The road to Lviv...

I _think_ that my great-grandfather Joseph Karel (born Yael Karditsky, or something like that) was born in what is now Lviv, Ukraine. In the sixth grade, Miss Mooney had us do some sort of international family heritage project - for my project, I called my Grandpa Milt to ask about his family. Grandpa Milt responded by making a cassette tape for me of a story about his father, Joe. Of course, like the careless sixth grader I was, I promptly lost the tape once the school project was over. Oh, what I would give to have that tape. Grandpa Milt died a couple years ago at the end of a long battle with a Alzheimer's-like brain disorder, and I am missing that tangible memory of his voice and his speech and what he thought was important about his father's life. It's such a shame.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up, is that I _think_ Grandpa Milt said on that tape that his father, Great Grandpa Joe, was born in a town called Lubitz, Poland. Now, Poland's borders changed a lot during the 19th and 20th centuries becaues of aggression from its neighbors - the Prussians, the Russians, the Austrians, and later the Germans, all claimed pieces of what is now Poland at various times. This Lubitz place doesn't appear on any map, but my theory is that Lviv (a.k.a. Lvov) was part of Poland at the time that my great grandfather would have been born (late 19th century), and that it was called Lubitz in Polish or Yiddish or some other language that Joe Karel's family would have spoken. What do you all think? Am I making this up, or does that sound like it could be true?

Now, getting to this place was a royal pain in the you-know-what. Let's start with trying to get a hotel room in this town. We were in Krakow, lovely veggie-friendly Krakow, with hostels galore, and train tickets to Lviv in our pockets. Lviv doesn't have hostels, really, it has a few hotels, and reputedly there are also babushkas hawking sketchy "private rooms" somewhere, but we've yet to see any such hawkers. So, we reconcile ourselves to staying in relatively posh accommodations in Lviv and start dialing hotel numbers. Wait, what's the international code for the Ukraine? Ok. How about the city code? Yeah, okay, so how many calls have we already made just trying to figure that out? Don't even want to talk about it.

Turns out the international phone in our hostel lobby actually stunk - a couple times, we got through to real live people in Lviv, only to find the line static-y and get disconnected. In the lobby of a very shwanky hotel near the Wawel Castle which we were definitely not guests at, we burned through two phone cards and learned that one hotel was full, and one only had Ukrainian or German speakers at its reception desk. We finally succeeded in making a reservation at a way over-priced option, but hey, a bed is a bed. Who knew Lviv was such a popular destination??

We breathed a sigh of relief. It'll all be OK. But then came the train....oh, the train.

First of all, the train was delayed 90 minutes.

90 minutes later, we get back to find it on platform 2. Great. We wait at platform 2, and wait and wait and wait.

Upon hearing an announcement entirely in Polish, everyone else waiting at the platform gets up and runs with their bags to someplace, Heather and I know not. Heather politely asks a Polish girl in English, "where are you going?"
She looked annoyed and said "one." OK. We go to platform one. No one is there but us. Hmmm. Billie runs out to the main train station to check the monitor, and finds that the train is in fact at platform 3, and that it is indeed very late. But how late? What exactly did that monitor say about the lateness? Pondering this on the walk back to meet Heather, Billie apparently mixed up numbers and thought the screen had said 300 minutes late. 300 minutes! That's 5 hours!

Billie and Heather decide not to go to Lviv today. In fact, our words were, "fuck Lviv."

We put on our packs that were growing heavier by the minute, and trudge back up to the terminal to check the screen again.

Wait, it says 180 minutes late, not 300! (Billie, where the hell did you get that number?) Wait, shit, the train is leaving in 5 minutes!! So, we sprint, or rather, scuttle back through the terminal, across the platforms, up the stairs to platform 3, just in time to leap aboard the almost-completely-full train, sweating and stinking and cursing as we were, and crammed into a cabin with four other people. Grrreat.

Fast forward through 200 km or so of beautiful Polish countryside to the border town of Przmysl. (Don't ask me how to say that, I have no idea. Can I buy a vowel?). We get our passports stamped at the train station and are escorted by Polish military onto the platform. Trying to board the train, the woman taking tickets waves us back to the station, saying "kasu, kasu!!" It seems that the ticket agent in Krakow failed to indicate the date, train number, or seat numbers on our tickets....the station agent in Przmysl wanted us to go back to the station to get these things assigned. But we'd already officially left Poland, passports stamped and everything. And, because of the 3-hour delay of our first train, it was too late, the "kasu" was already closed up for the night.

So, we stood around looking plaintive and helpless. We smiled at the Polish customs/military people a lot, and showed them our poor number-less tickets. They took pity on us, and spoke to the steward of the first class cabin on our behalf. He let us on board, and assigned us to a cabin just next to a cabin full of drunk Ukrainian dudes with pot bellies, wearing no shirts. Hot. And it was, temperature-wise, very hot. We were sweaty. So were they. It was gross.

But, here's the catch - the train we were getting on had no locomotive just yet - apparently, that train was wicked late too.

So, in the fashion of young American women traveling abroad, we made friends with young men. We met a nice Dutch doctor and talked politics of both our countries. We also befriended one of the military/customs guys, a 23-year-old, very overworked young fellow named Peter. He was a good egg, he did his best to get us on that train, even though he couldn't understand most of what we were saying.

There were mosquitoes. Luckily, we had Burt's Bees herbal insect repellant. Pesticide free, baby!

We were hungry. Luckily, we still had the makings of peanut butter and nutella sandwiches that we'd purchased at a Tesco grocery store back in Prague. So, we pic-nic-ed, on the train platform, in the dark, and made the Poles and Ukrainians laugh.

Fast forward to our arrival in fair Lviv...at 2:30 am local time. Ouch. After a very weird cab ride from the train station, we checked in to our excessively swanky hotel, fumbled around with buttons on the teeny weeny elevator, and fell exhausted into our beds.

What a fucking day.

I can only imagine what Grandpa Joe went through going the other direction back in 1902 or so....there's a great line from Angels in America, when the elderly Rabbi is eulogizing a recently deceased immigrant from Russia or somewhere....and he says, "in our day, such journeys do not exist." Something like that. Even with all this hell, I'm sure it's true.

Rednecks at Carolina Beach

Kate and I were rednecks at Carolina Beach this past Saturday. After a long day of putting ladybug tattoos on small children, we slept in the back of an SUV, drank beer, woke up several times to the sounds of bad country music coming from other people's stereos and drunk rednecks screeching down the beach in their cars, and then finally to the sight of the lovely sun rising over the ocean. Deeeeelightful.

Shit or get off the pot.

Seriously now. In my relatively short history of dating, and through listening to the trials and tribulations of the women and men who confide in me about such things, I have come to the conclusion that a lot of twenty and thirty-somethings don't know what the fuck they want, and are too busy analyzing their navels in pursuit of figuring out what they want to keep from being inconsiderate jerks in matters of love. Well meaning, but.....

Does this sound familiar to any of you all? What is the deal? I have one thought about it, one fabulous New York idiom that I think goes well for this situation:

Shit or get off the pot.

Seriously. Do not mess around with someone you care about. This is a totally different story if you're picking people up at bars or wherever, and you clearly don't know each other enough to care, but in cases of friends, of people who you already know and enjoy and respect, (To continue with the potty metaphor...) you can't crap out once you've already begun. If you get into something, you'd better be prepared to at least give it an honest try. None of this getting scared and crapping out, that's just lousy.

Breaking up sucks, so do it for a GOOD REASON if you have to. If your lover is mean or annoying or rude or way too eager to marry you or cheats or if you just don't love them, then by all means, break up. But just because you're scared and you don't know what you want? That's not a reason. Everyone who's out there dating is scared, no one knows just what they want. If you can't handle that, then for god's sake, don't drag the people you care about into it!

We have some responsibility to be good to one another, don't we? As creatures who want to be loved and trusted, we have some responsibility to our friends to be loving and trustworthy, to mean what we say and do, to communicate about problems, and be considerate of each other's feelings. Right? Come on!

I know, it's not so simple, you can't really know how you'll feel until you try it out, everyone screws up sometimes, I know. But, doesn't it seem like some people are a lot better at handling uncertainty than others are? I think THAT's the ticket, really - not necessarily becoming more certain about our choices, because who can ever be certain, but getting better at managing and handling our uncertainty, expecting it, communicating about it, and trusting each other.

Anyway, rant rant, pardon me, just airing some collective grievance here on the state of men and women in relationships. Emotional retardation, is what it boils down to, a goddamned epidemic of emotional retardation. It's the spice of life or whatever, I guess, but I do hope it isn't a permanent condition. ::::fingers crossed::::

A week from today....

Cheers mates. I apologize for not having posted in a wicked long time. It's a problem I hope to rectify while abroad in Eastern Europe this Summer - I'm leaving in just less than a week! Holy crap, did that sneak up on me fast!

In lieu of the mass email I used to send my beloved friends and family from the road when I was a spring chicken, I will post up some basic travel tales on this blog. So keep your eyes out for them!

For now, I'm just anticipating the trip....it's been sinking in slowly, and has just hit me hard over the past couple days. I was at a very long, rather intense conference this past weekend the Precautionary Principle, and how we can use it in our work. The P. P. being the very radical and far out idea that governments, when regulating things like pesticides and industrial chemicals, should strive to allow as little risk for harm as possible. Kinda like buckling your seat belt or looking both ways before you cross the street - taking precautions to make sure what you're about to do won't kill you, or anyone else.

Believe it or not, governments do NOT work in this most logical of ways. The burden of proof is not on proving something's safe before it's used - rather, a new chemical product can be used until someone proves it's not safe, and then it can still be used until they prove exactly how and why and in what quantities it is not safe. Weird, I tell you. You won't be surprised to hear that the motives for operating in this way are largely financial, ugh, but let's not get too much farther into that, it's depressing. The conference itself was also a bit depressing....something about preachy white people that makes me feel funny. There were some preachy, self-centered, quirky middle aged white people dominating the agenda at this thing, hoo nelly. I learned a ton from the conference and had all kinds of brain storms, very productive, but I overloaded on the crowd very quickly.

Now on the other hand, the young people I met, the twenty-somethings at this conference, gave me a great deal of hope and excitement for the future of non-profit progressive advocacy. I am part of a kick-ass, no bullshit generation that seems to be operating in a very smart, sleek, and respectful fashion. I could be biased, but I think it's really true - I see it all around me here in NC, not just at conferences.

Anyway, the whole leaving on vacation thing is starting to sink in big time, and I CAN'T WAIT! I'll post an itinerary soon.

Healing Touch

The way people do (or don't) touch each other is a very interesting thing to watch!

I have been doing a little self observation lately, and noticing that there are some people I touch a lot when I'm around them, and some people I don't touch harldly at all. I wonder if that has more to do with me and the way I react to people (i.e. I just want to touch some people more, prrrr), or with other people and the sort of body language they send (i.e., if you don't touch me, I won't touch you), or if it's some combination thereof. It's really been very variable for me throughout my life - I think some of it depends on cultural environment (i.e. when in Asia, much less hugging!), some is personal (i.e. when feeling insecure about overweightness, as I did when I put on my sophomore 25, yikes, I touched people less and consequently was touched less), and some is interpersonal (i.e. when around dancers and taiko drummers, physical people, I give and receive a lot more backrubs, oh yeah).

Some people are just body people. They are comfortable in their own skin, and they are comfortable with your skin, and so they touch you more. I sort of wish I weren't so variable, I wish I were more of a consistent body person.

That is because, I really do believe in the healing powers of touch. Genuinely loving or caring touch doesn't just stop at the skin - there is some exchange of energies between people, some love conveyed, some electricity generated. It's very powerful.

In the deepest darkest hole of my teenage angst, I had the opportunity to work with an energetic healer, who would lay me on a table and literally move energy blockages from my chakras while barely touching me. She would talk to me as she worked, and I would see colors and images and feel upwellings of emotion. It was pretty intense, and weird, and though I still don't really understand what happened, I think I am still learning from it. I think the notion not only of touch, but of energy exchange between people is something I am still very sensitive to, and strive to use better in my everyday life.

Are you a toucher? Are you too touchy? Do you think most other people are too touchy? What is too much, and what do you think determines where you draw the line?