Not All Who Wander are Lost

So, when I'm not off traveling I spend most of my time being jealous of those who ARE traveling. In this case, my Peruvian backpacking cohort is exploring the rugged terrain, beaches and intellectual tourism of glorious Puerto Rico. As much as I wish I could be there with him, he is actually doing a pretty good job of updating his own travel blog for (what I imagine is mostly my and his mother's benefit) the general amusement of all. And, you know, the fact that I get to play travel guide for him once in a while when he turns up in a new city with no set itinerary and IMs me as I'm on my way out the door for work isn't really a bad deal, either.

He has all of his adventures posted at There and Back Eventually, and any daring introverts considering a truly independent backpacker's tour of the 51st state would do well to check his posts for some real pro-tips.

This photo has been shamelessly stolen from his blog, and it covers part of an abandoned sugar mill on the Playa Grande lagoon tucked away off the mainland on the smaller island of Vieques. He has his own stories to tell about it, but apparently most of them star wild ponies and a handful of lizards, so I'm going to let the photo speak for itself. I can't imagine that my fat butt would have made the hike / bike trek out there, but I know I can't wait to look at the results when he finally comes back with a whole memory card full of new photos.

Cultivating Brick City

My good friend Laura asked me several lifetimes ago which was my favorite season. I pondered for a moment before replying "the new one." She found that suitably philosophical and grinned in that mischievous way she's mastered as we made plans to roll through the fall foliage together later that week. I'm unsure if we ever managed our autumn tumble amidst the scholastic jimjams and schedule clashes of academia, but I never forgot the sentiment our plans evoked. Something new lurked on the horizon, and we had all the time in the world to discover it.

That sense of eternal summer is fading now, along with many of my notions of "adulthood," but some things haven't changed as much as I expected. "The new one" is still my favorite season, and despite the abnormally cold spring we're having here in Brick City I am famously in love with the flooding river and half-barrels spilling daffodils around my block.

This move has been fantastic for me. I enjoy my work, at least as much as can be reasonably expected for a "social" job, and I have everything I wanted: an abundance of friends and my own one-bedroom retreat for solitude. I turned down an irresponsible (wonderful, temping, mind-bogglingly stupid) traveling spree to pick up this life of routine and bill-paying, and I can't say I regret it. Things are going very well, but I'm sure I'll miss Brice while he's off a-wandering without me.

At some point in deep-freeze of March I got the brilliant idea to start some seedlings for summer vegetables. My long-term project for this summer continues to be a low-to-moderate water usage container garden, but I've moderated the “vegetable” aspect slightly to include primarily herbs, lettuce greens and peppers with a few smatterings of shade-tolerant flowers. I'm fairly certain no amount of vigilant watering and anti-sabotage devices will allow me to grow heirloom tomatoes on a sunny Midtown sidewalk.

Two bags of potting soil, a few gallons of water, and half a dozen seed sachets later, I've got a window full of sprouts and an unfortunately cold spring during which to transplant them. I've been paralleling their development with my own in the recesses of my mind for a few weeks now – shiny new foliage, shallow roots and a nearly imperceptible list toward the sunnier side of life – and I'm finding that no matter how many metaphors I mix or Wendell Berry novels I read, there is just something fundamentally rewarding about cultivation. It escapes explanation, but all gardeners nod knowingly and embrace it.

I resolved shortly after the first few arugula sprouts popped up to grow my mind along with my plants, yet nothing I tried could convince my stubborn spinach seeds to germinate and I quickly lost interest in the metaphysical impact of gardening. But this weekend -- after my spinach finally deigned to push a spiky frond through the soil -- I dutifully bought a copy of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

That sentiment would probably be improved with a bit of exposition: five years ago Dr. Jonathan Lauer gave his First Year Seminar a list of books from which to choose one the a focus for a short paper catching glimpses of the holy in contemporary fiction. I have since read all of those books, with one glaring exception: David James Duncan's The Brothers K. It's the last piece on that list of what has been an unabashedly pleasant bit of enlightenment, and I simply can't pick it up without the obvious precursor under my belt. I've laughed, cried, read and re-read many of Jonathan's picks, always richer for the experience, but these have undoubtedly been the (somewhat surprising) best:

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham (read Walden first)

Godric by Frederick Buechner (read Reginald of Durham first)

Til We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis (read The Golden Ass [or at least Edith Hamilton' s Mythology] first)

I seriously doubt that Jonathan expected any of us to take his list of suggestions and run with it, and it took me a solid three years of doing English Major-type grunt work to fully appreciate a good book when I saw it. In fact, I was so fed up with Wordsworth (my least favorite lacustrine, loquacious poet) that I nearly didn't pick up any novel at all. Still, I was having a bad day and somehow I found myself wrapped up in the search for young Otters at dawn when the world suddenly melted away in a tragically short-lived spurt of transcendentalism. As it turns out, spinach spouts and books are never late, nor are they early; they arrive precisely when they mean to.

Writing from the Front Lines of Xmas

> rant get

Let me just preface this with a disclaimer: I am part of the problem, not part of the solution. I have multiple China patterns, enough scarves to strangle all the elves at the North Pole (I'm not getting rid of any of them) and I'm a gadget-junkie. I consume too much and give back too little. I'm from one of the most affluent places in the world but I'm broke and I owe the government money. Seriously -- there are people a LOT worse off than me living just a few miles down the road.

So what the hell is wrong with our society? Why do we need to sell 30 different styles of what is basically a long-sleeved T-shirt in 20 different colors, and why do we lose all sense of propriety when the decanter of infinite options runs dry?

I haven't worked a retail position over a major holiday since I was in high school, and -- to be fair -- I think I slept through most of those shifts. As a post-grad living in a major recession, I was thrilled to get a full-time job and start paying off student loans. But people are on the brink of absurdity, and as a person who finds a perverse thrill in the ridiculous I think I'm qualified to say that this is very quickly passing the point of amusement for all parties involved.

For anyone who has ever called the 20-something crowd the "Entitlement Generation," I encourage you to try telling a 50 year-old housewife from Alabama that the top she wanted is not available in Azalea Pink and that she will have to settle for Carnation Pink instead. I double-dog dare you. If I told a 25 year old that they couldn't have a top in Azalea Pink, do you know what they would say? "That sucks." Succinct, to-the-point and largely on-topic. Even most octogenarians would brush it off, mumble about cats/grandchildren/medicare/Florida and move on. But that 40-60 crowd?

What the hell happened to you as children?

> end rant

Tis the Season for Disappointment

So, not only did I miss the Harrisburg Zombie March AND The Rally to Restore Sanity / Fear at the end of October, it's becoming increasingly apparent to me that no manner of finagling is going to open up my schedule and wallet for this year's Anime USA convention. I'm thrilled to have a real job at the moment so I can save up for what I hope to be an early 2011 move, but this was supposed to be my first proper descent into the nerd hive-mind.

To add additional insult to injury, I had to back out on the Con's tech-supervisor. Daniel, a redheaded drinking mate of mine from college, asked me to help with the mobile tech squad in exchange for free room, board, and weekend passes. I was really looking forward to be helping behind the scenes with sound equipment and sarcasm all weekend -- if a single mic screeches or a single "that's what she said" goes unspoken, I'm going to feel personally responsible. So, if anyone out there reading this is planning on going to Anime USA this year, have fun. If anyone's planning on attending AUSA next year -- look for me! I'll be there yucking it up next to the kid with fire engine hair and a pint of Guinness in his hand.

On a marginally brighter note, I have every intention of posting my forays into interior decorating on this blog once I set up house in 2011. I'm just going to keep telling myself that every day I'm in Warren working is an extra day I have to look for work -- as opposed to taking the first bit of fluff I find -- when I finally do make that move.

And, you know, maybe I'll get around to finally making that Montreal Grand Prix post I've been putting off since summer.