The Lake People (Homo sapiens lacuna) - H Craig Wilson

This past Saturday, it was rather quiet at The Property after the previous weekend’s encounter with, what I shall euphemistically name: The Lake People or Homo sapiens lacuna. Are they the missing link? Are they an additional subspecies to the extinct Homo sapiens idaltu or ‘elder wise man’?

Nothing was amiss the Friday night of our arrival but there then appeared two rather large blue cocoon-like masses at the lake’s edge to be joined by three smaller pupae. One was a garish orange, seemingly designed for ease of egress but not camouflage; another was elongated and of various shades of blue-grey but with a translucent top , perhaps to allow entry of cosmic rays; and the third was by far the most complex. It was a dusty yellow but with an intricate construction design that must have put its larval inmate under great stress.

It was with bated breath that I waited to see what might emerge the following morning. To my delight, a beautiful, elegant creature emerged from the blue cocoon and I immediately recognized it as the female of the species because it was both radiant at an early hour and industrious. It was only later that I was able to observe the male-like drones emerging in various degrees of dishevelment and alertness. Had an attack been imminent from a predatory lake turtle or fire ant, they would surely have perished unless saved from the ravages by one of the early rising princess. But, to their credit, once they had imbibed a strange smelling beverage from a cooled can, each male, in his own way might have taken on the world and slayed a thousand turtles.

What really set them apart from the subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens and denoted their aquatic ancestry were their foot fins. These appeared to be frayed strips of leather or modified skin that encased their feet and enabled them to perambulate on land, albeit slowly. I had observed a similar subspecies early last year when on a visit to Austin and had put this down to the fact that it is an island city where seemingly liberal minded and educated individuals had beached themselves, seeking sanctuary in an otherwise inhospitable ocean of Republicanism.

I spent the day taking copious notes in my journal and trying to interact as little as possible so as not to influence their behaviour in any way unlike Margaret Mead. I excerpt a few examples:
1) They ate rather strangely in that the foodstuffs of preference were all healthy with whole nuts and 2% milk to the fore, even fresh fruit was consumed instead of the proffered candy.
2) Coffee seemed to be used as a stimulant to augment or counteract the strange smelling beverage but the instant version was shunned in preference for an elaborate infusion drained through a prized tribal possession that was granted ritual status and kept in the sole possession of a loquacious male.
3) On a night hike, admittedly something way out of the males’ comfort zone (They hunt and fish by day) as evidenced by the cacophony of squeals that shattered the otherwise peaceful quiet of the woods, one fearless female seemed to engage in ritualistic snake riding as if surfing a serpent from the deep.
4) Fireworks seemed unknown to them as these were ignited in any number of ways and I have never seen rockets and roman candles fired off with such gay abandon while being hand-held, and exploded above, below, on and in the water. Their skin must be much tougher than it looks or they are protected by some divine power that decrees that water is stronger than fire.
5) When I was lost in the woods with two individuals, although close to death they retained their composure, talked through the problem, remained rational and used the sun, a device on the wrist of one of them and common sense to extricate us from our dire predicament. They obviously have tremendous reserves of self control and would never resort to recrimination. They respond well to a gin and tonic drink with lemon although it was a drink previously unknown to them.
6) The males appear to have a ‘defense-defense’ paranoia rather than ‘fright-flight’ response to perceived danger. Their acute auditory senses allow some of them to ‘hear’ non- existent intruders whereupon they grab flashlights and patrol the inner perimeter of their encampment asking the intruder to reveal him or herself. Ever alert, this behaviour has undoubtedly allowed the survival of this subspecies and should be studied further.
7) In the heat of the day, sensibly, they would congregate in small groups for discourse that would centre on weighty topics such as climate change, recycling issues, global warming, tree hugging styles etc. Of course, none of this is purely altruistic, for as a threatened subspecies, they are more at risk since their very way of life is threatened. By comparison, Homo sapiens sapiens (Thinking man?) is equally in danger but seems oblivious to any threats and, despite itself, will reap the benefits of Homo sapiens lacuna’s efforts on their behalf, however unwelcome.

This was a fleeting encounter and I feel privileged that these fine representatives of Homo sapiens lacuna would be brave enough to visit and share their unique talents and insights with a mere mortal. We wish them well. As they left no visible traces behind and there are no pictures, I now wonder if this was all only a figment of my fertile imagination…

~ Dr. H. Craig Wilson

I love cigarette butts

Little things make me happy, and cigarette butts are pretty darn tiny. Actually, I think cigarette butts are one of the vilest creations on earth, they drive me up the wall, their putrid stench lingers, and they seem to be asexually reproducing, but fighting back against them makes me smile.

Yesterday was a great day for karma building (and I didn’t even plan it that way, it just happened which should get me bonus karma points…but then I’ve probably had a few deducted for bragging about it…sigh). After work I cycled (note: didn’t drive) to the library to return a dvd (note: checked out instead of bought).

Then I went back to work to store my bike, grabbed my yoga year and a book, and strode off to “my” bus stop (note: not driving AGAIN). “My” because I’ve official adopted it through Capital Metro’s Adopt-a-Stop program and the trash can proudly bears a sign with my name on it. So there I was on the side of South Congress picking up cigarette butts by the handful, with cars whizzing by wondering why this normal looking girl was groveling on the ground, and it struck me that I’m happy. Nobody will notice that for one afternoon this particular bus stop was cigarette butt free, there’s a pretty slim chance that anyone will notice my example and pickup a butt on their own or not put it there in the first place, but I don’t care. I saw something was wrong, I took action, and when my bus pulled up and I wiggled my way onboard I left a clean bus stop behind.

And the afternoon kept getting better. There was a gaggle of flustered looking ballerinas on board, and one of them whispered to the other one that none of them knew where to get off. I overheard, asked her where she was going, and told them exactly which bus stop to get off at.

After a relaxing yoga class I headed back to the office, grabbed by bike, cycled over to Barton Springs to meet John for a run. While I was waiting I noticed lots of bottles/cans in the trash cans RIGHT next to the recycling bins. Brushing bees aside I bravely picked them off the top of the can and put them in their rightful place. John’s always late, so I made it to 7 or 8 trash cans and saved dozens of misdirected recyclables from an unfitting end by the time he came for our run. My efforts were duly noted and John’s going to take a bag with him to his next meeting since he’s always been dismayed by the amount of recyclables his colleagues throw in the trash but never stood up to offer them another option.

And karma paid off, I got to end my day with a relaxing 3 mile run, good conversation, swim in Barton Springs, and bus ride home where I got to read instead of worrying about traffic.

Three cheers for cigarette butts! …now where did I put that hand sanitizer?

A picture’s worth a thousand memories

Well actually a good memory is probably worth more than a thousand pictures, but recently I’ve needed pictures to help me remember anything at all. Who needs a photographic memory when you’ve got a digital camera? I do, since I don’t remember to take it every where with me.

Today I was driving and trying to work out why I felt like I needed a nap, so I decided to think back over the week.

Sunday – photo with Rachel & Sarah at Hippie Hollow (must have been swimming and taking photos all day)

Monday – no pictures (ahhhhhhhhh catching up on chores after a long weekend of fun)

Tuesday – photo of Jim, Doug, & Saraya out at Pace Bend (so that’s why odd muscles in my body ache, I left work a couple of hours early to rock climb and splash back into the lake…it’s starting to come back to me now. I don’t have a photo of it but we went to Polvo’s afterwards and I had a refreshing margarita and veggie enchiladas with tomatillo sauce and then made everyone laugh when I put my leftovers in a reusable container I had in the car, good thing I had a trigger for that memory.)

Wednesday – photo of a huge crowd around a big xylophone at Barton Springs (crazy hippies dancing and swimming at night always makes me smile, how could I forget?)

Thursday – photo of friends board members working on the McKinney Falls SP amphitheater (that explains the white paint on my arm)

Friday & Saturday – nothin’ no photo….WAIT. Did I stay in on a Friday night in Austin? Can’t be…….must check outlook calendar. OK, I read for Angela Howard after wrapping up work for KAB but nothing’s scheduled after that. Pause. Rack brain for what feels like hours. Whew, thank goodness I haven’t fallen in senility just yet. Well maybe I have considering it’s only Sunday.

Friday & Saturday (without the aid of my camera):
Friday - After “working” for Angela for a couple of hours I took my bike over to Doug’s place and we cycled to Blue Dahlia for dinner. There was a cool breeze and somehow the roads were incredibly quiet. We cut through Rosewood Park, and I impressed myself by popping the front wheel over the curb without looking like a total girl (sadly Doug was in front so I don’t think he noticed my super cool tomboy move). We sat in their back garden section with an overhead fan, candle light, and a guitarist gently playing in the corner. I had a four cheese salad, candied walnuts, basil pesto, and fresh bread on the side. I forgot to tell Doug that one of the slices of bread had olives in it and he made an awfully funny face when he bit into it (the first time I cooked for him I asked for a list of foods he didn’t like and one of them was funny bread with olives in it). After dinner we cycled over to Club DeVille to meet Holly Vandrovec, a friend from the Nacogdoches Swim Team who I hadn’t seen since she graduated in ’97. We sat outside in front of what’s one of the coolest stages in Austin with a limestone cliff backdrop and listened to three bands while trying to catch up on 10+ years. She’s been married for 6 years and is a lawyer!

Saturday - Slept in for a little bit (a luxury I rarely allow myself since I’m normally jumping up to go volunteer somewhere). Played around in the garden, watering, re-potting stuff. Went to a VERY relaxing yoga class at Ruta Maya. At the end of each class you get to my favorite part, lying on the floor and letting your body go. After a few minutes the instructor always asks you to slowly bring the senses back to your body, and I did not want to. I would have been happy lying there and slipping into sleep. I managed to pull myself together and make it home for a nap. Everything was going well with my day of relaxation when BOOM my bedroom door slammed shut. I had my bedroom window and the living room open and a storm rolled into down, yeah for rain, boo for shocking me out of sleep. Then it was out to Lake Travis for an afternoon of rock climbing. I’d improved by leaps and bounds from Tuesday, and we had a quite a crowd this time. Doug, myself, Ralph (who was sooooooo stubborn and burnt himself out on one climb that he just couldn’t master), Wilson, Alex, & Jim. There were a lot more folks out at the lake, so big waves kept bashing us up against the rocks when we were starting our climbs. I was happy though and had a great time diving off the cliffs (not the top, just little ledges), “climbing” (one day I’ll be able to get rid of the quotation marks), drinking a couple of beers we found floating in the water, and saving stray fun noodles that kept floating off. After that, I drug my tired body into the shower, dressed, and headed up north for Amanda’s 30th birthday party. We all had name tags on that described how we knew Amanda in 3 words or less. Mine was “16 Girl Co-op”, Angela W’s was “West Mall Bump.” Amanda gave herself a streak of purple in her hair for her 30th birthday and was a very fun drunken b-day girl.

And sleep.

Colonialist

I seem to have wasted valuable time questioning myself, going through the unoriginal mid -(I’m not giving in quite yet to the word “late”…wait until July) 20s vicious cycle of who am I and who do I want to be, and after visiting Gran and Grandpa it came to me. Forget all those classes about the destruction of cultures and ecology by those dastardly British conquering the world, I am who I am, and the only thing a girl with a grandmother born in British Guiana can be…I’m a colonialist.

Now there’s no way I want England to take control of China and a few other small countries, or any way I want to excuse years of chaos caused by ruling thousands of folks who’d managed to rule themselves quite well for centuries before we brought “order” to them, but the colonialist mentality sure explains a lot.

I don’t need to choose between wanting to travel the word in search of adventure with being perfectly content staying at home to try out a new recipe. For generations family members have set off to live, work, and travel through exotic lands, and have still made it home in time for tea or pre-dinner drinks. After all, what’s a dinner party without a story or two about encounters with a lion or plans for the next adventure?

So I gladly surrender myself to my family’s past, it is genetics and who can argue with science? (Ok, point taken, science it practically all about debate but that’s beside the point.) The next time I sit on the banks of the Chobe, or start filling my notebook with family recipes, or spend the morning learning some bizarre new international dance I’ve taken a fancy to before having friends over for dinner I won’t need to justify it to myself or feel like I need to focus on one over the other. I am who I am, and this is who I want to be (for now).

Analytical or Artsy

My fondest memory of my Auntie Eli was driving through the countryside as she grilled me to find out what I thought made a good friend. I think after going round and round about for a couple of hours (mainly in conversation, but maybe a little bit with navigation) we’d finally sorted it out, and I’d started to understand how I have such a diverse group of people I care about. After a certain stage a lot of it just comes down to the caring.

But what drew us together in the first place? I realized recently that I’ve gone through a stage of spending a lot of time with engineers and hadn’t even noticed it since we aren’t talking about engineering when we spend time together. (I like renaissance engineers. Engineers by day… rock climbers, theater buffs, painters, salsa dancers…by night/weekend.) So why do I feel so at ease in the crowd? My immediate response was that they were analytical, but what kind of a response is that? Am I attracted to people who like to question and try to find reason out of chaos or once you get to a certain level of analysis, create chaos out of reason?

But lots of my closest friends are artsy and guided more by their hearts than their heads. Maybe the recent trend towards scientific minds has been because I’ve just been run down lately and look for comfort in the known and similar?

Does it just reflect who I am? Someone who struggles to balance the security of a bullet pointed plan and goals with the need to throw caution to the wind to tackle mountains and search for sea turtles?

Control

Some days are just crap. People are mean, they say hurtful things, work’s overwhelming, personal life’s overwhelming, sometimes, and it is just too much. But how much control do we have over stopping the spiral or even preventing it from starting? Can we put the troubles of the day (or past month…as the case may be) on hold, just simply press pause, and decide to create a wonderful day?

To say the past month has been a challenge would be an understatement. Back to back weeks of overtime, finding out Grandpa has advanced cancer, Gran going into hospital, Laura undergoing yet another treatment in the hopes that one of these days something will work, pulling back/neck muscles, not being able to play tennis/do yoga/load my bike onto my car, postponing the trip to Kilimanjaro…I’ve felt a little drained.

So I said enough. Enough of feeling the weight on my shoulders, what I need are bubbles...lots and lots of bubbles, and let’s throw in some weightlessness for good measure. So on Sunday I woke up, got out of bed, drug a comb across my head, bum, bum (man I’m easily side tracked these days).

Anyway…I woke up with the sun, put on my new running shoes, and went for a long jog around the lake. There’s something extra special about Sunday morning jogs around Lady Bird Lake. It’s so quiet, and the only other folks out and about are other long distance runners who respectfully acknowledge each other in passing, always with a smile and often a friendly “good morning”. During the workweek you always see folks who seem to be there to show off for each other like some bower bird mating ritual but on Sunday it’s just those of us who run for ourselves. I ended my eight miles (which I would have been happy to stretch even further) by bounding up the stairs to Congress Ave two at a time, just me, my breath, and swinging arms to give me that added umph.

After a bit of post-running r&r I pulled out my camping propane stove to roast red peppers in my apartment. Camping stoves are cool regardless of the situation, but try balancing three red peppers on one in an apartment in the middle of the city and challenge yourself not to smile. That’s got to be damn near impossible. Soon my place smelled like a real kitchen and I spent an hour or so coaxing a few ingredients into becoming a creamy roasted red pepper risotto. It was my first time to attempt risotto, so I was pretty careful about sticking close to the recipe but couldn’t resist throwing in some sherry to round it out and to transport myself to Gran’s kitchen in Childswickham where a touch more brandy, wine, or sherry seems to enhance every dish.

Not having anyone to answer to and my appointment with bubbles hours away I lazed around napping and chatted on the phone with Angela.

Bubbles time! Yup, I’d made myself an appointment for a scuba refresher course. I fully believe in scent being the most powerful link to memory because as soon as I walked in the dive shop I felt like I was in 5th grade again running around Diver’s Depot after school, picking out anklets, eating junk food by the pool, swimming, talking about boys... I made it through dive tables and such without much problem, and then got to get back in the water. It’s been about 10 years since I’ve been diving. When did time start moving so quickly and how could I have lost so much time that I could have been underwater? I knew the course was a great use of time, when the instructor needed to grab some stuff and told me just to hang out and blow bubbles, how great of an assignment is that?! We whizzed through clearing mask, retrieving regulator, removing bcd & weight belt, buddy breathing, emergency ascent, and it all came back so easily. Finally when we’d finished running the drills he said I could go, but I didn’t think I should be penalized for being a good student so I asked if I could just play around in the pool until my time was up. I got to spend the rest of the time throwing an underwater football, blowing bubble rings, and my personal favorite just floating upside down to get a different perspective on the world. I left the dive shop with an oh-so-sexy mask mark on my forehead, blood shot eyes (man they’d gone overboard on the chlorine), chemically overloaded hair, and a huge relaxed grin.

Then it was off to lay out on a pic-nic blanket in Zilker Park with friends and let my self get lulled into the rhythm of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. A friend summed it up, “Sunday night is a reason why Austin is such an incredible place to live… a warm night, Shakespeare, plus great food & company!” There really is something fulfilling about sharing things you love with other people. I’m a pretty independent person and would have been content enjoying the weather, play, and risotto by myself…but to be able to share it with others who might have otherwise just taken care of grown-up errands or watched tv on their Sunday night is indescribable. Sharing food and laughter has got to be one of the keys to happiness.

See what happens when you take control? And, who could ask for anything more?

Thump

It’s there…thump…pause…thump….listen for it…thump…an actual heart beat. A tiny, only audible in the exam room, heart beat, but there’s no denying it, it’s there. Yesterday, my co-worker showed me her first sonogram of my 6 inch pseudo niece or nephew. Thump. Yup, that was my heart being taken (who are we kidding? freely given) away. I’m bigger so I get the thump with a capital T.

She and her husband don’t know it yet, but I’m going to be a pseudo aunt (it’s a practice I’m increasingly falling into since I’m afraid the reality of actual blood related nieces and nephews is years away). You can’t have too many cool aunts to help baby sit right?

It’s startling how quickly things fall into perspective when you’re looking at a fuzzy black and white image of an inexplicable miracle. Yes, I was a bio major…I know how babies are made, I’ve taken evolution and genetics…but those don’t come close to explaining this stirring spark of life.

In the past few weeks while we’ve been obsessed with spring projects, a couple of cells have quietly grown into a being with a heart and even a profile (although we can’t tell whose nose it has yet).

And as I try to imagine Grandpa as child, I can’t help but smile.