I thought I was too young for nostalgia to have kicked in yet. And then I made my second cousin cry.
It wasn't intentional really. He's only 4.
We were all on vacation together (my cousins that is) and his father asked if I might help out by turning on the TV for the little ones. Hoping to get some gold stars in the cool and collected older-relative-without-kids category, I obliged.
"I want cartoons," Mr. 4 year old demanded.
"No problem." I said and flipped on the set. It was on MSNBC so I pressed the channel up button. That wasn't cartoons either. I thought it was no problem. But it was a BIG problem.
"I want carTOOOONS," he screamed.
"Just a second" and I pressed the channel up button again. And didn't find cartoons there either.
"I WANT TO WATCH CARTOONS," he shrieked bordering on hysteria. And that's when it all went to hell. He continued to disintegrate further and further each time I clicked the button desperately searching for cartoons, as though the actual fact of me pressing the button was existentially tazing him or something. And then he started to cry. "But I wanted the CARTOONS."
Thankfully, this is when his father stepped in.
"Oh, sorry about that. He doesn't understand broadcast television. He only understands things that stream instantly. He thinks you're torturing him by refusing to put on the show he wants."
Oh my Lord, I thought. This was truly the child of another generation, a child who would grow up without many of the formative experiences of my youth. And that was when I fell down the rabbit hole of nostalgia.
He (clearly) will never understand waiting for his favorite TV show to come on. He will simply watch them on Netflix.
He will likely never watch a video tape of something recorded off TV, in which the editing out of commercials meant the first 3 seconds after every break were missing. Instead, he'll log onto Hulu and find it in its entirety.
And he probably will never have to wait up all of Friday night to hear if he favorite song would come on the radio, finger poised over the record button of his tape player the entire time. Instead, he will download things on ITunes.
Actually, come to think of it, he probably will grow up without knowing what a tape is: without the whir of the player, without the loud click of it reaching the end, without the agony of having just spent 8 minutes rewinding the wrong side.
He will probably never spend most of his life singing the entirely wrong lyrics to his favorite songs ("Secret Asian Man" for instance) only to be corrected by a lucky friend who bought the album and can consult the lyrics in the front booklet. He will simply look all these things up on the internet.
Will he ever, I wonder, learn to look things up in an encyclopedia? Hauling the big volume emblazed with the correct letter off the shelf in order to answer some dinner table quarrel? Likely not. Even my father, who is not far from twenty times his age has a Droid for these types of things.
In many ways, he will have a totally different life. Which makes me wonder, is it always like this? What are the things that our parents said of us, 'I can't believe they'll grow up without..." I can think of some, but I wonder if others are lost to us. Lost to the tides of change where changing channels is as foreign as an 8-track.
What a world we live in.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Bean Town
I never know what to say when people ask me if I love living in Boston. There are things I love about it, sure, and other things I despise about it. But it will always have a special place in my heart. The only salient metaphor that I can find is (probably no surprise to many of you) cooking. If I were, for instance, to write a recipe for the city of Boston, it would go something like this:
Add rugged indigenous peoples. Let sit one thousand years.
Incorporate a good number of self-righteous British Puritans. Stir until sour. Add cranberries, turkeys, fur, and maple syrup. Remove any visible witches.
Let a thick crust of patriotism develop over all.
Set over heat and allow to boil until revolutionary influences begin to thicken. Take off heat. Strain out any British influences with a tea strainer.**
Freeze.
In a separate bowl, place several major educational institutions and allow to rise.
Slowly pour educational mixture into frozen Puritan mixture, and whip until it holds a sense of cultural superiority. Sprinkle with sea salt.
Fold in abolitionist tendencies.
Freeze again.
Add several waves of immigrants. Mix after each addition.
Let mixture ferment in a hot and humid location until you notice that the patriotic strains have lain dormant for long enough to transform into a fanatic sports obsession at least strong enough to support 4 professional sports franchises. Layer with ridiculous product endorsements. Add two tablespoons Dunkin' Donuts coffee.
Simmer with river water for several decades. Slowly pour in 1.5 million aggressive drivers. Make sure not to add any street signs.
Sprinkle with 180,000 college students.
Serve frozen.
*To make completely from scratch, use the "Planet" recipe on page 96,000,000.
** Use one if by land, two by sea.
Boston
Take One established coastal landscape with a relatively extreme climate.*Add rugged indigenous peoples. Let sit one thousand years.
Incorporate a good number of self-righteous British Puritans. Stir until sour. Add cranberries, turkeys, fur, and maple syrup. Remove any visible witches.
Let a thick crust of patriotism develop over all.
Set over heat and allow to boil until revolutionary influences begin to thicken. Take off heat. Strain out any British influences with a tea strainer.**
Freeze.
In a separate bowl, place several major educational institutions and allow to rise.
Slowly pour educational mixture into frozen Puritan mixture, and whip until it holds a sense of cultural superiority. Sprinkle with sea salt.
Fold in abolitionist tendencies.
Freeze again.
Add several waves of immigrants. Mix after each addition.
Let mixture ferment in a hot and humid location until you notice that the patriotic strains have lain dormant for long enough to transform into a fanatic sports obsession at least strong enough to support 4 professional sports franchises. Layer with ridiculous product endorsements. Add two tablespoons Dunkin' Donuts coffee.
Simmer with river water for several decades. Slowly pour in 1.5 million aggressive drivers. Make sure not to add any street signs.
Sprinkle with 180,000 college students.
Serve frozen.
*To make completely from scratch, use the "Planet" recipe on page 96,000,000.
** Use one if by land, two by sea.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
It Just Has to Stop
Okay. That's it. It's time for a little coming-to-Jesus meeting. Not an actual come-over-to-Jesus-camp meeting but a hey-heads-up-folks-this-is-getting-ridiculous meeting. And it goes like this. Non-religios: You MUST must must must must MUST stop being so awkward about me being a minister.
When I became a minister, I was fully aware that talking about my work could be sort of a buzz kill for a lot of folks. And it is. Trust me, I get this. It's not like saying you're a doctor ("Cool! Want to see this rash on my ankle?!") or a teacher ("You are a saint to put up with all those kids!") or any of the numerous vague jobs people have that no one really understands but feels comfortable letting slide by without asking too many questions. But having to say your a minister is just different....in a put down your beer quietly and stop using the f-word from this point forward kind of way. (Ironic, as I have a deep love of both these things.)
For my part, I have attempted to alleviate this by devising numerous strategic responses to the inevitable hard-swallowing, neck-torquing intensity of the moment when the cocktail party conversation turns to me and asks what I do for a living and I have to oblige. Sometimes, I say "I work at a church," which allows a small percentage of people to imagine me as a church secretary or preschool teacher and proceed without another thought. Sometimes I say "I'm a teacher," which is also true but a little bit of a cop-out. I've contemplated many other tongue-in-cheek responses such as "I'm in sales" or "I run a non-profit" or "I do institutional strategy." But truthfully, I've never really had the guts to pull one of them off because I fear the follow-up questions. Actually, my most successful strategy when greeting people I don't yet know is to say, "This is going to be a bit of a buzz kill, but I'm actually a Presbyterian minister." Kill 'em with comedy, I always say. It's awkward. But it's my life. And I knew it would be.
The part of all this that I wasn't prepared to deal with is that while many people will eventually integrate this idea and move on with whatever fun program of drunkenness and debauchery they were on before, there are other people that absolutely CANNOT move beyond this in a reasonable, mature way. Which leads to massive amounts of awkwardness all around.
Case in point: We (as in, Mr. L and I) have a number of sets of friends who, though seemingly interested in me as a person and delighted my general hilarity*, ABSOLUTELY refuse to EVER acknowledge that I am a minister. In fact, they avoid the topic like the plague. They won't ask me about it, won't talk about it, won't EVER let on that they even know (except that I know they do). All this is fairly amazing given that in adult conversation, one has to go pretty far out of the way to avoid asking someone else about their work life, likely the activity that takes up 70% of their waking hours. It is especially awkward when we find ourselves doing the rounds of "Oh, how's your work?" and "Are you still liking your job?" and "How did that interview go?" and when it gets to me, suddenly it morphs into "Oh, but what have you baked these days?"** Or "Anything interesting around the condo building lately?" Some people will go so far--and this is not an exaggeration, but you're going to think it is--as to NOT RESPOND at all if I mention something about my work. I'll say, "Oh, the other day at the church....blah, blah, blah....something hilarious...blah, blah,blah," and they'll simply stare back at me blankly as if I hadn't even said anything at all and then change the topic.***
What's really strikes me as bizarre about all this is that I have been surrounded by people who aren't religious all my life. And somehow many of those people, my closest friends from adolescence and college, especially, have always found ways to ask about my faith and my work and show their interest even if they didn't fully understand it. But now I find myself surrounded by this bizarre subset of folks who act as though me saying I'm a minister is akin to me saying I torture puppies for a living or that I'm a professional Dungeons and Dragons instructor.
I can't tell if this comes from some deep-seated**** fear that somewhere hidden inside me is a crazy fundamentalist Christian just waiting to pop out and tell everyone they are going to hell or perhaps it is simply a complete lack of religious awareness leading to a "File Not Found" pop up in their brains that makes them go totally blank.***** But I tell you what: I can't take too much more of it. This can't be that difficult. I meet people all the time who tell me crazy stuff about themselves that I don't understand at all (like that they are conservative-Tea-Party-Republicans who think we should eliminate all immigration in this country or that they believe in unicorns), and I don't go all black-belt-ninja-of-awkwardness-silent-treatment on their ass. I simply smile and nod and ask some general questions about it as it clearly is important to them and also I'm not a jerk.
What general questions, you say? How about starting it off easy with such as: "So, how are things at the church?" (You can usually continue with: "Oh, it's going bankrupt? I'm so sorry to hear that.") Or you could try something more direct such as: "You know, I have no idea what the heck you do all day." or "It's so strange that you work at a church. I feel like I can't use the f-word around you." At which point I will have the opportunity to tell you a bit about my life, which may be highly entertaining to you, will likely make liberal use of expletives and will definitely help us all feel edified in the end.
I'm not asking you to come to Jesus camp. I'm just asking you not to throw a strip of awkward nails under the bus I'm riding there. Capiche?
*Okay, okay. That's a little self-aggrandizing, I know. But this is a blog about my life, so it sort of fits.
** Some really awesome shit, by the way.
***For those of you concerned about my tendencies toward exaggeration, don't fret. I can verify that this is ACTUALLY HAPPENING because Mr. L also notices and will periodically say, "It's strange that we didn't talk about your work that whole (fill in time period: night, weekend, LIFE, etc.), huh?"
**** Okay, I just typed deep-seeded (which is probably what I've been saying my whole life) and my spell checker caught it. This is like the time I told Mr. L that we had to go see a Notar Republic. How did I make it this far without being exposed as a complete idiot? Yet another mystery to probe in the blog-o-sphere.
***** If the former is what's happening, you're just going to have to get over your religious ignorance and fear. When someone tells me they are a banker, I am not irrationally fearful that they are going to steal all the money in my IRA and invest it in the sub-prime mortgage market. That would be silly.
When I became a minister, I was fully aware that talking about my work could be sort of a buzz kill for a lot of folks. And it is. Trust me, I get this. It's not like saying you're a doctor ("Cool! Want to see this rash on my ankle?!") or a teacher ("You are a saint to put up with all those kids!") or any of the numerous vague jobs people have that no one really understands but feels comfortable letting slide by without asking too many questions. But having to say your a minister is just different....in a put down your beer quietly and stop using the f-word from this point forward kind of way. (Ironic, as I have a deep love of both these things.)
For my part, I have attempted to alleviate this by devising numerous strategic responses to the inevitable hard-swallowing, neck-torquing intensity of the moment when the cocktail party conversation turns to me and asks what I do for a living and I have to oblige. Sometimes, I say "I work at a church," which allows a small percentage of people to imagine me as a church secretary or preschool teacher and proceed without another thought. Sometimes I say "I'm a teacher," which is also true but a little bit of a cop-out. I've contemplated many other tongue-in-cheek responses such as "I'm in sales" or "I run a non-profit" or "I do institutional strategy." But truthfully, I've never really had the guts to pull one of them off because I fear the follow-up questions. Actually, my most successful strategy when greeting people I don't yet know is to say, "This is going to be a bit of a buzz kill, but I'm actually a Presbyterian minister." Kill 'em with comedy, I always say. It's awkward. But it's my life. And I knew it would be.
The part of all this that I wasn't prepared to deal with is that while many people will eventually integrate this idea and move on with whatever fun program of drunkenness and debauchery they were on before, there are other people that absolutely CANNOT move beyond this in a reasonable, mature way. Which leads to massive amounts of awkwardness all around.
Case in point: We (as in, Mr. L and I) have a number of sets of friends who, though seemingly interested in me as a person and delighted my general hilarity*, ABSOLUTELY refuse to EVER acknowledge that I am a minister. In fact, they avoid the topic like the plague. They won't ask me about it, won't talk about it, won't EVER let on that they even know (except that I know they do). All this is fairly amazing given that in adult conversation, one has to go pretty far out of the way to avoid asking someone else about their work life, likely the activity that takes up 70% of their waking hours. It is especially awkward when we find ourselves doing the rounds of "Oh, how's your work?" and "Are you still liking your job?" and "How did that interview go?" and when it gets to me, suddenly it morphs into "Oh, but what have you baked these days?"** Or "Anything interesting around the condo building lately?" Some people will go so far--and this is not an exaggeration, but you're going to think it is--as to NOT RESPOND at all if I mention something about my work. I'll say, "Oh, the other day at the church....blah, blah, blah....something hilarious...blah, blah,blah," and they'll simply stare back at me blankly as if I hadn't even said anything at all and then change the topic.***
What's really strikes me as bizarre about all this is that I have been surrounded by people who aren't religious all my life. And somehow many of those people, my closest friends from adolescence and college, especially, have always found ways to ask about my faith and my work and show their interest even if they didn't fully understand it. But now I find myself surrounded by this bizarre subset of folks who act as though me saying I'm a minister is akin to me saying I torture puppies for a living or that I'm a professional Dungeons and Dragons instructor.
I can't tell if this comes from some deep-seated**** fear that somewhere hidden inside me is a crazy fundamentalist Christian just waiting to pop out and tell everyone they are going to hell or perhaps it is simply a complete lack of religious awareness leading to a "File Not Found" pop up in their brains that makes them go totally blank.***** But I tell you what: I can't take too much more of it. This can't be that difficult. I meet people all the time who tell me crazy stuff about themselves that I don't understand at all (like that they are conservative-Tea-Party-Republicans who think we should eliminate all immigration in this country or that they believe in unicorns), and I don't go all black-belt-ninja-of-awkwardness-silent-treatment on their ass. I simply smile and nod and ask some general questions about it as it clearly is important to them and also I'm not a jerk.
What general questions, you say? How about starting it off easy with such as: "So, how are things at the church?" (You can usually continue with: "Oh, it's going bankrupt? I'm so sorry to hear that.") Or you could try something more direct such as: "You know, I have no idea what the heck you do all day." or "It's so strange that you work at a church. I feel like I can't use the f-word around you." At which point I will have the opportunity to tell you a bit about my life, which may be highly entertaining to you, will likely make liberal use of expletives and will definitely help us all feel edified in the end.
I'm not asking you to come to Jesus camp. I'm just asking you not to throw a strip of awkward nails under the bus I'm riding there. Capiche?
*Okay, okay. That's a little self-aggrandizing, I know. But this is a blog about my life, so it sort of fits.
** Some really awesome shit, by the way.
***For those of you concerned about my tendencies toward exaggeration, don't fret. I can verify that this is ACTUALLY HAPPENING because Mr. L also notices and will periodically say, "It's strange that we didn't talk about your work that whole (fill in time period: night, weekend, LIFE, etc.), huh?"
**** Okay, I just typed deep-seeded (which is probably what I've been saying my whole life) and my spell checker caught it. This is like the time I told Mr. L that we had to go see a Notar Republic. How did I make it this far without being exposed as a complete idiot? Yet another mystery to probe in the blog-o-sphere.
***** If the former is what's happening, you're just going to have to get over your religious ignorance and fear. When someone tells me they are a banker, I am not irrationally fearful that they are going to steal all the money in my IRA and invest it in the sub-prime mortgage market. That would be silly.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Home Is Where the Mart Is
I don't know why exactly, but I've been thinking a lot recently about
the idea of "home." Perhaps it's because I spent a good part of last
month in a place I think of as "home" only to get on a plane and fly
east for six hours in order to go "home". Or maybe because it's been a
rainy and cool fall in New England that has already filled me with the
sense of wanting to spend more time "at home." It might have to do with the fact that a while ago we read a book in
my book club called "Home" which I LOVED and everyone else hated.* Perhaps
it's because only rarely do I spend a day without interacting with
folks we've labeled "home"-less but who nonetheless have places they stay and identify themselves as being residents in our city and I've
been forced to wonder what exactly it is they are lacking that puts them
in this category. **
Perhaps I missed the day of kindergarten on which they explained all this, but I've realized that I actually don't know exactly what homes means. At least not entirely. But I feel that I should, as home seems an incredibly important concept in our society, what with homework and homing pigeons and TJMaxx HomeGoods and home games and home plate and nursing homes and home schooling and the home office and being home free and the general consensus that things are better if they are homemade. This might seem incredibly naive, but how am I supposed to know where my home is?
I wonder, is my home simply the place I live? In that case, if I've moved about 15 times in my life, does that mean that I've had 15 different, successive homes? Or is there something more enduring about home, a sense that some places we live are more "home" than others? Many of the "homeless" people I know return to the same place every night to sleep be they friends' houses or shelters or favorite (and seemingly proprietary) spots to sleep outdoors. Are those their homes?
Or is home the place where my family is? If so, what family? Is it where Mr. L and I are together? Or the place where our families of origin live? If it's both (or either really), then is one who lives far from one's family destined to a life of feeling "not at home"? If someone has no family, do we really say that that person has no home? Not likely.
Perhaps home is the place where I feel I belong or feel I would return to if I had a choice (is home, as the old adage goes, where your heart is?) Is it the place I identify myself as being "from" or that I generally identify the most with? Maybe, except that if these are true, then I don't know that I currently live "at home" as there are many days when I dream of being other places that would fulfill these things for me. Is it where we feel safe? Likely not, as my friends who teach in inner city schools will tell you, they send kinds "home" to places that aren't safe all the time.
Or maybe it is some combination of all of these things. Maybe it is where I live, and where Mr. L is and where I feel safe and where I belong and where my family is. Which means that sometimes it's many places and sometimes only one and maybe even nowhere at al. But this is all very abstract, you see.
For more concrete identification purposes, I've been cooking up a new adage: Home is where the mart is. Shopping mart, that is. You see, somehow, in a crazy way, I associate home not only with the place I live but also with how I feel when I'm there. It's the place I feel comfortable, stable, familiar, the place where I can drive to without thinking about where I'm going. Home is the place that I am when I feel comfortable at the supermarket, where I know just what aisle has the lemon soda that I love and which one has my favorite cans of black beans. Maybe that's how I know where my home is. Where is it for you?
*A regular occurrence.
**This very conundrum has led some service providers and homeless advocates to refer to their situation as "unhoused" meaning they lack permanent housing.
Perhaps I missed the day of kindergarten on which they explained all this, but I've realized that I actually don't know exactly what homes means. At least not entirely. But I feel that I should, as home seems an incredibly important concept in our society, what with homework and homing pigeons and TJMaxx HomeGoods and home games and home plate and nursing homes and home schooling and the home office and being home free and the general consensus that things are better if they are homemade. This might seem incredibly naive, but how am I supposed to know where my home is?
I wonder, is my home simply the place I live? In that case, if I've moved about 15 times in my life, does that mean that I've had 15 different, successive homes? Or is there something more enduring about home, a sense that some places we live are more "home" than others? Many of the "homeless" people I know return to the same place every night to sleep be they friends' houses or shelters or favorite (and seemingly proprietary) spots to sleep outdoors. Are those their homes?
Or is home the place where my family is? If so, what family? Is it where Mr. L and I are together? Or the place where our families of origin live? If it's both (or either really), then is one who lives far from one's family destined to a life of feeling "not at home"? If someone has no family, do we really say that that person has no home? Not likely.
Perhaps home is the place where I feel I belong or feel I would return to if I had a choice (is home, as the old adage goes, where your heart is?) Is it the place I identify myself as being "from" or that I generally identify the most with? Maybe, except that if these are true, then I don't know that I currently live "at home" as there are many days when I dream of being other places that would fulfill these things for me. Is it where we feel safe? Likely not, as my friends who teach in inner city schools will tell you, they send kinds "home" to places that aren't safe all the time.
Or maybe it is some combination of all of these things. Maybe it is where I live, and where Mr. L is and where I feel safe and where I belong and where my family is. Which means that sometimes it's many places and sometimes only one and maybe even nowhere at al. But this is all very abstract, you see.
For more concrete identification purposes, I've been cooking up a new adage: Home is where the mart is. Shopping mart, that is. You see, somehow, in a crazy way, I associate home not only with the place I live but also with how I feel when I'm there. It's the place I feel comfortable, stable, familiar, the place where I can drive to without thinking about where I'm going. Home is the place that I am when I feel comfortable at the supermarket, where I know just what aisle has the lemon soda that I love and which one has my favorite cans of black beans. Maybe that's how I know where my home is. Where is it for you?
*A regular occurrence.
**This very conundrum has led some service providers and homeless advocates to refer to their situation as "unhoused" meaning they lack permanent housing.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
I'm BAAAAAACK!
So I could try to convince you that the reason that I haven't posted in a month was because I was on vacation, but really that was just a small part of the laziness and disinterest-in-being-inside that has characterized my entire summer. But as I am back, desperately trying to shake off that sense of wanting to do nothing, and simultaneously trying not to FREAK OUT that there is so much to do, I thought saying hello y'all would be a great and balanced act of denial to fill out my day today.
Also, I want to give a shout out to the dozens of people that I visited while on my vacation who informed me that they are ACTUALLY READING this, which on one level makes me FILLED WITH JOY and on another, shamed enough to want to get my act together and post something worth you clicking over. So welcome, clandestine readers who include some old, old friends, the parents of those old, old friends and some former ministers. I will now write with much more purpose knowing you are part of my audience.
But for now, let me share with you something that has taken on great meaning for me recently. And made me seriously consider changing my career from ministry to "amazingly-inane-and-yet-somehow-addictively-awesome jingle composer":
Also, I want to give a shout out to the dozens of people that I visited while on my vacation who informed me that they are ACTUALLY READING this, which on one level makes me FILLED WITH JOY and on another, shamed enough to want to get my act together and post something worth you clicking over. So welcome, clandestine readers who include some old, old friends, the parents of those old, old friends and some former ministers. I will now write with much more purpose knowing you are part of my audience.
But for now, let me share with you something that has taken on great meaning for me recently. And made me seriously consider changing my career from ministry to "amazingly-inane-and-yet-somehow-addictively-awesome jingle composer":
Monday, August 1, 2011
Important Things to Consider When Writing a Guidebook
I should start by admiting that I've kind of always wanted to be a guidebook writer, as they get paid to go on vacation all the time and then come back write about it, which sounds like basically the opposite of any other vocation in which one works most of the time and goes on vacation sometimes. Sweet deal, right? But I digress. The true point of this post is to express some thoughts I have about how these incredibly lucky professionals do a more effective job and save us from getting killed.
For example, perhaps they might see fit to mention that the bike route which they suggested we take is completely devoid of any street signs and thus impossible to traverse without a GPS which I don't have. Had they mentioned this I might have considered taking another route rather than biking aimlessly through the hills, wondering what street I was on. Though this detour gave me the opportunity to note some new developments in above-ground pool technology of the suburbanites all around me, also made me tired and cranky and thirsty. Also, it might have been prudent to note that the fairly major intersection that the book labeled "Clapp's Corner" is actually marked by the town with a giant sign reading "Itchy's Corner." Though my mind is as dirty as the next gal's, I thought for sure that the intuitive connection could not have been so clearly made by the leadership of a stuffy New England township. But I was wrong, and hence, more aimless biking through the suburbs.
Or another example: maybe it might make sense (tell me if I'm going overboard here), if the backpacking guidebook would have mentioned that the trail we chose a few weeks ago was not actually a trail at all, but rather a dry riverbed full of granite boulders over which one had to climb, hand over foot, for several miles.* Though our dog (who you might imagine is built much like a mountain goat) enjoyed this challenge immensely, we bipedal folks weighed down and unbalanced by huge packs thought it not so novel. It also seems as though at least a sidebar or inset box could have been dedicated to the fact that this particular hike, if attempted in the summer, is so infested with mosquitoes that one cannot stop forward momentum for even a second lest one is eaten alive. As you might imagine, the necessity of constant forward motion, up a pile of boulders likely to appear in some dinosaur movies, while carrying all one's provisions on one's back, when it is 90 degrees outside, can cause some of us less rugged travelers a good deal of concern.
Lastly, when describing somewhere in a tropical vacation destination as an opportunity for "nightlife" you may wish to qualify that by dropping in that it happens to be a huge and almost scary meat market for locals....I will likely choose a different dining/entertainment option.
But I know I can't hold you to any of this. What can we expect from folks who are paid to go on vacation? Also, do you have any openings?
*Did I end up doing this for SEVERAL HOURS with a huge backpack on my back? Yes I did. Was I happy about it? No I was not. Was the trail SO difficult that after going for four hours and only making half the progress we expected to make we actually TURNED AROUND AND GAVE UP AND WENT HOME? Yes, yes it was. And did the guidebook fail to mention that the trail we were on was paralleled by another, well groomed, slightly sloping and easy trail that we could have taken? NO IT DID NOT. Was I annoyed that it did find it important enough to mention the different types of trees along the trail, as if I could care about them at all while sweating so heavily that drops of perspiration were falling into my eyes blinding me with salt and fury? Yes I was.
For example, perhaps they might see fit to mention that the bike route which they suggested we take is completely devoid of any street signs and thus impossible to traverse without a GPS which I don't have. Had they mentioned this I might have considered taking another route rather than biking aimlessly through the hills, wondering what street I was on. Though this detour gave me the opportunity to note some new developments in above-ground pool technology of the suburbanites all around me, also made me tired and cranky and thirsty. Also, it might have been prudent to note that the fairly major intersection that the book labeled "Clapp's Corner" is actually marked by the town with a giant sign reading "Itchy's Corner." Though my mind is as dirty as the next gal's, I thought for sure that the intuitive connection could not have been so clearly made by the leadership of a stuffy New England township. But I was wrong, and hence, more aimless biking through the suburbs.
Or another example: maybe it might make sense (tell me if I'm going overboard here), if the backpacking guidebook would have mentioned that the trail we chose a few weeks ago was not actually a trail at all, but rather a dry riverbed full of granite boulders over which one had to climb, hand over foot, for several miles.* Though our dog (who you might imagine is built much like a mountain goat) enjoyed this challenge immensely, we bipedal folks weighed down and unbalanced by huge packs thought it not so novel. It also seems as though at least a sidebar or inset box could have been dedicated to the fact that this particular hike, if attempted in the summer, is so infested with mosquitoes that one cannot stop forward momentum for even a second lest one is eaten alive. As you might imagine, the necessity of constant forward motion, up a pile of boulders likely to appear in some dinosaur movies, while carrying all one's provisions on one's back, when it is 90 degrees outside, can cause some of us less rugged travelers a good deal of concern.
Lastly, when describing somewhere in a tropical vacation destination as an opportunity for "nightlife" you may wish to qualify that by dropping in that it happens to be a huge and almost scary meat market for locals....I will likely choose a different dining/entertainment option.
But I know I can't hold you to any of this. What can we expect from folks who are paid to go on vacation? Also, do you have any openings?
*Did I end up doing this for SEVERAL HOURS with a huge backpack on my back? Yes I did. Was I happy about it? No I was not. Was the trail SO difficult that after going for four hours and only making half the progress we expected to make we actually TURNED AROUND AND GAVE UP AND WENT HOME? Yes, yes it was. And did the guidebook fail to mention that the trail we were on was paralleled by another, well groomed, slightly sloping and easy trail that we could have taken? NO IT DID NOT. Was I annoyed that it did find it important enough to mention the different types of trees along the trail, as if I could care about them at all while sweating so heavily that drops of perspiration were falling into my eyes blinding me with salt and fury? Yes I was.
I Try to Live Every Week Like It's Shark Week
....but it's especially important this week. Because this week it actually is Shark Week. So let's get together and put it all out there this week, following the advice of wise souls such as Tracy Jordan and your friend LIOLI.
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| What's that? Do I have a shark hat? Yes. Yes I do. |
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