Happy Holidays!

This post is to my wonderful family (and friends). Thank you so much for your presence in my life! I love you all very much. It's been an amazing year. To make up for faulty keeping-in-touch, here's my retrospective in photos.

I started in Chile last New Years, which also happened to be the night I received my new job offer.

Then it was off for a quick visit to Buenos Aires.

From there I made a visit back to New England, just in time to be caught in a blizzard in New Hampshire.

Then I moved to Berkeley, CA, where I spent 3 months learning my job and getting to know my eclectic bunch of housemates / coworkers.

In May we made the (BIG) move to San Francisco. I always complain about packing and moving but carting a house / office of 20 people with no labor except our own (and those die hard amazing friends & volunteers who turned out) was... near traumatizing.

Almost immediately after that I visited the Bahamas. Cruises are not for me, but hey, at least now I know (not that I doubted much prior...).

And then I spent 3 months living in Costa Rica. This was the view from our house. It was quiet, beachy, sometimes blissful sometimes dull. But we had a pack of howler monkeys pass through our backyard every day, twice -- 6am and 3pm, roughly -- and that will forever be one of the best daily routines I've ever had.

I quickly visited home for a couple of weeks, but was camera-less at the time.

In an all-too-fast month back in San Francisco, I attended the strange and beautiful Burning Man Festival. For the record I'm not a total convert and I will never, ever tell anyone that they "totally need to go, it'll change your life." I hope not to meet people whose lives are so undeveloped that they can change in a week long art-and-mayhem festival. But I will certainly say that it's an otherworldly blast and I hope to find myself out there in goggles amidst the dust storms next year as well. (photo via friend Casey A's facebook, as I was still without camera).

I also spent good times with my friends and coworkers at our house. At this time there were 30 of us living there. This may sound like living hell but I loved it. Normally, the backyard doesn't look quite so similar to Burning Man, but it does happen. (photo via friend Erin's facebook)


And then...China! The Great Wall....

The Forbidden City...

Tiger Leaping Gorge (the deepest gorge in the world), featuring the intrepid Caroline...

Shanghai...

And other adventures (seen: Hangzhou).

And now the lovely Istanbul, my new city-love.

Tomorrow I head to Andorra for a week of skiing and time with an old traveling friend I know from New Zealand. So that puts the grand count of 2009 at 8 countries visited.

Next year.....?

I love you all and wish you a very happy New Year!

How I Almost Ruined the National Holiday for 60 Strangers, or, Against Pollution

When the quarantine officials entered the plane, covered head to foot in white bio-suits, I turned to Caroline and said, “They’ve called the people from ET to come and get me!” Thank god Caroline’s good on a bicycle, but I’m not so sure that I’d fit into the front basket. It was around this time that the Chinese passengers, clustered around the bulkhead and back towards the bathrooms, began pulling out their cell phones and taking pictures of me.

It had been an interesting day.

Shanghai is extreme. This is certainly something that my subjective experience seems to corroborate. The visibility and thickness of the ground level ozone is overwhelming. On top of this, everything everywhere seems to be under construction, so pure dust is a contributor, along with smoke and all the usual suspects.

My sore throat began last Wednesday, when I’d been in town about 3 days. By Friday, I had developed a dry cough and was downing herbal couch syrup at regular intervals. After taking it easy over the weekend and avoiding spending too much time walking around in the pollution, the cough was a bit calmer.

So, of course, I stayed in on Sunday night to ensure that my planned trip to Kunming, in the western province of Yunnan, would go smoothly.

Just kidding! I went dancing.

On Monday I woke up and the cough was back in full force. Caroline and her roomie, Emily, and I, were due to head to the airport around 12. It’s National Holiday on October 1^st, so the girls have some time off (them, and everyone else in the country). Due to a work miscommunication, my 11am meeting didn’t get started until 12. At 1:15 I was just getting off of Skype, Emily was wrestling with a ginormous suitcase, and Caroline couldn’t find her keys. All well and good. We flagged a cab to the metro and, after some cartoon-worthy antics with Emily’s suitcase, got on the train at 1:30. We figured we’d just make it in time for Caroline and my flight.

Until we took the metro in the wrong direction for half an hour. When we reached the end of the line, the girls looked up and said, “we missed it.”

“By how far?” I wanted to know. I thought maybe we’d just talked too much and overshot.

Thankfully, there was another western woman on the train to witness our embarrassment. (what’s the point of being dumb if no one gets to appreciate it? I bet this woman went home feeling like the most competent expat in town) “You should have gotten on going in the other direction,” she helpfully pointed out to me, as the girls avoided eye contact.

We started back in the other direction. “We missed our flight,” I observed. This is when I discovered just what it means when your friends work with 5-year-olds all day.

“Not at all! I’m certain we can make it!” Caroline beamed.

“Absolutely! It’s not so far at all!” chirped Emily.

Silence.

“The Maglev only takes 8 minutes, you know.” [the Maglev is a bullet train that peaks at 430kph, suspended magnetically over a curving track]

“You won’t have to wait in the airport!”

“We can absolutely make it.”

Silence.

“You know, I bet we’ll get there with just enough time!”

“Emily, Caroline…..no. Just no.”

We got to the Maglev station at 2:40. Our flight was set to leave at 3:10. We’d already missed boarding by a long shot, but nonetheless Caroline and I gave it a go by ditching Emily with her bags on the platform (so chivalrous!) and running up stairs and across platforms. Where we waited, me coughing and wheezing, until Emily wheeled up behind us as a sign of the futility of it all and we all boarded the train together. It left the station at 2:45, bringing us to the airport at 2:53.

Where Caroline and I ran, again.

Needless to say, at 3:10 we were not on our plane. We were drinking a beer and having lunch at a restaurant in the airport, new tickets for 7:15 in hand. I was pleased. But the cough hadn’t been helped by all of the sprinting, so I was running through tissues at an alarming rate.

When our new, better, more conveniently timed plane began taking off a few hours later, the recycled air hit me in a bad way. No sooner had the vent turned on than I was doubled over, coughing so hard I thought I might throw up. This continued for a good 20 minutes. Once we’d leveled off at cruising altitude, I was red and sweating, and my scarf had become an incredibly sparkly handkerchief, but the worst of it seemed to be over. The flight attendant came over with a cup of warm water and offered me a face mask, which I took. Breathing through it kept the air around my face a bit less dry, so actually did help considerably. I have a photo of me enjoying my face mask, but can’t upload it at the moment.

The flight attendant asked if I’d like to take my temperature. Taking it as a nice offer rooted in a cultural difference, I declined. She seemed uncertain but left.

It wasn’t until this video was screened that I understood what she had been getting at. (You MUST watch this video, it is priceless).

The flight went on. My cough had subsided once I got used to the altitude and the air. Caroline and I worked through the guidebook, planning our ten day trip to Yunnan.

About 45 minutes before landing, the flight attendant came back and politely insisted that I have my temperature taken. I gave in sullenly, but what could be the harm? I’m not sick, let them take my temperature, whatever they want. The flight attendant, who for the record was absolutely sweet, chatted with us while we waited – or rather with Caroline, since I was sitting there with a glass thermometer stuck in my mouth. After 5 minutes, she took a look. And another look.

“37.3,” she said. Caroline and I were just beginning to figure out what that meant in Fahrenheit when the flight attendant said “I’ll be right back” and disappeared for 10 minutes.

By the time she came back, Caroline had scribbled through some longhand, memory-based calculations and determined that I was at more or less 99 Fahrenheit. Caroline was being sunny – “That’s nothing!” I was being pessimistic – “Then why’d she leave?! We’re being quarantined.”

"Well, this reminds me of a story...." said Caroline, and launched into a long history of someone she'd met somewhere.

After a while I turned my head and said "Caroline, I'm not listening."

She looked back at me, equally calm, and said, "This helps me."

So, with more respect on both sides, on went the one-sided chatter.

“I’m sorry,” the flight attendant said, when she returned, “but the regulations of China say that it cannot be more than 37.” Another flight attendant, a bit less sympathetic, stood glaring over her shoulder. “Some passengers heard you coughing, and we must have your temperature. If it is too high, you must speak to quarantine officials when we arrive.” She asked me to take a new reading, this time by armpit.

A few months ago, my mother called me to tell me that her friend’s son had been quarantined in Beijing. Someone on his flight had been declared a swine flu risk, so Chinese officials had required all of the passengers of the flight to check into hotel rooms for 4 days. My mother had urged me to get traveler’s insurance in case some such thing happened, since the friend’s son had been required to pay his own hotel expenses.

Did I listen? Enough to know that I was screwed should I be quarantined....not enough to purchase said insurance.

So we waited. I argued with the flight attendant, who was indulgent of my concerns and demands and clearly of the opinion that I was not sick. I tried to mentally control my temperature, but the thought of 4 days trapped in a closed room was not exactly calming. The flight attendants left for a minute and when I looked down I saw that I was at 37.5. The thermometer was retrieved. 5 minutes later, flight attendants reseated the row in front of us.

Over the half hour before we landed, the entire aircraft was rearranged. It wasn’t a very full flight, so by the time we landed, Caroline and I were isolated from the rest of the plane by a good 12 rows ahead and 2 behind. Caroline tried to cheer me up. I resisted and started yelling at the plane at large about my allergies, the horrific pollution of Shanghai, and other related topics. No one spoke English, and I was muffled by my face mask, so everyone just ignored me.

Enter the ET bio-hazard team. The Chinese passengers edged closer to watch the drama. I sat there with a thermometer under my arm, trying to look as healthily exasperated as possible. Caroline, now fitted with her very own face mask, giggled. The flight attendant translated back and forth. As the flashes were snapping all around me, I couldn’t stop thinking --

What does it do to your karma if, due to not caring properly for your cough, you cause 60 plane passengers to be quarantined and miss their holiday home with family?!?!?!

Luckily for me, after the temperature was read and the flight attendant translated my explanations about allergies, pollution and air conditioning, Lead Bio Hazard Lady took off her hood and raised her goggles. Things were said in Chinese. The hazmat folk left. The other passengers began leaving with their things. I took this as a good sign, but when the flight attendant came by and definitively told me I was not in lock down, that’s when I did the Rocky air punch.

Then coughed all the way to the terminal, while avoiding the gaze of the other passengers as well as Caroline’s attempts to ‘lighten the mood.’

“Well! Two first experiences in one day! A missed flight, and a near detention!”

“Caroline, let’s just get the hell out of here.” And we did.

Your Nomad Toolkit

There are many types of modern nomadism. Most people associate the word with what I'll call "river nomads": people who constantly move from place to place in a steady onward flow, never putting down roots anywhere, living out of their backpack or an RV. Dynamic, and watch out - if you fall in you might end up miles from where you expected to be (and your life will be a much better story for it). In contrast, I'd say that I'm more often a "waterfall nomad," to stick with the water theme (because nomads all have something aquatic about them, don't they?). Deep pools catch the water until the miniscus breaks and the movement cascades into the next swirling calm. Waterfall nomads move from place to place but tend to live in each of these places for a time, getting into the daily routine, putting down roots. Fall into my life and you can swim around for awhile, no problem. For months at a time, I look like anybody else.

I've been at this type of pattern for awhile now. Not a great long while, years-wise, but out of the span of my life, a pretty significant chunk. The whole adult bit, about a third of my earthly time. I'm 26 now. When I was just newly 18, I left Boston to attend college in rural western Pennsylvania. I'd taken solo trips before, and gotten the bug from them, but this was the beginning of my waterfall cascade.

What followed (with a few 1-2 month money saving stints back in Boston omitted):

2 years: Pennsylvania

1 month: Greece

9 months: France

9 months: Pennsylvania

6 months: San Diego

6 months: New Zealand

6 months: Boston

1 year: Chile

3 months: Berkeley, CA

3 months: Costa Rica

1 month: San Francisco

2 months: Shanghai (beginning last week)

next: a trip to Nepal; 6 months in Istanbul

In the years between 2002 and 2010, in other words, I will have lived in 11 places and moved even more times than that. And of course all of the travel in between (every waterfall is part of a river, after all).

Shallow? I don't think so, but it could be argued. Flighty? Very possibly. Sustainable? Now, yes, thank you. Common? Way more than you might think.

Here are my personal recommendations for resources to help you in the fluid life. All are free unless noted.

Your Nomad Toolbox - nuts, bolts, reads, networks, and more.

Beginning.

Why you can do this, too: The good folks at Technomadia (who run Camp Nomadia at Burning Man) shoot down common "I can't travel" excuses.

Work Your Way Around the World: If you don't have any idea of how you're going to tackle it, this book may get the wheels rolling. I found it useful when plotting out New Zealand.

Stay connected / practical.

Skype: Free computer-to-computer phone calls; very reasonably priced computer-to-phone calls.

XE: Currency converter.

World Clock Meeting Planner: Coordinate meetings for up to four different time zones at a time.

Google Docs or Zoho: Keep your projects going from any computer; give people worldwide the ability to work with you on comments and editing.

Blogger or WordPress: Making your writing public saves you from opening up the travel journal only to find incoherent, emotional babbling (rather, you will find coherent emotional babbling with comments from others -- a world of difference). A good way to share ideas with other travelers, and the best souvenir you can give yourself.

Yuuguu: Screen-sharing made easy. Teach someone in another hemisphere how to use a web tool.

A photo storage / sharing service: I use Kodak Gallery, which is hopelessly un-hip, but I've been using it for too long to bother switching. Flickr's the one I'd choose now, but that may just be because I like their content & design. Also check out Snapfish and PhotoBucket before making a choice.

Recipezaar: Why is this relevant? Because you can search by ingredients. This is very, very helpful when you find that your fall-back ingredients just aren't sold here, but all these other strange things are.....

Freecycle and Craigslist: If you move every few months, you don't want expensive furniture - but you do need something more than cardboard boxes (trust me, I've tried....cardboard tables collapse after a month or two and cardboard chairs just don't work). Get free stuff. And then when you leave, give it back. (note: in my experience, these really only work in the US).

World Newspapers: An index of international papers in English.

International Herald Tribune: Lackluster but worth skimming.

Telegraph's Expat Section: A weekly set of features of interest.

Meet people, make friends.

Word Reference: Simply the best language dictionary / translation discussion forum out there for the 6 languages it covers.

Facebook: Yes, we're all addicted. But also, you'd be amazed what can happen when you post, "I've just moved to XYZ city." Someone you went to preschool will say, "Hey I've been here for years! Want to come meet my friends this weekend?" Networking made easy.

CouchSurfing: "I'm also a client." I would like to point out that I've been in Shanghai for less than a week and have already made friends. Even if you don't need a place to stay, and don't want to host, you can still meet interesting people from all over the world.

WWOOF: Although it stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms, you can now find a variety of barter work-for-lodging exchanges close to, but in expansion from, the original theme.

Meetup: Another way that I've met friends in cities around the world.

Hostel World: Another way that I've found cheap accommodations around the world.

The Thorn Tree: Lonely Planet's online travel forum. I find LP guides hit or miss (like all guides) but these discussion boards have the answer to almost any destination-related question you may have.

Learn from your community.

Expat Exchange: Takes some skimming and parsing, but there's good information to be had here on all kinds of relevant topics.

Transitions Abroad: Ditto.

Escape Artist: Ditto.

Idealist: Ditto, but for non-profit jobs and volunteerism only.

Location Independent Club: Ditto, but in the form of a community network.

Digital Nomads: Group blog focusing on the new internet-based way of the road.

Expat Women: I never found this to be personally useful, but it is an active international network.

WorldTeach: A volunteer teaching placement agency that I used to get my Chilean visa / one of my Chilean jobs.

All this information! I'm sure you've got more of it. If you do, please contact me or leave a comment.

Rue Notre Dame des Champs

Today I feel like Hemingway wrote me into existence. Some travelers arrived yesterday to stay with us. They are great people, as always; having some new perspectives in the house is refreshing.

One of them is on a soul quest. He left his country at the advice of some friends. He was becoming dull, they told him, too academic. His world was shrinking. He's a philosopher, so I can understand this: the study of philosophy shrinks the world in an interesting but unnerving way. It is a sort of shrinking through expansion that makes me dizzy.

So he left on an experimental attempt to expand his world. He took a biography of Rimbaud with him; Rimbaud who would stab his friends (literally) for the sake of the experience. We discussed all this yesterday. Today I woke up and looked out the window; my friend was teaching him how to split coconuts with a machete for the juice.

And in this scenario, strangely, I felt like an image. Last night my housemate got drunk and took a civil debate to an argument. People who work '9 to 5' are soulless, he said. They only care about money. When we challenged that he was being offensive and narrow-minded, he said that clearly people who wanted to could find a way out, since he did. When I argued that he was living in a loophole and was blaming other people for not having his luck, he said that I was a North American capitalist and that was the reason for my anger. He stormed off and went to sleep before 9.

The debate was silly and commonplace; I wouldn't have thought much about it except for the new perspective brought by our visitors. Suddenly I felt like the debauched expatriots of the Montparnesse. Here we were, waving drinks around, arguing about the 'pathetic' concerns of the little people at home in their countries. Housemate expanding on their small-mindedness. I and others jumping in like self-aggrandized martyrs to defend people whose lives we were still somehow belittling just by assuming that we needed to defend them. It was a living parody. Earlier that day we'd discussed the definition of irony; I suppose that I wanted to show and not tell.

Earlier it had poured rain; the house was flooding from a thousand different directions. I stood outside and got soaked until my clothing looked like I'd gone for a swim; the others skinny-dipped in the pool. Our Rimbaud-reading visitor joined them and it was the first time he'd swum naked. An odd thing to meet someone who can say that. The rain poured down and it was, really, joyous. We enjoyed the little-kid kind of joy that things like acts of nature can bring: total abandon. Throwing my arms around to feel the way the rain hit them, I was not in myself. When the lightning blinded us every few minutes, I jumped impulsively on the plastic furniture as if somehow that would protect me. Even screaming, we couldn't hear each other over the drum roll of the water.

Weighing these two things, I wonder today what impression we made. I feel it's important. What will be dominant: the joy of the freedom? Or the disassociation from reality? How are we representing our lives? And when someone comes down on them in some silly Friday night debate, who will defend us?

Parallels, or lack thereof

Social networking means that you never lose track of anyone.

I know because this is the field I work in now. I spend the majority of my time on the page I work for, and then, in my free time, I click over to Facebook. I receive updates from people from all over the world, people who make me wonder 'Who the hell is that guy?' until I remember sitting across from him in 7th grade math class. It's strange, and many people bemoan this collection of fake friends we're all collecting.

I'm in favor of it. It's my own personal sociology news scanner. I am watching my old classmates and acquaintances grow into adulthood. And of course, they're watching me, too.

What is odd for me is that with each passing year, my life becomes further and further off kilter from my social news blotter. I haven't fully unpacked my suitcases since the end of 2006. My new career involves communal living, global travel, uncomfortable mattresses, and strangers that come to live with me as friends nearly constantly.

I love it.

But my Facebook news has turned into the equivalent of the "Births and Brides" section in a local newspaper. Now, I know what you're waiting for: here's where the travel snob goes off about the simple-mindedness of those who settle down, and congratulates herself for her sense of adventure and cultural nuance. Not so. The actual truth is far more complex.

Right before leaving for Chile, I was working at the wonderful Newtonville Books just outside Boston. One of my coworkers there was about my age, studying for her masters, and engaged. She had plans to open a children's book store someday, and was picking out her wedding invitations with a healthy sense of amusement. I was scrounging up my money, first for a job in Paris and then, within a week, for one in Chile. I lived out of a pile of clothing in my parents' house and considered a monthly public transit pass to be a considerable commitment. You would think that we would have hated each other, but we didn't. She knew someone 'like me,' she said, and would laugh in a head-shaking way about my wanderlust as I climbed the ladder once again to rearrange the travel books. And me -- well, that's the complicated part.

Her fiance would come to pick her up from work with takeout food and silly anecdotes. He'd prank call her during the day, pretending to be looking for some obscure book, and end up all sweet. They were house hunting. They were secure. They had a planned course. I respected it, often so much that I found it painful to be around. It was something I could have pursued, but at the same time, couldn't.

The path I've chosen, meanwhile, is like crossing a river while hiking. You jump from stone to stone, but you can only eyeball the next one. You can't predict how it will actually hold up under your pressure. Not blind leaps, but leaps of faith. Sometimes you find yourself on the tip of a deeply submerged, immovable boulder. Sometimes you find yourself teetering precariously on an unpredictable but at least temporarily dry surface. Sometimes you hit and immediately find yourself thrown sideways into the water.

Sounds exotic and exciting to some. Sounds idiotic to others. To me, there's no other way because this is how I live. But that doesn't mean I don't feel envy.

Some days, I want that prank call from the boyfriend who's known me forever and knows how to tease without making me angry. I want the silly Facebook pictures of the ring and the sunset and the surprise champagne. I want the ugly bridesmaid dresses, the baby nieces and nephews, the back porches, the season ball game tickets, the inside jokes.

Sometimes, I want security.

It is a trade off. Many of my friends sigh and tell me how they'd love to do the things I do, if only it were possible. It is possible, and I tell them so --but I've come to believe that the real reason they don't is not lack of ability, time, or resources. It's that they're able to get a little taste of my lifestyle from time to time, even if I wouldn't consider it as such. A person can have a stable, established life and take 2 weeks or a month to travel and come home feeling road-weary and global. And so both goals are satisfied.

The problem is that when your primary need is curiosity and travel, there's no equivalent voyage into the world of the rooted. I can't get a fiance and an apartment on a two week loan. As things in my family life have changed recently, I can't even name a place that would be a home to visit. There is no anchor, and it can't be summoned up for the fulfillment of a brief need.

So I read the daily engagement announcements on Facebook with a mixed heart. Most of me knows I would lose my mind if I were to trade shoes. The other part knows the same but wishes I could lose that trait. In the end, I'm happy with who I am and the life that I'm living. I know that if I could have held this picture up to myself at ten years younger, I would have died of joy and awe. I treasure this: the fact that my life has turned out more ME than I ever imagined it could have been. Even a year ago, my life today would have been unimaginable. I write this from my living room in Costa Rica, the place where I'll be working for the next 2.5 months. Every morning at 7am a troupe of howler monkeys passes through my backyard. I swim in the ocean nearly every day, as it's about 500 meters from my house, and I'm even learning to surf. I'm practicing my Spanish again. Geckos are as common on my bedroom walls as flies would be in other places (and would be here, if the geckos weren't eating them). I now know what a "tree chicken" is, and I've rode on a tiny motorbike through torrential tropical downpour.

Life is good. But the internet provides this incredible one-way mirror onto the lives of others. At the end of the day, though, I have to know that while I'm sitting here feeling pangs over someone else's settled and orderly life, someone else is envying my nomadicism. The information age, indeed.

Midnight Thoughts

There's been very little in this blog; quite a change from the last one.

In my Chile blogging life, I wrote every two to three days. I'd like to replicate that pattern in this blog, eventually. At the moment it doesn't seem possible. Possibly because I'm quite fulfilled with my writing, and possibly because after 3 months everything is still quite new.

Living in the moment is the most over-played philosophical concept of my generation. We want to 'live the dream,' we want to 'be here now,' we want to 'just breathe.' The fact that we harp on it so much seems a clear indication that we have trouble finding it.

From a mirror perspective, the realization that you are in fact living that way occurs slowly, through signs. The 11 voicemails on my phone, at least half of which I heard ring but didn't bother to answer because I was otherwise occupied - maybe with nothing. The TV shows, movies and music that I've missed out on for years on end. The need to remind myself that this life is new to me in order to appreciate what it is.

The fact that this is an insubstantial, sub-rate blog entry, but I'm posting it anyway.

The birds are flying north

This morning I woke up early to the sound of birds and the feeling of my muscles contracting in that cyclical way. The birds are calling out ancient territory patterns in the midst of the suburban fences, and my body is working away phantom children in an era that considers me nearly a child myself. I guess two hundred years ago these birds would have been staking out redwoods and eating plants that don't grow here anymore, bugs that don't fly here anymore. And I would have been raising children on an island in the North Sea, or I suppose maybe in some part of the American South, depending on how I deconstruct myself. Instead, after listening to the morning songs and rubbing my belly for an hour or so, I put on a sweatshirt that used to belong to an ex-boyfriend. I came downstairs with my laptop and made some coffee using the unlikely combination of my housemate's gourmet-style coffee grinder and the Mr. Coffee that's dependent on duct tape in order to function. I took some ibuprofen and settled in on the couch. It's 7am in Berkeley, California. San Francisco is turning pink across the bay, but here the light is still slate blue.

Lately I've been nostalgic for Pennsylvania. Northwestern Pennsylvania, to be exact, south of Erie and north of Pittsburgh. I went to school there for three years, once you subtract my JYA. It was a place of long snows and rampant rust belt style decay. Forty minutes away from my town with its small commercial toe-hold on the world, the mansions of the US' first oil barons slumped lazily under the care those left by the dried up wells. Where I lived, apparently the train used to stop between Chicago and New York. There was an opera house. Now there are a few local businesses that are slowly closing out to the chain stores, and two factories outside of town that keep the employment rate at least above 50%. It doesn't sound like the kind of place you'd miss, but it is. It's a location I struggled with, and came to love in a barbed and protective way.

Location nostalgia is a normal state of being for me, at this stage. I've lived in enough places now that my idea of home is all mixed up with elements of each one. In France, I once met an artist--an American expatriate, in his late 70s, who had been in France for several decades. "I don't travel anymore," he told me. "Everywhere you go, you leave a piece of your heart. I'm too old for that now. I can't give away any more of my heart."

I thought I knew what he meant then, but the peculiar kind of pain he was describing becomes clearer to me every year that I continue to live the way I do. For the most part, though, it's a pleasant ache. I'm only 25 and I can live with the fallout of movement: lost people, lost places. Sometimes, all I want in the world is to see a certain street, or smell a particular plant, and I know that that thing I am craving is thousands of miles away. Sometimes all I want to do is talk to someone in person who is farther away than my mind grasps. It's nostalgia though, not pain: nostalgia is semi-sweet because it relates also to knowing that you had something once, and you are thankful enough to want it again. The sharp part comes from always feeling like a piece of you is missing. A piece of your heart, maybe, if we are to believe my artist, and I think that I do.

So it comes in waves, and these days it's Pennsylvania. Over all of the starkness of that part of the world, the beauty is entering my recent days. This weekend, at a gathering in Golden Gate Park, some Canada geese flew overhead. I remembered going to the bird sanctuary outside of town one day in the fall in Pennsylvania to watch the migrants passing. The geese were the only ones I saw, floating in a pond by the entrance, because I came from a world with no hunting season. It was only after I arrived at the sanctuary that I looked down and realized that I was, for all intents and purposes, disguised as a deer in my nice little brown suede jacket. So I watched the orange-covered walkers come and go, and I watched the geese, and I listened to the gun shots echoing in the hills, and I thought about how little I'd seen compared to those birds.

Then last night, grating potatoes, a friend put on a singer I hadn't heard before. It was Pennsylvania Music, to me, although I don't quite know how to describe that. Heart lyrics, poetic. Celtic and bluegrass, folk. It made me want to call someone from that time in my life, but I didn't. I would have wanted to talk about nostalgia, but that's a hard thing to share over the phone.

So many other things are in my head recently. Fresh tomatoes from the farmer's market, which is still the best market I've ever been to (it's what all these urban markets are trying to copy, but they'll never get it down). The way that the first day of spring feels after going so long without any nourishment from the atmosphere. The crispness of fall. And the people I knew: my friends, my professors, and somehow most of all the family that ran the sandwich shop I worked at. These things are on my mind. Then, this morning, I woke up and all that I could think about as I lay there aching and listening to birds was the Sand County Almanac. So I got out of bed, because I craved silence for the first time in months.

EFL Recovery

I will not lie: teaching English as a Foreign Language was tough for me.

I don't like grammar. In fact, I pretty much hate it. I love editing, but this could be seen as a form of aggression against grammar: if it's wrong, it makes itself obvious. Kill the bad grammar, and it turns back into a harmless sentence again.

But--grammar theory? I spent 7 years studying French, and spent most of my time drawing comic books. Direct object pronoun, indirect object pronoun, subjunctive, conditional...horrific. It's like talking about the shapes of lines in a painting but never getting to see the work itself.

I took summer classes in college just so I could spend a year studying in France, which gave me no credit towards my major, because I realized finally that there was no way in hell that I was going to learn French unless I got out of the classroom. I moved to Chile to learn Spanish. Basically, I can't learn a language unless I use my obsessive urge to socialize against myself. Even then, I only get so far.

All this means that coming up with either the enthusiasm or the creative lesson plan I needed to teach well was a miss more than hit situation for me. Half the time, when trying to prep for a lesson, I found myself thinking, "They should just get a book, what am I supposed to do about it?"

Anyone who followed my last blog, if there are any of you left, will know that this lead to a severe period of permanent irritability.

So having an actual job, that I actually care about, has been a relief. But there's another side to that coin.

English teaching is unpredictable in many ways. You have no idea what's going to happen in your class. Class 1 might get through your lesson plan in half the time you expected and leave you flapping your mouth like a fish for 45 minutes while you stall. Then Class 2 might spend the entire 90 minutes on your warm-up exercise, after which time your whiteboard will be covered with arrows, stick figures, and other useless illustrations. Put these two together, and it adds up to an hour and a half of misery (generally for the students as well, I'll be fair).

Whatever happens though, it's an hour and a half. Time-wise, English teaching is very predictable. And your lesson planning can vary somewhat, but not wildly. Grading can be disastrously time-consuming, but it too is a limited time. The semester ends. You breathe.

Not so in the normal world of work (to the extent that my situation can be called "normal"). All of a sudden I'm back in the zone of unexpected projects, unexpected bumps in the road, unexpected complaints....just general day-to-day unpredictability. Add to this the fact that I care about my job, and the fact that I live in my workplace, and then I find myself randomly working for 10 hours straight before I notice what's happening and remember that I need to prioritize. A year of a very patterned work life, preceded by several months of an hour-to-hour job at a bookstore, preceded by unemployment, preceded by six months of wandering...well, it's fair to say that my time management muscles have atrophied, if I had any to begin with.

I'd be lying if I said I missed teaching. Last year taught me that, at least when it comes to foreign languages, that is not the path I belong on. In fact, I'm pretty much thrilled to be where I am: busy, interested, working hard.

I'm sure I'll appreciate it once my head stops spinning.

Honeymooning

Moving to a new city is always exciting, particularly if you happen to be an experience junkie (who, me?). About a year ago at this time I was falling madly in love with Valparaiso, Chile.

Now I'm losing my heart to San Francisco.

Unfortunately, I don't actually live in the city, I live in the East Bay. This may change soon. In any event, every time I get the motivation up to head into town, I get that high that comes with a new relationship (with city or person).

While Boston and many other cities I know have come to feel a bit like outdoor malls, with chain stores dominating the landscape, San Francisco has maintained a local feel. Even better, the local locales are loco and lovely (don't worry, I hate me too sometimes).

One example would be the overwhelming number of independent bookstores. I passed at least 4 this past weekend. I've already found my current favorite: Dog Eared Books, a great and inexpensive store with book clubs and other events. Selecting a favorite bookstore, for me, is an absolutely essential step in bonding with a place. In Paris, it was W.H. Smith, across from the Jardin de Tuileries. In New Zealand, it was a used book shop in Kaikoura. In Boston, it was Trinity Books on Newbury Street and of course my former employer, Newtonville Books. In Meadville, my college's bookstore was thankfully independent and stocked well. And in Valpo, it was the multi-lingual bookstore on Cummings, just off of Anibal Pinto.

There are also incredible events and organizations here. I've just found out about one that I'm very excited about: The Bike Kitchen. I've wanted to learn about bicycles for several years now, but there are two major problems: 1. Books about bikes are impenetrable, 2. People who know a lot about bikes tend to get snobby about it and make you regret you ever asked. So when I found out about this place, I was thrilled. For a low membership rate and parts fee, you can build your own bike with the guidance of volunteers. I've been told that there is little to no snobbiness involved. More on this as I get myself involved.

So yes: Valparaiso, I will always love you, but you can really never trust a romantic, now can you?

Alterna-Family

I recently started a new job. One aspect of this position is that my employer emphasizes an alternative work environment. This is probably giving you a mental image of 90's dot coms with pool tables and funky interior decorating. What I'm actually talking about, though, is on a totally different end of the new-workspace spectrum.

I live and work in a home with all of my coworkers--which fluctuates based on who's working abroad at any given time, but when I moved in was at 18.

When I found out that I'd gotten the position, I made a point of enjoying this as much as possible. I cannot tell you the fun that is involved in telling people in a somewhat conservative country, "I'm going to live in a commune." People in Chile thought I was crazy for being a vegetarian--dropping the C word definitely pushed me over into the "insane hippy" category for a few of the people I talked to. Which is a fun thing to accomplish for someone who hasn't owned anything patchwork since the 10th grade.

The truth is though, even my liberal friends were somewhat skeptical of this workspace/living space idea. Frankly, so was I. Imagine any work environment you've ever been in. Dramarama, correct? I worked as an apple-picker for awhile when I was living in New Zealand, and I discovered that it is possible to have office drama even when you have no office, work alone in a row of trees all day, and generally have your iPod on the whole time. (My favorite: "long-arming," which is when someone in the row next to you picks good clusters of apples from your side of the tree. Known long-armers became social pariahs...but we all did it on the sly.)

Now think about any living situation you've had that involved a high number of roommates. Chances are you still hate one of them. I know that I'm carrying around a couple of grudges; one for the girl who created insane house policies by posting angry announcements in the kitchen, one for the woman who would play music outside my door until 4 in the morning, and a big one for all of the people in hostels who pack each of their belongings in its own plastic bag and then pack at 5am. Or the ones who don't bring a flashlight when they know they're coming in late. Or the ones who talk when the other people staying in the room are sleeping. I guess I'll save this for a hostel manifesto.

I digress.

In any event, there are three areas of social contact that are extremely loaded: working together, living together, and traveling together. I have never had a friend with whom I was compatible on all three points. So signing up for a situation in which I would be doing all of these things with the same 20-odd people was a bit daunting.

And by daunting I mean, it sounded like a recipe for making my social life a living hell.

Well, thankfully, I was wrong. Way wrong. And what's followed in the three weeks since I arrived here has been one of those moments in your life when you realize that you've got yourself figured out wrong.

I think it may come down to having a weird set of genes. My father's family is full of loud social people--the kind of people where you pick up the phone and don't have to say your first word for at least 10 minutes. My mother's family, meanwhile, is full of people so reserved that conversation can be a matter of intense effort. So I wound up a little odd, as I see it. With people I know, I am extremely outgoing and almost never shut up. However, for most of my childhood I was so incredibly shy that I preferred dark colored clothing on the grounds that it would make me less noticeable. I pulled a little vigilante Cognitive Behavioral Training on myself, and by now I only feel shy when meeting a large group of new people--but even then I can generally fake comfort until it actually becomes real.

So that's what I did when I arrived in California. Surprisingly, the comfort became real within a few days, thanks to a truly incredible group of people who are accepting of themselves and of others. And that's when the realization settled in: I was made for this kind of situation.

In short, I'm a social addict, and someone let me into the catnip.

At any time of day, if I want to socialize, I wander around until I find someone who isn't working. At the same time, if you're visibly being productive, no one bothers you, so I never feel interfered with. I have dinner every day with at least 10 people. Whenever I want to leave the house, I usually have at least a few options for people to tag along with. Meanwhile, I'm getting to know people socially while also developing an understanding of and respect for them as professionals. The lack of boundary on that front means that compliments flow like water around here, and disputes are dealt with with the frankness you'd use in a social setting. Meanwhile, I laugh more often every day than I ever have.

Today was the first time I've spent time alone since January 31st. I was tired and run down after a bit of an overdone weekend, so I worked in bed (in my pajamas). It was a nice break, but I'll be back in the common areas tomorrow. Yes, I'm honeymooning right now. My blood content of warm fuzzies is probably off the charts. In any case, though, my new living situation has caused me to rethink my perspectives on communities. In Chile, everyone lives with their (often extended) family, and the feeling was extremely claustrophobic to me. Meanwhile, the typical studio-for-one goal that many young North Americans share felt cold and isolating, but roommates seemed like bad news. So here's a middle ground: a group of people who came together over shared ideals and lifestyle goals, living together family style.

So I just may be a way bigger hippy than I thought, because moving into a semi-commune has been the best living situation I've gotten into yet. Now if I could just make friends I don't live with...

It's the new rage

Watch this video. Then vote for it. Featuring several of my coworkers and my supervisor.

East Coast goes West Coast

I grew up in the Metro Boston area. We're known for our liberalism. I distinctly recall, for example, listening to a newscaster on the radio in San Diego decry Massachusetts' legalization of gay marriage as the first step on the "slippery slope" that would drag our country into the abyss. We're also, in what may seem a paradox, known for our general snootiness. I'd contest this in part, but I admit we're not the most laid-back state in the nation.

Following Boston's are-we-edgy-or-are-we-LL Bean ambiguities, I've lived in several largely conservative places, most recently Chile. So when I showed up at the San Francisco airport and two of my coworkers put me in kitty ears and a see-through shirt before taking me off to a Burner party (click here if you're looking baffled), it was a bit of a culture shock. However, while culture shock can often be really and truly unpleasant, this one was rather welcome.

Feeling a bit incapable of adjusting straight from Chile's ethos (where a knee-length skirt can still get you leers the size of the Cheshire Cat's) to San Francisco's (where a street-wear mini-skirt is still not quite flashy enough for certain parties), I opted to keep my tank top on under the top. Inside the club, I met a handful of new coworkers, all of whom would also be my housemates. Meanwhile, a girl in fairy wings, a wig and a bra danced on a table with a man in leather pants while I ate free sushi and circled my way through the open bar line. After a year of struggling to communicate in newly acquired Spanish, it was a relief to chat with people without my brain working itself into a fever, and to make jokes that had at least a chance of not flopping.

Coming back to a culture you recognize is sometimes more rewarding than expected. I didn't want to leave Chile when a new job first came on my radar. I missed it when I left, and I miss it still. But the feeling of release that came from being back in a world that I could understand without effort was stronger than I expected. It hadn't come while visiting my parents in Boston, where I spent most of my time visiting friends. But being there, in a bar with new people, it hit for the first time. More than anything else, being treated as normal felt like a hot tub after a long hike. I knew I was tired of being treated as different, of being harassed by strange men, of being treated like a child at times. But I didn't know how tired I was until I milled around a club without attracting any attention whatsoever.

At 11, the bar went back to normal pricing and we made our way back to Berkeley on BART. After riding micros with their destinations screaming out from colorful signs in the windows, I found myself baffled by the type of transit system I grew up with. It's surprising how difficult it is to predict which things will catch you off guard when you country hop. When I arrived in Valparaiso, the micros confused the hell out of me. 12 months later, I can't understand the concept of looking at a subway map.

Back at the house, I began what is now heading into two weeks of trying to establish connections with the people who now make up the key players in my daily life. Luckily, we all seemed to agree on sitting on the kitchen floor and drinking whiskey as a favorable Saturday night activity, so things got off to a good start.

For those who've followed me from my Chile blog and may be interested in such things, I'm happy to report that I then went on to an excellent first week of work. After a year of teaching students who had no interest in learning English, teaching business people who were never satisfied by the speed of their progress, and writing copy to sell a product I felt indifferent towards, I'm finally back to feeling useful. I am writing full-time for an organization that I believe in, and one in which a writer is most definitely needed. Things are good, and this is sparing you details of my wonderful coworkers and alternative work space (pajamas and beer at the same time? no worries, if you get the writing done).

Since then, I've done some things slightly more interesting (to you, I presume) than just living and breathing and meeting people (all of which are of high interest to me, but I recognize that I'm slightly biased). Stay tuned; hopefully New Blog will soon be updated as frequently as Old Blog.

the fact of space

Song of the Wonderful Surprise
by Kelly Cherry

Start with the fact of space; fill it up
with snow. There will be snow in the sky,
snow on the ground, snow in the mysterious courtyards.
You taste snow's tang, smell snow, feel snow on your face.
If you walk forever, you will not come to a place with no snow,
but one day, looking around, you will find
a green apple hanging from a spray of snow.


My first time around in the blogosphere, I wrote about Valparaiso, Chile. I've now accepted that eight years of slow-moving nomadicism are probably the indication of a trend. So welcome to the blog of someone who has accepted that she cannot sit still for long.