Last night I had a wonderful Thai dinner with A. from work, who is a smart, funny, interesting woman and one of the best things about my job — when I actually get to be there. When I first met A. I was struck by her incredibly good posture while sitting (Ramrod straight! All the time!) and her apparently unflappable poise and air of professional calm. I wondered if I’d ever get to know her, ever break through that clear, intelligent gaze. I was pretty sure she’d be a cool cat once I figured her out, but was it ever going to happen? Were we ever going to be friends?

Yup. We were. And so, in honor of her back, I say yo, Asher? Hey, Asher! I know you understand every word your Ah Yee says: Sit up straight if you’re gonna be at a computer, boy. When you are older it will make you look really impressive.

I cannot get over how grown up he is.

P.S. My mother is going on a trip to Hongkong with two of her sisters on Monday! They’ve never done this before! I am so proud. I hope they have a blast and take a million silly photographs. Hmmm. Maybe I should try to Fed-Ex them some paper crowns before they leave?

Maybe it’s because I’m up early, but the world looks like a riot of color today.

Last night a casual conversation between me and Ross took an unexpected turn, and ended in a decision that will broadly affect the next two years of my life. How will they be different, you ask?

They won’t be: that’s the big revelation.

For a while now, Ross and I have been operating on the assumption that he’d apply to Ph.D programs at the end of this year — all over the country and abroad — and that sometime in the fall of 2006 we’d probably be looking at a pretty significant move. Maybe to Seattle or San Francisco, maybe to New York City, maybe even to Vancouver or some other far flung place. We weren’t sure where, but we’d almost certainly be moving. Which

a) Would be really exciting, and
b) Would be the perfect time for me to leave my safe, stress-free job and decide what I need to do to make what I want out of my life.

We’ve made lots of decisions based on this assumption: we haven’t gotten a pet, because we thought we’d have to move it in a year. We haven’t bought a real bed, even though all we have is my lumpy old mattress and box-spring, because we thought we’d have to move it in a year. And I’ve put off thinking about how I might want to change things for myself, like plan a new career path or go back to school, because I thought I’d have to move me in a year.

In the course of our discussion last night (which began with me reminding him to register for the GREs), Ross admitted that he still doesn’t feel ready to apply to school this year, and that he really needs some extra time to get a new job (with a more research-based company that will be better experience for a graduate program) and decide what field of computer science he actually wants to spend six years of his life thinking about, so that he can better convince an admissions committee that he’s going to be a good thinker-er. Which makes total sense, of course.

But it was still kind of hard to hear last night, because it lengthens the holding pattern I’ve put myself into for another 12 months. As long as I’m in Boston, anticipating a move in the relatively near future, it makes no sense for me to leave my job — even though I’m pretty sure it’s not what I want to do forever. While I’m here I want to take the time to build up good relationships and references at work, so that when we do move to a new city and I have to apply for a new job — possibly in a new field — I’m in a good place to do that.

I just thought I’d only have to do it for a year, and that I could wait and see about the future when the future came, attached to the adrenaline of packing and moving and discovering a new city. I guess I thought that somehow a miracle would happen when we left Boston, that the rest of my life would rush into focus and I’d know, just know, what the right thing was for me to do.

But two years is too long for me to wait for a miracle. If I wait two years to start making a plan, I know I’m going to be mad at myself. So it’s official, folks: I am in the market for a life-change, and now is the time to draw up the blueprints. I’ve got some ideas percolating that have been with me for a while. I’ve got some avenues to follow and lots of things to think about, and dream about, and happily envision while I sit at my desk in my cubicle, doing work that I enjoy but that’s not what I want to be proud of in the end.

People have asked me a lot what I plan to do next, and I keep telling them that this is my time to reflect, to sit with the big decisions I’ve already made, to settle. Well, I’m done settling. Now it’s time to rise. And I’ve got two years to figure out how.

One of the coolest things we saw on our travels was something I never would have noticed. But Ross would have been an entomologist in another life, and is always looking down at the ground for bugs — so he was the first one to see the hornet slowly murdering the moth twice its own size. We have video of the one-time-only event: it’s a bit of a big file, but let it load in another tab and come back to it in a few minutes. It’s pretty cool. (What? You don’t use a tabbed browser? Shame on you!)

ETA: Ross does like the origins of words as much as I do, but I meant to say that his other-life-occupation would have been entomology, of course. Thank you for not leaving me a comment telling me how stupid I am. I appreciate it!

The trip pictures continue here and take us to about the middle of Day 6. At this point I was starting to use my other camera a lot, but there are still some interesting shots in the mix.

A couple of teasers to whet your appetite:

Alligator meat!

Dead-As-A-Doornail-Gull!

Maybe “whet your appetite” wasn’t the most appropriate turn of phrase.

Take your bad self on over here.

More roadtrip pictures are coming soon. I took a break from processing them yesterday so I could watch SuperNanny on ABC for approximately eighty nine hours. It was the first time I had seen the show — which features a starched and suited up British nanny in stern black wire-rimmed glasses (but a cockney sense of humor!) going in to save the homelives of familes where, due to the complete incompetency of the parents, one or more kids are running amuck. It’s kind of like SuperNanny Eye for the Hopelessly Failing Mum and Dad. And it’s completely riveting, especially for me because so many of the worst kid offenders behaved like the kids in my classroom, and so many of the saddest, most idiotic mothers behaved just like me in my classroom: “Adam, don’t spit in my face. DO NOT spit in my face. If you spit in my face you’ll have to go to the Naughty Spot.” (Spit.) Mum, in tears: “Adam, why did you spit in my face? I told you not to spit in my face! SuperNanny, what should I do?” Now I’m on a mission to find SuperNanny DVDs for my sister, since she may find them both diverting and instructive as she raises the smartest, most assertive little boy in the universe.

Tragically, ABC had seen fit to run a SuperNanny Marathon, so I was able to indulge my mashochistic desire to relive my feelings of failure as a disciplinarian, as well as thank the gods I wasn’t in these parents’ positions, for most of the entire day. I’m so not kidding. I did manage to wash the dishes, do a load of laundry, and feed myself successfully, but other than that it was all SuperNanny, all the time.

I really shouldn’t be left alone at home too often, because these things tend to happen — Ross would never have suffered that much TV, but he was working a 40 hour week squeezed into three days because there was a gigantic tech project at his company that needed to get done. So he was at work from 8:30am-11:30pm on Friday, and 10am-1am on Saturday. I’m surprised he’s not more delirious now, especially considering the fact that when I got home from Soul Revival with Jenn last night (I love my Jenn-time! Especially when it’s Dancing-with-Jenn-And-Being-Mistaken-For-Her-Girlfriend-time!) at 2:30am, he was still awake. And then we stayed awake another hour making Ramen and bitching about the absurdity of a society which values work so much that what he’d just done was considered pretty normal. Ugh.

I leave you with this picture of the two utterly delicious consumables Jenn and I consumed before our night out: a bottle of sweet, light, refreshing Reisling from the only vineyard we visited on the way to San Francisco, and a bar of dark chocolate from Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco.

It really was a good day.

Ok, so I thought through about six different permutations of road-trip chronicling possibilities, and most of them seemed like they would be

a) Way too much work for me, and

b) Way too boring for you. I mean, we traveled for two weeks. I don’t want you to have to spend the same amount of time looking at my pictures and listening to me babble about what a terrific time we had.

So, what I’ve decided to do instead is twofold:

c) Gradually post photographs on my Flickr page, with amusing commentary* appearing underneath each picture. These will take a while to post, so for now I can offer you only Days 1-3. For the moment, things are in basically chronological order, so if you start with the first picture and keep hitting “next” on the little thumbnail to the right, you’ll experience things as they happened. However, I should note that almost half of my photographs (the ones I’m most excited about showing you, because I took them with my Dad’s old Minolta which I was using for the first time) will only be available to me sometime next week. So at that point, depending on what I decide to do, you might be seeing things from Day 1 or 2 while you think you’re in, say, Day 5 or 6. Which, I’m sure, would completely destroy your sense of global synchrony and order and reduce you to a gibbering mess under your table. But hey — I’ll be under there with you. For Days 1-3, start here and keep pressing “next” until you can’t anymore.

d) I’m also going to write a bunch of entries here on Distances Between Ports, whenever I have time — entries containing longer stories, stories that are not attached to photographs, or more reflective, essay-like pieces such as I Really Believe Vacations Ought To Be Spiritually Challenging, But I’d Be Grumpy If I Had To Forgo Modern Plumbing And Comfy Sheets. Or People Who Own Bed And Breakfast Hotels Aren’t Always As Charming As Their Rooms. Or Dear God, I’m Eating In The Saddest Restaurant In The World (parts I and II).

Got the plan? Good. Then go here. And if you’ve really missed me, I’ll know because the next time I talk to you, you’ll remember the sparklingly funny comment I made buried under the picture you only get to after twenty seven “nexts.” Come on. Prove your love by looking at my holiday pictures!

P.S. Since coming home, I’ve been to a meeting about my newest volunteer project, started a new book, and watched several hours of TV in a fit of worry about the lack of appearance of the letter from the DHS telling me to go get fingerprinted, which I must do before they issue my work permit. If anything really interesting happens, I’ll keep you posted.

*Amusing commentary not absolutely guaranteed, but I’ll do my best.