The Year of 52 Adventures

Updates from February, 2014 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• 

  Kimberly Hula 8:38 pm on February 9, 2014 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: 2nd amendment, ice dancing, liberal fantasy land, olympics ( 2 ), shooting range   

  Live Free or Ice Dance 

  Hiro and I did two things with our Sunday.  We watched the last Olympic leg of the Team Ice Dancing competition and we drove to New Hampshire and shot some guns.  We didn’t do one to play off the other for effect.  Nor did we do either with any planning as Hiro isn’t much of an ‘ice-dance man’ and I sit squarely in the liberal fantasy land that is Boston fully in favor of a full repeal of the 2nd amendment.  Instead, we found our way into these activities and because they are of note, I thought I’d share them with you.

  The Olympics themselves are the first hurdle.  I love the games and the sad sappy commercials that oft accompany them.  I love seeing athletes recognized for their abilities no matter how niche or otherwise uncelebrated.  I also love the emotion that comes of winning AND losing.  There is no moment like the one moment you have opportunity to prove your worth.  As sad as it is to see someone fall, tumble, foil their way through their event it’s ever more uplifting to see them comforted.  To see human spirit in its purest form come to the aid of one another blindly and with good faith.  These games are a tall(er) order, what with the human rights violations and seeming disregard for said companioned vigor by the host country.  I was all set to boycott the games!  No games!  Not in my house!  But, besides my fervent need to feel kinship with all that hope, I felt it a great disservice to those athletes that are there based on their merit.  They did not chose for Sochi to host.  They only chose to be good/great/best in their field and can still use all the support we, as their adoring fans, can muster.  At any rate that’s how I justified that.  And that’s how we found ourselves ice-dance aficionados.

  We don’t know anything about ice-dancing, and if I hear the phrase “side-by-side twizzle sequence” once more I’m afraid I may never hear anything else.  But we were into it.  It was graceful and athletic and synchonized.  Before I knew it Hiro had fully seated himself at my side and we TALKED A BIG GAME at the Jonny Weir about what it takes to truly execute a side-by-side twizzle sequence, thank you very much.

  In all honesty I could have devoted my whole day to that, but ice-dance knows how to make an exit and Hiro and I were left with two choices.  Make a further dent in the sofa and become intimate with insane ski jumping or do something else with our day.  Because I’d sooner defer to adventure I chose the latter.

  

  “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt”

  Let me build off my earlier disclaimer.  I don’t like guns.  I hate them, really.  I want only to live in a place without them and can’t imagine having one anywhere near me without a lock, and a box, and another lock and a safe.  I have, however, shot one before.  Two, actually.  It was years back at the ranch of a then boyfriend in none other than Texas.  Then BF and I were already fading fast and my trip to meet his parents did little more than solidify the fact that this whole trip was going the way of my journal and a memory store I’d work extra hard to purge.  That may be why, when offered, I agreed to shoot those guns.  Even when my judgment told me to go back in the ranch house and read a book and let the boys and the ranch hand point big shot guns at clay pigeons with the right hands, while holding firmly onto bottles of Shiner Bock(s) in the other.  It seemed unsafe and reckless and my anxiety was mounting.  I was sad to be stuck in a place I didn’t belong and mad to have made that choice.  I felt alien and prudish and frustrated so I took that shot gun and did as they said.

  I did not shoot the clay pigeon.  I shot off into some vast air target never to see my bullet meet matter.  I did, however, feel some crazy backfire in my shoulder from the butt of the gun and quickly gave up.

  That was six years ago and I’ve long since forgotten the feeling, but somewhere in the back stores of my mind I must have equated the release of a trigger with that of frustration.  I may have mixed memories and convinced myself that all the trouble I had with the former BF was made palatable, or at least unleashed some irritation by way of firearm.  I don’t know if that’s the leap I made then, but I think that’s what I convinced myself today, as I found myself asking Hiro if we could go to a gun range. (More …)
   

  Reply Cancel reply

  Name

  Email

  Website

  Notify me of new comments via email.

  Notify me of new posts via email.

• 

  Kimberly Hula 10:25 am on February 9, 2014 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: customs, depression, travel, writing ( 7 )   

  If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you’ll cut the chord / articulating song 

  “…people with nothing to declare carry the most.”
  ― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

   

  

  Here’s looking at you

  I enjoy going through customs.  I like the confirmation.  A declaration of adventure.  Too often travel ends in a whisper.  I spend hours and days planning a trip.  Dreaming up scenarios: a blue bird London sky; a pop-up Parisian dinner party; the glory of a Tanzanian mountain descent.  I dream these up more than I take them on, but the fantasy satiates.  I  visualize a passport thick as a Thanksgiving belly and friends and new family on every corner of the globe.

  So I always welcome the customs line.  I waltz through there like the queen of all things because I am, if only for a minute, the world’s best traveler.  I am an ambassador of my own memory and I relish in the opportunity to confirm that I put into practice at least one fantasy.

  But it is never as expected.  My travel is calculated.  I buy Fodder’s and Let’s Go’s in the hopes of staying safe.  I go off the beaten path in as much as my mass-produced guide has instructed me to go rogue.  I stay in clean hotels, and fare well with my own language.  This is the stuff my family lives for.  A Disney sanctuary of pre-fab comfort and top-grade assurance.  It has effect.  It gets me to go, go, go when I live to keep moving.  This is good/great/ best less the end result; a mere crawl to the finish line – a hoarse whisper of thanks to whatever locale welcomed me that trip.

  I don’t want to whisper.  I want to yell from that Tanzanian mountain top.  I want to crawl into a yurt without shower and dance in the moonlight and fight for my right to speak at a dinner party.  I suppose it’s the experience I’m after.  The fall without net sensation of really living that keeps me on Expedia and believing, imploring, unabashedly reaching for a customs line that will stamp my passport ‘life well lived’.

  What are we without dreams?  But even more, who are we to scrutinize our best efforts to reach them?  Day in and day out I’m hard on myself.  I’m a lame traveler.  A failed adventurer.  I’m not working the job I want; not making the money I thought.  I’m not reading nor writing nor living.  Not, no, nor.  I allow these as refrains in my daily shower song.  But I don’t want a negative to sing to me.  I just want to dream without consequence.

  That’s what I carry to customs.  The realization of dreams deferred.  The overweight parcels of expectation and regret.  But, if anything, I’m in line, which has to say something.