Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

adventures / photo / Spain / Thursday — Comments Off
09
Mar 23

We made it … somehow … eventually

This is the story of Delta and KLM. Last year we were on American Airlines, who still owe us money, and who will never figure into a story I tell ever again. But between that, and Delta and KLM, we are wondering if we should fly in March ever again.

First, Delta.

When our Delta flight was late departing JFK for Amsterdam, we knew we would be in trouble catching our connection to Barcelona. We were correct. The Yankee spent much of the night talking to Delta on the phone, while we were still in New York, and through their app, while we were in the air.

Delta was happy to send us to Zurich later today, and then to Barcelona late on Friday.

The purpose of our trip to Barcelona was for a conference, and it took place in the City of Counts on Friday and Saturday. Going to Zurich would mean losing the best part of the conference. It’s her favorite conference, so we were getting inventive on ways to get there on time, or close to it. There are four other international airports in Spain. Could we get into one of those? Train over to the city by the sea? Should we rent a car in Amsterdam, after an overnight flight where we had about two hours of sleep, and try driving 14 hours into Spain?

Delta, like arguing with a family member who can’t be proven wrong, couldn’t see the problem of sending us to Zurich. That was just their solution, for some reason. (Delta customer service has taken a hit, it seems.) We went to Zurich last year, thanks, and that’s two countries removed from where we are supposed to be.

Because of this intractability, we were down to figuring this out in Amsterdam, with Delta’s airline partners.

Which brings us to KLM.

After trekking through Amsterdam’s enormous airport, going through the longest, slowest passport control line outside of the United States and being told to go to different wrong places for different wrong desks, you begin to wonder how anyone ever arrives on a plane in the correct place in a timely fashion, let alone how their luggage gets there, too.

At the third desk, we have finally arrived at the right spot, where a laconic KLM agent patiently and emphatically explained that, for us, it was Zurich or bust. Also, we must go to that gate now to make the flight.

Dejected, we headed that way. We were trying to reconcile ourselves to the idea of missing the bulk of the conference when we learned that we missed the flight to Zurich, too.

Back to that last KLM desk. The taciturn woman was helping someone else. Her more bubbly colleague drew the short straw with us. There were no flights, this woman said, into Barcelona through Sunday. There goes the whole conference.

What to do? Go home? Figure out some way to move on to the vacation leg of this trip? It was a mildly grim moment.

Then another KLM agent comes to the desk area. This new man and the bubbly woman chat back and forth in Dutch. And he finds that two people have canceled their trips to Barcelona that evening. While we were just standing there, wondering what to do.

From having absolutely no options to suddenly having seats, we were on our way. Hoof it over to this gate, and we actually have time to do that.

We thank her and her male colleague. To him, it’s just another task, and we’re obviously making him a little uncomfortable. So I turn back to the bubbly one, make the big eye contact and tell her she has been the best part of our day. We left for the gate right then. We’d wait there a few hours, removing all opportunity for stupid errors.

And so we strolled down to gate D85. Which is also, oddly, D55.

At this point we’re 22 hours into our trip, on two hours of sleep, and in a week that hasn’t seen an awful lot of sleep anyway. I sat beneath that monitor, took a photo of that monitor, and studied them both carefully, for a long, long time.

Are we in the right place?

Is this the right time?

Where is the plane?

Or even the gate crew?

Or the other passengers?

Finally, they all showed up. The passengers, the gate agents, the plane. We boarded, not sitting together, but happy to be in two middle seats, and going to the correct country, to say nothing of the correct city. We were finally on a flight to Barcelona.

At the Barcelona airport a guy appointed himself our taxi man. I’d just seen a dog do the squat of shame inside the airport. Then and there I said to myself, we are 27 hours or so into this trip and I will take a cab to anywhere, so long as it meant there was a hotel, and the end of this journey, on the other end.

I’d make Lewis and Clark proud, no doubt.

Or, on the one hand, we traveled a considerable distance, from the middle of the new world to one of the western parts of the old world, in just over a day. On the other hand, it took 27 hours to do so.

The taxi driver, who quickly sussed out that we were American and dutifully turned his radio over to the Barcelona station playing American classics and the hits of mañana, did not have any paper for a receipt in his hand-sized money device. I took a picture of his screen. That’s just going to have to do for reimbursement purposes.

We checked into the hotel at 9:30, dog tired, some eight hours later than scheduled, but ready for a shower, a meal and sleep.

Good news! The hotel restaurant stays open until 10:30. There’s enough time for us to get to our room, freshen up, and get a bite to eat.

The hotel restaurant is good! I had an Iberian pork plate. The Yankee ordered a salad. The salad was fresh. Very fresh. One of the little critters that had made the lettuce it’s home, perhaps as recently as yesterday, was still hanging out there.

Maybe that’s a Spanish thing? Of all the things you look up before traveling abroad, how a nation treats their salads is way down the list. (But it won’t be for the next trip, wherever that is.) The server stopped by to check on us. We show him the critter. He picks up the little saucer and the little critter and speed walked to the kitchen.

We never saw him again.

Another server takes over, apologizing profusely, offering us a dessert on him. We take him up on a scoop of ice cream. He brought us la cuenta, and it’s a blank piece of receipt paper. Flip it over, nothing there either.

Maybe, I said wearily, this is a Spanish thing? The server takes the receipt. Makes a big theatrical gesture of flipping it over and over, holding it to the light.

“Do you see anything on it?” he said, in his quite good English.

No, we did not.

“Then it must be free.”

So they picked up the entire bill. And, because of a translation issue, we’d ordered more than we intended anyway.

This second server said the first guy was so embarrassed he couldn’t bear to come out to face us. So we spent a good amount of time apologizing to one another. Please make sure he understands we aren’t upset, and we know it isn’t his fault. And the second server continually apologizing and humanizing himself and his coworkers. It was charming in a multi-lingual/mostly-English, please-let-me-go-upstairs-and-to-sleep way.

Tomorrow, somehow, we go to the conference that we almost missed.

adventures / movies / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
08
Mar 23

Should we continue trying to travel in March?

Or traveling at all?

Here is where we are. Spring Break is next week. We’re taking a few extra days for a conference and that meant a trip to the airport and that’s where the fun begins.

We flew, today, from Indianapolis to New York. We did that after giving up on a bike ride, which was the right idea, for a change. That allowed us more time, so we were well ahead of schedule and relaxed going to the very large building with the planes attached at odd angles.

Our flight from Indy to JFK was just fine. Arrived on time. The plane pulled into the same terminal we’d use for our connecting flight, an overnight trip to Spain. Here we are, waiting to board the plane to Barcelona.

We got on the plane, let’s assume it is that one, and everything was just fine.

And then someone kicked out the extension cord that connects the plane to the airport’s power. The plane goes dark! But we’re on the ground, so not a problem. Because there’s ground beneath us. I think about all of that ocean we have to fly over — power and gliders and altitude and ocean — but the crew did not seem concerned. The power is restored, either internally, or via that extension cord. Boarding took forever, and so we pushed back about an hour late.

We got out on the taxiway to learn we had to go back to the terminal for a maintenance issue.

And that ate up the entirety of our second-connection window.

But it allowed me to watch two movies, first, Minari.

Lee Isaac Chung wrote and directed the movie. He was just about to give up on Hollywood, taking a teaching job, when he decided to try one more script. Odd, but lovely, Willa Cather became his inspiration.

She drew upon memories of life in the Great Plains and wrote a series of intensely personal works that are among the most moving novels in American literature. She said, “Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.”

I wondered if the voice was leading me to these words, so that I would begin to trust in my own. As an exercise, I devoted an afternoon to writing my memories of childhood. I remembered our family’s arrival at a single-wide trailer on an Ozark meadow and my mother’s shock at learning that this would be our new home. I recalled the smell of freshly plowed soil and the way the color of it pleased my father. I remembered the creek where I threw rocks at snakes while my grandmother planted a Korean vegetable that grew without effort.

With each memory, I saw my life anew, as though the clouds had shifted over a field I had seen every day. After writing 80 memories, I sketched a narrative arc with themes about family, failure and rebirth. That’s how I got the idea to write “Minari”; it began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.

I also watched Clerks III, which, I assume, Kevin Smith wrote and directed because he wanted to cash in one more time. Truth be told, I knew this was in the works. I was skeptical. I didn’t realize it had already been produced and released. But here it was, on the plane, full of its own brand of contemporary nostalgia.

The first movie was 23 years ago, so there’s nothing contemporary about this nostalgia. But it bristles a bit that we’ve now become a nostalgia generation. But, befitting our role in this timeline, our self reverence is saved for reference to other media. Star Wars is all over the Clerks trilogy, so much so, there are two meta references right there in the trailer.

Give the third movie this: it is better than the second one, and has, perhaps, the best heart of the series.

Tomorrow, the rest of the journey. Or part of it. Or the beginning of a new side-journey.

Anything is possible.

Except for our booking travel in March, ever again, after these last two years.

IU / links / music / Re-Listening / tabs / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
07
Mar 23

There’s so much here to see and enjoy

I forgot to brag on this sunset from yesterday. My bad, sun. You know that big ball of fusion has been hurt by that oversight all day. And the skyline, poor emotional skyline. I’ll never be able to make it up to the skyline. And my thoughts are also with the remnants of those clouds, wherever they are a day later.

It was one of those sunsets of a fleeting sort. As I left the building I though, Take a picture, forget to post it, and give the clouds and all that some human emotions in a poorly framed joke. But by the time I got to my car, just a block away, and up to the top of the parking deck, that’s what I was left with. But, sun, you made a lovely one yesterday.

Probably today’s, too, though I didn’t have the chance to see it.

After darkness fell we walked over to the IU Auditorium to see the traveling show of Chicago. The old man sitting in front of us, and the younger man sitting behind us each obviously had no knowledge of the play. Their surprise at Ms. Sunshine was delightful.

And the performers were good. But almost everyone on stage looks so young all of a sudden. Indeed, quite a few of the people in this photo are making their national touring debut.

The audio guy had some trouble, but of the sort you’ll forget in a few days. Billy Flynn and Mama Morton and Amos and Roxie and all the rest pressed through and gave us a nice version of the musical. I think this is my third time seeing it.

I wonder which song will be stuck in my head for weeks this time.

Remember those flowers that I noted, last Wednesday, as a trick of winter?

Almost all of them have unwrapped themselves now. It’s quite a site, even at night.

Forty-five days until the bike races and the official arrival of spring, but it is starting to feel as though we’re closer than that.

It is time, once again, for the Tuesday feature that allows me to close some tabs on my browser. Some things are took good to X out of and see them disappear forever. Much better for me to memorialize them here, on the off-chance that one day they’ll come to mind, and I’ll do a good keyword search, find a particular thing, and hope the original link is still active.

It isn’t a long shot, but if the first real step is my coming up with the text from memory it might take two or three ties to find the right page.

But I digress.

I’m a sucker for all of these job interview type pieces you see on CNBC and Forbes and the like. The titles are outstanding click bait — case studies, almost — but every now and then you’ll find something good in the body of the piece.

I’ve helped hundreds of people land 6-figure salaries. These 5 job interview phrases got them hired ‘on the spot’:

Nailing a job interview isn’t just about listing skills and experience directly from your resume. You want to paint a picture of your accomplishments through concrete, detailed examples.

To do that successfully, you must know how to communicate effectively. As a career coach who has helped hundreds of people land six-figure jobs, I’ve found that there are certain words that will get the interviewer to pay attention.

Here are five job interview phrases that will make companies want to hire you on the spot.

An Amazon applicant who Jeff Bezos hired ‘on the spot’ shares 5 ways to ‘instantly impress’ during the job interview:

I started my 12-year career at Google in 2006, where I held positions as chief of staff and executive business partner. Before that, I worked at Amazon as an executive business partner to Jeff Bezos.

After spending so much time with some of the world’s most successful and influential leaders, I learned what to look for in new candidates. In fact, Bezos hired me on the spot after my first interview with him in 2002.

Based on the hundreds of interviews I’ve conducted throughout my decades-long career, here are my top tips on how to instantly impress a hiring manager during the job interview.

See what I mean about those titles? SEO bait and plenty of optimistic gold. They’re quite well done. Speaking of …

Why did I even open this one? To see what her side hustle was, of course. How one woman turned a part-time side hustle in her spare room into a gifting company making over $3 million a year:

Put up your hand if you’ve ever stared out your office window, daydreaming about launching one of your imaginative inventions, being your own boss, and getting very rich in the process.

If your hand is firmly raised, then listen up: The fantasy—which you’d be forgiven for thinking is restricted to those in Silicon Valley or movies—is not entirely unrealistic.

London-based Steph Douglas did exactly that when in 2014 she left her job as a branding marketer for EDF Energy to devote herself full-time to …

It’s an online gift company. You can order custom-made care packages and the like.

Finally, I see variations of this idea every spring now, and it is something I’ll try one day when I don’t have neighbors. You can turn your backyard into a biodiversity hot spot:

People have long stoked an urban-versus-rural rivalry, with vastly different cultures and surroundings. But a burgeoning movement—with accompanying field of science—is eroding this divide, bringing more of the country into the city. It’s called rurbanization, and it promises to provide more locally grown food, beautify the built environment, and even reduce temperatures during heat waves.

And, with that, I am now down to 28 open tabs in my phone’s browser.

I don’t remember how I got the next CD to appear in the Re-Listening project. I don’t even have the liner notes. But I never had those in this case, and I’m sure that’s part of the story, which I’ve forgotten entirely. I assume someone gave it to me, probably a radio station. “Fear” was released in 1991, but the last CD we played was from the first half of the 1997, and this one got added to my collection sometime soon thereafter.

Anyway, this is the first Toad the Wet Sprocket CD I owned, and the only one until the last year or two. “Walk on the Ocean” and “All I Want” seemed to be everywhere on everything. Both made it into the top 20. And, seriously, until looking through Toad’s entire discography just now, I thought they’d been put on multiple records for some reason. They released those and three other songs from “Fear” as singles. Eventually, in 1994, this record went platinum, having peaked at #49 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums.

Of the deep cuts, I always enjoy the “Nightingale Song.”

Sonically, this is an acoustically perfect alt rock song.

The very next track ups the ante.

And, remembering that this was recorded in 1991, they were bringing back the organ before bringing back the organ was cool.

Or, if you want some of the modern live experience, we saw Toad twice in 2022. Somehow I’d always managed to miss their live shows, to my chagrin. They’re now adding dates for this summer, but none yet so close that we’ll be able to see them. At least not yet.

I’d go back to see a bit more of that “confident, laid back urgency,” that the band has been able to mine for decades now. If this was the summer of 1997 for me, this was my first apartment, and I was desperately trying to personify my own version of confident, laid back urgency — failing miserably at that, no doubt. It was that, going to class and filling time while everyone else was out of town. This record, and the next one we’ll hear from on the Re-Listening project, became big, big parts of filling that time.

He said in early March, not at all thinking about the summer ahead.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
06
Mar 23

That last photo, though!

When I mentioned, last Thursday, that this site recently marked its 5 millionth visitor I coolly said I have no idea why people visit. Only I do know why.

You’re here for the cats.

Phoebe, as ever, is here for the sunshine.

This is my second favorite in-house joke right now. I say to my wife, I say, “On the floor of our house is a medium-grade residential carpet pad. On that carpet pad is stretched a standard 21st century carpet. On that carpet, there is an overstuffed ottoman. On that ottoman, there is a pillow. And that is where your cat is sleeping.”

Perhaps an even better joke is this one. I say to my lovely bride, I say, “On the floor of our house is a medium-grade residential carpet pad. On that carpet pad is stretched a standard 21st century carpet. On that carpet, there is an overstuffed sofa. On that sofa, there is a fuzzy throw blanket. On top of that fuzzy throw blanket, there is another fuzzy throw blanket. On top of that second fuzzy blanket, there is a third fuzzy blanket. And that is where your cat is sleeping.”

Occasionally, Poseidon also looks for the people inside the television.

They’ve gotta be in there somewhere …

This was the Day of Three Presentations. It was a day full of presentations. Many presentations were given, some of them better than others. One was maybe great! That’s the thing about having a lot of things: there will be variance.

I’ll spend all night staring at a wall thinking about every flinch and stumble. Every tone and tenor, time I squinted or had vague eye contact.

But none of that is important. What’s important is what is coming up at the bottom of this post.

Yesterday afternoon’s bike ride featured some dinosaurs. How many giant reptiles do you see in this graphic? I count six.

After that ride, we went outside. This is The Yankee’s first bike ride since her massive crash last September. Look at that smile!

Part of this is physical, sure. The bone is now starting to heal. (Turns out, she busted herself up so badly it has taken this long for the mending to begin.) Part of it is about getting out of your own way. This is perfectly understandable and reasonable. I was in a similar boat in 2012, when it took me five months to even want to ride again.

So we went out for six miles on quiet, empty roads. Whenever a car came along I put myself between the two of them, and we smiled some. It was cheery and emotional. It was a little more normal.

cycling / Friday / journalism / links — Comments Off
03
Mar 23

A note to self about coasting, and other things

I’ve been mulling over creating a syllabus for a trauma interview course. The idea starts with understanding that not all interviews are the same. Some of them require a more delicate care than others. Some would benefit from having some purposeful training.

The idea, for me, started several years ago. I read a profile, which I can’t re-locate, about a reporter in New York renowned as the guy that interviews people immediately after they’ve just found out a loved one has been killed. (What a thing to be noted for, huh?) He talked about his process — the respect involved, the solemn decorum, even the way he dressed for it. It was a thoughtful thing, and it’s worth expanding on.

I remember discussing this in a reporting class during undergrad. I think we did about 20 minutes on the concept. It was essentially, some people want to talk. Some people will not be prepared to talk. Some people will think you a ghoul. Accept whichever response you get, and don’t take it too personally.

It was, I guess, a different time. I think we can do better. Perhaps some people, in some classes, do. But I would argue it needs to be more than a simple unit.

The idea starts, basically, with social worker and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem’s definition.

Trauma is a response to anything that’s overwhelming, that happens too much, too fast, too soon, or too long — coupled with a lack of protection or support. It lives in the body, stored as sensation: pain, or tension — or lack of sensation, like numbness.

That’s from a 2020 interview, but I ran across it again the other day, and an entire lecture or conversation — a conver-lecture — sprang to mind fully formed.

The back-of-the-envelope notes suggest there’s a mini-term class here, easy. I am sure, the more I dive into it, there’s a full semester in the idea. Perhaps there is more. You don’t know until you really get into it. And I’ll get into it after Spring Break.

It’ll start here.

Trauma reporting
Listening to trauma
What happened to you?
Covering violence
Grief and COVID-19
How to approach people affected by tragedy
When interviewing trauma victims, proceed with caution and compassion

I, of course, think of this in a journalism context, but there are institutional approaches here, as well. And, furthermore, there are other elements to this, most critically, the second-hand trauma that impacts journalists from time-to-time. This was never discussed in any class I took, or any newsroom I worked in. There’s no newsroom I can think of why that shouldn’t be approached. There’s no reason why I can think of that isn’t taught, considered, and re-visited.

So I’m speaking it into existence, as it were.

Rode my bike this evening. It goes like this: following all that climbing last weekend, there were rest days — brought on by necessity and scheduling — on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then a brief ride yesterday. It felt rough. Tonight’s ride was faster, but maybe felt worse.

That avatar in front of me was fun. We paced one another for 10-plus miles. This was my first time ever on this particular route (though some of the roads on this one are on other Zwift routes) and I could tell from the HUD that this was his second lap, at least for the day. He knew the course, which is important.

We took turns pulling, which is the polite thing to do. Everybody gets a little draft and conserves a tiny bit of energy that way. Somewhere along the way he got tired of that and attacked. I let him go, but pulled him back a short time later. Then I started toying with him. For the next two or three times I pulled through I stopped pedaling for just a moment. It’s a question of touch and timing, but you can pass the other person when your avatar’s feet aren’t moving. It’s a funny joke, to me anyway. Look at me! not trying! Now I’ll pedal some more …

So we kept taking turns. Him in front, me drifting by him, then taking a quarter-mile pull or so, then him in front again. I like to think that my little joke aggravated him, and then made him grin with grim determination.

On that route there’s a little climb over the last mile and he was waiting for it. Just after the bottom of the hill that guy exploooooded. He was gone, suddenly 30 seconds ahead of me, and then a minute. I got about half of it back, but he buried me something good.

I learned this: I should coast less — or is it more? And, hey, it’s the weekend …

2023 Zwift route tracker: 78 routes down, 46 to go.