SEAF was fun this year as usual. I had one picture make it into the juried show, and I sold several refridgerator magnets in the SEAF store. The judges this year were far more “art-y”, as they were completely from the art community and none from the sex-positive community. That made the show more exclusive (only 100 pieces made it into the show, out of thousands submitted), and it also made it a little more bland, in my opinion. It was missing the quirkiness and offbeat humor of previous years.

Three years ago was the first time I submitted anything to the show, and I didn’t get anything accepted. They did give me a free pass to the show, just for sending a submission, so I went and checked it out to see what was different about my photos from the things that made it into the show. After spending several hours there, I concluded that the main difference didn’t have anything to do with composition or the technical aspects of the photography. Pretty consistently, the photos in the show had a story to tell, and I’ve decided since that that is probably the key to good photos. You catch an instant that tells a whole story, more or less. Sometimes the plot is only very subtly suggested and leaves the viewer to do a lot of guessing, but it at least inspires the viewer to wonder. I used that theory for the last two years, and have had things in the show both years. (If you’re curious to see the pictures, drop me a line. They aren’t appropriate for public broadcast, but I think they’re quite good.) So I feel like I’ve mastered that step, and I’m ready for the next level, which is to get someone to buy them once they are hanging on the wall at the show.

This year I spent my time walking around trying to get a sense of which pictures sold and which ones didn’t. There were a lot of works that were really inspired pieces of art, but that I just couldn’t imagine anyone hanging on their walls. Those didn’t sell. So it’s gotta be just this side of the line of appropriate. We’re dealing with a subculture where that line is a lot further out there than mainstream culture, but there’s a line nonetheless. I also talked with a few people, and noticed a few things. People who buy erotic art are overwhelmingly men. There are women also of course, but mostly gay men and straight men. That means that there is very little lesbian art in this show. I’m not sure if it makes sense to try to step into that micro-niche that no one is filling, or if it makes sense to try to reach the wider audience and focus on the male market. I think that the ethically correct answer is different than the answer that makes money, but I’m still pondering that.

One woman I talked with mentioned that she was looking specifically for pictures that showed some sort of relationship between people. She was dissapointed that the majority of the pictures had only one person in them, and usually only a small part of the one person. Again, I’m not sure which way to go with this information, but I’m storing it in the hopes that it will fit in eventually.

And Allena added that the subjects of the pictures that sell are usually somewhat anonymous. They are torso shots, or the face is in shadow or behind a mask or something. Part of what was so appealing, artistically, about my entry this year was the direct eye contact with the camera. That makes it good art, but it makes it less marketable.

I sold several magnets, or two different images. Both images were anonymous subjects, with two people showing a clear relationship, both subjects were women (therefore appealling to the straight men and gay women), and (an important note) they were priced cheaper than any other artists’ magnets. I had marked them with a profit of about 200%, so it worked out well that all the other artists were even more greedy than me.

Preston, Sarah, Eric, and I went to the opening night. Eric took this picture after we got all dressed up at Sarah’s apartment.

A couple years ago, my friend Amy accused me of always taking pictures of trees as
if they were phallic symbols. So this one’s for you, Amy.

I went for a bit of an explore in the Capitol Forest today. It’s rainy here, but in a spring-ish sort of way. This is different from the winter rains in a non-tangible sort of way that people who don’t live here probably can’t understand. But I have proof-positive that it is officially spring from my walk today. From the spring flowers to the club moss (at least, I think that’s what that is…) everything is blooming here.

{Edit: In the following pictures, I call them ensatinas, but I was wrong. I had to look up something about ensatinas the other day, and it turns out I had them confused with rough-skinned newts, which is what the animals below are. Ensatinas are much smoother and moist looking, and their eyes stick out way further. Around here, they are a similiar color pattern to the rough-skinned newt, but they vary wildly along the West Coast. Some of them are black with flourescent yellow spots even.}

Also, there were so many ensatinas out that I had to literally watch where I put my feet at every step so as to not step on them as they wandered across the trail. They are some of my favorite woodland creatures, very docile and peaceful, and I’ve never seen so many at once. I stopped to move them out of the trail every time I saw them in danger’s way. I saw dozens of them, but will only post a couple pics here.

I also had some nice reinforcement on the amount of time I spent wandering around in the woods in Onalaska. I knew in theory that I learned a lot about the flow of things in nature, and that I certainly became a lot more comfortable with the things that lived there. In Kamana, they insist that if you just spend a lot of time outside, ecology starts to make an intuitive sense even without reading any books about it or anything. So today, as I stopped to take a picture of some pretty flowers on a tree,

I heard a familiar buzz and looked around to see a male rufous hummingbird land in a tree just a few feet away from me and check me out. After a minute, he flew up to the top of a young Douglas Fir tree, which is just the sort of perch that the rufous humingbirds in Onalaska used to use all the time. And without pondering it at all, the thought came to me fully formed, “Wow, the salmonberries must be flowering.” And when I stopped to think about it, I realized that the hummingbirds showed up the same time the salmonberries flowered last year, although I don’t think I made the conscious connection until this year. And sure enough, just around the next corner…

Cool, huh? I spent a couple hours walking around. The Capitol Forest is a fairly extensive forest, managed commercially for logging by the Department of Natural Resources. The entrance I went to is just 7 miles from my front door, so that’s pretty cool. When it isn’t raining, it’d be a nice bike ride over there, and many of the trails are open to bikes. Here’s what it looks like wandering around in the woods when it *is* raining, as is usually the case. Check out that sexy raingear!

And lest we forget that most favorite of everyone’s Pacific Northwest woodland creatures, I saw a couple of these also. This one appears to be eating something gross, which is what slugs mostly do, in case you thought they only ate garden vegetables.

I did not pick this one up and move it out of the trail.

It pretty much looks like we’re buying a house. However, it also looks like we might be inheriting a problem renter. She’s taken very good care of the house, but she doesn’t seem to be in a big hurry to move out. She’s supposed to be out on the 30th of this month (as in, 7 days from now) but she doesn’t seem to have made much progress in finding a place. Preston and I don’t want our first act as new homeowners to be booting someone out on the street. It just seems like bad karma. So we signed an agreement with the current seller that if there’s anyone in there after closing, the seller will pay us $32/day ($950/month) for every day that we can’t move into it. Hopefully, that will be enough incentive for the seller to get her out of there ASAP. Our agreement expires on April 30th, so if she’s still in there at that point, we won’t feel bad any more about booting her out. At that point, she’ll be a squatter and not a renter so we won’t have to evict her, we’ll just have to have her arrested for trespassing. Which is still a big pain in the ass. Hopefully, the seller will evict her before we get to that step.

But other than that fairly major inconvenience, everything seems to be moving forward. We meet at the title company on Monday to sign all the final papers so that the closing can happen as planned on the 30th. As far as I know, there’s nothing that can fall through at this point, so it appears that we will own a house next week. We’ve started thinking about decorating options. In particular, we have to take out all the carpets and paint the walls before we can move in, since the tenant has been smoking in the house for the last four or five years. After looking into all of our flooring options, we’ve decided that you can actually do really cool things with concrete floors. It’s not just for warehouses and garages anymore. It’s relatively eco-friendly, and you can paint it and stain it in all sorts of beautiful ways. So the big decision to be made is about paint colors for both walls and floor (the ceiling is all popcorn which we don’t want to deal with, so that will stay white). I started collecting paint color books, and I cut out all my favorite color combinations to show Preston.

Each card shows a combination of four colors that I like a lot. Preston gets overwhelmed by too many options, so I’m not even showing him the whole books. This stack of colors is probably plenty overwhelming. I also picked my favorite combination out of all of them, so now it’s a matter of negotiating with Preston to pick a cohesive picture. He has a tendency to refuse to follow the structures I like. (”Sure, we can use your tan and orange scheme, but also I want to paint my room bright green.”) Anyway, here are my choices.

Of course, the colors don’t come out on the computer screen, but that gives you an idea. We’d use only one tan, one white, and one pink color, rather than the two variations that are shown in this scheme. The dark purple on the lower right will probably switch out for a dark orange-red (darker and redder than the upper left square) to suit Preston’s quirky taste. And I’m thinking the concrete floor will be whichever tan color we go with. I’m thinking that using one light color for all the floors (except the bathroom and kitchen, which are already tiled) will help make the place look bigger, and will also be easy to deal with, rather than trying some complex artistic thing with the floors right now.

Preston: Oh cool, I just got an e-mail from that girl who moved to some foreign country.

Me: (singing) “I’m livin’ in a foreign country, but I’m bound to cross the line. Beauty walks a razor’s edge, some day I’ll make it mine.”

Preston: That’s nice, babe. Is that White Snake or Bob Dylan?

Overheard during the girls’ arrival in the desert: “This is so fucking retarded!”

Overheard while the girls waited for the bus to come pick them up after 4 days in the desert: “I am so totally coming back here!”

I think that mostly sums up the experience. It was hard and awesome. There were 8 women on as staff out in the field, plus two more women who came on the 2nd and 3rd day to be our rock climbing specialists. The 8 core staff spent Saturday and Sunday prepping for the program. None of us had worked together before, so it was our chance to get to know each other’s style a little bit, to create a curriculum that utilized our strengths, and to decide on various “united front” issues (do we care if they cuss? what’s the policy on personal disclosures? etc…).

The women were amazing. One runs her own teen girl rock climbing program in Bend. Another manages the local climbing gym. One just got back from 10 months of working wilderness therapy programs in Maine (”I’ve slept on the ground far more often than in a bed in the last 10 months,” she said.). Anyway, they all rocked. It was so refreshing to be back in an environment where people understand the consensus process and use it effectively. It highlighted for me one of the reasons that I love wilderness education work; it seems like that level of respectful interaction is a lot more common among wilderness educators.

On Monday, we headed out to Vantage, WA and a local climbing site. Staff drove out in a van together with all the gear and the girls left from their school in Tacoma in their buses. Staff got to the site a couple hours before the girls so we could get our site set up a little bit and get a little bit grounded in the space before we were “on”. The girls’ arrival could be felt as a palpable ball of angst and fear hidden under a thin veneer of contempt. We started with a group game, a bit of running to shake out the kinks of the bus ride, but the instructor leading the game called a halt to it after not too long. Later, she explained that the punching and kicking going on on her side of the field were getting out of hand.

We split into our small groups. Sets of 8 to ten students and two instructors camped in the same general vicinity, but far enough away to be distinct. As the students settled in and had a chance to ask their questions (”what will we do if there’s an earthquake?”) they mellowed and at least seemed ready to accept their fate, even if they weren’t happy about having to spent the next couple days in the desert (”where are all the cute boys?”). We explained how things were going to work for the next few days, including how to pee in the desert. Peeing and pooping outside is something that most of these girls had never even thought of doing before. Those of you who’ve done it (probably most of the people who read this blog) know that they’ve been missing out, but they were pretty sceptical.

Wilderness educators in general seem to be pretty open about bodily functions. You’ve gotta be pretty okay with talking about poop if you’re going to work either with kids or in the woods. Combine the two (kids and woods, not kids and poop, although that works too), and you have a recipe for non-stop inappropriate staff jokes. In this instance, a couple of the girls announced that they weren’t going to poop until they got back home. In a staff-only conversation about that, one of the instructors said, “If there’s one thing that will ruin a camping trip, it’s a little fecal impaction.” Those of you who do wilderness education already understand how that was hilarious. Those of you who don’t won’t think it was funny no matter how much I try to explain (Preston gave me the “mm-hmm, that’s nice dear” look when I told him the story); suffice to say that Team Fecal Impaction became our official staff group name, used only when students weren’t around. We even had a team cheer, which it would be impossible to appreciate in written form.

The first night was a little rough for some of the girls. We had given them the basic run-down about how to set up the sleeping pads and sleeping bags, but we hadn’t realized to what extent they just had no experience whatsoever with any kind of camping. My co-instructor, Lina, woke up sometime in the wee hours of the morning with the hunch that some of the girls were cold. She got up to check on them and found that indeed they were all awake and freezing. She hooked them up with extra warm stuff to wear and got them settled so they could make it through the night. (I slept blissfully through the whole thing, even though Lina and I were sharing a tent. I was in my fancy new sleeping bag, bought just before this trip with xmas money, and for the first time EVER I was able to sleep through the night on a camping trip because I didn’t wake up with the feeling that my feet were about to just shatter and fall right off of my legs because they were so cold.)

The next morning, we found that most of them hadn’t known how to inflate their Thermarests correctly, or hadn’t had their sleeping bags zipped up (!), or various other things that we totally take for granted. So I hauled out my Sleeping Bag of Blissful Repose and also my Thermarest and gave a little demo while they had breakfast the next morning. You have to inflate the pad, and zip the sleeping bag up (all the way!), and it works better to put your clothes in the sleeping bag with you than it does to put more clothes on your body, and look at this nifty little drawstring so that I can close up everything but a little breathing hole! After that demo, and the fact that Lina started putting butter in everything we ate (including hot cocoa) in order to up people’s metabolisms, the girls all slept warm through the nights also, even though it was clear and cold in the desert at night.

On the second day, half the students went rock-climbing and the other half went exploring on a nearby mesa. It was a beautiful sunny day, and we were totally blessed with the weather. Even a desert-hater such as myself was basking in all that sunlight and warmth. It was our turn for climbing the first day, and every girl climbed, most of them more than once, even if they were afraid of heights. On of the girls in my group later explained that even though she was really scared, it was such an amazing view from the top of the climb that she made herself hang there in the harness for a minute so that she could look around. As you would expect, it was an amazing experience for all the girls, and I didn’t hear anyone say anything about it being retarded.

The next day was exploration day for us. This was the one big frustrating moment for me of the whole trip, because it tied in with my big issue with compulsory school in general. I’ve written before about how traditional school systems (in the modern European meaning of the word “traditional”, not in the “native to this area” meaning) create people who don’t believe they are capable of making rational decisions about their own safety and well-being. One of the things I love about wilderness education is the amount of personal responsibility placed on the kids, and how amazingly well they all do with it. So on the morning of that third day the 4 staff people involved in the exploration got together to create our gameplan for the day. We also had with us one of the school chaperones, a science teacher who none of the girls really liked. The chaperone was joining us for the day and was sitting in on the planning. We had heard in the report from the previous day that the other group hadn’t enjoyed the hike very much. One of the reasons was that the path was fairly rocky (all that manky lava rock everywhere), so they felt like all they could see was their own feet and the feet of the person in front of them. In our planning meeting that morning, I suggested that we start out the day with a quick lesson in foxwalking so that they could walk and look at the scenery at the same time. The chaperone immediately jumped in and said she thought it was really important that they students all watch where they are walking. “It’s a dangerous trail; I wouldn’t want anyone to fall down,” she insisted. Keep in mind we are talking about high school sophomores here. When I tried to explain how foxwalking allows you to look around AND not fall down at the same time (and believe me, if I can do it, then it doesn’t take much coordination), she insisted that she thought it was really important that everyone look at their feet while they walk. Finally, another instructor suggested that we could just teach it to them as an option, and if they felt like the ground was rocky then they could choose to look at their feet, whichever they preferred.

I get so frustrated when dealing with people who want to micro-manage every part of an experience for people who are younger than them. I’ve struggled with this a lot as I work in the public schools. The students have been taught that they aren’t capable of handling personal responsibility, which puts me in the awkward position of having to enforce rules that I don’t agree with in order to accomplish my job (to teach a fun science program) without children bouncing off the walls. My first exposure to the public school system’s military approach (which you’ve already read about if you followed the link above to my previous writing) had me all up in arms about the demeaning way the kids were treated.

However, that same school that I wrote about also ended up being one of the first classes that I taught when I started this job. Consistently, the kids were well-behaved and easy to deal with. They were engaged, curious, intelligent, and respectful. “Well, maybe I’m wrong,” I thought. “Maybe kids need a lot of structure at this stage in order to be successful.” And consistently over time in different schools around the area, I’ve found that the kids given the most freedom were hardest to deal with, while the kids with what seemed like excessive structure were polite and respectful and much easier to teach.

But a new school recently dinged the bell that most of you have probably already heard. In the first class I taught there, the kids were eerily silent. I actually ran out of science material and ended up killing a bunch of time at the end of the class, which has never happened to me before. It has also never happened to me before that I had a group of kids wait in line for something and they remained absolutely silent the whole time. No talking among friends, or even any arguing about who was trying to take cuts. Nothing. I ended up using up all my material while they stood silently in line waiting patiently for me to hot glue their color mixers together. It was weird, but I thought maybe it was just an off week.

The next week was the same. If you’ve read Watership Down, then you’ll know what I mean when I got the sense that they were just tharn. (If you haven’t read Watership Down, go immediately to your local library and check it out. My brother has a theory that part of the reason we are the way we are is that when everyone else’s parents were reading them Dick and Jane bedtime stories, our mom was reading us “children’s stories” (wink, wink) about the search for a utopian society. It’s a really good book.) The students all sat perfectly still; they didn’t talk out of turn or without raising their hands. They also didn’t ask questions, nor where they particularly interested in answering questions posed to them. There was no spark in their eyes. It was during this second class that I noticed the sign next to the classroom door saying, “No Bathroom Breaks 15 Minutes Before Or After Recess!” While I understand the reasoning, it’s exactly this kind of stupid rule that I hate about the micro-managing schools. Because what if I have to go pee and I can’t hold it for 10 minutes? Are you going to make me stand here and pee my pants in the classroom? How do you know whether I’m telling the truth or not? Are you saying that you know my body better than I do? Are you saying that my opinions about what my body needs are meaningless? Are you saying that I have no say over what happens to my body? How fucked up is that?

But whatever, lots of schools have similar rules, so I still didn’t get the connection until the third class. As some of you may remember from elementary school, elementary teachers often decorate their classroom doors. Often in the fall they put up the construction-paper-leaves, winter is the snowflakes, spring is the little pots of construction-paper-daffodils. You remember. And often there will be some inspirational quote included. You know, like the kind they put on inspirational posters. “Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.” Well, on the day of the my third visit to the school, one of the classrooms had a newly decorated door. I don’t even remember how it was decorated because the inspirational quote dominated the whole door. Written in the height of horizontal construction paper, so letters 8 inches tall, and taking up most of the door was this saying.

“A classroom without rules is like a zoo without cages.”

…
…

WTF!!!!????

This is wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. When I passed it on to some Mad Science co-workers they started brainstorming equivalent “inspirational” quotes. “A classroom without rules is like a prison without beatings.” “A classroom without rules is like a mental ward without straightjackets and electro-shock therapy.”

Also on that same day I overheard two of the teachers talking about how hard their classes were to control that day. “If you give them even 5 minutes of free time, it’s impossible to get them under control again,” one of them said. I taught my class and left the school really bummed out about the potential for positive change in future generations. And that’s when it all gelled for me about my confusion with the militaristic schools versus the freedom-encouraging schools. The super-structured schools DO make kids easier to deal with. It makes them polite and attentive. However, this is not the way to make good grown-ups. We have a societal picture of what a “good kid” looks like. This kid does their homework without complaint, helps around the house, never challenges authority, conforms to social norms like cleanliness and appropriate attire, gets good grades, and gets along well with others. And that kid is WAY easier to deal with, so I can certainly understand why that has become our social ideal. However, that kid grows up to be a person who accepts the status quo without thought, who never challenges authority or tries to improve circumstances, who conforms to social norms without thought, and who doesn’t see themselves as capable of independent thought or action. On the other hand, the kids who can’t stay in their seats, who are so excited about whatever we’re talking about that they have to blurt out their answers RIGHT AWAY, the kids who suspect that they might actually know more than their teachers, and who have the freedom to use the damn bathroom whenever they need to…well, yes, they are harder to deal with. Just the same as it’s always harder to deal with autonomous beings. Consensus decision-making is way harder than dictatorial decree. But those kids grow up to be the kind of citizens I want to have in the country where I live.

Fortunately, before I had a chance to go off on that diatribe with the science teacher in the desert on the third day of our trip (did you remember that that’s where we were?), one of my co-instructors figured out how to work around it and we all agreed on a way that would allow us to give the students their own power (choose to foxwalk or not, as you prefer) and short-circuited the teacher’s dictatorial tendencies.

The exploration was good, the desert was beautiful, and the girls enjoyed the various team-building challenges we had set up (blindfold walk, handcuffs, etc.). After dinner, all the groups got back together around the campfire and Trisha led something called an Appreciation Circle. When she originally described how it was going to work, it seemed, you know, nice, but not that amazing. So you might not be able to appreciate how really cool it ws from just this written description. Basically, everyone sat in a circle with their eyes closed. A few girls at a time were selected to stand up. Then the staff would call out some quality, “Touch someone who you think is very courageous.” Then the standing girls would have a chance to go around the circle and touch however many people they thought were courageous. After a couple of qualities, those girls would sit down and close their eyes with everyone else. The staff would pick a few more girls and call out a few different qualities. This continued until each girl had had a chance to stand up and give her appreciations. At this age in particular, it seems really hard for kids to give honest appreciations of each other. This way, it’s anonymous and they seem freer to express themselves. And it’s intense to be sitting there with your eyes closed and having people touching you for things you didn’t know people thought about you, for being funny or strong or a good leader. It was nice.

The fourth morning, we got up and packed up camp. We had a quick appreciation circle in our small groups. I wanted to demonstrate for them what it looks like to give someone an appreciation when it’s not anonymous. So we sat in a circle and Lina (my co-instructor) and I both told each of the 7 girls in our group something that we were really impressed with about them in the last couple days. Then they packed their lunches for the bus ride home and we spent the rest of the morning picking up camp and hauling gear over to the bus pick-up point. Then we drove back to Seattle in the van, spent around 4 hours unpacking gear, washing dishes, sorting leftover food, and debriefing the trip. We tried explaining to Stacy (the course director, who had not been on the trip) about Team Fecal Impaction, but apparently you had to actually be there.

I learned a lot from my first hat. Here’s my second completed hat.

Preston: Wow! That’s awesome. You could sell that for, like $18.50.
Me: Hmmm, that comes out to about…a dollar an hour. Maybe I’ll keep it.

While Preston’s mom was here visiting, she bought me the pattern and supplies to try my first pair of socks. This was my whole goal in learning to knit, so I’m a little worried that if I master the socks I’ll lose interest in the whole thing. But I hope that I keep making socks. The pattern is for “toe up” socks, so you start at the toe instead of at the top. This way you can try them on as you go to make sure they fit exactly right.

I’m going to be away from internet and cell access for the next week or so. I got an opportunity to work a course with a really cool Seattle non-profit called Passages NW which does teambuilding and rites-of-passage stuff with teen girls. We’ll be out in eastern Washington hiking and rockclimbing with the sophomore class of a Tacoma private school. 30 girls who have never camped before in their lives, 8 staff, and 4 days outside in early spring in the desert. Some people’s idea of Hell; my vision of a perfect job. We leave early Monday morning and will be back late on Thursday.

I’ll probably skip the Self-Portrait Challenge all of this month, since I’ll be gone this week, next week Preston’s mom will be visiting, and the following week is SEAF plus auditions for a local improv troupe. It’s turning into a busy spring all of a sudden. The following weeks (fingers crossed) we’ll be closing on our house. We have a few days’ vacation schedule the last weekend of March up at La Push, and then we start ripping out carpet and searching for salvaged hardwood floors so that we can move in to our new place the end of April.

No doubt, I’ll have some good stories after this week. And I have some thoughts about the work I’ve been doing in public schools which I have been pondering for a while, but I hope to have a chance to write down in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.