Ode to EWR

Ah, the joys of Newark Airport. It's funny to me how much I fail to hate this place (except when it's the weekend after Thanksgiving and the weather has canceled almost all flights, including mine, and there are so many people everywhere that I'm on the verge of developing claustrophobia, but that's another story).

The part of travel I really hate the most is the luggage, and on this trip I've neatly circumvented that problem by traveling from where I'm half living now back to the place I'm about to move out of but (and this is key) haven't yet (so 95% of my stuff is still there). Good trick, right? I'm not even bringing a toothbrush. Sadly this does not mean I'm traveling with a single small handbag containing nothing more than a book to read and an official ID to get me on the plane in the first place. But for me one backpack and one shoulder bag weighing less than 20 pounds (estimated) in total is a major triumph. Please remember, people, that whereas most women walk around with lipstick and cell phone in a small purse, I've been known to carry a liter of water, a snack, a 400 page novel and a first aid kit as a matter of course.

So on this trip I'm doing quite well on the luggage front. Which brings me to my next least favorite part of travel: sitting around the airport/train station/bus depot doing nothing. Waiting.

Patience? What?

(Let's note, now, that this is actually the legitimate reason for half the stuff I carry with me on a regular basis: to amuse myself when my infinitesimal patience runs out.)

This all brings us to the crux of this post: my ode to Newark Airport, written to pass the time while waiting for a flight to Nashville, via Charlotte (gods willing the weather cooperates).


Oh Newark Airport, under smoggy skies
You sprawl so hugely, as an airport should.
With seeming endless in- and outbound flights
To take a traveler anywhere she would,
You serve Northern New Jersey like a charm.
No need to drive to far-off JFK:
You're only twenty minutes in the car!
(Depending on traffic on 78.)
As planes alight over the Turnpike lanes
EWR over the airways reigns.

Snowy Day Update

Since the snow has been falling for nearly 24 hours now, and that's always an invitation to bake, I decided to go for the holy grail: gluten free yeast bread. I got out the tapioca flour, the xanthan gum, and a recipe for which I have very high hopes (http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=1396) and started mixing. The dough is resting now, so I'll have to give you an update on how it turns out.

In other news, the reason I vanished again after recently resurfacing is that I've been doing a lot of traveling and logistical business, the upshot being that I'm now back in scenic NJ and will be here for probably the next year or so.

It's a long story, and not particularly interesting, but the time has come to conclude The Nashville Experiment. The irony is that I've finally found some things in Nashville (namely a handful of people) that I'm reluctant to leave behind. But such is life, and in a couple of weeks I'll be making one brief trip back to pack up my apartment and drive the thousand miles home.

Which means... we begin the next chapter in the saga! Right now I'm hoping that this one will include things like a food processor and a large kitchen to house it. The main goal, though, is good health, and to that end I'm going to walk away from the computer, make a cup of tea, and watch the snow fall.

The view out my window this morning:


We've got about two inches on the ground, maybe a little more. The Tennessean is reporting 82 traffic 'incidents' so far today, and apparently there were 148 yesterday by some point in the afternoon. This is why I'm not leaving my apartment all weekend: 1. Tennessee does almost nothing to combat snow on the roads, and 2. no one here has the faintest idea how to drive on anything white or frozen.

I think Nashville's relationship with winter weather can be pretty well summed up by an interaction I had in December 2008, when approximately 1/4" of wet snow fell one afternoon. I was leaving my job to drive home, and one of the other tutors stopped me and said (completely seriously), "Are you sure you want to leave now? It's a blizzard out there!"

Hello, 2010! It's about time you got here!

Hello, Interwebs. It’s been a while, I know – sorry about that.

2009 was an interesting year, and by “interesting” I mean it involved at least 6 courses of antibiotics, the making of 4 or 5 short films (depending on how you count), the writing of 40 screenplay pages, the designing of a water slide… Yes, suffice it to say that 2009 was an interesting year, and that’s why I was in hiding for most of it.

But I’m back! In case there’s anyone out there reading. And there’s so much to say, about so many new adventures! (Don’t the exclamation points make those adventures sound fun and exciting?! See, like that!)

I’m supposed to be sleeping, but I’ll just give you a brief preview of some of the adventures of the moment. We have:
- the documentary film making adventure.
- the writing songs for a musical adventure.
- the gluten free diet adventure.
- the where-will-I-be-for-the-summer adventure.
- the learning to love Tennessee/the South/Middle America adventure.

As you can imagine, some of these adventures are more fun and exciting than others, but I think they all have potential. It all depends on how you look at them… and now that I’m no longer eating gluten or dairy, I mostly look at them from a very optimistic point of view. Except for bread. I’m having a hard time being optimistic about bread. But I’m trying.

Anyhow – more on bread, and all the rest of it, soon. No, really. I might even post some photos! (See? Exclamation points! Exciting!)

For the moment, I hope you’re all keeping warm, wherever you are. And if you’re in a place where keeping warm in January isn’t an issue… can I come visit?

Elbow Room

I first realized it when I flew home for my cousin's wedding in October: I'd never before been so happy to find myself at Newark Airport. Then it happened again as my plane landed at Logan and I walked out into the terminal. For four days I've re-entered a world of car horns and obscenities, and I've never had such a distinct feeling of coming home.

As I stood on the T this morning simultaneously cursing the group of shouting teenagers in my car and feeling immensely grateful for their existence, I began to wonder about these stereotypes of Southerners as being nicer and Northeasterners as being not necessarily mean but unconcerned with the welfare of their fellow humans. Now that I live in the South I’m seeing how much truth there is to those supposed differences, but as a born and raised Northerner I always feel compelled to defend the detachment: that’s what feels right to me, and I’d like to think that doesn’t make me inherently less nice.

What occurred to me on the T is that there’s just a lot more physical space for people to spread out in the South, and in my favorite cities (New York and Boston) there are so many more people crammed into the available space. In Nashville my apartment isn’t flanked on all sides by neighbors, and it’s more than spitting distance from the building next door. When I go to the far side of town (which is much farther away than the far side of Boston), I get in my own car and have however many cubic feet of space (and sound and attempt at thermal regulation) all to myself. In Boston you’re constantly surrounded by people – roommates, upstairs and downstairs neighbors through thin ceilings and floors, next door apartments with windows so close you could reach in from your room, jam-packed subway cars and buses, sidewalks full of pedestrians – so in order to maintain any sense of personal space you have to manufacture it for yourself.

Northeasterners are “mean” simply out of self-preservation.

It’s not that someone from Boston necessarily cares any less about other humans, but if you let concern for others surface even half the time you’re in close proximity to other people you’ll be completely overwhelmed by caring for a vast sea of humanity. In Tennessee it’s much easier to attempt connection with a large percentage of the people you encounter because on any given day there are so many fewer people who will come close enough to your personal space for interaction.

Obviously not everyone responds to these situations according to the stereotypes, but I think that if you grow up in the Northeast then you are much more likely to develop the apparently prickly exterior necessary to preserve some semblance of personal space, just as if you grow up with a lot of siblings you tend to be aggressive about staking your claim on things you want (lest someone else get there first). Yes, some people find themselves better suited to the environment opposite that of their own childhood, and some people feel equally comfortable in both sorts of places.

I think I’m a true Northeasterner in this sense, which is why I feel so at home when I’m surrounded by people who will honk and swear and cut you off without thinking twice. To me that’s just how you stake out your space in the world. My subconscious definition of "home" seems to include dense population and the attendant survival techniques. But defining "home" is another story for another day.....

The Itsy Bitsy.... Not a Spider....

I was thinking, a few weeks ago, that eventually I'd probably have to write an entry on bugs. This is the South, after all. The South is serious about its bugs. I was actually concerned about moving here specifically because of the bugs. I do not do bugs. Not even a tiny bit. (There's a story that involves a broom and a telephone and some hysterical crying....I won't get into it.)

When I had that thought, though, I brushed it aside with the very reasonable rationalization that as soon as I blogged about bugs I'd find them swarming into my life, when at that point I'd had basically no encounter with the crazy Southern insects. I figured I'd wait until they'd already made their appearance and then I'd tell the story.

So here's my bug story.

I like opening the windows, as you may recall from my allergenic lament earlier this fall. I really, really like opening the windows and enjoying the fresh not-quite-fall air, particularly when I'm bumming around my apartment in the late afternoon and there's just a little bit of a breeze. So over the weekend I went to open my windows, and as I did I noticed a whole bunch of teeny tiny winged bugs on the screen....on both sides. They were so small - and the screen so coarse - that they could walk right through the mesh.

I closed the window.

I went to the other living room window, and before I opened it I looked through. That screen was populated by the same little bugs, inside and out. I went to the bedroom window - all the way across the house, and lo and behold there were those same tiny buggers. Damn and blast!

They were too small to see any characteristics, but I nevertheless checked a National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders out of the public library and attempted to locate my pests in it. No dice. Turns out "tiny, with wings, on window screen in Tennessee" doesn't show up in any of the descriptions.

Well, not-very-long story shorter: I have bugs on my screens. For five days now I've been unable to open my windows for fear they'll all come rushing in and the apartment will fill up with little winged nuisances. I think they might be fruitflies, but it's really impossible to say.

Okay, so that's not much of a bug story, I know, but I'm hoping that by writing it up as my big insect encounter in the South I'll save myself from having any worse episodes for at least a while. And if you really want bug stories, sometime I'll tell you about the one I had to beat to death with a shoe.

If You Try, Sometimes, You Just Might Find....

I got in the car approximately seven minutes ago and, when I changed the station away from the DJ telling a fascinating story of that time he was late for an airplane, I happened upon the last third of this lovely little number. Thank you, Rolling Stones. I'm trying to think of this as the theme song for my adjustment period here in Nashville. Because I clearly can't get what I want. (All my friends to move here? A private jet for spur-of-the-moment trips north? Enough income to buy a plane ticket without suffering a massive panic attack?) But I have been finding that - sometimes - I get what I need. (Like when my friends manage to call or IM just when I'm most wishing I was with them. It's a good trick. They're talented like that.)

I'm trying to help this along. No, really. Just because I've been alone in my apartment anytime I wasn't actually in class or buying groceries for the last two weeks doesn't mean I'm not making an effort! I mean, there was that math test I thought I might fail. (I didn't.) And the cold I thought I was getting, and the allergies that turned out to be the cause of the cold symptoms, and which necessitate sitting in a sterile, enclosed environment. And there were the aliens attacking my stomach. And that episode of Project Runway that I hadn't seen, and the Netflix DVDs that arrived. So my seclusion has been totally justifiable. But I have (once again) resolved to begin leaving the house for destinations other than the engineering building or Whole Foods. Or Target. I'm actually going to go out into public places. Occasionally. Indoor, air conditioned public places, obviously. (Allergies.) But, like, ones with OTHER PEOPLE. People to whom I will probably not speak unless a monetary transaction needs to take place....or if they approach me first and don't seem totally lecherous or insane. And that's TOTALLY PROGRESS.

So as week five of the Experiment in Southern Living draws to a close, I conclude that I am, in fact, making progress. And I would pat myself on the back, but I'm not sure I'm ready yet to look quite that crazy in public. So I'll settle for blogging about it and fantasizing about going to - get this - other coffee shops. Ones that I haven't been to before. Shocking, I know. But hey - I've done crazier things. Like moving to a time zone where I don't know anyone. In the whole time zone. (Because "9, 8 Central"? that's me. I'm "8 Central". WHAT HAVE I DONE?!)

The good news? Only four more weeks until I fly home for my cousin's wedding. Not that I'm counting.

Allergic to Tennessee

Who knew it was possible to be allergic to a state? or maybe a region - maybe I'm allergic to the entire South.

I don't mean to imply that I've never suffered seasonal allergies before. Last summer in Boston I spent many lovely days Claritin Clear...except not really, because Claritin doesn't actually fix my allergies. But something about this fall's allergy season has knocked me on my ass. Perhaps there are other explanations for it, but I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that the pollen count here is approximately twice what it is in Boston. Awesome.

This means that even though the weather became totally gorgeous over the weekend - the temperature and humidity both dropped, so it's been cool in the mornings and evenings and gloriously warm and sunny in the afternoons - I cannot open my windows. I tried opening my windows, and it made me amazingly happy as far as the soft autumn breeze blowing through my apartment but fairly miserable in terms of the itchy, sneezy, phlegmy, awfulness.

So I have given up and become one of Those People who, despite the beauteousness outdoors, sits in the house with the windows shut and the air conditioning on. I really, really hope that this is effective. At about 3:00 this morning a handful of aliens decided to try to rip my stomach out of my body, and I can't help but think it is somehow related to the allergies. This is the only reason I'm willing to shut out the beautiful weather. I REALLY hope the pollen goes away soon. I mean, how badly do we need the trees to reproduce, anyway?

I'm now going to finish my recovery day by watching a DVD that's come highly recommended from a few sources: Once, and I'll let you know if it's any good. I can definitely say with confidence that Netflix is the best thing ever.

The Great Tennessee Experiment

I arrived in Nashville three weeks ago today.

I've spent the last three weeks setting up a new apartment, starting a new school, getting to know a new town, and generally trying to settle into a place a thousand miles away from my friends and family. It's been....an adventure.

My apartment is pretty awesome. My landladies are entirely awesome. Lila and Priscilla live downstairs, and are SO cool. From the minute I moved in, they totally adopted me. They're hilarious, and have been taking good care of me.

School is school, complete with classes and homework.

Nashville seems like a cool town, though I haven't done much exploring yet. I did take a long drive today down the Natchez Trace Parkway, and Tennessee is quite pretty. I'm looking forward to getting out into those rolling hills to do some hiking and keep trying to capture it photographically. (Wish me luck with that one.)

I won't promise regular updates, but I am going to try to keep some sort of log of this whole experiment in Southern living. If nothing else it'll someday be a kind of online scrapbook of that time I thought it would be a good idea to move to Nashville. We'll see....

Going to the Fair

Today I went to the Tennessee State Fair. Having grown up in one of the most densely populated parts of the country, I though the prospect of a Real Live State Fair - complete with livestock! - was like something out of a young adult novel about some faraway place like Kansas or Idaho. (My mother claims she took us to some sort of state fair when we were children, but I have no actual memories of that happening.)

So today I went to the Fairgrounds and paid my $4 to park on the grass, and $8 to get in. $4 bought me an enormous slice of terrible pizza, and another $4 procured a bag of kettle corn (totally worth it) nearly as big as my torso. A few minutes later it turned out to be a good thing I was busy with the kettle corn, or I probably would've eaten my body weight in fudge.

I figured that was enough outlay, though, so I didn't spend any more money to see the world's smallest horse, or have my age or weight guessed with astonishing accuracy. I did walk through rows and rows of goats, pigs, mules, birds, and rabbits. I saw a troupe of small girls in matching pink and blue outfits preparing to perform their competitive jump-roping routine. I got called Little Red Riding Hood twice, and Miss Hollywood once, by people manning the various booths I was passing. I saw a box truck marked as belonging to a group of Christian weightlifters. I saw the fattest baby I've ever seen, but she was just in a stroller, not on display in a booth. (To be fair, it was really just her face that was so fat. I mean, seriously, she looked like she'd had the baby fat from her chubby little thighs and ass injected into her cheeks...and on top of that was perhaps storing a winter's worth of acorns in there.)

I wandered around for about an hour before the noise and people and lack of edible vegetable matter started to get to me, and I decided to head home via Whole Foods. But I feel as though I've had an authentic Tennessee experience. It is a relatively foreign place, after all, for a girl who's lived all her life in the Northeast.

Check out my photos of the fair here, and stay tuned for more complete updates on life in Nashville.

The Move

The following episodes chronicle my move from Boston to Nashville in the middle of August, 2008. They were written at various stages, not in chronological order, so please forgive the tenses.

Episode 1 - Packing and Preparing

I've known for about four months that I'd be moving to Nashville this August. Early in the summer I started packing up clothes to take to Goodwill and posting crap on Craigslist that I knew I wouldn't want to take with me. I actually managed to do a really good job of starting early and planning ahead, for most things, and by the time I went out of town a week before moving day I had things pretty well under control.

I did, in fact, take a three day vacation less than a week before I was slated to move halfway across the country.... and I recommend it to anyone who's thinking of moving. Before I left I had gotten most of my stuff packed, and then I was able to walk away and not think about any of it for three glorious days in the Adirondacks. (The lake was beautiful, the mountains were beautiful, the company was perfect, the cupcakes were delicious. What more could you ask for?)

So I returned from my vacation with four full days to prepare, and on Friday I was to drive away with everything I still owned (i.e. that I hadn't sold over the internet) in the tiniest trailer rentable from U-Haul and the back of my glorious 1996 station wagon. Good plan, right?

The week was, of course, jam-packed with pre-leaving friend time. Perhaps I should've slept a little more, or spent a little longer on the moving part of things and less on the "OMG I won't see you for, like, three whole months!!" part of things, but "should" is a funny word, when you think about it. And if things had gone according to plan it all would've worked out just fine.

The plan began to run off its rails on Tuesday, I think it was, when my aforementioned glorious 1996 station wagon began acting funny. And by "acting funny" I mean "accelerating by itself, without me stepping on the gas." It felt sort of like a jet getting ready for takeoff. And then it stopped, so by the time I took it to my trusty (read "amazingly awesome and wonderful") mechanic there was no problem for him to diagnose. Right.

I retrieved the car from the mechanic and decided I'd just really really hope that nothing would go wrong again until I was in Tennessee. Alas, the jet engine started preparing for liftoff again as I was on my way to U-Haul to collect my little trailer. By the time I got home with the trailer it had gotten bad enough to incite rather a lot of screaming and swearing, and a phone call to my parents to say "HELP!! WHAT DO I DO?!?!??"

Long story short (there was a lot of unhappiness and NOT PANICKING and frantic phoning) - I ended up calling a lovely moving company who were able to schedule me on only 24 hours' notice. They picked up my stuff Friday morning, and I was left with just myself and a handful of things to truck home in my death-mobile, I mean station wagon.

And, of course, through those last three days were the goodbyes. Not really goodbyes, I guess: more like "talk to you online"s and "see you at Thanksgiving"s. They still weren't fun, not even a little bit. But since I couldn't pack all of my friends into the car and take them with me...beers were drunk, dinners were eaten, and leave was taken. I was, it seemed, on my way.

Episode 2 - Seven Hours from Boston

The drive from Boston to northern New Jersey normally takes about four and a half hours. Now that I was sans trailer, that was about the time I expected to take for phase one of the actual moving part of this whole escapade. I should, however, have anticipated Friday-afternoon-in-August traffic. I couldn't really anticipate the monsoons.

The good news is that having the entire contents of Lake Champlain dumped over my car seemed to keep it from acting up for most of the trip. It got a bit cranky about taking three hours to get to I84 at the Connecticut border (which normally takes an hour), and was threatening to take out the sedans in front of me in the last bit of that interminable crawling - leaping ahead every time I took my foot off the brake. But as I crossed into state two of my nine state (total) trip, the rain apparently cooled off the grumpy bits enough that they were willing to behave. (The rain also chased me off the road and into a rest area until it slowed down enough that I no longer felt that I really ought to have been in an ark.)

The Camry and I did successfully make it to NJ, and I even managed to not fall over upon exiting the house. My parents seemed slightly concerned about my well being, but after feeding me they decided I had revived sufficiently and could be put to bed. After sleeping, well, almost not at all and then taking 75% longer than normal for the trip, being put to bed was like a gift. It was a brief respite before the next episode was to begin.

Episode 3 - Maybe This Drive is Longer Than I Though

According to Google Maps, the drive from NJ to TN is approximately 12 hours. Of course, Google Maps doesn't have to stop and pee. Or get a sandwich from Subway and clean the windshield. And so, eleven hours in, my father and I are stopped at a Super 8 just outside Knoxville.

We thought that stopping before Knoxville would be good because 1. it's already been a long day, and 2. starting about 90 miles back there have been all sorts of signs about I40 being closed downtown. We figured this way we could plan our alternate route and not have to default to the detour that may or may not be terrible and/or backed up with horrible traffic.

So here we are with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the television.... and I think I'd like to go home now, please.

Episode 4 - Welcome to the Central Time Zone

There's a sign along I-40 between Knoxville and Nashville informing travelers that they've crossed into the next time zone. I'm not sure exactly what it says because I was too busy telling my mother, over the phone, that my father and I were crossing the time zone line. I was pretty excited.

The whole last day of driving was a bit of a roller coaster both literally and figuratively. We were past the proper mountains, but it turns out that Tennessee is all rolling hills, and of course as we approached our destination there came ever more frequent interjections from my side of the car, along the lines of "OMG I live in Tennessee now" and "what have I done??"

The scenery was quite pretty, and if I managed to adequately capture any of it with my random shots through the car windows I'll post them here.

Eventually we started to see signs of greater population density, and then we got a glimpse of the buildings of downtown Nashville before the beltway swept us off around the city to our final destination. My new home. In Tennessee. Where I live now.

Exactly where I live now happens to be an awesome one bedroom apartment in the upstairs of an adorable house. (My two new friends even, upon pulling into the driveway, began exclaiming how totally cute it is. They happen to be very male friends who wouldn't normally go on about the cuteness of something such as a house.) I am slowly collecting furniture and trying to make it feel like home, but mostly I'm waiting for the movers to arrive with my stuff. (I'm also waiting for the coolest company in Nashville to bring me things from far-off Ikea.)

Downstairs from my awesome apartment are two even awesomer ladies, Priscilla and Lila. I love Priscilla and Lila. From the first time I talked to Priscilla I knew I liked her, and she's even cooler in person. Lila is Priscilla's mother, and you know what they say about the apple and the tree. I totally lucked out with this apartment and these landladies/neighbors/friends. I think once my stuff gets here I'll have to bake them some cookies as a small token of my gratitude for the welcome they've given me. (Though I bet they can bake circles around me.)

I will definitely post a few photos of The Apartment once I get them uploaded to the computer and figure out which ones I want to show the world. I'm hoping to post lots of photos in the coming weeks and months so y'all can see for yourselves what this Nashville business is all about.

Of course, the best way to see it is in person, and by the time you get here my air mattress might finally be inflated......

A Tale of Two Cities

I want to go down to 3rd and Lindsley and run into all the people I used to see at the Lounge. I want a spicy chocolate chocolate chip cookie from Fido after dinner at Diva. I want two homes and a private plane.

I want to tell my friends that I’m not really leaving, I’ll just have a slightly longer drive to meet up with them. I want to believe that there will be no sense of loss, just a geographical redistribution. I want to say that I know it won’t be easy, but what’s (and who’s) important won’t change. I don’t know how it’ll work, I just know that it will.

That's Just Like a Vacation, Right?

Apologies for being MIA for more than a whole week! A dreadful sin in the blogosphere, I know. My excuse is that I was out of town, and too busy taking in a new city to sit back and reflect on much of anything. Now that I'm home I can share a few thoughts about (or inspired by) the trip:

• Southwest Airlines is lovely, but the way to "like where you sit" is NOT to "sit where you like." Give your sloganeers a pat on the back, and then find some other way of boarding people quickly without screwing us over. Thanks.
• Any city that has a coffee shop that serves a spicy vegan chocolate chocolate chip cookie (and a really good cup of coffee) is okay by me.
• Trees are nice. Grass is nice, too.
• A lake can be almost like an ocean, if you don't swallow any of it, and if you ignore the fact that you can see the other side.
• Long Island is REALLY big.
• I like nice people.
• I want a tiny house with its very own vegetation, within walking distance of civilization.
• Major corporations are the devil, but small-ish chains that make a strange city feel more like home might not be quite so bad.
• Motels are the most miserable places on earth. The free wireless access is necessary so the guests don't all drown themselves in the indefinably sketchy swimming pool.
  Time should be allowed, in life, for both varieties of vacations: the kind where you go somewhere new and run around like crazy trying to Maximize Your Time, and the kind where you go somewhere - probably somewhere familiar - and just become as much like a piece of furniture as possible for some amount of time. People call the first a vacation, but after trying to See And Do an entire city in 2.5 days, I'm really not sure it should count.

* photo(s) to be posted very soon *