For Tea to Turn You Into Rip Van Winkle, Steep Me In Hot Water

Wrenching me out of sleep these days requires a seven-foot goblin stumping into the room and setting the bed on fire. Even then I'd just blearily open one eye, ask if the goblin wanted to cuddle and, when he glared at me in disdain, roll over and fall back asleep. I'm tired, is what I'm saying. Ever since I got back from Amsterdam I've been climbing into bed at 8:30 and passing out like I'd just tossed back a horse tranquilizer with a shot of rum and a dash of chamomile. My champion sleeper status has been cruelly stunted by age. Add that to jetlag and a lot of late nights before I left Holland and I'm more than happy to sign over the majority of my evening to snoring.

After all the moving around I've done this summer - Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Costa Rica, San Francisco, Portland, Amsterdam - I would be perfectly happy never to move again. So, naturally, I flew home last Wednesday and turned around on Thursday morning and climbed into a car to drive six hours into California's gold country for my cousin's wedding. Because that's the way the world works. It was three days of family, pools, rope swings, emus and serve-yourself bars. I woke up from my naps in the hammock to let my brother pour me a whisky and ginger and then wandered across the grass to feed the emu. It was quite a party. Especially for the emu.

Emu not shown.

I've been sleeping and detoxing from all the European cheese and bread and beer and my brain is fuzzy and I've been avoiding blogging because blogging when your brain doesn't work is an exercise in mediocrity. BUT SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO DIVE INTO MEDIOCRITY AND LOVE IT.

HI, MEDIOCRITY! WE MEET AGAIN. You look pretty today. Are you using a new shampoo?

For my next adventure, I'm going to New York for a month in the fall. I'll be working, visiting friends, wandering the streets, and generally reacquainting myself with one of my favorite cities. For now, I'm embracing California and friends and as much sleep as humanly possible before the goblin lights another match.

At Least Now I Know The Dutch Word For Chicken

Figuring out which soup is chicken in a Dutch supermarket when you're feverish is a daunting task. I could have asked someone, but simply forcing one foot to step in front of the other in a vaguely normal fashion felt like summiting Kilimanjaro without a sherpa or even a water bottle. Conquering my squeamish belief that it's rude to walk up to someone in a foreign country and assume they speak my language was really too much to ask on the day that the insides of my stomach made an abrupt and brutal reappearance. I insist on being a pansy about this, even though everyone in Amsterdam does speak my language - even the yoga classes are conducted half in Dutch, half in English. I should probably just get over myself. But conquering deeply entrenched beliefs and getting over oneself are definitely too much to ask when the only thing between you and what feels like death is a mug of chicken soup. All of this to say, would a convincing graphic of a plump and obvious chicken be too much to ask, Dutch soup makers?

NMmF_iEtBd

Panda by Brian Andreas. Because he does things like that.

Traveling by yourself to random countries for months at a time can get lonely. I'm pretty good at being alone. I'm even reasonably good at being lonely. But at some point, being good at something stops being a good reason to do it. So you start dating instead.

There was the Italian man who wore his hat through dinner. There was the man who somehow found me on a random bridge after I'd manage to miss the very obvious landmark at which we were supposed to meet. Two days in a row. I missed it twice. Despite having been there many times before. My brain is missing the GPS component that comes standard in most models.

But the true winner in my own personal Dating Olympics was the guy who went to the police station with me instead of to the museum. Because my purse had been stolen on my way to meet him. HI. I JUST MET YOU. HELP ME FIGURE OUT ALL MY SHIT.

When we got to the police station - after I almost started crying into the iPad he very nicely let me use to skype the credit card companies, credit card companies that really really do not want to send replacement cards to the Netherlands - we learned that the efficient and genial Dutch cops had already nabbed the guy. They returned a very strange selection of items - my credit cards and my makeup and my umbrella. But not my purse or my sweater or the keys to my bike lock. But they were very apologetic about making us wait a whole fifteen minutes and told us about how they found the thief sitting in bushes (really) and so the cops crept around the building and hopped out from behind it to wave a cheery five fingered hello before tackling the guy.

If you have to sit in a police station and give a police report, you may as well do it in Amsterdam. Thanks for getting my debit card and my lip gloss back, guys.

On our second date, we did that whole nice dinner, night stroll along the Amsterdam canals thing. This would have been the best date in the world, were I not starting to feel queasy. I thought I was just low energy, maybe an adrenaline let-down from the whole purse thing. It wasn't until I was pedaling home like a 93-year-old grandmother instead of zipping around as many Dutch people on cell phones as possible that I realized I'd contracted the flu. Stopping on the side of the road and reintroducing myself to my lamb entree confirmed it.

First date, purse gone. Second date, flu. Third date...accidental arson? Horsemen of the apocalypse? Dinner theater?

Life Seen From a Bicycle

July in Amsterdam is remarkably similar to July in San Francisco. Gray and drizzly for a week and then the sun comes out one afternoon and everyone goes insane. Parks are clogged and any chair sitting on a sidewalk or along a canal is occupied by someone lifting their face to the sky and looking pleased with life. My apartment for the month comes equipped with a balcony, naughty felines (ask me how many times I've walked into the kitchen to discover a certain cat licking the butter) (TOO MANY TIMES IS HOW MANY), and a bicycle. The bicycle is tall and black and slightly rusty - it looks like something from the Sears Roebuck catalog, circa 1954 - and when I climb on, my posture is forced into corseted Edwardian perfection. When I ride it, I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West in her Kansas incarnation. This pleases me.

Since the sun was out yesterday and I feel slightly more sure of my ability to find the apartment again after I leave it, I cycled into the center of the city to sit along a canal and eat fries. Being a total cliche also pleases me.

My first time on a bike in Amsterdam was petrifying. I was compelled to climb on it after a week of procrastination because I was meeting someone in the center of the city and my bus card was out of money and the only place to refill it was closed on Sunday. Already late, I gamely hopped on. After pedaling an entire two blocks without dying, I started to enjoy myself. Not just because everything was all Dutch and sunny and picturesque, but because I was paying attention to all that bright, pretty Dutchness.

How often do you really pay attention in your every day life? It's so easy to go on automatic when you know where you're going and what you're going to do when you get there and understand all the rules of the system in which you're operating.

I had no idea what I was doing on a bike in Amsterdam. Yes, I know how to ride a bike and I had a city map in my bag, but I didn't know the streets or the road rules or the language, something that might prove handy if someone needed to yell, say, "WATCH OUT FOR THE BUS!" at me. So I went into hyper focus mode. And realized that a lot of life passes me by when I'm not truly paying attention to what's right in front of me.

Cycling past Centraal Station on my way home was oddly calming. My brain is usually concentrated on seventeen different things and at least thirteen of them are worries. Six consistent worries, four variable worries, and three new worries I've invented just for the occasion. But as I pedaled past the train station in the great salmon stream of Dutch cyclists, dodging taxis and tourists and the occasional rogue fish, all my worries and thoughts disappeared into a soundless tunnel and my brain filled instead with "Oh shit, oh shit, oh god, here we go, I'm going to die, we're all going to die, MOTHER OF GOD, WHO DECIDED THIS WAS LEGAL?"

Then I passed the station, filled my lungs with air, and concentrated on finding the giant windmill that points my way home. No, that wasn't a lazy Dutch metaphor. There really is a giant windmill in my neighborhood. The windmill serves beer.

I'd like to say that I'm going to take my first Dutch cycling experience and use it to stop regularly tuning out the world by sticking my headphones in my ears and watching the pictures in my head rather than the road in front of me, but that's absolutely not going to happen. Instead, I'll simply try to notice when my attention is focused entirely on what I'm doing. Because that is peace - and even grace. Something I never thought I'd find on a bike in Amsterdam. Certainly not when I misjudged an angle and almost barreled over an elderly man from Bristol. Sorry, dude. Enjoy your stay.

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Given my totally justified fear of bicycle-related death, taking this picture was probably a dumb idea.

How I Accidentally Ended Up in Amsterdam

If you're wondering about the likelihood of ending up in Amsterdam by accident, let me say that if it was possible to take a wrong turn somewhere in Northern California and end up in the Netherlands, I would've done it. I wasn't planning to go to Amsterdam. Yet here I am. Because life enjoys veering seven degrees to the left and often the thing you didn't plan turns out much better than anything you would've planned and that's saying something because you consider yourself a rather impeccable planner, even though it sounds suspiciously like boasting when typed out like this. YES, I'M A TOTAL BRAGGART. IT'S FINE.

Before I left for Costa Rica, I mentioned Amsterdam in a post. Because it was the first city that occurred to me when I needed a random location to end a sentence. Ten minutes later, I got an email from Nicolien saying that she had an apartment in Amsterdam and she was going to Serbia for a month and would I like to come to Holland and watch her cats while she was gone? WHY, YES. YES, I WOULD LIKE TO LIVE IN YOUR AMSTERDAM APARTMENT WITH YOUR CATS.

If you've ever wondered if a blog can wield some serious juju, let me assure you that it can. Make a joke about Amsterdam, end up living there for a month. I think we should all try to maximize whatever wordpress magic lives here. Ahem.

I WOULD LIKE AN APARTMENT IN NEW YORK THIS FALL, TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS, AND A STUFFED PANDA. I MEAN, A REAL PANDA WOULD BE AWESOME BUT I BET THOSE THINGS EAT A LOT AND FEEDING BAMBOO TO A GIANT BEAR EVERY DAY SOUNDS LIKE A HASSLE.

Now it's your turn! What would you like the blog genie to bring you? Leave it in the comments. May I suggest using the caps lock key? Everything works better in caps lock.

(I'll keep you posted on whether or not the universe coughs up any pandas or New York apartments.)

So I'm in Amsterdam for a month, staying in a lovely little apartment with two cats.

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Amstercat

My first full day here, Nicolien and her husband took me around the city. We walked past canals and wolfed down a huge pot of cheese fondue and I drank more beer in a day than I've had in the past year. It's a beautiful city, especially in the rare July sun. Every so often, we'd pass a building that pitched forward, as if it was straining to catch up with time. But they never fall, the houses just hover a few feet in front of their neighbors, like they can't wait to find out what's next. I know how they feel.

I'm Not Even Sure What I'm Writing Right Now

Being nomadic means most people start conversations by asking where you are or where you've just been. Being nomadic for longer than six weeks means you probably can't answer them correctly on the first try. Especially when you run into someone on the street in San Francisco, someone you'd only expect to see in LA and suddenly you're not sure what year it is, let alone what city you're in. Then you almost get stuck in an unlocked bathroom because the workings of doorknobs have ceased making sense. This is when you start to wonder if the life of an exhausted nomad is for you. I've been moving around a lot, is what I'm saying. I got home from Costa Rica last week. Where home is the Bay Area because my mom is nice about letting her 30-something daughter use her house as storage for her extra clothes. I went straight to a wedding where Carl the Balloon Donkey led the conga line and the bride went crowd surfing. Now I'm in San Francisco before I leave again on Thursday. I'm legitimately concerned that I'll accidentally try to pack for a month in Amsterdam when I'm really going to Portland for a weekend.

My family has been remarkably genial about shuttling me back and forth to the airport. There's something comforting about bookending month-long stays in a foreign country with family members. Especially because they're biologically required to love you even when you're jet-lagged and cranky.

There Should Probably Be a Segue Here. There's Not.

Yesterday, Bob and I launched one of my favorite pet projects, Random Love Punches. I'm staying with Becca for a few days and when I showed her the site, she said, "I like it, but I want the mean version." In two hours, we had its evil twin up and running and I'm pretty sure I like it better than the original for sheer clicking entertainment.

As exhausted and confused as I've let myself become, I'm loving this homeless thing. I love testing new beds and seeing random airports, some of which should not be called airports so much as cement benches alarmingly close to a runway with one plane that looks less flight-worthy than a 1992 Chevrolet minivan. I love being in different places and doing and creating fun things on the fly. I love eating fried cheese and fried plantains and wondering how my laptop got so filthy.

In the midst of trying to track where I am and where I'm going and when I'm going to carve out enough time to work, I don't want to lose sight of the fact that this is exactly the life I wanted for myself. I'm living it. So I'm trying to remind myself daily to stop and look around. To enjoy it, instead of constantly looking toward the next thing.

It's sunny in San Francisco today. Searching for my third cup of coffee this morning, I remembered how charmed I am by this city. My last day in Costa Rica, I went out to dinner with some friends and we ordered fish and watched the sun set over the ocean. I sat in the audience at the wedding of one of my favorite couples, listening to their vows and thinking, That's the kind of relationship I want one day. I ended up on a friend's couch at exactly the right time for her to have a genius idea that we were perfectly prepared to implement so that the love punches could go all Gretchen Weiners on the internet's ass. Today, we're going to a museum and tomorrow there will be margaritas and fireworks.

So many good things are happening every day and there are so many good things to look forward to. Dear self: Savor it.