Tag: travel

Cutting your nose off to spite your face

  • Love, Actuarially: How Mathematician Chris McKinlay hacked OKCupid to find the girl of his dreams.

    How typical. As soon as I begin to believe, it’s over. I am a fool. My lover abandoned me the day before we were to go to Vegas together for a captivating weekend of circus and adventure.

    I asked for him to come anyway. If he needs to put this relationship down, I respect that need, but please respect mine, too. Let us do it together and with grace, with sympathy and care. End it with a whisper, I begged him, so that everything that came before could remain valid, so that the joy we found in our hearts in each other could stay alive, so that he would not have left a terrifying gulf of pain between us. My heart could remain connected to the world. We could stay open. We would still have undamaged space. He refused.

    Now there is nothing that does not hurt. I have been running through my entire catalogue of cognitive reprogramming devices to try and repair as rapidly as possible, but it is impossible to remove this much pain on pure “I said so” alone. And it hurts that I know that he isn’t going to help me and it hurts to know that it is possible that his life never offered the compassion tools that teach a person how.

    (I imagine he might be the only person more sorry about this than I am. And making a decision one will regret for reasons that will pass will probably only make for more sorry over time.)

    Meanwhile, I try to stay distracted, the same way it’s better to talk about anything but an injury when you have to walk on it. No downtime. No interstitial moments that aren’t filled with something. Songs on repeat with lyrics or chord progressions I want to learn, playing Tetris-like repetition games while I mentally recite lists of scientific facts, “In order for nucleotides to..”, or practice foreign languages, “Estoy desconsolada.”

    There is only so much strength to this sort of knowledge. For such tricks to work, there need to be new associations, better associations, you need to have happier threads, spark your neurons with joy like forcing a new path through a forest. And I haven’t had such a thing for a very long time, actual years, nothing could get in until I discovered our connection. Now that my only well has been poisoned, I am left without comfort. (Appalling, dire, it almost feels like life has reset back to quotidian norm.)

    So I called out to my social media networks, asking if there was anyone who could come with me. It felt unnatural, but it was all I could think to do. Everything had been paid for, I had been saving for a year and I couldn’t afford to pay for it twice, and there were only a few things I had warning enough to cancel, (some surprise reservations, something on Friday night, a flower delivery on Sunday). And it would be something different. New pathways, new experiences. But even so I knew I couldn’t do it alone. There would be nothing except in relation to that void and his absence would overwhelm the world.

    It took hours, until almost midnight, but eventually the internet shivered, shook, and delivered. People had been looking at air miles, at school schedules, at spontaneous adventure savings accounts, had been reaching, but failing. Until there was a shift. The gears caught together. Esme offered to drive me to the Bellingham airport, That 1 Mike wouldn’t be leaving for his tour until Saturday morning, Joshua was back from Africa, and a woman named Cypris had recently moved to Nevada, CJ said, and you two would get on like a house on fire. Then Cypris showed up in the thread, summoned by his tag, and promised a visit with the tigers, panthers, and the lion that live on the property she’s moved to with her love. It was the tipping point. I would not be alone in the most artificial city strip on earth while my heart was breaking. There would be company, authentic company. And that would be enough to go on, enough to carry my through.

    So thanks to you, my internet, I went to Vegas anyway. I cried a lot. (The universe had a lot of extra fuck you saved up for me, too, like being denied entry onto Friday’s flights and the only empty seat on the Saturday morning plane being right next to mine, where he would have been.) I melted down a lot. But I also social hacked a $350 plan ticket with a chocolate bar, visited my favourite bronzes and the mantis art car with Joshua and went to the sexy Cirque Du Soleil show with a circus person who was pulled on stage and gave an incredible performance and we rode the roller coaster on top of New York New York twice, once in the very front, once in the very back, and Cypris and I made faces together for the coaster camera and I got to sleep on a couch in a pretty little house in the desert instead of the soulless hotel room and I woke to savannah-style roaring and I walked on a new kind of stilts and I pet big cats and was licked by tigers and scruffled a gigantic lion and held paws with a panther and fed a different panther and climbed all over Red Rock canyon. And it was magical.

    I wished the entire time, a rolling dull thunder, that he was there to share it with. I wanted to be the person who brought him to lion scruffling. To introduce him to these beautiful people. To kiss him in the art gallery. To pick him up and spin him in the line for the roller coaster. To coax him to laugh in the two-person sized bath I sat in alone. Of course I did. I still do. (I had semi-promised him a red rose in a love letter, so I carried one with me from the circus for him anyway and left scarlet he-loves-me he-loves-me-not petals in all the important places. I shook the last of them from the stem as confetti over my new friends and I at the airport. I told you I was a fool.) He would have loved it, we would have blazed with light, we could have had a record breaking excellent goodbye. But we didn’t. But I didn’t miss out because of him. That was important. Now I have these moments. They are shaded with loss, but still beautiful. Thank you.

    TLDR: Mourning. Loss. Suffering. Friends. But you know what else is important? Majestic one-on-one interaction with fucking gigantic cats.

    • Life is short. Do stuff that matters. – Siqi Chen

    Postcard from the Party

    You have to be invited, and there’s nothing
    you can do to be asked. Headlines and bloodlines
    don’t help. It’s a long way from home but I’m
    here, the view much better than I’m used to.
    How did this happen? Dumb but good luck,
    right place and time, the planets aligned.
    No contract, no deadline, no risk. And what
    did I do to deserve this? Slept with all
    the wrong people, gambled too much on friends
    of friends with light bulbs over their heads.
    Wrote every day no matter what.

    by Wyn Cooper
    from Postcards from the Interior

    We mostly do not exist except in small windows. Welcome to my apt-for-any-century, turn-based text-based slow-budding relationship. It isn’t enough. It is just right. It’s perfect. It’s frustrating. I worry. I care too much. I don’t care enough. I am honored. I am afraid. Sometimes I fade into sleep with my phone on my pillow and wake with it sweetly cradled to my chest, a voice on the wire device warmed by my skin.

    Approximately fourty-eight hours from now, give or take a handful, a radiant man (not a boy, though I often call him a boy with the same precision used when I often call myself a girl) will begin to travel North. He will drive a large metal beast across his country’s border to find me, following a road that I have traveled a thousand times, and he will succeed.

    the home group of one of my mothers

    I have just returned from a long and involved trip South – first to Santa Fe to visit family, then to the Bay Area for New Year’s Eve and dear friends and small adventures, then to Seattle to build family, then back to the Bay for a further adventure, this time with a stranger. It was a clean narrative, completely without disaster, and I safely arrived from where I left, at the Vancouver airport, without either serious physical or emotional injury and having only lost one item of clothing. (May not be remarkable for other people, but it may actually be the first time in my life such a thing might be said.)

    There is not a lot to say about my time in New Mexico, except that I have finally experienced that classic North American thing that people experience when they visit family in an isolated area in an isolating culture, minus the bits about disagreeable politics. For example, I was told there was a Solstice party happening the evening I arrived, so I dressed up shiny and put on my warpaint and arrived in style, only to find it was an entirely different thing. A coven of women (who might be the type to spell it womyn) have been gathering six to eight times a year for thirty-five years to have a pot-luck, create a “Circle” of good intentions, light candles, welcome spirits, tell stories, and sing old songs. I was the only heterosexual present and the youngest by an easy twenty years.

    To give you a clearer picture, they meet on dates that are significant to the moon and on at least two occasions, without any irony, someone present referred to the United States government as The Man. It was like time travel. I kept expecting someone to laugh and the entire gathering shatter, but I looked around the room and realized that I have read about these people in books on first wave feminism. It didn’t occur to me while I was delving into that history, but apparently some of those people are still riding that wave, passing talking sticks around in circles and singing droning hymns to The Goddess that they wrote while stoned in a yurt on the side of a mountain in a woman’s enclave somewhere in 1978. If I had gone outside and stood on something, I would even have been able to see the mountain the yurt had been located.

    As experiences go, it was an echo of a hundred different moments I’ve witnessed (and tried to escape), so not new, exactly, but distilled down to an ultimate essence. I slowly became fiercely uncomfortable. I felt hammered by the singing, by the tone of it all, by the waiting. I was a fish out of water with a bicycle and I wished, with increasing desperation, that I could switch bodies with someone who would love to be there, like my friend Pam, or simply teleport her there. I am disagreeable when confronted with rituals or religion. I feel that the invisible things that weave the world’s narrative are things like atoms or quarks, neither of which will ever care or be capable of caring about rattling sticks or human interaction. You can do whatever voodoo you like on your own time, (pray to invisible super dragons, consult random chance oracles, LARP, read horoscopes, or whatever), and I won’t care, but I am not ever going to be a complacent participant. Even so, it was interesting. Interesting in an I-wish-I-were-writing-about-this-instead-of-in-the-middle-of-it kind of way. I wanted to document the living history as it unrolled before me. So here I am, writing about it, still wishing, nearly a month later, that someone who would have appreciated the evening had taken my place.

    the contrast between who I’m visiting and where I am

    Denver is so beautiful from the air it crushed my heart. I stayed glued to the window for as long as I could manage, resenting my own breathing as the cold of the glass fogged from my breath. So far in the sky, the small plane that carried me would barely be visible from the ground, yet I could see down into streets, houses, everything. Bridges seemed like running rills of glowing LED jewels, even though the entire thing looked organic, as if the city were a vast glowing creature hidden within the darkness of a velvet cave.

    -::-

    Santa Fe is odd in that it feels perhaps smaller than it already is because all of the buildings are low, styled identically, and everything is the same three shades of tan. The ground and the architecture and all but the sky all seem the same tones, all taupe and dust and matte adobe, as if the city is an attempt to camouflage human habitation from some great predator. There is barely any colour in public, excepting a few painted window sills on what are obviously art galleries or the homes of eccentrics. (I am told that traditional adobe houses have doors and trim painted “virgin mary blue”, the actual name of the turquoise, in order to ward off witches, but I have yet to see any). I think of drones and how lost they might be in this place, unable to source a target. I imagine flying over in daylight and only seeing half of the buildings. It makes for few landmarks, and locals navigate by the shape of mountain ranges and give directions like, “turn left at the #restaurant-name”, instead of “at the green house”. I can sense the reasons for this might be deep and fascinating and potentially religious, but I am not certain if the questions that lead to that understanding are the sort that might occur to me to ask or try to answer.

    (I can already tell I would not want to live here, though I like that the mountains are far enough away to allow for the illusion of a horizon).

    The place I am staying is a double-wide mobile home, decorated inside like a cross between an unconventional shah’s palace and a set from Twin Peaks. I imagine anyone from this place who is not familiar with my godmother, Silva, would be actually stunned upon entering the home. I am told it is a mobile home because it is a structure with a Vehicle Identification Number, as a car might have, but there is no way to tell from the inside. The interior matches nothing of the surrounding culture or landscape. There are small, startling still life scenes scattered about, (a silver vase of metal roses alone on a blue chest of drawers, isolated and knife sharp in front of a wall painted the same blue paint; a menorah perched on a tiny shelf mounted close to the vaulted ceiling, perfectly framed against a blood red plate of small, shimmering tiles and haloed with five antique ornaments detailing five stories that melt Buddhism and Taoism together), and all the walls are richly ornamented with wall hangings of massive sequined tigers or hand-painted wooden panels that look like they might have been stolen from either a very expensive Asian restaurant or a First Nations history museum. The whole kit and ensemble is lush and gorgeous and profoundly unlikely, yet presents together in perpetually interesting ways. Silva has always nested in opulent surroundings, so it feels immediately familiar.

    Outside the land is bleak. Across the frozen mud lane is a high security penitentiary and base for the National Guard. Nearby are other small houses, but not a lot, and many of them have cement brick shacks or broken down cars in what passes for their yards. Trees are scarce, all of the plants are dead, and the only breaks in the lines of the land are rocks.

    The snow, however, is beautiful. We are so high that the snow come down shining like flakes of mica, each one separated from the others by a foot or more. It is as if a great hand were shaking glitter down from the clouds to slowly and deliberately hide the scarred ground with a blanket of soothing white.

    Facebook Friend #19 – Julie Salkowski

    Facebook Friend #19 - Julie
    Facebook Friend #19 – Julie

    Julie is a Montreal based painter, designer, and occasional horticulturist who married one of my best
    friends, Michel. We met when I visited for their wedding in 2009 and I have adored her (and their four
    cats) ever since. She’s quiet, but don’t be fooled, she’s mischievous, too.

    Side note: I took her photo in front of Silo #5, the home of the Silophone.

    My Facebook Friends Portrait project began when I hit 1000 friends on Facebook in 2012. The project is on-going and shall continue until I take a portrait of every FB friend I have.

    Travel Diary Day One: May 15th, Montreal

    I have just returned from a trip to Montreal for Dee & Freida's ish-wedding, (they eloped last year), and Madison for Karen & Pär 's ish-wedding, (they eloped 20 years ago), and WisCon, a feminist sci-fi writer's convention. I tried to keep a journal of the trip, an attempt to work towards fixing my awful stillness, sadness, and silence.

    I feel like I should be taking more pictures, the signs are all French, there are blue and white flags flapping from storefronts, but it has been a very long day, stretched longer by my restless, nearly sleepless night and the dilation effect of crossing two time-zones. The plane ride was choppy, but comfortable all the same. Not enough passengers to fill every seat, so there was room to stretch, room enough to feel like we weren't crammed in a can. How flat this country is, how bleak, I thought, looking over the plains, but then the lakes began to appear. The lakes that freckle the country are still frozen stiff, even in May, small, tidy sheets of white that gleamed like I used to imagine diamonds are supposed to, blazing with the sunshine even as our shadow touched them.

    My friends walk arm in arm, a married couple, beautifully affectionate, sweet and pretty. I adore them both, they make me ache to know the language better, so that I could be as quick and fluent with them as they are with each other. I remember their wedding, the sharp joy they gave out, like flares from lighthouses. They live together now by the Olympic Stadium in an apartment I had never been to before, shared with four cats, each with a distinctive personality, a greenhouse worth of plants, and books deeply piled on every flat surface. We are coming back from dinner, I’m to sleep in the front room, on a currant coloured velvet couch surrounded by novels, paintings, plants, and more art. It’s glorious. The building is old in a way that no buildings in the west are old, with painted over wallpaper raised in a repeating pattern of griffons and urns and dark wooden doors inset with stained glass. They are on the top floor, the stairs narrow, circular, and set with stone. It makes me think of castles and timeworn foreign movies. Someone shoots a gun, there are footsteps, someone running, but all you see is a hand on the rail. I love everything about it. I love everything about them. And underneath it all, a constant, the welcoming perfumed scent of sweet-smelling incense.

    Silence, the geography of detachment, so sympathetic, so absurdly bloody. There is no justice.



    The Centrifuge Brain Project, by Till Nowak.
    Also visit the homepage of the Institute for Centrifugal Research.

    -::-

    Our plan, once we had settled into the room, was to find our way to dinner then the Penn & Teller show at The Rio. Google Maps claimed it was twenty minutes away on foot. Rookie mistake, though, to walk anywhere off-strip. Simply making our way from our room to the street turned out to be our first challenge. Oh Google maps, if only your maps contained the inside of the labyrinthine buildings that make up the cold heart of Vegas, as well as the eerily simplistic grid it’s built upon! Second mistake was to try and cut through Ceaser’s Palace, which looked simple from the outside, but as all roads lead to Rome, so do all halls lead you in intricate twists designed to drag your wallet past as many opportunities to spend money as can be engineered by the human mind. Thirty minutes later it was a victory to find ourselves precisely where we started.

    Things became easier once we were back outside, especially once the Rio came into view. The walk was ugly, a rough, isolating half hour along a gritty highway, but any concerns we may have had about finding the place were squashed as soon as could see around Ceaser’s Palace. The building is not quite as large as many of the megaliths, but for what it lacks in overwhelming scale, (and do not mistake me, the Rio could still dwarf almost any building in Vancouver), it makes up in pure, unhindered tacky glam neon straight out of Tron, with external, glass walled elevators and racing stripes of hot red and blue lights that run the entire height of the building. Also featured: a ten story poster advertising Penn & Teller. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so happy to see an advertisement in my life.

    The theater was small, a simple black box set-up, with a plain wooden crate open on stage and a steady trickle of people walking up from the audience to inspect it. There was also an easel set up with an envelope on it, (pens provided to willing participants), the most traditional prop for a cold-reading trick. Penn stood to one side, playing jazz on an upright bass, riffing with a piano player who wore large plugs in the lobes of his ears and tattoos on both arms. It was unexpectedly casual. I liked it immediately and our seats were near perfect, centered in the room and close to the stage.

    Absurd, political, sublime, or a prank, it didn’t matter, every trick was expertly executed with the same enviable dedication, the same graceful madness. It was an honor to be there, audience to masters of the craft.

    first impression

    C’est la vie – ENGLISH SUBS from Simone Rovellini.

    Robin didn’t tell me where we were staying until after the plane had landed and we found ourselves outside, being loaded, then unloaded, then loaded and unloaded again back and forth between two small shuttle buses. (The same radio station piped in through the ceiling in both vehicles, making it feel extra pointless.) “Where are you staying?”, they asked, and he had to reply. “The Bellagio,” he said. Then again each time as they swapped us back and forth. Fountains, I thought. Is that all I know? Yes. Famous fountains.

    Every road was lined in billboards advertising mostly naked women, middle aged male caucasian comedians, and various big ticket shows. I saw one for Penn & Teller and felt a small jolt. Robin had asked me to choose something for the night we arrived and that is what I had, with absolutely no hesitation, pointed us to their website. It didn’t quite seem real. Stepping off the plane wasn’t enough. Airports are interstitial places, manufactured to be Anywhere, it was stepping into the hotel that grounded me.

    All the floors were marble, all the employees in matching black suits. I felt like I was the only women for miles without make-up or a tiny skirt. Perhaps the only poor person, too. The front desk clerk set the tone of the hotel quite well. Smartly dressed, impeccably groomed, our check in clerk looked a little bit on the expensive side, the way you can look at a man and tell when they pay too much for their shoes. His overstated pilot’s wrist-watch, for example, was the size of a coaster and shimmered with gold like a prize belt buckle might. (Large, flashy watches, an anomaly in these days of smart phones, were a trait we found common to almost all of the staff). But his manner, once he looked up to find himself facing someone with pink hair, (almost as rare a plumage in Vegas as in New York), was a tiny bit irreverent, the way a friend might be, or a friend to be. It was interesting, actually, to discover that trick – that the more expensive a place, the higher the grade of professionalism, the more comfortable the staff were to speak casually with us in particular. One clerk, much later in the week, even made flirtatious jokes as he approached us with useful ideas while we were trying to puzzle out an alternative to bubble bath at two in the morning.

    As there are almost 4000 guest rooms at the Bellagio, (3933, to be precise), my first time looking down the hall of the 22nd floor was my first visceral experience with the scale of The Strip. It’s one thing to peer at the resorts from the window of a shuttle bus, it’s quite another to see a hallway disappear into the horizon like a physical representation of a crude drawing lesson in perspective.

    Our room was unexpectedly lovely in a “this room is set to blue” sort of way. (Later I peeked into other rooms as they were being cleaned and confirmed my theory, finding mint, butter, and mauve). We liked finding switches, sinking into the chairs, and making fun of the ever-present Gideon, but most important was our perfect view of the fountain from the floor to ceiling window, where we could look down upon the display and listen along to the music on channel 23 of the flat screen TV. It was quiet when we arrived, but a show began while we were still settling in, so we plunked down on the carpet and proverbially pressed our noses to the glass. It was impressive when it was off, wide enough that it would be called a pond were it natural, but staggering when it was on, with some extra loud jets that shuddered up into the sky higher than our window, as tall as the mock Eiffel Tower across the street.

    we travel well together

    The Sciences Sing a Lullabye
    by Albert Goldbarth

    Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
    you’re tired. Every atom in you
    has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
    nonstop from mitosis to now.
    Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
    inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

    Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
    by inch America is giving itself
    to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
    lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
    You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
    one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.

    Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
    Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
    Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
    Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
    and
    History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

    -::-

    I’ve spent almost an entire week out in White Rock, testing the waters at a new part-time job and trying to tidy a sense of order into the chaos we’ve created in the beige wasteland that is his townhouse. Colour, (both literal and metaphorical), arrived with me, (a red, cuddly throw blanket, an orange pair of denim pants, a smart red wool field blazer, striped sweaters for the trembling little dog), but also some mess, as my life and Robin’s are too different to effortlessly integrate. Left to me, I would transform this place into a sheik’s palace, all emerald green velvet pillows and hanging glass lanterns like teal gemstones, but instead I have been working to assimilate. I’ve been wearing bland clothing and brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush and learning to use an iPad casually, as if it’s perfectly natural to be holding such a tangible chunk of future in my hands.

    So it continues. Today, for Valentine’s, we’re leaving for five days in Vegas. He booked it as a surprise trip, all I know for sure is that all of our evenings are booked, at least one night with Cirque and another with Penn & Teller.

    I will find something good


    Sergey Semonov, a Russian photographer, submitted the image to the Epson International Photographic Pano Awards,
    and took first prize in the amateur category. Click through for more information and to see it full size.

    Music: I ate too much.
    Music: Typhoon – Summer Home.

    Back in the land of suicide skies and itchy wet socks and art blind glass condominiums and witty t-shirt fashion and life locked down to a room, a computer, and an eternal quest for more work. New York I miss you already, your ornate, cake icing architecture, your brave pedestrians and perpetual strangers, even your extreme lack of green. Solid, implacable, a foundation of streets. Lay me down against your bitter cold winter, press me against your well tailored desperation, let me rest in the hollow of your inspiring anonymity. Stone to the horizon in every direction.