Trip Out Category
I like to go places. Sometimes far (annual expat experience in France) and sometimes near (I bounce up and down the Left Coast several times a year). This is where you can read stories about my travels.
Synchronicity
28
Feb
2007
In: Trip Out
I love that I arrived in New York and almost immediately stumbled across a copy of New York Magazine from a couple weeks ago, which included this article: Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll. This article exactly, perfectly fits into a project I’m stewing on, and the fact that I just randomly picked up the magazine and saw it is a delicious fantastical piece of fortuitousness. It sort of made my brain feel like an unfolding origami crane.
Also, it’s just a really well-written article. You should go read it, while I sit here trying to adapt to the three-hour time difference.
Upcoming travels
21
Feb
2007
In: Trip Out
I’ll be in New York next week! If you’re there, I hope you’ll come to my reading in Brooklyn on Saturday, March 3rd or maybe to Cringe on Wednesday, March 7th.
Andreas, meanwhile, will be in scuba diving in Bali next week. If this east/west separate spouses travel plan gives you a WTF?! moment, you’re not alone. Even our closest friends are like, “Wait, one of you is going on a tropical vacation and the other one isn’t? Buh?” Dre and I are pretty independent, but this is definitely a little extreme even for us. Here’s how it all went down:
A crew of friends started organizing a trip to Bali last fall. Dre was immediately into going, while I looked at the timing and wasn’t sure how it would work with book promotions. I stalled for as long as I could before Andreas was like “Dude, are we going or what!?” and I finally had to balk and say that it just didn’t seem like the right time for me to leave the country. I’m paying for all my book tour travels out of pocket, and the prospect of trying to swing an international vacation with several domestic trips just wasn’t feasible financially.
I also knew I’d get burned out and exhausted from all the traveling, and that I’d have trouble enjoying myself in Bali because I’d spend the whole time thinking about my book and trying to compulsively check my email. I don’t do this because I have to — I do this because I love it. Tropical vacations are great for escaping from the ho-hum of daily life, but when your shit is in high gear and you’re all excited about it, the last think you want to do is escape it.
So no: I wouldn’t go. But Andreas isn’t promoting a book right now, and is a consummate traveler who’s been stuck in the USA for several years, and why should I keep him from going a trip with a big crew of our friends just because I don’t want to go? It’s not that I couldn’t go — I just knew myself well enough to know that the timing wasn’t quite right for my brain. But the timing for Dre was just fine, so of course he should go, right?
(In the middle of all this I got laid off and was like “Holy fuck, I’m SO GLAD I’m not staring an international vacation in the face while I’m on unemployment.”)
I did have a brief flash of sadness and I realized it wasn’t being jealous of Andreas going to Bail (I made the choice not to go) but that there was some sort of “I don’t want him having fun if I’m not there” response which, HELLO: ew. I’m a solipsistic only child, but even I balk at that level of selfishness. I may be a narcissistic asshole sometimes, but I am NOT enough of an asshole to keep my favoritiest person from having a wonderful vacation just because I’m busy with other stuff. Picture that: me keeping him home so that I can run around and blabber about my book?
That said, I didn’t want to sit at home clacking away on book stuff while Andreas was gone, so I timed my East Coast trip during the time he’s gone. So now I have my own kind of wonderful vacation trip coming up, in exactly my flavor: a trip to two cities where I have many beloved old friends to see and meetings to have and business dealings to finagle and Cringe readings to do and books to pitch and reality television producers to chat up and a bazillion other things to do. While drinking cocktails in the Balinese sand sounds wonderful, for right now a trip to New York is exactly my brand of heaven.
And so this, to me, is what love is really about: wanting what’s best for your partner (him: bali! me: new york!) and being excited and tickled to see your beloved go off and do their thang while you go off and do yours, knowing that when it’s all over, you get to reunite and combine inspiration superpowers and take over the entire world with your creepy happy cult. That said, he will be the tanner cult-leader, that’s for sure.
Stump farm
Originally uploaded by .Ariel.
If you like temperate rain forests, crashing waves, and wood stoves, check ‘em out.
La Push … and La Pull
7
Jan
2007
In: Trip Out
I had tea with a friend on Thursday, and as I started blurting out all the things I was working on post-layoff and talking about how my brain was going a million miles and hour and how I was having trouble sleeping because I’d wake up at 5am in the morning all excited about something (inspiration-induced insomnia?), my friend took a sip of her tea and said, “It’s almost like you need to go out of town for a weekend or something.”
And magically, that was exactly what Dre and I had been planning to do. His Christmas/anniversary gift to me was planning a weekend away at La Push on Washington’s north coast. It just so happens that with getting laid off this week and the book stuff kicking into high gear and my brain churning at a million miles an hour, getting the hell out of dodge was exactly what I needed the most.
I’ll post more photos soon.
Wool in the Amanas, originally uploaded by .Ariel.
Andreas and I just had an epic day of travel (door to door: 15 hours, four airports, two delayed flights) returning from Iowa, where we spent Thanksgiving with Dre’s mom and her partner. Here’s the first of my photo sets: Iowa Still Lifes.
Yay, Eugene!, originally uploaded by .Ariel.
Synchronicity
28 Feb 2007 In: Trip OutI love that I arrived in New York and almost immediately stumbled across a copy of New York Magazine from a couple weeks ago, which included this article: Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll. This article exactly, perfectly fits into a project I’m stewing on, and the fact that I just randomly picked up the magazine and saw it is a delicious fantastical piece of fortuitousness. It sort of made my brain feel like an unfolding origami crane.
Also, it’s just a really well-written article. You should go read it, while I sit here trying to adapt to the three-hour time difference.
Upcoming travels
21 Feb 2007 In: Trip OutI’ll be in New York next week! If you’re there, I hope you’ll come to my reading in Brooklyn on Saturday, March 3rd or maybe to Cringe on Wednesday, March 7th.
Andreas, meanwhile, will be in scuba diving in Bali next week. If this east/west separate spouses travel plan gives you a WTF?! moment, you’re not alone. Even our closest friends are like, “Wait, one of you is going on a tropical vacation and the other one isn’t? Buh?” Dre and I are pretty independent, but this is definitely a little extreme even for us. Here’s how it all went down:
A crew of friends started organizing a trip to Bali last fall. Dre was immediately into going, while I looked at the timing and wasn’t sure how it would work with book promotions. I stalled for as long as I could before Andreas was like “Dude, are we going or what!?” and I finally had to balk and say that it just didn’t seem like the right time for me to leave the country. I’m paying for all my book tour travels out of pocket, and the prospect of trying to swing an international vacation with several domestic trips just wasn’t feasible financially.
I also knew I’d get burned out and exhausted from all the traveling, and that I’d have trouble enjoying myself in Bali because I’d spend the whole time thinking about my book and trying to compulsively check my email. I don’t do this because I have to — I do this because I love it. Tropical vacations are great for escaping from the ho-hum of daily life, but when your shit is in high gear and you’re all excited about it, the last think you want to do is escape it.
So no: I wouldn’t go. But Andreas isn’t promoting a book right now, and is a consummate traveler who’s been stuck in the USA for several years, and why should I keep him from going a trip with a big crew of our friends just because I don’t want to go? It’s not that I couldn’t go — I just knew myself well enough to know that the timing wasn’t quite right for my brain. But the timing for Dre was just fine, so of course he should go, right?
(In the middle of all this I got laid off and was like “Holy fuck, I’m SO GLAD I’m not staring an international vacation in the face while I’m on unemployment.”)
I did have a brief flash of sadness and I realized it wasn’t being jealous of Andreas going to Bail (I made the choice not to go) but that there was some sort of “I don’t want him having fun if I’m not there” response which, HELLO: ew. I’m a solipsistic only child, but even I balk at that level of selfishness. I may be a narcissistic asshole sometimes, but I am NOT enough of an asshole to keep my favoritiest person from having a wonderful vacation just because I’m busy with other stuff. Picture that: me keeping him home so that I can run around and blabber about my book?
That said, I didn’t want to sit at home clacking away on book stuff while Andreas was gone, so I timed my East Coast trip during the time he’s gone. So now I have my own kind of wonderful vacation trip coming up, in exactly my flavor: a trip to two cities where I have many beloved old friends to see and meetings to have and business dealings to finagle and Cringe readings to do and books to pitch and reality television producers to chat up and a bazillion other things to do. While drinking cocktails in the Balinese sand sounds wonderful, for right now a trip to New York is exactly my brand of heaven.
And so this, to me, is what love is really about: wanting what’s best for your partner (him: bali! me: new york!) and being excited and tickled to see your beloved go off and do their thang while you go off and do yours, knowing that when it’s all over, you get to reunite and combine inspiration superpowers and take over the entire world with your creepy happy cult. That said, he will be the tanner cult-leader, that’s for sure.
Stump farm
Originally uploaded by .Ariel.
If you like temperate rain forests, crashing waves, and wood stoves, check ‘em out.
La Push … and La Pull
7 Jan 2007 In: Trip OutI had tea with a friend on Thursday, and as I started blurting out all the things I was working on post-layoff and talking about how my brain was going a million miles and hour and how I was having trouble sleeping because I’d wake up at 5am in the morning all excited about something (inspiration-induced insomnia?), my friend took a sip of her tea and said, “It’s almost like you need to go out of town for a weekend or something.”
And magically, that was exactly what Dre and I had been planning to do. His Christmas/anniversary gift to me was planning a weekend away at La Push on Washington’s north coast. It just so happens that with getting laid off this week and the book stuff kicking into high gear and my brain churning at a million miles an hour, getting the hell out of dodge was exactly what I needed the most.
I’ll post more photos soon.
Wool in the Amanas, originally uploaded by .Ariel.
Andreas and I just had an epic day of travel (door to door: 15 hours, four airports, two delayed flights) returning from Iowa, where we spent Thanksgiving with Dre’s mom and her partner. Here’s the first of my photo sets: Iowa Still Lifes.
Yay, Eugene!, originally uploaded by .Ariel.
Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
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