Ugh
“I refer to jet lag as ‘jet-psychosis’ – there’s an old saying that the spirit cannot move faster than a camel.”
-Spalding Gray
Back
Whenever I head to California, to my parents’ home, I revert to a sixteen-year-old version of myself. We laugh and talk and do. It’s fun. It’s relaxing. It’s wonderful.
And, by now, it’s at least as much so to return to my real, New York life.
Home for Thanksgiving II
Eighteen people for dinner, with a handful more joining for dessert. This is, for us, ‘very small’.
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Mainly, no change to the classics: my mother’s roast turkey, my father’s stuffing (the crowd favorite), pecan-crusted sweet potatoes.
This year, though, grilled vegetables are out in favor of garlic oven-roasted (my innovation), and the cranberry bread is now cranberry / corn / whole wheat (my mother’s, to her own regret).
Also new: along with last year’s tomato-basil bruschetta addition (a hit), some with olive and caper tapenade, others with manchego cheese and apricot jam or Point Reyes blue and fig preserve. (These the result of my and my father’s joint gastonomizing.)
And, finally: prosecco. Lots and lots of prosecco. I bought three bottles last year, and the normally non-drinking crowd sucked them dry in minutes. This could be dangerous.
Home for Thanksgiving I
JFK to SFO, just more than six hours.
Almost killed my brother en route, as he kept sliding his elbow across the divider between out seats. Seems we’ve matured little since the back of our parent’s mini-van.
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In n’ Out: seriously, what’s the big deal? I don’t quite get people’s obsession with these burgers.
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[Ed. note: I’ll be adding to each of these postings throughout the day, for thre balance of the week.]
On the Road
Off to the University of Rochester early tomorrow morning, where I’ll be giving a speech cleverly titled “Get Off Your Ass: Start a Company (and Avoid a ‘Real Job’)” as ‘inspirational keynote’ of the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour‘s stop there.
That’s right. The Extreeeeeeeeme Entrepreneurship Tour. Like the X Games of motivational college speaking.
Don’t worry, mom, I’ll wear a helmet.
Weekender
After too long under fluorescent lights, Jess and I headed down this past weekend for a very brief jaunt to Miami Beach. The trip started off well enough, with a smooth flight down on Friday morning, and a free rental car upgrade to a new VW Beetle – which drove sort of like a turbo-charged go-cart – in the early afternoon.
We pulled up to our hotel, however, a ’boutique’ designed by Richard Meier, to discover an alarming array of rust stains running down the side of the building, and a valet parking attendant wearing, as a uniform, a pit-stained t-shirt and thoroughly yellowed khaki shorts. Further bad news inside, when we discovered that the hotel would shortly be razed to make way for a new, high-end Richard Meier condo, and that things had essentially been left to seed since the replacement had been planned, apparently a good five or ten years back.
As a result, the room, for instance, featured badly stained carpets, walls and ceilings, including what was clearly dried fecal matter crusted to the bathroom light-switch plate. The sheets looked dirty and threadbare, the closet doors hung at odd angles, and everything was pervaded with a slightly ‘pungent’ scent.
But, in an attempt to be good travelers, Jess and I looked past the room, and the crumpled used tissues littering the hall near our door. Instead, we figured, we’d head down to the pool and the beach, and simply spend as much of the weekend outside as possible.
Lo and behold, however, we discovered that the ‘private beach’ was actually a weed-ridden patch of shady sand, well removed from any observable body of water, scattered with rusted lawn chairs, and featuring an aging leathery woman sunning her low-hanging fake tits while chain-smoking Newports.
Still holding up our chins, we headed back to the pool, set out looking for towels, and were informed that we’d need to fork over an extra $25 ‘towel fee’ for the day. With that last straw, it was back to the room to retrieve our laptop, then down to the wifi-ed lobby to kayak.com an emergency transfer to anywhere less piece-of-shit.
As the weekend fell smack in the middle of spring break, we were unable to find anything for Friday evening – instead sneaking in to the nearby Sheraton’s pool, and wandering the adjacent Shops at Bal Harbour, before sleeping fitfully on top of sheets we tried to touch as little as possible. But, early Saturday morning, we hopped back in the (delightfully comparatively clean) Beetle, and headed down Collins Ave., to the National Hotel in South Beach, a beautiful old art deco property, with a long, slender waveless lap pool (designed for Esther Williams), and rooms regularly cleaned and poop-crust free.
The downside: apparently, the hotel was also the home for a weekend DJ convention, featuring showdowns by some of the best trance, deep house, and otherwise thumpy music spinners in the world. Which, while making for a remarkably MTV Spring Break scene and attracting long, long lines of pierced and tattooed visitors to the hotel, also left sunbathing a bit less relaxing than it might otherwise have been.
Still, I didn’t mind. We were joined for part of the weekend by Jess’ wonderful younger sister, and generally enjoyed the chance to sunburn our way out of the winter doldrums, horse around in the pool, sip pina coladas, and feel condescendingly glad we didn’t look like most of the people wandering up and down Miami Beach.
Summer, bring it.
Recap
How was the trip? Well, long.
But also, fortunately, good. Despite the stress of hosting twenty-something people for Thanksgiving, of introducing Jess to my parents and then having them all spend nearly a week together, of generally trying to align all the disparate spheres of my life, everything went about as smoothly as I could have probably hoped.
Still, as I often feel after time away, I think I need a second vacation just to recover from the first.
Je Ne Comprends Pas
Any time I’m outside of the US, I inevitably worry that I look like an American. Sure, on balance, I love this country. But so do fat, middle-aged men on bus tours, who roam the streets of Florence or Barcelona in sweatpants, white sneakers, and “God Bless Kansas!” t-shirts. And, as a result, nearly everyone in the rest of the world looks down upon my fellow countrymen enough to provide us noticeably worse service in their cabs, hotels, shops and restaurants.
So, it was some small relief that Jess and I, while in Paris, were able to more or less blend. At least until midway into any given conversation, which inevitably went like this:
Clerk: Payerez-vous par l’argent comptant ou la carte de credit?
Me: Oui.
Clerk: [Confused pause] Payerez-vous par l’argent comptant ou la carte de credit?
Me: [Blank smile]
Clerk: Je suis desole?
Me: [More blank smile]
Clerk: Ah. [Raised, disdainful eyebrow] You are not French.
Which, as Jess pointed out, likely meant that through the (often rather lengthy) first, one-sided half of conversations, people were assuming we were French, but simply deaf or retarded.
Interestingly, they still liked us better at that point than when they deduced we spoke English.
Over and Out
On the Metro North right now, headed up to Connecticut to deliver the aforementioned Extreme Entrepreneur Tour keynote. As I pulled the slides together mainly last night, the whole thing admittedly lacks the polish I might have hoped for. But, as readers of this site have doubtless already deduced, if I can do anything, it’s talk out of my ass for long, relatively articulate stretches even when I have pretty much nothing to say. Fingers crossed.
Then, more excitingly, I head back to NYC, retrieve Jess, and subway out to JFK, to hop on a flight to Charles de Gaulle. I haven’t been to Paris for several years, and I hear the croissant calling my name.
And while I’ll (unusually) be leaving the laptop behind, I’ll still be bowing to the demands of Cyan’s current surprisingly ongoing success, and carting along my BlackBerry Pearl. If nothing else, it should give me something to do as I wait outside the dressing rooms in Bon Marche.
Flickr users, keep your eyes peeled; if the technology cooperates, I’ll be photoblogging the (mis)adventures while they’re still underway.
Heading Home
Heading Home
With a touch of Hawaiian sunburn, some significant progress on Cyan’s C round from the prior week, and a bad case of jet lag (to be reinforced tomorrow on my second 3000 mile leg from San Francisco), I’m headed back to New York City to resume the daily pace of my crazy life.
These few days of tropical ‘vacation’ were much needed, though also a good reminder that, at my age, most people only head to Maui’s Wailea coast on honeymoon – attractive women and giant diamonds therefore spotted in precisely equal count.
More exciting, however, is the coming-shortly first set of theatrical returns from our ongoing Oh in Ohio release. Having sunk my personal savings into pushing Cyan ahead, and having similarly deferred salary for months to ensure sufficient dollars in the bank to underwrite the film’s national marketing campaign, I’m thrilled to see the bets and sacrifices paying off, and the accompanying additional few zeroes added to the end of my bank balance.
Money may not, as they say, buy happiness, but the chronic lack of it is a serious pain in the ass.