Day 4: Outlet shopping

Outlet shopping doesn't make for very good photos. It also makes for kind of a long day if you're trying to save money and don't really need anything, which would explain why I spent eight hours at the outlet mall and only bought a new pair of slippers from Target.

Nastja and I snuck off alone for the outlets, with her clutching the printed directions and me driving. As English is her second language and I get lost driving on my own campus sometimes, this was probably a recipe for disaster right from the start, especially given the bland sameness of Florida. How do people navigate this place without landmarks? It's all pastel buildings with short signs and lush greenery, so that if you're trying to, for example, turn left at the McDonald's, you can't even tell that building was the McDonald's until you're already past it and you see a little tiny set of golden arches hidden in a bush. Miracle of miracles, though, we only got lost once on the way there, when we missed the sign for the mall itself and had to turn around and double back.

When we got there, we decided we were starving and went into the first restaurant we saw, the Rainforest Cafe, which seated us under a fish tank:



I've never been a big fan of the Rainforest Cafe or the related and very similar Kahunaville. The food is ok, but I'm fully conscious while eating it that I've paid more for it just so that things like this can hang over my table:



I've got the same issue with Disney, too. I've been to both Disney Land and Disney World, and while they're both interesting, I've never felt the "Disney Magic" that people talk about. I look around the park and see a place designed to separate you from your money, much like Vegas, but I'm more bothered by Disney because they are less honest about it. Vegas throws the slot machines at you as soon as you get off the plane, and makes it clear that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but most of what happens involves spending money. Disney, on the other hand, tries to cloak the whole experience in benevolent, almost altruistic motives, as if the Disney Magic was not cold-bloodedly engineered through a series of focus groups and customer feedback surveys.

I'm not saying that like I hate Disney with a burning passion or would never, ever go back or even that I didn't have an enjoyable time while there, but I'm unable to watch the parade and see Cinderella as anything other than a corporate shill, and I have trouble understanding how people can speak of Disney World (or Land, or Euro-Disney if anyone ever went there) as this magical experience that they were privileged to attend. Anyone with a checkbook can enjoy it, and if you have a bigger checkbook, it gets even more magical, which proves that there really is no difference between Disney magic and Pepsi magic, except better marketing.

Speaking of magic, and trying desperately to pretend this was a planned tangent and not an annoyed rant, there was also a little bit of magic at the outlet mall:



A very little bit, based on the kind of trinkets they were selling:



Statues of the Pope? Really? I may have my history a little confused, but I'm pretty sure that the Psychic Fair Emporium would have been burned to the ground with everyone inside by the Catholic Church as recently as the 1600's, but there's Pope John Paul II nestled in among the fairies, crystals, and lucky Chinese money cats. Oh, Catholic Church, how the mighty have fallen. I've never seen a psychic booth at the mall outside of "Mallrats" (there was a psychic lady set up in the food court once, though), so I went in to poke around. A ten minute reading with one of the five psychics on duty cost thirty dollars, which is more than I usually pay for that sort of thing.

I don't need spiritual guidance to know that I should hold onto my money.

Day 3, Continued: Fishing and Hunting

Where was I before we ran out the door this morning to go outlet shopping?



Ah, yes, the pier.

With my feet good and wet and D and family trying to coax the baby into the water:



I decided to wander off and go explore the pier, as I figured I was probably the only one who wanted to and it was probably free of sea lice. I still have no idea of what they actually are, but if it has a warning sign then I'm certain it's something I don't want.

When I got to the pier gate, I found out that it costs a dollar just to walk onto the pier and four dollars to fish off of it. I had no intention of fishing, but it was surprisingly popular based on the number of people and poles around.



That point could probably be better illustrated by a picture with some actual people fishing in it or maybe a shot of more than two poles leaning forlorn against the railing, but that's the picture I took and it's all I have, ok? Just take my word for it that there was a fisherman (or woman, in some cases) on either side about every ten feet or so, and some of them were actually pulling in good sized fish. A number of them were also pulling in smaller fish that they would then use as bait to try for bigger fish, which I thought was surprisingly pragmatic and optimistic.

If I paid four dollars to stand on the pier and fish and only got a little tiny thing, I'd have kind of a "This is all I get? Screw this. Ripoff," attitude, but recycling the tiny fish seems more of a "Guess I'll use these lemons to make lemonade" idea. Maybe my parents weren't kidding when they said fishing and hunting teaches you things about yourself and the world that you'd never consider otherwise. Or maybe they just said that in hopes of convincing me to try it and maybe butch up a little.

Anyway, the people fishing had stiff competition from the pelicans fishing nearby:





The birds seemed to be having more success, but they also got to stay on the water after the lifeguards cleared everyone else out, so they had more time to work on it. The clearing, by the way, happened about a half hour after we got there, when yet another thunderstorm rolled in. In case you're not keeping track, days in the Sunshine State: 4. Days it has rained in the Sunshine State: 4. That name is about as apt as calling Jersey the Garden State.

I gave the beach one last, long look:





and then we headed to the car. I think it took us longer to get ready and get to the beach than we actually spent at it.

Also, I didn't spot a single set of footprints where someone carried someone else, or a young girl throwing starfish into the sea while an older gentleman scoffs and she explains that it matters to this starfish. Every inspirational story I've ever heard about the beach is apparently a sham cooked up to make Res Life training more inspirational and religious plaques more salable. I'd feel cheated if I'd ever bothered to buy into either of those two to begin with.

Speaking of buying, we wrapped up our night with a trip to the grocery store and to Gander Mountain, which D's mom needed to go to for kayaking supplies or something. (I'm sure someone mentioned why we were going, but I wasn't listening.) I've been to Gander Mountain, either because I was with my parents and they had the car or because I was running in just long enough to get a gift card for my parents and then get out, so I've never really walked around the store.

I should do that much more often:



It seems like a classy place, catering to the best sort of people:



I believe Brooke Astor had that same thing embroidered onto a chintz throw pillow in her sitting room.

The high point of the store, though, more than the random taxidermy:



or the pink and rhinestone-studded camouflage for girls (my mom, as an actual hunter, probably seethes with rage when she walks past that) or even the restaurant serving bison, venison, and elk, would have to be the Fine Gun Room. This sanctuary to maleness in the Hemingway mold, located in the very back of the store, is all dark wood, leather seats, fancy rugs, and guns in cases that are so expensive that they don't have price tags. All it really needed was a rhino head on the wall and a photo of Teddy Roosevelt on safari.

Oh, and it also contains vaguely pornographic taxidermy:



I walked around the corner, saw that, and thought, "Holy shit! Is that a buck mounting another buck? No, wait, it's a mountain lion mounting a buck. Oh, no, wait, it's a mountain lion eating a buck. It still looks kind of dirty, though."

I guess that makes up for the lack of an elephant foot umbrella stand.

Day 3: Sea lice and other creatures

You know what's not welcoming when you walk onto the beach?



What the hell are sea lice? Are they going to burrow into my skin? Is it like the regular lice that kids used to get in school, but from the ocean? How do you get them? Do they live in the sand? I'm guessing not, since they're not called sand lice, but right there, that pretty much guaranteed that I stayed on my feet the entire time we were at the beach.

Which couldn't have been more than a half hour, since it started thunderstorming and the lifeguard said everyone had to leave.

It was nice when we got there, though, with blue skies and sand and a pier, looking pretty much like a vacation photo come to life:



The sand was full of shells, mostly of clam-type creatures, but also other, unknown remains:



Is that a sea lice? I'm only asking because that thing was as big as my fist and, seriously, no way in hell am I letting that crawl out of the sand and onto me. Since it would seem like a total waste of vacation to say that I went to Florida and didn't get in the ocean, though (even though I don't swim and there was a warning flag up), I went down to the edge and let the ocean come to me:



It got closer than I had planned, and my shoes are still drying out.

I'll cover the rest of the day later. We slept in late and are running behind on plans.

Vacation Day Two: The Truth About Biking

Baseball was rained out last night, not surprisingly. I'm told that it's "the season" in Florida right now, which I'm assuming means hurricane season. The only other time I've heard people talk about "the season" and have it be followed by repeated deluges of rain was in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer", and I'm really hoping my vacation turns out better than that one, so I'm trying not to dwell on the weather.

Everybody was pretty tired yesterday from travel and such, so we all got up late and didn't really do much in the morning. Eventually it was decided that we would go to the pool so that some of us could swim, some of us could read, and some of us could attempt to exhaust our toddler. Kate and I, not having toddlers, opted for reading:





And no, I'm not being anti-social by being way over at the other end of the pool. There was more shade over there. We're still way too early in the trip to be tired of each other yet.

I didn't stay at the pool long, because the Boy Scouts staying on campus had a noon cookout and pool party scheduled and I didn't want to stay and accidentally pick a fight with the other guests about indoctrinating their children with the institutionalized homophobia that the Boy Scouts have gone to court to legally protect. See, committee member at work who said I was "combative"? I'm not always argumentative. I could have stayed and asked the kids if they had their "Fag Banning" merit badges yet, but I decided to go for a walk instead.



Sometimes my restraint comes as a surprise even to me.

When I started walking around the campus, marvelling at the wide sidewalks and palm trees and sunshine, I kept thinking, "This is a college? Why did I go to school in upstate New York?" After five minutes of walking, though, dripping with sweat and noticing a distinct lack of shaded spaces in the outdoor areas, I answered my own question. Florida is hot, and humid, and I can't understand how people live in climates like this deliberately. Everything feels like it's just on the verge of sinking back into the swamp at any moment and taking you with it. On the plus side, though, everything is air conditioned, and I could totally get used to that.

On the other hand, everything in Florida feels oddly alive, like plants might spring out of the ground at any moment. Granted, they would be strange plants that I wouldn't recognize:



but that's more my own fault for lacking horticultural knowledge. There are also bugs everywhere, and snakes, and frogs, and alligators, and tiny lizards:





so I keep finding myself spotting movement out of the corner of my eye and hoping it's not poisonous.

After lunch the baby fell into an exhaustion coma from being at the pool, and I got tired of reading and watching TV with everyone so I eagerly volunteered to go with Dan when he decided to go to the bike shop. While there, I learned that my biking friends have not been forthcoming about the actual benefits of biking. They've babbled about physical fitness and feelings of accomplishment and benefits of exercise and the wind rushing by and comeraderie and blah blah blah, but no one mentioned this:



Biking comes with candy.

And eating the candy while biking is not just accepted, but encouraged.

How could no one have mentioned this before now? That time that Sandy tried to take me biking and I was all "the seat is hurting my butt" and she was all "you'll get callouses and stop feeling that after a couple months", she never said, "Shut up and have some candy." Had I been presented with the right motivator, I could have been winning the Tour de France by now. Tragically the moment is gone and I will always think of biking as the sport that I was misled about. I may not have a bike, but I still have candy, and I guess that'll be enough to get by on.

Road Trip 2009: Day One

My vacation has officially started, and it's a real vacation where I leave the county, not a staycation like the one I took in the spring. Staycation was fun and all, but it's nice to be really, really away when you're away. This year's plan was to meet up with college friends in Florida, and since it's only eleven hours and driving is cheap while flying is expensive, I had to get up before dawn to get on the road:



It's not quite as early as last year, but still, that's a time of day that I rarely, if ever, see. As with last year's trip, I brought a copious supply of Mountain Dew for fuel, but this led to an unanticipated problem: Georgia would rather that you did not go to the bathroom in their state.

At first I thought this might just be because it was early. When I stopped at Georgia's Welcome Center, the lights were on but it was still locked up since it was before dawn:



I didn't really have to pee yet, but was just thinking that I might as well when I was finished with my breakfast bar. OK, the welcome center was locked and not very welcoming, but at least they had one, unlike, say, Maryland, which welcomes no one and only has a sign. I figured I'd just move on to the next rest area, and everything would be fine.

Except there wasn't a next rest area.

In the whole state, there only seem to be like three, total. I went zipping through Atlanta, still swilling Mountain Dew, and down into south Georgia, which I have never visited but have seen in a number of disturbing movies, and still... nothing. Maybe people in Georgia don't need rest? Or they have family all along the highway and can just stop in at their houses? I thought I might find a restroom when I stopped to get gas, but the gas station was kind of sketchy and all by itself out in the middle of nowhere, and I figured if I went into the bathroom alone I'd just end up feeding the clerk's family of inbred cannibals. Somehow these are the only kind of gas stations I ever manage to stop at on vacation.

In the back of my mind I still somehow believed that a rest area would appear, so I left the gas station, got back on the highway, saw a sign for a rest stop, and then this happened:



Someone got in an accident, and we sat for 45 minutes at a complete stop while they cleared the highway. When we finally got moving again, everybody pulled off at the rest stop, to the point that there was a line of cars going out to the highway, and somehow I thought it would be a good idea to skip this and just go to the next one with no guarantee that there would even be a next one, but eventually there was:



And I peed and all was right with the world.

Before I leave the subject of Georgia and I-75, though, I do want to say that I was greatly surprised that there was only one major accident along the way. When I called my friend Sandy, who lives in Georgia, to tell her to write her congresspeople to demand more rest stops I also told her about the accident and traffic jam and she said, "Oh, yeah, that always happens."

That always happens because people in Georgia are bad drivers. Given the option of passing on the left or on the right, they pick the right every time. A turn signal might mean that they are switching from one lane to the next, but it might also mean that they are cutting across five lines. A consistent rate of speed is frowned upon, but random tapping of brakes is not. If, for whatever reason, you are unable to pass someone on the right, you are apparently taught to get right up on their bumper and flash them with your high beams so that they can attempt to get out of your way, even though there is nowhere to go or you would have already pulled into that space to pass them. It's like everyone in Georgia sits in their driveway in the morning and thinks, "How can I make driving more dangerous? OK, I'll do that," and then, while doing it, thinks, "This thing that I'm doing now (applying makeup, swerving, reducing speed without braking and then speeding up again), would it be even more dangerous if I did it in another lane? OK, I'll switch to that lane and do it there."

Eagerly leaving Georgia, Florida welcomed me:



That sign is a crock, but I didn't think about it at first since they were busy handing me free juice:



I'd guess that they give away five times as much OJ as grapefruit. Given the choice, do you want sunshine in a cup, or something that tastes like soil? I sipped my juice, wandered back outside, and thought, "Why is the Sunshine State so cloudy?"



It rained the rest of the trip. Winds, thunder, sheeting downpour. Sunshine State, my ass. I finally got to Sean's, though, and as I pulled in the clouds miraculously parted, and we went to dinner, where I had delicious beef pot stickers:



and there was a classic car show wrapping up outside:



Today I think we're going to baseball and maybe to see "Star Trek".

comics and me

I don't usually count comic books, even comic book collections, in my end of the year book tally. Part of the reason is that I read so many of them that it doesn't feel like reading, like I feel as if I shouldn't list it as an accomplishment if it didn't take any real effort. I don't count cookbooks, or, as they are known around here, "food porn", for the same reason. There are so many shiny pictures and they're so fun to read that it doesn't seem right to count them as reading.

This year I'm going to make an exception, and count Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection on my reading list, because it's the kind of big, thick trade paperback that reminds me of why I love comic books. For me, comic books are a transcendent art form. Other people feel this way about music, or movies, or painting or sculpture or whatever else, but comic books touch something important inside of me and put me in touch with my feelings the way no other form of art ever quite seems to. For whatever reason, comic books speak to my heart while everything else speaks to my brain.

On first glance, Zot! doesn't seem like the kind of story that would do that. It's the story of a boy, Zot, who comes from the dazzling future world of the year 1965, a dizzying time of robot butlers and flying cars where everything is shiny and everyone is perfect. Zot is in love with Jenny, a girl from a terribly depressing place of broken dreams, disappointment, and loneliness, which is our world, sometime in the early 1980s. Over the course of the four years collected here, Zot and Jenny try to bridge the gap between their dimensions and themselves, but it's also a story about dreams, unrequited love, friendship, growing up, heartbreak, identity, and ultimately of hope for a better tomorrow. When I finished it, I wanted to read it all over again and, more than that, I wanted Zot and Jenny and all of their friends to be ok.

I wanted to write Scott McCloud a letter just to say, "Hey, I liked this. It made me feel," but I know that doesn't fully express what I'm trying to say, and I'm not articulate to get the point across. There wasn't a specific story or moment, but I've had an incredibly stressful week or so at work and reading this made me feel better. Maybe when I've had a few days or weeks to think about it, I'll have processed more, but for now that's probably enough.

Given that, and given that I rarely talk about comics here, I might as well cover a couple more, because they're the comics I use as examples when people ask why I like comics so much. One, The Plain Janes, has a message for everyone, but the other, "Planet Krypton" #1 (collected in The Kingdom), isn't really that good a story and only has personal meaning for me.

For starters, "The Kingdom" was a horrible miniseries, a followup to the much better plotted and illustrated Kingdom Come miniseries. "The Kingdom" is choppy, poorly illustrated (for Nightstar's arm to bend the way it is in the first issue splash page, it would have to be detached from her body at the shoulder inside her sleeve), and a lot of it feels like filler. Right in the middle of the series, though, there were a set of one shot showcase issues about various characters, and this is where "Planet Krypton" landed. Unique among the series, it's named after a place instead of a character, the Planet Krypton restaurant that former Justice League member Booster Gold runs as a kind of superhero themed Planet Hollywood with Batarangs on the walls and waiters dressed as Aquaman, and the protagonist isn't a superhero.

Rose D'Angelo is a waitress who works at Planet Krypton, dressed as Supergirl. She has had some kind of falling out with her family and sleeps in the restaurant storeroom at night in secret, which leads her to discover that the restaurant is haunted by the ghosts of people who never were. Rose doesn't recognize the spirits, but astute DC fans recognize them as characters from alternate timelines and out of continuity stories as Rose drifts among them, staring at the Kristen Wells Superwoman, or Ultra the Multi Alien, or Luma Lynai, or... well, you get the idea. Eventually Rose tells the spirits her story, explaining that she came from a poor family, and that her mother and sister wanted her to marry the flashy guy with big ideas who proposed to her, but Rose said no and let her family down. In her own words, she had a chance to be a hero, and she failed.

Eventually Batman comes to investigate the spirits, at Booster's request, and stumbles across Rose. Advising her to leave, he determines that the spirits are reflections of parallel universes, alternate timelines where things changed just a little. Discovering the cause, he removes it, and the spirits begin to fade as Rose watches. Batman leaves, advising her to go home, and as she turns to do so, Rose sees herself. Rose D'Angelo's parallel universe self is the last spirit in the restaurant, and she's waiting tables in her Supergirl uniform, and she's wearing an engagement ring and a wedding band. It's the Rose D'Angelo who gave in and did exactly what her family wanted, and it didn't change a thing. Seeing her, even just for a second, Rose understands that she was a hero, not to her family but to herself, and she walks out of Planet Krypton into the rising sun.

It sounds cheesy, I know, but there it is. I read "Planet Krypton", and I decided that I needed to come out to my parents. I'd been out to my friends for years, to my staff, to my students, but not to my father. I'd come out to mom when she asked straight out, and she almost ran off the road, told me to date more girls, and made me swear never to tell my father, and for years I didn't. I kept it to myself, allowed it to become a secret, and let myself think of being gay as something that needed to be hidden away. When I read that comic, Rose D'Angelo saw herself and I saw myself. I was beating myself up and denying part of who I was to please my family, and in the end it might not make any difference. I came out to my dad and my mom (who pretended this hadn't all happened once before) at the same time, within a week of reading that comic, and my dad was completely ok. Honesty healed a lot of our relationship, and we get along a hell of a lot better now. Metaphorically, I walked out of the restaurant into the sun, too, but in jeans and a t shirt instead of a polyester Supergirl outfit.

This is what comics mean to me. This is what they reach in me that other things cannot.

I'll save "The Plain Janes" for another night, as I've now outgayed, and with the mention of Luma Lynai, a character that I recognized without reference material despite her only appearing one time, ever, in five pages of a Legion of Superheroes story written before I was born, outgeeked myself enough for one evening.

farmer's market and baseball

Nothing perks up a day at the office by spontaneous baseball that I don't have to play. Before the office and baseball, though, there was a trip to the Farmer's Market downtown, where I didn't intend to buy anything. I just wanted to go walk around somewhere for a little while before I spent my whole day at the office.

I parked down on State Street, where weekend parking is free and where the parking garages besides the one behind the movie theater have all seen better days:



Granted, the abandoned building with smashed out windows isn't the actual garage, but see how the sign is all rusty? If Knoxville is ever going to get serious about revitalizing downtown, then they need to revitalize the places that you have to park at to be downtown. If it looks like the place where Batman's parents got killed, then probably no one wants to park there.

Walking up to the Farmer's Market, I passed the Wall Avenue wall and saw that someone else agrees that Knoxville could use a little improvement:



If you click on that and look at the bigger size, our river is apparently nasty and our zoo ghetto. I didn't think the zoo was really that bad (a little poorly laid out, maybe) but I might have just gone in with low expectations.

Bob Dobbs had no commentary to offer on the zoo or on the state of the city:



Moving on, I walked through the Farmer's Market:







Even though I didn't buy anything, I noticed a surprising lack of actual food at the Farmer's Market. This is the first time I've gone to it in at least a year, but last time I went almost every stand was vegetables and cheese and baked goods, the kind of thing I expect from the Farmer's Market at home. Those stands are all still there, but now there are at least the same amount selling wind chimes and candles and crafty stuff. I guess it's good that the Farmer's Market has gotten a lot bigger since the last time I went, but at the same time I think of food when I think of farmers, not jar candles that smell like cookies.

After an hour or so of walking around I headed in to work, where I am trying to get ahead on things before my vacation in a week. This year my goal is to try to get some pictures up while I'm still on vacation, so that I'm not spending five hours doing it when I get back.

Anyway, I was at the office for a couple of hours when I got an email inviting me to meet up with Jess and whoever else showed up for Tennessee Smokies minor league baseball. Since I've never been and baseball is way more fun than being at the office, I immediately said yes.

Smokies Park, deep in the Smokies, was just small enough to be cozy while still feeling like a baseball stadium.



If it holds more than five hundred people I'd be terribly surprised, but you never know. It does hold two mascots:



The green one has a ponytail, and we couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a girl or if it was just sporting a genuine Tennessee rat-tail. Either way, we managed to find nachos and hot dogs, Jess and George got themselves on the Dance Cam:



and we stayed all the way through the end, when it got dark out and we lost:



Losing was still better than spending four extra hours at the office, except that now I have to go in today again instead.