Good News and Random Bits of Exploding Matter

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So, I got an Enticing Offer yesterday.

Every Tuesday for the last couple of months, I’ve been waiting for this phone call. Yeah, I’m enough of a Twitter/Internet stalker to know that this person makes calls with offers on Tuesdays. My cup overranneth (yes, that’s totally a word) with conference calls yesterday. With all the serendipity I could ask for, my cell rang between work calls with a number I didn’t recognize. The woman on the other end asked for “Jeff.”

And I knew.

People who’ve only read my name inevitably go with “Jeff” first. I always respond, “this is Jeffe.” (jeff-ee) Then they apologize and I tell them it happens all the time, which is does. Then I waited for her to make her offer.

Which she did.

Hooray!!!

So now I’m checking with a few agents, to see if anyone cares, just in case. I’ll sign contracts next week and then I’ll be less coy with the details.

It’s amazing, though, how something like this blows my ritual and routine all to hell. Yesterday afternoon was a blaze of finishing day job and hitting queries, follow-ups and pitch polishing. I’m filling out forms, checking schedules, making plans. No writing done yesterday and I’m over an hour behind getting to things today.

I’m happy, but what are all these little whizzing pieces of shrapnel?

You Knew I Was a Snake When You Picked Me Up

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This isn’t a great photo, but I did take it myself. Not always easy to be steady when one encounters a rattlesnake in the wild.

Which I have, three different times. What I like about rattlesnakes is, they let you know they’re there before you step on them. Yes, I hear you, nay-sayer person out there. Inevitably when I say that, someone shakes their head and says, in an ominous tone, Not Always. Well, if I ever got near a rattlesnake that didn’t rattle before I got too near, I never knew it. The other times? Yeah, I heard that rattle and jumped back three feet before I even processed what that sound was. Gotta love those hard-wired protective instincts. Thank you, evolution!

We watched Eat Pray Love a little while back. No, I confess I haven’t read it. My mom gave me her copy some time ago – before we moved to Santa Fe, come to think of it – and it’s been sitting in my TBR pile ever since. In both houses. I never read The Last American Man, either, which my friend, RoseMarie, loved loved loved. I have a titch of a trigger about “finding real meaning” stories. Not that I don’t believe real meaning can’t be found out there. It’s just that…erf.

Okay, here’s the thing.

In the movie – and I totally cop to all arguments that Hollywood oversimplifies and probably made this far less deep than in the book – there’s this pervasive idea that everyone you meet is a teacher. This is a very Buddhist concept, that even the person you brush against on the street is connected to you and has a message for you. I always think of places like New York City with this one and I wonder if the Buddhists who first contemplated this idea ever conceived of just how many bodies people would eventually managed to jam onto one street.

But that’s neither here nor there.

Actually, maybe it is. Because, if you go around believing that every single person you encounter has a message for you…well, you’re not going to get much done besides receiving messages. Now, I do believe that we meet people for reasons and we do learn things from each other, but I think we have to apply a filter. We don’t throw out perception and intelligence, in the interest of receiving messages. The crazy person who yammers on about things that kind of sound profound and kind of sound nutty? Might be just nutty. Like the guy at the Ashram in India – he calls Julia on all sorts of stuff, like he’s a greater authority than she on her own life. She learns lessons from him, from his sorrows and it’s all lovely.

The thing is, sure everything in this world can teach us a lesson. That doesn’t mean you have to embrace it. A rattlesnake makes a fine teacher, carrying lessons about walking softly, paying attention, trusting those atavistic reflexes. That doesn’t mean you want to hang out with the rattlesnake.

Sometimes it’s enough to recognize the poisonous for what it is, then walk carefully in the other direction.

The Great Return

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We received sudden news this weekend that my Uncle Bud was heading into hospice.

He’s at the front right of this picture, taken in Oregon last August. Serendipity allowed my mom’s two sisters and their husbands to join us at a B&B on the coast. When I posted this photo of our four men to Facebook, Bud commented “Four jolly gentlemen, all doing their own thing.”

In some ways, our family branched early into two ways of doing things. My Aunt Carole married Bud and they moved away from Denver, had four children, became their own nucleus. My mom and my Aunt Karen stayed nearer my grandparents for many years, so we tended to have our own family gatherings. But we got together from time to time.

Now we know that this occasion, precipitated by the wedding of my cousin, Bud’s grandson, will be the last for this particular group.

My mom said that Bud has been a part of her life since she was nine years old. My cousin, Bud’s oldest daughter, said that we’ve had him as a part of our lives for 82 1/2 years. However you slice it, this marks the end of an era in our family. The decision not to try to halt the sudden and aggressive cancer with extreme measures wasn’t easy for them, but he’s surrounded by family and the stories he loved.

So, this is a celebration of a good life drawing to a close. W.L Rusho, author and lover of the wilderness, may you move on to greater things.

I’m including here a wonderful poem from a longtime family friend.

The Great Return

May you have the joy of rising waters
May the awe of ages surround you

May your feet sound soft upon the land
May the sweep of Nankoweep embrace you

May the Great Blue Heron stand upon her bar for you
And the Father of all mountain sheep stand vigilant on his loft

May you run the River true and hoot upon the waves
May you, your family, your friends pass through

And return home, home, and home again.

~Justice Greg Hobbs,
Colorado Supreme Court

Sandia

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I snapped this picture over ten years ago, as you can see. The date stamp is on because I was doing field work in Bernalillo, near Albuquerque. Sandia Ridge looked so unearthly perfect, I had to take this photo, too, and I kept it all these years, over many laptops.

It’s funny to me that today I live just on the other side of this mountain. I’m heading down to Albuquerque for a day of meetings. This has been a week of disrupted schedules and this feels like one more thing.

And yet, how lucky am I?

I might wish my day job – which is a career-type job that my colleagues devote all their energy to – intruded less on the writing. But it’s a great job with terrific people. I’m counting my blessings.

See you on the other side of Sandia!

Back Off, Man!

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This is one of my long-time friends back in Wyoming. We worked at the Wyoming Game and Fish Laboratory together, along with David. She’s still there and I’m betting she’ll be Director someday.

That era formed a big chunk of my life. Physiology, wildlife, the community of academic and applied scientists. Like all groups formed around a field of study, we had our jargon, our in-jokes. We once went around a party of Zoology & Physiology types and asked each person there this question: if you saw a dead animal by the side of the road, what would you do with it?

Yeah, see – a lot of you out there are kind of squinting at the screen now and saying, “um, do with it?”

The only people at the party who did not say “take it home and put it in the freezer” were spouses. For years I had any number of dead animals in my freezers, both at home and in various lab spaces. People sometimes asked me if they could put frozen dead animals in the Physiology lab chest freezers, because we always had extra space.

What? They might come in useful.

I still have a bobcat skull that I spent months cleaning.

At any rate, I thought of this the other day when the HVAC guy came. Don’t ask – just cross your fingers that our heat-exchanger isn’t cracked. He looked at the tag from the gas service showing the very high CO values they’d picked up when we called them and asked me if the gas company had explained what those high values meant. I scrambled for a way to respond and fell back on “We’re both scientists, so…” HVAC guy nodded.

It’s something I want to say sometimes, like when the dental hygienist is explaining in painstaking detail about gum health – and sometimes getting it wrong – that I’m a physiologist and I already understand about epidermal layers. It makes me wish for a t-shirt like my friend’s bumper sticker, back in Wyoming:

BACK OFF, MAN! I’M A SCIENTIST

This classic line, of course, brought to you by Dr. Peter Venkman of the Ghostbusters. Which should tell you right there that it was being used to justify somewhat un-scientific activities.

Still, it’s a great line and an even better attitude.

Maybe I’ll get a tattoo…

Overfat

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I have this overly informative scale.

Yes, I weigh myself every day. In the era when I did not (the Dark Years), I accumulated an astonishing amount of weight, seemingly out of nowhere. (You can make zooming space noises with that, if you like.)

On my Excel graph that shows my weight since 1997 (oh, come on – you knew I had one), there’s a big gap for the Dark Years. At the end of them, five years later, my weight was up more than 32 pounds. Ugly ugly ugly. Ignorance may be bliss, but it can be hell on the body fat.

I remember buying that scale, in 2002, coming back from a weekend in the mountains. I was starting to get those rolls of fat on my rib cage, you know? The ones where you really can’t pretend that it’s muscle or hip-spread. We stopped at a Bed, Bath and Beyond and I bought a simple scale that I step onto until I’d cut back on stuffing myself for a week. Thus I don’t really know how high it got. Clinging to my blissful ignorance.

That was two scales ago. Now I have this fancy/shmancy one that shows me not only my weight, but also my body fat percentage, muscle percentage, visceral fat percentage, metabolic rate and my metabolic age.

It’s the last one that really kills me.

Oh, my weight is still too high – about six pounds over the high end of my BMI. My body fat is in the “overfat” arena, which is tremendously annoying. But, to add insult to injury, this scale tells me, every damn day that I’m three to four years older than I am.

Even if I kick her.

Oh, it’s not as bad as it has been. At a couple of points in time (Dark Months), she had me over 50. We’ve bargained it down from there. But she still insists that, metabolically, fattily, I’m older than I am.

Otherwise, I’m a youthful person. I come from a family of youthful women. People say I look younger than I am. I admit I have ego tied up in it.

So, while it’s nice to see my weight come down, the body fat percentage decrease, what really makes my day is when I lose a year overnight. I feel like Merlin, aging backwards, growing younger.

I’m not really inclined towards anorexia, but I could see wanting to keep working to peel those years away. Erasing the pounds until I’m a sweet, young thing again.

Eh, who am I kidding?

I’ll be happy to shake the “overfat” insult.

A Day in the Life – Rogue Oracle

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We have a new girl on the town. Rogue Oracle is no shy young debutante though. She’s sister Word-Whore Laura Bickle’s fourth book, the second in the Delphic Oracle series she writes as Alayna Williams.

She seems demure on the surface. Just a sweet, suburban fantasy, with a penchant for fresh herbs.


And lingerie.


She keeps herself spiffed up, with a pedicure for sandal season, because she also leads a secret life.


Taming wild crocodiles!


Consulting with the President and his cabinet.

And

Russian spy! You think it’s an accident this book is about Chernobyl? Oh no no no.

Don’t be taken in by appearances. Watch her.

Watch her very closely.

Bulan Lapar

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Okay, I know that’s not really how you say it.

My friend on Twitter, my kawan, @Arzai is Malaysian. She’s read Petals and Thorns, which gives me such a kick, that this lovely woman all the way in Malaysia has read my story. She kind of shakes her head at my enthusiasm and says that she’s certain many people in Malaysia have read it, that Malaysia, after all, is a very big place. But she’s the one I know about and I get all pleased thinking about it.

Last night she was teaching me Malay words and phrases on Twitter. I asked her for full moon (bulan penuh), since I knew this would be my morning post. I then asked if Hunger Moon would be bulan lapar, since she’d already taught me that “lapar” is hungry. She didn’t think that would be right. Then she came back and asked what “Hunger Moon” means.

I had to explain that it’s not really English, either. That the full moon names are English translations of Native American concepts. In this case, the moon itself isn’t hungry, but that this is the moon that’s full during the time of hunger. It’s still deep winter here, I told her, and though spring is coming, it will be a while before the plants grow again. This is the time when stores grown thin.

She said she’d learned something and I realized what a cultural difference that is. Even though our replete grocery stores keep us fed year-around now, we still have those underlying concepts, from our frontier ancestors and native neighbors, that winter is a time of privation. Something those in the tropics don’t experience in the same way.

So, here’s to the Hunger Moon, that rises over the mountains in Santa Fe and the beaches in Malaysia.

And to the ways we connect, great and small, across our little world.