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Apologies – Some Thoughts

November 16, 2017 – I want to write about apologies for this post.

No, I don’t feel like I owe anybody an apology!  I just saw something in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago that triggered a memory and voilà – motivation to write a few thoughts about apologies and some of the mess that surrounds them.

First, I’ll address the current monster in the room: “sorry, not sorry.”  Oh my, but doesn’t that monopolize song titles, lyrics and graphic t-shirts?  I thought it was over (isn’t it so 2012?) but sorry, not sorry still dominates web searches of “sorry.”  How did we label Generation X as the “Me” Generation when our current young popular artists created the “selfie” and the delightful sorry not sorry that is also known as the “fauxpology” or the “notpology?”

Here’s the scenario: “Sorry not sorry!  I know you’re ticked off, but <shrug> I really do not care.”  And while there may be a tiny bit of regret about not caring, it has not grown to the level of sorriness (?) that would warrant a real apology.  There is (according to Wikipedia) a distinct “lack of guilt.”  So, sorry not sorry!  Gonna do what I want even if it means hurting someone else!  It’s all about me, Me, ME and my happiness and darn the rest of the world!

However, there are other apology/non-apologies that I do believe are useful.  I refer to those that are pretty much polite niceties.  They don’t express any serious regret, remorse or sorrow (thanks, dictionary.com).  They aren’t really meant to compensate the receiver for a genuine slight.  A polite apology that’s really a non-apology goes something like, “I’m so sorry it’s been so long since I called.”  “Oh, no, I should have called you!”   Well, really, the apologizer and the receiver know that the phone works both ways, they both had higher priorities so they were just completing a courtesy apology.  No real regret there, just a polite acknowledgement of a situation.

There are “polite nicety” apologies that get a little tiresome, however.  I have a long-time friend who is always happy to receive a lunch invitation from me and quick to say yes, but it never occurs to her to offer an invitation herself.  When I do the inviting, she inevitably says, “Oh, I know I should have gotten in touch, I’m so sorry!”  I don’t think that’s even necessary.  The passage of time since our last meet-up echoes in me, with the feeling that we should see each other, so I do the inviting.  I know the inviting is not her thing, so her apology might even highlight the imbalance in the inviting – which makes me more uncomfortable than the actual imbalance itself (the fact that I’m doing all the inviting).  So, stop apologizing, woman, and just say “yes” enthusiastically when I make the invitation!  A positive and happy response and a good lunchtime conversation are the important components to the transaction!  No more apologies!

Then there’s the – what’s the point? – “it’s too late!” apology. I think everyone has endured one of these.  It was this type of apology described in the newspaper that dredged up all the apology-related muck swirling in my head. The newspaper column described an award ceremony for a young person who hoped that her parents and sister would attend the event with her. Connected to the ceremony was a luncheon with a $100 pricetag, which all members of her family acknowledged was a little steep.  It would cost the parents some money and some time to attend the ceremony, but they had plenty of both and their attendance was important to her.  The sister conspired with the parents and the three decided they wouldn’t attend.  The honoree was very sad that her family didn’t support her at the ceremony.  The day after the event, Dad called her and said they had made a big mistake and they should have been at the luncheon.  She confessed in the newspaper column to having a hard time letting go of her sadness and forgiving them. And I agree!  Who cares about that apology now?  What’s the point of Dad’s apology, anyway? (And friendly reader, whatever you may think of award ceremonies, don’t make this about you. The issue is about support to a family member who makes their wishes known AND the physical inability to fix it after-the-fact.)  The family members can’t go back in time and do the right thing.  It’s too late!  It will always be too late!  You can’t make it right; your remorse is little compensation for the situation!  You should have done the right thing when you had the chance!  Honoree, just stay mad and sad!  You deserve it!

Can you tell I have personal experience with an example of an “it’s too late” apology in my own history?  Like the story above, it’s about a once-in-a-lifetime event.  My Mom went back to work when I was twelve years old.  She worked for 14 years, until she was just about sixty-six.  She planned a wonderful retirement party for herself at the house and invited a bunch of her best friends from over the years:  coworkers from before I was born, current coworkers, family members, neighbors, everyone.  One of her longest-time friends contracted with a florist nearby to send a large spray of flowers to the house on party day, because they were going to be out-of-town and couldn’t attend.  My honorary aunt called me the next day and asked how Mom liked the flowers.  Well, you can guess what I said, “What flowers?”

The florist had blown it.  They delivered the flowers on the wrong day – the day after.  Well, that didn’t make up for the flowers’ not being there on the big day when the party was going on.  No apology could compensate for the failure to deliver.  The event was over, that was it.  I felt very sad for our family friends (Mom had a great time at her party and never knew what she was missing – I think she assumed the flowers were meant to be delivered the next day).  But the delivery was too late!  And I harbor resentment for that florist all these decades later!  (Can I hold a grudge?  Why, yes, I can!)

Last but not least in this essay are some of my groundrules for apologies.  Everyone knows you have to apologize sincerely – and NOT for getting caught (oops, officer) and NOT for someone else’s feelings (I’m sorry you’re mad – HA! Not an apology!).

You have to use the words, “I’m sorry.”  You can say how you’ll fix the situation, you can describe what happened (confirming you recognize the wrong) but don’t heave the blame onto someone else, definitely promise to do better, make sure the other person knows you understand how you hurt them, and ask for forgiveness.  These are the steps to help put a relationship back together.

To destroy a good apology, you can include some words that justify your behavior (I was really busy!), blame the victim (You told me you…), make excuses (I have a boo-boo that keeps me from…), or minimize the consequences (I was just joking!).  There are books, webpages, and scientific studies on how humans can twist apologies into non-apologies, so I’ll just leave it at that.  Apologize with care.

Now to wrap up, how about the aftermath of an apology? I’ll relate a little story about an apology of mine from far back in my career. I worked for a short period of time in a place we nicknamed “Westfields” for the area surrounding the building.  Our big boss was so happy when he acquired a chief of staff whom he considered one of the finest administrators in our agency.  We all knew she was getting kicked out of her previous office at headquarters because she was hard to get along with but he overlooked that fact and was optimistic that she would be great at organizing our relatively new group. When she arrived, all of that came true:  she was great at organizing our office AND she was very difficult to get along with. She seemed to lack some basic conventions of polite office behavior. All those bad behaviors that we ascribe to acting out “low self-esteem issues” were her bad behaviors. And one of my most memorable interactions with her was about an apology that I offered her. I can’t remember the topic or how I’d wronged her, but I figured the smartest and quickest way to get back on her good side was to apologize sincerely and succinctly. I think the situation was a “you were right” kind of thing. I figured pointing out that she was right while apologizing for not following her advice would be a good pat on the back for her crummy self-esteem.  Well, har-de-har-har, it didn’t turn out that way.  I delivered my well-thought out apology – then she attacked me!  And the apology. Not in a way that said that I had wronged her and we could now move on but more like I was an idiot and didn’t deserve to live. Nice!

It was a great learning experience.  I have given and received many apologies in the ensuing years.  Every time I have made a sincere apology, I have held my breath, hoping that the receiver accepted my apology and wouldn’t jump my (stuff), to tell me that I was an idiot for my transgression. And on those occasions that others have apologized to me, I have worked extra-special hard to listen to their apology and then NOT respond that they’re an idiot to have wronged me – but to politely accept their apology and try to move on.

It’s a good lesson.  If you’re offered a sincere apology for a wrong, just try to accept it, and move on.

Wanda Words – “Discommode” doesn’t mean throwing you off the toilet AND “An Easier Read Than My Last Post”

October 13, 2017 – I received some positive feedback and some not-so-positive feedback after my last post on “Measuring Up.”  Without apologizing for causing difficulty in your reading – what’s the point? – let me reassure you that I edited that son-of-a-gun post at least five times in an attempt to make it more readable.  Apparently I only achieved partial success.  Darn it!

Moving on to lighter things, I’ve come upon some fun Wanda Words of the Week in our local, national paper that you might or might not know.  An interesting set, if you think about it.  Shall we give them a try?  (Definitions are from Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.com.)

Jeremiad  – a prolonged lamentation or mournful complaint; a cautionary or angry harangue

Revanchism  –   a foreign policy aimed at revenge or the regaining of lost territories or status;  desire or support for such a policy

Mendicant  – adjective –  begging; practicing begging; living on alms; pertaining to or characteristic of a beggar.

Measuring Up

October 4, 2017 – I heard a quiz result on the radio a few weeks ago and it stuck on me.  The quiz was something like, “The average woman does this 19 times before getting married” and the answer was, “Kisses 19 different men.”  How quaint, huh?

This daily radio quiz is usually open-ended questions like the one above that are pretty tough to guess because they are so wide open.  But this particular question stuck in my head for a couple of reasons.  First, the question sure supposes a lot about “the average woman” – assumptions about her getting married and her partner preference.  She’ll marry once and only once.  She’ll only kiss and marry men.  And she’ll shop around, kissing 19 dudes first.  No comment on how many she might have sex with.  Where’s that sensitive little tidbit in the on-the-air quiz world?  (We’ll get to my thoughts on that in a few paragraphs…)

I find a connection between that radio quiz and an online posting I came upon a few weeks ago.  It was written by an older woman who listed “Things Time Has Taught Me.”  I enjoyed the list and thought I’d eventually maybe write about some of the ten items she listed.  The tie-in to today’s blog post is that one of the items on her list was “Most of our life is spent chasing false goals and worshipping false ideals. The day you realize that is the day you really start to live.”

As a young person, one must have goals or one spends one’s days virtually treading water and not making progress.  I’m not sure how you tag one goal as “false” as in the online list and another as “making progress”, though.  Is your life wasted if you choose to completely live in the moment instead of fighting to get ahead and move up?  Are goals and self-improvement bad things?  Well, heck no!

Living in the moment might translate as complete freedom to do as you like at any time: ignore social norms, spend resources foolishly without consideration, learn what you like, help others as you like, help yourself as you like.

I think that there are plenty of people, however, who others might call ambition-less, who just do the best they can, day-to-day, trying to stay in the same place, just trying to survive.  They’re not focused on getting ahead, they’re focused on Maslow’s hierarchy’s lowest level:  food, water, warmth, rest.  Maybe second level:  security and safety.  And that’s it.  The whole focus of their lives.   I’m trying to project myself into my trashman’s life, the neighborhood landscaper’s life, the restaurant dishwasher’s life and consider, do they all want to be the next level up? Wouldn’t they each like to be promoted?  To the trash truck driver, the landscape crew foreman, the sous chef?

Do they have the luxury of thinking that way – upward – or are they just trying to survive and put food in their stomachs and look after their families?

Next, I consider my friends at my old workplace.  We were evaluated and competed for a finite number of promotions like many workplaces.  If an employee didn’t make it to their personal goal grade level, was their career a waste of decades?  One friend of mine considered that not getting promoted to a certain level meant she was a failure – regardless of the insignificant monetary bump that came with the promotion –  and the fact that no one wore their grade level on their sleeve so it was pretty much unknowable to the rest of the workforce.  It was her knowing that caused her anguish. Her self-evaluation.  Maybe some coworkers would know about that grade level reached – by seeing the different colored parking hangtag or finding a promotion list lying around.  But without others knowing, without that few paltry extra dollars, without reaching that certain grade level, she considered her career would be a failure.  I think my friend completely overlooked the nice sum total of money earned over those decades – at that next level down where she considered herself stuck.  She ignored the friendships forged across hundreds or thousands of daily interactions, the extra education she was paid to acquire, the nice salary that provided a comfortable life for her family and the significant successes she garnered during that decades-long career.  She still considers herself a failure for not achieving that final promotion.

So what’s with this need to self-evaluate, measure up and have goals?  Which goals are false and which are about creating good progress?  Is it about measuring yourself against others (relative success) or measuring your own happiness (absolute success)?

Early in my career, I was pretty happy with my salary and level of responsibility and daily challenge.  As time passed, in order to be where I felt I should be, grade-wise, I measured myself against my coworkers – in three ways. Intellect, ability to get along, and desire for work-life balance.  I thought some were lacking intellect compared to me (okay, stupid).  Or were a little nuts (crazy/rude/mean).  Or there were those who spent inordinate amounts of time at work and never went home.  Those had out-of-balance worklives.  I think I’m pretty smart so it bothered me when someone who I thought was a simpleton was promoted ahead or above me.  It also bothered me when a crazy person who couldn’t get along with coworkers was promoted at all.  However, if someone I thought was stupid or couldn’t get along wanted to take a horrible job that no one else wanted, or they wanted to take a job that kept them from doing anything else in their lives, so be it, and congratulations on the promotion! Just shows that you really are stupid or crazy so I’ll just try to ignore you.  Many of our highest levels of management turned out to be these people.  Isn’t that something?  I’m describing the highest levels of leadership as the lower intellect or hard to get along with because they willingly took those jobs that no one else wanted. They didn’t seem to care about having horrible jobs or losing their work-life balance.  Of course there were those who were driven to the highest levels of management for selfless, altruistic reasons. And I was happiest working for them – if they were smart, communicative leaders and appreciated a decent work-life balance. There were plenty of high-level jobs that paid well, were challenging, and yet fun – with a decent chance for maintaining some work-life balance.  Those were the jobs worth competing for!  Considering all that, I did pretty well across the years.

Back to the radio quiz.  It’s about the measuring up that is NOT in the workplace.  How about measuring ourselves against others in those areas we don’t talk about?  Do you get worried about measuring up in society, your neighborhood, with friends?  I do.  Or I did.  Maybe I worry about it less, now that I’ve got a few years on me.  But I’m really not confident enough in all areas of life to think I’m doing it right, regardless of what “it” might be.  Am I cooking dinner at home enough nights each week?  Do I take too many vacations each year?  (Never!)  Do we do enough charity work? Do you have too many cats?  Do we own too many cars?  Is our fashion up-to-date? (Ha!)  Is our house too small?  Too big? Is it decorated okay?

The trickier measures we don’t talk about or think or write about much:  are we having sex too often?  Not often enough?  Have I (or you) had too many sexual partners?  Too few?  What might I be missing out on in life?  Do I have it so good I should shut up and be happy or even gloat (to myself in a pleasant, quiet way)?

What’s this drive to measure ourselves?  Is this measuring against others a kind of competition?  Is it more natural to some people than others?  Are the sportsmen and sportswomen among us different because they enjoy the competition even if they lose?  Is the drive to measure ourselves in general related to some competitive drive that some of us have and others do not?  Is it human nature for some (or most)?  Or does the measuring yourself against others fall into the realm of “overthinking” and we should really focus on living, being happy and just getting along?

For me the need to measure has definitely diminished with some chronological maturity. (As opposed to personal and behavioral maturity which I won’t pretend to have achieved!)  Nowadays, in my life, it is now much easier to just do what feels right and to heck with what others think.  Simply one of the benefits of passing years.  So, my young friends, try not to measure yourself against someone else’s norms.  Who’s to say what’s a norm, anyway?  As long as it’s not illegal and doesn’t hurt someone else (or yourself) do what feels right.  You were raised right, weren’t you?  Focus on integrity and treating others well and it doesn’t matter if you have 5 designer purses or none – or if you drive a beater car or a fine German-engineered marvel.   Focus on leading a good life.

It sounds easy to say, doesn’t it?  Then I find myself in yoga class, looking around, thinking, oh, do I have the straightest, best triangle pose?  Is my warrior two pose the deepest and best?  “Stop it!”,  I yell silently to myself, “Reset, dammit!  The only person you’re supposed to be competing with is yourself!  If anyone!”

In yoga, the instructor will very commonly ask you to “set your intention” at the beginning of the session.  I’m pretty sure no one (and that includes me) sets their intention to “do better than everyone else.”  Yoga isn’t a competition.  I attend yoga class so I can loosen up my back, improve my balance and flexibility, and relax.  Not really anything you can measure.  Yet the competitor in me can’t help looking around and comparing.  Sheesh!

I can’t complete the NY Times crossword puzzle in pencil much less ink, I’m not a chess master, but I did pretty darn well on my SATs and GREs. So what?  Do those things help me be a better person?  I do like (need?) external validation (please say this outfit looks nice, please say the food I made tastes good, please say I made the right decision on whatever, because I don’t trust myself to know these things – yuck!).  I can say we all have our strengths and weaknesses. We’re all allowed to have and to celebrate our strengths and weaknesses. I don’t need to be the bestest and mostest anymore.  No one needs to be the best at everything. I had a horrible boss at one time who seemed driven to prove he was the smartest person in the room – any room – full of people – on every topic.  It was ridiculous.  He was ridiculous.  And he was a horrible boss and horrible at getting along with people because he had this low-self-esteem-driven-need to be the most, best, smartest, etc.  It was awful for pretty much everyone who worked for him who couldn’t bring themselves to just laugh at his antics.

Let someone else be the “best” sometimes.  It’s kind of fun when you get into it.  You can actually take joy in someone else being better than you at stuff.  It’s okay. I wish I could draw and paint better.  I wish I were a better photographer.  But I have friends who can draw and paint and take photographs beautifully so I celebrate their talents and take joy in their wonderful skills!

I look around at the Arts and Crafts Shows where we sell our work.  I measure myself up against the other ceramic artists.  I rationalize why that dude can throw taller than me (oh, he’s a full-time potter), or has more beautiful glazes (oh, she’s been doing glaze chemistry for 30 years), or has more creative ideas for decorating (maybe, but I’m make much better forms).  In my mind, I decide for the customers from whom they should make their purchases!  Even before the show opens!  I used to do this when husband and I played doubles volleyball on the beach.  I’d see the other couples warming up and I would size up their capabilities.  Ostensibly for discovering their weaknesses but really I’d be measuring us against them.  Typically, during these analyses I’d decide we were better than our competition.  And, typically, we’d LOSE to those whom I’d decided we were BETTER than.  Nice.  Why did that happen?  Well, hubbie or I would choke at some important point in a game, get grumpy, or we’d be less consistent than our opposition, or we’d get tired sooner or something, anything.  The pre-evaluating of our opponents set expectations that we rarely met.  Our sand volleyball doubles career definitely didn’t achieve greatness!  In fact, we both did better at doubles with other partners!  Insert pouty face here.  (We did, however, do just fine playing volleyball on the same sixes team over many years. Less choking (each other?) and less grumpiness since there were more teammates. It was on those sixes teams that we had the most fun.)

I have no idea if I would continue that sizing-up-the-opponent habit these many years later, long after we left the sand courts.  Have I achieved some level of maturity that obviates that measuring against an opponent before the game even begins?  As I think about it, these days I don’t participate in any athletic events that result in a “winner” anymore anyway, though I didn’t leave competition behind deliberately.  Injuries took me out of the game, so to speak.

But I still like to win at board games!

Back to annual evaluations and the workplace for a minute.  We used to joke at work when confronted with annual evaluations where everyone in the whole organization got a good rating – that we were all “above average.”  Well, aren’t we?  Who’s average?  Do you know anyone to whom you’d assign an IQ of only 100?  [Sidebar – from Wikipedia:  Historically, IQ is a score obtained by dividing a person’s mental age score, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person’s chronological age, both expressed in terms of years and months. The resulting fraction is multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score. When current IQ tests were developed, the median raw score of the norming sample is defined as IQ 100 …approximately two-thirds of the population scores are between IQ 85 and IQ 115. About 5 percent of the population scores above 125, and 5 percent below 75.”]

I firmly believe there are different types of intelligence, that’s for sure.  In 1983 an American developmental psychologist, Howard Gardener, described 9 types of intelligence:  Naturalist (nature smart), Musical (sound smart), Logical-mathematical (number/reasoning smart), Existential (life smart),   Interpersonal (people smart), Bodily-kinesthetic (body smart), Linguistic (word smart), Intra-personal (self smart), Spatial (picture smart).  I love this notion.  I’ve thought about it ever since I served on a NOAA survey ship for a month and worked with people who were extremely good at their jobs but probably hadn’t made it past high school graduation.  Their jobs didn’t seem to involve pure intellectual strength (reasoning) but more spatial smarts or naturalist   It also occurs to me that professional athletes (bodily-kinesthetic smart) deserve huge salaries because they have a rare genius in their sport.  Even 30 plus years after Gardener’s book came out, there is still a debate whether talents other than math and language are indeed types of intelligence or just skills.  But I think some folks are just plain better at getting along (call it EQ for Emotional Intelligence, if you must) than others.  They’ve got the interpersonal people smarts.

We did have a little room on our annual evaluation forms for “how” you did your assigned tasks for the year.  Were you a good teammate?  Were you honest?  Did you communicate well?  Were you a good leader?  A rater had a tough job, you can imagine, because they could measure much more about GETTING the assigned tasks done than HOW they were done.

So let’s wrap up measuring and evaluating.  I confess, I like to measure things.  My dad was an engineer.  Trained, educated, through and through.  And he loved to measure things. He wrote the date on the packages of almost everything he bought, from cookies to epoxy.  My husband and I are educated as scientists so we like to measure things, too.  If you don’t know it’s 80° outside, how are you going to know that your favorite temperature is 80°?  If you don’t notice that those potato chips have a “best if used by date” of a year ago, you’ll be surprised when you take a bite of a very stale chip.

And measuring (counting) from there to the radio quiz… does it really matter how many men a woman kisses before she gets married?  Is she a late bloomer?  Or loose?  Holy cow, what actually even counts as a kiss?

You could go crazy with all this measuring, counting, self-evaluating, and annual reviewing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Walden, when he writes about leaving the woods because he had “several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one,” goes on to say, “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary…and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”  A few pages later he gets to the familiar part: “Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.”

“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Chris Staley (Ceramic Art professor at Penn State, PSU Laureate 2012-2013, and my teacher at Penland School in June 2007), is online in a video about liking mistakes and not worrying so much about perfection: “…life becomes about a sea of measuring and quantifying, … evaluating ourselves” and enduring “annual reviews…Life is so much more than being evaluated in some way, validating ourselves.  Life is about emotions and feelings and how we can connect with one another.”

I like it.

Title: What’s a Vacation? Subtitle: Hurricane Irma Destroys Much of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin

September 10, 2017 – I’ve done some thinking and some talking with husband over the years about why we pick the places we pick for vacations.  After many years of marriage, after many vacations (I do like vacations), some common themes arise.  There must be safety and security, of course.  I’m not a thrill-seeker in that area at all.  I don’t need to see riot police, have my papers checked regularly, or have my camera forcibly taken away.  Which is not to say that we obsessively check the State Department website before we travel to other countries.  For our visits, there must also be healthy conditions like safe drinking water, healthy food, no great excess of insect-borne or other disease.  But beyond those safety/security givens, what does anyone look for when choosing a vacation destination?  And what brings you back for more than one visit?  Especially that question.  What makes us return to the same place over and over?  It’s a mighty big planet with lots to see.  Why repeat?

First of all, we must consider what our vacation goal is.  I don’t consider visiting European countries as a real vacation-vacation.  “Vacation” to me is a relaxing, lying around, taking-it-easy type of scenario.  Goofing around at the beach, reading trashy novels, playing catch, lying around the pool, playing board games, fishing, playing golf or tennis, going for a boatride – that’s a vacation.  I’d label visits to exotic European locales (even as exotic as London!) “trips”.  Educational trips, full of sightseeing.  Visiting museums, galleries, touring, hiking, even shopping – those are trips for learning and being wowed by the magical differences between here and there: whether that’s cultural, geographic, nature-related, weather or whatever.  For those “trips” – do we return to that exotic locale after some period of time?  As in my example, London, there’s always something new to explore as it’s a huge city.  The theatre shows change all the time.  Some museum or landmark was closed on a prior visit, so you want to go back.  Or you’re enthralled with some delightful part of the culture – like pubs, or the best Indian food in the world without going all the way to India.  In a non-English-speaking country you might enjoy practicing your second or third language and return to do that.  In Italy, you must see that artwork again and again and again because it is just so amazing.

For relaxing, recharging vacation-vacations, what do we look for?  All of us have knowledge of folks who own vacation homes in addition to their primary residence.  How much must you like a place to fork over the serious money and constant worry to own a home you don’t live in all the time?  In exchange for that money and worry you get a familiar place, in a delightful locale of your choosing, with no reservations required, visits with zero-planning-ahead, no rental fees/hotel costs, and you get to personalize your vacation home to your heart’s and wallet’s content.  And you trade variety for familiarity.  And familiarity is good.  Is that the draw of Disney?  Familiarity and sameness?  This familiarity issue will lead to my ultimate thesis in this post shortly.

There are 25-28 separate island nations in the Caribbean.  Each with its own personality (culture, landscape, food, entertainment, lodging choices, transportation accessibility, etc.).  Many, many years ago I remember saying that I didn’t see any reason to return to any island until you had tried them all.  Twenty-five nations provide pretty endless variety!  So why return to any of them?

But husband and I do.

Across my lifespan I’ve been to seven different islands, from as far north as the Bahamas to as far south as St. Lucia (Mom and Dad took the family to St. Croix when I was 16, after Mom accompanied Dad on a business trip to Puerto Rico and found it fascinating).  But husband and I keep going back to one island, in particular.  Nine visits total, as a matter of fact, spread out over 15-20 years.  Why?  Because it checks those boxes of required characteristics that we look for in a vacation-vacation location.  Ease of access: it takes about two-thirds of a day to get there, not an entire day.  There are multiple flights per day on large American airlines.  Lodging:  we have found a hotel that suits us.  It is clean, it is well-maintained, it is pretty quiet, it is in a spectacular landscape setting, it has decent amenities, there’s a great restaurant onsite, there are numerous outstanding restaurants within walking distance, the hotel is pretty reasonably priced, there are choices of room configurations, the clientele is pleasant, the staff is friendly and helpful, and there is a hint of the exotic as the nation is French Caribbean.

We love Saint Martin.

Can you guess why I’m writing?  Earlier this week Hurricane Irma did significant damage to both the Dutch and French side of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin.  The Dutch side, Sint Maarten, is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.  Other constituent countries include the Netherlands, Aruba and Curacao. Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius are special municipalities of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, if you know of them.  The French side, Saint Martin, is a French overseas collectivity along with St. Bart’s, French Polynesia and some other islands I’ve never heard of.  Martinique is also French but is labelled a French Overseas Region.

Having studied French for a few years in school, we enjoy playing with the language with the locals in St. Martin.  Bon jour!  Ça va? Qu’est-ce que c’est?  Au revoir! The French West Indies “laissez-faire” attitude means there are fewer rules about clothing choices (the men don’t have to wear long pants to dinner like they do at some of the British West Indies – even if the outdoor temperature is above 80°!), clothing just needs to look nice.  We like that.  The overall atmosphere is a little less uptight.  Our favorite lodging is near the “Gourmet Capital of the Caribbean” where French, Caribbean, Italian, and fusion food are some of the best in the world.  French food is one of our favorite cuisines.  “You had me at croissant!”  On Saint Martin you can use your dollar bills or you can use Euros.  Just expect your change to be in Euros.  And in some fine dining establishments you can get 1:1 because they love that American dollar – that means significant savings when the dollar is at 1.3 or 1.5 against the Euro.  The weather is tropical and steady – until tropical storms or hurricanes enter the picture and then it can get dicey.  On one 7-day visit years ago, we had 6 ½ days of rain, as a tropical depression hovered above Puerto Rico, some 200 miles west, not moving for our entire visit, dumping copious amounts of rain the entire time.  But as we stayed on the French side, with that laid-back attitude, I remember heading to one of those fine-dining establishments for dinner one night with umbrella in hand, dressed as nicely as ever.  When we arrived at the restaurant after our 10-minute walk, I was not surprised, but stifled a chuckle, when I saw some of our fellow diners dressed as nicely as we were, but wearing their plastic Tevas under the white tablecloth instead of their Italian loafers and stilettos.  Ordinarily temperatures are in the low 80’s during the day and the mid-70’s at night.  Fabulous weather.  The French side isn’t busy when we visit during the shoulder seasons, in Spring or late Fall.

The quiet and relaxing setting, the natural ocean beauty, reasonable prices, the beach boy providing food and cocktail service to your chaise lounge – oh my, who wouldn’t return time and time again?  Especially when the restaurant staff welcomes you back so warmly after you’ve been gone for 3 or 4 years?

That familiarity: warm, personal greetings from staff who remember you and whom we know by nickname, knowing which restaurants have the best food, best wine, best view – not feeling off-put by the scary roads, rundown buildings, intimidating local bus rides to the capitol (for the bargain of $2 each).  That familiarity keeps you coming back.  I write “lessons learned” after each visit – which configuration lodging unit did we have?  Did we like it?  Did we like the floor we were on?  How was the wifi (for monitoring weather)?  Was the manager’s reception good?  What is Laurent’s beard like this year?  How are Chantal’s children doing?  Which offsite restaurants did we like the best?  Did we rent a car or just use the bus and taxi?  It’s easy to remember all the details when you write them down!!  But I write them down because I know we’ll be back.

Right now, in the aftermath of Cat 5 Hurricane Irma, Saint Martin has apparently endured damage to 95% of the buildings on the French side.  The nice onsite hotel restaurant described above where the beach boy picks up the lunch food and cocktails to deliver to the beach and where we have our continental breakfast every morning has been destroyed.  Not a surprise, I guess, with 185-mph winds and a largely wooden structure.

Non-military flights to Sint Maarten/Saint Martin are cancelled for the time-being, as rescue and supply missions are the only planes allowed in and out.  The new terminal, which just opened in 2006, has had its roof blown off, so that’s a big mess.

We’ll find another place for our next tropical vacation-vacation.  We were just on Saint Martin in May of this year, so we can’t be greedy, I suppose.  Hurricane Hugo did a number on Saint Martin in 1989, damaging some structures that weren’t repaired until after 2000 – and one timeshare resort on the Dutch side just fell off the face of the earth because owners and managers couldn’t decide on how to rebuild.  Now it’s just gone, empty buildings destroyed and debris carried away.

I don’t think that will happen to our favorite place.  It’ll probably take most of a year to get back to some semblance of “normal” but unfortunately, hurricanes hit tropical locations this time of year.  I’m afraid it’s sad but to be expected.

For us, maybe it’s time to re-introduce a little variety and add a new tropical island to the list.

About Time for some Wanda Words of the Week – “S”

September 1, 2017 – I just typed “August” – where did Summer go?  In honor of Summer, here are some Wanda Words of the Week that start with “S”.  All were used in our local national paper, so they’re not oddball words that no one ever uses or you only find on that tear off “word a day” calendar you won in the office gift exchange.  Here goes (definitions are from Google and Merriam-Webster online):

Susurration:  a whispering sound :  murmur.  And the related, susurrus:  whispering, murmuring, or rustling – “the susurrus of the stream”.

Scabrous: rough and covered with, or as if with, scabs.  Indecent; salacious.  (Interesting combo, eh?)

Solipsism:  the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.  Wikipedia: the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist.  (The only thing I know for sure is that my mind is here.  Ya’ll may be some imagined something-er-other.)

My Brilliant Idea for Eclipse Chasing in 2024

August 28, 2017 – The buzz is slightly wearing off now that a week has gone by since our excellent eclipse adventure.  What would I do differently?  Ah, that’s what has led to the brilliant idea for maximizing your chances at clear skies.  Going to our chosen viewing spot a couple of days early was fine this time.  We got to try out several restaurants, do a little practice run to the (not used) potential viewing location, and see the sights in a city we’d never visited as tourists.  Remember, we chose a pretty-good-sized city within about an hour of the line of totality, with the chance to drive up or down the line, if we had to.  A medium-sized city gave us good flight options, good rental car options, good hotel options and last-minute shopping opportunities, too.

All that logic was successful last week, for sure.

Where we ran into problems was with the “average” weather forecast for this time of year.  Sad to say, we did not receive the average good weather in our chosen location.  But our chosen hotel spot near shopping and with the opportunity to drive up and down the path, worked in our favor and let us adapt to our weather situation in the final hours.  We bought food, drinks, air mattresses, paper towels, and toilet paper to take on our improvised, last-minute 500-mile drive to good weather.  And we did – we headed southeast at high speed along the line of totality.  High speed.

If you read the post before last, you know we headed out late the evening before the eclipse and spent a few hours that night in a Walmart parking lot 350 miles from our hotel base of operations, just trying to avoid an all-nighter.  Staying in the Walmart parking lot, while free of financial cost and in an area where hotels may have been full of eclipse travelers, turned out to be miserable.  Hot, cramped, and in a too-well-lit parking lot, so no real sleeping transpired.  How to avoid that for the next eclipse?

The brilliant new plan:  choose that medium-sized city within an hour’s drive of the path again for homebase.  Decide how many days in advance you wish to spend there.  Find out the eclipse-related activities that might be scheduled for that area.  Find out about touristy activities to do while you’re waiting for Eclipse Day.  Ensure there are hotels available near restaurants and shopping, about a month out buy plane tickets, reserve hotel room for entire stay, reserve rental car.  Then along the line of totality – about 6 hours in each direction – reserve two more hotel rooms, one in each of those places for one night, the night before the Eclipse – especially if they have 24-hour-before-visit cancellations. That way you won’t be trying to sleep in your vehicle overnight and you won’t have to worry that all the hotels are full if you have to move out from under clouds at the last minute.

In 2017, the Eclipse was in the afternoon on a Monday.  April 8, 2024, is a Monday, eclipse again in the early afternoon.  Another minor adjustment I’d make would be to schedule the flight home for later in the day on the day after the eclipse.  Having to leave our hotel at 6 a.m. after two very short sleeping nights was a chore.  If we could have checked out a few hours later, we could have caught up on some sleep.  I’m sure we chose that flight because it was cheaper than the others.

But if you’re made of money, as the amateur astronomer accused me of acting when he heard my brilliant idea, and you’re going to reserve hotels in three different locations on the night before the eclipse, you might as well pay a few more bucks and fly home at a reasonable time of day on the day after the eclipse!

There you have it, the brilliant idea for eclipse chasing – for next time.

I Believe I have Fixed the Glitch with Commenting on the Posts – Feel Free to Try It!

August 27, 2017 – I received word that the “comment” function wasn’t working properly.  I did a little research to figure out a fix and have subsequently deactivated the plug-in that was misbehaving.  Comment at will!

Eclipse Chasing: Fly 1,000 miles Out, Drive 500 miles Back – in Search of Good Weather!

August 25, 2017 – Eclipse chasing turned out to be fun, exhilarating and exhausting.  Fun, because husband and I were working together as a pretty darn good team toward a simple, science-based goal that millions of people were aware of, if not participating in.  Exhilarating, because, you know, the sun pretty much went away – even if it was just for a couple of minutes!  And exhausting because we did the best we could to pick the best weather location and the weather let us down.  We drove something like 1,000 miles in two days just to get to optimal weather for eclipse viewing.  I’ll tell you, that’s far!

We chose Kansas City for two primary reasons.  First reason:  it’s a big city (so easier [and maybe cheaper]) accommodations, flights, rental cars) very near the path of totality.  Second reason:  “average” sunny weather for this time of year.  You can’t see the sun disappear behind the moon through storm clouds.

So, for the path of totality, we had complete control – the path was very well-documented, we had access to many maps (online and in paper). We were large and in charge of totality.  But we had to have clear, sunny skies.  And the weather, of course, was pretty much out of our control.

With the eclipse on Monday, we flew into Kansas City the Friday before.  Flawless.  Picked up rental car – normal airport rental car counter glacial pace of service – but we got a pristine, 500-mile odometer, fully- loaded Chevrolet Equinox (SUVs are cheaper in Kansas City than compacts – everyone drives an SUV or a pickup truck in Kansas so rentals skew toward SUVs).  We had made reservations at a nice enough hotel – convenient to restaurants, big shopping mall, Walmart, Target, gas stations, interstate. Excellent. Chilled out Friday evening, dinner at a Missouri chain restaurant, “Jazz”, with live music and Cajun food.  (Yes, Cajun.)  That evening we started really getting the weather forecast figured out.  Not good for St. Joseph, Missouri an hour up the road where we had purchased a parking pass for the small civil/National Guard airport.  ($25 to park, $50 for tent or RV camping on the little airport.)  Weather, in fact, not good for about a hundred-mile radius around us.  We spent hours Saturday morning, fully dressed, sitting on the hotel room bed surrounded by maps, books, laptop and phones trying to figure out where the weather would be suitable so that we could drive to clear weather for eclipse viewing.  If you are not familiar with the geography around Kansas City – my own knowledge very limited, I confess – Kansas City sits on the Kansas/Missouri border. To the northwest is Nebraska less than 100 miles away, and due north is Iowa about 100 miles, as the crow flies.  To get out from under the stormy weather, places like Iowa offered no help as the line of totality ran northwest-southeast, so we needed to drive in one of those directions to stay on the path.  My goodness, the planning and re-planning we did sitting on that bed!  Drive northwest to Nebraska?  Drive southeast into Missouri?  We roughed out a plan that we might need to sleep in the SUV if we had to travel far – and that original “average” weather report was letting us down – sour weather and clouds predicted for hundreds of miles.  As it was only Saturday, we decided we’d let it go for a while, head out to explore and resume planning Sunday.

So where to explore?  We had tickets to get onto the St. Joe airport, why not check it out, just see what we’d purchased and probably wouldn’t be using?  Rosecrans Airport houses Air National Guard, has a 8,000 foot runway and two or three big propeller cargo planes (sorry, no can identify).  It is literally surrounded by cornfields, soybean fields, and the Missouri River.  We drove the circuitous route around the runway, circumnavigating the entire “base”, on tiny little paved roads where the security folks had covered up the “authorized vehicles only” signs temporarily (there’s an eclipse coming, you know).  It was easy to see that bringing in 5,000 vehicles (yup, that’s how many parking passes they sold) would take forever – and be horribly slow exiting, too.  But the food vendors were already setting up on Saturday, a few tents were there, a couple of RVs and emergency personnel were in place to help any eclipse viewers who needed it.  (Turns out St. Joe was 95% socked in at eclipse time.  And a little rainy.  I’m pretty sure they didn’t get hear the 5,000 revelers they sold tickets to.)

Saturday night it was time to take advantage of being in KC and get a steak.  We ended up at The Majestic – “downstairs” in the jazz club.  We’re usually pretty reluctant to get engaged in live music much (usually too loud for my pretty decent hearing) but the three-piece band (piano, clarinet, drums) played at a perfect volume, our steaks were yummy and our cocktails fabulous.  On the off-chance that we’d need to camp in the SUV on the way to some better viewing point we shopped that night at Walmart to purchase folding chairs, air mattresses, paper towels, toilet paper, a cooler, drinks and snacks.

Sunday morning became all about planning – AGAIN!  The previous night (Saturday) we had fooled ourselves into thinking maybe we could drive 3-4 hours to better weather.  By Sunday morning, none of the forecasts had improved and most had worsened for the areas within 350 miles.  (Which is not to say that those cities and towns didn’t enjoy some good viewing in the end, but we couldn’t take the risk.) We had to find a “sunny” forecast for Mr. Amateur Astonomer to be satisfied.  We’d come this far, we weren’t going to gamble on poor visibility.

After we did some planning and getting sad about these contingency plans we were going to have to execute, we made like tourists in KC on Sunday.  The Nelson-Adkins Museum of Art was great.  It’s the place with the giant shuttlecocks in the sculpture garden.  Gigantic badminton shuttlecocks.  But they also have a diverse sampling of impressionist work (Monet Waterlilies and a Haystack; Van Gogh Olive Trees; a pretty Pisarro and so on) and a pretty good sampling of contemporary work (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rothko) including “Mural” by Jackson Pollock, which we’d seen during our springtime visit to Chicago!  Turns out we’re following a gigantic painting around on tour!  (Guess where it’s going next? The National Gallery of Art in Washington!  Starts in mid-November!)

After the art gallery, we headed over to the Kansas City Zoo.  Arrived two hours before closing.  That was enough time to see the hippo, rhino, giraffes, lions, tigers, and the free-roaming kangaroos – couldn’t get too close to them – keepers told us they were “skittish”.  It was too hot for the chimps, baboons, and gorillas so we missed them – they were hanging out in the air conditioning…aren’t they from Africa?  Hmmmm.

We started to realize during our touristy day on Sunday that we’d have to drive pretty far and it would be to the east to get to weather that would be maybe guaranteed to be good.  We went to dinner, packed up the SUV and departed Kansas City at 9 p.m. Sunday night aiming for Belleville, IL – just southeast of St. Louis – where I had visited many years ago during a trip to St. Louis and Scott AFB.  Belleville seemed like a nice place then so maybe it would be safe for us to find a Walmart parking lot to sleep for a few hours.

We arrived at the Walmart in Belleville at 1:30 a.m.  We asked the manager if we could sleep in the parking lot like the RV people do in Walmarts across the country.  He said, “Sure” with a wide sweep of his hand, “No problem.”

But the thing about Walmart parking lots is that they’re very well lit.  Even at 1:30 a.m.  (It’s a 24-hour Walmart.)  We ended up parked under a tree and non-functioning overhead light in front of the Lowe’s that shared the same parking lot.  Sleeping in RVs and sleeping in SUVs are totally different experiences.  SUV sleeping is not good sleeping.  We could fold down the back seat to make enough room to lie down, but Mr. 6’4” takes up a lot of room.  We couldn’t get the air mattresses to inflate but the blanket from our KC hotel room provided a little padding.  The problem with SUV sleeping, like tent sleeping is that if it’s hot outside, it’s hot inside.  And it was hot.  And we didn’t want to roll down windows because we didn’t want bugs and bad guys to get into the SUV with us.  So, husband got maybe 4 hours of sleep and I got about 2.  Ugh.  Back on the road at 6:00 a.m.

Our goal was Hopkinsville, Kentucky or any place in-between that had a “sunny” forecast.  Hopkinsville had the longest duration totality on the continent.  And already had a sunny forecast.  No place in between looked as good, so we headed there.

At the interstate pull-off for Hopkinsville there is a McDonald’s and a few other businesses like gas stations and Cracker Barrel.  After getting a drink and bathroom break at McD’s, we had a debate over staying right there for viewing – as there were already people in lawn chairs set up in a couple of places around the McDonald’s!  I thought we should try to get closer to town and away from the lousy parking lot but remember that exit ramp area as a backup plan.  So we headed toward Hopkinsville with about an hour and a half to go before the eclipse started.

Google Maps showed, and Facebook verified, that Hopkinsville, pop. 30,000, expected 100,000 visitors.  We hoped to stay away from that melee.  As we drove closer to town, we saw “Camping – $100” signs and were pretty sure that was primitive camping at Farmer Green Jeans where all you’d get was a port-a-potty for your $100.  Also we saw, “Eclipse Parking – $25” for parking in someone’s front yard.  We were not compelled.  We decided we’d pull over in a wide spot in the road if we had to.

As we neared Hopkinsville, we glimpsed a family cemetery off the side of the wide, dual-divided state route we were pm.  A couple of cars were already parked there with one fellow aiming his camera, mounted on a tripod, at the sun.  Well, that looked pretty darn good!  We ventured a little farther toward Hopkinsville but saw how the traffic was worsening on Google Maps, so we turned around and headed back to the cemetery.  I understand little family cemeteries – my family has one in the boonies of South Carolina.  As long as you’re respectful, sure, you can visit.  Just don’t leave a mess!  We were the third car there, chatted with the folks ahead of us – no one related to the cemetery family, all were just looking for a good eclipse-viewing point.  And, wow, it was a great spot!  A small asphalt parking lot, a few little trees and a couple of big old trees for shade and about a dozen headstones – surrounded by soybean fields.  We parked, pulled out our chairs and all the eclipse-viewing paraphernalia and got set up.  Tripods, cameras, white paper, chairs, cooler, phones with the eclipse app and so on.  More cars pulled into the little lot – everyone looking a little sheepish about just plopping down there, but we developed a bit of camaraderie.  We met families from Arizona, Chicago, Boston, Memphis.  Some folks had driven there, some flown there, for some the eclipse was part of a longer trip or they were just traveling for the viewing.  Some had nothing more than cardboard viewing glasses, some had tripods, telescopes and cameras.

All told the final tally was about 20 cars and about 50 people.  Kids, parents, grandparents.  And this was a case where having that range of ages only made the event more fun.

We had beautiful clear weather, the talking eclipse app on our phones worked great, the cameras all caught different extraordinary phenomena (first contact, corona, diamond ring, pinhole through the trees, and maybe even shadowbands!), and we were overjoyed.  A complete success!

Then, we had to face it.  We had a 7½ hour (no stops) drive back to KC – which we had to accomplish that night so we could leave the hotel at 6:00 a.m. the next morning to catch our plane home.

The drive was long, we took turns, but the weather became very ugly for the final 30 miles outside KC – after 10 p.m. and sleep-deprived from SUV sleeping the night before.  It was a struggle but we made it to the hotel by 11 p.m., showered, packed that night and nabbed a few hours of sleep before heading to the airport for the uneventful trip home the next day.

My next post will include my new, brilliant strategy for viewing the 2024 eclipse on the path of totality.

Eclipse Chasing! Solar Eclipse August 21, 2017

August 17, 2017 – Cameras, tripods, beanbags, phones, chargers galore, extra batteries, goofy eclipse glasses, solar filter for binoculars, homemade pinhole viewer, maps, plane tickets, car rental, hotel reservation, ticket to park on the airport, sunscreen, hats, bug spray, nerdy science t-shirts, and shopping list for when we get there (beach chairs, etc.).

Now we just need some good weather on Eclipse Day – Monday!

No Trivial Pride when Racism, Bigotry, and Hatred Rear Their Ugly Heads

August 15, 2017 – Well, heck. I saw a Facebook post about how well William and Mary scored in the latest Princeton Review – garnering a #5 for Happiest Students and #5 for Their Students Love These Colleges (congrats to VT for #1 on that one!).  So I built a little FB entry crowing about my school and my friends’ schools that did well on these lists. And deleted my prideful entry less than 24 hours later. I did so because one of our “local” schools happened to NOT show up on either one of those Top 20 lists and under the current circumstances now was not the time to be self-serving and cocky. They need our support. I felt horrible that a bunch of small-minded, fearful, ignorant, cowards showed up in Charlottesville (the home of UVA) and displayed open, murderous hatred, the likes of which we haven’t seen in public in many years (but seems to be okay with some folks these days).  Well, it’s not only not okay with me but it’s repugnant, shameful, and a little embarrassing – it’s easy to be white, isn’t it?  Is it bad to say that?

Anyway, I took down my boast about W&M.  Maybe next week.

Americans are allowed to have and voice their opinions – but I can’t imagine what the WWII vets are feeling right now who fought in Europe against Nazis.  In Charlottesville there were clueless bums espousing racism and anti-semitism only seven decades later.

It occurs to me that saying, “Hello” and shaking hands with someone who doesn’t look like you can be really helpful in teaching sad, sheltered morons that skin color isn’t the measure of a person, no matter what that skin color might be, but to paraphrase MLK Jr, the measure of a person is the content of their character.  I’m silly and naive that all it takes is a greeting and handshake, but I’m afraid some of these haters don’t even know what they’re hating.  I go back to my words “ignorant and fearful.”  It’s easy to be afraid of new things and things that we don’t understand.  But master the fear!  It should never come to hate.

I, myself, am torn about Confederate statues. Condoleeza Rice in May 2017 said, “When you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your history to make you feel better, it’s a bad thing,” Rice said. “I’m a firm believer in ‘keep your history before you.’ And so I don’t actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners. I want us to have to look at the names and recognize what they did, and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history.”

The Civil War is the deadliest war in American history.  And the impact of the Civil War cannot be underestimated. I was called a “Yankee” by my southern relatives for many years and so badly wanted to be a southerner.  How do we balance pride in southern culture with respect for those who are sensitive to what looks like a celebration of slavery and racism?  How do we achieve that balance without insisting that we erase Civil War history lessons? I want to celebrate the “southern culture” NOT of slave-owning, indenture and servitude but of sweltering climate, an agriculture-based economy, genteel courtesy, and food and drink that is unequaled!

I guess today’s post is really just a sad rant.