My drive today took me back to Eustis, north of Orlando. For only the second time this trip, I revisited a town -- the first was Seattle -- and for the second time I spent the evening hanging out with Alex (my Floridian friend from the Utena forum, who again is not to be confused with my brother Alex in Charlotte, my college friend Alexis in Seattle, or my new friend Aleksa in Chicago).
The drive, as so often happens, was not very interesting. It was marked by my final admission of defeat in the struggle to keep Zhuge Liang attached to the dashboard. (For those of you who read only periodically, Zhuge Liang is my GPS; I am not keeping an actual Chinese tactician attached to my dashboard. Or anything else, for that matter, but I'm getting to that.) The sticky disc the GPS came with gave out way back at Lake Tahoe. I'd been using double-sided tape to keep it mounted, replacing the tape periodically as the sun's heat melted the adhesive, but as both the GPS and the dash became increasingly marked up, the tape became less and less useful. Finally, I believe in Indianapolis, I decided to try Velcro. This turned out not to be such a great idea; the Velcro did not stick any better than the tape had, but its residue is much harder to remove. So with only a couple days to go, I threw up my hands and have been riding with Zhuge Liang perched in the front seat with my foxes. Sometimes you have to know when to say when.
Anyway, as I was trying to say, interstate driving is boring, especially in the South, where the road is flanked by generic trees and you can tell this is not an actual forest: you're not seeing landscape, just landscaping. So I listened to some NPR, cued up my favorite traveling songs, and sang along to lunch in Jacksonville and at last to Alex's house in Eustis. Here, after other nocturnal activities -- the 1984 edition of Trivial Pursuit at Olivia's Cafe (where it turns out Edgar Cayce is the right answer to every question), dinner at the Mason Jar, and watching Perfect Blue, to name a few -- we went out on Alex's porch to look for lacewings. We didn't find any, but we did discover the praying mantis. I mean that in the same sense that Columbus discovered America -- it may not have been new to other people, but it was new to him -- and the emotional content was the same as if we had never known such a thing existed. We oohed and aahed as she showed off her spindly, frightening arms as if posing for a textbook photo (which Alex's mother indeed tried to take). Eventually she marched off into the bushes, wagging her butt at us, leaving us to look instead for the large toads and tree frogs that densely populate Alex's yard and, apparently, her grill.
Tomorrow the two of us will drive into Orlando to meet Andrea, another forum friend. We'll tour some gardens and go to some kind of tea and coffee market that Andrea says is brilliant, and then, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, I will get in the car one last time and point it towards home. Tonight's is my 100th post to Lover's Lanes. In the spirit of adventure and shooting for beyond the horizon, my post from home concluding this long journey will be #101!
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Pics and it happened
Charlotte has been a nice, cozy dream. I've been holed up with Alex playing D&D and watching anime and doing other things that don't photograph well. So this seems like the moment for another photo post!
Among my first views of Yellowstone National Park!
Mule deer like this buck are everywhere in Yellowstone. This particular specimen was grazing right next to the visitors' center. Attention whore!
Ground squirrels!!! They're a lot like the normal kind, but without the tails. These two live near the petrified tree, which makes me wonder if they eat petrified acorns.
But what of sweeping Yellowstone geological panoramas, you ask? Well, this is a start! It's hard to capture scenic beauty, because I've come to the conclusion that "scenic" means "uninteractive and remote," but this is one of the better landscapes that came out of that expedition.
Caterpillars or worms of some sort, crawling all over the handrail of a boardwalk in west Yellowstone. The other tourists were all grossed the fuck out. I was just wondering what they metamorphose into.
BUFFALO! This bison came close enough to the pullout that I could have touched him. I didn't. He looks very sad in this picture, but in real life he looks like a decaying zombie bison.
Yellowstone is of course known for its thermal springs. Here's one of them, practically unmarked, beside the road.
And here is a more famous geothermal feature: Old Faithful in mid-eruption! I have a picture of the geyser at full mast, but it's on its side and this picture does a better job showing what the geyser actually looks like.
Last Yellowstone picture. See the horizontal line in the center of the photo? That's where incinerated forest ends and live forest begins. The transition is that stark. Controlled burns, I guess?
Obligatory Mount Rushmore photo! TR looks left out back there.
And on the way back from Mount Rushmore, I stopped at the Reptile Gardens, which host an impressive collection of gross creatures. These are death's-head cockroaches.
This snake's name has been lost because I was careless about snapping the nameplates, but isn't he pretty? Don't you just want to give him a big hug?
The Reptile Gardens had a bird exhibition, too. Action Wildlife Photographer makes his return in this startling picture of a bald eagle striving for liberty against its oppressive and probably British captor!
The Reptile Gardens cost rather a lot to run.
The Badlands were to my mind much more dramatic than Yellowstone, but they were equally hard to photograph. They're like a mountain range in miniature!
The Badlands are not at all uniform in height, shape, or composition. Every turnout offers a different view!
A pic from the Sioux Falls butterfly garden. These two were kind enough to let me get close. One butterfly landed on me and gave me a kiss!
And in other insectoid news, here is the sculpture that welcomes you to Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. Made entirely out of scrap metal, this waspish monstrosity is a sight to see.
And here is the Forevertron itself! Towering over visitors in its steampunk glory and studded with strange machines and decrepit spiral staircases, it begs to be climbed on! But you're not allowed! >.<
A velociraptor menaces visitors to the dinosaur exhibit at the Brookfield Zoo in La Grange, outside Chicago. His head, arms, and tail move periodically to startle tourists. I can't imagine why these things needed to hunt in packs.
Aleksa was terrified and fascinated by the dinosaurs. She spent that walk clinging to me and cringing whenever an animatronic reptile looked at her the wrong way. But she enjoyed herself, and I did too, partly vicariously thanks to Aleksa!
Polar bear!!! Wait, polar bear? Yes, Brookfield has two polar bears. This one was one of the more active animals at the zoo; he showboated for us a little, lumbering around the front of his cage. His back is dyed green because of the chlorine in his wading pool. I have mixed feelings about that.
And at the other temperature extreme, camels! Two humps means these guys are Bactrian camels. I'm not sure whether you sit on a hump or straddle the space between them.
At Indiana University at Bloomington, the Lilly Library collection of rare books displays this lock of Sylvia Plath's hair alongside a couple poems she wrote. Who got a hold of a lock of Sylvia Plath's hair, why, and at what point did they decide it should be put on display for the edification of the public?
John James Jingleheimer Audubon's illustrated book of birds is as large as a toddler's mattress when opened, though because not many original copies remain I don't suggest you actually use it as such. Every week they turn the page, and this week was grackles!
The proper orientation of this photo of Ogle Lake, east of Bloomington, is left as an exercise to the reader.
And at last, here I am ensconced with Ruth and Robert in Indianapolis after a Haruhi Suzumiya marathon. I'm on the right. It's late in the evening and we're all a little tired, but an Utena forum member threatened to perform certain acts on us that don't bear repetition in a family blog if we didn't post pics, so here we are! Stay away from my butt!
I haven't taken many photos since Indianapolis, and I haven't uploaded the ones I have. I may get to make one more photo post before drawing this blog to a close. Tomorrow night, God willing, I'll be in Savannah, the next night in Orlando, and the following night... well, I'll be back in a place I've been away from for both too long and just the right amount of time.
Among my first views of Yellowstone National Park!
Mule deer like this buck are everywhere in Yellowstone. This particular specimen was grazing right next to the visitors' center. Attention whore!
Ground squirrels!!! They're a lot like the normal kind, but without the tails. These two live near the petrified tree, which makes me wonder if they eat petrified acorns.
But what of sweeping Yellowstone geological panoramas, you ask? Well, this is a start! It's hard to capture scenic beauty, because I've come to the conclusion that "scenic" means "uninteractive and remote," but this is one of the better landscapes that came out of that expedition.
Caterpillars or worms of some sort, crawling all over the handrail of a boardwalk in west Yellowstone. The other tourists were all grossed the fuck out. I was just wondering what they metamorphose into.
BUFFALO! This bison came close enough to the pullout that I could have touched him. I didn't. He looks very sad in this picture, but in real life he looks like a decaying zombie bison.
Yellowstone is of course known for its thermal springs. Here's one of them, practically unmarked, beside the road.
And here is a more famous geothermal feature: Old Faithful in mid-eruption! I have a picture of the geyser at full mast, but it's on its side and this picture does a better job showing what the geyser actually looks like.
Last Yellowstone picture. See the horizontal line in the center of the photo? That's where incinerated forest ends and live forest begins. The transition is that stark. Controlled burns, I guess?
Obligatory Mount Rushmore photo! TR looks left out back there.
And on the way back from Mount Rushmore, I stopped at the Reptile Gardens, which host an impressive collection of gross creatures. These are death's-head cockroaches.
This snake's name has been lost because I was careless about snapping the nameplates, but isn't he pretty? Don't you just want to give him a big hug?
The Reptile Gardens had a bird exhibition, too. Action Wildlife Photographer makes his return in this startling picture of a bald eagle striving for liberty against its oppressive and probably British captor!
The Reptile Gardens cost rather a lot to run.
The Badlands were to my mind much more dramatic than Yellowstone, but they were equally hard to photograph. They're like a mountain range in miniature!
The Badlands are not at all uniform in height, shape, or composition. Every turnout offers a different view!
A pic from the Sioux Falls butterfly garden. These two were kind enough to let me get close. One butterfly landed on me and gave me a kiss!
And in other insectoid news, here is the sculpture that welcomes you to Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. Made entirely out of scrap metal, this waspish monstrosity is a sight to see.
And here is the Forevertron itself! Towering over visitors in its steampunk glory and studded with strange machines and decrepit spiral staircases, it begs to be climbed on! But you're not allowed! >.<
A velociraptor menaces visitors to the dinosaur exhibit at the Brookfield Zoo in La Grange, outside Chicago. His head, arms, and tail move periodically to startle tourists. I can't imagine why these things needed to hunt in packs.
Aleksa was terrified and fascinated by the dinosaurs. She spent that walk clinging to me and cringing whenever an animatronic reptile looked at her the wrong way. But she enjoyed herself, and I did too, partly vicariously thanks to Aleksa!
Polar bear!!! Wait, polar bear? Yes, Brookfield has two polar bears. This one was one of the more active animals at the zoo; he showboated for us a little, lumbering around the front of his cage. His back is dyed green because of the chlorine in his wading pool. I have mixed feelings about that.
And at the other temperature extreme, camels! Two humps means these guys are Bactrian camels. I'm not sure whether you sit on a hump or straddle the space between them.
At Indiana University at Bloomington, the Lilly Library collection of rare books displays this lock of Sylvia Plath's hair alongside a couple poems she wrote. Who got a hold of a lock of Sylvia Plath's hair, why, and at what point did they decide it should be put on display for the edification of the public?
John James Jingleheimer Audubon's illustrated book of birds is as large as a toddler's mattress when opened, though because not many original copies remain I don't suggest you actually use it as such. Every week they turn the page, and this week was grackles!
The proper orientation of this photo of Ogle Lake, east of Bloomington, is left as an exercise to the reader.
And at last, here I am ensconced with Ruth and Robert in Indianapolis after a Haruhi Suzumiya marathon. I'm on the right. It's late in the evening and we're all a little tired, but an Utena forum member threatened to perform certain acts on us that don't bear repetition in a family blog if we didn't post pics, so here we are! Stay away from my butt!
I haven't taken many photos since Indianapolis, and I haven't uploaded the ones I have. I may get to make one more photo post before drawing this blog to a close. Tomorrow night, God willing, I'll be in Savannah, the next night in Orlando, and the following night... well, I'll be back in a place I've been away from for both too long and just the right amount of time.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Winning the Charlottery
I've spent the last two nights with my brother Alex here in Charlotte -- not to be confused with my hostess Alex in Eustis, nor my hostess Alexis in Seattle -- and we have had multifarious Fun Thymes! Fortunately for the length of this entry, most of these Fun Thymes have been of a catching-up and sharing-cool-things nature that don't really need recapitulation here, except to say that I have infected Alex with the Haruhi Suzumiya meme I got from Ruth and Robert. I am an anime proliferation vector! But we've done other things, too. Most novel: rock climbing! I've never been rock climbing before, but on Wednesday I scaled a 25-foot wall and on Thursday a 30-foot wall at the National Whitewater Center. Guys, rock climbing is hard! My fingertips have muscles I didn't know about, and they hurt!
What struck me about rock climbing, which I think of as a dangerous sport, is how safe it is as practiced at the places I went. You can scale walls at four years old. It's all because of the belaying: a person or mechanism is gripping a rope run through a pulley at the top of the rock down to a secure (and package-flattering) harness strapped to your waist. If you fall off, which you will, the belayer controls the rate of your descent, and you land like a feather. For the same reason, you don't have to climb down, which would be perilous because you can't see what you're doing; once you've reached the top you just let go. As a result, what could be a terrifying activity is actually exhilarating, fun -- and very difficult for those of us who aren't especially flexible. Getting from one finger- or toehold to the next requires a certain amount of yoga and stern control of one's center of gravity. Otherwise, well, you get a free ride down the rope.
I also got to catch up with a college friend, Laura, who I haven't seen for five years over lunch this afternoon. She's living here in Charlotte working as a substitute teacher, having spent two years with Teach for America and another two in area high schools. But she's like me: education isn't a calling for her, not a career, just a job. Which is not to say she's not good at it!!! -- and anyone who works with inner-city middle schoolers has my respect -- but she and I are both holding out hope that we'll find something else out there. We also talked about creative writing; I shared a writing exercise I invented and Laura told me about a short-story she's writing and her problems coming to grips with how to write a monster convincingly. It was fun chatting like old times, though I was sorry I couldn't ask if she wanted to go to Edwardo's for dinner. I may get to see her again this evening, unless Alex and I end up playing D&D. And then there's a forum friend I'm hoping to link up with while I'm here! So much fun to have, so little time!
What struck me about rock climbing, which I think of as a dangerous sport, is how safe it is as practiced at the places I went. You can scale walls at four years old. It's all because of the belaying: a person or mechanism is gripping a rope run through a pulley at the top of the rock down to a secure (and package-flattering) harness strapped to your waist. If you fall off, which you will, the belayer controls the rate of your descent, and you land like a feather. For the same reason, you don't have to climb down, which would be perilous because you can't see what you're doing; once you've reached the top you just let go. As a result, what could be a terrifying activity is actually exhilarating, fun -- and very difficult for those of us who aren't especially flexible. Getting from one finger- or toehold to the next requires a certain amount of yoga and stern control of one's center of gravity. Otherwise, well, you get a free ride down the rope.
I also got to catch up with a college friend, Laura, who I haven't seen for five years over lunch this afternoon. She's living here in Charlotte working as a substitute teacher, having spent two years with Teach for America and another two in area high schools. But she's like me: education isn't a calling for her, not a career, just a job. Which is not to say she's not good at it!!! -- and anyone who works with inner-city middle schoolers has my respect -- but she and I are both holding out hope that we'll find something else out there. We also talked about creative writing; I shared a writing exercise I invented and Laura told me about a short-story she's writing and her problems coming to grips with how to write a monster convincingly. It was fun chatting like old times, though I was sorry I couldn't ask if she wanted to go to Edwardo's for dinner. I may get to see her again this evening, unless Alex and I end up playing D&D. And then there's a forum friend I'm hoping to link up with while I'm here! So much fun to have, so little time!
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Bullet train
Another missed post means more bullet points!
- Indianapolis activity 1: puzzles at the Lilly Library! This library, which houses UI's rare manuscripts and such, had an exhibition on mechanical puzzles ranging from tangrams to Rubik's Cubes to twisted pieces of metal you had to figure out how to separate. I accidentally spent two hours there playing with the puzzles! Also there: a gigantic edition of Audubon's guide to birds. They turn the page every week. This week was grackles, which seemed appropriate for the blackbird theme of the trip.
- Indy activity 2: hiking in Brown County! The sign said "Ogle Lake," so I did.
- Indy activity 3: watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with Robert and Ruth! I'd never seen the show before, and now I've seen the first five or six episodes (in broadcast order, not chronological; this is important). Now I too can participate in the fan-wankery over this show! It is a lot of fun, at least as far as this particular normal human being is concerned.
- Missing: cottonwood seeds. They'd been drifting across all the non-coastal interstates since Denver and I'd gotten to like them. Now I'm either too far east or outside of cottonwood seed season, and either way there's no more cotton drifting around. Also missing: Rene, Al, Aleksa, Ruth, and Robert. There's nothing like making new friends! -- and then having to drive away a couple days later. >.<
- Passed: a guy driving a beige car with a U.S. Marines bumper sticker. Thought: Hey, mister tan Marine man, play a song for me.
- Currently residing in: the Red Roof Inn in southern Knoxville, Tennessee. Entertainment: nature! Their Nature Center here has a parking lot eerily reminiscent of the Calusa Nature Center back home. Their trails, though, are more convoluted and easier to get lost in, which I did, to my delight! There was forest and rock and the Tennessee River and lots and LOTS of bright blue damselflies. Also attempted: McKay Used Books, a warehouse of a used bookstore that turned out to have the same isolating feel as Wal-Mart. I did not know a used bookstore could feel like that.
- Next stop: Charlotte!
- Indianapolis activity 1: puzzles at the Lilly Library! This library, which houses UI's rare manuscripts and such, had an exhibition on mechanical puzzles ranging from tangrams to Rubik's Cubes to twisted pieces of metal you had to figure out how to separate. I accidentally spent two hours there playing with the puzzles! Also there: a gigantic edition of Audubon's guide to birds. They turn the page every week. This week was grackles, which seemed appropriate for the blackbird theme of the trip.
- Indy activity 2: hiking in Brown County! The sign said "Ogle Lake," so I did.
- Indy activity 3: watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with Robert and Ruth! I'd never seen the show before, and now I've seen the first five or six episodes (in broadcast order, not chronological; this is important). Now I too can participate in the fan-wankery over this show! It is a lot of fun, at least as far as this particular normal human being is concerned.
- Missing: cottonwood seeds. They'd been drifting across all the non-coastal interstates since Denver and I'd gotten to like them. Now I'm either too far east or outside of cottonwood seed season, and either way there's no more cotton drifting around. Also missing: Rene, Al, Aleksa, Ruth, and Robert. There's nothing like making new friends! -- and then having to drive away a couple days later. >.<
- Passed: a guy driving a beige car with a U.S. Marines bumper sticker. Thought: Hey, mister tan Marine man, play a song for me.
- Currently residing in: the Red Roof Inn in southern Knoxville, Tennessee. Entertainment: nature! Their Nature Center here has a parking lot eerily reminiscent of the Calusa Nature Center back home. Their trails, though, are more convoluted and easier to get lost in, which I did, to my delight! There was forest and rock and the Tennessee River and lots and LOTS of bright blue damselflies. Also attempted: McKay Used Books, a warehouse of a used bookstore that turned out to have the same isolating feel as Wal-Mart. I did not know a used bookstore could feel like that.
- Next stop: Charlotte!
Sunday, July 19, 2009
I woke up in a car
A "usual" day on this trip, if there is such a thing, is that I have a hotel on one end, a hotel or friend on the other, and some driving in between. Today was unusual in that I had friends on both ends! I spent this morning in Chicago helping Aleksa claim the last two Power Stars in Super Mario Galaxy; she has now unlocked Luigi and thinks I'm a video game deity (which, one gets the impression, is pretty high up there as deities go). But in order to have happy welcomings one first must have sad partings, and I said goodbye to Al, Rene, and Aleksa at around 10:30. As planned, I stopped at the Parthenon for lunch -- their slogan should be "nothing is ever as good as you remember it, except the Parthenon's saganaki" -- and then made for Indianapolis to stay with Ruth and Robert, aka Mylene and Paradox from the Utena forum.
I'd woken up early, at eight, to have time to play with Aleksa before leaving. (She slept in till 8:30 by accident, and yelled at her mom for not waking her up sooner.) As a result, on the way to Indy I encountered a problem: I kept nearly nodding off. That's no way to make a road trip, so I pulled over at a Mobil station and took a half-hour nap in the driver's seat. The reason this event was significant enough to mention in this space is that I'm pretty sure if I'd been making this drive a month ago, I'd have tried to soldier through the fatigue, thinking "well, I can't exactly pull over at a gas station and take a nap, can I?" It turns out that yes -- yes, I can -- and it feels good. I drove the rest of the way to Indianapolis full of energy and ready to meet two new friends!
And it turns out that Ruth and Robert are both swell people! Ruth's a public librarian, Robert a code monkey for the VA. They met on the Internet because of Sailor Moon, explored their shared geekeries on online forums, role-plays, and chat, and ended up going to school together at Purdue. They got married in 2003. This trip isn't about collecting love stories anymore, but if it were, this one would be a heartwarming tale about love persevering across distances (Robert is Texan, Ruth Indiananinian) and through economic hardship.
Yes, they're a sweet couple. They're also both wonderfully nerdy, so we spent much of the evening, including my first-ever dinner at a Japanese hibachi place rather similar to having a Mongolian barbecue right at your table, chatting easily about anime and video games and the Internet. You'd be surprised watching us to learn we were meeting for the first time! Shared subculture is a great social loosener, and of course it helps that we've been reading each other's forum posts for a couple years. In fact, things have gone well enough that I'm staying another night! I'll spend tomorrow exploring upstate Indiana -- there's a puzzle exhibition at a library in Bloomington, conveniently near some hiking trails that Robert and Ruth assure me are beautiful -- and then, time permitting, make the obligatory visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There's a race this weekend, so it might be an interesting time to visit! Unfortunately, I'll be making these trips alone, since my hosts have this "work" shit they have to do, but we'll be able to spend the evening together!
To avoid road naps tomorrow I'll go abed now. Until the morrow!
I'd woken up early, at eight, to have time to play with Aleksa before leaving. (She slept in till 8:30 by accident, and yelled at her mom for not waking her up sooner.) As a result, on the way to Indy I encountered a problem: I kept nearly nodding off. That's no way to make a road trip, so I pulled over at a Mobil station and took a half-hour nap in the driver's seat. The reason this event was significant enough to mention in this space is that I'm pretty sure if I'd been making this drive a month ago, I'd have tried to soldier through the fatigue, thinking "well, I can't exactly pull over at a gas station and take a nap, can I?" It turns out that yes -- yes, I can -- and it feels good. I drove the rest of the way to Indianapolis full of energy and ready to meet two new friends!
And it turns out that Ruth and Robert are both swell people! Ruth's a public librarian, Robert a code monkey for the VA. They met on the Internet because of Sailor Moon, explored their shared geekeries on online forums, role-plays, and chat, and ended up going to school together at Purdue. They got married in 2003. This trip isn't about collecting love stories anymore, but if it were, this one would be a heartwarming tale about love persevering across distances (Robert is Texan, Ruth Indiananinian) and through economic hardship.
Yes, they're a sweet couple. They're also both wonderfully nerdy, so we spent much of the evening, including my first-ever dinner at a Japanese hibachi place rather similar to having a Mongolian barbecue right at your table, chatting easily about anime and video games and the Internet. You'd be surprised watching us to learn we were meeting for the first time! Shared subculture is a great social loosener, and of course it helps that we've been reading each other's forum posts for a couple years. In fact, things have gone well enough that I'm staying another night! I'll spend tomorrow exploring upstate Indiana -- there's a puzzle exhibition at a library in Bloomington, conveniently near some hiking trails that Robert and Ruth assure me are beautiful -- and then, time permitting, make the obligatory visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There's a race this weekend, so it might be an interesting time to visit! Unfortunately, I'll be making these trips alone, since my hosts have this "work" shit they have to do, but we'll be able to spend the evening together!
To avoid road naps tomorrow I'll go abed now. Until the morrow!
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Most true of all the true, say we
I missed an update yesterday for the first time in -- well, a while! That's because I'm having a blast in Chicago. This is the city where I went to college with many of the friends I've been staying with, including Wiley in Aurora, Sushu and Jono (the bride and groom) in San Francisco, and Alexis in Seattle. Here in Chicago, I'm staying with Jono's family: his mother and father Rene [sic] and Al, and his nine-year-old sister Aleksa. They are fantastic hosts! Aleksa and I have been playing a lot of Super Mario Galaxy. She got 100 stars by herself and we're trying to crack the last 20 before I leave tomorrow. These are some of the hardest stars in the game, which means they're stars I've attempted dozens of times at home, which in turn means that I've gotten disproportionately good at them; Aleksa is very deeply impressed and says she wishes I could stay here forever. :D Rene and Al have also been extremely welcoming, and took me to two fine eateries for dinner yesterday and today.
All this couldn't be better suited for the breather I needed Chicago to be. Video games and nice meals are a little taste of home here in the Windy City. I've managed to get out of the house as well, though: today I drove down to the university, where I took a deeply nostalgic walking tour of campus. I have memories attached to almost all of those buildings, and I remembered a few stories I'd forgotten just by walking by the places where they happened. There's also some new alongside the old: the street-crossing lights are the countdown kind now, and oh, right, there's a frigging enormous new dorm being built right behind my old digs in Burton-Judson. Everything was closed, of course, this being a Saturday in summer, but the feeling you get walking around your old college, a mix of nostalgia and mastery and regret, is powerful, an aesthetic experience in itself.
And then I went to Edwardo's, my once and future favorite pizzeria of all time anywhere ever. They tried to serve me a "mini-pizza," since I was alone, but I know their wiles: the mini-pizza is prefabricated and not half as good as a freshly baked pie. I got the delectable, made-from-scratch deep dish and downed it while thinking of all the times I'd been to that restaurant before, who I was with and what I was literally and figuratively carrying.
When I got back to the house, Rene took Aleksa and me to the Brookfield Zoo! It was full of the exotic fauna that most Americans only get to see in zoos. The giraffes were especially funny: the way one of them spread his front legs and stooped to get water, the way another spent ten minutes licking a tree trunk with her blue tongue. I also loved the monkey house, which is a spacious series of chambers that create a huge three-dimensional habitat for its simian inhabitants. Rene and Aleksa wouldn't go in with me because it smelled bad. In fact, it smelled like monkeys, that's all. My favorite exhibit in the monkey house was a gap in the wall inscribed with the text "Look through here to see primates behaving socially;" the gap looked back on the tourist path, and through it you could see all the zoo visitors chatting and gawking.
Social behavior, after a week of near-solitude, has been a fun challenge for me as well! It's complicated by the fact that both Al and Aleksa are hard of hearing; Aleksa in fact was born with a vestigial right ear with no canal and needs an unusual hearing aid for her left. Seating at restaurants and walking on paths always has to take into account who can hear out of which ear(s). Combine that with my own challenges understanding conversation, particularly in noisy and crowded places like zoos and restaurants, and you have all you need for some memorable interactions!
But these two halcyon nights in recollective and unseasonably cool Chicago are at an end with tonight's stay. Tomorrow I'll rustle up a lunch of flaming saganaki at the restaurant that invented it, another of my favorites from college, then make the drive to Indianapolis to stay with Ruth and Robert: two of my peeps from the Utena forum who I know only through their posts. Where I'll stay after that is still an open question; will I dart to Lexington to make Charlotte in two days, or take my time through Louisville and Knoxville? Either way, I'm slowly but surely heading southeast, back to where I began...
All this couldn't be better suited for the breather I needed Chicago to be. Video games and nice meals are a little taste of home here in the Windy City. I've managed to get out of the house as well, though: today I drove down to the university, where I took a deeply nostalgic walking tour of campus. I have memories attached to almost all of those buildings, and I remembered a few stories I'd forgotten just by walking by the places where they happened. There's also some new alongside the old: the street-crossing lights are the countdown kind now, and oh, right, there's a frigging enormous new dorm being built right behind my old digs in Burton-Judson. Everything was closed, of course, this being a Saturday in summer, but the feeling you get walking around your old college, a mix of nostalgia and mastery and regret, is powerful, an aesthetic experience in itself.
And then I went to Edwardo's, my once and future favorite pizzeria of all time anywhere ever. They tried to serve me a "mini-pizza," since I was alone, but I know their wiles: the mini-pizza is prefabricated and not half as good as a freshly baked pie. I got the delectable, made-from-scratch deep dish and downed it while thinking of all the times I'd been to that restaurant before, who I was with and what I was literally and figuratively carrying.
When I got back to the house, Rene took Aleksa and me to the Brookfield Zoo! It was full of the exotic fauna that most Americans only get to see in zoos. The giraffes were especially funny: the way one of them spread his front legs and stooped to get water, the way another spent ten minutes licking a tree trunk with her blue tongue. I also loved the monkey house, which is a spacious series of chambers that create a huge three-dimensional habitat for its simian inhabitants. Rene and Aleksa wouldn't go in with me because it smelled bad. In fact, it smelled like monkeys, that's all. My favorite exhibit in the monkey house was a gap in the wall inscribed with the text "Look through here to see primates behaving socially;" the gap looked back on the tourist path, and through it you could see all the zoo visitors chatting and gawking.
Social behavior, after a week of near-solitude, has been a fun challenge for me as well! It's complicated by the fact that both Al and Aleksa are hard of hearing; Aleksa in fact was born with a vestigial right ear with no canal and needs an unusual hearing aid for her left. Seating at restaurants and walking on paths always has to take into account who can hear out of which ear(s). Combine that with my own challenges understanding conversation, particularly in noisy and crowded places like zoos and restaurants, and you have all you need for some memorable interactions!
But these two halcyon nights in recollective and unseasonably cool Chicago are at an end with tonight's stay. Tomorrow I'll rustle up a lunch of flaming saganaki at the restaurant that invented it, another of my favorites from college, then make the drive to Indianapolis to stay with Ruth and Robert: two of my peeps from the Utena forum who I know only through their posts. Where I'll stay after that is still an open question; will I dart to Lexington to make Charlotte in two days, or take my time through Louisville and Knoxville? Either way, I'm slowly but surely heading southeast, back to where I began...
Monday, June 29, 2009
Verbal snapshots
Until today, when a hike in Muir Woods yielded them in abundance, I've almost completely neglected to take any pictures of my manifest and wonderful activities since Friday. Things have happened quickly, a camera would have been inconvenient, I plumb forgot, etc etc. -- but I do think I've been more in the moment without one. In the absence of such pictures, though, there are a few memories I need to preserve in words for recollection.
- Standing atop a boulder at Golden Gate Park and looking down at nearly the entire city of San Francisco from the hillside
- Running across the wet beach in my sneakers to taste the Pacific Ocean. It is salty, but not as salty as the Great Salt Lake. Its waves are bigger, though. In fact, they're bigger than Gulf waves, which accounts for this coast's legendary surfing.
- Making enormous bubbles at the Exploratorium, then making enormous smoke rings at the Exploratorium, then making enormous towers on wobbly tables through the use of counterweights at the Exploratorium
- 1999-Sushu's letter to 2009-Sushu, written ten years ago as an essay for her Chinese class, which correctly predicted what she would major in, her current unemployed status, and the fact that she'd have a wonderful boyfriend; she also admonished herself not to get complacent, as hard times are ahead. Sushu's mother presented the letter via overhead projection at the dinner.
- Jono's extemely sensual presentation of the Rocky Horror Picture Show's "Transsexual Transylvania" at karaoke
- Wearing the Raskins' python as a hat
- The plenitude of Asian restaurants in the Bay Area, and the extremely concrete and real distinctions between Japanese, Thai, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Szechuan...), Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian, Cambodian, and other Asian food, in contrast with Fort Myers' all-pan-Asian all-the-time approach
And then today I went for a marathon hike on the steep trails of Muir Woods. It was about a 2.5-hour walk during which I climbed, then descended, over a thousand feet through a gorgeous redwood forest and a rolling meadow with amazing views of the surrounding hills. I met two deer and a goldfinch along the way. Yes, I know, you want pictures. I was going to put them up tonight, but it looks like I'm relocating to Pacifica tonight in preparation for an early start towards Seattle tomorrow morning (not sure yet where I'll be tomorrow evening). I'll have Alexis's company, as well as (last I heard) Isaac's, though he may yet decide to ride with Aviva. All concerned have been warned that my backseat will be cramped with road tripping supplies.
Gotta get going if I want to make it to Pacifica by seven through rush hour traffic. Till next time!
- Standing atop a boulder at Golden Gate Park and looking down at nearly the entire city of San Francisco from the hillside
- Running across the wet beach in my sneakers to taste the Pacific Ocean. It is salty, but not as salty as the Great Salt Lake. Its waves are bigger, though. In fact, they're bigger than Gulf waves, which accounts for this coast's legendary surfing.
- Making enormous bubbles at the Exploratorium, then making enormous smoke rings at the Exploratorium, then making enormous towers on wobbly tables through the use of counterweights at the Exploratorium
- 1999-Sushu's letter to 2009-Sushu, written ten years ago as an essay for her Chinese class, which correctly predicted what she would major in, her current unemployed status, and the fact that she'd have a wonderful boyfriend; she also admonished herself not to get complacent, as hard times are ahead. Sushu's mother presented the letter via overhead projection at the dinner.
- Jono's extemely sensual presentation of the Rocky Horror Picture Show's "Transsexual Transylvania" at karaoke
- Wearing the Raskins' python as a hat
- The plenitude of Asian restaurants in the Bay Area, and the extremely concrete and real distinctions between Japanese, Thai, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Szechuan...), Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian, Cambodian, and other Asian food, in contrast with Fort Myers' all-pan-Asian all-the-time approach
And then today I went for a marathon hike on the steep trails of Muir Woods. It was about a 2.5-hour walk during which I climbed, then descended, over a thousand feet through a gorgeous redwood forest and a rolling meadow with amazing views of the surrounding hills. I met two deer and a goldfinch along the way. Yes, I know, you want pictures. I was going to put them up tonight, but it looks like I'm relocating to Pacifica tonight in preparation for an early start towards Seattle tomorrow morning (not sure yet where I'll be tomorrow evening). I'll have Alexis's company, as well as (last I heard) Isaac's, though he may yet decide to ride with Aviva. All concerned have been warned that my backseat will be cramped with road tripping supplies.
Gotta get going if I want to make it to Pacifica by seven through rush hour traffic. Till next time!
Man and life
I've spent the last few days hanging out with old friends and meeting some new ones. Most especially, though, I've spent them delighting in Jono and Sushu's newfound matrimony. The weekend has been a whirlwind. Hell, in a one-hour span today alone I established in-jokes with my buddies about buffalo, pagodas, and pylons in separate episodes. (Golden Gate Park has all three.) For the record, Stephen's buffalo call is "buffalo!" said in a slightly different voice, and the famously bizarre (but perfectly grammatical) sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" relies on the word "buffalo" being a collective plural noun, a transitive verb, and an adjective, properties we couldn't think of any other word that fit. (The sentence means "Buffalo from a city in New York who are bullied by other buffalo from a city in New York bully still other buffalo from a city in New York.") The stories for the pagoda and pylon are similarly elaborate. We all learned the word "equitational" in connection with the latter.
But I digress. I should really start with Friday, a day spent mostly at the home of the grandparents of Aza Raskin (a webfamous software developer) exploring their wonderfully eccentric farm and treehouse. They have chickens, goats, alpacas, a dog, a cat, a python named Monty, an African gray parrot (not a Norwegian blue), a swing hung from tree branches perhaps thirty feet high, and two tree forts connected by industrial-strength rope netting. I traveled this strange realm with friends old and new; it's been a pleasure getting to know Aza's sister Aviva over the weekend, and I hope we stay in touch! (They have a third sibling, Aenea, and if you are observant about language you will notice that their parents have a particular playful naming convention for their children.) At the Raskin clan's house Alexis and Aviva baked a red velvet cake to complement the wedding while I wrote a story to perform at the picnic, a work of fiction based on the tales I've recounted in previous entries here; it includes elements from Ruby Falls, from Tunnel Hill, and from Winnemucca, and tells how my nonexistent friend Richard had a surreal experience while on a road trip to San Francisco to pick up a statue of St. McGuffin.
The following day I actually told this story in front of the picnic crowd of about sixty people, to general applause! Other acts included a trumpet/cello duet (?!) written especially for the wedding, some really fantastic juggling with that spinning thing on a wire, two ukulele songs, and embarrassing stories about the many ways Jono has almost killed himself over the years. During the eating portion of the picnic I wandered off with Alexis and Aviva. We found a creek, took our shoes off, and had a foot dip. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but it was for me, maybe more than the storytelling. Spontaneity is difficult! I love spontaneous people, but I have trouble cultivating that quality in myself. I can't go out and mindfully practice it, either, because by definition you can't plan spontaneity. So instead I just have to be alert to the times when I can break out of my own expectations to create something unexpected and wonderful. In this case I came out refreshed and with dirty feet. The willingness to accept dirty feet as the price of being able to tell this story is relevant to what I'm trying to say here.
After the picnic there was the wedding dinner, where I sat at a table of twelve and was very nearly socially functional! The toasts and well-wishes would have been nauseatingly sweet for anyone but Jono and Sushu, who are superhumanly sweet themselves and deserve all the sweetness the world can bestow on them. Afterward there was karaoke. That started out okay, but it turns out that when you pack forty people into a room with flashing lights and loud music and bad technology and people trying to make conversation with you in this environment you have a recipe for social disaster. I fled the scene after about an hour and spent the rest of the evening in my car until the friends I was driving home were ready to leave, turning the car on only to play "Blackbird" softly. I felt really awful. This is the same as the creek story except for the outcome. But I don't want to beat myself up for that; karaoke could have been fantastic and I gave it the opportunity to be. Adventures don't always have happy endings, but most happy endings come about because of adventures.
And then today I got to meet Jono's very little sister Aleksa, who is without doubt the nerdiest eight-year-old girl I know. (I'm guessing at her age.) Jono, Sushu, Aleksa, and I played some Rock Band together, and it turns out I'm best at the drums while Aleksa is best at singing. Then there was tourism: the Exploratorium, a San Francisco interactive science museum full of the coolest exhibits I have ever seen, from magnetic sand to imaging technology that draws evolving, moving stylized sketches of you in real time as you stand in front of the screen gaping at it; and Golden Gate Park, which I've already talked about. That plus the amazing Asian food that my visit to Cali has been full of made this a day well worth getting out of bed for.
It looks like I have two more full days in the Bay Area. I'm driving Alexis and possibly our fellow anime club alum Isaac up to Portland and then Seattle later this week, probably Wednesday, in convoy with Aviva. Until then I will happily stay in these bay cities that have afforded me so many adventures!
But I digress. I should really start with Friday, a day spent mostly at the home of the grandparents of Aza Raskin (a webfamous software developer) exploring their wonderfully eccentric farm and treehouse. They have chickens, goats, alpacas, a dog, a cat, a python named Monty, an African gray parrot (not a Norwegian blue), a swing hung from tree branches perhaps thirty feet high, and two tree forts connected by industrial-strength rope netting. I traveled this strange realm with friends old and new; it's been a pleasure getting to know Aza's sister Aviva over the weekend, and I hope we stay in touch! (They have a third sibling, Aenea, and if you are observant about language you will notice that their parents have a particular playful naming convention for their children.) At the Raskin clan's house Alexis and Aviva baked a red velvet cake to complement the wedding while I wrote a story to perform at the picnic, a work of fiction based on the tales I've recounted in previous entries here; it includes elements from Ruby Falls, from Tunnel Hill, and from Winnemucca, and tells how my nonexistent friend Richard had a surreal experience while on a road trip to San Francisco to pick up a statue of St. McGuffin.
The following day I actually told this story in front of the picnic crowd of about sixty people, to general applause! Other acts included a trumpet/cello duet (?!) written especially for the wedding, some really fantastic juggling with that spinning thing on a wire, two ukulele songs, and embarrassing stories about the many ways Jono has almost killed himself over the years. During the eating portion of the picnic I wandered off with Alexis and Aviva. We found a creek, took our shoes off, and had a foot dip. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but it was for me, maybe more than the storytelling. Spontaneity is difficult! I love spontaneous people, but I have trouble cultivating that quality in myself. I can't go out and mindfully practice it, either, because by definition you can't plan spontaneity. So instead I just have to be alert to the times when I can break out of my own expectations to create something unexpected and wonderful. In this case I came out refreshed and with dirty feet. The willingness to accept dirty feet as the price of being able to tell this story is relevant to what I'm trying to say here.
After the picnic there was the wedding dinner, where I sat at a table of twelve and was very nearly socially functional! The toasts and well-wishes would have been nauseatingly sweet for anyone but Jono and Sushu, who are superhumanly sweet themselves and deserve all the sweetness the world can bestow on them. Afterward there was karaoke. That started out okay, but it turns out that when you pack forty people into a room with flashing lights and loud music and bad technology and people trying to make conversation with you in this environment you have a recipe for social disaster. I fled the scene after about an hour and spent the rest of the evening in my car until the friends I was driving home were ready to leave, turning the car on only to play "Blackbird" softly. I felt really awful. This is the same as the creek story except for the outcome. But I don't want to beat myself up for that; karaoke could have been fantastic and I gave it the opportunity to be. Adventures don't always have happy endings, but most happy endings come about because of adventures.
And then today I got to meet Jono's very little sister Aleksa, who is without doubt the nerdiest eight-year-old girl I know. (I'm guessing at her age.) Jono, Sushu, Aleksa, and I played some Rock Band together, and it turns out I'm best at the drums while Aleksa is best at singing. Then there was tourism: the Exploratorium, a San Francisco interactive science museum full of the coolest exhibits I have ever seen, from magnetic sand to imaging technology that draws evolving, moving stylized sketches of you in real time as you stand in front of the screen gaping at it; and Golden Gate Park, which I've already talked about. That plus the amazing Asian food that my visit to Cali has been full of made this a day well worth getting out of bed for.
It looks like I have two more full days in the Bay Area. I'm driving Alexis and possibly our fellow anime club alum Isaac up to Portland and then Seattle later this week, probably Wednesday, in convoy with Aviva. Until then I will happily stay in these bay cities that have afforded me so many adventures!
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Life at altitude
After a second day in Aurora, Colorado, I once again greet the evening exhausted but full of life. I've stayed both days with Wiley and her family -- who, along with my previous hosts Jacob, Zach, and Alex, must be some of the best and most generous hosts in America -- and will forge west tomorrow morning with fond memories of the Mile High City.
The days here seem to blur together, as my head is fuzzy from fatigue and altitude, but I remember a lot of words. I've had plentiful and often hilarious conversations with Wiley's clan about topics ranging from tomatoes to economics to charismatic megafauna. I've heard stories about tornado chasing in Denver, President Clinton's personal troll doll in Washington, and signs informing tourists what to do if you encounter a cow in Switzerland. We had conversations over dinner last night at a charming local Persian restaurant whose combination lamb and beef patties were new to me, over Wiley's mother's koi pond this morning as she recovered from being attacked by a vicious garter snake, and over lunch today at a Boulder tea house imported piece by piece from Tajikistan.
I've also learned many things about life in the mountains -- some from the family, others from direct experience. Most of the direct-experience items have to do with the atmosphere of a town a mile in the air. For one thing, I've spent much of my time here suffering from airplane ear from climbing and descending the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. For another, the lack of air means Aurora is far cooler and less humid than Kansas City; Wiley tells me that every thousand feet of altitude means the temperature drops three degrees. Yet in spite of the cool air, it's easier to get sunburned or dehydrated here; less air between us and the sun means that everything the sun does in Florida it does better in Colorado. I learned this firsthand as Wiley and I walked a 2.5-mile path in Golden Gate Canyon State Park outside Boulder after a dizzying climb to nine thousand feet that Blackbird struggled to surmount. I'll eventually post photos, but as usual they will be a pale imitation of the wonders that are the Continental Divide and mountain creeks and aspen groves. There was a fifteen-degree difference between sunlight and shade, and my water vanished quickly as we trod the steep paths alert for mountain lions or grizzly bears. (No "charismatic megafauna" was in evidence on the trail, but we saw some awkward and cute mule deer from the car.) The hike was the defining moment of my time near Denver, the part that made me understand how everyday life here is different from life in Fort Myers.
There is of course so much more to say, but I can never say it all and I have to hit the hay now so that I can hit the road later. Tomorrow I detour from the interstate along a circuitous route recommended by Wiley's mother. I'll get a king's view of the mountains and visit the highest incorporated town in the lower 48 states. I hope to blog next from Grand Junction, Colorado, near the western border of the state. Until then!
The days here seem to blur together, as my head is fuzzy from fatigue and altitude, but I remember a lot of words. I've had plentiful and often hilarious conversations with Wiley's clan about topics ranging from tomatoes to economics to charismatic megafauna. I've heard stories about tornado chasing in Denver, President Clinton's personal troll doll in Washington, and signs informing tourists what to do if you encounter a cow in Switzerland. We had conversations over dinner last night at a charming local Persian restaurant whose combination lamb and beef patties were new to me, over Wiley's mother's koi pond this morning as she recovered from being attacked by a vicious garter snake, and over lunch today at a Boulder tea house imported piece by piece from Tajikistan.
I've also learned many things about life in the mountains -- some from the family, others from direct experience. Most of the direct-experience items have to do with the atmosphere of a town a mile in the air. For one thing, I've spent much of my time here suffering from airplane ear from climbing and descending the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. For another, the lack of air means Aurora is far cooler and less humid than Kansas City; Wiley tells me that every thousand feet of altitude means the temperature drops three degrees. Yet in spite of the cool air, it's easier to get sunburned or dehydrated here; less air between us and the sun means that everything the sun does in Florida it does better in Colorado. I learned this firsthand as Wiley and I walked a 2.5-mile path in Golden Gate Canyon State Park outside Boulder after a dizzying climb to nine thousand feet that Blackbird struggled to surmount. I'll eventually post photos, but as usual they will be a pale imitation of the wonders that are the Continental Divide and mountain creeks and aspen groves. There was a fifteen-degree difference between sunlight and shade, and my water vanished quickly as we trod the steep paths alert for mountain lions or grizzly bears. (No "charismatic megafauna" was in evidence on the trail, but we saw some awkward and cute mule deer from the car.) The hike was the defining moment of my time near Denver, the part that made me understand how everyday life here is different from life in Fort Myers.
There is of course so much more to say, but I can never say it all and I have to hit the hay now so that I can hit the road later. Tomorrow I detour from the interstate along a circuitous route recommended by Wiley's mother. I'll get a king's view of the mountains and visit the highest incorporated town in the lower 48 states. I hope to blog next from Grand Junction, Colorado, near the western border of the state. Until then!
Monday, June 15, 2009
Days like this, part 2
Before you read this post, please read part 1, below, which is about the act of traveling. Done? Okay, good. Now we can move from journeys to destinations. Or rather interim destinations which are themselves waypoints in the larger journey.
I've stayed in three towns so far -- Eustis, Decatur, and Paducah. No two are anything like each other. My camera is full of Sunday's pictures from bucolic Eustis and its neighbor Mt. Dora, both rural communities in central Florida where tractor supply shops are cultural hubs. Those pictures mostly do not do the area justice. The horizon over Lake Dora, for instance, is far more beautiful than a camera can capture, at least in the hands of an amateur. But here are a couple snapshots that did turn out well.
Snap! The great heron of Eustis, commemorated in fountain statuary. Does it represent ibis-headed Thoth and my symbolic entry into the underworld of my own psyche? No, it's just a bird, but thank you for giving me so much credit. That's downtown Eustis in the background. That's all of downtown Eustis.
Snap! Olivia's Cafe, Eustis hotspot and beacon for open mic night devotees. My hostess Alex and I were entertained by live performers on the cramped stage in front of the bar more or less throughout our evening in the cafe. I sipped ginger peach tea that you taste with the roof of your mouth instead of your tongue -- you have to taste it to understand -- and taught Alex chess.
Snap! Here she is after her narrow defeat. During the early game both of my bishops got exchanged for both of her knights, leading to fun situations where she learned the potency of her long-range alternate-color bishops as well as that of my leaping, forking knights. I think bishops are probably her favorite piece now.
Snap! Alex with her favorite chicken -- one of many her family farms. She also has a dog, two cats, a beehive, and a cockatiel. All are adorable, even the bees. Alex says her dad fancies himself a "gentleman farmer" (though he's actually an accountant). Whether that's just his fancy or not, the hens' brown eggs are real, and they are delicious. Bubbles the cockatiel also lays eggs, but I guess you don't eat cockatiel eggs. Alex worries about Bubbles depleting her calcium.
Snap! The roof of the Donnelly House, a sightseeing spot (and Masonic lodge) on the National Register of Historic Places. The Masons are big in central Florida, apparently. I think of the Masons the way I think of the Mafia -- once influential, now moribund -- but in Mt. Dora, at least, being a Mason (Masonry?) is still a way of life for some. These are the things you learn when you have a host.
Snap! The Mt. Dora historical museum, once used as a combination firehouse and jail. One jail cell is visible in the back right. (I have a picture of myself in jail, too.) That hand-cranked record player still works. I got a personal tour by virtue of Alex's serendipitous employment with this very museum, which is normally closed on Sundays.
Things I didn't get pictures of: the church sign in Mt. Dora reading "Life is fragile. Handle with prayer." The alpacas farmed down the street from Alex's house. The moment when Alex presented me with an extremely comfortable belt, whose infinitely adjustable metal buckle is helping to hold my pants up even now. (I swear to God those pants fit when I packed them. They got looser as the day went on until I could hardly stand up.) The aging, slightly awkward guy who ran a roadside boiled peanut stand -- another cultural phenomenon I had no consciousness of until Eustis. And much else. It's amazing how much Alex and I crammed into my short time in Eustis!
Next post: the other waypoints!
I've stayed in three towns so far -- Eustis, Decatur, and Paducah. No two are anything like each other. My camera is full of Sunday's pictures from bucolic Eustis and its neighbor Mt. Dora, both rural communities in central Florida where tractor supply shops are cultural hubs. Those pictures mostly do not do the area justice. The horizon over Lake Dora, for instance, is far more beautiful than a camera can capture, at least in the hands of an amateur. But here are a couple snapshots that did turn out well.
Snap! The great heron of Eustis, commemorated in fountain statuary. Does it represent ibis-headed Thoth and my symbolic entry into the underworld of my own psyche? No, it's just a bird, but thank you for giving me so much credit. That's downtown Eustis in the background. That's all of downtown Eustis.
Snap! Olivia's Cafe, Eustis hotspot and beacon for open mic night devotees. My hostess Alex and I were entertained by live performers on the cramped stage in front of the bar more or less throughout our evening in the cafe. I sipped ginger peach tea that you taste with the roof of your mouth instead of your tongue -- you have to taste it to understand -- and taught Alex chess.
Snap! Here she is after her narrow defeat. During the early game both of my bishops got exchanged for both of her knights, leading to fun situations where she learned the potency of her long-range alternate-color bishops as well as that of my leaping, forking knights. I think bishops are probably her favorite piece now.
Snap! Alex with her favorite chicken -- one of many her family farms. She also has a dog, two cats, a beehive, and a cockatiel. All are adorable, even the bees. Alex says her dad fancies himself a "gentleman farmer" (though he's actually an accountant). Whether that's just his fancy or not, the hens' brown eggs are real, and they are delicious. Bubbles the cockatiel also lays eggs, but I guess you don't eat cockatiel eggs. Alex worries about Bubbles depleting her calcium.
Snap! The roof of the Donnelly House, a sightseeing spot (and Masonic lodge) on the National Register of Historic Places. The Masons are big in central Florida, apparently. I think of the Masons the way I think of the Mafia -- once influential, now moribund -- but in Mt. Dora, at least, being a Mason (Masonry?) is still a way of life for some. These are the things you learn when you have a host.
Snap! The Mt. Dora historical museum, once used as a combination firehouse and jail. One jail cell is visible in the back right. (I have a picture of myself in jail, too.) That hand-cranked record player still works. I got a personal tour by virtue of Alex's serendipitous employment with this very museum, which is normally closed on Sundays.
Things I didn't get pictures of: the church sign in Mt. Dora reading "Life is fragile. Handle with prayer." The alpacas farmed down the street from Alex's house. The moment when Alex presented me with an extremely comfortable belt, whose infinitely adjustable metal buckle is helping to hold my pants up even now. (I swear to God those pants fit when I packed them. They got looser as the day went on until I could hardly stand up.) The aging, slightly awkward guy who ran a roadside boiled peanut stand -- another cultural phenomenon I had no consciousness of until Eustis. And much else. It's amazing how much Alex and I crammed into my short time in Eustis!
Next post: the other waypoints!
Saturday, June 13, 2009
A double rainbow
The first half was the drive. Four hours from Fort Myers to Eustis, where I'm typing this entry. It was exhilarating and triumphant, the culmination of the preparatory journey I talked about in my last post. I listened to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" on NPR, then turned on the iPod, which randomly blared songs including I Woke Up In A Car, I'm On A Boat, and I'm On A Blimp, giving me a travel theme to go with my first day of journeying.
The second half was Eustis. My tour guide was a friend from the Revolutionary Girl Utena forum, and she showed me the prettiest parts of this rural community a hundred years old. (Tomorrow I get to see the most historic.) I taught her how to play chess, and she taught me how to play with chickens, of which her family keeps something like fifteen. The highlight of the evening was our visit to Olivia's Cafe, an adorable hole-in-the-wall run by Santa and Mrs. Claus, right down to the board games stacked on a bookcase on one wall. I couldn't have asked for a better first day.
Tomorrow it gets harder. More driving and a late arrival in Atlanta to an address I don't have yet. It'll be an adventure! I'm already foreseeing a problem with the writing end of things, though; I'm tuckered out after writing this post, and I didn't even have to design an itinerary today. Hopefully as I get into the swing of the journey the writing will become part of the routine. Until next time!
The second half was Eustis. My tour guide was a friend from the Revolutionary Girl Utena forum, and she showed me the prettiest parts of this rural community a hundred years old. (Tomorrow I get to see the most historic.) I taught her how to play chess, and she taught me how to play with chickens, of which her family keeps something like fifteen. The highlight of the evening was our visit to Olivia's Cafe, an adorable hole-in-the-wall run by Santa and Mrs. Claus, right down to the board games stacked on a bookcase on one wall. I couldn't have asked for a better first day.
Tomorrow it gets harder. More driving and a late arrival in Atlanta to an address I don't have yet. It'll be an adventure! I'm already foreseeing a problem with the writing end of things, though; I'm tuckered out after writing this post, and I didn't even have to design an itinerary today. Hopefully as I get into the swing of the journey the writing will become part of the routine. Until next time!
Monday, March 23, 2009
Lessons from the frontier
I'm writing this post the night after my very first interview! For a first try, I think it was a tremendous success. I interviewed a friend, who I'll call Alice, at her apartment after we had dinner together at Perkins. It was a comfortable way to go into my first interview and both of us felt relaxed as we sat on her sofa, Kino listening from the coffee table, and she began to tell her story.
The content of the story is a topic for later this week. Today I want to talk about the interview as an interview, and in particular what I learned from it. In gross terms, the most surprising feature of our chat was its length: it clocked in at a cool forty-seven minutes! I'd been expecting that interviews would be shorter than that, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Probably they will be; strangers haven't set the evening aside for me like Alice did, and Alice is talkative by nature. This is important. Pascal said that he wrote a long letter for lack of time to write a short one, and my experience tonight makes me think something similar will be true of interviews. Tonight Alice and I had time to explore several different angles of her love story. I won't always have that luxury. Getting enough interesting detail to make the story unique in ten or fifteen minutes will be harder than doing it in just under an hour.
Which leads into another aspect of interviewing I didn't realize was important until tonight: finding an angle. Boy meets girl is a good story, which is why it's been told so many times, but it's never told the same way twice. Romeo and Juliet is "boy meets girl, only they're from warring clans;" Pride and Prejudice is "boy meets girl, only they're of different social strata;" WALL-E is "boy meets girl, only they're robots;" and so on. These are oversimplifications, but the point is that the story always has a premise beyond the fact of love. Sometimes it's a source of conflict, sometimes of novelty. The same has to be true of my subjects' stories. My job as an interviewer is not just to facilitate storytelling; it's to capture the most unique aspects of the story and how they relate to the common ones. Never at the expense of reality, of course! I'm not going to write caricatures that emphasize an element that was unimportant to the subject's actual experience; I'd sooner not use the interview. But I will find and focus on important elements that distinguish this story from every other love story. Tonight that meant asking questions about the dynamic between Alice's high school boyfriend and his parents. Theirs was an odd relationship that was the source of some tension between Alice and her boyfriend and bore indirectly on other frustrations she had with him. If I could do the interview again I would have focused more on that -- though thanks to the interview's generous length I got an interesting story out of it even without knowing going in that I needed to look for an angle. The hard part will be sussing out that angle under the pressure of time.
Enough for today. More tomorrow!
The content of the story is a topic for later this week. Today I want to talk about the interview as an interview, and in particular what I learned from it. In gross terms, the most surprising feature of our chat was its length: it clocked in at a cool forty-seven minutes! I'd been expecting that interviews would be shorter than that, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Probably they will be; strangers haven't set the evening aside for me like Alice did, and Alice is talkative by nature. This is important. Pascal said that he wrote a long letter for lack of time to write a short one, and my experience tonight makes me think something similar will be true of interviews. Tonight Alice and I had time to explore several different angles of her love story. I won't always have that luxury. Getting enough interesting detail to make the story unique in ten or fifteen minutes will be harder than doing it in just under an hour.
Which leads into another aspect of interviewing I didn't realize was important until tonight: finding an angle. Boy meets girl is a good story, which is why it's been told so many times, but it's never told the same way twice. Romeo and Juliet is "boy meets girl, only they're from warring clans;" Pride and Prejudice is "boy meets girl, only they're of different social strata;" WALL-E is "boy meets girl, only they're robots;" and so on. These are oversimplifications, but the point is that the story always has a premise beyond the fact of love. Sometimes it's a source of conflict, sometimes of novelty. The same has to be true of my subjects' stories. My job as an interviewer is not just to facilitate storytelling; it's to capture the most unique aspects of the story and how they relate to the common ones. Never at the expense of reality, of course! I'm not going to write caricatures that emphasize an element that was unimportant to the subject's actual experience; I'd sooner not use the interview. But I will find and focus on important elements that distinguish this story from every other love story. Tonight that meant asking questions about the dynamic between Alice's high school boyfriend and his parents. Theirs was an odd relationship that was the source of some tension between Alice and her boyfriend and bore indirectly on other frustrations she had with him. If I could do the interview again I would have focused more on that -- though thanks to the interview's generous length I got an interesting story out of it even without knowing going in that I needed to look for an angle. The hard part will be sussing out that angle under the pressure of time.
Enough for today. More tomorrow!
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Pheidippides, at your service
There are two schools of thought surrounding cold swimming pools: you can wade in gradually, or you can take the plunge all at once. The same goes for removing Band-Aids, filing taxes, and enduring various other minor daily discomforts. Slow and steady wins the race versus it hurts less if you get it over with. On the other hand, you don't approach a marathon that way. You can't just run it real quick and get it over with; unlike ripping off a Band-Aid, marathoning has to be slow and steady. The same goes for training for a marathon. Coaches use the rule of thumb that a marathoner in training should increase his distance by no more than 10% per week. If you can only jog one mile at the outset, it therefore takes eight months to train for the 26-mile race. You build up to the event slowly and with discipline if you have any real ambition of success.
All this circumlocution leads up to this question: is interviewing more like a Band-Aid or a marathon? Do you have to work up to it by degrees, or can you just do it? The idea of asking a stranger for an interview has not grown less terrifying over the last month and a half; on the contrary, as the event has gotten closer the proximity has made it seem larger. Should I treat interviewing as a cold swimming pool which, perhaps, one should just dive into -- begin straight off with asking strangers for love stories? Or should I treat it as the marathon -- begin by interviewing a friend, and work up to strangers by degrees as I grow more comfortable with the process? I'm inclined towards the latter, but then I would be; I'm a procrastinator in some ways and wouldn't mind putting off the moment of truth. Yet to be fair to my own instinct, I might very well be more comfortable approaching someone unfamiliar if what I approach them with is not also completely unfamiliar. (It's partly for a similar reason that I want to start my interviews with easy questions like "what do you do?" and "how long have you lived in East Kudzuburg?" -- my subjects will be more comfortable if they don't have to plunge right into deep and private waters, and for that matter, so will I.)
So I'm hoping that this weekend I'll be able to get together with a friend and do some conditioning, to return to the marathoning metaphor. I'm a lot less likely to be turned down, and maybe afterward they can share feedback that might help me conduct a better interview next time. Then I can return home and play back the recording, courtesy of Kino, and listen for questions I missed. If I can't get a hold of anyone, I'll work on an alternative.
All this circumlocution leads up to this question: is interviewing more like a Band-Aid or a marathon? Do you have to work up to it by degrees, or can you just do it? The idea of asking a stranger for an interview has not grown less terrifying over the last month and a half; on the contrary, as the event has gotten closer the proximity has made it seem larger. Should I treat interviewing as a cold swimming pool which, perhaps, one should just dive into -- begin straight off with asking strangers for love stories? Or should I treat it as the marathon -- begin by interviewing a friend, and work up to strangers by degrees as I grow more comfortable with the process? I'm inclined towards the latter, but then I would be; I'm a procrastinator in some ways and wouldn't mind putting off the moment of truth. Yet to be fair to my own instinct, I might very well be more comfortable approaching someone unfamiliar if what I approach them with is not also completely unfamiliar. (It's partly for a similar reason that I want to start my interviews with easy questions like "what do you do?" and "how long have you lived in East Kudzuburg?" -- my subjects will be more comfortable if they don't have to plunge right into deep and private waters, and for that matter, so will I.)
So I'm hoping that this weekend I'll be able to get together with a friend and do some conditioning, to return to the marathoning metaphor. I'm a lot less likely to be turned down, and maybe afterward they can share feedback that might help me conduct a better interview next time. Then I can return home and play back the recording, courtesy of Kino, and listen for questions I missed. If I can't get a hold of anyone, I'll work on an alternative.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Chambers of the heart
So I'm thinking my journey is going to be about ten thousand miles long. That's something like four times the distance from Los Angeles to New York City as the crow flies -- plenty of room to explore this astonishing country of ours. But it's not the kind of trip you make in one day.
Where to stay? I've got a few family members and college friends living far afield -- Seattle, Charlotte, Kansas City -- and their houses and apartments will be landmarks on my journey, but this isn't the kind of trip where you make a beeline from Point A to Point B. Love stories are like butterflies; sometimes you have to go far afield to catch them. So the vast majority of my nights will not be spent with my friends and family. I'll spend a lot of nights in cheap motels, and that will be an adventure too. But I'm also hoping to take advantage of CouchSurfing. Have you ever heard of this? It's a bunch of people willing to lend a couch to travelers passing through. I'm grateful this exists; on some nights it might mean a free bed and a story to add to my book. Every night is an opportunity to collect a story, just like every day is an opportunity to collect a story. I can't wait.
Where to stay? I've got a few family members and college friends living far afield -- Seattle, Charlotte, Kansas City -- and their houses and apartments will be landmarks on my journey, but this isn't the kind of trip where you make a beeline from Point A to Point B. Love stories are like butterflies; sometimes you have to go far afield to catch them. So the vast majority of my nights will not be spent with my friends and family. I'll spend a lot of nights in cheap motels, and that will be an adventure too. But I'm also hoping to take advantage of CouchSurfing. Have you ever heard of this? It's a bunch of people willing to lend a couch to travelers passing through. I'm grateful this exists; on some nights it might mean a free bed and a story to add to my book. Every night is an opportunity to collect a story, just like every day is an opportunity to collect a story. I can't wait.
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