I Moved My Blog ...

... over here: http://saltcathedral.wordpress.com/

A good reason to be a lousy blogger....

Spent three weeks slogging gracelessly through two deadlines so I could get out of town clean this afternoon, because I'm going to Scotland to visit Kevin and Anna! (And Barrow and Strummer!)

I arrive at around 8 a.m. tomorrow morning and then it's into a car and on the road to the Isle of Skye. I wasn't all that familiar with the Isle of Skye until Kevin mentioned it, but through the past few weeks, I've been using its official website description of its scenery as motivation to get through some low, work-related moments. One paragraph, for example, starts like this: "Aside from the magnificent mountains, tumbling rivers, colourful rugged moor land, rich sea-lochs, intricate coast, and bountiful wildlife are its climate, light, weather and evening skies. ... One short day can witness a tranquil morning sunrise burst over the mountains, shortly later bringing wild south westerly wind to blow waterfalls uphill capturing misty rainbows in their flight."

Kevin and Anna are regular bloggers—there's a link to theirs over there on the right at the top of the white box—and it's possible I will elbow my way into a cameo at some point if you feel like checking it. (At the very least you'll get a heavy dose of rosy-cheeked cute-monsters Barrow and Strummer, which is well worth it.) I'll be back June 1 with a lot of exposed film, and meanwhile, here's a photo of the duck in the Giant Eagle parking lot who sidled up next to my ankles and tried to sell me a timeshare. I bought it and paid in a summer currency called Bun.

Love,
Laurel

I Got Grazed by a Tornado

It's true. At a race this weekend in Birmingham, Alabama, the skies went dark and a terrible black wall of clouds tore up from behind the treeline and towered overhead while TV screens flashed a bright red cell sawblading over our exact location with these words scrolling underneath: "Severe and dangerous tornado schedule to arrive at Barber Motorsports Park, 2:10 p.m." It didn't, but along with the other journalists I did some legitimate cowering for a while, and—because as most of you know, I'm lucky enough to work the same events as my father—I made him leave his nice, cement garage to come cower with us, just because it made me feel better. I heard a handful of fans took cover in the racetrack's inflatable church, for reasons that ranged from the lightening-resistant properties of rubber to the the importance of location vis-á-vis faith.

I took the Holga along, obviously, but by the time the storm hit Sunday I was using 100-speed slide film, which 1) probably means everything will be too dark, and 2) had to be mailed away to a lab. If you'd like to see a few other images from earlier in the weekend, though, I posted them here. And if you'd like to read a kind of ridiculous work-related blog that details my ride in the pace car (and reiterates the tornado thing), it's here. And speaking of slide film, it turns out that stuff is velvety and miraculous. Just got my first roll back—the results are here and I have three favorites from it. One of them is:

I Found Religion for $59.99

I had two profound thoughts this morning:

1. I wish I could direct Somali pirates toward a New Kids on the Block cruise.

2. Wikipedia's definition of religion—"an organized approach to human spirituality that usually encompasses a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs and practices, often with a supernatural or transcendent quality, that give meaning to the practitioner's experiences of life through reference to a high power or truth"—means I got god when I got my Holga. (It came with a book of photos and a roll of film, too!)

Living in West Virginia isn't always easy, and returning to West Virginia from trips out of town and overseas often takes a kind of brutal, rusty resolve (as opposed to a steely resolve, I guess) that's difficult to summon. Like most landscapes, it has its own kind of beauty, but like most landscapes with people in them, the way you feel about a place is largely determined by the extent to which the general populace's ideas and mindsets and world-views line up with you own. If you've been lucky enough to live in dramatically beautiful places like the the Northwest and Southwest, this area's more subtle beauty is easy to miss or overlook or get used to (unlike, say, Mount Rainer from Highway 5, which can make you crash your car in awe once a day). And if you've lived in places that are diverse in terms of ethnicity, restaurant offerings, political views, arts scenes, and so on, that last part about mindsets can really, really wear on you. So I am not always as cheerful as I should be, and I think it's fair to say I'd ceased to see the place I live.

Having a Holga has changed everything. Organized? I've never been so organized. I even got a special bag for my spirituality that holds camera, film, and filters perfectly (and has a nice lavender interior). Narratives? Everywhere I look I see narratives, and suddenly they all seem to matter. Beliefs? Practices? I believe that if I look at my local grocery store long enough—the one I've found crushingly depressing since moving here; the one where the produce is only slightly more wilted than the people sifting through it and where I once saw lettuce infested with lice—I will see something else entirely, and I practice the clumsy, clattery loading, advancing, and rolling of film in the further belief that when the prints come back they will demonstrate a higher truth. And they do. A glowing, hazy, out of focus, supernatural, transcendent higher truth that brings added meaning to my experiences of life.

I know, for example, that the view from my $121-a-month, seventh-story writing space doesn't look like this to everybody, but this is what it means to me:


and it's satisfying to see it that way.

I posted the rest of Roll 2 on a Flickr account, so there are more here if anyone else is feeling fond of squares.

Holga, Roll 1

Shot with these, my favorite piece of plastic ever:

The acceptable members of my first attempt:

Streaked Tenrec!

It's a lowland streaked tenrec, to be exact, called "tandraka" in its native Madagascar, which means "spiny insectivore that resembles a hedgehog." They live in the rainforest on the east side of the island, while highland tenrecs (which are not as exciting-looking) stick to the central uplands. There are other kinds of tenrecs out there too, all subject to different sorts of fate. If you're a greater hedgehog tenrec, for example, your name also sometimes translates as either "family pet" or "dinner."

You can do a lot of interesting reading about the lowland streaked tenrecs if you're in the mood, or you can walk away with my two favorite facts:

1. The tenrec produces three sounds audible to humans: a high-pitched keening noise known as "stridulation" (made by rubbing middorsal quills together and theorized to help mothers and babies find each other); a "crunching sound during agonistic behavior" (I read that as "during agnostic behavior" the first time, and it made perfect sense to me); and finally, a "putt putt." No explanation offered.

2. They sometimes stamp on the ground with their forepaws to increase earthworm activity.

I love #2. It's like Dune, on a 1/20th scale.

Cousin Max guessed baby porcupine ...

... but no.

And the truth is, I know what it is now. Word came in from Washington.