Tag Archives: travel

me, a bikini, a glacier: alaska!*

{15 July 2010}

(think of it as where’s waldo for the alaska photoset.)


the short and the long of the trip to alaska was: cruise ships are maybe not my style (being penned up on a boat with a lot of old people), but as a way to see alaska’s spectacular inside passage, pretty great. vancouver is a lovely city, and the forest around juneau is easily the most beautiful forest i’ve ever been in. B and i opted for as much adventure travel as was possible while off the boat: snorkeling, ziplining, hiking, rock climbing. it became clear that we were out of our demographic when we kept ending up on shore excursions attended only by us and members of the boat’s crew.

other perks of the week included: eating my body weight in salmon over the course of seven days (mmm). learning to run on a treadmill while the boat heaved over waves in conditions that ranked a 7 on the Beaufort Scale (sometimes you have to embrace the absurd). hanging out with my family (my ADORABLE and much adored niece Geneva has a bright future in chess). experiencing the near-constant daylight of alaska around the summer solstice (blackout curtains do wonders, when you want to sleep). oh, and of course, the polar bear plunge, going swimming in the (unheated) pool on the back deck of the ship while the ship sailed past glaciers in Glacier Bay.

* with apologies to the panama canal guys. i had a palindrome phase when i was a kid…

directing my ire at Salt Lake City for no particular reason

{24 October 2009}

on the phone with B tonight, who is in Washington for the week, and we got to talking about city planning, the ways that major US cities conform (Chicago, DC) or refuse to conform (Boston) to a cartesian grid. generally, i’m a fan; when the numerical portion of an address corresponds to a physical distance it’s easier to know how far apart two locations are, how to navigate there, and so forth. but the discussion of gridded cities reminded me of one of my least favorite places: Salt Lake City. one of my chief objections* to Salt Lake is the way the city streets are laid out. instead of clarifying the street name’s position by assigning it a numerical position on the grid, they just skipped over the street name part and numbered all of the streets. So you can navigate to an address like 910 S 900 E. wait, what?** okay, so it’s a little confusing, but a few days and you get the hang of it. after which, navigating is a breeze. but tonight i finally figured out what bugs me so much about that. the city has no place names. think about what a deeply ingrained part of the cultural landscape place names are. there is an entire field of study (toponymy, thank you, wikipedia) built around the study place names. place names matter. how can you trust a city that refuses to name their streets? it’s like numbering your children or something.

it makes me love england even more, for all their crazy street names that change every third block, and the way that cottages in small villages still have their own individual names.

* okay, let’s be honest. another of my chief objections to Salt Lake is that it is the iconic center of the mormon faith. and having grown up as the only catholic kid in a mormon high school, i developed something of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to the subject of mormonism. yes, that was 15 years ago and i need to get over not having been popular. i get it. but still.

** okay, so Chicago DOES have a corner where North Avenue intersects Western Avenue. I’ll give you that one.

{16 October 2009}

Here’s a new idea for you, airlines: free wifi in the terminals (yeah, in the air, too, but one thing at a time). I appreciate Southwest’s rocking chairs, the banks of leather arm chairs with outlets for laptops, even some table and chairs so you don’t have to eat pre-flight meals in your lap. But what about wifi? It could be unlocked with your flight’s confirmation code and last name, that way the terminal wouldn’t be flooded with other airline’s passengers trying to bogart it (tho, don’t get me wrong, i’d rather there was just free wifi for the people, especially in airports).

Bongo, i will not pay your exorbitant fees!

eco-friendly travel, or how it isn’t at all

{14 October 2009}

Mcdonald’s egg-mcmuffin-minus-the-canadian-bacon is my early-morning airport guilty pleasure. I’ve been indulging in this long enough that I’m prepared for the buyer’s remorse when it comes to eating the sandwich (delicious melty “cheese” suddenly congeals into a rubbery cold substance on the wrapper and you wonder what sort of “food product” you just ate), but what really kills me is the packaging waste. I finish my sandwich, and now have a paper wrapper, three napkins, a receipt, and a paper bag, all of which, besides the wrapper, are perfectly pristine. There is no paper recycling in this terminal so I tuck it into a corner of my bag, to recycle it when I get home. City of Chicago: see what your bad recycling policies have brought me to? Hoarding trash. This is not the first instance of this behavior you have invoked.

PS – the in-flight service gives me the guilty heebie-jeebies, too. one can easily go through 3 or 4 of those clear plastic cups in a cross-country flight. styrofoam for coffee. a bleached white napkin under each cup. and all those snacks in single-serving packaging. ugh. okay, i still can’t resist the those fake-cheese-and-cracker sandwiches that southwest gives out, but i’m making a point of filling up my own water bottle at the departing airport’s drinking fountain and using that instead of having a new cup of water every time they offer me one. err, don’t say anything about the ecological damage that the jetfuel is doing, okay?

ramblings in the airport after a nearly perfect weekend

{11 August 2009}

So I was supposed to drive to Ashland and see a show at OSF, but I discovered that the Pothole that Nearly Ate My Car last week actually really did nearly eat my car, and I need two new tires and a NEW WHEEL (wtf?) before the car is road-trip worthy. So much for saving up for a new tv…but, I decided to take advantage of a non-ideal start to the trip. Instead of dropping money on the car w/out having time to shop estimates around, I decided that the repair could wait till Monday. So I played hooky with the rest of Friday, burned some frequent flier miles, and hopped a last minute flight to Chicago.

Saturday morning I played in the Ultimate Frisbee Collective’s Finale Game*. As teams sports go, we were a scrappy group of theatre geeks, most of whom have some innate athletic ability but little or no talent for team sports. But for the past two years, we have played nearly every Saturday, rain or shine (or snow), and the ultimate game has often been the best part of my week.

For my efforts, and in recognition of being the only non-carnivore (also the only girl) on the team, I received a trophy shaped like a piece of tofu with arms and legs,** aptly named the “Facon [Fakon?] Award”. The winning team received a trophy with a piece of bacon on it, also similarly anthropomorphized.

In the afternoon Shinjinkai held the fourth annual fall-a-thon fundraiser, raising money for the zendo (rural retreat center) we are building in Wisconsin. I had planned to drop in, cheer and generally be supportive, but a minor injury sustained by someone in an earlier round meant that i got to jump in as nage for one of the later rounds. In 15 minutes I threw a contestant 305 times! The impressive feat isn’t the throwing – it was the guy taking the falls. Last year I took 206 falls and was pretty sure I was going to barf by the end. Anyway, it was so so so good to see all of my fellow aikidoka. Just being back in the room, the scent of the incense, the polished wood floors and textured mat under bare feet – it all felt so comfortingly familiar. I’ve been short on familiar and comfort, lately.

As I was changing into my gi in the locker room I looked at myself in the mirror and remembered how at first I felt so awkward in my uniform, it felt too big, goofy, poorly fit. I felt too tall, long-limbed, my balance too high in my body, i moved like a dancer, not a martial artist — no grounding, my center of gravity up high in my chest rather than centered low in the abdomen. I know those feelings of impossible awkwardness weren’t just born of insecurity because I see that look in new students, in their faces, in the way their gi hangs on their body, in the way they move on and off the mat. I felt that way for a long time. And I’m not sure when I started feeling at home in my gi, in the dojo, in the martials arts. When i started taking newer students under my wing and helping them through the maze of confusing rituals, when to bow, where to leave your shoes, how to sweep the mat in a smooth, even rhythm in step with the student before and behind you.

I’m not saying I’m accomplished or anything. On the contrary, the point here is perhaps that it took me two and a half years of training just to be confident in the most basic of rituals. Any wonder, then, why aikido is a martial art that takes a life time of dedication and study to master.

Since I moved to California I haven’t made any effort to find a dojo yet – there’s just no time for training. And I know how frustrated I would be if I were training once or twice a week, never moving forward or improving, just see-sawing back and forth. Right now there is pretty much time for work, and running. But being back at Shinjinkai for the afternoon reminded me that this is not a part of my life that I want to leave behind in Chicago. I will need to be patient in order to find the time to resume a proper study of it, but I’ll also need to make the effort to find that time. My profession isn’t one that just hands over free time if I don’t make an effort to wrestle some away now and then.

The trip at once was good for me to shake me out of my all-work-all-the-time routine here and remind me that I am more than the sum of my days and nights, that my life is bigger than the work I am doing here now. But I was confused all weekend that I was on vacation in Chicago and returning to San Francisco. I’d forget which airport I was coming from or going to, invert “back home” and “out here” when I was speaking about my new home or my old one. While waiting for my connecting flight in Denver, I had a moment of confusion when a Chicago-bound flight was directly across the hall from a San Francisco-bound flight. I’m headed home, but where is that? This weekend was restorative and troubling all at once. Restorative because it was a reminder that work is not me. I am not my job. I spend long hours at work, and when I’m there I work hard and care passionately about it. But it does not define me any more than any other single thing defines me. I am a sum of many parts, of preferences and fears and activities and plans for the future. I am martial arts and running marathons and making theatre and crafting things with my hands and wanting to explore the world. I am staying up too late and never getting enough sleep, hating to wear shoes and carrying around deep fears of vomit, spiders and mediocrity, a love for fireflies on Chicago summer nights and lingering over after-dinner coffee after a good meal. I am a terminally off-key singing voice and an aunt and someday maybe a parent, someday maybe a very good production manager. Right now I’m mostly working on the career part. But all in good time. My friend Callie handed me a bit of wisdom a few months ago when she pointed out that the great thing about getting to your thirties and facing big life-changing unrest like moving is knowing that you are not defined by your place. That you are still your same self no matter where you wake up in the morning. She’s right, and it’s a good feeling to realize that.

And it was troubling because being back in the community of Chicago makes me feel more sharply the lack of community in my new life. I’m new here, of course, and I know it takes time and work. But it’ll be an uphill battle, I think. Mill Valley is not a community where I am going to find like-minded artists or people my age. It’s an adorable and ritzy little Marin County hamlet that eschews chain stores and has polymillion*** dollar mansions in the hills where successful doctors and lawyers who commute to the city for their jobs raise their kids, disaffected spoiled teenagers who slump around downtown and congregate on the lawn in front of City Hall after it closes, looking as bored as one can possibly be in a town filled with the most spectacular weather and nature that one could ask for. I will have to go further afield to find my community.

* For some reason, the west coast is responsible for breaking up the band: at least four of the core players are in the midst of either executing or contemplating moves to various west coast cities.

** which seems to be working at cross-purposes, doesn’t it? Anthropomorphizing the thing that people eat who don’t like to eat things that have legs or eyes?

***I’ll make up words when I want to make up words. This is my blog. Bug off.