Alas poor keyboard

So I fire up my computer this evening, to look up crepe recipes and turn on Jon Stewart for some dinner time company (william is working from 8 am to 10 pm today...) and discovered that I couldn't type the letter L. Or, after a little investigation, O, 9, or the comma. So that was bit of a pain, but "googe" will fortunately autocorrect jn Stewart to Jon Stewart, so very thing was fine.

The crepes were okay, too.

The problem didn't really start until I decided it was definitely time to write up a cover letter and stare despondently at my resume some more (this is a semi regular ritual of mine). It seemed highly probable that I would want to use a l, o, or comma somewhere in that cover letter. So I figured, since fiddling with the physical keys had done nothing, it was probably just having the binary equivalent of a brain fart. Clearly this called for a good ole restart.

Which seemed like a great plan until I went to log in to my rebooted computer and realized two things:

1. Alas, 'twas not a brain fart. Rather, my keyboard is mechanically damaged somewhere beneath the surface

2. And, oh, yeah, I NEED ONE OF THOSE LETTERS TO TYPE MY PASSWORD!!!!!

I went from having a computer with an obnoxious limitation (but not, as my successful Jon-Stewart-watching proves, a completely disabling limitation) to having a COMPLETELY useless hunk of plastic that is only capable of saying "wrong password"


Soooo... Do I spend thirty bucks on a cheapo USB or wireless keyboard? Spend 70 bucks on the official Mac version, which would be investing in my hypothetical future computer? Or take a deep breath and start mucking around in my computers' innards? (the internet says something about a very significant "ribbon cable" that might be disconnected)


I dunno. But boy do I wish I had thought about that password before I hit restart...


Typing on a smartphone is a royal pain in the thumbs. Other updates: NY finally got warm. We found a waterfall. We silk haven't swum in the lake.

I relearned CPR and first aid. The instructor had lots of terrifying farm equipment stories.

Existential despair and insects are my current nemeses.

Those, and cover letters. Boy, do I err hate writing cover letters.

What to do, what to do.

Ya’ll, we are rural. I mean, rural rural. I mean, you have to drive 20 minutes to get to a bank, and almost an hour to get to a wal-mart. I mean the-town-clerk-also-runs-the-liquor-store rural, I mean the-closest-stoplight-is-two-towns-away rural, I mean “the-best-coffee-for-a-hundred-miles”-is-shit-but-I-still-believe-its-reputation rural. That’s how rural we are.

Accordingly, my wistful wishlist of things I’d like to do includes an awful lot of leaving Springfield Center. I have a lot of conversations that go like this:

“We’re only four hours from Montreal!”
“Uh huh.”
“And only four hours from NYC!”
“Uh huh.”
“And only four hours from Boston! I’ve never been to Boston! Can you believe I’ve never been to Boston?”
“Uh huh.”
“And really, it’s just one hour to Albany, and then three hours by train. Doesn’t that sound wonderful! Let’s go to Montreal!”

[I’m the one with all the exclamation marks, and William is the “uh-huh”er, in case you didn’t figure that one out on your own.]

The problem with this fantasy is that it’s a Saturday morning and William is working. And the season hasn’t really started yet. Once things really pick up, he’ll work Sundays, too, and have one day off per week if he’s lucky - and that day will be Wednesday. A Tuesday night in Canada is not precisely the same thing as a weekend in Canada… and a little harder to justify.

So the question becomes, what is here to do around here - as in, less than four hours away? Fortunately it’s an absolutely beautiful area. We’ve done the closest hike already, a leisurely little trail in the state park just four miles away, but word at the opera is that the Finger Lakes area has some wonderful trails less than an hours’ drive away. We’ll be checking at least one of them out tomorrow.

The roads are also pretty bike-friendly; not a lot of drivers on them, since we’re so incredibly freaking rural. And while there’s lots of rolling hills on the horizon, the roads hug pretty close to the lakes, so they’re quite flat - good for my lazy, out-of-shape butt. We took a bike ride up to the closest gas station the other night (two towns away, I’m not making this stuff up, and they pump your gas FOR you because they haven’t figured out what century it is).  It was probably the most invigorating beer run I’ve ever been on. I think everyone should have to bike a few miles through green hills and beside glistening lakes before buying a six-pack. It would be great for our collective health, both physical and mental.

Speaking of beer, there are quite a few little breweries in the area, including some that make some darn good beer. So on my more-probable, less-than-four-hours-travel-time things-to-do list, I’ve included a lot of brewery tours. 

Hikes, bikes, and beer - honestly, that pretty much exhausts the immediately-surrounding possibilities. Not completely, of course: we went to the local art museum already (maybe too soon - should have saved it for later in the summer) and there are also museums dedicated to sheep and baseball. Pity I’m not into sheep or baseball. We also drove for an hour last night and went to a drive-in: the closest movie theater is 45 minutes away, so might as well go a little further and get two shows for the price of one, right!? So we’ll probably do that again, although dusk comes pretty late and two movies last a long time, resulting in a terrifying drive home at 2 a.m. when the rain is pouring down (it rains like every day, I swear) and the roads are potholed and poorly marked.

And a fifteen-minute drive away, there’s a little bar that also serves Chinese food. (Well, the Chinese food is made at the restaurant next door, but you can order at the bar and they bring it right to you, so… yep, a bar that serves Chinese food). It’s not much of a destination in itself - all wood paneling and locals who look at you funny, since you are immediately obvious as an opera person - but on Thursday nights they have karaoke. And a lot of people who wind up working backstage or in admin at an opera house have an extraordinary amount of vocal training… which makes for a hell of a karaoke show.

There you have it. My nearly-exhaustive list of things to do in this little corner of the world.. Meanwhile, if you need me, me and my bookshelf will be right over there.

did I mention we don't have wireless?

I had really good timing getting a smartphone. William and I, like all the other residents of this intern housing complex, get no wifi in our rooms. And don’t even have ethernet cables or any other last-century alternatives. There’s internet in the common rooms, including the kitchen, but that means that you really have to decide to go get online. Like, “I will go browse the internet now. I will carry my internet-connection device to the proper area and when I am finished, I will return.” Such a foreign concept to me. 

So at least we can get to our email and answer pressing wikipedia questions without needing to put shoes on and relocate to a public place. Thank you, super-convenient little computers.

But there are drawbacks to our newly upgraded digital lives. For instance, I really want to get a newspaper subscription even though we’re flat broke and the non-student-discount price for the NYT made me gasp. (Not that it's not worth it! I've just been spoiled by my student discount status). But seriously, every morning we have breakfast hunched over our smartphones, scrolling through our RSS feeds. It’s comedy of the absurd to try to catch up on the world on those tiny little screens.

Anyway, I’m typing these blogposts on my internetless laptop and posting them when I make it to the common room. Apologies for the irregular intervals.

Graduation, redux

I had a dream last night about graduation - a dream in which, just like at my real graduation, I left every event early, and completely failed at packing up my stuff, and didn’t get the photos everybody else got, and generally kept missing out on things. But in my dream I wasn’t sick - I just kept being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When I wanted to pack up my stuff, I went to the wrong room - when I finally found the right place, my parents had done it all. When I decided I wanted to get my photos taken  just like everyone else (in my dream, a process that involved a manic photographer and some really bizarre poses in front of a shifting background), I lost my place in line. I kept getting lost and confused about what time it was. I don’t remember actually graduating.

And this made me very upset. It was one of those dreams where I woke up all sad and agitated and angry, not even sure of why until my dream started coming back to me. And what’s interesting about that is that, while I was actually graduating, and feeling like shit, and missing festivities, and not saying proper goodbyes, I didn’t feel very upset at all. I sighed and said it was a pity I was sick, but mostly I just felt apathetic. Endless gratitude towards my parents and Alex, without whom I would have been an unpacked, overwhelmed, incredibly lonely mess. Annoyance with my body. And that was it. No fountain of tears, no ecstatic moment of glory, no gutwrenching ache of goodbye. Just… ‘well, that’s over, I want to sleep now.”

But now that I’ve revisited that weekend in my dreams, I think I’ve gotten the chance to work through some of my mixed-up emotions about leaving a place I’d lived and breathed and cursed and loved and beat myself senseless against for four years. And leaving all the people who’d been right there with me, doing more or less the same thing, without really being there with them for that crucial moment.  It makes me sad and agitated and angry.

Of course, maybe dream-me just really, really wanted a portrait in front of a psychedelic green background. Anything is possible.

Things I did today:

 Applied for two jobs
Bought local kale and honey
Cried for an hour
Recovered
Ate rhubarb coffeecake
Wandered around a used bookstore for an hour before buying a $2 collection of James Woods' essays
Started cold press coffee (life without an electric kettle, my friends!)

 Not in that order.

Empire State of Mind

This blog is getting revived because I appear to have a complete inability to think about things without writing about them. Which meant that during school, my classwork was all I thought about, which was fine. But also means that now that I'm out of school, I stand the very real risk of not thinking about anything at all.

Out of school... I've always thought of that phrase as signifying freedom, something like out of jail, out of prison, led out of slavery, etc. But now I'm thinking that it's more akin to out of sugar... out of eggs... out of money... out of time. Not that I've been set free from something, but rather that I've used it all up...

Well, we'll see. Anyway, out of school for now. Yes. I graduated. On Sunday. I am no longer a Davidson student. And that should be very earth-shattering or, at least, odd, but I've met it with more of a "meh" and a shrug of the shoulders.

Also, a shuddering, hacking cough, because I got sick the weekend of graduation and therefore while everyone else was crying, drinking, and hugging each other, I was drinking ginger ale and trying to stay upright. Struggle city: Population, me.

Actually, my current location is upstate New York. Near Cooperstown, aka the home of the baseball hall of fame. I'm working for a summer opera festival as their new general admin intern, where as far as I can tell I will be juggling an awful lot of mail. I learned several years ago that it's a bad idea to blog about work, so that is officially the last thing I am going to say about my job.

Instead, I'll pretend that this is still a travel blog (and isn't this the sort of thing where, if I pretend it, it's true?) and say that this part of New York is beautiful. We're on a lake - Glimmerglass Lake, which led Alex to rather reasonably ask if I was working in Fairyland - and it's lovely, surrounded by low rolling mountains covered in trees. This is one of those parts of the east coast that help you to imagine what it must have been like when it was all forests, trees from Maine down to Florida and inward towards the Mississippi... back in the Shenandoah Valley, even in the forested mountains you can see the wide expanse of farmland that fills the flatlands. Here, every lawn looks like an island, a meadow hacked out from the pervasive trees, and the overwhelming sense is that if you turned your back for too long everything would melt invisibly back into the trees that surround you in every direction.

There are other lakes, too, a few miles in any direction - at least that's what it seems like. On my to-do list: visit the Fenimore art museum, visit the Finger Lakes, go kayaking, find a road I can jog on without getting hit by a thousand cars.

On my more immediate to-do list: buy coffee that isn't instant.

Toodles.

Alone?

"Alone?" they ask me, incredulous, concerned.  Not alone, I want to say.  I travel surrounded by ghosts.  The echoing whispers of their lives roll down these tracks and weave through the air, a constant murmur in the back of my mind that says "you are not the first."   My great-grandmother rode this train to New Mexico with a trunk full of beautiful clothes, and somehow this knowledge has changed the shape of my backpack; my great-great-grandmother followed this road when it was a path cut through the prairie and the wheels of our car must be pressing down on her ancient footprints; my great-great-great-grandfather picked his way down these country lanes on mule and buggy and I can smell that journey in the air, muleshit and sweat.  These empty deserts are full of cowboys and these industrial backwaters have known a thousand laborers.  None of us are alone.

Besides, I want to say, even without these accompanying shades, company abounds.  My mother texts, my boyfriend calls, my cell phone shows my twitter updates and who messaged me on Facebook.  Every time I step off the train I walk towards family, towards a world where the quiet corners of my brain must be twisted into a socially-acceptable shape, where at dinner I am polite instead of moody and warm instead of cold.  The most basic duties we take on when we decide to live with other people - I take them for granted until I visit my grandfather, who has dropped these duties (and others) in the dirt of his past.  Seeing him reminds me that I do not ever live alone.  And in my bags I carry letters, cards, loaned books, little bits of other people.  In the seats next to me and the rooms across the hall sit strangers and we ask each other "Where ya headed?" and share our stories.  Even in the middle of an endless desert, in a little steel-and-glass shell slipping between canyon walls, there's no alone.

But I know that's not really what they're asking me.  They're asking, "Aren't you afraid?"  And to answer I return to ghosts: my great-grandmother came out here when the west was lawless and Las Vegas a place where the sins were deadly, not sexy.  My grandfather barely spoke English when he crossed this country in the colored sections of these trains.  My great-grandfather hopped freight trains with hobos in the great depression, fleeing along the dark and dirty edges of a civilization that seemed to be crumbling away.  And I've got a cell phone and credit cards, the internet at my fingertips, friends in every state, and the kind of face policemen look kindly upon.  

This isn't scary.  If anything, it's too easy.

But I don't say any of this.  I smile and say last summer I traveled alone in the Philippines, and that this is far less scary - deflecting their concern to a trip safely in the past, one I clearly survived.  To one woman, with a friendly smile and precocious children, I dare to tell a bit of the truth - that traveling "just one, please" is easier, less stressful, because there's only me to deal with.  When something goes wrong, it's just me to fix it.  When the nights are uncomfortable and the mornings weary, there's no snappy arguments because there's nobody to fight with.  When the days are long and slow there's nobody to keep entertained - just me, and I stretch my arms and yawn and open my netbook and I know that I'm fine.  There's no negotiations over when to stop and where to eat and who needs what and how we get it.  When it's just me, traveling is easy.  She nods like she understands and her son’s green eyes are watching me and they remind me of myself, when I was ten years old, and really believed in adventures.

But I don't tell anybody that I'm not alone at all.  When I was in the Philippines I rode down a mountain on the back of a stranger's motorcycle and felt a single, pure moment of ecstasy.   I realized that no one in the world knew where I was, except for Jun-jun, my ride - and he didn't know who I was.  For this brief moment I existed only with and for and in myself.  And yet I knew I was riding this motorcycle, the quick way down the mountain, because I had promises to keep, and miles to go and so on, and that there were people waiting for me just around the corner of my life, and I could not disappear.  One moment behind the curtains, but the show goes on.  The web that ties me to the people in my life is stronger than the distances I test it with, far stronger than these teasing absences.  

Sometimes I have the face of a girl who is careful and does not make mistakes, the kind of girl who savors quiet adventures and plans a responsible career and makes clever small talk and will laugh at your jokes, and this is the face I wear to dinner on the train.  I lost my nose ring in California, I brush my hair each morning, I work on my laptop, I do not flirt with strangers, I do not drink, I do not curse, I do not argue.  I would trust me to watch my laptop.  I would let me talk to my children.  And this is the person strangers fear to see alone in the world, the person other people's parents reach for with concern.  

I am as vulnerable as they need me to be, obligingly nodded my head like a wide-eyed ingenue as they warn me that New Orleans isn't the world's safest place.  Strangers surround me with compassionate concern everywhere I turn, every time I return a glance.  And yet they think I am alone?  

In the dining car, surrounded by the noise of wheels on track and engine through air and wind through sagebrush and knives clattering on plastic, I sit by the window.  I sip coffee from a plastic cup.  I cannot see the other passengers; I'm staring out towards distant mountains as the sunlight turns golden on the sagebrush, watching two delicate deer, ears up high.  I only look alone.