Come on in, the weather's fine...

And so we have arrived, safe and not quite sound, in bucolic Moorpark, to live this next chapter of our lives. Things are as they always are here, white pickup trucks blare terrible music, the hills have faded from green to gold, and the weather is always just perfect. The ocean is more magnificent than I remember. In Ventura and off the coast of the Santa Monica Mountains the Pacific is a stolid grey-green, but ten leagues north off the coast of Santa Barbara she is twinkling sapphire blue. And a days drive north from there, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, the ocean is clear, and turquoise on the breaks, and if it weren’t as cold as Lake Michigan it would seem as if you were in Hawaii.

The sound of the sea was forgotten as well. Several days prior to my departure from the windy city I stopped by DePaul’s art gallery, and I found an exhibit of Palestinian contemporary art. One piece that struck me in particular were a set of a dozen or so ‘headphones’ each made from a pair of near identical seashells, set together on a band of copper wire. The idea was to wear the ‘headphones’ and find solace in the sound of the crashing waves. Well, I heard no such thing. I heard an organic static, if anything, and was rather disappointed with the product regardless of my respect and admiration for the idea. When I sat on the beach at Carmel, however, I realized that I was wrong about the headphones. The waves do not crash, one after another, as I had imagined. They overlap to form a rather uniform and steady noise, undulating but relentless. Perhaps that persistence is what the artist had in mind.

The professor I spoke with at UC Santa Cruz was very encouraging about my interest in pursuing a career as a marine scientist. He as well as several of his colleagues had studied the arts in their undergraduate education, and he said that the field welcomes ‘migrants’ such as myself. He also warned against taking too many classes at the community college, as the course of study in population ecology and systematics that interests me is so unrelated to sub-organismal biology that I will become bored and disillusioned by rote introductory biology classes. He advised me to crush the GRE, especially the quantitative section, and to volunteer for some scientists in Santa Barbara. Bill and I are trying to outdo each other on the GRE, and I am trying to line up a trip with a few scientists for the fall.

It is ten-thirty in the evening, and it is past my bedtime of these days. I am registered for ‘Marine Life and its Environment’ class at Moorpark College, which is scheduled to begin this coming Monday at the grueling schedule of 11am-5pm Monday through Thursday. I am also up for a job from a temp agency which pays $16 to $20 an hour to work at a guitar amplifier manufacturer. I do not know if I will be able to take that job as well as the class, and I honestly do not know which option is a better occupier of my time. In order to volunteer for any of the marine biologists working around here one must hold a Rescue Diver certification, and that is no cheap venture. It is comparable in both price and time to the SOLO program in New Hampshire. We shall see.

So that concludes my first entry. Goodnight.