Triangular circumnavigation

Location: Cambridge, MA.
Objective: Find home.
Miscellaneous: Calm sniffles with Sudafed.

Yes, it's that time again--when I fly across the country for a two-day trip to find housing in preparation for graduate school. Now I never have flown across the country for a two-day trip nor attended graduate school, but everything becomes déjà-vuey by the end of the second day when you're hopped up on antihistamines. Contrary to my cute little B&B location I'm actually attending school in Somerville (or is it Medford?) at Tufts and living ten minutes away. And oops, there goes the surprise. In the course of eight meetings yesterday I found a place and roommates that I really liked and casually committed myself to a year of their company. What's worse is that the guy of the male/female pair wasn't even there, but traveling in Boulder, CO. And don't worry they are not a pair in any way (yet) but anonymous strangers. I won't ever make the "hi we're a couple looking to fill a room" Craigslist mistake again.

Today I mailed the deposit and cancelled five housing meetings, which is the best feeling in the world when you don't even want to get out of bed at 11AM. I spent most of the day doing a work-sleep rotation and stumbled outside a couple times to find Mexican food. My bedside table looks like a recently-departed pop star's minus the syringes (hidden behind the lamp.)



Tomorrow morning I jet off to Calgary via Montréal to repose on the front porch of the family farm for a short spell. I should mention that I'll be offline so my posting schedule will remain irregular. Maybe I should mention that I have no readers too, but then you'd be miffed.

As the pro-drowsy formula kicks in I bid you all goodnight from my three-person sachel-tied red ruffly curtained room and I'll pray for more humble accomidations on the farm. Think attic with ghost of bat.

organize orange orang-utan

I struggled back to the office today to see what it felt like after 4 weeks of voyage to come back to two jobs, one which may have ended and the other which may not have started. Predictably I spent much of the day evading the clockable hours and tended to more mundane housekeeping, looking for Boston lodging for the fall and filling out medical forms for the university. Way to come back home a changed man--I'll never accomplish personal transformation before a computer screen.

As week-long Alps-related neck pain encroached upon my afternoon I desired a comfy couch and a pile of books. The heat and a couple aspirin put me into a doze but some good reading transpired afterward. The things I really want to do that take a bit more than passive attention, such as working my way through a new pop piano instruction book and sprechin' a little deutch, seem still off limits. But writing is not, and I realize I really have to start writing every day, just in case I have a grandson in 50 years who lives in a bubble and thinks my world was interesting.

Dear grandson, I promise that I'll make the world better for you and all your fellow humans and critter friends of the world, and other planets if such discoveries should be made soon. But I'm not writing to promise you a better world, just to give you a little perspective on a world very different then yours. Hence (yes I know you'll no longer have this word in your dictionary) but hence I will try to be a bit more concrete in my writing from now on so you don't have the abrasive feeling of experiencing bad abstract art, but instead a good funny tale from your old-timer granddad. Oh and here's a picture of me writing this at age 32. Yes, we didn't have 24-hour 3-D personal video recording in my time, just these crazy ear pieces for hearing external music sources.
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My uncle has been writing to his grandson, sending his diary entry and my grandmother's for the corresponding day in 1950. There was an acute dearth of pictures, but great descriptions of every day life on the farm.

Homing in on confusion

I arrived here from Boston via Paris and Geneva from Chamonix, the tourist mecca under Mont Blanc in the Alps. Here is home, but home feels like such a bad word these days. My trip lasted three-and-a-half weeks, beginning in my future home in Boston for Sarah and Oren's wedding (cousin and cousin-in-law and all around wonderful companions.) I played tourist there when I should have been shopping for my future neighborhood, but who can resist a T ride down to Quincy to learn all about the Adams? Next Air France took me to Barcelona with a courtesy dinner and two breakfasts, unheard of in American airspace. I wandered the city until my Barcelonian friend Elena came home and rescued me from bad tourist restaurants and gave me an insider's tour complete with local cheese and meats and a three-course patio lunch in here little beach town of Premia for just 10€. Next it was train time. I breezed out of Spain along the Mediteranean at 80+ mph to Montpellier, a lovely walkable town with nightlife 'til dawn and streetcars and paving stones instead of cars and asphalt. Then I jumped on a TGV to Lyon and a couple mountain trains to Chamonix.

I had no idea what lay in store for me when I began my 12 day trekking tour around Mont Blanc. I was gifted 14 other hikers and two guides, many of whom became my best friends for the duration. My roommate Ross was a one-of-kind intrepid New Yorker (New Jersey, I know Ross) who is spending the Summer conquering Europe and striking up conversation with every old man, beautiful woman, fortunate cute dog, and everyone in between. Language barriers for him are opportunities, and his camera and humor are his tools for priceless moments and a hilarious travel blog, http://rossgoround.blogspot.com/. His outlook on travel is truly inspirational and I wish him the best in Croatia and nations beyond.

The Alps trek can only be called spectacular. The views and flowers are meekly portrayed in my photos, which I'll link to here when I'm off my iPhone and back at the big keys. If there were ever a case where every penny I spent was worth it, it was this trip (and the Lasik surgery I had in '01.) Despite the stiff neck from hiking that still plagues me a week later, I wish nothing more than to be back on those gorgeous alpine passes again.









I wanted to return home and write something humorous, but this weekend I'm really in a daze trying to figure out what it is I'm doing at home. I know I have to get ready for grad school this fall, and that means planning, studying, and making some money, but I have no idea why I have to do any of that from here. Other than some expensive rent to pay I really have nothing keeping me here. My friends and family shouldn't be offended; they've seen enough of me lately and know what's best for me. I've worked for years at making this a place I like to be. I can play that game for another 6 weeks or I can fold and buy some more plane tickets.

At this point any good listener would ask me, what's really going on here? Do I feel like I'm missing out on something, do I fear my immediate and long-term future, or do I just wish my days could be as pleasant and carefree as the mindless, serene trekking of last week? I was so free of stress last week--I didn't wander around with a tight jaw; company was a given and not a luxury; I barely saw a computer and didn't have to worry about being the solitary beta male that seems to dominate my home life. The crystal ball says that I will now resume my daily trudges to the office and gym. I will waste away my evenings with a walk around the ugly neighborhood that is nicer than anything else around the city because this city is so fundamentally ugly. I won't maintain my spirit of meeting new people and talking ro strangers that Ross inspired so simplistically.

We all have our balls and chains, but what should we do when there is a rare opportunity to break free of them all, or at least check them at the airport counter? Maybe all I really need to do is stick my head up straight, stiff neck notwithstanding, smile, and keeping walking down the street with that beat-up Spanish novel that survived Europe as my makeshift dossier. I could lie down in my housemate's new hammock and read that book, or learn some German, or watch the rest of Eddie Izzard's all-French performance on YouTube. I can keep eating the pumkin bread with garlic yogurt that I bought from the Afghan guy at the farmer's market yesterday. Maybe life isn't so bad if I can keep making big plans and stay patient. I dunno.

Una idioma perdida

Sorry if you don't read the Spanish, but if you're dedicated enough to be here, you probably do have a grasp of it.

Odio decirlo, pero como siempre hice un buen rato que no hablé ni escribí en castellano. Viajaré en España por la primera vez en tres semanas. Aunque voy a pasar solo unos días en Barcelona prefiero lograr un nivel decente de una idioma que no es ingles. Supongo que me frustrará no hablar catalán, pero no puedo evitarlo. Lo importante es que utilice lo que conozca.

Tengo que limpiar el polvo de las casetas del curso avanzado del Foreign Service Institute. No se donde encontrar una grabadora pero parece que hay un curso semejante al mío en el Internet: http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/Spanish.aspx. Lo voy a examinar.

¡Hoy es el 2 de junio y hace lluvia! Dicen que va a llover un poco mañana y mucho el día siguiente. Y ahora predicen relámpagos y trueno viernes. Me hace recordar la tormenta de junio en 1995 en el día que me gradué de la escuela secundaria. Nunca se espera la lluvia aquí entre los meses de junio y agosto. ¡Que suerte!

Quiero escribir mas en español antes de mi viajé et ojala que siga el costumbré después.

let's talk musicanship

If were Ben Folds I'd be endlessly entertained by the ability to play my own songs and anything else I wanted to play. This shouldn't be construed as the start of a fantasy posting; it is rather a segway into how I can improve as a musician. I'm not trying to be a professional or even a live performer. I would like to be someone who gets better at playing the type of music I love so that when I belt out a tune at a party I am satisfied with my twenty five years of playing the piano.

Without analyzing my skills, let's just say that I'm a level 2 musician, somewhere beyond a beginner, and I want to improve over the years by a level above 2. 2 is the answer to everything, by the way. I recently spent two years learning jazz piano with a private instructor. I probably learned a lot from it, but I have difficulty applying the acquired skills to improve playing, which is what I do the most. I should be composing music and making arrangements of songs I want to play, since that's what we worked on it the lessons. But I don't do either of those things. Thus the taught type of playing didn't match what I do now, and also the genre didn't match what I do. I'm not a jazzer, I'm a pop "artist." We did work on pop a bit towards the end but it was exclusively arranging pop pieces. I need two things, I need to get better at improv and I need to find motivation to arrange and compose.

I can get help from either instructional material or a teacher. Perhaps I can find a hybrid, such as online videos of instructors that you pay to watch. These exist for guitar and for piano. They tend to be targeted to beginners, but I'll keep my eyes open for a suitable one.

The problem with being me

If I could describe to you the currents in my mind, you would probably nod with agreement. You might relate it your own currents that pulse within, swimming around your head and occasionally dipping into other organs when it's too big for your brain to contain. To describe how I feel, I start at the zero, zero, zero coordinate in my brain. The pulse goes out to my forehead and then down to my nose. It splits from there to the two sides of my jaw that stay stiff all day because they clench whenever I feel stress. Thence it shoots out a ahead of me and performs daring lunges and meager ascents all the live-long day. It drags the rest of me along with it until I get tired and fall behind. Then it patiently trots back and awaits my rejuvenation.

If I could reign in that current I would tether it to many ropes and then force it to spread in all directions in front of me, so that I might follow whatever bit of it I pleased, grabbing another reign and pulling myself left and right, like the feeling you get when you use a motor boat's velocity to accelerate you over the wake while water skiing. That terrific pull diagonally-forward leads you to a new point of braced anticipation. Though my course is inevitably set by external factors, I would like to create more the illusion of a spectrum of activity rather than the line that is reality.

It's hard for any of us to be errant, but it beats following that boring old rising and falling pulse that composes the daily rhythm which I've thus described. I need to find a way to live paragraph two. I sometimes feel it then loose it. Maybe I need to meditate, maybe I need to dance. All I know is that the minor adjustments aren't doing it for me. I'm thirty-two and I all too often feel like the sixteen-year-old who still sits in his room alone and wishes a friend would call.

Song improvisation

I'm great at singing pop songs. I know the lyrics to a couple hundred, and it's quite often that I make it all the way to the bridge before floundering on a the last verse. When I shift my hands on the piano over into improv mode, I flounder immediately. I realize just now the reason. I don't know what it is that I'm listening for. When I play pop tunes I'm trying to recreate the way my brain hears the song. Would it be possible for my brain to come up with something it wants to hear and then mimic that on the piano? Some improvists must perform from that motive; when I try to tinker around and make a noise that my brain likes I inevitably repeat the same lick to try to make my brain remember it.

I was going to use the first paragraph to segway into something more interesting, but my written improv apparently fails me the same we as the musical when my brain hasn't decided what it wishes to put to pen. Maybe I'll go diary for a paragraph or two, copying that which my brain has already observed and processed, and reproduce it in an entertaining manner.

This past weekend was my 32nd birthday. I have to say it was one of the best birthdays I've had. First off a Saturday birthday is great because it can be legitimately celebrated from Friday afternoon through Sunday, especially when that Sunday is Easter and that means that the nice restaurant on the corner has an unusual number of empty tables. The surprisingly wonderful thing about the weekend was that I got to see most of the people in my current life in several settings and altering quantities and intimacies. From hot tubs to crowded concert halls to fancy upstairs dining, it was really a varied petting zoo.

I don't worry much these days about the future. I figure as long as I'm not in prison or defending the rear flank in some crazy combat mission that I'm in pretty good shape. I suppose disease could bring me down in a hurry, but otherwise things will be just fine for me for a while. I'm especially excited about a little bit of camping momentum that started with some kayak camping a week ago and continues with some bike camping this week's end. I'm declaring a bi-monthly camping trip that migrates further and further north, following the last green grass that dies away so soon around home.