Happiness

My time with Americorps is over. It is sad in a reminiscent way but now I can lobby again, and make enough money not to qualify for food stamps... exciting times! I've stumbled into two new jobs, and although I searched fruitlessly and anxiously for months prior to finding them nothing could have been easier or more pleasant than the stumbling that happened just as my Americorps term came to an end.

With my first employer I share a name, a hometown, a birthday and the characteristic of having unusually bumpy thumbnails-- I believe that these coincidences helped me get the job at the herb store, that and my blind confidence.

For my second job I answered a craigslist add that described my skills with ridiculous precision. The one odd skill was "willingness to learn to handle a variety of animals, and show them to other people." The advertisement--although exact, never said just what the job was. I was asked for an interview and directed to the zoo. My interview was conducted amidst peacocks. I interpreted this as a good sign. I was asked back for a second interview and then offered the job-- which I now know is to travel around to schools in Albuquerque in a van that converts into a miniature museum (complete with plants and animals) that describes the ecosystems through which the Rio Grande travels. My particular responsibilities are to create and administer fun art projects.

So, Americorps has ended and new times are beginning in the desert. Just now it is raining and I am glad.

Gold Earring Theory, Part I

I told myself stories as I looked in the mirror. The stories were about heavy eyes and a person who wore only one gold hoop earring. It looked so nice in the story that I tried on just one earring as well. My theory (as of today) is that one gold hoop earring only looks nice if you wear it out of necessity. If you wear the earring for the express purpose of melting it down for gold at some later and critical moment it will look beautiful. My thin gold-colored earring would cringe and smoke sickly puce if anyone tried to melt it down. It was obviously purposeless alone, so I put on both earrings instead.

"Wrapped in a dreamy state getting up was slow today."

The day was lazily hot and overcast. I wanted to bike languorously to work but ended up fighting wind, and trying to outrace mysterious cyclists dressed in black. I encountered tumbleweeds, swooping clans of pigeons, and dry warm dust. I took a path I'd never ridden before and stumbled upon the intersection of Don Quixote and La Mancha. "Huh!," I said, as I remounted my trusty steed (bicycle) and headed blindly back into the wind my cheap earrings clanking about my ears. I kept a suspicious eye out for windmills, but found none.

Happy First Day

Albuquerque

Albuquerque, I have heard recently, is a land of the brokenhearted. This idea interests me because locals are forever cryptically calling this the land of entrapment --although the license plates insist it is the land of "enchantment." What is it about Albuquerque that has it stepping between love and loss?  Neil Young wrote a sad song about Albuquerque.  I am downloading it now, so I can listen, and hopefully, understand.

Here is comes!  Now I am listening to the strains of "Albuquerque." As I listen I will muse.  

Driving back from the community center where I work in the "war zone" I was drawn into a discussion about the garish lights and signs that are so central to Burque's mystique.  The conversation lead me to proclaim that 'some people don't do things to do them beautifully.'  But then I realized that after they do these things without beauty in mind, beauty still comes.  Once, I wandered into the reference library downtown and found a book of photographs documenting the signs of Albuquerque.  They advertised fuel, fast food, and hotels- and they were beautiful all seen together like that.

That's how the signs are here.  They are grouped together, lining the longest, most tired stretches of roads.  My favorite garish and aging advertising remnant is sculpture of a lumberjack sitting on a pole twenty feet up and reaching twenty feet higher.  I have never found out what he's advertising. There aren't many lumberjacks here.

Actually there aren't a whole lot of trees here either.  The only place you can really find a lot of trees is down by the Rio Grande which is quickly becoming my favorite part of Albuquerque. While the streets are crowded with loud reds and bellowing yellows on all the signage, the river and all that surrounds it is a comfortable range of browns.  The river is chocolate milk, the leaves are aging orange, the ground is thick brown, the goat-heads are a kind of blonde, and the wood comes in a variety of shades between stark white and black.  The overall effect is extremely calming.  I feel that I am being reintegrated into the earth when I am by the river because there is such a contrast between the low brown everything and the exemplary unending sky.

Maybe it's something about the difference between the land and the sky that makes this a heartbroken place.  We are exceptionally close to impossible empty beauty from the vantage of our brown river, and our prickly plants.  Maybe the gaudy yellow and flashing neon signs intervene in this relationship: each glowing "El Rey" and "Red Ball Cafe" a lonely love letter to the sky.

Sing the Rock and Hum the Stone.

I got to go to the desert.  Gallup itself was similar to west 11th street in Eugene, but everything around Gallup was Beautiful, and really old, and amazing.  The images above are of Window Rock, in Arizona (HEY!)  as the sky is getting darker.  There is much more to it than this but: The rock was singing, and I heard it.