writer / artist / shameless goof
I used to keep pet frogs. Lazarus was a green tree frog, who lived in a tropical environment in a little tank. He escaped from the tank one summer, a very dry season, I thought he was DEAD. Then three months later I found him moist and happy on top of and outside the tank. Alive and kicking!
I went through a crayon period of photography. Crayons make great photo objects. They are colorful, easy to work with, inert, and small.
I left my vast collection of new and used crayons with some deserving artist friends when I made the cross-country move to Boston, so I’ll have to start amassing new ones!
I took a road trip across country and stopped at many National Parks, including Olympic National Park. It features unbelievably beautiful lush, mossy rain forests.
In my first post, I confused Quinault and Hoh and called it Qoh! Oops.
Gloomy looming large figures! So much moss.
So many ferns! Ferns all the way down.
Snow on my deck the day after the snowstorm! They let the snow pile up really thick before they shovelled it off. I think I can make a full-blown snowman or two out there.
Footprints in the snow.
I found this snowman in a nearby park in the south end. I love the attention they paid to his coiffe:
My second national park on my epic San Francisco to Boston road trip was Glacier National Park. I started on the main road into the park. It was the main road. Full of cars. Nothing remote about it. I was still wearing flats, not boots. I pulled over into a small parking lot to put the boots on. A marked parking lot! Cars all over! Main road! People and stuff!
So there I was next to my car with no shoes on when this guy shows up. He was on the other side of the car at first. You’ll have to imagine that he’s LOOMING next to me (I only started photographing him from the safety of the car). I jumped into the car, shoes in one hand and boots in the other, climbed into the driver’s side, put on some form of shoes (I forget which), and took a bunch of photos. At the time I thought he was a fox because he looked like a small dog.
Later on I showed a native american nature guide my photos. Apparently he is a coyote. Hah hah, double-dumb on you, Kristen.
Never leave the house without your boots on!
I saw this rainbow after a big rainstorm somewhere in the middle of the country, during my road trip. What’s amazing is that every time I saw a giant rainbow, people would pull over and exclaim about it. There’d be a tiny gathering of people in some parking lot, chatting up about the rainbow.
Then they would start talking about where they came from, what they were doing just before. It turns into a little party by the side of the road, focused around the colorful thing in the sky. I love that part of the trip. Makes you wonder how our cave people ancestors reacted to rainbows.
This was my pet frog Jabba the Hutt. I kept him for about ten years. He was a fine fellow. He sometimes barked, puffing up his throaty area, and sounded just like a giant dog. He ate a rich diet of live crickets. He enjoyed a tropical, humid climate and fast-growing live plants. He was often hard to find among the plants in his tank because he changed colors from dark brown to light green.
My new favorite show, American Horror Story, has all the elements I enjoy in both television and movies:
The premise is brilliant. Although there’s one core idea (“horror”), each season focuses on a variant of the theme (ghosts, mental asylum, witches). The primary actors play different roles in each season. Jessica Lange is absolutely delicious in every role she plays. There are some fairly well-known names: Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett.
I’m keeping up with the episodes, so I am in season three (“Coven”). I found the first season the scariest, but I thought the second one was the best-written (so far). As per usual, I am binge-watching the show. I kinda want to see Fiona get her everlasting vitality, beat cancer, and remain supreme forever. I empathize with her desire for one last big fling. As much as I feel bad for the Marie LaVeau, I want to see her people lose the war. The voodoo people are kind of annoying. Enough already with their zombies. It’s like they never let go of a grudge. The voodoo people and the witches should join forces, they’d have more to gain that way. There is no reason for them to fight with each other.
Another photo from the extremely mossy Olympic National Park in Washington State. I really could have spent a month in this place. So tropical! Everywhere I went it was crazy-thick ferns, moss dripping off giant trees, strange frondy things that probably only grow where it rains all the time.
I love jungles. I want to visit Costa Rica. I’ve been to Mexica, Belize, and Guatemala. Not bad. I would love to see some sloths either in the wild or in captivity. I’m not a big fan of captivity but what are you gonna do, those animals need help. Also they look like muppets. How can you not want to help an animal that looks like a muppet, and moves so slowly.
When I was in Olympic National Park I was getting nervous about how much of the country I had to cover before hitting the east coast. I had spent a good week already going straight north through California, Oregon, and Washington. I did not want to short-change the trip east. The country I had to cover looked pretty large.
I also made a mistake in booking the hotel inside Olympic National Park. I meant to reserve a hotel room in the center of the park, but instead I reserved an RV hookup. Whoops! I didn’t realize this until I drove around the wiggly edges of the park all night through dense fog and arrived at 7am, exhausted. All rooms were booked. My disappointment was almost as bad as my exhaustion. I wanted to take a shower and sleep in the worst way. That is when I developed my second rule of the road trip (first rule involved no hiking with the hood up): don’t drive more than 8 hours in a row, ever.
The guy at the desk took pity on me and tried to book me in the nearest nice hotel, but that was also fully booked, so he booked me at the Hungry Bear Cafe, Motel & RV Park an hour away. It turned out to be very cozy and cute. Each room was its own self-contained cottage. Very reasonably priced. Aside from the hour drive, which I obviously wasn’t keen on, the motel was just grand. I’d stay there again.
Key part of this story is that they lady that ran the motel/diner insisted that I see the very far northwestern point of the peninsula, Cape Flattery, before I head east. I was a little concerned that I would not have time, but there was something terrifically charming about this grandmotherly lady who ran the diner like a champ and gave me inside information about the best local places to see.
“Oh you’ll love it! I know you will!”
So off I went, driving several hours even further west. And… sure enough. First there’s this:
A super-lush gentle forest with an adorable little path goes on for a maybe one or two miles. WHERE DO THEY KEEP THE HOBBITS? Adorable. Just adorable.
Then there’s this:
Whales! Seals! Water fowl! Some kind of… HAWK!
So thank you lady, that was a good find. In terms of ease of hiking, while other parts of the park might be a little more strenuous, this is gentle for all ages and quite picture-book-esque.
Cape Flattery was the farthest northwestern point of the U.S. excluding Alaska. On the way back I was so far north that my cellphone beeped “WELCOME ABROAD!” with instructions for how to dial back into the United States. I had to call AT&T and instruct them to lock off Canadian cell towers. I definitely recommend July as the time of year. I was comfortable in a light jacket. As I got closer to the coast, a thicker jacket.
In terms of booking rooms, my sense is that you need more than a week in advance to get something inside the park for prime-time July. I had no trouble finding something on the edge of the park (such as the Hungry Bear place). Since I was doing a road trip I had to wing it a bit, but under other conditions you might want to plan it out more.
It is hard to describe how unbelievably hobbit-like Olympic National Park is in July.
The thick verdant nature of everything is really hard to capture on camera. I was lucky it wasn’t raining. Everything was covered in moss. Electric poles: moss. Electric lines: moss. Everything: moss. I could imagine houses get quite dingy if you don’t keep them dry. I would not want to live here, I think I’d feel damp too much of the year, but it was quite resplendent mid-July.
It was also not very busy. I hiked Quinault Rain Forest. I must have been happily marching along for two hours by myself without hearing a soul in the world, lah lah, my head meandering about how nice the green stuff is and whether I’ll see an elk, when all of a sudden some dude briskly walks past saying EXCUSE ME. I also had my hood up to keep the bugs off, so I really didn’t hear him coming. Sheesh I nearly had a heart attack. After that I stopped hiking with my hood up.
To get from San Francisco to Boston, I took a six thousand mile circuitous route through many national parks. I started in mid July 2013 from San Francisco, having sold or given away all my furniture, and rolled into the Boston area during rush hour on August 17. I travelled alone because I like to eat on my own schedule, pee on my own schedule, fill the gas on my own schedule. I don’t like chatter in the car while I’m trying to drive. I’m in the zone when I drive. I concentrate. I hiked alone except when there might be grizzly bears. Maybe I’m a loner? I don’t know but I had a blast. I was never afraid. I took precautions regarding wildlife.
My first destination was Lassen Volcanic National Park in California. It was full of evergreens and redwoods typical of the forest you’d see in California. I took a longish hike in new boots, luxuriating in the hot weather outside of the city.
I’m a big fan of Andre Braugher. I’m disappointed that his better shows don’t last more than a couple of seasons. Aside from Homicide: Life on the Street (great) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (terrible), many shows he was in did not last. He deserves longer-lasting vehicles for his talent.
There is something about a show with subtlety/intelligence/magic/challenge that the mass public isn’t interested in. When the public isn’t interested, there’s no money in it, and executives pull the plug. Here’s a short list of the Andre Braugher shows that got cancelled too soon:
I binge-watch tv. As mentioned in a previous post, I recommend that you consume your television as you do your food. Pair up your television choices to maximize your emotional well-being at the end of the experience. I like to pair up a bitter edgy drama with a nice calming popcorn comedy. I like to end the evening on a calm note.
But how often should you watch television? In this age of endless choices, we can watch an entire series in a weekend. In a day, even. I often do. Is this good for me? What do I miss out on when I do? Is it healthy to forgo the art I might have been making, the social contact? Or is tv a welcome intellectual and emotional adventure, albeit 10 episodes at a time? How much is too much?
To give you an idea, I’m a serious binge-watcher. When I had a bad breakup, I watched all episodes of Arrested Development in a row. I never laughed so hard in my life. Good laughter. I am forever grateful for those stupid shows. I don’t remember exactly how long it took, but it was a very accelerated period. I watched all episodes of House of Cards in one evening. There was no way I was going to let my eyes turn away from Kevin Spacey‘s creepy mug. I mean, eesh. Here are other shows that I have watched through one episode after another:
In some cases I watched television while doing something else (art, writing emails, paying bills, exercise). It’s only for the highest quality shows that I pay strict attention. In some cases the series spanned such a long time that I binged sections of it at a time in between “life”.
I believe I am making active, intelligent choices about what I watch. One of my favorite activities is mulling over the movie or television descriptions on Hulu or Netflix, reading reviews, and reading about directors. I have rated almost 3000 items on Netflix, so its recommendation algorithm is uncanny. If Netflix and OKCupid combined forces, they’d form one hell of a dating company. Netflix has me all figured out. Also, binge-watching is the only way I can really follow story arc, character development, plot. If I watch episodes separated by too much time, I lose all that. My interest would also wane. I have a short attention span. It’s like picking up some long-lost thing and having to thread the needle again before the story can get going. It just doesn’t work for me.
But still, I am a little conflicted. In my metaphor of television as food, I wouldn’t eat ten meals in a row. I’d have some problems. And am I missing out on art? Exercise? Friends?
Soooo. Hm! Jury is out. I’m probably going to continue binge-watching, but I don’t have a great justification for why it is better than getting off your butt other than “I like it.”
I like scary and edgy shows. A lot of people do. Breaking Bad is a runaway success. The Aliens franchise spanned decades. Why would we continue to watch a show that is so intense that it makes us uncomfortable? There are a number of possible explanations. They validate our feelings of good and bad. We experience endorphins and serotonin after all those stress hormones have finally played out. We get to be the good guy. We get to see justice played out.
However, there’s only so much I can take. I don’t enjoy “torture porn”. I don’t enjoy shows like Saw that showcase inescapable acts of extreme pain. I especially don’t like seeing children or women being hurt in real time. I don’t like animal rescue shows that show the hurt animals – I’d rather they wait until the animals have had treatment. Shows that I used to enjoy when I was younger are too visceral for me now: Wire in the Blood, or Se7en. I have joked with my friends that I’d love Law and Order: SVU if they took out all the raping and child-crime. Maybe they can have Law and Order: Forensic Tax Crime? If only crime shows didn’t have to be so violent!
Compare that to Bones. Oh Bones, with your light-hearted banter and cutesy-pie chemistry. The crime is pretty much incidental to the character chemistry. Alright, so there’s a lot of suspension of disbelief and a good dose of silliness in order to make this show work. Well…
Here’s what I came up with: treat your television like you treat your food. Get your serious, intense course of television first, a show like Breaking Bad, and wash it down afterwards with a light bouquet of The Daily Show or even perhaps That 70s Show. Pair up a bitter edgy drama with a nice calming popcorn comedy. You should be left relaxed, not amped up, at the end of the evening. Get a little adrenalin with your first television experience, and chill out with your second. Example:
1. The Fall:
Balance that out with…
2. Bones:
To me, television should exist to modulate your moods and enhance your experience. TV is food. Consume it wisely! I apply the same techniques to movie-watching. Requiem for a Dream was followed straight-up with some Spongebob Squarepants. For this reason I do prefer watching movies at home.
*Gillian Anderson demands an instant “must watch” for me, so I’ll bend my rules to watch her shows even if they are violent.
Kristen Ankiewicz 