November 2003 Archives

When I said, "I miss you like summer," I was thinking of the sweltering heat that day that I took Feith to Taniguchi, and how we sat on big limestone rocks under the tree (my tree) and looked down at the water until our cheeks turned pink. I was thinking of a night spent under the stars with friends, watching a musical at the hillside theatre, and of the sweet tea we poured into a plastic jug to drink, and of the spicy salsa into which we dipped crispy corn chips, and how it was both cold and hot on my tongue.

And she got that, all the nuances of those five little words, translated into cilantro and tequila and the flavor of her personality, spicy and passionate like that salsa, and mine calm and warm (and maybe a bit muggy) like the night air.

And it all makes me miss her more.

I feel sometime like the one bird left in someone's backyard when the rest of the flock has taken off on its usual migratory path, and there's nothing to eat but birdseed, and nothing to do but wait, brave the winter, and hope they'll make it back at the end of the season

It's the hazard, I guess, in living in a transitory town and knowing transitory people. Nearly all my friends from college came to Austin, got their degrees, and then left. And though I thought it was a college phenomenon, it has stricken my coworkers, too; my friends leave one by one, chasing jobs or love or better lives, and I stay here to hold the fort and hope they'll return (someday), once the winter has passed.

It is only at the end of a long and winding trail that one can stop and look upon the path trudged upon so long, upon the hills and valleys scaled and the rocks and roots stumbled over on the way. And it's only upon the looking, there at the end, that one gets a sense of perspective. When a path is taken one step at a time, it is hard to measure exactly how long it might be.

The process of reflecting upon a life is much the same. While there is beauty in the day-to-day minutiae, it's hard to gauge one's progress on a day-to-day basis.

Sometimes, I feel as though this is all I ever write about. Is there more to life than this?

For today, I can content myself with minutiae.

It was one of those juxtapositions that made us giggle, Claudia and me. As we walked back and forth upon the long bridges that crossed the Danube, from the older Buda to the newer Pest, I noticed how short the safety walls were along the sides of the walkway.

Here in the U.S., we're protected from ourselves, out of concern for liability more than for our own safety, I suspect. It's as though building the safety walls higher and covering them with barbed wire will somehow dissuade people from hurting themselves. In Budapest, where so little of the recent past has been devoted to tourism and appearances, no such provisions have been made.

We laughed at the attitude, about how, as in many places in Eastern Europe, the prevailing philosophy is, "Live here if you'd like, but if you'd rather die, we won't stop you."

It's exactly the kind of city that could spawn this story:

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Police on Friday removed the corpse of a man believed to have hanged himself at least a year ago after builders and students at Budapest's University of Arts had initially mistaken it for a modern sculpture.

The body hung for a whole day in a garden building that had been re-opened for repairs before onlookers realized what it was and called the police, local media said.

This is old, old news -- nearly two months old -- but maybe it bears repeating.

What $87 Billion Buys (link MSNBC)

I had been in London for all of twenty minutes when it started raining. I wasn't exactly surprised -- London is, after all, known for its rain. It was warm that day in early July, though welcomingly cooler than the scorching afternoon I'd spent in Romania the day before, and the rain fell softly like kisses upon my hair and my nose.

I was exhausted that morning. A twelve-hour bus ride on poorly maintained Romanian roads had brought me to the Budapest airport at 1 AM, and I was working on very little sleep as a result. Anything requiring the most basic skill in concentration becomes an order of magnitude higher when I've had no sleep, and figuring out how to get to my hostel near the London Bridge by navigating the complicated Underground system, which I had never ridden before, was nearly impossible.

Carrying my over-full backpacks, I trudged to the Heathrow station and rode the Underground for nearly 45 minutes before I found the London Bridge stop. Then it was another 15 minutes of trying to find the street I was looking for, and the address on the street I was trying to find, and then waiting to check into the hostel, which was closed in the late morning, so I couldn't take a nap. I paid for my bed and stashed my heavier backpack at the hostel, keeping the smaller pack with me, since it held my digital camera and other meager valuables. Then I trudged in the rain again, finding another tube entrance, where I took the Underground to the Elephant & Castle stop and continued to a free museum located nearby.

I found out later that Elephant & Castle is known for its colorful shopping district, but I managed to miss all that, as focused as I was on getting to the Imperial War Museum. It's hard to explain (or remember, for that matter) what (other than free admission) drew me to a museum of war, but I spent hours exploring the place. The museum didn't celebrate war, though it did, unsurprisingly, present a decidedly Anglo-centric view of the subject, and though its Holocaust exhibit was the third I'd seen during my trip to Europe, repetition of the topic made it no less moving.

The majority of the rest of my time in London was spent sleeping. I couldn't really fight the exhaustion any longer, so I took a long nap, and then went to bed very early in the evening. Really, I spent just enough time in London to know that I want to spend some more time there.

My travel bug is itching.

The way it works, if you really want to know, is this: I am a person of big plans and bigger inertia. I am excellent at dreaming up ambitious ideas, and often, I know exactly how they should be completed, but I'm not so good at following through with them. I tend to get overwhelmed and procrastinate, because there is always something I'd rather be doing. Always.

Those who I've worked for, or who have worked with me, are probably aware that there are two ways of dealing with me. 1) Provide deadlines (even ambitious deadlines) and a great deal of structure. I thrive with structure, for some reason, though I don't always like it. It keeps me focused to know exactly what I need to be doing and when, and I am easily distracted. 2) Leave me to my own devices. Be forewarned that you'll get mixed results with this technique.

While this does (ahem, occasionally) apply to my work environment, the fact that I'm accountable to somebody keeps me more focused than I might otherwise be. My own personal projects? That's quite another story. Let's take stock, shall we?

I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year, but as of today, the 4th of November, I have written precisely 0 words. The prospect of 50,000 words by the end of November was just too daunting. I couldn't do it. That's alright, I have other (more important) things I want to do this month, anyway.

Like redesigning this site. I love Movable Type, but I hate that my page is basically the MT template, with just a few slight alterations. I want to declutter and organize, and basically feng shui the hell out of the place. I want to make this site more personal, in both style and content. If there's anything I learned at JournalCon, it's that I want this to be a site that people (other than my dad and my friends) can become engaged in. At the same time, I want to aggregate my web presences together somehow. Oh, and I'd like to use the TypePad subscription I've been paying for since August. And while we're at it, I'd like it to be both seamless to the user (that would be you) and aesthetically pleasing to the creator (that would be me). I don't ask for much, do I?

I'm not completely sure what's prompting this desire to upend everything, to purge things from my life and try to rebuild them based on what I know now but didn't know then. Some things have been changing around me, while others have remained the same. I got promoted, for one. The responsibility promotion, as my dad called it in an e-mail this morning, happened a few months ago, right in the middle of preparations for JournalCon, which gave me effectively about three lives there for a while to try to live in 24-hour days. It's nice, in any case, to have the monetary (and titular) promotion to go along with the responsibility.

The whole thing makes me feel like a grown-up all of a sudden, and so much grown-up-edness, not to mention my birthday in about three weeks, is more than I know how to handle sometimes.

I had an epiphany about a month ago while I was lathering my hair in the shower on a lazy Sunday morning. Somehow, I got started thinking about travel, and how I'd like to do that more often, and about all the things tying me down to Austin and the place I live. This part, in and of itself, wasn't particularly revolutionary. I've had these thoughts before. In fact, two weeks prior to my epiphany, I saw my dad in Kerrville, and he not only asked me when we were going to South America together, but he provided some practical ideas of how I might support myself if I were to go traveling for a more extended period of time.

The ideas themselves weren't new, though it was helpful that they'd been slow-cooking in the little pressure cooker of my brain for a couple of weeks at that point. The revolutionary part was that I set myself a little mental deadline for making a radical change in my life, to rid myself of the things that bind me to one place, and to travel until I'm tired of traveling. The date? My thirtieth birthday. It'll happen in 2006, for those keeping score.

I've been slowly trotting out my little plan to select audiences to test their audiences, like some test-market viewing of a limited-release film, and the reactions have been mixed. I've heard several people say, "Wow, cool! Can I come along?" and "I can totally see you doing that," but then, I've heard some people say, "You don't know what it's going to be like," as well. And it's true, I don't. I don't know if I have the temperament for a nomadic lifestyle, but I'm not sure whether I could know without trying.

I've been a bit nervous about publishing this little missive of mine out here where the whole world can see. It makes it all feel a tiny bit more concrete to show it to an audience that can make me feel accountable. Because it is absolutely a cop-out for me to plan a date three years in advance. Any number of things could happen between now and then that could cause me to change my mind, and I'm fine with that possibility. What's remarkable about this idea is that it changes substantially my own concept of who I am and who I might become, and that's more exciting than anything else I've done lately.