Bourbon and Sprouts Are So Pretty

My pride

Sprouts Eye View 1

Sprouts Eye View 2

and joy

Earl Grey Infused Bourbon

Orange and Spice Infused Bourbon

My sprouts were sowed one week ago today, and now about forty plants are poking through and doing their thing. The mustard seeds came up super fast and the turnips (I think) followed them.

The bourbon is another adventure. I already had success with the earl grey-infused bourbon, so today I’m making another batch of that while I’m also trying out one of my favorite herbal teas, orange spice. I’ll be sure to update in a few days with news of that tastiness.

31!

Woo! Since yesterday at noon, my garden has gone from 4 to 31 little mustard green sprouts. I also appear to have either a turnip or a carrot making it’s first push through the soil.

Today I went by Common Ground and picked up some fertilizer for the little guys. I went with the Earth Juice Grow because that’s what the guy told me to do. One kind of fun thing about embarking on something so unfamiliar is that I can be blindly trustful of salespeople without feeling dumb. After all, they do know more than me, right?

That and if my plants all die, I can blame Common Ground, Earth Juice Grow, and the dude.

miracles!

2 hours later, I went to water my pots of dirt, and hello-hello-what do you know? Four lovely little sprouts peeking out.

Aren’t they adorable?

sigh. still no miracle.

Last night I actually dreamt of an uncurling, bright green little shoot. This morning, no dice.

Sadness

More Sadness

In better news, an impulse buy from Whole Foods seems to be doing a lot better. As I was checking out one morning maybe three weeks ago I spotted this lovely little plant.

What's my real name?

I have a soft spot for succulents – they are so hardy and their fat little leaves are fun to squeeze – but I left this guy in his original pot too long. Even with the prescribed watering and lots of sun, he started wilting in a major way and this weird brown scaliness appeared on his leaves. I decided it was time to repot and prune him. Saturday, before my sowing bonanza, I placed him in this pot that I found in my backyard. I then used some shears to snip off his sorriest looking petals(?). It seems he’s healing up pretty well.

His stumps - on the mend

One weird thing though – it was called a “Desert Rose” when I purchased it, but then when I tried to figure out more about it’s care, I discovered that everyone except for cheesy florists calls some other plant the Desert Rose. So what is this guy’s real name? Anybody care to identify my succulent?

maybe it’s because I didn’t buy the clogs

The day before yesterday I spent a few hours getting my little garden in shape. What with the facts that we rent here and that I’m afraid of large gardening equipment, I’m doing it all in containers. This limits the sorts of veggies I can grow, but happily fall and winter vegetables are pretty much my favorite kind and I can grow the ones I like best in containers (except for squash – stupid, big-ass squash). I’ve planted one pot with carrots and turnips and several pots with bok choy and mustard greens. I’m also attempting to start an okra plant and put a couple of seeds in small pots as a way to get it going. Actually, all of these are being started from seed which is a surprisingly stressful prospect. I’m working from McGee & Stuckey’s Bountiful Container, an incredibly accessible and well-written book all about container gardening edible things (including flowers, not that I went there in this round).
Aren’t they cute? They are in the book, too, with lots of little asides and other delightful things. The thing is that their cuteness may have pulled me into a rather stressful period of waiting. When discussing whether to work from seeds or transplants purchased from professionals, they say that you should consider seeds if “You don’t want to miss the fun of witnessing a very dependable, very accessible miracle.” I mean really. How the hell am I supposed to buy transplants after that? It’s like bogarting someone else’s miracle or something.

So two days ago (Saturday) I sowed my seeds and got my hands dirty and have been watering regularly since . . . and so far, nothing. Nada. No miracle. Before I planted, it didn’t occur to me to investigate how long before little green shoots would start popping up. At some gut level, I actually expected to see them by the end of Saturday – ten hours after I planted them. When I investigated and found that some seeds can take over a week to germinate, I got a bit sad. Which is ridiculous. When did I become so impatient? But then I’m like this with all of my “learning and practicing the skills of my grandmothers” ventures. When I leave my bread to rise I have to make myself very busy and scarce so I’m not peaking at it all the time. When I roast veggies in the oven I’m stalking and opening the oven door and messing with the temperature because I can’t wait for the tastiness. It would seem that I’m learning (or perhaps will eventually learn) patience along with all this baking, cooking, and gardening.

But now we’re at two days and I’m actually starting to get nervous. What if it’s colder at night than I thought it was? What if I’m overwatering? What if I planted the seeds too deep and they won’t be able to make it through all that dirt? Really this is all ridiculous. Every first grader manages to grow a bean plant in a paper towel and a plastic cup.

When (not if!) the sprouts appear, I’ll be sure to post them here. If the sprouts never appear, I will weep and destroy my garden with the fury of a adherent denied their miracle.

updated
Not twenty minutes after I posted this, my silly ass was on my back porch, peering at the pots while holding a candle (apparently I don’t know where we keep the flashlights).

The Ever-Lurker

I moved to California a bit less than two years ago to start my new life as a grad student – which also meant starting my new life as someone who spends a hell of a lot of time online. Before I even came out here, I consumed a lot of my news through newsvine (which recently seemed to descend into some sort of hellish netherworld of trolldom, at least to my eyes) and was both compelled and repulsed by the user comments. I mean, that’s the draw of newsvine and lots more such sites – you not only get information, but you get to interact with a bunch of people. You get to see how lots of your compatriots see the world – it’s fascinating stuff to the dilletante sociologist.

But lots of people don’t. People like myself show up, lurk, enjoy themselves, and then let themselves out through the back. In some article (I can’t find the damn site), the writer noted that a majority of participants in the multiplayer-role-world-of-halo-type-action don’t actually engage in online play in the total community. Instead they either play the computer or only each other. So there are lurkers all over, and the question is: if commenting and forming relationships is so awesome, why do so many of us lurk? Now, the article that I mentioned sans citation is one about trolls, and yes, trolls are a problem and a half – but that’s not where this is going.

Beyond the ever present threat that a committed asshole will pull you into a deathspiral of a conversation, there is the interesting phenomena of community. Communities have languages and ways of doing things. When a person joins a community in real time (think first day in a new school), they start by hanging back and being quiet and eventually they find out how things are done and they start doing them too. If they don’t like how things are done generally, they can find their own niche of peeps (think Magic/theater kids table in the cafeteria) where they do like how things are done.

The thing about commenting on blogs is that gaining fluency in the local way of doing things takes much more effort. There is nowhere to pull someone aside and ask “so . . . what is _____ all about? what do you mean by HAES?” People’s irritation with such behavior is what leads to the creation of lengthy FAQ pages. These are very good ideas, but they make it clear to the reader that the community has little time and interest for n00bs who don’t invest time and energy in figuring out what’s up. The things is though – this is very very different from how people generally join communities. Normally they join as apprentices to someone who is an expert (the newbie who tags along with their experienced friend) or they scatter their inquiries among their new peers in real time (pulling aside a coworker “Where do I find the ____” pulling aside another coworker “How do I ____”). But online you can’t really pull people aside casually.

Putting that aside – once the reader figures out how things happen in that little sector of cyberspace, they have little recourse to shift and change it. Comments are an open forum. There aren’t places they can carve out (like the parking lot or the smoking lounge). This leaves the sub-communities of readers always exposed. This may be good in the short term for discourse, but with nowhere to retreat to, dissenting voices have little opportunity to strengthen.

I don’t have a solution to all this. I’m an inveterate lurker, and what did I do? Started my own little blog. I don’t have solutions, but then I’m not certain that it’s a problem. Lurkers are just a symptom of the limitations of online discourse. That there are limitations to online discourse is a given – there are limitations and affordances in all forums – rather than worrying about fixing those limitations, I think that exploring and understanding them is probably a better use of time.

Lit Reviewing is Lonely Work

A literature review, for the uninitiated, is a common first step when you get ready to research something. It’s a wise and sensible practice – before you go and try to answer a question, you figure out whether someone else worried about it before and what they were able to come up with and how they came up with it. Sensisble. Now, the trouble comes in when you are trying to investigate a question that no one’s really asked before (from what you can tell) with lots of parts. Then you have to start investigating those parts, but that’s tough because the questions that people have asked about those parts are different from the questions you want to ask.

To illustrate:
Tammy the researcher wants to know, “When children see something disturbing on television, what resources do they use to make sense of what they see?”

Good question, huh? I know, I just came up with it myself. Okay, so no one had researched this before and Tammy figures she has to learn about some things, including:
1) what resources children have when they are traumatized
2) developmentally, at what stages would children need help making sense of disturbing images (i.e. old enough to be disturbed, young enough to freak out and need help)
3) images that might be disturbing to kids and under what conditions they might see them

When Tammy starts hunting, she runs into lots of articles about the affect of televised violence on children’s aggressiveness, but nothing about how and when they see violent images. There is also nothing about whether these images trouble the kids at all. So she reads lots and lots of articles that tangentially apply to her question, but they are never quite right, so it’s hard to figure out where to draw the line. What studies can she skip? How far back will she go?

All of this to say – I’m trying to do a lit review, and apparently no one cares about the things I care about in the way I care about them. It’s a frustrating and weirdly lonely thing to think.

on help

I haven’t been able to ride my back for the last two weeks. Two weeks! I, ladies and gents, am a bike-dependent individual. I live in Silicon Valley where the buses don’t go where I need them to go and (since the people taking them are either wealthy-ass professionals who don’t have to get to work on time or service-workers whose lateness doesn’t concern the VTA) where they don’t get anywhere on time. Well, I’m generalizing – but that’s been my experience.

Thing is, I’ve had to figure out how to get from here to there, and I find myself trying to devise all sorts of ridiculous and expensive schemes – Walk a mile to the more reliable bus stop? Rent a car until I’m able to ride my bike again? – all to avoid asking my roommates or my friends to come by and pick me up. Happily, I know good people who reach out and offer me help.

It’s a funny thing though – there are times when asking for help is easy enough and straight forward, and all that. You know, asking for a recipe, advice, company to go drinking. All very easy. But help when the problem is . . . personal is much harder. Like help when you’re needing to go somewhere you don’t normally go: “Can you give me a ride to the pawn shop?” Or when you have some medical issue: “Hey, can you cover for me? I have to go to the doctor. Why? Ehhhhhhh.”

Okay, I’m gonna lay it on the line. This is why I can’t ride my bike. I mean really, who wants to discuss that each time they need to ask for a ride?

And I guess that’s the thing. When I ask for help, there is a part of me that doesn’t want to have to explain why I need it. Because if I need help doing something that I normally do on my own, something personal has gone awry. If I don’t volunteer that information, it’s because I (a) don’t want to burden you and/or (b) want to keep it to myself. And that, in a way, is the hardest thing about asking for help. Not only admitting and exposing my vulnerability but being in a position where I have to explain it.

So – flipping the question – when we are asked for help, can we answer yay or nay without further inquiry? Or does that make us seem cold-hearted and disinterested?