in which the universe thwarts me

There are days when the universe offers you a hundred tiny confirmations that the choices you've made, no matter how ridiculous the may seem, are the right ones. Today was not one of these days.

It started with me switching off my alarm in my sleep, and having only 20 minutes to get out the door in order to get to Brooklyn on time for the film shoot. I take a cab to the N/R and upon getting out realize I don't have my cellphone, which I suspect I have left in the cab.

I catch a train, and wind up sharing the ride with another gilr on the film. As I realy like the people on the film, this is fine and fun, although I had wanted the time to get myself together.

Exiting the train, we get slightly lost, but eventually find ourselves at the location, a Brooklyn stripclub of low and absurd quality named, Sweet Cherry. Its most notable interior decoration, outside of the basic stripper necessities (mirrors, poles and neon), is a yellow, orange and brown sign dating from somewhere in the 1970s and reading "Real! Lesbian Show! Every Tuesday at Midnight!"

The shoot is remarkably efficient, and despite the director being desperately in need of a producer for a lot of logistical things, he clearly has an actual vision, good ideas, efficiency, authority, a clever mind, etc., and the process is, as far as these things go, a joy.

Of course, the shoot runs over, and I have 30 minutes to get to Hoboken, which is where everything starts to go horribly, horribly wrong. I call a car service from a sticker on the side of a payphone. The driver doesn't speak much English, but everything seems well enough, until we try to get onto the Brooklyn bridge. A car is being towed off the onramp and everything is at a standstill. I suggest we take the Manhattan.

This works like a breeze, until he makes a wrong turn getting off it. I explain we're headed downtown and east, he insists we're going uptown, and it's a mess. Eventually, after a great deal of stress and self-directed hysteria on my part, I get out, _run_ five blocks, hop on the two train and take it to WTC to the PATH station, where there are no working payphones to call my SM and tell her where I am (which I can't do because of the phone).

Then, the fire alarm goes off in the station, and we have to evacuate briefly. Eventually, I get to Hoboken, panting and in pain (after running many many more blocks upon leaving the station), and we do our read through, which went well, and I got to have fun by filling in on a monologue I love for someone who wasn't there.

Of course, the phone was on my bed, and none of this sounds horrific in the retelling. But tired and crazed doesn't even begin to gover it.

On the other hand, I began Birll Bryson's In a Sunburned Country on the PATH, and will write something epic about that in a bit.

australia, airplanes and new york

As mentioned earlier, I started in on Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country. I've never really been one for travel essays, but the book has been recommended to me repeatedly, I'm awfully keen on Australia right now, and everytime I flicked through it in the store, it amused me.

Despite being only twenty-two pages in, I've come rapidly to a number of interesting conclusions. The first is that I'm having an Internet romance with Australia. No, really. It's like, if I feel this way about it when I go, then by god, it's love, but I won't say that about a place I've never been. It's not that it's unwise. It's that it's embarassing. And like all Internet romances, it'll end in tears -- either because it won't live up to expectation, or because distance always leads to some heartache, no matter how you run the numbers or make your choices.

My other realization is that this is bizarre, but not for the already obvious reasons. It's bizarre because Australia is packed with stuff that I don't get along with so well. Extreme weather. Bugs. (Did you know, for example, that ants are descended from wasps, and that the intermediary species, long having been thought to be exitinct thrives in Australia? I find this to be perhaps the most uncontrollably alarming things I've ever read, although I couldn't tell you why. Wasps upset me. They are primoridal and evil and have little chewing mouths. And this is where ants come from? Dear god. No wonder my cats are afraid of them). Jelly fish. Falling rocks. Vegemite.

But yet, I am reading this book and swooning with anticipation, fantasizing about long haul train travel across the continent and ridiculously long days of beachside contentment. And I realized exactly why I seem to feel about Australia the way theotoky has always felt about China (and now that she's been, I'm eager to hear how that's turned out) -- it's because Australia is like airplanes.

I used to take flying lessons, mainly in a Cesna 172 (the 150 was like flying a lawn mower). I loved flying lessons, but they were just ultimately something I couldn't afford, but the second I have that sort of disposeable income, I do intend to be a licensed pilot. Flying, all in all, isn't that dangerous -- the risk factor is vaguely proportionate with frequent motorcycle riding, except unlike with motorcycles, the reality is that if you die or are seriously injured in a small plane accident, chances are it was pilot error. You are at all times required to be exceptionally observant and fully responsible for your continued existence on this sphere, which for some people is an attraction, for others, a nasty thing to get past, and for some, just a random fact of the matter.

For me, it was just a fact of the situation, and one I didn't dwell on much. I am capable of, and enjoy, being hyper-focused when I'm interested in something, and it was part of the package, as much as checking the fuel and dealing with log books. Flying requires calm, intelligence, and a reasonable amount of rather serene low-level paranoia. I can't help but imagine with the world's highest concentration of deadly wildlife, Australia is much the same (and to the Australians on my friends list, feel free to tell me to go to hell if I just don't get it at all, but please do so informatively); if something nasty bites you, odds are you weren't paying enough attention or really shouldn't have been poking it with a stick.

So where does my interest in better living through constant vigilence come from? I am in many ways a remarkably risk adverse creature. Dogs make me nervous. The thought of wearing contact lenses makes me nauseous, and I'm really amazingly unfond of heights -- although I can deal with the first and the third when necessary (and I've simply avoided necessary thus far with the second).

The answer, of course, is that New York is filled with as many weird ways to die as a Cesna 172, or Australia. I didn't always accept this. In the 70s, when New York was dangerous, one just got shot. Very boring. And then New York became safe. It was not a place for adventure travel, no matter who you were. When Times Square got cleaned up, there was a brief shining moment where you couldn't convince anyone this city was risky if you tried. But then, in the vacuum left by plain old crime, the seriously weird deaths started to emerge, really just because of a shift in the signal to noise ratio. A woman is smashed on the head randomly with a brick. Construction matterials blow off of a scaffolding and kill two people. The Twin Towers fall down. A woman is electrocuted while walking her dogs. And while none of these fates could really be avoided through the vigilence urged on us constantly by the news, we like to pretend otherwise. We scold people for their inattentiveness, and if we ever really think about the risks of living here, generally do so blithely and with humour, and we love to have those from elsewhere come and face the possibilities. We tell them about the tiger in the housing project, the fictional alligators in the sewers below the subways and the fleets or rats that scurry from construction site to construction site planning their empires.

Living here I know that life is peculiar, random, lovely, cruel and humorous. It's the same when you're flying an airplane. And I suspect ever so strongly, that it's the same on the other side of the world. In all probability, it's the same everywhere else too, but having not decoded or mythologized those places yet, all I can think about is the weird differences in the quality of the light in all the places I've travelled to, and what it's like there.