Big Sky, indeed

This has been a strange week… I spent three days teaching college freshmen some basic web development, then took Thursday and Friday off work to visit my dad (and his wife K) in Montana. W’d really put it off for too long… three years between visits this time. So I spent three full days and two partial ones in Big Sky country, with wifi only available in tiny patches and everything all rural and rustic. There was hiking, and more hiking, and one night spent at my 20-year high school reunion.

<shudder>

In the spirit of not whining, let’s just list the good things for now.

• Getting to meet their cat Noir, and hearing a million times now Noir warmed up to us SO much faster than she does to loud doggy people (duh). Noir is sleek and plump and a huntress, and it was nice to have a cat around.


• In Glacier National Park I found the waterfall I will go sit beside if my heart is ever broken again; there's a natural stone bench halfway down the falls, and the water roars deafeningly.
  
  


• We saw a marten on the trail — first time either I or dad had seen one in real life -- and, on the same hike, lots of wildflowers.


• We saw eighteen goats all resting under a highway bridge together, including mama goats with their very new babies.
  
  
  


• Kept testing the limits of Lactaid in enabling me to eat dairy. I ate some cheese, and the first ice cream I’d had since sometime before March. No real breakouts; mostly just skin continuing to heal up / calm down from last week’s pre-period shenanigans. I keep feeling like maybe my stomach hurts a little after eating dairy, but I also think I'm making it up.


• Walking around with [Bad username or site: “say_shazam” @ livejournal.com]… it’s fun talking about mid-30s girl stuff with the same person I used to talk about six-year-old girl stuff with. Must stay in better touch there. Yes.


• High school reunion not so bad. It was pretty emotionally neutral; nobody was there who I'd had a crush on, or who had a crush on me, or who particularly hated me or vice versa. Got lots of compliments on my cheap $30 dress, which norwoodbridge speculates were veiled compliments on my body... heh. It is pretty clingy. We did a full circuit of the room, and took off pretty uneventfully.


• Got lots of on-target gift ideas for Dad and K, immortalized them in my spreadsheet of gift ideas.


• Good-tasting tap water and easy, stressless driving conditions.


• heisenbug had fun with photography, and reminded me I'd like to play with a decent macro lens, and we were able to give them some good pictures of Noir.
  
  
  


• Staying in their new guest cabin -- on their property, but separate -- actually worked pretty well.


• K gave me a lipstick that works really well on me! "A Different Grape" by Clinique. :-)

In short: survived, could handle going back next year or the year after. All this being nice to Montana is still breaking my brain, though... the place triggers me, and driving hurts my hamstring, and I scratched the crap out of myself in my sleep every night (stress, I'm assuming, though it's not always that clear). Figuring out how I could have a good life there is a serious mental exercise, the answer almost certainly to include frequent hops to Seattle to study acro with the crowd here (as I type away in SEA-TAC). HOWEVER... I don't have to. I get to go home to Hyper and Nala and my usual life. So grateful.

How Should We Live? ... I mean, the book.

I read (and finished, and left in Montana) a fairly interesting book called How Should We Live?, which does its best to grab some good ideas on life from the dumpster of history. I liked the idea of this (history: just the good parts, please!), and agree with the author’s notion that some of what we’ve inherited in our cultural baggage is unhelpful and should be deeply questioned.

I initially bought it for its musings on the different types of love, and how these have become all balled up in the One Great Love we expect to find in Western culture today. The author stopped short of suggesting we pursue eros separately from the pragma of practical long-term marriage feelings, but I forgive him for the sake of his account of HOW all the loves got folded in over time. That was pretty fascinating.

A quote I liked for the purposes of minimalism: “Whenever we purchase anything beyond our essential needs, we should ask how we have come to acquire this desire.”

Hmmm, yes indeed, sounds quite useful. The book goes on to prod, “Can we honestly say that it is a free choice, or should we admit that the marketeers at Nike, Gap, L’Oreal or Ford have something to do with it?” I think it’s good practice, and maybe a more valuable practice the bigger the thing we want is. I’m quite sure I own the most valuable object I own because of a Tiffany & Co advertisement, which itself played off a long and successful De Beers campaign; nothing to be overly ashamed of, but nice to be aware of.

(My second most expensive possession is an ocicat kitten named Hyper, and that is the result of a slowly growing interest never fed by advertisers.)

And here’s one from the chapter on senses that I am stunned by:

'Seeing is believing’, we say, not realizing that the original expression from the seventeenth century was ‘Seeing is believing, but feeling’s the truth.’

WOW. This is huge! There’s starting to be a whole list in my head of “sayings that are twice as long as people think they are”. And as for the saying itself, it rings very very true. Yes, I am thinking about sex again.

There was other neat stuff in the book — the story of Kaspar Hauser, who was raised in the dark or at least held captive there for a long time and who briefly had astonishingly acute sensory perception. The learning that we probably have 10+ senses, rather than five; the idea that we have five is from Aristotle, who was trying to draw a parallel between the five elements and the human senses. Hey Aristotle, got some more for you: proprioception, nociception, equilibrioception, temperature sense. We might even have some sense of magnetic fields; we have a crystal of magnetite in the ethmoid bone behind our noses, just as many animals do. And I seem to recall, from some other source, that itching too is carried on its own sort of nerves. Is it a separate sense?

Oh — the book also told me that travel derives from ‘travail’, meaning to suffer or toil. No kidding. :-) But plane rides are good for blog posts, if nothing else.