Crazy Crossover (Thanks, Google)

3 juin 1972 à New York, NY - John Kennedy Jr est invité sur le banc des New York Mets au Shea Stadium, avant leur match contre les Braves d'Atlanta. © AFP

The title of this post refers to my story about stumbling upon the New York Mets in John F. Kennedy Airport.

That kid had an awfully big bat.

How did we write?

How did we write back then? How did we keep track of our travels? How did we share our experiences?

On another big trip, my grandparents went to Italy. We got postcards from them every other day. New pictures on the fronts, new stamps, new postmarks, new brief mentions of an adventure or a view. We pored over every inch. Examined every component of this communication, feeling, somehow, that we were participating in their exploration.

When Michael and I traveled through Europe in the back seat of my parents' rental car, we wrote in our diaries. We got locked diaries for our very first trip. And kept getting them for each new trip. I particularly remember a Ziggy one. My entries were rather mundane (ref: Kevin) but Michael's were more experiential, more poetic, more artistic. But those diaries were for ourselves (they had locks for crying out loud). The memories were just for ourselves. They weren't to share, really.

How does that differ in a travel blog? The new technology allows for an instant and potentially very wide audience for your travel diary. Does it change your writing voice? When you write to remind yourself of an experience, how does it differ when you write to entertain? I wrote a blog when I lived abroad last year. Its primary purpose, or perhaps its impetus, was to share my adventure with my friends and family back home. I am happy to have a potentially permanent record of my experiences, yes, but am I happy they are out there potentially permanently for all to see for(potentially)ever? If I wrote for a specific audience, an audience that was gathered to share in my journey, what effect does my writing have on future, unrelated audiences? Will it hold up? Will people find it at all of value? Will there be some governing body or judgment bench that decides what survives in cyberspace and what does not? Have we just created a new place for trash? Where do all the abandoned blogs go? Do they actually waste space? Is all the material on the Internet accumulating in some way that will wreak havoc on, or at least compromise, future societies?

What are your thoughts?

Kevin's Recipe

Kevin reminded me of something...

His recipe for giving future to our past:

1. Combine a couple events
2. Change the years
3. Add even more famous people or incredible happenings

When I was four—yes, people, get used to it. Chris is back, in all his tangential ways—when I was four, we went to (probably) John F. Kennedy Airport (formerly Idlewild) to see my grandparents off on a big trip. They were flying to (hold onto your hats, girls) California.

This was 1972. Still in the glory days of air travel, when whole families would travel to the airport to wait with grandparents at the gate until they boarded the plane. Lillian and Johnny were flying with their dear friends, Herman and Charlotte. In support of Herman and Charlotte were their grandchildren, John and Tara (was Tara even born? I think so). Along with Lillian and Johnny and Herman and Charlotte was the entire New York Mets baseball team. I don't know when it was first noticed that we shared the waiting area with the likes of Yogi Berra, but it was. The daughters and sons-in-law of the traveling grandparents were a-twitter and can we take a picture well I'm not going over there me neither are you kidding oh just give me the camera I'll do it. That was my mother. The brave soul who sidled up to the famous ballplayers and asked if they would take a picture with the boys. The boys meant us! John and me, the big four-year-olds. So we sat on the floor in front of all the Mets men in their suits, dress suits for travel. Mom took out the Polaroid. The BIG Polaroid. The one with the old-fashioned accordion looks that takes one picture at a time that you have to pull out of the cartridge and then peel off the film once the tiny, fun-to-play-with timer goes off.

My mom took two pictures. One with us in front of the entire team. One with the generous Kenny Singleton (who later went on to play for the Baltimore Orioles—shocked you didn't I? I know a thing or two about sports, yo) who squatted down to our level. The picture with Kenny Singleton came out real nice. The one with us in front of the suits was just that. Us in front of a bunch of suits. My mother had cut off all their heads!

To this day, we laugh about that picture. She's quick to defend herself with the fact that she was the only one with the nerve to approach the Mets. We're lucky to have gotten what we did. She did have the wherewithal to ask them all to sign an envelope that she pulled out of her purse. She keeps that envelope with Yogi's and Kenny's signatures along with the two pictures in a giant, falling-apart family photo album that we stumble upon from time to time.

I won't even start telling you about the day we saw Björn Borg at the airport. Maybe that was LaGuardia.

Sifting Through My Poop

OK, that was another of my alarmist titles. But it ain't inaccurate. My friend Kevin responded to the "My First Time" post by not only posting a comment, but by writing a very interesting post of his own on his own blog, Frivolous Motion, in which he, well, in which he sifted through my poop.

Aug. 20, 1962
The first time Sally hears about school.

In addition to dissecting the concept of "firsts," Kevin writes astutely of storytelling:

...in the interest of constructing a perfect narrative out of the chaotic tangential truth of our lives, we pick and choose memories to turn into events and highlight as important. Sometimes we will combine a couple events, change the years, add even more famous people or incredible happenings, in order to be able to share a story rather than something...mundane

Do give his post (and his blog) a read. It is well worth it. He would definitely get high marks if HE were writing my paper. Oy.

My First Time

If you don't count a trip to Niagara Falls when I was two and actually drove a boat, then I guess my first trip of note was to Sweden when I was eight.

My parents took my brother, Michael, and me to Sweden in 1976. I remember visiting my grandfather in Göteborg, my aunt and uncle and cousins in southern Sweden, more distant cousins on the island of Öland and finally a trip up to the nation's capital, Stockholm, to visit more distant relatives and also to sightsee.

I remember both my grandfather's apartment in Göteborg, Sweden's second largest city, and his summer house at Näset on the shore. I remember picking black currants and red currants and gooseberries off the bushes in his yard. I remember meeting my Swedish cousins for the first time and Staffan, the youngest, could say a few words in English and to this day I can recall his "funny" pronunciation of "Chris and Mike." We played with toy soldiers and the dogs and ran through the university campus on which my uncle taught. All this on days when we didn't go for long walks to find cherry trees, which my uncle Birger and cousin Sune would climb like monkeys straight to the top and the rest of us would just stand in place at the bottom yanking every cherry within reach off the tree and shoving them in our mouths.

I remember visiting the Royal Palace in Sweden and learning about the king and queen (a real king and queen!). We saw (and touched) a ship that had been recovered from the harbor that dated back several hundred years. We met my dad's cousin Ingemar and his girlfriend. We went to Skansen, an outdoor animal park, with indigenous animals from all over Sweden and actual houses and barns from all different regions of the country. I still have a little donkey that I won in a raffle on my eighth birthday.

I remember all of these things. But the story I tell most of all was of the initial flight over. We flew Air India, and either it was the spicy food or the air-travel-for-the-first-time, but I had to poop desperately and ran to the back just as the plane began its descent into Heathrow in London. There was, of course, a long line. So I ran back to my seat, told my mom the news, sat down and promptly had diarrhea right there in my airplane seat. Yelps of horror erupted and I was whisked by the stewardess back to the secret staff bathroom and cleaned up somewhat. When we got to Heathrow, my mother took me immediately to an airport bathroom where she threw out my soiled undies and I had to endure the humiliation of not only pooping on a plane, but walking through Heathrow airport without any underwear.

How did I start?

It's almost as if it were a false start, ladies and gentlemen. (Once again I speak in the plural, in the hopes that there are more of you than there may actually be.)

I feel the desperate need to share with you the germination of this project. I spent last winter living in Stockholm, Sweden and experimented with blog technology for the first time then. I wanted to share the humor and confusion and adventure of my abroad experience with friends and family back home. So I did. At Viking Around.

For my final project, I thought I'd take a look at travel blogs. What they are. What they can be. What head are the writers in when they write? Why do they blog?

I can speak to my loneliness. I was living abroad for the first time and while I did have family in Stockholm, I was still away from my circle of friends and family in New York. I needed to connect in some way. By living my life there as if my friends were part of it, as if I were even having these experiences just to share them with them, it made it more bearable. We discussed in our blogging class the point at which you become your blog, or, more specifically, when you live your life just to blog about it. I can't say I did this to write about it, but what about writers who do. And I mean writers, not necessarily bloggers. (No disrespect meant at all.) I refer to authors who embroil themselves in a different life, so they can better understand the novel they are writing. Or journalists who walk in different shoes so they can better report on a different culture. Blogging is by partial definition writing about one's own life. So the blurred lines happen everyday, not just for a specified period of study.

I blogged for companionship. I wasn't even hep to the comment realm at the time. Neither were most of my friends actually! In fact, as we have discussed, the whole medium was still new to people. Here's an example from a comment of how a close friend of mine was handling all of this electronic communication:

I'm sorry that I haven't figured out the skype(spelling?) thing but i'm an ignoramous when it comes to those things. I could have sent you this in e-mail but I wanted to prove to you that I'm actually reading your blog.

The travel blog allows the writer to stay in touch. It allows the reader to accompany him on his travels. It allows for a connection across great distances. It also challenges the reader to keep up with the technology adopted by the writer. It forces the audience to step up, to meet the artist halfway. If the viewer is not proficient in the medium, she will not be able to experience the art.

Where does one start?

At the very beginning, some say. Some say it is a very good place to start.

Just for kicks (and because it is a source so controversial) I began at Wikipedia. (Let it be known this is the FIRST time I've used Wikipedia to begin research for a research paper.) It wasn't very helpful. The entry on travel blogs is rather weak. Although it did pique my interest in reading or re-reading some rather elderly literature.

I then went to what is normally my first point of departure: The Google. The first door I chose lead me to a terrific site just all about travel blogs. "Travel Blog is a unique free online travel diary for travellers across the world."

It further defines itself as "a collection of tools so that travellers can write down a journal, send the address to family and friends, set up automatic mailing lists so that everytime you add a new entry to your list your friends get an automatic email. Also the theme is travel, the tools are designed to cope with you moving around, maps and flags are linked from each journal. Photos can be added to your journal (if you have a digital camera or scanner) - many internet cafes have scanners - if you have some must see photos you should get some help there. We have a photo gallery for each blogger to be able to showcase their best photos, complete with slideshows. We encourage our members to link to useful sites about areas, to help out future travellers. Write reviews, guides, journals, add photos."

As we read further in its About section, we learn that it was launched in 2002 and that the founder, Alistair Watters, still travels and maintains his own blog. Really worth checking out. I read a recent entry about diving in the Galapagos Islands. It seems the blog serves different audiences in different ways. I, personally, have never been to the Galapagos Islands. Seeing the underwater pictures from his dives were fascinating. Hearing about his being in the water with a school of hammerhead sharks was exhilarating. An experienced diver will glean different information from this entry. She will be interested in his notes about the diving company and the water currents, for example. Both useful and enticing, Ali's blog serves multiple purposes, as does travel itself. [That was a lame, "wrap-up" kind of sentence. Stupid.]

And We're Off!

Let's take a trip together, shall we?

I'm studying travel blogs for my final project of this terrific class which examines blogs as a medium of communication. We've pulled them apart, broken them down (both blogs and bloggers), discussed their future, discussed their past, and, not to be left out of the excitement, have created our own.

In this final burst of electronic energy, I will examine travel writing in the form of the blog—both my "paper" and my subject. I invite you to participate in this. Along the way, I will ask for your input, regarding your own travel experiences. We have found the comment threads on blogs to be rich sources of information exchange.

So, Bon Voyage, as they say. Or GET THE LEAD OUT, as my friend Caitlin would say.