15 life tips for the unitiated, or, how to flourish as a stranger in a strange land.
April 5, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
Thirty years ago, my grandpa’s girlfriend found out he was still married, to my grandmother, who no longer lived with my grandpa. So upset at that initial “I’m married’ confession to even hear the details, this woman, who later became the woman I called “Grandma,” climbed on a bicycle and rode from his house in a rage. In tears, she pedaled furiously down the gravel driveway, and crashed. My grandpa fetched her, told her the rest of the story, and shortly after, married her, right around the time my parents married.
That was in California, near San Diego. Meanwhile, thirty years later, in San Jose…
I got a call from my mother, who had ridden my dad’s bicycle from his apartment in San Jose, pedaling furiously, also because of a confession about another woman. She was riding around town, beside herself, determined to stay at a hotel and fly back to Buffalo the next day. It was late afternoon when she called me, and after I heard her out, she said, “I’m going to go get some dinner.”
Imagining her riding back and forth between downtown San Jose and its airport, knowing my mom well enough to also know she would not return to my dad’s apartment that night, I asked her if she’d found a hotel room yet. She said no. I said, “Mom, get a hotel room. The first rule of survival is to make your shelter, even before you find food.”
She reconciled with my dad a day and a half later, but in the meantime, had a place to stay.
You’re not going to believe this, at least, not if you’ve heard me ranting about hunting, fishing, and camping, but I spent one hour of every day of my senior year of high school in a class called Outdoor Living. I needed a science credit and couldn’t fathom chemistry, so while I spent half my day surrounded by fellow over-achievers in AP English and History, I took another class with the kids who were destined for management positions at Wendy’s: the slacker science class. My teacher spent an entire unit on survival skills, and even though I hated the class, I remember a disturbing amount of it.
I hadn’t thought about it until that class, but the idea that one needs shelter more than food probably stuck in my head because I wound up later living in a lot of different, alien places. I don’t move to new cities with a boyfriend and an SUV, I move with a couple suitcases and a willingness to walk. And after doing so in Seattle, Portland, various parts of New Jersey, New York, Brooklyn, southwest England, Barcelona and now Austin, Texas, I can authoritatively call myself an expert on surviving in the non-wild wilderness we call the civilized world.
Some of the things I’ve learned, most people don’t and shouldn’t have to, because they give themselves “luxuries” like cars and familiarity. Other things, everyone should know, especially every woman, and I’m continually astounded how many don’t. So here’s a mixture of both.
- No one judges you for doing something alone. It is usually more fun to eat, shop or travel with good company. But the self-consciousness and fear that prevents most people from acting alone is largely imaginary: no one cares, and as long as there are other people within shouting distance, you’re probably safe.
- Rely on the kindness of strangers. Anyone who works at a bar, hotel, or any form of public transportation, knows from experience how to help the lost and confused. Elderly people and parents with small children are also usually trustworthy. It doesn’t matter whether you’re going to the fair or flying to Guam: tip the bartender well, trust the bellhop, and be kind to the curly-haired grandmother sitting on the bench. Also, just because you didn’t stay at that hotel doesn’t mean you can’t ask the bellhop to call you a cab like your suitcase is upstairs in room #321.
- Conversely… if you’re female and alone, it is never rude to be rude. Most well-adjusted men know where it is and is not okay to engage a strange woman in conversation. The ones that don’t are the ones you probably shouldn’t get to know, even if their biggest crime is general cluenessness. Safe zones include: Bars, hotel lobbies, Toys R Us, and gas station pumps with at least one car between you. If someone approaches you outside one of those settings, feel absolutely free to respond in one sentence, smile politely, and turn away.
- If you’re worried someone’s following you, take some advice from a Wiccan book I’ve kept for the past ten years, and turn all the way around instead of glancing furtively over your shoulder. If someone actually is following you, he might be alarmed by your confrontational pose, you won’t look as scared as you would if you kept glancing, and you’ll be in a better position to fight back. And if it was just your imagination, the only people who’ll see you do it are the pigeons.
- Lost or overwhelmed? Find a restroom. I don’t know about Morocco, but in the US, even the worst parts of town have a crowded bar, grocery store, Starbucks, or McDonald’s. Head for the stall and get your bearings. It may sound gross, but no one is going to notice you studying your map or digging frantically through your purse in the bathroom. Collect yourself and then return to the fray.
- Reminding yourself that “you can always take a cab home,” takes the stress out of most situations, as long as you keep cab fare with you, and have the number of a cab company stored in your phone.
- Don’t drink unless you can accept the worst case scenario if you have one too many and your judgment flies right out the window.
- It’s okay to go home early.
- Don’t be afraid to get lost. Some of the best love affairs, creative epitomes, and undiscovered coffee shops have been discovered when I was lost. Just be aware that it all gets a lot more stressful after dark, and/or in ouchy shoes.
- Keep the following in your purse at all times: Antibacterial handwipes (Purell won’t do it if you have actual dirt on your hands); an iPod with cheering comfort music on it; almonds (to avoid costly emergency meals when you’re too starving to take another step); and if it makes you feel better, pepper spray.
- If you look sexy, you’ll get admiration, and (maybe) sex. If you look competent, you’ll get a job, the trust of strangers, entrance into any building you want without question, and that fabulous rent-controlled sublet. I’m not advocating women hide their feminity. I’m just saying that if you look like you’ve got money in the bank, a husband, and a full three car garage, you get access. Think J. Crew instead of Victoria’s Secret.
- Pay attention to landmarks. Navigating any new place is much easier if you note the tall building that looks like an owl (Austin’s got one downtown) and the big billboard with a salon advertisement on it.
- Most bus systems can’t give change, and most bus drivers are friendlier than they look.
- Regardless of what I said earlier, it’s always okay to show a little cleavage and a big smile, if you need some help and attention.
- Serendipity is your best friend. Planning the entire experience sets you up for disappointment, and you’re liable to miss the local treasures the guidebook missed. Leave the house with one planned destination or event and leave the rest up to chance. It is very, very important than you have time to pause for the shop, restaurant, or conversation that just seems to “catch your fancy.” Following those whims creates about 97% of the magic any individual will ever need in one lifetime.
Bilbo Baggins will tell you that every good adventure is scary by definition. The important thing is to find the wizards, dwarves and enchanted mini-swords that give you the courage to take it.
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Frederick Douglass, Wamba, and Jim Halpert.
January 12, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
“I have heard men talk of the blessings of freedom,” he said to himself, “but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.” -Wamba the Jester, Ivanhoe
It took half an hour to remember what high school reading included that line, and then, to find the line itself, all thanks to Wikipedia and the Gutenberg Project.
Fate wielded its well-polished sword last week and left me, like Wamba, riding off into the sunset without a master, wondering how best to appreciate my long-sought freedom.
As readers know, I’ve been unhappy at my job for months. What you don’t know are the gory details, because I try to keep negative comments about other people to the barest minimum on my blog. Still, if you’ve made the occasional comment about “communication struggles” with your boss, and if you’ve listed her as a reason you’re so unhappy, and if your boss happens to find your blog, and if she reads all the way back to entries made in August, and if she’s already a little frustrated…
We’ll return to those not-so-hypotheticals in a second. My boss gave my coworkers and I the week between Christmas and New Year’s off, and I spent most of it alternatively dreading or mentally avoiding the fact that, come Monday, I’d have to return to work. You know how new years are- we all like to pretend we’re starting them off auspiciously. Starting mine off in what I considered an unhealthy professional relationship hardly seemed auspicious. Yet, as I bawled on my brother’s shoulder Sunday night, I was still afraid to leave.
By Monday afternoon, however, I could tell that worrying about what to do next was this close to pushing me into an OCD brainfever. It was just time to go. I also recognized that I was terrified of telling her in person, so dorky as it was, I typed up a letter of resignation to leave in her inbox after she left that night.
My coworkers went home. The sun fell outside. My boss worked in her office, me in mine, and I kept an eye on the clock- when was she going to go home so I could give her this letter?
She emerged from the office carrying a folder, pulled a chair up to my desk, and said, “I got this email linking back to your new website…”
My head-scratching began with that sentence, and didn’t end for the rest of the conversation. She was referring to the web design portfolio site I’d spent the past couple weeks building. I haven’t let anyone know about this site yet. It’s still under construction and changing daily. The odds she’d find it on a day when the links were functional are slim, but even more puzzling is where this notification email came from. I think it was a Google Analytics mishap, but the detectives are still working on the case.
My boss continued on to say that she was sorry to learn, through the blog my design site linked to, how unhappy I’d been in Buffalo. Handing me two printed entries, she said, “Here are reasons I think it’s no longer appropriate for you to work at Young Audiences.” She handed me this entry, and this one.
Even though I disagree with my boss’s argument that the blogs are a fireable offense, I had no desire to work for someone that eager for me to leave. And, I knew better than to look a gift blog in the mouth. “I’m going to Seattle,” I said, “I’m not sure how you wanted to end this, but…”
We agreed that I would work through Friday and stick to the Seattle story as the official one. But isn’t it so ironic, or coincidental, or bizarre to find your boss approach you with reasons she thinks you should leave, on the day you’re preparing to put an “I’m leaving” letter in her inbox?
Yeah, I thought so too.
Later that week, I worked at my desk while my boss and coworker met with a potential new teaching artist in the other office. He was presenting his proposed program on the Underground Railroad. An actor, his voice carried easily from the next office, and I listened as I finished up instructions to my coworkers on how to carry out my responsibilities once I left. His conversation moved from the history of slavery, to an anecdote about a friend who had had a wonderful idea for how to improve a struggling neighborhood in Buffalo. He wasn’t able to carry it out, however, because the “powers that be” had threatened him- the idea would have lessened their own power over the neighborhood. I didn’t catch whether the friend had been threatened with losing his job, or worse, but it prevented him from carrying out an idea both just and helpful to others.
“Is he free?” the actor asked my boss. He compared this friend to Frederick Douglass, adding that the moment Douglass decided to seek liberation was his moment of liberation. Not the moment Douglass actually stepped on free ground, but before that, when he decided to disagree with the entire social structure of Southern slavery. His friend, the actor said, had not made that decision- he kept his idea to himself out of respect to or fear of the powers that be. He had not freed himself to do what he thought was right.
I dug this actor’s point. You don’t need to be shackled to someone to be his slave. I was a slave for months, to fear, doubt and anger. Anger that a woman I had considered a friend now treated me and my coworkers with such disrespect. Doubt that maybe I deserved a few of her snipes and jabs, or was being overly sensitive. And fear that if I left my job in this economy, I’d never find another one.
That Sunday night, before I wrote the letter of resignation, crying on my brother’s shoulder, he said, “Mom’s got money, I’ve got money, you’ve got money. We’ve got your back.” And I knew they did. As much as I’ve complained about sharing an apartment with them, I did walk into work Monday morning knowing that our living expenses were low enough, they were generous enough, they loved me enough, that I wasn’t going to wind up living in a cardboard box if I couldn’t find another job right away.
Love and faith can be big liberators.
So, I’m free. Like Wamba, I do wonder what to do with it. Plans still evade me. But unlike Wamba, I’m not worried. I was worried. For months. Fortunately, coincidences, fateful twists, acts of God, timing like that makes worrying seem so damn irrelevant. It’s time to go, and I’m grateful that everyone- even Google Analytics- stepped in to remind me of that.
The future will probably take care of itself, and meanwhile, I gotta admit, I’m kind of proud of my blog.
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home for the holidays, part one, or, the power of acception.
December 15, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Thursday afternoon I flew from Buffalo to Chicago, with a mere half-hour layover before boarding a flight to Seattle. I’m not sure why I booked such an optimistic schedule. We were held up in Buffalo waiting for a pilot, and then de-icing the wings, and landed in Chicago half an hour after my flight to Seattle had departed. It was the last flight of the evening, so the ticket agent rescheduled my flight to the next morning, and gave me a few flyers for local hotel brokers.
Alone in a strange city late at night, I promptly did what any sane person would do: order a Mickey Dees Angus mushroom and Swiss burger. Restored by the fragrance of fake meat, I called the number on the flyer. The broker gave me a confirmation number for a Doubletree room twenty minutes from the airport, and told me the hotel shuttle arrived every hour on the hour outside “Door number three.”
I went downstairs, wondering if my luggage was still in Chicago. Collaring an airport employee, I was sent over to the Southwest office, where a woman informed me that the suitcases were held in a high security area. The luggage dudes were understaffed, basically, so even if she requested them, it could take two to four hours. Wilting at the thought of boarding the plane the next morning in what I was wearing, I shuffled outside to wait for the shuttle.
I had left my down-filled coat in Buffalo and brought a lighter weight Seattle-worthy coat instead. It was nine degrees in Chicago. Shuttles came and went, but none were mine. Another shuttle driver and the red-coated Commander of Taxis urged me to return to the airport and use the courtesy phone to call the hotel. Doing so, I was told by the Doubletree employee, “Oh, no, we don’t send it out unless it’s requested. But I’ll let me him know. He’ll be there in forty to forty-five minutes.”
“Are you kidding?!” I squealed.
“That’s how it…”
“Never mind, I’ll get a taxi,” I said, slamming the phone back in the cradle. Muttering to myself, I went back out Door Number Three, to be shoved by the Taxi Commander into a cab.
The cab driver had a mysterious, thick accent and friendly manner that was not immediately reciprocated. Still scowling to myself at the inconvenience and cost of having to stay at a hotel of unknown quality, my luggage-less-ness, Woman A telling me false information and Woman B wanting me to wait another hour at the airport, I did not feel like chatting.
We drove past fancy strip malls, and then poorly-lit ones, my concern about the quality of the hotel we were bound for growing. The driver kept trying to start a conversation. I relented, telling him about missing the flight, that I was from Buffalo. I don’t remember what I said next, but it was a short, passing remark about how I wasn’t sure how I’d wound up living there.
Quick flashback. Two nights before, my brother told me he’d read my last blog and found it, as my entries have been for the past couple months, “Good but… depressing.” I told him I blogged less often these days because I had a hard time describing life in Buffalo positively. But that night I got out my journal and attempted to write a rough draft explanation of the benefits of living in Suckallo, the strange challenge (and therefore opportunity for growth) it presented. I wrote several versions, never quite circling in on my point. What I clarified instead was that the series of events leading my present circumstances was just… plain… odd.
I’m in England when my mom calls in tears- my dad’s cheated on her and doesn’t want to patch things up. I convince her to come to England for an adventure. She gets on a plane. She’s questioned at the airport, accidentally reveals my status as an evil illegal alien in the country, and is denied entry. I follow a week later. My brother puts her up in Buffalo, but is working full time and getting worn out coming home to a tear-soaked mother. I could interview for a job in NYC, or go with her to Seattle to stay with her parents for a while. She refuses to go without me. So instead of going back to Manhattan to look for work I follow her to Grandma and Grandpa’s. We return to Buffalo a month later anyway. I’m engaged to an Englishman who wants to move here, but won’t discuss how or when. My mom and I go to Vegas, convinced she should get a divorce right now. We return to Buffalo. Mr. Hotness asks me to wait for him there. So I get a part-time job to pass the time. I get tired of waiting for him. My mom and brother fly back to Oregon to sell my parents’ house. I’m left by myself in Buffalo, and need a full-time job to support myself, so I take on more responsibilities at work. I’m promoted. My mom and brother return from Oregon. They can’t find apartments here they like, so we continue to live together. My boss and I struggle to communicate or even get along. I start looking into ways to leave Buffalo, as an au pair or in a volunteer home stay in Europe. When those options look unworkable, I try getting an apartment in a prettier area outside Buffalo. I discover prettiness in Western New York is often walled in by wind and snow, and besides, another year at this job sounds wretched. The next thing you know, it’s December, and I’ve lived in Buffalo a year, and have absolutely no idea what’s going on.
I wanted to know whose fault it all was. Mine? Bad karma? Family? The cat?
So I’m sitting there in that cab gazing out the window at the passing Targets and burger joints, and mutter something to the cab driver about how random it is that I live in B-Flo. He says, “I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes you find yourself in this strange place, and you look around and think, ‘How did I get here?’ This odd series of events just happen, all these weird things, and there’s no explanation for it all. It’s like, whatever your belief is, God or fate or whatever, something is pushing you.”
I stare at his right ear through the open window into the front seat. He’s just summed up the thought process I’ve been running for the past two days.
“Believe me, after I turned forty I realized, it is better to be easygoing. I don’t worry now. Acception,” he said, meaning “acceptance,” “Acception is the only way. It is out of your hands.”
Some part of my tired brain registered that this man was probably talking a really weird series of events- like being a Turkish neurosurgeon who finds himself fleeing some extremist group of his brother’s, and lands in Chicago because his mother’s second cousin lives there, and gets this curvaceous but talkative waitress pregnant, and the next thing he knows, is supporting fourteen Turkish-Irish kids as a cab driver. Or something.
The conversation was slowly restoring my will to live, my head lifting slightly from the back of the chair as I said, “It’s like when we were sitting at the Buffalo airport waiting for them to de-ice. I knew we were going to miss my connecting flight. And I was getting more and more stressed out until I realized, my getting stressed isn’t going to make any difference. Might as well relax. It’s all out of your hands.”
“Acception,” he agreed. “It’s the only way to look at things.”
We continued along this vein until we pulled up in front of the Doubletree. After a heartfelt goodbye I climbed out of the cab with my two suitcases, walked up to the front desk, and told the busty woman at the counter, “I have to apologize, I don’t know who I talked to, but I called a while ago from the airport and I did something I never do, I let stress get the better of me, and I was so rude-”
“You’re the taxi lady,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, nodding, “I spoke to you? I am so sorry…”
Using the policy of “acception” herself, she asked me about my flight, gave me two extra bottles of everything: shampoo, face wash, lotion, a razor, man’s deodorant (“but deodorant is deodorant”), chocolate chip cookies, and a toothbrush. She and her fellow front desk agent worked out the next morning’s schedule for me: wake up call at 6:20, order room service breakfast, catch the 7am shuttle back to the airport.
The hotel had been remodeled the year before; I had clearly gotten a steal at eighty dollars. Elegant decor, a hot shower, some TV, and a pillowtop bed wrapped me up in a warm embrace. The next morning I turned on an episode of the Arthur cartoon, made a cup of Wolfgang Puck coffee, ate a delicious breakfast, put on the bare minimum of yesterday’s clothes, hopped on the shuttle, and returned to the airport.
If I had caught my flight the night before, I would have slept or read through it, arriving late that night, keeping my relatives up so they could fetch me at the airport, probably feeling pretty scratchy the next day. Instead, I spent the four hour flight talking nearly non-stop to a Buffalo pilot who lives up the street from me, and a girl covered in piercings, on her way to Seattle to become a live-in nanny. Seriously. The flight flew by, with political debates, arguments about whether the pilot looked good in orange, and exchanges of family sagas.
I landed bright-eyed and bushy tailed, collected my suitcases, and walked out to a balmy morning, where my aunt, cousin and her little boy waited to pick me up. I desperately craved my flat iron, but other than that, I was in high spirits. I’d been revived by a good night’s sleep, some four-star treatment, fun conversation on the plane, and this guy of mysterious provenance, reminding me that if you can’t figure out what the heck is going on… it’s probably beyond your scope of understanding.
Now I know three things: it’s no one’s fault, my life is a lot more normal than a lot of cab drivers, and acception works.
