Up Up and Away

This is me, sitting on a red-eye from Portland, destination Charlotte at...well that's way too complicated a statement at this time. If you go with Portland, it's 2:30 in the morning. If you favor Charlotte as having the final say regarding what time it is, then its 5:30 am. My body doesn't really know what to think. The trip was relatively short, consisting of some 5 days to the west coast, so it goes with a more general message of telling me I'm crazy and that my neck was not created for these failed attempts at sleeping either vertically or hunched over on the tray falling from the back of the seat in front of me.  It's at times like these...be it 2:30 or 5:30 am, as I'm sitting on a red-eye, where I am slightly certain, if one can logically combine that adjective with that noun, that I'm rather dense. Insanity is, after all, repeating an action multiple times and hoping for different results, no? I consistently book red-eyes such as these, ignoring the warning built into the nomenclature, and assume that I am saving myself a day of travel by flying through the night. What I am actually doing is ensuring the fact that the following day will be experienced in a groggy, otherwise unnacceptable state. Lets be honest, flying coach for a deceiving short amount of time (leave at 10:10, arrive at 6 am doesn't seem so bad, no? Except for the fact that if you stay in one time zone, it is either 10:10 pm to 3 am, or 1:10 am to 6:00 am, and any sane individual would tell you that does not constitute a full night) in a vertical state, is not a recipe for success. Yet I am so quick to attempt it time and time again. Oh but to learn from my mistakes! I hold out hope for the future, but not much. That being said, there are some small pleasures that come from traveling through the night, chasing the dawn. One being the comical nature of seeing the large, eastern european man across the aisle from you sitting straight up, leaned forward with his forehead unabashedly pressed against the back of the seat in front of him. At that angle and position, its amazing that drool was not falling from his gaping mouth. There is also the quiet. Once you give up the futile attempts at any sort of restful sleep, there is much to appreciate in a darkened plane brimming with people, yet full of silence, devoid of any movement. There is something so amazing about the silence, at least when you don't have things you are trying to keep your mind from, that is. I had a conversation about this with a friend the other day.In those cases, you avoid the silence at all costs.In a situation where your soul is at peace, however, silence is something that is welcome, and something we don't seek out enough. For me personally, I need times such as these to make sense of all the thoughts which have been whirling around in my head, searching for some form or orientation. I feel that I cannot learn from my experiences if I don't stop to think about them, to analyze them and work through them.   Across the aisle from me, above the head of that large eastern-european, the window remains uncovered, providing a glimpse to the world outside at 40,000 feet. In this instance, the sky is awash with all the colors of the spectrum, from a deep red up to a faded seafoam blue. We are flying above a trampoline layer of fluffy clouds, colored lilac by the rising sun. One can't help but wax poetic at sights such as this. The beauty of it all is breathtaking, and it makes me appreciate the world I live in, and the creator who brought it to be. I was reading on the plane a book by John Lennox, a noted scientist and philosopher among other things, and a current professor of mathematics at Oxford University. In it he quoted Romans 1:20 which says, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible attributes-his eternal power and divine nature-have been understood and observed by what he made, so that people are without excuse." Lennox follows with the argumentation that it was a belief in theism, or an almighty and singular God who created a world of order and traceable laws, which enabled the spur of scientific discovery in the 15- and 1600s of the order of Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, to name just a few. Lennox explains it best when he writes, "At the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly. Without this deep conviction science would not be possible." He then goes on to quote T.F. Torrence who writes, "Theology can still claim to have mothered throughout long centuries the basic beliefs and impulses which have given rise especially to modern empirical science, if only through its unflagging faith in the reliability of God the Creator and in the ultimate intelligibility of his creation." Yes, looking out that window from a machine which jettisons the skies due to its engineering in line with proven scientific laws which are constant, I am, as the Bible says, without excuse.  As I formulate these "deep thoughts" a voice comes across the loudspeaker telling us passengers that we are 80 miles from Charlotte and must now prepare for landing. All electronic devices must be powered off and traytables stowed. I will begrudgingly comply, even if I must shake my head at the usage of "stowing" one's traytable. Really? Stowing? Where am I stowing it away to? The english language has so many great words to choose from, and the airline industry overwhelmingly goes for this one to describe an action which would be much better suited with another verb. Why not "flip your traytables back up to the closed and locked position." That would be both less ridiculous and more considerate to our non-native-english-speaking friends who most definitely did not learn the verb "to stow" in any introductory, and I would go as far to say intermediate, english classes.  ...conclusion? I really need to stop booking these red-eyes. 

Smelling the Roses

I think we all have those family members who are known for having this or that saying they consistently insert at any and all opportunities. One example being "if it ain't broke don't fix it!", "you're getting too big for your britches" or "cold as blue blazes"...well maybe that last one only strikes a cord with me. It is a saying of my Mammaw's, and I still have no idea what it means. (*Mammaw = grandmother for you non-southerners. And to my European friends, no, it is in no way of french origin ;)

Sometimes these little sayings don't really hold any meaning with us. Too often, I'm afraid, they would if we hadn't heard them a half a million times. Why is it that we can become immune to words of wisdom as well? I wish our "immunities," if you will, only applied to things that are proven to harm us, like colds and those metaphorical "words that will never hurt me."

I was talking with my Granny down in Texas recently, catching her up on my travels and just letting her know that I was still alive and well after my trip to China. My granny is one of the most entertaining women you will ever meet. She is a mix of Chicken Little and Annie Get Your Gun. The sky may always be falling on her head and the world may be going to hell in a hand basket, however she is still grateful for all that she has and is as ballsy as they come. And it took her 10 years to become convinced the microwave was not some devil's machine. That tidbit doesn't play into Chicken Little/Annie bit, it just makes her more fantastic and thoroughly entertaining.

My Granny has always repeated this saying "don't forget to stop and smell the roses." Basically, it is trying to tell us not to run through life, missing the beauty that is all around us. We should take time to stop and smell the roses on our way. This job I accepted has pretty much been a sprint-paced marathon. I am changing projects, departments, and locations every 2-4 months, making it a go!go!go! time in my life. That is how I like it, however after a while it can overwhelm me as well.

I was in Portland for a period of 4 months this year, from May through the end of August. I had this conversation with my Granny about 2 weeks before I left Portland to travel back home to NC for a week before heading on to Germany (where I am currently). I really tried to take those words to heart in the little time I had left in the Pacific Northwest. Plus, could it be more apropos that my granny reminds me of this little proverb while I am living in the city of roses? So, here are my roses from a wonderful summer. Even looking now, they still smell great...? Ok, waaay too corny there! Enjoy the pics, folks :)

Panoramic of Crater Lake

Crater Lake...such an amazing sight

Something about sunflowers...

Am I the only one who finds this sign ridiculously ironic?

In the High Desert along the Columbia River separating WA and OR

Anyone know there was a Stonehenge in WA?

Mt. Hood

David visited and we drove up to Seattle

Sunset looking over the landscape from the top of Mt. Hood

Expectations asunder

I recently returned from a business trip to China. It was my first time there, and my first visit to Asia as a whole. It was a fascinating 10 days, and I will likely center my next few posts about some of the things I learned while in this intriguing country.

As an introduction to the topic, however, let me just start off by saying that China was not at all as I expected...even though I can't really say what exactly it was I was expecting either. I think I had envisioned some other world, completely foreign to most anything I had seen or experienced. Yet when I arrived, I found myself to be in an international city. Yes, their were men on bikes riding diagonally across 8-lane intersections on a red-light, with so much piled on the back that you wondered how the poor chap managed to pedal. It is also true that on smothering August' days you could see women walking down the street holding umbrellas, not because it was raining, but rather to block out whatever sunlight managed to get through Beijing's city smog. These and a few other anomalies aside, however, it was not all that shocking. There were more skyscrapers to see than in NYC. You could find cuisine from every corner of the globe, assuming you could figure out how to explain to the taxi-driver where you wanted to go (also assuming that it was not raining, as apparently taxis do not like to drive in the rain due to fear of hydroplaning...we learned this out the hard way after it began pouring our first night out on the town!). Basically, it was a huge, dirty city. Not quite so international as other big cities, however not at all a large step from everything I had experienced before. Maybe that just goes to show that when we expect to find differences, the similarities are what seem surprising. The other way around, when we assume that we know how it should be, should work, should look or should be done, even small disparities stand out.

This point really evidenced itself to me in a simple exercise on my third day in Beijing. The first few days of my trip were spent participating in an intercultural training with other business colleagues. Towards the end of the training, we were instructed to play a card game. I didn't know what the purpose of it was, and to be honest, I wasn't all that concerned about it either. I was still really jet-lagged and, by this point, so tired of sitting in one place that I was happy to have a simple distraction.

We were split up among 5-6 tables, and on each there was a stack of cards and a sheet explaining the rules of the game. We all sat down at a table, read the rules, and played one round. Once we had finished the "practice round," so to say, we were told that from then on, whoever won was to move clockwise and whoever lost was to move counterclockwise. Players whose outcome fell in between winning and losing were just to stay where they were. The instructor said that at the end of a few rounds, we would see who had moved up the most. The final rule was that from then on, no speaking was allowed. With those instructions in mind, my competitive spirit came out and I was ready to go. I knew (so I thought) what the goal was, and I wanted to be the person who got the farthest. Plus, I had won the practice round, so I was feeling pretty confident at this point.

Pride aside, the game was really quite shoddy. It had little to do with ability, much to do with luck, and almost everything to do with who was sitting left of the dealer. I ended up losing the first round and moved down a table. This already served to aggravate me and to make me all the more concentrated on my goal - moving up! I became so focused on what I thought the purpose was, that I lost sensitivity to all other signs.

I sat down at the new table and was delt a fresh hand. We played a few rounds, and then came one draw of the cards where I clearly won. I laid down a King, and the King is the highest card there is. Another girl at the table though, tried to grab the cards. She kept on pointing to a 7, which was the lowest card. We went back and forth a few times, neither one of us giving in, although both still smiling. You could tell that we were definitely getting frustrated behind the grinning facade, however. Finally, we decided to do rock-paper-scissors, and I won the hand. Since we couldn't speak, I couldn't reason with her and let her know why I won. My thought process was pretty much as follows: she either (a) read the very simple rules incorrectly (aka a dimwit), (b) forgot the rules (also a dimwit), (c) thought she could pull one over on me (need I say what I thought of that?) or (d) had been struck by lightning and did not even realize what she was doing anymore (maybe not definitively a dimwit, but still acting like one which is just as frustrating). It never even occurred to me that she had other rules. I guess that clarifies who was actually the idiot in this case.

As was later explained to us, each table had the same rules, except for 1 line of an entire page of text. That 1 line, however, created confusion, aggravation, and chaos. We were not allowed to speak with one another, so we couldn't explain things or ask questions. What this led to was 5-6 tables full of very convicted mimes, each trying to gesture their way into victory. I found it extremely disappointing, however, to find that my first reaction was frustration and the assumption that someone else had read the rules wrong! The confusion led me to conclude someone was at fault, and that it naturally wasn't me.

I think the reaction I had can be traced back to my expectations and focus. Had I gone into the game thinking rules were completely distinct at each table and been purposefully attentive to see how the other tables played, I believe I would have easily picked up on any different rules. Even more so, I would have likely been quite surprised and pleased with how much there was in common. I approached China with a mindset of "I am entering a sino-alien world," and it allowed me to take the differences in stride and be overwhelmed by the similarities. All in all, the card game was a simple, common exercise and also an excellent way to put in perspective my first experience in China.

...don't think that is the only way I'll describe my trip though! Coming up next - culture blog, spotlight China.

Restless T.

Us "CAReers," as we are called, eating out one night sampling the famous Peking Duck

They had many specialties at this particular restaurant...

Favorite spot - Great Wall of China. It was incomprehensible to me. 

The "Why?"

For much of my life, I have had this feeling of needing to flee every so often. Not flee as in to run away from something bad, but as an escape from the routine, that which is known. I guess I would call it an innate restlessness. I was that kid in church whose mom kept on telling them to "sit still and behave yourself!" But this kid was so anxious to be doing something, anything, else that they just fidgeted in their seat until finally the sermon was over. The preacher would end the closing prayer with "And all Gods' people say..." and while the congregation would resound with an "Amen!", I would mumble "finally" and be out the door before anyone could blink an eye. That specific real-life example can be translated generally as a constant trait throughout much of my life. The only difference is how it manifested itself, as the scenery and surroundings have changed quite a bit. 

Now, at the ripe old age of 24, I can look back on the last few years of my life and see this "flee phenomenon" rise up again and again. It has all resulted in a constant change of location, or at least change of daily routine. In the past 3 years I have spent 1 year studying in Germany, traveling much of Europe and completing my bachelors degree, 1 year completing my masters degree (voll Stipendium, Gottseidank!, sonst haette ich das mir nicht leisten koennen), 3 months visiting friends throughout europe, 3 months working as an au pair for a french family in Manhattan, and 6 months working for a German company in international sales splitting that time between the 2 coasts of the US. The next 6 months will see me working on two different continents, europe and south america. After that, it's anybody's guess. I am not sure whether routine scares me, the unknown draws me, or if it is some combination of both. If I were a betting woman, which I am when it's someone else's money, I would put their money on the last option.

Since I have a history of doing, seeing, exploring and experiencing new things, and since I also have the conspicuous ability to forget things that I've previously done, seen, explored and experienced, I thought it advisable to keep a record of some of the highlights. That is what this blog will be. I hope to sketch out new experiences, interesting tidbits, or even just thoughts that I am mulling over at the time. In the case that it proves interesting to anyone else, it is here for others to find. More to come soon,

Restless T.