Grass and flowers, revisited

I

Yo-yos were in for a while.
I was in eighth grade. I learned
some tricks, I was pretty good.
My daydreams involved wooing
the cute girl from my earth science
class in a yo-yo showdown – old
west meets geek meets fad
meets a melted heart. I wanted
a 3-in-1 yo-yo, all-wood, forty
dollars from the company web-
site. It was the perfect yo-yo for
me, I thought. Forty dollars said
otherwise. I never bought the yo-yo,
I never wooed the girl, and I went
on to mostly forget. Perfection is
a rare thing to find, and even rare
to imagine.

II

Alcohol on a cut or scrape has
been hell to me. Fear of the
sting cuts so deeply.

III

On Memorial Day, 2005,
I went with my family to
the cemetery, looking for
stones with names I hadn’t
known before, but names
that I was told belonged
to me. We found a young
magpie, injured or sick on
the ground near a tree. It
was very cold, and my dad
caught the bird and we
took it home in a box. We
hoped to nurse it back to
health, and then to free
it. I secretly wished to
keep it as a pet. It didn’t
recover in the cage where
we kept it. We buried it
without tears showing.

Grad School Dedication

For Leslie Lynch King, Sr.,
Jimmy Cracker, and
Strawberry Clean,
with all my love.

Grass and flowers

My Praktica MTL5B Camera
is a prized, if seldom used,
possession. Perhaps I love how
constant it is. Kodak prints

remain Kodak prints, and though
my perspective may change,
the purple flower, and not the
white one, will remain in focus.

No revisionist history will bring
a kestrel's head out of its box,
no wishing can hide that a paint
can once held honey-roasted peanuts.

East German, one battery, all
manual. Even smudges on the lens
can be blamed only on me. And
regrets are dated and catalogued,

Every 3 by 5 in every album
eternal in its message: I
do not take back what I have
felt, I do not withdraw my statements.

I do load a new roll of film.

(Gordon Rees, personal communication 2009)

So Tuesday afternoon I'm working on calculations for a soil physics lab. Then I stop thinking about it all together because I've got this monster paper due Thursday by midnight, right? So, it's not exactly on my mind, if you catch my meaning.

At least, that's what I thought. Turns out: no. It was on my mind. As evidenced by the following:

Wednesday night I went to bed earlier than I maybe should have. I hadn't made a lot of progress that day on the paper I was supposed to be writing for my Pedology class. At least, I'd made very little progress in the actual writing part. That is, I still hadn't concluded the research portion of the paper, let alone started writing it. The good news from Wednesday, however, was that, after a long early-afternoon nap, I woke up to the conclusion that I'd picked the wrong topic for my paper, and that's why it wasn't coming together mentally or emotionally for me. I changed the topic a little after three that afternoon from gleization, shrink-swell, and ferrolysis to clay synthesis, shrink-swell, and ferrolysis. This was a huge comfort to me, and I became, almost instantly, a much more pleasant person. Unfortunately, there was no one else there to enjoy this dramatic change.

At some point, while I was in bed (and I honestly can't tell you when - maybe just when I'd gone to bed before I'd actually fallen asleep, maybe when I had a brief textersation at about 1 am, maybe waking up randomly during the night, maybe after my alarm had sounded in the morning but before I'd really awakened... Maybe in a dream) the thought came to me: Wait, we did all those calculations using the Q value as if it were our q value. We have to divide by the surface area of the column. That's why our saturated hydraulic conductivity (K) values didn't come close to matching what we'd calculated earlier.

It wasn't until a little later that I realized how bizarre this was. The K value disparity hadn't really bothered me at all. I hadn't been thinking about it at all. And suddenly, in a state of partial consciousness, not only did this lab randomly come to mind, but an error in my calculations that I hadn't been looking to find.

I'm not sure that makes any sense to anyone else, but I can't get over that. A day and a half later. Bam. I have to divide by surface area. Bam. When was my mind thinking about that enough to process all my calculations and come to that realization?

I haven't ever really had a fried pie. Maybe I can remedy that. Maybe not...

There's your trouble

I was going to spend most of the day working on the 10ish page paper due on Thursday that constitutes a third of my grade in one of my classes. I was going to spend most of yesterday evening on that too. Now I'm thinking maybe that's what tomorrow is for. Obviously I'm in a bad way - I dangled that preposition and I don't care.

On the bright side, I'm almost done with that paper: at least in terms of time: I'm only a couple days away from finished.