Post-thesis experiment

Seems like one of the most enduring fantasies to which readers and viewers like to escape is one in which people have full, busy, meaningful lives. Not the sort of full lives I observe from here, in my quiet perch of German solitude—lives apparently constructed from errand-running, commuting, work and the sort of routine driven by suburban isolation and children’s schedules—but lives light on work, heavy on social interaction and community involvement, full of friends and love and collaborative effort and centered on tight, functional communities. The work these people have is personally satisfying and, though occasionally demanding, is conducive to a healthy work/life balance and pleasant enough to return to in the morning with a big cup of coffee and an optimistic mindset.

I used to view these diversions as low-brow and unchallenging. No, scratch that. I still do. But now I’m beginning to wonder if the persistent presence of television and books that feature these optimistic, happy, well-adjusted characters who are surrounded by supportive, loving friends and communities is a legitimate, even expected response to our entrenched dissatisfaction with our post-industrial, suburban, work-centered lives. What could be more comforting after a long day of sameness and meaningless interaction than to lose one’s self in a world we’ve lost, a world where you can stop in at the neighbor’s, or pop into a coffee shop where everyone knows you? Where friends are close at hand, and aren’t so busy working and raising families that they can’t drop everything and spend an evening over a good meal and conversation that isn’t about work or the minutiae of parenting?

Sure, this world probably never really existed. People being people, the neighbors may have been annoying, the smallness of such a world stifling, and the expectations of friends who’ve known you for decades limiting and unrealistic. Though this ideal is probably non-existent, a form of this fantasy world exists wherever people form communities based on common interests, a shared history, similar worldviews and a genuine desire to be a part of something outside the four walls of their house.

Fredericksburg was a bit like this, as was Monterey. San Diego definitely has pockets of this. I have no doubt there are vibrant subcultures in large cities everywhere, especially in non-sprawl cities. But I suspect the commuter class, the ones who moved out to the land of culs-de-sac and pitch-sized lawns to raise suburban children in safe schools, spend so much time in their cars and at their jobs that at the end of the day, they long to live a different life, even vicariously. They want the connection of the city without the actual city. All they need are some attractive, usually happy people to watch go through their mostly pleasant lives together. Problems are small and temporary. Characters are allowed their baggage and complexity—think Gilmore Girls, not Brady Bunch. Aim for the “soaking in a warm bubble bath” flavor in physical and emotional setting. Write it from the point of view of the owner of a small restaurant.

Bingo.

More from the underside of the planet

Sydney’s highlight, hands down: the Sydney Opera House. Though everyone knows it’s an iconic hulk of amazingness, it’s so much more than that when you see it up close. We took a tour of the inside—we’re not tour people, so we easily might have skipped this opportunity—and the views the windows allow of the clean lines of the exterior are breathtaking. The design reveals much more of itself from the inside; the spine and ribs of each shell come together gracefully, and the thoughtfully placed windows provide stunning glimpses of the harbor and of the building itself. Absolutely incredible. And those giant shells themselves are so much more intricate than the photographs I’ve seen suggest. They’re covered in small pieces of ceramic tile, and the undersides are as beautiful as the surfaces—the fan-shaped supports hark back to Art Deco in that the lines are mathematical and visually pleasing and to Art Nouveau in that they mimic nature.

Now we’re in a small cottage that faces a forest and an inland waterway. The Pacific Ocean is a right behind us. These two ecosystems converge in funny ways; there are turkeys, magpies, wallabies, eastern whipbirds and kookaburras in the forest, and all manner of otherworldly bird calls wake us every morning. Meanwhile, dolphins patrol the shore, but seagulls and other shore birds are strangely absent. It’s a strange combination.

Return to the big city

Sydney’s a funny town. It’s plenty big, I gather, but it doesn’t feel like a proper city. Revise that, actually – Sydney feels like a North American city. The public transit is probably slightly better, but it’s still a car city, more or less, and the lack of a real subway makes me less inclined to take it seriously. Having said all of that, it’s a friendly, loud, young, sunny city, though terrifically expensive. If an enormous variety of Asian food is your thing, you ought to pack your bags and get here. Not since Auckland have I seen such a selection of cuisines from all over Asia and the Pacific Rim.

My visit in Victoria was a pleasant reminder of why friends are the most important thing in the world. The folks I hung out with there are lifelong buddies from thousands of miles away from here and from where I currently live. Though we hadn’t seen each other in almost three years, we just picked up right where we left off. 2 1/2 days of easy, fun, interesting conversations, lots of laughter, terrific food, stunning scenery including miles and miles of coastline and sunny hikes in the bush is just what I need to ground me for our last several months of living in near solitude in inaccessible, stoic Southwest Germany.

Way, way down south

If I’m not as far south as I have ever been, I am really, really close. Sitting here in Victoria, Australia, I think I’m just a shade closer to the earth’s bottom (or top?) than I was when I was in and around Auckland in 2010. Summer is chilly down here, hovering around 15 or so during the day, and much colder at night. Still, it’s not Europe in a Siberian cold snap, and I’m heading back to Sydney today to catch up with the heat.

Though cold, it is a gorgeous place. I’ve seen kangaroos, wallabies, koalas and countless birds, including the wonderful Australian Magpie. This gregarious species, though obviously related to its European and North American cousins, here in Oz has a happy, goofball song that sounds a bit like a turkey met up with a yodeler. They’re apparrently very protective of their nests when the wee ones are around – I hear they take out a cyclist or two now and then – which I suppose validates the common belief that nearly everything down here can and maybe even will kill you. There’s a certain charm to that.

I’m here visiting with dear, dear friends who picked up and moved down here to live out their lives as Australians. Their extended family is all here, and it’s such a happy, normal, healthy, relaxed scene that it’s kind of making me long to live in a similar arrangement, impossible as that is. Everyone’s smart and funny, and we can just talk and laugh and carry on like the close friends we are. How I miss this.

iPad airport early ugh

Up after not enough sleep, but the excitement of being at the airport is counteracting the fatigue somewhat. This has been a theme in my life; as a kid, the only sane place that existed in the chaotic world created by my drama-addicted parents was at my grandparents’ house in Los Angeles. It was to this quiet refuge that I escaped as often as humanly possible, and the relief of getting away began when I was dropped off at the airport. This trick worked wonders once I was in high school, when many arguments with my parents ended with me driving to the airport to just sit in the terminal and pretend that I was leaving.

Almost 30 years later, I’m often still accompanied by happy butterflies as I sit in the departure lounge. The trip seems ripe with possibilities, and though I no longer have anything  in the world from which to escape, I still relish the thrill of making a clean getaway.

Impossible travel

There are people out there who claim they can’t sleep on a plane. I was once one of those people. The longest flight I’d even endured was from the West Coast of the US to Europe, and though that’s no cakewalk, you can do that repeatedly and still think you can’t manage a decent night’s sleep in a plane seat.

Then I flew from San Diego to Dubai. And from Germany to New Zealand. And, a couple of days ago, from Germany to Sydney. These flights have taught me that if you “can’t” sleep on a plane, it might well be because you haven’t been on a plane long enough; eventually your body says, “fuck it” and goes to sleep. It may not be restful, it may not be comfortable—especially in coach, where I reside—but it’ll be something like sleep. I managed 7 hours of it on the flight from Stuttgart to Singapore.

I suppose if you do it all the time, it gets less weird to fly between seasons. I don’t do it often, so going from walking my dog in -10° C on a cold, bright and beautiful Friday, face stinging in the bitter wind and booted feet tramping through dry, sparkling snow to putting aloe on the bit of sunburn I got from the dazzling Antipodean sun while strolling sleeveless on the far side of a continent 16,500 km away on Sunday is still a feat so astonishing as to  seem impossible.

I’ve been an airplane geek since I was a wee one. I can spend hours watching planes take off and land, and I can even entertain myself in the terminal by sitting next to a large window, watching aircraft taxi slowly about, like fish in a giant aquarium. Being married to an aeronautical engineer and pilot who can rationally explain to me why there’s nothing miraculous about these enormous vehicles being able to fly has done nothing to diminish my wide-eyed wonder at the extraordinary reality that they can.

Boarding a 747, as we did Friday and Saturday, feels special, and like I’m a part of something powerful and dignified. I like to sit on the wing and watch the impossibly huge machine lift us into the sky, monstrous engines propelling us through time and space over distances our ancestors wouldn’t have dreamed possible in months, far less hours. Drink in hand, I watch the world scroll beneath us from heights humans never saw until my grandparents’ day, and marvel at the technology and skill required to do this now commonplace task. The new A-380 may be the biggest now, but it looks like what it is: an air bus. Not so the 747; even now that all the glamor of the jet age has long ago vanished, the sculpted lines and muscular form of this remarkable airship bring to mind the days when decks of cards, real glassware, racks of magazines, adequate leg room and other long-vanished amenities were still part of air travel. If only.

The intensely blue skies of Sydney are taunting me from my hotel window, and since I’m full of instant coffee, I’d better head out and focus that penned-up energy somewhere.

Tap, tap, tap

I’m sure there’s something I ought to be doing right now, but my ass is affixed to the couch while I administer coffee in large gulps. Now and then I read something about giving up coffee, but I don’t think I’m going to pursue such a silly goal during this lifetime.

The next two weeks involve two trains and 8 flights. I’ll see two new cities, put my toes in sand I’ve never toed before, greet some Pacific water molecules I perhaps last ran into on the West Coast of the US, and hang out with old friends I haven’t seen since we all lived on a continent where none of us live anymore. While we’re off accomplishing these feats, another smart and amazing friend will be traveling to this very spot on the earth, right here, from yet another faraway land and we’ll miss seeing him completely. A lot of joy and a portion of regret, then. I suppose that’s the mix we’re best equipped to handle.

 

Just a little off the ends, and hold the racism, please

The last thing I need is to have to find someone new to cut my hair in this silly town, but today the woman who’s been handling such things for me since shortly after we moved here pushed up the corners of her eyes and said, “Japanisch? Sehr schön!” when I mentioned a Japanese friend. You know, like a small child would, perhaps having seen such nonsense on some dreadful old Looney Tunes cartoon. My German skills don’t cover phrases like, “Wow, you’re a racist tool,” or What the fuck was that?” or “Is there some reason you’re giggling after having insulted an entire ethnicity?” so I just flinched, clammed up and failed to make a followup appointment. Hole-y-cow. That’s how my day started.

So. There are big plans afoot here. These plans require me to make with chore-doing, and so I am. Tomorrow’s a big day, and there will be no time for such trivialities as laundry and errand-running. Hence, my day went from distressing (see hairdresser, above) to busy (see laundry, et al., above) and now on to indecisive (trying to decide if I should have an early dinner and pass out or continue to do the things that I know I’ll have time to do tomorrow, despite the insanity). I’m still on the fence. I’ll breathlessly update you with how it all went tomorrow, while I tap my foot nervously all day because all the work I needed to do got done today.

Got an offer for three more stories. Gotta pitch ‘em. Quick and easy, decent pay, low  maintenance.

Need to go cook a pork chop and stop freaking out.

Tapping the vein of social networking

I’ll admit to dorking around uselessly on Facebook, or in the comment thread of the occasional blog. I don’t want to think about how much time I’ve wasted like this, and how many productive things I could have done instead. But every now and again, I find myself in a really compelling online conversation. I hear of resources this way, and learn from other peoples’ experiences. I find terrific things to read, and these things often end up in my writing.

If I had to guess, I’d say that only about 25% of the time I spend social media-ing is actually valuable, but that 25% is the most enjoyable time I spend online. I wonder how I could maximize this sort of quality time and reduce or even eliminate the wasted time? Facebook is terrific to keeping in touch, but it’s so unfiltered and general that it takes a ton of effort to get to the information you really want, and to find conversations with people you want to network with beyond the personal updates. I wonder if there’s a way to separate these things better (other than switching to Google+, which I admit seems much better, but no one’s over there). 

It’s sunny and bitingly cold out, and there’s still some snow on the ground. A sublimely perfect winter day. 

 

 

Slave to my sidewalk

There’s a law in this part of Germany that states that all residents must have snow cleared off their sidewalks by 7am. Practical, sure, and since we’ve got a decent amount of foot traffic outside, I’d feel responsible for dealing with it regardless. But setting an alarm on a weekday, when I don’t have to be up, just to crawl out of my warm bed and shovel a damn sidewalk is not my idea of how to get my day started. When the alarm went off this morning, I stayed immobile, eyes closed, hoping I wouldn’t hear the telltale sounds of obligation outside. It was not to be. The neighbors, reliably Teutonic citizens all, reminded me of my role in their city by loudly doing their scraping, grinding duty by 6:30.

On the plus side, the early start gave me a jump on today’s bread production. Jim’s a huge fan of snow, and the early start means an early walk during the second half of the bulk fermentation. I reckon we’d better lap up as much as we can of our last German winter; this time next year we’ll have to drive east to find snow. Though I’ll miss having four seasons, I can’t say I’ll miss shoveling snow much.

What else will I miss? Having a chilly season that’s conducive to bread baking. We had plenty of cool mornings and evenings in San Diego, but afternoons tend to be too warm for baking. Hence, my lust for this lovely item. Roasted vegetables from the farmers market in August? Fresh bread all year? Pizza? Oven-roasted meats without the hot kitchen? Yes to all. I can’t imagine what we’ll do with such an item if we end up in NYC in 2016, but in the meantime, I aim to get three grand’s worth of use out of it—that is, unless we decide to go insane and buy the six grand one instead. (Un-bloody-likely, but isn’t it gorgeous?)

So my goal at the beginning of the week was to have a nearly final draft hammered out by Friday so that I could stop thinking about my thesis for a couple of weeks. This goal is the centerpiece of a bunch of smaller goals I want to accomplish this week, and though the lesser goals are getting hit out of the park, this one looks likely to remain unfulfilled. Being the partner who’s in charge of the home front means that there aren’t many days that I don’t have a series of errands that need running, and in a country where every last business is open at different times and  closes for lunch for different parts of the day, this becomes a scheduling challenge. Add the bases to that (no parcel pickup until after 11:30am, conflicting lunch breaks, which base does which service, etc.) and I feel like I need a personal assistant just to help me keep track of where I need to go, in what order, what method of payment I’m going to need (Cash only? German chip credit card only? Regular credit cards? Inexplicably, US cash?) and what my odds are of driving across town to find the thing I scheduled my day around isn’t available because I forgot about one of the many German holidays that close the country down completely. This time-consuming sort of barely productiveness means that when I imagine I’ll have yawning gaps of free time to sit and torture myself with the process of wrestling this thesis into submission, I instead realize that I have conflicting errands in far-apart destinations and that since the local Esso is out of super+ unleaded again, I have to start by driving out of my way to the base to get gas before I can even get started. I hadn’t really thought about it, but hey, won’t being able to buy affordable gas at any old station, having a piece of plastic that everyone accepts and being able to assume that places of business will actually be open for business, all day, even (gasp!) on a Sunday, be nice? Why yes, in fact, it will.

Jim is now on his back, rolling around and making impatient “rowr-rowr-ruff” sounds in my general direction. I have my orders.