Musings Archives — Page 3 of 3

03/07/201703/07/2017

A Dumpster-Fire of Joy

I think we’ve all seen those commercials for Las Vegas. Lots of pretty, generic-looking women, decked out in ankle-breaking heels and sequined dresses. You know the ones. Groups of Jersey Shore rejects dancing to top 40 songs, drinking Malibu, and pretending that they’re having a wild and crazy experience. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas they say, pretending for just a minute that they’re not going to spray this all over Instagram the second their hangover let’s them look at their phones again. This is the time of your life! Aren’t you wild! they say.

Those ads are bullshit. If you want to see some wild crap, spend a weekend in the woods with the raging freak-show that is a Purdue Outing Club reunion or, POC for short. I’ve spend three such weekends with these loveable weirdos, and let me tell you, they’re one David Attenborough voice-over from something you’d see on Discovery channel. And I mean that in the best way possible.

* The names of people have been omitted because, let’s face it, your mom probably doesn’t want to know that you ate an Oreo out of your boyfriend’s butt crack (note: this was not me).

**What, did you think I was fucking kidding when I said these weekends we’re debaucherous? POC don’t play around when it comes to truth or dare.

When I think of my undoing that weekend, it all comes back to a single contraption, brought to the party by an endearingly sadistic POC-er. Picture a hastily-made miniature wheel of fortune in which the only outcomes are either increased alcohol consumption, or public humiliation. You know, like playing russian roulette with a fully loaded gun. It’s fun.

The evening started off innocuously enough, with a fully-nude hot tub session in which we managed to cram 15 grown-ass adults into a single tub. I’ve never been entirely sure where the propensity for nudity came from at POC reunions, but it’s safe to say that anybody who has attended one has been subject to at least one accidentally seen asshole. Or, as might be the case from my first POC reunion, the asshole you’re trying not to stare into like the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings, is being intentionally displayed for your viewing pleasure. My precioussssssssss…..

Anyway.

The night began to unspool in an endless stream of drinks, laughter, magical hamburgers, and spin after spin on the drink-wheel-0f-torture/fun. People swirl in and out of the room. Another hot-tub session is instigated. A man takes a naked lap around the house in the snow. Then a woman does the same. Shots are taken off of previously-unthought of body parts. The man that I love shotguns a beer like a champ. People cheer. Clothes are swapped and then swapped again until the women in the room look like Tom-Boy children and the men strut around the room in skin-tight yoga pants. I laugh until tears stream down my face and I cannot breathe. Everyone in the room is hysterically, and unendingly funny.

The next day we’ll get up and hike to a lookout high above the verdant Washington forrest. We’ll sit around eating cold leftover hamburgers as our hangovers leach out of us into the cool Washington air. That night we’ll do it all again. On Monday we’ll ski, making lap after lap through the powder which barely conceals the blue ice, working feverishly for a few good turns each run, and raucously cheering on our fellow skiers from the chairlift in a way that is hilarous only to us.

On Tuesday morning I’ll return to Los Angeles where people will ask me how my weekend was. I’ll say it was fine. Fun. We went skiing. The askers will smile in a vague sort of way and the conversation will move on. In truth, I barely have the words to explain these POC reunions. I’m stuck relying on a phrase, drunkenly uttered into the dark amongst friends and half-strangers in a hot tub. It’s like a dumpster-fire of joy.

02/13/2017

Monday Action Post – Feb 13th

Look, the world seems messed up and scary right now, it’s crazy and I totally hear you. I also know that it can seem so overwhelming to reach out and do something without any guidance on how best to spend your time, efforts, and energy. Again, I totally get it. But let’s make a collective move from Freakout-Ville and take the productivity train to Change-Town! It will be fun, I promise.

Each Monday I’ll be doing a quick post that helps you get involved, and better yet, gives you an asset or information for something you can do right now.

To kick things off I’m going to highlight an awesome site called 5 Calls. 5 Calls allows you type in your location, and select an issue that is important to you, and then will give you the name, the title, and the phone number of one of your representatives to call! It’s so easy. And if you’re afraid of talking on the phone (but seriously, no judgement here, it’s the worst), then you can just recite the sample script they provide on their site.

So pick up your damn phone for something other than looking at cat videos and make a difference in the world. Retweeting Obama memes doesn’t really accomplish anything (although it does feel damn good), but calling your state representatives is the fastest and one of the easiest ways to make your voice heard.

Bonus Reading: Massive attendance and protest at a Utah town hall lead to Rep. Jason Chaffetz bailing on the session an hour early after the crowd became agitated with his answers and began chanting “Do your job.”

http://m.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/9/1632123/-Utah-congressman-bolts-an-hour-early-from-constituent-town-hall-amid-Your-last-term-chants?detail=facebook

02/09/201702/09/2017

Dirty Fucking Hippies, and the Art of Conversation

The first sunrise of 2017. She is pretty, no?

If you’re sitting around butt naked in a hot-tub full of strangers, I think it’s fair to say that you’ve passed the politeness benchmark that dictates you ask your fellow soakers what they do professionally. Or, so I thought, until somebody turned to my boyfriend and I and asked what we did for work. I smiled at this bland woman and told her: Advertising, grateful once again to have a job that people almost universally recognize, and yet few truly understand. This limits the number of follow-up questions, usually to zero.

Living in LA can give you the impression that your work is who you are. Certainly this is a city where people come to “make it.” The cliches exist for a reason. And if you live here too long the little worm that tells you your value comes from your job title and pay grade will slowly creep into your ear, and make it’s home in your brain. Then one day you’ll be sitting around naked as the day you were born, on your second breakfast beer of the day, on the first day of the new year and the only thing you can think to ask this pool full of strangers is what is says on their W2. Jesus tap-dancing Christ, the creativity is staggering!

So here is a fun little challenge to try. Or don’t. I don’t know you. Let’s try asking people something of interest. I think it’s fair to say that the world is pretty messed up and scary right now, and walking around in a constant state of hostility or apathy towards your fellow man isn’t really helping the situation. Ask somebody what they’re reading right now, ask them what their current obsession is, ask them what was the best thing they ate this week, or heck, ask them what their latest dream was and if they maybe want to reenact it with you through interpretive dance. And if you ask them about their jobs at least have the common decency to ask them why they do what they do. You might get an interesting answer, for once.

09/01/201609/28/2016

Trip Report – Getting in the way of Important Things

The roof of hidden lake lookout needed replacing. Badly. Cedar shingles, once a cheerful blonde, had turned grey and cracked after nearly 30 years of abusive Washington weather. Our hosts, Robert and Ethan scrambled across the lookout’s roof, installing the new shingles. Ones that would hopefully last as long as their predecessors (read: 20 years longer than they were intended to). To say the two men moved with ease would belie the precarious nature of the situation. Only Ethan had a harness, and while I could not ascertain how safe his rigging system was, it certainly had to provide greater safety than Robert’s, which, consisted of a knotted piece of rope wrapped repeatedly around his leg. It was this rope that would, at least in theory, prevent Robert from plummeting the 500 feet off the side of the mountain should he slip from the roof.

Hidden Lake Lookout in all her splendor. Sporting a lovely new roof.

Just six hours earlier I’d been waking to a 4am alarm and loading my gear into Rob’s battered Subaru Outback, grateful, if for nothing else, that the lingering smell of gasoline had faded since the last time I was in this car. As we drove through the predawn light, the urban glimmer of Seattle faded into the background, and our conversation turned to the dreaded permitting system. The goal was to beat the rush to the ranger station and secure one of the elusive Hidden Lake Lookout permits. As we pulled into the parking lot, we knew we had failed. The parking lot was filled with bleary-eyed people, more than a few of whom had spent the night in their cars. Rob returned to the car with our number, 13. My lucky number. We had to get a permit now, we just had to.

And we did.

Although it came with the warning that the lookout would likely be closed for repairs. Well then. That was just a chance we’d have to take.

Forever ascending. Remember to look back.

Ultimately, no chances had to be taken. No blustery bivies set up on an exposed ridge. Just a few hours of honest work helping to restore the old lookout would secure our lodging for the night.

The first glimpse of our lookout. If you look closely you can almost see the building… but then again, maybe that’s a lie.

After the work had been done our group of four, now turned to six, sat atop the rocky summit and watched one of the most incredible sunsets I’ve ever seen. The conversation turned to the niceties that had been foregone earlier. Where are you from. What do you do. I couldn’t help but feel self-conscious about my answers, especially surrounded by our new companions. Los Angeles, and advertising, seemed impractical and vain next to Ethan, the Boulder-based photographer, and Robert the possibly-nomadic lookout care-taker.

Ian the Newbie Photographer. His enthusiasm was so infectious.

The thoughts of employment and value had been circling my head for the previous month as I started a job hunt. What value is there is selling luxury cars, pimping mobile video games, and pushing content onto disinterested consumers? How does advertising, media, PR, marketing, any of it; how does any of it better our world? At 28 I’d already started to look around and wonder what my contribution to this little blue rock would be. How would I structure my life differently were I not saddled with more student debt than my annual salary? Or was my debt simply an excuse I used to keep myself in a city I felt no love for, and a job I had increasingly become disinterested in.

Robert said having a job just gets in the way of the important things in life. I was surprised he didn’t finish his sentence with the hippy-cliché, a drawn out, maaaan. But man, maybe he was right. If not for the desire for a bigger house, why do I need more money? I certainly don’t have much interest in a new car, a bigger (or any) TV. So then, what the fuck am I doing?

Rober of the Lookout, accidentally causing 20-somethings to have existential crises’ since… fuck knows when.

The answer is, I’m not sure. This isn’t a blog post about where I suddenly discover the meaning of life from a mountain top guru. That’s the stuff of Hollywood movies, and frankly it’s crap, the notion that life’s choices can be distilled into an instant. Instead, our trip through the North Cascades left me with open eyes and a deep, aching desire to return to Washington to explore further. And Robert left me with more questions than I started with, and an urgent desire to find a place in the world that would better align with my lifestyle, values, passions, whatever you want to call it. No, no answers were found. But that’s just the way life is…. maaaaan.