I took a long walk in the rain around Arcata. I walked over to the high school, where I attended. It looked almost the same. Hmm… it’s a beautiful town, but I think it was a good thing for me that I moved away.
Here is Humboldt State University’s “University Annex” building. But in 1965, it was the Trinity Hospital, and this is the building I was born in.
This is Arcata High School, which I attended 1979~83. It basically looks exactly the same as when I was there: California-classic-high-school-as-prison architecture, with its outdoor hallways and grim, utilitarian exterior.
This is the view up 11th street from its foot near Janes Road, looking up. At the top of the hill, that’s Redwood Park, and my house is a few blocks below the top of the hill.
Category: Hiking & Travel
Caveat: Zigzagging across the State of Jefferson
In the 1930’s and early 40’s, the northern counties of California and southwestern counties of Oregon launched a secession effort aimed at creating a new state, which was to be called the state of Jefferson. It was one of the most successful “new state carved from existing states” movements of the 20th century, but got derailed by WWII.
Even now, however, the region as some distinctive features. The high incidence (relative to most of the west) of rural poverty means that it has often be attached with the sobriquet “Kentucky-by-the-sea”, for example — at least that was something I heard sometimes, growing up.
Anyway, I was born and grew up in Humboldt County, which is, historically, part of this never-to-be State of Jefferson. And I was in Roseburg, near its putative northern border.
I stayed the night with my aunt Janet and uncle Bob, who live outside of Eugene. I saw a lot of relatives at my aunt Freda’s memorial service, some of whom I literally hadn’t seen since I was a child.
Today, I drove back down across the Oregon border and back into Humboldt, to spend a few days in my hometown, in my home “house.” The house isn’t owned by my mother anymore, but a very close friend of ours, Peggy, bought it, so I can “visit” and stay in the house. Although it’s been remodeled and changed a lot over the years, it still has the feel of home. Peggy was one of my babysitters when I was an infant, and she was also, later, my 6th grade teacher. She’s like a godmother to me, in many ways. She has been very important in my life.
I went on a hike in the morning with my aunt Janet, my dad and their cousin Larry. Here is the view from Janet and Bob’s driveway in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, looking at some very relaxed-looking neighbor cows.
Below is a picture of Larry, Janet and my dad, stopping to talk about something near the top of the hill.
Caveat: Roadtrip Aesthetics 101 (or sentimentality)
Is it possible to love a highway?
I certainly harbor a special feeling toward US Route 101. I was born 3 blocks from it, and grew up 4 blocks from it, and have lived more than half my life (discontinuously) within a few miles of it.
When I left San Luis Obispo on Friday night, I knew I’d have to drive all night to get to Roseburg, Oregon, on time, so I figured I might as well go up 101 (which takes a few extra hours due to its not being freeway the whole way, as compared to Interstate 5) most of the way, just for sentimental reasons.
It was strange, especially from downtown San Francisco on northward through Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino into Humboldt counties, because although I was driving in the middle of the night, I’ve been up and down that highway so many times I was able to visualize the scenery along the way effortlessly. Kinesthetic memory on the curves is almost eerie, too.
Anyway, I got to Arcata and stopped at the beach for a few hours. I watched it get light (the sun was behind thick clouds) and then went on to Oregon.
Caveat: Return to Ragged Point
Some who know me really well know that Ragged Point, California, holds a special place in my personal biography / cosmology.
Ragged Point was the place where, in November, 1998, I reached my lowest point. And where I then took a decision to take an ethical responsibility for my own life and my own being, once and for all. It was a sort of atheist epiphany, where I realized I truly was alone in the universe, but that that wasn’t as bad as it seemed like. “Born-again atheist”? Sounds funny. But it hoves close to the truth.
It’s where I got the name “raggedsign” from, that you see applied to my online identity here and there. The sign at Ragged Point… is deeply significant – like Saul, on the road to Damascus: but for this Saul, all there was to be seen was my own soul, laid bare.
It’s not always been smooth road, since then. I’ve not always done perfectly with the goal I set for myself that night. The first months and years after were exceptionally difficult, and Michelle’s suicide in 2000 was another low that felt like an inversion, in so many ways, of Ragged Point.
Anyway, part of my traveling, in general, is about seeing new places. But part of it is also about revisiting, paying a sort of homage to, old places. Important places. Re-integrating all the disparate places that patchwork together to form the narrative of my immanent selfhood.
This current trip back from Korea, all this driving around, has been especially like that. It’s almost only that.
So today, I’m returning to Ragged Point. It’s up the road a ways from San Simeon, on the central California coast. I’ll probably sit and gaze at the ocean for a long time.
Later, I’m having lunch with Wendy, my stepmother (well, ex-stepmother, technically, but still a very important person in my life and one of my most important role-models, growing up). She lives in San Luis Obispo, currently.
Overnight, up to tomorrow, I’m driving to Roseburg, Oregon. My aunt Freda passed away while I was in Alaska, and I’ve decided to go to her memorial service, there. It will give me a chance to see relatives I haven’t seen much of. And I’ll be re-integrating the length of California, along the way.
I took the picture below right at the county line between San Luis Obispo and Monterey counties, a few miles north of Ragged Point on Highway 1. The ocean that you can see is at least 500 feet straight down that cliff under the tree.
Caveat: Good idea, bad implementation
I spent some time today with my brother Andrew. We went on a hike in the canyon behind JPL in Pasadena, seeing a lot of fire damage on the hills from the apocalyptic fires earlier this fall.
We drove over to the west side, to get my stuff I'd been storing at Wendy's in Culver City. Driving around LA is so… unpleasant. And it was smoggy. But once on the west side, I took joy in seeing the cultural mix that the city represents: I could find bilingual signs for churches, dry cleaners, and auto dealers… Spanish and Korean. No English included.
I love the cultural mix of LA. But the city itself… just seems so stunningly badly laid out. So difficult to exist in on a day-to-day basis. I was talking with Andrew about it, as we sat parked in traffic on the 110 near downtown, and we decided it could be a new motto for the city:
Los Angeles — good idea, bad implementation.
Caveat: old demons
I really like Southeast Alaska. It's a beautiful and compelling place. But in one way, it was hard for me to be there. That's because the first time I went there, in 98, I was at a very low place in my own life. Michelle and I had separated, and we would exchange bitter emails and hateful telephone conversations intermixed with commitments to try again and reiterations of love.
It was the only time in my life that I tried "writing" full time. That didn't go well, either. I sat at my little laptop and produced quite a bit. But I wasn't happy with it. Or not happy with myself. In the end, I deleted over 200 pages of dense writing. And then I regretted it. And later, I lost almost an entire novel, begun during this period, to a hard drive failure. The writing of this time was destined not to exist.
I always felt a weird kind of claustrophobia in Craig, too. That's not the right word. The problem is that in small, isolated communities like that, there's no space to be a "stranger." Everyone needs to know who you are, and what you're doing. They may leave you alone, but just the need to explain myself to everyone I met was awkward.
So… did I enjoy seeing Arthur? Definitely. Will I be moving to Southeast Alaska? Probably not.
More later.
Caveat: redemption through a heroic deed
Sometimes my dreams have titles. (Sometimes they have commercial breaks, too, but that’s not what I’m going to discuss here. Obviously, I’ve watched too much television in my life.) A dream’s title will come to me in the form of a voice-over, or, more rarely, an “on-screen,” written title.
This morning’s dream had the on-screen title of “redentus heroica.” Seriously. I think it’s Latin. Why Latin? Latin was the first language I studied intensively (in 9th and 10th grades – it’s a complicated story, as I didn’t take Latin in high school, where it wasn’t offered, but rather up the hill at Humboldt State – hence it constituted my first college-level work).
It may not be good Latin. I tried to google it, and came up zero. But, assuming a macron on the last “a” in heroica (making it ablative case) and the ellision of a feminine noun meaning something like action or deed (which is a common syntactical phenomenon in Latin), you could get the meaning “redemption through [or by means of] a heroic deed.” Which seems like the sort of thing you should say in Latin, eh?
The rest of the dream? Kind of foggy, but I was walking around Ketchikan (logical), and trying to find my car (not logical). I didn’t even know which car I’d lost. It was raining (logical) and the town was crowded with Koreans (not logical). There were a lot of airplanes flying around (logical).
And I woke up – to a lot of airplanes flying around outside my hotel. Ketchikan has a lot of airplanes and boats, which makes sense for a town unconnected to the rest of the world by any kind of highway. Here’s a picture of an office where the guy who works there needs at least two parking spaces: one for the boat, and one for the airplane.
Caveat: Revillagigedo
The name of the island where Ketchikan is located is Revillagigedo. There are actually a lot of Spanish names attached to geographic features in Southeast Alaska – something to do with Spanish explorers making the navigation maps later used by Russian and English and American colonists.
It’s a cool name, though the locals mutilate the correct Spanish pronunciation – but who am I to criticize the mutilation of correct pronunciation?
Here are some pictures I took in Ketchikan, over the weekend.
Driving down to the south coast of the island:
The end of the road, at about mile 15. This is about as far from downtown Ketchikan as you can get, using a car:
A great view of downtown Ketchikan from the north end of town (where the “mall” is) (note the disconcerting presence of strange bluish coloration in sky due to absence of normal cloud cover):
Looking straight out from the seawall at my hotel:
Similar view, after the clouds shifted, revealing an unfamiliar but naturally-occurring thermonuclear phenomenon suspended 95 million miles in space above the planet:
Wow, nice. It lasted almost an hour. Then it rained again:
Tug boats, congregating:
Along the main drag, Tongass Ave:
The way in and out – the Alaska Marina Highway ferry Columbia docked:
The strange case where the northbound traffic uses a tunnel, and the southbound traffic goes around the hill – but they’re not even a block apart:
A Ketchikan streetscape
The pale pink skyscraper of downtown Ketchikan, AK:
The town’s famous “Creek Street”:
A fishing boat, heading out southward:
Caveat: the view from right here
Here's what you can see if you stand at the shoreline of Arthur's property, looking west down the Saint Nicholas Fiord toward Craig (sort of off to the left). That's Sunnyhay Mountain with some fresh snow sticking up in the clouds.
Caveat: dodging potholes just for fun
I went on a drive today, just to go exploring. During all my time here, back in 98, I didn’t do much exploring beyond Craig and Klawock (which are the island’s “twin city” metropolis, with something around 2000 inhabitants, combined).
So I drove up to Coffman Cove, which is where the ferries from Petersburg and Wrangell stop, then I went down a 40 mile dirt road along the east coast of the island to Thorne Bay, thence back to Klawock. A big circle.
Driving on these old forest service logging roads is all about dodging potholes. I made a video of the drive along the Port Saint Nicholas Road from Arthur’s place into Craig. It’s 8 miles, but takes 25 minutes, dodging potholes all the way. I’ll post it, when I get some bandwidth.
Today, about halfway between Coffman Cove and Thorne Bay, I saw a downed tree across the road (see pic at right). Someone had used to a chainsaw to carve a path exactly pickup-truck-sized through the branches and under the main trunk of the tree. I took a picture.
OK, more later.
Caveat: A trip to the post office
["back post": written/created 2009-11-09]
Here is a video I made of a trip to the post office from Arthur's house in Alaska. I thought it would make a nice contrast with the one I did in August of my trip to the bookstore in Seoul.
Soundtrack is Cat Stevens' "On the Road to Find Out." We went on the road. And we found out.
Caveat: World’s Largest Free-Range Lunatic Asylum
"World's largest free-range lunatic asylum" was the phrase used by one of Arthur's neighbors out here on Port Saint Nicholas Road to describe Southeast Alaska. Sounds about right, maybe.
Many people who come out to such remote locations as this extoll the amazing experience of a night sky littered with thousands of stars with absolutely no interference from the lights of civilization. But personally, I find the experience of stepping outside in the middle of the night to be much more amazing when the sky is heavily overcast: it's a thick, deep blackness that is unparalleled. Nothing can be seen at all. Zero light. Yet the sky is above, you can smell the salt air of the fiord at your feet, the trees, the eternal drizzle.
Caveat: out of range…
My uncle Arthur's house is beyond cell-phone range, DSL (that he's "borrowing" from the neighbor via wi-fi) is spotty, and it's been down anyway because of a tree-branch-thru-wires at around mile-marker 2.5 on the round-the-bay road. So… I've been off-line, until today, coming into town to the Craig Public Library to go on wi-fi and make this post.
But I'm enjoying my visit, and being out in about as middle-of-nowhere as one can get, here on Prince Of Wales Island, Alaska.
More later, then… for next time I come into town.
Caveat: Rain and wind – of course
It was actually almost clear when I arrived. But that’s pretty rare, in Southeast Alaska. Mostly, it’s about rain and gusty wind. I think I saw somewhere that Ketchikan is the rainiest city in the US – not sure if it’s true, but it’s got to be near the top of the list, anyway.
Unlike everyone’s image or expectation of Alaska, much of the Southeast isn’t snowy or frozen, even in winter. When I stayed here in 98 for several months, I only actually saw snow twice, and both times is was a damp rain-to-snow-to-rain that never got around to sticking to the ground.
I walked around some last night, but there wasn’t much to see. The part of Ketchikan where my motel is has a couple of high-rise apartment buildings, which seems downright strange for a rural American city of less than 10,000 inhabitants – it fits in better with what I would call an “Asian” model of urban development: the idea of high density plunked down in the middle of nothing. I don’t remember those apartment buildings from before, but when I was here before, I didn’t spend much time in Ketchikan.
Caveat: Ketch as Ketchikan
Catch as catch-can – I always, always wanted to say that stupid pun. So there.
Here’s a photo taken from my hotel window. Ketchikan is, of course, quite beautiful.
Caveat: LAX=>KTN
I'm flying to Ketchikan today, to visit with my uncle.
So much for the "low carbon footprint" lifestyle, eh? Driving everywhere. Flying everywhere. Uh… carbon guilt.
Caveat: Jared goes to Hollywood
All the years that I lived here, I never did much stuff like this: my brother has a friend who works at a cinema in Hollywood, and they spontaneously invited me to a "special screening" there on Friday night. It was a cinema screening of some episodes of "The Guild," a web-based video series, followed by a screening of "Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" – the title alone should give you some idea of the sheer extent of the genre-bending that was going on. I liked both – I had actually been aware of (but had never seen) "The Guild," but "Dr Horrible" was completely new to me, though I'd have been interested in it immediately, since it's a Joss Whedon project, in part (Whedon created Firefly / Serenity, for example).
And several of the actors / directors / producers of the projects were there, too, as a "panel" to answer audience questions, afterwards. So I got to see Whedon and several of his talented brothers and other various writers and collaborators in the two projects (which were intertwined creatively but not at all plot-wise).
Overall, it was a fun night.
Today, I went to Mojave (a small town out in the Mojave desert about 70 miles north of L.A.) where my dad's significant other's house is, and my dad and she and I hung out for the day just chatting and such, mostly.
Caveat: A ghost abroad in Burbank
I spent a major portion of yesterday visiting my old haunts in Burbank, where I worked at Paradise Corporation (a pseudonym) from 1998 through the end of 2004. As large corporations go, it's pretty much run-of-the-mill, but as a work environment that brought out the best in me and helped me to grow and learn, it was a fabulous place. Three of the best bosses I've ever had were there, and the three of them are still working there, and I got to see each of them. Luz (who was my first boss when I started as a temp worker in the AR department) is now in Finance, and Tom and Carol are still holding down the fort in National Accounts, which was my most accommodating home there.
I also got to visit with my crypto-sister Joanne, as well as Gina and Judy and Marina and Oscar and Tracy and Diana. And I had a great chat with Kevin in finance, who was my "best customer" for complex business analytics and reporting off the data warehouse. Lastly, I saw Spot and Karen in IT, where I wasn't always completely at home, but those two as individuals were reliable and welcoming team-mates, back during my abbreviated sojourn as an "official" programmer/analyst (as opposed to my longer and somewhat more successful career as a "stealth" data warehouse hacker working for the sales and marketing people).
Anyway, this is a "shout out" and thanks to everyone I saw there: I often think of my time there very positively, and I feel grateful for the genuine friendship they offered me, which is often hard to come by in a workplace.
Caveat: America is full of weirdos
OK. I'll be the first to admit that maybe North Hollywood isn't the most representative population sample.
I had my third major experience of "reverse culture shock" today. The first was in the grocery store on my first visit. The second was at that social gathering with my friend Bob's friends. And now… just wandering around.
I took my truck in to the dealer for its 100,000 mile service (the actual dealer where I originally bought it, which they thought was weird because it's got Minnesota plates and all that). But they took a long time to do it, and so I killed some time by walking around my old stomping grounds in Toluca Lake and Noho (North Hollywood).
Boy, there sure are a lot of weirdos. I suppose there might be a lot of weirdos in Korea, too, but I don't notice them because I'm not as tuned in to the cultural norms they might be breaking. Perhaps because, ultimately, in Korea, I'm the weirdo.
Caveat: I will cross a desert
I'm off to the land of LA.
Caveat: Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
We saw some buffalo while driving across northeastern New Mexico yesterday. And some mountains and stuff like that. Here's a video of the buffalo. (Note that the title for this blog is a grammatically correct sentence in English, although the buffalo we saw weren't, in fact, "buffalo buffalo," but rather "new mexico buffalo").
Caveat: First Snow
I saw my first snow of the season yesterday. That's not really such a milestone, when one is traveling around as much as I am, but it was still wonderful to see. It didn't really stick, but there were fat flakes floating down for a few hours and there was a solid frost on my truck this morning.
And now I'm off to Phoenix via New Mexico. More later…
Caveat: Long-promised [임형주 – 행복하길바래]
I’ve been saying I would post a video from my visit to Ulleungdo [울릉도] for a while, and I finally have. It’s not as carefully edited as the ones I made before, but it’s a glimpse of what I saw when I was there. The music is 행복하길바래 by 임형주 [haeng-bok-ha-gil-ba-rae = “I hope you are happy” by Im Hyeong-ju]
Caveat: Erie, Colorado
I arrived at my stepsister Brenda's house yesterday evening, here in Erie, Colorado (sort of between Denver and Boulder). I actually met my niece and nephew, Sarah and James, ages 3 and 5, for the first time. And this morning, I built legos with James for a while — bonding with kids it pretty easy, huh? And then we walked to a book fair at James' school, and I realized there were a lot of books I'd love to acquire and have on hand in Korea, if I decide to go back and teach there some more. I managed to limit myself to just a few books however.
I'm on Brenda and Eric's computer, so I'll make this a short post. More later — I was finally making some progress putting together an Ulleungdo video last night. Maybe that'll get posted, but I'm off to pick up my dad at the airport, now — he's flying in from LA and we're driving back there together via Phoenix where we can visit my other sister and nephews there. So that will give me a chance to spend some time with my dad.
Caveat: 100000 mile milestone
My little pickup truck turned over 100,000 miles yesterday. I can imagine what everyone is thinking: Jared drives so much, how can he have a truck that’s over 9 years old and only now be turning over 100,000 miles?
I think the reason is that although I have taken many road trips in this truck (I’ve done the Minnesota/Phoenix/LA/Portland circle at least 6 times by my count, plus several loops out to the east coast too), I have only rarely used it for substantial commuting. I always tried to arrange my life so that my commutes were short or even walkable, so except for that rather unpleasant almost-a-year when I was driving almost every day from Long Beach to Newport Beach, I’ve never had a commute over about 10 minutes. And of course, for the last two years, it’s been in storage, putting on exactly zero miles.
So, anyway, I set out from Bob and Sarah’s yesterday morning, and per my usual randomness, I decided to avoid interstates for a few hours. I traversed northwest Illinois without even getting onto a 4-lane highway: I drove to the west of Rockford, around Freeport and Sterling, through many small towns and past the endless umber expanses of ripe corn and soybeans.
I crossed the Mississippi at Clinton, Iowa, and follwed the river on the west side down to Bettendorf. It was along this stretch that I happened to notice my odometer was at 99999. I looked up and saw a sign with an arrow: “Picnic Area, 1 mi.” So I drove to the picnic area (not, in itself, anything worth blogging about), watched the odometer turn over to 100,000, and then took a picture of my pickup truck for its “milestone” moment.
I crossed Iowa on the interstate. I went through some pretty major rain around sunset at Omaha, and I stopped at a motel near Lincoln, Nebraska. And here I am. I’ll post pictures when I get a better internet connection.
Caveat: It’s morning so I decided to wake up
I'm going to drive to Denver to see my sister Brenda (and my father is meeting me there). I could make it in one very long day of driving (it's about 16-18 hours from southeastern Wisconsin), but I'm intending to divide it into two days. So tonight I'll be somewhere in eastern Nebraska, I would guess.
I had one last bowl of borsht last night, it was so delicious. And then I had some "apple brown betty" (apple cobblerish) that Sarah made, for breakfast. Also very delicious.
Henry's first words to me this morning: "It's morning so I decided to wake up."
OK, bye.
Caveat: Corn mazes and other midwesterniana
Today I went to a “corn maze” with my friend Bob and my honorary nephew, his son Henry. These are quite the midwestern phenomenon, they’re pretty fun. Here’s a website showing the actual maze [UPDATE: the link rotted – no replacement link found] we went into. Because Henry is only around 2 years old, we ended up converting a dead end on the star-shaped trail in the upper left quadrant of the maze shown in that picture (roughly west of the Ecuador, which makes sense if you see the maze map aerial photo) into a pull-ups changing station.
I drank some hot apple cider and Henry had more fun in the parking lot inventorying the various vehicles, including some tractors and an ambulance, than he did in the maze.
At the risk of seeming like an indulgent “uncle,” here are some pictures of Henry. The first was a picture of him at the corn maze, looking through a cut out of a car. I did it with my cell phone because I forgot to take my camera to the corn maze.
The next pictures show him hamming around the house.
.
.
This is a picture of him this evening at a gathering at some friends of Bob and Sarah’s, wearing interesting “shades.” Cute kid.
Caveat: Peshtigo, WI
I drove through Peshtigo, Wisconsin on my way back down from the UP (you-pee = Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, one of my favorite places on planet earth). I saw not one, but two, signs in Korean in this tiny town. Of course, knowing what they said made them less interesting: one said 시온교회 (Zion Church) and the other said (태관도 Taekwondo — of course). Still, it was weird seeing these signs in a tiny town (population <1000).
Here are some pictures from the UP.
Odometer: Start 99408 End 99833 = 425 miles.
Caveat: It sure ain’t Tokyo
But it’s beautiful. I drove to Duluth, just for the hell of it. Because I love Duluth. I’m not sure I could live here… though I often fantasize about it. It was very windy, and there were waves on Lake Superior.
Then I got really crazy and drove to Houghton. Michigan. I got here after dark, but I’ll look around tomorrow before recrossing Wisconsin, north to south, and visit my friend Bob and his family.
Notable music from soundtrack: Röyksopp, Jesus Jones, Cat Stevens, Dylan (of course)
Odometer: Start 99107 End 99408 = 301 miles
Caveat: Dinkytown
I spent some time in my very old haunts around Dinkytown, the neighborhood on the northeastern edge of the University of Minnesota campus. Some things change — there's the appalling new stadium on which the University clearly spent a vast sum of money, and new parking ramps and buildings and roads. And the Student Book Store where I worked for 3-odd years has changed management and shrunk a bit, while the "Dinkydome" where it's located is under humongous renovation — it looks like they're going to put a giant building behind it where the parking lot and the Starbucks used to be. The "Expresso22" (the cafe with the punk-gothy vibe that I used to escape to) is closed because of the renovations.
But some things stay the same. Down on 14th Street, the Expresso Royale is still going strong and has the same feel to it. I used to study many hours there, way back into the 80's, when it was called something else and was open 24 hours a day. I even saw some of the same dysfunctional Dinkydenizens loitering along 14th street… faces familiar from 10 and even 20 years ago.
Then I saw Minneapolis police officers on horseback. That was weird. What's that about? In Dinkytown? It's always been rather bohemian (Bob Dylan started his folk career there), but horse-mounted police was a rather excessively Manhattennish touch, I thought.
Overall, I guess I was just reminiscing, though I stopped in the U's bookstore, as it's a good place for the obscure sorts of things I tend to like to browse.
Caveat: That didn’t last long
I went into a grocery store, and it was strange how the "reverse culture shock" of my return to the US suddenly caught up with me. I really hadn't been experiencing much difficulty with adjusting to being back, but somehow being in the store left me feeling lost. And even more strangely, amid a giant warehouse-style grocery store, I managed to find some locally made kimchi in about 2 minutes, but couldn't find several things that should be easy.
I managed not to have kimchi for about a week. I guess I was craving some. Weird how it grows on a person. I used not to like it.
Caveat: 개구리도 움츠려야 뛴다
개구리도 움츠려야 뛴다 => frog-also crouch-[“only when”] jump-[UNMARKED PRES.] => “A frog has to crouch first to jump.” A Korean proverb that I found inscribed on a tourist-souvenir tshirt that I bought before leaving Korea.
I ran errands today. It was blustery with cobalt clouds scudding across the sky. Intermittent splutters of rain, 12 C. Weather like this could convince me I’d rather stay in Minnesota than return to Korea or elsewhere — I love Minnesota’s weather so much. People think that’s crazy, but it’s really, truly true.
I had dinner with my stepson Jeffrey, who’s moving from St Cloud to Twin Cities because of a promotion with his work. I enjoyed my time with him — he’s turned out a strong, decent sort of human being, and I’m glad.
Caveat: Disorientation at Dawn
I had one of those moments when I woke up in "the middle of the night" – actually it was around dawn, I think – where I spent a really long, mostly lucid time puzzling out where in the world I was. That's common for many people when traveling, but I don't experience it very often. In my brain, I was paging through the many places I've been over the last month: my apartment in Ilsan, hotel rooms and ryokan and yeogwan in Japan and Korea, my friend Peter's apartment where I crashed, too. Nothing was matching up to the homey familiarity of my crashing spot on Mark & Amy's living room floor. It took a long time — at least 5 minutes. Finally, I put it together, where I was.
Was it all a dream? This is where I stayed on the nights before my departure for Korea, too. So it's a "full circle" moment.
Beautiful Minnesota fall rain, now. I slept late — later than I have in ages. I can blame timezones. Now, off to get some things done. I hope I can get my car running.