sunt lacrimae rerum

Dear Jeff Esworthy and Classical MPR,

Just because you CAN play nothing but Handel, Vivaldi, and Mozart before noon doesn't mean you SHOULD.

A little Mahler or Stravinsky would wake me up a lot faster.

Ok, so my two male housemates both have full beards that they started growing sometime after they got here. And my supervisor at work just started growing a goatee thing.

So now I don't know what to do, because I'm sure if I start growing a goatee thing it will look like I'm copying my boss, and if I do the full beard thing instead it will look like I am copying my housemates. And I'm not too big on other specific styles of facial hair. HARRUMPH. We'll see what happens.

Actually that is the opposite of what I'm thinking right now. (Though "Muck Fissoula" appeared on many t-shirts I saw in high school in Bozeman and virtually always comes to mind when I think of Missoula now.)

I'm excited about thinking of moving to Missoula for several reasons. First of all, I'll probably be able to get a DOG OMGW00T. That's true of virtually anywhere I could be next year, though.

But there are other reasons as well.

• For example, Missoula is near the Bitterroot Mountain Range which is really one of the most beautiful parts of the state and definitely rivals the Bozeman/Gallatin Valley area in terms of overall recreational appeal.
• It's relatively close to Glacier National Park, which I've heard is much more geographically impressive than Yellowstone.
• It's home to the Missoula Symphony, which is a middlish-highish-level amateur orchestra that I could realistically join and still enjoy.
• Missoula is also by far the most liberal city in the state, as well as the most culturally "progressive." Garrison Keillor once described Missoula as "Like Montana, but with feng shui and herbal tea."
• Along those same lines, Missoula is full of granola hippies and lots of enthusiasm for ecological causes and, from what I hear, very bike-friendly, with at least one natural foods co-op.
• I know that the school system and their music program is decent, so if (God forbid) I ever spawn offspring I would be comfortable sending them to the public schools.
• It's a little over two hours away from my family's cabin at Canyon Ferry and just over three hours from my parents' house in Bozeman - so holiday and weekend visits are perfectly possible and not too costly.
• And of course - it isn't Bozeman. Yes, I love Bozeman. But there are also some things about Bozeman that make me a little queasy. Like the fact that, in Bozeman, I could at any moment run into some ignorant former high school acquaintance. The idea of community living is so important to me that whatever city I end up living in, I want it to be a city that I can really feel is my own, not tied up in my weird past or populated by people who are overly interested in my weird past, or not even PAST my weird past. And, of course, there is the simple reality that if I ever live in Bozeman, it will be awkward to make the transition between feeling like "home" is my childhood home/neighborhood and feeling like "home" is my current apartment or house (or whatever).

So Missoula is basically a lot like Bozeman, but more liberal-friendly and without the weird baggage that comes along with being a transgendered person from a small town with some admittedly small-minded folks. It combines the best possibilities of being able to create myself anew in a new place while still staying grouned in the places and people that I love. The only real downside I can think of at the moment is that if I ever wanted to roadtrip to the Twin Cities, it would add an extra 3 hours to an already obnoxiously long drive. The flipside of that is that roadtrips to the Seattle area would be that much shorter (though I have less reason to visit the West Coast than the Midwest).

I now have membership at the Saint Paul public libraries and the YWCA and a joint bank account with my house. I've formally cooked for the house three times, since we've been here about three weeks and each of us cooks once a week. We've found a retaurant that sells $.50 tacos and $2.50 pints of beer that we plan on going to every Friday (I can buy a full meal and a beer plus tip for $5 even). I am getting the knack of riding my bike around town, although the biggest pain remains dragging the bike up and down the stairs at the house.

After having been so long deprived of the obligaton to conduct life's most basic business, like buying and preparing one's own food, taking out the trash and doing the compost, cleaning the house, and so on, it's actually remarkably rewarding to do them now. I feel like a real-life grown-up human being in almost every way. I'm not sure how long that feeling will last. The feeling of not missing Montana has certainly gone away. It really only took until the first weekend when I didn't have much to do, and I realized how much I missed living within walking distance of a national forest. But right now the Montana-sickness is fairly manageable.

My career plans have taken another sudden turn as I was informed that non-teachers can't really get into graduate programs in education. Which is... crappy. I was offered an alternative program... some kind of online licensure program crap. But I decline to stoop to the level of an online education. I've reassessed my law school plans and taken the first step of registering for the LSAT (as well as requesting the LSAT study book through the public library). I live about five blocks from the William Mitchell School of Law, so I thought of looking into that until I saw that tuition is $33k. And after my dealings with the University of Minnesota I'm not too excited about applying there, but I might for kicks. The Universiy of Montana seems my best bet, and I felt better about it after a few things: First of all, NPR played a rerun of the Missoula, MT show of Prairie Home Companion, in which Garrison Keillor's cowboy character Lefty referred to Missoula as "like Montna, but with feng shui and herbal tea." And I browsed the UM Law School homepage, where they advertise that they have been listed #6 in some sort of list of "best value" law schools. As a resident, tuition is only $10k without considering possible financial aid.

I was never particularly fond of Missoula when I visited it, though I never saw much to be honest. Mostly the big bald mountain with its "M" was the turnoff. But the surrounding Bitterroot Valley is truly a beautiful area, and there's no question that Missoula is by far the most liberal of all Montana cities. We'll just have to see if I can find an apartment that lets me have a DOG when I get there. :-)

So I am now in Saint Paul. Not a suburb of Saint Paul, not a town close to Saint Paul, but actually in Saint Paul itself, less than a mile from downtown. Were it not for trees and houses, I could probably see both the cathedral and the capitol building from here. My house is pseudo-Victorian, probably from the turn of the century, and I share the top two floors with my four LVC housemates. The bottom floor is occupied by a young family and their two dogs. I live about a mile from my workplace and two blocks from the nearest bus stop.

I don't miss Montana nearly as much as I thought I would, not because I wouldn't like to go back at the drop of a hat, but because actually living in a city is so very different and completely incomparable that I rarely have a reason to think about how much I would rather be in Montana. I liked Northfield a lot but in many ways it was just a pale imitation of my hometown, and therefore, utterly depressing for a good deal of the time.

I haven't much to say about work because I've only had two days and am still not really in the loop. For the most part it seems to be a standard desk job but the office atmosphere is considerably better than most offices I can imagine.

Also, I went to the state fair or should I say the State Fair yesterday. I can't imagine anything more maddening. Every kind of food you can name, fried and stuck on a stick. Hotdish on a stick. Steak on a stick. Cheese on a stick. Chocolate-covered frozen key lime pie on a stick. Sausage on a stick. Fried candy bars on a stick.

I stuck with pretty standard -on-a-stick fare, which is to say, a corndog. I also got strawberries and cream and a caramel apple (on a stick), which in terms of health seemed to be a little more reasonable than, say, chocolate-dipped key lime pie.

The whole schtick (no pun intended) of the fair seems to be having small samplings of things that might be cool on their own and then jamming hundreds of thousands of people into a small area to experience them. Bird shows, for example, could be interesting if you were actually at a zoo, viewing cattle could be interesting if you were actually at a farm, going on rides could be interesting if you were actually at a carnival/theme park, viewing a parade could be interesting if it was actually the 4th of July or whatever. Unfortunately the hundreds of thousands of people made it a madhouse. I have no intention of ever going back again.

"The first thing that strikes the observation is an innuerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone."

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 1835

Postscript: I used to think that my dad was an anamoly, the freak right-wing, war-loving hardline conservative who happened not to be a Christian fundamentalist also.

It recently occurred to me that in fact my dad is what all right-wingers look like when they are stripped of all the pretenses and apologetics of Christian faith and love. My dad is not a freak right-winger; he is just one of the only honest ones.

"Those Christians who feel at home in the United States can do so only because they have buffered themselves from the brutal conditions of poverty, blinded themselves to the realities of racism, and deluded themselves into imagining that the vast military force of this country is the agent of justice. Many such Christans worship the idol of prosperity and have quieted their conscience in return for lives of relative ease and material comfort."

Dennis A. Jacobsen, Doing Justice

I got contacts when I was a junior in high school and have hated them ever since (also, have used them so infrequently that I still haven't gone through my alleged one-year supply).

Went to the Costco (bless them) optometrist the other day and got fitted for a new brand and new prescription. I am wearing the new ones now and my eyes are SO HAPPY. Not only can I actually read and look at a computer screen without getting a headache, but I also don't feel like I need to blink and rub my eyes constantly.

Maybe I will even start wearing them regularly.

I am seriously considering getting rid of this journal since I can never find anything interesting to write about, and I'm only aware of 2 people who read it. Hmm.

So apparently the reason I stopped playing WWII games was because even the "good" ones are bad. I learned this the hard way after buying Call of Duty: World at War yesterday and playing through the entire campaign in a couple of hours. I'm just pissed now that I paid full price for it. What a waste.

I bought it because I've been having the inexplicable urge to blow up pixelated Nazis for a while now, and there was a huge Band of Brothers marathon on the History Channel yesterday. I also bought it because I did my research and saw that CoD was clearly the best WWII game for Xbox360. Which leaves me a little worried for what the other WWII games must be like. Ugh.

Well, my cat may be senile but she can still be cute somtimes. Ex: She is currently curled up next to me with her nose buried in her paws.

I don't remember if I ever mentioned that I tore a tendon in my ankle about a month or so ago, about 2 weeks before graduating. It's been a rather long recovery, and I could only barely run for the first time last week. I think I will go running again today, though. I gave it a few days to recover. But I figure if I don't start running now, my ankle will never be fit for running. Ugh.

In other news, it's 70 degrees and sunny here in MT, and in MN it's apparently in the 90s and humid. Lol.

I just took my cat for a walk because she is going COMPLETELY batshit crazy. She used to be a real outdoor cat... gone for a week at a time sometimes, but miraculously, despite all Montana's cat-eating predators and our house's proximity to a relatively busy highway, she always came back. Amazingly her brother, Rocky, did too, and he survived long enough to die of natural causes a few years ago, but Deeders has slogged on persistently without him. Now, although she is in relatively good physical condition considering her 16 years, she's a lot slower and less springy than she used to be and has certainly lost all interest in her long hunting excursions.

But we still let her outside for 15 minutes at a time, because she will sit there and meow at the door until we let her out, and then a few minutes later she will sit and meow at the door until we let her in. So this time I went outside with her and walked around the yard with her a little bit. She did her cat thing, eating grass and sniffing bushes and listening when birds chirped. When she was younger and sprightlier, she would stealthily follow my dad or I around the neighborhood when we walked our dog. This, I presume, is because her biggest threats were from neighborhood dogs and cats that didn't necessarily want to show aggression (or show up at all) around our 180-lb Great Pyrenees with an instinct to protect his "flock" (in this case, me, my brother, and the two cats). I don't think cats are particularly intelligent but Deeders was at least smart enough to figure out that she could roam the 'hood a little more safely if she followed us. Anyway, I figured maybe she would get out a little further into the yard if I was there to lead her around. I think I will try to do this on a daily basis from now on, if for no other reason than to feel like I am doing something to make my aging and senile cat a happier critter.

I'm also doing it because, while our cats had always been sworn enemies of the neighborhood magpies, Deeders has finally gotten on enough in years that we are actually concerned for her safety if they show up. I suspect the magpies won't want to get too close if I'm around.

Life has been pretty uneventful, for which I'm grateful. After living four years always being worried about the next thing to do the next day, and the thing to do the day after that, it's pretty refreshing to go to sleep every night knowing that I essentially have no important obligations to fulfill the next day. At home, I've been wandering the recesses of the internet, bicycling, playing Fallout, reading, and helping out with cooking. At the cabin, we go four-wheeling, boating, wandering around with the dog, and enjoying the weather from the deck. Well, I suppose it hasn't been all fun and games. With my mom's reunion coming up, I got put in charge of designing and ordering the reunion t-shirt, helping bake lefse, banana bread, and other freezable food items, and doing a lot of touch-up stuff at the cabin like helping dad finish the trim and painting in the garage. For the most part, I think my mom is freaking out unnecessarily about this reunion, except that I know the only people more perfectionist and demanding than she is are her sister and her sister's husband. I don't think she is too concerned about pleasing any of the other various family members, but she is clearly going out of her way to make sure that Aunt Deedee and Uncle Sal are well accommodated. And Sal can definitely be a pain-in-the-ass. He's a great guy, but he's an appellate judge on the New York state supreme court, he was a U.S. attorney under Reagan, and he's even had a movie made about one of his more dramatic cases, and he's got his New York Italian attitude to match his accomplishments. He's definitely quite opinionated on a huge range of subjects and he doesn't normally bother being particularly tactful about it. My mom still has a sort of love-hate relationship with the guy, because she lived with him and her sister in Buffalo right after she got out of college and had to deal with him for a long time. Though, in fairness, he and his Italian immigrant mom are the primary reason that she knows how to cook food that doesn't consist of jell-o and preserved fish, like Norwegians make.

Anyway, I'm off to try to find stuff about the Italian Renaissance. Maybe I will even stoop so low as to watching The Agony and the Ecstacy, ie the movie in which Professor Higgins is the Pope and Charlton Heston is Michelangelo. I've always liked Renaissance history, and pre-Modern European history in general, but I am especially stoked because the second Assassin's Creed game will be set in Renaissance Italy in the 15th century. I'm actually quite relieved that it is, because with the ending of the first game there was no way of knowing if the gameplay in the sequel would follow modern-day protagonist Desmond Miles, if it would continue with Third Crusade-era assassin Altair bin Al-Ahad, or if it would focus on a completely new characterin a different era. Because of the prominent appearance of some sort of Japanese prophecy towards the end of the first game, there was a lot of speculation that the sequel would take place in Japan... and frankly... I was terrified of that prospect, not because I dislike Japan, but because ninja videogames are a dime a dozen. And frankly, ninjas have become a huge cultural cliche, especially given that the black-clad, star-throwing ninjas of popular mythology never really existed. And even if the game developers didn't label their stealthy assassin character as a ninja, it would be hard to prevent it from happening naturally if you set the thing in Japan.

One of the things that I liked about Assassin's Creed was that it worked so hard to vividly and convincingly portray a setting which has been featured in virtually no videogames, which is crusades-era Palestine. And I'm fairly confident in saying that Renaissance Europe has never been faithfully recreated in any mainstream videogame setting, so it will be fun to be able to explore the great architecture and colorful carnivales of Venice and Florence, and the rolling countryside of Tuscany as brand-spanking-new yet startlingly familiar-looking assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze. It's not been confirmed but I hold out hope that Rome will be available to explore as well. You can check out the cinematic (ie non game graphics) trailer here. I think the trailer is visually stunning, and the music is great and sounds historically accurate, even if the trailer isn't quite as dramatically interesting as the trailer for AC was. The only real problem I have with the trailer is that the mask shatters when it falls off... which is silly because real Venetian carnivale masks are made of papier mache, not ceramics.

So. Yeah. That's all.

Dad and I headed up to the cabin on Thursday again, but the weather wasn't cooperating with us. On Friday we decided to go up somewhere called Cave Gulch, which is actually further north than any of the ATV trails we've tried out so far. My dad brought three separate trail maps as well as his compass, and we both carried .22 pistols to be safe. It wasn't a particularly difficult trail on its own, but of course I am always really uncomfortable driving the four-wheeler with the dog because I worry that she will fall off and hurt herself. We got a few miles into this trail, well up some mountains, and we realized that the trail maps were totally off. Dad used his old military skills to triangulate our actual position based on known landmarks, and it turns out the trail maps were really messed up. But we kept on going... and suddenly the four-wheeler starts flashing "Lo BATT" and then a moment after that, a red engine light turns on and it starts cycling the messages "Lo BATT," "check engine" and "limp home mode." Of course, at that point we're so far out into the sticks that we can't do anything but keep going. Eventually we get to a fork in the road and we stop the vehicles to consider which direction to take, and the four-wheeler just dies. The engine just stops in the middle of nowhere.

So I end up having to hop on the back of the Rokon, aka the super-sketchy 1950s-design off-road motorcycle, and the dog just has to run after us. We sort of end up picking a random direction and hoping that it will lead us to the road at Magpie, which is where we think we're closest. Luckily it was only about a two mile ride down some pretty rough switchbacks before we got to the relatively well-maintained dirt road at Magpie. Dad took off from there and left the dog and I, and came back and picked us up in the car. Dad decided the problem with the four-wheeler was that it either had a bad alternator that wasn't getting enough power to the battery, or else it had a bad voltage regulator. So he and one of our neighbors, a Ford dealership owner/vehicle buff named Darrel, headed back on Darrel's four-wheeler to charge the battery so that they could at least get our four-wheeler home. Now they've dumped it off at the Helena dealership where they bought it. It will be interesting to see what's actually wrong with it, since we've owned the four-wheeler for two years and apparently almost the same thing happened with my uncle Mark's four-wheeler two years after he bought it, and it was a faulty alternator. Unfortunately, because of the crap weather (38 degrees with snow in the higher parts!) and the lack of an ATV, it didn't make sense to try to put the jetski in the water. Bummer. Also sad is the fact that the weather isn't supposed to get markedly better for the next 10 days (which is as far as the forecast goes).

So we got back to Bozeman yesterday afternoon. I decided to take my new bike out again, even though it was rather wet and cold, and ended up going up as far into Bear Canyon as he pavement does. I had to turn back when it turned to gravel because although the new bike is fantastic for roads, the tires are road-bike thin and it has no suspension or shock absorption. Riding gravel would be murder to my hands and butt. I took my camera with because it was such a strange day... everything was wet and green and lush, very uncharacteristic for Montana, but the mountains were misty and cloud-swirled and frosted white from snow. I didn't end up getting any particularly amazing pictures, but it was a nice ride anyway, even if a bit cold towards the end.
( Pictures. )

So tired right now. I have been getting to sleep at around 10 and waking up around 6:30 or 7 each day, which I have to say, is pretty freaking awesome. More daylight, anyway.

On Thursday I went with my dad and the dog to the lake. I did some chores... painting some trim, washing the four-wheeler and Rokon. Most of it was just chilling, though. I saw lots of wildlife... Thursday I saw a turkey and its chicks, an elk, lots of mule deer (as always). Friday Dad took me to Hellgate to ride the trails up in the mountains, since I've never gone off the road onto the trails before. He rode the Rokon, which is like an all-terrain motorcycle, and I took the four-wheeler with the dog on the back. I was a bit worried, but after sliding and scraping and jerking around for three hours over some pretty treacherous mountain terrain, I'm thoroughly impressed with her ability to hang onto the back of that thing. We got some pictures, though they aren't necessarily that pretty because we were in the northern part of the Big Belts, where the fires burned pretty much everything out in 2000. Lots of dead trees. In fact, we took the chainsaw with us in case we had to clear out any in our way. Didn't see any wildlife other than a Hungarian partridge, though. My dad took a bit of a tumble off the Rokon while scaling a steep path, which was a little scary, but all he got was a good scratch on his knee and some bruises.

Saturday I took the four-wheeler myself out to Hellgate again, just to see if I would have any more luck spotting wildlife. I did see a single antelope outside the gulch itself, but nothing inside. I was a little disappointed because I've seen bears and mountain goats there before, and I had brought my camera. There were too many people for the animals to come out, I think... some folks rock-climbing, a bunch of people four-wheeling and dirt-biking. This morning I didn't do anything particularly exciting, but we did get the big boat into the water.

I tried to go for a jog this evening, just to see how things would go. It was ok... I could jog for short spurts before having to stop again to let my ankle recover. Suffice to say I am REALLY looking forward to recovering from this injury. Sitting inside on that stupid recumbent bike drives me bonkers and it's not even a particularly good workout. Ugh. I think I might hike the M tomorrow so that I can at least get a decent workout, even if I can't run. And hopefully that will give me more photo opportunities anyway....
( Some photographic higlights of the weekend. )

It's oddly satisfying to look at some of the crap you've accumulated over the span of four years and legitimately know that you will never need it again. Among the things I am trashing, recycling, donating, or selling, are the huge tower fan that kept me cool through many a Minnesota summer night, the little refrigerator that couldn't, the Ikea particle board coffee table that has housed my TV and Xbox since sophomore year, and a little storage cubicle thing that served as a pseudo bedside lamp table when stacked on top of the fridge. I'm also strongly considering pawning off at least one of my three horn cases, probably the backpack one, since I have never actually used it (though I have lent it to people on numerous occasions).

I definitely still have more stuff now than I did when I came to college, but... that's sort of an unfair comparison. When I first came to college, my mom was on a business trip and my dad was yelling at me that he never brought half as much stuff as I did. All he brought was a suitcase and a typewriter, which allegedly fit into a car with four other people and all their stuff as well. So, in a panic, I ended up taking very little and forgetting several important articles (including sheets and a desk lamp). And on the clearly faulty advice of my older brother, I only took two weeks' worth of clothing to begin with. My mom ended up shipping a bunch of stuff to me over the course of the next few weeks. But even after that year, everything I owned fit easily into Amy's van when we moved it from Hoyme to Thorson. That's a far cry from the Uhauls full of stuff that I see other students' parents carting around. My freshman year roommate had to make three trips to her house with her parents' suburban. Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of multiple trips - it's all got to go in one shot. I've got my little car, and my dad and grandma are driving mom's Prius out for graduation, so I'm not too worried, but I'm still trying to shed everything I don't need or haven't used recently. At the moment I only own a fraction of the clothes that I used to, and the only furniture-type item I plan on keeping out of what I have now is my small bookcase, which collapses onto itself. Other than that, I've got the TV, Xbox, horn, two suitcases, a few boxes' worth of little tidbits, the rug, my five-headed floor lamp.

I guess it's worth mentioning that I am done with school. Done, finished, nothing left to see here. And, I will be graduating on time with my degree. For a moment I was worried if my pathetic work in Spanish would come back to haunt me, but according to the student information system my foreign language requirement has been fulfilled. It's not that I'm horrible at Spanish - I got almost all Bs on the stuff that I actually bothered to turn in - but I was so remarkably lazy with completing assignments and going to class regularly that I really kind of screwed myself over. But it doesn't matter now. I passed, and I'm graduating.

Of course, to me it feels appropriate that even with class, aka the "real" part of college out of the way, I've still got tons of rehearsals and two concerts left. I can't really work myself up about being "finished" when there's still so much left to do. I was playing music at St. Olaf before I was in classes, before I was even a student here, and even through my academic career, my dedication to the Ole Band and Orch always took precedence over my own class obligations. Maybe my GPA suffered for it, maybe I missed out on being able to write a distinction paper, but I don't have any regrets about the way I prioritized my time here. I learned more about myself and about people by playing music and going on tours than I did in all my classes combined. And graduating cum laude from an institution as ass-kicking as this one is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Mostly right now I am just feeling horribly homesick. I haven't been able to spend a summer in Montana in a couple of years, and I miss those mountains and lakes like they are part of my own soul. I've been browsing amateur photography of Montana scenes on flickr.com and I'm not sure if that's been helping or hurting. Also, I am actually a little bit grateful that President Anderson has been such a bastard to me. It reminded me that I've got bigger and better things to worry about tackling in my future. Every other graduate of Olaf that I've known has always expressed to me how sad they were to leave, how much they miss it. I think I will miss it, but at the same time, it feels right to be finished. I am ready to move on with the next chapter in my life.

I sprained my ankle the week before last, and it has been a long and slow recovery. I am still working hard not to limp around everywhere. But just now I was able to run all the way down the hallway to the vending machines, and all the way back! It was gimpy and limpy, and slow, but it didn't hurt. It felt really tight and sore (my ankle, that is). But no pain, and no residual pain now. So that's promising.

I am off to the gym to keep up my recovery bike/elliptical/stretch/etc regimen. I'm hoping I am recovered enough by the time I get back to Montana, aka next Monday or Tuesday, to be able to start running again.

Went to the Cow last night with Rebecca, Lauren, and Tim. To celebrate Lauren getting oodles of scholarship money from the Northwestern music school and Rebecca getting into the University of Bergen (in Norway). Hopefully I was prematurely celebrating getting into the LVC, because I had my LVC phone interview that morning. Hopefully it went well. Phone interviews are really quite terrible for me, but I didn't feel TOO awkward, and my interviewer (who is a current LVCer herself and probably about my age) even asked me if I could email her the title of a book I referenced but couldn't remember. I am mostly banking on the strength of my application and in particular my letters of recommendation - these are the ones after which Dr. Mahr told me I walked on water, and Amy told me I healed the blind. The quality of the recommendations is almost secondarily important to the fact that they all come from highly-regarded professors and spiritual leaders at a highly-regarded Lutheran school. Maybe I have a slight minority edge with the fact that I am transgender, but I suspect I might have an edge because I am male as well. I read online somewhere that in recent years there have been 4 or 5 female LVCers to every male. Anyway, since LVC was my backup plan for the Lilly internship and that fell through, I guess I've just got to bank on hope now. If I don't get into LVC I will just have to look for some kind of work in Bozeman until I can take the LSAT and apply to law schools. I guess a "gap" year wouldn't be a horrible thing. The British seem to be really into it.

Speaking of things British, the Cow is our "British pub" so they've got lots of pub-like things, including something I had last night. It was cider and black... cider with blackcurrant liqueur. And it was freaking delicious, and I've decided to go out and buy some cider and blackcurrant stuff. Of course I have no idea where in the store one might find it - I know that it's called "creme de cassis" but I haven't been able to find any prominent brand names. If all else fails I think Chambord is supposed to be a decent substitute, although that shit's pretty expensive.

Maggie (aka Professor Odell, whose name I tragically misspelled as O'Dell) gave me an A on my paper prospectus. Which is amazing because I did about 5 minutes of research for it and was quite certain she was going to give me a lecture for how bad it was. Before getting the papers back, she sent us an email saying that about 70% of the prospecti were in the "B" range and I was sure mine must be among them, and only a few had gotten an "A" for being so advanced in terms of argument of thesis and so on. So. Bleh. My paper's got a lot to live up to, I guess.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

I'm writing this in part because I've yet to see a source that has sufficiently compiled all the pertinent details of the story that is about to follow.

Yesterday (Thursday) morning at approximately 8:12 am, a natural gas leak caused an explosion in downtown Bozeman, MT (my hometown). Two buildings - housing a restaurant called Boodles and the American Legion bar - were instantly leveled. Witnesses claim to have seen the roof of one building fly hundreds of feet in the air. The explosion could be felt as far away as Bozeman Deaconess Hospital, more than a mile east of downtown. The concussion and debris destroyed windows and damaged buildings as far as three blocks away. Customers at Mainstreet Overeasy, a downtown breakfast eatery, report hearing something that sounded like a bomb. The building shook and the ceiling tiles rattled visibly as the lights flickered off and the power died.

The fire caused by the explosion quickly destroyed what little was left of two buildings on either side of the first two - the Montana Trails Gallery and the Rocking R Bar. The downtown Pickle Barrel and a children's store called LillyLu's were also destroyed. The Rocky Mountain Rug Gallery, which currently houses hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of hand-woven Persian rugs, was also severely damaged.



My mom drives through downtown on her way to work every morning. She emailed me and told me that she left home at 8:04 and drove past Boodles at some point after that and before 8:12. She said that thanks to a heavy snowstorm the night before, almost no one was driving that morning. She was the only car she saw on Main Street.

Her old law partner, Mike Cok, works in the restored Carnegie library just a block north of Boodles. He normally arrives at work before 8, but on Thursday he had a haircut scheduled at that time. His desk is seated in front of an 8'-wide and 20'-tall window facing south: When he arrived at the Carnegie building after the explosion, the entire window, frame and all, had collapsed onto his desk and chair, smashing them both as well as his computer.

A newspaper article quoted the owner of the Persian rug gallery. He would have been in his office at 8:12, which was destroyed, except he decided to get a cup of coffee from a coffee shop first. The woman who cleans the Rocking R Bar from 2 am-8 am every night called in sick. Apparently, a number of R Bar and Boodles employees reported feeling sick the evening before, but no one remembers smelling any natural gas.

This is almost a miracle story: Downtown Bozeman is a thriving part of the Bozeman community and is typically clogged with both pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Thanks to the thick snow from the night before, even fewer people were driving at 8 am than normal. Had the explosion occurred only a few hours earlier as the bars were closing, or a few hours later as businesses began to open, there could have been hundreds of fatalities. The Bozeman Deaconess Hospital, which had prepared itself to receive hundreds of injured people, reports that no one showed up with any injuries related to the blast and subsequent fire.



Tragically, the miracle didn't hold out for one person. 11 people were reported missing yesterday morning: Police tracked down 10 of them. One remains missing, and although the authorities have not yet released her name, I have it on good account that it is the manager of the Montana Trails Gallery. She was talking on her cellphone at 8:12 when she opened the gallery. Immediately after she told the person on the other end of the line that she was going to turn on the lights, her signal cut out. The authorities have witheld her name not because they hold out any hope of her survival but because they have not yet located her remains: The natural gas system in downtown Bozeman was installed in the 1920s and lacks emergency shut-off systems, so fire crews were forced to let the fire burn all day Thursday. The debris is still too hot to search.

Fire crews, National Guardsmen, sheriffs, energy company officials, and many other workers were present on the scene throughout Thursday. Martel Construction, one of my mother's clients, was working on two different construction projects in the area. Their employees helped the fire crews, and Martel even sent in construction supplies to help. Montana Bagelworks donated every bagel and pastry in their store to the crews as they worked. Montana's governor, Brian Schweitzer, and two local representatives flew in from Helena to offer the state's aid: Montana Senator Jon Tester flew from Washington to offer federal support.


Before the explosion: The R Bar, Pickle Barrel, Boodles (green facade), Montana Trails Gallery (red overhang), and American Legion (round sign)

Bozeman is the jewel of Montana, and downtown is the jewel of Bozeman. We were named the nicest small town in America for several years running, and an "All-America City." The businesses that were destroyed will undoubtedly rebuild. But it's hard to imagine that things will ever be quite the same in the heart of Big Sky Country.

I just want to say that my love for Laura Roslin, Saul Tigh, Kara Thrace, Bill Adama, Lee Adama, Galen Tyrol, Romo Lampkin, et al. has only grown after watching the last 3 BSG episodes.

Only five to go....

We leave for California tomorrow morning and will be gone for the next week. I am really exhausted now, as I got up at 7 am for my final and have had a fairly dramatic day.

I spent the past hour or so writing my devo for tour. Most people frantically scratch theirs out on a notebook the day of, but I'd like to have at least a little time to work mine over and make it good. And who knows, maybe I will scrap it and write something completely different (I have written the first part of two other devo ideas before now). My devo as it stands right now is mostly reflective and not particularly inspirational, so I might work on that a little bit.

That's all for now, folks...