Pinned

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

I was coming home from the gym the other night and I saw a guy decked out — head to toe — in fraternity gear.  Now, this guy was either a) an extremely old-looking student; b) coming from an alumni event; or c) a complete freakjob, because he looked to be at least my age, or older.  (To give you perspective, there are double-digits between me and my college graduation date.)

It is my sincere hope that he was returning from some kind of alumni event.  Tis the season, after all.

But seeing Fraternity Guy reminded me that I was once upon a time pinned to my fraternity boyfriend.

My non-American friends always find my sorority past fascinating.  That past was formative, maybe.  But fascinating?  Not really.  I had this same conversation over dinner in London a few months ago with an expat sorority sister, who is now married to a Brit.  She said How do you explain Greek life to the British?

And I shrugged.  Of all the things that one can and cannot bring across the Pond, Greek life is one thing I’ve found that simply does not translate.  There are analogues, certainly.  But while the British seem willing to accept (and even adopt!) such things as Prom, they seem unable to wrap their minds around the concept of sororities and fraternities.  Secret societies have existed in university culture since time immemorial…and yet, undergraduates in matching sweatshirts do not compute.

I digress.

So once upon a time, when my friends were the executives of our sorority chapter, we concocted a plot to get me pinned.  This was harder than it might have appeared at first blush, because my then-boyfriend was not the romantic type, and had been engaged in a weird battle with his fraternity over live-out dues (i.e., the cost of membership for people who did not live in the fraternity house).   And I was generally not the most popular girl in my sorority because I’d never held a leadership role aside from being a career Chaplain, and while as an adult I am often perceived as being kind of cold, as an undergraduate I was sometimes called frigid.

These obstacles were handily overcome when my then-boyfriend’s fraternity agreed to pick up a large portion of the cost of the event.

And we were off!

The substance of a pinning isn’t particularly interesting to most non-Greeks, so suffice it to say that it includes singing, and a candle-passing, and then a reading of a sweet letter written by the boyfriend as all the sisters stand in a circle in the safe enclave of the sorority house.  And then there is serenading by the fraternity, and the sorority women sing back.  There are speeches.  And then everyone goes out to a party.

But in my chapter, there was also a tradition of a mini “hen party” between the reading of the letter and the mutual serenading bit.  And my then-boyfriend had missed the memo that he was supposed to write a sweet note, so he wrote a horrid letter.  It had to be rewritten by my friends before it could be presented at the candle-passing.

To make matters more difficult, I had petulantly decided that I wanted my hen party to be at Skybar, because back then, the place was still uber cool.  In those days, you had to call the answering service and leave a message and they’d call you back if they felt like giving you a table.

Clearly, a bunch of sorority twits were not going to warrant service during that era.  So one of my hip sisters who aspired to a career in the movie industry hatched a plan and left a message claiming that a famous producer wanted to send over a gaggle of interns — could we have a few tables that Monday night?  The producer’s name she used was very well known in the industry, but it wasn’t a household name.

Obviously, this worked.

So we survived the candle-passing and the nails-on-chalkboard letter, and made it to Skybar where we ordered one round of drinks which we paid for, and another round of drinks, which apparently were accidentally billed to this producer (I can neither confirm nor deny that).

Then we went back to the sorority house for the main event.  In true Meredith fashion, I’d invited my parents to witness the spectacle.  They, in turn, had invited my Auntie and Uncle.  And really, why not?  My sorority sisters thought this was spectacularly weird.

The whole thing was a candle-lit shitshow.

It culminated in my then-boyfriend pinning his fraternity pin to my dress.

The pinning was supposed to mean something — it was supposed to be a big commitment between the two of us.  In the moment, it was all sort-of meaningful.  And then again, not.  After the pinning, we scattered for limos and buses and we went off to a big party on the beach that lasted until all hours.  People wound up in the ocean.

The whole thing was silly, and weird, and uniquely American.  And as you all well know, that boyfriend wasn’t The One.  But the night when I wore the red dress, and Tink read the Fake Letter, and we were a Famous Producer’s Interns — everything was perfect.

Having attended both my pinning and my wedding, I would have to say that while neither of the men were right, and both the events were sort-of disasters, the pinning was definitely the funner of the two.

But, to my point: Some things translate well and some don’t.  I’m so quick to point out what doesn’t.  But at their core sororities, fraternities, pinnings, weddings are merely bonding rituals recited in a universally understood language of love and charades. And the experience of being bonded to others by way of ritual does not need to be translated.  It is human; it simply…is.

The reasons for wearing head-to-toe fraternity gear well into one’s thirties, however, require further explanation.

Posted in home, musings, relationships, Stuff and Things | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Suspended Disbelief

Posted on May 3, 2012 by

One thing I love/hate about living in Manhattan, and New York generally, is that one begins to forget how often she must suspend her disbelief in order to survive.

For instance: I was on the 5 train when it turned into a 2.

If you ride the New York subways, things like this happen all the time.   You will get on a subway train, and it will magically and without warning turn into something else.  A local will turn into an express.  A 5 train — which for most of the length of the island of Manhattan runs on the East Side — will suddenly turn into a 2 train, which for most of the city runs on the West Side. 

In reality, one train turning into another train is simply not possible.  Like characters in some absurd play or movie, we disappear down the stairwells into the belly of the beast, and our C’s turn into E’s and we take it.  Then we get off, and we turn around, and we wait on the opposite platform with nary a groan, because there is nothing we can do about it.

I travel a lot, as you all know, and I take public transport in other cities,  and this sort of stuff doesn’t generally happen — their trains are notmagical. One does not get on the London Tube, for example, and have a Jubilee Line train become a Central Line train.  At least, as far as I know or have experienced.  But in New York, we think nothing of our trains becoming other things — suddenly and without warning — because they always have.  They might as well become stagecoaches drawn by six white horses.  We’d probably swallow that just as easily.

But I suppose I am a woman who struggles with suspending her disbelief.

For instance:  I was watching Happy Feet 2 on the plane to Hong Kong (because I love penguins), and I was really annoyed that the penguins had a mishmosh of accents.  For starters — they would most definitely not have American accents.  And why did the one have a British accent?  The Robin Williams one properly had a South American accent.  But did the others pick up theirs from nearby Antarctic research stations?  But if they were all members of the same colony, then they wouldn’t have a variety of manners of speaking!  Andfor the love of all that is good, why did the old, grizzled one have a Scottish accent?

This bothered me for the entire movie.

That said, I have no problem forcing others to suspend their disbelief.

I spent Boxing Day and the week after together at my best friend’s mother’s house in Melbourne, Australia.  And, speaking of penguins, when Das asked me what I wanted to do, I told her that I wanted to see the Little Blue Penguins on Phillip Island.

So we drove the hour and a half or so from her house to Phillip Island, and it was good.  And when we arrived, it was packed.  So I began to scheme: How could we get as close as possible to the penguins?

Because I am very used to travelling in non-English speaking countries at Christmas, and because I am fluent in the Universal Language of Charades, I thought that if we pretended not to speak English we might pantomime our way to the best seats in the house.  But that didn’t really make sense.  This required more thinking.

I know this all sounds horrible, but you need to understand how I feel about penguins.  This is a Kristen Bell-sloth situation here.  I was close enough to touch a parade of tiny penguins and their babies, and no one was going to stand in my way.  No one.

Somehow in the course of this scheming, I decided that Das should pretend she was deaf, because in my desperation, that made sense.  As if being deaf entitled her to a better view.

But…but…they’re going to know I don’t speak sign language!  she protested.

No they won’t, I replied harshly, Australian sign language is different than American sign language.

So we started out small and approached a family who was hogging a bench close to the front.  Das began gesticulating wildly trying to get them to make room for the two of us.  They Were Not Having Any Of It.

Das and I stood in the aisle of the bleachers, shaken but undeterred.  Finally, tenacious Das approached a Park Ranger, and either spoke to him in our agreed-upon sign language, or lied through her teeth, because the next thing I knew, we were sitting in the primo seats on the sand, next to the cordonned-off area through which the Little Blue Penguins marched from the sea to their homes. 

I was out of my mind ecstatic. 

So which one of them is Robin Williams?  And when does Morgan Freeman start narrating?  I said.

That doesn’t happen, Dither.

But wait.  When does Robin Williams come out?

This went on for hours.  The penguins were as amazing as I had built them up in my own head to be.  I was on such a high afterwards, I was even convinced to take a picture with the creep in the giant penguin suit by the exit — and if you know me, you know I am The Least Likely Person On The Planet to do something like that in earnest.

(Not cute.)

But I suppose the point of this whole disjointed story is: at times we must suspend our disbelief in order to get what we want.  In New York, we suspend it to get from place to place and in order to survive.  A 5 train becomes a 2 train; a C train becomes an E train.  They called it “The 1 and the 9″ but the 9 train never actually existed. 

And likewise, sometimes, when watching movies or even live action shows, we have to suspend our disbelief about the characters — or maybe even ourselves — in order to truly enjoy what’s happening around us.

Posted in Adventures, balance, friends, musings, My Life in Airports, On the road again | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Gift of Finest…Rice?

Posted on April 30, 2012 by

This is my last morning in Asia, and over breakfast, I texted Strand (paraphrased): Have I mentioned that I don’t feel nearly as crap as I thought I would after this kind of travel, plus having been in Europe the week before last?  This massive reduction in eating wheat has worked!

A few years ago, I stopped eating most wheat products and tried a “low inflammation diet,” but that was partly (mostly; actually) a cover for the fact that I had stopped eating…period.  This time around, one of my doctors had suggested that I might have a (very trendy) gluten sensitivity, and wheat is highly inflammatory anyway, so maybe I should try cutting way back on bread.

As everyone knows, I am not very good at moderation.  So…there was obviously a massive risk involved in anyone suggesting I try any kind of restrictive eating .  And no one was minding me, so there was that, too.  In other words, this was a combination for complete disaster.  Like, for reals.

But I was desperate for anything that would reduce inflammation in my body, and I was getting sick constantly from the medication I was taking to achieve the same end, so disaster had struck anyway.  There was really not much else to go wrong.

I searched “gluten-free” on Fresh Direct.  I bought brown rice bread (which I loved); I bought gluten-free sauces, and pastas, and salad dressings.  I already eat a lot of Asian foods, so that rice-based stuff made life easy — it was the checking labels and asking questions that was trickier, and that mattered more.

I didn’t cut out bread or wheat or gluten entirely.  I just cut back — a lot.   And shockingly, I began to feel much better.  Of course, I imagine that the medication I was taking was also helping (which I have since stopped taking because the side effects I was having were so atypical that I was literally losing the will to live).  But the way I have been eating was probably helping quite a bit too — since there’s absolutely no way I could have been on the drugs I have been on and have been functioning at the level on which I’ve been operating if some part of my body hadn’t been working.

Interesting, wrote Strand, We’ll have to get a gluten-free cookbook.

The upshot here is that my inflammatory response is now under control.  I have travelled 15 of 30 days of April; run 3 races; been in 6 countries and taken an astronomical number of meetings…and have suffered little more than a touch of a head-cold.  (And a root canal, but that’s neither here nor there).

In other words, I strongly recommend cutting back on the wheat products.  And I’d really like a high-five for managing to do something in moderation, for once.

That said, here are some things I like:

1) Brown Rice Bread:

2) A gluten-free eggplant parmesan-type dish that I made:

- rice pasta (I used spirals, since that was all I could find)
-gluten-free pasta sauce (I used “Classico” brand, since they made clear they were gluten-free)
-fresh mozzarella, sliced
-roasted eggplant slices (purchased fresh, pre-roasted from Fresh Direct because I was running out of time)
-fresh parmesan, grated

Cooked the pasta; combined ingredients in a baking dish layers; topped with fresh parmesan cheese; baked at 375F for about 1/2 hour.  This is awesome.  You’re welcome.

3) Aki Sushi avocado rolls.  Period.

4) Continuing my theme of yuppie-asshole-juice-cleansing-expensive-eating-nonsense, Blueprint Bars.  The reality is, no human being should eat these.  When I hear myself say things about my grotesque taste in spa food, or read myself write about the same, I literally cringe.  But I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t like yuppie cold pressed veggie juice, and I didn’t gab with my colleague about which cleanse we are going to do next.  You guys…I actually like the taste of this shit.  I think it is good.

The joke’s on me.  I spend my hard-earned money on $10 bottles of vegetable juice and associated $30 boxes of fruit bars and think I am getting a “bargain.”

Anyway, they’re gluten-free; wheat-free and really tasty.

5) Sweet Potato Fries.  Sometimes I order these in; sometimes I buy them.  You never see these in my freezer because if I buy them, I eat the whole damned bag.

So that is the tale of how I spent the last 6+ weeks vomiting, having my tooth operated on, ceasing my love affair with bread, travelling like a madwoman, running shitty races, not relapsing, and generally embracing change in the form of love, acceptance, going back to the places that hurt, surviving, and eating brown rice.

The End.

Posted in balance, F & B, friends, On the road again, Try, Tutorials From Hell | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Flight Attendant

Posted on April 29, 2012 by

I left for Shanghai on Saturday morning, after a fitful, feverish Friday sleep.

I am a notorious non-sleeper — my body does not require a ton of it.  If I go to bed too early, nine times out of ten I will wake up a few hours later and be up for the rest of the night.  I have been this way since birth.  I sleep more now than I ever did — and that is to say that I get 4-5 hrs of sleep a night, and maybe I have a “crash” night every month or so where I sleep for a long stretch.

If you’ve ever lived with me, you know that I am also a terrible “snoozer.”  If you are my close friend, you know I unabashedly play what I call “time zone arbitrage” when I must wake up for a race, or meeting, or flight.  The hotel concierge does not seem to have the same vested interest in me making my flight as does…my mother.  And when it is yesterday night in Los Angeles, it is 530am tomorrow in London.  When I must wake up at a miserable 330am for a 600am flight out of London City for a quick day trip to Frankfurt, well, it is nightcap time in Manhattan, and someone at home is usually happy to call, whereas Claridge’s is notoriously bad about waking me.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever called me to get me up for a marathon; a flight; a meeting?  Right.  On an ordinary morning, I set six alarms.  On an extraordinary morning, I ask for help.

So Strand called me at 545am Hong Kong time on Saturday morning to shout me awake, because after a long week, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to get up on my own.  And I was off.  Hours later, after probings and flight delays and traffic, I finally met my friend Lucy and a school friend of hers in the French Concession (an area that was once settled by the French, and is still has a distinct character and strange history — probably the part of the city I love most).

I love Shanghai.  Many people hate it — it grows and sprawls — in some ways, it looks remarkably like Southern California.  In the financial district, the streets are wide; the buildings are tall with recognisable names plastered atop them.  If you were brought to Shanghai blindfolded and then cast out into the light of day, you might not know you weren’t in the middle of some big American city.  But for all its arguably Western quirk, it is still Chinese.  And it is architecturally interesting; rapidly changing; aggressive; beautiful; cosmopolitan.  It seems overwhelmed with an eager desire to obscure the ugly bits but it is not always successful at that.  Shanghai, it seems, is maybe in the midst of an identity crisis.

Hey, girl, I can relate.

(From my 2008 pictures of the scale model of Shanghai – updated weekly? – from the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre)

I was in Shanghai last in 2008, with my ex-husband, who was ambivalent about the place, except for its cuisine, with which he fell madly in love.  We went to one restaurant at Xin Tian Di (Xin Tian Di is like a…Third Street Promenade?) — some newish, trendy restaurant — and we ate some traditionalish Shanghainese fish dish.  It was basically a whole white fish in a sweet-and-sour sauce.  Andrew talked about that meal for a long time after — about it being one of the most memorable dinners of his entire life; as if the whole of Shanghai could be reduced to a shopping plaza containing the first Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf I’d seen since I had left West Los Angeles and a candy-coated river trout.

When I saw him recently, he mentioned the fish again — somewhat out of the blue, since my Hong Kong trip had not yet been on the books when we spoke.  He said he had finally found a similar dish while out on a date, and he said how happy he was — both about the meal and the date.  The Xin Tian Di experience had been the second-to-last date we had ever had, and to that day I remained ambivalent about both the date and the fish.

(This is probably why I am divorced.)

But coming back to Shanghai on Saturday confirmed that I loved the city for what it was and what it wasn’t — or what it hadn’t been and what I hadn’t been.

(Irony, defined…since this was snapped on Saturday.)

At the time of the trip, I hadn’t realised that as a wife, I was still the steward of my husband’s fragile heart — even as things were failing and even if he hadn’t been the steward of mine.  I was so focused back then on the things that I didn’t have that I wasn’t a very good care-taker of the things that did belong to me.  To us.

And when things got wrecked at home, I was ultimately the same way with Frederic.  I had always been so concerned with what the addict wasn’t giving me, and wasn’t telling me, that I didn’t do my part of protecting those beautiful, fragile things he — and we– did share.

So going to Shanghai was literally a wakeup call — 545am; American Woman screaming from a British mobile phone.  I am the steward of real and fragile hearts, and there are many stewards of mine.  This moment in my life is not about what I am not giving or not getting, but it is about being close from far away; loving harsh realities; letting the past be past, no matter how good or bad the meal may have seemed at the time.

Posted in Adventures, friends, My Life in Airports, On the road again | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Photo Opportunity

Posted on April 26, 2012 by

“A man walks down the street
He says why am I soft in the middle now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard
I need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard…”

-Paul Simon, You Can Call Me Al

It is easy to get lost.

Easy to get lost on travel; in the fawning nonsense slathered on thick by service providers and the people who gather information.  It is easy to lose yourself.

It is easy to become no more than the sum of your degrees and titles and cocktail party stories.  Your very existence is reduced to anecdotal evidence of a life.  And you begin to wonder, do you want to be more?

Do I?

Who am I?

The lawyers and bankers and brokers all remark on the university degrees, and the letters before and after your name, and they whisper about the long blonde hair and your appetite for adventure.  They parrot it back, wrapped in compliments and conveniences and covered in chocolate.

But at the heart of it — at the center of that strange little truffle — who are you?  What is that?  Do they know, or care, or do you even want them to know?  Does it matter?

Are you caramel?  Peanuts?  Some strange nougat tasted then spat quickly back into a napkin?

I am soft-centered, that’s for certain.  But I live in fear of being spat out.  In more concrete terms, I am afraid of life going on without me.  I am, like any human, concerned that if people knew what was really inside, they’d pick a different candy.

To that end, on Thursday morning in Hong Kong, I stood in the foyer of an event space on a high-up floor of a skyscraper and asked the assistant at the front desk Excuse me, what is the wifi password?

The desk attendant looked at me quizzically, demurred, then at my insistence, gave it up.  She didn’t know that it was Winesday back in New York.  She didn’t know that the Women of Winesday had made plans for a girls’ night on the town to surprise me a few weeks ago, and I’d had to reply to their message with Sorry, girls, I am leaving on Thursday night for Amsterdam.  She didn’t know that life in New York was continuing even while I was out on the road.

She had just been told not to give out the password.  But I can be persistent.

A secret handshake, and a few taps on my iPhone later, I had wireless internet, and a few more taps, and Strand and Miss Mal appeared on my screen.

Eeeek, it’s working!!!  Miss Mal squealed.

It was hard for me not to squeal back.  I had to pretend to be a grown-up.  It was, after all, mid-morning for me and I was standing in the middle of an event, surrounded by other putative grown-ups.  There was no privacy; one guy stared; I smiled and waved him on.

Kids? he mouthed, and pointed at the phone, like he could totally relate.

I nodded.  It was only sort-of a lie.

Miss Mal and Strand crowded the iPhone lens, showing me the flowers Strand had brought over for Winesday.  An excessively popular patient of hers had donated them to the Winesday cause.  JM popped into view as well, waving hello.

We spoke face to face, from opposite sides of the world, for a few more moments then disconnected.  Their night was ending, and my day was at full tilt.  This transaction had been carried out in the middle of an important event, with twelve hours and thousands of miles between us.  And just moments before All That, I’d been tweeting back and forth with eee, who was at that moment on a plane, travelling between New York and Los Angeles.

Welcome to the Future; don’t get left behind.

Who am I?

I am a woman who sometimes confuses her priorities, and puts items in a funny order on her to-do list, but who rarely forgets her own soft-centeredness.  God forbid I ever stop trying to get to the middle of all of these glorious moments!  Heaven help me if I forget to savour this time; this one chance I have to get things right — and then all of the second chances that follow!

Who am I?

Later that night, in my hotel room, I dialed my father up on my iPhone and set up a FaceTime call.  We chatted about his days in Hong Kong; I flipped the screen to point the camera out over the Harbour.

Your mother and I once took high tea at a lovely hotel, he said, and there was this beautiful view, not unlike yours.  But the windows looked out over a building with a bunch of circular windows and the waiter called it The House of 1,000 Assholes.  He laughed.  That’s exactly the sort of thing my father would find funny.

I scanned the late night landscape.  It was obvious that he’d taken tea in my same hotel, because I was looking at the exactly that building.

Is that it? I asked him, turning our FaceTime conversation around.  He laughed, and said it was.  And we were both delighted, because we’d shared a moment from his Hong Kong and mine.

We hung up, and I got ready for my next call — this one work-related.

It is easy to lose yourself — especially with what I do and how I live my life.  But I am a soft-centered girl, and I’ve got to guard it as best I can.  And this life is delicious, and scary, and a little but unknowable — and meant to be protected and savoured.

Posted in Adventures, balance, friends, musings, On the road again | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Adaptation

Posted on April 24, 2012 by

What do you do when you travel?

Well, Sport, I do what everyone else does.  I pack a bag, and I go to the airport or train station, and I move between point A and point B.

No, no.  I mean, how do you handle work; who takes care of your dog; do you check bags; how do you manage it?

Ah.  The $64,000 question(s).

Well, here are the answers to questions I commonly get.

1) What do you do with Roo when you travel?

Maybe I am anthropomorphising my dog to an unattractive extent when I say that while I think Roo likes the idea of doggie daycare, I think he is overwhelmed by it, and it doesn’t suit him well.  He is…an only child.

So it makes me feel monstrously guilty to leave him at Biscuits & Bath overnight.  And it’s also painfully expensive.  I’m lucky that I have friends who love him; who are generally willing to house-sit for me, or who are willing to take him in.  This week, he’s staying with Kat & Matthew.  On Sunday, I took him downstairs to help Kat & Matthew load their car up with his crate, and Roo nearly tore off my arm thinking that Kat was leaving without him.

In other words, he’s fine.  And I live in a constant, precarious state of gratitude and jetlag.

2) How do you sleep on planes?

I am a notoriously poor sleeper…in a bed.  I can, however, sleep gloriously on a plane.  I understand that this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

My only overnight flight gripe was that I usually had to sleep wearing uncomfortable headphones because there would be so much nightnoise on the plane.  However, someone recently tweeted a link to these things called “Bedphones” – a flat pair of headphones meant to be worn to sleep and I immediately bought a pair.  While I have not been compensated to endorse these, they have changed my life.


Bedphones.  Check them out.  (Image via their site.)

I now slip these on when I snooze on a plane. I literally slept for 12 of 16 hours of the flight to Hong Kong.  I cannot say enough good things about Bedphones.  If you travel frequently, get yourself a pair.  They’re not meant for super sound quality, but they are fantastic, comfortable headphones for having tunes to block noise while you sleep, and you’ll never wake up with that awful pinch in your ears from earbuds.

3) How do you not look like crap when you arrive?

The answer to this one has many parts, and presumes that I do not look like crap when I arrive.  The first part is: water.  I typically drink an extraordinary amount of water even when I’m not travelling.  When I fly, I will drink at least 2L of water on a 6 hr flight.  I usually travel with an empty Nalgene and fill it in the lounge, and then ask the flight attendants to refill several times on the plane.

The second is: waterproof, smudgeproof mascara.

The third part is: dry shampoo and a nice brush.  I recently discovered the Klorane dry shampoo and after having tried pretty much every other dry shampoo ever made, I must say that this is the best I’ve come across.

The thing I like is that this actually smells like shampoo, not “new car scent” — which is what I think most other dry shampoos smell like.

I’m also a fan of having a nice brush.  I suppose you could have any brush you like, as long as it gets the job done.  I’ve had a Mason Pearson brush for about as long as I can remember, and I credit every single good hair day I’ve had in the last decade to it.  My brush is A Thing, but I can honestly say it is one worth the investment.

4) Do you check a bag?

When I started travelling a lot for work about three years ago, I had a bad experience on a shuttle flight between Washington and New York.  I’d over-packed, and my suitcase wouldn’t fit into the overhead compartment.  A nice, silver-haired fellow saw my predicament, and was helping me get the suitcase into the locker.  But the bag slipped and cut my hand.  I drew my hand away, and got blood all over the man helping me.  He continued to try to stow the bag as I swore and tried to stanch the flow.

The flight attendant came over and insisted that I gate-check the bag, and she and my Good Samaritan pried the bag loose from where it had been half-wedged into the overhead bin.  While she was carting my luggage off and someone else went to get me a band-aid, it struck me that the man who’d been helping me looked an awful lot like Wolf Blitzer.

As it turned out, it WAS Wolf Blitzer.

So they gate-checked the bag, and we made it to LaGuardia.  Wolf had checked a bag as well, and he and his wife and I were the only three people in baggage claim.  The wait was never-ending; we pretended as if the incident on the ground at DCA had never happened.  And life went on.

The point is:  I have since learned my lesson, and am sort-of ambivalent about checking a bag or carrying on.  While checking a bag is annoying, so is bleeding on Wolf Blitzer.

5) How do you adapt all of your appliances?

The plug question!  This is an easy one.  I have a product called the “Apple World Traveller Kit” — which Apple makes and retails for about US$40 — and it includes plugs for most countries around the world.  They just snap into your Apple products, and it’s all quite easy.  Also, my blackberry and Garmin can both charge to my computer via USB cord, so no need for a plug (or if I do use a plug, both devices use the same snap in/out adaptable prongs).

The only time any of this backfires is when I am not travelling abroad, and I am only going to, say, Washington or Los Angeles.  Then I find that my hyper-preparedness fails, and I’m the pretentious Yankee asshole adapting a British plug back into an American plug.

(Sadly, that wasn’t the first time I did that, either.)

The point is: I have found that a life on the road is a lot about adaptation; learning lessons; being nimble; moving forward.  Relying on the kindness of others, and trusting under even the unlikeliest of circumstances.  And also, it is a bit about having the right plugs.  Or at least, being able to adapt to them.

Posted in Adventures, My Life in Airports, On the road again | Tagged , | 3 Comments

An Englishman in New York

Posted on April 23, 2012 by

Another day; another hour of sitting in the British Airways lounge at JFK.

This has all become an exercise in existential roadwarriorism.

Why am I here; where is this next flight taking me?  What are we doing?  I always look the same when I do this:  skinny jeans; blazer; button up.  It is always a variation on the same theme, my travelling outfit.  Maybe my feet are in gold flats; maybe stiletto-clad this time — depending on how well my suitcase is packed and whether the shoes fit in the bag.  Maybe the blazer is blue; maybe it is black.  If I go into the office dressed like this, someone will inevitably ask Where are you going? because I only wear these clothes when I travel…and I don’t quite know why.  I have simply always been this way, and probably always will be.

Away we go.

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan and in an interesting twist of fate, my friend the Englishman came to New York and visited me last night.  Our relationship has always been one of hotels, and restaurants; occasionally, sitting down at his house or visiting his friends.  What is this; what was this?  I suppose it all tests the limits of whether men and women really can be friends.

We were supposed to go out to dinner, but instead, wound up talking at my round table.  In other words, like everyone is, he was sucked into The Vortex.  I am not sure whether it is the lack of natural light (though it was after 8pm and pouring rain, so that seems irrelevant), or the absence of true corners that makes my dining room area so irresistible to company.  People come to my apartment and they don’t leave.

Not that I mind.

So, he said, somewhat out of the blue, I test drove [a ridiculous luxury car] and I’m thinking of buying it.

Startled, I listened to him go on and on about the car.

I think it is no secret that I used to drive a ridiculous luxury car, and that I love cars, generally — the amount I knew about cars pleasantly surprised even my ex-husband, a man who had to be right about everything, and a man who used to build race cars as a hobby in college.

And the Englishman, for his part, currently drives a ridiculous luxury car.  Just not one was ridiculous as the car he was proposing to purchase.  However, being a single, successful attorney without a family of his own, he thought he could justify the purchase if he could make the numbers work.

I sat, dumbfounded.

I think you’re doing this to compensate for something!

He retorted with the wisecrack that would be expected.

No, I said, all of your friends are having babies and moving away, and you’re turning a certain age this year, and you’re trying to fill an empty space in your heart.

Do you want me to go lay down on the sofa so you can continue to analyse? he laughed.

I’m serious! I insisted, This would be different if you were really passionate about cars, and you dvr’d every episode of Top Gear, and you were doing this for that reason.  But you’re not!  You’re doing this as an eff-you to your friends.  You just don’t know it yet.

Well, if I dvr’d every episode of Top Gear, that’d be a bit obsessive, don’t you think?  And it’s just a beautiful car.

I threw my hands up in the air and pressed them to my eyebrows in the way I do when I am overwhelmed.  I gave him a long, hard look.  You’re so ambivalent about everything.  I don’t understand you.  You just like it?!  One doesn’t make a purchase like this because one thinks it’s “pretty.”

This went on and on, until we finally ordered some late-night Thai food.  He challenged me again over why I was challenging him.

It’s not that I don’t love luxury cars — I mean the car you want is objectively beautiful.  But you have a perfectly good, beautiful car right now.

Yes, but I want this new one.

But WHY?!

We were reaching impasse.  I continued to try to explain the psychological and emotional ramifications of his purchase of a fancy new car, and he continued to try and explain that his unconscious mind was in no way hurt or feeling abandoned by his friends for marrying off, moving away, having babies, and leaving him alone.

But at some point, I let something slip about my ex-Jag.

Wait.  You had a Jag?  So would this be different if I wanted to buy a Jaguar?  He said “Jaguar” in that British way that always makes me laugh.  And his voice rose an octave with mock rage as he asked the question.

Well, no.  It would be different if you were passionate about this car.  I was passionate about my Jag.

We looked at each other and laughed, our mouths full of late night Thai noodles.  The point ultimately was, a car obviously didn’t make the man (or the woman).  Sometimes, a thing was just a thing.  Sometimes, friends were just friends.  And sometimes not.  But for all my overanalysis of things, there was an equal and opposite natural force.

And also, I did have the propensity to be a hypocrite.  Just like the rest of the human race.

Then we parted ways around midnight — he went back to his midtown hotel; I slept fitfully for a few hours before donning my skinny jeans and blue blazer and heading back for the familiar wilds of JFK.

Posted in F & B, friends, Stuff and Things | Tagged , , | 1 Comment