18 Months and Counting

April 10, 2017 JG 2 Comments

It’s April. Spring showers, wildflowers, coming out of dormancy, beginning again. It’s also the 18-month anniversary of my return to corporate America, and the date by which my younger sister told me I’d better be out of it again.

I have always been better at doing what I was told, than determining what I would do. I have dreams, but I view them as the things I can’t wait to do when they pop up right in front of my face, not things I go out and make happen. It’s an approach that explains why my decision to travel around the world petrified me: I had made a statement of intent, and now I must follow through. It was exactly the opposite of what I was used to.

During the first week of this trip, I was terrified. I tried to be patient, but any forgiveness I happily show another person isn’t a generosity I bestow on myself. In calls home to family, an ‘auntie’ said to me, “you know you can always come home.”

This struck me as possibly the most ridiculous thing anyone had ever said to me. Of course I would not go home. Face-saving aside, who takes three steps forward into a dream and then turns around? Not THIS chick. And saving face isn’t an aside. I was not going to give up – not on the trip, and definitely not on myself. I had come this far. It was only the beginning, but it was still pretty far.

This wasn’t the first time someone had said such a thing to me. In grad school, out of my element, in a new town decidedly more conservative than any I’d been used to, in a program that forced me so far out of my comfort zone I began to drink regularly for the first time in my life (at the age of 30), I sought counsel from a mentor back in Seattle. She said a very similar thing, “if you are this miserable, why don’t you quit?”

When my auntie told me I could just go home, the first thing I heard was, “if you’re miserable, why don’t you quit?” It was ridiculous, and a revelation, and true: I could quit. I could go home, and no one would be bothered by it. Except for me. As much as I was out of my element in trying to catch the Transmilenio in Bogota, as much a failure as I felt for not having conquered the world three days into seeing it, I just needed to know there was an out, in order to find the ability to continue.

And so, last July, when I showed up for a family vacation 10 months into my new job and six months into literally dreading every single day of it, into waking in the night riddled with the buckshot of anxiety that tore up my confidence, into driving to the office and sitting in the parking lot willing myself to open the door and go into the building, I was slightly more prepared for someone to ask exactly what one sister did.

“You know you can quit, right? It sounds miserable.”

This time, I knew. And because I knew, I had started working through what the plan should be. How to turn the three steps forward into ten, into 20, into, potentially, a path to the door.

The project that was making me miserable was more out of my comfort zone than foreign transportation. It was amorphous, relied on resources who were poorly managed and had no people skills, and required the involvement of literally every area of the operation. I couldn’t articulate it, let alone lead it. I had no guidance, no mentorship. I was bogged down.

But here is what I knew: I don’t like to give up. I hated what I was doing, but I didn’t want to let it get the better of me. I had, by July, outlined the most significant milestones, the release dates and deliverables, and put regular routines in place to track them. I had found a mentor who could help keep me out of the weeds. I had taken three steps forward, and was continuing to put one foot in front of the other.

No one wants to see a resume with a job that lasts under a year, so I wouldn’t leave before October. I had a significant deliverable by Sept 30^th, and I was requesting permission to work remotely for a month. I would wrap up the first and if I got the second, I would stick around a little longer. I had my out, so I could continue to work.

I delivered the first, they delivered the second. And during October, from my remote work escape to the Pacific Northwest, I had my mid-year review, during which I was told something that caught me by surprise: I was knocking it out of the park.

How could I be this miserable, and successful? Because the metrics by which these things are measured are vastly separate. Delivery despite the cost it takes on my self is workplace success, but not a personal success. Unlike delivering myself successfully around the world, which was almost pure joy, where each fear conquered was a gift to the person I had once been and was becoming again, each milestone conquered at work was another little weight on the scale tipping in a direction way from who I am. I will pull the scale back into balance, but only by hanging off the edge of it and pulling it back down.

So here we are: April. Month 19. A time for growth, for rebirth, for new buds and sweet smells in the sun coming out. A time, perhaps for coming out of the cocoon as a butterfly and flying away. Only time will tell.

Los Angeles, Uncategorized

The Sounds of Silence

November 7, 2016 JG 2 Comments

There is no picture to go with this post, and for that, I apologize. But you can make one for yourself. Go ahead. I will help.

Close your eyes. Go on – close them. Close your eyes, and take a breath – slow, long, and deep. I’ll tell you what the breath smells like: clean, a little sweet with the scent of fecundity. Fall sun, the whisper of winter, a slight afternote of salt floating in. Now let out that breath and take another. And while you take it in, listen, and I will tell you what you hear: nothing.

You hear nothing, and that nothing is everything. It is the space that is made for a pair of mergansers to fly across a field and alight on the pond near you. It is the space that is made for a sudden wind to blow – strong enough that you can see it coming across the still surface of the water and listen as it shakes down the alders and birch and begins the winter process of stripping them bare. On its way, it bats the apples from the trees by the beach to the ground with a heavy, abusive thud that leaves sugar spots on their skin and calls the deer to feed, their slow chew a silence of its own, until they sense your presence and stop, perking up their heads in a frozen stance and then prancing away – a hop almost like a rabbit – the pattern of it smashing grass beneath their feet with the quiet underbeat of a drum.

Let out your breath and take another. Keep your eye closed. Here come the geese, the heaviness of their wings sweeping by you like a brush across a snare drum – sleepy, slow, the shushing of mother nature putting the earth down for a nap. The beat of fall. If you whistle for the dog, he will come, too, soft and silent across the grass and then faster, his own background beat, louder as he comes to your feet and stops suddenly and it is silent, except for his heavy pant of breath, backed up by a faint lap of waves sipping from the rocky shore and swallowing shells back down to sea with the tinkling of a wind chime.

This is what silence looks like. This is the picture to send with this post – of stillness and breath, of a life that happens around you like a quiet background beat of a drum to steady the earth’s breathing, and your own.

Now, open your eyes. Take a deep breath and try to hold on to that picture while the sounds of the city replace it with the cacophony of urban-ness, an aural affront that wakes your brain to alertness. It is endless, unpatterned: the unpredictable whine of a siren down La Brea. The inevitable, irrational hum of a helicopter over Hollywood, or the highway, or on a trip to the beach – the Uber of the rich driving through your backyard – louder, louder, closer, too close, too loud, receding, gone. Replaced in irregular waves of sound and motion. The neighbors are having the same discussion about their relationship across the alley over the one constant: the whir of air conditioning units pushing too hard at work, broken at irregular intervals by plumbing from the floor beneath you, so loud it may be in your own kitchen or bath.

These are the sounds of the city, and they create a picture of their own. The backdrop is an uncontrollable foreground that we don’t breathe in. We don’t move to them so much as follow them along, dodging their beat, letting go of our own, occasionally in step, or stepping aside. Welcome back to LA. Welcome back to the wake up.

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

Dallas

This One Time, In America

August 31, 2014 JG 2 Comments

The first week I was back in the country, I was determined to make domestic life the same adventure I’d created in the rest of the world. Was I not seeing the US through new eyes? Didn’t I want to be able to tell stories about home that sounded just like stories I could tell about every other country? This one time, in America…

I made a list of sites unexplored by me prior to my Dallas departure, and took a stab at one: The Bush Library.

The library is situated on the edge of the SMU campus. I followed signage that pointed me in the general direction of the library but not directly to it, or its parking lot, and eventually found what I was looking for. I have navigated the world’s museums and monuments in languages I don’t speak or read, but I literally got lost going from the parking lot to the museum, and accidentally ended up here, where an armed guard redirected me.

I’d feel like my lefty impulses had led me astray, but two guys wearing OU shirts came up right behind me. “Turn around,” I told them. “Follow me.” They proceeded to believe I was a tour guide, until we got here, and I sat on a bench in the sun to wait for my friend Vivian.

I’ve never been to a presidential library, so I have nothing to which to compare this one. I’ve also never voted for a Republican, which I confess by way of saying, I went in with open eyes – been all around the world, seen a lot of things, like to absorb without judging – and this is what I saw, which I’m sure is partly impacted by my political beliefs:

George and Laura love each other – it sounds silly, but it’s true. The pictures of their early life together, the building of their family, may be propaganda, but they seem filled with love. I doubt the Clinton library could make so genuine a montage.

The exhibits start off feeling less than substantive. One big day-care-like room has information on education – No Child Left Behind exhibits and a display of books (Laura Bush is the creator of Texas Book Fest, an annual festival of authors, publishers, agents and books in Austin) aside a tax relief display without a hint of irony that the latter gutted any possibility of the former being successful. But then, we forget all about that, because 9/11 happens.

A narrow entrance pulls you into a circular path around the remnants of an I-beam. Lights are dimmed. The walls are lined with engraved names of the dead from both towers, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania flight, while televisions play news coverage of the attacks. It is emotionally overwhelming, but visually simple; an impactful, respectful display.

But then, there are the docents. In 15 feet of walking this exhibit, I was twice approached by women who may have been 55 but looked 75. While I was wiping a tear from my cheek, one said to me, “I saw you looking for someone’s name; did you know people in 9/11?” Another one approached me toward the end and said, “were you near New York on 9/11? Do you want to share your experience in our digital visitor book?”

I was tempted to ask, “are you a therapist? That’s so great that the library provides therapy with this exhibit!” Or, alternately, “are you a moron? You have NO IDEA what I could say right now. Are you prepared? Are you ready for me to tell you my mom jumped from the 44^th floor? I didn’t think so.”

I just smiled, and moved on to exhibits on terror prevention (or deficit creation) and a beautiful display on action against HIV, with, of course, no hint of irony that the man responsible for re-establishing the global gag rule (and as a result, the loss of donated, HIV-preventing contraceptives by more than 20 developing nations around the world) would also give $15 billion dollars to combat AIDS.

Global AIDS Map

The faces of HIV

Though everything pales in comparison to the 9/11 exhibit, the library makes excellent use of technology in Decision Points Theater, an interactive activity on decision making, in which participants get to participate in global diplomacy based on the limited amount of information a president would have had at any given time. Results are based on the majority vote of people in the room – exciting during a classroom visit, not so much when Vivian and I are two of five people in the room.

By the time we had lunch (delicious) and were ready to leave, I was contemplating voting for Laura Bush, should she happen to make a presidential bid –

and feeling like this gift shop offering was a little redundant.

Life Skills, On the Road, Tourist, Traveling, United States

Where I’m From

April 17, 2014 JG 1 Comment

Three months before I turned 40, I spent a month obsessively looking at new cars on craigslist. When I realized I was perfectly happy with my 12 year-old stick shift station wagon, I left the cars behind and decided just to pierce my nose, like I’d wanted to do since I was 14. Suddenly, I was freed from the socially-acceptable expectations of mid-life, and welcomed into the decade that would allow me to just be me. Midlife crisis narrowly averted.

Not even a full state from Texas, a crisis of an entirely different order arose. I took refuge from a torrential downpour at a café on the Taos plaza, and got to talking to a woman about her dog. Naturally, she asked me where I was from. A normally chatty human being who can carry on a conversation with anyone from the Pope to a wall, I was struck silent. I didn’t even stutter; I just couldn’t answer. I was faced with a geographic identity crisis.

For the eight, mostly uncomfortable years I lived in Dallas, I told people, “I live in Dallas, but I’m from California.” This is the technical truth – I was born in San Francisco, and consider myself a Californian – but it isn’t the whole story. I arrived in Dallas a full seven locations after I originally left my home state. As a result, I’m a committed recycler with aggressive driving skills, a very northeastern way of flipping the bird, a New Yorker’s style of walking through a crowded urban center ignoring everyone around me, a Northwestern desire to be outside even when the weather fills with rain and wind, and a Texan belief that my boots and a good buckle should work for any occasion. When I say, “I’m going home,” I could be referring to Seattle, San Francisco, or Dallas. But I don’t know how to tell someone where I’m from, because choosing one place feels like a lie.

I hoped this issue would resolve itself when I left the country, but it got worse. Complete strangers took a kind-hearted interest in the specifics of my personal history, and weren’t satisfied when I told them simply, “I’m from the United States.” People in other countries know a surprising number of US states; they also watch a lot of bad tv. Texas is on the map for Dallas (the original), Walker Texas Ranger, and George Bush. Telling people I’m from California garnered a lot of, “I’ll be back,” “oh…Ah-nald,” and, “California?…Hollywood?” So I tried Washington.

Cold, beautiful west coast

Understandably, it’s confusing to foreigners that the state of apples, Starbucks, and the Olympic peninsula is both not the same as the capital city that shares its name, and is located on the other side of the country. I didn’t bother correcting people who responded to Washington with, “ah! Obama’s house,” until the questions about DC got too involved, and I would confess that I was actually from an entirely different place (though I’ve lived in both).

Washington State

The irony of all this is that it actually doesn’t matter. In earlier eras, outside of Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and great migrations, people rarely moved far from home. Now, we’re in a shrinking global community, where constant population flux consistently alters cultures, blending them across geographic boundaries, until good barbeque isn’t just found in the south and good bagels aren’t held captive in New York. The San Francisco of 2013, with its dot com billionaires and microapartments for a million dollars, isn’t the San Francisco of 1993, with its distinct neighborhoods, affordable housing, and hippy funk. (When people ask me if I’m moving back to San Francisco, I feel compelled to point out that San Francisco isn’t there anymore.)

And yet, for all this movement, for all this homogeneity of culture, place matters. When I go out for coffee, place matters. Am I walking there, biking there, driving there, or taking public transportation? Is it Dunkin’s coffee, Starbucks coffee, local coffee, organically sourced and priced up coffee? Or maybe it’s Turkish, Thai, or Vietnamese white coffee? Is it hot or cold? Is it smooth roasted, or bitter? Am I standing at the coffee bar chatting with neighbors, sitting at an outdoor café under a heat lamp, or grabbing it to go while I drive off someplace?

Place matters for the most simple things, because it’s the simple things that form who we are. The personality of a place shapes our approach to the world; it demonstrates for us how we absorb information, how we respond to stimuli around us, and how we view what we see moving forward. Thirty years ago, when I moved from the Bay area to Boston, this mattered a hundred times more.

I left a place of cold oceans with rough surf and foggy-day picnics on the beach, of yoga and recycling and home-made peanut butter, and went to the land of green pants with blue whales, classmates related to passengers on the Mayflower, and ‘one if by land two if by sea.’ As a result, though I longed regularly for the west coast of my childhood, I was raised using the T, rooting for the Celtics, watching my first baseball game from the Fenway bleachers, and busing out to Great Woods for one concert after another. There is no mistaking that these experiences gave me some of the independence that I enjoy when I travel, and that the longing to get back to the other coast, to see what was beneath me when I flew from one to another, gave me my desire to actually buy a plane ticket and do it.

New York subway

So when I tell people I’m from California, I feel like I’m disrespecting half of my roots. And I feel like my roots have more than two halves. Didn’t summers on a small island in Puget Sound teach me to love reading, staring at the water, and the smell of fresh wind? Didn’t college in New York help me understand that I can only do cities for a moment before I shut down? Don’t we continue to grow, to absorb place and its personality, and to change as a result, throughout our lives? I didn’t move to Texas until I was 30, but didn’t it warm me a bit, teach me a about expressing myself respectfully to people with opposing viewpoints, and help me understand myself better? Isn’t growth and absorption of place the only thing that explains Madonna’s fake British accent?

For all the shrinking of the world, place still matters. The more we create these hybrid humans who herald from multiple cultures, possibly without much leaving their own, the more confusing the question ‘where are you from’ will become. I, for one, am looking forward to it, so I’m not the only one suffering from a geographic identity crisis.

Crazy Dallas weather

Worth Packing In

the little truth of traveling

Health