Dispatches from Life

Today I’m on a boat (viewer discretion advised). It’s pretty cool, but I have been having the hardest time for the past few months figuring out how ships sail upwind. My difficulty stems from my strong understanding of the physics of wheeled things. If you take a little Brio train or matchbox car, set it on the floor, and push it at a diagonal angle backwards, it will go backwards. If you orient a sailboat so that the wind is hitting it from a similar angle, it will go forward somehow. Today I hope to receive a full hands-on education in the matter from the crew of the Mystic Whaler, but here’s what the internet has to say:

First of all, you can’t sail straight into the wind. You sail at an angle, and tack back and forth across the wind in a zig-zag to go in the direction you want to. But how do you go upwind at all? It’s because of the sail. The third link sailing link I give above gives cool physics force diagrams and compares the phenomenon to the example of holding your hand out the window of a moving vehicle. The wind is coming straight at you from ahead, and if you hold your hand flat and almost horizontal with the front tipped up slightly, you feel the wind deflected down off the bottom of your hand and the resultant lift force pushing your hand up. With a boat, that force pushes the boat sideways and slightly upwind. The keel keeps the boat from moving sideways, so the boat goes upwind.

That’s basically how it works, but I’m still not 100% clear on it. As I said, doubtless I will be fully educated today and in the next two days, but this is my starting point.

Last night I started my 48-hour train ride back to New England. I have three-hour layovers in both Chicago (today) and DC (tomorrow). My trip has been exciting and a fantastic experience, but I miss home a lot and it will be great to return there. Today I’m writing the first post-trip evaluation post: what I should have brought with me on the trip, and what I shouldn’t have!

Things I brought but didn’t use:

• So many books. I didn’t read nearly as much as I anticipated, and thus I lugged three books which I never opened all around the country.
• Rain pants. Great idea in theory, but bad in practice, because they were too cumbersome to put on when it rained, and insufficient for warmth.
• Map moleskine. I used this moleskine to learn my way around Boston and to have a reference for the New York and Philly subway systems, but my compulsion to only have superior maps in it made it difficult to add to on my trip. Also, limited access to printers makes this more difficult.
• All the crap in my wallet. My wallet was full of gift cards and membership cards and the like until just a couple days ago. It was pretty bulky. Now it’s not anymore, and it’s wonderful.

And that’s it. I packed very efficiently overall. Now here are some things I wish I had brought, but ended up buying or going without (to my detriment).

Things I wanted but didn’t have:

• Cool weather clothes. The Pacific Northwest and northern Idaho and San Francisco are all colder in the summer than I anticipated. A good long-sleeve shirt and long pants necessarily entered my wardrobe.
• Envelopes & stamps. Postcards and letters are difficult without them.
• More food, more water. Or at least the capacity to carry these with me. As previously mentioned, Amtrak food is expensive, and it’s good to have the kind of stuff you want when you want it on the train. Also, having my own comestibles would help when staying with hosts who have difficult food rules.

Otherwise, my packing seemed to be pretty optimal! I’ll keep these things in mind for my next trip.

Yesterday I went to the wedding of one of my best friends from high school. It was mildly hectic, but went off without a snag and was calm and fun. It was held at the Denver Zoo, where after the ceremony the wedding party and guests rode on a merry-go-round. Late into the night after everyone had gone home, the bridesmaids and groomsmen and a few other relevant young people stayed up talking and chilling in one of our hotel rooms. It was lovely.

First of all, this is the first close friend of mine whose wedding I’ve been to. It is strange. While I know that I’m entering into the time of life where weddings are not uncommon, it’s still new and bizarre. It just feels like we’re too young for this stuff! It feels like we shouldn’t be playing at being adults; that we might get in trouble if someone finds out! I certainly think this couple whose nuptials I witnessed yesterday is very well-suited for each other and totally at the right stage to get married, but…peers of mine getting married still feels weird. Presumably this is something I will get used to as time goes on.

And while weddings are certainly all different, one of the things about this wedding I enjoyed the most was meeting all these other young people who know the bride or groom. We had this totally comfortable point of commonality in our knowledge of the couple, and upon conversation we found many more similarities. Of course, this is how meeting new people always works, but it just felt really fulfilling yesterday. I hope at my own eventual wedding, attendees experience that same joy.

I am not one to bash food based on high standards of quality. But food on Amtrak is really unjustifiably expensive. I will endeavor to bring a whole bag full of my own for the next extremely long leg of my trip. Access to cheap and healthy food will make me a much happier traveler. Also large quantities of water, as the on-board water is gross and dehydration gives me headaches.

I safely and expeditiously arrived in Denver, though, and today am attending my high school friend’s wedding. More thoughts on the craziness of this phenomenon at a later time. And tomorrow, the long journey back to New England begins. Perhaps I will see you there.

When I was very little, I participated in a secret gift exchange where I used the alias “Lots of Ideas”. I continue to periodically have these grand visions, and these days they’re usually oriented toward improving one of my communities, or to making myself loads of passive income. I announced here a while ago that I would be conducting a survey of colleges that are good for contradancing, but after that initial statement I have done little work on the topic. The other night, I was awake until 6am, excitedly brainstorming about a new project: a web app that would make it extremely easy for people to let their congressmen know what they thought in a form that would be more effective and accessible than anything currently available. I think it’s a cool idea, but again, I’m worried about it losing steam and stuttering to a halt. I’m worried these good ideas will gather dust as I pursue other things. I don’t intend for them to, and am hopeful that these two won’t, but it’s a persistent worry.

How do you ensure that your great ideas don’t falter and fall? How do you make the time and energy to keep them alive around the commitments of your already-busy life?

So, I was going to leave the Bay Area yesterday and arrive in Denver tonight. Unfortunately, I made the stupid mistake of incorrectly transcribing the departure time, so I missed my train. I re-booked it for today, but now I’ll be rushed at the arrival end, and I had to pay $38 for the new reservation. But it’s not the money that makes me angry. It’s that I could have made yesterday’s train, and instead now I have to change plans at the last minute on both my Berkeley hosts and my friend who’s getting married on Saturday. I get stressed and angry when I make a big mistake like this. And being stressed out is tiring! After resolving everything last night, I felt just totally wiped.

It sucks making mistakes and getting angry at yourself, but I suppose it’s good to know what makes you angry, and it’s also better to be temporarily angry at yourself than it is to have other people be your primary source of anger. Hope your day goes more according to plan than this.

Today I finished watching Once Upon a Time in the West. As my host pointed out while we were watching the beginning of it the other night, this is not a movie made for modern American sensibilities. Its length (2:45) defies our short patience, and its long, artistic scenes are more filled with characters’ themes than with dialogue. It puts the “spaghetti” in “spaghetti western”, directed and written by Italians. I liked it (though not as much as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, another similar-length film by Sergio Leone), but those qualities in a movie were much more acceptable in the late 1960s than they are now, it seems to me. It’s a shame that the artistry and storytelling capabilities of such films has been sacrificed for the cookie-cutter commercialism of today’s box office crap.

And another thing! Nothing that you buy is durable these days! Planned obsolescence defines our globalized commodification of commerce. And let’s not even get into disposable, unusable packaging. This comes to mind because I walked into town earlier to get some small carabiner clips for the strap on my mandolin case. In order to get my total at the store up to the minimum for paying with plastic, I bought a set of camping silverware. I’ve been meaning to find a compact, durable set of these for a while, as until now I’ve been relying on reused plastic knives and sporks, which are disgusting and totally insufficient. Even the set that I bought today (while being advertised as “durable”) is pretty flimsy and thin. In my reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance yesterday, the narrator described how the question “Are you teaching Quality this semester?” drove him over the edge of insanity. I decry the degradation of quality in our material possessions today. It’s so repulsively wasteful to buy things that are unsuited to lasting more than a few uses, and yet what other options do we have?

There are many things to complain about in our culture at present, and thanks for indulging me while I assert these two complaints here.

Procrastination happens. Let’s acknowledge that and stop running away from it. The more effective habit to attempt control of is how we procrastinate. Currently my default procrastination method is to go on the computer. I check my five websites (Facebook, Gmail, Google Reader, Huffington Post, and the Youth Dance Weekend registration list) and then run through them again. I go play a half-hour game of Cities & Knights of Catan online. I listen to music and play mahjong or yahtzee or sudoku. These activities are next to useless, and don’t move me closer to any of my goals.

So why wait for New Year’s Day to make resolutions? I want to change my default procrastination method to the making of music, and I want to make that change by December 31st, 2010.

What’s your default procrastination method? Does it further your goals? What would you like it to be instead?

I’ve been having a discussion on Facebook about private property and theft, sparked by my dismay at the capturing of the Barefoot Bandit in the Bahamas. Not to get into the details of the argument here (I was defending my romanticization of his story, and asserting that owning a plane or a yacht is barely less selfish than theft) I am struck by how much my behavior toward others is influenced by the way they present themselves. If someone argues with me in a tone that I don’t like, I am very likely to dig into an opposing position, with little regard for what the argument is over. Conversely, if someone states something in a fashion that I deem courteous and responsible, I will treat their position much more respectfully.

Do you do this too? I’m not sure how I feel about it; logically arguments should be taken at face value. I would not be surprised if arguments presented derisively are more often fallacious, but it’s not a necessary connection. I don’t know. What do you think?

[This is an account of my most recent adventure, barely edited from the form in which I related it to friends this morning on gchat.]

Last night I went to the Palo Alto contradance. I knew three people there: the two friends I’d come with, and another exuberant tall young guy who I’d met just twice. The size of the crowd and the quality of the music were wonderful, but the number of young dancers was not. I had been grumpy earlier in the day due to hunger and miscommunication and low productivity, but had cheered up upon hanging out with my friends for dinner. I became glum again from not knowing people at the dance and the slight differences in style in this region. But then, just as I was having a conversation with my friend about how I didn’t know many people at the dance and wished there were more young people, I saw standing in the doorway my friend Mia. She’d just arrived with a whole passel of other young New Mexicans on their way back from the Mendocino American Dance Week. Some of my favorite people from last year’s Youth Dance Weekend were there, as well as new lovely people who I hadn’t met before. Needless to say, they made my evening.

But they were flying home this morning! And also, I had already concluded that it was too late for me to take the public transportation home. Therefore, I decided to latch on with them and sleep wherever they slept. The thing was, they didn’t have a sure place to sleep yet. Stuart Kenney (a central musician from my home dance and a sweetie of a guy) was there with them (he’d been staffing the dance week) and he hooked them up with the place he was sleeping…in a haunted warehouse.

So, after the dance I crowded into a minivan with all these radiantly wonderful friends, squashed next to this big-deal musician and organizer. He was telling crazy and amusing musician stories, and I just glowed with grins at all these awesome people I’d met up with. We got to the place we were supposed to sleep. It was right next to San Francisco International Airport, and it truly was a warehouse, high shelves of boxes and all. In the corner of it was a martial arts dojo. Our hosts ran the place, a husband and wife pair who taught martial arts and shipped educational materials from the same building. She demonstrated some sword forms while people were getting their stuff out of the minivan. He was really chill, one of the organizers of the dance week my friends had just been to. And…he told us about how the place was haunted. “But don’t worry,” he said, “the shaman guy who haunts the place is friendly. You’ll see something out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn to look at it you’ll see this little Kokopelli guy watching you, then scamper off. Just in case you hear noises in the night, I don’t want you to freak out.” I didn’t see anything, but I certainly heard something a few times! Bangs as if someone was banging into the shelves or the lights, and some barefoot footsteps, at like 3am when everyone was asleep, and from out in the dark warehouse part, not from the mat where everyone was sleeping. One of the other guests said he’d been off sending an email after most people had gone to sleep, and upon standing up to go to bed, he felt and heard a WOOSH right next to him; apparently he’d startled the ghost. We all spooned close: four young New Mexican dancer women, Stuart, and me.

So. Sleep. Not much of it. Cuddling. Lots of it. Though because they were all exhausted from their dance week, it was the sort of low-intensity cuddling you do with a sleeping person so as to not really wake them. We got about six hours of sleep. Stuart had gotten up extra early for a separate flight, but the rest of us piled into the minivan, and all the New Mexico folks (everyone except me and two others who I didn’t know that well, Jubal & Chelsea) got out at the airport, and we had many hugs and goodbyes. Then the rest of us headed to Oakland, drove around looking for parking, then walked around looking for food (at 9:30am on a Sunday). We found a place, where we got a very eclectic breakfast (french toast, Chinese noodles, a waffle, ramen, and green tea) and talked about crossover contra and contra gossip. It was great fun. Chelsea & I had met a couple times before. She’s an inveterate traveler, and budding organizer of crossover contra dances. Jubal is a southern guy who’s got his fingers in a bunch of different genres, but plays with a well-known contra band. He’s a great guy, and we’d never met before. After the wonderful discussion over breakfast, we found our way back to Berkeley, where they dropped me off at my hosts’ house, and we went our merry ways.

[This is probably the biggest single adventure of my trip, and will likely stand out as a climax. In one week I will have just attended my good friend's wedding in Denver, Colorado, and will be departing for a forty-eight hour train trip back to New England. I'm glad to get the chance to share the account of such an adventure here!]