Part 3: Texas, Detroit, Friend Visits, Summertime, and Beyond (Summer Review in Parts)

Chillaxing at the Beach in Holland, MI

Now that today is the last day of July (the best month of the year!) it is timely that I wrap up my posts about summer, or at least the things I did in July. Now, I realize that Michigan is a long way from almost anything. Many people don't realize that Michigan is in the Eastern Time zone. When you look at it on a map, I'm sure you first think, "wow, it really IS pretty far east". And for this reason it means so much to me when someone dear to my heart comes for a visit. My bestie from the westie came to visit me again in July. We decided it would become some kind of summer fun-trip for ladies to vacation. Whether or not she always comes here, we know it is increasingly important for she and I to have long visits with one another every year.

I love my friend Brenda. She is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and she has seen me through some of the most difficult parts of my life. And our frank, loving, supportive, and honest relationship is what has endured and grown our friendship. So when she comes to visit it means we get to laugh at how silly I am, because she is the same way, I get to indulge in all of my goofiness because she loves that about me, and I get to have long long long conversations that span from "maybe we should be wearing make-up" to "educational philosophies" to "design research" to "why we love the movie Bridesmaids." I am so thankful for girlfriends who come visit the Mitten state, the middle of nowhere state it feels like, from the far away west coast.

Part 2: Texas, Detroit, Friend Visits, Summertime, and Beyond (Summer Review in Parts)

I have no shame in posting this RIDICULOUS photo
of me on my 11th birthday. In Nebraska. Looks like
I got a donut and cocoa from a vending machine.
And if you're wondering, yes, that is a cassette tape of
Debbie Gibson's "Out of the Blue" I'm holding up.

A couple of weeks ago I had a big week. I celebrated my (gulp) 39th birthday, and rang in my last year in my 30s with some nature walking, birding, eating out for both breakfast and dinner and LOTS of relaxing. My birthday came right after I returned from Texas, and it was a nice weekend to spend in Lansing, particularly because of my *interesting experience in Texas. Plus, I got to just lie low for my birthday, something I always prefer. I've never really liked celebrating my birthday. This could come from years of having my big day in July, which meant no one was ever around. Sometimes I wasn't around. I think the ultimate birthday was spent in Hastings, Nebraska. I always remembered this birthday being in Wyoming, but upon looking up this choice picture of myself, I see it was taken in Nebraska. I also remember never getting a classroom celebration. No cupcakes for me. No forced birthday cards from my classmates. I think more importantly, however, is the celebration of turning 39. It has been an incredible decade for me, and I still have 11.5 months left in my 30s! I'm excited to see what this next July to July has in store for me. I can guess a few things (ahem, coursework and probably writing my dissertation proposal) but outside of my life as a PhD student I know there is a ton more in store.

Birding and a Bosch book for the 39th.

Texas, Detroit, Friend Visits, Summertime, and Beyond (Summer Review in Parts)

The last few weeks I've been having that feeling of "I don't want to write" which means I've been disengaged with my reading and writing. This isn't necessarily bad, it just means that my practice in writing, particularly for my blog, has been on hiatus. And now July is almost done and I haven't written barely anything about the first half of the month. And it was a wonderful and interesting first few weeks of July for sure. I'll first begin with my trip to Texas.

About two weeks after I returned from the Netherlands, I took a trip to College Station, TX to Texas A&M, aka AGGIELAND. I went there initially to present a paper I had written with my previous faculty advisor at Seattle University and another former student from my master's program. It was a great opportunity to present at a different kind of academic summit, and also gather some data. I decided a few months before I went to the summit that attending would be a great chance to collect some data because I will be taking a qualitative methods class in the fall and I want to be ready with a project already started. I was incredibly nervous, to say the least. Even though everyone there knew I would be doing what is called a "participant observation" I was so nervous! I had to both participate and scribble down notes and record everything at the same time (and remain ready to answer questions). It was indeed intimidating. But now I have hours, HOURS of data. And I will be transcribing for triple the amount of hours I recorded.

In addition to the presentation and research project, I was able to partake in some seriously good barbecue, and also see some new birds! (Scissor tailed fly-catcher, great tailed grackle, and brown thrasher).

BBQ dinner, the 'Merica flag at the Bush School of Public Policy, and Khanh, Maureen and I
in the super hot summer sun.

I Am A (Bad) Homeowner

The tomatoes survived and
are about to pop!

I've come to the conclusion that I would make a terrible homeowner if I did not have the help of my lovely homeowner partner, Kevin. During our first year in Lansing, he was gone a lot. Yet, because the house was a rental, I never felt overwhelmed by the entire responsibility of making sure everything was "okay". Now, however, two years later and a homeowner, when Kevin does leave, things kind of fall apart. It takes all of my consciousness and energy to remember to water the plants. I have to leave post-it notes around the house. It takes all of my being to pick up things around the yard, like when a giant storm comes swooping in and tree limbs are hanging off our tree, or in our front yard. It takes a great amount of energy to mow the lawn. I convince myself I like weeds and, oh, aren't the dandelions so pretty? Not to mention things like, a leaking pipe. Uh, duct tape? If a light goes out, I just decide not to use it until I buy a new bulb and then take a few weeks to change it out. Thankfully, Kevin is back. Unfortunately, I'm headed out of town again for four days. But that means that someone who knows how to water plants and compost will be here to take care of everything.

Stirring: A Long Post After a Long Week

During the past two years I have mostly avoided social media. I switched to Instagram (because pictures) and also to Twitter (because academic news). One main reason I left other platforms is because I felt I lost the power to curate my own feed, and when I friended everyone it means I got bombarded by posts that I may not necessarily have agreed with. In short, looking at FB made me crazy mad, so I had to shut it down. This also means, unfortunately, that I have become too shy in expressing what I am thinking, that I became hyper aware of my presence and overly curated my own posts, knowing they weren't for me but for others to like and comment on. Consequently, I started this blog, not because I need a platform, but because I needed a way to write through my thoughts and my life, to practice putting these thoughts into public because as a PhD student, part of my role is to make public my thoughts, my scholarship. This is perhaps the irony of my life as an artist, I hated to publicize, and now here I am in another life where I absolutely must publish, or I will perish.

Needless to say, the past week's events have been stirring inside me. They have been stirring and scooping up my experiences in the Netherlands, and contrasting how American politics and European politics are so different and also so very much alike when it comes to matters of race. Last night, it was as if the nation's collective mourning turned into the Michigan skies and let out a giant cry. Giant hail, inches of rain, down trees, power outages, and whipping wind, came smashing through the middle of the state. And because my mind was empty with grief, I thought, "I guess I don't need to water the plants" and then I cried.

I am often between two worlds, one as a woman of color, and one as a privileged white woman. This makes me extremely self-conscious. But it also gives me the ability, in part, to understand the powers I have to know marginalization and express that marginalization to those who don't experience it. I can switch, I can pretend because I'm ambiguous. But I'm also aware that my ambiguity marks me. I am always aware of my positionality. And because of this positionality I feel compelled to write something, however I know that often the best way to say something is to listen. This morning, I decided to listen to a professor here at MSU, and this is what she said. While I am not in the same position she is, I felt her post said a lot of the things I think about yet am often unable to put into words.

Anne Frank House

Late Saturday night (although it felt like Sunday around 5am for me and I'd been awake for 26 hours) I returned from the Netherlands. As I think about my time there, one of the most salient experiences that comes up for me is my visit to the Anne Frank House. It was during my group visit to Amsterdam that we were able to visit. And not just visit, but have an almost two hour lecture and discussion about the history of Anne Frank and her family with an outreach staff member there, and discuss the events that led to the Frank family going into hiding. Most poignant for me were the similarities of current events to those for the Frank family. I am still (and likely will continue for many months) digesting the experiences I had while in the Netherlands. And here, I'm not writing about my tourist experiences, but the ones where I interacted with refugee and immigrant students and had discussions about immigration in Europe. I believe the realness of the immigration phenomenon in Europe is lost on most Americans. The US is too vast and too big for us to have to know exactly how immigration is playing out in our own country, much less on another continent. I'm sensitive that most of us (including myself) in the States live in a region where we don't have to talk about this subject except on a theoretical or idealogical level. This means there is a high probability we form opinions about immigration apart from any personal connection or interaction with those who are immigrants. (I do know that many are also VERY involved and aware of working with immigrants and refugees, but I'll make a general argument here that the majority do not have any personal connection).

No pictures are allowed
in the Anne Frank House.
I found this graffiti tag,
and many others, of Anne's
recognizable portrait.

The woman who worked at the Anne Frank House gave us a very detailed program about the house and also led a discussion about Anne Frank and her family, tying it closely to current events. As I listened to her, I kept thinking about the students I worked with in Maastricht, and their families. How were they able to come to Maastricht? What family circumstances did they have to allow them to get there? Like Anne and her family, did they get status to move to the Netherlands somehow? If not, how many of those students came there in secret? Like Anne and her family who were denied access to the US, how many of the students in Maastricht had also been denied access to the US or other countries? How many had to hide? How many will have to hide if circumstances change in Europe like they did for the Frank family? The similarities of a dictator in power and removal or mass migration of people seeking a safer place to live during WWII and its link to today was not lost on those in my group. The personal story of Anne Frank and a revisit to her words and her secret annex deepened the daily experiences I was having with students at ISK in a way I could not have imagined.

Netherlands: Unstructured Time in Amsterdam

As I mentioned before, there are two parts to the Netherlands trip I was on. The second part was unstructured time. During this unstructured time my traveling group and I went to several different cities, some of which I have already posted about. One city I haven't written about yet was our visit to Amsterdam. We spent three days there, one was devoted to visiting a school just outside the city, and one half a day was spent at the Anne Frank House. For the rest of the time, it was what we referred to as "unstructured" which translates to "do whatever you want." So, we did whatever we wanted in Amsterdam, which for me meant museuming and biking.

I have become enamored with the Netherlands. This adoration is mostly due to the biking culture that is there. It is simply astonishing. Really, I mean it, amazing. As a regular bike commuter both in cities that have large cyclist communities and those that have none (ahem, Lansing), I do have some experience with biking around. The Netherlands is an entirely different place for this. Of course I had always heard of the biking culture, but I wasn't entirely prepared for what I saw there. Bikes have their own lanes. They have their own stop lights. When it comes to the transportation hierarchy, bikes are at the top. (With the exception of larger cities such as Amsterdam and The Hague, the trams are at the top). But really, bikes are the top of the transportation food chain. All things stop for bikes. You get politely yelled at, or dinged by a bell if you step into a bike lane. Or walk in a bike lane. I'm sure I am a little too giddy about the biking culture there, but it really is, well, AWESOME. I want to learn Dutch so I can move there. And bike everywhere. My friend Heather came up with a term for bikes that have two kid seats and a kid trailer: The Maastricht Minivan.

So of course, I biked while there. In Amsterdam, Heather and I rented bikes (only 7 Euros a day!) and used them as our transportation to get around and hit museums. The 7 Euros a day got us single speed coaster brake bikes, and since it's pretty much flat in the Netherlands, you don't need much else. We rode around to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, to a big park where we found some picnic sandwiches and chowed down. Heather got a little bell crazy and dinged almost everyone. She also came up with another term when we thought we could get to one road by crossing a little bridge, but alas, there was no bridge because there are so many canals they can't all be crossed in a straight line. Her term was "getting canaled." It was fabulous. Certainly there are other parts of Amsterdam, but well, it really is kind of weird. There are so many tourists in the Red Light district, and after about 8pm it starts to get creepy. But whelp, I was in Amsterdam so I needed to check out all the neighborhoods, but the best ones are just outside the center of the city, and the best way to get to those parts is by bike.