The Jig Is Up

October 1, 2015 JG 2 Comments

I’ve never been great with milestones. When I left New York after five difficult years of college, the friend with whom I was driving cross-country asked if I had anything I wanted to say or do to mark the occasion. I said, “yeah, get in the car and leave.”

Setting intention isn’t historically my strong suit, and sabbatical-ing around the world was no different. As I mentioned way back when, I landed in Bogota with a four day hostel reservation, an around the world plane ticket, a six-year-old copy of South America on a Shoestring, and two weeks to get to Bolivia. Advance planning: not my strong suit.

So how do I mark today, the momentous last day of freedom before I return to work? With gratitude, with friendship, and with adventure – the same way I spent my time out and about in the world.

I walked the dog this morning the same way I have most days I’ve lived in this neighborhood. I happened, today, to see the owner of a home that I have watched, dog walk by dog walk, be lovingly restored and re-landscaped in a neighborhood where homes are more frequently torn down and replaced with McMansions. I got to tell her how much I’ve loved watching her house come back to life – and see how happy she was to be thanked.

Dogwalk LA today

I went to the Broad Museum, just opened last week, and saw amazing art with a friend who took the same semester off from college in 1991; the last cultural thing we did together was use my dad’s tickets to see La Traviata at the San Francisco Opera, which we left after one intermission because we were both crying so hard we couldn’t take anymore. But even today, we both remembered that evening for its beauty, which I believe is how I will remember today. Something old, something new, something inspirational.

Me beside a chair in Robert Therrien’s Under the Table, at the Broad

These plates are taller than I am. My grandfather always said, "Don't stack the plates!"

These plates are taller than I am. See the person in the background? My grandfather always said, “Don’t stack the plates!”

And then I delighted in the mundane. I went grocery shopping. I cleaned my room. I changed my sheets and unpacked my suitcase from last week’s adventure. I hardly remember how to go to work, despite some contract jobs here in LA (like that time I worked on the Oscars, which I’ve yet to report). So I’m trying to remember what I need at a desk, what one wears to an office, and to bring my paperwork to prove I’m a legal, able to work, resident of the USA. Thank goodness my passport is close at hand.

This transition – this last day of ‘freedom’ – is one of many lasts I’ve had since I packed up and hit the road over two years ago. There was my last day in Dallas , my last day ‘out and about in the world, which took place in Turkey, my last drive in my beloved Bessie. But this transition also marks one of many more firsts on this adventure my life has become: my first visits to 16 countries, my first published piece, my first new car in 15 years, my first time (and second, and third) in the Eastern Sierra in 25 years, and tomorrow, my first day at a new company since 2005.

My last day out and about in the world, in the harem in Istanbul.

My last day out and about in the free world (today). Do I look THAT different?

The struggle with this transition is the looming question, “Is this the end?” Is the adventure over? And while, of course, I’ve had moments of panic at this very thought, the reality is no, of course not. The adventure began where, somewhere along the way, I learned to let go of fear and let in life. To take risks that were previously unimaginable because I would have rationalized my way out of them, before even starting. Quitting my job was a risk. Moving to LA was a risk. Taking this new job is a risk – it seems safer than the wander but the truth is, I will be measured against or among a number of incredibly competent people while undertaking new and unfamiliar tasks, and I may not measure up. But at least I will have tried.

What I have learned these last two years could fill a book – and hopefully, it will. In the meantime, I will be toiling away at something new – at a desk, or on a page, or here in LA – and storing up time and resources for the next great wander. And I will be doing it with a degree of gratitude and compassion that I’ve only discovered in myself because of the amazing trip I’ve taken.

(PS: This isn’t goodbye. There are at least three half-written blog posts on this computer crying to be published, not to mention that in looking for that picture of Turkey, I realized I never wrote about Turkey (or Morocco, or Patagonia, or…). So check back…)

Life Skills, United States

Cultivating A Herd

September 21, 2015 JG 1 Comment

Cultivating a Herd

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m single. I would love to find the man of my dreams, but I don’t spend that much time dreaming about him – I’m too busy out here being me. Oprah would probably tell me to ideate a version of who/where/how that guy is so that I can make love manifest when he is in the vicinity, but I’d rather go to LACMA. I feel a vision board coming on.

Unlike a number of single women I know, I do no reading or research about dating. That comes to me unsolicited and for free (minus the psychological cost) from friends who take a much more organized approach to these things. From what they’ve told me, I understand I’m to be “cultivating a herd,” of options, from which one will be right. It’s a fancy way of saying the whole thing is a numbers game over which I have about as much control as I do a roulette wheel.

I was thinking about this yesterday while walking down the street in Washington DC, where I’ve come to visit a friend recovering from a significant and unforeseen health event. It occurred to me that, though I’ve failed to cultivate a dating herd, I managed to cultivate a fantastic herd of friends in the less than 12 months I lived in DC. And they have more than risen to the occasion during this most recent event.

When I mentioned I may be coming to town, I was immediately offered a couch to stay on. I flew overnight and went straight from the airport to spend a day at the hospital. That evening, I was welcomed by friends with delicious dinner and a glass of wine, given clean sheets and towels and pillows and snacks, house keys and a ‘guest’ metro card, a laundry card so I could wash the patient’s laundry, and a cocktail when I returned home at night. One friend made big dutch baby for breakfast, gave me tea and helped me find games to bring to the hospital for entertainment and cerebral stimulation. I was lent a car. An impromptu drinks gathering was arranged during my stay. A not-yet-three year-old delivered home-made banana bread to the door. Friends took breaks from work to meet up with me at odd times to accommodate my being at the hospital for visiting hours. My hosts made me laugh at least once each morning and twice before bed.

A Three Year Old Delivering Banana Bread

This is only one city, one group of friends, with whom I’ve been lucky enough to spend time. And certainly, this is a remarkable event. While pondering how fantastic this herd is, I realized that, while fumbling dating for decades, I’ve successfully cultivated a variety of herds, flocks, gaggles and prides across time and geography. Rather than one partner, my efforts have yielded a community of strength and laughter and insightful conversation and delicious unsolicited opinions and adventurous travel partners. I do hope that someday, one of these groupings will yield the man of my dreams. Until then, I’m going to be vastly fulfilled, entertained, challenged and supported by these amazing people I’m grateful to call my friends. Mr. Right would be lucky to join us.

The Silver Lining: a portion of the herd together again in DC

Goodbye, Los Angeles

Driving Off Into the Sunset

July 16, 2015 JG 1 Comment

I’ve said goodbye to many things over the last few years. Things, and people, and experiences. My dufflebag was first. It was followed by a bandana that fell off while I was hiking in Parque Tayrona, (and washed up on the beach an hour later so is once again with me). My travel pack sprouted one structural break after another starting somewhere in Asia, got repaired in Kenya, and sprang another leak before I got back to the states. More significant are the less physical things to which I’ve said goodbye: economic security, a physical grounding in place, an emotional safety net. Recently, constant adventure. And now, the perfect combination of them all: Bessie.

I should know better than to blog about Bessie. Last time I waxed poetic about my reliable steed, she countered by ‘stranding’ me in Oregon for three days while she was fixed to the tune of more than her worth. It was late last summer, and I was heading down to LA to confirm I should move there. Despite having been on the road in some form for over a year at that point, I had just begun to feel homeless, in the sense that I was not in one place, but should be. I was unrooted. My movement was less of an adventure and more of an aimless pause in a waiting room of mid-life.

The Eugene stranding was a blessing in disguise. It was a reminder that wherever you are, there is an adventure to be had, something new in the mundane. I visited the museum at the University of Oregon, where the art was amazing and the campus a cool respite from the heat.

A Buddha of layered paper

I managed to get to the Bell Telephone Pioneer Museum, with cool switchboards and a badass phone-fixing Barbie, during its four open hours of the week. There was good beer (hello, Oregon), decent food and more important, always, than any of this, were the unbelievably nice people of Eugene, from the motel clerk to the amazing team at Action Automotive, who cheerfully ferried me around town. Even when she lets me down, Bessie builds me up.

Colorful phone wire becoming obsolete at the Bell Pioneer Telephone Museum

Since then, Bessie and I have driven almost 14,000 more miles. My commitment to be the one to get her over 200k miles has wavered as I contemplate all the places she may strand me when she gives up the ghost. Lights I’ve never noticed have lit up – and stayed on – in the dash display. Twice, the brake fluid has needed topping. I finally listened to the signs she was giving me. At 198,890 miles, we said goodbye.

When I began to clean Bessie out to sell her, one memory after another came pouring out. There was the fossil found behind a friend’s house in Taos that I keep for good luck, the Italian notebook I use as a travelogue, and the 20-year old swiss army knife I use for everything and anything. From the stick shift, I removed a rosary from Chimayo and from the rearview, a Hello-Kitty phone decoration a friend brought back from a business meeting in Japan. And then there was the visor organizer

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A small collection of small collections in my visor

Inside, I found an entrance ticket to the Santa Fe museums dated Dec 22. The only Christmas I drove to Santa Fe was in 2007, the first year I owned my home, which means that this ticket was used two days before my house was broken into the first time. While unfolding it, I could smell powdered sugar melting into the thumbprint cookies I was making when the alarm company called.

The art before the con

Tucked into a mesh side pocket of the organizer I found a stack of business cards, dating back to 2003. The gold US Senate crest on one of them reminded me that my parking sticker from some Capitol Hill garage is still tucked way down at the base of my window.

My 1.5×3 inch life

I found a faded receipt from the Dry Clean Super Center in Dallas, onto which had once been written the address and phone number of the owner. The store lost a new dress of mine, and the employee with whom I was discussing this lured me outside the shop to finish our argument because he could tell the rising tone of my voice was attracting the attention of other customers. The dress had only been worn once, and he wanted to pay me no more than half its value. My fury was mostly about the way he bested me in our negotiations, and my frustration at the degree of my anger. Despite it being the least expensive cleaning location in town, I never went back. Two nights ago, while looking for someplace to eat in Red Bluff, California, I noticed Yelp has messaging. In my inbox was a note he had written me several months after the incident to say that he found my dress but had been too embarrassed to contact me. The note is only dated “more than two years ago;” the faded date on the receipt says 2009.

A faded, angry dry-cleaning receipt

One after another I dug these bits of my life from the nooks and crannies of my car. There was a flyer for a friend’s short film that showed at AFI Dallas, also in 2009. The friend is now a successful director. Behind it, two thank you notes, from 2006 and 2007, evidence of my bad habit of opening mail in my car (and not cleaning it out, but that was obvious already). They are wedding thank-you notes from a brother-in-law and a sister.

Long-forgotten, still-beloved thank-yous

In addition to some pots and pans, the sister also thanked me for the flip flops I got the bridal party members to wear during the reception when our heels proved too much. Mine were grey with bedazzled flowers on the thin thong straps. I remember them well because I hardly wore them until the fall of 2013, when I took them with me around the world, and left them with my hosts, and a bit of my heart, in Kenya.

Long-forgotten, still-beloved flipflops

I pulled a removable decal from the windshield.

It’s a tinkerbell-like fairy. I have no idea where it came from originally, but I found it on the kitchen window of my apartment in Seattle – the one I moved out of in 2002 when I headed to Texas. She has been flying right in front of me as I drove these last 13 years, and it was time to say goodbye. But now is a time for new adventures. 3,000 miles into my next car, I’m ready to tuck away some different memories that will last me the next decade and a half, and I’ve got a door-pocket full of national monument postcards to prove it.

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Even Spanky was a little sad to see Bessie go

On the Road, United States

Going for Gold

June 19, 2015 JG 2 Comments

They came for the gold. They were a little late, and they weren’t quite in the right place, and the competition did a little better, but they found enough, close enough, to keep something going until someone hit it big. And then it ran out, and so did they.

Bodie’s story is typical in the Sierras: boomtown gone bust. Here, it’s even more typical than its successful counterpart, boomtown gone boom. For every Reno, there are ten Bodies, most of them long disintegrated into scraps of wood and metal strewn around the mountains, in places no one ever goes. Why one survives better than another is anyone’s guess. In the beginning, it’s about ore, but in the end, chance makes the decision.

I first came to Bodie when I was about 13, on a vacation with my family that based us near Lake Tahoe and took us on day trips like this one, through the smaller towns on the east side of the mountains and then out six miles of dirt road in the heat and dust. In my memory, we rode here in the back of my uncle’s blue Toyota panel van, named Squirt, after the soft drink. It is a magnificent sight, coming up out of nowhere, the buildings nestled between hills, rising above scrubby manzanita and the sandy ground with just enough consistency of shape and variation of color so that you can tell there is a town, even at a distance.

The last time I was in Bodie was 25 years ago. It was the summer after my high school graduation and somehow I lucked into a trip to the mountains with my mom, uncle, and grandfather. No sisters. It was right before my grandfather unraveled into the abyss of dementia. I knew it was starting though, because he kept telling the television to slow down, and asking why the picture had to change so fast. (A sentiment, to be honest, I now share with him.) Between outings, I pulled a blanket onto the windy lawn behind the condo and read Bukowski’s Women, in what had become a burgeoning love affair with his debauched misogyny that even now, I betray my feminist instincts to devour.

I had been given my very own Olympus OM-1 as a graduation present, and this was the first of many trips on which it would accompany me. Even then, they were hard to find. I loved the feel of its weight in my hand, the click of the lens as I switched between f-stops, the ratchet of the film being clicked into place. I lugged it up into Lundy canyon with me, photographing columbine. And then, I took it to Bodie.

Bodie was founded in 1859 after gold was discovered in the hills. The cache wasn’t great, and compared poorly to the mass of silver found in nearby Aurora. Twenty years later, gold-bearing ore was discovered and the town boomed to around 6,000 people at its height. It was big enough for a bank, a red light district, and gymnasium called the Bodie Club, which sported both workout rings, and cold beer.

Bank Fare

Gas Station

It bustled with business, a train track was built, families laid claim. Miner’s organized into a union, and Chinese workers built a Chinatown on one end of town. But by late 1880, mining booms in Montana, Utah, and Arizona began to pull people away. Despite a resurgence in the early 1890’s, when cyanide processing allowed a second-pass at discarded mill tailings, the population continued to diminish, until the 1910 census recorded just 698 people, mostly families, still living in the town. By 1932, when a fire demolished much of ‘downtown,’ Bodie, it was down to 120 people.

The Remaining Safe

My memory of Bodie is mostly of the wood, and the wind. On that visit 25 years ago, the story of the town was different. It was of a place people had left in a hurry, due to a fire in the mine. Food plates were on the table, clothes still hung on hooks, pottery and goods still lined the shelves of the store. I may have made that story up to match the pictures I took, looking in through six-pained windows at a yellow pitcher, a table setting. The wood warmed a reddish brown in the sun, grooves worn deep in the pattern of its grain by the wind, heat, and cold of the century it stood there. Curtains, edged in lace and slightly tattered, frame the scenes.

Now, Bodie has a proper parking lot and a restroom, and the day I was there, a google-camera car was in the lot. The driver got out and put on a photographic contraption to walk the main streets of town, so soon you can experience it from your desktop.

The Google Car

But the wood is the same. Even when the sacred photographic light of morning has passed and the amateur professionals are packing up their tripods, the wood still glows weathered and warm. The picket fences that remain have grown skinny and rickety over time, their moorings less secure.

I assume this was a barber shop?

The buildings stand proud against the few defined streets. The hotel is there (no guests), and the Bodie Club. The mercantile is now a museum/foundation shop. The piles of debris, or of trash – wood, cans, bits of tin and leftover shoes – have grown a little larger as time wears down structure. Trash as artifact and memory. Reminders.

Reminders.

The wind is still predominate. Bodie is nestled in a crook of hills and as you walk upwards past the mine, toward the hilltop, the wind falls down against you, whispering secrets as it goes. When you walk the main street out of town, to the north – to where a bank and a brothel once stood – you hear little but your footsteps, the breathing of the dog that follows behind you, panting against the heating sun. The wind blows across the top of the metal stanchions that mark property lines and Do Not Enter areas like the sound of a drunken cowboy blowing across the top of his beer bottle in mockery of your wander. It slips quickly through the spaces left between shrinking wooden slats, pulling splinters of them with it, beckoning you in, just a little closer, just come here for one minute, it has something to tell you. Don’t leave yet; your time will come soon enough and it will be here, whispering, long after you have gone.

Main Street

Los Angeles

My Hello Happy Place

May 30, 2015 JG 1 Comment

I’ve died and gone to my happy place, and it’s full of Hello Kitty.

I have loved Hello Kitty for as long as I can remember, and I blame my maternal uncle. Long ago, for a birthday or Christmas, he individually wrapped and gifted to me about 20 individual, adorable, itty bitty Hello Kitty toys. Tiny erasers, tiny stationery sets with tiny kitty and tiny flowers and tiny stickers to close the tiny envelopes around the tiny little itty bitty notecards. I’m talking a couple inches here, if that. There was a tiny colored pencil set in an itty bitty see-through envelope with a red snap closure and tiny decorations on it. There was a coin purse. There was a pencil case. There was just a bunch of red and white and black vinyl and kitty and joy, individually wrapped, and it stamped the glee of Hello Kitty on me for life, and left me with a disproportionate appreciation for stationery, pens, and sending mail.

This was the mid-70s, and Hello Kitty was younger than I, by two years. The founding principle of her character – a little gift with a big message of friendship – has stuck with me since then. My childhood love for her turned into a teenage nostalgia, a 20s appreciation that morphed into some form of girl-power in my 30s, at which time she experienced a huge, popular and pop-culture resurgence. I didn’t resurge until my 40s, at which time she may have jumped the shark (MAC cosmetics line, Beats by Dre, Swarovski bling, back off).

My active adoration for her continued unabated and public this entire time. In my 30s alone, I was gifted a hello kitty toaster, which toasted the face of hello kitty, complete with bow, into a piece of bread, to make your morning more joyful; a tote bag, which I still feel is unparalleled by any other tote, and you can see I have loved part of its face off; a cell phone trinket, which dangles from my car’s rearview mirror; and juice glasses, which we use for tequila in my house, but that’s beside the point. This year, I turned 43 and a friend gave me this:

It doesn’t stop there. A lifelong friend lived in Korea, then Japan, and bestowed upon me an endless stream of fantastic gifts that arrived in vague connection to Christmas and my birthday. The mouse pad next to me right now, barely larger than the mouse and in the shape of Kitty’s head; chopsticks; duct tape; something related to shoes that neither of us can figure out because all the package writing is in Japanese; origami paper; candy; food-like items I was eventually forced to discard because, due to my inability to understand Japanese, I could never figure out what they were.

So imagine my relief, my first week in LA, slightly out of pace with the world and myself, trying to wrap my head around this ‘staying in one place’ concept, when I saw that the Hello! Exhibit – Exploring the Super Cute World of Hello Kitty – had just opened at the Japanese American National Museum downtown. If HK herself was here for a while as well, clearly LA was the right place for me. I vowed to get downtown as quickly as possible. On the red line, because I was determined to use public transport in LA.

I finally made it, in my car, six months later. And it was ever. So. Awesome.

Even without the big sign outside, you know you’re getting close to the Hello Kitty exhibit because people of all ages and orientations – male, female; Asian, Caucasian, African American, Latin – are wearing the ridiculous paper Hello Kitty crown you are given with your admission. Case in point: the first couple I happened upon the minute I walked into the exhibit:

Where else would this man put on this crown? (I don’t know him, so maybe he wears Hello Kitty PJs to bed every night, but judging from his response when I asked to take their picture, I’m guessing not.) And yet EVERYONE was wearing them. Giant Polynesian dude? Wearing it. Two elderly women accompanying an even more elderly woman in a wheelchair? Wearing it.

Me? Wearing it! Happily, but not well.

The exhibit starts at the beginning: with a coin purse, a man, and the concept kawaii. The term can be translated as ‘cuteness,’ but is also related to the Japanese word for ‘pitiable,’ “suggesting a fundamental emotional basis of empathy and caring.” By using the English-language greeting with the character, the brand welcomes the customer as a friend and marks Hello Kitty as a global, social character. The original creator, Shintaro Tsuji, intentionally focused on items that “foster ‘social communication,’” which explains why so many of the early Hello Kitty paraphernalia was stationery-oriented. Also, Hello Kitty is a twin – who knew? Poor Mimmy must feel very much in her sister’s shadow – and her last name is White. And they live in London. Wait – what? They are very international. Also, Hello Kitty is not a cat. I just have to leave that one alone.

The first half of the exhibit focuses entirely on the building of the brand, by displaying a growing family of branded items. Since I’d had the toaster, the small appliances came as little surprise. I’ll confess the motor oil, in a three quart can caught me by surprise, and the toilet paper just made me jealous. As did the sanitary napkins. I mean, what can make a period happier than HK tp and maxi pads? HK candy, I suppose.

This, however, blew my mind, and there was no description for it other than “mask.”

A glimpse of the inevitable fetishization of anything girl-plus-Asian appears with the hello kitty vibrator, which Sanrio assures is just a “massage wand,” (though even the exhibit plaque puts that in quotes). They assure the visitor it is, “designed to buzz away one’s troubles around the neck and shoulders with a quick flick of the switch. Ahhh!”

The Hello Kitty Kiss dolls are all in good humor and part of her resurgence as some sort of pop icon. Clearly, if HK is becoming a celebrity, she’s going to rub shoulders with the big (shoed) boys. And as those of us who grew up with her help morph her character into something we can still use as adults, she is bound to grow too (though the exhibit notes multiple time that Kitty’s birthday is November 1^st, “but she never gets another year older!”). Hence, her inspiration of Japanese street fashion (always inspired)

or her appearance in the western fashion industry, with an entire slew of outfits featured on America’s Next Top Model.

Then comes the art, which also walks the line between nostalgia, pop art, and fetish. How is this not a sexualized cross between cosplay and a blow up doll?. When did Kitty get boobs (she never ages…)?

Dark but less sexual is this one, titled, “Uh Oh Kitty Ho.” I’m not sure that isn’t reproductive organs on her shirt.

She goes on a Life Aquatic-inspired ride with Paul Frank’s Julius and friends,

morphs onto Lincoln, storms Tokyo as Godzilla, . impersonates the Sphinx, and bursts into bloom

My favorite artwork, though, is Marc Dennis’s Allegory of Love. Nothing else sums up so perfectly what Kitty has provided to the women of my generation, who were introduced to her when we, and she, were young, and have relied on her to grow, change, express and nurture ourselves, while holding on to a simple, happy semblance of childhood to console or strengthen us when we need it. All of that is wrapped up in this image, which I stood in front of for quite some time, smiling…and wondering where I could buy that sweatshirt.

Worth Packing In

the little truth of traveling