A Room with a View

This is one of the stranger features that I’ve seen in a hotel bathroom. I can appreciate a glass door on a shower, especially when the shower is small (I hate when the shower curtain brushes against me, all I can think about is everyone else that it’s contacted). I can appreciate a shower with a frosted window to let in natural light. But this confuses me. Is it so that I don’t get lonely while I’m showering? Is it so that I don’t get bored while I’m pooping? All of this assumes that I’m staying with another person, but this is a hotel geared towards business travelers.

I guess it’s good to know if a stranger sneaks into my room to pee while I’m showering.

 

Pole Position

When I was a kid we had an Atari 2600. My favorite game was Circus Atari (especially when their little heads splatted on the ground), but I have the most vivid sense-memories of playing Pole Position. I remember fading into a trance-like state while watching that center dotted line as my car drove along through the desert and the cities. The dots never stopped, they kept coming and coming, an unending line as constant as the sway of a hypnotist’s pocket watch. This carpet reminds me of that game. It’s a long, long walk to the elevator, and I’m getting veeerrrry sleeeeepyyyy….

 

A sack of melon

This is a picture of me holding up a ziploc baggie full of cantaloupe in a public restroom. The events that led me to this moment exemplify all of the weirdness of travel. Let me explain.

I enjoy staying at inns and B&Bs while I travel. More accurately, I enjoy the idea of staying at inns and B&Bs. They’re quirky, there’s usually a dog or cat underfoot or in my lap, the food is good, and there are other human beings around who want to chat and pass the time. Sometimes though, things don’t work out as imagined.

I stayed at a lovely inn near Kenyon College where I was the only guest that night. Not a big deal – until breakfast when the innkeeper made breakfast for me. Just me. The previous evening we had discussed my food allergy (minor, but limiting for breakfast options), and she asked the requisite dietary-restriction small-talk questions (anyone with a food allergy or sensitivity will know what I mean), and we decided on pancakes and chicken sausage. Excellent. Lovely. Delicious. So there I was, the only diner at a table for eight, sipping coffee from a rose-patterned teacup, when the innkeeper walked out of the kitchen with a giant slice of cantaloupe.

I panicked.

You see, in all of the discussion about the foods that I can and cannot eat, we never really broached the topic of foods that I do not want to eat. And melon, my friends, melon of any sort, is at the top of that list. The top, all caps, in bold. But she had already sliced it, and there was no one else to eat it. And I had already established myself as (in my head) a nuisance with dietary restrictions. And before I could get any words out she put the plate down and disappeared back into the kitchen to make my pancakes.

I stared at the melon. The melon smiled at me. Then the voice of my friend Joe popped into my head, telling me about how he hated melon in his 20s then he tried it again when he was 30 and he liked it. Being a mature, sensible 31-year-old, I took a bite. And spit it out. And cursed Joe in my head because now I couldn’t just politely say that I don’t care for melon because it looked like I took a bite and spit it out.

What to do? I thought about feeding it to the dog, but immediately realized two flaws to that plan. One, I don’t think Irish Setters care for cantaloupe either. And, two, the innkeeper would realize what I did when the dog vomited orange goo later. I  could shove it into my backpack and deal with it later because, as we all know, my life is a sitcom and that always works on TV. Except that no one, even people who love melon, no one eats the rind. I opened my backpack, thinking maybe that I could just climb inside and hide, and saw the ziploc bag I carry full of band-aids, ibuprofen, and other travel essentials. I knew I didn’t have much time – had she flipped the pancakes yet? So I dumped out the baggie, quickly spooned out ten or twelve bites of melon, scooped them into the baggie with my hand, and shoved the baggie into my backpack just as the innkeeper came around the corner.

Here’s the thing. I’m normally a very confident person. Really! I speak in front of large groups all the time, I voice my opinion constantly, I laugh at my mistakes. But something about this scenario just made me freeze. It wasn’t until I got to the convention center later and hid in the bathroom to pull out the sack of melon that I could begin to see the humor in the incident. And let me tell you, my friends, when I arrived that night at a giant corporate hotel, I was mighty pleased to be just another anonymous guest. With hands that smelled like melon.

 

The Ring of Fire

Back when back, I was a student at Colby, a small, rural, liberal arts college. On Tuesday I had the pleasure of visiting Kenyon, another small, rural, liberal arts college. I recognized a lot on their campus from my own college experience: the rolling green landscape, the administrative offices housed in quaint cottages, the freshly minted hippies smoking hand rolled cigarettes in rocking chairs on the lawn, and the bizarre modern architecture that has no place on a brick & ivy campus.  Like this oddity decorating the lobby of their brand new hangar-like athletic center, which the president of the college called the “Ring of Fire” .  Ring of Fire?  Really?  Because what I see is more like a ring of rainbows, ominously hovering over the sports center like a holographic beartrap poised to lure all the queers on campus into the middle before it suddenly descends, trapping all the fairies inside so that the jocks can pelt them with dodgeballs.

But that’s just me.

 

Round on the ends and high in the middle.

In a few days I’ll be leaving for a five-day trip through Ohio, and this is what I’m bringing. Luckily (in the long run) this is an abnormally large amount of stuff to bring. Unluckily (in the short run I have to schlep it all with me on this particular trip.

I like Ohio, so far at least, and I should have some room on this trip to take scenic byways instead of megahighways. Here are my Ohio Road Trip Goals:

• - Stop at a roadside farm stand
• - Eat a good slice of pie or some quality biscuits & gravy
• - Spend the night in a silo

I think all of this is achievable (more about the silo later).

Oh, and did I mention that these boxes are heavy?