Last week I fixed a water tornado at the kids museum where i volunteer. The exhibit is basically a big clear acrylic cylinder with a drain in the bottom on the ‘waterworks’ table and a tube that fills the tornado with water and pushes it clockwise until the pressure from the drain focuses the flow into a tornado. Its a lot like a pop bottle tornado if you’ve seen one of those, only perpetual.
The thing about this is that when i got to the museum my friend Sarah who does maintenance with me now each monday, was already starting to disassemble it because it was draining too much and wasn’t making a very good tornado at all. We had to calibrate the system, which took a good while, and then wait for it to fill up before we could see if it was working, and then we had to re-calibrate it so that it stopped filling up and just kept going without overflow.
I love this volunteer work because its
A: Crazy what adult gets to hang out in a treehouse and fix a knot board, or rewire a shoe-sole keyboard!?
B: Its a challenge to me, not to damage anything further, and to outwit the six year olds who can systematically rip apart gorilla glue and snap apart silver brazed steel components WEEK after WEEK!!!
C: Its a regularly scheduled ‘something’ the likes of which i actually really miss in my life!
I’m like the tornado. If you follow me for a minute.
When i first got here to Seattle, i didn’t know anyone which was a heck of a shock since i had lived in toronto for fully 8 years and had created lots and lots and lots of good friends and memories and places to go for lunch where you know exactly what you’re in for, which really do make a difference.
Familiarity in general is really VERY comforting in a generally familiar sense.
So yeah, now that i’ve been here for a few months, i have been struggling to calibrate things. To fill my life up with friends and familiarity and happiness. I’ve been lonely and irresponsible and overcautious, the whole bit. Its been a real struggle but its really all worth it. It feels good to know that i have people locally to call if i want to chat, people counting on me to be there for them, and things that i am a part of out here.
(Being Chased by Robots is something that i've started to do, since moving here.)
Things were a bit overwhelming at first because everything seemed to come together all at once and i started having such a good time that the impulse to fully enjoy it was really hard to ignore. I was overflowing and have just recently had to re-calibrate.
I love it here, I love a lot of the people i have met and hope to stay friends with as many of them as is reasonable.
Things are a sort of wonderful quixotic balance now. No more sitting at the window table at restaurants by myself, not unless that’s what i want to do anyway.
I know that if/when i move again when school is over in a few months it will all go back to zero and i’ll go through that loneliness again in a new place without a Linda’s restaurant where i drank bad coffee and talked about mothers with marie, or a discovery beach littered with barnacle rocks where my cousin and i walked and got to know each other again after several years, or the magnolia bridge that i walked over and back again while discovering how totally and completely confusedly lost I was in a city i felt like i was just starting to know.
The place is another thing i’m starting to really love.
The longer i’m here and the more i do, the more things i add to my list ‘to explore’. There is so much to do outside here and i’ve only just scratched the surface. Its very much a place of parks, now that i’m not clinging so tightly to the urban-ness of the place (that reminded me of my home in toronto i guess) I think i will really miss the different kind of opportunities I have here, after i’m gone.
:)
I am so proud of me, and have a renewed appreciation for the beautiful science of just living life.
Thanks!
