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Brief Dispatch

Hello, Blog. We meet again.

Yes, I have decided to eventually convert to an email newsletter format, doddering old 28-year-old that I am, but only after things cool down a bit. Life has been much too busy of late. In the interim, I'll still post here now and again, I'll dabble. Oh Blog, you are reliable and long-suffering.  If my Blog and I had been in a relationship, we'd now be at the point of intermittent, non-committal late-night text messages. My Blog would be like, "...You up? ..............?"

At the moment, my freelance grab-bag overfloweth. I have social media work, and technical editing work, and journalism work, and proofing work, and too much of it. And too little time to write my fictions. Right now, my fictions are commiserating with Blog. Probably talking mad trash about me.

Thanks to my handy boyfriend, I've been beamed up into the low-stress and relatively lucrative world of advertising agency proofing. Last fall I went camping on an illegal pot farm, there were guns and there was a giant rainstorm and I was somewhat terrified the hillside I was sleeping on would slough away (wouldn't have been the first pot-farming induced mudslide). I made a thousand dollars on that story. Last week I sat in a cubicle, read the Internet, and intermittently inserted commas into PowerPoints. I made more than a thousand dollars. It's been a revelation. 

Not really. Obviously, there are multitudinous ways to make money that are easier than journalism. I'm happy I've found one that will (hopefully) continue to take me on an intermittent basis so I can keep doing my own thing the rest of the time.

It was weird to be back in a cubicle. Actually, I don't think I've ever had a cubicle before. The newsrooms I worked in were all open-plan. In Shanghai we worked in an old lane house. But I haven't worked in any office setting since the end of 2012(!). Good for me. I hadn't thought of it before, but just now that feels like an accomplishment.

Actually being in office was sort of anthropologically interesting. Here are some stray observations:

One day I couldn't go out for lunch because we were waiting on documents so I went to the lunch wagon and paid $9 for what I thought would be a pulled pork wrap. The "pulled pork" was saitan - which is a weird tofu thing. It was sweet and horrible. There were probably chemicals in it to keep the workers from revolting.

This week I proofread a 50-page stack of resumes for a job proposal (so, now you know the pot farm was way more entertaining). Lots of found poetry in those pages. Here's one: "executional silos of skills." So beautiful, but what does it mean?! 

I'm sure anthropologists have actually studied this, but there seems to be pride taken in how difficult it is to explain one's job. I think most jobs can be simplified down to an explanation that would suit your average 9-year-old. Unless you're an astrophysicist, I should be able to understand what you do within 30 seconds. And even if you are an astrophysicist, that Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty dang good at elucidating the mysteries of the universe!

Once I got hungry and bought Doritos at the vending machine. I ate them at my desk. Very loud. Will not repeat.

Had to work until 3am one night, so they sent me home with, no, not a taxi, but "car service." A black sedan with leather seats picked me up in midtown and delivered me straight home to Brooklyn. I didn't have to pay and I pretty much felt like the Wolf of Wall Street. Except, you know, not cheating, just cleaning up the grammar in PowerPoints.

I missed sunlight. The office is huge and the proofing corner doesn't have windows. It made me appreciate my very sunny apartment, usually I don't have to turn the lights on at home until after 4pm.

If your stomach is crazy grumbling - can the person in the adjacent cubicle hear it? Not an observation, real question.

Requisite Monthly Blog

Hello, dear reader. February is always the coldest, darkest month. Maybe not scientifically, or whatever. But I remember even growing up in Alaska, it always seemed like the worst of winter. Same is true in Brooklyn.

February has been extremely busy. I have too much work at the moment, which I have to remind myself is a good problem to have. On a not-out-of-the-ordinary day I might spend the morning chatting with someone who makes organic marijuana-infused jam, then I'll spend an hour or so tweeting about fancy home products, and then I'll spend the afternoon on some dull writing about multinational insurance companies. Ageh. The hope is that this situation will distill into one or two reliable long-term projects, and that I will free up my time to write fun stuff. I also had a couple pieces published this month. You can read them here and here. 

Last week a friend visited from Taiwan, so I got to play tourist four a few days. Over the weekend, the three of us visited Niagara Falls (pictures to come). On Thursday we stood outside for 90 minutes waiting for the ceremonial new year's fireworks in Chinatown. Before this week, my friend had never even seen snow, so I was thoroughly impressed with her stamina.

I'm thinking about retiring this blog. Although the idea makes me really sad for some reason. Alas - blogs are a dated format in this present era of digital communication (social media, ftw!). If I decide to do so, I'll keep the domain and it will keep existing, it just wont be updated. I like it as a record of my wayward youth, erm, travels.

If I did so, I wouldn't stop writing about myself, but I'm thinking of perhaps switching to a family e-newsletter (and a few friends) format. I think this blog was probably most entertaining when I was in Taiwan. Partially, it was all new back then. And blogs were an energetic platform. Also, I mainly write here for family (and a few friends), i.e. the people who are at least mildly interested in the quotidian moi. A more private mode of communication feels more appropriate at this juncture. 

Some of you are probably thinking newsletter???? Okay, grandma! But over the last year I've noticed that Twitter/Facebook/et. al. feels like a fire hose of information shooting past my head every day and sometimes I catch something funny and interesting, and sometimes I miss the important stuff. It all feels too impersonal. I like the idea of writing for a small group. 

If you've got a strong opinion either way, shoot me an email or a Facebook message. 

"Blizzard"

We bought flashlights, candles, beer, and ramen packets. We filled the bathtub with water. And then...we got, like, 4 inches.

Nevertheless, the subway was shut down and all non-emergency vehicles were ordered off the streets by 11p.m. Monday night. Last night someone told me people were playing beer pong in the street in the East Village. That sounds fun.

Still, fun to go out Tuesday morning when there was no traffic and the streets were blanketed. Here's my neighborhood post-"storm."

Nothing the Golf can't handle

Doing Dartmouth

Last weekend we drove to New Hampshire to see my cousin who seems to have landed the best of both worlds: a research job at an Ivy located in an adorable New England town. Not a lot of fancy jobs in small towns these days, we're happy/proud of him.

Here we're walking around Brook's big old backyard of his centuries-old farmhouse. This was my first time driving north of New York City. On the drive over, I added three more states to the tally of ones I've been to (Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts). As a West Coaster, I'm not sure the novelty of being able to drive in five states in one day will ever wear off.

The small towns here are so different from the ones I know in the West. They all have pretty, steepled churches, central greens, and all kinds of lovely old houses. As we drove through the States, we also drove through accents. Those too are much more concentrated here. 

On Sunday, we walked all around the Dartmouth area, which made me want to be an undergrad again, carrying around a bunch of books and coffee, studying the weekend away. 

In the afternoon we stopped by a bar for beer and a scotch egg, and admired all the post-church bar goers in their sport coats and knit sweaters. Definitely preppier Sunday attire than how we do in Oregon.

We went out to Mexican food in the evening and caught the end of the Seahawks-Packers game from the fourth quarter onwards, easily the most exciting football I've ever seen. And it was nice to be three Northwesterners celebrating in Patriots territory...

Also on Sunday, we toured this old Shaker house (compound?) in Enfield, New Hampshire. Before last weekend, I mostly only knew Shakers as celibate makers of nice furniture. (There are only three of them left now). 

The docent told us how industrious they once were and what a boon to the local economy all the Shaker activity was. Shakers were also exceptionally progressive about gender roles, design, and adopting new technology - not things I expected to hear about a strict religious sect.

From what the guide said, their numbers started to wane around the Industrial Revolution, when new technology meant there was less to be gained from communal living. 

More of Brook's backyard

James photobombing my nature shot.

It was a fun trip. We're excited to get out see more of this part of the country.

Holidays, Revisited

This weekend we are headed to New Hampshire to see my cousin, ye olde Dartmouth professor. And I suspect I will have more photos to post from that excursion, and can thus no longer delay my Christmas/New Year recap. See below, you can probably deduce what's Oregon and what's Alaska:

It was good to be back in Anchorage for the first time in 6 years. I don't have many friends left there, but the ones who are still around have pretty cool jobs. One is a bush pilot. One is a petroleum engineer; she gets to travel a lot. 

While waiting for my flight up in Portland, I looked around the gate and realized how un-Alaskan I look these days with my peacoat and ankle boots. Alaskans are casual in the extreme. Driving around Anchorage, I was reminded of a thing I saw in Alaska as a kid and still exists today -- which is middle-aged women in sweats or jeans and loose t-shirts, no coat, who do their errands in apparel the rest of the country would only deem appropriate for warmer climes. 

I felt even more like a tourist once I was on the ground and had the urge to do all the tourist things: Look through art galleries for native art (none of which I could afford); we drove out to Girdwood one day and I made James pull over several times to take photos (but they turned out okay, right?!).

But I'm not a tourist. In fact, one evening James' family and I all went over to someone else's house for a big multi-family dinner. A woman who'd married into the family looked so familiar, but I couldn't place her. Finally I worked up the courage to ask her for the run down (who are your siblings? where'd you go to school?) Turns out, we'd gone to elementary school together. In fact, we were in the same class for a whole year and I attended her birthday sleepover. I could remember all sorts of strange facts about her, once I knew her maiden name - like that during sixth grade her family had vacationed to Fiji. Anchorage is still a small town.

2014 Reviewed

Hoo boy, it's almost the middle of January. Here I go:

Austin: 8 months

New York: 2.5 months

Florence, Oregon: 4 weeks

Humboldt County, Calif.: 2 weeks

Marfa: 1 weekend

San Antonio: 1 night

New Orleans: 3 days

Alaska: 3 weeks in summer, 4 days in winter

Tennessee: 1 night

Georgia: 1 night

Virginia: 1 night

Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey: driving time

Mexico: shore time on 4-day cruise from Texas

I am possibly forgetting one state from our big moving drive.

Things that happened:

Freelanced for a full year

Went sailing in southeast Alaska

Camped on a pot farm

Published in print for the first time since 2012

Ate a lot of breakfast tacos

Took improv classes

Saw a lot of music and comedy

Went floating in San Marcos

Did a fair amount of yoga

Read Middlemarch

Moved to New York

Joined writing group(s)

Went back to Anchorage for the first time in 6 years

Finished a draft of a novel

Rolled the dice one more time on grad school 

Crashed a small group lecture by Salman Rushdie

Randomly sat next to someone on the New York subway, complimented her on her Feiyue sneakers, realized we knew each other from Shanghai

Sometimes freelancing was stressful and hard. I'm still not comfortable about the stability of my situation, but it's a world better than where I was a year ago. And freelancing allowed me to travel a ton this past year, something I hadn't expected, but was awesome. 

After my piece in California Sunday Magazine, a couple people reached out to me about working with me. Up until this point, it's been a whooole lotta cold pitching. Although I am now 28, my first year back in the US felt sort of like being fresh out of college again since I came back with no network, an unknown quantity. I am still always telling everyone I may need to get a day job, but I am also more optimistic about freelancing evolving into a long-term thing. 

2014 was my first full year back in the US. I had a lot of fun being a tourist in my own country, I feel more engaged with what's going on here now, and I'm excited to be living in New York. I saw friends from high school I haven't seen in many years. My best friend is getting married this year, and I'm happy I'll be around to celebrate. 

2014 Resolutions Revisited

1. Eat right and exercise (I did fine? I guess? Barring serious health problems, I'm less interested in seeing this as something to "work on" (damn you, pervasive culture of women's magazines!) I exercise sometimes and I like vegetables, some people would probably say I drink too much coffee, but whatever.)

2. Curate what I read better. (I read about a dozen books last year and a ton of short stories. I still probably waste too much time online, but I spend less time reading stuff on Facebook now because I find it so overwhelming. I realized this year that even friends I keep in close contact with miss my infrequent Facebook updates, so it doesn't even seem like a very good platform for keeping up with people.)

3. Finish the novel (I finished a draft? I think I was operating under the delusion I would be done with it. Maybe this year.) 

4. Write diligently (I could've been better. But I did a lot.)

2015 Resolutions

1. Make more money: I would love to believe I'm exiting the bumbling beginning phase of freelancing. I hope this year to get to a point where I'm doing money like an adult, i.e. saving some of it.

2. Writer better things: Fiction and Non-fiction.

3. Get better at cooking Chinese food, so I don't have to drop $50 every time I want a proper Sichuan dinner.

4. Pick up the scrapbooking habit I dropped in high school. I've traveled so much, but it's no fun revisiting pictures on the computer. 

5. Explore the Northeast. We're going to see my cousin in New Hampshire this weekend. We want to go to Maine and Niagara Falls, we hear the train ride up to Montreal is beautiful in autumn. There's a lot to see. 

--

leslie-writes.com

'Tis the Season in Manhattan

I don't go to Manhattan that often, no need to. James goes there every weekday, but he was still a good sport last weekend and accompanied me to check out the Rockefeller tree and other seasonal festivity. 

So, window shopping: The windows at the big department stores here are so tricked out this time of year there are roped-off lines to herd people past them. (We did not stand in these lines, content to just see the displays from afar.)

I've never been a huge rom-com watcher, even still sometimes when I go into the city, or the night we went to look at the skyline from Dumbo, sometimes I feel this giddy sense of nostalgia which I can only attribute to the sense of physically stepping into this world I'd only seen in movies for the first 28 years of my life (yes, the first time I ever came here was September). 

We also went to Ikea last weekend and our apartment is mostly furnished now. We love it.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Holiday Horror

This has already been recounted on other family blogs, but for the record herein I will explain my role in a, hmm how shall we say, a very memorable Thanksgiving. 

Something you need to know up top: I am very, very cavalier about eating raw eggs. I remember making cake with my mom as a little kid and she was like, "don't eat the batter! you'll get sick!" But...I'm a kid. I can't help but eat the batter. Though usually I'd sneak just a little bit, because when you're 6 or so you don't have a sense of how sickness happens and the logic "a little probably wont hurt" suffices. Then, when I was slightly older, I had a babysitter and we made a box cake and she was totally cool with me eating batter. She said when she made cake with her mom they'd eat like HALF the batter before it went into the oven. I recognize this now as exaggeration, but at the time I took it as carte blanche to eat all the raw egg I wanted. 

I guess you could say the babysitter left a lasting impression. Now I eat all the uncooked things - steak, fish, eggs. Life is too short not to eat everything. My friend told me about a restaurant in San Francisco that serves sashimi chicken, I might draw the line there. Maybe.

However, this is a deeply personal gastronomic choice and not a decision one should make on behalf of say a very large holiday dinner party. One that probably includes pretty much every stripe of person listed in the CDC's increased risk group. 

This Thanksgiving, I rolled those dice.

I made cesar salad, the way I always do, with a raw egg. I didn't even think twice about it. Really, I didn't think about it at all. Nor did I tell anyone. It was delicious, most everyone ate it, it ran out before the last couple folks could get through the buffet line. Lucky them.

About 24 hours later, my cousin Meghan was the first to go down. She mistakenly blamed barbecue oysters she'd had for lunch. We all felt bad for her and played Scrabble without her.

Sometime around 2 am Saturday morning I started to not feel so good myself. I knew I was on the verge of bad bodily things happening so I went to the bathroom. Regrettably, I was too tired to think strategically about what was maybe, probably about to happen. If I'd been thinking strategically, I might have sat down in the usual place and picked up the trash can. I did not sit down in the usual place. Instead, I hugged the toilet bowl. Big, big mistake.

I woke up the next morning and learned six other people were sick. Two more people got sick later Saturday. I took out 10 people, including myself, with a single egg. 

In consideration of the mass pain, inconvenience and holiday-weekend-ruining I wreaked on so many people, this is probably the worst thing I've ever done. Top five, at least.

Later in the weekend, when I was feeling somewhat better, I inspected the bathroom where I did not take appropriate strategic action. If you've ever watched a crime procedural, you've probably seen a detective, combing over the scene of the crime, looking for clues that the perpetrator left after a hasty clean up. In this fall's Gone Girl, there are the two drops of blood spatter over the kitchen range. And I'll end by saying I'm glad I gave the bathroom a second pass.

If you're reading this and I haven't apologized to you yet, I am sorry. Have I learned my lesson? Absolutely, I will never serve raw egg to unwitting dinner guests again. First thing I cooked when James and I made it back to New York? Carbonara. The kind where you put the raw egg into the cooked pasta. Because YOLO.

On Pot Farming

In October I spent two weeks in Humboldt County and several nights camping on a marijuana farm. The story came out in California Sunday Magazine today. If you happened to be a California newspaper subscriber living in an affluent zip code, you might be able to read me in print today! All other riffraff, here's a link. 

Important detail not included in story: I had to wash my yoga pants five times to get the skunk out. 

Also, Humboldt is awesome. I got really lucky with a friend I met while hiking in Burma who hooked me up with his mom's empty beach house in Arcata while I was reporting. Most nights in Arcata I'd walk over to his place, 5 minutes from the beach house, and we'd have beers and talk about Humboldt. 

Marijuana really seems like beer there, people are casual about it, and in turn it seems less 'edgy,' it's just whatever if you smoke or not. Such a huge cultural divide from here in New York - where they only just approved medical marijuana, and only for a strict list of conditions. In Humboldt, the question isn't if but how you are connected to the industry. 

My friend in Arcata is into rapping. One night he brought another rapper over to jam, plus a French singer-clarinetist who was in town to trim showed up too. I told the group about harvesting pot at 1 a.m. on this farm (the growers were rushing to beat the rain) and was subsequently treated to a freestyle session about my harvest experience. That was cool. Naturally, there was a pipe going around.

Legalization is necessary for the environment, to reduce violent crime related to the black market, to relieve sick people, and because people should be free to get high. But the most pressing reason to legalize is to do away with the criminalization that disproportionately affects people of color. Black people are four times as likely as whites to be arrested for possession despite similar usage rates. That disparity exists even in states with small minority populations. Here in New York, black people are nine times more likely to be arrested for possession, according to the NYCLU. 

Thankfully, NYPD stopped arresting in favor of ticketing last month. Nevertheless, we have a racist justice system. Fact. Not opinion. This is one small, easy and obvious way to make it better.

End rant.

Horror Story

So last night James and I were laying in bed on our air mattress watching a horror movie. It's called Resolution and is about a guy who goes to a spooky cabin to try and get his buddy off drugs but  all these creepy things start happening.

Guess what else is creepy?

At a quiet part of the movie I hear a rustling noise ... coming from our room!

I tell James and he pauses the movie so we can both listen. He hears it too and gets up, because this is the part of our lives that follows the constructions of genre film: If there's a noise in the night, I'll be damned if I'm the one who's going to get up and check on it.

James peers over a stack of shopping bags holding my clothes and says something like, "you're right" and then tells me he has to take one of the bags outside. I hand him his sweatshirt and he departs.

If I were a better person, I would've followed him outside, but instead I stayed put on our slowly-deflating air mattress, clutched the comforter around my shoulders and listened for more intruders. Feeling a little bit like crying...

He went out on our stoop and started pulling my clutches and scarves out of this bag a piece at a time until the mouse realized, "oh shit, I gotta get out of here." and spun in a circle and jumped out.

"You're going to want to wash this stuff," he said when he returned.

Reader, I'm glad I didn't actually see this. It would have been too much for my tender constitution.

It doesn't look as if there's poo poo threaded through my accessories, but who knows, mice shit everywhere they go, so I'll wash it all anyways.

I was operating under the comforting delusion that our sublet only had one mouse and it resided primarily behind the stove. From now on we're going to keep the bedroom door closed. The scariest thing though is I only heard it because there was a plastic bag on top of the canvas bag he was in, and he was pushing up against it to make the noise. What if he'd been somewhere else, somewhere quieter?!

The movie was pretty good, if you're looking for a Halloween-time flick, at least as much of it as I saw, I fell asleep before the end, which would've never happened if I didn't have James around to take care of the mice. I guess now I can never leave him.
***
And now for a status update, because I can feel the curious family emails pouring in already: Yes, we're still subletting, but probably only for a few more weeks - we'll be in our own place by the beginning of December, latest. James will go from full-time freelancer to full-time employee Nov. 1 at his work (yay!). I'm still doing four things at once, I don't know if I can sustain this freelance thing in New York, but I do have a magazine article coming out soonish that I'm excited about. Stay tuned!

We Live in New York and I am 28

Either of those points would be newsworthy enough to have warranted its own post (at least in the world of Under Sundog!), but between the hubbub of moving, a full freelance load and other assorted life-business - making time is tough.

So 28. The twilight of my twenties! I've outlived a whole bunch of rock stars! I think I'm officially to old to ever be a Bond girl. Boo-hoo.

This year went by so fast it's almost scary, probably because so many things changed and I was never in one place too long.

Some things I did when I was 27:

Published a giant article on North Korean kidnappings

Took the Trans-Siberian

Visited Marfa and New Orleans

Moved to Austin

Wrote an essay on censorship, and a bunch of tech articles

Ate a lot of barbecue

Saw a lot of comedy

Took three improv classes

Finished a (very rough) draft of a novel

Spent two weeks on a sailboat in Southeast Alaska

Moved to New York (three days before turning 28!)

It wasn't easy transition into freelancing, but it's getting better and I'm leaps ahead of where I was 10 months ago. All told, it was sort of a strange year. Repatriating was kind of like being fresh out of school again. I felt young, or really I felt too old for the scrappy things I was/am doing. But I feel older too. I think I'm a more educated and empathetic person than when I graduated six (and a half!) years ago.

So New York. I really like it here. Not oh-my-gawd-I'm-gonna-live-here-forever like, but more this-will-be-really-fun-for-a-few-years like. I'd never though I'd live here, but I enjoy how life continues to surprise me. 

Why do I like it here? The diversity is incredible. We live in a Caribbean and Jewish neighborhood, we're not terribly far from Chinatown, we've had Asian food almost every other day since moving here. We finagled our way into a Lexus party during fashion week. I used to think LA was like a microcosm of the world, but New York is more so. And, and - I've had better Chinese food than anything I've had since leaving China. Thank you, God.

Book stuff: In our first week here, I dragged James to three literary events. I went to an online poetry class meet-up and I joined a fiction workshop. I've been in love with books since I learned how to read, and this is the first time I've been in a city that feels like it cares about writing as much as I do.

On my actual birthday (three weeks ago already, ack!): the Penske truck we split with another couple arrived. Amazingly, most of what James and I own fits in 1/6th of a Penske truck...and most of it is his! We helped the other couple put their stuff in storage, and then the four of us went to iHop (we were pretty, pretty far out in Brooklyn - the place even had a big parking lot) and we all ordered the eggs and hash combo. The waiters sang for me and I got a lollipop.

That was also the night of the Lexus party. So to celebrate 28, I also had 3 classy and free cocktails and felt incredibly provincial surrounded by models and fashion people. I could literally see the event photographers circling, taking a look at James and I, then moving on, like "Nah, not worth it." Ha ha!

Austin to Brooklyn

Our car went through 11 states in four days. We live in Crown Heights, which is in Brooklyn, now. I'm at the Brooklyn Public Library now because nobody has air conditioning in the city and it's too hot right now. I've been a New Yorker (lols) for almost 24 hours.

I have a plate full of freelance work at the moment, but I need to blog now before I start forgetting the trip. I'm probably already forgetting parts of it.

Moving out of our apartment was horrible for all the usual reasons. Heat. Packing. Stress. Then we spent a strange few days in limbo, sleeping in a friend's living room, before we left Austin Friday morning.

On the way out of Austin, James took an enthusiastic selfie, showing me in the driver's seat giving him dead eyes. It got a lot of Facebook likes. I told him he's always casting me as 'the shrew' in his social media, and he said it's cuz I always make those kind of faces. That's about right.

We drove in and out of accents: Austin, standard American English. Gas stations and fast foods between there and Memphis, southern accent. Memphis and Nashville, neutral. Arkansas was the boring-est state we drove through. That's not necessarily a reflection on the state of Arkansas, just the Interstate.

Outside Nashville, we stayed with one of my best friends from junior high. It was fun to meet her two children since I haven't even seen her since before she was married. I appreciate how Facebook and Instagram lets us stay loosely in touch with old friends. I've been following photos of her kids for years now, and when we started plotting our journey it was easy to remind myself that she lives outside Nashville. Her 2-year-old cried when we came up to breakfast Saturday morning. Debbie brushed it off and told me she'd give me some bacon to chum her with. It's cool when your friend's sense of humor and temperament hasn't changed in 13 years.

We stopped in a record shop in Nashville and ate lunch near Vanderbilt at a place with fried artichoke hearts. Our Saturday drive had the worst weather. The rain got so bad at one point we pulled off the highway.

Saturday night we stayed in Gainesville, near my brother's boarding school, which looks like a castle-fortress. He took us on a grand tour and we took him to a movie (ninja turtles). I slept for some of it. Had to be rested for all that driving.

James' dad sent us a very nice Austin-sendoff email (thanks, Mike!). He encouraged us to think about our 10-year plan on the drive. At first all we could come up with was "be back on the West Coast before we are 38." Then James declared he would grow a great big bushy beard. I decided to be a Nobel Laureate. And we are thinking about investing in a fleet of jet skis. In fact, if we make it to Seattle we will probably just commute on jet skis through the Ballard locks.

The rest of the south was a blur, so many billboards for steak and Chinese buffet and giant porn warehouses with big parking spaces (for truckers). We spent our third night in Roanoke. Virginia doesn't appear to allow all the big, horrible billboards. The drive was more scenic. Tennessee was the state we'd most like to explore more.

How else did we entertain ourselves? We listened to music loosely tied to region - bluegrass and folk rock in the south, there is a plentitude of songs about Tennessee so we listened to those. We listened to Rip Torn read some Kurt Vonnegut essays. I read James the entire company history of Cracker Barrel in a southern accent (we were trying to figure out how it got its name. Unrelated - but maybe related?? -- Cracker Barrel has a looong history of discrimination lawsuits).

In Pennsylvania, I'm pretty sure I saw one Amish girl in a long pink dress walking through a yard with laundry on a line. New Jersey was greener than I expected (probably everyone says that). When we made it to the Holland Tunnel, I played that Sinatra song (you know, that one), but I didn't get too much further into New York songs. It was still about an hour to our place, but the driving was stressful enough to curtail music.

It was exciting to get that first glimpse of the Empire State Building and the Manhattan skyline, I'm  excited to start exploring. There is a lot of the trash on the ground, like, everywhere. And the first thing we smelled when we found a parking spot was hot garbage.

We're subletting a room in a second-floor walkup. It's newly remodeled with high ceilings, but we're looking forward to getting our own place again soon. The heat is awful. When the wind changed last night, I could smell different strains of garbage-smell.

Today I did work and then we wandered around trying to find something to eat. It's exhausting being new to a place, not having your go-to spots or any food in the pantry. After lunch I cut off all my hair. Like, pretty much all of it. New city, new 'do.

I'm moving?

Our lease ends next week. James doesn't have a full-time offer yet, but there are way more jobs in New York and that's where all his contacts are, so the logical next steps appear to be: pack stuff, head east. 

I was all sad to leave Austin and then I went to make coffee and watched a cockroach scuttle into the water reservoir, and now I'm like, "Okay Texas, that's a wrap."

New Story Out

Another one for The Daily Dot. Check it out here. 

Back from Alaska

​Most of you already know, I just spent two weeks in Alaska on a boat (albeit a much, much smaller boat than the one photographed in my previous entry).

It was an incredible trip. I think over the next few weeks I'll try to post a few entries about what I did and what it was like, plus include some photos. I posted an album to Facebook, but I know some people didn't see it. 

My ego isn't such that I require all my 600+ Facebook friends to see my stuff, but it would be nice if it showed up in the feeds of the people I'm close to, who might actually be interested. Last night I was on the phone with a girlfriend (not just any girlfriend, I stood in this one's wedding) and she asked about my trip - see, she knew about it because I'd told her on the phone about a month ago. She asked about photos, and I said they were already up. "I feel like all I ever see now is a bunch of updates from people I don't care about," she said. Me too. I had almost the same conversation (different girlfriend, different photos) several weeks ago.

In its efforts to sell us stuff, it seems like Facebook has abandoned its initial mission, which was to foster connection between the people we already know and care about. I guess I'll just have to start picking up the phone again, at least until Mark Zuckerberg 2.0 comes along and gives us something better.

Anyways - more about my trip soon. 

Until then, here is my impression of every single Alaskan I told that, although I grew up there, I now live in Texas:

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wait for it...

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"TEXAS?!?!"

Okay, more posts soon!

Cruizin'

Docked on Cozumel

Tourista

Submarine Coral Reef

Me and Nainai

Taken after James got an internship offer! More on that in a later post

After James graduated the entire Meiser family descended on Austin and we all piled into a mini van bound for Galveston to board a five-day Carnival cruise to Cozumel and Progreso (to see Chichén Itzá).

Nainai came all the way from Taiwan, first to Hawaii to see James' sister's graduation, then to Texas for the cruise. She's 85 and what a champ to do all that travel and eat almost all Western food for a couple weeks. When we all got caught up talking in English, she'd just take a nap. She was fine with all the Western food, James' mom said, because growing up in China (back when it was nationalist China!) she'd go eat at the hotels that served Western food, so she likes tiramisu especially. It was good to see her again, and this was most likely her last trip to the US.

The boat was fun. I've never taken a cruise before, but every day there are a ton of activities and gambling specials and shopping deals ... We did some of that stuff, like we went to see the shows every night, but the nicest thing was just finding a table on the top deck in the morning and hanging out and watching the ocean.

Cruise ships are also great for people watching (lots of people + leisure time). I witnessed several interactions over the week that were interesting:

1. As we were boarding the ship in Galveston a Carnival employee was trying to hustle people down the hall, away from the customs area. A woman told him forcefully she was not leaving because "she was waiting for a minor." The man barked into his walkie talkie "she refuses to leave." Eventually the kid showed up and the woman continued away, miffed.

2. On the pool deck I was in line to use the restroom. It was a tight space, a young woman in front of me asked in a loud voice before she opened a stall door, "is anyone still in there?" to a middle-aged woman exiting. The woman responded, "No one is going to help you if you are rude."

3. James and I got on an elevator. One floor up we were joined by a big group mostly comprised of giggling teenagers. They got off one floor later and next thing I hear James shouting at them. None of them will look at us. The adult in the group turns around to ask what's wrong and James tells him they've pushed all of the elevator buttons (we were on the 2nd floor, headed to the 9th). The man apologized. We continued upward.

The first instance in Galveston was funny because when the woman's daughter appeared, she basically looked like a full-grown woman. I suppose she was 15, but if someone had told me she was 25, I would have believed them. Even still, both parties, parent and worker, felt they were in the right. I think the bathroom issue was mostly miscommunication. The younger woman wanted to be sure she wasn't going to walk in on a kid, the older woman thought her tone was too demanding. Then what happened to us was just annoying, and the kids deserved to be yelled at.

The reason these three things were interesting to me is they all seemed like distinctly American interactions. They aren't scenes I can imagine playing out in the same way in China. I saw plenty of pushing and shouting and run-of-the-mill angry people when I lived in Shanghai and Beijing, but I think Americans feel more inclined to "teach" one another (i.e. complete strangers) what is right. I think this is probably wrapped up with our low power-distance culture and high value placement on individualism.

It reminded me of a New York Times article I read recently about spite. Usually that word is used in a negative context, but a group of researchers used game theory models to show the utility of spite. Basically, societies need people who will go out of their way, perhaps cause themselves inconvenience, in order to punish misbehavers. This provides a net benefit to the society as a whole.

Anyways, enough arm-chair sociology. The vacation was great.