Dear faithful readers (and if you've kept checking this site for the past seven post-less months you are faithful indeed),

Although I have enjoyed keeping an online journal here on Windows Live Spaces, it was time to dare to strike out and find new ground. I have thus established a journal on Wordpress (one of the only online journal sites whose name does not contain the loathéd "b" word):

http://fishiefishies.wordpress.com

Same vision, same tone, same random-as-all-get-out subject matter... In short, same fishies, new location.

Enjoy...

Those on the "A Word a Day" e-mail list will probably recognize this quote from the end of yesterday's message, but I absolutely love the sentiment:

It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?
—Richard Bach, writer (1936- )

Update: The June 15 "A Word a Day" quote was just as good:

Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind, you have failed.
—Jan de Hartog, playwright and novelist (1914-2002)

• Tram doors do not open automatically. Unless you push the button to open the door, the tram will leave the platform while you stare through the windows at the passengers who are staring back at you and wondering why the h[eck] you don't just push the stupid button, already.
• Those bright red blotches scattered randomly through the hair of otherwise very conservative-looking women are stylish, not accidental. The even brighter red streaks adorning the hair of punks and/or goths are also deliberate.
• The landlord is not completely naked. She is wearing swimsuit bottoms, albeit very small ones. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, she also wears a shirt.
• You must furnish your own grocery bags unless you want to purchase new bags every time you buy milk and/or Nutella.
• You must bag your groceries yourself. You must do this as fast as you possibly can. If you do not, your groceries and your newly purchased bags will be piled at the end of the conveyor belt while the cashier and other customers look quizzically at you and wonder why the h[eck] you haven't been bagging your groceries, for pity's sake.
• The key really will open the door—you merely have to learn the Top Secret Rapid Gymnastic Wrist Flicking Motion first. This should not take more than ten minutes.
• You will not find your lodgings on Großburgerstrasse if you live on Gabelsburgerstrasse. These are not the same street.
• Brussels is not the only European city with iconic decorative fauna. Wolfenbuttel also proudly features a large yellow bell-wearing cow.
• Although exactly two people in the entire country have your contact information, that may be your mobile phone that starts ringing noisily during Sunday School.
• Germans do not jaywalk. Your cavalier against-the-light and/or mid-block street-crossing will engender startled and/or disapproving expressions from those patiently waiting for the light to change at an intersection with no cars in sight.
• It is possible to smoke a cigarette while riding a bicycle.

So, I've been in Deutschland for four days now, and I love it here. Some things are a little bit strange, though—you know how sometimes you see weird foreigners whose speech is slow, grammatically dubious, heavily accented, and generally tortured? Well, here, that's me. Which has made me realize that when I see these other people walking down the street, jabbering in what seems like a random collection of consonants with a smattering of vowels, they're not just pretending to understand each other—they really are communicating.

 Whoa.

 A few other observations:

• Mohawks, mohawks, everywhere. I've seen at least a half dozen of these, on individuals from age 10 to 30. Those west of the Atlantic, consider yourselves warned.
  
• Just because you can find your way there, that doesn't mean you can find your way back.
  
• Under no circumstances should you ever challenge a kamikaze bicyclist. Under no circumstances should you try to dodge one, either, because regardless of the way you frantically dart, the bicyclist will swerve in that same direction, leaving you in the path of a bicycle and rider now even closer than before. Just close your eyes and stand perfectly still, like when you're avoiding a tyrannosaurus rex.
  
• Germany has a seemingly endless supply of Unspeakably Tacky Postcard Day™ possibilities. (FEAR ME.)
  
• There actually is a place on earth where my allergies are even worse than in Massachusetts and Arkansas.
• Though German has a phrase that means "escape pod from the mother ship"(I needed a way to describe Smart Cars), it has no word for "jailbait."

So my roommate C-t-P and I were talking the other night about our adopted hometown and those people who (for whatever reason) are grimly counting the days until their schooling is complete and they can flee to the dry, arid West. Less than twelve hours later I had a similar conversation with a new acquaintance, who is “unconvinced” that Boston has any advantages over the relentless dazzling glamour of the city situated a four-hour careening Fung Wah adventure to the south. All this Boston-derogation made me think of some of the many, many reasons I love this city; if I have to live in the US, it’s gotta be here.

I love that for my birthday in late February I did misshapen cartwheels on a Walden Pond still gloriously frozen (though the ice was somewhat disconcertingly thin in a few places) and that in just a few short months that same pond will offer the thrilling flowing glide of warm water over bare skin. I love warm nights in Harvard Square, complete with cacophonic street musicians and spare-changers and punk kids and uneven red bricks that sometimes trip even seasoned Bostonians. I love the invigorating gold and crimson autumn leaves that form a gorgeously colorful, rustly, slightly acrid blanket over the sidewalks from October through early December. I love the Red Sox and their maniacal fans and the Green Monster. I love zipping from the Fenway to the Riverway to the Arborway to the Jamaicaway and back again (though it’s a rather indirect route) in my car that sounds like an airplane right before I shift into third gear. I love that four out of the five apartments I’ve lived in have been quintessentially New England and therefore adorable, with gorgeous golden-brown hardwood floors and crown molding and tons of light and air (absolutely essential for a Seattle refugee) and built-in china cabinets; the other one—the epitome of all that is horrid in architecture, interior design, maintenance, and general liveability—is gasp-for-air-hysterically described here (make sure you read the comments). I love the weeping willow by the pond on the Boston Common and I love the Public Garden and the Park Street Church whose hourly chimes play “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” during December in a beautiful flowing plainsong rhythm that’s anything but pedantic. I love howling Nor’easters where the whole house trembles in the impossible wind that moves curtains through closed windows and where the rain or snow propels itself horizontally into foolishly unprotected skin so that the few pedestrians outside walk backward to avoid the sting of innumerable microscopic ice crystals—and I love returning home to a warm, golden-wood-floored apartment where I can curl up with a fuzzy blanket and hot chocolate and a book like The Remains of the Day in a chair next to a window and watch the storm rage unabated outside. I love wandering through Quincy Market on the way to another blissful cannoli in the North End and returning through the Haymarket just as it closes and stand owners give away three butternut squash and a smattering of radishes for a dollar. I love running along the Charles River or around Fresh Pond (when I don’t have a way-too-much-running-related injury—these days I love driving through the quaint New-England-architectury town of Winchester for physical therapy). I love the Rapunzel Tower in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, from which you can see the “Mormon tabernacle” (as the locals know it) perched atop the hill to the west before wandering through the gold-red splendor of autumn leaves or the exhilarating blooms and leaves against the backdrop of a cerulean sky in spring. I love, love, love that statues of not just ducks but frogs (FROGS!) decorate the Boston Common; I love that New England citizens young and old don elaborate period costumes for pre-daylight Revolutionary War reenactments in Lexington and Concord; I love Salem in all its October wannabe-sinister kitsch. I love the used book section at the Harvard Bookstore. I love that this city was freaking cool enough to host a live taping of This American Life and that I thus got to see Ira Glass in person (albeit from far, far away).

And of course I love the people here—this quirky, charming, high-achieving city attracts characters who are similarly quirky, charming, and high-achieving but that are somehow simultaneously down to earth—who seem to prefer elbow-patched tweed to the sequins and power suits of the southern 2/3 of the Megalopolis. These are people who do amazing things, not just for themselves but for the world (in a very literal sense), and not for accolades or so that they can pseudo-self-deprecatingly discuss their achievements in boardrooms and at glitterati-laced cocktail parties but because they genuinely care about people. Yes, there are pretentious people here—more than one café is crowded with future Intelligentsia who discuss their Kierkegaard theses a little too loudly, while the white-haired Old Boys sequester themselves in red-leather-and-dark-wood faculty rooms and bemoan a world full of people who simply will not understand their particular brand of bespectacled genius—but I have the privilege (and it’s admittedly a great one; I’ve done nothing to deserve it) of living in a charmed environment, surrounded by people who don’t fit those stereotypes, who are genuinely humble even as they’re breathtakingly and effortlessly extraordinary. (I attended a fireside given by one such man last night; officially reinforced is my determination to move heaven and earth to hear him speak whenever I possibly can.) There’s our stake president, a seemingly rigid professor who suddenly bursts into impromptu ballroom dance steps during combined priesthood/Relief Society meetings (his adorably idiosyncratic first counselor just might simulate an airplane in the same meeting). There’s the stake choir director, impossibly brilliant and stunningly insightful, whose writing is so beautiful that she could pen a 2,000-word treatise on the benefits of convection heating and I would read the essay over and over and over. There’s the seminary teacher with an incredible gift for reaching and inspiring her students. There’s the man who speaks at least 17 languages (most of these fluently), and the women at top medical and law schools who also just happen to be incredibly gifted pianists, and the man who knows everything about everything from geology to robots to sailing to rowing to music to business to Irish dancing to the best days to see the autumn leaves and spring flowers in the afore-celebrated Mount Auburn Cemetery. There’s my roommate, who started a charity to help kids in Ecuador who can’t afford go to school, and another friend who gave up a prestigious job to face an uncertain year in Kenya, living in a cement-floored apartment with occasional plumbing and heading a struggling microfinance bank. This list doesn’t even begin to cover them all. All of them brilliantly gifted; all of them startlingly humble.

And then there’s the handful of friends I’ve become especially close to (a.k.a. the Rapid Response team), who really make life here special—I do love all the things I’ve described, and then some, but it’s midnight Monkee-walks across the Boston Common and occasional arm-flailing shrieks of “BUG HUG! BUG HUG!” and spontaneous trips to the Noath Shoah and/or Maine and/or New Hampshire and special treats of cinnamon-raisin bread and daily apartment prayer that really make up life, not occasional encounters with great people (though those are certainly worth having). I’ve made some of the best friends of my life during the past four years, and I’m inexpressibly grateful for these people who make up songs and write impromptu poems like “Ode to Morning Face”* on my bathroom mirror and race wildly on foot and/or with carts through the IKEA parking lot and transform inexplicably legless Easter turkeys into pale pink bunny heads (with the aid of knives, raisins, and variegated toothpicks) and miraculously make shopping for clothes into an altogether pleasant experience and fix things like my methinks page when I break them and listen to me when I’ve had a rotten day (or week, or month) and constantly share their wit and compassion and charm and general brilliance. AKK (who shall return!), C_H, C-t-P, J_H, LADH, and SDY: Woot, to the power of infinity plus a googolplex.

*”Ode to Morning Face” by C_H

O beautiful when first I rise
My amber** mop of hair
And purple bags beneath my eyes
Will make the kiddos stare!
It’s morning face, O morning face…

**This isn’t quite an accurate description at the moment, though it may be nearer the truth in the fall or so. But then, I tend to favor a more burgundy than amber color when I’m a redhead, given my eye color and skin tone…

Text: This issue is nonfatal to the program engine...

 

Sylvia (editor extraordinaire, native speaker of English, and comprehender of grammatical rules involving prefixes, negative and otherwise): What does "nonfatal" mean?

 

Author: It means "is not fatal"

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.