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Annabel_Kean
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Name: Anna
Location: Canada
Gender: Female
Interests: Guitar, drawing, math analysis, composing ditties, and other artsyish passtimes. Occasional elaborate mention of things I dislike.
Expertise: Solving PDE's for food and fame, polishing the apples of academic seniors and looking for people who would polish mine in years to come.
Occupation: Mathematician
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  Annabel Kin
Member Since:
4/9/2002
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| Found this in an old notebook left over from undergrad.
Solution converged like its factor
When a large eigenvalue attacked her:
She couldn't get far,
She was trapped by x*,
A Lyapunov-stable attractor.
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| July Fireworks / by Annabel Kin
A watermark upon a parchment sky:
A gentle orange pink, all lined with cirrus.
Blue letterhead of mountains, smoke and mirrors,
And curly-bracket eagles flying by.
The page is set for breathless summer prose
July's been scrawling in his innocence:
Gunpowder smoke -- his dirty fingerprints,
And careless splotches of the Fire Shows.
Small commas crowd the distant public park;
On muddy water bob ellipsis-birds...
Here you and I -- so far the only words,
And this our sail -- the exclamation mark!
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| On Love and Pain.
There is a joy I've come to experience that is very new to me, and it is one I never thought I'd feel. It changed me in much the same way fundamentalist religion and motherhood change other people. It permeates my being; and in many ways it defines me and fulfills me. It is the Joy of Ownership.
It was a frightening leap, to buy Her. She was expensive, ridiculously expensive, especially compared to alternatives (chartering, co-ops, all that jazz). She wasn't new, either, nor the best in line. She carried with her a daunting amount of unfamiliar equipment, a long list of mysterious repairs, and an expectation of me having skills I didn't have.
Those voices in my head responsible for common sense, caution and the sort of mild jewish apprehension I've inherited from my solid line of jewish female ancestors all told me not to commit to an insane idea such as this. And yet, the other voice -- responsible for the craziest, bravest, and ultimately most awesome decisions I've ever made -- told me that I needed to make her mine.
Truly, how could I possibly justify keeping "con a ship" on my sacred list of Things A Person Needs To Be Able To Do, if I were too scared to own one, to care for one, to risk breaking one? And so, one long breath later, Essorant was mine.
That was December. Since then, almost every weekend I've spent on the water. Sailing is frightening, for the most part, highly uncomfortable and quite honestly, pretty unsafe. Most everything is cold and wet and constantly swaying, dropping, falling, slipping. Nothing ever goes according to plan. Something always breaks in one way or another. The boat is never truly properly equipped to go to sea. There is never enough crew, and when there is, there is never enough space. Most of the time I'm convinced I'm either doing something wrong, or not doing something crucial. Some of the most tense and trying moments of my life happened on board of the Essorant. And -- of course, I never regretted a minute of it.
During the week, working at my desk, riding the bus, I dream of the next time I'll be uncomfortable and afraid. I dream of the next time I'll see my best efforts fall short of the ocean's whim; of the next time I'll know that nobody but me will be there to fix everything, to make it all better.
Many people I know mistake this love for the love of a new thrill, or the love of a new toy. I always somehow felt that was inaccurate -- but I haven't realized just how inaccurate until very recently.
On Comfort and Safety
When you're new to English, like I was 12 years ago, the only people whom you can understand well are prerecorded public service announcers, cause they are the only ones who talk slow and enunciate properly. Those two words, securely glued together, ringing clear through the gibberish that was English speech, were a heads-up signal even before I could carry a conversation. Comfort and safety, so listen up, because what's to follow is a requirement or a regulation that's likely to (1) be enforced (2) make everything less fun but (3) be what you are already doing, anyway.
For your comfort and safety, fasten your seatbelts tightly, keep your hands and feet inside the craft, do not twist or turn abruptly, avoid speaking loudly, wear proper footware, lift with your legs not the back, pull the strap and breathe normally, turn off personal electronic devices, ensure proper disposal of medical equipment, place your feet at the yellow marks, stay well behind the red safety line and enjoy the show.
It used to be that I'd only hear it in airports and on rollercoaster rides -- but now I hear it more often, or possibly just notice it more often. For instance, as a part of my job I had to take a 9 hour government-mandated seminar on how to comfortably and safely not to feed people an excess of salmonella with their chicken. A month ago, a gorgeous hiking mountain trail in Hawaii had "comfort and safety" as part of the experience, relayed onto me with a soft island accent. Snorkeling in the reefs, renting a dinghy on a beach, going off the deep end of the pool -- all were poisoned with "comfort and safety". A nuisance and an assurance, stated by the announcer or simply implied -- every time I follow the rules, be they good or bad, useful or stupid -- that someone, somewhere, guarantees me my comfort and safety.
My only escape from the duo used to be to close my eyes and pretend that the painted carousel mount was a real pegasus, and that it flew above wondrous worlds of my own imagining. And oh, the wonders it works, that trick, against tyranny of any sort! An infinite, intoxicating, unstoppable fountain of freedom right in my own head!
And yet, as amazing as it is -- as long as I kept my eyes closed, it was still just a trick, a toy, a cheat. It is a cheat to free your mind as long as you're comfortable and safe with the disembodied enunciating announcer to thank for it.
When the wind blows through my hair, and the mast creaks above, and the tiller pushes ever so slightly against my hand as I helm, freedom exists there too, but in its true form -- bought and paid for by the constantly wet socks, painfully cold fingers and skin inflamed and cracking from the salt and the sun and the wind. When I stand crouch on the deck alone, tugging at the flapping tangling rigging, my magical world is there too -- enhanced, not dulled by the pain -- and this time, for the first time, truly mine.
On Ownership
I've owned a great deal many objects in my life -- clothes and books and toys -- but each was just a little vessel for enjoyment of toy freedom, a "rented" freedom, just one more lap on the carousel. A boat is different. It carries me to a place where I am a maker of my own fate, a supreme being. More than that -- I'm a supreme being with an orchestra inside my head that played loud enough back on shore to drown out the recorded safety video for 27 years.
Ownership changed me. I can no longer just "rent" a little piece of freedom every once in a while. Freedom is something that must be bought, that must be owned. Mine is 27' long and its waiting for me at the Point Roberts marina.
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| Anna's Great Canadian Adventure -- days 3 and 4 --Winnipeg.
I was just about to retire one of my old scribbly notebooks to the bookshelf and came about these notes, which I intended to post, and, of course, never did. So, before I un-private any of my other posts, for continuity's sake, I'll post this my travelog, despite it being half a year late.
The prairies take an entire day. My lovely neighbour Bertie disembarks in Melville, a one-silo town. (In Saskatchewan you know when a town is a one-silo town without disembarking the train -- cause you can see The Silo, and more importantly, the absence of other silos from your window) Truly massive satellite dishes on practically every roof offer explanation of just to what Bertie owes his encyclopaedic knowledge of hockey.
Bertie's place is taken over by three excited portuguese (although probably Brazilian?) girls, headed for Toronto. I'm absolutely puzzled as to by which magic these exotic persons happened to pop out of Melville on a bright winter day. High heels, hoop earrings, neon fingernails and weather-inappropriate club wear and a fluttering kind of buzzing activity that fills their seats leaves me to believe they're really insectoid aliens on an exploratory mission.
The rest of the prairies are filled with more Melvilles, white silos, white satellite dishes, white sky, grey stubble of hay growing through the thin layer of snow, and Joseph Roth -- so very appropriate for this leg of the trip. To the tune of Austrian melancholy in my head and alien pixie-funk-talk in the seat behind me, I roll into Winnipeg, A Major Metropolitan Centre.
The stop here lasts two and a half hours, while the train changes crews and takes in water and pre-packaged minimuffins. I take the chance to get out and take a walk in the Paris of the Prairies. The first building I see upon exiting the train station is the Fort Garry Hotel -- the poster-building of the city. Now, I could describe the rest of Winnipeg (or rather Winnipeg's Main Street, 2.5 hours worth of it), but I think it is sufficient to simply describe this building for the reader to internalize the true spirit of this city.
Fort Garry boasts late-19th-century quasi-gothic Empire architecture identical to that of the Hotel Vancouver. It serves exactly the same role as the Hotel Vancouver, too -- an expensive hotel and convention centre, crammed with as much Nostalgic Victorian Opulence (TM) as is possible. (In fact, all the brochures I pick up at the train station list it as nothing less than the Historic Fort Garry -- "historic" being a Canadian adjective used to describe any building built before the implementation of superior cement pouring techniques. )
But it is not Fort Garry that is truly the spirit of Winnipeg -- it is the Fort Garry Place that is adjacent to it. While the Historic Fort Garry was designed to be a hotel exemplifying Victorian Opulence (now Nostalgic Victorian Opulence (TM) ), the Fort Garry Place was designed to be a hotel exemplifying the immense pride that Winnipeg takes in having in it a place such as the Historic Fort Garry, and in having all sorts of other things that proper cities have. Here it is:
Fort Garry Place consists of three major parts: possibly the least offensive one is the Phallos -- a rather run-o-the mill skyscraper tower hosting luxury apartments. The stuff you don't see in the official pictures, however, is that a person who buys a luxury apartment in Manitoba enjoys the luxury of displaying the flag of their favourite hockey team, and sometimes their favourite country (Canada) on their balcony. The luxury of storing children's strollers and bikes on the balcony goes without saying.
Another thing not shown in any publicity shots is the Umbilical Cord -- a glassed-over walkway connecting the Fort Garry Place to the Historic Fort Garry Hotel around the third story level. This way people can know that the Two are now One -- the new and the old, forever connected by an intestine of glass.
The elaborate facade below the Phallos is the Scrotum. What you can't see on the picture is that it surrounds the entire building, overlapping in some places with the Historic Fort Garry, to further foster the unity of the two structures.
The defining characteristic of the Scrotum is the relief. Because, of course, what can better merge modern architecture of the Fort Garry Place with the Nostalgic Victorian Opulence (TM) of the Historic Fort Garry, than greco-roman statuaries, elaborate ballustrades and molded reliefs? Naturally, if one is commissioned to do greco-roman relief, one can't approach that sort of thing half-assed. The designers really made sure they gave Fort Garry Place their money's worth, putting hordes of toga-clad women and semi-nude men along the first four stories of the facade. Dozens upon dozens of women carrying grape vines and books and sometimes just their robes support the elaborate ballustrades with their heads. Stately nude greek gentlemen poke out from every alcove and crowd balconies.
To top it off (although you can't see it from any of the official pictures I could get my hands on), some traditionally-minded landscape designer thought it would be a great idea to cover a substantial portion of the facade in ivy. The ivy, encouraged by the abundance of mineral-rich stucco and high humidity has proceeded to eat at the faces of the poor statuaries Aliens-style, in some places engulfing the poor greeks entirely, leaving only their sandalled feet poking out from the lush growth. On the account of winter their obstinate faces were still visible from beyond the tangle of hibernating ivy stems.
And, finally, what better says "We're a real city" than a revolving restaurant!? On top of the Phallos sits a squat round Head, providing a view of downtown Winnipeg (and a taste of the high life... "high". Do you twig?;) ) to willing tourists. Except that unlike most other buildings that have revolving restaurants, the Fort Garry Place dimensions don't really sync up with the placement of the giant blue dish on top. From most angles it looks like a badly parked UFO.
In short, for those of you my readers who have read the Fountainhead, this is the building that Howard Roark never got to blow up. :)
After my tour of the Fort Garry Construct I walk up Main Street, and make it to the Art Gallery and the Courts -- two buildings that look almost exactly alike, on the opposite sides of the street. The Art Gallery is showing the detestable Andy Warhol, so I naturally opt for the establishment named "Court Cafeteria Open To The Public". The Public inside consists of mostly farmers and their lawyers, enjoying rather tasty inexpensive meals. If you're ever in Winnipeg, it's probably the best cheapest place to eat in the city.
Thus concludes my tour. The buzzing babes bureau returns to the train car just as we're about to take off, loaded with various purchases and enough junk food to last them until their space rendezvous in Toronto. Back to Joseph Roth and the prairies. By nightfall I'll be in Ontario. Good night!
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