Image by Ed Yourdon via Flickr

If you’re looking for the biggest, best Fourth of July fireworks, I found a really wild website.

It’s called the Fireworks Display and Shows Worldwide Guide, and once you get over the garish colors, layout and goofy graphics, it’s got a ton of information.

I went straight to the 10 Largest, Biggest, Best 4th of July Fireworks category, and here are their top ten selections:

Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks – New York City
July 4th Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular
Central PA 4thFest – State College, PA
Welcome America! Philadelphia
A Capitol Fourth – Washington DC
Family 4th at Lake Union – Seattle*
Go 4th on the River – New Orleans
Fair St. Louis – Ohio
Lights on the Lake – Lake Tahoe
Freedom Over Texas – Houston

* The website listed Seattle’s display as the WaMu Family 4th. That was the name of the celebration until the sale of Washington Mutual to Chase. And when Chase didn’t want to sponsor the fireworks anymore, a grassroots effort to save Seattle’s Fourth of July fireworks resulted in a 24 hour-blitz where $500,000 was raised from both corporations and people in the community. You can read more about the down-home campaign in an article I wrote on my Seattle Travel Examiner site.

But the rockets red glare isn’t happening in a lot of cities this year, as reported in this CNN article Dark skies: No 4th of July fireworks here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Where to watch the fireworks on the Fourth (uptownflavor.com)
• PHOTO: Lady Liberty rises (seattlepi.com)

Kilt shop in Glasgow, Scotland. Sue Frause photo.

I’d never heard of National Tartan Day until this year.

It’s celebrated on April 6 in the US and Canada and has been an official event since 2005 in the US.

But Tartan Day is also celebrated elsewhere in the world (in some places on July 1). Here are some of the Scottish events being held this week:

New York’s Tartan Day Parade
Missouri Tartan Day
Colorado Tartan Day Festival
Minnesota Tartan Day

There’s a Scottish Tartans Museum in Franklin, North Carolina.

Wild rabbit on Whidbey Island. Sue Frause photo.

I’ve always been intrigued by two islands named after holidays: Christmas Island and Easter Island.

Christmas Island was discovered by Captain William Mynors while sailing aboard the Royal Mary, a British East India Company vessel. Mynors sailed past it on Christmas Day in 1643, hence the name.

The other holiday island is Easter Island, named by Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who discovered it on Easter Sunday in 1722. I can’t say either are on my bucket list. My husband, a ham radio operator (K7PVT), has always wanted to go to this island in Oceania on a DXpedition.

Closer to home, there are no shortage of Easter egg hunts for adults and USA Today has a travel feature about The Bunny Museum in California, which has the world’s largest (non-living) rabbit collection of more than 26,000 items.

On a silly note, Uncyclopedia (“the content free encyclopedia”) has an entry titled Bunnyland. I can’t explain it, just click it on.

A surprise Easter basket. Photo by Sue Frause.

Easter egg hunts for adults? The last egg kids’ hunt I went on I was to take photographs for our local newspaper … it was one of those pre-digital oops! times when I realized after the event I had no film in the camera.

Prior to that, we’d done egg hunts here at home with our son and went to a few biggies with way too many kids and the potential of tears for those not finding the golden egg. Oh, and we used to have a white elephant hunt at a big Easter brunch with dozens of friends, where people would hide weird and unwanted stuff out in the woods.

But these adult Easter egg hunts are the real deal. The St. Louis area has eight adult egg hunts beginning this weekend and running through Easter and there’s no shortage of egg hunts in California. Yorba Linda is hosting the 5th Annual Adult Flashlight Egg Hunt on April 5.

And in Portland, Oregon it’s the 2010 Easter Egg Hunt BarFly Tour — the one with the most eggs wins!

Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Ireland. Sue Frause photo.

If you love a parade, and all things Irish, the celebrations begin across the United States this weekend.

Saint Patrick’s Day parades are so popular that there’s a website dedicated to them. And no surprise that Ireland’s #1 tourist attraction, Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, is throwing a huge party, too.

Complimentary passes are being given to anybody named Patrick, and all revelers will be greeted by street performers and fire jugglers as they enter the seven-story Storehouse building. Musical acts include Rattle and Hum performing U2 tunes; Irish born guitarist Jimmy Smyth; and Irish groups Sliotar and The Gravel Walk.

MSNBC has put together a fun list of the top ten hotels to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, from New York City to the Caribbean.

Erin go bragh!

Did Sherlock shop in Manchester? Sue Frause photo.

Our choice for a New Year’s Day movie was narrowed down to two: Sherlock Holmes and It’s Complicated.

We ended up going with the latter, which was a real hoot. Filmed mostly in Santa Barbara, California it’s an all-American film, written and directed by Nancy Meyers.

The one that got away, Sherlock Holmes, is about as far as you can get in both story and setting. Directed by Guy Ritchie, the film stars Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, and was filmed mostly in England.

Now you can follow in Sherlock Holmes’ footsteps on an independent tour with Across the Pond Vacations. The Sherlock Holmes Britain tour is 12 days and 10 nights and begins in London where Holmes and Watson lived at 221b Baker Street. Then it’s on to Dartmoor, setting for The Hound of the Baskervilles; Manchester and its Victorian charms of the northwest and where many scenes where the film was shot; and ending in Edinburgh, Scotland where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born and studied medicine at Edinburgh University. Here are the tour details:

• Airport transfer via London black taxicab from either Heathrow or Gatwick airport to London’s City Centre
• 10 nights in 4-5 star hotels (including a stay in a luxury manor house)
• 3-days’ transportation on the London Underground and via London buses (Oyster card)
• Excellent seats to a London theatrical production (your choice)
• Sherlock Holmes Walking Tour in London
• 7 days’ car rental in an automatic shift, air-conditioned car (GPS available upon request)
• Full breakfast, daily
• Victorian dining and mystery experience based on The Hound of the Baskervilles
• Edinburgh Pass – Admission to 30+ attractions in Edinburgh, Scotland

Price is from $2,945 per person/double occupancy/airfare to London not included. This is an independent tour, so you’ll be going it on your own. No large group!

Image by oskay via Flickr

…unless you happen to live in Central Coast California, that is. This came in from my local paper of record today:

For the fifth year, downtown Santa Cruz will be designated a “safety enhancement zone” starting at 8 p.m. tonight and ending at 3 a.m. Jan. 1. The effort is designed to help prevent violence that can erupt from a large number of people, many drinking alcohol, police said.

The safety enhancement zone designation involves closing Pacific Avenue to cars and triple fines for violating the city’s municipal code.

An open container ticket, for example, will cost about $500, while the “abuse or mutilation of a plant or tree” will run around $1,000.

“We will have a zero-tolerance stance for alcohol-related violations,” Clark said.

New Year’s Eve is part of a “maximum enforcement period” for the California Highway Patrol, which plans to have 80 percent of its local officers on duty throughout Santa Cruz County tonight.

Every traffic stop is scrutinized as a potential drunk driver, CHP officer Sarah Jackson said.

Perhaps no holiday in America – with the exception of Saint Patrick’s Day – is more associated with drinking than New Year’s Eve. Speaking as someone who is prone to bouts of depression on December the 31st, getting blasted is absolutely mandatory for me.

Yet there will be none of that in Santa Cruz, this year. Indeed, this famously “tolerant” burgh has decided to Disneyfy New Year’s, ensuring that  no one dare have a drink downtown to celebrate (or mourn) the onset of the new decade. This illiberal fiat is sure to provide a perfectly sanitized, wonderfully “safe” atmosphere in downtown Santa Cruz this evening. No one need worry about encountering the taste of alcohol, the smell of tobacco – or the sound of laughter. And perhaps more disturbing is the frankly Un-American decision to treat all motorists as guilty until proven innocent.

Let’s show the contemporary temperance leagues exactly what we think of them by getting absolutely loaded tonight.

Let’s tell the modern day prohibitionists to stick a cork in it.

via Big party in store in downtown Santa Cruz to celebrate 2010 – Santa Cruz Sentinel.

In either case, up to 1/3rd of the fun is getting the cork out of the bottle.

In a press release warning you to duck you head and shield your eyes, a ophthalmologist says that the cork’s pressure can be three times that of a car tire (about 35 psi, or two-and-a-half tons per square foot, or almost a quarter of a million pascals, or, as a European would say, 250 kilopascals — the “pascal” is sort of like the lire — too small for its own good — and it travels at speeds of 50-60 miles an hour.

Anyway, he says if you do get hit in the eye, go to the hospital right away. (Preferably, have someone else do the driving.)

I hate to be a curmudgeon but—no, wait, I actually love to be a curmudgeon. And in the interest of as much curmudgeonly, Andy-Rooney-esque behavior as possible for the remaining hours of 2009, I would like to go on the record as saying I dislike New Year’s Eve.

I was going to say “hate,” but that’s a strong word, and I don’t blame the day itself for society’s annoying fun-for-the-masses consumerist approach to it, or the bummed-outness which that inevitably brings.

When was the last time you had fun—and I mean really, truly fun, not just the kind of fun you feel obligated to have because you’re paying through the nose or waiting in line surrounded by drunks in freezing conditions—on New Year’s Eve? (Because if you’re not actually having fun doing that, you’re just … not so smart, now, are you?)

My favorite New Year’s Eve was when I was in middle school. Since I was a middle-schooler, I wasn’t going out with friends or expecting the most romantic evening yet or drinking myself into a stupor.

My mother, brother, and I (Dad had long since gone to bed) stayed up to watch the ball drop and just got generally goofy, blowing on New Year’s horns, throwing confetti, and wearing ridiculous hats.

I went to get my brother good with a particularly violent toot of a paper whistle, and, to my surprise, it recoiled and bounced back at me, hitting me in the eye. Which may well have been a symbol for things to come.

We all dissolved in laughter, and then the ball dropped, the cat licked the remaining popcorn, and we went to bed. I didn’t even have a hangover the next day.

There’s so much pressure related to the holiday nowadays. You know, it’s your last night of the year, even the decade, you better blow it out and have as much fun as you can. But with great pressure comes great disappointment.

Not to mention, everyone is out there trying to do the same thing, so you can’t get cabs, or into the good restaurants—and if you do, the meals are twice the price. It’s just not worth it.

And there’s a certain lack of insight in capping off a recessionary, semi-unemployed year by spending a lot of money on something that’s not even worth it, right?

I say, have fun through the year, maybe even blow it out New Year’s Eve Eve, and then on the 31st, you can feel superior when you stay in, order a pizza, and watch Mad Men, or the ball drop, with a close friend or two.

Which is exactly what I’ll be doing, not to toot my own horn. (Unless I change my mind, which as a curmudgeon I reserve the right to do.)

Here’s a little bit more information on the Times Square Ball itself: The 2010 version of the New Year’s Eve ball for Times Square is a twelve foot geodesic sphere, which weighs 11,875 pounds. The ball itself is covered in 2,668 Waterford Crystals and is powered by 32,256 Philips LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes). And believe it or not, the ball is capable of creating a palette of “more than 16 million colors” and “billions of patterns,” according to the Times Square Alliance website.

Happy New Year everyone! See you in 2010.

via The Times Square Alliance.

Image by adamjackson1984 via Flickr

I hope your 2010, and the decade to come, is filled with good things.

Here are a few of the life lessons that hit me upside the head these past few years, some more gently than others:

1) Young ‘uns rule. If you’re older than 35, 45, let alone 50, it’s a good time to get to know, and understand the thinking and relationships and behaviors of, people unrelated to you who are smart, talented, ambitious — and under 30. Maybe not if you’re a civil servant or tenured professor, but in the media, I think so. Even as a manager, it’s your job now to figure out how differently they think and deal effectively with it, whether the use of technology or some radically different ideas of what work is.

My two best professional opportunities arose this past year thanks to meeting two young women, both of them barely out of graduate school, who were working with high-level people they introduced me to. Had I been dismissive or skeptical of their interest, which many older, experienced workers can be, or could have been pre-recession, I’d have missed out.

One of them is fellow Canadian-jock-in-NY, T/S’s Katie Drummond, who heard me speak to her grad school class at NYU, snagged me, and is now one of my under-30 bosses. Reporting to people so much younger than is a little funky at times, but work — now more than ever — is less about titles and degrees and what you’ve done for the past 20 or 30 years, but about collegiality, mutual respect, enthusiasm, shared values.

Some of us older folk also share the “new” values of Gen Y, such as a way to make a living that also allows us the time and energy to enjoy our life. And there’s no way past the ugly truth that age discrimination is thriving. If you’re out of work, sneak in under the skirts of someone fresh(er)-faced.

2) Techno-sabbaths will keep you and your relationships healthy. I’m not an Orthodox Jew, but I admire their strict Sabbath. In an era of cool, sexy, portable toys that buzz, beep, blink, ring, whine and suck us into their orbits 24/7, turn ‘em all off! One full day every single week. Very, very few of us need to be available 24/7, to anyone. It’s ego, addiction, boredom. Your kids, partner, co-workers and others — like wait-staff and retail associates trying to serve lots of other people at the same time — will like you more.

Read the fantastic book on this issue, “Distracted” by Maggie Jackson. Then go stare into the sky or at nature, night or day, uninterrupted, for 20 minutes. We are not meant to spend all our days reacting and responding to machinery, no matter how alluring its form.

3) Take gentle, consistent, grateful care of your body. In January 2000, mine started teaching me a lesson I had no interest in learning — it has limits. Excuse me? I’m not invulnerable?

That’s when I had a right knee arthroscopy to remove torn cartilage (the result of playing three squash games a week). December 2001, I had left knee arthroscopy for the same problem. May 2008 offered right shoulder surgery. By December 2009, the left shoulder needed months of physical therapy to avoid another surgery. November 2009, stress fracture of my left foot.

I’m now on a first-name basis with a whole pile of physical therapists, whose praises I sang in a piece for The New York Times. Not exactly what I had in mind.

In the past decade, I’ve also watched more than a dozen people I cared for die, one at 17 of cancer, another at 49, of cancer, one murdered the day after he retired. Life and health are to be treasured.

If you’re young — under 30, say — you’re certain you’ve got your whole life, probably 80+ years’ worth, to eat junk, sleep 4 hours a night, ride a bike without a helmet, binge-drink, have weird/complicated relationships with food, smoke, take all kinds of drugs or share prescription medications with friends. All you need is one bad accident, surgery or months-long injury to get it and get smart(er.)

Women, especially, are socialized to care for everyone but themselves and to focus endless, tedious, narcissistic attention on the size and shape of their bodies. Focus instead on your blood sugar/pressure, heart health, cancer risks, mental health, wearing a facial moisturizer with SPF every single day.

We live, in the U.S. in one of the most brutal and bare-knuckled of capitalist countries: no paid sick leave, little or no paid vacation, 1/3 of the workforce now working freelance or temp or contract — i.e. no paid sick days or vacation, people terrified to disappoint their boss(es) and get fired. Don’t let this larger world shorten your life, as it can and will.

I worked myself, in March 2007, into three days on an IV in a hospital bed with pneumonia. Don’t ever be(come) that person. Save several months’ expenses so when you are ill you can take enough time off, in most cases, to fully recover.

Respect your body for its strengths and be gentle with its weak(er) bits.

4) Mentor and volunteer, wisely. Everyone needs help, at 17, 28, 39, 54. Whenever. Don’t be a doormat and beware of users, but make it a point to help others trying to achieve a goal you admire and share. It’s fun and it builds good karma.

I answered an email about six years ago from a younger writer in D.C. asking advice. Unlike most people who shamelessly ask to “pick my brain”, he immediately offered several extremely valuable, hard-t0-get editor contacts. Which was kind, classy and made me reply right away. He wasn’t, as so many hungry wannabe’s, out to grab and run.

We have since — still never having met face to face — become good friends and colleagues, acting as valuable sounding boards for one another. The book he was then trying to sell became a best-seller. Cool!

I also serve on the board of the 1,400 member American Society of Journalists and Authors and am a trustee for the Writers’ Emergency Assistance Fund, which gives grants of $5,000 quickly to qualified writers in need.

Find a cause, or several, that matter deeply to you and make a commitment to giving back.

5) Publishing a book will not, despite people’s fantasies to the contrary, change your life. Everyone thinks it will. They want it to. You want it to. Your agent or publisher, maybe less so. They’re been around that block many times before. Don’t assume you’ll get on “Oprah” or even get reviewed anywhere.

If you’re lucky, and/or persistent, and the book has some lasting value, you will find a community of its fans. That’s a lovely thing. Nurture them.

If it does change your life in any significant way, say a huge thank you to whatever deity — or non-deity — you pray to. You are extremely fortunate. Now, go help someone else achieve this; see Lesson Number Four.

6) You can find a decent guy/woman on the Internet. In March 2000, a man in Brooklyn saw my profile on aol.com and wrote me a letter.  Like me, he was a workaholic, ambitious career news journalist, someone who lives to eat, drink, listen to music, take photos, travel. We would never ever have met otherwise, even though we both worked for the Times, he staff, me freelance.

I was, officially, writing a story about on-line dating — then declasse, secret, scary — for the now-defunct women’s magazine, Mademoiselle. We’ve been together ever since.

7) Taking risks is essential to growth. The most terrifying choice — of man/woman, job/career, pet(s), kid(s), re-training, new city, town or country, the fellowship or grant you’re sure you’ll never win, leaving the man or woman or boss who abuses you, the athletic challenge that looks impossible — go for it! Be selective and smart about it, but if nothing you’re working on or with ever makes you a little nervous or anxious, in a good way, you’re stagnant.

8) Your dream job/man/woman/home may prove to be a nightmare. You’ll survive.

9) Being broke, (short of losing your home and health), is annoying as hell but it won’t kill you. I am not talking about severe, chronic poverty, but the nasty fiscal dive so many of us have taken in the past two years — and in the recessions of 2003 and 1990. I’ve watched my income plummet by three-quarters on a few occasions. Not fun!

I live near New York City, where simply driving my Mom to the airport in the summer of 2008 snapped my last nerve after paying an insane $13 in tolls and parking for 15 minutes. Not including gas. Enough already!

Live as far below your means as you can tolerate, adding luxury and pleasures when and where they are affordable; read The Millionaire Next Door, published in 1998, for advice and inspiration on avoiding dangerous peer or family pressure to “keep up”.  Health insurance, safe housing and healthy food are necessities. Cable TV, cellphones, a gym membership, new clothes (short of underwear or socks) are not.

Being broke, even for a few weeks or months, offers a powerful, unavoidable opportunity to sort out your priorities and values, let alone prompt a come-to-Jesus conversation with your partner/spouse/family of origin/kids.

Don’t attach your entire ego to your job title, profession or career. If you have to leave them behind, what (else) will provide you with your sense of self-worth and value?

10) A balanced life includes nurturing your mind, body, soul, heart, friends, family and community. It’s not a zero-sum game. Think of yourself not as a two-sided scale, but a multi-faceted gemstone like a diamond, one that needs to gleam.

I weary to nausea of “balance” conversations. It’s life. It’s your life. It’s your only life. If you need someone to do more of, (even some of), their share of the cleaning, grocery shopping, housework, picking up their dirty laundry — delegate. Insist. Insist again.

Little kids, let alone teens, need to learn that Mom (or, less frequently, Dad) doesn’t mean “slave” in some foreign tongue. If you do always feel like a weary slave to your domestic environment, job or location, consider quitting, moving, downscaling and buying/owning fewer things that need care, feeding, dusting, polishing. Your only life is getting shorter by the minute.

Even if you don’t have kids, you likely have a kajillion other commitments, certainly in a lousy economy with little relief in sight. The word “no” is useful, short, easily said. You can still be a generous and giving person and carve out time for yourself. Do you really need everyone to rely on you being indispensable all the time — or could you, even a few nights a week, instead flop into bed at 9:00 pm. and enjoy a full eight hours’ sleep?

If you don’t take deliberate and consistent care of your own needs, whether for privacy, silence, worship, dawdling, doodling, canoodling, doing nothing, you’ll burn out and become a monster. No one likes a martyr.

Make a list, today, of 10 affordable, accessible activities (no, not Paris) that make you really, really happy. How often do you do them?

Have a Happy New Year  — and great decade!

Image via Wikipedia

I hate January 1st. And the 10th, and usually the 20th, too. Five mornings a week, between the first day of a new year and the thirtieth, my life becomes exponentially more annoying. There’s someone sweating on my treadmill, a line-up for the elliptical and – last resort – a grunting gum-chewer on the recumbent bike next to the only empty piece of workout equipment in the bustling life-sized hamster cage. Personal trainers are barking a little bit louder, women in the locker room are weighing themselves with a little extra scrutiny, and a new crop of obnoxious, insulting posters are lining the gym windows.

Of the hundreds of people at my gym, I assume that around 50 percent consider working out a chore. In January, as membership skyrockets, that probably shifts to 75, maybe 80 percent. Nobody who resolves to exercise more, or drop 10 pounds, or do 90 minutes of daily yoga, really wants to be in fitness apparel at 6 a.m. on a Monday. If they did, they’d have been doing it for years, or they’d at least not have chosen the most cliched possible opportunity to make a vow of gym-going. And that’s not my problem – until it is. When someone’s not invested in fitness for the enjoyment, or for their upcoming race or some tangible – positive – goal, they kind of suck to workout with: towels left lingering on machines, weights scattered on the floor, coffee that you really should have consumed before you got to the gym, spilling onto the stretching mats. And don’t even get me started on the cell phone chatter. Dudes. If you can chat on your cellphone, you might as well just sit in the lobby, rubbing chocolate cake onto your stomach, for all the good this gym membership is doing for your New Years resolution.

I know. I’m a huge gym spaz, and you probably hate me. You probably think I’m self righteous in my proclamation that the treadmill nearest the window belongs to me. And this is all true. But I also know a thing or two about having an enjoyable gym experience, having joined and quit four New York-area fitness palaces in 18 months (I’m also a gym slut, apparently). If you dislike gyms, don’t vow to frequent them: vow to find something active that you actually like. For those who don’t take that advice to heart, or for those who do aspire to gym-rat-ness,  allow me to offer a list of essential tips to surviving the January gym-going experience. I present GYM, DUH.

1. Go get some shorts. You can workout in khakis and a polo shirt, or leggings and a fur stole (no, seriously, this is New York – it’s happened). But that’s a really good way to sour yourself on exercise before your free trial even expires. Nobody at the gym cares what you look like – they’re all too busy feeling bad about their own bodies. Do yourself a favor, and go get a pair of shorts, a t-shirt and something without a three-inch heel. Oh, and while we’re at it, if the back of your shorts says “JUICY” please go home and curl up with your toy poodle and your hair gel. You have failed.

2. You really shouldn’t do that. Lift weights that make your forehead resemble a ripple chip. Run for an hour after a fourteen year “hiatus” from your track-and-field “career”. Do deep lunges in side-slit athletic shorts. Use common sense, both in how much you do (because injuries suck) and how much you reveal (because there are mirrors everywhere, and we’re bound to catch a glimpse). If your body is screaming at you, go home. If the woman doing bicep curls to your left is screaming at you, go home.

3. Make it count. Don’t do too much – but avoid doing too little, as well. If you want to read US Weekly on the elliptical, then power to it. If you want to read your damn study notes on the treadmill, then I’m inclined to suspect that you really aren’t putting in the effort. Image-heavy magazines, with minimal content and large font, are acceptable. Scribbled notes on fundamental physics are not. Oh, and those TVs at the front of the gym? Those are for people to watch while they exercise. They are not free cable for you to enjoy while you sip your fruit smoothie.

4. Don’t talk to me, or anyone else. Some gyms are more of the “meat market” variety than others. If that’s your thing, then check those places out. But at the average neighborhood fitness center, pick-ups are unwelcome: usually for the person being picked up, but even more importantly, for the people forced to observe this awkward, sweaty interaction as they try to exercise. You smell, they smell, and everyone’s feeling vulnerable, irritated and a little bit thirsty. These are not sexy times. These are also not times to brag about negative splits, ask an iPod-wearing runner for the time, or, really, even make eye contact with anyone but yourself.

5. Unless that’s water, put it away. Muscle Milk seems to be the latest non-water option for over-enthusiastic gym-goers, convinced that a 30-minute strength session requires 50 grams of whey protein condensed into a $3.95 bottle of chalky lactate. Muscle milks, 5-Hour-Energies and ginko-electrolyte-ades are gimmicks, meant to convince new gym attendees that they’re “fueling up” for an intense, sweaty experience. For a workout that’s an hour or less, drink some water. For a workout that’s longer than an hour, why are you even in a gym? Go outside.

6. Heed the masters. By now, you probably think I’m arrogant enough to consider myself a gym-master. Hardly. I’m too busy cruising from one fitness center to the next, while others are mastering a single gym – cultivating relationships with managers, establishing a complex workout dynamic, knowing where to get extra towels or the best magazines. Find those people. Subtly trail them. Learn. How to track one down? She’s got an iPod strapped to her tanned bicep, waves at the desk staff, and winks at the best-looking trainers. He’s definitely got a shaved chest, does unimaginable things with his abs and a Bosu Ball, and is confident enough in his sexuality to stretch with a yoga strap.

If you survived January – got some shorts, avoided injury, learned to love water – and you’re still motivated to wake up at 6 a.m., stumble to the coffeemaker and throw on your sneakers, then congratulations. It won’t be long before you’re welcoming a new crop of gym-goers into your world. With a sneer when she flies off the spin bike, and a sigh when he dribbles coffee onto that silk Armani tank-top, you’ll peer into your eyes in the floor-to-ceiling mirror, and smile: oh, how far you’ve come.

Image via Wikipedia

Yep, it’s New Year’s Resolution time again. And damn it if I can’t remember what I resolved last year, which may or may not bode well for any promises/aspirations/obligatory statements about what I will or will not do in 2010.

However, you have to give me a little wiggle room. Because 2009 was a humdinger of a year. Shall we recap?

In December ‘08 I was freelancing at a weekly gossip rag. In late October of that year I’d been laid off from my managing editor job at a brilliant, irreverent monthly when that monthly ceased to exist. I was offered a full-time job with aforementioned gossip rag (albeit for quite a bit less than I’d been making at the previous gig, but we all knew there was a recession on by then and things would get worse before they got better).

So I took the job after a cursory analysis of my options: take the job, or take no job.

In January, I was working peaceably, or as peaceably as one can at a weekly gossip rag, at my cubicle when the news came down that the team that had hired me had been fired. Some of them had only been there a few weeks. I was “saved,” somehow. But only temporarily.

In May there was another regime change, and I was out.

So I started collecting unemployment, enrolled in COBRA, and took to freelancing as much as possible.

In the past 7 months, I’ve worked for pretty much anyone and everyone who asked. When no one asked, I emailed pretty much anyone and everyone I’d ever known to see if they might need me to do something and would pay me for it.

I project-managed and copy edited and fact checked for magazines; I wrote about topics ranging from Dan Brown’s latest novel to semen-stained showers—and, obviously, the recession. I worked at a sample sale of high-end kid’s clothes. I even attempted to write marketing copy. I sent out countless resumes, interviewed for more than a few jobs, and have been in and out of magazine publishing companies all over town as a freelancer.

It’s been interesting to note the little things at formerly high and mighty publishing cos: No longer could you get a free bottle of water, or a coffee stirrer, in once-hallowed halls, while in other places, the water bubbler was broken for months (recently it’s been fixed, and there’s free rice pudding in the fridge, which has to be a sign of something good, no?).

Through it all, I’ve been depressed/euphoric/drunk/sober/weary and occasionally well-rested. My dad told me that I’d go through the five stages of grief after my layoff; I think it’s been more like 90, and I’m still cycling through. I’ve had checks for a lot of money come in, and I’ve had no checks at all for too long.

But if this year has taught me anything, it’s that we displaced media professionals can get by. Sometimes I was true to myself, and sometimes I wasn’t, but I got by. We all did. Right?

So for 2010, I’m going to keep it simple. I’m going to keep the faith. (And, maybe, learn to surf.)

How about you?

The author, during the dark ages

And I don’t believe it’s just me. The noughties aren’t over, and the teens don’t really begin until 2011. It’s a simple matter of the most rudimentary addition. Nine years do not a decade make. You need a full set of ten for that. Yet journalists everywhere, even some of the generally cool heads at True Slant, are making lists of the best and worst of the decade, and heaving collective sighs of relief that the most troubled decade since the 1940s is drawing to an end. The same thing happened ten years ago when 1999 turned into 2000. We partied like it was 1999.

Was it just because the artist formerly known as a symbol told us we should? A decade ago in 1999, New Year’s Eve found me roaring drunk in an Irish pub in Krakow, Poland. Ever the stickler however, I wasn’t celebrating the millennium, because there was no millennium yet to celebrate. (I had a damned good time anyway).

No folks, my personal millennium celebration didn’t come until the following year, which I spent in the town formerly known as New Amsterdam. Regards this decade, I have mixed feelings. Geopolitically, America has probably had the worst president on record, committing the US armed forces and untold billions to the greatest military blunder since Napoleon marched on Moscow: Greater even. America, Britain, Canada and others have now become caught up in an endless and unwinnable war on an adverb. It seems also to me alot of the most intractable world conflicts have just dug in deeper. I’m thinking for example of Israel and Palestine. Well I would, as they’re right next door to me here in Beirut. Global warming continues apace. Or doesn’t. I tend to think the former, but I wish the so-called experts would make up their minds, and the governments who are supposed to protect us would do something about it. Borrowing, spending and greed almost brought the entire global economy to its knees, and then the people and institutions who perpetuated this colossal fraud were rewarded for their behaviour, setting the stage for another, possibly even bigger crash a few years down the line. On a lighter note, but we all have to live with this stuff, reality television and K-list celebrity culture have done the unthinkable, and succeeded in dumbing down the populus even further. That witless twat Victoria Beckham is now considered a style icon, and people are interested in what the prattish Simon Cowell has to say about music, and God help us, Oprah Winfrey about literature. The world has indeed, gone to hell in a handbasket.

So er, given all that, I suppose I can understand people wanting this goddamn decade over. Except that aren’t journalists supposed to be you know, at least kind of interested in the facts?

On the specifically personal front, most of the really interesting things that have happened to me in my life, or that I’ve made happen, have occured in the last decade. I helped author guidebooks to Hungary and Florence and Buenos Aires. I started making films, and acting in them; playing a crafty KGB agent, a Nazi apologist lawyer, and a cokehead aristocrat living in Buenos Aires. I wrote a book about feral cats, for which I’m currently seeking a publisher. Hint, hint. If the old Chinese curse is ‘may you live in interesting times’, I believe I’ve met that particular blight head on.

And we might be getting on a bit, but we know when we’re onto a good thing. Let’s have two end-of-decade/beginning of a new era blowouts: Starting with this one. The Jet-Set Hobo requires no excuse to drink Champagne and kiss every acquiescent woman in sight, but if he did, this would do nicely… so Happy New Year/Decade/Era of Peace and Prosperity everyone, and let’s not spoil it by thinking too much!

Oahu's Waikiki Beach. Sue Frause photo.

The press is having a heyday with the Obama family spending Christmas vacation on Oahu.

He’s the first president in 20+ years to not spend Christmas in the White House.

And you can be assured that the tourism folks in the islands are grinning from ear to ear. With the number of visitors on the decline in Hawaii the past few years, they’re hoping that visions of surf and sand will make folks want to ditch their winter and head for summer.

Barack Obama’s Hawaii is a link on the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau that highlights all things Obama. The microsite includes the history of Barack Obama’s family in Hawaii, along with food and activities with Obama tie-ins (think shaved ice and golfing).

The Obama Tour Hawaii is a $40 tour that traces the footsteps of “the local boy who became President.” It includes transportation from Waikiki hotels.

Image by gjeewaytee (On) via Flickr

The purple tricycle from Target arrived in a box so battered that it looked as though an elephant had sat on it. Inside, the rim and spokes on one of the back wheels were bent beyond the point where we could straighten them.  The trike remained in the basement Christmas morning. And by the time we got two-thirds of the way through opening presents, I was glad it had.

That’s when Devon’s brain short-circuited. After the mittens and hat, the Tigger and Pooh stuffed animals, the magnetic letters, and hair brush and barrettes, the popup books and Legos, she started zigzagging around the room like the wind-up $3 Lady Bug in her stocking that did flips and proved her favorite present of the morning.

We always get too much stuff at Christmas, and having a 2-year-old grand-daughter around doesn’t help. At Christmas, anyway, shopping is our buzz as we drink deeply of the American addiction to buy things in an economy whose engine relies roughly 70 percent on consumer spending.

One can only ask, “Why?”

The ’80s brought that cynical bumper sticker, “He who has the most toys wins.” And yet even now, in the midst of a recession, with neighbors losing jobs and homes, we are still primed to buy, still think that somehow lots of things will solve our problems, that good times will return and that this time, unlike last, all those material goods will make us happy.

They won’t.  Kathy and Betsy both bought me beautiful Christmas presents that I really appreciated. But my very best came from Meghan, my younger daughter and Devon’s mom.  When it comes to material things, she doesn’t have much. But she cooked me crepes, smothered in butter and as good as the ones I loved as a child when Margot, our German au pair, made them as a labor of love.

Margot died a few years ago, but the handmade gold stars she shipped from Germany a few decades ago still hang from our tree, another gift of special meaning.

Love has never had a dollar sign attached. Neither does friendship, community, caring or any of the other nouns that make day-to-day life worthwhile.

Why then do we buy too much and work all the harder so we can buy more or at least buy as much as we did when the economy was better?  Why do we shove family into a handful of holidays when we finally allow time to slow down enough to enjoy ourselves before racing out the door again to cram in more work so we can buy more things?

I picked up this morning’s New York Times and came upon this headline: “A Time to Think Hard About Retirement and Death.”  I’ve started thinking more about the first recently, but was kind of hoping the second would hold off for awhile.  Life flies past like a rocket in part because we all quickly forget the childhood story of Ferdinand. He’s the bull who refused to fight and instead sat in a field to smell the flowers.  Bull or no bull, he understood the value of each day.

This is a season of hope. I take much from my family, from Betsy’s visit home, Meghan’s crepes, Devon’s exuberance and Kathy’s steadfastness. As I look ahead to the next decade (is it 20-10 or 2000-10?), I take it as well from the stories my students write and the Facebook emails former students send.  These are stories about helping — those raising money for displaced children abroad or tutoring underprivileged children near to home, those engaging in conversations on race or engaged by opportunities to volunteer.

These narratives are small pieces of my hope for this nation as a whole in the decade ahead, a hope that this will be the decade of giving and caring, of volunteering and engaging, of community through action, one person, one act of kindness at a time. Forgive me, Miss America contestants, but world peace is just too big a prize for me to wrap my hands around.  Teaching an uneducated newcomer to this country to read, that’s something I can understand.

And do. Which brings me to my resolution. I’ve written about the need for voluntarism. I’ve taken some pride in teaching students to write well and, I hope, do some good. But when it comes to carving time for my own volunteering, I keep filling my plate with all these tasks which are more like the goods we buy at the store at Christmas than the crepes Meghan put on my plate this morning.

It’s past time to grow by giving — in person, not from a checkbook, but from the heart. Thinking about retirement can wait. So can death, as far as I’m concerned. When it comes, I’d like to be in a slower, less affluent place, one that leaves me personally much richer.

Image by KWDesigns via Flickr

I have a pair of boxing gloves that have been sitting in my apartment, unused, since November.  This is not so much because of my own laziness, as you might expect, but because my boxing instructor hurt his foot and my nearly intermediate lessons stopped just before Thanksgiving.

And I was just getting good with the speed bag.

Fortunately, my instructor’s foot is on the mend, and lessons shall resume this January, which is pretty much an ideal time to start something new, athletically speaking (and otherwise).

After all, even if you haven’t spent the last five days pounding wine and turkey stuffing, it’s fun to start the year with a new hobby, and it’s especially gratifying if it’s one that makes you sweat, whether or not you actually punch people doing it.

The great thing about this particular December/January is that your gym membership/boxing class costs/yoga mat fee/pilates reformer is going to be cheaper than ever. Per the New York Times:

Clubs depend on the December-January rush for the bulk of their memberships. But this year the frenzy has been ratcheted up a notch as clubs try to make up for the recession, which caused many corporate sponsorships to evaporate and many individual members to drop out or cut way back on costly extras like personal training and massage.

This is a great boon, especially for us freelancing or semi- or actually unemployed people.  Working out was pretty much what saved me during my darkest jobless days.  Endorphins, getting out of the house, and interacting with people rather than your TV or refrigerator are all very good things.

So when you start drafting your resolutions, make sure there’s one about some new workout program, whatever it may be. And then bargain hunt for the best deal.  Because it’s a buyers’ market where gyms are concerned right now, and that’s a gift that keeps giving.

But now, reports Joel Millman in the Wall Street Journal, it is being taken over for sport.

In some places, Boxing Day really is about pounding on an opponent in the boxing ring. For some fans of fisticuffs, Boxing Day is the biggest boxing day of the year.

That’s certainly the case in Ghana, where tonight Accra’s Ohene Djan Sports Stadium will be rocking with fighters and their fans. The nine-match program starts at sundown. Six bouts are for all-Africa titles, three of those featuring a Ghanaian hero facing a rival from Nigeria. Ringside seats cost 10 Ghanaian cedi, just under $7.

Boxing is a Boxing Day staple across Africa. Besides Ghana, it’s a tradition in Uganda, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania — all places where Britons once ruled and left a Boxing Day legacy, if not quite the one Queen Victoria envisioned when she made Boxing Day an official holiday in Great Britain.

Somehow, the insertion of boxing into Boxing Day seems ominous. I went to a boxing match once. Some sports-writer friends of mine at the Richmond Times Dispatch, where I was working in the very olden days, invited me to join them in ringside seats. We got there early, people were skipping around just about at my eye level, beer-drinking was going on with enthusiasm and it boded to be a fine time. Soon, however, the action began. The blue-trunks guy opened a cut above the eye of the red-trunks guy, a tooth may have been knocked out, terrible sounds were heard in the land. When blood started splattering from the cut over the eye, I am still embarrassed to admit, tears starting coming from mine. I was never invited back. I think that was when I started dating a guy from the radio station across the street.

Maybe, we can still hope and trust, people somewhere are boxing up donations for the peace and goodwill of humankind. But this latest news about a once-goodhearted holiday does not bode well for the future.

Season’s Beatings: ‘Boxing Day’ Takes a Pugilistic Turn – WSJ.com.

Image via Wikipedia

A good Christmas tale should be uplifting, at least by the end; otherwise what’s the point? Just to be a Scrooge or a grinch? Not here, not now. So, don’t be put off by my starting with a lament that Christmas is both impossible to ignore and really tough to enjoy.

First, if you don’t believe in the holiday’s supernatural creation myth then the day can seem to be about not much more than shopping and cookies. Not that I have anything against shopping and cookies–well, I actually don’t like shopping–but all the juice behind the day should be about something more than consumption, even if you don’t buy the myth. The day still should somehow promise celebration and communion: something “liminal,” something special.

Plus, if you are not only a materialist athiest but also Jewish, or otherwise not raised with Xmas celebrations, then appreciating the holiday gets even more complicated. Sure, you can follow Jewish tradition, at least in NYC, and devote the day to movies and Chinese food, but that risks missing out on something both special and meaningful–kind of like making Thanksgiving into a fast day.

Now comes the uplifting part, courtesy of a story on the radio about the tales of a primatologist named Barbara Smuts. Her research took her to the savannahs of East Africa where she lived 7 days a week 10 hours a day for 2 years with a tribe of baboons. The story, what I now appreciate as an early Christmas present, came Tuesday morning on Morning Edition by Robert Krulwich and RadioLab. While you might think it strange to go from struggles with the Christmas spirit all the way to baboons on the African savannah, you won’t feel that way once you read a couple of the stories she tells of her time with the baboons.

In an article from the Journal of Consciousness Studies Smuts describes many of her experiences while she was an unobtrusive participant in the tribe’s daily life. In a section about being both social beings and individual selves she wrote (and the “we” below refers to her and her baboon tribe);

They most vividly convey a sense of group spirit when they share a highly pleasurable experience. Once, after few days of heavy rain, we stumbled upon a plethora of newly emerged mushrooms — a baboon delicacy that normally evokes competition. This day, however, there were enough mushrooms for everyone. To my amazement, before anyone dug in, they all paused to join in a troop-wide chorus of food-grunts, their bodies literally shaking with excitement. In that moment, I realized that collective rejoicing in celebration of sustenance must have begun long ago.

via JCS Journal of Consciousness Studies 8,5-7.

Oh my goodness … baboons say grace! They stop for a moment of shared gratitude before diving-in to the feast before them. They were not just going to pound down those delicious fungal calories, when there was enough for all they were going to pause first for a moment of communal gratitude, then eat. There was no supernatural deity being invoked, although there is always that possibility since even Smuts doesn’t fully know the mind of a baboon. But even without one, baboons stopped to count their blessings.

Her work, and a baboons life, gets even more interesting and relevant to holiday celebrations. The following is the story RadioLab told with wondeful radio-ish sound effects. You can hear it here or just read Smuts moving description;

One experience I especially treasure. The Gombe baboons were travelling to their sleeping trees late in the day, moving slowly down a stream with many small, still pools, a route they often traversed. Without any signal perceptible to me, each baboon sat at the edge of a pool on one of the many smooth rocks that lined the edges of the stream. They sat alone or in small clusters, completely quiet, gazing at the water. Even the perpetually noisy juveniles fell into silent contemplation. I joined them. Half an hour later, again with no perceptible signal, they resumed their journey in what felt like an almost sacramental procession. I was stunned by this mysterious expression of what I have come to think of as baboon sangha. Although I’ve spent years with baboons, I witnessed this only twice, both times at Gombe. I have never heard another primatologist recount such an experience. I sometimes wonder if, on those two occasions, I was granted a glimpse of a dimension of baboon life they do not normally expose to people.

via JCS Journal of Consciousness Studies 8,5-7.

OK, that knocked my socks off. Transcendental baboons; creatures with an apparently rich reverential inner life. That special experience of communion, a “spiritual” connection to something larger, to something shared that inspires awe and wonder was right there in the middle of the natural world. They stopped and collectively gazed at the water, like a prayer-service. I’m astounded, awe-struck by a world that has baboons who will both chase down a gazelle fawn and rip the flesh from it’s bones and then on another day stop for no apparent reason on a journey home so they can experience nothing less than a stream-side Quaker meeting.

All the talk this week about pantheism in conflict with a more meaningful Christian theology (see Ross Douthat in the NY Times or Allison Kilkenny and David DiSalvo here at T/S) misses the point that no supernatural entity of any sort is necessary for  transcendent communion. There is no higher power necessary, whether you locate the supernatural in the natural world or in sacred texts. The natural world as weakly as we are still able to understand and experience it is not only all we have, it’s all we need. One can stand fully inside the natural world and find there our ethics, our striving for immortality, for transcendence.

And while it may not be enough to get me to go shopping, if baboons can stop to count their blessings before a meal and even have moments of reverential contact with the possibilities of life, so too can we.  Merry Christmas.

Surveillance Santa

“Santa Clause is Coming to Town” was one of my favorite holiday songs growing up, even though the lyrics are a bit ominous. Jolly St. Nick helps kids get used to the idea of living in a surveillance society:

He’s making a list,
He’s checking it twice,
He’s gonna find out
who’s naughty or nice.

Santa Claus is coming to town!

He sees you when you’re sleeping,
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake!

I imagine that Santa has progressed with the times. I hope that he feeds his reindeer organic carrots, has a hybrid sleigh, and makes use of Google alerts for monitoring kids’ behavior. But I wonder: if he had to choose between Google and Facebook for planting his elf spies, where would he want them in order to learn the most about our naughty behavior? In other words, which company knows more about us?

Facebook knows who our friends are, which is very revealing. In fact, your friends list can reveal your sexual and political orientation. Depending on how much is in a person’s “About Me” page, the elves could determine the music and movies they like, where they live, and where they’ve worked. And of course, Facebook has lots of dirt on us in the form of photos. And I don’t know about Santa, but I judge a person based on how many of those stupid quizzes they take in a day.

Google, on the other hand, knows what we search for. And what we click on. Elves at Google could search through our archives of hundred, thousands, and maybe millions of emails. Google knows who our friends are too. And professional contacts. And random acquaintances. And everyone we’ve ever communicated with via Craigslist. If you use Picasa, it has access to your photos. If you use Calendar, it knows what you’re up to day to day. And if you have a YouTube account, it knows what you’ve been watching.

All in all, I’d say Santa would get better intel from elves at Google. Those who have been naughty might be alarmed by Tony Bradley’s take on Google vs. Facebook at PC World:

The difference between Facebook and Google as it relates to privacy is that Facebook appears to listen to concerns and respond by implementing changes to try and address issues, while Google seems to be dismissive. The Google response is to just stress why you should trust it, or why you shouldn’t care about privacy.

In a CNBC interview, Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained his stance on online privacy “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines –including Google –do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

In other words, Schmidt is saying:

You better watch out,
You better not cry,
You better not pout,
I’m telling you why.