Down to Zero
June 08, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Home Front, The Way We Live Now
Way back in February when I booked our now rapidly approaching Alaska trip, I was sure as shootin’ I’d have a couple of juicy writing assignments under my belt to finance this thing by the actual time of departure, if not a book deal.
In between then and now, the economy tanked and tanked and tanked some more, gas costs spiked to their highest levels in recorded human history, and it is now more difficult and uncomfortable than ever before to fly across country. Lovely.
And, as you might already suspect from various and sundry previous postings, I have had not one shred of a second to seek out writing gigs or any other forms of remuneration for this ultra-ultra-expensive jaunt. So yes, in the middle of a recession, we are slamming the entire thing on a credit card. [Confidential to T: for now, honey, just for now.] How very American of us, is it not? The 50th State indeed.
If it all seems like sheer folly to you—and yes, it does to me too, to the extent that it’s keeping me up the 2 hours at night that aren’t already reserved for other worries—rest assured it’s nothing new for me and mine:
* When I went cross country in 1985, I was quitting a job that paid $14,000 a year, so not a lot of cash heading into that trip. My friend D and I traveled to 37 states in 3 months with a gas card and one credit card between us, which we didn’t use. We tented it the entire way (well, we hit two hotel rooms in 90 days). When we got back, we were well and truly broke, down to zero. We found crummy jobs to replace the crummy jobs we’d left, and life went on etc.
* Five years later, when T and I quit our jobs and took off to Italy for five months before we got married (one of the first words I learned in Italian was fiancé, fidanzanto or something like that), the booming ‘80s economy turned suddenly sour in our absence. Our friends kept writing letters (yes, people did such things way back in the ‘80s) saying, don’t come home, the economy sucks. We did indeed fly home, completely out of money, with no jobs and a wedding to stage. And once again, we faked it through somehow.
* One vacation a few years after that in the Adirondaks, I called in to the office to find out I’d been let go. [That boss was the spineless and gutless type (sorry, P).] Another year, same place, T had found out hours before we were to head North that he’d been laid off himself, but we decided to fake it and not tell anyone (sorry, M and T).
Now we’re taking what’s absolutely the most expensive trip of either of our lives in the middle of a deep, deep recession and the beginning of what I’m personally convinced is a permanent oil crisis. So it goes. As the Alaska charges pile higher and higher on the credit card and the economy dives further and further down, I can at least look back on our ignoble cash-strapped vacations past and say, well, we’ve survived worse. We didn’t die, we didn’t go bankrupt. We just worked our butts off upon our return.
Looked upon that way, the only thing that’s troubling is that my butt already feels worked off. Of course, it doesn’t look worked off, or on, so… there’s (dare I say it?) wiggle room there.
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Worst. Blogger. Ever.
May 28, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Home Front, The Way We Live Now
How bad is it? It’s this bad: my teenaged child emailed me the other day from the “contact me” section of my own web said and said it was lame that I haven’t been blogging. That bad.
I know I’ve been gone a long, long time. I wasn’t kidnapped—I was run over, mauled, spit out, and left for dead by the runaway engine that is Swellville local politics at its most furious. Post-election, I am crawling across the floor to my laptop like some kind of aging, transgendered, slightly-less-hairless Wile E. Coyote, but yeah, thanks for asking, I’m still breathing.
If you truly want to read the nitty-gritty details, you can go here, where to my dismay I was named by name, but really, why would you? My own mother prefers to pretend I’ve taken up gardening (except, she keeps wondering, where are the actual plants?)
Speaking of which, while all this infighting and outrage has been going on, a spectacular spring busted out all over Swellville, almost out of spite, it seems. Now there are fourteen days till school gets out and less than a month till we embark on our Alaska vacation. Again in the immortal words of Wile E., “Arrrrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” [Insert mental images here: high cliff, long fall, puff of smoke.]
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Will You Please Be Quiet Please?
April 06, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages, The Way We Live Now
It’s weird to be pitching a book about falling in love with America again when in fact I am less and less in love each day with our economic system of government. It’s kind of like going to a marriage counselor when you already have one foot out the door.
Poor Swellville is in such dire economic straits we are in danger of having our town name changed to UnSwellville (and who among us could endure a tragedy of that scope?). It just doesn’t make any sense to fund public education from tax revenues that go up and down (and down, and down). Really, what am I supposed to say to my kids, sorry for the gaping hole in your knowledge bank, but that was the year everyone stopped going to Best Buy?
I have been working with a lot of other people to try and turn that around somehow, but all the while in the back of my head a little voice is saying, isn’t this pointless?
It was with a head full of this kind of crap that I took Pip out for a walk into a spring morning that, in typical New England fashion, was neither sunny nor warm. Because I was blasting Pearl Jam on my iPod in the hopes of shutting up the noise in my brain, I missed the warning cries from the crows and the sudden dead quiet from the littler (and smarter) birds that would have told me a hawk was nearby (a juvenile red-tail, as it turns out. I looked it up when I got home.)
So I nearly jumped out of my skin when he swooped about a foot above my head and gave two sharp, economic little flaps and sailed to the top of the tallest pine. He ruffled up all his feathers and looked down on Pip for a moment, wondering if she were worth a fight (she’s not), then turned back to his job of dispassionately surveying the Swellville horizon and freaking out the crows and the jays.
Was he a message from God? It was Sunday morning after all. A sign from Buddha? I should be hawklike in my resolve? Or maybe I should majestically rise above all these petty social concerns? What did it all mean?
Nothing, I decided as Pip and I rounded the corner toward home. Not a damn thing. It was a hawk in spring, and if he could talk he’d say, My message to you Tracy Mayor is: shut up.
Which I will.
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Testify, people!
April 02, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now
Six months in the making—proof positive that writing something in random sporadic bursts is never a good idea— my article on Asperger’s and IT is finally live.
Click over there and run up my page count, will ya?
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Two Duhs and a Ruh-Roh
March 29, 2008
Filed in: Alaska
I imagine Alaskans, especially those in the tourism business, spend their long dark winter months drinking and swapping tales about how incredibly stupid people from the Lower 48 can be.
I am still months away from setting foot on Alaskan soil and already I have committed a couple of whoppers. I only assume the list will grow:
1) emailing Larry, proprietor of the inn we’ll be staying at in Homer, I ask him if there’s anything doing around town on July 4th, since we will just happen to be in town that day. Stuff like, you know, fireworks.
He emails back there are plenty of things to do but no fireworks because it doesn’t get dark in Alaska in the summer until midnight.
Oh right! I knew that…
2) emailing with Jordan, who runs the wilderness lodge we’re booked at for 3 days and nights of remote hiking, kayaking, etc., I’m trying to figure out how the food and other provisions work.
He’s being friendly but not super-specific ("You’ll love our food!” he keeps saying, without actually ever mentioning exactly what that food might be. What if it’s like moose hash or fish flakes or something?)
Thinking of T, and yes of myself, and our little Chardonnay problem, I ask, “and what about alcohol? Does anybody bring liquor? Does anybody drink?”
Uh yeah, he writes back, people drink in Alaska.
Of course, when he says it like that, I stop imagining super-fit, polypro-clad outdoors freaks rising at dawn for 12-14 hours of continuous physical endurance training, followed by a Spartan supper and early bed, and replace that with a mental picture of toothless old pan-handler-types in ripped flannel shirts with little black X’s over their eyes from too much moonshine. (It’s important to traffic almost exclusively in stereotypes, don’t you think?)
Separately, here’s my little Ruh-Roh moment, which I am now busily ignoring:
Describing the atmosphere of the Kenai Peninsula in June and July, when we will be there, my 10-years-out-of-date Frommer’s, which I simply refuse to return to the library (it’s now 2 months overdue and counting) has this to say:
“The peninsula … exerts a powerful magnetic force on RVs, those road-whales that one finds at the head of strings of cars on the two-lane highways. The fishing rivers, creeks and beaches…become sheet-metal cities of hundreds of Winnebagos and Itascas parked side by side during the summer.”
Oh, dear. Not to be a snob, but: I do not like Winnebagos. I do not like the whole RV culture thing at all. So is it smart for me to plow ahead with a staggeringly expensive and complex vacation to a place where RVs are so plentiful they constitute cities unto themselves?
That la-la-la sound you hear is me singing with my fingers in my ears. Must. Ignore. Warning.