This Is Autumn

The air's taken on that old familiar crispness, the trees are turning russet and flame and gold. Upstate New York's most beautiful season is here! 

 
I made the hard decision not to visit back to Berlin/Germany/other destinations in Europe this fall, even though I'd had that as a goal in sight all year – I was only able to tear myself away from my Berlin life by promising to be back soon to visit! I want to see all my friends there and I want to be sure not to let that part of myself slip away – the part that lived in Europe for all my adult life so far, and traveled like traveling was breathing – so it's scary to decide not to visit there now, without knowing when a visit will happen instead. But right now figuring out What Am I Doing Here, Now...And Do I Have A Plan, At All? is requiring all my mental effort, and I know I need to focus on that first.

So I'm not visiting Berlin this fall after all, and I'm sad about that. But the other side of that decision is that I get to be here to watch all of glorious fall unfold for the first time since I left the US, and that is a deeply gladdening thing.

Also: Halloween! I cannot express how excited I am to be back in the land of Halloween for the first time in almost a decade. (Yes, Halloween as celebrated by Americans is drawn directly from British/Irish pagan traditions, and I will happily talk your ear off about those traditions if you like! But the fact remains that Halloween as imprinted on my child brain is a deeply North American holiday of falling leaves and crisp, early-dark evenings and porches decked out with pumpkins and spiderwebs, a joyous time of dressing up and spooky silliness that's delightfully kid-centered but with plenty of room for adults to get in on the fun, too.) I'm going to a proper Halloween party, I'm going to make a costume. These are simple-sounding things that are a big deal when you've been away from them for a decade.

So, fall in Upstate NY, it's good. Also, this:

Gnomes Loitering

Rather clever graffiti:

New Orleans, Louisiana: Good Friends, Good Food, Good Times

And here's New Orleans, from the same trip!

NOLA

Austin, TX: Keeping It Weird

Long time no see... Here are some pictures from my trip to Austin back in May!

(Yes, that's how far behind I am on everything else in my life, with my entire being currently devoted to this intense but intensely fun summer job!)

Austin Impressions

Childhood Heroes

Ani. You were the years of my growing up.

(Ani DiFranco at the Rainbow Stage, Clearwater Festival, June 21 2015.)

Hudson River Revival

Volunteering with my dad at the Clearwater Festival, aka the Great Hudson River Revival, aka the beautiful folk music festival started by Pete and Toshi Seeger, and carrying on in their name.

Two Wheels Good

FREEDOM. I finally have a bicycle, and I can already tell it's going to change my life.

I honestly didn't mind being mostly-a-pedestrian through the winter months, and I'm grateful for how walkable Ithaca is. (At least, the downtown parts of Ithaca, not the insanely-steep-hills parts.) But having a bike expands exponentially the places I'm able to go on my own, without having to borrow a car.

For example, yesterday I ushered a show at the Hangar Theatre, which is a bit outside of town, along the lake, and it was a gorgeous day, so I biked out there along the new (or new-ish, to me) Waterfront Trail, and it was perfect. Just perfect. Then, heady over having this new freedom and independence, I went grocery shopping by bike for the first time. Getting everything back home using just my own back and the handlebars (since the bike doesn't have a basket yet) was...interesting, but I managed.

In the evening, I dropped by to see the family friend who'd offered me an old bike basket, but when I got there, he was across the street hanging out on the porch of his neighbors...who happen to be the folks I housesat for this winter.

So I joined them on their porch/what-was-once-very-briefly-my-porch, and we hung out for a while over wine and Thai food. I saw another old family friend bike past and called out to him, and he joined us for a bit, too. (It turned out he was on his way to a birthday party...of someone I went to elementary school with.) This street really might be Ithaca's friendliest, a quiet, short stretch of road that "starts nowhere and goes nowhere," but with so much neighborliness contained within its brief length. (They say they get HUNDREDS of trick-or-treaters each year, because families actually drive in from outlying areas to trick-or-treat on this street, specifically.)

Our host, the one I housesat for, asked me, So, now that you're back, what's the difference? Between Berlin and Ithaca?

I boggled at him and asked, The one difference??

Yeah! he said.

So I thought it over and tried to give a real answer. There are plenty of things I could have complained about, sure (WHY does it require a car to get anywhere in this country? Why are the grocery stores so immense and overwhelming?) but I do believe in trying to see the positive when possible...and in fact, all in all I'm very happy to be here.

So I said: I love that Ithaca has the feeling of a small town, but with the arts and culture of a big city. Like that in the afternoon I could go to a top-quality theater performance, and then in the evening hang out on a porch on a leafy green street, recognizing half the people who pass by and calling out hellos.

The Inadvertent Time Capsule

Nine years ago, I graduated college, worked a summer job in my college town for half the summer while simultaneously preparing to uproot my life and move to Germany for a one-year (ha!) grant program, then gave myself something like a week total to pack up everything I owned, empty out the apartment where I'd lived for the whole second half of college, somehow (the mind still boggles) fit it all inside my parents' car in one go and drive it back across from Ohio to New York with AWESOME parental assistance, pack it all into storage at my parents' house, then also pack for a trip that not only included moving to Germany for a year but also visiting Hawaii and Thailand, uh, "on the way" there (yes, I know my definition of "on the way" is flexible). I shipped one box to Germany, but other than that arrived there with only what fit in my travel backpack. Everything else I'd previously owned stayed in boxes in my parents' house.

And has stayed there, unopened, ever since.

Tomorrow I move into a place of my own in the US for the first time in nine years, a summer sublet with a friend. So all day today I've been digging through my old, stored stuff, finding things I didn't even remember I owned. Hello entire set of pots and pans and kitchenware! Hello bedsheets I bought as a freshman going off to college, blue and spangled with moons and stars. Hello lovely old chest in which my college housemate and I stored kahlúa and all our other fun drink mixers for parties, which is apparently something that college friends still remember about me and I'd forgotten: my house was always the place with the fun and creative drinks. (I pause here to frown in Germany's general direction, for getting me accustomed to nothing but beer, beer and more beer.) Hello table made from an old orange crate. Hello lovely Thai fabrics waiting all these years to be draped over things.

Y'all and I are going to have some fun this summer.

Seriously, Though, What IS Kava?

I think I am now an official Ithacan: I'm now friends with a kava bar on Facebook. When I moved back here four months ago, I didn't even know what kava was*.


(*Kava is a plant from Polynesia valued for its relaxing properties; it seems to be beloved of hippies all over the US, but Ithaca being Ithaca, this little town has not one but two kava bars. Which makes me smile.)

Zug- oder Lokführer? (aka, the German Language Is So Weird)

Ah, German. The language in which being overly literal about how you build words leads to strangely non-literal complications!

I was helping out a local friend-of-a-friend-of-my-parents (or something), who writes articles about trains, and has one that's been translated into German to be published in a magazine in Germany, and he wanted to check and make sure they'd gotten everything right, so I read the German version of the article and then answered his questions about it. Anyway, that brought me across this gem of a linguistic fact:

A "Zugführer" and a "Lokführer" are both jobs on a train; however, despite the fact that they look practically like synonyms ("Zug" = "train" and "Lok" = "locomotive," and then they both contain the word "Führer," which can mean either "leader" or "driver," depending on context), they are emphatically not. The "Lokführer" is the engineer, the one who drives the train, while the "Zugführer" doesn't drive anything – that's the conductor, the person who goes through and takes tickets, etc. I suppose the logic here is that the "Zugführer" "leads" the train in some sense? So one is the "driver" of the "engine" and the other is the "leader" of the "train," and it just happens to come out looking like synonyms?

Why, German? Why?

This reminds me of my deep resentment when I first learned that the word "Zugbrücke" (which is LITERALLY "train" + "bridge") is not a train bridge. No, no, it's a drawbridge, because the word "Zug," though usually used to mean "train," actually derives from the verb "ziehen," which means "pull" or "draw," and thus a "Zugbrücke" is one that draws up. Duh, right?

And if you want to talk about an actual bridge that a train goes over, you have to say "Bahnbrücke" ("railway bridge").

Despite how clearly absurd all this is, I'm feeling nostalgic right now for the days when I got to muck around with the German language as my job all day!

(And appropriately, as I'm finishing writing this, the lonesome whistle of a freight train is wafting to me through the night air, as it passes through the edge of town. European trains are a hundred (a thousand) times superior when it comes to actual usability, but for nostalgia and romance, nothing beats a mournful American train whistle in the distance.)

The Passover Section of the Supermarket

It's good to be home. (I missed religious pluralism! Say what you will about US society in other ways – and I certainly do, frequently – but this is a thing we've got, and it's an important thing.)

Extraordinary Cover Versions (That Will Make You Hear Over-Played Songs as Something New)

Okay, how did I not know about these guys until now??

Also, this three-part-harmony, all-female, almost-acapella cover of "Wrecking Ball" is amazing. Who knew a Miley Cyrus song could be...beautiful? (And I say that as someone who loves Ásgeir Trausti's cover of it!)

Ithaca Key West Tourism Board

Ha ha ha, oh, I finally get the joke (I didn't get the joke when someone used it as a team name at trivia night last night) now that I've read this article: "Ithaca, New York, tourism site: Don't come here, go to Florida."

The article explains that the Ithaca tourism folks did a sort of spoof thing on their website, where they told people that the weather is too cold here, and they should go to Key West instead.

Unsurprisingly, the Visit Ithaca website itself seems to be down (too much traffic, I suspect, now that the joke's out there in the national news world?) but here's a screencap of what the site looks like, or at least looked like yesterday, as shown in the Ithaca Journal:

It really is an unusually harsh and long cold snap this winter. Apparently I'm the only one avidly enjoying it...

Philosophical Bathroom Graffiti

(I love you, Ithaca.)

"Ten Degrees and Getting Colder (Down by Boulder Dam that Day)"

Wheeeeee!

That's -17°C / feels like -23°C, for you European folks.

(The alarming fine print on that "Wind Chill Warning" reads, in part: 

A wind chill warning is issued when winds combine with bitterly
cold temperatures to create extremely dangerous conditions for
exposed skin.  The wind chill will be cold enough to cause
frostbite in about 15 minutes or less...and could lead to
hypothermia if proper precautions are not taken. If you must go
outside...remember that several layers of clothing will keep you
warmer than a single heavy coat. It is very important to cover
all exposed flesh to protect yourself from frostbite.

But I walked home in it, and it didn't seem that bad!)

SNOW, more

And a few more...

And one I'm calling The Perils of the Steps (icicles to spear you from above, treacherously slick steps to wipe your feet out from under you below!):

SNOW!

Snow!

I'm finally in the right place.

Bad Grammar and the Detritus of a Childhood

Remember mix tapes? Walkmans? The phone trees that schools used to send out to families, back before all information was conveyed by email? How about those free trial CDs that AOL was forever mailing to everyone, in the early days of the internet? And printer paper with perforated edges? For that matter, remember floppy disks??

All these and more I've been sifting through, as I sort, clean and ruthlessly dispose of things from my childhood bedroom.

Also, look, I found old middle school German tests! My grammar was so strikingly bad!

(I'm sure I'll have more to say about being back in the US once it's settled in a bit more... For now, I'm in an odd sort of limbo, and don't know quite where I am. Patience!)