Wanderlust Heaven!

Got into Boston late on Sunday night. Normally I wouldn’t care what time I rolled in, but there were a couple complications this time. First, I had to get my rental car from Avis – generally not a problem, but this time I was using coupons and I suspected that the process would take a bit of time. Second, a somewhat more stressful situation: the family house was full of relatives – regular and step-family – who were all apparently waiting up for my arrival. And because of the principle of LIFO (Last Indahouse, Firstondafloor), all the beds were taken and I’d be sleeping on an air mattress on the floor of the living room. After a crazy few days in San Francisco, what I really needed was a full night’s sleep, but I was quite used to odd hours and would soldier through.

Got to the house around 11:30 p.m. I wasn’t sure my father would still be up – he tends to arise at 4:30 a.m. each day, work out, work, come home, have dinner, and be ready for bed soon thereafter – but there he was. Along with my step-mother, step-sister, and step-brother and his family. Full house, indeed. Caught up with everyone for an hour or so, then I was the last one standing. Felt a bit strange being home…more on that later in this posting.

Couldn’t sleep – was still on a combination of SE Asia time and West Coast time – so plowed through a bag of mail and read a couple of Sports Illustrated mags. Finally went to sleep at 6 a.m…and got up at 8 to drive to my storage place to get some things from there. There were a few major chores I had to attend to…and despite my enhanced level of calmness these days, I still get a bit manic when confronted with a slew of tasks.

You may recall that I got on Sony.com whilst in Tokyo and spent a bundle there on a new laptop (replacing my waterlogged VAIO), a new camera, and a diving case for the camera. Well, now it was time to open the boxes and get those machines running. Which, based on past experience, would take me pretty much the entire week to take care of. Getting a new computer going is a serious pain – particularly if you’re doing it on your own (i.e., no corporate IT Department doing it for you) and have loads of 3^rd-party software. That would be me. So I needed to procure my original CD-ROMs from storage, and figure out how to port the other/downloaded programs from my original laptop. As suspected, that took me most of the week, but it generally went smoothly. Microsoft only got $150 from me – a sort of moral victory.

The new camera proved much simpler – inserted battery and memory stick and it was ready to go. And the new waterproof casing looks promising – it’s pretty bulky, but fits in my daypack. Finally, after a year of traveling, I felt appropriately kitted out.

I was able to lighten my load a bit and drop some things in storage. The key item I discarded was my sleeping bag, used exactly zero times over the past year. Losing that freed up significant space in my pack. Also dropped off a bunch of paperwork/receipts and diving materials. I get obsessed with the contents and weight of my pack and am constantly optimizing it.

Besides fiddling with the electronics, I was signed up for a 2-day motorcycle riding education course in Bourne, on Cape Cod. I got my permit in January, while home, and had planned to go ahead and upgrade that to a full motorcycle license when next in Boston. I’ve been riding bikes overseas since 1992 – a 12-year-old kid in Kathmandu taught me to ride, and I’ve had rental bikes in India, the Philippines, and a few other lands. These countries couldn’t care less about having a license, as long as you have cash and you don’t crash the bike on the way out of the shop/shack. But I know that riding is dangerous and wanted to pick up some safety tips, and this course was designed to do that. An added bonus is that if you pass the course, you don’t need to visit the Registry of Motor Vehicles for a road test, the course takes the place of that. I’d prefer to never again visit the Registry – I suspect I’m not alone there. So the benefits of taking the course were manifold.

It was held at Otis Air Force Base in Bourne, Mass., a place I’d heard of but never seen. I hadn’t been missing much – the place seemed a ghost town. The classroom portion of the course was given in a small non-descript building; I hadn’t sat through a class (or meeting) in some time and could barely stay awake. But we soon escaped outside and went to the riding range – really, nothing more than a large asphalt patch, much like a supermarket parking lot. But it was good enough, and we were soon all on Japanese 250cc bikes. The instructor, Jason, was a former cop and a very good guy. He took us through a few exercises on the bikes – mostly shifting, stopping quickly, turning, doing some figure-8s (not easy), etc.

I certainly picked up some good tips, and I passed without incident. So did the other 4 guys in my class. And we had a good time throughout – I had expected, snob that I am, a bunch of semi-literate hominids as classmates, but they turned out to be normal fellows. One of them owned a deli in nearby South Dennis, and on day 2 he brought a big cooler full of deli meats and bread for the entire gang. As we had just passed the class – with some hairy figure-8s – we were all in the mood to celebrate heartily. Felt like a combination of Beowulf and Hells’ Angels…

I felt a sense of accomplishment as I drove back to Boston. I’ve been wanting to get my motorcycle license for years, but it’s never been particularly urgent and it seems that whenever I’m in Boston my days are consumed with the ugent (not necessarily the important). I was finally getting to a place where I could dig down a layer and get to some of the richer, more subtle rewards I’ve long sought.

Stayed with my sister and her family that night. We had a cookout – with Italian chicken sausage, very nice stuff – and caught up for a while. My little nephew Jacob is now forming complete sentences and (I’m biased, I know) promises to be a budding genius. We need at least one of these in our family…

Next day, got my teeth cleaned and had some bond inserted on a tooth that was showing a bit of wear and tear. Years of chewing chicken straight off the bone in Asia must have taken its toll. Then drove over to REI, where I met my sis, brother-in-law, and nephew, and we scoured REI for an hour. I needed to get some new clothes and gear for travel and REI is probably the best outfitter around.

We had planned to go to the Red Sox game that afternoon, but our tickets fell through and we had to resort to trying to buy tix from scalpers (i.e., off the street). Not much was available…and it was a brutally hot day, so we needed seats with some cover. Didn’t find anything acceptable, so blew off the game and drove over to Harvard Square. Had lunch at the Border Café, a Tex-Mex establishment that employed me from 1988-1990. The food and ‘dining equation’ hasn’t changed at all – they still provide huge portions of pretty good food for cheap prices. The key is turning the tables quickly – there’s no dessert, coffee is available but rarely ordered, and you’re in and out of there (if there’s no wait for a table – there often is) in 45 minutes. Nice to see that one aspect of the ‘old Harvard Square’ is still around – because not that much else is. My favorite burger-and-fries joint, The Tasty, was torn down years ago…my favorite bar, Casablanca, was stripped of its flavor years ago…and in general the Square has become a center of franchises and boring outlets. There are still unique bits – I love the old Brattle Bookshop, and I think Harvest restaurant is still there – but the wave of ‘generica’ sweeping the USA has not passed Harvard Square by. My brother-in-law Dave worked in the Square for 10+ years and I invite him to comment at length on what he’s seen over time…

We walked around Harvard Yard for a while in the heat, then ducked into a bar to watch the end of the Red Sox game (they won). We rehydrated, and my nephew ordered some French fries. I could sit and watch him eat those things for hours, it’s so entertaining…

Had dinner that night with an ex-colleague with whom I’d worked many years in Japan and Oz. He was my boss for most of my projects, so knows me quite well. We met at Sorrelina’s, a semi-new place near the Boston Public Library. I got there first and ordered up a Maker’s Mark bourbon on the rocks – one of my favorite drinks, one that’s not easy to get in Asia outside Japan. My friend soon showed up and we polished off a couple more drinks before dinner.

I have to say that Sorrelina’s is one of the best spots in Boston. Great bar, superb food, and an energetic vibe. We just sat at the bar for a few hours and had dinner right there. My friend is a regular and knows the staff and other patrons, and it felt welcoming.

I had a great piece of veal, and took my time polishing it off. We had lots to discuss. My friend is just a couple years older than I, and is quite accomplished. When we were working together, his counsel was invaluable to me – but we had our clashes, mostly due to differing work styles and mindsets (and talent levels). The funny thing is that – and I only realized it towards the end of the evening – he’s the closest thing I’ve got to an older brother. I don’t know of anyone who’s in the position he is to provide me with advice about a range of topics – and, I’ve gotta say, he’s never shy about chiming in.

We covered the usual work gossip, and that was good fun. But most of our conversation focused on this very blog – he’s one of my more devoted readers, despite being very busy with work. Perhaps my blog provides him with a bit of escapism. Anyway…his counsel to me was that the blog could use more ‘edge’ and a bit less of the play-by-play. There are some deeper themes to explore and my readers would likely find those more gripping than my daily activities. I couldn’t agree more – I do feel like some of my recent entries have run on forever. The issue is that I do want to record many of my activities and experiences, and go back to them later in life…the challenge is thus to be more selective about what I record and to what level of depth I dive. Blending the minutiae and the ‘life analytics’ will be key as well…

Advice well taken. I made a mental note to push harder on a couple key themes, staring with this post. Stay with me and you’ll see what I mean.

Finished up with dinner – was well and truly buzzed. Walked over to the Delux Café to meet another friend from Monitor, and his wife. The bar was pleasantly empty – it was Thursday night – and the lack of smoke, from the fairly recent ban – made the place more agreeable than in the past. Spent an hour or so with my friends catching up. They’re Filipino and we talked about my recent 5-month stint there. I don’t remember much more – the Maker’s Mark must have taken hold of my medulla cortex by that point.

In a cab on the way home, noticed a car with a large anti-gun bumper sticker. It read: ‘We have your President and Congress. – NRA.’ That’s the National Rifle Assocation, one of the more odious organizations/lobbies in the US. I believe I’ve remarked in earlier entries about the insanity of this country vis-à-vis guns. Every male politician seems to feel the need to don hunting gear, grab a rifle, and go out hunting as soon as the campaign begins. One of my least favorite presidential candidates, Mitt Romney, told the press that he is a lifelong hunter – this despite his having gone hunting only 2-3 times. I wonder what it will take for people to wake the hell up – Thomas Jefferson coming back from the dead to tell us that the Second Amendment is being misinterpreted?

The end of the week was brutally hot – the temperature gauge (admittedly, right in the sun) at home read 101 degrees Fahrenheit on Friday afternoon. I’m used to the warm weather, of course, but my father really is not, and he was scheduled to do the 90-mile Pan-Mass Challenge on Saturday. We crossed our fingers and prayed for a helping hand from our Canadian friends up north…

Friday night, I went over to my friend Charles’s new house in Waban for dinner and drinks. Charles is one of my oldest friends – we’ve gotten in some serious trouble together over the years. His wife, Jodi, is the brother of friend Bob in Bangkok (I met Jodi first, then Bob). Charles and his family just moved in a couple weeks ago. The house is therefore not fully furnished – but I prefer the spacious, uncluttered look, and they seem to as well. The house itself is almost 100 years old, but the inside was gutted and redone and feels brand new. They put together a nice meal – grilled flank steaks, Israeli cous-cous, and some other veggies. And Charles was was his usual self, mixing up ginger beer and vodka to form what he called ‘the house special.’ It was pretty special – thankfully I didn’t have to drive home.

As I mentioned, Charles and I have caused some trouble together and have had our share of misadventures. So I found it hilarious when Charles went out to the front yard to check on some car noises – turned out there was a house party next door or down the street. Charles standing in his front yard, hands on hips, trying to get partiers to keep the noise down so his two kids could sleep – truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

On Saturday my father rode the Pan-Mass Challenge. He got going very early, then my stepmother and I went to get him in the afternoon. Lots of traffic getting down there – the Cape is generally mobbed on weekends in the summer. Dad did very well – he finished in the middle of the pack, riding with his friend Marty. It was a hot day, nearly as bad as Friday, and he commented that ‘my sweat had sweat.’ Like father, like son – and more than eloquent enough. Here’s a picture of him coming to meet us:

Rode back to Boston, then went to a nearby gastropub for beer and dinner. He was understandably exhausted, and packed it in around 8 p.m. I had a headache, which I confronted by staying up late and drinking a few glasses of wine. I got progressively better, watched a pirated copy of the movie ‘Knocked Up’ (superb) from friend Bob in Bangkok, and hit the sack around 2 a.m.

On Sunday we went to Dad & Ellen’s golf club near the Rhode Island border. Hadn’t played golf since April or so, in Manila. But my game is always about the same. I’ll hit some nice 3-irons, a few decent wedge shots, and a putt or two. The rest is a step above depressing. The weather was much milder, so we didn’t sweat to death. Played 9 holes, then had dinner with my sister and her family, then drove back to Boston. Dad and I relaxed a bit before the drive, here we are in very good spirits:

What else…saw my accountant on Monday, I go see her every time I’m in Boston. Earlier this year I converted my old Monitor 401(k) into a traditional IRA, and then into a Roth IRA (individual retirement account). I owe some hefty taxes as a result – and she told me to pay the bulk immediately. Ugh. As I was about to leave Boston and head back to Asia, I was mailing a very large check to the US Treasure Department. Which didn’t feel that great – I mean, where the hell is it going? Not to maintain bridges, methinks – more likely to buy machine guns for undermotivated Iraqi police. Ah, democracy…
Left Boston on Tuesday morning to fly to Bangkok, en route to Laos. As I sat in the cab to the airport, I thought about my week in Boston and how I felt about it. As always, I regretted that I had loaded up the week with a series of tasks – getting the new laptop going, doing the motorcycle course, seeing dentist and accountant, etc. But I suppose those things are just a part of life – and some aren’t really optional. I’ve found that about a third of each day is consumed with errands – they look a lot different now that I’m traveling and not working, but the tasks are still often annoying and I do wish I had a personal assistant/robot to handle them all.

My thoughts on the week fall into two categories. First, coming back home allows me to take stock of life – it’s a semi-regular touchstone for me. I’ve been coming home roughly every six months for 10 years now. In the past 18 months, since I left work, I’ve gotten healthier…I’m sleeping better (when I choose to sleep)…I’m tackling things that I just could not get to years ago. I’ve read more books in the past 18 months than I did in the previous 5-year stretch. And my travels have been an absolute blessing. When I think back to being up in Coron, Philippines, on a dive boat with new Brit friends Alan and Janine, I sometimes can’t believe that actually happened – that I was able to simply go there without any constraints, that I was able to meet and befriend such cool folks, that at the age of 40 my horizons are still expanding so profoundly. And it seems that my life, and the time around it, are being stretched and lengthened – now my days (and locations) are so varied that a month seems to comprise a year’s worth of living. Granted, I always traveled like mad, for work, and had an interesting and varied lifestyle, but the locus was always work, office, and airplane. It’s quite different now and that’s incredibly gratifying.

Second, I took measure of my family and how I’m feeling about my relationships with them. That’s obviously a more complex topic. I should start by saying that when it comes to people – any people – I believe in a slight variation on the law of scarcity. If I see someone every day, I get sick of them, or at the very least the interaction gets dull. There have probably only been 2-3 people in my life who qualify as exceptions. I’ve never been the type to call home every day, or even every week. I call when there’s some news to share. After all…I’m male. You get the drift.

So despite my missing my family, I’ve never felt guilty about being away. I’m conditioned to see them every 6 months and catch up then. And they’ve been conditioned in their own way. When I arrived in San Francisco near the end of July, I called my father in Boston to say hi. We’d be seeing each other in 5-6 days, so we didn’t need to have a lengthy call – but still, it only lasted two minutes, and he was the one who seemed in a hurry to conclude it. And even when I call him from abroad, we’re all caught up in 5 minutes. So really, what would we talk about if I was around every day?

Years ago, when I lived in Hong Kong, my father left me a testy voicemail at work. He felt that I was running away from things in Boston, and that I should come home. A year or so later, he and Ellen visited China and HKG, and had a great time – they seemed impressed by HKG and Shanghai. I felt vindicated at the time – Dad had obviously recognized that HKG was no backwater and that perhaps Boston wasn’t the only possible place to live. So some of it is awareness and exposure to the lifestyles others lead.

That’s one aspect of it. Another is around freedom and constraints. My current lifestyle is all about being unconstrained. There are, of course, some constraints – I need to get a visa to visit certain countries…I don’t have unlimited funds…some flights and hotels are fully booked and I can’t get in. But by and large, I can do what I want and that’s both intoxicating and very hard to back away from. When I’m home, I feel viscerally constrained, by things both small and significant. I need to rent a car to get around and see everyone. If I leave the toilet seat up, I hear about it (I’ve never really understood this one – at least I raised the seat when I peed, right?). I’m probably the most hygienic and cleanliness-obsessed member of my family…but if I leave a cardboard box on the table, that’s not looked kindly on. I can’t talk freely about my deceased mother – I can’t even begin to describe how much that grates. And sometimes I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall – I don’t get much response or warmth. I’m no angel, to be sure, and I realize my occasional appearances shouldn’t come to disrupt the daily lives of my family…but I do feel like (whether I’m home or abroad) I make disproportionate efforts to please everyone and avoid transgressions…and that I often take some grief regardless. Walking on eggshells take a lot of getting used to when you’ve been roaming the wilds of the planet.

I do love my family, and these issues may be quite common to all families that have been mashed together – it’s not an easy thing to successfully accomplish. But at this point in my life I do feel the need to acknowledge things that bother me and you may be hearing more in future postings.

So it’s back to Asia for me. Two weeks in the States was good, but sufficient. In my usual way I saw a lot and covered a lot of physical and emotional ground. Checked into United Airlines at Logan Airport this morning – they insist on having those insane self check-in machines, despite the confusion and anxiety they cause. So scores of passengers are milling about, nearly all with baggage to check – this defeats the very purpose of having unmanned kiosks. Really crazy. Then there were weather issues in Chicago, and getting there and out was a cause for concern. I swear that flying in the States is one of the worst travel experiences known to (civilized) travelers – I preferred the stripped-down experience of flying in Burma…

A final thought – my upcoming destinations are Laos and Vietnam. Once I’ve visited those countries, I’ll have been to all the remaining Communist countries – except for North Korea. This claim would have been far more impressive 20 years ago, but that’s all I’ve got. Pyongyang, anyone? Over and out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.