We have a lemon tree. It’s right outside our bedroom window, and it’s really a charming, sturdy feature of the backyard. I’ve watched our meyer lemons come back after a freeze in 2011 when we thought they were gone forever. But here they are, slowing growing ripe and orange (which is weird).
Happy Thanksgiving. Let’s not forget why America exists in the first place…because some people are so hard to be around that you have to send them off to the “New World.”
Before I get accused of being the Thanksgiving Grinch…I’m thankful for many things. In particular this year I’m thankful for my little stowaway and her father.
No One Likes A Puritan
I. We celebrate each late November
A date we know we should remember
When persecuted pilgrims sailed
Across the ocean and prevailed
Upon these rocky shores.
Don’t think the story is completed
With tales of corn and natives greeted.
That boat contained some noble envoys
But they were joined by royal killjoys.
No one liked the Puritans.*
II. If you shun your well-dressed neighbor
And never greet or grant them favors,
If you refuse to house-or-dogsit
Your principals may justify it
But no one likes a Puritan.
III. When you say “no” to every party
Especially when the crowd is arty
It’s true you’ll never face temptation…
For fun, or mirth, or celebration.
That’s why folks hate Puritans.
IV. Food and beverages are fun
And, yes, often overdone.
But turning down each scrumptious pleasure
Makes you seem more grim than measured.
It’s tough to be a Puritan.
V. A joke can be both crass and funny
Concerning poop or sex or money.
If you don’t deign to laugh along
Insisting that it would be wrong
No one will like you, Puritan.
VI. While your beliefs may be sincere,
Your values too may be held dear,
It is your right to hold them firm
And not to compromise or squirm.
But people may not like you.
So like the Pilgrims long ago
If your answer’s always “No,”
Don’t be surprised if no one sees
The beauty of your earnesty
And wishes you’d set sail.
Historical Footnote:
* We know that no one liked them, because they were persecuted. People don’t persecute people they like.
Karen’s a/c didn’t work, so she had to be retired. We “sent her away to a farm” where she could run and play and blow hot air out of her vents in 100 degree weather all day long.
On The Fourth of July we did what JFK told us was the most patriotic thing we could do: we shopped. I don’t usually pay attention to car ads barking at me about ZERO DOWN! and ZERO PERCENT INTEREST! But I did spend enough of my formative years in front of the television to know that “Independence Day” is just the prefix for “Sale.”
Really it was Lewis’s idea, after picking me up from the gym. I would never have tried to negotiate interest rates and down payments in my sweaty gym clothes, but I have learned that when Lewis gets the wild hair to spontaneously spend money, I’d better hop right on that, regardless of how I smell.
The distinct disadvantage was that I felt like anyone liberal enough to be nice to me looking like a vagrant the way I did, deserved to make a sale. I wanted to buy a car as a way of saying, “Thank you for not laughing at me.”
The day was fairly uneventful from a car-buying standpoint. We test drove three vehicles. Purchased one. Traded in Karen for beans (more beans than she may be worth, however). Pretty efficient day of shopping, really.
This is the gorgeous German machine we bought. We named her Marlene Dietrich.
But along the way we heard two stories that together convinced us that car salesmen might have a more interesting job than most us.
As we were getting into the Prius V, we asked how often people wreck the cars when they take them out for a test drive.
“You’d be surprised how rarely that happens,” our 30-something salesman replied.
“Have you ever seen anyone try to steal one?”
“Not really,” he said. I was thinking that the conversation was a dud, and that we would have to make halting holiday-based conversation (“Any plans for the fourth?” “Well…we’re buying a car…you?” “I’m at work…”).
But then he continued.
“But I did have a guy try to carjack me once on a test drive.”
Suddenly I thought about it. This guy gets in the car with strangers every day. Strangers who have wandered in knowing full well that there are hundreds of brand new cars available for joyriding. All they have to do is ask.
But even if people do have honest intentions, they might be hazardous. Salesmen have to pull out onto busy access roads with grandmas behind the wheel. Or slam to a stop 2 feet from the tailgate of the giant truck when a 16 year old finally applies the brakes at a red light. Bickering couples. Distracted parents. Dudes trying to impress their girlfriends. Women who drive like Cruella de Vil.
It’s a really dangerous job.
A highlight of our return to the Volkswagen dealership to trade Karen (no, we didn’t really euthanize her) was when Lewis found a stuffed monkey under one of her seats. We then had to proceed with negotiating, discussing interest rates, credit scores, and down payments with a stuffed monkey in tow, in addition to me being smelly.
Lewis and the monkey do some tough negotiating.
“Is that your good luck charm?” people kept asking.
We would laugh, assuming they were being funny. I mean, they were definitely being funny, but we assumed they knew that. Finally, when the Finance manager, Frank, looked back at us, earnestly waiting for our response, Lewis clued in.
“Do people bring good luck charms to buy cars?”
From there we got a laundry list of the good luck charms he had seen in his time in sales. It crescendoed to this story.
Frank took a man out for a test drive, and it was clear on the drive that the man was loving the car. It was everything he wanted. The deal was so close, Frank could taste it. Suddenly, while behind the wheel, the man said, “This is it. This is the car I want. I just gotta ask my wife.”
Frank totally understood, though probably rolled his eyes a little that the man hadn’t gotten the major purchase pre-approved by the home office. He tried to keep the momentum going, should they need it to overcome whatever obstacle the wife presented. He waited for the man to pull out a cell phone, but instead, they just drove further from the dealership.
And kept driving.
Until they pulled up to a cemetery. The man parked the car and told Frank he would be right back. True to his word, the man came back shortly thereafter, a smile on his face, and good news for all.
First, the Heineken Brewery in Amsterdam. It’s slick, it’s corporate. But it’s got lots of fun things. Or maybe it doesn’t…I don’t really remember.
Why don’t I remember? Because I went to the Heineken Brewery with Lee, on our whirlwind tour of Europe during Holy Week while I was in grad school and Lee was working for The Alley in Houston. Amersterdam was our first stop, and we were there for 36 hours. At no time in that 36 hours was I fully aware of what I was doing. We are so so so tired in this picture.
We’d left my London flat at 3am. By 10am we were at the Heineken Brewery, hyped up on caffeine. Thanks to the samples given at the Heineken tour, by noon we were asleep on a bench on the top floor of the Van Gough museum. At some point there was more caffeine, and this happened:
After that is was around 4 o’clock, maybe a little after…
Somewhere along the line, this happened:
The other brewery tour I remember fondly was the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen. I went with my cousins, Matthew, Tommy, and Alex. We were on another backpack blitz of Europe, on the way to Tommy’s law school summer course in Innsbruck. Matthew and I had done a Eurail trip together before, and I think we can both agree that it was a sign of our deep familial bond that we tried it again.
Copenhagen was our second stop after visiting the family in Stockholm/Boxholm. I personally find Copenhagen a little odd, but this was a classic brewery tour. I don’t remember how, but somehow Alex and I got separated from the boys and found ourselves in the bar at the end of the tour (a standard feature). Carlsberg is more generous than most with their samples. We got two full size beers of our choice. To consume in the 30 minutes we were allowed to stay in the bar.
Carlsberg makes Elephant Beer. Which at the time had an ABV of 12%.
I woke up on a bench just outside the brewery. I’m not certain, but I think Alex did too.
I guess my criteria for a good brewery tour is the quality of the nap you get at the end.
I continued to think about Liz’s wedding, making plans for bridals showers, bachelorette events…and started feeling a little nostalgia for the beginning of things. A longing for something new.
It’s ironic because Liz and Jason have been together for almost twice as long as Lewis and I have, so I really can’t look at her relationship and think, “Ah…I remember being where they are…”
It’s more ironic, because I’m actually not a fan of beginnings. I’m a fan of grooving middles and bittersweet endings. So the nostalgia surprised me. The little itch in my heart for something gone by. Something I saw in movies. Or in a friend’s smile when she changed her Facebook profile picture to include her new boyfriend. Finally I figured it out, what was giving me the itchy heart.
Our first picture together. I probably vomited with excitement.
I’ll never fall in love again.
Sure, sure, I fall in love with Lewis every day all over again. That’s a nice sentiment, but it’s not what I’m talking about. I’m going to be really frank here, because I think it’s important. Because for a lot of people, that nostalgia for falling in love sneaks up and steals a lot of joy.
Falling in love is that nauseating, unsure, tears of excitement/relief/fear soup of suspended reality. The kind that would wreck your health if you experienced it too often. That’s what I can’t get from Lewis anymore. I also can’t get herpes, which is nice.
I dated a guy once who was fond of saying, “I’ve always wanted to do that…” after he made some sort of romantic gesture. It was sweet and lots of fun. Very rom-com. When I was later single again, I would look back on his gestures cynically and think, “That had nothing to do with me. He was just fulfilling his own dreams. I could have been anyone.”
This sort of thing still happens…but I don’t stay up until 3 am thinking about what it means.
But now…I’m so thankful for his moments of cinematic grandeur. And the other fellas who wrote notes, or showed up in the rain, or sang to me in the supermarket. It didn’t need to be about me. It was about a time in life.
[Side note: There are also some destructive, unhappy dating moments that I never want to revisit. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about those giddy moments of “He likes me!” that only happen once per relationship. And they are going to happen whether you are dating, courting, hanging out, or whatever. People connect, however you define it.]
In my opinion, once married, it’s okay to look back on “He/She likes me!” fondly, even if the “he/she” involved wasn’t your spouse. Because it was a happy time. There’s a pressure to look back on all of it with disdain, but I don’t think that’s honest. Getting married doesn’t dissolve every human connection and every happy memory.
We’d been dating a couple of weeks. I was probably about to have an aneurysm of happiness, because he drove with his hand on my knee.
On the other end, I think it would be misplaced to go trying to constantly recreate “falling in love” in marriage. Rather than looking back and saying, “Awww…” a lot of people seem to take the melancholy itch as a sign that something is missing in their marriage…when it’s not at all. You can only fall in love with someone you’re not already in love with. So if I want to fall in love with Lewis again, I’d have to fall out of love with him first. And I don’t want to.
It’s also unfortunate when people try to speak that feeling back into existence, as though it is the incantation that will protect their marriage from harm. When people say that their spouse is “new to them everyday” or something like that, it terrifies me. We’ve got way to much invested in this thing to wake up and say, “Who are you?”
Boyfriend Lewis was naive. Husband Lewis knows better than to take his eyes off his injeera when I’m around.
Falling in love is a fun and finite thing. Loving, sharing life, is only as good as it’s staying power. Falling in love is about potential. Marriage is about actual. And we should all know that something can be potentially wonderful, and actually horrible. And vice versa. Like movies adapted from young adult fiction.
The fact that you didn’t marry some of the people you fell in love with is still a very happy ending! I’ll take roses from any old clown, but my gosh I dodged some bullets on getting married (and I was also the bullet myself sometimes). Yes there were tears…the way there were tears when my mom wouldn’t let me drink the whole bottle of Dimatap Cough Syrup.
When I feel nostalgia for butterflies and nausea, I’m not thinking about Lewis. I’m thinking about a feeling I had and liked. It’s a feeling I can’t get from Lewis anymore, because he’s closer than my skin. We’re one. He can be romantic, generous and sweet (which he is, almost always). He just can’t be unfamiliar and new anymore.
But that’s the best part of a sweet, sweet irony…the more I get to know him, the more I like him. I wouldn’t trade him for all the nausea in the world.
After six years, I gave up my booth at Night in Old San Antonio (NIOSA). This has got to be a record for shortest tenure, seeing as how the woman from whom I inherited the booth had it for something over 30 years.
And actually, I’d been trying to quit for about three years, but kept getting talked out of it. But this year, as I slid into April with my hair on fire, I knew it was the magic year. The year where I finally learned to say: “No.”
Okay…maybe “learned to say no” is a bit of a stretch. But when I do finally scream “nooooo!!!!” in desperation, or cut someone off in traffic accidentally, or put my foot in my mouth I have learned to say: Eh…they’ll get over it.
So I quit NIOSA, a massive fundraiser for a cause that I affirm, the San Antonio Conservation Society. While I believe in their end goal, the event wasn’t something I could throw my whole self into anymore. For more on that, see my article in the Rivard Report.
I have stared out of that booth for 133 hours. Five and one half days. In all of that time, these were the highlights:
1) In the beginning, I was very…VERY into the whole thing. This photo was taken my first year in the booth, when I was 24 and kept company with primarily college students and single people. Back when stumbling home exhausted and sticky and smelling of beer was super cool. Back when I had a job that started at noon.
photo credit: Nell Glazener-Cooney
2) Nothing delighted me more than the men who would come by the booth in the drunking hour… not to see me. Dress a man up in a frilly blouse and a corona and you’ll have a line out the door.
3) I had many faithful helpers over the years. Becky Meyers, Justin Clement, the Behams, a whole host of Trinity Students who worked a shift every single year they were in school. But by far, the Volunteer of the Years(s) award goes to these two. I inherited them with the booth. They were the only thing that made it possible the last two years (when I had a job that didn’t observe “NIOSA week” as a holiday).
4) I have a whole philosophy on Big Red, thanks to NIOSA’s contract with the RC Company and their refusal to sell Coca Cola or Pepsi Products. Here were some of the greatest quotes to come out of Cold Drinks #2.
THE “You didn’t do so well on multiple choice tests, did you?” CONVERSATION
Customer: You don’t have Coke?
Me: No. We only have RC products.
Customer: Pepsi?
Me: No. We only have RC Products.
Customer: Dr. Pepper?
Me: No.
Customer: Diet Coke?
Me: No.
Customer: Okay, I’ll take a Big Red.
THE “What the hell is your 7 year old doing here on a school night?” CONVERSATION
Customer at 9:30pm: Do you have anything without caffiene?
Me: 7-Up
Customer’s Kid: I hate 7-UP!
Customer: Okay, he’ll take a Big Red.
THE “This is why America is obese” CONVERSATION
Customer: Do you have water?
Me: No.
Customer: Okay, I’ll take a Big Red.
Me: *blank stare*
I was beginning to believe that people only ordered Big Red as a last resort (which would mean that the four other drinks we served were beyond hope). But then there was this conversation, the year we decided to use the booth as a public health research venue.
Customer: I’ll take a Big Red.
Lewis: Here you go sir. And if you don’t mind my asking, how often would you say you drink Big Red?
Customer: Most of the time.
Lewis: *blank stare*
5) I am pretty sure that NIOSA is the single most significant thing I have ever done (six times) to/for my immune system.
6) Lewis coming along was a major change for my relationship with the booth. It was the beginning of a new time…a time when being irrationally tired had relational consequences.
I think the Conservation Society secretly knew this, and thus employed their prerogative as the arbiters of preservation. My maiden name (and the endless volunteer energy that went with it) is apparently one of the many monuments worth saving. 2013, when this picture was taken, was my 3rd NIOSA with the last name “McNeel.”
7) Whether it was the very earnest cloggers, or the wildly inappropriate “flasher” character that roved the dancefloor, the booth was never lacking in spectacle to observe. Of course, the perennial favorite of drunk festival-goers across the Anglo-German world is the Chicken Dance.
We kept a yearly tally of how many times the chicken dance was played.8) The whole event has this sort of mom-n-pop feel to it. No one bothers with new-fangled conveniences like computers or health codes. So you can’t help but wonder how much money it could possibly make.
Millions, or more appropriately, tons. One trip to the ticket weighing station underneath the booth at Sauerkraut Bend, and you see that these moms and pops are nobody’s fools.
About 3% of the nightly spoils. Each of those tickets is worth 50 cents.
9) Odd as it is, perhaps the thing I’ll miss the most is walk out, after it’s all over. There is no moodier light than the fading of a heat lamp. No more melancholy sound than the last of the revelry 100 feet ahead of you. No more atmospheric icon than the trash and debris of the party covered in confetti. It would have been easy for my last walk out of NIOSA to be a nostalgic, bittersweet moment…but then someone spilled beer on my shoe and nearly poked me in the eye with their sausage skewer…
When I was a sophomore in high school, I was invited to attend the Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership Conference, or HOBY with the best and brightest from the region for a weekend seminar on leadership, service and innovation.
What do the best and brightest do when they are broken into groups and dispersed around a gymnasium with their enthusiastic counselors (read: kids one year older than them who had such a good time the year before that they wanted to come back and do it again)? Ice breakers. Team building exercises. Cheers and chants. And they kept telling us that the people around us would be our lifelong friends and that this weekend would change our lives. Truth is, they needed our loyalty and vulnerability up front in order to create this magical environment.
I stuck it out at HOBY for about 7 hours before calling my dad to come pick me up. I just wasn’t feeling the magic.
I had a similar reaction to the Welcome Week activities in college, but I had to stick it out as this was the front door of my education…which would be the front door of a career. Yes…the portal to success lies behind answering the question “boxers or briefs?”, making animal noises, and dorm-olympics. I entered adulthood with a big orange “S” painted on my face.
I remember thinking, “I came here to go to school. Why am I doing call-response chants with the Student Life staff? I don’t even know if I like it here.”
One of the best parts about being an adult is that, for the most part, there’s no more chanting. I still dread public participation. Whenever a speaker, pastor, or teacher says, “say it with me…” or “everybody stand up” I want to start shouting vulgarities just to ruin their demonstration.
Just give me what I came for, and let me give back on my own.
Which is why I love TED. In many ways TEDx conferences are the kind of grown-up, skeptic-friendly, purpose-oriented events I’ve been looking for my whole life. The day is jam-packed with “talks” and most of the exploration is left up to the individual.
TED’s appeal and vibe is in its DNA. Technology, entertainment, and design are not the fields of group-think chanters or dispassionate couch potatoes who need to be roused from their inertia. The crowd is given to creating the experience they want, approaching the people they like, and engaging on multiple levels in order to make connections. The curated audiences offer some front-end engineering of this environment as well.
However, I think TED is in danger of drifting from what makes it great, at least in the TEDx events. The emphasis on general inspiration has broadened their appeal and I’ve noticed that a TED-culture is percolating. A cult of TED, if you will. The cadence and tone of the speakers and emcees is distinctly TED. A lot of the talks center on someone bottoming out and stumbling upon their calling. The extroverted interpretations of themes like “FearLess,” and “be Bold” engineer vulnerability and joinerism.
TEDx Austin is exactly the kind of exemplar event that you would expect from that city. The speakers were visionaries. The interactive art exhibits were professional. The lunches were innovative and attractively packaged. Even the snacks were superb. It was exceptionally inspiring for all the right reasons.
But also in play were more overt attempts to inspire, rather than simply spread ideas. There was an obvious effort at creating a community around the event, rather than creating an event for a community. So it felt like we were being asked to find ourselves, to become something in this manufactured environment. This was made most obvious in the interactive elements, which included a room for hanging anonymous love letters on the wall, and two wigwam-meets-teepee type structures called confessionals. In the darkness of the wigwam was a phone, which connected to the other wigwam with voice distortion technology. The confessor was provided a safe space to tell their deepest secrets.
The cone of confessionThe wall of love notes
There is no doubt that in our over-mediated world people are hungry for community, safety, vulnerability. But it felt a little too reverent. A little to sacred. A little too religious for me.
TED is brain candy. When the occasional Brene Brown pops up to challenge your heart, it’s great. But if the theme of Technology, Entertainment, and Design is replaced with Heart, Mind, and Soul, I cannot help but wonder if “TED: be daring” be replaced by “all aboard the HMS Inspire?”
Again, at this moment, TEDx Austin is still a great example of getting that for which I paid (handsomely, in this case). Invisibility cloaks, slack rope walkers, urban cable, sociological linguistics, and experimental jazz. Yes, yes, and yes. It did generate spontaneous contribution and conversation. And I was deeply inspired by many of the talks. A lot of the social Post-Secret-esque environs could be due to their correct understanding of what gets millennials jazzed. We want something that means something.
But the exact opposite of what millennials want is meaning –so naturally generated by TED and TEDx events– packaged and sold as a brand-name experience. That’s when the satire kicks in. Be careful TED, SNL is coming for you.
As I write this, I am sitting on the dog bed next to a (finally) sleeping puppy who has only recently abandoned her efforts to help me type. I cannot rest the heels of my hands on the laptop, because they are skinned raw, and Lewis is dead-to-the-world asleep. The sign of a truly productive vacation is when upon return home Lewis can’t stay up past 9, and I can’t fall asleep until after midnight.
Things lined up rather marvelously this weekend, if I do say so myself. A concert coincided with an important anniversary. A race with some unused vacation time. A spay surgery with a road trip. The results were five days of patchwork vacation held together by the Steve Jobs biography on audiobook.
Day 1)
Austin. We cashed in a “Friends and Family” rate at Hotel Saint Cecilia so that we could design-geek/beat-geek out. We also conducted research on counterintuitively veggie-based foods, which on South Congress mostly just means we ate out. To be honest though, as much as I love anything leek-based I would have been content with the minibar at the hotel…Central Market has nothing on Liz Lambert’s minibars.
The whole trip was planned around a Heartless Bastards concert. The date of the concert, January 17th, happily coincides with the anniversary of the day Lewis decided not the be a heartless bastard, an instead to ask me out on a “real date”…
The band was amazing. Definitely a band that should be heard live, which was why is was particularly peculiar that we were surrounded by an unusually uncouth group. Not what one would expect in Austin, the standard bearer for indie music culture. My inner, snarky, guardian of all social contracts, we’ll call her Emily Post-modern, would like to send the following memos:
To the gorilla grinder requiring five feet of clearance on all sides: we’re not forming a dance circle around you. We’re trying to avoid the splash zone of your Lone Star. And the girl you met five minutes ago with the line, “That’s a beautiful name,” is not making up a new dance move, she’s trying to get away.
To the guy whipping out disco moves while the rest of us do the Buster Bluth: I think you’re cool, but the girl with whom you are obviously on a first date looks a little uneasy.
To the sorority reunions happening in front of and behind us: talking over the music makes your voices sound fat.
Day 2)
More Austin. We check out vinyls from the front desk (it’s that kind of place) and Lewis makes the most of the outdoor shower (yes, that kind of place).
Day 3)
Big Bend. We headed out early in the morning for the National Park, armed with Steve Jobs’s biography on Audiobook. Which made us so glad to arrive at the headquarters of the Big Bend Ultra Run where your choices for company were happy, sun-dried, endorphin-fueled nature nuts…or no one for hundreds of miles. Either choice seemed better than imagining myself in the company of Steve Jobs circa 1982.
We hiked to an amazing waterfall. In the middle of Big Bend. Amazing. Lewis tells me that it is great for skinny dipping when not serving as the meet-up point for three generations of a family reunion, which it was at that moment. Lewis, though intensely private, is an avid streaker and skinny-dipper. I, though intensely public, am neither.
Day 4)
The Race. Last year we ran the Big Bend Ultra Run 50K. After nearly losing my religion, I declared that I hate trail running and had no desire to do anything of the sort ever again. So this year we registered for the 25K, employing theory that stopping half way through the 50K would have made me incredibly happy. Ergo, if I ran a race half the distance, I would be incredibly happy.
We we right. It was great.
Other than the moment I caught sight of the finish line and forgot to watch where I was going.
We met up with Lewis’s parents for dinner and soaked in the views of the Chisos, as the medic informed me that soaking the Rio Grande or the hot springs with open wounds was ill advised. I drank a soda and a beer. One for the race. One for the road rash.
Day 5)
The Long Road Home. We piled back in the car with Steve Jobs (having had all the laid-back, balanced people we could take) and headed back to Marathon for breakfast. The Burnt Biscuit Bakery is always an entertaining stop, so we made it and were regaled on why there were flowers coming out of the coffee roaster while we feasted on fried pies (I’d run out of reasons for indulgences, so this one was just a plain old indulgence).
At exit 477, we took a detour to Marble Falls, to meet the newest member of our family. Florence McNeel (formerly Chloe the rescue rottweiler) rode home in my lap, finally fully vetted and ready for her new home. At this point, Lewis, who bikes to work most days, had been driving for five straight days (except when he was running across the desert). I knew he was exhausted, and wondered if the two-hour detour to fetch Florence had been the right call.
I need not have feared. Lewis’s assessment after 1,380 miles: “If only all long road trips ended with a puppy.”
I didn’t do a lot of reflecting on the turn of the year as 2013 approached and 2012 eeked to a close. But a couple of weeks ago, I was offered the opportunity to close the year out with a bang. Or rather, um estrando. A client canceled his trip, leaving a vacant room up for grabs in a Rio de Janeiro hotel. On Copacabana beach. With a view of the New Years fireworks.
The trip to Rio was the ultimate way to “stick it to” 2012, a year that was full of upheaval and bad news. Hop on a plane, soak up some sun and order room service. Be jetset. Come out on top.
It’s not uncommon for me to close chapters of my life by skipping town. A good international cleansing to bookend seasons of growth, struggle, incubation, or serenity.
After a last minute scramble and a lot of tension (can Lewis go? can we get visas in time? plane tickets are how much???), it didn’t work out, and thus I am blogging from my home office, not a Club Room overlooking the Rio nightlife. And the holiday I had was entirely different than the holiday I passed up.
Instead of a plane, I hopped on a Megabus. I guess instead of jetset, I’m coachset.
Instead of the concierge, I hung out with old friends (Rex and Lee are not pictured, but they came to visit on a night that I would have been in transit).
Instead of Copacabana Beach, I sat in a cozy coffee shop on Guadalupe Street in Austin. The people watching was just as good.
Instead of room service I had Kerbey Lane Pumpkin Pancakes (once at the restaurant, and then again at home with this exotic local…)
Instead of in-flight entertainment, I did a lot of this:
And instead of fireworks from a Club Room in Rio, I watched them from my own bed. In addition to the official display downtown (which we can see to the south), last night it was hard to tell if 2013 or a revolutionary militia had arrived in Dignowity Hill. Fireworks are a major budget line item for our neighbors.
Compared to a trip to Rio, yes, it was a low-key holiday. But it’s a more fitting way to say goodbye to 2012, the year of bad news. Rather than fleeing to South America to dazzle the year into oblivion, it exited through a sieve. Staying home I realized that there were a lot of things from the past 12 months that I don’t want to leave behind. And those things have passed through Christmas and into the new year. I love my friends. I love my husband. I love gingerbread pancakes. And I love our city. God is on the throne. I hope that some things stay just the same in 2013.
…
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![IMG_0620[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/img_06201.jpg)
![IMG_0609[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/img_06091.jpg)
![IMG_0339[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_03391.jpg)
![IMG_0342[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_03421.jpg)
![IMG_0368[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_03681.jpg)
![IMG_0377[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_03771.jpg)
![IMG_0361[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_03611.jpg)
![IMG_0380[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_03801.jpg)
![IMG_0387[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_03871.jpg)
![IMG_0389[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_03891.jpg)
![IMG_0398[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_03981.jpg)
![IMG_0401[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_04011.jpg)
![IMG_0404[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_04041.jpg)
![IMG_0413[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_04131.jpg)
![IMG_0416[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_04161.jpg)
![IMG_0417[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_04171.jpg)
![IMG_0420[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_04201.jpg)
![IMG_0421[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_04211.jpg)
![IMG_0423[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_04231.jpg)
![IMG_0434[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_04341.jpg)
![IMG_0207[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_02071.jpg?w=225)
![IMG_0203[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_02031.jpg?w=300)
![IMG_0204[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_02041.jpg?w=225)
![IMG_0231[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_02311.jpg?w=225)
Instead of in-flight entertainment, I did a lot of this:![IMG_0236[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_02361.jpg?w=225)
![IMG_0222[1]](http://freebekah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/img_02221.jpg?w=435)