Mom: I didn't get it at a truck stop, but...

 

Me: Well, does it involve wildlife?

 

Mom: (somewhat bashfully) Yes...

 

Me: AWESOME.

So an e-mail to a select few people Monday night contained the following:

I would love to keep entertaining you all with grammatical exploits, but it's getting late here on the Left Coast and I am getting tired. And I have to fly out in the morning—assuming none of the airports I'll be visiting (Seattle, Houston, and Little Rock) are closed. Pray for me that I don't get stuck in Houston, because that's in Texas.

Apparently I asked the wrong people to pray for me (oh, the burden of unrighteous roommates), or they didn't, in fact, pray for me (oh, the burden of unrighteous roommates), because I did, in fact, get stuck in Houston, for 17 hours and counting, with at least another 2 and possibly 8 remaining. (The alternative theory for this predicament—that this is compensation for yesterday's inwardly condescending, smug, and altogether uncharitable attitude toward other stuck travelers—is not currently under consideration.) Highlights of this (yet ongoing) ordeal include:

• A connection missed by less than five minutes ("I'm supposed to be on that plane." "It's gone." "What do you mean, GONE?")
• The somewhat disheartening prospect of an overnight stay in Houston ("I'll put you on the next flight. It leaves at 7:10 TOMORROW MORNING") and its associated freak-out (thanks, LH and AK, for being good friends)
• The even more disheartening realization that the luggage with all my clothes and toiletries did, in fact, make it to Little Rock last night
• The Shuttle for the Lost and Abandoned (as the delightfully cheerful man who welcomed me thereon called it)
• A ghetto motel with a bathtub plug improvised of plastic film and a washcloth (I wanted to relax, da[ng]it!)
• A 4:30 AM wake-up call that occurred at 3:15 AM (who needs more than four hours of sleep anyway?)
• A frigid 5:00 AM ride to the airport accompanied by freezing rain, "Eye of the Tiger", and other power ballads 
• Two hours spent waiting for a 7:10 AM flight that was canceled, without warning or explanation, at 7:05
• The truly disheartening prospect of at least six and possibly twelve more hours in Houston (I'm on standby for the 1:15—someone other than my roommates, please pray that I make it onto that flight)
• Aimless, semi-catatonic wandering through Terminal B (part of a completely futile search for a comfortable place to nap)

Enjoying this opportunity to develop patience and effective stress-handling techniques,
S.

(The following was written at 1:20, but I unfortunately didn't get the e-mail sent before I was out of range of the wireless Internet access.)

Update: Ladies and gentlemen, we have a real, honest-to-goodness BOARDING PASS!

(Hopefully this boarding pass will prove more than a tangible representation of exercises in futility; as I am actually on a [very cold] bus at the moment, awaiting deportation to a plane somewhere out on the tarmac, my hopes are high.)

Another hypothesis for today's predicament, heretofore unmentioned because I wasn't sure it was valid (though I was certainly hoping so), has to do with my Theory of Finite Quantities—the idea being that there are finite quantities of elements such as luck in the world, and that thus one person's good fortune reduces that of others, at least to a certain degree. In other words, I got stuck in Houston for 19 hours because AK was using all the luck, but since (warning: spoiler to follow) one of the newest admittees to Harvard Business School now has some VERY good news (I almost jumped out of my seat right there in the terminal but didn't want to inadvertently use my laptop as a projectile), I don't begrudge him a Texas ordeal or two. And he quit using all of the luck in time for me to make this flight, which is very benevolent of him.

And now the bus is moving, presumably toward an airplane, so I gotta go. Loves to all yous guyses!

Aaaaaaand the saga continues. My body is here (thanks to the prayers of JR and maybe JH), my computer is here, my backpack is here, and one of my checked bags is here... The other, despite having visited Little Rock during my absence (according to the testimony of at least one Continental employee who all but swears she not only saw but personally handled it), apparently has heretofore unsuspected abandonment/anger management issues and hence either went looking for me, maybe in Florida (my mom's guess), or just ran away, maybe to Beirut (more likely, in my opinion). Continental has vowed to find the suitcase whatever its present locale and disposition and return it to me, which I, for one, find indescribably—INDESCRIBABLY—reassuring given the events of the past 24 hours.

Props to all you pray-ers (at least, you effective ones),

S. (who was waving her valid boarding pass a few hours ago with an ecstatic vigor usually reserved for finders of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-style golden tickets ["I got one! I got one!"])

It's official—we have a name and a website now:

http://www.uwandi.org

If that URL doesn't work (the co-founder is still setting it up as I type this), try this one: 

http://uwandi.googlepages.com/home

So one day in May 1998 I was driving through Orem, Utah when suddenly I heard a CLANG—clunkclunkclunkclunk accompanied by a loud hiss. I pulled over and found that I hadn't merely run over a nail, leaving a tire that could be easily fixed; instead, my overachieving car had run over a wrench—yes, a wrench—that then embedded itself in the inside wall of the tire, leaving a hole about a half inch in diameter. Shortly thereafter I was the proud owner of (yet) a(nother)* brand-new tire.

Fast-forward just over eight years to August 18, 2006, about 19 hours before I was to embark upon a 1500-mile drive. While driving near the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, I heard the same CLANG—clunkclunkclunkclunk, accompanied by the same loud hiss. Unlike most people, who require only one tire-death-by-wrench experience, I apparently didn't learn whatever lesson I needed the first time. And apparently I needed even more schoolin' this time, because while I was attempting to raise Simon Bennett in 101-degree (Soul-Sucking Hot) heat, with the pavement burning my knees through my jeans so that I had to kneel on the owner's manual and with eyes stinging because I couldn't wipe away the sweat with hands that were covered with dirt and grease, the jack first began to sink into the pavement and then broke altogether. ([Expletive deleted] cheap dealership jacks.) Fortunately MINI Roadside Assistance came to the rescue within about 45 minutes; I then had 90 minutes to find a new MINI-size tire in Little Rock before everything closed for the weekend--a rather daunting task. Luckily the manager of the third place I called apparently has a soft spot for desperate-sounding Yankees, because he was kind enough to send an employee that he was really too busy to spare over to the warehouse and work me into the already overcrowded schedule at the end of an incredibly busy Friday. Thank goodness for people like him.

So the tire incident and losing my keys Saturday morning and Simon Bennett's invisibility cloak (unsuspected until three separate vehicles tried to pull over on him) and waaaay too much caffeine Saturday evening and even more caffeine Sunday morning and Ohio drivers who think 66 MPH is a perfectly acceptable speed for the fast lane and an incredibly painful combination of toll road insanity and bathroom/gas station idiocy in New York were the less-fun aspects of the trip; however, the drive also included an amazing Cincinnati sunset, a pillow-top mattress at my roommates' parents' magic house, an exquisitely beautiful view of Lake Erie, charming countryside vistas, good music, an audiobook about Ben Franklin, several episodes of This American Life (probably my all-time favorite NPR program), good conversations with several friends, numerous law enforcement agents whose radar guns somehow missed me, and a 90-minute stop in Palmyra, New York, where a long wander through the Sacred Grove was decrankifying and soothing enough to make the final 5.5 hours very close to enjoyable. I arrived home at almost exactly 12:30 this morning to welcoming hugz from my roommates and cool, pleasant temperatures. I think I'll stay here a while.

*Remember the brief aside in the “Update from a time zone jumper” post about a tire disintegrating in pre-dawn Roseville, California? I had to buy four new tires before I drove back to Utah. One of these 10-day-old Michelins was the wrench recipient.

In the last update I mentioned that I was headed to Lake Tahoe to spend a few days doing all sorts of constructive things, like sipping virgin daiquiris and working on my tan. Well, despite a rather alarming Mustang-overheating episode in Roseville (a truly wretched town for Fords—I passed several less-than-pleasant hours there on Saturday, May 1, 1998, after one of the tires on Susanna [my 1990 Escort from HELL—oh, how I detested that car] disintegrated at 4:30 AM as I was driving from Provo to Oakland), we made it to our cabin (with its thrice-blessed wireless Internet access) safely on Tuesday night. And I spent the next day—my first ever at Lake Tahoe, enchanted paradise of swimmers, fishers, hikers, and outdoorspeople of all stripes—

In bed. All day.

That is, except for the two times I managed to stagger out to the living room for a few minutes, looking "like death" (according to my aunt) and feeling like I'd been beaten by a steamroller. Fortunately, thanks to some late-evening magic pasta a la Jessica, the illness provided only 24 hours of abject misery and the attempt to not throw up was successful. (Would that I had had some magic pasta on the overnight train in Zimbabwe, though I doubt even that would have been sufficient to counteract the synergistically antisalubrious forces of baaaad sadza ma nyama, ramshackle machinery, inescapable cigarette smoke, and miasmic eau de humanity.)

Yee-haw y’all!

Greetings from the land of catfish, aggressive poultry, towns named Bald Knob and Possum Grape, and venerated establishments from B.J.’s Star-Studded Honky Tonk to Hogman’s Hog Pen! A. and I left Washington, DC (where the flooding had closed a lot of things we wanted to see, unfortunately) on Tuesday and arrived in Conway (halfway between Toad Suck and Pickles Gap!) at about 4:00 AM Wednesday, after a longlonglong drive that included all of the following:

Five hours of near-constant torrential rain (A., an amateur motorcycle racer, consistently sped up as the rain became heavier, prompting occasional less-than-charitable comments from his older sister, whose driving habits aren’t nearly as aggressive as some people think [ANINDYA]),

An accident that involved three 18-wheelers and two SUVs and that closed both lanes of northbound I-81 (we were going south, fortunately),

A rather messy post-bite-pre-swallow meatball sandwich sneeze (A. now knows that inhaling peppers is a bad idea),

A longer-than-expected stop at a Tennessee gas station (whose hand-lettered Department of Redundancy Department signs admonished customers to “Pre-pay before pumping gas”) so A. could re-aim his headlights and then fix the hood of his $408 car so it would actually stay shut,

Two night-time police pull-overs for A. and one for me (I’d stopped to wait for A. and didn’t realize that the car that pulled over behind me was a police car, so when I immediately drove away the policeman wondered what, exactly, this Yankee was up to),

Surprisingly little construction in Memphis,

FOUR separate carbon-, syrup-, and caffeine-laden libations that made my limbs feel like they were filled with helium,

Several hours of continuous full-volume high notes sung through a throat already ravaged by carbonated beverages, CornNuts and other junk food, and allergies more powerful than prescription medication, and

Half-hourly wake-up calls carried out entirely in Spanish because English wasn’t enough to keep us both awake.

All these combined to make the trip preternaturally enjoyable, of course—but the real highlight of the trip was the selection of radio stations in Virginia and Tennessee, which included at least four Christian self-help channels (handily located on both ends of the dial), one Christian rock/rap station (surreal, that), a few ultra-conservative talk stations (the unique national pride that Americans have is “what separates us from the animals in other countries”—you guys probably heard me scream), an 80s hair-band channel (had a wonderful time shrieking “WHOA-OH! LIIIIIIIVIN’ ON A PRAYER” ad nauseam along with Mr. Jon Bon Jovi’s eponymous quartet, though I drew an adamant line at Heart), and one unbelievably wonderful station out of Knoxville, whose three commentators slathered thick Southern accents over a completely serious, in-depth discussion of the virtues of Eastern Tennessee wildlife. Not only can you sell skins for good money ($180 for a single otter pelt, and otters are plentiful this year!), but if, like one commentator, your goal is “to eat [your] way across Eastern Tennessee,” you can enjoy otter, beaver, and even muskrat (“it’s a dark meat” that tastes better than otter and that’s also available as “marsh hare” in fancy restaurants up North). The discussion of gourmet fare then naturally progressed to frog legs, which can be acquired through frog-giggin’: Armed with an instrument resembling a stunted trident, you wade through swamps and ponds listening for a tell-tale “ribbit,” whereupon you gleefully spear your quarry—and, as with furry critters, you can skin your catch and fry it up right there in the swamp! I, for one, was profoundly grateful for The Sports Animal (99.1 FM Knoxville), whose (again, completely serious) program kept me laughing in wild and euphoric incredulity for about 20 minutes; oh, would that I had the sheer unadulterated genius to come up with something like it myself.

So now I’m staying at my grandparents’ house in Little Rock, where the goal is to read and write me little brains out (those of you who just thought “THAT shouldn’t take long” are cordially invited to keep your clever witticisms to yourselves) until I head to Oakland for a month, where my cruel, CRUEL relatives will force me to stay in a cute and conveniently located house and drive a little red sports car before they drag me (kicking and screaming, mind you) up to Lake Tahoe for a few days. I’ll then return to Arkansas for about as long as I (and my family) can stand it; I should be back in Boston in mid-to-late August. (Those who want to fly down to Arkansas, experience some inimitable Southern culture, and drive back with me, consider yourselves invited!)

I hope you’re all doing well, and that I’ll hear from you frequently during my self-imposed exile,

S.

Factoid Index:

Dollars, in U.S. currency, A. paid for the car he then drove from Maryland to Arkansas: 408

Swedish persons met in Virginia: 1

Western Virginia Christian self-help and/or Christian rock radio stations: 5

Tennessee radio stations with useful information: 1

Times a Sylvia suffering from the effects of several liters of fluids said “tengo que urinar como un perro loco” with increasing desperation during the last 30 minutes of the trip: 18 or so

Sylvian blood-to-caffeine ratio, 3:30 AM Wednesday: 1:67

I actually had something else to write about today—a Chicken Bus Epiphany, no less, which I feel somewhat obligated to write because of popular request/demand—but I hadn’t yet written it when a friend sent an e-mail that set me a-thinkin’. The e-mail was about a high-profile company’s use of the phrase “Pimp my <object>”; it had generated quite a bit of discussion, and some people were deeply offended at the term “pimp” and its connotation (or lack thereof—even more lamentable).

So… I am, as usual, of two minds on this issue. (Meaning that I'm generally of two minds on ANY issue, not that this particular issue has arisen with sufficient frequency for me to have a “usual” way to think about it.) On one hand, the word “pimp” has entered the vernacular and no longer has quite the explicit sexual connotation it once did; it’s also a pretty colorful expression, one that perfectly captures the image this company (one that according to numerous recent articles is “in crisis”) wants to portray (young, hip, experienced but nonchalant [oh-so-“over-it”], impossibly cool). One could see it as a harmless, humorous expression that will be terribly dated in about five years.*

But then there are people like me, who mourn with painful earnestness and bitten knuckles that same pervasive oh-so-“over-it”/in-your-face attitude amongst the Youth Of Today (also known as Generation Y, I think [which I escaped by the same year that makes me too young for Generation X]). I HATE that Bratz are the dolls of choice today (not that I think Barbie is any better—we seem to be trading one set of destructive stereotypes for another); I hate that everyone is so nonchalantly sophisticated these days; I hate that cynicism has become so entrenched in our culture that we instinctively look for the cloud behind every silver lining. I hate trying to navigate through a world where distrust and suspicion is the norm, where soul-fulfilling connections are scarce and genuineness is so unusual that it's described as “refreshing.” Ademas (a Spanish word I really like [and that’s unfortunately missing an accent over the second a]), I don't like that a word once so charged as “pimp” has become so common that nobody thinks about it anymore; we take it for granted that a “pimp” is someone we want to emulate rather than someone who exploits other people (or maybe someone we want to emulate because a pimp DOES exploit other people—oooo, the power, the raw sexuality—the POWER). Words have the ability to make tolerable things that shouldn't be; I think it was George Orwell who pointed out that something like the Communist International inspires less thought when it's called the Comintern.

And then there are people who are also like me, who think that painfully earnest people should just shut up and get OVER themselves, already, and who realize that John Adams was bemoaning the deplorable state of the country’s youth back in the 1770s.

But I tend to fit most frequently into category 2, sensitive soul-eyed spirit that I am (or want to be, because introverts are, like, DEEP, and nobody in this lamentably shallow world understands us—we like to corner the long-suffering market as much as we can, because we secretly envy all those socially skilled people who are having so much fun).

Would love to read your forthcoming rant! Feel free to disagree with anything and everything I've said—I feel like there are a lot of sides to this issue that I've left unexplored.

Yay for pseudo-intellectual discourse (maybe I should find a room in an ivory tower somewhere),

S.

*Forthcoming bonus material/potential rant: Why I have a hard time with modern architecture and “aesthetics” (related to concept of things being so quickly dated).

More forthcoming bonus material/rant anodyne: Why a lot of things, like modern architecture and “aesthetics,” that used to bug me don’t so much anymore (includes a Chicken Bus Epiphany!).

Managed to read a few books (finally!) while hitchhiking and chickenbusing across Zimbabwe, so the current list of completed books for 2006 is:

Dominique Glocheux: La Vie en Rose (The Little Book of Joy)

Sarah Vowell: Assassination Vacation

Malcolm Gladwell: Blink

Jon Scieszka: The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales

C.S. Lewis: The Problem of Pain

M. Catherine Thomas: Spiritual Lightening*

Azar Nafisi: Reading Lolita in Tehran**

Tracy Kidder: Mountains Beyond Mountains**

Philip Barlow, edited: A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars

The on-deck circle (that is, books that will hopefully be read while I'm busy doing as much learnin' as I can in Arkansas and/or California) (p.s.: suggestions welcome):

Bookcraft: Why I Believe (book of LDS essays, no editor listed)

Jeffrey Sachs: The End of Poverty

James E. Talmage: Jesus the Christ

Gary Neilson and Bruce Pasternack: Results: Keep What’s Good, Fix What’s Wrong, and Unlock Great Performance

Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

V.S. Naipaul: Literary Occasions

Henry James: The Wings of the Dove

*Book that inspired the Chicken Bus Epiphanies

**Books that directly or indirectly help justify my existence, even if they didn't quite lead to a Chicken Bus Epiphany

Lots of non-fiction this year—in fact, the only fiction even on the to-read list is The Wings of the Dove. There are reasons for that. Eventually I'll stop neglecting my 19th-century British and American authors and dive back into some Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, James, and Wharton (again, suggestions welcome)…