abu dhabi

The oddest thing about these trips is how much life goes on no matter how exotic your location or experiences are. While I feel like I’m in suspended animation here in an Arabian Disneyland, my timeshifted friends and family back home are living their lives. Or not.

I was very saddened to hear of the death of Anita Rowland. She was one of the first bloggers I ever met and was one of the small group of folks who was at the first Seattle Blogger Meetup back in February 2000. We’ve been in touch on and off over the years and I think we both delighted at all the funny bloggy things that have happened in the seven and a half years since. I’ll miss her.

I also got bad news about my mom’s health situation last night that I don’t feel like going into more now. Things that we thought were better are not better and we’re back in the “more tests” phase. Send my Mom your good wishes if you know her or even if you don’t. That news, compounded by the thought of almost a day of travel alone to dwell on it, has really sunk any more “wow, vacation!” things I might be thinking and writing. Everyone makes difficult choices; my love of near-constant travel means that there’s not really a good time to get news like this to me. Still, I wish they could have waited. Pictures continue, but for all intents and purposes my trip is over. I’ll write from snowy Vermont.

dubai, day five

So I’ve been here about five days. The first two, which included the conference, were a blur of librarians and jet lag. The third day was a mass of paperwork and mall walking and yesterday was a noodle around town day. Step, the friend I am staying with, is going to Abu Dhabi to teach a few classes for the local digital preservation initiative (oooh metadata) and I will be tagging along. We leave in a few hours and I’m looking forward to the car ride even though traffic here is a really different animal from the no-traffic back home.

I’ve been enjoying myself, despite tiredness and weather adjustment and weird internet foibles. My talk and workshops went really well and you can read about some of the odd synchronicities I’ve experiences over at librarian.net. In a nutshell, when you’re in a place like this with a large number of expats and people who travel around, don’t be surprised if they know you from … somewhere. At a conference of 100 people, I met two people from Vermont, two people who had seen me speak before and one person who I’d served on a five person committee with four years ago. Oneof the women from Vermont actually had my home phone number in her address book because she knew Ola. I’m used to the small world phenomenon but this was pretty impressive even to me.

I wonder sometimes when I travel if the food situation in Vermont won’t be the thing that ultimately causes me to be one of those people with a summer home there and a tiny apartment in some big city somewhere. I’ve eaten food from a different nationality — Iranian, Lebanese, Indian, pseudo-Mexican — at pretty much every meal. It’s great to get to eat so much hummus that you’re not just like “Mmmmm hummus” but where you can actually explore and appreciate the variety of tastes in the different kinds of hummus. All this and I still can have coffee and a bowl of cereal for breakfast and be in the pool as many days as I want to be.

Yesterday I headed into the city with a backpack and no destination other than the public library. The library system here is, like many things here, relatively young. The cab driver didn’t know where it was and there is no big central library. While Zayed University has a really lovely library, the local public facility was small and seemingly underutilized. I walked around taking photos which I am slowly uploading to Flickr for or five at a time. And then I just walked. I had a guide book in my bag and an email from my friend with some good advice but I just ambled around lookin at things. I had some great meals, ate bizarre candy, went to the museum, took an underpass that actually went beneath the canal, took the water taxi back across the canal, went into a bazillion little shops seling all manner of things.

I was, for the most part, almost the only solo female under the age of 60 that I saw all day. I don’t mean just traveller/tourist, I mean female person. It was totally disorienting to be walking up and down completely full streets of people and suddenly thinking “Wow, I haven’t seen another woman in 10-15 minutes”. I vaguely remember Turkey being like this as well. However, unlike Turkey where I didn’t get out of the big downtown Western area much I was out and about walking for hours and it was always somewhat the same. This wasn’t any sort of problem — no one gave me a hard time, no one seemed to much care — it was just a constant vague awareness.

Last night we just sat around on the couches here at Step’s place and ordered food in and watched Syriana which was filmed partly here. Since I’ve been here I’ve been asking Step a million questions “what about the nomads?” “how do the royal families interact with everyone else” “what can you tell about a person by how they’re dressed?” and the movie I think makes a new sort of sense to me than it would have if I had seen it five days ago.

totally different stars

My friend Colin Lingle read a story at one of my open mic parties which were semi-regular occurences when I lived in Seattle. I liked it so much I asked him if I could put the story online and he said yes. The title of this post comes from it, the story is called The First Thing. I think the sentiments he expresses are very familiar.

So I’m in Dubai and it’s wonderful and pretty foreign feeling. I took a very crowded flight here which was full of mostly non-Americans and was a little too tightly packed to read all the Wikipedia articles I’d saved about the place. I still haven’t read them. I watched a lot of Doctor Who and the Simpsons movie. When I lived in Romania I remembered visiting Turkey and getting off the train in Istanbul after a long and crowded trip and being amazed that the place smelled like food and … something … instead of garbage and sewage. Dubai smells like flowers and grilled meats and heady incense and someplace else. I type backwards into the Google box. A few sites I like to visit are blocked entirely. The call to prayer wakes me vaguely at 5 am and I’m not sure why I’m awake.

Today is my big talk and the workshops I’m leading, so I’ll feel a lot more settled once they’re behind me and not looming and I’ll be sure to let you know how they are. To work off a little extra nervous energy I went swimming last night in the next door pool. I don’t think I’ve ever been swimming outdoors in a pool at night before (ponds and lakes, sure, but it’s weirdly different doing lap swimming much less wearing a hot pink bathing suit outside in a Muslim country) and, like most other experiences here — besides my morning coffee which I’m enjoying as I type this — it was familiar and yet totally different.

away

snowflakes

So as of tomorrow evening I’ll be on my way to Dubai for ten days including about a day of not-so-bad travel each way. We just got about a foot of snow yesterday. I like snow, a lot. However, the beginning of the end of surefootedness on the ground I walk on takes me by surprise every year. This way, I can come back to the icy wavy wobbly ground expecting it. I went to the post office yesterday while it was still snowing and had to walk in the middle of the road since the sidewalks weren’t plowed yet. There wasn’t much traffic but when there was I had to leap for the side of the road into a dune of snow and salt. It was worth it, the post office is always worth it. The weather in Dubai looks like it will be fun for a visit, not so great to live there.

I’m giving a keynote talk at a library conference, sitting in for a Q&A session and then leading a few workshops on blogs and wikis and how they work. Then I have about a week of screwing around. My pal Step is there and she’ll take me a few places and I’m sure there are places I’ll see on my own. I want to see a greater flamingo. I’d like to walk around on a sand dune that I don’t have to tread lightly on for fear of erosion. I want to sit on a new beach and talk to new people.

As I’ve told people where I’ve been going and why, the responses have been interesting. There’s the normal amount of “Go you!” and “I’m jealous.” [to which my reply is always “Just go then. Once the money is in line all the rest is sorting priorities.”] and then there’s the weird “OMG are you going to have to wear a VEIL” jokes. It’s true that many women there wear full body coverings as you can see when you look at the library website. However, Dubai is fairly Westernized and people visiting can wear pretty much whatever they want with the caveat, as my friend let me know, that more revealing clothing will attract unwanted attention of the “I’m going to treat you like a slut/prostitute” variety or just feelings that you’re not being respectful. I guess to people for whom this is an eternal abstraction — men, people who don’t travel when not in the company of men, people who don’t travel — this may seem amusing or strange or worthy of ridicule.

For me, it’s just a little scary to remember that while I feel totally okay generally doing whatever the hell I want here in the States, that may not fly elsewhere. And it won’t fly because I’m female. And, more to the point, I won’t know until I get there. Exciting, sort of.

chemistry

All I can think about when I watch the sun set at 3:30 and a chill stillness descends almost immediately over everything, is chemistry. I remember, vaguely, learning about particles and how they speed up when something gets hotter and slow down when it gets colder. To the point that they get so slow they practically solidify, or so hot they turn into gas. I got a D one semester in chemistry class. I understood everything, but about a week too late. I rescued my grade by making a cake with my friend Lauren (later valedictorian) with the chemical makeup of every damned thing in the cake written in icing on the top. So you see, I have always been like this.

Anyhow, my point is that I think my movements around this place bear a striking resemblance to what thay’d be like if I were a single particle. Here is my illustration. The pink line is me, through the seasons. You can click through to Flickr for more commentary. I have also always had a fondness for Bil Keane.

winter	spring
summer	autumn

storm-non-storm

What an odd set of days. Men with snowpants. An extra-day houseguest because of weather. Wifi lifeguarding. And a Thanksgiving that was truly memorable. Usually I’m happy to see family or friends and eat some food and not be working and reflect on the weird US holiday and the many origin stories it has. This time around something clicked more.

It was my Dad’s birthday. I discussed this odd birthday thing we have in my family on my site about nine years ago. In looking that up, I found that I was already concerned about superstardom, even then. “I have very real fears about becoming a net celebrity despite myself.” I had forgotten saying that.

I slept til 10 Thursday, got up played a few moves in some online Scrabble games and and called my Dad and had a nice long convo with him. Got dressed, fed birds, and headed to Forrest and Kelly’s house with my candied and spiced nuts beating Kelly’s mom and sister and her boyfriend by a little bit. We ate and drank and I got to get to know some of Kelly’s family. The older I get, the less I get the occasion to meet friends’ parents or siblings since our paths don’t cross like that except at weddings. This is of course more the case in rural noplace. I liked meeting everyone and I think I was a decent buffer to make the evening not All Family All The Time. I called my sister who was at my Mom’s house and talked to both of them and they had had a nice day. Kelly’s family left and we all hunkered down and did dishes and debriefed. Then we did some laptopping and I Skyped in to talk to some MetaFilter folks who were having a meetup/dinner in Portland Oregon. Everyone passed around the headset to talk to me and I showed them dumb videos of the exhausted pets and Forrest’s back.

I headed back to my house over non-icy roads and got in bed and chatted with Matt and Josh who I work with over at MetaFilter about some issues that had been cropping up all week on the site and really needed some attention. The holidays seem to bring out the best or the worst in people and MeFi has a lot of both kinds. We hammered out a practical solution to some things that had been vexing us and I was pleased to see before I went to sleep that our ideas had been mostly well-received. I chatted with my friend Sharyn who had a decent time with her family and we had a nice little “aren’t we doing well lately?” discussion. We both really felt that we had nailed Thanksgiving in a way we hadn’t before.

I’m not sure exactly what did it, or maybe it was just what didn’t happen. As I was getting ready for bed, putting on my pjs and crawling under 50 pounds of blankets in the giant quiet empty house I felt well-connected to all sorts of people all over the place. I had this real sense of feeling effective and pretty much in love with everyone which, if you know me, is not something I feel or say lightly. I stood on the porch and heard water melting off the house, or maybe it was freezing rain falling from the sky. I knew I was going to spend Friday like I usually do, in quiet reflection thinking about my plans for next year and, of course, Buying Nothing.

I’m wrapping up the day today with a bath and recording some banjo mandolin “music” and learning to use GarageBand. Tomorrow I have Big Plans with Big Books and maybe a turkey sandwich. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I hope yours was the way you wanted it.

represent

A very busy week is wrapping up here. A very busy week is starting tomorrow. Today is a missing empty day between them.

Last week I went to Providence to give a talk that I briefly mention on librarian.net. It was about agitprop which is a topic that I always assume people know about, but apparently they don’t. It’s just a shortening of agitation/propoganda, the trick being that you need to both explain your good ideas but then urge people towards them. It was of some use during the Communist Era and activists often use it as a tactic. So, this talk that I gave to a bunch of librarians and information scientists talked about my activist background and the idea of getting people to do the things that you think are a good idea. In this case, I meant using new technologies (where “new” still means stuff like email, lord help us all) as well as changing things in a traditional culture generally. I even got to talk about William James and his “genuine option” idea which is one of my favorite hobby horses. It was one of the most heartfelt talks I’ve given in a while because I didn’t have to pretend that I wasn’t some sort of anarchist, or that I don’t really have an issue with the corporatization of librarianship. I got to talk about the danger of palliative technologies that stultify us and make us soft in the face of decreasing social liberties and increasing government nonsense. I was happy with it.

Then I drove home on Thursday in a rainstorm to greet the skiiers that were staying at my place. I belong to a few “hey come stay at my place” websites, most notably Couchsurfing.com and HospitalityClub.org. People rarely take me up on it, but I feel that regular deposits into the Cosmic Karma Bank keep my good luck flowing. So, I got home and was unpacking when my incoming guest called and said he’d be in around 2 am, not 11 pm as he had earlier hoped. I was exhausted and barely awake as it was so I left some lights on, left a note taped on the door with information on where the guestrooms were, and went to sleep. I woke up briefly in the middle of the night hearing footsteps and then woke up in the morning to young men in snowpants wandering around cooking and packing on their way to Killington. They were nice guests who mostly did their own thing and I did mine. They were gone this morning before I fully got out of bed.

I only mention this in detail because I feel like I get inundated with oogy boogy talk concerning just how much risk there is in the world nowadays. My bank tries to make me afraid of identity theft, my insurance company tries to make me afraid of fires and floods. My students’ computers try to make them afraid of their computers being “at risk” when what they are really dealing with is more of a Norton Protection Racket than anything else. There is risk in taking a shower, risk in eating seafood, risk in leaving your car unlocked, and risk in talking to strangers. We hear about these risks all the time, seemingly constantly. But there are also rewards too: being clean, eating tasty food, ease of access and the fact that real people are more interesting than abstract free-floating anxieties. I just figure every so often someone should tell the good stories.