The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I just got back from a 12-day trip to Europe, which I may comment on more in depth later. My trip took me to the British Isles. I'd been to London several times before and some of the nearby areas (e.g., Oxford, Cambridge) but that was about it. This time I got to Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Belfast.

I had no idea what to expect about Belfast. In a sense, upon arrival, I was pleasantly surprised. The area around the Central (train) Station is full of modern new buildings, and runs into a vibrant downtown shopping area. It appeared on first glance that Belfast is a fine and functioning town.

The next day I joined some other women from my hostel on the Black Taxi tour of the city including the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. And there the dysfunction was revealed. It's not as if urban planning isn't challenging enough without having Balkanized neighborhoods and walls separating them. Buildings and walls were covered with huge murals with each neighborhood's propoganda and memorials to the perceived martyrs of either side. The wall dividing the Catholics and Protestants was stained with the scorchmarks from petroleum bombs and pocked by shrapnel. A brick shopping center near downtown used to be a bus depot, the driver told us, where one day apparently 15 bombs went off. He said they had to scrape up the body parts with a shovel afterwards.

I was just there a few days ago and I'm still reeling from the ironies and contrasts. On the one hand I had a great time in Belfast connected to the event I was there to see. On the other hand, I feel a twinge of guilt for having griped about my hostel in the face of such more serious - and still mostly unresolved - issues.

This is a more detailed explanation of what I was doing in the UK and Ireland during the last two weeks.

With my friend visiting me for the 4th of July weekend we made some effort to get out and see the local sights, possibly my last chance before my aforementioned move.

We ended up in Solano County, in the northeast corner of the Bay Area. We went wine-tasting in the Suisun Valley area, headed over to Vacaville later to catch Johnny Colla perform at CreekWalk, visited the Jelly Belly factory (which, with the Cadbury Factory in Birmingham, England makes the second large confectioner I've toured this year), and of course, couldn't miss the crop circles... cue twighlight zone music

As if relocating across the country wasn't emotionally stressful enough, the moving itself caused all sorts of hassles and elevated blood pressure. It took 2 days and several emergency trips to UPS (too much stuff!) to pack up my car to the gills (where on earth did I get all this stuff????) and then 4 days to then drive from Santa Clara, CA to Boston, MA.

The most interesting day was probably Day 2 when I went from Salt Lake City to Omaha. First I nearly failed Basic Roadtripping 101 when I almost ran out of gas. That morning when I left Salt Lake there seemed to be enough left in the tank to get me to Evanston, WY, where I had planned to stop and get breakfast. It's the border town, only 60-70 miles away, and I figured it would be more efficient to hit the road right away and get the gas when I'd be ready to eat. My car generally gets great mileage so I didn't think the extra miles would pose any problem at all. However, I neglected to calculate the loss of fuel efficiency that comes from lugging a car hauling a gazillion pounds of stuff (approx. 1/2 gazillion kilograms for you metric types) up the northerly spires of the Rocky Mountains. As I was climbing the gas gauge started to drop precipitously low. When I passed the sign indicating 22 miles to go, I figured I was toast. I took out my cell phone and started watching the mileage markers so that I could give AAA precise location information about where to find me when I inevitably stalled out.

And then, over a ridge, like an oasis in a desert, was the first exit in Wyoming. With a gas station at the end of it. I nursed my car down the exit ramp and pulled up to the pump. I've never been so happy to be at a gas station before. Had you been there you would have seen me lovingly pat my dashboard and say, "Good car! Very good car!" Next you would have seen me slap myself upside the head for being such a moron.

Gas purchased, and a new personal policy passed to always top off the tank any time I stopped, I headed off across the vastness of Wyoming. I have a book called Rising from the Plains which is about the geology of Wyoming. Apparently the state has some very interesting geological features, some of which are visible from I-80. Unfortunately, while the state may be interesting from a plate-tectonic standpoint, it's not all that interesting from an automotive touring standpoint. Until about Laramie when the terrain gets more varied with buttes and valleys chasing each other to see which can be the highest.

Heading through the hills surrounding Cheyenne, the friendly fluffy rainbow-bearing clouds from the day before had started ganging up into some nasty looking storm clouds. As I descended out of the hills into Nebraska, I saw in the rearview mirror dark charcoal skies with a lightning bolt slicing through to the ground. Growing up back East I'd seen thunderstorms build up before, but they'd tended to swell up more slowly as they inhaled all the humidity. Whereas in Nebraska follicles of moisture careened into vengeful atmospheric monsters with great speed and viciousness.

When I was a little I had one of those irrational childhood fears of thunderstorms, probably because they were loud. It was only when I grew up and found out that thunderstorms could actually be dangerous that the fear turned more rational. So as raindrops started dripping onto me I began trying to outrace the storm. And good thing too, because as I happened to glance off to the right I saw a swirling patch of dirt. It looked a little bit like the clear air dustdevils I've seen while driving through the Nevada desert. But it was bigger, and it was connected by a ghostly funnel silhouette to a big nasty cloud up above.

I'm no idiot, I saw what happened to Dorothy. Tornados cause all sorts of havoc and I wanted nothing to do with this one. Fortunately, it was heading southeast and I was just heading east so it posed no threat to me, other than the inherent danger that comes from zipping down a highway while looking at a tornado.

For the most part, I managed to avoid other calamitous weather. The only rain of any significance fell just as I was crossing the Hudson River and ended by Connecticut. I was originally going to cross at the George Washington Bridge at the eastern end of Route 80 so that I could say I'd gone from Bridge to Bridge (Bay Bridge to GWB). But then my dad told me that 80 technically stopped in Teaneck, NJ, and there just didn't seem to be anything romantic about saying I'd driven from Bridge to Teaneck. Disillusioned and tired, apathy took over and so in Pennsylvania I veered off to I-84 instead.

Although it's too bad I didn't drive through New York City, because with all of the beautiful flitting butterflies smashed on my windshield I could have used the services of those famous Squeegee Men.

This entry was actually posted on Aug. 4. However, it really applies to 8/3 when it was mentally conceived. Like the previous post I wanted to assign it a different day to keep things spread out.

I've travelled all over Europe by train. Though the rail system is complex, it's very easy to get around nearly the entire continent by train. Trains run on time with predictable pre-printed schedules. Bookings are easy to make for almost any train anywhere in Europe. Ticket agents are friendly and helpful. I only had problems in Italy, when the night train was mysteriously cancelled and no one could hazard a guess as to why, either in English or even Italian. And in Spain, when the train was mysteriously and inexplicably late departing (but that worked out ok, because so was I.)

Then there's Amtrak. I wanted to take a trip from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe, but I didn't know the best way to route it. The website was insufficiently helpful. So I called the reservation line. The agent was even less helpful. She didn't know where the stations were, and when I tried to look them up online while we were talking (broadband is a good thing) so I didn't book the ticket to the wrong place, she threatened to hang up. "This line is for reservations only! I've got calls waiting and can only talk to people who have all their information. You need to do your research and call back."

"But it isn't possible to do any research because I can't get any information!"

Back and forth we went. Eventually it became clear that she wasn't going to be able to provide me a sufficient amount of information to allow me confidence in ending up in the right place so I had to hang up. When I called back the different woman who took my call was very nice, but interestingly, in booking the reservation no money changed hands. So I'm wondering why the first woman couldn't have waited a few more minutes to make sure I'd gotten the information I needed since it's not like I was preventing an actual monetary transaction from taking place.

It turns out that if you board at unstaffed stations, which I did, you pay on the train. It also turned out that the reservation was completely unnecessary since I had no proof of it and the conductors had no way to tap into the reservation system. So I think next time I take Amtrak I will save myself a phonecall (or two.)

But on the good side, the conductor was nice and, glory of glory, THERE IS FREE WIRELESS ACCESS ON THE TRAIN!!! I'm zipping along (ok, not really zipping, the train's moving fairly slow) the Sacramento Delta as I type and post this. Wireless access makes up for a multitude of sins, but still, I fear for the nation's rail infrastructure. Amtrak shouldn't be losing money, and it should be a functional rail network. To make it truly comprehensive and functional will take a lot of work, but I think it will be well worth it for the nation's interests if we undertake it.

In the meantime I think there are a couple of quick fixes that might help. A comprehensive, usable reservation system, for one. And a reduction in the amount of surely reservation agents employed.

Edited for clarity and style 1/18/04.

9/16/04: I turned off comments for this particular post because it seems to be a popular one for comment spammers. I'm going to see if that makes my life easier, not having to delete so many so often. If you really want to comment about Amtrak, drop me a line.

By last Friday I was a mess. I had applications due, summer jobs to be found, run-of-the-mill homework to do, upcoming seder plans to make, and I'm sure 14 million other things I can't remember offhand right now. I was starting to regret having signed up for the student bar association-sponsored softball tournament to be held in Virginia.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, to get to play organized softball. I can hardly remember the last time I had the chance to be on a team. Maybe intramurals as an undergraduate, but even that wasn't so much fun since I had to organize the team. For this I just needed to show up. But at the time I signed up I hadn't anticipated just how complicated my life would be, or how trampled my sense of self-worth would be, by the time the weekend rolled around.

I was sure though that I didn't want to miss my classes, so I decided not to take the chartered bus down with the rest of the team. This was a good call, because I also didn't think spending 14 hours on a bus with increasingly inebriated law students would be much fun either. My goal was to take a flight after classes were over for the day and then rent a car. It turned out that the only cheap plane fare was to Baltimore, and I figured that was close enough to the University of Virginia. It is, if you consider a 2-3 hour drive to be convenient. I probably should have looked at a map before I set the plans into stone but oh well.

Oh well indeed, because I think in the final analysis the trip logistics, poorly planned as they were, served me well. I love traveling. I love getting to new places. I even love the journey of getting there. Although I suppose there is a breaking point, I seem to have a lot of stamina for being in motion and in some ways derive as much pleasure from it as I do from arriving at the destinations. To some extent this might stem from fascination from the miracle of flight, that so much ground can be covered so quickly. But even the driving is pleasant, cocooning myself in the cockpit of the car with my favorite music and (hopefully) open roads.

It may not be possible to express succinctly the amount of angst I was experiencing last week. I was particularly stressed out about my summer employment situation, which had not yet settled and involved absorbing the disappointment of not getting a position I had greatly wanted. The specter of all the work I had to do, combined with the psychic kick in the gut, sapped the energy required to do it and was becoming a vicious cycle. It is questionable whether, if I had stayed home, I would have gotten anything done anyway. There's a good chance I would have frittered away the time, stuck in the mire of stress, and then I'd have begun the week even more behind and feeling worse about it. Maybe being able to get away right then was the best thing for me after all.

Because I was already behind on some things due that day I ended up missing one of my classes anyway. Then I left for the airport, hoping to be able to standby on an earlier flight. I was there on time, but ended up missing the earlier one due to complications from the moronic policy by US Airways to charge for the privilege of MAYBE getting to fly standby. I think that in the age of overbooking and weather delays, when the airlines are constantly requiring flexibility by their customers, they should be GRATEFUL that passengers are willing to fly earlier if they are able. It makes no sense that an airline would rather send a plane off with an empty seat and keep a willing passenger in the airport, especially when there's a reasonable likelihood that by the end of the day the airline will have too many passengers overbooked and will need to bump people, or that delays may keep these willing passengers from making their connections. It makes even less sense considering that the only reason airlines such as US Airways won't fill the seats more efficiently is out of spite that customers didn't pay for the privilege of helping them out. And it infuriates me that, although I arrived with enough time to catch the flight, I did not arrive with enough time to pay for the ability to catch the earlier flight. Because of that I was doomed to waste extra hours in the airport. My time is rare and precious and I resent the airline for making me waste it as a consequence of doing business with it.

Eventually I took my preplanned flight to Philadelphia and from there a 20 minute flight on to Baltimore, which, being in a 737, took over an hour what with loading time and taxiing and takeoff clearances. I got to Baltimore and rented the car and began the trip to Charlottesville.

Unfortunately, my law-addled brain once again let me down in the packing department. While this time I did manage to remember to pack the suitcase, I didn't also manage to remember to pack pants. All I had was the jeans I was wearing and nothing more suited for playing lots of softball. So once again I had to reconstitute my wardrobe on the fly. On the way down I popped into a Walmart and found some cheap sweatpants. They did the trick, but I lament having needed to shop at Walmart. The economic cost Walmarts have inflicted on the downtowns of America is severe, and the resulting effect on the community by driving away diverse establishments is particularly problematic given that Walmart refuses to provide a full suite of female pharmaceuticals. While that might be their private prerogative, if it has made it uneconomically viable for a pharmacist whose prerogative to provide them to stay in business, then I think the prerogative becomes much less private and is subject to public scrutiny. It's a terrible burden for women who happen to live in rural communities to not be able to purchase the same medication that females in a more economically diverse locale can.

(The next morning I also bought some cheap shorts at a Marshalls, but I have no tirade about that establishment.)

All told the trip took about 3 hours of fairly easy driving. As the miles passed and Boston got further and further away, so did my stress.

The next day the tournament began. We had sent two co-ed teams and one men's team. I was on the team that was presumed to be the least talented of the three, and the outcome of the first game would seem to have supported that view. I did, however, get to play second base, which made me very happy. I did so with some degree of competence, which made me feel even more satisfied. It is a tantrum that I will save for another day that all my years of little league were spent banished to the outfield or the bench while all the more popular kids got to play the positions where things actually happened. It was only as an adult when I was able to stake out second base, with no one knowing that I was supposedly an un-athletic unpopular urchin undeserving of playing time, when I was able to get the opportunity to work on developing the necessary skills.

There was a gap between our first game and our second game, which was at a field outside of the central Charlottesville area. In fact it was in a fairly undeveloped spot near the Monticello visitors' center. In the intervening time I went to the center and stood in the early spring sunshine communing with the Jeffersonian spirit. Spring came earlier to Virginia than Boston, and as rainy clouds departed the skies became warm and blue. My cell phone rang with a phone call from my dad.

"Where are you?" he asked. I imagine he'd tried to call me at home, noticed I wasn't there, and was curious about what I was up to. I don't think he expected the answer, "Charlottesville, Virginia."

The reception was lousy (sometime I will have another tantrum about AT&T Wireless) so it was a short call and soon I got back to the field. The games were being held all over the Charlottesville area in this double-elimination tournament, and so far all of our teams were way on their way to being eliminated. We had no reason to suspect a better result when we took the field for our second game, but it turns out that somehow we won nevertheless. The lousiest team of the three we sent, we were the only one who managed to win any games. As a result we got another game to play, hours later at ten o'clock that night, when Rutgers managed to serve us up our apparently unavoidable fate.

Since we lost, soundly, there was no reason to stay around the next day and we all left around eight in the morning. I got in the car and drove back to Baltimore. I was early for my flight, which had been booked for late in the day anticipating needing to play that morning. Since I had so much time to spare I decided to splurge for standby status. It worked, and I got to LaGuardia by 4. Unfortunately, the next flight to Boston was too full to standby on. So since I was "in the neighborhood," I decided to surprise my grandma and drop in on her in Brooklyn. This was a very impetuous plan, though, because traffic could be a nightmare, she might not be home... any number of things could go wrong and it would either not work, or I might miss my flight to Boston... But as the cab pulled up to her house I called her from my cell phone. "Grandma, open your front door." She did, and there I was. When I was a little girl she used to come over to my house a lot. I remember walking home from school and at the top of my street, a long, straight downhill, I used to squint and look to see if maybe I'd see her car parked in front of the house. It always seemed like the best surprise if she was there, so I figured I would return the favor.

It was a very short visit, not even an hour, because I had to make sure that I caught by 8pm flight back to Boston and I had no idea how much traffic there would be on the return. Maybe it was a gratuitous use of cab fare, $65 roundtrip, but I'm glad I made the stop. In the cab returning to the airport my cell phone rang again with a call from my dad. "Where are you?" he asked, probably expecting Virginia or Boston. "I'm in a cab on the BQE," I told him. I take it as a bonus from the weekend that I spent it flummoxing my dad by popping up in all sorts of far-flung places. Given how much I like to travel, I suspect there will be further flummoxing in the future.

It turns out there was little traffic and I got the airport early enough to take the 7pm flight back to Boston. I was home around 10, tired from a long day, but happy and surprisingly de-stressed. Something about the traveling reset something in me, like I'd been wound up tightly and now the tension had been released. It's odd because traveling is itself a source of stress, what with schedules to keep and not being able to relax in a home environment. But I seem to thrive on it and was glad I took the trip. It turns out it was probably the best way to have spent my weekend after all.

I began writing this on the date I've changed the entry to, but didn't finish or post it until 4/18/04.

The two have nothing to do with each other except my weekend involved both.

I flew back up to Boston to see my sister graduate. I took US Air from Baltimore because it was supposed to get me United frequent flier miles and it was relatively cheap. But it's so hit or miss with them. I got to the airport plenty early but with summer thunderstorms on the East Coast the schedule was a shambles already. So they put me on American direct. Worked for me, I got there sooner. And I didn't have to enable their bizarre policy of paying for the privilege of standby to do it.

Senator Lugar spoke at the ceremonies in comments that were picked up by the national news. As a Republican, his criticism of the Bush foreign policy takes on additional gravitas because it can't be labeled as partisan. Still, I feel a bit cynical about him. Although I agree with his meta message about the necessity of putting more resources into diplomacy than exercise of military might, I thought some of his comments were politically manipulative. In making the argument for increased funding for the State Department (whom I am now a fan of...) he seemed to suggest that Congress had cut funding for such programs. It's possible that it has, I'm not sure, but my problem was that based on the facts and figures he cited in his speech, it was only possible to conclude that Congress had simply not INCREASED the funding as much as they could have. I resented him for using provocative rhetoric that implied a different conclusion than his facts supported. Of course, such is what politicians often do, I guess.

My sister all graduated, I rushed from a family celebratory dinner to get to the airport. When I checked in US Air said everything was on-time. I don't know why they said that – the plane was already late from its previous destination. Time got wasted while I went to the gate and shoertly thereafter saw it delayed by 45 minutes, then an hour and 45 minutes. Even the gate agents were confused. I was supposed to change in New York but it was unclear if I would make the connection. I didn't want to get stuck there (it was too late to call up my grandma) so an agent put me on the flight to National in DC. Great! Yippee! Except my car was at Baltimore. So he gave me a taxi voucher for the trip up to get it.

Of course, the expediency of the plan began to crumble when we sat on the DC-bound plane and the pilot detected a mechanical problem. After maintenance poked at it they declared it unflyable. They did find another plane to fly, but by the time they towed it over and we boarded it was over an hour later. We didn't get to DC until after 10:30pm, and then I still had to take my taxi ride to DC. All told I didn't get home until after 1am. Nice way to start the week...

The extended pause in posts was due to a trip to Points Far Away. It's too long to blog, so you can read about it here.

Travelling is a great way to meet people different from you. With my trip to Cambodia and a trip planned to another developing region later this summer I'm getting to meet people much different from the people I know in America.

But maybe I just don't know the right people in America.

Today I stopped into a Subway near my job to pick up dinner. The place was nearly empty, so neither the sandwich preparer nor I was in a rush. As he made my sandwich he asked me if I wanted American cheese or provolone. This led to a conversation when he asked me what the difference was between them. I was sort of surprised he didn't know his own product, but I went along with it. He seemed to have a subtle foreign accent and it dawned on me that he might really not know too much about cheese.

"Provolone has more flavor than American. American is much more bland."

"Cheese is cheese to me," he said.

"Well, HERE," I said, pointing to the Subway cheese spread, "It may all taste the same, but the Europeans take their cheese very seriously. They have lots of different kinds and wouldn't like a bland cheese like American."

He laughed, finished making my sandwich, and then sat down at a table since there were no other customers. I filled my soda cup and went to put my sandwich in my backpack. "That's a heavy backpack," he marvelled.

"Oh this is nothing. I'm a law student and I've carried much bigger and heavier ones."

This led to a discussion on studying law. Apparently he had taken law class in school -- in Africa. His country was a former British colony - so we presume a common law country - where the legal education, like in many other countries other than the US, happens at the undergraduate level. So we talked for a bit comparing legal systems and education. It was like a mini global exchange.

In a Subway restaurant in DC.

I sort of realized, too late, that when I planned my summer I had neglected to schedule for myself a day at the beach, literally or figuratively. A day where I could do nothing but lie around in a relaxing place. And/or go swimming. Even my trip to Southeast Asia ended up beachless, despite there being some very nice ones in Thailand. And I really could have used it - it's been a marathon going form the semester to the writing competition to the move to the job to travel to the job again and I was craving a mental pit stop.

I finally got the proverbial day at the beach when last weekend my friend and I... spent a day at the beach. We headed out to Ocean City, MD. It was a beach whose geographic proximity mocked us as we fjorded the state highways for three hours to get there, but once there we had a nice time. The beach was pleasant and we had a nice swim. The waves were high enough to not be boringly placid but not so big that swimming became a bruising experience. Initially we were near the boardwalk and walked around eating boardwalk food (which naturally included crab cakes) but then we went up the road to this complex that was sort of a Disney-fied bar on the inlet (Ocean City is a barrier island). It was all done up as a Jamaican oasis, with palm trees and sand and lots of distinct bar areas done up with their own tropical atmosphere. It was sort of nauseating, in a way, although having never seen a place like that it was kind of fun to take in for the first time while it still had some novelty. My concern stemmed from the realization that it was the kind of place where "Girls Gone Wild" videos are probably shot (as the various signs warning us that AV recording was happening at all times suggested), where drunken coeds partake in their unique notion of inebriated "fun," and where, for a place with no walls, the dress code was highly regulated (e.g., no backwards baseball caps). I did think the jetski parking lot for those who approached by sea was an interesting touch though.

Neither my friend nor I had ever jetskied, and although it was a little expensive, we decided to give it a try and rented one for a half an hour. It seems that if I think it's important to take in all sorts of new but foreign experiences, it's also worth taking in new domestic ones as well.

For dinner I'd not yet had my fill of greasy beach food and really wanted fried chicken, so we pulled into the first place that seemed like it might offer it. Big mistake. The service was very slow and poorly prioritized. For instance, my meal came with fries. When the waitress came over mid-meal to see how we were doing she thought to ask THEN if I might like ketchup. She eventually returned with it, after having done about 10 thousand other things first.

The bigger problem that really bothered me, in no small part because my fried chicken fix was absurdly expensive (3 or 4 times the equvilent price at KFC, but hey, it was table service and convenient, right????), I couldn't get the chicken pieces I wanted. It came with 4. I was hungry enough for at least three. I asked for drumsticks, which, as I explained to the waitress, was the only kind I really liked. When she brought my order there was but one. "We can't give you any more, we save those for our kids meals."

After my stunned silence abated I managed to shoot back, "Well would you prefer I act like I'm 12? I'm a paying customer and I asked for drumsticks!" I might have understood if it had been like ordering a half-chicken and you'd need to keep the set of parts together. But since they obviously manipulated the inventory I was flabbergasted that they wouldn't manipulate it for me. Given that white meat is usually more popular it wasn't like I was asking for something I wasn't paying for. She took the plate back to the kitchen and returned but one more. "This was all the chef would do." Fearing I'd never get to eat anything at all at this rate, I took it, and regretted it the whole meal. I'd finished the two and was still hungry and I was increasingly livid that I'd be spending an obscene amount of money to not get what I wanted. It was sort of interesting because as the meal went on I heard her tell another table, "Oh we can't do that," with regard to some request (reasonable, I'd imagine). What kind of restaurant says "no" or "we can't do that" to a customer? Has our notion of hospitality really strayed to such cavalier proportions? There are schools all over the country teaching restaurant and hotel management, and I really doubt they teach their students to say that to their customers. Ever.

When you go to a restaurant, the deal is that for your money (more than you'd spend cooking it for yourself or in a take-away shop) you actually get served satisfactorily. This place was straying from that tacit agreement and then playing, well, chicken with me that I wouldn't get uppity and walk out. So not only was I hungry, and not only was I embittered that I wasn't getting what I was paying for, I felt increasinly resentful that I was being taken advantage of. Had I been alone I might have walked out but it wasn't really a viable choice with my friend there. Plus it would have resulted in the wasting of two full meals which couldn't be reserved, and I really hate waste. But I felt I had to assert myself somehow because I hated feeling so taken advantage of.

I thought about asking to speak to a manager but everyone in the restaurant seemed fairly surly and I doubted that I'd get any satisfaction. So I told my friend that I'd contribute the cost of my meal and tax to the bill but no tip. She let her customer flounder and not get what she ordered, and I wasn't going to reward her for it. It was also the only way of acting that wouldn't potentially result in a loud public argument.

The problem is that my friend didn't have the right denominations of money for his share, and decided (for me) that it wasn't such a big deal and I should still contribute a dollar for my portion. But this really made me angry with him, plus it created an awkward situation. "I'll LEND you the dollar you need to pay the tip on yours, but you need to pay it back to me because I WILL NOT GIVE A TIP." This was very awkward because I normally wouldn't be so petty in making my friend repay the debt of a dollar. But it was the principle of the thing, and I was annoyed that he was minimizing it. I'd picked my battle and sunk my teeth into it, and being told to let go for the sake of expediency did not sit well with me at all.

It's not that I'm so petty that I always get worked up over things like two pieces of chicken. It was more a sense of indignation that the restaurant was taking advantage of its customers' compliance, bullying them into just shutting up and taking what it gave them and then making them pay for it, and that's wrong no matter what the context. I didn't like feeling I was enabling such behavior, and I really hated feeling so runover by it personally. As a result of that it was no longer a fight over chicken and felt like something worth fighting on principle. Stupid things that aren't fair always are. Injustice or bullying don't deserve a fair pass for anything.

But I will acknowledge being a little prickly that evening. The sun and salt sort of suck out all your energy while you are having all your fun, and I had a three-hour drive looming in front of me. I was also not looking forward to passing by the spot where earlier in the day we'd passed by a house in the final stages of burning down to the ground. It was a place of anxiety and trauma, where the sweet sooty smell of someone's life being ruined permeated the car (and was still lingering in the air when we passed by again hours later.) As we were passing by in the morning I foolishly turned my head to see it for just a few seconds and that was enough to etch it forever in my mind. The fire raged with a remorseless thoroughness, immune to any pleading to end its destruction. It's frightening enough when such indifferent destruction is exhibited in something inanimate, like fire. It's even worse when that same sort of unrepentant power is demonstrated by people.

I flew up to New York today to see my grandma for her birthday. She mentioned that I seem to be full of complaints lately, which I've noticed too. I've become pretty grumpy lately, and I think it's part of the Great Change. Some of it stems from personal stress – there's a lot of stuff I need to do right now as part of this process – but some of it stems from the experiences I've been having lately, working for an NGO to try to stem the tide of horrific legislation, confronting far greater challenges to the civil liberties I treasure than I ever thought possible in the United States, and worrying about how I'll be able to fix all this (and be a happy healthy person in the process) .

But I can still appreciate and report on nice things, a tale of which I shall report here. Unfortunately, a complaint is going to need to precede it, but then again if something hadn't gone wrong there wouldn't have been the occasion for someone else to have gone above and beyond to fix it.

I flew into LaGuardia and met my mom at the gate, who had arrived from somewhere else. It was pleasant to have her there waiting: one of my favorite feelings is the happy rush you get from being met at an airport by someone who's glad to see you. It happens for me less and less these days because I fly so often on my own to all sorts of farflung places. And when it does happen, because of the new security measures, you never get met at the gate. But because she had arrived on the same airline she was able to be right there. It was a nice change. (And there you go – I just said something nice.)

We then set off to figure out how to navigate local transit to get to Brooklyn. The subway unfortunately doesn't get all the way to the airport, but there are buses that go to subway stops. But even more unfortunately, these buses don't take dollar bills even though a ride costs $2. And still more unfortunately, despite this rather stubborn insistence on taking only (a rather heavy handful of) change, we weren't advised that we needed it when the information desk told us what bus to take. On the plus side, the buses do take Metro Cards, but again, misfortune frowned upon us when we were unable to find a newsstand that could sell us a card good for just one ride (in fact, we had to walk to another whole terminal to find one that could even sell us any cards at all – what a huge waste of time.)

After we gave up the fruitless pursuit for the correct Metro Card, we went to the bus stop, clutching our two singles each, and saw the right bus pull up. Then we discovered we needed change. So we ran into the terminal and luckily found a change machine (that thankfully was not out of change), and when we came out, the bus was still there. At least mostly. It had pulled away from the curb but was stuck in traffic. I knocked on the window but the driver refused to open the doors. MAYBE this is MTA policy, but in most of the places I've been drivers have been willing to pick up passengers as long as it was reasonably safe to do so, especially when service is less frequent than every five minutes or so.

Meanwhile, the Avis shuttle bus driver, seeing this take place, jumped out of his bus. "Get on, and I'll try to catch up with him at the next stop." We did, and so did he. It was tough, what with traffic and an extra stop he had to make that the MTA bus didn't and a Hertz shuttle bus inexplicably stopping in the middle of the road, but there by the Marine Terminal we managed to cut off the MTA bus with a shortcut and he got us to a stop just in time.

It was an interesting mini-adventure, shlepping and racing around LaGuardia (which itself is an interesting airport with its conflux of modern and old airport architecture). It was very nice of the Avis driver to go to the effort for us, but that said, it would also be nice if New York made things a little easier for people coming to visit (or even people who live there, for that matter).

Toward that end, buses should take dollar bills. That technology has been in existence for a long time, and most other bus systems use it. I'm struggling to imagine a compelling enough reason for the MTA not to use them. People are less and less frequently carrying a lot of change, and the amount they need to carry for a ride is becoming absurd. I think the logic is that there's little point since the locals use Metro Cards, but the tourists who've just arrived have no opportunity to acquire them before needing to ride the bus.

So toward fixing that problem, and this would be even easier to do, the Metro Card machines (which I happen to think are very nicely designed – extremely usable particularly in light of the complexity of their offerings and methods of payment) (and see, I said something else nice) should be placed in the terminal where all the mass transit information is. Otherwise there's a good chance tourists could get stuck (what if the single change machine broke?) and most certainly will end up wasting a lot of time. New York City has a very nice and otherwise reasonably usable public transit system. Why make it hard for visitors to use it? Why force them to pay extra for cab fare?

Meanwhile New Yorkers privately are willing to go all out to make things better for their city's guests, but I think it would behoove the city to make certain efforts on its own behalf, especially since it desires to have more visitors (Olympics, RNC). It's hard for them to see what a nice place New York is if they can't easily get into it.

Technically finished and posted 7/18. Mostly written though on the plane back down to Washington on 7/17.

I finally finished my travelogue from my two-week trip halfway around the world [link to the post where I alluded to it]. I went to Israel, the Balkans, and Germany. It was about 14 pages in a word document so I split it up into the three sections.

Edit 8/23/04: I'm working on making some edits so, for instance, ALL the sentences make sense grammatically, and things like that. So check back...

Edit 8/25/04: Most of the sentences should now make sense. I may still clean it up and clarify, but I think it's generally safe to read now...

Like a swallow to Capistrano, every year I return to the Bay Area for the Big Game, the annual football match-up between Cal and Stanford. This year the stakes were even more exciting because Cal does not, as has been the case in recent years, suck. In fact, not only do we not suck, but we're good! We Bear fans don't quite know what to make out of this change in fortunes, so unaccustomed we've become to decent football-playing.

I came out on Friday, on an early flight for which I woke up at 4 in the morning in order to pack, since the Career Panel had kept me out late the night before and I was too wiped out to deal with it when I got home. So maybe because of the exhaustion I was a little raw. And maybe because the semester has gone on so intensely for so long I was also a little worn. And maybe not knowing quite what my future holds, or where it will hold it, had also drained some of my emotional fortitude. And maybe none of these things mattered and the weekend was just weird.

But it began well. After I landed I rented a car (Alamo lets you pick the car you want, so I chose a blue one to show my Cal spirit) and drove up to San Francisco to have lunch with a friend at an organization I much admire. It was such a positive experience: I enjoyed her company, and I was very grateful for having her support in shaping my career. Back at her office I was also conscripted to help out on one of their projects and that has me extremely excited because it's doing the kind of work I hoped to do when I went to law school in the first place.

Then I headed further north to Marin County where I was due to have a Huey Lewis and the News-esque moment. I didn't travel all the way to California just because Johnny Colla was planning to have a concert, but I thought it was awfully nice of him to schedule one so conveniently for me...

It was at Rancho Nicasio, a restaurant (dinner theater?) up in the Marin hills. I drove up after the sun had set, which is too bad because it's a gorgeous drive during daylight. I ended up sitting at a table right next to the stage. At first I thought that would be fun (I hate having an obscured view). Then the show started and I immediately emotionally bonked.

It was the oddest thing. There's nothing more certain in my life than his music - I ALWAYS respond to it. But for some reason, once that show began I was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation that I did not want to be there. That I didn't even belong there. I should have been off working on that cool law project - THAT'S what my life was about. What was I doing going to this concert? I wasn't like anyone else there. I didn't have a boyfriend/spouse/significant other to dance with, like it seemed everyone else did. I wasn't a local and/or neighbor like it seemed everyone else was. I wasn't even (I really hope) one of his uber-fans who danced all night up front and brought the band their beers. I was there, alone, and suddenly I couldn't figure out why.

And the worse I felt, the worse I felt. There I was, right up front, being a vortex of negative energy, and that didn't seem fair to him. Part of me wanted to sneak out the side door to go get my head on straight. Part of me wanted to sneak out and not come back. Eventually, near the very end, I warmed up a bit and went out onto the dance floor and flaccidly danced. I felt like my soul weighed 15 tons, I could hardly move. On top of the embarrassment, I also became worried that maybe the magic of his music has started wearing off and no longer would work for me. Given how important his music is in my life, this change would be awful. But this is probably not the case: my troubles occurred because I do so respond to his music. When he tells his story my mind starts to wander. It kicks up mental dust in my mind, scattering poignant particulates throughout my brain. I was just in no condition to process them, so I got overwhelmed and shut down.

Things improved after the show, though. I chatted a lot with the guys in his band, people I'd met before but hadn't seen since before going to law school. I apologized for being a wet blanket but they weren't too bothered by it. I also talked with another friend I hadn't seen since before I'd started school either, and it was good to catch up with everyone. By the end of the evening things felt much better (mostly). Still, the whole experience felt unexpectedly strange. Little did I know that wasn't the last time that weekend unexpected strangeness would kick in...

The next day I headed over to Berkeley. My friend has, for years, hosted a tailgate party in the same spot in the middle of campus so there's a whole bunch of us who know to converge there on Big Game Day. As we've gotten on with our lives and scattered to the wind I rarely see many of them, so it's nice to have this occasion to bring us back together.

After dining on yummy ribs, I started walking up to the stadium. It seemed like a perfectly innocuous journey... for the first 20 feet at least. Then, there at the top of the stairs, I suddenly nearly bumped into my ex-boyfriend.

I always thought it inevitable that I would run into him somewhere. It's not that big a world, and we'll both be (at least roughly) working in the same industry eventually. But there??? He IS a Cal grad too, but he'd never gone to Cal games except at my instigation. And on this particular day there were 70,000 other people converging on the stadium. The odds that I would have run into him right there, not even six feet away, seemed quite slim.

But there he was. I was initially too stunned to know how to react. The way we were situated though meant that while I saw him, he hadn't seen me. The question then was whether to say hi or not. To my retrospective chagrin, I immediately became befuddled by the relative pros and cons of doing so. It was ridiculous, the same self-doubting garbage that had infected the relationship. But by the time I'd shoved it all to the side and decided to say hi like a normal person, he'd already peeled off to take a different route.

I wasn't inclined to follow him, but then further up the hill I could see our paths would once again converge. As it happened I ended up in front of him, but not in a position where I could just turn around and say hi without it being massively awkward and contrived. But HE could see ME and say hi if he wanted. He didn't. He peeled off once again and was lost in the crowd of 70,000 people.

I couldn't decide what to make out of this. Part of me was disappointed. Part of me was relieved. I'd sometimes wondered about what would happen when I saw him again - since I knew it would happen someday - and how I would feel. I just didn't expect to find out quite so soon. But maybe it was all just as well: that neither of us could cut through the crap to just say hello like normal people makes me think that neither of us was really ready to.

The encounter did seem to fit the strange emotional theme of the weekend though. And I still wasn't in good shape to be able to easily shrug it off. But there was a game to go to and so my attentions were soon preoccupied by more pleasant things. Cal tried to make us nervous by only leading by 10-3 at halftime, but then it squashed Stanford to a pulp in the second half to win 41-6. We still have the Axe, the trophy from the annual match-up, and we all daydream about what sort of Bowl game we might finally get to play this year...

After the game I went down on the field with three friends, and then accidentally lost all of them in the crowd of thousands of celebrating fans. Had I realized my friends all needed to leave so soon, I wouldn't have lost them so readily. I would have said good-bye at least, but I figured we'd meet up again when the band marched out. But they'd apparently all left by that time. It was disappointing, but I did bump into another friend I hadn't seen yet down there on the field. Then I went to Bowles Hall where the band always serenades the crowd and saw another man from my past. I'd had a crush on him for a while but fortunately (on retrospect) he was such a complete jerk so early into the acquaintance that it was pretty easy to get over him. Though it's been years since we'd last spoken, an already poignant weekend didn't seem like a good time to change that.

I walked down afterwards to meet up with my tailgating friend while he was packing up his car. We were in the center of campus, which is up on a hill on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay, with a view straight out the Golden Gate. I suddenly looked up and caught a spectacularly gorgeous scene. The waning hours of the afternoon had given way to a most provocative sunset, one that was begging me to stay when I knew I had to leave.

Posted 11/25, written earlier.

My mom and I went over to Cambridge last night to see a talk by Rick Steves. He's part travel guide, part philosopher, part stand-up comedian. Definitely worth hearing speak. His "Europe through the Back Door" book and TV series (new seasons continue to be aired on PBS) have inspired many travelers with his unique approach to travel. The notion of the "back door" is that the point of going to these foreign places is to really know what it's like to BE there, not to drown in superficial touristy kitsch, but to meet the people and see what life is really like in those places. To make a connection.

The importance of making those connections becomes more acute the more isolationist our country becomes. As long as we think the world is exactly like us (or that if anyone differs it's a shame they are so flawed) our policies might appear to make some sort of sense. They make no sense at all, however, on a planet with millions and millions of people who are not like us, and who may have a thing or two to teach us themselves.

Traveling helps broaden everyone's horizons and build tolerance. Of course to do that we need to travel responsibly. If we travel to places and bark at people because they don't speak English, no connection will be made, and we'll all be much worse off for the encounter. Rick Steves' work - his shows, his books, his tours – attempts to show a better way to travel, a way where more is gained than just some souvenir knickknacks.

For readers unfamiliar with the wonder that is the Garden State Parkway, let me explain. It's a toll road, with a toll plaza in every county it passes through. Actually, Bergen County has two, including one up near the New York border. Unlike the New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Indiana turnpikes, where you get a card as soon as you enter the road and then pay for the distance traversed when you exit, on the Parkway you pay 35 cents at every toll. There are three ways to pay: in cash, with an attendant who makes change, by EZ Pass, the automated system, and with exact change you throw into a basket. I refuse to use EZ Pass, partly because I don't trust there not to be billing errors, and partly because the government can tune into the transponders at places other than the tolls. I'm not keen to enable Big Brother, so I pay my tolls in cash. (Except in France where they are so expensive I pay them by credit card). Of those options, the exact change is the quickest.

When I was learning to drive, as a teen in New Jersey, I had to learn how to pay the tolls. You have to pull up just the right distance from the basket – not too far so you can't reach it and not too close so you hit it... It took a few attempts before I mastered it. At least I thought I had it down, until tonight.

I drove down to my dad's in NJ and had to pass through a toll plaza. I had all my change queued up in my hand, the handy dime and quarter I'd gotten as change from the earlier toll on the MassPike. I pulled up to the basket, at just the right distance, unrolled the window, stuck my arm out...

And somehow managed to hit the door frame. The change went flying. And not into the basket. This was a problem. I didn't have any other spare change to deposit instead, and anyway, I'm a poor student who can't afford to strew money hither and yon on highways. So I put on the emergency brake, turned on the hazard lights, opened the door, and started looking for my change on the ground. I had to act quickly: there were now cars behind me and I feared the wrathful honking that might ensue if I unduly blocked their progress. Lo and behold, there was the quarter, and there was the dime... the dime... the Canadian dime... another dime... another quarter... It was better than Vegas. With one dopey move, I'd managed to double my money. And there was more still lying there. But I decided to quit while I was ahead, before a traffic jam ensued. Quick as a flash I dropped one of the dimes and quarters into the basket, got back into the car (that I had managed not to lock myself out of, as I feared I was accidentally going to, what with me being on the outside of it and the keys still in the ignition), and drove away without further incident, flush with just enough loose change to pay for the trip back.

Edit 12/28: So my cousin thinks it's illegal to pick up change on the ground at the tollbooth, the theory being that the money was intended for the Parkway Authority (this the same authority that requires the National Anthem to be played before any concert at the place formerly known as the Garden State Arts Center - even if the act isn't American or doesn't want to have it played - just so we're clear on the level of fascism that may be affected here). There is something to that theory: [another relative] says that when she misses the basket she drives off anyway, thinking that it should be enough that she got the money TO the toll. But my impression always was that if you didn't get it into the basket it didn't count. Worse, leaving change all over the ground is essentially littering, and I'm sure that's illegal. (And given the age of some of the coins left on the ground it doesn't seem like the Parkway Authority is particularly interested in collecting this money.) Of course, if it does count as paying just by leaving the money on the road at the toll, perhaps that solves how to pay the toll for the George Washington Bridge...

Anyway, it's not that I'm advocating jumping out of the car at every toll to scrape up the lost change as a separate career or anything. Blocking traffic is illegal and dangerous. I was just trying to do my citizenly duty by properly paying my tolls, something that the Parkway Authority often makes difficult. And any guilt I might have had for picking up a teeny bit extra was pretty much wiped out by the booths at which it was impossible to pay *unless* you had exact change or EZ Pass. They do give out envelopes so you could mail in your 35 cents, but by the time you pay for postage you've paid twice. That's hardly fair. If the tolls require you to pay, they should make it possible to do so.

And we're not talking grand theft here either. I picked up an extra 35 cents plus a Canadian dime. In fact, I only had the mens rea for taking an extra 10 cents (plus the Canadian dime because I think foreign coins are neat); I really genuinely and sincerely thought that quarter on the ground there was the one I had dropped.

I just hope my little change-collecting spree doesn't make me fail the moral character application for the bar...

Technically I didn't have time over these holidays to have a proper vacation. (I still have all sorts of papers to write.) But the overall pace of life is less frenzied during the semester break and it's a good time to catch up on all the relationships I've had to neglect for the past many months. Last weekend I went to New Jersey to see lots of family. This past one I went to Seattle, where two of my best friends live.

One of them has a whole bunch of friends who are avid gamers. So for New Year's Eve we sat around playing all sorts of board games and strategy games and party games until 4 in the morning. (I played Bohnanza, Puerto Rico, TransAmerica, and Apples to Apples.) At about 1 min. 42 sec. before midnight the 18 of us went downstairs to watch the final countdown on TV. After several "five, four, three, two, one!" countdowns prior to 20 and 10 seconds remaining, we counted down the final seconds, mocked the city of Seattle's festivities ("Hey, if we want to party like it's 1999, in Seattle that means we won't party at all!"), drank a miniscule portion of the vast collection of champagne that had been accumulated, and then went back to the games.

The next day we woke up to lots of leftover potato chips for breakfast, went out for fondue for dinner, and then went to another person's house for still more games (this time Can't Stop and Celebrity). Then my other friend picked me up on Sunday and I finally got to meet her kids and watch Huey Lewis and the News videos. It's so nice to have friends for whom watching HLN videos is just as much fun as it is for me... and it was really good to see her. I hadn't since exactly a year before, at a HLN concert actually (imagine that!).

After a pleasant, lazy bunch of Sunday hours catching up she returned me to the first friend's apartment. We had earlier decided to meet up with her boyfriend for sushi that evening. In fact, we'd become pretty fixated on the idea that we'd be eating sushi later that evening. It even came up in conversation a few times with the second friend - when she asked me what I'd be doing later I was very clear that it would involve eating sushi.

So when we called the intended restaurant and found it closed, we had no choice but to find another. My friend called the second place. "Are you open for dinner?" The answer was yes. "What time do you close?" Given that we were about to leave to go eat I teased her for asking such a redundant question. It was already 5pm. What kind of restaurant is open for dinner service at 5pm and closes by 5:30?

We left her apartment and pretty soon arrived at the restaurant a bit later, just a moment after her boyfriend. Whereupon we found a "closed" sign and a disillusioned employee outside.

Her boyfriend: "They're closed!"

My friend: "What do you mean they're closed? I just called and someone said they were open!"

Employee: "Yeah, that was me. I thought we were open, but it turns out we're not."

Apparently he had mixed up his days off. Earlier that evening he'd come in and set everything up, but sometime after we'd called he put two and two together when none of his coworkers were showing up.

Everyone was disappointed with the turn of events, but it turns out he was the sushi chef. After we asked if there was anywhere else he knew of nearby where we could get some he volunteered, "Well if you just want sushi I can do that. I just can't do teriyaki and things like that." But who cared about the teriyaki - we were there for the sushi. We HAD to have the sushi. "Yeah, if you wouldn't mind..."

So we ended up with a private sushi dinner. He was very good, and single-handedly served us the entire meal (complete with tea and some very interesting steamed mushrooms). At the end I think we left him a 40% tip, so hopefully that will salve the bruise on his ego from him kicking himself so much for his mistake.

(On the way home afterwards her boyfriend and I stopped off at an Office Depot to pick up some supplies for his printer. While we were paying the lights suddenly dimmed. "Are you closed?" we asked incredulously. "Oh yes, we've been closed for 15 minutes." So it turned out to be a very interesting evening of doing a lot of business with apparently closed establishments.)

All in all the few days in Seattle made for a really nice break. It was good to see my friends and get away from the drudgery for a while. Who cares that there weren't warm sandy beaches and tropical drinks being served poolside... This was all much more rewarding and fun.

I saw a friend at school on Thursday. "Going anywhere on spring break?" she asked. "Yeah. Japan."

With my rather elastic sense of geography, Japan seemed just as easy to get to as New Jersey. But whereas I'd been to New Jersey before, I'd never been to Japan. (Well, I'd been ON Japan last summer when I changed planes for Bangkok, but that doesn't count.)

Meanwhile my friend's job situation happened to leave him free in March. In an email to several friends he said, perhaps only semi-seriously, March is a good time to come visit. So I cashed in some frequent flyer miles, and now here I am...

Getting here was a bit of an ordeal, although at the beginning it went well. For a change I had good T karma, meaning that when I got to the T station the train was just pulling in, rather than just pulling out... I was also processed through airport security expeditiously and got to Chicago O'Hare with more than two hours to spare.

The problem with this trip, however, was that my sinus problem seemed to be more than a trifling cold. All the vegetables, sleep, and fluids didn't seem to shake it, and I didn't have time to see a doctor before I left on my trip. I emailed my friend, "Um, I may need to find a doctor once I'm there..."

I guess it wouldn't have been the end of the world if I'd needed to. My friend would have helped me navigate the system. I've gone to doctors in foreign countries before, including several times in France. (In fact, one of the best doctors I ever had was in France, but that's another story for later.) But at least in France I can speak the language.

It turns out that in Chicago I can also speak the language as well. Which would be apropos of nothing, except that in the airport is a medical clinic. I've seen signs at other airports for medical clinics, but I've never had occasion to use one. But here was my chance to get looked at by a doctor I could talk to and get whatever medicine I might need.

It turns out that I had a 102 degree fever, which, while on the one hand made me feel good as a means of documenting how crappy I felt, on the other hand still meant that I felt crappy. But once I got my prescription I felt much better, if just from relief from not having to worry about how I would take care of it in Japan. I limped back to my plane, boarded at the earliest opportunity, and waited to be whisked away.

And waited and waited and waited... I'm not sure the full comedy of errors that ensued, but first there needed to be refueling, and its corresponding paperwork. Then they needed to check out an electrical smell. Then they needed to figure out why the back of the cabin was so warm. (This problem, in particular, took a while to solve.) Then they had to refuel again because we'd used so much while troubleshooting the problem, and then do even more paperwork. Then we needed to wait an inexplicably long time for an air compression truck to help turn the engines back on (I think this is what the pilot said). Then just when we were good and ready to leave, a passenger decided he was good and ready to leave the plane RIGHT THEN, so we had to let him off and then turn off the engines AGAIN so they could find and remove his bags. By the time we were "on the road" we were about three hours behind. Thus making a 12-13 hour flight even more interminable.

Eventually I and my semi-ambulatory self arrived in Tokyo, where my friend met me. We went back to his apartment, a convenient three hours away from Narita... and there I am this morning - sniffly, but at least medicated.

It's 3/6 in Japan when I wrote this.

On the plane they showed a promotion for the Food Channel's Iron Chef program. With the secret ingredient being "trout," they flashed on the screen the types of dishes each Iron Chef would make with it. Bobby Flay, for instance, would do something southwestern and chilpotle-infused. Mario Batalli would whip up something Italian. Meanwhile Japanese Iron Chef Morimoto would offer up "Trout Ice Cream, with Eyeball."

I think it's sometimes taken on faith that the things Morimoto serves up are even human-edible at all, but it's a testament to the Japanese palate that it can be so creative and expansive with its culinary choices. I'm enjoying eating here more than any other country I've ever traveled in, including France. There's everything – EVERYTHING – you could possibly want here. Especially being sick that's been a huge thing for me. I've had soups in all sorts of styles: udon, then later won-ton soup in Yokohama's Chinatown. When my throat got sore while walking around, right around the corner was a shop serving raspberry sorbet. Today when I craved tempura, there was a special tempura shop we could go to. Tonight when I wanted something light, in the local department store food hall was a salmon-lettuce wrap that totally fit the bill. Meanwhile for the last two days for breakfast I've been eating this great little bean and corn salad that I picked up at the local 7-11...

The food's all been good, and it's all been cheap. I certainly think dining here is cheaper than traveling in Europe would be right now, at least with the exchange rates. And in some instances I think the prices compare favorably with those in the US, as do the tastes and selection as well.

The dearth of posts lately has been due to global travel compounded with my cold (which sapped any available cycles I might have had.) I stayed in Japan until Thursday. My cold got a little better so I was able to see a bit more. Koichi took me to Yohokama station, and the next day we went to Odawara Castle. The day after that we saw more of Tokyo and then on the next we went to Disneyland. The Lonely Planet says, "Despite the crowds and queues, no-one is ever disappointed. Ever." High praise indeed, but it was fun. It was also strange. Everyone there, EVERYONE, was Japanese (or maybe also Chinese or Korean). Despite this being a most American of destination, there were really no Americans there at all. (I actually didn't see many Americans anywhere in Japan during my trip, but what few were there had clearly not been lured here...) There were long queues, however. Really long, even for things like popcorn. Disneyland had this racket going where you could get these souvenir buckets filled with popcorn, and then get them refilled at various stations around the park. Each station offered a particular flavor: carmel (my favorite); salt; honey (yuck); curry(!); etc. Anyway, way too much effort was being expended on popcorn acquisition, but at least for the carmel one I thought it was nominally worth it.

Thursday was my last day, so after a quick jaunt to the Akihabara neighborhood ("Electric Town," where there are tons and tons of electronics stores selling everything from home appliances to individual transistors) and a lunch of ramen, we went to the airport for my afternoon flight. To California. Because what would a school vacation be without a Huey Lewis and the News concert? They were playing out in the desert past Palm Springs, another part of the world I'd never visited. After landing at LAX I rented a car and drove out there (with all the rain SoCal has had the desert was extremely lush and verdant). I am fairly sure that I'm the first person who has visited both Tokyo and Indio in the same day, although if I'm mistaken I'd be interested to know who else might have done this, and why...

Edit 3/15/05: Well this is sad. A tour bus going to the Fantasy Springs Casino in Indio (where I was, and where I had a very nice time) crashed and at least one person died. It's such a random place where I was, and yet here it is, mentioned on CNN.com just a few days later... Very sobering.

Being sick took all the wind out of my sails. Lots of things about my trip were interesting, but I just had no energy to write about them. (The few entries I did manage to post were fairly dull, although a few now have some updates.)

I did mention the food, which was important because I did eat every day, although on retrospect I realize I did not eat enough sushi. Kind of silly to go to Japan and not eat my fill of it, but I was busy trying out ramen and other culinary delights that I ran out of mealtimes.

I didn't mention the tissues either. On street corners and such people often hand out promotional materials. My Berkeley-honed reflexes are now well attuned to avoiding the offerings of such people, but in Japan I had to override these sensibilities. Why? Because what was most commonly handed out was tissues. And with my leaky sinuses, that was the best thing anyone could give me. In fact, even with my massive tissue consumption due to my extremely drippy nose I think I still netted more tissues than I used. It wasn't until several days back in the States – today in fact – when I finally ran out.

Meanwhile it was interesting to wander the streets and subways of Tokyo and be of average height for a change. The problem with the stereotype about Japanese people being short is that, as with any stereotype, there are many, many people for whom it doesn't apply. Still, I did seem to be relatively taller in proportion to the rest of the population. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to discover that it didn't make me taller than Koichi. It seems that if I was to be relatively taller in Japan, I should have been relatively taller than him too...

In reading the following, bear in mind I was walking around with a 102F fever, having just gotten off a 13 hour flight, which was preceded by a 3 hour delay on the tarmac, which was preceded by a multihour layover in Chicago, which itself followed a flight in from Boston for which I had to get up really early to catch.

Because as I was walking through Narita airport from the gate to customs, I happened to have looked through the windows to the departures' area foodcourt, and immediately thought to myself, "Gee, this airport has a lot of Japanese restaurants."

The real reason I went to Washington was for the University of Virginia's law school softball tournament.

Unfortunately, it's been pouring all day so we've been rained out. On the other hand, Charlottesville is not a bad place to be, so we've been making the best of it. A whole crew of people went to Monticello, for example.

We have two French students with us, LLM students, who are disappointed not to get a chance to try out their new baseball gloves. I'm disappointed not to get to watch them play. It might be amusing, except they're on my team so perhaps "amusing" isn't the word...

But another teammate and I decided to introduce them to another aspect of Americana instead, and for breakfast took them to a Waffle House. I suspose it was very mischievous of us, exposing the French palette to a Waffle House just to see what would happen. But they were good sports. Although it might be the first time someone has ever gone to a Waffle House and tried to order an espresso.

Update 4/3: The French guys played great! Or at least no worse than anyone else on the team.

The tournament was supposed to be made up of hour-long double-elimination games. But with all of Saturday's games rained out, it was no longer possible to do that. So instead on Sunday, for the teams that stuck around, there were single-elimination, half-hour speed games. One pitch per batter. Which meant our fate was decided rather quickly.

On the upside, I cleanly fielded all the ground balls hit at me in short center field. About 3 of them. Which held each batter to a single base. So that we could immediately walk them home on the next three pitches. But it at least feels like a moral victory, if not one measured in runs.

Last Thursday I departed from central New Jersey for California. Four days later, I'm now here.

The first day I drove to Effingham, IL. It was about 850 miles, which I've decided is a reasonable amount of driving to do – particularly heading west. The problem with the eastbound journey is that you lose an hour almost each of the first three days. Going west you actually get an extra one. Still, it's a bit of a stretch doing that much in the eastern states. They are slower to traverse, being both more congested and with lower speed limits. I found Pennsylvania particularly tedious. It was pretty, in a bucolic way, in central Pennsylvania with its rolling green farmland hills. But it was a deceptively huge state. Being in the Northeast it at first seemed to be small. But unlike Indiana, which is nice enough to orient itself so you get to zip across the narrow part, Pennsylvania forces transcontinental drivers to traverse its widest dimension, which is actually quite wide. And at only 55 mph, no less.

(At least West Virginia, in the 13 miles I-70 crosses, lets you go 70. Whom are they kidding, they must reason... by the time they caught up with a speeder they'd be in Ohio. So they might as well just let you go fast.)

I was taking I-70, rather than the more direct I-80, because I needed to correct a rather embarrassing geographic omission. See, though I'd been to Kosovo and Cambodia, the alliterated list of places I'd seen did not also include Colorado. I decided that should probably change, and this was my chance.

But not on the second day, which mostly entailed driving through Missouri and Kansas, two other states I'd never before visited. Missouri was ok – not remarkable – but I loved Kansas. Just west of Kansas City the road got open. At the eastern end of the state the surrounding countryside was mildly rolling – but what's really noticeable is just how big the sky got. The day I was there the leading edge of a cold front was right over the highway, brewing into a storm. It was just a lot of rain and wind (no tornadoes) but really dramatic. The land was so open – you could see for so many miles in every direction – that you could see everyone else's weather just as well as your own. The people to the left were getting very wet, but those to the right were still basking in sunlight.

Eventually Kansas got flat, but not until I was about halfway to two-thirds through it. But near the western edge, just as the sun was setting, I could see the tops of the Rockies silhouetted on the horizon. It was dark by the time I got into Colorado, but I just went in a little ways until Limon, where I spent the night.

The next day I finally saw what I came for: the Rockies. It was actually a little stressful driving – my car did not like accelerating at 10,000 feet, which it had to do several times. But after Vail Pass it was essentially all downhill into Utah. As I went west the landscape got drier and drier, although it seems to have been a wet spring because even the desert was verdant (particularly in Nevada). Shortly after Green River in Utah I cut off the interstate, taking US 6 up to meet I-15 in Provo. It seemed like a shortcut, and it was, but it was still about 150 miles of non-interstate road. The first part was two lanes, crossing the desert valleys. Then up over a ridge, suddenly there was a lush canyon. Things stayed fairly green up until I-15, at which point things seemed to get drier. I bypassed Salt Lake City, hooking up with I-80 to head for Nevada. As I drove past the lake and the salt flats yet another storm was brewing over the Nevada hills. Ribbons of lightning snaked to the ground in front of me, and the setting sun silhouetted wisps of rain falling from the clouds. The storm had passed by the time I got to West Wendover, just over the border in Nevada, where I spent the night.

Wendover is actually an interesting phenomenon. There are two towns, one in Utah and one in Nevada. The one in Utah has a salt-flat racetrack, but not much else. Just over the border West Wendover is practically the Wild West, with all the vices one is deprived of in Utah on offer in Nevada.

The next day – yesterday – I finished my journey. First I crossed Nevada. It was about 410 miles, but they rolled away quickly. This is partly because out west (after Kansas City) the speed limits tend to be 75. So you don't have to be speeding to go fast. And Nevada is a series of valleys and basins stretched out before you. As you descend into one valley you can see up ahead, 15-30 miles, to the little ridge at the end, separating it from the next one. Once you cross that crest, a new valley appears, offering a completely different view. Also along the way are tiny towns, offering food and fuel, and breaking up the monotony of the drive. I ended up veering off into Wells, a former stop along the railroad, and saw some of its dusty history reflected in its old buildings. It was too early to go into it, but there was also an information center describing the journeys taken by the westward settlers. It took me three days to go from Independence, MO, to California. What it must have been like for the horse-drawn wagons, crossing interminable and inhospitable landscape, with no Burger Kings and gas stations to alight their route...

The border town on the other side of the state is Verdi, where I also stopped. Whereas Wendover is more of a hardscrabble, blue collar oasis in the desert, Verdi, on the edge of the Sierras with its well-healed Lake Tahoe-vacationing Californian and Reno suburbanite clientele, has a much different feel to it. Continuing on just a bit I-80 climbs to Donner Pass, and then descends through the gold-laden reddish Sierra foothills into the Sacramento Valley. The road by then gets very wide, with many lanes of urban drivers, and continues that way until its end. Once over the ridge between Fairfield and Vallejo, I caught my first glimpse of the Bay Area: its shimmering waters sparkling in the sunset, Mount Tamalpais' tree-lined hair draping down Marin, the suburban sprawl creeping up the region's hillsides. I kept going, over the new Zampa Bridge, around the Albany curve into Berkeley, where now I could finally see the ocean waving to me from under the Golden Gate.

More notes from the roadtrip...

+ Door to door, Boston to Berkeley, it was 3401 miles.

+ I stopped in McDonalds exactly 0 times, thus proving it's possible to drive across the country on the interstate and not have to eat in one. In fact I ate french fries only once a day, and only because I wanted to. With most fast food restaurants now serving salads, there are healthier choices than non-stop grease as one works their way across the interstates.

+ I used 88.5 gallons of gas, at the atrocious price of $195.01* (it got increasingly atrocious the further west I travelled, from a low in the $1.90s to nearly $2.50). Fortunately I think I got in the low 30s in terms of gas mileage, which is pretty good for a 10 year old car (and would likely have been even better had I not had a bike strapped to the back to ruin the fine Sentra aerodynamic stylings.)

(* Actually, I used more than that. This figure does not include the gas used to drive from Boston to NJ, or the little bit I burned off driving to Berkeley after filling the tank in Fairfield. Also, I think I'm missing a receipt.)

+ I stayed in 3 Super 8's, at the annoying cumulative price of 170.84. I probably could have done it cheaper - there were some cheap Motel 6's that I passed - but after last year's dog show fiasco (when there were no motels with vacancies within 30 miles of Youngstown, OH, where I was ready to end my travel day) this year I decided to plan my journey in advance and book rooms where I thought I'd stop. And where I knew some to be.

+ I passed through the Indianapolis area, stopping once just to the southwest for a meal. Everyone there was gearing up for the upcoming race. The KFC, for example, planned to open at 7am that day so people could pick up their orders.

+ My favorite sign seen on the journey was in Nevada, on I-80 somewhere east of Battle Mountain. The billboard read something like, "The Washington Post voted Battle Mountain the armpit of America. Make us your pit stop." Alas, I did all my stopping in Wells and Winnemucca so there was no need.

On the Conglomerate, Gordon Smith was discussing his impressions from visiting Auschwitz. (I also recommend reading the original post he cited, and some of its comments.)

I weighed in in the comments on my experience visiting Dachau:

One of the best Holocaust museums I've ever seen was at Dachau. In the main building, which has survived, there is a series of exhibits on the history of the period. Starting from about WWI, the exhibits slowly snake around the large room, showing how bit by bit over time things would change. The changes we