

And I have writing samples winging their way to Memphis, where if all stars align and the clouds part, an editor will let me be one of her freelancing pool, to write real magazine articles! That's kind of a long shot, but I'm hoping.

So that's me.

K's all disappointed because we showed up for volleyball yesterday, on a gorgeous Indian summer afternoon, and it was canceled. Then, tonight, the guys who were going to start playing basketball in a league are now displaced b/c of all the churches needing their gyms for Halloween activities. But hopefully he'll come home bearing news of a reschedule.

But still, we persevere.

We had a real writer and his super-cool wife to dinner on Friday. If any of y'all like thrillers, check Ace Atkins out at Amazon.

And lastly, speaking of Amazon, many thanks to my wonderful sister-in-law, who bestowed such generous bounty from that marvelous site-- I picked myself out "The Silver Spoon", which is THE Bible of Italian cooking, just in English for the 1st time, and "Laundry", so I will never shrink/permanently stain anything again.

ramblings of a wannabe writer

Every day I try to annoy someone. I'm doing it for professional reasons-- namely, pestering people to publish me. Not the novel-- it has to be done for that-- but article ideas. It's a wee bit humiliating, but I'm ok, because you know what?Eventually I'll break them :) Although yesterday the editor of Vanderbilt's alumni magazine blatantly lied to me, but hey, with a last name like doll and a nasty accent, I'd be a pissant too.

(No I wouldn't. She said that the Vanderbilt magazine only writes about issues in Nashville, which is a PATENT lie, and only uses seasoned Nashvillian writers, which is just stupid. She stinks.)

I think much of succeeding must be not listening to other people, namely the naysayers and the I'm-too-importants. But as I'm not successful yet, we'll see if that theory holds up :)

stress meditations

Today two Italian doctors with hearing problems told me to take an antiviral suppressant for the next year. The younger one paused on his way out of the door. "And stop worrying about it," he said ("it" being the disfiguring cold sores I get way too frequently). "Treat the pill like a vitamin, take it once a day, and never think about it."

The power of the mind over the body can demonstrate itself in pretty nutso ways. People having panic attacks really believe their heart is imploding. Women can summon the strength to raise cars off of their children. And when I was trapped in a stressful situation two years ago, I immediately got a cold sore...as in, one minute I'm stressed, the next I have the beginnings of a fever blister.

While doctors to admit a relationship between cold sore outbreaks and stress, I'm convinced that a host of physical ailments get medically treated while their root causes go undiagnosed. Not to sound too hippy-dip on you, but if you're consistently breaking down in some area (stomach, sinus, bowels), and you're not abnormally physically made, then perhaps that particular area is where your body manifests stress. So perhaps incorporate less caffeine, more sleep, and some yoga or a walk outside into your life.

I've done the proactive healthy things, and now I'll be trying another round of pills. Covering both bases seems like the best way to go.

Make sure you're covering yours.

bright and shiny dreams

It's hard to have a husband who makes...well, if he makes a lot, let's say, and I make zero, how many times is that?

The not-earning is getting to me. But on the other hand, when I look at my peers, they are in graduate school and have yet to make a dime, or are quitting jobs right and left (for darn good reasons), or are working jobs that they fully intend to quit as soon as possible.

Plus I came with a dowry, which is my little nugget of marital financial equality, and I hold on to that justifucation very tightly indeed.

But still. The not-earning is really tough.

It's not if I'm just sitting on my ass, people (can you taste the defensiveness? I can). I'm streaming ahead with my novel-- the new time has probably quadrupled my rate of speed, I'm interviewing people in town (a whole other story), I'm awaiting proofreading jobs from the journal where I used to work. But as always, I want to be there, which involves many, many uncertain months ahead, because THERE means a successful author.

So there. Life isn't just cake.

So far, I've interviewed two people in this town of Oxford-- no mean feat when you consider that I know no one.

My idea is to assemble a veritable dossier of mini-autobiographies of people in this town. I think it's a good idea, and hey, it's a great way to meet people. So far, I've interviewed a thrice-divorced English professor who is mad, mad, mad, and the CEO of K's company. (At 4.30 in the morning. And let me tell you, he is one tough nut, who came to the flourescently lit table with a whole wall of something that I just could not get through, even though I'm a pretty young thing who came bearing homemade bread, even though I was on time AT FOUR-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, even though I did the canine equivalent of rolling on my back, baring my belly, and smiling to show how much more important than me he indeed is.)

So I'll let you know how the whole following-the-dream thing goes. Keep your fingers crossed.

in the throes

Things I'm missing about DC:

Cheap organic milk
Whole Foods coffee
Brown Cown plain creamtop yogurt

Things I'm LOVING about Oxford

-the weather
-the friendliness of just about everyone
-the historic downtown
-the fact i'll be paying about 3 bucks for every pilates and yoga class at the ridiculously cheap gym
-Square Books (the bookstore)
-the weekly volleyball game where you park on the side of a country road, take a trail up over a ridge, and emerge into a near canyon that happens to contain a volleyball court and many passionate old men
- my very first DSL and landline

Move south, my friends, move south.

Welcome to the Dollhouse

Apparently, intending to write a guest blog means that someday, writing from the K. might grace this website, but not any time soon.

So it's just me.

Today is Wednesday, the official start of our Mississippian life. We're ensconscned in a three-month-leased townhouse, complete with hardwood floors downstairs only, a gas fireplace, and for the first time in my life, a garbage disposal. K. keeps clucking over the shoddy workmanship of these new homes, but it's clean, high ceiling, bright, and airy. Kind of like a luxury hotel except with our stuff.

I keep clucking over the fact that this development is very akin to a dollhouse, with the faux-Victorian fronts, complete with dolls, in the form of lissome young collegiate things who surround us on every side.

K. told a colleague about my dollhouse/dolls comment.

The man's response: "Yes, that is hard on the older women here. How old's your wife?"

K." "Twenty-four," with a look of disbeleif.

The man: "Two years out? Yeah, I can see that."

See what, precisely? Apparently, I am over the hill at my fresh new age of twenty-four. I want to stomp my foot and protest that indeed, I am a child bride.


So K.'s at his first day of work. I have gone to yoga, put in a good two hours on the novel, and now I'm taking a lunch-clean myself break before I go try to get myself a job.

Wish me luck.

the sum-up: One month, many tears, and 1400 miles later

We're in Oxford. More on that later. My husband K. is planning a guest blog, so stay tuned.

But since I'm finally sitting on my own couch, in our own space, here's the sum-up. Start at the bottom.
















































And p.s.: tomorrow is my birthday!

apologies

number one:

k's laptop dropped out of a cabin windowsill, and we haven't been able to deal with a new way of uploading pics. We have them, but you can't. Sorry.

number two:

being a crappy poster, but come on, it's crunch time, and we worked until after 8 tonight, then drove an hour here, ate dinner, and now i've got to get some rest before tomorrow's marathon.

But:

tomorrow, we put on the roofing tin. the tarpaper and decking is already down.

and the windows and doors get put in.

and we finish our loft.

which means, my friends, we have a cabin. a drafty one without its final flooring, an incomplete porch, and no installed stove, but four walls with a roof and doors a cabin makes.

g/night.

September

It seems that September is our month of gigantic change. Last year, K. and I threw our mutual belongings into a house together and got married. This year, we're building a cabin and in limbo between D.C. and Mississippi.

Two of my old friends have become engaged. Two friends have had their first children. My best friend has bought a house.

Change.

Perhaps unfortunately, I believe in the power of the past. And so, as we near completion of this project and move onto a very undefined future, I keep reminding myself-- that last year, I was 6 days married. And two years ago, I was in a different state, still a student, months away from my I'm-graduating-college-without-a-job crisis. And the September before that-- I was still dating the wrong guy, still trying to stuff myself into the college-sized hole.

I visited my former best friend today. Former best friend; isn't that odd? Why aren't there any books about maintaining friendships after the easy laughs are gone? According to our culture, with its emphasis on the self-created urban family (Will and Grace, Friends, Sex and the City), friends are forever, and family are the baggage you leave behind. But in my life, family are the ones you're forced to keep sticking with, and friends-well, I've had too many friends fade out or burn out, depending. It takes years, but here I am, still young, and I have two definitive best friends I no longer talk to. (Let's not even enter the boyfriend realm.)

Anyway, enough. In a week, the roof will be on, God willing. In a month, we'll be denizens of the fine state of Mississippi.

And next September? Here's hoping that we're in a house, the right house, still healthy, still here, and for Pete's sake, not moving.

5 minutes left on a computer in the library.

the walls are way above our heads. the roof tin gets delivered next thursday.

i love vermont-- we went to a steakhouse-- on our 1st anniversary-- with my mother's cousin and her bf (nice, but so not romantic)-- and at this steakhouse, they buy as per their contract with VermontFresh from local farmers. how cool is that? if only the rest of the world had such high standards.

speaking of high....the walls are above our heads.

:)

Short, because Saturday is a work day

This morning, I rolled on to my own arm and woke up because it didn't feel like mine. Yep. Whole new arm here, chock full o'muscle. Let me tell you, all you abs exercisers and aerobics fanatics, that building a cabin for 11 hours a day on a hillside is supremo exercise.

That being said, of course, I prefer aristocratically languid exercising.

Cheerio chickens. Hope everyone is well.

Pictures ? below. The first is now; the 2nd, Sept. 6th; the 3rd, the site pre-bulldozer.



  

  

  

It's a woman's perogative to change her mind

Conversations from the Camp:

1.
Him: You're a whiner and complainer...(it's in a tune, like a...well, I'm tone-deaf. But it's a song, consisting of that phrase.)

Me (given the fact I've been complaining for 24 hours): Then why'd ya marry me? Huh? Huh?

Him: You'll recall, my sweet, that I began singing that song to you on our honeymoon.

Me: Sucker.

2.

Me, sitting astride a log that I'm peeling the dirty bark off so that it will not blunt K.'s chainsaw, hysterically crying: I want a home! A home! I want a shower, and a room with a door!

K.: We're building a cabin. It's for 30 days. Cityslicker.

Me: I'm not a cityslicker! I don't mind working! I'm a good worker! But I (bursting into fresh sobs) I don't like living under a tarp in the woods! That doesn't make me a cityslicker!

K., considering for a moment: That's true, isn't it.


3.

Me: I hate living outside.

K.: I know. You'll never have to do it again.

Me, thinking to myself: Victory?



So, you've probably gathered that the euphoria has worn off. It's ok. At the end of this damn, wretched, dirt-and-bug-filled month, we'll have a cabin, and I love cabins. I love woodstoves. I love the trees. I am a little afraid to go to the outhouse by myself after dark, but who wouldn't be?

That being said, the cabin is coming along. Mostly, we've spent this week milling logs. Now, if you're like I was before this adventure, milling logs means nothing to you. Here's what those two words mean: Finding a tree. Cutting it down. Cutting all extra branches off of them and leaving them to rot in the woods, a fact that fills my psycho-neat-freakness with HORROR. Hauling said log to cabin site, where you use a peavey (amazing miraculous tool) to heave the log that you can't budge by pushing on it up onto risers. The bark is filled with mud from being dragged, so I “skin” it with a drawknife. K. then sets up a very long board on top of the log, and cuts the length of the log 3 times, a process which takes a minimum of 30 minutes, not including the inevitable chainsaw repairs.

We need over 80 of these.

But as K. says, we are not the kind of family who buys pre-cut logs, or even a darling little antique cabin that was crafted with handtools (I tried this, since we have the tools. My dear Lord, those pioneers were made of IRON).


But here we are, still married, still talking to each other. And only 10 days in :)

____

Written Saturday morning. And after 9 hours of work on the cabin, some visible progress, and that thorough venting of my feelings, I am once again quite chipper.

A woman's perogative.

P.S. I have tried for half-an-hour to post pictures. It cannot be done this evening. Very sorry.

___

Sunday morning: trying again!

1. the site before bulldozer

 

the site post bulldozer:

 

The site with sill logs:

 

The site with two layers of logs, joist hangers and porch joists in, and doorways blocked out:

 

And there we are! Not bad for ten days work.

hand on hip and jaw cocked

showered. in clothes that do not smell of woodsmoke. wearing flipflops. it's like a vacation!

after finishing the foundation, K. and I are at his parents' house for the night...and our day off tomorrow!

now, I'm tired of talking about the cabin. It's what K. and I do all day long, think about in the wee hours, and all of our outside conversations with other people include it. So I'll keep y'all updated, and when we remember our camera, I'll post pictures, but that's it, ya hear?
________

problem being, I have nothing else to say. We don't even listen to the radio. I haven't read a book in a week. It's funny how fast a world can get small. Which brings me to a previous ponder: aging.

Because we all know that I like to chew my nails to stumps over things that aren't actually pressing problems, I worry about aging all the time. Not just the physical aspects, but also the personality parts. It seems to me, in my admittedly extreme youth, that some people just...stop at a certain point. And it's not even when they're super-duper old. They stop changing and growing and all those new-agey things I'm so fond of and become more like caricatures of what they were when that stop occurred.

Anyone noticed this? A person whose life, opinions, habits become static and gradually become more like a default reality?

In the cases I've seen, it's as if these people have had some small internal spring cease to function, because of some life tragedy, or, in one case, laziness.

That "stopping" has gone on my list of things to avoid, along with becoming fat, wearing mommy-jeans, and unprotected sun exposure.

on the second day

It smells good here. That’s the thing I keep noticing—the aroma of crushed fern, living evergreens, and clean quiet air. Last night, K. and I slept in our soft sheets, under our flannel comforter, on a futon with featherbed, in the bed of our truck. We pulled it in under the giant tarp-ceiling, draped the track-rack with mosquito netting, and fell soundly asleep to the sounds of crickets and water falling from the leaves of the trees.

So far: the camp site is set up. And since we’re here for a month, the campsite includes food shelves, pots hanging from clothesline, a stone-rimmed firepit with coal-cooking area, many, many boxes of tools, a work bench, a card table with candles and stools, and lastly, a marble slab on stools with a vase and candles for me, with a mirror tacked to a tree above, acting as a very deluxe vanity. It’s beau-tiful.

That was yesterday. Today, many trees met their ends, and we now have two improved roads (the entrance road and the old logging road we’ll be dragging our cabin trees on), as well as a completely level building site. In case you’re in awe: Harry came over with a bulldozer. On our side of things, K. and I have erected half of an outhouse. The hole is dug, and the structure itself is about half-done. It is also beau-tiful, with a fab view into the green trees and to the blue mountains. Pictures will follow when completed.

Best incident: a mouse ran up my pants. Yep. I was carefully moving stones, and found two little field mice. I couldn’t leave them, as that area is now completely flatted by the dozer, and so I carefully picked up the last stone, their last hiding place. One headed for the wood pile, and one went up my pants. I shook my leg a few times, but nothing came out, so I went about my business until I felt little legs crawling up my lower thigh. And even though I knew what it was, I still hollered and danced around while whipping my pants off.

--- end of cabin building installation

On the interminable drive between DC and Vermont, I listened to an NPR interview with Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian priest. Her story was mainly about why she left her church and began teaching, but she said something that’s been playing on my mind ever since. Warning: it’s about God.

I’ve always conceived of God as a person, despite all the official gender-neutrality thing. The closest I’ve managed to achieving that is having God be female sometimes. Kind of like one of those weird frogs. But BBT said she conceived of God as this infinite web of conecctedness, omnipresent. Maybe I’ve perverted her words in my head, but that’s what I took away—and I really like it. It makes God more like this alternate reality that if you slow down, you can touch.

I think I’m a fan.
___________

The bulldozer approaches. Until soon!

how can i talk about ideas when I have so much NEWS?

My fingernails are chewed to the quick, I have a stress-induced spot on my face, and my toes are unpainted for once, but-- the house is empty. Packed. Done, pretty much, except the final cleaning we'll do before we leave.

And I better get my beauty act together because... K. got the job in Mississippi, where the girls take their looks very seriously. That's right-- our official unemployment period lasted a grand 15 days, though we still get September to build our cabin. We'll be driving to Oxford directly after VT, and K. begins work October 11th.

That's not very far away, but in that time period, I will spent a month in the woods, built a cabin, had a birthday, and moved up and down the east coast twice. It's a fast pace, these days, and I'm doing my best to stay kosher with all this tasty change...

But meanwhile, I'm going to shout out to my sweetie, who handles moving with excitement and unbelievable competence, my frequent standing-in-the-middle-of-the
-room-crying-and-mumbling-about-my-china-pattern breakdowns with grace, and negotiations with corporate bigwigs while in his underwear on a stool in our empty kitchen with aplomb. Throw in the fact he managed to take apart all the plumbing to unplug the sink, and I'd call him a winner. (man, did I luck out.)

alright, i know, we're still not in vermont.

here's the skinny: our house is in boxes. we're back from a 2-day family thing at the beach. we're walking through our house with the landlord on sunday to get our whopping security deposit back and we're heading north on monday. tuesday: set up a campsite, meaning find places for the tools, make a make-shift kitchen, and to k's disgust, set up a counter with mirror for me. wednesday: build the outhouse, go madly shopping for necessary supplies. thursday: start assembling the foundation.

we can do this. we can do this!

diatribe #416

Well, I have to say for all you people slogging through day jobs: not working is fabulous.

that being said, k. and i found telling people that we are unemployed so distressing that we've resorted to "we're retired." which is pretentious, but a lot more fun.(and no, we don't have enough money to retire. sabbatical's probaly the most accurate).

So, we've spent the last week driving around the East Coast, visting friends, family, and most notably, a now-9-day-old baby, Jilas Alistaire, born to our friends. We saw him on Monday, meaning that's he's practically doubled in age by now. Crazy, eh? He's a beautiful baby.

While I am as happy and confident about moving away from DC and taking September to build a cain, the people we've come into contact with in the past week (NOT our actual friends, but more the at-party-conversations) have not been as supportive as one might think. The "that's-not-possibles" have made me wonder how many people are settling in life. People are shocked to find out the K. and I have planned our departure from DC for as long as we've lived here; they're bitterly incredulous that we're not hiring construction crews to build a one-room cabin without electricity or plumbing; and strangely, they're resentful that we've saved enough to take a few months off without wiping ourselves out financially.

How have we come from a nation where people strode into the wilderness and created homes with handtools and old-fashioned labour to a society where unjamming a sink requires a plumber and knowing how to run a chainsaw makes one a woodsman? Now, granted, I still don't know how to use my $35 sewing machine. I've never canned in my life. But I've learned how to use woodtools, weedwhackers, and I can cook-- that puts me significantly ahead of most people, and I have big plans to keep aquiring more skills. My husband, blessed to come from a family where people know how to do things, regularily astonishes people with his ability to work on his car, do drywall, install water heaters, rebuild lawn mowers, and the like.

What's interesting is that domestic skills-- and yes, domestic skills involve screwdrivers and drills as well (domicile means house, not women's work)-- but anyway-- domestic skills have become vilified. Women are afraid to learn to cook and clean, and they don't replace those pretty necessary household tasks with the other duties, such as car maintenance, gardening, etc.

My beef isn't with people eating take-out, or getting their oil changed at Jiffy Lube. It's about the mentality that we are not capable of taking care of ourselves, and so we pay, pay, and pay for everything. For cooking. For food itself, because we're too lazy to grow it. For oil changes and fuse replacements. For someone to clean our toilets.

I don't know how to build a cabin, but my husband's read some books, done some things with his hands, and I'm a good follower. We're willing to learn.

There's a great how-to section at the library. Which, incidentally, is free to join.

resolutions

Today is my last day of work.

I'm a nostalgic kind of person. I keep photo albums...and in a trunk, there is every picture I've ever taken that didn't make it into the photo albums. I have notes I passed in 5th grade, and they didn't survive by accident. I kept them. Because I'm a keep-and-cry-about-them-later person.

But I'm not feeling the least bit sad about leaving this job. Sure, it paid well enough, and I learned proofreading, BenchPress, and how pompous public health authors are, but the main lesson I learned here?

Don't waste time doing something you're not interested in. Sure, I was panicked, with about a three-week window to get a job (and more importantly a fix on my job's location), and the money was good and the hours decent. But really? There are so many places I wish I had worked while I was here. The National Preservation Society, the Land Trust Association, the Building Museum...

So next time, I'm not settling for something I know I can do with my eyes hut. Here's to being challenged.

And my novel selling for an unprecedented advance, so the whole issue becomes irrelevant anyway :)

-- NOT THAT IT HAS, MIND YOU. just that it should.

tibet

Great idea:

A bike tour in Tibet. It's going on my list of things to do before I die.