What I Did on My Summer Vacation, Day 19.5: Boston, MA to Stockholm

I say "19.5" because with a flight out of the country in the evening, this wasn't exactly a whole day in Boston. I spent a smidge over 24 hours in town, so should that count as two days?

I woke up a little before Diana's alarm and futzed around a bit on my phone. She showered and got ready for work, and I got dressed in my lazy bum traveling clothes and we were off.

My morning wasn't too eventful. I dumped my travel bag at the station, and then spent the rest of the time I had until burritos with Diana and Walter writing in Boston Common and then wandering through the botanical gardens.

Much State. Very Legislature. Wow. So Government.

I appreciate the bird photobombing but not dude in the fannypack.

It was SO. HOT. that day and I very much wanted to jump in any and every body of water I saw. Fountains, duck pond, the little kid wading pool...all of them.

All of this was right after Nazi demonstrations and protests and tiki torches and all of that good stuff. (I picked a helluva time to be back in the US!) It was a topic of discussion when we were at dinner in Old Orchard Beach. Seth (Walter's boyfriend) was amazed that Nazis would even dare to turn up and show their faces in Boston, of all places—the city is so progressive and liberal and etc.

I shook my head. "Nah man, what I've heard from non-white friends of mine who live there...it's a different experience."

There were leftovers of protests and rumbles on the Common.

The text spraypainted on the ground reads "Racism will not win." We can only hope. =/

And on this monument to I guess the Pilgrims? "$ IS POWER XFREEDOM I$ RESISTANCE." I don't know if I hold entirely with that logic, protest artist. The first half, yes. But I don't know it's connected to resisting or freedom. Maybe "resistance is freedom"? Otherwise you're maybe putting the cart before the horse.

Civil War memorial to "white officers" and "black rank and file." It feels like a lukewarm attempt at Black History TM by throwing them in with the white officers but on the other hand if they fought together, shouldn't they be memorialized together?

I finished my writing and my photo-taking and wandered in the direction of the public gardens, because I guess that's what I do on vacations now?

Overheard in Boston:

"The flowers are dyin' 'cause they don't water 'em."
"They do water 'em, every day."
"Why are they dyin', then?"
"'Cause of the sun."

More overheard in Boston:

"MOM! A duck bit my thumb!"

There were a couple buskers out in the park. An elderly Asian man playing what I think was an erhu, and then a hip young white dude with a tenor sax: "Careless Whispers," "What A Wonderful World," etc.

I wandered over to the burrito place to meet and Walter. It was a take-out place for nearby young professionals, and since I was eating with young professionals, that meant there was no place to really sit or any time to really talk.

We said our goodbyes and I walked around the city a bit, despite it being SO. HOT., because I figured if I'm going to say that I visited Boston, I should have at least seen some of it? The other times I've been in Boston, I've been sequestered away indoors at anime conventions so I wanted to say that I had actually been in Boston. Or whatever.

I was due to meet another friend, Amy, at a marketplace in the afternoon, though I turned up quite a bit early so I could browse around a bit and enjoy the air conditioning. I bought some yarn for one of my knitter friends back home, and picked up a business card from American Stonecraft. I love rocks, and I love New England, and this is exactly the kind of thing that my mother-in-law loves, so I'll probably buy something online for her birthday or Christmas present. (Probably a coaster or two.)

Once in a green time a flower
Oh, fell in love with the sun.
The passion lasted for an hour
And then she wilted from her loved one.

I appreciated the tip jar humor but was fresh out of any cash at all by this point. Nor did I feel like buying some nuts, even as the guy behind the counter was really friendly and offered me some free samples. Womp womp.

Amy did the very smart thing and brought GAMES because two people with low-key (and sometimes not so low-key) social anxiety need all the help interacting they can get! Or at least I do, even if meeting Internet friends is always less fraught than I expect it because it's not like I don't know them at all or anything. Although I was still a bit of a traveling mess—piecey hair, clothes chosen for comfort rather than fashion, indescribably sweaty—so props to and everyone else that day for spending time with my unattractive self!

After we got chocolate and chatted a bit and I saw some Andy pictures I hadn't before (ATTACK OF THE FIFTY-FOOT TODDLER!), we played a couple rounds of Hanabi, which I sucked at but enjoyed nonetheless and have since added to our small roster of games (Munchkin, Dixit, Magic: The Gathering).

After that it was off to the station to pick up my bag, which I had to pay some extra for by all of ten? fifteen? minutes. Ugh. Nonetheless, it was worth the convenience. I had a hell of a time finding the bus to Logan, and then the check-in line for Norwegian was FOREVER LONG. It wasn't as stressful as it would be if it were my flight going in—I had no pressing plans back in Sweden that would suffer if I got bumped back a few hours or even a day—but it still made me anxious. The family behind me, on the other hand, realized they had the wrong passports, and it was a rush of phonecalls and sending out teenage son to meet dad and etc. to fix it. So someone was having an even more stressful wait than I was!

We boarded on time, though, and everything went smoothly. My layover in Copenhagen was slightly shorter this time around, so I didn't try to do any more exploring. I just hung out at one of the terminals, charging my phone and letting my boyfriend know that I would be at Arlanda in a couple of hours.

Friday 5: Welcome to the Terrordome

Photo by sergio souza on Unsplash

What’s the scariest movie you’ve seen?

I don't know about scariest as such, but the most unpleasant movie I've ever had to watch is a Japanese one called Blood and Bones. Every trigger warning ever for that movie; I actually had to hit pause a couple of times and take a break for something more pleasant.

In the same vein, Pan's Labyrinth also messed me up. I went to see it with a bunch of friends on a Friday night, and afterwards the plan was to have a Dungeons and Dragons and beers session. Instead I just curled up in a ball on the couch without drinking or talking to anyone for the rest of the night.

I think the last movie thing that genuinely terrified me, though, were the TV commercials for Bram Stoker's Dracula back in the 90s. I had nightmares about vampires for a solid week after catching a glimpse of that ad.


What most recently startled you?

I guess my alarm?


What’s something in your residence that’s frightening?

I have a postcard with art that I guess someone might find frightening but I just really like. It's original art by a friend of mine, an altered photo she took of Buddhist statuary in Japan.


What kinds of social settings cause you anxiety?

Social settings where I'm not in charge of something or running something but where I just have to open-endedly interact with other human beings. So you know, most of them.


What’s something you are no longer afraid of?

I've 99% conquered my fear of getting hit by a car. As a kid I was terrified of blacktop pavement because I was afraid that cars lurked around every corner, waiting for me to step on the road just so they could run me over. (One summer when I was maybe 6 years old or so, I just straight up exposure therapy'd myself by running back and forth across the street in front of our house, as if proving to myself SEE NOTHING HAPPENED IT'S FINE.) I still get nervous crossing the street, but you don't have to carry me across parking lots anymore!

What I Read: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

Time for the Hercules gif.

Okay, so here's the cool part: Abdel Kader Haidara, after years of careful negotiations and curation, managed to assemble a peerless collection of ancient Malian manuscripts, both Islamic and secular. But when Al Qaeda took over Timbuktu, the manuscripts—works of art in themselves that also advocated for religious tolerance and scientific curiosity, even in the 13th century CE—became a target of Islamic extremists. Haidara and other archivists worked hard to smuggle these literary treasures to a safety.

And the book starts off with a satisfying and easy to follow history of Timbuktu and its cultural heritage in the larger Islamic world, as well as a brief history of Haidara's work hunting down and negotiating with families, convincing them to entrust these priceless artifacts with him so that they could be preserved and studied.

And of course you get snatches of Haidara and his helpers smuggling books out of Timbuktu and into safety.

But.

In reality, the focus (at least in the middle and end of the book) is more on the sectarian violence in Mali in the early 2010s. An extraordinary amount of detail about developments and actors in the political situation is provided when a simple summary would have sufficed. I suspect that these lefthand turns are the reason that I kept falling out of the book and why it took me several months to finish. Maybe even years? I remember reading it in an airport on the way back from a wedding, but I can't say for sure if it was Aaron's wedding in 2017 or my brother's wedding in 2016. Either way: it doesn't usually take me that long to finish your stand popular journalism kind of book. (Reading an ebook version probably didn't help, either.)

Friday 5: Waste

Photo by Bas Emmen on Unsplash

What’s something you unintentionally threw away?

Nothing, thankfully!

What disgusting memory of garbage do you have?

The job I worked at in the US has a picnic grove attached to it. It's a tourist trap (I say that in the most affectionate and loving way possible; I love tourist traps) in a small town, so naturally it has a bit of extra property with space for visitors to relax and plan their next stop (or for visiting school groups to eat their lunch). The trash cans in that picnic grove were some of the foulest things I've smelled in my life, especially during the summer or after a tour of 120 school kids with bagged lunches. They usually required two people to empty, too, since they were big, heavy-duty things, and the picnic grove was downhill and across the street from our dumpster.

I get nostalgic for that job a lot, but not for that part of it.

How are you about deleting emails?

I think the oldest email in my inbox is from 2006. It's weird to think I have emails that are older than some (most) of my students, but there you have it. I should maybe be better about deleting them, though. In case I want to run for President. BUT HER EMAILS

What do you treasure that someone else considers trash?

One of my best sources for beads is old jewelry no one wants anymore.

What’s the litter like in your neighborhood?

Not too bad. And the Nazis have stopped putting up posters as well!

What I Read: Gena/Finn

I had really personal reasons for being interested in Gena/Finn and for recommending it for my Discord book club and then it fucking disappointed me.

Most of my friends in high school were of the Internet variety, out of a group of fans of a particular TV show. Even though I was never really active in "fandom" as such (I don't write or read fanfiction, I don't hoard fanart, I'm not really interested in making the things I like the be-all, end-all of my identity...I just wanted to find the rest of the episodes online that I hadn't already seen), the way those friendships formed online were really important to how I grew up and where I ended up in life. I don't think there are many books that really tackle the importance (and also weirdness) of online friendships; the last time I'd read about that sort of thing was in Pattern Recognition of all things, and that was just a brief aside in what was otherwise a cyberpunk thriller.

I was expecting a story that chronicled the kind of awkward budding friendships I was cultivating in front of the computer screen in high school, and what I got was something else. Those were the bits Moskowitz and Helgeson skipped right over in favor of the kind of melodrama that could happen between any two friends, regardless of where or how they met, but with a sprinkling of unrealistic lefthand turn plot points for good measure (former child actors! shoehorned romance! tragic deaths!).

And the nail in the coffin for me was reading the book summary after I had read the book.

Gena (short for Genevieve) and Finn (short for Stephanie) have little in common. Book-smart Gena is preparing to leave her posh boarding school for college; down-to-earth Finn is a twenty-something struggling to make ends meet in the big city.

If I've read the book and I still need the GoodReads book description to tell me that Gena and Finn have nothing in common, and that one is "book-smart" while the other is "down-to-earth," then you've failed in your writing. In the book they come across as quite samey, except that one of them has a history of mental health issues.

Anything more specific than that will veer into spoiler territory so I'll save those complaints for book club where I know that people will either have read it or not care about it.

101 in 1001, Round 3

As of the end of March, I finished up my third 101 in 1001 list. The final count is currently available on my 101 in 1001 page, but since that will be scrubbed in a few months, I'm memorializing it here, after the jump because it's a bit long. First, the commentary.

Proudest Moments

Out of all three lists, this one feels the most accomplished so far. I cleared around 60 goals completely, and I attempted a fair amount more. I'm not sure how that compares to past lists, since I don't feel like going back and comparing at the moment, but I did power through two pretty significant items:

1. I finished my modified TIME Top 100 novels list, a goal I've had since I first started this in 2009 (!).

2. I ran a goddamn 5K. I ran multiple 5Ks. This was a goal I'd set for myself on previous lists, then invariably take off the list in favor of something else because it felt too ambitious. And then I accomplished it by accident? Life is weird.


Moments of Reflection

1. I like the old-school Dr. Who, I really do, but we got up to the French Revolution story line and Lord Xenu kind of lost interest in it so we stopped watching. I don't really watch much TV or movies on my own, either, so if he doesn't want to watch something, I just won't watch it. (On the other hand, he's often quite keen to watch MST3K.) I'm torn between A) still including this because I like Dr. Who, or B) not including it because I'll probably fail at it again. I might just compromise and scale down the attempt (like, just finishing the French Revolution story line from the first series, or just finishing the first series, rather than the first two Doctors).

2. There were a lot of political things that got tacked on this list because The Election happened midway through. But I did a bad job counting them and an even worse job being consistent. I might scale it back, or figure out how to find my rhythm.

3. How much do I really care about that IMDB list? I don't know. But even though I failed pretty spectacularly on foreign movies and documentaries this time around, I do care about those, so that goal will definitely continue to stay on.

4. Now that running is a well-established habit, the next thing to tackle is strength training. I like yoga, but it's not the most efficient strength training route. The RCAF 5BX (or rather the adapted version here) seems like it might be a better option. I might also incorporate a planking challenge as an item? I don't know.

For the Next List

1. The reading goal is shaping up to be a combination of this Modern Library list and some books recommended in this post.

2. I might have to up my Swedish reading game, since I'm no longer in Swedish class. (Lord Xenu uses English with me so it's not like I get that much practice at home.)

3. I have some hard travel choices I'm going to have to make. After being invited to vend at last year's WorldCon (in Helsinki), it occurred to me that...I might do really well at WorldCon? It'll be in August 2019, which is sneaking up already. In addition to bulking up my Etsy stock, I would have to get a proper show table and display ready. On the plus side, one of my best friends (founding member of the Austin Feminist Science Fiction Book Club) got in touch with me about attending WorldCon in Dublin, fond as he is of the city (and, I hope, of me...!). The other horn of the travel dilemma is a wedding in Seoul, South Korea in March, which is less than a year away! Neither my sanity nor my budget can afford both (probably), so...

Friday 5: The Shine of A Thousand Spotlights

Image courtesy Jacob Morch on Unsplash

What physical trait are you (or have you been) self-conscious about?

Hi guys, I could write a whole novel on being fat! But so many other writers handle it better, so rather than go into it myself I'll just post links to two writers whose perspectives helped me get right with Fat Jesus.

Dances With Fat

Jill Grunenwald (and her memoirs Running With a Police Escort)

Even though I've gotten right with Fat Jesus, small things remain. Mostly my nose. I don't hate it enough to go under the knife, and my human brain recognizes that it's a perfectly normal nose, but my lizard brain can't stop comparing it to adorable ski jump button noses. Even actresses who are constantly put on "quirky beauties" or "big noses" or whatever lists don't have the same kind of nose I do.

When did you last do something risking injury?

I guess going for a run always risks injury, right? So depending on when this post goes up, either Wednesday or today.

Why do critics and the general movie-going public never seem to agree?

I'd say the operative word is "seem." I suspect most of the time critical opinions and the public's opinions are generally in line. Otherwise I imagine that the contributing factor is that movie critics are a self-selecting group of people who gravitate towards the arts and appreciate, even crave, novelty in the form and as a result they're generally more appreciate of movies that are subtle or unusual. Most people watch movies for comfort or entertainment rather than critical engagement, and so they're more drawn towards predictable (or surprising-within-predictable-schemas) and comforting rather than challenging or difficult.

How do you feel about Hugh Jackman as an actor?

#NotMyWolverine

Who is the best singer you’ve seen in live performance?

I don't really go to live music performances that often. (Aside from the odd years where I can make it to Musikfest.) I guess two come to mind:

Ssingssing, with lead singer Lee Hee-moon

Black Masala, with singer Kristen Long (though my memory of their Musikfest performance seems to have a different singer?)

My Real Children: Book Review

I decided that I'm no longer bound by space and time when it comes to book club reads. In other words, I don't have to wait for a respective book's month, or even read them in order! Which is why I dug into My Real Children last week, even though it's not on the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club docket until June.

Image courtesy Tor

My Real Children takes a very personal, intimate look at history and chaos theory. Walton gives us two (alternate?) lives of Patricia Cowan, with different spouses and different struggles and different triumphs.

Of course, it's not just Patricia's life that's different between the two. History also takes two different tracks (though both are different from history as it tracked in our world). Walton sets up a delicious little tension there that's never entirely resolved: did Patricia's choices in any way affect larger world events? Or did those larger world events have any effect on her? Another author might have been tempted to draw a line between Patricia's choices and world events (like Charles Wallace body-hopping through different people in A Swiftly Tilting Planet), but Walton just leaves those differences there.

While My Real Children is put out by Tor, an imprint famous for fantasy and science fiction, I wouldn't classify it as science fiction myself. (I was actually surprised to see it was a Tor book!) But maybe that's because I already comfortably half-accept the idea of there being alternate reality versions of myself leading different versions of my life. There's no attempt to explain why those lifetimes are converging in Patricia's memory, or why she's drifting between two timelines. It's most certainly not a metaphor for dementia; she has dementia in both lifetimes, unrelated to the timelines crossing. The dual lives are simply a narrative device that shows how differently things can turn out on the micro- and macro-scale.

On a really personal level, I read this either at exactly the wrong point in my life or exactly the right point. (I'm not entirely sure which, yet.) Some days I'm cool with the idea of those alternate versions of myself being out there, hopefully living their best lives while I'm trying to live my best life in this timeline; some days I hate and regret everything and want nothing more than to tour through the different timelines and pick one where things are going a little (okay, a lot) better for me. I might have texted Austin Feminist Sci Fi Book Club Co-Founder Friend in tears over that. (Spoiler: I did.)

There's a moment where Patricia contemplates the differences in her two worlds: not in her life choices, but in the history. The lifetime where she had a long and happy marriage was in a world marred by multiple exchanges of nuclear warheads and the ensuing radioactive fallout; the lifetime where she had a shorter but deeply unhappy marriage was much more peaceful on the global scale. And there's an element of bitterness (why did cancer and violence have to wreck her storybook life?) there's also an element of hope (the sacrifices she made, even unknowingly, perhaps tilted the scales towards world peace). And at the end of the day, you can choose: bitterness or hope? This is the importance of stories: I can choose a story for myself where my struggles and my choices make the world a better place. Whether or not it's true is secondary (how could I possibly empirically test or measure that?); the fact that it's possible is what counts. It's perhaps hackneyed to quote David Foster Wallace at this point, but he hit the nail on the head:

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line—maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible—it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important—if you want to operate on your default-setting—then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.

And since it rankles, a bit, to close a review of a book deliberately chosen for a feminist book club with a quote by a man (who has, unfairly, become the catch-all representative of obnoxious litbros everywhere), I'll actually close this review with a quote from A Tale for the Time Being, which is still one of my favorite books that I've read recently, and that feels very relevant to this act of choosing:

Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.

Friday 5: Mist It by That Much

This week's Friday 5 is a delightful callback to one of my childhood favorites, Mel Brooks's Get Smart. 

If you didn't pick up on that before, you know now!

What did you most recently spray out of a can?

Dry shampoo. I like having bangs but after about a day they get really piece-y, so I sometimes touch them up between washes.

What’s your favorite food (or food product) that’s sprayed from a can?

None of them? The options are either cheese or whipped cream, as far as I can tell, and I don't care for either of this. I guess the cheese wins by a slight margin, as a "whiz with" is a Philadelphia favorite.

When did you last spray-paint something?

Probably when I was helping touch up a metal trash can when I worked at Lost River Caverns a million years ago.

What’s something that’s not sprayed from a can but would be pretty cool if it were?

Pancakes! Too tired to make breakfast? Just spray out some pancakes! Got a case of the munchies? Even the most chemically impaired person in the world can manage a spray can. Want to get a perfect circle every time? Just make sure the nozzle's clean and that your aim's straight.

What’s conceptually the oddest thing sprayed from a can?

Honestly, dry shampoo. It's up there with dry cleaning in terms of how counter-intuitive the concept is.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, Day 19: Walden and Boda Borg, Boston MA

We hit the road early the next morning, while Theophanes's brother and his girlfriend and her nieces were still asleep. First order of business: a picture of this thrift store sign, which caught my eye even on the delirious and sleep-deprived drive up in the middle of the night. Unless Mildred Wymen was really into Stephen King? Orthography is hard!



Then breakfast at a greasy spoon and we were off to Concord!



I was originally going to bus down from Maine to Boston, but Theophanes  volunteered to drive and do Boda Borg with me and my hostess with the mostess in Boston, Diana. I broached the subject of stopping by Walden Pond on the drive down, since it wasn't too out of the way and I didn't know when I'd be in New England again. (I mean, I'm sure I will be—I just don't know when.) She puzzled it over in the GPS and agreed, since it wasn't ridiculously out of the way. It just would have been a little far for a day trip from the cabin.



It's really hip these days, at least among the people I like and admire, to hate on Thoreau and Walden. And I guess I get it—he was only able to stay at the cabin as long as he did because of the good graces of other people and he was an obnoxious houseguest to boot, he's maybe (even inadvertently) the foundation of modern American libertarianism, he was kind of a pompous ass, etc. etc.—but for a weird, thoughtful kid in high school to read about this dude being weird and thoughtful by himself in the woods was reassuring. Even as I drink tea and continue to use a doormat.



I was surprised to see so many parents of very small children trying to do the educational, dutiful thing and go through the assorted signs and the replica cabin and whatever tourist center is also on-site (we didn't visit it, though). Maybe I'm underestimating kids, but I don't think a 6-year-old is going to be super interested in, or at least appreciative of, someone living by themselves in the woods. I'm pretty sure they just want to go swimming in the damn lake.



I have to admit, sometimes a cabin out in the woods sounds like the most appealing thing I can imagine. We peeked inside and it was easy to imagine me holing up in such a space for the rest of my days. Maybe in a place a little bigger, only because I'm less stingy than Thoreau when it comes to books worth holding on to.

It was then very weird to see that the plot of land where he went to live simply, away from people and society, so filled with people. In addition to all of the signage and statuary and sites associated with Thoreau, the pond itself is now a local swimming hole. The sound of people talking and laughing and splashing in the water was the background sound for most of the trip. Incongruous, but at the same time, maybe it's better that such a spot be appreciated by the general public rather than forgotten.



(I still did my best to get this picture of the lake without any people in the shot, though.)

There were also these assorted illustrations from some kind of Walden ABCs book where I'm not sure if it's actually for kids, or a kids' book for adults (a la Go the Fuck to Sleep), along the assorted paths. This was by far the reach-iest one of them all:



and I, when we saw the first one ("C" or something), started speculating as to what they'd do for the trickier letters. I thought "X" would be for "fox," but no. "Z" either was or should have been "zephyr." I was right, though, that "Q" would of course be "quiet."



If the pond and the museum-type stuff was relatively packed and full of people, the site of the actual cabin was mercifully quiet. Theophanes pointed out that many of the trees in the area were fairly young, so one wonders what happened to the patch of forest between when Thoreau was here and when the site was discovered in 1945. (Or perhaps it was never actually discovered; perhaps that's just a random spot along the lake that they decided to declare Thoreau's Cabin in order to give visitors something concrete to experience.)





People also left little stacks of stones next to the cabin. For me, this is something people do in Korea (maybe East Asia?). I saw this all the time, especially in temples; from my understanding, it's part of a folk Buddhist tradition that has to do with making wishes or requests. (Do ones this small still count as cairns?) For example, here are some I saw by Cheonjiyeon falls in Jeju in July, 2012:



And an anonymous Korean woman building one at Bulguksa in Gyeongju, January, 2010:



And yet maybe last year or two years ago, my crunchy granola friends started sharing articles like this one, as if making those tiny towers had suddenly become a widespread Thing in the US as well. It was certainly a Thing at Walden, anyway, and I left my own, because it's a way for me to connect my time in Korea with the places I visit elsewhere.



Other people left messages or drawings on stones, which I hadn't seen in Korea. (Though at temples, you can buy a roof tile for X amount of won and leave a message on it.)







The weather was warm enough that by the time we were back at the lake I was regretting leaving my bathing suit in the car; Theophanes as if reading my mind, said, apropos of nothing, "I'm going to take off my shoes and dip my feet in." I followed suit. The rocky shore of the lake made the barefoot journey less than appealing, but the payoff was worth it. The water was ice cold and stung pleasantly at the myriad mosquito bites I had acquired at the wedding (open-toed shoes and a knee-length dress means lunchtime for bugs). We stood in silence for a while and watched some small fish come and dart around our ankles. I splashed some of the water on my arms and face and filled up a tiny pocket of my heart with the experience to draw on later, when I feel like garbage. I also picked up a white piece of something (quartz? marble? I'm a bad junior geologist, guys!) as a souvenir.

When we used to visit Emerald Lake State Park as a family, I (and maybe my brother?) would always want to take home a rock or two from the bottom of the lake. Teacher Dad, a former Boy Scout and adherent to the "leave it better than you found it" ethos, would always make us put them back: "What if everyone took one? There'd be nothing left!" (I totally managed to get one out with me once, still, when I was maybe eight.)

The thought crossed my mind as I washed the grime off the rock and dried it with my shirt: "What if everyone took one?" I'm an adult now, and that means I get to violate Boy Scout prescriptions on nature preservation whenever I want!

Diana had been anticipating watching the eclipse with us (this was the day of the eclipse), but we ended up spending it at Walden instead, which I'm kind of okay with. Spending a significant astronomical event at a site that's personally meaningful is a pretty okay way to spend it, in the end.

Another friend from the wedding, Walter, wanted to meet up in Boston once he knew that's where I was going, but he couldn't make it out in time for Boda Borg, so it ended up being just me, Diana, and Theophanes. This was probably for the best—they say "up to five" in the groups, but anything more than three people would have been cramped, really. It was my and Theophanes's first escape room and I suppose we did OK, although the first room we picked was obnoxious and we couldn't get it. Fortunately, it seemed to be way harder than many of the other rooms, and we still managed to solve a few puzzles and pick up a few stamps.

Before Boda Borg was Vietnamese food and introductions. Afterwards was boba tea and farewells. Theophanes was off to her mother in Rindge, not super far from Boston (certainly closer than the Maine cabin). and I spent the rest of the evening with Diana watching The French Revolution episode of The Supersizers Eat and talking about stuff. I left most of a six-pack of Yuengling (I am trash and love my regional PA trash beer that would be prohibitively expensive and thus pointless to acquire here) and the last of my roadtrip music (Black Masala, Gangstagrass, and I think also Galactic?) in exchange for an autographed stand-up album. Before we hit the hay, I solidified plans with people the next day: lunch with Diana and Walter, then later meeting up with a blogger buddy  before the long flight home.

And like the other Maine parts of my trip, Theophanes also wrote about it. There are a lot more pictures of Walden and some more details about Boda Borg over on her blog.