Roosevelt Island

We needed some way to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., right? So we met up at Bloomingdale's. Luckily, someone had the foresight to make a reservation at Serendipity. We ate awkward sandwiches and went into sugar shock over a frozen hot chocolate and some absurd ice cream sundae. Our waiter was wearing green contact lenses. They deceived me, and I thought I had witnessed the eighth wonder - the world's greenest eyes.

Once again, I failed to take the picture until after the food was eaten. I need to get with it. This is getting gross.

It was a blustery, cold day, so why not hop on the tram over to Roosevelt Island? I'm always in the mood to check something off my list of northeastern adventures, so I tagged along for a glide across the East River.

Over the years, Roosevelt Island's residents have called it Minnehanonck, Varkens Eylandt, Blackwell's Island, and Welfare Island. It has been home to a New York Penitentiary, Penitentiary Hospital, and the New York City Lunatic Asylum. The penitentiary has jailed, at various times, Emma Goldman, Mae West, Boss Tweed, and Billie Holiday. The Asylum, in one of the city's less-proud moments, housed 1,700 patients - twice its designed capacity.

Before our excursion, my only knowledge of Roosevelt Island came from the movie Dark Water, so I was expecting our trip to be replete with creepy little girl ghosts. The experience was, unfortunately, little-girl-ghost-free, but there are still plenty of otherworldly things on the island. The first is the Queensboro Bridge, which passes directly over the island.

I wonder what it's like living with the imposing specter of the bridge looming over you all the time.

There's a lovely esplanade down both sides of the lower part of the island, so you get a nice view of Manhattan on one side, and a bunch of what appear to be abandoned hospital buildings on the other.

The hospital is pretty otherworldly as well. They've spray-painted the letters for the buildings on their sides. It looks as if Roosevelt Island underwent the apocalypse before the rest of us, and the abandoned buildings have been overtaken by some kind of futuristic gang.

One building of particular interest, fenced off from the rest, and which I believe the city is turning into a memorial of some kind, appears to have been bombed at some point. Check out the video below.

What's strange about the bombed-out building is its close proximity to the FDR Memorial at the bottom of the island, which is fairly grand and sweeping.

It was brisk. It was time to go home. It was time to get Liz to give me back my coat.

Brookyland

I finally have 37 things to do for the 37 weeks before I leave for Africa. Check them out here. Thanks to all the people that made amazing suggestions. A lot of them made it into my list.

I've already checked a few things off the list. The first was the Brooklyn Flea Market. There was something in the air. Everyone suddenly and independently decided they wanted to go to the Brooklyn Flea. And by everyone I mean les copains that jaunted off to Williamsburg for the day on Saturday.

Williamsburg is striking and disarming the moment you step off the train. Here are some of the things we saw right off the bat:

The Brooklyn Flea is less of a market and more of a strange world inhabited by fanciful creatures:

It's also a massive coagulation of old stuff. One person's trash is another's treasure:

We smelled some fantastic, old, leather jackets. We rifled through vinyl records, old maps, and grade-school flashcards.

I bought 30 family photos from the 40s of unknown, ordinary people. Pictures taken on family outings, graduation days, pictures of nurses and soldiers, people in canoes and on grassy lawns. An assemblage of histories lost to time except for a handful of mysterious snapshots. I impose upon these pictures stories of my own, and the characters in my stories may as well be the real people in the pictures. 

The guy selling the pictures said he acquired them dirt cheap at auctions, yard sales, and estate sales. I feel a little wrong co-opting these individuals' histories into my own life. I'm currently arranging the photos into a collage on my bedroom wall - I'll post something about that when I'm done.

A few blocks from the flea market is Pies 'n Thighs, which comes highly recommended:

I'm a poor foodie-photographer. I always forget to take the picture until I've taken a bite out of the food. Gross.

Overwhelmed at the fact that we had the entire world available to us in our wanderings, we explored a funny little store across the street that had some weird pillows:

In a wonderful lapse of judgment, we decided to walk three miles to Ample Hills. It was the Sabbath, so the very Hasidic neighborhood was extremely quiet and still. There is a huge disjuncture between the two preeminent cultures of Williamsburg: Orthodox Jews and young, white hipsters. I've never seen so many sidelocks. Or so many Buddy Hollies.

I'm not too proud to wear a woman's scarf. It was cold.

Finally, Ample Hills.

Once again, taking pictures of half-eaten food. Yum.

Tiny Wonders

The beginning of my year was a real flurry of activity - of sound and fury - regarding my round-the-world voyage. However, now that I've decided to leave in October, I have nine months to save money and just... live.

After spending a few days twiddling my thumbs, I've decided that's no way to spend nine months. Nine months of dead air on a blog is probably a bad idea, too.

So here's my plan: I have thirty seven weekends between now and October 1st. In those thirty seven weekends, I plan to really explore New York and environs, and have some much smaller-scale adventures, from several hours to several days in length. Here's my list of things I intend to accomplish/places I intend to visit, blogging about each one along the way, of course:

1. New York Aquarium
2. The Great Saunter
3. Brooklyn Flea Market
4. Williamsburg
5. Greenwood Cemetery
6. Brooklyn Botanic Gardens
7. City Island
8. The Cloisters
9. Montreal
10. Niagara Falls
11. Governor's Island
12. Castle Gould/Sands Point, NY
13. Explore Roosevelt Island
14. See a movie at IFC
15. PS 1 Contemporary Art Center
16. Walk the length of Staten Island
17. Prospect Park
18. Montauk Point State Park
19. Boston
20. Socrates Sculpture Park

I'm still 17 short. What are some of your favorite things to do in the Great Northeast that 1) I probably haven't done before and 2) are a little more off the beaten path?

Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn

The Boy Is Back In Town

I had a lovely, three-week stay at Edwards Headquarters in Bountiful, Utah. But now I'm back in the city. Thank goodness for the stay. Thank goodness that I'm back.

New York has a bewitching effect on me. It knocks me around. It changes me, as if without my permission. Being here makes everything seem possible.

It was strange going back home after just two months in the city. When my frame of reference changed, I realized that I had changed. I spoke differently, carried myself differently, and was a lot less patient with crowds on the sidewalk. It's nice to be back now in a place where that kind of thinking is acceptable.

Now that I'm here, the rest of the world feels like it's a mere hop, skip, and a jump away. No wonder - New York is pretty representative of the world. 36% of New Yorkers are actually foreign-born. And only 44% of New Yorkers are white. New York is the principal entry point for immigration into the United States. Want to travel around the world? Easy - just take the train to midtown.

My return marks a new chapter in my life. For the next nine months, all I have to do is work and prepare for my journey. I see those nine months, yawning out in front of me, the way that a trader must have felt staring down the endless Silk Road, at the beginning of his journey. Until now, there has always been a new conquest every few months. New semesters come every three-to-five months. On my mission, my fate was up for grabs every six weeks with the next transfer.

Those nine months are unconstructed. What a blessing. I'm free to make anything with them I please. Let's hope they're stunning. And that the next three are even spent sleeping on strangers' couches in foreign lands.

How To Avoid A Nervous Breakdown

In my last post I presented the problem: one month is too short a time to really enjoy travelling. After some thought, and some helpful advice, I've settled on a solution: spend THREE months travelling instead! (Some of you presented some more conservative - and more rational - alternatives. Too bad about my balls-to-the-wall attitude about this trip.)

Obviously, this approach comes with more than a few difficulties.

Difficulty #1: Money.

In food and lodging alone, a trip of this duration will cost about $3000 more than my shorter version. Add in little banalities like my rent back home, my cell phone, and paying back my student loans, and it comes up to about 6000 more buckaroos than I was originally planning on.

Fortunately, I currently have a great job that not only pays the bills, but allows me to work when and wherever I want. (I'm under contract building a web app to help people find outdoor adventures near them.) Contracting is the best. If only the halcyon days could last forever. Unfortunately, my current gig will be finished within the month. Which brings me to...

Difficulty #2: Timing.

The longer travel itinerary would require me to leave in October. This is for a couple of reasons. First, I need more time to save money. Second, you can only visit Antarctica during the austral summer, which lasts from November to February. Leaving in October would land me in Antarctica right when it's at its warmest. Perfect, right?

Only one little hang-up. Leaving in October leaves eight months of unemployment between the end of my current job and the moment my plane takes off from JFK. The problem should be pretty obvious: without a job, you can't live. And you certainly can't save up for a circumnavigation of the globe.

Easily solved, you say. Just get a job for the eight intervening months! Except that, in the software industry, salaried employees are expected to stay on board for at least two years from their hiring dates. If I say hasta la vista after eight months, my name is mud and I never work in New York again.

Solution: More Contract Work

But not this kind of work-from-home job.

I would really love to get a salaried, 9-5 kind of job right now. But it's simply not going to jive with the whole continent-hopping thing.

The long and short of it is that I need another job that is similar to my current one. It may be a long shot, but it may not. Yesterday I started putting out feelers on the job boards. I'm also in the middle of a redesign on my résumé website to improve its search engine optimization. Hopefully that will draw some interest. My pièce de résistance, however, is a JavaScript data framework that I developed over the holidays called GeniusJS. Hopefully, all of this, combined with a little ingenuity and a lot of pavement-pounding, will yield the 6-month contract/work-from-home kind of job that will make my voyage possible.

The Upside

The good news is that I'm now even more excited for the adventure ahead. And I've gotten some great new ideas, as well: first, to couch-surf my way as much as possible. Second, to travel by plane as little as possible. Additionally, if I can get the kind of job I need, I can spend three weeks at a time in each place - enough to live, to make friends, and to go on excursions along the way.

I'm so blessed to have friends and family that have already helped me a ton. They've pointed out resources for helping me get to Antarctica, given me great ideas for modes of travelling, and poured out lots of support. I'm going to make another appeal: if anyone needs a web developer for the short term (or for the long term and doesn't mind if he doesn't come into the office Oct-Dec), or knows of a friend who does, I'd love to hear about it.

What Was I Thinking?

Within the last few days, numerous people have pointed out something to me that should have been obvious all along: one month is simply not enough time to really see the whole world.

They have a point. According to my rough calculations, the trip I have in mind involves 85 hours of flight time, including layovers. There are only 448 waking hours in a month. Therefore, 19% of my time would be spent on planes or in airports. Add in bus and cab rides, trying to find my hotel, and packing and unpacking, and one can see that easily 25% or more of my severely jet-lagged time would be spent on actual transport. This means that I would be much less likely to have all of the adventurous, hallmark experiences I'm hoping to have, such as:

1. Eating brains
2. Making new friends
3. Learning about other religions
4. Getting food poisoning
5. Going to church
6. Getting robbed
7. Having an appendectomy with a rusty scalpel in a tin lean-to

So I'm forced to reconsider my priorities. In the words of Jeff Alley,

Are you trying to see the world? Or just accomplish this? I feel like you're reading the Book of Mormon to get it done. Instead of reading to understand it.

I'm not proud of it, but part of me just wants to mark off a checklist, so that on my future résumés and online dating profiles I can emblazon the words "I've circumnavigated the globe and visited every continent."

However, when I daydream about this adventure, I don't envision myself bleary-eyed at 4 AM, watching in-flight movies, eating Planters peanuts, and grasping with quivering fingers for my rapidly evaporating sanity. Though that sounds cool in a kind of desperate, modern, David Foster Wallace way, too.

Rather, I see myself giving away food to Indian beggar children. Or sitting on an Australian beach watching the waves come in. Or standing atop a mountain in Patagonia. All of which I may not have time to do if I limit my time to one month.

What would you do? I have a solution I'm playing around with, but I think I'll just talk about it in my next post.

Get 5 Bucks at My Expense. And Keep Your Dang Goals to Yourself.

After watching this TED Talk, I realize that I may have shot myself in the foot by starting this blog. That is, I may have given myself a premature sense of accomplishment by sharing my goal with the world. The truth is, I've talked a lot about my goal of visiting every continent, and I'm very excited about it, but I haven't done a great deal to make it happen. I've looked up some airfares, done some research, and so on, but I've yet to:

• Get vaccinated
• Buy tickets
• Arrange lodging

So, in accordance with Sivers' advice, I want you all to hold me accountable. 

To get the ball rolling, I'm going to tackle the first task first. I need to set up an appointment to get immunized before 12AM on Thursday, 9 Jan. Here's how you're all going to hold me accountable: if by midnight on Thursday I don't have an appointment, I will give $5 to the first person to comment on this post after that time.

Let me rephrase with a hypothetical:

1. I don't get an appointment for immunizations
2. Midnight Thursday morning arrives
3. You're the first person to comment after midnight.
4. I send you a check for five bucks.

I think that will work.

Adventuresome Company

This harebrained, visit-every-continent notion is in part the result of my being able recently to spend time with an unusually high number of extremely adventuresome individuals.

Last week, attending the local singles' ward where my parents live, I couldn't help overhearing a couple of ladies talking. One of them had apparently just moved back to Utah after a rather bohemian, four-year jaunt around the Eastern Seaboard.

Sensing a kindred spirit, I interrupted their conversation and we ended up having the nicest chat. Turns out she had spent six months in Spit-in-the-Middle-of-Nowhere, WY, living off the land. She also spent six months in the Dominican Republic, palling around with impoverished house-servants, not to mention a variety of other wild excursions. We ended up running around a bizarre Mormon sculpture garden in the dark the next day.

Dinner and a movie? How about instead we have our fortunes read in a seedy building downtown?

I met another adventurer in New York who had spent two months doing humanitarian work in the Dominican Republic immediately after attending High School in Utah and immediately before leaving home to attend college in the city.

My usual go-to date line is "Want to grab dinner this week?" In response to this question, this person responded that dinner was a little too pedestrian for her taste. Though not in so many words. Rather, she suggested, why don't we tromp up the canyon and look at ice castles and then toboggan down an Olympic ski slope?

That didn't happen, but we did have a lovely time ice skating and skiing.

And all of this without mentioning my boss, who is currently building an "Adventure Lodge" in the Peruvian rain forest, where like-minded individuals can spend a lively vacation photographing jaguars (or whatever it is one does in Peru). And let's not forget about an old copine from High School who is leaving this week for the Dominican Republic (is there something Dominican in the water?) to learn Spanish and who-knows-what-all.

My life feels charmed. I'm lucky to be surrounded by so many people who are living so fully. I feel inspired to go and do. I feel an enthusiasm to, when I encounter people like these, be able to compare notes.

Logistics

Here's my itinerary as far as I've thought it out up to this point:

New York -> Casablanca, Morrocco -> Chennai, India -> Sydney, Australia -> Ushuaia, Argentina -> Somewhere, somehow in Antarctica -> Back to Ushuaia -> New York.

With just a little bit of searching, I've reduced the price of airfare for this route to about $3,000. But I think I can get it even lower by moving around dates and such. I'm seriously considering swapping out Casablanca for Cairo (what better time to visit Egypt than right now, right?). Morocco, however, has the dual advantages of having French (which I speak to some extent) as a very commonly spoken language, and of being more politically stable.

The only really difficult part of this itinerary is Antarctica. I've been searching, but, up to this point, the only way I can find of getting there is a cruise. Which lasts 7+ days and typically costs $5,000+. I, on the other hand, would prefer to travel there for 3 days tops, and I certainly don't need all of the fancy amenities of a cruise. I would gladly sleep in a sleeping bag inside a shipping container and pack my own food. I'm even willing to swab the deck, if that's a thing.

Anywhere else in the world, you can take a cargo cruise, wherein you hitch a ride aboard a freighter for dirt cheap. For obvious reasons, however, there aren't a lot of cargo freighters heading to Antarctica - no one to ship to, you know.

My sage brother-in-law suggested I join Sea Shepherd, an environmental activist organization that takes excursions to protect the ocean's wildlife. According to their site, though, they are looking for "people who burn inside with a rage against the injustices perpetrated upon whales, dolphins, seals, sea turtles, sea birds, fish, and every living thing," and their expeditions are at least one month long. I'm not sure that's quite going to fit. I mean, I eat canned tuna.

More than one wise guy has suggested that I row a canoe to Antarctica. But - surprise, surprise - there are more than 500 miles of open ocean between Cape Horn and Greenwich Island, the northernmost land mass that can be considered part of Antarctica. For context, 500 miles is approximately the distance between Salt Lake City and Denver, CO. So that would be a pretty long, chilly canoe trip. 

I am appealing to my friends and family, however, to see if anyone knows any of the following:

• A scientist working in Antarctica that could give me a lift on a resupply trip
• An Argentine fisherman or other seafaring individual that could drop me off on the frozen continent

Openings Up

I finally broke the news about my round-the-world resolution to my parents last night. They were way cool about it. I don't know why I had any concern that they might not be... they've always been crazy supportive about my sometimes irresponsible endeavors. I'm glad to have them as parents. I have more than a few friends whose parents would have a conniption at news like that, even when their child is as old as I am.

Conveniently, my dad and I had just returned from watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which had a particular poignancy for me. I think that I am entering into a particularly Mitty-esque period in my life, which is a real gift. Most everyone that knows me knows that my single genuine obsession in life is New York City, and that I've spent the better part of my life either dreaming about living there or actively trying to live there. Living in New York isn't very practical, or even rational. It's expensive, far from family, dirty, loud, inconvenient, and sometimes dangerous.

It's in my nature, which is to say it's probably human nature, to idly dream about romantic but impractical ways of living. I think that finally moving to the city, finally living out that fantasy, has opened me up to a different kind of living. Hopefully, a more complete kind of living.

Commence to Rove

In the fictional words of Julie Powell, "I could start a blog! I have thoughts."

My sole New Year's resolution for 2014 is to set foot on every continent that I have not yet visited, namely Africa, Asia, Australia, South America, and Antarctica. I plan on taking a month to do it, all in one fell swoop, circumnavigating the globe in the process.

I think it's only right to document an occasion of such moment, and a blog seems appropriate. Plus, a blog could be a form of self-preservation - if, while traveling, more than a couple of days pass without a post, someone will probably notice and wonder if I'm writhing alone in a ditch in India after having been hit by a rickshaw. Or in an Argentine hospital with Typhoid. You never know.