Pilgrim Souls

On this trip I have been inhaling The Time Traveler’s Wife, a beautiful and poignant meditation on fate and free will disguised as romance disguised as science fiction, but which is anything but genre. It has throw me into a familiar funk, a longing for connection. True love and soulmates are concepts so common and easy in the night realm of stories and fairy tales but so rare and difficult in the waking realm we are forced each day to inhabit. I wander the streets of Barcelona, watching all the pretty people hand in hand in their pretty lives, laughing and smiling, and I wonder what amount of it is pure and what is illusion. I make myself another useless set of promises: to find my life’s direction, to get into shape, to broaden my education, to explore the Outdoors, to find an Other who is Significant. But what does any of it mean, in this, a world that is full not of fairy tales but of far more mundane narratives?

I check my email and discover that while I’ve been away, my department at Harvard has been dissolved, something new born from the ashes. A fiery phoenix? Perhaps, with enough imagination and prose, we can force interesting mundanities into the vacant molds of marvelous fairy tales. Perhaps, if we squint and open our minds wide, we can experience our lives as great and beautiful adventures. But can it ever really be the same as the stories we read? Can the longing ever truly be fulfilled?

Triplog: Cardiff

We arrived amidst a sea of graduation gowns — Cardiff Uni was sending off its 2008 class. After a helpful stop at the visitors bureau for advice and bag storage, it was on to Cardiff Castle for grog and merriment. Well, not really, but this fortification is roughly two thousand years old (give or take a century), so no doubt it was host to some form of revelry at some point, perhaps when the Romans were in residence. They did say the Queen has visited, and she’s quite the dancer, or so the voices in my head tell me.

Anyway, big neat castle.

An interesting tour with no pictures allowed, although we were all taking them regardless.
Continue reading “Triplog: Cardiff”

Heathrow Express

I got dressed Saturday morning, and then at some point I realized that I had lost a day and it was Sunday afternoon and I was wearing the same clothes.

Boston to JFK by Bolt Bus, which is nice except the lack of seat-back trays is terrible, and then LIRR and then AirTrain, and then I caught up with Jessica, fresh from LAX. A very long time checking in, a very, very long wait on the tarmac, and then a decently long Air India flight to London Heathrow on a big Boeing 777 with lots of on-demand movies (both English and Hindi) on a big seat-back screen. And very tiny cups for water.

Heathrow Express tube

The Heathrow Express, it’s tunnel here pictured, took us to Paddington, then onward, after some Chicken Kiev and Sausage Sandwiches (we chose to forgo an English Breakfast) to Bristol. Left out for easy reading: hassles finding trains, hassles finding Hyde Park (we turned back just a block short, after running into a nice gent with bad teeth who gave us a lunch recommendation, i.e. a local), and hassles at our B&B, which we sat outside of for half an hour before another guest let us in, not to mention two hours of customs at the airport.

Ben Folds we found eventually, not where Google Maps told us he would be, and he was great as always and half his audience was Welsh, so he made up a little song about Wales and promised to tour there some day. We’re heading there tomorrow, for a day in Cardiff before a longer spell in Glasgow, where my Jess and Adam’s Jess get to meet and we get to use a computer with a Skype client that actually works and perhaps some adventures will be had and some tasty Indian food eaten, and some fried pizza and fried Mars bars and fried burgers avoided.

The keyboard on my fun new Eee PC is dreadful and driving me batty, and local time is 2 in the AM, so for now adieu. All in all, a generally pleasant, if time-consuming, start to our little holiday. Also, its easier to cope if you just pretend that the £7 pizza take-away was $7, and not $14. Jessica is gradually coming around to my view on this.

Gone Adventuring

I’m off to explore a bit of Europe for the next week and a half: England, Wales, Scotland, and Spain in rapid succession. I’m taking along a tiny computer that is hard to type on and a big camera for pretty pictures, but no guidebooks. I’ve already started things off right, getting behind on both my work and my packing, such that I’m planning to sleep through my 7:30am bus to New York tomorrow and have preemptively booked a second seat for the noon departure. But hey, its only money. Ask me, sometime, about how a not paying attention to a silly JavaScript web page widget cost me $100 in ticket change fees on Ryanair…

Anyway, see you folks on the flip side.

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

— William Butler Yeats

The moral of the story is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around.

— Kurt Vonnegut (via Matt)

Limbs made glorious

I just can’t stop watching the new Where the Hell is Matt? video. In a follow-up to his previous video from 2006, Matt Harding traveled to over 40 countries and danced with the locals everywhere he went. If anything can bring about world peace, this has got to be it. Just…just watch it.

The song was written just for this project, with a fitting message. The lyrics, in English translation: Continue reading “Limbs made glorious”

A gallon of milk, an indicator of things to come

If there is any doubt that higher fuel prices are going to have a positive impact on the environment, a look at the sort of radical rethinking we’re starting to see at all levels of the supply chain for basic goods should make the trend clear. The New York Times today runs a front page story about a new type of milk jug that is far more efficient to fill, pack, transport, and recycle. The rigid rectangular jugs do not require traditional crates and, due to their efficient shape, can be packed far more tightly and securely onto pallets. This results in faster filling, fresher milk, and fewer deliveries to stores, saving fuel.

Customers are skeptical of the change, because the new milk containers are oddly shaped and can be difficult to pour. But customers will adapt, and other designs will emerge. And these sorts of small changes, these little sparks of innovation, will slowly add up to big impacts on our environment.

Now granted, this new design was being discussed back in 2001, so it didn’t just miraculously appear fully formed due to the current energy crisis. But it is a sign of things to come as more people start to think about these issues and the bottom-line benefit becomes more clear.

So I was talking to one of the nurses. What brought most of these patients here? Smoking and drinking, was the short answer. Reminded me of what a doctor friend told me many years ago. “Without tobacco and alcohol, you could close half the hospitals.” We can’t get rid of stuff that’ll kill us in the long run. But we can choose not to indulge them.

— Doc Searls