Author: Steven

There’s No Place Like “Home”

On By StevenIn Florida, Life At Home10 Comments

Last week, I found round trip airfare from Orlando to Atlanta for this year’s Dragon Con for only $136.  I posted it to BookFace, saying something like, “The moment when you spot an INSANELY good rate for Dragon Con airfare, but you don’t know if this will still be your home airport. ::sob::”

To my vast surprise, several people had a “wait, what?” type of reaction, and a few messaged me privately to ask if I was moving away from Orlando.  I mentioned in my new year’s post that I was contemplating a move out of Florida, and I’ve been talking incessantly about the possibilities with a few people, so it never occurred to me that so many of my friends would be in the dark.  (Clearly, I need to get more of them reading this blog.)

To address the question more directly:  I still haven’t decided for sure if I’m leaving Florida.   Or where I’m going if I do move.

It’s really difficult to break through the inertia of staying in one place for a while.  I’ve moved twelve times in the last ten years, but I’ve been in this one place for a little while now, and it can be difficult to pick up and go for the thirteenth time.

What I have decided with certainty is that when my lease ends this summer, I don’t want to stay put.  I don’t really like my apartment, for one thing.   Also, it’s fricking hot here.  And it would be significantly hotter in South Florida.

The climate here isn’t the only thing to be considered.   It’s been years since I lived in a place that “felt like home” to me. When I came back to the US after my time abroad, no part of South Florida felt quite right; I felt like a stranger in my own home town- more than I did in Germany.

I traveled back to Germany twice after I moved back, once for work and once just to visit.  During both of those trips, I had the uncanny feeling that I had only just left a few days before.  Aside from a few familiar restaurants closing and new ones opening, and aside from Jenny and Robert’s children getting taller, everything felt the same.  It felt like I had just left, and it felt like no time had passed at all.  I was incredibly comfortable there.  Not so with my return to the US – everything here felt kind of alien to me.

I’m not suggesting that I want to return to living outside of the United States- I absolutely do not. (Although if my job wanted me to be in the London office for a while, I wouldn’t say no.).  What I am saying is that when no place feels like home, it’s difficult to feel settled.  I genuinely don’t know where I want to be.

For where to go next, I have a few main considerations:

  • Is the temperature colder than Florida for most of the year? (Not bloody difficult!)
  • Is there cool shit to do?  Especially the music;  how’s the concert scene?  Is it a constant flow of activity there or do they roll up the sidewalks at 8pm?
  • Is there decent public transportation there?
  • Do I know anyone in the area? Friends or family?
  • Can I get a decent apartment there without blowing my spleen out on rent payments?
  • Is there a variety of delicious food options?

I’ve considered a number of possible destinations.  I’ve considered eastern New Jersey, with easy access to New York.  I considered Austin for the music scene, but moving from a swamp to a desert is not my idea of cooling down.  I also thought about Portland and the Pacific Northwest, or the Raleigh-Durham area, or Atlanta.   My work is completely remote, so I can theoretically work from anywhere.  In practice, it’s best if I stick to the same time zone as the main office in New York;  I am NOT a morning person and moving west would mean working earlier.

The top contender at present is the Washington DC/Northern Virginia area.  It ticks every box I just listed, and then some.   DC has easy access to three airports and the most useful part of the US rail lines.  It has a pretty useful metro system, and a constant flow of things to see and do.  The weather is a lot closer to what I actually want.  I’ve got a few friends and a really nifty cousin there.  Despite having no firm decision to move, I already have tickets to at least four concerts there this year.  I also have a fervid desire to go to at least five more events that were announced, but until I learn to clone myself that isn’t happening.

So yes, I’m leaning that way.  Still, the decision is not fully made.

Florida is not without its advantages, and I would be remiss to ignore the things I would be leaving behind:  An established social scene with a lot of friendships that I would miss.  Easy access to the theme parks.   Having sorted out which doctors to see in the area. (Finding new doctors is just a pain in the ass.)  Tijuana Flats and Publix.   Being only about a 70 minute drive from my sister, and only a few hours away by car for most of the rest of my family.   Being able to comfortably wear shorts for eleven and a half months out of the year.

But then there are the parts of living here that are less thrilling.  For example, the great social scene I just mentioned is largely centered around a bar scene, which means lots of beer intake.  (Some people would call that a plus, now that I think about it.)  Also, having to wear shorts for eleven and a half months out of the year to remain comfortable while still sweating is miserable and uncomfortable and kind of sticky.

And Orlando doesn’t feel like home either.

I don’t know if a new city will be any better, but I do think a fresh start would be really good for me.   I’m not worried about making friends in my new location, because I’ve moved to a new city sight-unseen a few times now, and I was able to find a tribe there each time.   For an introvert, I’m really quite friendly and sociable.

And hey, at least I won’t be sweating in January.

When is the last time you moved?  Was it a difficult change?

6/52

Music History: Firsts

On By StevenIn Life At Home, Pop Culture11 Comments

I love music.

This may be the most understated thing I will say all year.   Long-time readers of this blog probably figured out a long time ago that most of my non-work trips start with me going, “Ooh, a concert I want to see!”    I’ve talked a great deal about music on this blog already- I’ve talked about They Might Be Giants, and Leonard Cohen, and Eurovision.   I ‘ve posted about musicals in general, and about Starlight Express and A Chorus Line in particular.   I’ve also talked about my first ever concert (New Edition), and about my memories of the Ghostbusters soundtrack in that glorious red plastic Arista case back in 1984.

And of course there’s a page on this blog that I keep updating to show the artists that I’ve seen play live.

I’ll say it again:  I love music. I need music.  If I don’t listen to music for a while, I can get downright cranky.  It’s as vital to me as breathing, and I go to concert after concert after concert for the love of music, even though I hate crowds and I have a fair amount of travel anxiety.  I can’t not go. (FOMAC, or Fear of Missing a Concert, is an entirely different blog post that I may come back to later.  Shut up, it’s a real thing!)

With that introduction in mind, I want to talk about music throughout various parts of my life.  I’ll start at the very beginning.

My earliest memory of music, any music, was all the way back in 1978.  I was five years old, and I remember being in some sort of a school or daycare center or something along those lines- it wasn’t a usual place for me.  I was waiting near some other kids while we picked up one of my siblings. The kids I was hanging out near were playing with original first-generation Star Wars action figures. I remember they made me be C3PO. While we played with the Star Wars toys, there was a radio on.

There were two songs in heavy rotation on the radio at that time, and they were the first songs to ever penetrate my tiny little head.  Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana,” and John Paul Young’s “Love Is In The Air.”

Those two songs played back to back. I can’t remember ever hearing music before that day. I’m sure I did, but I don’t remember it.

I also recall the very first album that I ever owned.  When I was ten years old, there were advertisements in the back of comic books that said that if you sell stuff from their crappy catalog, you could win prizes.  This company sent an army of tiny Willy Lomans (Lomen?) door to door to sell magazine subscriptions, Christmas cards, pecan turtles, and wrapping paper.  With enough sales, you could get yourself a tent, a bicycle, or any number of other “fabulous prizes.”  It took a hell of a lot of sales to get anything substantial, but in 1983, I used my hard-earned prize bucks to get a voucher for a cassette tape from one of those music places like Columbia House or BMG, only not quite as obnoxious. That first album?  I was grooving to “Future Shock” by Herbie Hancock.

I had seen the video for Rockit, of course, and the kicking-pants robots made me want to dance.  Or something.  The entire album turned out to be really phenomenal, but I didn’t appreciate it nearly as much in 1983 as I do now.

My mom got me the second album I ever owned- we were in a Richway, which was sort of like the larval form of the retail chain now known as Target.  Richway’s parent company sold all of their stores to Dayton-Hudon Corporation around 1988, and that company closed all the stores, stripped them for parts, and then reopened most of them as Target stores.  The specific Richway from this story is actually some other non-Target store, according to Wikipedia.

But I digress.   We were in Richway, in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1984.  It was an amazing day for eleven-year-old Steven because not only did I get my first transforming toy there, a red Gobot sports-car named Turbo, but  Mom also bought me a cassette of Rockwell’s first album.   Again, I was familiar only with the first single released, a popular song called “Somebody’s Watching Me,” which had Michael Jackson on backup vocals. The rest of the album was a lot of fun, though, and I still listen to it sometimes.  “Obscene Phone Caller” was always one of my favorites songs, even though it would be years before I actually understood how pervy the song really is.

What was your first album?  Your first concert?  The first song you remember hearing?

5/52

Unanswered Questions, or an amnesty on polite-but-late inquiries.

On By StevenIn Miscellany2 Comments

During a recent group conversation on social media, a group of my friends decided to exchange non-Internet contact info in case of emergencies. After phone numbers and other details were swapped around, one of the people in the group said to me, “I FINALLY have your phone number!”

I would have been happy to give this friend my phone number at any time in the preceding year, had I known that she didn’t have it. Alas, we were caught in that weird social conundrum where you’re missing some piece of information about your friend but you feel like you’ve waited too long to ask.

This happens to me all the time, as it happens.  Usually, it’s people’s names.  I try very hard to remember the names of people who are introduced to me, but I don’t always get it with the first meeting.  Or the second.

With that in mind, I’m declaring an amnesty on all questions.  If there’s anything at all you want to know about me, even if you’ve known me for years and you’ve just been too polite to ask them, now is the time.  I will answer, within reason, any question asked of me.*  If your question is suitably interesting, I might answer it in the form of another blog post.  You can ask your question as a comment on this post, or in an e-mail if you’d prefer to ask me something privately.  The e-mail address is on the blog if you need it, to the right of this post.

* – If your question is dickish or WAY too personal, I might decline to answer, but I’ll be nice about it.

So tell me, friends, what do you want to know?

4/52 and a half

 

Memories of Chris, ten years later.

On By StevenIn Life At Home4 Comments

I realized while going through the remnants of my old blog that it’s been ten years since Chris passed away.   I’ve outlived a great many friends and loved ones, and some people leave more of a mark on you than others.  Chris was like that- he definitely made an impression.

I first met him in the very early 1990s on an accidental double date.  It wasn’t supposed to be a date-  Jade, one of my best friends at the time, wanted me to meet her friend Amy and arranged a meet-up at a local pool room. Amy brought Chris along, and we got on brilliantly.  After we all left the pool hall, we drove to the Lake Worth Pier.   Chris wanted to talk to Jade on the drive over,  so when we reached a stoplight, he got out of his car and knocked on my window.  A brief car switcheroo commenced, and we each drove the rest of the way to the pier in the other’s car.  This was the first of many shenanigans over the span of our friendship.

If you called Chris by his full name, he would say “the Topher is silent.”  After Chris died December 28th, 2009, from complications of pneumonia, that sentiment is truer than ever.

Chris and I were thick as thieves through most of the 1990s. We took classes together at PBCC, before it evolved into its current form. In 1994, we got an apartment in Boynton Beach and spent a year as roommates. We worked at Motorola together making the circuit boards for pagers.  He stayed on at Motorola when I left to finish my bachelor’s degree in Orlando.

A lot of who I am today was the direct result of my time with him. Being around Chris shaped parts of my personality.  Chris is one of the few people I have ever known with a music collection that was larger than mine-  we became fiercely competitive about the size of our CD collections.   It was all in fun, though-  there’s a ton of music in my regular rotation even now that I might never have been exposed to if not for him.

To this day, there are certain things that are indelibly linked to Chris in my mind.  There are certain songs, certain places, certain concepts that will always remain linked to him in my mind.  Whenever I see a Volkswagen Golf, or drive to South Beach near the former location of his favorite pizza restaurant in Key Biscayne, my mind drifts back to the past.

The memorial service was a traditional funeral mass, and I think Chris would have been terribly amused at how much the British reverend sounded like Rowan Atkinson. I kept waiting for him to say “…and the Holy Spigot.”  The only people I knew at the church were his mom, his widow, and my good and dear friend Lorrie. I’ve known Lorrie since middle school, but this was the first time that I’ve seen her in person in over a decade.  I noted a few days later how much it bothered me that it took the death of one friend to bring me back into the life of another friend.  Lorrie and I never fell out of touch again after that.  Even now, she’s a frequent concert-and-convention buddy.

But then, Chris was always a catalyst in my universe. The people from his world and the people from my world tended to get to know one another.  And quite a few of them miss him even now.

4/52

Chris and I goofing around in the early 90s. Please disregard my mullet.
Chris and I goofing around in the early 90s. Please disregard my mullet.

Just ow. Did I mention ow?

On By StevenIn Life At Home4 Comments

On Friday, I tripped on a curb and wiped out pretty hard. I am ok; I am scraped and sore, but not permanently injured. I didn’t see that there was a curb there, and by the time I realized something was wrong I was already falling and there was nothing I could do but take the fall. There’s an awful sickening moment when you’re falling where you’re aware of the fact that you’re ass over teakettle, but also aware that there’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening.  I do not like being upside-down and out of control.

The whole experience has caused me to reminisce a little bit about my history of trips, falls, and injuries. Here’s the thing- the vast majority of my injuries throughout my life have been downright cartoonish. I’ll give you two examples.

In the first, it was the summer between ninth and tenth grade. I was riding a ten-speed bike through the Springhill neighborhood where my friends Brian and Phil lived. We were doing this insanely stupid thing where you close your eyes for a moment while riding, just to feel the wind and sun on your face. As you can imagine, this backfired splendidly- in rapid succession, I hit a mailbox and then the ground. The front fork of the ten-speed (which was borrowed from my brother’s friend) was bent at 90 degrees, and I landed in a broken heap at the foot of someone’s driveway.

A small child, smaller than me at least, walked down from the front step where he had been sitting, looked down at me, and demanded, “do that again!”

The specific break of my wrist that I got by hitting the pavement was such an obscure type of break that the doctor reading the x-rays had to look up the name of the specific type of break. I wore a cast for a few months, and that part of my right wrist still hurts from time to time.

In a second very cartoonish injury, I needed seven stitches in my left shin after I fell into an open manhole. I was closing up at work, walking a path I’d taken many times before to go to the utility room on the far side of the building. It was dark, and I was unaware there was a manhole there. Some workers had left it open earlier in the day, and by the time I realized there was a problem, I was six feet shorter and dangling by my elbows. I flailed on the way down in such a way that my arms hit the rim before I fell all the way down.  My left shin caught the edge on the way down, and I’d bled all over my shoe by the time I pulled myself back up. The hair on that part of my shin hasn’t grown there ever since, which gives me a weird little bald patch a few inches above the ankle.

When my injuries weren’t ridiculous and cartoonish and self-inflicted, they were usually at the hands of my brothers. Brothers are good for that sort of thing. I have one scar on my knee from when I was playing tug of war with my brother over a piece of the grill before we went on a family vacation. He let go, I kept pulling, and suddenly I had a gouge in my knee.

In another instance, my brothers taught me to fly. Each had me by an arm and a leg, and they were swinging me back and forth. Every time this comes up, and it comes up fairly often at family gatherings, my elder brother swears he didn’t mean to let go. Let go he did, though- both of them did. I flew splendidly through the air, right into the arm of a nearby chair. To this day, I can’t grow a full beard on my chin because of the scar there.

The scar on my forehead? That’s from where my siblings pushed tiny-me’s tricycle into a wall. I have a litany of smaller but less permanent injuries from various competitions and fights with my siblings, including one hilarious time that I was racing Jon down the street on our Schwinn bicycles and I rammed right into the side of a car that had just backed out of the driveway. I flew over the handlebars, slid over the hood of the car, and fell in a crumpled heap to the ground on the other side, laughing all the while. That poor woman was so traumatized, but I just thought it was the most fun I’d had all day. All boys love the Luke Duke hood-slide, even if they don’t know who Luke Duke is.

Sometimes I think that I really ought to just bubble wrap everything in my apartment – I crack my knee on the coffee table at least once a week, I whack my hand on doorframes as I walk past, and stubbing my toe is almost a scheduled event.  Maybe I should wear a hazard suit at home.

None of these injuries will ever be quite as over the top ridiculous as the stuff I did when I was younger, though.   As for my brothers and sister, I have a sneaky suspicion that all the shared trauma when we were kids is a big part of why we’re so close now as adults.  That’s as good a theory as any, I suppose.

What’s the most memorable time you have ever injured yourself?

3/52