Peripatetic

So the second phase of the big move is now underway: I’m back in Missouri (where it is a brutal 95 degrees, obviously in my honor—though it’s not much cooler in the NYC area), having returned yesterday to collect the cats and oversee the move. Right at this moment I’m taking a break from packing CDs and other things that I didn’t manage to pack before I started the new job. The packers arrive tomorrow, ostensibly to pack the kitchen, bathroom, our few bits of framed artwork, and our electronics, but I have a feeling they’re going to end up packing more than that. (It turns out that packing services don’t add as much to the cost of a move as I thought they did, which isn’t to say that they don’t add quite a bit–but it’s so worth it, as I discovered the one time I had an employer who paid full relocation expenses.)

And I am a big giant ball of stress. I got about 3 hours of sleep, I think; between the heat (we have central air conditioning, of course, an essential in this climate, but it can only do so much) and all the worries and concerns racing through my mind, I just couldn’t stay asleep for more than an hour or so at a time. I think that must be the biggest reason that I keep having bouts of uncontrollable crying. This house is just so crowded with…stuff, stuff of all kinds, some of it toss-able, much of it not. I’m afraid that we won’t get all of it packed in time, though rationally, I know that worrying about that is silly. If we don’t get it packed and the movers end up being delayed a day, or we end up having to get them to pack more than we plan to, the world will not end. Worst case, Bill can rent a truck and move the rest of it when he’s ready to join me in NJ. Rationally, I know these things; rationally, I know that worrying about things I can’t control is silly and even unhealthy; rationally, I know that there’s nothing I can do but to keep packing and see how it goes. But “rationally” and I aren’t getting along very well at the moment.

My cell phone has this cute little feature that lets me add a message that displays when I turn the phone on. During the two weeks when I was between jobs and should have been spending every waking moment putting stuff in boxes, the message read, “Shouldn’t you be packing?” For the past month, though, the message has been “Don’t forget to breathe.” It’s good advice; I think I need to tattoo that message to my eyeballs for the next few days.

But it’s not the advice I’m referring to in the subject line. That advice is far better, and it is my heartfelt gift to anyone reading this. The advice is: Never move house. Ever. Find a city and a house you like or even love, and stay there. Or if you really want to move, because you hate your house or your kids are grown or the neighborhood is going downhill or whatever, for heaven’s sake don’t move any farther than a few miles. And for the love of God, don’t do it in July.

This is perhaps the most important advice I will ever give anyone.

For months and more, I’ve been wavering about whether or not to just delete the whole blog, to leave it here for posterity (an addition to the world’s growing collection of ghost blogs), or to revive it. I’m still not sure what I’ll do, but since I am wandering again and living up to the name of the blog—and since I have a rare ambient wireless connection here at my dad’s apartment (he still has dial-up, so I have to count on grabbing an open signal from the air)—it seems like a good time to post.

Yep, I’ve uprooted myself and my life yet again. In a little more than two weeks, I’ll be a resident of West Orange, NJ, a place I had never even visited before renting a house there. (I was in East Orange back when Upsala College still existed, many years ago, at a record fair or something at WFMU radio, but that was the extent of my knowledge of the Oranges.) The spouse is still back in Missouri, trying to juggle his long workdays with getting work done on the house so that we can sell it. The cats are there too, though mercifully, they’ll join me when I move in to the house; Bill (and the dog) will follow when they can.

And I have to confess that this peripatetic stuff isn’t as easy as it used to be, or seemed to be once. There are so many weird and scary variables that weren’t there the last few times I uprooted: having to sell a house in a tough market (and it wouldn’t be an instant seller even in a good market), having to find a place where we can have cars and pets and space, having to worry about Bill finding a job when he gets here. And not having the cats with me has been truly traumatic; I’ve given serious thought to packing the whole thing in and going back home, resuming my old job and my old life, and I think most of those thoughts have been triggered by my missing the cats. Not all of them, but most. Is it pathetic that I can’t bear to be away from the kitties for more than a few days? I don’t know, but when you consider that their lifespan is only around fifteen years (if they’re lucky, and it makes me nervous even talking about it), three weeks is a long fucking time.

Last time I moved east, with my first husband, we sold our house at a garage sale (really—our next-door neighbors made us an offer while we were chatting during the sale), we had the promise of an apartment in a brownstone in Park Slope, owned by family friends of my ex, and I never had to leave the cats behind. And my ex’s salary in Minneapolis was so negligible that it didn’t matter that he took a job here that paid even less than the one he’d had in Mpls.; we were still able to get by. At my new job, I’m making far more money than I did the last time I moved here, but somehow, it still doesn’t seem like enough.

And then there’s the New Jersey thing. My job is in Newark, and for a variety of reasons, it seems to make the most sense to find a place in suburban Jersey rather than staying in NYC and commuting by train. The office is in a part of Newark that could be called “emerging,” I guess, and it’s not really that bad…but it’s iffy enough that I wouldn’t want to have to walk to the train station if I were working late; I’d rather be able to just go to the parking lot and get in my car. (Many of my co-workers commute from Manhattan and Brooklyn, though, so my thinking may be flawed there.) Living in Jersey will also allow us more space and a less frenetic pace, and, if I’m being honest, the easy access to familiar stores like Target that we love to patronize is enticing too. (And there’s a Trader Joe’s within easy driving distance, which I’m excited about. Trader Joe’s has snubbed our part of Missouri, apparently forever.)

So we’ll be Jerseyites, and I have mixed feelings about that. It’s not the stigma of living in “Joisey,” exactly; just because I grew up making fun of the state doesn’t mean that I fail to recognize that it has many lovely towns and places. It’s more that I’m worried that a suburban Jersey life won’t feel like I’m back in New York, back home again; it seems more likely to feel pretty much like our life in Missouri, only a lot more expensive. Is that the life I want? I’m just not sure. Of course, there’s no way I can be sure until I actually start living there, and we’re renting, so we won’t be tied to West Orange for more than a year if we don’t want to be. But it’s yet another thing that’s been keeping me up at night.

Geez, this is the whiniest post ever, isn’t it? On the plus side, I’ve already gotten to see one of my two wonderful nephews,* and the opportunity to see them a lot more often is very welcome. And being able to hop on a train or bus (not as easy from West Orange as from some of the neighboring, pricier towns, but still very doable) to check in on my dad and my brother will be great—I’m really looking forward to not having to get on a plane to see my family. I like my new job, and I get the sense that I’ll continue to like it—and if ever I don’t, I’ll have a lot more job possibilities here than I would have in Missouri. So there’s lots to be optimistic about, and I’m trying to focus on that. Not altogether successfully during these first two weeks, but I’ll keep trying.

But I really think I’m too old for this. I’m not making any more cross-country moves for a while, that’s for damn sure. Or at least I hope I won’t have to.

*My nephews, who are now 21 and 17, respectively, are a genuine source of joy in my life. They’ve both turned out to be such amazingly good kids, smart and kind and fun to be with. Not that I would have expected them to turn out any other way, but y’know, they’re kids, and they grew up in a well-heeled New York suburb, and they could just as easily have been brats or snobs or otherwise unpleasant, despite having good parents who raised them well. I know this because a lot of my college friends grew up in the same suburb, and some of them were kind of wrecks. But my nephews, bless them, turned out to be good people, and they make me proud.

Salon’s campaign coverage has been very disappointing lately; there’s been a strong undercurrent of Hillary-worship, a tendency to ignore everyone but Obama and Clinton (just like the mainstream media), and in the last week, a remarkably lame bit of bandwagon-shifting from “We <heart> Hillary” to “We loved Obama all along.” But this little snippet might just be the thing that makes me decide not to renew my subscription. Not just because I’m an Edwards supporter, but because I don’t need to pay money to read this kind of trivia-obsessed non-journalism. I have the entire rest of the fucking media for that.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/01/07/john_edwards/index.html

(Note the obligatory, oh-so-original comment about Edwards’s hair.) And seriously, did anyone fall for Hillary’s carefully constructed attempt to make herself look more human? The choked-back sob, the little catch in her voice—it was a fine performance, but nothing more. Not to mention that she’s said far, far worse about her opponents.

Addendum: I never write letters to the editor, but this piece made me so mad that I actually posted a comment—but it’s not the one signed by someone with my name and initial; I used an alias, as I always do nowadays whenever I post in public places.

I need to vent for a moment. To wit:

I was sitting here minding my own business and looking for some information on the Website of one of the several professional organizations in my world, and I noticed that they were plugging their new social networking site, which is sort of like an industry-specific version of LinkedIn. So I went to investigate it, and browsing around, I noticed that they had a job forum. I’m not job-hunting, particularly, but I always like to keep my eyes open for new possibilities, so I looked at it. And lo and behold, there was a job that sounded perfect for me.

It’s a long story, but there are a bunch of subspecialties in my field, and my particular subspecialty is a little more obscure and less “hot” at the moment than the others, so jobs that are truly just right for me are kind of few and far between. This one, though, could have been invented for me: it requires someone with a content/writing/editorial background, and a library science degree is preferred.

And it’s at Zappos. Zappos, the online shoe store that is my favorite place to shop, from which I’ve bought countless pairs of shoes. The perfect job at the perfect place, in other words.

Before a) jumping up and down with excitement and b) zooming my résumé to them right away, I looked for a location in the job description. I had this vague recollection that Zappos was someplace in the Southeast—not my ideal, but not out of the question, either, depending on where in the Southeast we’re talking about. This could be good.

But no. My recollection was faulty. They’re in Las Vegas. I loathe Las Vegas.* Of all the places in the country that one might consider moving to, on a scale of 1 to 10, Las Vegas falls somewhere in the region of Miami. Or Camden, NJ. Or to put it in early Talking Heads terms, I wouldn’t move there if you paid me; I wouldn’t live there, no siree.

Not even to work for Zappos, alas. Why couldn’t they be somewhere else? It would be too much to ask for them to be someplace I actively want to move, of course, but couldn’t they at least be in Des Moines or Raleigh or someplace I could even remotely conceive of considering moving to? It’s no fair, I tells ya. No fair at all.

*I didn’t actually know that I hated Las Vegas until recently. I mean, I knew that the weather wouldn’t appeal to me, and neither would the city’s status as one of the fastest-growing in the country, especially because the growth seems to be mainly concentrated in new, faceless suburbs. But I didn’t have anything against Las Vegas, particularly. Kitsch doesn’t appeal to me (<–understatement) and I’m not much on gambling—no moral objections or anything, I just get bored as soon as I lose more than $5.00—but I was still fairly curious about the place, and believed that like any good American, I should see it at least once. Then I went to a convention there this past spring, and slightly to my surprise, I absolutely hated the place. Hated it. Everything about it. It’s depressing, it’s skeevy, it’s unpleasant. I hope never to go back.

So I joined a CSA this year. All organic produce, grown about 30 miles away. So far, it’s been pretty good, although it has stricter work requirements than the one I belonged to back in Mpls.* Actually, it’s been very good; it’s just that I’ve been kinda bad. I guess I’d underestimated the degree to which I just no longer do any real cooking. As a result, I’ve had to throw away a fair amount of produce.

But I’m trying to do better. And right now, I have literally about 15 beautiful heirloom tomatoes just waiting for me to do something with them. I also have various Japanese-type eggplants, a few peppers, some basil, and a bag of various types of baby squash. Oh, and some new potatoes. And green beans. But mostly, I have tomatoes, and I’m determined not to waste them.

With that in mind, I need help: What would you do with all those tomatoes? I suppose I could cook up some tomato sauce—I forgot, I have onions and garlic too—but that would be pretty boring. I remember making a tomato tart a number of years ago, but I have no clue where I got the recipe. Can canning be learned quickly, like in a day? Anyone got better suggestions? Please?

*Needless to say, I’m overwhelmed with sorrow and horror at the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. It’s particularly upsetting to me because I know that area well; I didn’t spend much time on I-35W heading north, but it’s quite close to where I lived, and I drove under that bridge every day for years. In fact, parts of the bridge apparently landed on the River Road, which was my route to work (and which was a delightful road to commute on—scenic, no traffic, very few stop signs). I just can’t even begin to imagine what people are going through there, and my heart is with them, and with the city.

My iPod appears to be horked. All of my songs have mysteriously disappeared, though their space on the drive has not–the menu says 0 songs, 4.5 GB (out of 20) available. I’m going to try a couple of possible fixes at home tonight, but I’m guessing that I’m screwed, based on what I can find in the various iPod support forums out there.

So should I be:
a) really annoyed that I’m going to have to buy another iPod and reload it;
b) grateful that I got three years out of this one;
and/or
c) glad that I can afford a new iPod, even if it means putting off the possible purchase of a Nintendo Wii (which I was contemplating getting myself for my birthday) for a while?

I think I’m all of the above, actually.
——————————————
Update: Against all odds, the music magically reappeared when I connected my iPod to the computer And we got a fancy new coffee machine at work today (replacing the fancy old one, which didn’t seem to have anything wrong with it, far as I know) that makes really quite respectable cappuccino and uses coffee from local treasure the Roasterie. Could this day get any better? I think not.

There’s a question on my profile page over at LiveJournal that asks: “How did you spend summers when you were a kid?”

I decided that question deserved a longer-ass answer than I was prepared to post on LiveJournal. It’s started to get hot here, and my summer isn’t off to a very good start, so it’s kind of refreshing to think back on a time when I actually enjoyed this part of the year.

New Yorkers like to get their kids out of the city in the summer if possible, which is very sensible. When I was a little kid, that wasn’t possible, but we used to visit friends who had a house on a lake in Putnam County, about an hour outside the city, on weekends. Then for a couple of summers we rented our own house up there and spent pretty much every summer weekend there.

The summer I turned 8, I joined the ancient Jewish tradition of going to summer camp. The camps I went to for the next four summers were in the Berkshires, which is undoutedly why I still want to retire there–probably my favorite place in the US.

During my last summer at camp, my dad wrote a series of articles about the life and history of East Hampton, which “required” him to go out there every weekend in August. The next summer, he managed to parlay that into a longer series, and got to stay in a motel suite with its own private stretch of beach in Amagansett for six weeks. I joined him (my mom and brother came out on weekends), and during the day, I took riding lessons and cleaned out stalls and just generally hung out at the barn. That was one of the best summers of my life. The next summer, I stayed in a house near the stable in East Hampton with a bunch of other barn rats, riding and doing barn stuff every day and competing in horse shows. That was the summer of Watergate, which will forever be linked in my memory to my last days as a member of the horsey set.

I turned 14 the next summer, and got to do so in Sibford Ferris, a Cotswolds town so small that addresses there include the name of the nearest big town. That was a life-changing summer, boy howdy. I fell in love with England and everything English, not the usual touristy/stereotype stuff but the actual people—that was my first prolonged exposure to British humor, which went well with my own sense of humor—as well as minutiae like how much better their chocolate bars are than ours and the typeface that they use on signs (Gill Sans, I learned years later) and stuff like that. Ever since then, whenever I’ve had enough money to travel, I’ve gone straight to England. If I hadn’t had a job that allowed me to travel to Italy and Germany on business, I probably still wouldn’t have been anywhere else outside the US.

And I wound up there almost by accident. I’d wanted to go to France on the Experiment in International Living, but it turned out to be too expensive. To make it up to me, my parents found a summer camp in England called, er, Summer Camps in England. “Camps” because it was actually four camps in one: a travel camp, a boys’ soccer camp, a drama camp, and an archaeology camp. I was in the drama camp—not that I was really all that interested in drama, but I’d been in plays at previous summer camps and enjoyed it, and that was as good an excuse as any.

It was my first time out of the country (unless you count a dimly remembered trip to Puerto Rico when I was four), and it was also pretty much my first exposure to people who weren’t from the East Coast; the soccer players were mainly Midwestern and Southern, and I didn’t know quite how to react to them. That was good for me, learning that there was a world not too far away that was so different from my own. I preferred hanging out with the locals, though—mostly a group of older teenage boys who would descend a few nights a week on the school that housed the camp. They were small-town, working-class, slightly yobbish I suppose, but I felt more at home with them than the nice suburban soccer players somehow. And Sibford itself was so beautiful—I’d never seen countryside quite that green and lush and rolling, and it was impossible to imagine anyplace better at the time. But then late in the summer we made a four-day trip to London, and even in the sticky heat and our nasty cheap hotel, I knew I had found my favorite place in the world. I wanted to stay there forever, and I hated leaving and going back to plain old NYC.

That was my last summer away from the city, pretty much. I was a teenager by then, and capable of finding fun without leaving town. Which was just as well, and I had some great city summers during high school and college. Besides, it would have been hard to top a summer in Sibford, anyway.

So some years ago, I saw a short travel feature on some cable channel or other about an island town in Italy where all the houses were painted bright, vivid colors, and anyone wanting to paint their house had to request approval from the local government. It looked like an absolutely wonderful town, and I always had it in the back of my mind that I would try to visit it someday. (This was when I was going to Italy for the book fair every year, and the idea of getting to travel around the country seemed much likelier than it does now.) Except that I couldn’t remember the name of the town or which region it was in, only that it was an island, in the northern half of Italy.

And then I forgot about it, mostly. But every so often when I’m wandering aimlessly on the Web, I’ll try to think of things that I’ve always meant to look up, and the name of this town falls into that category…except that I never remember to look up half the things that I’ve always wanted to look up. But today, for some reason, I finally remembered the little town with the multicolored houses. It turns out that my memory was accurate, if fuzzy: the town is called Burano, and it’s an island in the lagoon around Venice. And it looks just as magical as I remembered from the travel show. Funny thing is, I’ve never particularly wanted to go to Venice, which I’ve heard is overcrowded and too touristy; I’d rather go back to Milan or Rome or Florence or, God knows, Bologna again. But I think Burano would be worth the trip.

Well, phooey. I went to the IA Summit, met some amazing people, had some inspiring conversations, saw some excellent presentations (along with, admittedly, a few fairly mundane ones), and came back feeling revitalized and glad to be doing what I do for a living, which was especially refreshing after the spate of “Information Architecture Is Dead” posts in recent months. But then I came back and found that there are more cranky IA Is Imperiled posts floating around, and reading them took away my enthusiasm for blogging about the Summit. It didn’t take away the sense of renewed energy that I’m still feeling, nor is my overwhelmingly positive impression of the event itself diminished, but I’m going to need to take a little extra time to marshal my thoughts and write something about the experience.

A few quick thoughts, though:

1. The trading cards were incredibly cool. Seriously, best ice-breaker/conversation starter ever, and as a bonus, they’ll be a great quick way to educate account and client teams. The NForm folks deserve tremendous credit for coming up with them.
2. Some sort of organized newbie event would have been nice. The first-timers table at the Saturday lunch was a good idea, but one table wasn’t adequate, and since I arrived late to lunch that day, I couldn’t even get near the table. Of course, newbies need to take initiative and meet people on their own, and I did, but a dinner or a reception or even something less formal would have been welcome, especially because there were (I think) an unusual number of first-timers this year. (Then again, next year I won’t be a first-timer, so maybe I shouldn’t worry about it!)
3. I would like to respectfully ask ASIS&T and the Summit committee to never, ever have the conference in Las Vegas again. No one I spoke to was happy about it being in Vegas, and the, er, charms of the city and the Vegas experience seemed mostly lost on the attendees. Plus the hotel, with its absurdly inflated prices and its appalling lack of reliable Net access, was a real disappointment.

Okay, now it sounds like I’m griping, and really I’m not. As I said, the experience was amazingly positive. I was so impressed by the energy and creativity and intelligence of everyone I met, and I learned more than I would have expected to. It was a true pleasure to meet so many people whose blogs I read regularly* and find that they were down-to-earth and approachable and more than willing to share ideas and experiences—even the big names in the field. Despite joking with a fellow IA Institute member about IA rock stars and the cult of personality, I was genuinely impressed with the fact that those “rock stars” sat and listened to other people’s presentations and came to the lunches and just generally didn’t act like they were above it all. I’m not at all sure that that’s the case in a lot of other professions.

And in case it’s not clear, I really, really didn’t like Las Vegas. This surprised me a little, because I have no moral or philosophical issues with gambling,** and though I am very much not into kitsch (I’ll save that particular rant for another day), I thought I might half-enjoy the over-the-topness of the place. But no. As soon as the overpriced airport shuttle (with GRATUITIES NOT INCLUDED printed in large type at the bottom of the ticket) hit the Strip, I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy Vegas. I knew everything would be tacky and ephemeral-looking, but I didn’t know it would all be that tacky. “New York, New York” didn’t impress me at all; it looked like it would topple over if you sneezed on it. Ditto the “Eiffel Tower” at the Paris. (Okay, I’ll grant that the Pyramid at the Luxor was sort of cool. Sort of.) And the larger-than-life scantily clad Toni Braxton that covered the façade of the conference hotel was not an encouraging greeting. I will not be going back. But hey, at least the weather was nice.

*(I’m disappointed, though, that I didn’t work up the nerve to talk to Lou Rosenfeld and didn’t even see Peter Morville. Both were extremely gracious and helpful to me via e-mail when I was applying to LEEP, and both are (along with my friend Sarah) the main reasons I got into IA in the first place. Maybe next year.)

**To state that more precisely, I have no problem with the act of gambling. I’m not exactly a fan of the gaming industry, though I’m also not convinced that it’s inherently worse than other money-hungry industries, just more blatantly sleazy, I guess. And I think our (the US’s, that is) collective ambivalence about gambling is goofy, much like our ambivalence and double-talk about sex. But I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally immoral about betting on stuff. Plus I like to play slot machines every once in a great while, even if I do quit as soon as I lose $5.00.)

…is “30 Rock.” Or more accurately, it’s the best thing on broadcast TV. (The best thing on TV is “The Wire,” even when it’s between seasons, as it is now.)

I never expected to like this show. I haven’t watched “Saturday Night Live” in years—decades, even—so I don’t know Tina Fey from a chair; I’m very, very picky about comedy, and in particular, I have limited patience with sitcoms and usually burn out on them after about half a season. But the show is comic genius. Alec Baldwin has been getting a lot of accolades for his performance, and deservedly so—his delivery is so spot on that nearly everything he says is hilarious—but the rest of the cast is also excellent. It’s the only sitcom that has ever sent me scurrying over to TelevisionWithoutPity to look for posts quoting lines from the episode that has just aired.

Seriously, if you’re not watching this show, you’re missing out.

(On the other hand, I recommend avoiding the heavily hyped new Paul Haggis show, “The Black Donnellys,” like the plague. Unless you enjoy watching one-dimensional, anachronistic Irish-American stereotypes stealing things and getting into fights, that is.)