How I learned to stop worrying and love the car horn

As my time in Atlanta draws to a close, I figured I’d reflect on one of America’s great pastimes—driving (sorry, no baseball fanatics here). Long have the beatniks and hitchhikers of old romanticized the American highway system, from Route 66 on to California’s Pacific Coast Highway and—my own true love—the Blue Ridge Parkway. Though not as delicate as Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, or as beautifully honest as Kerouac’s own travel memoirs, I figured I’d pay tribute to my favorite part of living in Atlanta (note: sarcasm).

Adopting the Buzzfeed-style “listicle” narrative, here are 30 things that I'd compare to driving in Atlanta:

1. Running out of hot water in the shower.
2. Getting shampoo in your eyes after you've run out of hot water in the shower.
3. Having to wait in line for coffee.
4. Having to wait in a line with screaming children.
5. Forgetting your wallet at home.
6. Forgetting your phone at home.
7. Accidentally dropping and shattering your phone.
8. Doing your taxes.
9. Applying for financial aid.
10. Applying to jobs.
11. Going to a doctor's office.
12. Having a tooth pulled.
13. Slamming your finger in a car door.
14. Getting a flat tire.
15. Getting the middle seat on a plane.
16. Being thrown up on on a plane.
17. Only being able to listen to Nickelback for the rest of your life.
18. Having to use dial-up Internet for the rest of your life.
19. Having to watch those Sarah McLachlan commercials about abused puppies and kittens.
20. Watching the Red Wedding for the first time.
21. Watching Se7en for the first time.
22. Only being able to watch Will Ferrell movies for the rest of your life.
23. Only being able to listen to country music for the rest of your life (yes, I'm a bad southerner).
24. Having your seat kicked throughout your 2.5 hour captivity in a movie theater.
25. Going on a date to Chuck-e-Cheese.
26. Going on a date with a misogynist.
27. Sitting next to someone with really strong BO.
28. Sitting next to someone wearing $0.99 perfume.
29. Having to get out of bed.
30. Having to get out of bed knowing you have to deal with Atlanta drivers.

Cheers to another week of necessarily excessive horn use and figuring out new ways to spin my favorite four-letter words into intricate tapestries of inaudible road rage.

There and Back Again

Hello friends and faithful followers (aka Dad who keeps bugging me to update this thing more than once every decade—oops). 

So it’s been awhile. I could make up some witty and ultimately utter bullshit response as to why I’ve been MIA for about seven months, i.e. some crocodile beat me in a WWE-style wrestling match in the outback, one of those giant scary (however innocuous) spiders claimed me for its own or, my mom’s personal favorite: “the dingo ate my baby”, but the truth is I just haven’t really cared enough to write about my life while I’ve been out enjoying it. (Sorry, it’s the best excuse I’ve got.) 

In case you missed it, I’m now living farther south than I ever really cared to in good ol’ Atlanta, Georgia. Despite being born and raised (technically) in the South, I still can’t get a grasp on the southern accents I sometimes encounter, I’m lamenting the—albeit terrible—public transit (even you, Translink) I’ve relied on for the past three years, and I’m desperately trying to re-acclimate to a fast-paced culture I didn’t mind leaving behind temporarily while trying not to melt in the blistering summer heat.

Now that I’ve kicked the jet lag and been back in the States for a little over a month and a half, I’ve spent most of my time working at CNN International (and loving it), trying to psych myself up for one more year of school (sigh) and on the road—not quite Jack Kerouac style. Since coming back to the northern hemisphere, I’ve spent a grand total of 72 hours back in North Carolina (sorry, parents). And for the past two weekends I’ve spent about three hours stuck in Atlanta traffic, 24 hours driving through the aesthetically homogenous American southeast and an indiscriminate length of time becoming familiar with the long stretches of I-85’s characterless perimeter while driving to and from the homeland.

So, here are the things I’ve noticed in my two return trips to North Carolina:

1. Leaving Atlanta on a holiday weekend or on a Friday afternoon is kind of like trying to understand physics—slow, frustrating and ultimately futile. Brace yourself for the 1-3 hours of being stuck in highway purgatory: play car bingo, learn a new language, read Don Quixote—all of this (and more!) is possible with your newfound (and compulsory) wait time.
2. You’ll see interesting people when you're stuck in traffic, from the unapologetic Cosmo reader to the hyper-vigilant nose picker—or the random guy with a ferret on his shoulder (stay weird, South Carolina).
3. Despite their claims of being ‘the station with the radio’s best hits’ (because, yes, they all say that), every other station plays the same five songs on rotation.
4. Whatever Taylor Swift lacks in Spotify she makes up for on the radio threefold. If I had $1 for every time I heard “Bad Blood” scan across my radio I could probably afford another return ticket to Australia.
5. On that note, the number of religious radio stations increases from North Carolina to South Carolina and then again once you cross the Georgia state line. It’s kind of like listening to a modern-day reading of a Jonathan Edwards sermon. Fun!
6.  The farther south you go, the more frequent the ‘c’-word becomes—country, not the four-letter expletive. The number of country music stations increases, the Confederate flag bumper stickers become more prevalent and you’ll start seeing billboards for “Country Bride” and “Country Western Outlet - 5 miles ahead on right”. Still trying to figure out what makes a bride ‘country’, tbh.
7. Sometimes traffic jams are caused by accidents. Sometimes it’s 5 o’clock on a Friday and the mass exodus from the city will clog the freeway for what feels like an eternity. And sometimes traffic jams spring from the voyeuristic rubberneckers who find the minor accident on the other side of the median more relevant than the open road in front of them. 
8. There are probably enough tire shreds strewn along I-85 to fill a dozen Goodyear blimps. Sorry, Earth.
9. If you have to stop somewhere for any reason, take an umbrella. Even if it’s sunny when you get out of the car, it will almost positively begin to rain torrentially by the time you’re ready to head back to the car. (Fact: it will always downpour when you’re wearing white and still have a 3+ hour drive ahead of you.)
10. And, a fun one, dead deer on the road still look like kangaroos from a distance. Guess it’s time to brush up on my North American road kill or look into an ophthalmologist.  

Until next time, I-85.

When A Bird Tries To Steal Your Food, Just Go With It

Even though there's no language barrier or huge cultural shift when you move from the U.S. to Australia, life Down Under can still differ dramatically from life in a small North Carolina town. I've been in Oz for about 10 days now and the 15-hour time change, tropical climate and seasonal transition from a rainy winter in Charlotte to the stifling Australian summer aren't even the strangest things I've experienced in my month abroad (has it really been a month already?). For my first trick I'll attempt to describe some of the things I've picked up on in my first ten days in Brisbane:

1. First and foremost: birds are pests. In Brisbane, and especially on campus, ibises are EVERYWHERE. And they are shameless. It's totally normal to have one hop up on your table and steal (or try to steal) your food (yes, this has happened to me twice now).

2. Turkeys aren't rare here. At home it's extremely unlikely to see a wild turkey milling around. Here, brush turkeys are all over campus--usually digging and kicking loose dirt on you because they don't care about your personal space or hygiene. I'm currently covered in a fine layer of my university's dirt because one of our friendly neighborhood turkeys decided to dig a hole next to the table where I was sitting.

3. The sun hurts. It doesn't matter how much SPF 50+ you put on in the morning, if you're out in the sun and you've got the fair skin of someone who's just come from a winter season spent indoors, you will get sunburned. After visiting the Gold Coast this weekend, I'd be lying if I said my shoulders aren't the color of freshly picked strawberries right now.

4. The tropics are hot and humid--and everyone hates the heat. I figured most Aussies would be used to the climate (because, you know, they live here), but it looks like most people avoid the heat when they can (air conditioning is everyone's best friend) and curse the average temperature (86 degrees F) the rest of the time. Self note: return to middle school arithmetic and learn how to calculate Celsius--and the rest of the metric system while I'm at it since, you know, the U.S. is one of the few, the proud, the only places that doesn't use it.

5. Spiders and bugs--even if you can't see them, they're probably there. I used to have a terrible fear of anything insect-related and now I'm beginning to get used to living with them. That's not to say that I like them (I'll probably burst into tears the first time I see a huntsman), but I accept that they're here and there's nothing I can really do about it. I killed my first Australian spider last night as it was scuttling across my bed...and I didn't scream(!) (although I'll admit there was a brief millisecond of internal panic).

6. You'll hear a lot of weird sounds--they're probably possums and geckos (also toads). Despite the size of the Australian geckos I've seen, they make incredibly loud sounds. They're probably about 3 inches long at most, but they're as loud as some of the birds I hear at every waking (and sleeping) hour of the day. That rumbling on your roof? Yeah, that's probably a possum.

7. Lizards are pretty commonplace. You know the kind you can usually buy in an exotic pet store? Yeah, they're everywhere. I almost stepped on one on campus because the little git had his 900 meter-long tail across the pathway.

8. Australia's public transit beats America's twice over. It's a bit more expensive (as is everything here), but the buses, trains and ferries run reliably and frequently and are incredibly easy to navigate.

9. Brisbane (and Sydney) are a lot cleaner than the big U.S. cities. Granted, both are quite a lot smaller than places like New York and Chicago, but whatever the Aussie government is doing to keep up these places...like a middle school yearbook inscription "don't ever change".

10. Aussie barbecue is nothing like southern BBQ. This is what I think of when I think of barbecue (ahh, home). This is what Australians mean when they say barbecue. It's not bad, it's just not as good as Lexington-style pulled pork (sorry 'bout it).

11. Just go with it. Whatever it is, whether it's a bird trying to steal your food, wrapping a non-venomous snake around your shoulders (which is, in my opinion, the weirdest sensation on the planet) or trying to slackline with random surfers on a beach (harder than it looks, people), life will be much more comfortable if you learn to adopt the Jeff Spicoli outlook on life.

I look calmer than I feel tbh.

Until next time, here's a kangaroo punching out a drone...because Australia.

The Great Cyclone Fiasco of 2015

It's about noon on Saturday in Brisbane and I'm sitting here in the comfort of the world's smallest library (no joke, there's one table and around 10 bookshelves) while the rain continues to pour as it's apparently done for the past couple of days.

So in case you missed it, I'm now a temporary Australian citizen. After a delayed flight yesterday, I moved my life into a hostel I'll be staying in until I find an apartment in the city. I know I'm about two weeks behind (I'll get back to you on New Zealand in the coming days), but I did manage to scrape up a few thoughts while waiting yesterday in the Queenstown airport and again from 35,000 feet in the air:

Friday, Feb. 20

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon and I’m back to my favorite place in the world—the airport. Normally airports excite me—picture the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart picks up his suitcase and declares that he’s going to cover it in labels from all sorts of exotic places like Italy and Baghdad and you’ve got my feelings about travel in a nutshell. Not today. While I may have a suitcase for 1,001 nights, I don't quite have the mentality or physical energy to carry it any longer. This being my fourth flight this month, I’m a little tired of lugging around my life in a two-piece luggage set and a cripplingly heavy backpack. I’m tired of going through airport security, of taking my shoes off and walking along floors that thousands of dirty feet have walked along and of filling out immigration forms from 35,000 feet in the air. (That being said, I’ve finally mastered writing the date backwards and completing the forms like an expert migrant.) 

We’re in the Queenstown airport. It’s hot, somewhat crowded and from the terminal I’m eye-level with the tarmac and can see the jagged peaks of the Remarkables jutting out in the distance. I don't hate the view. Queenstown’s airport is nice—it’s small, it’s straightforward and the architecture is around 70 percent glass meaning we can get one last look at the beautiful landscape we’ll soon be leaving behind for tropical cyclone Marcia who’s now making her way over Brisbane. 

I’m sad to go. I’ll miss the people who’ve made everywhere in New Zealand feel like a second home, the range of people you meet by sharing small hostel rooms and the dialects you hear while walking down any street, the incredible landscapes that no photograph can ever really capture and the excitement that comes with finding new places and willingly losing yourself in the beauty that surrounds you on all sides.

But I am ready—I’m ready to have a home where I won’t have to live out of a suitcase, a semi-permanent address and a familiarity with the place I will soon be living in for the next few months. I’m going to Australia homeless. I should probably be more nervous than I am—but I’ve learned to love the hostel and I don’t mind staying in one until I find an address to my liking.

So here’s to New Zealand—a place that now holds a very dear place in my heart. A place that showed me one corner of the beauty that can be found in the world, a place that satisfied my inner nature-lover and wandering soul, and a place that showed me that while there may be no place like home, some places are capable of feeling like one—at least temporarily. 

 Queenstown from above

In-flight Thoughts

You know those flights where everything goes wrong? Not the ones you see featured on those god-awful History Channel features about unsurvivable plane crashes and take-off disasters—I’m thinking more along the lines of that video featuring Sir Patrick Stewart imitating every poor bastard’s worst plane nightmares: the bad passenger stereotypes. 

We’re a little over two hours into the flight somewhere over the Tasman Sea. Cyclone Marcia is going strong over Brisbane and St. Lucia’s city council is probably still placing sandbags along the river somewhere in the throes of what I hope is an event somewhat tamer than a Day After Tomorrow scenario. All that’s visible right now is the semi-blinding reflection of a thousand cumulus clouds hovering above the Pacific and a white warmth that feels like it’s capable of tanning my left arm. The inside of the plane is different. 

We’re a bit higher up because of the apparently unexpected turbulence that intermittently tap dances along my nerves and raises my blood pressure to a level that I’m sure would upset my physician. I’ve got the window seat, an unruly backseat neighbor who has a penchants for kicking my seat and a screaming toddler and his clueless parents who can’t quite seem to console him despite multiple attempts at shoving rice cakes and sugar cookies down his throat—hey, I’d probably be crying too. 

This is probably the most stressful of the four flights I’ve been on in the past month. Our plane was a half hour late, we’re expecting one of Shakespeare’s tempests in Brisbane and I still have to worry about whether my ride from the airport to my hostel will be waiting for me, despite an unexpected delay in our schedule. Oh, and baggage—I’m perpetually convinced that the airline is going to misplace my baggage.

So maybe the last three flights were a stroke of good fortune that has now dissolved with the last grains of sand through the hourglass. Here’s hoping the rest of this interminable flight ends on a higher note and that I won’t need a Huck Finn-style river raft to make it to my accommodations in Brisbane. 

Greetings from Straya sans Vegemite

It's about 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday the 11th. I completely missed Tuesday somewhere across the International Date Line and slept on/off (as comfortably as one can on a plane) for 10 of the 16 hours on my flight. I'm currently sitting in a gate at Sydney's airport waiting to board my last flight (yoiks) to Christchurch, New Zealand.

We landed around 6 a.m. Sydney time and had a 13-hour layover--naturally we decided to explore.

Things I've learned in the past 24 hours:

1. Leaving home is hard--but it gets easier once you're up in the air. (Don't worry, Mom and Dad--I still miss you even though I'm very quickly falling in love with the southern hemisphere.)

2. Mondays in February are a GREAT time to fly. I got away with having an aisle seat and no one beside us on both flights from Charlotte to Dallas and Dallas to Sydney, and even had back row reclining seats on the way Down Under. Needless to say, I basically got three seats for the price of one and my own personal bed on the way down here.

3. Rain Man was right--Qantas, definitely, definitely Qantas. They make a 16-hour flight much more bearable. And there is SO MUCH FOOD.

4. When you have a 13-hour layover in Sydney...you explore. There is nothing like that first glance of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's unbelievably huge. And there are probably people climbing it. Granted, it's 7 a.m. and I'm amazed by everything because I've just had a strong cup of Australian dark roast. Walk a little farther, shift your vision and boom--the Opera House. It's equally stunning and even more brilliant against the incredibly blue water in the Harbour.

5. Sydney is huge. I mean HUGE. We walked around the Botanical Gardens and took a ferry to Manly Beach and couldn't believe the city's sprawl.

6. The Aussie sun is no joke. It's summer, the sun is high and when you're lugging around a small child on your back (in this case, a 20-lb. backpack), the heat will get to you. I'm WIPED. Also a little sunburnt (oops).

7. The accents! I dig them. You could say moist in an Australian accent (aka the worst word in the English vernacular) and I probably wouldn't hate it.

8. Maybe it's because it's a Wednesday and kids have school/adults are at work, but it's really, really quiet here. I'm not complaining--I'm just surprised. It's definitely not at all what I expected.

9. It's still hard to register that I'm in a new country, continent and hemisphere. Cue the "pinch me I'm dreaming" cliché, but seriously, it's unreal. It's about 11 p.m. yesterday at home and it's hard to believe that my family, friends and fur babies are 8,500+ miles away. For all I know, I may be having an incredibly vivid and pleasant dream from my bed in Chapel Hill.

10. This is the longest, strangest and most non-Wednesday Wednesday I've ever had. Beginning with an airplane breakfast at 3 a.m., adventures in Sydney from 7 a.m. through the early afternoon, and now on to my last flight to New Zealand, I can't say I've ever experienced anything like it--and I wouldn't change any of it. Except buying sunscreen. In hindsight, that would have been smart.

11. There is one Australian airline worker who sings the boarding flight numbers over the intercom. No, it's not philosophical, but when I'm this tired it's the best I've got.

Signing off for now and probably for awhile because I'm not banking on having wifi in NZ. Here's hoping my bag made it safely from America (no, I haven't seen it since Monday), the flight to Christchurch is as pleasant as the past two have been (seriously, how did I get this lucky?) and I remembered to pack my shower shoes. And in case I don't see you...

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

As the time before my departure continues to drain more and more quickly, I've tried something that the teenage iPhone addict I once was would never have thought twice about doing:

I've put the phone down.

Not completely--I still check it a couple of times a day and tend to me more active at night when my family's gone to bed--but while I still have time with my family and friends, I've tried to be better about staying tuned into them instead of the tiny blue screen that's usually within a, perhaps, much too easily accessible location.

The funny thing about putting the phone down is that it's simultaneously both incredibly easy and painstakingly difficult to do. If I'm watching a movie or having a conversation with someone, it's easy to willingly ignore the whole other world that sits at my fingertips--it's almost cathartic. I can almost forget the fact that I have an iPhone and a list of contacts who could be trying to reach me via one of the multiple modes of social media I've (at times, regrettably) chosen to subscribe to.

On the other hand, the news addict/journalist/slightly anxious person in me feels slightly hesitant to be completely removed from technology for fear of being unable to be reached in an emergency or other similar circumstances. While I know these situations are unlikely, particularly when I'm in the presence of my family, I still find that I can't completely remove myself from technology.

Because we are a technological age, it may be difficult to ever completely unglue from technology--unless I spontaneously decide to pull an Office Space and embrace my inner Ron Swanson. But, for now, I guess I'll stop worrying and learn to love the smartphone--in moderation, that is.

Ticking Away the Moments

So maybe I'm not the best at keeping up with a blog--there are worse things in life, aren't there?

I'm 13 days out from leaving behind my two homes (because once you live in Chapel Hill, it will always feel like home) for a two-week love affair with New Zealand (wherein I ultimately decide to drop out of school and become a sheep herder) and a five-month stay Down Under. I'm less nervous than I was when I last posted--I don't know whether to attribute that to the fact that I've nearly finalized all my plans for New Zealand or to the immense cabin fever that continues to close in on me.

I've been at home for nearly two months now. As the child of divorced parents, I've split my time running back and forth from one parent to the other and filling my days with books, movies and missed television shows. I've had more genuinely enjoyable time with my dad than I've had in years (at least since I've left for school) and I've gotten a closer look at my increasingly goofy mom and her continually emerging quirks (her dance moves are getting better, I think). I've now seen half of the nominees for Best Picture at the Academies (and, surprisingly, I have yet to be disappointed), rewatched New Girl two times over ("I hope you like feminist rants, cuz they're kind of my thing"), three-fourths of Wes Anderson's filmography, and read more non-school-related things than I have in nearly five months. And while this break from the everyday stressors of class, multiple part-time jobs and worrying about paying for rent/groceries/etc. has been precisely the break I've needed for some time now, I do kind of miss the routines and familiar faces of the university life I've grown accustomed to.

It's odd returning to my childhood room as a long-term visitor--it's less comfortable. I'm not living out of a suitcase (yet), but this isn't really my home anymore. I miss the independence of having a key to an apartment I pay for, my friends being no more than 10 minutes away and even the familiar environment of the classroom. While I could do without the 2 a.m. coffee breaks, the bullshit papers that somehow coalesce into something mildly articulate and the truly discouraging cold, rainy, miserable days that make me question my overly optimistic initial desire to go to school somewhere other than Southern California (or anywhere, for that matter), I do miss learning and I do miss all of the more pleasant aspects of Chapel Hill that I frequently take for granted.

But with just over two weeks left I'm not going to count down the days until I go or envy the life I know I could be having had I chosen not to go abroad. I have to decide what to do with the time that is given me (you didn't think I was going to post about New Zealand and NOT mention Lord of the Rings, did you?)--and I've decided to spend it as I have the past few weeks: enjoying the invaluable time I haven't had with my parents in years, appreciating the comforts of a home that will soon be 8,500+ miles away and remembering to love the sound of silence that will soon grow unfamiliar. Adventure is waiting--but it can hold on just a little longer.