Somewhere Over the Sun

I turned eighteen on the flight. It was a red eye from Mexico City (MEX) into Heathrow (LHR), next stop Tel-Aviv (TLV). Excited about my upcoming, first-time-on-my-own adventure, I hadn’t slept the night before, and got little sleep on the flight itself. It was 12 p.m before I realized it was my birthday. Well, 12 p.m is a loose term here, because I don’t remember what time zone I was going by. Origin, destination, wherever we were flying over? Is it worth getting used to a time you’re only just passing through? These questions and their philosophical implications only came to me months later, after I’d caught up on sleep.

I landed with a very vaguely drawn map my Dad had provided me with of what to do in London. He’d gone to school there, and so he knew what a ten-hour layover tourist could hope to see. “Oxford Circus,” he’d said, “that’s the underground station to go. Plenty to see.”

So I take the train from the airport into Paddington Station, as per my poorly drawn instructions. I look at a board showing schedules, purchase a ticket to Oxford and get on the train, sleep-deprived but looking forward to exploring London (on my own!). About five minutes into the train ride, I ask myself the following question: “Why do they call it the underground if we’re not really underground?”

I do a quick calculation to figure out how much a nine-pound subway ride would be in dollars. About seventeen. That seems…excessive. As every single one of you even slightly familiar with English geography, or the London underground, or subway rides, or currency exchange have probably figured out already, I was not where I wanted to be. I was headed to Oxford, the city. 

The rest of my time in London was spent as such: getting off at the next stop, getting on a train headed back into actual London, getting on an actual underground train (with the same look on my face as someone who’s stumbled in public and hopes no one has seen him, but knows someone must have noticed the display of clumsiness), getting off at Oxford Circus, and walking around aimlessly. 

I’m happy to report that there was a light rain, so I got a true London experience. I walked for too long trying to find the perfect place to eat. Found a great pizza place, and then, certain that my sleep-exhaustion would lead to further unintentional detours (Sweden, maybe?), I caught an early train back to Heathrow. 

The lesson: sleep is important while traveling. 

I’ll be leaving my computer behind as I attend one of my best friends’ wedding somewhere near Kitchener, Ontario.

I wanted to let you know of the following: the first wave of reader-request postcards is about to be sent out. I’ve truly enjoyed working on them. Peruse my site for details and then message me your request for a city/writing prompt (please note, only one Chicago and one Mexico City postcard remain).

Writing hasn’t been my main focus these last couple of days (it’s fallen behind reading and exploring the very green Baltimore ‘burbs), and I’ve decided to take a break from everything aside from the postcards until I return from the wedding. The second draft of my new book, Bright and Blue, still needs some work, and so does my short story, The Rabbi Sent an E-mail, but I’ll let the need to write build up over the weekend. I’ll have a couple of weeks from my return until I head off to BookExpo America to fine-tune those (and the accompanying query letter for Bright and Blue).

Fiction comes from life, my friend Naomi once wrote to me, go live.

Have a lovely, lovely weekend, dear readers.

It was one of those plane rides that you can feel the faint urge to pee as you slide into the (ugh) middle seat and when the plane lands the ache still isn’t strong enough for you to bother to stop at the first bathroom you see. The cab ride back from the airport is almost as long as the flight.

Tepa, as it’s known, is about a thirty minute drive from the Guadalajara International Airport. Parts of that drive look like parts of Central California, when the hills have dried to yellow. The cows are skinnier here, although I guess it could be said that the happy cows which freckle the gorgeous pastures of Highway 1 are fat.

The town is small in that on-a-first-name-basis smallness that my hails-from-a-town-of-twenty-million will never get used to, although it always brings to mind the word ‘quaint’, which is such a lovable word. Its zocalo looks almost exactly like the town center of Valle de Bravo. There you go, dear reader. A place you’ve never been to and possibly never will looks almost exactly like another place you’ve never been to and possibly never will. There’s an insight to be had here.

I was brought along as baggage handler/trophy son/liaison of travel enjoyment. The business meeting gets momentarily philosophical when my book is mentioned (“You told me what it’s about, but what’s it about?” “Finding beauty in everything”) in between the latest behavior of (what I can’t help but feel is the fictional world of) the stock market and a delicious, authentic Italian lunch. What an authentic Italian lunch is doing in Tepatitlan, Mexico is a question made less and less valid by the growing smallness of our world.

The ice cream is great, there are large birds which are either hawks or eagles or some other creature that wouldn’t survive in the pollution of my hometown. There are beggars and school girls in uniform competing in the Mexican tradition of escoltas, which is pretty much about holding flags and marching and being in uniforms. I am not writing, but I am always writing.

Ah, yes. Road trips. The road. On the road. Many a fine piece of literature/song/art has been produced with thoughts of the open road, inspired merely by the thought of traveling to the unexplored. Even my book, Somewhere Over the Sun, has plenty of road-tripping and traveling going on.

I took a road trip from Las Vegas to San Francisco this weekend to dine with some family in celebration of my great-uncle’s 70th birthday. It was a great weekend, but this post isn’t about my familial pleasures; it’s about the road. Okay, it’s not really about the road. It’s about a few random thoughts, perhaps road-related, that occurred to me on my travels this weekend.

Every night, I check my Google Analytics for this site. For those unfamiliar with the program, it’s a way for me to track how many of you lovely people view my site every day, how long you spend on it, and one of my favorite bits of info: where in the world you are. Every day, I see about 20 to 30 cities listed in my Analytics, some I’ve been to, some I haven’t. Most of these cities are full of people I have absolutely never met.

Being on the road this weekend reminded me about all the lives I am not privy to. All of you, whether you’re first-and-only-time visitors or constant readers, are living lives that, despite my knack for creating stories, I simply have no idea about and can’t accurately imagine. You’re going to parks I’ve never been to and never will, or stopping by the same Barstow coffee shop where my family and I stopped at due to my mother’s Starbucks addiction and my sister’s pea-sized bladder (hey-oh, pun!). Maybe you’re the woman with the perfect collarbones in Barstow. How do you do anything other than keep those collarbones perfect? Your concentration must be wrapped up in them.

The road has a way of putting distances in perspective. Eight and a half hours each way at 75 miles-per-hour covered such a tiny fraction of land, such a tiny fraction of human population, yet it’s so much more than previous generations could have conceived to travel. Power lines in the middle of nowhere; instantly accessed information on the internet; internet; the ability to be constantly in contact with anyone. Life’s changed, and traveling puts that in perspective.

Speaking of life and poor transitions, I was hit by a lovely realization while recently helping a few friends through less-than-stellar times. You know how we all have a bad dozen photographs floating around untagged on Facebook? Even gorgeous people have been snapped in an unattractive sneer. They live their lives being generally beautiful, sometimes making ugly faces that go unnoticed until a camera records evidence of their moments of imperfection. Life’s a lot like that. Every now and then, we look at life and see ugliness. It doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful, it’s just as prone to being un-photogenic as the rest of us.