Claire On The Move

I am a dangerous subversive threat

2011-11-16T20:00:00.001-08:00

So, I've noticed something recently. Call me observant, say I'm attuned to subtle social interactions, but it has come to my attention that douchebags in utes like to shout at me when I'm cycling.

I cycle at least a few times a week. Usually I cycle from my home in Cannington into the main Perth CBD, or from the Perth train station to West Perth or Osborne Park, or similarly not-very-impressive cycling paths. I'm definitely not one of those cyclists who wears padded spandex shorts decorated with sponsorship logos who goes 27km an hour. I am frequently lucky to reach 17km an hour. I have a ridiculous looking helmet (of course, all bike helmets are ridiculous-looking), and usually cycle with my mouth open because it is damn hard work, especially as LITERALLY EVERYWHERE I GO in Perth seems to be into the wind. No matter what time of day, no matter where I'm going, it's always INTO THE WIND. Sky will probably agree with me on this one.

It's a good thing there aren't any cars at Burning Man, because I would be GETTING IN THEIR WAY.

But my cycling makes me happy and it's excellent cardiovascular exercise and I enjoy being self-propelled. What I don't enjoy is the demographic of jerks who feel like they need to shout at me.

I have not only been shouted at on my bicycle, mind you. Once I was walking from my house to the Cannington train station and some utebag (shortened from "douchebag in a ute") drove past and shouted "Freak!" out the window at me. I'm guessing because of my pink hair. Which is freakish indeed.

Freak.

But the utebags who shout at me on my bicycle all say similar things, which amount, in translation to: "Hey, you there, lady on a bicycle! Why are you delaying me for an additional five minutes in my journey? You should remove yourself from my path!" Only ruder.

The first few were some variation of the (always 20-to-30-year-old, always white, always male, always wearing a baseball cap, always driving a hotted up ute) utebag cry: "Get off the fucking road!" Usually when they shout this at me, I am cycling on the road because the footpath is full of pedestrians, and is furthermore not designated a bicycle path. Just so you know, if I ride on the footpath when it's not designated for bicycles, and a policeman sees me, and is feeling ungenerous, I will get a fine. Also, I ride to the far left of the road, closer than I should to the parked cars which could open a door and knock me off my bike at any moment.

It was the most recent utebag that pissed me off enough to write this post. While cycling through Victoria Park, heading home, he drove past me (so obviously I wasn't actually in his way), and helpfully pointed out "There's a footpath right there." He was slightly past me when I helpfully pointed out "Fuck you," in response, although he must not have heard me, because he didn't say anything. That section of Albany Highway is always packed with traffic, and I saw his ute stalled in line several times before I actually not only pulled up beside him, but passed him. I was riding on the footpath at this point (no pedestrians, dual pathway), and noticed he was looking out the window at me, so I grinned and waved at him as I passed him.

His response? "Get a real ride! And get on the footpath, you stupid bitch!"

It was so obviously designed to be a personal attack, on me, the person riding this bicycle, who was DISOBEYING what he told me to do, that I found myself shaking as I was driving home. I remembered a story S. told me many years ago, when she was crossing a street at a pedestrian light, one of those ones that lets traffic go one way, then the other way, then all pedestrians can cross. She was walking through the intersection when a guy in a truck (whoa, surprise) made an illegal left turn through the intersection, on a red light (Australians, this is like making an illegal RIGHT turn...across traffic). He almost hit her. So she gave him the finger. He shouted something unintelligible at her and then drove away.

Imagine her surprise, shock, and fear when she saw him WALKING TOWARDS HER along the sidewalk minutes later -- he had figured out which way she was going, circled the block, parked his car, and decided to get out to abuse and harass her. Calling her a "white bitch" and yelling swearwords at her, he kept advancing on her. It was actually remarkably fortunate that a friend of hers, a gigantic blacksmith who looks like a neo-Nazi but is actually adorable, happened to see the situation and came over to find out what was going on.

But who grows to be an adult believing it is actually okay to personally insult someone in a public venue? Like the recent Twitter hashtag #mencallmethings, where female bloggers and activists report accounts of men trying to shut them down using organized "humorous" namecalling, it amazes me that anyone can get to a point in their lives where they are so entitled, so threatened, that they feel like it's not only okay, but the best course of action to insult someone they will literally never see again.

Sad freak.

He tried to intimidate me, tried to use verbal force to get me to do what he wanted, and he was so irrationally upset that I have no doubt he would have willingly gotten all up in my face and shouted about it some more. All because I was on a bicycle and following road rules.

Oh and also: I was a lady. Don't forget that part.

Moving towards activism

2011-11-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

I have been doing a whole lot more activism-y type things lately. I marched to protest CHOGM -- well, not so much AGAINST CHOGM as FOR spending money on climate change awareness, renewable energy resources, and actual poor people, instead of, you know, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka. I hung around at Occupy Perth and discussed anarchism, got shoved by a West Australian reporter (who called me a "fucking feral" when I told him to stop talking to me like a dickhead), and ate snacks. Snacks are an important part of activism. Snacktivism! You heard it here first.

While I was hanging around at Occupy Perth, some quiet ladies were seriously painting away at some signs for the Reclaim the Night march that was due to happen that evening at 5pm. I'm all in favour of drawing awareness to, and working to end, violence against women. I think the feminist fight is NOT over and won, and that feminism is an issue that affects EVERYBODY -- you there? Guy who complains about how women get to have the door held open for them and expect their date to pay for them? You're a feminist too! You there, person who thinks that it's funny to ask lesbians what they do in bed together? You're...well, maybe you're not a feminist. You might just be a jerk.

However, I have my reservations about the Perth Reclaim the Night event, primarily because last year's was run by ROAR, a staunchly anti-man feminist activist collective, who were specifically transphobic about RTN last year (this year's also seems to have been run by ROAR, although they're calling themselves the Reclaim The Night Collective). Following a longstanding global tradition of "when I feel slightly less oppressed, my solution is to oppress others", ROAR banned trans people from the event, claiming it was more important for people who had been identified BY SOMEONE ELSE as women, from birth, to feel safe. Cause, you know, identifying YOURSELF as a woman, despite being confusingly in the wrong body for how you identify, isn't scary and disheartening and needing of some support. Similarly, people who find themselves somewhere along the gender continuum, but have some woman in their identity -- those folks aren't welcome either. Never mind that EVERYONE can be against violence against women-identified people.

When I posted on the RTN page on Facebook asking a very simple question, I got a roundabout, evasive answer. Let's see what I got:

Claire Litton asked: “hey there, are transwomen welcome at this event?”
Kat Pinder replied: “The organisers have not developed a particular position, other than the event is for women and children. Analysis’s of trans politics can be divisive, time consuming and often unlikely to reach consensus, so it is not something that we have even attempted to reach a decision about this year. I know some womyn who are attending who would not welcome male to trans people and differing perspectives on female to trans people. I am aware that trans identified people, who were raised as males, have attended the event last year and the previous year.”

Interesting. That sounds to me like "we don't want to talk or think about this Very Important Issue so we haven't developed an Official Position on it, to avoid having anything in writing that says we DON'T like the trans people, but also that we DO." Many other Take Back The Night and Reclaim The Night rallies specifically include transwomen (who really should just be known as "women"), and it's a bit sad that these guys have kind of gone out of their way to not be inclusive...but not really be UNinclusive either. Guess they learned that lesson last year.

I find it grating that she said trans politics are "divisive". You know what helps make them divisive? Creating arbitrary divisions between who you think should be allowed to call themselves "women". Just a thought.

I am also unimpressed by how she sort of laid the "blame" at the feet of transwomen -- just so they know, "some womyn" attending have problems with MTF trans women, so, y'know, those transwomen should take that into account and be polite enough to stay home. So they don't offend their womyn compatriots. Who don't really want them there anyway. Because they're not women. They're men. Or something.

And let's not even talk about "analysis's."

I dislike any attempts to create a mysterious third gender consisting of all the "other" people, as we deem them. You're not a woman, MTF transwoman! You're a TRANS. You're not a man, FTM trans man! You're a TRANS. And you guys who have alternative gender identities, you don't really count at all.

So after that answer, I was really unimpressed by the Reclaim The Night ideals, but was willing to see how events unfolded and maybe consider joining them if I felt comfortable and welcome, and that everyone was included.

Until I saw the very serious quiet woman painting the following on her gigantic banner: PROSTITUTION = PAID RAPE.

Now call me a crazy feminist ("Okay, you're a crazy feminist") but I'm gonna call Andrea Dworking and all the other ladies who subscribe to that whole all-sex-work-is-oppression-and-by-the-way-any-hetero-sex-is-rape-because-penises-are-evil CRAZY FEMINISTS. Okay, maybe they're not crazy. But they're sure taking any form of agency and choice away from the women for whom they claim to speak, the women they claim to empower.

Some sex workers, which include prostitutes, are oppressed. Some office workers are oppressed. Some sex workers are in the sex industry against their will, through coercion. Some women become doctors against their will, through coercion. Implying that women who choose to be in the sex industry for their own reasons are doing it because they are sadly deluded or forced is patronizing, misogynistic, rude, and disempowering.

Furthermore, implying that a rape survivor's experience is in any way similar to what a prostitute experiences is deeply patronizing to a rape survivor. A sex worker has a choice about who she sleeps with. A rape survivor doesn't. A sex worker frequently acts like she enjoys it. A rape survivor doesn't. A sex worker uses condoms (and in some places, is required by law to both use condoms and dental dams, and get mandatory regular testing). A rape survivor doesn't usually have that option. Cheapening the experience of a rape survivor by saying it's "same-same" with sex work is shameful.

So, Reclaim The Night Collective, whoever you are, because I couldn't find anywhere on any literature anything about who you actually were, you faceless entity -- bad show. You are presenting a space where YOU are the ones who get to choose what being a woman means. Must be nice for you.

(Also, just as a disclaimer, I am a cis-woman myself, and I have attempted to use language in a way that gets my point across without implying divisivenes. I hate using "transman" and "transwoman" instead of just "man" and "woman" but I felt like it was necessary in the context of trying to explain why I was pissed off.)

Not a long post

2011-05-29T02:50:00.000-07:00

But a quote, found on the literary tattoo website Contrariwise, and a quote from Whitman I've oddly never heard before. I'm not as well read as I used to be, and haven't picke dup a classic work of literature in years (am I blowing my cover?), but this quote resonates with me in so many ways:

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

This is from Leaves of Grass, but it was apparently only ever published in the first edition and in no other editions. A shame, because it seems like the best possible life motto.

The words of life

2011-05-16T03:47:00.001-07:00

It would be good if life actually had warning signs like this, wouldn't it? Instead, we get stupid ones like "Don't Walk" or "Danger: Cliff", which actually, now that I think of it, are pretty good warning signs.

They say that the sense you use the most when you're remembering things is your sense of smell (now, who "they" are and why they keep saying things that we take at face value, I don't know) -- and certainly nothing brings back a sense of BEING in a memory like a smell. It's not like looking at the picture of my mom and I hand in hand in the driveway of our old townhouse; I look at the picture and it jogs faint impressions, of the babysitter I had when we lived there who let me watch Happy Days and the movie "Bloodsport" which I claimed for a long time was my favorite movie because I was nine years old and my hippie mother had never let me see anything with violence in it before so I naturally assumed that anything forbidden was AWESOME and I still vaguely believe Jean-Claude van Damme is sort of cool just for that reason.

But let me get a particular smell and it SMACKS me back into my grandmother's driveway in August, in Hartford, CT, in my little-girl clothes, when I decided I was going to be altruistic and give all my toys away to the neighborhood kids, so I left them all on everybody's doorsteps and then instantly regretted it, and went crying to my mom so we could go get them back. I liked those bears. Or a dry sandy smell places me on a rooftop in Morocco in 1999, desperately in love with Wolf and the newness of everything.

Music, and particular songs, do that for me as well. Now, I am kind of a musical weirdo. I rarely buy or download new music, even by bands I really like, and happily allow my iPod to shuffle its way through the 17 days of music I already have loaded into it, skipping the approximately 6 days of which are bellydancing music. The kind of music I like leans towards clever or monstrously sad lyrics, acoustic guitar, and Canadian lesbian acts (that's you, Tegan and Sara!), and I happily accept recommendations from people who are cooler and more vastly connected with music than me: like my ex-crush who used to be a radio DJ, and Arlette, who is just cooler in general than basically everyone on earth, and also funnier.

This is the kind of joy Arlette gives me: the kind I want to write about on garbage bins.

But every now and then, a particular song swims up on my iPod and it just brings me right back to a place, or a person.

I was massively ambivalent about leaving LA: on the one hand, I was finally allowed to LEAVE LA, which gnawed metaphorically on my heart like an apathetic, laidback zombie. On the other, I was going away from some very good friends, and a boyfriend (which actually turned out to be a pretty good move). But I was torn, and on my last night before flying out of the country, I found myself at home alone for a short time, while packing the gigantic piles of stuff I had strewn over the living room (have you ever tried to pack to move to another country where you can only take what fits into your checked luggage on a trip to Thailand?).

Water makes everyone introspective, particularly feet,

And while I was at home, I found myself playing The Weakerthans "Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure" over and over again. Now, this is The Saddest Song Ever, but sad in a satisfying way, and the lyrics are just heartbreaking, so of course I LOVE IT and I found myself singing along to it over and over again, with tears in my eyes. Hearing that song now brings me back to the tiny office room and living room of that pool house in the San Fernando Valley, which I can picture almost exactly, with every decoration intact, and the empty dusty shelves that used to hold my clothes.

Similarly, They Might Be Giants "We Want A Rock" ("Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads...") immediately plops me into Colleen's tiny Smarte car convertible, driving down Highway 1 to the Pacific Coast Highway from Camarillo, under a cloudy sky, with the top down. She and Peter were crazy enough to get me to housesit for them while they went to Australia for their honeymoon, and I totally had a wild party every night and sold drugs and made pornography movies and snorted cocaine through a hundred dollar bill. But when I wasn't doing that, I fed their cats and drive Colleen's car to the beach and enjoyed being alone in a remote area, and actually felt the first smidgeon of affection for California as a location, rather than a movie set.

My Honda. I miss the bumper stickers. A lot. More than the weird rattling noise it made.

The Magnetic Field's "All My Little Words", despite having been given to me as part of an attentively-constructed song playlist by an elegant paleontologist I had a giant affection for, actually reminds me of driving again: driving between Christy's house in the hills above Boulder, CO and town itself, passing along the winding roads in the sun, with the trees surrounding me, and the music blasting from the speakers of my old Honda Accord (sold for $750 to a teenager who I think was stoned, bumper stickers and all). I was excited because I was helping a camp get ready for Burning Man, and because mountains are awesome, and because I got to sleep in the tiny cottage with the gigantic Tempurpedic bed ALL BY MYSELF.

It didn't hurt that Christy's neighborhood looked like this.

"La Famiglia" by Mirah, a light-hearted and delicate song about boning, reminds me of staying at Reed's house in the Presidio, sunset lowering over San Francisco. James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" brings back both the heady rush of loving someone that turned out to be a self-centred egotistical asshole and the tears that trickled down my face as I remembered him, flying home from Biloxi, MS with Beth after teaching a dance workshop, looking out into the dark mile high air so she wouldn't see me crying and ask what was wrong.

What are your songs? The soundtrack of your lives?

Major difference in cultural points

2011-04-08T05:16:00.000-07:00

So, since coming to Australia, I watch a lot more tv. This is due to several factors -- my old housemates watched tv in the evenings, Jason loves having the tv on, I've lost the will to fight about it as much as I did when I was 22, and there are actually sometimes shows on that I want to watch.

One of these, a recent Australian production, is called "Winners and Losers", and is a night-time dramedy about 4 deliberately quirky friends who were outsiders in high school ("losers") and then meet up again at their 10th reunion to kick ass and show the bitchy Queen Bee (described by one of my coworkers as being "almost American") who they are...namely, they are WINNERS! The plot twists are deeply improbable; for example, they become actual winners when they buy a lottery ticket, and are each the recipient of $2 million -- at the end of the first episode. How am I supposed to identify with that? I was definitely not the coolest of kids in high school, although I never saw any stratification of the type common to Lindsay Lohan movies, so I was doing all right with my "amen, sister!" until they won a ton of money and then I immediately could not sympathize with their problems anymore ("Oh, you can't set a date for your wedding? Boo fucking hoo, YOU HAVE A YACHT!!")

One part of this show that made me almost drop-jawed in amazement was a scene near the middle of the first episode (and the episodes go for indeterminate amounts of time...the first one was about 2 hours long, while the second was one and a half hours long, and the third was about 45 minutes. Maybe they're using up all the story early?). The four girls all have definable traits, and one of them is the Hot Brunette. She's also the Only Brunette, since Australians are OBSESSED with blondes in the same way Americans are obsessed with redheads. But Hot Brunette is a personal trainer, which is how she lost all the weight that made her a loser in high school, and to deal with her nerves at the reunion, where she teeters in on improbably high heels and a sexy tight-as-skin dress, she pops into the nearest bathroom stall (see if you can tell what's going to happen), takes a COMPACT MIRROR out of her bag, TIPS SOME COCAINE out onto it, and SNIFFS it with an audible snort!!

Australians: take a minute to imagine the amazement of my American compatriots, who, even now as they read, are probably staring at each other saying, "You can SHOW that on AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC TELEVISION?" Americans: this wasn't even cable. This was a channel that everybody gets. And the show airs at 8:30, which is actually within the kids-are-awake window of prime-time programming.

I tell you what, I was floored. And then, in the next episode, she answers the door to a couple of police officers WITH A PLATE OF COCAINE IN HER HAND. And they arrest her. And then SHE'S ALLOWED OUT ON BAIL. With a fine. A fine! They have not revealed on the show how much her fine will be, but I looked up drug laws online, to help curtail my amazement (thinking, "Well, it's got to be like $50,000"), and discovered that anything up to 2 grams is okay, with a fine of up to $2000 if they catch you and are in a bad mood.

Stop to imagine the cultural divide, here. More like a cultural yawning gulf, with dudes in helicopters with uzis patrolling the borders of it. Not only would you never see drug use on American non-cable channels unless it was in the form of a cautionary tale ("Tiffany started out as a perfectly normal, happy eight year old...until she took ONE PUFF of a marijuana cigarette. Now she's a streetwalking whore doing gang bangs for crack."), but it would never be a trait of a sympathetic main character. And if you got arrested for holding a plate of cocaine in front of police officers, you could make damn sure you would not be let out with a fine and a slap on the hand from a magistrate, who I always picture as portly red-faced men in wigs and waistcoats. You would go directly to jail, do not pass go, and you might get out in a couple of years after you had become the bitch of several men with THUG LIFE tattooed on their foreheads.

This is how badly our ridiculous War on Drugs has screwed up our nation. Drugs are not necessarily bad in and of themselves; just what people do when they're on them and addicted to them, and in my opinion, alcohol is the worst of all of them. Have you ever been aggressed on the street by someone who'd just finished smoking pot? Now how about some dudes outside a bar at 2am? Which one is more likely to punch you and which one is more likely to take your corn chips and give you a hug? And alcohol is the legal one.

Sometimes I don't remember I'm a foreigner until something like that happens, and my mind gets completely blown.

PS In other news, one of the guys I work with told me about a hilarious practice he and his friends engage in called "stealth bumming", where you wait for someone to be doing something that involves them bending over, then you sneak in and pretend to be pounding them in the ass ("bumming" them, in British) while someone takes a picture. Then you post it on Facebook. Perhaps thisisphotobomb.com should change their name to thisisphotoBUMMING.com. If only.

Interesting point, with clarification

2011-01-22T07:35:00.000-08:00

It has been pointed out to me that I ruminate a lot on the nature of leaving; that I talk about how sometimes it's sad to move around the world and leave people behind and stuff, and that there might be some kind of inherent implication in that: the implication that I don't like where I am.

It never occurred to me that anyone might think my sadness over leaving one group of friends might not be able to co-exist with my happiness in a new group, or that my expressing said sadness might not similarly imply my future sadness for eventually leaving all awesome people in my life. So here we go: if any of my totally fantastic friends and amazing fun partners have ever been upset or offended by my unwitting implication that I Just Don't Love You, I'm really really sorry. I may be sad to leave the other people, but I will definitely be sad to leave YOU. You are the cat's pajamas. You are the bee's knees, and my life is much richer and better with you in it.

I have to say, the main reason I wrote this most recent article was simply because I still, despite evidence of Niagara Falls-worth of apathy on his part, often think about my ex-boyfriend. It's rough to like someone a lot and they tell you they like you, that they love you more than anyone else on earth in fact, and they tell you so much that it's easy to forget that they're not actually SHOWING you, so the relationship is not that great really. Actually, emotionally, it sucks. So why should I miss that person? Well, because he was charming, and really funny, and because he had a particular turn of phrase that I found hilarious, and could talk to me about pretty much all the music that I liked, and he generally did almost all the things a perfect life partner for me would have done except ONE THING: want to be a good life partner. FAIL.

And actually, missing him PISSES ME OFF because it is dumb. Emotions are weird. And then Facebook has to turn up and even though I have blocked him from my news feed, I just can't bring myself to unfriend him, because yeah, he's pretty funny, so instead Facebook is constantly reminding me of the latest Place he checked in at (with by the way the new girl he instantly replaced me with) or reminding me that I have some photos in which we are both tagged, and generally constantly reminding me of a person that never thinks about me. So...well, it's a bit emotional sometimes.

That's why I wrote that.

I hope all my friends, old and new, know what they mean to me. And if you don't, I will SHOW you (not tell you) every day, because frankly, that counts so much more than anything you could ever read online.

Disposability, impermanence, and Facebook

2011-01-22T00:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, what I absolutely can't stand is thinking that someone I care about might find me...replaceable. Nothing says, "I don't really love you that much" like plugging another person right into the spot you left behind -- nobody wants to be so indispensable that their friends are left weeping in inconsolable heaps upon departing, but a wee bit of grieving might be nice.

It just goes along with the nature of a nomadic lifestyle, though; until I can perfect my Evil Secret Plan (now not so secret) that means everyone I love will come live with me in a commune and stay with me forever, chances are some of my relationships will end because of choices I make. And not choices like "I'ma join a Doomsday cult and get my hate on for comets." No, choices like, "I don't want to live in the same place for very long." Some relationships rely on proximity for maintenance, and as soon as the distance increases, the relationship decreases, until you're left with...nothing.

Morose? Partially. Obviously, with every new move, comes new opportunities to increase your social circle...every time God closes a door, he somehow opens a window, yadda yadda. But something I've been thinking about thanks in no small part to Facebook. Facebook allows you to keep in somewhat obscene faux-proximity to people you might only have met once; before you know it, you find yourself reading the daily ruminations on breakfast food or dreams of some girl you sat next to in a lecture that one time, who you kind of liked. I remember in my orientation program at Curtin, I briefly talked to a lovely Singaporean girl on my way to the gym where we were being oriented, and she wouldn't release me from her grip on my arm until I gave her my phone number. She really wanted a new friend.

Facebook means impermanence is so much less likely -- how can you pretend someone's not in your life when you constantly see them changing their profile picture? (Answer: do what my ex, Justin, always does, and just don't read anyone else's Facebook, ever, preferring instead to concentrate only on what everyone else thinks of YOUR Facebook profile) However, it also increases the sting of disposability confirmed: nothing drives home how replaced you've been like seeing your ex-girlfriends out on dates with new guys, or your old tango partner swinging around with someone else (note: these are generic examples, as I neither date girls nor dance tango).

Dear Zuckerberg: you've made it easier to stay in touch, but also easier to grind salt into the wounds of loss. I'm sure you don't find it so dramatic, since according to The Social Network, you're just pounding cocktails and banging girls, so you'll never read this. Also it's a pretty melodramatic way of putting it. But still.

Living, not traveling

2011-01-09T07:26:00.000-08:00

So I don't really write here because I just don't know how interesting it is for all of you (you know, all four of you) to read about my exciting life in Australia and how I WENT TO THE GROCERY STORE and then I RETURNED SOME BOOKS TO THE LIBRARY and then I WALKED MY DOG. Those are the things that living is made up of, not traveling, and since this blog is about traveling, I don't want to bore you with my ex-pat lifestyle. Unless you are panting to know where to find the best seedless grapes in season here in Perth, in which case I can tell you, it is the Morley Grower's Market, where they are less than $6 a kilo, and Americans, if you think this is massively expensive, this is only because you don't know that bananas are $2.99 a kilo. Compare that to the whopping US sum of 39 cents a pound. Also gas (or as they say here, petrol) is up to $1.35 a litre and not falling. I might as well light all my money on fire as soon as I get it.

I live in a new house now. It is very large, much larger than my boyfriend and I can fill up, even with an enthusiastic dog. The dog mostly just sits where we are anyway, hoping that he will someday have discovered the way to occupy the exact same molecular space as us so that he can literally be INSIDE US and therefore complete the purpose of his little pat-obsessed doggy brain. The house has rooms everywhere, so many rooms that we have two guest rooms and only one guest to fill them with (Jason's teenaged son, occasionally), and whole rooms with which we do nothing. It's like living with Jeff all over again: having not just rooms but FLOORS where nothing happened, and dust slowly settled on whatever thing we'd temporarily decided to put in there. (As an aside, can I say that I think dust is one of the most unfair things about living in a large house? I remember complaining to my mom once about how I had just dusted and then I had to go and dust AGAIN. And she said, "Yeah, that happens. Dust really never stops, you know?" Stupid dust)

So this new house is in a supposedly bad neighborhood, and apparently we can't get contents insurance on our stuff--which, given, is mostly not very expensive--because we don't have up-to-date security stuff. We have deadbolts on all the doors, and window locks, but we don't have security screens or an alarm system. The dog would probably lick burglars to death, and Jason's son would probably not emerge from the depths of World of Warcraft to notice that they'd made off with the TV and laptops. So contents insurance is renter's insurance, basically: it's insurance for the stuff in the house, as opposed to the house itself.

Living in my own space as opposed to just renting a room from an awesome lady I met on Couchsurfing entails some understandings of things that I didn't have before: namely, that domesticity has a tendency to hit me hard. For example, I seriously considered buying a $400 Dyson vacuum cleaner the other day. I bought a 1950s dressing table and put it in the bedroom. I refinished it with wood cleaner and walnut polish. I feel like I should be wearing an apron and curlers, and like my name should be Mabel.

I also need to understand that it's a sort of permanence I've avoided rather seriously up til this point. Living with Justin, I always knew I could leave whenever I wanted. In fact, most of the time, I felt like he would have been equally happy if I left or stayed...he might have been a bit sad that I was gone, but he would have gotten over it by evening, when he found a nice squishy girl to have sex with. The only time in my life my name's been on a lease before now was a six-month stint at an apartment in Pittsburgh (still the only six months I've ever lived alone), and I always knew that was temporary. I had the plane tickets to Guatemala already blinking in my in-box; the end-date was set. Now, in Perth, I've gotten more settled than I've been for a very long time, and I admit, it scares me a bit.

The thing is, whenever I get settled, I get hurt. I give up parts of myself, get all domestic and homey, and then realize the world I've settled myself into has cracks...it goes bad...and I end up ending a relationship or being forgotten. Moving in with someone takes a big commitment, obviously, but just the space of commitment is a commitment itself. I take a big breath, though, and I try again.

Long overdue

2010-06-21T23:27:00.000-07:00

I know, I haven't written in this damn thing for WAY too long? Do you know why? Because I am entertaining myself in the real world instead of sitting indoors with a computer; or, more accurately, I am sitting indoors with a computer, moaning and gnashing my teeth because the internet is SO SLOW IT FEELS LIKE IT IS COMING BY ROMAN AQUEDUCT FROM ROME because they have bandwidth limits, so we only get 8GB of data transfer per month on our home system. That is not very much. I probably use 8GB a DAY in the States. So it gets really slow in the daytime, but it's okay, because at least if I want to get up at 2am, it will speed up again.

On the other hand, I have a new job, which frequently has shifts that end in the middle of the night, so maybe I will be using the internet in offpeak hours and it will seem fast again. But for now, it mostly just makes me feel like crying because it is so bloody slow.

That said, let me show you some pictures of the trip Ray and I took to Mandurah. We didn't do much there except eat delicious ice cream (I had apple pie, he had honeycomb and nougat...then the other day at my friend Nancy's house we had burnt fig, honeycomb, and caramel ice cream with cinnamon whipped cream that she whipped herself and my mouth exploded) and ogle the beautiful war memorial. And took these very bad pictures.

egg-O-mania Omeleteers...sounds much better than Mousketeers.

I just thought this passageway was neat-looking.

The war memorial was the best one I've ever seen. Really thoughtfully designed and beautiful.

Claire is very bad

2010-05-05T17:39:00.000-07:00

To make up for it having been almost a month since the last time I posted, here is a post with a lot of pictures in it. I would like to point out, though, that the reason I haven't been posting that much is because I have been having a great time, and staying amused, and doing fun things, and just don't have time to post on the internet. Which means I hate you all. No, it actually mostly means exactly what I said: the world is too exciting to hang out with Blogspot. Although now that I have an AWESOME NEW IPOD TOUCH, maybe I will install a Blogger app and then I can post from my POCKET. If I do that, you will then be thinking, "Wow, she posts so much more frequently, but all her posts say "*&*%&^$^Y$#WDDDDDDD" and then she updates Facebook and Twitter simultaneously."

UFOs and CLAIRE invade the Top End.

So, I went to Darwin. Darwin is well-known in Australia for being very hot, for having once been destroyed in a horrific cyclone, and for being full of two kinds of people: blue-collar construction workers who hang out in pubs, and hippies in organic hemp fibres who hang out on beaches.

Beaches like this. Totally boring and horrible, right?

I am a big hippie. I know this may come as a shock to those of you who did not notice my flowing harem pants and preference for freshly-squeezed juices, but I am a huge, hairy-armpitted hippie, who uses cloths instead of paper towels, and bicycles to save the environment and also because I like it. Also, I don't shave my armpits because I kept forgetting to do it, not out of some kind of personal statement. But I do have baggy harem pants.

So I fit right in in Darwin.

Me being a hippie with orange hair, walking barefoot on the beach. Those ripples in the water were caused by the Grateful Dead.

I went to Darwin on a whim. I wanted to see some more of Australia, and I liked the tropical part the last time I was there, and I had a free weekend, and the tickets were on sale. It was pretty awesome. Then I stepped out of the airport and immediately sweated through everything I was wearing, including my shoes and my hair. Darwin is not really that hot (only about 35 degrees Celsius year-round), but since it's in the Tropic of Capricorn or something, it has approximately 104% humidity at all times. So it's hot, but at least it's a WET heat.

This is another thing Australians known about Darwin: you need lots of changes of clothes, because you will make them all smelly and dripping within seconds. After awhile, I didn't really care, because everyone was sweaty. Except for us women: we gleam. Plus, since there's no water restrictions, you can have as many showers as you like, so where's the down side?

I'll tell you what the down side is: estuarine crocodiles.

Probably closed due to death.

Estuarine, or "saltwater", crocodiles are the largest and most grumpy of the crocodilian family. They're like Kodiak bears in northern Canada: they see you and run right up and rip your arm off and eat it while laughing at you running around spurting blood, and then they kick you in the stump. Except with a crocodile, it looks more like heaving its 750kg mass onto the beach, chasing you down at the speed of a freight train, grabbing you in its massively strong jaws, and dragging you underwater so you peacefully drown while it punctures your kidneys.

Since they're saltwater crocodiles, they sometimes end up following the estuaries into the Arafura Sea, which borders on the beaches in Darwin. So that means you could technically be sunbathing in your bikini, and be interrupted by waddling, toothy death.

Enjoy the sunset, because it might be the LAST ONE YOU EVER SEE.

I didn't see any crocodiles, though, except for dead ones in the museum. Mostly, what I saw, was plates of snack food and the pages of whatever book I was currently reading, because, darn it, I went on vacation to go on vacation, not have one of those trips where you're basically jogging from site to site so you can take a picture and prove you were there.

I had a weird feeling of deja vu, actually, because Darwin was the first place I ever went in Australia, back in 2004, and, as it turns out, over the exact same weekend. I know this because I went to the Mindil Beach Markets, the fun beachside gathering of imported Indian clothing and musicians playing funky didgeridoos and Thai food in plastic containers, and they had fireworks. Turns out they only have fireworks on the first and last days of the market. But when I was at Mindil in 2004, they had fireworks too. So I managed to go to Darwin exactly six years after the first time I went. And the same musicians were playing at Mindil in exactly the same places, and I think the drummer I briefly flirted with last time was still playing the drums, only he looked older and more bearded.

I wonder if the two headlines are related, and the UFO was actually drunk driving.

I also went to the museum and spoke at a Rotary club and went to the Seabreeze music and art festival, and saw the world's whitest funk band. They called themselves an "all-white brotherhood" and wore ridiculous afro wigs and sparkly suits. One of their songs was called "Mr. Funkypants." That alone made the price of the ticket worthwhile.

The trip was a major success, not just because of Mr. Funkypants. I met some amazingly fun new people, and saw some gorgeous artwork. I enjoyed hot sun and the sound of waves, and picked up some shells off the beach (which I then promptly put down and most certainly did NOT take across state lines, NT police! Haha, hello!). I drifted. I finished a paper on the sexuality of people with severe mental illness.

You know, the usual vacation stuff.

Couchsurfer Imbi tried to fly a kite on a blue, blue day.

Things I've learned about myself

2010-04-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like so much about being here is learning new things about myself; actually, I always like learning new things, no matter where I am. This is why I ask a lot of intrusive personal questions, because I long ago found out that people are so startled by them that they answer truthfully. This goes over well when you're a therapist, not so well when you're on the bus.

But traveling always throws a lot about you into sharp relief. You learn about how you react under pressure ("Ahhhhh, I missed the only bus out of Nice!"), how you feel about certain situations ("Ahhhhhhh they want me to eat cockroaches!"), and the hilarious meanings in Lonely Planet language phrasebooks ("Ahhhhhh it has a section on sex that has phrases like "Touch my eyes/breasts/hair/face" and "You can't stay here tonight" in Swahili!").

For me, I've mostly learned lately that I seem to be allergic to milk.

This sucks for two, equally bad reasons. The first is that now I have to be one of those smug, irritating people who drinks oat milk, eats Rice Dream and soy cheese, and says, "Oh, no thank you, I can't haaaaaaave that -- it has daaaaaaaiiiiiiiry."

The second is, I have to eat soy cheese.

The only thing on earth I love more than breathing is cheese. I LOVE CHEESE. A lot. To the point where one of the main reasons why I don't particularly want to live in many parts of the US is because they don't have good aged cheddar. To the point where I happily ate pretty much nothing but chèvre the entire time I was in France, with absolute disregard for what anyone else wanted to eat. To the point where I have cheesy garlic bread with my pizza. I have frequently been given cheese for Christmas, and it was my favorite present.

But now, due to the alarming stomach cramps and other interesting symptoms (I won't bore you, but you can Google "lactose intolerance" if you're really interested) I seem to get as a direct result of consuming milk, I am reduced to only eating cheese if I really want to suffer some consequences...or more accurately, if I really want everyone AROUND me to suffer some consequences.

Oh, also, you know what else has milk in it? Chocolate.

It's also possible that I am allergic to Red Bull, or at least that it has something in it that strongly disagrees with me. The allergen jury is still out, and the allergen jury mostly consists of me noticing the day after eating something that I'm in horrible gastrointestinal pain and some other stuff I'm too delicate to mention because I'm a lady, and then trying to figure out what I ate the previous day, forgetting, then remembering and thinking, "I can't possibly have a problem with THAT."

So mostly I'm engaging in fun experiments with the art of farting quietly in public.

Typically Australian snapshots

2010-03-30T06:34:00.001-07:00

No, not actual snapshots, like with a camera. Verbal snapshots.

- Sitting in the park at the foreshore, having a family picnic (which in Sian's family means mostly ducking projectile foodstuffs...anything small and round is fair game, which means we have a lot of salads with cherry tomatoes and grapes to ensure plenty of ammunition), when we saw a wedding go by. Everyone, including the bride and groom, were carrying their shoes and meandering around barefoot; everyone, including the bride and groom, were carrying stubbies; and everyone, including the bride and groom, had sunglasses on. The groom was also dragging an Esky. Which he put in the trunk of the Rolls limousine.

- I walked past an elementary school in the middle of the afternoon the other day, and saw all the kids bouncing off the equipment, screaming and yelling, all with their bright green Cancer Council hats on. Hats are mandatory for schoolchildren in Australia, because otherwise they are one giant melanoma before they even have a chance to vote. Which is also mandatory.

- Standing on a street corner, I heard the screech of tires as a Holden ute thundered up next to me, the open window blasting AC/DC. The driver was young, about eighteen, wearing sunglasses, and a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. This is such a stereotype of a bogan hoon, you have no idea. I love that newspapers will have headlines with the word "hoon" in them, since it basically means "thug who drives around dangerously in a car" as well as "the act of a thug driving around dangerously in a car" (noun and verb, all purpose). So you could say that somewhat was a hoon, or that they were hooning around Perth. And a bogan, well...hmm. See if you can figure that one out. It took me a while to get the contextual gist of it.

- Speaking of bogans, Sian and I noted: bogans always have dogs with muscle-y names, like Macho and Mustang and Tractor and so on. So we voted that bogan dogs are now called "dogans". This may only be funny to Australians. And me.

Stationary Claire

2010-03-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

Rottnest Island, tourist hellhole, except when you go on a weekday. Then it's still a tourist hellhole, but the beaches are emptier.

Not being actively traveling, but rather, settled down in a completely foreign country, is an interesting experience. I did some calculating the other day, and realized that except for my Big Trip when I was 19 (6 months traveling through Europe and Morocco) and 6 weeks in Australia in 2004, all of my trips have been only weeks long. As someone who views traveling as being, by its very nature, a longer-term endeavor, this makes me a big ol' fraud. All my pretentious "be free and vagabond around the world, drinking life to the lees and some other old-fashioned, high-faluting-sounding stuff that makes you think I'm smart" persona presentation (and alliteration) are actually based in very little fact.

I like to travel. I like to travel for long periods of time. I actually think that's the best way to travel. So why haven't I done that? Am I afraid of something (being lonely, getting lost, figuring out the money)?

What is there to be afraid of? Falling off a cliff while doing the YMCA dance.

And living somewhere is way different from traveling through there, although you can approximate living somewhere if you stay for three to four weeks. You can develop the favorite coffee shop where they recognize your order, the familiar stores where you buy familiar pants, the same place you leave your toothbrush every night.

The most important rhetorical question: what the hell is "Manchester"?

You can even approximate living somewhere with short bursts of long-term travel by developing lasting friendships, getting jobs and bank accounts, finding a romantic entanglement or some sort of lover. But then, when the month is over, you pick up and move on, and you have enough of a place's imprint to memorize a map of its city streets, but not enough to know where the best walk to take your dog is. You don't know what it smells like in fall, but you unpacked your bags and put the backpack in the closet for a while.

The top of this mailbox came off. They deliver mail there anyway.

Which one is better? I really don't know. Is it better to settle somewhere, or is just a taste of settling enough? Is it okay to confuse doing something with pretending to do something, and figure out the difference later? Or are you really conducting a mini-life in that month-long stay,with enough veracity behind it that you could really say you've lived there?

Is it more important to SAY you've lived somewhere than actually live there?

What's up there? Drop bears?

What's with all this freaking navel-gazing, anyway? I don't know, but it sure is pretentious. In order to make you forget about how omphaloskeptic I've been, why don't you go read about Lady Gaga instead?

Art is cool.

2010-03-11T00:02:00.000-08:00

I went to Sculpture by the Sea at Cottesloe Beach. This is a sculpture festival where they plop down artwork by the side of the Indian Ocean and you can look at it or touch it or totally ignore it while you are sunbathing or perving on other sunbathers.

There is some cool art.

This is the seawall, and they put this huge rusted metal archway at the end of it. The lamp-post was already there.

The sign at the other end says "Please do not walk through sculpture."

Neat standing mirror tower

The swimmer was made out of layers of wood glued to sheets of glass all stacked together. The artist is there on the left, repairing a crack in the glass from a night-time bashing.

Creepy. I asked Jason, who took the picture, why he thought the man was screaming, and he said, "Because he's got another person coming out of him."

Steampunk horse. It had little swinging doors, and a ladder into its interior.

I want to know what they're looking at. Steampunk bathers.

What culture have you engaged in?

2010-03-07T04:27:00.000-08:00

I'm writing my First Report for my Rotary scholarship, which mostly involves discussing what Rotary-related activities I've been involved with since I got here, and also how I have a) learned about Australian culture, and b) shared my culture with Australians. Unfortunately, they don't mean things like figuring out what "half a rabbit" means, which is too bad, although I suppose I could count that towards my degree. So here are some of the cultural things I've been involved with since the last time I posted:

Went to the Perth Writers Festival. This was actually quite amazing; held on the UWA campus, it featured panel discussions with all sorts of authors, including American ones and, fabulously for me, Garth Nix, which made my geeky, YA-loving heart flutter. My notes for the session on landscape in literature and art, which I took on my cell phone, since I didn't have any paper, say: "the inutility of hierarchy...the intimacy of landscape" and "i-thou relationships with land...congruence/consistency." I was quite struck by that talk, actually, and stood up at the end to ask a question about why landscape seems to act as a narrative character more often in Australian media than in American ones, which caused several people to come up to me afterwards and question ME. I also really enjoyed what the panelists said about, if you could express landscape perfectly in words, it would have been in words to start with, which is what I always tell my students about dancing.
Went on a Rotary river cruise. I mostly, unsurprisingly for me, spent my time talking to the hired help, who told me about how hungover they were. One did, anyway. the other one wanted all my notes on Laos.
Had my first week of school. It was largely uneventful, except for talking about penises in class, for credit.
This Monday, we get to watch penises.
I dressed up hilariously to go see Alice in Wonderland.
I never dress up to go to movies. Cat was sort of the March Hare. I, as housemate Jason pointed out, resembled a Fruit Tingle.
I read poetry at an open mic night. It was my poetry (sharing culture), and I listened to a poem about RAIN in Australia going down the DRAIN (receiving, unfortunately, someone else's culture.

Culture has been spread. You can tell cause I used the passive voice.

Photos from Australia

2010-02-27T07:37:00.001-08:00

My friend Ken and I went to Preston Beach, with Tippy, for a dog-related adventure. Preston Beach is a short distance down the coast from Perth, which, as you might have noticed, is on the Indian Ocean. This is a cool ocean to be on, although it is very full of sharks, apparently, not that I've seen one. Today on Cottesloe Beach, for example, I saw a school of herring just jumping out of the water, which means there were probably dolphins around...and then the other day in Fremantle, I saw an absolutely gorgeous sunset, but no sharks.

Tippy's shadow is much more terrifying than Tippy herself, who frequently immobilizes enemies by sitting on their feet and licking them.

There are kangaroos in Preston Beach.

Quite a lot of them, actually.

I love the way the rills in the sand show the footprints.

Actually, Australia is awful. You shouldn't come here. Definitely not WA. Sydney is nice. Go over there.

Updating etcetera

2010-02-21T18:41:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day in Australia is remarkably low-key -- everyone pretty much mostly ignored it, in favor of the super major interesting holiday coming up, Easter. We're talking about Easter egg hunts and all the grocery stores have fabulous Easter candy displays with six thousand things that are very bad for you, like chocolate-covered Turkish Delight eggs from Cadbury's and...well, mostly just stuff like that.

In the meantime, I have been trying to cut back on eating so much sugar again, which is difficult because it seems like everyone is surviving entirely on carbohydrates and sugar syrup. I've never seen a nation that doesn't drink diet soda quite so much. Everyone puts loads of butter on pretty much every bread product known to mankind, including their hamburger rolls before they put hamburgers in them, and piles of crackers with Vegemite on them are considered a nutritious meal for school students. There's this thing called "cordial", which is basically sugar syrup, and is pronounced "cord-ee-all", for those of you who might be convinced it's pronounced "corjal", as I pronounced it until I was corrected by virtually everyone...cordial is brightly colored sugar syrup that you mix with water and drink. It doesn't even pretend to have health in it.

last night I spent about twenty minutes amusing some kids by repeating words they asked me to say in my American accent. "Darcy," for example. And "marshmallow" had them in hysterics for several minutes. Then they asked me if I would swear for them, and I pointed out that cussing is funny no matter what accent you have, with which they concurred. Two points for me!

I've been really remarkably busy, a state of affairs I'm actually pleased with, although I'll have to start turning down social engagements when school starts. Note to self: just because you CAN say yes, doesn't mean you SHOULD say yes. I've been speaking at Rotary clubs pretty much every Monday and Wednesday since I got here, and I'm starting to feel a little bit dazed...they're all very nice, but meeting so many new people is moderately confusing. After so long in LA, where people said they wanted to hang out and never did, it's a bit of a shock to see the cascading effect when people say they want to see you and they actually really DO want to see you, so you end up with ninety-two invites. I never knew I was so popular. I'm not sure I *am* popular, or if it's mostly just novelty.

I've also started taking aerialist classes, so I spend an hour and a half every Wednesday hanging upside down, very badly, from strips of silk or a trapeze. I think it's really beautiful and I love the idea of it, but I really could use more practice, and short of hopping around on the bus poles, I'm stuck with once-a-week practicing, which as everyone knows, does not make you an expert. Whatever is the opposite of expert, that is what it makes you. Probably a quadriplegic, given that if I am not an expert, I slip off the silks and fall on my head.

I have been spending a lot of time on the beach, listening to waves and walking around and watching surfers. I met Natasha, a couchsurfer looking for a fun partner, and we drove to Margaret River on Friday, which was a seven hour round trip. It was worth every minute of wonderful conversation, delicious vegetarian food consumed while staring out over the ocean and watching surfers get smashed on rocks.

Also Ken got me a gift certificate to dive in the shark tank at the WA aquarium, which is the best present I think anyone has gotten me for a very long time. And I learned how to say bad words in some Aboriginal language, but I don't know which ones. And then the kids laughed at me some more.

New list of things that can kill you

2010-02-11T01:16:00.000-08:00

What is Australia famous for? Things that can kill you in horrible, disfiguring ways. Ken and I went to the aquarium, precisely so we could go to the section called "Dangerzone", where they store all the dangerous sea creatures that you'd really rather not accidentally brush against if you had a choice. Like, you know, a great white shark. They don't have one of those, but they have a display about people staggering from the surf while missing limbs which is riveting.

So what is there?

Cone shells. So, the slow motion video of this innocuously pretty-looking seashell engulfing a small fish is pretty entertaining, but then you read the information and realize that it contains a fast-acting toxin that causes muscle paralysis and extreme pain. But don't worry, the notice cheerfully informs us, there is an antidote. Oh good. I'll be sure to keep that in mind while I pick up this shell that's washed ashore with the tide and raise to my ear to OH GOD OH GOD MY BRAIN IS ON FIRE!!!!!!
Sea snakes. These are kind of pretty. They have flat tails. And enough venom to kill several people. They tend not to emit it when they bite you in defense though...only when they're trying to eat you. So you should ask it its intentions while it's dangling from your calf muscle. "Were you trying to swallow that or just piss me off?"
Blue ringed octopuses. These very tiny little octopuses are capable of hiding behind rocks and under sand, and are so poisonous that even the water they hang out in can become toxic. They contain enough poison to kill 10 people. It causes muscle paralysis and cardiac arrest. There is no antidote. Consider that one for a minute. There is a tiny octopus that can hide in small spaces, that can immediately kill you in drooling searing agony, and there is no antidote for the poison. Oh, and also, you might not know you've been stung immediately...only when your face starts to tingle might you think, "Hey, this isn't so good, is it?"
Also the dunes near the beach have tiger snakes in them. So when you come screaming out of the water to avoid a blue ring or a bluebottle (these are extremely poisonous and painful jellyfish) or a shark, and you stagger into the dunes for safety, chances are you'll get bitten by a dangerously poisonous snake up there. The water isn't safe, but neither is the land.
Stonefish and lionfish. both disguise themselves as rocks or pretty kelp. Both have extremely sharp pointy spikes on them that can pierce all the way through your flesh. The stonefish also injects you with a toxin that causes -- you guessed it -- muscle paralysis. The lionfish just ruins your day.

Shorties

2010-02-10T01:02:00.000-08:00

People have asked me repeatedly: what is the main difference between Australia and the US? Everyone asks this...my friends in the States, Rotarians in Perth, random strangers who find out that I'm from the US, the guy who runs the bellydancing studio where I taught a class two weeks ago. Everyone wants to know what I think, and I'll tell you: nothing like Steve Irwin, so you can just get that out of the way right now.

They don't sound like Crocodile Dundee either, although one of the kids at the College I work at described in graphic detail the methods he uses with his machete to kill the cane toads that infest his farm up near the Northern Territories. "I toss them in the air and try to cut them in half," he said, with a peculiarly flat affect. If you don't hear from me for a while, it's because he's keeping me in a basement and he's hacked off all my limbs.

Mostly, the main thing that Australians are easily identified by, the one thing that would make it obvious to everyone that they were Australians, aside from their cute accents, is this: shortening everything. Everything has a cute nickname in Australia, including your food, your friends, and your times of day. They shorten placenames ("Fremantle" becomes "Freo", "Victoria Park" becomes "Vic Park", "Subiaco" becomes "Subi") and peoplenames ("Sharon" becomes "Shazza", "Daniel" becomes "Dazza", "Bob" becomes "Bazza"...you get the drift).

They shorten documentaries ("doccies") and presents ("pressies") and sandwiches ("sangers"). A utility vehicle, which is what Americans would call a pickup truck, is a "ute". The afternoon is the "arvo". Breakfast is "brekky." Americans are "morons for electing George Bush." Okay, I made up that last one.

Also, Australian humor is significantly more subtle and wry than North American humor; they think our witticisms are similar to Harpo and Groucho falling down the stairs: obvious, tasteless, and overdone. A lot of Australian humor relies on sarcasm, irony, and witty repartee, which makes me very happy, as I established with Justin when we were Skyping today that I am funnier than he is because I deliver punchlines faster. Like when you put down one meal in front of three teenaged boys: the fastest one eats the most. So Australian humor suits me fine.

In sad but further news: my camera is currently broken. I am trying to fix it so I can update you with stunning pictures of my local area and the Target and the Hungry Jack's, which is what Burger King had to call themselves when they got here because "Burger King" was already trademarked by some random Australian guy. Also the bubble tea place right down the street, where I am trying to see how long it will take before I fill up my intestines entirely with sago. Which is what Australians call tapioca pearls.

Did I mention all the money has little see-through windows? How cool is THAT?

The last of Laos and Thailand

2010-01-29T00:05:00.000-08:00

Finally, wireless internet! And in case you're wondering, I named it "Fatline". props to anyone who can identify which science fiction novel that's from. It was a toss-up between that and "Ansible."

Here's the last of the trip to Thailand. Enjoy.
---------------
With all the poking, prodding, shoving and slapping going on, you'd think it was Naughty Hour at kindergarten. Instead, it's just the Jomtien Beach roving gang of massage therapists assaulting tourists both physically and with their cheerful cries of "Hello, darling, you want massage?" Jomtien is the quieter, older beach of the Pattaya beach complex; Pattaya itself is where the crazy blinking neon and endless parade of ladyboys apparently happens, when it's not on Sukhumvit in Bangkok, that is.

This is the beach resort of middle Thailand, and if you don't like being contorted into a "relaxing" position by a masseur/euse, there's the second most popular activity here in Jomtien: listening to Russians shouting. There are a lot of Russians here...the signs are in Russian and Thai in some places. The way you can tell when someone is Russian is because they are shouting; also because usually they will cut in front of you in line without giving you more than a glance that basically says, "You are so far beneath me I can't even see that low."

Okay, so maybe I am engaging in blatant cultural stereotyping...but the French people aren't shouting. They're just quietly looking more cultivated and sleek than everybody else (see how I slipped in another cultural stereotype?). The Thai definitely aren't shouting, and the British are too overwhelmed with heat and humidity and the crush of humankind to speak, let alone shout. There don't seem to be many other Americans here, or at least, I haven't heard anyone speaking unaccented English, although there seem to be some Scandinavians, mostly in the company of young ladies wearing extremely short shorts.

So what is there to do in Jomtien other than find a short-shorted lady friend? Get a massage. Listen to shouting. There's also diving, which is not very good here compared to the rest of Thailand; basically, all the serious divers go to the islands in the south, where they can engage in the main diving activities: a) diving, b) getting impossibly muscular, tan, and blonde, c) drinking, and d) having sex with each other and every remotely attractive paying customer. These do not always have to happen in this order, but they definitely have to happen; divers are invariably about twenty years old and all very good looking, so being in large diving communities tends to make one feel inadequate. Which then leads to taking a bunch of drugs and dancing semi-clothed at a Full Moon party on the beach in Phuket. So diving is a risky business.

Jomtien is supposedly very small, although the sort of culture shock I suffered from doing a rapid transition from Don Khon to Bangkok must be felt to be believed. With each new conveyance that brought me to a yet larger city, I thought "Surely it can't get bigger than this." In Pakse, I marveled at the rampant availability of...well...everything. There were plastic baskets and t-shirts and food on grocery store shelves, all RIGHT THERE, and you didn't even have to buy it off a guy on a motorcycle. After the aircon bus to Ubon, I stared, stupefied, out the window of my fancy pickup truck transfer, goggling at the bright lights and cars. Cars! There are CARS in Thailand. In Laos, everybody rides motorcycles; there are cars, but nothing nearly like so many as there are in Thailand. Then, as my overnight train chugged its way to Bangkok, the roof of my head lifted off. It's amazing how only three or four days completely separated from all the trappings of civilization can make you forget it exists.

Oddly enough, it felt much slower on the way out...away from the cities. The slow easing into Ubon was a boon after busy, crazy Bangkok, and then Pakse felt even quieter yet. Don Khon basically kept me hammock-bound and isolated, but in the best possible, most sleepiest way. Jomtien was, despite being the sleepier of the two town options -- Jomtien and Pattaya -- full of neon lights and harassment and the smell of diesel, and motorcycle taxi-men picking their teeth on the side of the road, and the neverending parade of scantily dressed tourists. For the modest Thai, who go in the water with their clothes on, it must seem somewhat horrifying.

I walked along the curving sea path my first night in town and listened to the waves; it was dusk, so the folding chairs that jostled for space like so many New York businessman in an elevator had been folded and put away, and the air was cool and sizzling with the smell of cooking bananas. I stood on the rocks looking out at the ocean, seeing the tiny clip of a sliver moon, and felt totally at peace.

Too bad that was shattered the next day when the diving company, Mermaid's Dive, which was supposed to pick me up at the hotel between 8 and 8:15 am, failed to show. I waited. And waited. Then walked down to their office, which had a cheery sign on it that said, "Gone diving!" which just made me grind my teeth. Then I discovered from a map taped to their door that their main office was literally a block from my hotel...IN THE OTHER DIRECTION. So I walked back up there and man, were they happy to see me -- they'd been looking for me, I'd been looking for them, it was all nuts, so they kitted me up quickly (very quickly -- I ended up with a size medium wetsuit, which is approximately four times too big for me. I usually take an extra small) and a lovely New Zealander took me in his pickup to the pier where I hopped onto the boat, which was waiting for me.

Full of the usual assortment of smartass divemasters either ascending or descending the star towards their diving instructor certification, I bobbed my way up to the top sunroof as we headed for the island an hour and a half away. Here is a trick of the trade: if you want to see cool stuff while you're diving, flirt with the dive leader. That's not the only reason to flirt with the dive leader, since usually he (rarely she) is young, tan, muscled, and often possessing of an endearing English, Scottish, Australian, or Canadian accent. But when you flirt with the dive leader, he makes sure you see the puffer fish first or amuses you by hanging upside down and then diving is loads of fun. You know when else it's loads of fun? When I'm not overweighted. I never remember how much weight is right (answer: 3 kilos), so I always start out way overweighted, furiously struggling to use my breath to control my porpoising buoyancy and stop myself from drifting down onto the caltrops of sea anemones. You can supposedly remove weights underwater, but as a diving lightweight with only like 12 dives under my belt, I, um, well, it makes me nervous. What if I shoot to the surface?

So afterwards, I spent a lovely few hours on the boat impressing the divemasters with terrible offensive jokes and generally making friends, and then they invited me to come to Mermaid Talay after I'd showered, the dorm where the diving fraternity sleeps. When I got back to my hotel, with the genial laughter fading from my ears, I was alone in my room and realized the chest pain I'd thought was from rubbing straps had intensified, and I felt like there wasn't enough air in each breath I took. Immediately panicking seemed like a bad idea, so I showered, got dressed, then walked back to the dive center, figuring if I was dying, it would be better to do it among divers and not alone in a hotel room where no-one would find me.

They ran me through the DCS and barotrauma tests -- I didn't have any symptoms, including bad diving (no rapid ascents, no wild fluctuations in depth) so we weren't really worried, but the shop owner (fyi, the shop owners are never drunken carousing types. They did all that already) took my pulse, then had the clinic next door take my pulse, and everyone was concerned that it was high. It was a little over 100...and pretty much stayed there for something like the next eight hours. I drank some water, tried to relax, joined the divemasters for a soothing bite to eat where we discussed ladyboys in intensive depth (no, really, the operation lets you choose how deep you want it to go: 4, 6, 8, or 10 inches), and then they brought me up to the fourth floor Talay so I could wander between their rooms and see them all changing each other's desktop wallpaper to pictures of men with huge naked penises gleaned from Google Images. While drinking unrefined Thai rum straight from the bottle. And smoking.

Then they took me to Walking Street, the red light (even red-lighter than Bangkok, really) district in Pattay, assuring me we would keep it low key so I could rest, which we did: lots of sitting in bars watching impassive women pretend to enjoy forming a five girl daisy chain of cunnilingus. My favorite was how the girls seem to mostly just switch their weight from leg to leg while chatting with each other, sort of in time to the music, rather than actually dancing. My second favorite was the little numbers on disks they all have strapped to them somewhere. These are not strip clubs per se; often the girls are already naked, anyway. They're just bars where EVERYTHING is for sale; the numbers are on the girls so you can order them like a drink, and they can even be added to your tab. Some of them have fake breasts; most don't. Most look bored. At one point, one of the totally inebriated divemasters leaned over and shouted, "They look like they're having fun, don't they?" in reference to two girls dressed in sparkly angel costumes faux-giggling and smacking each other with big foam floggers, which they sometimes also directed towards the large fiberglass banana they were straddling. I almost laughed and said, "Are you kidding?" They look like they're WORKING, only their job is to make you think they're having fun.

But by this point, the pain in my chest was becoming inarguable. My heart rate was speeding and speeding, slowing down, then racing again, especially when I coughed. I could breathe fine, although it still felt like I wasn't getting enough air, and I needed to lie down. So I left the divemasters with my apologies and took a baht bus, what Jomtien and Pattaya call songthaews, back to my hotel, where I promptly fell apart. My heart was speeding, I had this pain in my chest, which hurt and hurt and HURT, not in a stabbing way, but definitely present.

So I took another baht bus to the hospital.

Bangkok is actually a beacon of modern medicine for all of Asia, which I knew before I got there; far from the thatched roof with chickens on it that people are probably imagining, it was instead an immaculate and friendly, desolately empty emergency room, with nurses wearing outfits straight out of Star Trek. They showed me in, wai-ed me (that's the greeting that looks like Namaste, but not over your heart), laid me out on a bed, pulled a blanket over me, and took my blood pressure (fine) and pulse (still about 102), and then a very nice, softspoken doctor came over and listened to my heart and lungs with his stethoscope (heart sounded fine, although fast, no arrythymia, lungs sounded a bit congested but no crackling indicating fluid). Then they gave me an EKG, which was sorta fun. I could walk and talk and had good balance and no dizziness or numbness or tingling. I also don't drink alcohol or smoke, and exercise frequently. I'm not obese, or even overweight. My thyroid UNDERfunctions occasionally, which would make me sluggish, not give me a racing heartrate.

The doctor said he thought it was nothing to worry about, and gave me some anti hypertension pills to calm the heart rate down, and Lorazepam to help me sleep (whee!) and some stuff for the cough. The EKG was normal (although still on the high end) and with no other real symptoms of anything serious (no frothy blood in the mouth or disorientation, etc), they sent me back to the hotel under orders to take it easy and sleep.

Total cost for emergency room visit, doctor, nurses, blood pressure, EKG and medications? You Canadians are probably baffled at the idea that emergency care costs anything, but Americans are probably cringing in anticipation. The total cost was 835 baht. Which is actually less than $30 US. They called me a taxi, which cost me about $8, and I went home and collapsed facefirst onto the bed.

So the final diagnosis is: I don't know what, if anything, is wrong with me. It's probably just the slight cold I had mixed with residual bronchitis (for which I am still taking antibiotics) mixed with strange pressures on the body from diving mixed with dehydration that combined to create the perfect storm of weirdness. I still have tightness in my chest, which intensifies to pain when I walk too fast or too far. I'm coughing a lot. But my heart rate is stable (low stable).

UPDATED TO ADD: I went to the doctor here in Perth, too, and she gave me some more antibiotics, antacids, antiphlegmatics, expectorants, cough syrup with codeine, and a ventalin inhaler with a spacer to allow the ventalin to reach my lungs a lot. As of today, January 29, I've got an occasional tickling cough and not, as my mother was afraid, a bacterial heart infection. the doctor thought it was mild grade walking pneumonia that just wasn't audible through the stethoscope yet.

A Letter to the Uninformed

2010-01-27T05:15:00.001-08:00

Dear Los Angeles:

You suck.

Love,

Claire

PS Do you know how long it took me to find any kind of work in Los Angeles? Well, okay, weird piecework jobs, I managed to string together, those weren't as hard as -- say -- laying asphalt. But do you know how many resumes I sent out? 10 a day. EVERY. DAY. Do you know how many interviews I went on? NONE. Unless you count the visit to the temp agency that showed me a film about workplace injury designed mostly to test whether or not you knew to put the truss around your waist and not on your head or down your pants, and asked me a questionnaire designed for the monumentally naive.

It was a forty-question jobbie, apparently cleverly designed by the same people who put together the MMPI, with multiple differently-worded questions to catch you out if you happened to be lying. It became quite apparent after the first four questions what kind of applicants usually work at temp agencies though. "True or false -- Sometimes I use violence to solve problems at work." "I use cocaine...Every Day/Once A Week/Every Couple of Weeks/Rarely/Never" "Have you ever falsely claimed a workman's compensation form?" "True or false -- Taking a little nip on the job isn't so bad." "Are you sure you're not a violent, drug-addicted, insurance fraud? Tell the truth!"

In Los Angeles, when Trader Joe's opened a new store, they got 800 applicants. Now given, TJ's offers full health coverage to employees if you work 3 days a week, so they're probably like the Holy Grail of part-time work, but still. That's a lot of applications. I doubt if anyone I gave resumes to even saw them; more likely, they went into some huge slush pile with a sign on it that said either "INCINERATE" or "For Immediate Recycling." Everything advertised as paying the lucrative sum of $8-10 per hour, which in Los Angeles is about enough to keep you from being evicted out of that nice refrigerator box you've managed to set up behind the Ralph's, with the screenwriter from Pacoima and your boss' cleaning lady. All sharing the same box.

Do you know how long it took me to find a job in Perth? I arrived on Wednesday of last week...by Monday, I had a job offer. Today, literally one week after I set foot on this continent, I have a job that is not only interesting and emotionally fulfilling, but literally two blocks from my house, ON MY WAY to the University where I will be studying, and well-paid. The boss and I were both woefully disappointed that I'm not allowed to work more than 20 hours a week: "I'll schedule you for as much as you want," she told me. I go in on Friday for an orientation, and start my first shift on Sunday.

Have I mentioned that it takes an hour to drive ANYWHERE in Los Angeles? Well, it does. Remember how it's supposed to be a seaside town, with waves sloshing over rocks and the gorgeous, omnipresent sun bearing down on the surfers? guess what else they have here in Australia? Sun. Warmth. All the time. It's a desert, but even in the winter, it doesn't go under 10 degrees Celsius. The ocean and white sandy beaches are about half an hour away...BY EASILY ACCESSIBLE PUBLIC TRANSIT. Do you know how hard it was to go to the beach in California? Who wants to drive for an hour and a half through gridlocked traffic on the 405 to join several squalling kids being looked after by a Mexican nanny while their recently Botoxed mother flips through People magazine?

You know what else Perth has? Smiling, happy, friendly people. Everyone chats with you. It's like a small town, where people actually mean it when they ask you out for coffee, instead of Los Angeles, where someone could nick a small cut in each of your thumbs and press them together, swearing Blood Brotherhood Forever, and then the next day, they won't even return your phone calls. People here are nice. They help you. (Well, except in the International Office at Curtin, but that's another story.) They're tolerant of your failings, like not knowing they're called "bathers" instead of "swimsuits." (Silly Americans.)

PPS Oh, and you know what else? People in Australia have got senses of humor. I was always having to explain jokes in California, especially because people take themselves so f-ing seriously. Here, everyone takes the piss ALL THE TIME. It's like the national hobby, after avoiding poisonous creatures.

You know why nobody really needs to provide health insurance with their jobs, either? They have universal health care.

PPPS Also the money is pretty. Colorful, and different sizes, and cool clear plastic windows in it. And they sell cough syrup with codeine in it.

So, Los Angeles? I know we had a bit of an abusive relationship, where neither of us really wanted to be together, but we put up with each other for the sake of the children. I know we had our fights, our massive flaming battles of seething violence, and our cold-shoulder late-night freeze-outs. I know I cried numerous times over your high gas prices and impossibly fake boobs, your long distances and two-hour commutes. So consider this the final notice. We're broken up. I'm returning your stuff. I'll just leave it in a box on your porch. Don't bother coming to the door.

Placeholder

2010-01-24T06:02:00.001-08:00

This is a placeholder post, as the post I have been wanting to post for days, which is very funny and erudite, is on my computer...and I have no wireless till I go out and buy a router. I'm on it. But you'll have to wait a short amount of time until I've got one. That's all.

Some pictures to fill in the gaps

2010-01-17T06:15:00.000-08:00

This tree lit with lanterns is in the main park in Ubon. I love it.

I like entropy, things that are fading or being weathered. This is from Pakse, and I don't know where it was pointing to.

More interesting decay. Also from Pakse; Laos used to be occupied by the French, so you have these odd colonial facades all over the place.

Whew, I was afraid this was the SMOKING Wat Luang.

I love this door/window combo. More entropy. Sorry, I really like it.

It's a good point.

Monks with umbrellas in Pakse. In Buddhism, every man is encouraged to become a monk to bring merit to his family -- he can be a monk for as short a time as a week, even. I think this is why people don't appear as overly solicitous towards their "clergy" here; if that holy guy is your cousin Larry, it's hard to be all, "Your worshipfulness!"

Sunset from the railroad bridge in Don Khon, Si Phan Don. I guess it's kind of okay, if you like things that are GREAT.

View from my hammock on Don Khon. See that black speck mid-photo? The next shot is an enlargement, if you will.

Kids tubing in Don Khon. They floated down the river shrieking and tumbling off and having a great time, just at dusk.

Things that will probably kill you: #436

2010-01-15T18:12:00.000-08:00

So, the most intriguingly dangerous part of this whole trip is this: in Thailand, people drive on the left (mostly)...but in Laos, they drive on the right (mostly). Crossing that border every day must lead the airconditioned minibus drivers into more than one traffic accident, although presumably none so impressive as the semi truck we saw overturned and jack-knifed on the side of the road between Si Phan Don and Pake yesterday. Since I was traveling by local bus (which is essentially a Daihatsu pickup truck with benches welded into the bed), everyone made sure everyone else got a good look, even if we didn't speak the same language. "Oh my god, will you look at that," seems to be universal, as does "Holy crap, something to divert me from the jostling and diesel fumes and bumpiness of the past two hours."

The French sisters told me a story back on Don Khon about how they had been walking along and saw a tourist woman come flying by on her bicycle, which then caught on something and tipped up, sending her headfirst into the ground. When she sat up, she was pouring blood down her face, and the sisters said they could see a huge gash on her scalp, with a glimpse of bone (ew). They mopped her up with their little portable medical kit which they brought because they are good European girls who get all their vaccinations and travel with more pills than most Asian pharmacies. She kept protesting that she was fine, and they kept telling her she needed stitches, but finally she got on her bike and rode off. However, when they were done wiping the blood off her, they looked up to find themselves completely surrounded by uniformed Laos schoolchildren, gaping in wonderment. Schadenfreude: better than television.

This morning, my last day in Laos, I woke up later than usual (7:15am, yes i have become an old woman and I go to bed at 10pm and wake up with the roosters and the Laos) and walked out into the cool sunny day. In the market, I bought two baguettes for the bus and train later, and a small bunch of bananas, and three steamed pork buns, and took them down through the wat to the wall by the river. The Laos and Thai have a much more cavalier view of their religious buildings than we do; while we might consider it the height of irreverence to cut through churches or sleep in their backyards, most useful paths in Laos and Thailand cut through the back of a wat and people just ride their motorcycles right on in.

Eating my buns in the shade and watching the local secondary school students poking each other and giggling and stripping leaves off the nearby plants before class started in the building at the base of the wat, it was very peaceful. The Mekong was in front of me and the traffic bridge that connects downtown (such as it is) with where everyone lives to my right. The bridge is pretty funny, actually: it's only wide enough for one lane of traffic, so everyone spurs across it in a flurry of motorbikes and tuktuks and then the stream ebbs and dies and there's utter silence for about a minute. Then it happens again in the other direction. Again and again, all day.

It makes one want a motorbike, that's for sure. Just to blend in with the crowd.

Quickie

2010-01-14T23:11:00.000-08:00

I'm back in Pakse, having paid almost twice what I had to (about $17 more) to get from Pakse to Bangkok via Ubon tomorrow. I could have saved all the money and bought the tickets myself, but I don't know what the train availability from Ubon to Bangkok is, and I arrive in Ubon with only an hour between them, so...

I paid for comfort and peace of mind, but then instead I'm beating myself up for not being more thrifty. It's only $17, but I'm castigating myself for having spent it. That's a full freaking day of traveling in Laos, I tell myself.

So much for peace of mind.

Somebody slap me and tell me that $17 isn't that much, and I'm not a bad traveler for paying it.

Laos Laos

2010-01-12T20:32:00.000-08:00

No pictures with this post yet, as I'm sitting in a very tiny internet "cafe" in "downtown" Don Khon, in the Si Phan Don, the part of Laos closest to Cambodia. In fact, I saw Cambodia this morning, biking around the island; there was a dirt road that dead ended in some beautiful blue water and a cluster of tiny islands in the distance that was a whole different country. How did I know that? Because the sign in English right before I got there said "Hello you can go no further there is the end of the island so walk to the beautiful sandy beach and look at Cambodia and sit down relax have a beer thank you."

See?

Moving from Thailand to Laos was relatively uneventful, except for being relieved of $35 US at the Laos border for a "visa", which you don't actually get one of, just a stamp with an end date. The border crossing is dusty and hot and the windows are completely tinted black ecept for one small semi-circle at the very bottom, so we all spent a lot of time shouting "Forms? Passport? No picture!" with our heads tilted sideways and resting on the Formica countertop. The shouting was happening in lots of different languages, since the bus from Ubon to Pakse was crammed full of, not just tourists, but Laos returning home and Thais on vacation. And bicycles.

Although Pakse itself is a pretty touristy town, the Laos are probably the friendliest people I've encountered so far. They're always smiling, even if you're not buying something off them, and everywhere you go, people are shouting "Sabaidee!" In Pakse, I found the street market and amused myself playing with a tiny puppy and gnawing on an ear of corn while watching the smiling faces come and go, eating soup from a bag and noodles from...still a bag. They like plastic bags.

(When I told the French girls I've been hanging out with about the puppy, one said, "Oh my God, what do you think they were keeping it there for?" Note: it was purebred and had a collar. Not food.)

The Sabaidy 2 Guesthouse had one dorm bed left; tidy and spotless, the dorms had four actual beds, not bunkbeds, although when I returned from breaking into a deserted mansion later in the day, another mattress had been added to the floor, along with a backpacker on it. I wandered and wandered, Pakse being pretty freaking tiny, and crossed the Mekong as the sun was setting, wandering through the dusk and jogging Laos and motorcycles and shouts of "Sabaidee!" and construction workers yelling "I love you!" onto the Laos side of the river. From there I could look through the pink air across the Mekong back at the tourist fiesta, see the bright lights and signs proclaiming "Pizza!" and I smiled.

I'd spent the whole day looking for a riverboat down the Mekong to Si Phan Don, which is the ONE thing I really wanted to do while I was in SE Asia. There aren't any. Well, there might be some, but you can't find them without speaking Laos, and I think my limited vocabulary would not extend to such endeavors, unless all they required of me was to say "Please," "Thank you," and "Hello." So I got a ticket from Sabaidy 2 on a tiny Mitsubishi minivan that brought back memories of Guatemala, and dumped me at a rural boat launch known as Ben Nakasang.

The small canoe with outboard motor crammed as many tourists as possible into it and rocked out into the Mekong, depositing its first and largest load at Don Det, the backpacker paradise. As the rest of us continued onwards to Don Khon, I laughed out loud to see several water buffalo swimming, their noses barely held out of the water; for some reason, I turned my head to look at the boat driver, directly behind me, presumably inviting him to be delighted at them right along with me, like he doesn't see the eact same thing every day. A few minutes later, he touched my arm and pointed at some more swimming by, with a big Laos grin.

Arriving in Don Khon, it's pretty easy to find accommodations: there's only one big town and one road. So The two French sisters and I walked to the first guesthouse we found that had riverfront rooms with hammocks (I NEED hammocks...the same way some people need cocaine) and took it. My room is 25,000 kip, or approximately $3US, for a large bed with mosquito net, outdoor toilet, view of the Mekong, hammock, and, presumably, mites, ticks, bedbugs, and other infectious stuff.

Yesterday night, watching the sun set over the Mekong from the gentle sway of my hammock...well...it probably couldn't have been better. This morning, however, I made the mistake of believing the guidebooks and bicycle merchants and rented a bicycle. Why doesn't anyone talk about how intensely unpleasant riding a bike around this island is? The roads are scattered with rocks the size of fists; no wonder every Laos rides a motorcycle, because everybody but dumb tourists knows that biking around is a sure way to either fatal head injury or potential shaken-baby syndrome. I did find some isolated sand beaches, and enjoyed a breakfast/lunch of chicken and vegetable curry while staring out over the river. A Buddhist nun joined me and we sat in companionable silence, while she surrounded herself with animals and I slurped my curry, which had probably been made of river water. Yay, Parasitology Museum!

I can't stress enough how terrible bicyclcing is here -- I'd really almost rather walk, assuming you get up early enough to avoid midday heat. So now I'm heading back to the hammock to nap till it cools down a bit...then probably walking across the railroad bridge to Don Det. I'll probably be staying in the Si Phan Dno for at least another day and then...I don't know. Maybe north to Vientiane via sleeper bus and work my way south through Thailand back to Bangkok...or maybe back the way I came, spending another night each in Pakse and Ubon. Either way, I'm on a tropical island.

A quick update

2010-01-10T05:31:00.000-08:00

I went for a walk earlier, through the park near my hotel, at dusk. And came across this.

Apparently this is quite common in Thailand, but it just made me smile all over. You can also hear the deathly chirping of the numerous birds, which sound like a Hitchcock movie.

Thai one on

2010-01-10T00:44:00.000-08:00

Yes, I'm continuing a tradition of cheesy pun-related post titles.

I'm writing now from Ubon Ratchathani, a lovely, gentle Thai town to the east, about 12 hours by slow-moving, multiple-stopping train from Bangkok. It's only 45 minutes from the Laotian border, and that's where I'm planning to go tomorrow, Laos and points south. Which actually would technically still be in Laos. Just the south of Laos.

So, let me explain. No, there is too much; let me sum up.

I landed in Bangkok at night, and without a window seat there's no way to even tell how close you are till the wheels touch the ground. I slept the sleep of the terminally exhausted on the Seoul to Bangkok leg of the trip; my head tipped back whether I willed it to or no, and I was irrationally infuriated with the nice ladies offering me first scented towels then a drink then some food and JUST GO AWAY AND LET ME SLEEP ALREADY! And can't you turn out the cabin lights, for the love of god???? I don't want your headphones! In other circumstances, I would have been delighted with the in-flight services; this time I mostly just wanted to be horizontal.

Bill Bryson pointed out how odd it is to cross the international date line, because you suddenly and without your consent, cease to exist for one whole day. My cessation mostly left me feeling compacted, like I had lost about a foot of height, which was odd since I'm finally in a country where everyone is not only my height, but my size. I'm tired of people telling me how tiny I am, so from now on, I'll just translate it in my head as them telling me how Thai I am. "You're really going to eat all those French fries? But you're so Thai!"

I skipped the backpacker paradise of Kaosan Rd, mostly because I have a deep-rooted aversion to people who wear a lot of hemp and worry about ecotourism. i can't help it. I didn't like them that much even when I was 18, and now that I'm almost 30, hanging out with a bunch of hard-drinking idiots wearing tank tops and flip-flopping around filthy Thai streets looking for the best bargain has gotten old. I did fall asleep in my quiet, clean room listening to someone croon Neil Young's Harvest Moon into a portable karaoke machine. It was a Thai person, I'd evidence, based on the mispronunciations.

This is Sukhumvit at night, the busy urban sprawl of Bangkok. there are 7.7 million people there...in Bangkok, not on Sukhumvit. I may have seen all of them at Siam Paragon mall on Saturday though.

So I didn't have any plan for what I was going to do when I got here -- here Thailand, as well as here-Bangkok -- so I basically did what seemed like the best thing: obeyed Reed's suggestion. reed has been to Thailand several times and he said, "Go stay in Banglamphu one night just so you can wake up there and say you did it." So when I woke up the next morning, I waded my way past the numerous 7-11s ("I'm feeling thirsty...I wonder how many seconds it will be after I turn down this side street before- oh, there one is!") and hopped on the Chao Phraya river taxi to the Siriraj Hospital and the parasitology, Forensics, and AWESOME Museums.

Okay, there wasn't a museum of awesome, mostly because that's what the whole thing was made of. Has anyone seen the Mutter Museum? Now picture the Mutter Museum as existing in a country where things actually go wrong with people; the Mutter was all about syphilis. The Siriraj Museum had mummified rapists, graphic photos of prolapsed rectums and young boys with thousands of roundworms spilling from their guts, and poorly preserved organs with stab wounds. As well as deformed fetuses. Did I mention the round worms? I can't wait to not eat anything or touch anything ever again, and I'm fairly sure these red bites on my legs are from me GETTING A HORRIBLE PARASITE. Maybe I should have saved the Parasitology Museum for AFTER traveling in rural Thailand instead of before. Oops.

Then I went to the Buathip School for a Thai massage.

Unlike every other "massage" "parlor" in Bangkok, Buathip makes it pretty clear what to expect: in English AND Arabic.

If you've never experienced one before, Thai massage is halfway between your little brother poking you for more attention and a violent altercation with the Cirque du Soleil. Mine was conducted by a tiny lady who gently pounded me, smacked me on the head, and finished by sliding her finger into one of my ears and wiggling it around. Definitely no sex, although the ear thing was kind of nice.

My second night in town, I spent on Soi 4 off Th Sukhumvit; Kaosan is where the backpackers in fisherman pants go to trade copies of Kerouac and smoke a bowl. Sukhumvit is where sex tourists go. It's urban, dirty, and lined with a "street market" that sells porn, knockoff wallets, and, essentially, anything you want.

Offshoot road Soi Cowboy is a neon-painted spectacular, with every bar featuring pairs like this, except when the Thai person was obviously a boy.

Bangkok is famous for being a sex paradise, with ping pong shows and child rape abounding. I didn't see either of these, but I did see evidence that sexpatriotism is alive and well in Sukhumvit.

It's strangely innocent evidence, after all: every white man older, chubbier, and walking proudly hand in hand with a young Thai woman in a tight dress...or the tables at every bar with a giggling Thai girl crossing her legs and flirting with the bedazzled German in a sweaty Lacoste. no outright sex, or even kissing; just the pristine hand-holding and half-stunted conversations, again and again, and the sweaty smiles. The thing that struck me about these couples is how BORING it must be to be one of these girls; to have to spend your whole day struggling with a language you don't know, pretending to be fascinated by someone's business ventures or family woes, hoping you can get to the grunting part so then he'll feel obligated to buy you a handbag.

I saw a lot of these couples where the smiling woman carried several bags of shopping; stopping in the post office, I saw one older man bending over a money wire form as his young Thai lady leaned over his shoulder. It's a living, if you can make it; as I rumbled on the train out of town, I ruminated that the amount of money I cavalierly took out of the ATM to "do me" for my time in Thailand (20,000 baht, figuring it's better to go high than risk running out) is more than the average monthly salary for a well-paid business professional.

Leaving Bangkok was great. I bought an overnight 2nd class sleeper ticket to Ubon and had my tiny swaying bunk made up for me by the steward as I made faces and clapped hands at the grinning baby with her hair in a sprightly topknot, directly across the aisle. I had a top bunk: less light and air, more coolness factor, and we chugged into Ubon around 6:30am and I took advantage of the early morning and rode around on a songthaew for about an hour.

A random temple of some kind in the park in downtown Ubon, directly across from the swingsets.

The pace is slower and gentler out here away from the city; I can finally see why people say Thais are the friendliest, most polite of people. Here they smile, and move slowly through the streets, grinning and laughing. I've waved at more children, and had old ladies grin at me more today in a few hours than I did in all of my time in Bangkok. Also the city is rife with wats, meaning there's gorgeous gilding and sloping roofs and bells and marigolds, everywhere.

I don't know what this charred paper is, but it was tucked into this gorgeous stone flower side wall.

I love the country. I'm not a city girl. And the Thais seem to love it too, given their cheerfulness and open arms and camaraderie. or that has something to do with me finally figuring out how to say "Thank you" in Thai. It was killing me not being able to say anything, but Thai is purely tonal, so you can't read it in a guidebook and pronounce it anything like accurately. I'm completely afraid of sounding like an idiot and stumbling around with my Lonely Planet held open to the "Language" section, so instead I remain mostly mute. But now I've learned thank you...hello can't be too far behind.

I've got Seoul...

2010-01-06T22:07:00.001-08:00

So, I'm in Seoul. I ended up in Seoul for 11 hours because that is the layover I got when I bought my ticket from LAX to Bangkok lo these many months ago. You'd think with the amount of pre-planning and researching I do, actually for a job as well as just for myself, I might have noticed that Seoul gets winter. Like, actual winter. With cold. A 63 year old museum docent pointed out that it was minus ten Celsius today. I don't have any cold weather gear. It's freaking summer where I'm going! Oops.

These are emergency gas masks behind glass in the subway station.

I wandered around Seoul for a few hours, trying desperately to find things to do that were inside and heated. I went to the Korean War Museum, which was impressive, particularly when the above docent told me about his life, which was amazing. I went to the Korean National Museum, which was mostly boring paintings and Stone Age artifacts, which are very interesting to archaeologists and basically nobody else. And I spent a lot of time on the subway. It started out pretty enjoyable, but I've gotten more and more tired as the cold seeped into my bones, so now I'm content to sit here on the comfortable reclining rest chair in Incheon, waiting for my flight.

I'm going to go get some hot water in a minute, and make some pre-packaged udon soup that I brought all the way from Trader Joe's. Other than that, how do I feel about embarking on the biggest gosh darn trip I've embarked on so far? Do I miss my friends? Do I miss Justin? What are my plans? It's all murkily obscured behind COLD and SLEEP and COLD and HUNGRY and COLD. There's apprehension and so forth, but mostly I'm just reduced to grunting and pointing.

Jet lag, thy name is rapid time zone shift.

Stylish bathroom stalls in Seoul Incheon Airport

Sun-Return and the passing of time

2009-12-20T20:21:00.000-08:00

It has been way too long. That's my own damn fault for having time to write lots of boring technical documents and emails to friends, but not here. Although, since one of those things brings me money and the other one brings me solidified relationships with people I love, I don't know what I'm apologizing for.

Since November, when I last wrote, I've been to Pennsylvania and Canada, kissed loved ones goodbye and patted pregnant tummies, spent Thanksgiving in Woodside, CA, gazing at the moon from a hot tub surrounded by poison oak, and watched Zombieland snuggled up with some of the best company ever. I've also spent some time panicking about getting rid of all my stuff; if you ever post on the North Hollywood Freecycle list, you'll think the Fountain of Youth just opened up, except instead of youth, it's spewing useful objects like suitcases and weatherstripping and old clothes.

I've also been to Mojave a few times, and wrote this about it in a recent email to my mother:

Last night I drove to Mojave to visit my new friend Zach. Zach is tall and Texan, with well-worn cowboy boots, an endearingly dimpled smile, and a taste for classic literature; his bookshelf of "fun reads" includes Ginsberg, Saint-Exupery (naturally...he's a pilot), and Salinger. He works for an airplane-building company at the Mojave Airport, the deserted plane "bone yard" about an hour and a half north of me, in the hilly desert in the middle of nowhere. It's a two-crossroads town, and one of them has a sign proclaiming Jesus Is Lord on it. Zach lives in an old adobe church, drives a 1952 Chevrolet truck that he restored himself, and tells terribly obscene jokes. He's an aerospace engineer making secret government projects.

So I met Zach because he came and couchsurfed with us, and we liked him so much that we went and stayed in Mojave with him, and he took us flying in his small plane and then bought us donuts in the morning. Then he and I struck up more of a correspondence, so I drove to Mojave to couch surf at Zach's alone.

We'd decided before I got there that we'd take his small company plane over to the Camarillo airport, 35 miles northwest and pick up my friend Colleen and buzz her around for a while. She met us in her little Smarte car and had a GREAT time in the air: grinning and smiling, and shrieking when we hit little air pockets. it was my second time in the plane, but I already felt like an old hand; maybe it was the flight suit I was wearing, although it has rhinestones on the back, and was designed for Burning Man.

Then we went back to Camarillo and picked up Colleen's husband Peter and all went for gourmet burgers. Eventually, Zach and I flew back to Mojave. It was a clear night, with loads of stars. The cars snaking along highway 5 were packed in like so many delicate glass beads of light, and through the headset, Zach said, "It looks like a crack into the earth." He was right; it did.

We stayed up late talking and fell very soundly asleep at about 3:30am. He woke up at 6:30 to go to work (yep, on a Saturday) and I dozed off and on for another two and a half hours, when the light through the long, tall windows, and Zach's returning footsteps reminded me that it was time for coffee, pancakes, and eggs. I drove home in the beautiful sunny day, through the mountains and the weird pass called The Grapevine, back to LA.

Packing

2009-11-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

These days are mostly completely occupied with packing.

I'm packing a bunch of my stuff that was still in Pittsburgh up to my mom's house in Canada, using a rental PT Cruiser that they gave me instead of an "economy" size. My mother pointed out, "Does anyone ever get the size car they reserved?"

I am researching freight forwarding so I can figure out how to get my crap to Australia. I also have to investigate how much crap I want to bring to Australia and whether or not I feel like just taking a backpack's worth of stuff and then buying everything else when I get there. So far, freight forwarding one bag of luggage (as opposed to multiple pallets of shrink wrapped cheap dolls that were made in Hong Kong by limbless children, eg) would run me about $450 door to door. USPS Ground is $327.

I could also take bags with me on the plane to Bangkok, leave them in left luggage for two weeks and then haul them with me to Perth. It costs 100BH a day to store them in the Suvarnabhumi Airport (which is approximately $3 at the current exchange rate), although I can't, according to Korean airlines, have bags that exceed 62" in total diameter (L+W+H) or 70 lbs each, which is somewhat limiting in terms of stuff.

However...what stuff do I really need? I was thinking it would be nice to have a fair amount of my clothes, and maybe some books and artwork and stuff, but I'm prepared to keep all that in storage if my other option is to pay hundreds of dollars for some twee shipping company to provide "valet service" for my one goddamned bag.

Remember, Remember

2009-11-05T12:06:00.000-08:00

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November,

Gunpowder, treason, and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

- trad.

So here it is November already and so much has happened in the measly two weeks since the last time I wrote. All right, two weeks is a long fracking time in this world of blog updates and other fun jazz, but here is a small sampling of the things I have done, will be doing, or am currently in the process of doing since October 24...

Become involved with the funky production company EpicMegaPro to work on sending a fancy rock opera, created by iconic Swedish band Brainpool, on Swedish tour sometime in the next few years. I've been visiting with Swedish consuls, hanging out at Swedish mixers, and writing letters in Swedish, which is particularly engaging because I DON'T SPEAK SWEDISH. Thank you, Google Translator! They're probably all wondering, "Wow, this sure is an interesting idea, but why do all the letters sound like they were written by a five year old?" So far, no-one has pinged me as being little more than Eliza, and most Swedish people speak English anyway, or so they tell me. Our boss is going to Stockholm in January to have business meetings. As much as I would like to go to Sweden, STOCKHOLM...in January. Can I get a "Hell, no"? I'm sure the Northern Lights are very pretty, but I don't like freezing cold places with dark, gloomy daytimes.
Received my Australian student visa ten hours after applying for it. You know, when I first saw the application process necessary for visa application, and the warning that it could take up to 3 months to get it after you applied, I started to panic. Proof of medical health? Four passport sized pictures? Proof of financial security? Gosh! Then I checked the online form, which didn't seem to have places to attach or append any of that information. Weird, I thought. Maybe they ask you to send it later. I filled out the online form, signed it digitally (basically typed my name under the place where it said "You better be you if you type your name here") and bit my fingernails. The NEXT DAY, at 7am my time, after I'd sent the application at 10:30pm, I received a blythe little notice that said, basically "Thank you for using our weed-out-the-truly-interested form! Because you applied online, we've ALREADY GIVEN YOU YOUR VISA. Here it is. It's good from right now. Yep, until March 2011. It's a party in Australia, and you're totally invited!" Okay, maybe I'm paraphrasing, but it took LESS THAN TEN HOURS to get a visa for an entirely different country, which says I am allowed to study and work there for a long time. Um...sweet!
Bought my plane ticket to Perth, via two weeks in Thailand. You know, I've never been to Southeast Asia. I'm totally into Southeast Asia. And so when I received the go-ahead from the Rotary travel agency that they couldn't find a ticket to Perth for less than $1200, I leapt into action and quickly investigated the sales I had just seen on STA Travel. Sure enough, there was a ticket to Perth for $986, including tax. But...hmm. What if I went somewhere else first? Let's look at other places I could go...Hawaii? Ooh, almost $2000. Solomon Islands? Fascinating, but tiny airport, and therefore expensive. How about Bangkok? Turns out that a one-way ticket from LAX to Bangkok (via Seoul) and then from Bangkok to Perth (via Kuala Lumpur) costs only $200 more than a ticket that flies directly to Perth. So who's going to Southeast Asia? Me! Got any suggestions for places I should contract intestinal parasites? I hear everyone does it. So far, according to my research, it's not really a matter of whether you contract diarrhea and vomiting in Thailand so much as when you contract diarrhea and vomiting. My hope? Not on a long ferry trip to Laos.
Started writing for NaNoWriMo. I've done this a few times before -- the most recent time, I started writing TWO NaNo Novels simultaneously, one a YA novel (which I cannot locate on my hard drive, but I'm sure it must be somewhere) and one an erotic novel (hey, why not?) and then dumped them both in disinterest and languour only a couple of days in. The first time I did it, I blazed through, wrote the whole thing, and then got me a literary agent using that there NaNo Novel. I mean, she may be an agent who hasn't returned my phone calls in over a year, but she's still a god damn agent. So this time I'm writing a murder mystery, set at Burning Man. Why not? One of my favorite reads is a book called Murder At The War, written by Mary Monica Pulver, and it's a murder mystery set at Pennsic. I seem to recall someone wrote a mystery set at Burning Man several years ago, but *I* haven't, and darnit, now's my chance. So far, I'm wrestling with making sure I'm not just stringing together thinly veiled anecdotal vignettes, and actually creating a cohesive, interesting and FICTIONAL story, despite my amusing myself by putting people I know into it all over the place. If you can't directly describe your friends and acquaintances in a NaNoNovel, where can you describe them?

So that's what I've been up to. How about you?

Waves Above Chapter Three

2009-10-24T19:21:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to say two things:

First, I just bought my plane ticket to Australia a few days ago, via two weeks in Thailand and Laos. Well, I fly into and out of Bangkok (that's LAX-> Bangkok and then Bangkok -> Perth) visa Seoul on the way there and Kuala Lumpur on the way back. Sweet! I am excited to have 11 hour layovers at each of my partway airports, actually, because I'm hoping that means I can leave the airport which means I get the BEST souvenirs of all time: passport stamps for funky countries.

Second, here's the third chapter for The Waves Above.

My favorite thing

2009-10-09T20:58:00.000-07:00

My favorite thing in the entire world, ever, to do is walk down the street at night looking in people's windows. Some people watch reality television, but I like the simple storyline-less act of just stopping to have a look when someone's lights are on, catching a glimpse of a dog's snout, or Finding Nemo on the television, or a bare foot scratching another.

My second favorite thing is listening to someone playing an instrument at night, from the street. You hardly ever hear this anymore; people don't play music at home, or they practice at rehearsal spaces or in the agonizing light of mid-afternoon, after they've stumbled out of bed from another late night at the jazz club (apparently, my favorite thing happens in the 1920s). But I can't imagine a greater pleasure than standing on the sidewalk outside someone's cozily-lit house, on a cool fall's evening that's still warm and delicious, the air smelling of sage and sounding of crickets, and listening to the piano spill out from those buttery windows.

It reminds me of one of Madeleine L'Engle's rules for a happy family, the theme that spread from the Austins to the Murrys and their children: singing and music in the home. I've always wondered, marveled at her families who gather together and sing in the evenings, or play instruments together; not like the Allman Brothers Band, but just like a fun way to pass the time in the evening, instead of watching television. Of course, I don't watch television usually either, preferring instead to engage in singularly repetitive evening behaviors, regardless of the day: I work, I read, sometimes I have sex. I sleep, before midnight. And I wonder, amazed and reverent, at the people who play music, because they remind me of a comforting, cozy world, where people can talk to dolphins.

I went for a walk through the cool night, watching people's lives out here at the sprawling complex in Camarillo that is my home until October 19, and passed life after life that could have been mine. People stay home out here; the young ones don't want to drive very far, or they invite their friends over on a Friday night...one house I passed had rouged lacy curtains, laughter, and the smell of pot. Most of the others have families and kids and garages and Finding Nemo on DVD and that's another kind of satiety.

I look in the windows and try on different lives, when my own is, quite frankly, a little disconcerting. I wander and wander, leaving a trail of good friends, and I miss and I want and I work but I don't have a job. My life promises to be opening out more and more, but if you open too far, holes can happen and things can slip through.

So I look in the windows and listen at the doors, wondering if there's some secret everyone else has to how to be happy in their sweet, beautiful suburban homes, and I smell the hedgerows of sage, drying against the desert air.

Staying right here at home

2009-10-06T12:35:00.001-07:00

Since I've been a bit busy what with going to Europe and San Diego and also what with being a lazy bum whom spends all her time lounging in bed with small dogs, eating bonbons and clapping for my servants, I haven't gotten around to posting the second chapter of The Waves Above.

As a housekeeping thing, I've added a cumulative section in the sidebar of this blog, where all the chapters will go as I post them...it's down there under my archive lists. You can also click on this link right here --> link and it will take you to chapter two, which is disappointingly short for those of you who like to be able to read more about what's going on in a chapter. Sorry, that's just where the chapter wanted to end. But I'll be much better about posting following chapters from now on, so there won't be too long to wait in your frantic late night reading sessions, as you wait up, biting your fingernails, cursing me when another chapter fails to manifest itself. That's okay. I know you love me.

Although I'm not traveling anywhere particularly exotic over the next little while, I will be housesitting for some friends in Camarillo, which is lovely and deliciously remote from all the part of Los Angeles that I hate: namely, the city itself. So I get to go wallow in their house and do my laundry in their washing machine and vegetate on their couch watching movies on their TV and roll around in their bed and, most importantly, play with their cats. Have fun in Australia, Colleen and Peter! I'll just be over here MAKING YOUR CATS LOVE ME MORE THAN THEY LOVE YOU.

Back in the US...SR

2009-09-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

My plane from Europe landed yesterday at LAX around 3 pm, and Justin picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at home, then immediately had to leave for a business meeting. Judging by the time difference, I'd actually been awake since 10:30pm PST on Monday night, since I didn't sleep on the plane (although I did watch a hilarious British film called French Film, as well as The Proposal, I Love You Man, and...geez, what else did I watch? I also started a Bollywood movie that has Shakrukh Khan in it, but they turned off our individual seat TVs before it got to the part of the movie where he takes off his nerdy glasses and shaves his moustache).

So needless to say, I was a little loopy. But it was just starting to cool off, and I'd been sitting down for essentially an entire day, so I walked over to the bike repair shop and picked up my bike, which is actually Justin's old orange-spray-painted Playa beater, and rode through the calm night over to my PO Box to get my mail. As I rode, it cooled, degree by degree, and I passed a house where someone was practicing the drums, which made me smile.

In Belgium, all the open French doors has calm classical music blasting out of them. Ray and I took a long meandering walk through the back alleys of Brussels, and passed window after window with warm light and curtains and violins and piano, such that we'd stop and listen to see if someone was playing themselves. Then we walked again.

Yesterday, riding my bike through the Los Angeles twilight, I felt so indescribably happy, and not just happy but CONTENT with my lot in life and where I was, that it was almost too much. But then some jerk in a car honked at me for obeying the road rules, and it shattered my contemplation. :)

In a few hours, I drive to San Diego to go to a psychology conference (exciting!) and stay with friends Jack and Charity (also exciting!). Justin is coming too, so I have a little family outing. I wrote in my journal (yes, my actual paper and pen -- although in my case, paper and Crayola marker -- journal) that I love my friends, how much they keep me going, and how I cherish them so much that I keep them around for ridiculously long amounts of time. I have friends I've known for 26 years, for 21 years, for 16 years. It's kind of awesome. It bodes well for staying in touch with everyone while I'm in Australia.

O England

2009-09-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

There is only one full day left of my European odyssey, after having spent a whirlwind day-and-eight-hours in Brussels because we had some time to kill and couldn't figure out where else to go and we wanted to go SOMEWHERE. But since we decided that Brussels is actually the San Luis Obispo of Europe -- sunny, warm, pleasant, and you can't quite put your finger on why it's boring -- it was a very pleasant short trip. Now we're back in London, preparing to fly out the day after tomorrow.

There are so many things I'd like to see in Europe: back to Italy, for example, the land of loud men's clothing and flamboyant hand gestures. Eastern Europe and the majestic spirals of Praha. But I find myself missing the individual money -- all those deutschmarks and francs and lire and pesetas (not to mention drachmas) that are currently gone forever. Instead, we have bland old Euros, except in England. And Switzerland, which has apparently not joined the EU.

Mostly this trip has made me nostalgic, although my friend Raf and I were discussing how strange it is when parents get nostalgic for the past of their children...like when you wish your toddler was still an infant. Sometimes I get nostalgic for Europe, even though I'm actually in Europe, because I'm really getting nostalgic for what it was ten years ago, when I came here and you could get a hotel room in Spain for the equivalent of $8. I miss having everything be gritty and new and different, and the language polyglot, and smacking people by turning around with my backpack.

Ten years later, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it's still a complicated, immense continent, more like a place to live than a place you'd want to visit. And, conveniently enough, most of my trip here was spent "living"...staying in people's houses, visiting their families, learning their routines. No hostels, this time. No hostiles, either.

It's a different place, for all that there's a church down the street that's 600 years old. But I'm a different person. Thank god.

PS We went to Cyberdog today on the way back to Chalk Farm. Everything in there a) is very cool, b) would look fantastic on me, and c) costs immense quantities of pounds. A pity. So much cuteness for raver culture!

Gewürtztraminer

2009-09-17T00:11:00.000-07:00

We were invited to go to a wedding while in France; it was Laurent's friend Laurent (no, not the Laurent whose house we were hanging out at, the OTHER Laurent) who was getting married, and our Laurent was best man. So we ate chevre melted on toast and drank wine, and abjured Catholicism, which states that you can't have a big fancy church wedding if it's your second time around, even if your BRIDE has never been married before, and might potentially want to wear a floofy white dress. I told Ray, "Time to switch to Protestantism," if only for the veil and gown.

Apparently French weddings are half wedding, half roast. We found this out when the bride's family, her tiny little mother and father and her cute younger sister and her younger sister's Madagascar-ian boyfriend all came out to sing a song about the bride, who apparently played the clarinet in her youth. It was very sweet and harmonic, and the chorus was a beautiful repetition of "Clarinete, clarinete," except that they were pointing out such things as "When your sister was born, you hated her and would happily have pushed her down the stairs," and "Gosh, you sure like beer a lot." It finished with "If you liked this song, we#re happy to repeat it, and if you don#t, stick it in your ass." I translated for Ray.

Then the groom's eleven year old daughter stood up and sang a song, accompanied by a younger boy on dramatic re-enactment, about how much her new stepmother liked beer, and how now she was allowed to drink beer, and it made everyone fall down and act silly. The bride did not seem to be that much of a lush -- she actually seemed very lovely and nice -- but it was pretty funny. I guess lots of things rhyme with "biere".

Then we went to Paris, wherein fall seems to have come all of a sudden. The streets are cold and grey, and full of people in monochrome, looking far better than anyone else, and knowing it. I saw a motorcycle with a bumper sticker that said "I {heart} nothing...I'm Parisien" which kind of sums it up, although I pointed out that most big-city residents like to go on about how nihilistic and jaded they are...like New Yorkers. We rode the Metro a lot. We ate a lot of food. We stayed in a French hotel that had a shower and toilet IN THE ROOM, which you may not understand the miracle of if you've never been to France before. Suffice to say, I would have fallen to my knees in dramatic appreciation, if there had been room in the room to get down on my knees. Hotel rooms are SMALL.

Then we hopped on a TGV and ICE combination and made our way to Germany, land of hilarious words like Eisenbahngesellschaft and Gefahrt and Geschmacht. I don't reallz know more than a basic smattering of German, and Ray knows none, so it's fortunate therefore that we are staying with my old high school friend and his delightful family, who speak English, what with him being from Canada and her being an accomplished filk-singer who's toured in the States. The baby doesn't speak anything yet, but she sure is cute.

And here we remain until we go to Belgium, although I'm tempted to go back to France and see if we can make it to Chamonix. It's so freaking cold right now, though, my only long sleeved shirt is getting a layering workout. I can't imagine what it's like in the Alps. Yikes.

To should

2009-09-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I like French so much is because there is a verb that, roughly translated means "to should" (devoir). Coincidentally, homework is called les devoirs ("the shoulds"), and so is the things that nuns do in the mornings and evenings, which we call "devotions." It lends a whole aura of indebtedness to the situation.

So I'm in France.

I'm in Nantes (pronounced NAHNT), specifically, which is in the Northwest of France, about two hours from Paris and an hour from the coast; Nantes is apparently most famous for having been destroyed in World War Two by Allied bombs attempting to knock out the German occupants, and not, unfortunately, for the GIANT ROBOTIC ELEPHANT that WALKS UP AND DOWN WITH PEOPLE ON ITS BACK every day after 2 pm. But that's cool; it only blinks and yawns and sprays people with water. Oh, and they have a giant animatronic spider, but that's in China. Or maybe Japan. Somewhere Asian.

Why did I never hear of this before? Or of the ride called "Star Wars" that Ray and I walked past while investigating a tiny outdoor street fair in the flat cobblestoned spot near the castle of Anne de Bretagne, which not only spins you around in cylindrical holders, but also then loosely rotates you while up in the air (the ride, not the castle)? I know why I'd never heard of that, namely because just thinking about it makes me feel like I'm going to vomit, and watching left both of us nauseated. The signs said "Nouveaute!" which means "New thing!" but I think they meant the ride and not the nausea.

We are staying with Ray's old work friend Laurent and his family, in their gorgeous house in Nantes, which has a lap pool INDOORS and a whole airy spare bedroom with the most comfortable bed in the world, which I could not, unfortunately, fit into my bag. I also could not fit the rounded old 50s refrigerator or the squat 40s red stove at Laurent's friend Laurent's house, nor can I fit the attractive push-drawer kitchen in brushed steel, into my bag. I suppose I could have fit the huge quantities of delicious beef and oysters that everyone (except me, at least oyster-wise) is eating into my bag, but they fit much better in my stomach.

I have discovered that, while I understand about 85% of what everyone says, even when they're speaking quickly and using slang, my own spoken French has taken a giant leap back in terms of vocabulary and grammatical consistency. I can express simple ideas, but more complex concepts, like "unfortunately" and "your mom" and "towel" are beyond me. While having a conversation with a dashing Parisien named Fred, I pointed out that his news sales job skills would be useful "nowhere", instead of "everywhere", as I'd intended. He corrected, fortunately, and was undeterred.

I also make bizarre and untranslatable errors, such as when I asked about an apple tree in someone's back yard. I meant to say "Do you eat the apples?" but instead said "Vouz mangeons les pommes?" which is the second person plural pronoun with the first person plural verb conjugation, and therefore actually means nothing. Oops.

But since all the French people keep telling me I have very good French, I just grit my teeth and hope they don't mind when I mangle their beautiful language.

My mom (YOUR MOM!)

2009-09-06T09:47:00.000-07:00

Yep, it's true...MY MOM is here visiting me. As a matter of fact, MY MOM is a pretty welcome visitor, in that she is very tidy and compliant, although she certainly does like shopping. And aside from the super cool aspect of having MY MOM visiting, because she is fun, there is the added benefit of it a) distracting me during Burning Man so I don't spend a lot of time pining away about how I wish I was there getting all dusty and blinky, b) letting me listen fondly to a semi-Canadian accent so it feels like I'm home again, and c) she lets us engage her in unusual behaviors.

For example, the other day, it was about 8 pm and we were at a loss. Should we be entertaining? Should we call it a night? Instead, I turned to Justin and said, "You know, the firing range is open until 10." And my mom said, "I'd love to go shooting!" So we rented her a .357 Magnum and she shot the heck out of the target in such a fashion that makes me concerned for anyone who tries to mug her under the assumption that she is a docile old lady. TAKE THAT, PUNK!

I'm so amused by the mixed reactions to people using guns; among other Popular Things to Hate, like fur. Justin has a fur coat. It is cute. I have absolutely no bias whatsoever towards people wearing fur; just as I do not attempt to push my "agenda" of eating meat on other people, so too do I believe that everyone should be allowed to wear and do and say what they want to wear and do and say, unless it hurts another PERSON. Do I think a person is worth more than a bunny? Hell, yes, I do. Does this mean that I have a round-the-clock bunny-torture pit in my basement, or that I nightly bathe in the blood of innocent animals and virgins? Nope.

And yet, just by mentioning his coat in passing, an acquaintance of ours got all up in arms about the fur. It was all That's bad and People who wear fur are evil and when I was flipping through the Gun World magazine in the bathroom at the firing range, after washing the lead off my hands, I noticed an anti-PETA article, calling them all crackpots. That article was wrong too. I just don't see any point in believing that other people should do something the way YOU want them to enough to hurt them, kill them, offend them, or slander them. Live and let live, you know?

So when Justin and I have mentioned that we've gone gun shooting, or when we take my mom, I've had some unusual responses along the lines of and Oh my god, you touched one of those things?The people who go there are all crazy right-wing redneck freaks. To which I say: my shooting a gun at a range is not going to hurt anyone. It definitely won't hurt anyone because I don't have very good aim. What will hurt someone? Calling them a crazy right-wing redneck freak.

Like MY MOM.

Two things

2009-08-31T21:55:00.000-07:00

Two things:

1. I'm a featured writer in the USAirways inflight magazine for the month of September. I'm in the front, in a section called "The Gist", and I'm apparently considered an expert on Cyberculture. They found me because I wrote a Vagablogging article about Twitter and how people seem to assume it's factual without checking sources, and how that might be a bad thing. The article started a debate over on Vagablogging, although I don't know if you can call it a debate if there's only two people and they're arguing back and forth. But anyway, the article's in there, and so's my name! In the table of contents!

2. I'm trying this new thing. Which is that, as some of you may know, I write a lot. I've written probably about eight novels, and articles, and poetry, and even won some awards. But unfortunately, my literary agent has come to a standstill (along with the publishing industry) on my represented novel, and I wrote another one a while ago that I actually love and I can't really shop it around anywhere until we figure out something to do with the first one.

So I thought about what John Scalzi did, and decided that if you like this one chapter, you can have the rest of them, if you tell me you want them. So here's the first chapter of the novel I quite like, which is a sort of urban fantasy novel about a woman who finds out some interesting facts about her family background and it sort of wanders around on the East Coast of Canada and has some interesting facts about mythology and sexy people and shouting and witchcraft and weird alternative universes. It's called The Waves Above. Tentative working title. If you like it, tell other people and see if they like it too. I'd love feedback, too. But only if you like it.

LA Story

2009-08-29T21:21:00.000-07:00

It's your standard Los Angeles story; every year, the area catches fire and imperils dozens of expensive homes, forcing evacuations and painting the night sky reddish orange. But this is the first year I've been here to see it, and they're saying the Station Fire is actually much larger and spreading much faster than some of its other compatriots.

We first noticed the fire this early afternoon, when Justin had a doctor's appointment in Montrose, which is several miles east of us in the Valley; driving over there, we saw volcanic clouds of smoke, tinged with pinks and oranges.

As we drove closer, we saw the occasional tiny flame gouting upwards, and the fine sifting of ash drifting past the office doors.

As the day progressed, more flare-ups. The fire started to trickle down the hills towards the San Fernando Valley, closer to Pasadena and Glendale than most people would be comfortable with. We watched the bright orange flames spurt upwards, and the constantly circling firefighting airplanes return again and again to drop payload after payload of fire retardant water. The payloads seemed so small compared to the riotous size of the blaze, which is cresting this hills, dipping down towards the houses.

Occasionally there is a brighter-than-usual flare, with deep orange flames and darker smoke; that is a house, or something that's not brush, catching and burning. The temperatures today were about 106 degrees, and the firefighters are wearing full protective gear; they have to, because the fire is so hot. I suggested bringing marshmallows up to the firefighters, and Justin suggested they be shaped like priceless heirlooms.

As night fell, we watched the sky glow in so many places, edging the hills with red and orange, and the creeping bright yellow flames dipping down towards the edges of Pasadena. The smoke is everywhere.

I wonder what will happen tomorrow.

Traveling new places

2009-08-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

I have been through a great many things with a great many people: divorce, the death of relatives, losing a child, unexpectedly gaining a child... There's a lot of trauma and stress that goes along with getting older (although damned if I know when we're supposed to start calling ourselves "grownups"), and one of those things is starting to know people with health problems, sometimes chronic, sometimes dangerous health problems.

Justin is not one of those.

Justin has an infected abscess in his abdomen, behind his navel. Basically, his bellybutton is infected; it's happened before, when hairs that grow INSIDE his belly button turn and grow inwards, and he gets what are essentially ingrown hairs inside his body. This time, it didn't go away though, and after a systemic infection that didn't respond to three increasingly aggressive rounds of antibiotics, he finally got his surgeon on the phone and they said, "Oh, we're a bit concerned over the severity of this thing and you're going to have surgery on Monday. With general anesthetic."

On the bright side, his deductible is $3500 and his insurance said they'd cover 100% of everything else, so once he hits the deductible, he has free health care for the rest of the year. I told him to get a physical, have his blood tested for thyroid disease, go see a therapist, and, what the heck, get a full battery of STD testing. Why not? Any suggestions for other medical things he can take advantage of? Maybe he needs a colonoscopy?

On the down side, he has to have surgery. The pre-operative stuff is kind of scary; it's all blood draws and "who's your next of kin" and "what do you want us to do with your corpse" and the internet, which tells me that sometimes people with infected, bleeding belly buttons have DIRECT OPENINGS INTO THEIR URETHRAS or possibly DOZENS OF TUMOURS TRYING TO PUSH THEIR WAY OUT. It has nothing to do with his bellybutton piercing, which is what 95% of the postings online are about, so those aren't too helpful. We were kind of hoping briefly that they would sew his bellybutton closed, which they apparently won't do in case he needs laparoscopic surgery later.

Basically, it's interesting because it reminds me of the four months I didn't have any health insurance and everyone liked to tell me fun stories about cracking their kneecap in half or getting beat up in a bar fight and fracturing a skull and needing physical rehab for a month and falling off a skateboard and having all your ligaments rip so your foot faces the opposite direction. People are so sweet to tell me medical stories, but mostly what it means is: getting older, in some ways, means breaking down. I'll have to keep an eye out for funny-shaped skin moles, and poke around my insides, and just...be careful. All of you, be careful. I'd rather pick you up after general anesthetic from a minor hilarious surgery than have to hold your hand when you hear a diagnosis.

The Personals Critic Edition

2009-08-17T17:52:00.001-07:00

I started reading Datewrecks some time ago, which led me to the mysterious Vermont craigslist postings of the Personals Critic. Since I'm not going anywhere except San Diego anytime soon (hi, Jack and Charity!), I thought I would travel in my mind instead, and do a little impromptu Personals Critic-ing of my own. Craigslist has provided me with hours of mindless fun (usually while working at the library), so it's only natural that I red-pen a little, giving back to the Craigslist community.

Starting with:

Tired of dumb women - 24 (Long Beach)

This is an important point when you look at his very first sentence, which is:

Looking for a coo black girl that's smart but also likes to party.

"Coo"? Can I go on record as saying that I really hate people who try to spell in dialect? I hated Irvine Walsh, too.

Can't be into this weird new way of dressing.

This is SO INTRIGUING. What weird new way of dressing? Wearing your pants hanging down around your kneecaps? Wearing socks on your ears?

Must have a pretty face and a fat ass

Only if Baby Got Back should you be looking for this playa. And make sure that your bee-hind is covered with some good ol' fashioned pants instead of this weird new way of dressing, where you swath yourself with cuttlefish.

Next up (this one is too long to reproduce in entirety, so it will be only highlights):

Seeking a white woman - 39 (Glendora)

You know, Khafif plays a song called Makedonsko Devojce, which translates as Macedonian Woman, and has a line in it about how nowhere in the whole wide world will you find anyone as beautiful as a Macedonian woman. Except it literally translates as "whole WHITE world." Everyone is racist!

Hello, I am Mexican American decent born and raised here is So Cal.I stand about 5'8 Ht and have a Teddy Bear Husky build

Well, it's good he's a Mexican American "decent", because I'd HATE a Mexican American IN-decent. And I can't help but wonder what Teddy Bear Husky is; it makes me think of that creepy talking doll, Teddy Ruxpin. Remember that? It rolled its eyes. Really, if you want a talking doll, you should get a Butthole Bear from my friend Boris (PS That link is the cutest video of Justin I have ever seen).

As far as my personnel interests, I am a "Huge" sports guy.

"Thank you for coming to the interview today, Mr. Green. Our personnel department has several interests: whether or not you can effectively use Excel, what your availability is, and sports. "Huge" sports."

What I am seeking in a real woman?? good question so I will do my best to answer it for you.I want someone who is "REAL" not a game player.Someone who is looking for a long term committed ..I "DO NOT PLAY GAMES!!!!! and I want someone who will appreciate me for who I am and I will do the same and more.If you like what you hear get back to me.I hope to hear from you soon, and thanks for taking time to read my add.Please no "LIERS or people that are "FAKE or FLAKES".I want someone who is "REAL" and knows the true meaning of the word.

You know how when you use a word over and over it doesn't sound like a real (oops) word anymore? So how can you figure out what the true meaning of the word is when you've forgotten what it's supposed to mean? And he clearly doesn't actually want someone real, because he keeps putting it in quotation marks. So he wants someone "real", aka fake.

Freckles are attractive but love women who are girly girl and polish there "Toes" (big plus)

In the first place, are these things related? I mean why does liking freckles garner a BUT for girly girls? I mean, it's sort of like saying "Coffee is good but love bicycle racing." Also, since it's clear he doesn't actually mean TOES, what do you think he might mean instead? What else could you polish, that you might refer to as toes, if you were feeling silly? Doorknobs? Skin tags? "Can you come out with us tonight, Irwin?" "No, I have to stay home and "polish my toes", if you know what I mean."

And finally, captured in its entirety, Captain Pretention:

Older Women Are So Alluring and Enticing - m4w - 27 (Sherman Oaks)

It is mysterious, the attraction we feel for that certain age group that is different from ours. For some, it is for someone older; for others, younger is the attraction. You find 20-something men sexy in the same way that I find 40-something women inherently enticing. Why is that? What is it about that age differential - for you, the man who is a decade (give or take) younger than you; for me, the woman who is a decade (give or take) older than I - that fuels our respective attractions? I have no idea! Nor do I care, I simply enjoy it for what it is :)

I am dark haired, light brown eyes and attractive. I am not attached. You are not seeking a husband and I am not seeking a wife. We are both seeking lovers. Fun lovers.

Where to begin? With the pseudo-philosophical expressions he uses? "It is mysterious"? "That certain age group that is different from ours"? Did you write the Celestine Prophecies? He sounds like a guy I used to know in high school, who, under his graduating yearbook photo, wrote that his nickname was Shadow, which it wasn't, because he was always walking alone at night. It's so "I've just finished reading bad poetry."

And who says "inherently enticing"?

Finally, "we are both seeking lovers. Fun lovers." I can't tell if he's restating the noun and clarifying it, or if he's making it a whole new noun, like "funlovers", as in "people who like to have fun". So does he wants someone to bone him, who is fun, or someone who just likes to have fun? And is enticingly older than he is?

And how does he know what I'm seeking?

BritBrit and Jenny (and Sadie)

2009-08-13T11:23:00.000-07:00

Are so cute they deserve their own post.

Britni gets attacked a lot. We have lots of pictures of her being smacked on the head.

But she sure is ADORABLE.

It's actually a good thing Jenny isn't here all the time, or she would make me feel inferior.

Justin is wearing his "sleep shorts", which he claims he brought so as to have something to wear while sleeping, but are actually, as I pointed out, far more obscene than him wearing nothing. Sadie, on the other hand, always has the audacity to wear fur coats, no matter what the outdoor temperature.

Clear Lake

2009-08-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

This is me driving a boat.

I'm at Clear Lake, as I pointed out before. It is full of ridiculously attractive people, unfortunately, and all of them are in our cabin. I didn't have space in this post for a picture of Britni or Jenny, so they will be in a shortly following post. But these are who I have been spending my days with, although there are no pictures of Justin's betrothed, Sadie McWaggle, at least until we get the photobooth pictures.

This is Adam. He has numerous facial expressions, but tends to lean heavily on "sardonic."

Boris has very deep dimples. This is what he looks like when he's happy. Boris took me out on the WaveBlaster yesterday and we were actually approximately four feet above the water on several occasions. He went wakeboarding yesterday too, and is now wandering around like an old lady; he just sat down next to me moaning "Ow...why does it hurting?"

This is what he looks like after half a bottle of Jagermeister while I wax his back. Still pretty happy.

And then, of course, the master of it all:

Miami Vice.

Lake Clarity

2009-08-09T21:55:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, we never had a "lake house" that we went to every summer for a month, like all the kids in the young adult stories, where I got brown and wore flip-flops and ate ice cream with other brown, tan, be-flip-flopped kids. The closest we had was my grandfather's cottage in Massachusetts, which is on a lake, but since he technically lived in a completely different country from me (to wit: the United States), we didn't really go there for very long. I have pictures of me jumping in the lake with some other kids, and my grandfather swears he remembers me playing cowboys with my cousin Isak, but I don't really have lake-related memories.

Justin, on the other hand, is rife with lake-related memories, because he grew up going to The Lake, aka Clear Lake, aka the Murkiest Lake I Have Ever Seen. It looks remarkably like Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, what with the lazily brown mountains and sort of haphazard trees and speedboats zipping all over the place, but it differs in several major senses: a) it is not in Guatemala, b) everyone who lives here is richer by approximately 47 times than everyone who lives on Lake Atitlan, where you can purchase a vacation home for the equivalent of $300 US (yes, there is not a missing set of three zeroes from that number), and c) people go SCUBA diving in Lake Atitlan. If they went in Clear Lake, they would see nothing, until someone riding a WaveBlaster tore their heads off. Then they really wouldn't see anything.

So we got here yesterday and have been spending the days doing what most people do at the lake, apparently, which is snack and lounge, sometimes both simultaneously, sometimes on a boat. We are frequently on a boat, which means we are all incessantly singing about being on a boat. I drove the boat, both yesterday and today. And I ate a lot of snacks, both yesterday and today. I would nap more, but the beds are very uncomfortable.

I also rode a WaveBlaster today, which is the kind of water device that people like to complain make too much noise and go too fast. I can vouch that they do, in fact, do both. Despite us making some truly impressive sharp turns across the wakes of larger boats, and becoming totally airborne on several occasions, Justin pointed out some valuable reassurance. 'It's pretty hard to hurt yourself on one of these," he said. "We've tried."

I think it's more likely I'll hurt myself with eating too much, until my stomach falls off, which is what I'm doing right now.

"You, Ernie?"

2009-07-25T23:18:00.000-07:00

They say you can't go home again.

Actually, nobody says that, probably because it's so blisteringly obvious that it's true. It's one of those things that people bring out when they're trying to sound deep, like "Water is wet" or "Tomorrow never comes." It's like saying "How about those Mets?" It fills space when you don't know what else to say, because of course you can't go home again -- wherever it was that you consider your home, as soon as you stop living there, it's not your home anymore. Your parents' house, your first apartment, even your first car. You have these wonderful ideals of going nostalgically back to see the lilac trees you used to chase guinea pigs under and the front porch where you once got snowed in, only to discover that, as in my case, your most beloved childhood home is now a real estate office.

So while you can't go home again, you can return to places you have lived and people you knew there, which is what I did this past week when I went back to Pittsburgh to give a Rotary speech and get rained on. The Rotary speech was planned; the rain was not. I'd almost forgotten that it was possible to have days that weren't nice, days where--dare I say it--you could not just wake up in the morning and decide to walk somewhere instead of driving, because you might actually be crushed by a tree felled by lightning. I forgot that everywhere outside Southern California has weather, which actually stuns me in how quickly I got used to the constant Sesame Street theme song that is my life ("Sunny days...").

I don't think of Pittsburgh as my home either, really (I'm leaning more towards Canada in that sense...oh, Canada, and your land of pine trees and giant Muskoka mosquitos, and free health care, and Aero bars), but I sure do like all the people I know there, despite their having all had babies.

I like babies. I think they are adorable, with their little chubby cheeks and great big eyes and their obvious bid for survival via such a cute defense mechanism: You don't want to leave me for the wolves; look how cute I am when I'm sleeping! It's the only thiing that stops you from hurling them out the window at 2am; well, that, and the nagging feeling that if you did that, all that time you spent growing them inside your body would have been wasted, when you might have been able to spend it getting drunk and smoking crack.

But it seems like the first thing everyone I know decided to do after I left Pittsburgh was get themself some babies. It's like my friends all shouted, "Hey, honey, can you stop at the store for some duct tape, and while you're at it, could you maybe pick me up a couple of babies? But only if they're fresh!" The nice thing about this is that I get to be strange Auntie Claire, who arrives from unknown lands, probably wearing something strange, bearing gifts and kissing cheeks and staying in your spare bedroom, which you think is cool until you get to high school and realize this just means Auntie Claire is a bum. Then you get to college and realize Auntie Claire had it right, and it's really the corporate hegemony that had it wrong.

So there's all these babies, which is fun for me, because then I chew on their soft little ears without actually owning one myself...although, as I told my friend Amy while we wallowed on the beach today, I would be tempted to have a kid just so I could let it run around naked without those cute-but-pointless little leather shoes that people cram poor little baby toes into. Babies don't need shoes. They can't walk. They don't really need clothes either, unless it is cold out. Then you can keep them warm by placing them inside a wolf. At least, that is the traditional manner of dealing with kids in the winter, especially if they have a harelip.

So what with babies, and the Rotarians (who do not resemble babies), and the greatly, deeply enjoyable visiting with my dear, dear friends, there was almost enough sweetness and light in my life to deal with the DMV. I say "almost" because, as everyone knows, there is no good mood that cannot be destroyed by the DMV. It could be your wedding day, to the most wonderful person in the world, who loves you deeply, and has flown you to the DMV on his/her private Learjet and is waiting, naked, with your favorite coconut curry in a fancy electric car, and you could walk into the DMV and all the joy in your life would be drained out of you until you were too depressed to lift your hand to slice your wrists and sink into a lifeless stupor.

People were getting so excited when they saw the numbers flip over. "Awright," exclaimed one gentleman, who was holding a slip of paper that said D05, as the monitor number flipped over and said 95. "It's almost me."

"It's on the B's," I said. "Sorry." I showed him my ticket, which said C00, and he looked so dejected that I almost wished I hadn't said anything.

Even thinking about babies didn't help. So instead I went off my "no sugar" diet, and ate a Hostess cupcake. That didn't help either, but at least it felt like I was getting something done.

Traveling in my MIND

2009-07-16T21:42:00.000-07:00

I have, fortunately, not left Los Angeles since last Saturday. I was starting to feel like I was leaving every day and going somewhere far away and even for me, that would be a lot of traveling. As soon as someone invents a transporter, I am so there, even if it's one of the preliminary models that, 6 out of 10 times, leaves you spliced with someone else's DNA and growing a small but attractive third arm in your sacrum. It would be a small price to pay if it meant being able to zip over to see friends in other states for an evening, and then zipping home. I would alter my pants. And, frankly, I am not rich enough for this jetset lifestyle.

Even though it doesn't take a lot of money to fly around anymore, it still chips away at your savings bit by bit: a hundred dollars here, two hundred there, the infuriating taxes that make a $700 ticket cost $2000 and don't even get me started on baggage checking fees, which are exorbitant, just so you can have someone break your stuff. So is it better to save it all up and go on one big splurging trip that lasts several months and leaves you wrung out like a dirty washcloth? Or is it better to take lots of little trips here and there?

I don't have much choice about it, actually. It seems like I keep HAVING to take smaller trips: I have to speak at a Rotary club, or get a medical checkup, or visit someone. I guess I don't HAVE to visit people. I could just stay home. But they're my peeps! I love them! And also Southwest gives you free peanuts! And doesn't break your stuff, like United!

So I've been speculating about this whole "one big trip" idea postulating that it's actually a little bit better for your soul. One of the downsides of "living" somewhere and then traveling away from it every weekend is that you're in a constant state of change: it's like moving house every week, except instead of taking everything you own, you're only taking a few things, and no liquids bigger than 3oz. So you're on a shoestring of stuff, which is good because it teaches you to love minimalism and reject capitalism and The Man and all that hippie bullshit, but you also don't have anything you need when you need it (god, I missed my cute summer tank tops when I was in Europe, unexpectedly longer than I thought I would be) and then you end up buying things to replace the things you already have at home.

That's a lot of "things", but it all boils down to: they say one of the most stressful things in life is CHANGE. Actually, they say moving, or divorce, or death are the most stressful for younger adults, but especially as we get older, what stresses us the most, physically and emotionally is change. Things being different. If you're on a longer trip, things started different from back home, and they stay that way; you adjust, get used to being on the road, and the shirts you have, and slap a little more duct tape on your sneakers. If you keep going on shorter trips, your body freaks out and gives you a cold.

So the moral of the story is: go big, or go home. Literally.

Day Off

2009-07-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I just can't handle the city. There's too much concrete and too many lights, and too much NOISE: people shouting and cars and the constant badgering blink of advertisements several stories high, reminding you that acne scars are temporary and McDonald's is having a sale on cheese fries (by the way, does anyone remember back when McDonald's had tiny individual pizzas? I had a craving for one the other day).

So today I wanted a day off. I wanted to go camping and smell something other than exhaust and maybe see the stars. It didn't help that a very good friend of mine is roaming the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest, and I just couldn't make it happen to get up there for one weekend to go camping with him. So I knew he was surrounded by trees and empty air and robust bugs, and I'd be damned if I wasn't going to get the hell out of Dodge.

I originally considered going to Joshua Tree, and then Slab City (again). Then I ruled them out on the theory that it was possible I would completely vaporize, leaving behind only a whiff of gasoline and a single black hair, floating gently to earth, where it too would immediately sizzle to a crisp. It's hot, and Joshua Tree and Slab City are in the DESERT. Camping in the desert is fine for approximately 6-12 hours, and those hours are at night, and since it is summer, that would be closer to 6 hours than 12.

Also I live near the fucking ocean and I never go there, so I decided to go beach camping. I don't know anything about camping around here, but I mostly just wanted to get the hell out, so that's what I did: loaded a bunch of odds and ends into the car and drove up highway 101 towards Santa Barbara, passing the mysterious isolated palm-tree island that bemused me when Justin and I drove up this same route for Colleen and Peter's wedding. What IS that little island? It's joined to the mainland by a long gated-off road. Is it someone's private islet? is it a BDSM fantasy resort? A fancy restaurant? A game preserve that is only a mile across?

Then I sat on the beach for hours. I didn't have a bathing suit; I just sat, and listened. There is nothing that is more the antithesis of the city than the ocean. While I sat, I remembered being in Utila, bobbing on the dock at the end of the day, hair stiff with salt, everything tasting of cheap coconut sunscreen. There, the sound of the ocean followed you, mixed with the taste of sweat and a slight seedy undercurrent of pollution. I remember how every scrape and scratch softened and refused to heal, but I also remember the smell of salt everywhere, and the infernal calm in everyone's eyes. Divers are young, tanned, beautiful, fit, and devastatingly remote from normal society; there is no other group so much like mercenaries, in that they live outside standard social rules and do things for you if you offer them enough money. It was in Utila that I paid for my diving certification in lempira, so I could take out thousands of them from the ATM and hurl them up over my head, while Colleen and I turned our faces up to the bills.

Here, on the beach near Solvang, CA, I sought absence from a group, where in Utila I wanted to fit in; I felt too old, much of the time I traveled, too different from the bright-eyed teenagers. I wasn't enough of a diver to be accepted, and I wasn't enough of a traveler to be accepted for that either. But today, on the beach, I wanted to hear the sound of no voices. Only waves. I lay on the brightly colored beach towel and read a book about the wild Sierra Madres cover to cover, until I looked up in the evening sunlight and forgot where I was, for just a minute. Wait...I'm in Mexico? At one point, I read of the marijuana trade that is the backbone of capitalism there, and at that exact second, smelled the couple thirty feet away lighting a joint. Sensurround.

The pelicans fall out of the sky like stones, like wingless beasts who only just realized they don't know how to fly. They bob in contented groups and I mistake them for the heads of children. And then, walking back along the beach towards the car, I saw a pod of dolphins. Their sharp fins sliced the water over and over, they leapt out, twisted, played, and my face hurt from smiling.

Later, I found the RV overnight parking area off the 101, near the turnoff for 33 and Ojai. I pulled in, determined to spend the night by the water, but was deterred by the numerous signs that very clearly say "If You Camp On This Beach And Are Not In An RV And Didn't Pay $25 And Are Not Where You're Supposed To Be, Big Big Fines Await You." I flipped the hatch of the truck open and lay down in a curl of sleeping bag anyway, feeling the salt dust my lips and hands, and staring out at the sky. Then fear got the better of me, and I sat up, intending to move on; again, not a part of the in-crowd. No RV, no parkie. And I sat humped in the truck bed, listening to the waves and the absence of city noise, while a dozen tiny campfires burned along the beach, from the legitimate RV owners, and I saw a shooting star, like a silver hair, there and then lost.

There were ships on the water, brightly lit, and I wondered what we on land look like to people who don't come onshore. We create arbitrary divisions, but that's one that's as old as it can be, and as divisive: land vs sea, the soup of creation vs where we can survive. And then I closed the hatch, and turned the wheel towards home.

People are everywhere! Everywhere! People!

2009-07-09T15:27:00.000-07:00

So, as the summer begins to hammer away at Los Angeles with, I'm told, its usual ferocity reminiscent of motivated illegal Mexican immigrants under threat of deportation, people start dressing kinda funny. I can understand how the heat might do strange things to your brain, causing you to imagine that pulling your socks up all the way, despite wearing them with sandals, is a good idea. Plus, there are tourists, who are notorious for sock-related badness.

But, really, girl crossing the street...was it really a good idea to wear a front-clasp black bra, short shorts, and flip flops in public? Also, middle aged man on a skateboard, despite your "busting" some funky "moves", you are not a teenager anymore. Also shave your moustache.

I saved up my grocery shopping until 10pm last night, and was rewarded by seeing Lindsay Lohan stalk irately into the Ralph's and loiter sullenly in the imported cheese section, shouting into her cell phone. She was drawing attention to herself not because she was Lindsay Lohan, but because she was shouting. In the cheese section. This is not to say that shouting in any other section would have gone over better, only that I don't really think Ralph's is the place for shouting.

This is the same Ralph's that I think I saw Sandra Bullock at the other day, and just as an aside, I think Sandra Bullock is probably actually quite fun to hang out with. I think she swears a lot.

And also, malls here are different. Back on the east coast, malls have Forever 21 in them, or Claire's, or Orange Julius. Sometimes they have a Hot Topic. Here, they have 7 For All Mankind, and Diesel. Same mall smell. Same crappy made-in-Chinese-sweatshops-by-gang-raped-fourteen-year-olds merchandise. Higher prices. Los Angeles is like the East Coast, only with a thin gloss of "expensive" over everything.

Explosions

2009-07-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday started as a great day. I woke up at 10, opening my eyes to the standard California blue sunny sky, and went and checked my email and then was just making quinoa with chicken apple sausage and broccoli and tomatoes when Justin staggered from the undergrowth and collapsed on the couch. He's been sick over the last few days; he got it from me.

I fed him lunch, and then we retired to bed, where I read him about seventeen chapters of "Practical Demonkeeping" and we ordered food delivered from the local food delivery place and they brought it to the gate and I went out and got it in my pajamas. And then I had to go to dance rehearsal.

I'm dancing with several different projects here in town, and none of them are bellydance related, which is kind of fun for me. The bellydance community here is pretty tightly knit, and there aren't a lot of troupes; twosomes and threesomes, yes, but no troupes. It's on my own or nothing, and I am uninspired to fight tooth and nail to claw my way into the public eye when I'm leaving in six months anyway.

So I went to dance rehearsal and was slightly hurt by a misunderstanding but still chipper, and on my drive home, I stopped at the 7-11 to pick up soda for Justin and realized I didn't have my wallet. "I must have left it at home," I mused. So I got home. Not there. Called the people who might still have been at rehearsal. Not there. But by the time they called me back, I realized I'd left it on the roof of my car after getting gas before rehearsal, and drove away.

I panicked. My credit card, my ATM card, my health insurance card, my driver's license, my irreplaceable student ID card, and, painfully, my Social Security card, which you're not supposed to carry around with you...all in the wallet. I called to cancel the credit card at about 7:45 to find that someone else had already called to report it lost at 7:15. Maybe that means I'll get it back, I hoped. But then realized I had to act like I wouldn't, so I had to replace everything anyway, and do all the things that you're supposed to do in case of identity theft, like notify the credit bureaus and all that jazz. The worst part really, is that I'm leaving in six months. The wallet could have held out another damn six months, and then I wouldn't have needed the cards in it anyway.

Then (thank you, PMS) I got painfully miserably angry with Justin for never washing the dishes. Which he doesn't. But I was pissed about it.

The downside of traveling is never feeling like you're at home anywhere. Although I've come to a rest here in California, it doesn't feel like my home; I feel like a temporary resident, which is why I don't have a California driver's license (well that, and I don't need one). This is my current mailing address, here in North Hollywood, but it's not where I live in my head, mostly also because I don't want to stay here.

The major problem, of course, is that the government does not look favorably on those who migrate, or even people who spend six months in one state and six months in another...where do we mail your checks? Where do you replace your driver's license? Where is your residence, your address, your home? Do you want where I'm living, or where my mail goes to? It's a series of questions, and life is not easy for a nomad, at least not here.

(On the other hand, I do live in an industrialized nation. I have loads of friends. My life is hardly difficult. But trying to figure out where you belong is more of an emotional hardship than a real, physical one. Trust me. I know. When RAID performed at the Echoplex on July 4th, in the two hours beforehand, I walked around Echo Park listening to the illegal fireworks go off everywhere and smelling the cordite floating in the air, and thinking how lucky we are in this country that it doesn't smell like this for more sinister reasons.)

Back in the saddle, naturally

2009-06-24T18:54:00.001-07:00

So, it turns out, San Francisco is the best possible city to be going to if you are going to have some kind of car accident and rip the tires off your truck. Hypothetically speaking.

When I woke up on Saturday morning, much earlier than I was hoping to, I called AAA and they delivered to my door a flatbed tow truck driver who could have come from Central Casting if you requested a "sturdy, friendly young man who could star in a production of Oklahoma!" As it was, he held the door of his truck cab open for me, and we happily regaled each other with political discussion on the two block drive to the mechanic, who, since they were attached to a Shell station, I knew would be ass-raping me on the prices, but they were the only ones open. When we arrived, I unthinkingly hopped down from the cab to see driver Jaime standing there, arms akimbo.

"Oh, sorry," I said, and climbed back into the cab and shut the door, which he then promptly re-opened, and helped me down out of, using his hand as a stepping block. Then he manfully maneuvered the truck into place, tipped his hat and said, "No problem, little lady," and got on a horse and rode away. Not really, but that's what it felt like. Although, since it was San Francisco, he was more likely to have been starring in a revival of Brokeback Mountain, not Oklahoma!

Then Darcy and I went into the city to take Jill Parker's class, which, as it turned out, Jill Parker wasn't teaching. She was in the hospital. Then we took the BART back to Oakland, with my friend and local shit-disturber Burstein, and dropped Darcy at her Crucible classes, where she learned how to put out someone who has caught on fire ("Tip number 42: Spray them with water. Just a thought, really.").

Then we engaged in some tomfoolery of the Stuff White People Like variety; namely, we participated in a giant Oakland-wide game of tag/capture-the-flag/Red Rover. It was called Journey To The End Of The Night, although by the next day, everyone was calling it Journey To The End Of My Feet, because everyone had dislocated something or tripped on something or fallen into a rosebush or gotten blisters. As one friend pointed out, "My blisters have toes." Fortunately Darcy almost passed out from dehydration and famine before we'd gone too far, so we were spared the indignity of passing out, or being chased in front of a car, or tiptoeing through someone's backyard.

Instead, we ate Chinese food, and watched people flee by our window, to the consternation of uninvolved passers-by. Turns out, the truck was basically uninjured; except for needing new tires, which was an aforementioned ass-rape, it was completely driveable, so I picked it up (with Burstein), and then we completely left it in the wrong part of town during JTTEOTN and had to walk back it dragging poor gimpy Darcy, who hurt her leg, and in the company of some guy Burstein knew from Noisebridge. We looked drunk, but were actually just deeply, deeply amused, which probably amounts to the same thing. Then we went to Dorkbot's 7th anniversary party, where I realized just how jaded I am, when Darcy asked what a Tesla coil was, and I said, "They shoot like 50,000 volts of electricity and make lightning. But these probably won't be as cool as the ones I saw at Flipside, which actually played music and the Doctor Who theme song." When Tesla coils are boring, you've been going to Burning Man too long. Ditto snail shaped art car that shoots fire from antennae.

Sunday, we gave our souls to Five and Diamond in the Mission, and I realized why all SF belly dancers look the same: because Five and Diamond's stuff is really fracking cool. I escaped only having spent several hundred dollars. Then on Monday, I drove home, where I was instantly assaulted by having Lots Of Things To Do. And also with Being Poor.

The moral of the story is: do good deeds, and God will reward you by making sure you don't die when you drive off the side of the road, and you get to talk on your cellphone the entire drive home without a headset and not get caught by the very same CHP officers who were nice enough to let you sit in their (collective) patrol cars.

A day.

2009-06-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

To begin with, I am fine.

Today, I was driving to Oakland to meet Darcy; Darcy has never been to California before. Not only that, she's never been this far West in the United States before, and I have been planning for months to drive up and meet her and hang around with her in Oakland, while she goes to fire eating classes. I've done this drive a zillion times; it's a straight shot up highway 5.

So I put an ad on Craigslist for a rideshare and picked her up after volunteering at the Center this morning, around 11:45, and we hit the road. She was a sweet girl with a head wrap and sunglasses, who said, "That's so crazy," every five minutes and spoke in detail about where she lived in San Francisco. Like, for hours. So it was sunny and the sky was blue and we were going through the really boring part of California, and it was just starting to get interesting again, about fifteen miles before the exit for 580, when I was like, "You know, that's weird, the car is kind of juddering."

I'd noticed some liquid leaking from under the car (which was not my car, but Justin's truck) before and wondered if it was leaking oil. I checked the oil. Not leaking oil. I checked the radiator, and then smelled whatever was leaking and realized it was water, probably from the air conditioner. I checked the tire pressure on all four tires, and put a little more air in each one (they were all low).

This was in Patterson, CA. Then we started driving abck on the highway again and I said, "That's funny, you feel that little catch in the car? It had that before, that's why we were shaking." And my rideshare said, "Yeah, that's weird."

And I thought We'll keep an eye on it, at least until about six minutes later when we blew a rear tire going 75 on highway 5.

I was in the right lane, and there was a car behind me, and a large truck coming up in the right hand lane, all a fair ways back, and a damn good thing they were too. I heard a loud noise and turned my head a little bit to go What the fuck? and suddenly the car started to fishtail. It skidded across the highway, weaving wildly across lanes, and I saw it heading for the center median and had a chance to think Holy fuck when I tried to steer into the spin the way they teach you to do in Canada if you're on ice and we spun in a wide circle across the highway, hit the side lip at a slight angle, spun backwards, rolled backwards down the hill, and came to a rest parallel to the highway, down a very steep embankment, near some attractive apricot trees.

We were both uninjured.

As I sat there trying to process what had happened, the first thing I did was make sure my rideshare was okay. She was. I was. I looked up and saw that two cars had stopped. There was a bearded man on the phone, shouting "Is everyone okay?" I nodded, dazed. A woman walked towards us, holding up two fingers. "What?" I said. "Only two passengers?" she shouted. "Yes!" I shouted back. "We're not hurt."

She drove away and the other guy stayed with us. He'd called California Highway Patrol, who had been, interestingly, chasing a motorcycle that was going 140 and weaving in and out; the same bearded guy was ON THE PHONE with CHP when he saw my tire blow and watched me hit the ditch. He must have just pressed 2 when it said "Do you want to report another incident?"

So the CHP officer showed up, and the nice bearded man took my rideshare to Berkeley. I waited in her patrol car, as she remarked, "I'm almost out of gas." The tow truck showed up. He didn't take AAA. We called another tow truck. He took 45 minutes to get there, in which time I switched officers. Then eventually that officer left me with ANOTHER officer, and we got a flatbed truck for the car, since the first AAA guy got my car up the embankment, but couldn't load it onto the dolly.

While I was sitting in third CHP officer's patrol car, he got a call to look out for a blue Mustang that had run someone off the road. We were waiting and waiting, and then suddenly I said, "Hey that's a blue car. And it's a Mustang!" and before we could tell the tow truck driver where we were going, we pulled out and hit the lights and pulled the blue Mustang over. It turned out to be a seventeen year old girl, who may or may not have been drunk. I watched the CHP officer give her a very stern talking to while I sat outside the McDonald's and wished I hadn't left my purse with the tow truck driver, because my stomach was starting to consume itself. I think I used every calorie in my body in panic.

Eventually, the truck showed up, I bought a hamburger, and they used my 100 mile AAA membership to haul me to Oakland, where they deposited me on Morley's doorstep, since no mechanics were open. The tow truck driver was super nice, and pointed out the remains of a brushfire on our drive up 580, and I remembered that the bearded guy had remarked "It's a good thing your catalytic converter didn't start the brush on fire!" as we stood on the side of the highway staring at the aftermath and I thought That was an option????

It could have been so much worse. If we'd hit the lip of the highway at a slightly different angle, we would have rolled the truck going over the side. As it was, we almost rolled when we slid down the embankment, but didn't. The truck has no body damage, although the rear driver's side tire, the one that blew, is dramatically untreaded, and it apparently popped the front passenger side wheel and did something to the front suspension, what with going over the edge of the highway. We didn't get hit by the semi behind us on the highway. We didn't hit anyone else while the car was out of control. Not only were we not killed, but we were not even injured in the slightest; not even whiplash.

The worst that happened to me was spending three hours sitting on the side of the road with CHP, waiting to tow my car. I got to Oakland about four hours later than I expected to. I have a place to stay and public transportation to get me around. I have friends who took care of me and texted me jokes and tried to help me in any way they could.

It could have been so much worse. I am so lucky.

As we were coming to a rocking, juddering landing in the ditch, the split second thought went through my head, "Of course we're okay." It never crossed my mind that we were going to die. Not once. And we didn't, through some miracle. Some people might think we were about to die, but the whole time I thought, "This is very bad, but how could we possibly die?" Maybe I'm naive. Maybe I'm overly optimistic. But I thought we weren't going to die, and we didn't. Not a scratch.

It was only when I heard the fear in everyone else's voice that I realized this could have been a much bigger deal. We could have needed an ambulance. This post could have been made by Justin, and said something very different. You could have read about it in the papers.

But you didn't. You read about it here. Written by me. And now I'm going to sleep.

The sort of thing we do out here

2009-06-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

The party I was at on Monday was the premiere party for a TV show my friend SuperKate is involved with. In no particular order, there were: a bouncy pirate ship, a guy on stilts, a fire eater/sword swallower, completely naked girls painted to look like they had tiny outfits on serving food, midgets painted exactly the same way doing the same thing, a Mexican guy with a monkey that was wearing a little mariachi outfit, a balloon twister who was making dirty balloons like strippers on poles and penises, a magician, a bellydancer (that we knew, naturally) with three snakes, a rollerskating chicken, karaoke, a roller rink, hot chicks giving out vodka, hot guys giving out water, blinky bracelets, and probably some famous people. There was also a head-on collision directly out front with fire trucks, police cars, and staggering people, which was PROBABLY not due to the party. I hope.

Also, this is very important: Justin Winokur's new album, "Leaving" is out on iTunes and CDBaby, for digital download only. It is good. Very very good. It sounds sort of like what would happen if you let Brian Wilson and Elliott Smith have a summertime pool party with a bunch of kindergarteners, as directed by Baz Luhrmann. It's poppy and rocky and zippy and sad and happy and introspective. He asked a bunch of his friends and family what songs they would want played at their funerals, and then wrote his own music based on the answers he got. It also has one of my favorite versions of "Don't Fence Me In" that I've ever heard, and the title song of the album, which he wrote for his friend Adam's mother, is so soft and sad and sweet that it always makes me tear up a little.

It's only ten bucks. If you like good music, and I'm sure that you do, please go buy it.

All that glitters is Hohoq

2009-06-06T19:15:00.001-07:00

When I first told my friend S about Kripalu, which is a yoga retreat center in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, she burst out laughing and said, "Is it a coincidence that their name can also be pronounced Cripple-You?" The idea of being jammed into Scorpion Pose by people at a place whose very name offers the risk of quadriplegia sounds like the kind of thing you DON'T want to pay several hundred dollars for.

A neat little rock cairn from a hike behind Kripalu.

And yet everybody does. The place is always full of people swooshing around in their organic bamboo pants and their lululemon tops and their peaceful expressions, talking about crystals or wearing buttons that say "In Loving Silence", which as far as I can tell, means they're part of a meditation retreat and are taking it Very Seriously and means you shouldn't talk to them.

I think you can find spirituality everywhere, frankly, and although I think Kripalu is an excellent place to do it because it's neat and out in the woods, and the food is delicious and provided for you and there's three yoga classes a day (although one's at 6:30am) and there's ayurvedic massage and classes on Kundalini and chanting...I also think that I might have been just as happy swinging in the hammock with the volunteers I met. One of them offered me really terrible organic gum, which is exactly how he presented it, and then we hung out in companionable chatter. The breeze and the birds...so peaceful. Hammocks are my sense of God.

Little deserted boathouse on the same hike.

Usually I don't like cities at all. I hate them, actually. Small cities are okay, but big ones like New York and Chicago and Los Angeles? Hate. And this may seem pointless, because I actually live in Los Angeles now, which seems like a unique form of self-loathing, but I like grass and real nature smells and birds and trees. I like sounds that aren't man-made and not having to drive everywhere.

But last night Justin and I had a date. We went to his friend Beth's art opening, and looked at her photography and ate all her cheese and crackers. Then we had nowhere to go and the sun was warmly lighting all the buildings, so we just drove. We drove past the alien palm trees stepping down off curbs, and through the condominium spires of Beverly Hills, where there is nature, because people can afford it. Finally we tipped out at the ocean and parked in one of the Santa Monica parking structures, which are free for the first two hours.

We walked along the beach and the moon hung above us, and the pier was all lit up. We ate in a restaurant that was like the fantasy of a boat, all dangling glowing glass globes (say that five times fast!) and criss-crossed bamboo ceilings and the bathroom sinks were copper bowls sitting in roughly-hewn wood and the waitresses were REALLY pretty. And we walked along the Santa Monica Promenade and saw a dog skateboarding. Justin said, "Did you see that? That was amazing!" And I shrugged and said, "If you've seen one skateboarding dog, you've seen them all." And he said, "Have you seen a skateboarding dog before?"

And I said, "No."

Squid from the aquarium in Mystic, CT

We watched the sun set in the cloud city that could have been Hohoq, drifting out of the sky and populated by Thunderbirds. I turned to Justin at one point and said, totally surprised, "Los Angeles is really pretty." I don't usually think that, since I spend so much time hating it here. But he just smiled his soft smile and said, "Yeah. It is."

This morning

2009-06-05T09:56:00.000-07:00

I crawled into the bed cave to kiss Justin on the cheek when I left for the counseling center I volunteer for, and he murmured, 'I don't sleep as well without you. You're my anchor."

There was a brief sleepy pause.

Then he said, "It's like you're dragging me down kicking and flailing into the briny depths."

Flying back to the South...west

2009-06-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

Finally, back on Southwest.

Inadvertently, I somehow booked my return flight from Hartford to arrive in LAX, which is the world's most hateful and difficult airport, except maybe Philadelphia. As an aside, I have learned from numerous discussions with flight attendants over the many many years that I have been jetsetting from one corner of this country to another, that if a plane is late, it's coming from Philadelphia. If it's got a mechanical problem, it probably came from Philadelphia. If some airport somewhere is iced in with a bizarre snowstorm in July, it's Philadelphia. If a wormhole to an alternate dimension ever opens and rends the fabric of space-time so badly that we are sucked into the dimensional vortex, it will occur on Runway 1 at Philadelphia.

So, after a short and uneventful flight from Hartford to Baltimore, I looked at the Departures board and was mildly alarmed to see that there were no flights for Burbank listed. "That's weird," I thought, and dug out my boarding pass to see the dreaded LAX code on it. This was literally the first I had noticed not having booked myself through Burbank. It was a bit of a surprise. Not only that, but the plane goes through Phoenix too, which actually means two stops on my way home, and then a hellish hour-long ride on stupid highway 405. Not that I am bitter. But Burbank is literally seven minutes from where I live.

The Southwest flight crew on long trips are invariably both immensely amusing and in excellent spirits; perhaps they all are passing around amyl nitrate back there in the galley. But this flight, the male flight attendant, a very fetching, tall, handsome African-American man, called the cabin's attention to himself as we were boarding. "We have a newlywed couple right here," he said, "and they're on their way to their honeymoon, and I was wondering if anyone with an empty seat next to them could switch elsewhere to let them sit together."

Someone did, so they cuddled into their seats, blonde and young and smiling. The girl keeps stroking the boy's hand. Very cute. Then about two hours into the five hour flight (or maybe three, I don't know...long-distance flying gets vaguely tedious after a while and it all blends together after the Miracle of Flight passes), that same flight attendant coughed into the PA and introduced the blushing couple.

"Now, I'm going to go through the cabin and hand out napkins to everyone who's married, and ask you to write some advice for them, and then I'll collect those napkins and hand them back," he said. The couple laughed nervously. And after they sat down, hands shot up all over the cabin, looking for napkins. I saw people writing industriously, and then the flight attendant held up a sheaf of collected napkins with writing all over them. "These are all we got!" he said. "They got lots of advice to read now. Thanks for participating!"

The nice thing is that I'm sure he did that to keep everyone amused in the middle of the flight, when everyone is starting to get a bit tired of sitting down...but he also asked us to turn to our neighbor and sing the big purple dinosaur's "I love you, you love me..." friendship song as we taxied down the runway. I suspect he's really just terribly outgoing. This further underlines my desire to be a Southwest flight attendant. Or at least marry one. Or maybe all of them.

Days in Hartford

2009-05-30T20:27:00.001-07:00

Aside from family-related insanity, which involves a lot of driving around, calling on cell phones, shouting, and playing Apples to Apples (I'd like to point out that my family is relatively dysfunctional, and when I say "dysfunctional", I mean "before this weekend, none of them had spoken to each other in more than twenty years, and in some cases, thirty; also, some of them are dead from suicide or drug overdose and everyone is deeply emotionally traumatized, except for me"), not much has been happening here in Hartford.

I've spoken at a bunch of Rotary clubs...well, okay, two. Two Rotary clubs. But they were both very nice. One gave me a silver whale. And both told me I had a positive attitude. One guy even asked me how I kept my attitude so positive, or why I was so happy, and I really had to think about it. Unfortunately, I blurted out, "Drugs!" BEFORE I remembered what a tough crowd Rotary is. I amended that to, "Really liking people." Dear Internet, please remind me not to crack jokes about artificial stimulants to a group of relatively conservative people who think acupuncture is bizarre rather than a valuable part of their everyday process, like all the hippie pinko commie bastards I hang out with. Kthx, bye.

(Although one of those Rotary veterans, when the room was asked if anyone had any Happy Dollars, went on a long rambling speech about a medication he'd recently been put on, which he refused to name, and how it kept him awake, and while he was awake at night, he reflected on God and decided God was the Goodyear blimp. then he let some dollars drift to the table and sat down. Later, he engaged me in completely random conversation, and then wandered off in mid-sentence. He probably would have enjoyed the aritifical stimulants.)

So it's all been family stuff for a while. Today we drove out to my grandfather's cottage on the lake (which lake? THE lake, duh...) and on the way back, I stopped dead on the small highway. My mom looked at me with that look that says I taught you to drive in a high school parking lot and I am now seriously doubting that decision, until I pointed out the turtle frozen in the middle of the road.

She hopped out and bent to pick him up when he started RUNNING (for a turtle, meaning his little legs were windmilling and he was going about -2 miles per hour) back towards the other lane of traffic; she finally seized him around the midsection -- I noticed all his extremities had been pulled in, so he looked like a rock -- and placed him on the side of the road. When she climbed back into the car, as everyone honked and gestured behind me, I saw him crane his little head out and look around.

On our way back from my deceased uncle's first ex-wife's house tonight, out of nowhere, my mom said, "We rescued a turtle today!"

Yep, it was a good day.

Exhausted in Albany

2009-05-22T05:40:00.001-07:00

After a red-eye flight that left after yesterday's two-hour intern training program at the counseling center, I'm now sitting blearily in Albany via Phoenix and Newark. The most memorable bits are:

- how much I hate traveling on any airline that's not Southwest. The people are meaner, the seats are less comfortable, and in the Phoenix airport, I actually had to go back outside security and re-enter after taking a bus to a different terminal, because I was flying on two different airlines (US Air and Continental, btw)
- the 60 mini-parliamentarians on the Phoenix to Newark leg -- mostly girls, and approximately twelve years old, they were all wearing light blue shirts with pictures of the White House on them. I overheard a woman at the gate asking if she could be placed as far as possible from them in the airplane, but I just took an Ambien (for the first time in my life!), slipped on my eyemask, put in earplugs, and thrashed my way through a fitful four hours of sleep. I hate anything that's not Southwest. the seats even recline farther, or maybe they just feel like they do. Also their in-flight magazine is made of gold. And their planes fly on biodiesel.
- there was a small weimeraner puppy which got loaded last into the cargo bay of our turbo prop between Newark and Albany. He sat on the ramp, wagging his tail and inquisitively looking at everyone through his carrier, until they stuck him in the Scary Cold Dark Room Of No Oxygen And Also Death, which was directly behind us in the rear of the plane. We heard some tiny little yips for a while, straight through the back wall, and then some howling and moaning. Then nothing but turbo prop engines. And the next we heard was the baggage handler exclaiming, 'Oh my God, he's so cuuuuute,' clearly audible through the double-sealed windows. He was too.

Albany airport has a meditation room. I'm going to go sleep in it now. Until I catch a shuttle to Kripalu and my weekend of yoga and writing fun with my mom begins, shortly followed by my week of family festivities for my grandfather's 90th. Mostly right now I feel like I'm bobbing up and down cause I'm so tired. When your own body has tides, it's not such a good thing. or possibly I'm just rocking back and forth and my brain hasn't noticed yet.

Edited to add:

I feel so much better, although still weird, possibly due to the fact that I thought I would sleep better if I took the second half of the Ambien cause the first one must have worn off in the intervening flight, right? I mean, I took it at like 10:40PST and slept until 6am EST, and then took a WHOLE SEPARATE FLIGHT and landed in Albany and asked the extremely friendly old people if they had a "lounge or a retreat center, something like that," because I absolutely did not want to bring myself to say Meditation Room if that was just a colloquialism.

Instead he said, "Oh, our Meditation Room is right over there!"
Right. I walked right past it.

Inside, it was dark and had curving wooden benches, and a large wall screen that was peacefully lit with a low blue light. It was silent, and had meditation cushions and a prayer mate in the corner with a mark on the wall indicating East. There were Jewish prayer shawls and something that I'm not sure what it was for (a piece of black fabric?) and books of all religions. Inside, two people sat silently, meditating, one on a bench, and the other on a cushion with her palms gently open.

Then I braged in with my rolling suitcase and stole the other meditation cushion to sleep on, and lay down behind one of the benches, like a bag lady. I put on my ridiculous eye mask (which is actually Justin's, so if he's reading it, now he knows where it went), put in one earplug to ensure I would hear my alarm, and promptly fell asleep.

It was only when I woke up at noon, with three hours of sleep under my belt, that I realized someone could very easily have stolen my laptop if they wanted. I guess you don't do things like that in the Meditation Room.

Comings and goings

2009-05-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

This weekend, Justin and I are flying to San Jose. It was an unexpected trip, although it couldn't have happened at a better time: Southwest had a "50% off fares to Bay area" fare sale the very day we bought the tickets. But why are we going? Because Justin's Nana died.

Nana was in the hospital for a long time. She was in and out for years. This last time, she was in the hospital for almost a month. She couldn't walk, or even talk much; it was painful for her to listen to your voice. As Justin put it on his Facebook status, "Nana died while Grandpa Paul was telling everyone the story of how he got crabs from some girl. I guess she was tired of that story."

Nana was in so much pain at the end that they put her on palliative care; she had a constant opiate drip that kept her from gritting her teeth as her body gave out. You could press a finger into her skin and the dent would stay, rising up slowly like sourdough. The last time I saw her, I told Justin it looked like she had given up hope.

She always told him she loved him. She always hugged me and called me sweetheart. Justin's mom told me how much Nana liked to see him happy. She wanted to go on a cruise before she died, but she died too fast to make it.

On the other end of the spectrum, my friends in Pittsburgh went and did some adding to the world:

Meet Aislynn.

Like yoga?

2009-05-09T07:43:00.000-07:00

Me too! So go read my yoga article over at Matador Travel!

Plaing dead

2009-05-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

I woke up at about 8 am this morning and walked into the kitchen, where Justin was standing.

"I learned something," he said.

"What?" I said, blurry.

"Possums can swim." He indicated out the window, where e tiny bedraggled beast was squatting next to the pool. "I fished it out a few minutes ago."

"He doesn't look so good," I said, as we watched the little rodent wobble around and then blindly aim for the pool again and wobble on its edge. Our pool is unheated and therefore frigidly cold even for people; tiny furry mammals would be lucky to last longer than a few minutes. And, as we found out later, possums can actually only swim for a few minutes and then they drown.

"Maybe we should put him in the trees?" I said, so we picked it up and put it in the trees, where it promptly staggered around so badly we were worried it was dying, then keeled over sideways and played dead. Not the right solution. "Maybe in the sun?"

We moved it over to the sunny patch of leaves. It got tangled up in a bunch of debris and sadly bumped its nose against the window grate to the basement of the big house. It was drunkenly staggering still, so I said, "Maybe we should wrap it up in a towel to keep it warm," and headed back inside to do what every middle-class white hipster city-dweller does: look up "possum retrieval" on Google.

Turns out, keeping it warm was absolutely the best thing we could have done. It sat complacently, blinking at both of us from between Justin's hands and a blue towel, eyes drooping occasionally, as I called WildRescue, then the "possum lady", then another possum lady. She suggested we put it in a box with hot water bottles and something to burrow under and then bring it over to her in Tujunga.

Having no hot water bottles, we instead filled several latex gloves with warm water and spread them around the little guy, wrapped it in dishclothes, and stuck it in a box. "Who's a bad possum?" Justin muttered lovingly as he arranged the little nest. "See Claire? She didn't save you. I saved you. I'm like your god. Love me! Kill her!" He aimed the part of the box where the possum's little head was at me and said, "Attack! Attack!"

That didn't work so well, since the possum mostly just nuzzled the gloves and twitched its little ears. So we took it to Tujunga. The lady met us in her driveway with a cardboard cat carrier, and when we effected the handover, our little possum stared up at us with its mouth open. "Are you yawning?" I asked it.

"No, it's trying to scare you," the lady said, and pulled out our little (as it turned out) girl. She lashed her little tail and glared at us and fiercely bared her teeth, which were miniscule and adorable and generally did not scare us at all. It's hard to be scary when you're six inches long and also have a prolapsed anus.

More soliciting

2009-05-04T15:15:00.000-07:00

Friends and Family,

I recently applied for a "Roads Scholarship" to travel North America this summer and share the highlights on Digital Vagabonding. I'd like your help to win this scholarship.

The winner will be chosen in May and favorable comments posted to my proposal will help me win. Please view my scholarship proposal and comment on why you think I have the "right stuff" for traveling North America and creating a compelling travelogue.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. If I win I'll make it a journey you'll want to follow online this summer.

---------

PS This is a very stilted way of asking you to go vote for me again. Yes, it's like the Australia thing, which no, I didn't get. Tell your friends about this one too! Why do you think I'd be great? Maybe you don't think I would be great. In which case...shhhhh.....

A whole new world...

2009-05-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

You know, they say that smells have more to do with recalling memories than any other sense; you can think hard about what your grandmother looked like, but only when you smell her fried chicken or asphalt driveway to you really remember what it was like to visit her in the summer.

For me, the aroma of meat cooking on a grill outside mingled with dust and hot pavement only makes me think of one thing: my medieval childhood. Add to that the tweetling sounds of distant recorders, the thumping of not-so-distant terrible drummers and the occasional jingling of somebody's ill-advised coin scarf, and, in toto, we have an instantly recognizable memory category that encompasses approximately fifteen years of my life.

When I was thirteen years old, I went to my first Pennsic, with my mom. This was back when you could pay per day, and the price rolled over at midnight. I come from the Kingdom That Sings, aka Ealdormere, which means that we didn't need directions to get there since they had already been laid out for us in filk -- "As we headed down the Queensway...as we drove up to the Peace Bridge/so much was on our minds/What would the customs guards say?/What did we leave behind?"

I mostly remember a jumbled blur of excitement and tents and dudes in spurs and fuzzy naked people, who were fuzzy because I took one horrified, breathless look at the Classic Swimming Hole and immediately squeezed my eyes shut and begged my mother to take me someplace else. That's a lot of nudity for a thirteen year old girl. This is why I am occasionally amused when people tell me they lost their virginity at some absurdly young age, because I couldn't even look at someone with their pants off when I was thirteen, let alone assist in the depantsing.

Pennsic has blurred over the years into snapshots so specific that I can't even remember what year they're from: the time I camped in the Swamp and one of our campmates discovered her husband was cheating on her with another campmate, who was younger, and hurled his armour cup right over the wall of the encampment, shouting, "He won't need THIS anymore!" The time I camped on the bottom of Runestone Hill and they had pudding wrestling for the last year. Playing live action Vampire: The Masquerade and being so taken with the Storyteller that I begged him to bite me on the neck (he didn't. Fortunately, he was, in retrospect, immensely dweeby, so it cured me of any potential teenaged obsession with vampires). Watching fighting on the battlefield; being too cool to watch fighting on the battlefield. Listening to the same songs being played over and over again. Watching people do pavanes. Organizing events. Going to the same parties. Seeing the same people get older, more sunburned, have children.

The smell is always the same, tying all those years together. The smell of HOT, especially with a slight tinge of humidity, and especially asphalt. The smell of meat cooking outside. The smell of frankincense & myrrh. The smell of unwashed sweaty bodies, especially pressing a little too close to me. I knew a guy once who claimed to have an overdeveloped sense of smell; he said he could smell what kind of pipes his bathwater had gone through. Pennsic must have been an olfactory midden for him, because there was so much not-washing, and sweating, and fire-spinning (in later years) and staying up late and getting drunk and playing Risk, and none of that leads to smelling like a rose...but it is definitely a REAL smell.

I went to the Southern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire. I was not a Ren Fair girl; I've never been a Rennie. I didn't grow up at jousts or crying, "Prithee, milord, wouldst give me a penny?" or "Huzzah for the tipper!" I didn't spell it "Drynks" or add an "e" on the end of everything, although I do know that when you add an E, it means you pronounce the last syllable, you that last word should be pronounced "sil-lah-bul-leh." I did spend a lot of time scoffing at the un-periodness and inaccuracy of Ren Faires, their pretentious dragons on shoulders and mixing of fabrics and time periods. WE were different. WE did the research. THEY just tried to sell people pewter mugs with dragons on them and give everyone a good gander down the bodice.

Yeah, not so different, really. I went with Colleen and Peter; Colleen was a Ren Faire baby. She grew up in Faires and suffered the same lasting, potentially deleterious effects that I got from growing up in the SCA (an intensive knowledge of scifi television! knowing who Cory Doctorow is! caring!). They were used to the Ren Faire madness, of stages with performers, and people shouting and talking in silly Faire-speak, and constantly pushing and peddling for the next spare change, and selling pickles, and going on rides, and the more I wandered around, the more I thought how wrong people are: Pennsic is not like an overgrown Ren Faire. Pennsic is so much more like Burning Man.

A Ren Faire is always acting, except at night when the townies go home, and the Rennies converge in their trailers to drink bottles of whisky and have sex and play Risk or Axis and Allies, with some of the latest and most lucky Faire groupies. Pennsic and Burning Man are just weird places to live for one or two weeks. But the smells of Faire...that brought me back. The bodices and pewter mugs, the used-to-it movement of someone folding a skirt out of their way to sit down, the smells, the singing songs that were only familiar four hundred years ago and are now known by name.

It's a different world, for sure. I traveled further than I thought this weekend, and I only went to Irwindale!

Back from the 'burgh

2009-04-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

Pittsburgh was also broken while I was there; apparently the nice weather that SF was having followed me across the country, hidden in the jetstream of my airplane, to smack me down with humidity and general hotness when I stepped out of the Pittsburgh airport. I didn't wear a coat ONCE in Pittsburgh, and actually found myself sweating helplessly on more than one occasion and looking like a refugee from an unfortunate office-supply-manager boating accident, as I wandered Squirrel Hill in fitted pinstriped pants and fitted pinstriped shirt, both rolled up, and hiking sandals. Sweating.

It's not fair that there are four ice cream places in one block in Squirrel Hill. Especially now that I'm trying to eat less sugar. But they make up for it by being prohibitively expensive, and serving ice cream in vast, sweetened vats, mixed with repulsive add-ins. My friend Colleen had a great idea for her next birthday party; she's going to have a Disgusting Ice Cream Add-ons Party, where everyone goes to Coldstone Creamery and tries to create the grossest combination they can think of. Think licorice ice cream with gummy bears and pineapple. Pretty much anything with gummy bears is likely to be bad.

"And then," she said merrily while outlining this plan, "we'll invite some people who are supertasters, and torture them." She is evil.

My meetings went well, although I forgot all my notes in the ballroom of the hotel. I had a mysterious 1am call from a fellow student, who woke both me and my roommate up. I'd gotten in at midnight from a night of polite carousing around the South Side (I say polite because I don't drink, although we were also pretty polite because we were, on the whole, Midwesterners), and had fallen solidly asleep, when a shattering ring broke through my earplugs. My roommate grunted and flung a pillow over her head, and I answered the phone.

After stating his name, the gentleman asked if I would care to come to his room. He had music. And dark chocolate. And he was all alone. "I think I'll stay here," I said, my head absolutely hazy.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"Yep," I said cheerily, and went immediately back to sleep, so that I wasn't sure if I'd dreamed the whole thing, until he basically avoided me all the next day. It was interesting, and made me reflect on something one of the returning scholars had said, about how everyone just assumed she was promiscuous because she was American.

"That's all well and good," I pointed out to the lovely local who gave me a ride into town from the airport Marriott, "but what if you really ARE promiscuous?" Do you have an obligation to curb your natural inclinations to avoid stereotyping your whole nation? Must you keep it on the downlow? Is this discrimination against the slutty?

All over the place

2009-04-22T14:28:00.000-07:00

The retaining walls at Griffith Park have leaf impressions in them.

Well, lessee...since the last time I wrote, I've managed to be about as insanely busy as one could be. I saw Avenue Q in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, which was disconcerting, since I saw it for the first time on Broadway. I went for a long walk in Griffith Park with not only one friend, but two. I have two friends in Los Angeles!

And most importantly, a week ago, I flew to San Francisco to take the Mira Betz intensive master class, a performance-based self-exploration of wonderment that mostly left me feeling not quite so terrible about the future of bellydancing, and also had me remembering how much I really like acting exercises.

It's possible there could be an uglier knick-knack, but I doubt it. This is from the yard sale that I helped price at the counseling center where I volunteer.

I've been wandering the streets of the Mission, taking BART to Oakland, and basking in the totally broken, un-San-Francisco-like 92 degree weather for the past week, and tomorrow I fly out to Pittsburgh for a Rotary orientation, without which I would not receive my scholarship funds for Australia. I am very excited about it, actually, although I am naturally more excited about visiting the friends I left in Pittsburgh.

I miss my friends. I miss them a lot. I find myself missing them but not wanting to intrude on their lives, which are busy and moving on past me, as I chose to step outside their parameters. So I miss lunch and breakfast and dinner and dance practice and random trips to stores that are familiar.

Where to go if you aren't sure you want booze.

And then I prepare for my grandfather's 90th birthday and reflect that you might have a lot of years of missing left.

Memories, all alone in the MOONLIGHT

2009-04-06T18:34:00.001-07:00

The North Hollywood library smelled like farts this morning. Not sure why that is.

I had two friends from Pittsburgh in town visiting me -- well, actually in town for a meeting and then vacation, but I like to pretend they came only for me, glorious me! -- this weekend. So I forced them to do things I like to do: namely, eat Thai food and go see Vaud & the Villains.

The Thai food was delicious and copious -- we had eaten until we were bursting, eaten until our ears were turning inside out and tea was trickling into the leftover spaces of our stomachs, and then the lovely little Thai waitress came out and said, "Just few more minutes, barbecued chicken, okay?" and we realized we had forgotten AN ENTIRE DISH. We stared at it mournfully and each ate a bite before having it wrapped up and then ordering some mango sticky rice, because everyone has room for mangos.

I love going to see Vaud & the Villains for several reasons, like: they are amazing, they are amazing, and they are amazing. A show like they put on would be $50 and playing to a packed crowd anywhere else in the country, but instead they are in this dripping-with-ambience Parisian style cafe every Saturday and/or Sunday night for something like ten bucks (although every time I come the price is higher, ostensibly because there is some Special Event, but I think someone just told them There's a Jew coming, let's make sure this is physically painful for her!). There are seventeen of them (although the pictures on the website show and I seem to remember there being an eighteenth, a blonde singer). They sing and they play everything; they are like Lynette, if she were seventeen people instead of one, and had classical operatic training. They sang Paul Simon covers and old Negro spirituals; they sang musical theatre songs; they tapdanced. Only one of them.

At the first intermission, Jake and Erin turned to me and I said, "Eh?" with the rising inflection that means, "So? You like?" and both of them just stared, blinking in bewilderment, and said, "Wow." Afterwards, Jake said, "I would have been very sad to miss that. Only I wouldn't have known I was missing it, so I wouldn't have known I should be sad." I couldn't hear him, though, because the sound was making my ears ring. I sang, "Oh, Mary don't you weep no more," in the car all the way back to the house, and fell asleep to dream of angels.

The next day we all went to Venice. And Santa Monica. It was a sweltering hot day, a summer day, and we were repaid by seeing lots of hot dudes with their shirts off, and girls in flip flops and bikinis looking disdainfully at you as though you shouldn't be staring at their barely covered bits instead of putting some clothes on. We went in the freak show and saw the 5-legged dog, and the two-headed turtles; I was mostly amused because it seemed to be a family business, with dad doing the barking, mum showing of fthe dog, daughter showing off the turtles, and disgruntled 12-year-old son playing Tetris in between taking fistfuls of ones from punters.

We watched a Thai man slowly lift his body until it was perpendicular to the ground, hanging off some bars, and we watched an ancient-looking man swing himself gleefully from ring to ring in the playground section. A bunch of circus performers/acroyogis were practicing on a patch of Astroturf. Small children screamed at the water. Everything smelled of burnt sand and cotton candy.

I love making memories.

Living in LA

2009-03-30T10:14:00.001-07:00

Living in Los Angeles is mostly amusing for this reason: last week, Justin and I decided to meet his friends Brian and Lucy for dinner, at the notorious Rainbow Room, which is Mafia-run and full of hair-rock bands looking like they don't care if nobody is looking at them. Delicious pizza, though: thumbs up! I ate while watching the table across from me, which consisted of a dapper middle-aged man in a suit, an older man in a windbreaker, and a woman whose face looked like it might have been reconstructed from Play-Doh, had a glass of wine and presumably made plans to have someone whacked. I could hear the Godfather theme merrily playing in my head.

After dinner, we decided to get a late show of "I love You, Man" at the Grove Theater, which is right around the corner from the Rainbow Room, in the little chi-chi walking district called the Grove, as if it is populated by trees and not by Abercrombie & Fitches. So we went over there, bought our tickets from the (strangely) Australian-accented ticket machine and settled in.

The movie's great, first of all -- hilarious and painful and there's a Rush cameo in the middle! It's a bro-love story, a romcom based on two dudes who become best friends. But the whole thing is a major paen to Los Angeles. Paul Rudd lives in Silverlake, and drives to work along a street that I had just met an old friend for lunch on (I leaned over to Justin and said, "I was just there!"). His friend, Jason Segal, lives in Venice and walks along the exact part of the Venice Boardwalk that I took my mom along when she was here (the easiest part to get to). But the funniest part of the whole thing was when both male characters are looking for a tuxedo, and they are wandering through the Grove...directly past the glittering marquee of the Grove Theater, where we were watching the movie.

It felt like watching Flashdance in Pittsburgh. :) Except with Rush.

Other than that: still no snow. Definitely warm. I'm going to San Francisco in about two weeks, and then back to Pittsburgh. Then back here. I'm probably going to my grandfather's 90th birthday in May. And my gym got a fresh orange juice machine, which squeezes them right in front of you. When I told Justin, he shook his head and said, "I love California."

Moths and Rust

2009-03-10T18:46:00.000-07:00

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.

-- Matthew 6:19-20

My mom came to visit.

The day after she arrived, I bundled her into a rental car, and we drove four and a half hours through the Mojave desert to Vegas, where we parked our car in the obscenely large parking lot of an obscenely large casino complex, and wandered past rows of slot machines to arrive, finally, at the place where they were holding an enormous bellydancing spectacular.

Now, I have not seen Rachel Brice dance in person for years; I think the last time I saw her perform was the year we were both performing at Spirit of the Tribes (and teaching there), and then we were both at the same Suhaila workshop in 2006 or so, but it's been a while since I've seen her dance in costume, so that was nice. It was REALLY nice to shock the heck out of my friends who didn't know I was going to be there -- watching Amy and Heather's eyes go wide as they tried to place me was probably one of my favorite moments. Having nightmares about removing shredded paper from my ears because my mother snores like a stevedore and I had to jam wadded up Kleenex into my aural passages to cut the noise was NOT my favorite moment.

Then we drove back to LA, and immediately dropped off the rental car and got in my car (which is making an intriguing rubbing-metal noise that is melodically similar to bottles clanking together) and drove to the Venice Boardwalk. Then we drove to the Santa Monica Pier. It is worth pointing out that the part of these two famous LA landmarks that my mom liked the most was seeing a park that features in a crossover episode of Grey's Anatomy. "I think that's the exact spot!" she squealed with unsurpressed joy. Yeah, the one with a homeless person sleeping in it.

We went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which cannot be explained. Then we went home, which can be explained. The next day, we drove down to Hollywood Blvd so she could buy souvenirs for her workmates, and we ogled Grauman's Chinese Theatre and the crowds of Japanese tour groups taking pictures of Marilyn Monroe's footprints. Then we ate cream puffs. We also consumed mass quantities of soda.

Then Saturday morning we got up and drove to Joshua Tree. We stopped at the Purifoy Art thingy (I hesitate to call it a museum or gallery), which is essentially piles of toilet seats and canteen trays screwed together and rusting out in the desert, which is amazing. Justin's friends Dave and Ray were with us. At one point, mom came to find me. "I want to show you something I think you might have missed," she said, and led me to a cave-like tunnel lined with debris. There, between two stacks of sun-bleached book pages, was a tiny nest woven of what looked like electrical wires, and in the nest were two pinkish opalescent eggs. "The bird flew off when I walked in here," she said. It was so perfect and amazing. Later, in bed that night, Justin said that seeing the eggs had been the highlight of his day.

After Purifoy, we drove to the Integratron for a friend's wedding. The wedding was full of more laughter than most other weddings I've been to, where it seems like laughing is against the law. Also there was a tiny perfect cowboy with blonde hair who wandered from lap to lap in the congregation as we sat on the floor, piling over onto people's legs and grinning a wonderful gap-toothed grin. It was COLD that night. But we slept in tents anyway.

The next day, we drove to: the Desert Christ Park, Bombay Beach, the Salton Sea, Salvation Mountain, and the Slabs. As we were driving to the Slabs, Mom said, out of nowhere, "This is like the moths and rust tour!" And it was. We drove past so much strange desert art, slowly collapsing, made by strange desert people, who were also slowly collapsing. We found houses made of driftwood, and trailers half-buried, encased in glistening salt crystals...an entire abandoned record collection in what used to be someone's living room, solidified into rock by the sun. We spoke to Leonard about how God spoke to him an told him to build a monument to Jesus with his bare hands and adobe; he makes the flowers by splatting on extra adobe and then pushing his fist into it. We spoke to Dan, the guy who built the Slabs LIbrary with it's librarian, Rosalie, and carefully weighted the doors with cans of dirt so they would swing shut. "The gas station in Niland has free water," he offered us, and when we stopped there to fill our gas tank on the way back to LA, we saw someone in a pickup with two 50-gallon drums pull up to the water spigot.

I know where I want to go, and it is not a city; it is the desert, and it is a free paradise where everything is swept with dust, and it reaches 125 degrees on summer nights, but you can sleep under a tree in a library you have built for yourself. I'm going to go be the resident dance teacher and therapist for the Slabs and no-one can stop me; one day you'll look up and I just won't be there. My only forwarding address will be "Niland, CA" and when you come looking, just like that, I'll be covered with salt, hardened by sun, into something strange and new and happy.

No phone, no pool, not pets...just baths

2009-03-02T22:41:00.000-08:00

Turns out, the Sutro Baths, on the coast in San Francisco...are actually kind of okay. If you like that sort of thing. And by "that sort of thing", I mean, "pounding surf," "dilapidated old buildings," "gorgeous rocky cliff faces," and "Japanese tourists." Fortunately I like all of those things times 9000, and I also really like peeing in the dripping, dark, salty-smelling rocky walkway underneath the cliff face because I just couldn't hold it anymore. It's the being homeless that does it to you. Soon, you just HAVE to pee outside.

Next is peeing on yourself. Or someone else. And then developing a hobo name, learning hand signals, and believing Chicago actually exists.

I like spiderwebs.

I stood there with my finger on the shutter button for ages trying to get the right "spray" picture, and then, naturally, as soon as I took a halfway decent one and didn't have time to focus again, the most spectacular wave hit, foaming and spraying everywhere. This is not a picture of that wave.

Dilapidation and decay. Also, your mom.

Always good to know where you can find one.

So many tire tracks!

A day in LA

2009-02-27T18:39:00.001-08:00

This morning, Justin's friend David Meijer, a tall, soft-spoken Swede, bungy-corded the pool cleaner back together so he could fish the dead squirrel out of the bottom of our pool. It looked like a very old Chinese man, its paws neatly folded on its chest, although with the somewhat open mouth, it had the appearance of yodelling.

Such is life in LA. Never a dull moment.

It's a weird place, but I find myself unable to either appreciate the weirdness or rebel against it, because I am very very tired. Clearly all this driving and moving around and being friendly to people has completely worn me out, because I am nothing if not tired right now. Usually I have all kinds of energy and can think of tons of fun things to do, but now mostly I just have enough energy and strength to contemplate making another mug of tea and then blowing up some Peeps in the microwave.
San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco and the lapping of your clustered houses against the hills in a way that would be pornographic if the San Fernando Valley (where I am right now) didn't have the market tightly sewn up (har!) on womanly references. I had a lovely if whirlwind time there, characterized by looking for replacement windshield wiper parts and the kind of solid good company that leaves you feeling lucky to know the people you know.

My friend Rob and I went for breakfast and he told me of the remarkably Dickensian twists of his current living situation, then showed me his new digs in the Mission, a cool green house with nary a hint of said labyrinthine travails. Then I left his disheveled hair and twisted humor to meet with a brand new friend, MB. I call him MB since I don't know if he wants to be known by initials, although the likelihood of him ever noticing his presence here is probably low.

I flirted with MB twice, each time to absolutely no avail: the first time at the vice-presidential debate, at which he sat next to me, and said no more than "I'm sorry, was that your foot?" in between shouting at the horror that was Sarah Palin. The second time was in the aimlessly meandering aftermath of clowns vs. mimes in the Mission; he was the organizer, and ended up walking from bar to bar in half-removed mime makeup, swigging from a bottle of whiskey every time we got inside.

You might fathom that MB is a somewhat interesting chap, with a multitude of interests and talents; you'd be right. And that's all I'll state, except that anyone who uses the word "pugilism" on the first date is a hottie.

So my life is full of delicious friends, old and new, and I finished my taxes. Now if I could just stop feeling so damn tired, I guarantee I'd be up to my old self again. In the meantime, have a picture of the Honky Christmas, a chocolate set I found in a drugstore in Canada. I also found it unintentionally hilarious, especially given the opposing gang colors.

The Hell of California

2009-02-22T21:29:00.000-08:00

I left Moab, Utah with a heavy heart -- partly because it's beautiful and I love it, the clean, cold isolation and lovely ancient rock formations, and partly because I knew it would be an eleven hour drive to Reno. Nonetheless, I drove onwards through the desert...and then more desert...and then some more desert...until we got to the glittering, confusing lights of Reno.

Reed, my partner in crime for this camping trip, had been remarkably patient with a great many things beyond either of our control. For example, when he arrived in Boulder and I told him we were staying an extra night so we didn't have to drive in the dark and camp in someone's hippie friend's trailer's front yard (thanks, Katie!), he went with it. When there was a crowd of people he'd never met imploring him to do yo-yo tricks, he did them. And when my windshield wipers completely stopped working, stuck over at the farthest point, outside the snowy, slushy town of Silverthorne, Colorado -- town motto: It's Real Close To Everywhere Else You Want To Be! -- he very kindly did not pout when we tried to find a mechanic.

We found one. He was very nice, but said he'd have to order a new motor from Denver and have it driven up...and since we had some time, why not get lunch? He regaled us -- well, mostly me -- with filthy jokes, a running commentary, and aggressive flirtation for about an hour and then we retired to Borders, and waited. And waited. And finally, the car was fixed, and we got as far as Grand Junction before collapsing for the night. It had, I feel I should point out, stopped snowing in the amount of time it took to fix the wipers, so we didn't need to use them again, and we had a wonderful view of Breckenridge, Telluride, Vail, etc. Aspen, by the way, is the only town in Colorado with gas at $2.19. Everywhere else, it was $1.79. Aspen is clearly designed for rich jerks in BMWs and should be peed on.

By the way, not that this is relevant, but the mechanic was driving a Mustang sports car. "I know this is an impractical car for winter," he said. "But all my other cars aren't working." It was both hilarious, ironic, and kind of awesome that anyone would drive a Mustang convertible at 9200 ft, in six inches of snow. We watched him pull out onto the icy street with remarkable, wheel-spinning aplomb.

So today, after the most beautiful trip through Moab possible, we woke up in Reno with a couchsurfer, whose 10 year old limping short-haired chow spent all night snoring solidly across my legs, pinning them to the air mattress. It's a six hour drive to Reed's, in San Francisco's national park, the Presidio, from Reno. Burning Man is good for allowing us to estimate how far everything is from Reno, that's for sure.

It got bad about twelve miles west. On highway 80, we hit the most atrocious traffic jam known to mankind. Traffic was crawling, practically at a standstill, and as we crept along the winding road into the Sierra Nevadas, we saw more and more cars sitting, blinking hazards, by the side of the road. It was lightly raining, but hardly "sit out the weather on the shoulder" weather. Then we saw some trucks pulled over.

Then we saw a bunch of guys in bright yellow jumpsuits, and signs that said, "Snow Chains $30". And a sign that said "Snow Chains Required." And then another sign that said "Chain Control 1 mile."

So we went up a mile to the guy in the orange jumpsuit and I opened my door, since my window doesn't roll down.

"What's going on?" I said.

"You need chains past this point," he said.

"Why?" I said.

"It goes up to 7200 feet!" he said, in a tone of voice that indicated the argument was now closed. "And there's snow on the ground up there!"

Let us stop to consider for a moment:

1) I had just spent almost a week in Boulder, Colorado, whose elevation is approximately 8000 feet.
2) I was born in Canada, and lived in Pennsylvania until last April. Not only have I never used snow tires, but I've never met anyone who needed snow tires.
3) When I left Canada, I did it through about six inches of standing snow on the ground. Just turn the wheel into the spin, people!

"How much snow?" I asked. I was mostly surprised and frustrated, not antagonistic. I was really curious about how much snow had been delivered to the Sierra Nevadas that I would need snow chains, when I never needed them in Ontario, New York state, Pennsylvania, or the Rockies. Or Vancouver. Or, presumably, the Arctic.

He flushed. "We're done playing twenty questions," he shouted. "You have to go get snow chains!"

After an aborted attempt to get on highway 50, we did, in fact, get back on highway 80, about two hours after we first arrived at the checkpoint. Then we drove past it, into the dreaded area of extreme snow, and 7200 ft of elevation. It was snowing. Not a lot, but it was. The road was a mite slushy, and festooned with broken snow chains.

Then, about six miles later, we saw the sign: End Chain Control.

Yep, we had essentially wasted three hours and $36 to have the California government waste taxpayer's money to have chains on the car for SIX MILES.

We wasted no time in getting them off, let me tell you.

Then, we hit neverending traffic outside Sacramento...and Vacaville...and then, about half an hour from San Francisco, my windshield wipers died. Again. In the rain. In the dark. I almost cried.

Reed took my whole windshield wiper assembly apart with his Leatherman and a cheap socket set from Walgreens, and wired back together the cheap-ass fix our Silverthorne mechanic charged me $150 for, using the twist ties that had held the snow chains together in their package. At least they came in handy for something.

Would it be

2009-02-20T19:21:00.000-08:00

so wrong to live in Moab, Utah?

Claire Travels...a lot

2009-02-15T12:29:00.000-08:00

I like old buildings. You could show me the nicest mansion on the finest piece of land in the most lovely area of the country, and I would shrug, and go, "Enh." Probably, actually, I would speculate as to whether or not Scientologists lived there. But show me an old barn with holes in the roof, or a horse stable that is listing sideways like it got too drunk at a party and is relying on an invisible friend to get it to a cab, and I want to live there. I get enraptured by rickety old buses or chicken sheds; small places that reek of decay are where I want to spend the rest of my days, with the rain dripping merrily through the holes in the roof, and a wireless internet connection.

Needless to say, New York City is a little difficult for me. Usually I can deal with the buildings and the agro drivers and the rushing and bustling and people with flyers and enormous waving rabbits in Times Square, but this time, I mostly just felt overwhelmed and exhausted. Poor New York. I gave it short shrift. At least I got to hang out with my very good friends and worship their baby, who is truly worthy thereof.

Then started the drive West, across this great land of ours. I stopped in Centralia, land of the coal fire, and observed the smouldering clouds of smoke and the warm venting air coming from splits in the ground. It was raining. I think I was most surprised by the heavy traffic; the center of Centralia is the crossing of two major county highways, so there is all kinds of traffic going through a place where there used to be a town.

The weird thing is that when you're going to a town that was razed to the ground, its inhabitants moved two towns over because otherwise they would have died in their sleep of black damp, what you're looking for is things that aren't there. You're looking for the lack of buildings, the absence of people. And when you get there, mostly what you think is, "Wow, there's nothing here."

After a brief stop in Pittsburgh, I kept driving West, across Indiana and Illinois and Missouri, across Kansas. Neverending Kansas, whose main saving grace is that the speed limit is 70 mph. I did get out at rest stops from time to time, and marveled at the clean expanse of air. You definitely feel small in the middle of Kansas, which is very silent and the sky is aggressively blue, and the air has no smog. Then I got to Colorado, and the speed limit went up to 75 mph, which was good, cause I was really ready to be out of the car.

As I drove towards Boulder, the mountains looming at me in front of the setting sun, I thought about how lucky I am. I live in a country where this is possible, where the vastness spreads into our hearts and souls and makes us ready and open for anything.

Get Rid of Claire!

2009-02-11T20:19:00.000-08:00

I know, you've seen me post this all over the internet. You got an email about it. Or you've never heard of it. No matter what, here is your chance to help Claire go to Australia even sooner than you ever hoped! Want a great place to stay in Queensland? Come crash on my couch! Hate me and want me gone? Send me halfway across the world! Love me and want to make me happy? This would totally make me happy.

Here's the deal: I applied for this job, which comes with a need for viewer voting, apparently. It's sponsored by Tourism Queensland and is pretty awesome; you can apply for it too. Here's what you have to do. Go to this website:

http://www.islandreefjob.com/#/applicants/watch/-4zNUx-6bsY

and if you want, watch the video. That's not the important part, although it is pretty funny, because I am a goofball. And an international superspy. The most important part is for you to give me a high rating (or any kind of rating, at least). See where it says "Rate" at the bottom with blank stars under it? Click on 5 stars (or 4...hopefully not 3). Then you're done. Voila! It took you three seconds to make me a very very happy Claire.

So you'll get tired of hearing me talk about this, because the voting ends on March 2. Also, I will exhort you in many locations to beg your parents and friends and people who don't know me to vote for me as well. Tell your work chums. Tell your badminton partner. If you're on there, I'll vote for you too! Heck, write a program that allows us to swing the system and log thousands of votes, and I'll use it! :) Nah, probably not.

NY, NY

2009-02-07T18:01:00.000-08:00

I drove from West Hartford, CT to New York City today. Yesterday, I crossed the frozen Hudson River, highway empty except for one car far in the distance ahead of me, and the light a grey-blue of such piercing clarity that I wondered if I had accidentally driven into a Guillermo Del Toro movie. There were no strange midgets with alarming overbites though, so clearly I was not.

I drove to West Hartford to visit an old college friend of my mother's, and current friend of mine. Her house is a cozy brick haven, decorated with lights and stained glass, and I even noticed that before plummeting face-first into the sheets in her spare bedroom and sleeping. I was so tired I was actually shaking, which is hilarious given that all I did was drive for 8.5 hours. I mean, I did it while stuffing my face with horrible sugary snack foods -- after a bowl of mini-wheats and some yogurt that morning, all I ate all day was half a brownie, a handful of Nibs, some CornNuts, and some marshmallow creme hearts that were 60 cents per 100g at the Bulk Barn. Then I had Pad Thai.

So we talked about music and politics and life and husbands and photography and pretty much everything ever, which was wonderful. Then I got in my car and drove to New York...well, more technically, Queens. There I joined a party thrown by my fashion designer friend Kazuki and her numerous extremely gay stylist/designer friends, who actually spent about an hour discussing Coco Chanel in depth. Kazuki calls them her stepdaughters "Aunties".

Driving across the Triboro Bridge was kind of impressive -- it was about 4:30, and I could see the whole blue-ish smoggy delta of Manhattan looming through the afternoon sun. The Empire State Building's spire peeked at me, and the White Album blasted on my iPod.

Life is great.

Northern Oasis

2009-02-01T14:47:00.000-08:00

A few weekends ago, there was a party. It was the kind of party that I'm used to, which means playing music, bellydancing, eating home-made foole m'damas, and talking about dance belts. Hells yeah, dawg. We can throw down some ATS action.

I love going to parties that are mostly one specific social group or purpose, where there are occasionally a few hapless boyfriends and/or husbands and/or unsuspecting roommates lurking in the kitchen by the mulled wine, hoping desperately for someone who knows anything about football to show up. At work parties with J, it was usually my turn to be the hapless one, as everyone around me plunged into discussions of "packets" and "Linux" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" (don't ask), while I nodded, smiled, and ate my way through trays of hors d'oeuvres. (This actually, apropos of nothing, reminds me of a gig that Bernie and I did once; it was a wedding, but they had a CANDY TABLE which they let us raid before we left, which was probably the most epic wedding I have ever danced at for that exact reason)

So this party had the added bonus to being not just an awesome bellydance party with some truly killer live music, but my actual family was there. This is great. My family is not exactly like other families in the sense that I was not born with most of them. My mom was there, yes.

But it's always awesome for me to have big groups of people I love very much all in one place. And people I've known for fifteen years. And people I've known for only a few years but think are awesome. Relationships are neat. And so are bellydance parties.

All you need is love

2009-01-30T18:24:00.001-08:00

I was walking from the gym to pick up some actual pictures from actual film that I found stashed away in one of the boxes I have stored in my mother's spare room, when I accidentally walked through a re-creation of the Beatles' famous 1969 rooftop concert.

Some dudes with long shaggy hair were parked on the roof of an Arby's in downtown London, and the street was jam-packed with people in winter coats, staring upwards and cheering as they sang, "Nobody loves me like she do..." Sometimes I wish I could time travel and go back to 1969 and sit down with Lennon and McCartney and, and I have to point out that I say this as someone who pathologically loves the Beatles, tell them that, in case they hadn't noticed, they're not black. "Nobody loves me like she do"? I mean, really.

So they played the exact playlist of the concert back in 1969, which means they played "Get Back" three times, and "Don't Let Me Down" twice among other things -- as I wended my way through the crowd, I heard someone say, "Did they really play that three times?" -- and I'm assuming they did this because we're in London and it's January 30. It's just the wrong London. I hope the real London is warmer than this. It was -9 today without windchill, and that's about 12 degrees Fahrenheit, y'all Americans. I felt really bad for those musicians.

When I retrieved my actual film pictures, I found 3 pictures of me in Guatemala, 3 of my going-away party in Pittsburgh in March, and 28 pictures of someone I've never met's backyard barbecue. To Whoever That Was: your children are very attractive, but how did all your pictures get on to my disposable camera?

Bad to the bone!

2009-01-23T15:33:00.000-08:00

I was talking to Justin on the phone the other day; we talk pretty much every day (or every other day, given both of our schedules -- I'm in bed by 10:30 EST most nights, and he's perpetually working). He just did a shoot in Joshua Tree with a stylist, make-up artists, two assistants, a set dresser, and, obviously, a model.

"Does yogurt go bad?" he asked me.

"Is that from when I bought it when I was there?" I exclaimed, horrified. Seeing as I was last in his house in November, that would be sentient yogurt, ready to engulf Planet Earth with its yogurt-y ways.

"No, it's from the shoot," he said.

"Sure, it goes bad," I said. "I mean, it's a milk product that has to be refrigerated. Even though it's already technically fermented, it's possible for it to go even more bad." I added, "By which I mean, it wears black leather jumpsuits and grows a moustache."

A second of silence. "You mean it joins the A-Team?" he asked, slightly puzzled.

Pimp it, yo

2009-01-17T08:49:00.000-08:00

Yes, I occasionally write things for other places. You can find one of them here.

Don't forget to check me out on Vagablogging, too! My time has now been switched; instead of posting on Mondays at noon (as I'm sure you were all pantingly waiting for), I am now posting twelve hours later, at midnight on what is technically Tuesday. Good thing I can set up posts to post in advance so I don't have to sit up until midnight with my finger on the "post" button.

Kissing the sunset pig

2009-01-12T16:10:00.001-08:00

This is a map of California I drew for my mom. She asked me where Santa Monica was in relationship to the rest of LA, because she wasn't quite understanding what I meant when I said that the 405 is always jammed because it's the only highway from Santa Monica into the city.

On this map, can you identify:
1) Mexico
2) San Diego, land of beautiful white houses
3) the ocean
4) Joshua Tree national park
5) where cowboys are
6) where Burning Man is
7) Highway 1 (hint: look for the twists and turns!)
8) San Luis Obispo, the blandest and most pleasant town in California
9) Hearst Castle
10) Fresno, the Sarnia of California. My mom took a sign language class ages ago, and the sign for Sarnia was the same as the sign for "armpit". Ditto Fresno, at least in demeanour. The people there are awesome.
11) the misguided circle where I almost drew Fresno
12) San Francisco, conveniently represented by three items (not to spoil it, but they represent, individually, a rainbow triangle, Fleet Week, and man-on-man love)

Not on this map: the last place James Dean bought gas before he died, Death Valley, the barbed wire down near Tijuana, giant redwoods, or clowns. The big amorphous line and the smaller scribbles within it are, respectively, the outskirts of LA and neighborhoods within LA.

Erie, Erie, Erie

2009-01-11T15:57:00.001-08:00

I drove down to Pennsylvania for the weekend to rehearse with Khafif for a show and workshop set we were doing in Erie, PA. I drove down on Thursday and successfully managed to cram visiting a great number of friends into a small period in time; if I missed you, it means you weren't important enough. Just kidding. If I missed you, it means I don't love you. Also kidding! Maybe.

Really what it means is that I was in Pittsburgh for less than 24 hours and about four of those were spent rehearsing and eight were spent sleeping. I drove up to erie alone on Friday night because I heard the weather was supposed to be terrible and I didn't want to have to rush in for Saturday. I spent a delicious night in the hotel and spread out across the bed. I sleep naked in hotel rooms by myself. Don't tell the cleaning staff.

The workshops and shows went well, if you don't count J not having anyone in his drum class, when 5 people were registered. We rocked the afterparty (all...night...long...or, more accurately, until about 11:30 pm) and sold a bunch of artwork and generally had a blast spending time with each other. Khafif was all together (minus our trumpet player) for the first time in ages, and we had total connection and jamming out. Also the bartenders were cute. Didn't hurt.

On my rive back up to Canada the next day, the sun was shining and the snow piled on the side of the road didn't interfere with my tires at all. When I got to the border, I pulled out my trusty sign -- which says, "My window does not roll down, may I open my door?" -- and the border guard smiled and nodded.

"You don't have to do that," he said. "I've seen that a lot."

"I just want to make sure I don't scare you and maybe get shot. You could reach for your gun!" I pointed out, and we both laughed. He asked me a few standard questions, and then said, "Do you have anything you're bringing back?"

"No," I said.

"Do you have a gun to return fire?"

"No," I said, "but there is a bazooka in the trunk."

"Those are okay," he said, and waved me through.

Reading Room

2009-01-03T14:24:00.000-08:00

I've recently started reading S.M. Stirling's series based on the anti-electronic apocalypse that results in people in the SCA finally coming into their own and trouncing everyone's asses. Basically, this series is total vindication for anyone who spent their youth hanging around in armour, getting the snot beat out of them at school, and secretly wishing they were elves.

I still think, if I were going to have a battle cry to yell while I charged the enemy, along the lines of "A Elbereth Gilthoniel," or "For England and St. George," I might prefer what one of Stirling's characters yells while charging into battle: "Sod this for a game of soldiers!"

It has a panache.

A photo post

2008-12-30T16:59:00.000-08:00

This is sunset over Alcatraz. I took it while walking through the Presidio, waiting for Reed to finish work. Yeah, this is from San Francisco like a month and a half ago. So what?

This sign from Koreatown in LA is a lot funnier if you know how "Mademoiselle" is actually supposed to be spelled.

Yet another reason why Canada is better than anywhere else. not the price. The price is too high. No, I mean the CARAMILK ICE CREAM. Vote: is this better than Samoa Girl Scout cookie ice cream, or no?

Lessons For Stupid People #32: This Is How To Wash Your Hands

World's most overprotective sign.

And a ho, ho, ho

2008-12-26T18:46:00.000-08:00

This year, I hoped to start a new Christmas tradition based on a
reading I performed on Christmas Eve. I found a tract on the
bathroom floor several months ago, a tiny elderly looking thing
entitled "The Christmas Spirit" and published by the Berean Baptist
Ministries in North Carolina.

Since the Christmas spirit is probably still strong in all of us, I
would like to share some uplifting passages from this tract so that you
too can discuss them with your families, learn, and grow.

The tract starts out happily enough:

Soon expressions will be frequently heard, such as -- "Christmas is in the air," "He really has the Christmas spirit," "Merry Christmas," etc.

At this time of year there is a change that takes place in this world. There is a definite difference in the world and its thoughts now compared to the rest of the year. The Christmas spirit prevails in the world around this time of the year.

This sounds nice enough. I mean, clearly this is a good thing. I conjure up images of happy, smiling neighbours shaking hands and straightening each other's wreaths, singing carols and tipping waiters, and generally being kinder to their fellow men. I mean, good tidings to all, right? Christmas is about joy and sharing and generosity; what can be so bad about that?

The Christmas spirit requires that on December 25 a Christmas tree be involved in this Christmas religion. So everyone has to get a tree. They are cooperating with the Christmas spirit and rebelling against the Holy Spirit...The world co-operates with the Christmas spirit because it is in harmony with their depraved nature.

Hmm. So it's really the Christmas TREE that's the problem here. Because it's stolen from a grand old pagan tradition, and technically is all about Solstice, and the rebirth of light, and the bringing of nature into the home. Well, that's not really the CHRISTMAS spirit, I guess. It makes sense that you might object to that part, although calling all those little kids "depraved" when they drag their dads by the hand to choose between balsams and firs seems a little harsh, but...you don't learn without lessons.

It is a spirit of Christmas parties and drunks -- They say they are celebrating the birthday of Jesus so the beer joints and whiskey stores do a booming business. There will be more liquor sold just prior to December 25 than at any other time of the year. the celebrators will be staggering, stumbling, vomiting, driving drunk, wrecking cars, wrecking lives, etc.

Many who wouldn't touch a drop of alcohol all year long will drink their egg nog with whiskey in it.

Whoa! That cavalier mention of wrecking cars and wrecking lives, that quick tonal alliteration and focus on the destruction that can be wrought by Christmastime makes one think indeed! HERE is a difficult message. Boozehounds who, over the rest of the year, reject and neglect their fiery and demonic nature calling to them from the neck of a bottle, at Christmas can no longer resist and succumb to their baser natures. They are forced to, coerced into it by EGGNOG. Eggnog is certainly Satanic in nature (did you know in French it literally translates as "Milk of the Chicken"?), but I admit, I'd never considered its effects on the downtrodden of the world.

I also like that staggering and stumbling are two equally bad things. How about lurching? How do you feel about collapsing?

After the direct attack on dirty lushes, it gets a little weird:

Satan is successfully promoting his mother-child religion through the Christ-Mass observance. He must gloat as Baptist churches sing -- "Round yon virgin, mother and child."

Because God knows (and He *does* know), "Silent Night" is a tool of Satan. I certainly feel that way after its hundred and seventh repetition at the shopping mall. I mean, there's only so many ways you can jazz up an instrumental version of "Silent Night" or "Jingle Bells" before slaughter becomes the most viable option.

Before December arrives in Palestine the shepherds do not abide in the fields at night. The weather is too cold. Even the winos and bums who sleep in back alleys and park benches can't stay outside when it gets cold. They have to go into rescue missions. The shepherds did not abide in the fields with their flocks on December 25.

Good point. Forget about that whole "different climate" thing, and about how it never really gets that cold in Palestine, although it is the desert, so it probably gets chilly at night from the lack of itinerant moisture in the air.

But what about Santa? I mean, surely there can't be anything wrong with that jolly old elf, right?

Santa Claus is a lie. Look at him -- He has long hair and a whiskey red face. He is too fat and too jolly. He is artificial from start to finish.

Oh. Oops. My bad.

But what else is wrong with Santa? I mean, surely there can't be-

He is accredited with omnipresence. It is said that he takes gifts and presents to children all over the world on the night of December 24. That is a lie. Only God can be everywhere at one time. God alone is omnipresent. If there was a Santa Claus he couldn't make his way to 100 houses in one night. He couldn't haul enough toys for 100 children. He couldn't eat the cake and such that is put out for him in ten houses. What a big lie this is.

Ouch. Now that is some irrefutable logic. I mean, it certainly couldn't be MAGIC, like the way an angel appeared to Mary ("came on her," more accurately, and hilariously). And how nice of the tract's author to be concerned about Santa's waistline; I know with the dawn of the Atkins diet, more children should be encouraged to leave Santa some nice meat popsicles instead of all those carbs.

But there can't be anything wrong with letting kids have a little magic in their lives. I mean, kids like magic. They like surprises and things they don't understand completely.

The children are not a bunch of dummies.They wonder how he could go all over the world in one night, and the parents lie for him to cover up his lie. That is the way lying is.

So, wait. Who's lying? The parents, to cover up for Santa? I thought Santa HIMSELF was a lie? how can you lie FOR a lie? This is making no logical sense!

There are a lot of lies connected with Santa Claus. Flying reindeer are about like rabbits laying Easter eggs.

Fortunately, this last statement exhausts my logic quota for the next century. I mean, who can argue with THAT? It's proof positive: NO, Virginia. There IS NO Santa Claus. If there was, reindeer would be able to fly, and then your daddy would have been knocked off the roof and covered with reindeer poop instead of falling off on his own, because he had too much whiskey-laden egg nog. And what was he doing up there, in the first place? He told you he was putting up Christmas lights, but actually he was SACRIFICING VIRGINS TO BAAL. And I bet he didn't even leave any out for Santa.

So what should we do about Christmas, then?

The Christmas spirit is a spirit of hypocrisy. The Christmas spirit is a spirit of error. We are to have no part in that Christmas spirit but we are to follow, obey and listen to the Spirit of truth.

Okay. So...we're supposed to stone our neighbors to death, beat our slave girls, tithe one-tenth of our belongings to the church, and give up dancing, singing, and playing cards? Sounds like...fun. I think I'd rather have some Christmas spirit. Or Christmas SPIRITS. Pass the whiskey.

God bless us, every one.

Operatic distractions

2008-12-21T16:22:00.000-08:00

I did two distinctly contradictory things yesterday.

Well, actually, I probably did more than two. I brushed my teeth AND THEN drank a disgusting, sickly sweet, mostly-milk chai latte that cost me four dollars. I woke up AND THEN immediately went back to sleep. I tripped over my cat AND THEN yelled in a festive holiday manner. I guess that last one isn't contradictory at all.

First thing I did was go to the opera. The Metropolitan Opera house in New York, which is basically the ONLY opera house if you know anything about opera and are a complete snob and I realize those two things are actually redundant, offers the occasional performance of a matinee show in assorted movie theatres in HD. Brilliant idea. The cameras swoop and dive in the gorgeous, opulent Metropolitan, showing the rows of seating, the backstage antics (at one point, a scene dresser shoved a swatch of desert into place and then unceremoniously said, "Shit" in front of the camera, and ran off), and, of course, the opera.

This time around was Massenet's Thais. The story of it is pretty simple: this wandering desert Christian dude with long dreadlocks regrets the evils of the world. He returns to his hometown, evil Alexandria, there to attempt converting its head hedonist, the prostitute Thais. He succeeds (which, according to the translated subtitles, was accomplished by him basically saying, "God is pretty awesome. You want some?" And she Gave Up Her Life Of Sin). He takes her to a convent in the desert. Then he realizes that he loves her. He returns to the convent where Thais, due to excessive fasting or flagellating or something else that people in convents do (other than lesbian sex) is dying. He implores her to realize that he was wrong, earthly love, sin, and sexual frolicking are better than Godly love, only she dies and goes right to Heaven.

Thais is in French. This made it hilarious for me, because I understood what they were saying even without the subtitles. I wondered for quite some time how it was that my French vocabulary has come to include words like "sin," "flesh," "lust," "destruction," and "shame." Then I realized that it probably comes from being stuck in a work program in France for three weeks in 1999, where the only available books were French Anne Rice novels. I should be glad I did not need further vocabulary from her novels ("pouting," "whining," and "prancing like a huge ponce," all come to mind).

Then, in the evening, my mom and I went to a Solstice celebration at the best yoga studio ever. I started doing yoga there in 1996; it was my first introduction to it, so now my archetypal yoga studio includes available mats, little eye pillows that smell of lavender, and gentle swoops of cheesecloth hanging fromt he ceiling. But the Solstice celebration was all about snacks and chanting and drumming and wandering around lighting candles. It couldn't have been more different fromt he expensive, traditional artistry fo the opera. But the little homespun drum circle and friendly faces, the dancing people in long skirts and cloaks, made it feel welcoming. It was a lovely way to pass a bitterly cold night. From now on, it only gets brighter and warmer.

Schnee

2008-12-19T19:33:00.000-08:00

Walking in snow is like walking with enormously distended and inflamed testicles. You walk astride, taking broader steps than you might otherwise, slipping and sliding, jerking suddenly, tilting in one direction or another, cursing and frowning and generally not enjoying yourself.

Oh, you can say what you like about beautiful drifting snow falling gently from the heavens to lay a mantle of white like the gown of a virgin across the benighted land, washing away all signs and vestiges of evil and leaving only humility. Or, you could be Environment Canada and refer to the storm which is currently sweeping half of Canada as "Snow-mageddon." Never let it be said that they understated an issue.

I particularly enjoyed briefly surfing to the Globe and Mail website in stolen snatches of time at work (where we HAVE the internet, but we're not allowed to use it...oh torture!), where I read such responses as: "It snows in Canada in winter. In other news, Generalissimo Franco still dead," and "Global warming is over! We won! Now I can go back to my Friday night styrofoam fires!" I admit, Victoria's getting the first snow it's had in years. But the rest of Canada gets snowed on ALL THE TIME. Why is everyone pussing out?

I'll tell you. Because going anywhere in 25cm of snow sucks. The roads still aren't plowed tonight, despite my having seen numerous crowds of people -- families going to look at the lights in Victoria Park AND families emerging, all laughing and rosy-cheeked, from the performance of A Christmas Carol at the Grand Theatre AND drunken college freshman on winter break staggering between bars and falling down in alleyways where they freeze to death like little whore-sicles. All these people probably wouldn't like to be hit by cars, although I admit, the whore-sicles probably wouldn't notice. So why haven't they plowed the damn roads?

Also, all that staggering and lurching and tipsily sliding and clambering and getting your pants soaked and finding an uncomfortable clump of snow tucked in your sock when you get back to your house...winter's hard work.

New Advertising Campaign

2008-12-10T14:35:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, I was a sugar fiend. That is technically false advertising, actually, since I am *still* a sugar fiend; in fact, my friends call me the Sugar Princess, and I am the only person I know to have snorted Pixy Stix. It was, I hasten to point out, an accident. I also once threw up almost a pound of undigested Chews, the citric-acid-y gum that is my absolute favorite thing about Canada; I felt MUCH better after that particular night was over.

But I used to buy all the Canadian penny candy from the convenience stores -- back when it actually cost a penny. Penny candy, loose sour gummies and hot lips and Swedish berries (why are they SWEDISH berries? In the Bulk Barn, they call them "Nordic berries"), is ubiquitous in Canadian convenience stores.

But one of my favorite things to buy was Thrills, a purple elongated rectangle that purported to be gum. They came in yellow cardboard boxes like Chiclets, and I bought them because you got the ENTIRE CONTAINER for 25 cents. Even then, I was kind of Jewy. By which I mean, "cheap".

The interesting thing about Thrills is that, while they were cheap and sugary, they didn't taste particularly good. They tasted, as a matter of fact, like soap. But I ate them anyway -- and I do mean ATE, swallowed enough for my future gastroenterologists to shake their heads in alarm -- because they were cheap and sugary.

I'm glad to know that not only am I not the only person to have noticed this particular taste sensation, but the company (Concord Confections of Concord, Ontario) has actually latched on to a new marketing scheme:

Notice the tag line. The French, literally translated, reads: "Always the same soap gum!"

Nobody in the States has ever heard of Thrills. Too bad for y'all.

Lo! The Flat Hills of my Homeland

2008-12-09T15:11:00.001-08:00

I am about to admit something that may cause you to think less of me. In fact, it may cause you to question my humanity, nay, the very existence of the universe you thought you knew. It might cause the rending of garments or a tear in the space-time continuum, through which all rational thought will leak, causing you to retreat, muttering, to a tiny corner somewhere and spend the rest of your days rocking back and forth, whimpering, "Why?"

Ready?

I hate coffee.

I think it smells great. I like coffee ice cream, which is essentially a big cappuccino with lots of sugar, frozen. I am willing to concede Tim Horton's Ice Capps, which are not so much coffee as experiments in sugar (did you know that, aside from teh more standard variations like replacing the milk with half and half, or chocolate milk, you can now get Chocolate Brownie Ice Capps? They're not even pretending to be healthy anymore).

But coffee, regular drinking coffee that farts its way out of a filter in the early morning? The kind that people order from Starbucks if they're feeling pretentious and their neighbourhood independent coffeeshop if they're feeling even more pretentious? I hate it.

It tastes awful. It tastes like a small rodent crawled into your mouth and died after suffering a random bout of some intestinal disease. It's a diuretic and doesn't do such great things for your breath.

But the one thing it does do, is wake you up when you had to get up and get ready fro work at 7:30am. I have a very good friend who has to be AT WORK at 7am, and I commend her utterly, since just waking up then left me sagging and lifeless. I drank enough coffee today to make me feel sick and spacey. I actually zoned out an awful lot today, my first day on the job. It felt kind of like being on disassociative drugs, like ketamine or something. Not that I would know.

Also, it's been NINE YEARS since I spent more than a long weekend in Canada in the winter. I am most heartily glad for global; warming and the fact that it hasn't been that cold for more than a couple of days in a row. I mean, it's still lifeless and grey and morose and raining, but at least it's not minus thirty the way it is in Fredericton. But it'll probably be 25 tomorrow. And then California will fall into the ocean.

Exciting new worlds

2008-12-05T09:23:00.001-08:00

When I first started working, right out of high school, I had a job at a talent agency that eventually went under because the owner was batshit crazy. Immediately thereafter, I applied at a temp agency right down the street from my house, and they got me a job with Sterling Marking Company as a data entry person. I showed up at my job every day, on time, for about a month, and then Sterling liked me so much they hired me on as full-time bilingual customer service. I told them I'd be leaving for Europe in March. They said fine. When I got back from Europe, they asked me if I would work for them again for a few months. So I did. They really liked me there.

So I had good luck with this temp agency. On a whim, I re-entered myself in their database, hoping to find some seasonal/temp work. And they just found me some!

I start this Tuesday, doing customer service/data entry for Goodlife Fitness coroprate offices here in London, ON. I'll let you know how it goes.

Long distance lessons

2008-12-03T10:52:00.000-08:00

I was only thinking about roaming charges.

I forgot to think about overage charges. To the tune of 700 minutes over on my last bill. At 40 cents a minute.

Oops.

Cats and church

2008-12-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

Stepping stones by the weird deserted ship in St. Catharines.

If you think this was at about 4:45pm, you are correct.

Dead fish are neat.

Strange mysterious rotting ship in St. Catharines.

World's oldest cat. Really. We got her when I was 8.