Tag Archives: Research

The Way We Do the Things We Do

May 25, 2009

I thought it was pretty likely my plane out of JFK was going to crash, if only for the opportunity to disrupt the perfect performance that was Monday, the day I left the US. I packed until the very wee hours of the morning, accompanied in my low-voiced monologue (“this goes here, and oh! I can…oh yes, that will fit…hells yeah I packed that shit”) only by birdsong, which grew louder and louder as I myself grew increasingly desperate to zip my bags and be done with the thing. I finished at 4 am on the minute, but woke Monday (at 8 am) with a sense of accomplishment at knowing that almost everything I needed was sealed in two not-even-remotely-professional-looking bags (my new internal frame Osprey hiking backpack, and my large soccer duffle bag from the days of Shooting Stars), which were zippered securely shut, clad with soft, smushable items around their exterior walls and not even lumpy. There should be an award for packing that well.

I spent Monday morning jetting around 17 North in New Jersey, buying up last minute items that should never have been left for last minute, and wincing every time my Gold credit card – which I refer to simply as the “big card” for the size of the trouble I could get into for using it too much – was pulled through the payment machine. All in all I hit Home Depot (they sell flagging! And flags!), Kmart (just as horribly sketch-tastic as it used to be, but …I was desperate), and a few other smaller stores to pick up odds, ends, and incredibly-important-things-I-should-have-ordered-from-Forestry-Suppliers-WEEKSAGO. To keep from being too hard on myself or getting tired early I played 92.3 (KROC) as loudly as I could stand, making it through not one, not two, not three, but five iterations apiece of Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without U” and Pink’s “Sober” before I had to put on the classic rock station and lay off the teeny-bop. Playing KROC while driving in New Jersey always sends me straight back to the balmy summer nights of high school, when I would fly down routes 17 or 4 on my way to Jose, Cormac, and Pat, or Cristi and Tia, rocking out and singing along to whatever new middling rock band was dominating the airwaves at the moment. Those few years in New Jersey were the only ones in which I drove with regularity, as I have not owned a car since a short, nine month stint in senior year. So driving, for me, is mostly a set of very specific memories, rather than a daily part of my life.

But back to perfection. I set my goal to return to the house by noon for the inevitable re-packing and forgetting of various items, and returned by 11:45. This never happens. Like, not-in-this-lifetime, never. But by noon I was back at my computer, finishing up some emails, googling some of the stuff I had just bought to make sure I wanted to keep it before I opened it ::cough:: expensive-Garmin-GPS-device-and-fancy-schmancy-high-end compass-I-don’t-know-how-to-use ::cough::. I had lunch with my parents, actually speaking to them instead of sitting at our dining room table working, or doing my best to avoid our screamingly loud TV while I finish my work (do people ever not get attacked by snakes and vampires on TV? Someone is always dying! And they have to die so loudly! And so often!), which is what I’ve done since arriving home Friday. But we had a quasi-leisurely lunch, and I returned to doing work before Jose came for some coffee and chatter, and to help me pound the last few items into my bag by sheer force and innovation (hello, duct tape!). It was lovely, actually, and by 2:24pm (with 2:30pm my target departure time), the car was loaded, the photos were taken, and I and my copious amount of gear and plain old shit (plus both 5lb forest ecology textbooks! Oh yes, oh yes I did bring them!) were on their way to JFK, and by extension, Nepal.

I arrived at the airport right on time (was aiming for 4pm, arrived a few minutes before), moved effortlessly through checking my bags and security despite the fact that my hiking backpack is three kilos of last-minute-flagging over the weight limit, and found myself sitting idly at the gate almost an hour before my flight, feeling, well…nothing.

Although it seems like a bad thing not to feel anything after something I’d worked so hard for, it was in fact my reward. I’d traveled to Nepal over spring break so I could sit here now and feel nothing – no fear, no hesitation, no worry over where I would sleep next, whether my hosts would find me likable, whether the food would make me sick. Instead I rested complacently, blankly staring out the window at the gorgeous early summer day, content in the fact that I was about to board a plane to spend three months abroad, doing many things I’ve never done before (and undoubtedly failing at some of them), living amongst what was before March a completely foreign culture, eating a metric ton of rice (I may actually calculate how much I end up eating by summer’s end…and I bet it’s more than one metric ton), and speaking in (flawed) Nepali. The contentment and the nothingness, then, were in their own way, beautiful.

I do want to say here that I did not achieve all that I should have, or finalize everything I ought to have, before I left. My methodology is wobbly and I keep changing my mind about how to go about it, so have done a poor job of putting it on paper (which would enable others to help me strengthen it…but…) I didn’t maintain good contact with the Nepali faculty between my trips to Nepal, so spent the last two weeks rapid-fire emailing kindly Nepali faculty members with limited access to email or power, to confirm that upon my arrival in Pokhara logistics would be arranged as we had discussed. In perhaps my stupidest, most ass-backwards oversight of all, I procrastinated, and avoided, buying the appropriate already-budgeted-for gear from Forestry Suppliers that I need for my summer in enough time for them to mail them to me, and so was left scrambling for substitutes at the very last minute. My execution of this process, despite hours of rehearsing it and thinking through my actions and to-do list, has been incredibly flawed, and without good reason. I’ve never procrastinated so much in my life, and have done so of late when I should have been working on some really important things that I know matter to me. So one of the things I hope to have come out in the wash this summer is that procrastination, and ascertaining why I do it.

But in the meantime, there I sat, waiting for my flight, and ready to go. I felt ready, and that was really the point. I had given myself a lot to think about on the long flight through Belgium, Delhi, and finally to Nepal, but in that moment, with the things I needed packed, my bags checked, and perhaps most importantly my head in the right place, I was willing to accept that maybe right now this is just the way I do the things I do.

-M-

Also tagged , – No Comments

The Adventure Begins!

May 24, 2009

Welcome to my new blog!

I’m super excited to have this up and running, with many thanks and cyber hugs to Jose for being so fantastic, and also incredibly technologically inclined. Over the next few days I’ll be posting the posts I’ve written since arriving in Nepal, but as it is not my top priority, you may need to bear with me while I bring things up to speed.

So, why a blog?

I’ve actually blogged before(!) but kept it a secret from all but a handful of people, as I was mostly interested in exploring the medium, and in the level of interaction I would experience from anonymous users. That blog has long laid quiet, though, and an experience as fantastic as this – the opportunity to do my own field research, by my design, in a country as beautiful, unique, and multifaceted as Nepal, seemed like too rich an experience to keep all to myself, or to post on an “old” blog. So here’s the new one.

I’m hoping that this blog can become an electronic watering hole, of sorts, for my friends, family, loved ones, peers, former colleagues, and anyone else interested in weekly updates from the field, and as such, invite you to share it as you see fit – whether because I make you laugh out loud at work (and perhaps selfishly, I hope I do), because you recognize something you understand or can relate to in a story or experience I share, or even just because you care about me and want to share my little adventure here with those around you, just as I seek to share it with each of you. I’ve hid the blog from the search engines, for the moment, so the only way its readership will grow, is through each of you – if you want to share it. Whether you do or you don’t, though, that’s okay with me.

I would however encourage you to comment – that’s really the point (low-tech folks – there’s a “comment box” below each post). I look forward to hearing your thoughts on my ideas about the world, on the things I struggle with, and even at the times you watch me fail (especially if you have ideas that might help!) I have wanted to do something like this for such a long time – this feels like a really big step. So thanks for taking the time to read, and I can’t wait to start to get started, and share this new adventure with each of you.

Of note before we start:

* Adventure is an important theme in my family, and one which is certain to carry forward for generations, if not several dozens of blogposts. As each of the three kids in my immediate family can and have attested, there are a few little quirks of my father’s that have not only endured in his children but that have rippled outward and infected the communities around us, be they our boyfriends and girlfriends, childhood friends, friends’ families, school contacts, colleagues, etc. That is to say, when we were kids, my dad had a tendency to be pretty stubborn about not asking for directions when he gets lost. He would rather drive (far!) in the sort-of-right direction, than stop at any of the myriad gas stations that litter northeastern highways and byways, and ask where he is. When we were kids we thought this was annoying. High-pitched, whiny-kid-in-the-backseat-who-has-to-pee, annoying. When we’d mope and complain that my father was taking us off in the wrong direction, or that we just wanted to get there, already, my father would pull a face, stick an arm up into the air (sometimes out the car window) as if we were the cavalry charging off into battle, and in his deepest, most dramatic voice, call out (to no one and everyone), “AD-VEN-TURE!!” And we kids in the back would moan and roll our eyes, dragged around by our da-a-a-a-ad, but it seems that secretly, we all loved it.

Because it was. Always. An adventure.

And so I hope it will be this summer, although I know that contemporary Nepal is not an adventure in the Indiana Jones sense of the word, but perhaps in the way my father meant it. An opportunity to grow, to see, to learn and bear witness. To go down a path (in his case, a highway, but work with me here) where you’re not quite sure what you’ll find at its end, but you know you’re interested enough in finding out what lies in wait to take the first few steps in that direction. Most of the time, in my experience, when I do these kinds of things, and strike off on my own…it tends to change my life. Not overtly, perhaps, but in the little ways I experience and interact with the culture I am lucky enough to visit, with my own culture, and with the way I value and relate to my loved ones, and country. They are always worth doing. So I keep doing them.

*I am not succinct. Many of you can vouch for this. Despite hours spent pining for succinctness, its on a long list of not-in-this-lifetime character attributes that I aspire to and fail at with regularity. That’s why I think a blog format is ideal – join me, leave me, and rejoin me anywhere in this experience as you see fit and have time for – no hard feelings if you are too busy to read. Unless you’re my parents – in which case you better find the whole darn thing absolutely fascinating. I will work to keep blog posts to four paragraphs, and if I have had enough sleep, I will almost always fail in this attempt. I will also endeavor to write at least three posts per week in the beginning. I know from the get-go there will be more, and would speculate that in the middle there may be less. But we’ll get there.

*I know about myself that I am going to write across disciplines and areas of interest. I thought about doing a blog about the research process, a blog about Nepal, a blog about graduate school, a blog about being a single female traveler and scientist, or an aspiring writer just trying to get words down. But I am not any single one of these things, and this blog is my first, so I decided to be liberal with the subject matter. I will sort posts by tag, which will hopefully save readers time if I go on a long tangent about access to the outcomes of federally funded scientific research, or about stupid things people say to women who are in science. Bear with me.

*Finally, I believe strongly that we don’t do or achieve anything in life alone. I don’t mean to say that going to Nepal for my summer research is an achievement (although covering the cost of a plane ticket kind of was!), but I do know I could never have done any of the things I’ve accomplished anywhere in my life without the support of friends and family who maybe wouldn’t do what I do, or do it the way I do it, but who always are positive, encouraging, and enabling. So thanks to the friends and family who just in the last few weeks have repeatedly opened up their afternoons to ever-delayed train station departures, who have stuffed and crammed my things into bags when they wouldn’t fit (and in some cases, duct taped them on!), who raced for trains we missed and then sat on the platform getting me high on caffeine and letting me expound on life for awhile, who sent the write-in-the-rain notebooks they didn’t want me to overlook, who tended me with cold washcloths and care when I fell sick upon landing in Nepal, and who have lent me technology, resources, affection and their attention as I prepared for yet another adventure. You make my life so full and joyful that it overwhelms me, and remind me of all the reasons I have to return home.

With Love.

Also tagged , – 2 Comments