Thanks

I have quite a few people to thank for my journey and the direction my life has gone. I realize whenever I explain to somebody new about what I'm doing and how I got there, I have been lucky in so many ways, mainly because of the awesome people I have in my life.

Thank you Mom. You taught me how to be a good person and how to take care of myself. You've helped me through many obstacles, including schooling, and I appreciate your continued guidance and support (but would ya quit worrying about me?!).

Thanks Dad for supporting me through school when I needed it and for showing me so many things growing up. Thanks for teaching me that I can fix things myself.

Thank you David for the long talks and for encouraging me to support my opinions logically in our little debates! Thanks for giving an alternate point of view when I am surrounded in people who generally agree with me most of the time.

Thank you Mary for keeping me in the loop while I was in Korea (when Dad seemed to be allergic to email!).

Thanks Tanya for gentle guidance and support in my life decision-making. Thanks for the positivity and love you have an abundance of! And thank you so much for visiting me in Korea and burning with me.

Thanks Chris Kornegay for hiring me, convincing me to stay a little longer, letting me leave and then letting me come back. Thanks for teaching me how to weld and for putting up with my snarky attitude!

Thanks Dean for understanding.

Thank you thank you thank you Ruvi, Shereen, Rekha and Aasha. I've never met more generous and open, loving people. The great advice you have given will stay with me forever. Thanks Shereen for all the amazing food and for showing me how to make some of it. Thanks Rekha for teaching me all I ever needed to know about Star Wars (and for always making me giggle).

I also want to thank the following people for general support, love and/or guidance, Chelsea Kent, Justin Dessel, Tara Irwin, Heather Walters, Thomas Leach, Jim Jordan, Derek Buranen, Grandma and Grandpa Dessel and family, Grandma and Grandpa Moellers and family, Lorna Rothmeyer, Matt Wohltman, Lizzy Miller, Chris Kasych, Chris Manfredi, Eric Kim and Kay, Jo Young Min, Kat Smith, Jennifer Gorman, Wendy Havlik, and all my burner family. I don't know where I would be without you.

Thanks!!!

Burning Man 2010

August 2010 marked my second year at Burning Man. This is an annual arts festival held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada which has been going on for over 20 years. The idea is that all the attendees are the citizens of a temporary city, it is an experiment in community and self-reliance in that everybody must bring whatever they need to survive one week in one of the harshest environments in America. You can only buy coffee and ice. There are no sales of anything else, including art, food or drink, etc. If you want it, you bring it. The people who go (called burners) often deck their camps out in decorations and/or provide some gift in their camp, like a bar, a dance floor and DJ, or maybe some interactive art. Then there’s art that people bring and construct out in the middle of the playa (the open desert space within and around the city) that we can all walk around and look at or play with. There are also art cars crawling around the city, which are all mutated to the point where they are no longer cars, but various animals or other objects. The end of the week-long event is marked by the burning of a very large wooden man (we call him “the man”). Artists are not paid, they just do it because they want to. Tickets are far from free, but they help pay for the organizers, the porta-potties, and other urban necessities, like on-site ambulances...which are used surprisingly often.






My burn did not start out the way I thought it would. Due to life, my entire camp had to bail on this year’s burn. No Wasef this year. No Tanya to lose my mind with. Luckily, another friend invited me to stay in his camp with four other awesome Phoenix-area burners. The week and a half I had in Arizona before the event was spent gathering many supplies I no longer had - a bike, a tent, sleeping gear, goggles for the intense dust storms the playa is known for, something fun to wear (costuming is a HUGE part of Burning Man!), and many other necessities for living in the desert.

I rode up in an RV with my friend Ruvi and several others. I learned my first year that RVs are the way to go! Got plenty of sleep there and back. The catch is that you have to clean every last speck of dust out of them when you get home or you and your mates have to pay an exorbitant cleaning fee (and playa’s favorite past time is sneaking bits into places you didn’t know existed.)





My camp was great! We had a flamingo-based theme, complete with painted furniture, flags, and even plastic lawn flamingos (which were curiously labeled “plastic livestock” on the shipping box), which we of course molded into naughty positions. My camp mates even made a large number of flamingo/Burning Man 2010 dog tags to give out to our friends, new and old (mine even has my name on it!) We had a bar as well, and our lovely neighbor to the east, Charles, regularly graced us with his DJ-ing skills. To add to the awesomeness of my camp, right next door was a camp that included a good friend of mine from Orange County whom I hadn’t seen in a couple years, and one of his camp mates made fabulous dinners every night (which I was invited to enjoy as well). Then on the other side of their wonderful camp were my other burner friends from Arizona. They were camped next to the porta-potties, so any given trip from camp to the loo took around an hour with all the stops for socializing. Home rocked!








Without the girlfriend I thought I was going to have with me there, I mostly ran around during the day by myself, seeking adventure. I would pick an event or a friend’s camp I wanted to visit, and just let the playa pull me in whatever direction along the way. Like maybe I would aim to find a friend, but get hollered at by a bar-full of burners beckoning me over for a drink. Sometimes it took a while to get to where I wanted to go, but that was the point. I never wore a watch, just sometimes checked the sun’s position to see how much daylight I had left before it got dark (and cold). There are just so many camps at the burn with fun things to do, I could wander all day by myself and have a grand time, not worried about what other events I may be missing or what time it is. There are trampolines, dance floors, bars, giant seesaws, jungle gyms, and other fun things to climb on all over the place. And the citizens of Black Rock brought it all! It’s one of the most amazing places I’ve seen on this planet so far. The creativity, acceptance of different people, and the giving spirit are astounding. Don’t get me wrong, Burning Man is not totally full of hippies and tree-huggers. There’s a wide range of folks here. Many are just so different from what you would expect (carnivorous, red-meat loving BBQ-ers, people who have no problem wasting large amounts of propane to make lovely explosions, and also people who just want to ruin your day by telling you to “fuck off”). But it’s amazing to see what people achieve with the freedom from criticism and failure that this event allows us.










On the Monday we arrived, the streets were nice and packed down by dried rain (very convenient for us cyclists), but that evening it stormed for a while. I hid in my tent from the cold and curled up in the blankets for about an hour, until I heard the wind and rain subside and the residents of Black Rock City start cheering. Cheering? I guessed they were really happy it stopped raining! But then I heard my camp mate Kurt imitating that silly “double rainbow” Youtube video (“What does it mean?!”), so I went outside and saw what the cheering was about. Yet another burn with a double rainbow! Not a bad start to the week. Only bad thing was that since it rained and people walked on the streets afterward, clumps of playa were kicked up and dried the roads into a cobblestone street system. Great. Had to hold my butt off my bike seat all week to avoid the bruising.

The week went incredibly smoothly and wonderfully. The weather started out chilly, but warmed up nicely throughout the week. I did not have the ex-boyfriend drama I was sure I was going to suffer through, him being camped a couple hundred feet from me. We even got along! Also, I was surprised to find a few friends there that I didn’t know were coming, like Paula who’d moved to Colorado and Hamish who came all the way from Australia! Very awesome surprises!



Another fabulous surprise was that I actually found my friend Roxy. She and I both went to Arizona State and lived next to each other a year ago. I’d forgotten where her camp was and she had trouble finding mine, so both of us were a bit worried. But it was only Tuesday when I was out with Dixon and he went over to compliment a cute girl on her very cool chopper-style bicycle, and I looked over to find it was Roxy he was chatting with! Awesome coincidence. We met each other’s friends and had some fun with a bunch of hula hoops that just happened to be there (what?!)






So during the day I would traipse around and find friends to hang with, then at night I would find friends to spend the eve with and we’d generally go lose our minds out on playa. I got lost in some incredible psychedelic art that appeals to all the senses. One of my favorite things was this thing that (I think) was called “Electric Lazy.” It was a lazy-boy with wheels that was pulled around the playa by two cyclists on their bikes. The chair was covered in cushioning and fur, and when you sat down, they reclined you in it and warmed you up in a fur blanket. A set of glasses with strobe-lights covered your closed eyes, and headphones played ambient music. When it all started, the chair vibrated in unison with the lights and music. The shapes you normally see when you concentrate on your closed eyes became more pronounced and your body just felt like it was no longer on this planet. I just got lost in an abyss of freedom from normal senses, just comfort, visions, and movement.








Wednesday was the Arizona burners’ Santarchy or Santacon. This is where we all dress up in santa suits and go on a rampage! We do this every December in Phoenix and it is incredibly fun! The turnout this last year was around 200! Other cities do this too. Anyway, it was fun on playa because our friend Chris brought his sno-cone machine so we surprised unsuspecting burners with snowballs!











On Thursday was the annual bunny march, so a bunch of us donned ears and tails and went out to the playa. This event was huge! There were hundreds of bunnies! There were bunny art cars there, including my friend Fuzzy’s which I hopped on (no pun intended) and rode around for the event. Another art car was from my friend Dean’s camp - Black Rock City Animal Control. They were capturing and tagging loose bunnies all over the place. I pointed out to a few random bunnies that we out-numbered Animal Control, so we attacked one of theirs and tackled him on the ground. I got tagged twice (so came out with a couple BRC Animal Control tags). Found Dean near their art car and said hi. Their car is a big van with bars on the back where they capture stray “animals” out on playa. The front has a large hanging carrot to attract the bunnies. It’s really easy to find friends like Dean and Fuzzy when they have an art car they’re usually with.


On the bunny march I met Konrad, a Polish guy who came all the way from Michigan for the burn. We hung out on the bunny car for a while that night and later went out on playa to see a really awesome DJ called Bassnectar. We were meant to watch him at Root Society, which has an amazing setup. The DJ booth there is set into a big framed structure with canvas stretched across the front surrounding the DJ. Two movie projectors are set up to display images and video to go with the music. But there is space behind the canvas, so dancers go back there or even better, a couple my camp neighbors hung silks behind it and dressed up in gold suits to perform aerials. It was incredible. Though this night, Bassnectar had to move from Root Society to another very awesome dance floor called Nexus. Nexus had a giant steel globe that shot fire out of it from all sides, a domed dance floor with a beautiful cityscape wooden art piece backdrop, and on each side of this dome were adult-sized jungle gyms, with huge swings and chains and rope ladders to play or dance on. So awesome!





Friday was spent trying to find my bike (fail, someone moved it or stole it), and running around with Roxy by ourselves finally. Nice to get some girl time! We wandered about playing on art and talking to people. It was very fun, but we ended up staying up way too late! Only too late because when you try to sleep in your tent during the day it gets too hot. Saturday was spent recovering (my body was upset with me for all the abuse) and I had to hide out in my friend’s RV for a while. Luckily, I recovered and got my steam back that evening and was ready for the burn! But the dust storms that had raged on all day barely subsided enough and the fireworks and explosions that make the man burn so awesome were a bit difficult to see through all the dust. Nonetheless, I had an amazing burn night and stayed up once again till the sun came up out dancing and socializing with Konrad and whomever else crossed our paths.




By Sunday morning I was ready to go home and be free from the constant dry dust. Once in the RV I slept like a rock for most of the way home and couldn’t even be awoken for food. It felt good to get home and clean everything! The dust tends to get to you by the end. Time to hose everything down and take one big load of laundry to the cleaners!


Some of the things I took home from this year’s burn are feelings of freedom and relaxation. I really got out of the habit of constantly needing to know what time it is. It was really nice not caring. I have been deliberately not looking lately because I don’t care to know. I just want to eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired, and come and go when I want to. Of course, one can only go so far with this because of work and other responsibilities, but when applicable, I highly recommend this practice. Another feeling I brought back was that feeling of not caring if my art lives up to the expectations of others. It does me no good to think up an idea and not go through with creating it for whatever silly reasons I seem to come up with (it’s expensive, it might not turn out to be that cool, I don’t know where to put it, etc.) It’s about time I get back to making things the way I used to, though travel does make it tough.