I Couldn't Let It Conquer Me

So I went back.

Back to Skyline Trail, where I fell off a cliff and ruined my body forever.

Okay, melodrama aside, I fell off some rocks I was scampering on and sprained my ankle. But it was a really bad sprain - 3 torn ligaments. I was on crutches for 3 weeks and it hurts even now, 12 weeks later. It definitely put a damper on the second half of my summer. I refused to let it get me down mentally, but it was a bummer not to participate in all the hiking and backpacking I had planned.

Fortunately it didn't stop me from leading the fall fire field trips - a 2.5 mile hike - though it was a challenge at times. Now, even though my ankle aches and stiffens up at the slightest exercise, I feel confident that I can do anything on it. Gingerly, but anything.

So I knew I needed to conquer Skyline before the summer ended. Columbus Day, a day off that dawned a magnificent sunny blue sky and an unheard of 50 degrees: a day to hike! To put old adversaries to rest!

Rachel, Emily and I hiked to the tippity top of the trail. From there the view is spectacular. Could we see Denali? Maybe that huge white beast way past Anchorage is her, visible 700 miles away only because of refraction.

The recent wind storm knocked all the leaves off the trees, and even knocked a huge cottonwood across the trail. Despite the bizarre warmth and lack of snow at the upper altitudes, fall has indeed passed us by. Only the last vestiges cling, a few moldy spots of yellow in an umber landscape. It feels like resolution; it feels like time to leave.

Dried seed pods and crisp brown flower petals crinkle along the trail and invite thoughts about fertility, decay, cycles and seasons. It feels right to be a woman today. It feels right to be three strong women on a mountain top, bareing ourselves to the view and the wind and the turning tides.

From my ankle's point of veiw, the exercise was anticlimatic. The way up presented no challenge. On the way down, thanks to the tension and precision needed to keep myself from waah-tumbling down the mountain, both feet cramped up, but I kept moving, and soon we were eating yummy veggies, homemade hummus, and green hempseed butter. Our bodies felt good! fresh! alive!

It was a good day.

Photo Essay

This was my fun fun appetizer dinner. Why yes, that is avocado, artichoke heart, kalamata olive, green olive with garlic/habanero stuffing, hot peppers, vermont extra sharp cheddar, two kinds of bleu cheese, and gruyere, jalapeno jelly, raspberry preserves, and whole grain mustard. Oh, and triscuits. Heaven.


Killer weekend.


Thursday a.m.


Thursday p.m.




Got carried away with the grass and the mud.


Mt. Redoubt: view from the Kenai flats




Sunset: view from Cannery Road beach

me and anna

Why a Philosopher can’t convince me of What I Already Know

In response to Wake-Up Weekend in Grand Rapids last Friday and Saturday, I engaged a few smart friends in the topic of Veganism. By ‘smart friends’ I mean some vegan philosophy students that I know and like very much.

I was curious what their response to my question would be, but I was not looking for an answer perse. The result of the entire discussion was to persuade me – yet again – that philosophy is overrated. Over the past year I developed a tendency to expose myself to the pompous intellectual mind games that call themselves philosophy despite being a skeptic. I have learned a lot through this, and feel more strongly now than ever that philosophy has its merits but is not the substitute for God that it likes to claim.

My question builds on the following premise:

I see two basic differences in types of vegans – the Must-Not and the Should-Not. Both groups see animals as having more rights than generally afforded by human society, and therefore they do not eat or use animal products (meat, dairy, leather, fur, gelatin, or anything else that comes from an animal).

The Must-Nots believe that animals and humans have the same rights. That is, humans have no more right to eat animals than they do to kill and eat other humans – or use them for their products such as milk even without killing. Their moral structure, therefore, forbids them from eating anything animal as an abhorrence.

The Should-Nots believe that although animals have rights, human still, in some circumstances, have the right to eat them or their products. These people choose veganism primarily as a protest against the corruption in the production of animal products.

I fall into the Should-Not category, which, unfortunately, gives me freedom to eat animal products occasionally even though I feel that it’s better not too. I take advantage of this freedom all too often. I presented this question in part because I am trying to increase my private arsenal of conviction for maintaining a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle.

The question I presented is: “Given these two categories, what are the differences in practice? What potential fallout is there?” I could have given my own answer (I just did, in an abbreviated sense), but I wanted to hear what other people had to say. I wanted to be convinced.

The problem with philosophy is it is all built on common assumptions. First philosophers break down all common assumptions to the bare nothingness, then they build them back up again using reason to determine their validity. Any discussions I’ve had with philosophers end up pandering in a mire of declaring assumptions, having them challenged, backing them up, which reveals deeper assumptions which are then challenged, and so on. It’s very easy to digress and lose track of the point altogether. After the end of the convoluted conversation, I tried to piece together what was presented, and I came to this:

1. Sentient beings feel suffering.
2. Causing suffering is less preferable than not causing suffering.
3. Humans are moral beings.
4. A duty of being a moral being is to maximize what is more preferable and minimize what is less preferable.
5. Suffering among all sentient beings is equal (no differentiation human vs. nonhuman).

Therefore, humans must not cause suffering in any way shape or form upon any other sentient being.

The problem with an attempted logical argument is that it is required to be foolproof. It must go all the way. This argument in no way goes all the way. A vegan, however, could probably fill in the cracks. We got mired in a few details, such as, why are humans not allowed to eat animals when other omnivores are? I got two responses: other animals actually don’t have the right to be omni/carnivores (I don’t get that one); and because humans are moral, we have the duty not to cause suffering. We entered the inevitable extreme case model, for example when it is either eat or be eaten. In that case, self-preservation trumps. One validation for this what because a human death causes more suffering because other humans feel sorrow.

Trying to pin these considerations down just leads into increasingly complex byways. For example, does self-preservation extend to species-preservation? And only after that, sentience-preservation? And after that, preservation of things non-sentient? What if self-preservation comes only at the cost of causing massive suffering upon any one of those other categories?

We didn’t discuss the problem of flourishing. Do I have a right to flourish? Do I have a right to increase my flourishing? At what cost? Imagine we decide that to minimize suffering must come before increasing flourishing; it is not likely to flourish while there is suffering (roll with me here). Therefore a person should not eat animal products, even at the cost of her own flourishing, because it inflicts suffering on another. This model, when fleshed out logically like philosophers do, raises many questions. Is it allowable for any being to pursue their own flourishing at the risk of causing suffering to another? What about getting a promotion over a colleague? Is it allowable to pursue flourishing when another sentient being is suffering? Or must we all collectively progress together – all nations and individuals and cows and turkeys together?

Clearly that is impossible. Existence is an inherently selfish pursuit.

And what constitutes flourishing anyways? One idea is to maximize potential. But does human potential include the capability for pleasure? In which case, the human ability to take pleasure in consuming animals is acceptable, even encouraged.

If we allow for flourishing, what kind of rubric must we put into place where we can flourish at the extent of others?

And this doesn’t even touch on the assumptions made about morality. Is morality necessarily to pursue what is more “preferable”? Why does our morality put us above animals only in responsibility towards them but not rights over them? (That is, they, being not moral, can eat each other, but we, being moral, must not eat them.) Why doesn’t our morality put us above them so that we have the right to use them, so long as it is with care and responsibility?

In turn, the others disagreed with my differentiation between “should not” and “must not,” for how can there be shades of morality? There is only “allowable” and “not allowable.” I couldn’t disagree more heartily with that. Life is full of “should nots” and “must nots.”

At the end I realized that I can’t be convinced. The others’ beliefs were just that – beliefs. They could logically argue them in the same way that a Christian theologian can argue, but without a leap of faith to see morality the way they do, no attempt at reason could convince me.

The truth is, first we FEEL something is right and then we find the arguments to support it.

When it comes to veganism, I believe that I should not participate in the animal products industry as it exists today. Veganism is a better choice on many many levels. My point here is not to argue them, but they spread the gamut of animal rights, human rights, environmental, health, and a general concern with capitalist infrastructure. In the end, there are many pressing reasons to be vegan, even if dissecting them all to prove them logically is impossible.

There are no pressing arguments for the consumption of meat. The only real reasons for a person like me to use animal products are for pleasure and convenience. Even without a cohesive ethics structure, I cannot validate my own pleasure and convenience despite all the evils that they cause.

And so, I reach my own conclusion, which is the same as it was before the discussion. My belief in the effectiveness of reason and logic, however, take one more hit.

Rome, as promised

I never finished my story about Rome.

The second and third day of my trip were significantly better than the first. I left the hostel early Saturday morning to walk to meet Virginia. We spent the day touring the city Virginia style - perfect. Espresso and cornetto (croissant) as the first thing. An open air flea market in the rain. A walking tour of her favorite cathedrals. Across town to Vatican City, where I saw San Pedro and the Swiss Guard and everything else. I didn't go inside, which maybe I regret a little tiny bit. No Sistine Chapel. But I don't really regret it, because I had a wonderful day laughing and reminiscing with Virginia. We went to a restaurant owned by her friend for a fantastic lunch buffet. Exhausted, we hiked it to her beautiful apartment in a wealthy area built up in the 1920s.

At any point I expected to head back to the hostel for the night. I would meet up with the Australians, I hoped, and pretend that I enjoyed myself as I tagged along on their nightlife tour. At the last minute, however, plans changed and I followed the Dao where it led me. Virginia and her husband took me to a dinner party with their group of intimate friends - all rich Roman socialites. One family owns a chain of shoe stores, one runs the restaurant, one couple were both famous models, Virginia's husband himself is a city architect. Not the elite, but definitely wealthy and happy to be in Roma. They welcomed me with warm friendliness like I hadn't seen even in Milan. They teased me for living in Milano, saying "that's not Italy. you must come to the south" and promising to introduce me to their single sons, all doctors and lawyers or their counterpart. We were served by a Filippino girl. I wondered if it is weird for Virginia, a Filippino herself, to be on the other side of society from most of her countrymates. In Milan I saw a lot of Filippinos working as nannies for the youngest of children and the oldest of grandparents. Virginia is in her element, however, and perfectly poised as she relaxes with her eight best friends.

I loved it, but I was the one who fell asleep on the couch at the ungodly hour of midnight. Virginia says that if you are the first to leave one of their dinner parties, they all talk about you after you've gone, but there was no saving me after two nights without significant sleep.

They let me sleep in their daughter's bed - lofted a few feet from the ceiling and graffitied with all her friends' names and love notes.

There was a hail storm that night, but I slept right through it.

The next morning I shared a coffee with Paul's mother who lives inside her room in the small apartment. The streets were full of inches of hail piled up like autumn leaves in the gutters and curbs. Virginia and I adventured to the Capitoline museum, where some of the most famous Roman, Etruscan, and Italian art is held. We saw the ruins buried forty feet under the current street level. We saw Nero, and Marcus Aurelius, and Romulus and Remus sucking the wolf's teat, and some of the best trompe l'oeil sculpture I've ever seen. I again, like in Florence, saw in person the works I've learned about.

Greek pottery - We learned the difference of black on red versus red on black, but it all looked the same in the textbook photographs until I could get my nose a few inches from the clay and see the scraped away bits and the painted on bits and truly relish their delicate beauty.

Humanist sculpture - I never fully understood what it meant for art to be humanist, how the Roman was revived in the Renaissance and the intervening Medieval art was truly different. In a hall of sculpture, however, where I could feel (even without touching) each muscle fiber and twitch of flesh carved into the marble, it all made sense. The importance of the human body - and the human mind attached to it - impressed itself upon me intensely. A slide in art class cannot convince the viewer of the time and effort it takes to wrestle a human form out of solid rock. In real life, however, you understand that what deserves this much time, attention, effort, expense - that reflects what is important to the ones creating, funding, and viewing the work.

Museums quickly overwhelm me. By the end I was ready to leave and find a bar for a cappuccino. Perfect.

A final tour of - oh shoot, i can't remember the name of the famous squares we visited - anyway, all the sites you are supposed to see in Rome. She took me to her favorite street, where all the artists live (the rich artists who've made it big). She used to tutor in English the modern aristocrat who owns most of the street. I loved seeing the pride she had in her own city. The day rendered me speechless, and I'm afraid Virginia misunderstood it as disinterest, but I tried to show her the rapture on my face.

Back again at Virginia's, we watched a football match on tv. It was Rome playing (I don't know against whom) and when they scored, we could open the windows and hear the cheers erupt from the stadium a mere kilometer away.

Paul gave me Grappa to try, which I am embarrassed to say I didn't like at all. I suppose my palette is not yet that refined.

Just as the night was turning dark, we went out in the car - Paul, Virginia, and Alison their daughter - for a driving tour of Rome. They wanted to hit the sights that weren't seen by most tourists because they could only be accessed by car. We went up to a mountain over the city and saw the view of the city. There was a peephole in the gate, through which St. Peters glowed like a golden diamond in a cerulean evening sky. The Garden of Oranges. Smaller, older cathedrals where I could see the simplicity that makes the famous ones ornate by comparison. They treated me so well.

Driving around the Coliseum in their car, I was happy.

Finally we went to a little (and expensive) Italian restaurant where they treated me to a final Roman meal before dropping me at the train station. I waited a few hours in the station before finally catching my 1130 train home.

Victorians, Post-modern architecture, Ikea, and Kung Fu. Not a bad night, if I do say so myself.

Tonight we went to a bar in Corso Sempione, near the park in Milan. The bar was an Indian bar, and it was beautiful, with elaborately carved wooden doors and golden pictures of elephants on the walls. We sat in a red, turquoise and blue tent to take our drinks. I wanted to order something off the “Indian Drinks” menu, but they had run out of the Indian liquor, so I ordered a Long Island Iced Tea instead. I am constantly ordering mixed drinks even though I know I don’t like them. I much prefer beer. Anyway, it wasn’t bad.

The night was that perfect temperature where it’s cold but not too cold. It felt like the wind was blowing warmer air into the night, but Federico tells me it’s going to snow. Tomorrow night we are going to the Chinese restaurant and wouldn’t it be perfect if it were snowing. I chatter along in Italian, pausing now and then to let Valentina help me with vocabulary. I know my grammar is awful, and I use that to my advantage in telling bizarre jokes. The jokes don’t have to be funny, but because I am clearly poking fun at my own ineptitude, everyone enjoys the comedic relief.

The area around Corso Sempione was built during the same time as the park and the aquarium, during that wonderful late-Victoria era that I love so much. The houses drip with an art nouveau sensibility—square and tall and with tall, narrow windows. The period has been associated with a stiff collar and stiff upper lip, but in the details of these houses we can see the truth of the aesthetic. The ornate window irons are not so formal and symmetrical as the Elizabethan, or even early Victorian, periods. Today we insist that ornamentation like this is formal, stodgy even, but there was a time when oriental rugs harkened to lush opium dens and hedonistic harems rather than our grandmother’s parlor. The patterns are inspired by leaves and vines, wrought into man-made materials, as if the wild lustfulness of nature could be captured in the windows and ushered into the house.

The Victorians planted aspens throughout their cities, planted rolling parks in the midst of their new industrial centers and populated them with quaking trees. Aspens may be planted in rows, but they nevertheless grow in a twisted dance. Their leaves may look like plate gold, but they twist and spin and show all their colors, colors which are reflected in the speckled smooth bark of their trunks.

Last weekend I went to Bologna and in the park were fantastic ferocious statues from the same period. There were two of lions and their prey. One showed the lion, his phallic tail stretching straight up behind him, snarling over the great body of a bull beneath him. The other showed a lion (phallic tail long-since broken away) battling a serpent with evil teeth over the victory of a massive mountain goat. Half the snake’s head had crumbled, but a full set of iron teeth remained. The other two statues were of busty mermaids in sensual, homoerotic (can we use that word for women?) poses, looking like stone representations straight from a Mucha painting. Their hair swirled around their nipples and the fullness of their flesh. Everything was pockmarked and vaguely green with a pervasive fungal life form.

In Parco Sempione is the Aquarium, built in 1906, with the hippo’s head spouting water into a tiled pool with poi fish and lily pads. The decorative tile around the perimeter of the building echoes the sensibility of the posh neighborhood it was built for.

I eat up the ornamentation, I who usually snub my nose at formal decoration. But the details here reveal whimsy. The artistry and revelry, which we now assume the Victorians brutally repressed, is revealed at every corner. Here, for example, is a fence in which every rung ends at a different height in a fantastical curlicue. Here is a white box of a mansion with a fantastic balcony busting with great drooping plants like it’s a portal to a tropical world. Even the lower level sports marvelous germanium plants—that red blossom that I once associated with domesticity, thanks mostly to New England watercolors, but now I see as a wild red-headed vixen in the midst of a grey city.

If I were in Grand Rapids, I would host a party. Art Nouveau Party, I would call it.

“Come celebrate those twenty years (give or take a decade on either end) from 1890-1910. Come dressed as your favorite buxom Greek goddess (if Mucha is your preference) or as your friendly Victorian couple on holiday (if Talouse Latrec is more your style). Come as Sarah Bernhardt or Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Come as a Baudelaire adventurer, eagerly conquering in the name of England, God, or Science. Come as a Bohemian, emerging from the darker alleyways of Paris or Prague. Come celebrate that, for the first time in human history, we have money to spend. Come pour green into your drink, whatever it may be, and pretend it’s absinthe. Come commune with those people who pretend to be sober at work and keep their private lives hidden behind tall, thin, iron-barred windows. Come and make merry, for tonight the show must go on.”

That’s what I would say.

We drove away from the neighborhood of dreams and on through the city. The last beautiful thing I saw out my window was the porticoed Italian mansion with Michelangelo’s great horse rearing on copper legs in front.

Then we passed the stadium, which looks like a monument to communist-era architecture. An unwitting monument, the type that thinks it protests cement soviet blocs by using cement to make turrets instead. Great round, striped turrets that were either parking garages or nothing at all except a pitiful post-modern attempt at design.

“When was this built?” I asked.

“The early nineties, I think.”

Of course. I had guessed a few years earlier, before the fall of the wall, but the early nineties were the same. The cement of cities was upheld as gritty reality. That proletariat, industrial glorification is so communist in origin, yet there we were as “free western countries” promoting the exact same aesthetic. It makes me shudder as much as the green-tinted glass, brick and exposed metal beam omnipresent CAD-program aesthetic of today. In 2002, my high school was featured in an architectural magazine for it’s cutting-edge design. The library which faces the entrance drive is reminiscent of a lantern shape, green oxidized exposed metal making up the bone structure for the large glass windows and ligaments of brick. By the time I left college in 2008, every new bank, hospital and office park in Grand Rapids utilized the exact same idea. Puke.

Since arriving in Italy I have visited my first Ikea. This experience would be almost exactly the same anywhere in the world, but I had to come to Italy to finally discover the joy of mass-produced homeware fashion. At least here is something we can’t blame on the Americans. The Swedes are to blame, although we can always point to Ford or McDonalds as the originators of the cookie cutter model that has been applied so ubiquitously. Many thoughts (probably not original ones) ran through my head as I followed the school of shoppers through the store’s current. Is Ikea bad? Is it wrong to have our aesthetic handed to us on a plate? I found myself attracted to many things in that store. Was I attracted because Ikea has hit on the common current aesthetic and now offers it to us at affordable prices? Or has Ikea in fact /created/ this aesthetic, which has pilfered into my brain because it’s on tv and in my friends’ houses? If Ikea didn’t create it, then some other designer did. Is there a problem with that? Is a designer for Ikea no less an artist? Must everyone create their own living aesthetic instead of picking and choosing from those offered commercially? Is it even possible to live outside of a commercial identity?

As I said, these aren’t original questions, but there they were in my head. I have an itch when it comes to aesthetic tyranny. We can’t escape it. What the stores tell us to like, we like. At least those chains like Ikea, Pottery Barn or Anthropologie (oooh, I love their aesthetic) have an intentional aesthetic. At least there is recognition of the artistry of life. What’s worse is the tyranny of aesthetic that we experience every day without even being aware: the color and font choices in advertisements, for example, affect how we think and view the world. Advertisements, at their core, are intended to manipulate. Thus, for the last 100 years (since the period I have already exalted), our social aesthetic has been moved forward primarily by manipulation, sometimes really shitty manipulation at that.

I suppose that for this reason, someone has argued that the impressionists were truly the only artists unaffected by manipulation. Prior to that, it was religious purposes. Afterwards, it was the bas-cultural trends. I’m sure I don’t agree with this at all, but whatever. It’s something to think about.

After the bar in Milan we drove to Andrea’s house and watched Kung Fu Panda. I think there must have been a drug in my Long Island Iced Tea, because I felt sloshy-headed yet somehow hyper-attuned to everything. The daoist philosophy shining in the movie was reassuring, even if it was a cartoon.

As I’m applying for internships and jobs back in the States, I find a lot of solace in stoicism. By non-resistance, my path will take its natural course. By trusting in God, I know that He will bring me to the right place. By working hard to follow every opportunity that seems good, not getting too attached to any particular one, and leaving decision-making until the time when decisions must be made, I can balance fierce excitement about my potential futures with calm reassurance that what will be will be.

And all these thoughts thanks to an Iced Tea. I wonder what the Indian liquor would have done?

strange twists

I am trying to follow the unexpected (the spontaneous) and allow the Dao to carry me along.

A problem arises when other people are involved. This tends to make things difficult in a variety of ways.

Mushroom of the Day

After I took this current batch of pictures I showed my parents and they were amazed at how much variety and color and, frankly, beauty there is the fungal life of their backyard. Guess they don't spend as much time with their noses an inch away from the grass as I do.

Today I read The Tao of Pooh and washed my car. Ooh does she ever look pretty.

I love sending mail. Often I don't do it for long periods at a time, but right now I am on a mail-making spree. So if you (even if I don't know you) want something via post, get me your address.