summer fun 2018
By Tamika Whitenack
Well, upon rereading my summer post from last year, I would like to start off by saying that PLUOTS have entered my life consciousness and although I have been aware of their existence for quite some time, I didn't include them in my stone fruit rankings last summer and I feel ashamed. I sampled lots of delicious pluots at the farmer's market recently, and for that reason, my stone fruit ranking of this summer is...drumroll?....nectarines, apricots, pluots, plums, peaches (but a good peach might make it above the pluots).
Now that we have that out of the way...
This has been a long, busy summer. I got home on my birthday, May 20, and am heading back to Poughkeepsie on September 1....so it was basically a 15 week summer, 1.5x as long as any summer during normal school! It definitely feels like I've been home for a long time, and it really does feel like I've lived here my whole life –which sounds silly, since it's mostly true, but is sort of strange concept since technically I now spend the better part of each year at college? Sense of place is often on my mind since going to college, and my overall conclusion is that El Cerrito and the Bay Area and my house here will always be home, even as Vassar increasingly starts to feel like home away from home. Additionally, I'm extremely excited to go back, and looking forward to this semester at Vassar...but it will always be a little sad for me to leave home, because I have a very good life here and I am quite content.
Okay, okay, sorry about all the musing. You know how it goes with me. On towards what I actually did this summer!
First 3 Weeks
The first 3 weeks were pretty relaxed, and feel so long ago I'm struggling to remember exactly what I did. I believe there were some boring visits to the doctor's office, a bout of cleaning fever, a healthy dose of running and visiting with family and cooking and baking....all the things you'd expect me to do. I felt amazingly relaxed and almost got bored! We also took a quick trip to Kings Canyon, which was beautiful! I love big trees. The river was also quite impressive, and actually seemed considerable enough to warrant the many "Danger: #1 cause of death in the park is drowning" signs.
Summer Job with Camp ANV
After these first 3 weeks came work! My job was the majority of my summer (8 weeks), and I feel like I actually got a sense of what it's like to work a full time job. I was a camp counselor (the kiddos call me Ms. Tamika) at Acta Non Verba, a youth urban farm project in East Oakland. A typical MWF included cooking and farming sessions in the morning, then capoeira and digital storytelling (usually photography or video) in the afternoon. Tuesdays were swim days, Thursdays were field trip days. I loved my job! It was great to be working with kids and food and spending lots of time outdoors. It was definitely a tiring job, but rewarding (I know this sounds very cliche but it's very true). It's hard for me to totally capture how this experience affected me, but I feel that it did have a strong impact on me and I am very, very grateful to have had this work experience. I learned a lot about working with a community that I didn't really grow up in and about the compromise between organization vision and the reality of resources. I also felt like I glimpsed what life routine might look like if I had a real job...my day was pretty much 6am wake up, BART commute, work, BART commute, run, dinner, early bedtime. The 2 hours each day of commuting was a little rough, especially given the early wake up, but I read soooo many books this summer, which was awesome(see below for full list)! And I enjoyed having the super early bedtime (9 or 10pm) which I disciplined myself with knowing I would get up early.
Okay, I'm really rambling here, like I said, it's difficult to explain my job experience in words to really convey how special and enjoyable it was to me. But there was so much cooking! And appreciation of good food and where it comes from! Also we went camping! And children are wonderful :)
Some highlights: teaching the kids how to make potstickers for cooking class one day, camping trip at Tilden, Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk field trip (field trips in general were fun, I got to do lots of fun SF tourist things lol), snail hunts in the garden (don't worry we just remove them, don't kill any souls here), kid dance parties, kids playing hair salon with me as hair model, music and dance in capoeira, helping out with cooking so many yummy things (fried green tomatoes were a highlight! also samosas, banana lumpia, and so much more). Idk there were a lot more special things too but if I keep going I'm just gonna ramble more.
Shenanigans when I wasn't at work
Even with work, I was still doing lots of stuff on the weekends and sometimes during the week (I can't help it, I'm a compulsive baker and made something almost every week to bring for staff oops). I spent 2 weekends playing tour guide for one of my Vassar friends, which was super fun because I got to do more tourist stuff! The first weekend was our nature adventure to Angel Island and Muir Woods, the second weekend was SF stuff and lots of food–Chinatown, Japantown, Asian Art Museum, Golden Gate Bridge and Japanese Tea Garden. A different weekend was spent at Asilomar with family, which was great to spend time with the cousins and rellies and also a nice dose of California beach. We also had a few other family events thrown in there, and on my week off from work I managed to make it down to Yosemite with Andy to visit Cam! This was a dream of 48 hours, Yosemite is one of my happy places and even though it was crowded we managed to squeeze in a lot: hiking (to a lake!), valley floor wandering, stargazing, a run, more hiking to a ~secret waterfall~ ...plus lots of great views and a lot of good car ride time.
Overall, it was quite a successful summer in terms of hitting nature spots and spending time with family. I didn't do the greatest job of seeing friends all the time, but it was nice because this didn't really feel like a failure. I have less of a sense of urgency to hang out with people now, which I think reflects a change in my relationships with people from high school. I don't think this suggests that the friendship is weakened, but an acknowledgement that the value of the friendship has already been established, such that seeing each other is not necessary for the friendship, but still normal and pleasant when it does occur. I am not sure if that makes sense, but that is the best way that I can describe it.
Sisterly love
I believe I also feel that way about a certain sister of mine, and even stronger, since the strength of our relationships also sort of involves 14 years of growing up together and also like shared identity and blood and all that good stuff. The strength of my sistership does not feel threatened by time apart, though of course I think fondly of our somewhat peaceful cohabitation and am a little sad that it will never again happen in that same way. I say all this to introduce what I sort of think of as phase 3 of my summer, which was our trip to China to visit Mariko!
The fam spent about a week in Shanghai playing tourists/houseguests for Mariko. When people ask me how it was, my standard reply has been: hot, humid, and lots of people–sort of overwhelming, but it was good to see Mariko, we ate some yumyum food, and we saw some cool things! That's a sort of annoyingly generic answer, but I think it sums up the trip? I'm hoping that the heat and humidity will have prepared me to go back to the East Coast and Vassar weather will be no problem for me. The discomfort of adjusting to weather and people and just local stuff also made me think about how my privileged background and where I come from plays into the type of tourist that I am and how I'm not sure how I feel about that, but that's a long bit of thought vomit that nobody wants to read right now. The Mariko visit also made me consider what factors I might want to take into account before moving to live abroad for an extended period of time. (Rest assured, currently I plan to get back to full-time living in the Bay Area asap...going back to that sense of place thought above)
Highlights of the trip for me included the Chinese garden aesthetic, playing soccer with Mariko's soccer team, wandering around the French concession finding street food with my mom (don't let her know, but I actually think Mom and I make a good traveling duo in these sorts of situations), buying lots of fruit and veggies on the street and eating so much dragon fruit yum, my frozen peas!, not having to wait for the metro (coming from my BART life, the Shanghai system was a dream omg), and collecting amusing t-shirt slogans with my dad. Some favorite t-shirt quotes: "let's not let him have a enjoy" "he society brainwashing every morning" "i'm fine thank you for not asking" "even my feelings have feelings" "life is not a fairytale. if you lose your shoe at midnight, you are drunk" "never trust a man who doesn't like cats"
Also, I sort of just appreciated spending time together as a family. It happens very rarely these days, but I think our family is pretty hilarious to interact with and that the dynamics now that Mariko and I are kind of adult (lol we all know that's not really true) are different...again, not sure how to describe this, but it was kind of nice to just spend prolonged periods of time with my parents and Mar and get up to shenanigans like being amused by t-shirts, making fun of each other (bathroom humor is still strong in this fam, I blame my father the perpetual 8-yr-old boy), and idk I feel like we're at the point where we all get on each other's nerves, but we know exactly the ways that we get on each other's nerves, so it's kind of like watching a comedy that we've written ourselves? This is my way of saying that I love my family.
End of Summer
Okay, now for the last part of my summer, which hardly even counts. I've been spending the past week being relaxed (I didn't set an alarm one day!) and squishing in my last running and food things and family stuff. Also seeing some friends. Oh and some last minute hiking! Diablo with Cam and Andy and a sort of unexpected 14 mile hike in Pt Reyes with Julia before she went off to college.
Books
So yes, that was my summer in a blog post! Also, I want to add a full reading list because I really am happy that I got to read for pleasure (not that reading for school isn't fun, it's just not the same), and I enjoyed most of what I read so I'm gonna list them all now.
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihira
The Bees by Laline Paul
The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz
My Brother, My Sister, and I by Yoko Kawashima Watkins
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
The Penderwicks at Last by Jeanne Birdsall
...that's all I can remember but there is a chance there were more! Now I'm working on The Color of Water by James McBride, and may or may not finish before school starts...if you want my mini review of any of the books above, lmk!
ALSO OMG I CANNOT LEAVE OUT THAT A BIG ENDEAVOR OF THE SUMMER WAS AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER which became a family activity and me and the parents made it through all 3 seasons lol family bonding with the TV I'm so ashamed....but also family time :)
It's hard to truly conclude a whole summer, so I won't even try. Instead, enjoy some pictures and get excited to start hearing from me on this blog more...
I had lots of difficulty with photo uploads (technology is a struggle), so this is just a smattering of photos and does not include a lot of important events...hopefully later!
Well, upon rereading my summer post from last year, I would like to start off by saying that PLUOTS have entered my life consciousness and although I have been aware of their existence for quite some time, I didn't include them in my stone fruit rankings last summer and I feel ashamed. I sampled lots of delicious pluots at the farmer's market recently, and for that reason, my stone fruit ranking of this summer is...drumroll?....nectarines, apricots, pluots, plums, peaches (but a good peach might make it above the pluots).
Now that we have that out of the way...
This has been a long, busy summer. I got home on my birthday, May 20, and am heading back to Poughkeepsie on September 1....so it was basically a 15 week summer, 1.5x as long as any summer during normal school! It definitely feels like I've been home for a long time, and it really does feel like I've lived here my whole life –which sounds silly, since it's mostly true, but is sort of strange concept since technically I now spend the better part of each year at college? Sense of place is often on my mind since going to college, and my overall conclusion is that El Cerrito and the Bay Area and my house here will always be home, even as Vassar increasingly starts to feel like home away from home. Additionally, I'm extremely excited to go back, and looking forward to this semester at Vassar...but it will always be a little sad for me to leave home, because I have a very good life here and I am quite content.
Okay, okay, sorry about all the musing. You know how it goes with me. On towards what I actually did this summer!
First 3 Weeks
The first 3 weeks were pretty relaxed, and feel so long ago I'm struggling to remember exactly what I did. I believe there were some boring visits to the doctor's office, a bout of cleaning fever, a healthy dose of running and visiting with family and cooking and baking....all the things you'd expect me to do. I felt amazingly relaxed and almost got bored! We also took a quick trip to Kings Canyon, which was beautiful! I love big trees. The river was also quite impressive, and actually seemed considerable enough to warrant the many "Danger: #1 cause of death in the park is drowning" signs.
Summer Job with Camp ANV
After these first 3 weeks came work! My job was the majority of my summer (8 weeks), and I feel like I actually got a sense of what it's like to work a full time job. I was a camp counselor (the kiddos call me Ms. Tamika) at Acta Non Verba, a youth urban farm project in East Oakland. A typical MWF included cooking and farming sessions in the morning, then capoeira and digital storytelling (usually photography or video) in the afternoon. Tuesdays were swim days, Thursdays were field trip days. I loved my job! It was great to be working with kids and food and spending lots of time outdoors. It was definitely a tiring job, but rewarding (I know this sounds very cliche but it's very true). It's hard for me to totally capture how this experience affected me, but I feel that it did have a strong impact on me and I am very, very grateful to have had this work experience. I learned a lot about working with a community that I didn't really grow up in and about the compromise between organization vision and the reality of resources. I also felt like I glimpsed what life routine might look like if I had a real job...my day was pretty much 6am wake up, BART commute, work, BART commute, run, dinner, early bedtime. The 2 hours each day of commuting was a little rough, especially given the early wake up, but I read soooo many books this summer, which was awesome(see below for full list)! And I enjoyed having the super early bedtime (9 or 10pm) which I disciplined myself with knowing I would get up early.
Okay, I'm really rambling here, like I said, it's difficult to explain my job experience in words to really convey how special and enjoyable it was to me. But there was so much cooking! And appreciation of good food and where it comes from! Also we went camping! And children are wonderful :)
Some highlights: teaching the kids how to make potstickers for cooking class one day, camping trip at Tilden, Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk field trip (field trips in general were fun, I got to do lots of fun SF tourist things lol), snail hunts in the garden (don't worry we just remove them, don't kill any souls here), kid dance parties, kids playing hair salon with me as hair model, music and dance in capoeira, helping out with cooking so many yummy things (fried green tomatoes were a highlight! also samosas, banana lumpia, and so much more). Idk there were a lot more special things too but if I keep going I'm just gonna ramble more.
Shenanigans when I wasn't at work
Even with work, I was still doing lots of stuff on the weekends and sometimes during the week (I can't help it, I'm a compulsive baker and made something almost every week to bring for staff oops). I spent 2 weekends playing tour guide for one of my Vassar friends, which was super fun because I got to do more tourist stuff! The first weekend was our nature adventure to Angel Island and Muir Woods, the second weekend was SF stuff and lots of food–Chinatown, Japantown, Asian Art Museum, Golden Gate Bridge and Japanese Tea Garden. A different weekend was spent at Asilomar with family, which was great to spend time with the cousins and rellies and also a nice dose of California beach. We also had a few other family events thrown in there, and on my week off from work I managed to make it down to Yosemite with Andy to visit Cam! This was a dream of 48 hours, Yosemite is one of my happy places and even though it was crowded we managed to squeeze in a lot: hiking (to a lake!), valley floor wandering, stargazing, a run, more hiking to a ~secret waterfall~ ...plus lots of great views and a lot of good car ride time.
Overall, it was quite a successful summer in terms of hitting nature spots and spending time with family. I didn't do the greatest job of seeing friends all the time, but it was nice because this didn't really feel like a failure. I have less of a sense of urgency to hang out with people now, which I think reflects a change in my relationships with people from high school. I don't think this suggests that the friendship is weakened, but an acknowledgement that the value of the friendship has already been established, such that seeing each other is not necessary for the friendship, but still normal and pleasant when it does occur. I am not sure if that makes sense, but that is the best way that I can describe it.
Sisterly love
I believe I also feel that way about a certain sister of mine, and even stronger, since the strength of our relationships also sort of involves 14 years of growing up together and also like shared identity and blood and all that good stuff. The strength of my sistership does not feel threatened by time apart, though of course I think fondly of our somewhat peaceful cohabitation and am a little sad that it will never again happen in that same way. I say all this to introduce what I sort of think of as phase 3 of my summer, which was our trip to China to visit Mariko!
The fam spent about a week in Shanghai playing tourists/houseguests for Mariko. When people ask me how it was, my standard reply has been: hot, humid, and lots of people–sort of overwhelming, but it was good to see Mariko, we ate some yumyum food, and we saw some cool things! That's a sort of annoyingly generic answer, but I think it sums up the trip? I'm hoping that the heat and humidity will have prepared me to go back to the East Coast and Vassar weather will be no problem for me. The discomfort of adjusting to weather and people and just local stuff also made me think about how my privileged background and where I come from plays into the type of tourist that I am and how I'm not sure how I feel about that, but that's a long bit of thought vomit that nobody wants to read right now. The Mariko visit also made me consider what factors I might want to take into account before moving to live abroad for an extended period of time. (Rest assured, currently I plan to get back to full-time living in the Bay Area asap...going back to that sense of place thought above)
Highlights of the trip for me included the Chinese garden aesthetic, playing soccer with Mariko's soccer team, wandering around the French concession finding street food with my mom (don't let her know, but I actually think Mom and I make a good traveling duo in these sorts of situations), buying lots of fruit and veggies on the street and eating so much dragon fruit yum, my frozen peas!, not having to wait for the metro (coming from my BART life, the Shanghai system was a dream omg), and collecting amusing t-shirt slogans with my dad. Some favorite t-shirt quotes: "let's not let him have a enjoy" "he society brainwashing every morning" "i'm fine thank you for not asking" "even my feelings have feelings" "life is not a fairytale. if you lose your shoe at midnight, you are drunk" "never trust a man who doesn't like cats"
Also, I sort of just appreciated spending time together as a family. It happens very rarely these days, but I think our family is pretty hilarious to interact with and that the dynamics now that Mariko and I are kind of adult (lol we all know that's not really true) are different...again, not sure how to describe this, but it was kind of nice to just spend prolonged periods of time with my parents and Mar and get up to shenanigans like being amused by t-shirts, making fun of each other (bathroom humor is still strong in this fam, I blame my father the perpetual 8-yr-old boy), and idk I feel like we're at the point where we all get on each other's nerves, but we know exactly the ways that we get on each other's nerves, so it's kind of like watching a comedy that we've written ourselves? This is my way of saying that I love my family.
End of Summer
Okay, now for the last part of my summer, which hardly even counts. I've been spending the past week being relaxed (I didn't set an alarm one day!) and squishing in my last running and food things and family stuff. Also seeing some friends. Oh and some last minute hiking! Diablo with Cam and Andy and a sort of unexpected 14 mile hike in Pt Reyes with Julia before she went off to college.
Books
So yes, that was my summer in a blog post! Also, I want to add a full reading list because I really am happy that I got to read for pleasure (not that reading for school isn't fun, it's just not the same), and I enjoyed most of what I read so I'm gonna list them all now.
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihira
The Bees by Laline Paul
The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz
My Brother, My Sister, and I by Yoko Kawashima Watkins
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
The Penderwicks at Last by Jeanne Birdsall
...that's all I can remember but there is a chance there were more! Now I'm working on The Color of Water by James McBride, and may or may not finish before school starts...if you want my mini review of any of the books above, lmk!
ALSO OMG I CANNOT LEAVE OUT THAT A BIG ENDEAVOR OF THE SUMMER WAS AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER which became a family activity and me and the parents made it through all 3 seasons lol family bonding with the TV I'm so ashamed....but also family time :)
It's hard to truly conclude a whole summer, so I won't even try. Instead, enjoy some pictures and get excited to start hearing from me on this blog more...
I had lots of difficulty with photo uploads (technology is a struggle), so this is just a smattering of photos and does not include a lot of important events...hopefully later!
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| tea with Bachan |
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| little blackberry pies |
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| i love the bridge |
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| tilden botanical garden |
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| ice cream |
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| kings canyon waterfall |
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| kings canyon river |
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| kings canyon wildflowers |
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| big trees <3 |
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Haha I've had a "beginning of the semester" blog open and half written for a while now and totally forgot about a summer post! Guess I should work on that too... Also I read 'The Namesake' and remember enjoying it :)
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