Lost: 1 sagebrush lizard

Last week my husband found a bluebelly lizard in his office, which he caught and brought home for Sasha. Sasha was enamored. She named the lizard Lulu. Lulu is just about 4 inches long; she fits perfectly in Sasha's hand. We set up the old fishtank for her, filled with twigs and compost and the bugs that live in compost, and set beside it a halogen light (for warmth), and Sasha's been putting her in the tank and taking her out and carrying her around and then putting her back so she can warm up and then taking her out again.

Last night, after we'd told Sasha good-night, she retrieved Lulu from the fishtank. She fell asleep with Lulu in her grubby hands. This morning, Lulu was gone.

Now I have to search my daughter's room for a four-inch-long sagebrush lizard.

I hope I find her. Eeek.

Work vacation

Three days in Portland:

rain

rain

rain

Pink is Portlanders' reward for all that rain!

Pink!

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

"I skied in the pink," my husband told me. Wednesday evening he skinned up Mt. Bachelor and skied down at sunset, when alpenglow turned the whole world pink.

*

Last week I phoned my sister-in-law, who has been painting Central Oregon for decades. "Where and when might I find pink?" I asked.

Artists are used to questions like this. Manzanita is flowering pink right now, she said immediately, but of course you have to lean close to see them. Currant's tiny flowers are pink. Some rocks are pink. (See painting to the right: Hot Rocks.) In the fall, cheat grass is pink.

So there you have it.

*

Actually last week was a summer week ("spring" here being the rapid alternation of winter/summer, as I mentioned) and now all the crabapples and cherries are blooming violently pink. As you walk around you spy them between pine trees. They're absolutely lovely.

Meta blogging

These are some thoughts about online reputations and branding spurred by Bon's recent post.

A few months ago I attended a party, a fairly wild one, where I met some new people. Last week I ran into one of those people again, this time in a professional capacity. She was embarrassed. She was afraid I wouldn't take her seriously. In a small town like Bend, this kind of thing happens all the time, and she commented on how it still takes her (a big-city native) by surprise.

I think that anytime you leave a trail online – on Facebook or on your blog or in another blog's comments, on Twitter, or whatever – it's like attending a party in Bend. Sooner or later everyone's going to know what you said. That means you'd better take care what you say and do; but also, you should give other people a break.

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Your brand is not your reputation. Your brand is your clothing: it's the image you (attempt to) project.

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Blogging used to be primarily online journaling. When you're journaling, you're writing as if to a group of friends. It's confessional. It's intimate. It's vulnerable.

Now, it seems to me, blogging is more business-like. It has a purpose. It's not like a dinner party; it's like a cocktail party. And the cocktail party has a sponsor.

*

There's this scene in the movie Wives & Daughters, a recent adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's 19th century novel of the same name, in which a woman who has been unjustly accused by gossip-mongers of philandering has her reputation restored. How does she achieve this magic? She goes for a walk through town with the highest-ranking woman in the vicinity (a countess, I think she is), during which the countess clings to her chummily and praises her every opinion.

This kind of thing can happen online, too, can't it? A woman gets flamed out on one person's blog, and then a blogger of high rank says cool it, and everyone does...

*

On Mt. Bachelor's web site there was (is? I can't find it now) a Facebook widget. It showed Mt. B's comment stream and the profile pictures of some of their fans. I found that really disturbing. If I fanned Mt. Bachelor on Facebook, I'd do so to view their conditions updates, not to endorse them. They'd be welcome to include me anonymously in their boast of "over 5000 fans!"; but promoting my profile picture, with my full name, as a fan of theirs crosses a line. When I saw that widget, I unliked all for-profit businesses on Facebook.

On the other hand, if I were a business hoping to catch the attention of certain other companies' customers, I'd fan them immediately.

How is the widget different from Facebook's standard practice of showing fans/friends in the lower left corner of every profile page? It's different because in the widget, fans' profile pictures are more prominent than the company's status updates. It's the fans, it seems to me, who are being advertised.

With that widget, Facebook (at least for me) has also become a sponsored cocktail party.

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Penelope Trunk once said that email is dead. She must have meant only for businesses. Email blasts are as dead as telemarketing, I'll grant you that; but if Twitter and Facebook and blogs are all cocktail parties? then email is the last place to host a dinner party.

A pink kink in your think

Whilst driving to the other side of town (and back) two days ago, I scanned the landscape for pink. I saw exactly seven instances of that color: the buds on three crabapple trees; the flowers of three rock-garden shrubs (candytuft); and the petals of one lone desert wildflower.

It's interesting that pink elicits such a strong cultural response when in fact pink is so seldom seen in the landscape, is it not?

*

I asked the kids to help me find the color pink. Sasha laughed at me and pointed to the passenger seat, where I'd set the hot-pink canvas bag containing our first week's CSA veggies.

OK, OK, but do you see pink outside?

Sasha pointed to the coat of a little girl walking by.

Well, but I mean in the natural world — among the things God made, not the things people have made. I never see pink there!

And then Blake laughed, and exclaimed, "Haven't you ever seen a sunset?"

*

Do you see pink where you are?

Enduring May

I'm in the mountains all the time partly because dudes, it is totally depressing down here. It's supposed to be spring, but very few trees or bushes have leaves and it's below freezing at night and storms keep moving through.

In May I'd rather snowboard on Mt. Bachelor, appreciating a sun higher in the sky than usual, than allow a stray warm day in Bend to tease me!

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Last month Nonlinear Girl, who lives in Portland, photographed pink. Pink! I barely remember what pink looks like.

We do have some yellow, however. A blackberry and two roses, leafless, in the foreground; forsythia in the background.

Endlessly new

Quote from Ursula LeGuin's story "Solitude," published in the collection "The Birthday of the World."

"Life in the [village] ... is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. So for the young soul there is wandering and scouting, travel, danger, change. But of course travel and danger and change have their own dullness. It is finally always the same otherness over again; another hill, another river, another man, another day. The feet begin to turn in a long, long circle. The body begins to think of what it learned back home, when it learned to be still. To be aware. To be aware of the grain of dust beneath the sole of the foot, and the skin of the sole of the foot, and the touch and scent of the air on the cheek, and the fall and motion of the light across the air, and the color of the grass on the high hill across the river, and the thoughts of the body, of the soul, the shimmer and ripple of colors and sounds in the clear darkness of the depths, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, endlessly new.

"And so I came back home."

**

Reading this, I thought of the years I spent travelling around Eastern Europe and how I knew when they were over: when I met the man who is now my husband, I knew that I had had enough of movement. I wanted to live in one place awhile. I wanted to understand how that one place could be "endlessly changing, endlessly new."

And here I am.

Happy 39th birthday to me.