status update

Today, my beloved Fitbit app told me that I have walked a total of 1,600 miles since first donning the tracker a year and a half ago - the equivalent of the length of the Great Barrier Reef. I for one am just grateful that we in this world have the technology and the means to aggregate such ridiculous data for people. I mean, think about it: I put on a rubber bracelet, go about my business, and then months later I get a notification from the tiny computer in my pocket that I've covered a distance equal to one of the natural world wonders. It's a technological amazement. You know what else is a delightful advancement? The internet. It's full of weird and magical and sometimes even informative things, and in case you've had enough awful news this month (I know I have), here are some things that aren't so awful and that may brighten your day. Be well ;)

- Sweet (home) Chicago accent
- Be more Hemmingway
- Aziz for the win 
- Claire and I made this last week and it was delish
- This one hit close to home
- Are you confused as I am about this whole Pokemon thing? Rolling Stone explains it all
- Life hacks of the poor and aimless
- The most delightful piece of mail I've ever received

book report #9

*Love With a Chance of Drowning (Torre DeRoche) - a fun and entertaining memoir about a woman who overcame her fear of water (hence the title) and embarked on a three-year sailing adventure from LA to Australia and beyond. I'm not normally a fan of memoirs but I am a fan of boats and love stories, and the humorous and familiar tone DeRoche took to tell her story kept me engaged instead of at arm's length. While I doubt I'll sell all my possessions to live full-time on an 18-foot boat, this book almost made me want to take sailing lessons and definitely made me want to jump on the next flight to French Polynesia.

*Undermajordomo Minor (Patrick DeWitt) - this one was strange and not in a good way. I never quite figured out if it was a fairy tale, allegory, magical realism, or some other type of literally genre I never learned about in college. Amazon reviews call it "delightful, wacky, quirky, and charming" but I just thought it was weird. Not my cup of tea.

*Wild By Nature (Sarah Marquis) - honestly, this book eventually pissed me off so much that I stopped reading it about 75 pages from the end. It started off with promise - independent female explorer sets off to walk the length of entire countries - Mongolia, China, Thailand - on her way to Australia. After some obvious setbacks (weather, equipment failure, more weather, a tooth extraction) her trek totaled nearly three years in time, and this book is her memoir about the walk. But at no point did she ever say why she was obsessively walking. Was she running from something? To something? To discover something? To learn something? And even though she had helpers and fixers throughout her journey (she was given a contact person in each country and boxes of supplies at each stopping point) she never justified how she could simply take three years out of her life to walk. I guess it was a sponsored trip? Even if it was, she wrote with such a jarringly jib tone throughout (oops! almost died again lol) that it was entirely off-putting. I had high hopes for this one and it sadly did not come through.

*A Book of Silence (Sara Maitland) - I've obviously had female-adventurer memoirs on the brain this year, and this one was interesting and informative, if not a little too heavy on the dry research. Regardless, it was an interesting concept - a post-marriage woman in her 50's goes in search of silence - but what is it, exactly? And what does prolonged silence do to a person? I most enjoyed when Maitland got personal and reflected on her own silent discoveries as opposed to the more scholarly sections, but even so, this book got me thinking about my own auditory experiences, including but not limited to the ironic fact that I read the majority of this book on the subway, a notably loud method of transport that leaves little room for silent introspection.

*The Nest (Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney) - an all-around wonderful novel. A smart, funny, and captivating story that was a welcome blend of epic family saga and modern relevance. The characters were beautifully flawed but entirely relatable and the plot was so enticing that I actually woke up early one morning to finish reading it before heading out for the day. I'd been in a bizarre literary rut for the past few months (see above) and this was the perfect story to get me back into the reading game.

*We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Karen Joy Fowler) - part mystery (but not really), part anthropological study (but not really), part memoir (but not really) and part tell-all (but not really), this beautifully bizarre work of fiction is narrated by a woman who was raised alongside a chimpanzee back when these kinds of things were still kosher in the scientific world. Needless to say, her upbringing screwed her up in all kinds of ways, and even though I tend to stray from the "I had a terrible childhood" kind of stories, this one was just enticing enough to keep me reading and get me thinking about what exactly determines the difference between humans and animals.

Cabo San Lucas

On nearly every vacation, trip or excursion I've ever taken, I am the one that plans things out. I'm the one with the map, the guidebook, the train schedule, and the annotated to-do list. It's me who carries around the giant purse laden with extra tissues, band-aids, a water bottle, two cameras, a charger, Advil, and an extra map just in case that first one flies away. I can't help this Type-A preparedness of mine. I blame it on being a Girl Scout, but it's also partly because the one with the map is the one in control (or so I tell myself).

In preparation for a work trip to Mexico last May, I did much less than my usual obsessive level of pre-departure research. Outside of flipping through one brochure I picked up at last year's NYT Travel Show, I didn't read up on the best restaurants or the must-see attractions, and I didn't endlessly scroll through Instagram trying to plan out photo ops before I even got there. A business trip is entirely different than a for-pleasure vacation, and I was to be at the ready at all times to attend to my boss' and the client's needs. Sight-seeing was not on the schedule. I simply got on a plane, sped through the airport in Mexico City in an attempt to make my connecting flight (spoiler alert: I did, but barely), and followed a vaguely-worded email to find a guy named Mush who would drive me in a sketchy white van through the backroads of the Baja Peninsula to a hotel on the ocean.

From there, I followed an equally vague daily schedule that gave me and the other production assistant ample time to wander the gardens of a renowned organic farm. We contemplated the origin of tropical fruits and vegetables (omigod mangoes grow on trees!), picked up random Spanish vocab words (muneca = doll; mantel = tablecloth), watched our lunch get cooked over a giant open roasting pit, and ate some of the best crew meals we've ever tasted. But our hours were long - early morning to well after sun down each day, and after working ten hours under the hot Mexican sun the only thing I wanted to do each night was shower and collapse into bed.

The event went extremely well. The client was pleased, my bosses were pleased, and I executed my task of monitoring a dozen mini-projectors way more smoothly than I did the previous month at a similar event in Hawaii. But there was still no down time. We needed to be back at the farm by 6am the morning after the event in order to load up the trucks and shut down our production tent and watch the empty truck get stuck coming up the dirt road and wait for a machine to come to clear the road so the truck could get unstuck and then finally for reals load up the truck and say our goodbyes and have one last delicious meal at the most captivating farm-to-table restaurant I've ever had the pleasure of patronizing.

It was around 1pm when we made it back to our hotel. We were officially off the clock and the rest of the evening was our to do as we pleased. I looked at two of my coworkers. "Should we see the arches?" I asked. "What are those?" they asked. "They're these natural stone formation in the ocean. I saw a picture. They looked cool." I said. "Sure." They said. "We can take the rental car." said David.


After a quick nap, the three of us were on our way to the end of the Baja Peninsula, or as the locals tourists call it, Land's End. But we still didn't have a plan. We weren't really sure where exactly these arches were or how to see them, but we were at least heading in the right direction (south). After a couple wrong turns down trashy and spring-break-bar laden Cabo streets, we found a parking lot with open spots. As soon as we got out of the car, a man approached us. "Want to see El Arco?" he asked. "Si!" we replied. "The boat leaves in two minutes! We must hurry!" he said.

I soon found myself once again following a strange man into a sketchy vehicle, although this one was accompanied by a $15 "boat fee" and a separate $1 "dock fee." We were granted permission to board the water taxi and immediately set sail for the choppy waters of the Cabo San Lucas Marina.

It was an utterly delightful ride. We somehow timed it out so that we were on the boat at golden hour, which is really the best time to do or see anything. The captain didn't speak any English, and when I asked him what caused the arch to form (earthquake? tetonic plate shift? global warming?) he gave a giant grin, pointed at a giant seal sunbathing on a rock and said "Si! Sello!!" and then arched his neck back and let out a eerily accurate seal bark. Our seal friend threw us a sideways glance and responded with an annoyed "arf."

45 minutes later and we were back on dry land. Then a walk around the marina, some nachos and guac, a giant margarita, and a Yelp consultation that led us to an Asian-fusion restaurant for wine and ceviche and ramen and coulis-covered sherbet. An evening full of good food and wonderful company fueled entirely by uncharacteristically spur-of-the-moment decisions. While I am in no way going to stop planning and researching and measuring distances between sights in anticipation of upcoming vacations, my evening in Cabo reminded me that spontaneity is a virtue worth having. Sometimes the unplanned moments make for the best adventures.