sunday best-of blogging: the travel issue

best song to wake up over the atlantic ocean to: "pure imagination," as sung by gene wilder, the one true willy wonka.

best reason to pinch malcolm gladwell rather hard on the arm: here's malcolm during the q & a after a speech made for the commonwealth club on january 20, 2005:

the word "intuition" does not appear in blink for a very deliberate reason, and that is i intensely dislike that word. i dislike the connotations that are associated with it, i dislike its fuzziness, i dislike the fact that it's, among many people, synonymous with something that is irrational, and, you know, it's called women's intuition—why is it called women's intuition? not as a way of honoring it, but as a way of degrading it, right? of dismissing it. but my biggest problem with that word is that it suggests that what is going on in an instant is not thinking, it's feeling; i'm sorry, it's thinking, it's just a different kind of thinking, and it may manifest itself as a feeling, but it didn't start out that way. it didn't start in your heart, it starts in your head ….

if you listen to the audio (this part starts around 8:55 of the q & a), you'll notice how emphatic he gets about all of this; by the end he's nearly yelling. you'd believe that he really, really hates that word, the way my high school english teacher hated it when people described things like weather and paintings as "nice," or the way i hate it when people put unnecessary and inappropriate quotation marks around words they want to emphasize. i listened to this on the plane heading in to paris (lsz, if you're wondering, the ums [which i've omitted in my transcript] worked like a charm) and thought to myself, malcolm, aren't you a cheeky little monkey, because here he is in his september 12 new yorker article on rick warren and the saddleback church:

"The Purpose-Driven Life" is meant to be read in groups. If the vision of faith sometimes seems skimpy, that's because the book is supposed to be supplemented by a layer of discussion and reflection and debate. It is a testament to Warren's intuitive understanding of how small groups work that this is precisely how "The Purpose-Driven Life" has been used.

cheeky! it's okay, malcolm, i still love you, but you need to remember that the world is watching, and there's always going to be one crazy person who'll remember everything you say and call you out. you're lucky, because today it's me, and i'm pretty swell for a crazy person. next time, though, it might be zp, and you won't be in for a paltry pinching then—she'll just beat you like a redheaded stepchild. for the record, though, if anyone asks, you are officially my bitch. you may decide how you feel about that in either your heart or your head, i'm not fussy.

most satisfying combination of elements in a return-flight movie: christian bale, cillian murphy playing an evil madman, ninjas, and, of course, batman, in batman begins. now, all of these perfectly blended spices were still not enough to mask the slimy, dirty-nickel-flavored core of the movie's banal and one-linery dialogue (i think the actual comic books took more care with their writing), and katie holmes is positively vampiric in her ability to drain a scene of any and all vitality, but she's not in that many scenes, and the boys atone for her almost every time. i'll tell you, though, when even the batmobile kicked it ninja style and went invisible without moving from the middle of a three-lane highway, i did the happiest dance i could do without rising from my cramped non-aisle seat, and i think cillian might be the new ronnie "z-man" barzell. it wasn't good the way i tend to want my movies to be good, but i liked it better than charlie and the chocolate factory, which came on after it, and some rainy weekday when i didn't have anything pressing to tend to, i'd be happy to watch it again. in a roomier space, mind you.

best location for a children's birthday party and/or easter egg hunt: il parco dei mostri di bomarzo, the one place we visited in italy that i never wanted to leave. i thought perhaps i would live here, and it would be sort of like living on a boat, which i've also always wanted to do. but my friends said, no, juniper, you can't live in the sacred wood of bomarzo, and i said, why not? i can forage in the woods for acorns and berries, and i can use the giant ashtray by the gift shop for a toilet, just like those stray cats, and they said, put your soggy ass in the fiat, juniper, we're going home. and i did, and we got there and it was cold and on the kitchen table there was a plate full of gnawed chicken parts that our hostess's roommate had left congealing in its horrible fats, and i didn't say it, but i thought, i knew i should have stayed.

best translator: renaissance le corbeau, who handled the site for the parco dei mostri and offers us this delightful bit of slain grammar: "The sculpture represents the descent into hell (but where did the soul of the beloved wife?) of Baccus."

friendliest stray cat: the suave gray tabby we encountered on our way back to our car after exploring the largely abandoned mountain village of casteluccio, on the eastern edge of umbria. he was such a charmer that i didn't even mind when he covered my thighs with tiny muddy pawprints as he worked his sly, stealthy way into my lap. i should have minded, because i only packed two pairs of pants, but what the hell. i may never be loved by another italian tomcat, and that outboard-motor purr went straight to my head. i know, i know, i'm easy.

best random search: the blue ribbon goes to montreal's trudeau airport, where i was made to remove all of my jewelry after passing through the metal detector and being given the once-over with the handheld. a stocky woman with hairspray-crunchy curls asked me if it would be all right if she went through my bags; i assume that i had the right to say no, collect my things, and hitchhike back to massachusetts, but i had nothing to hide except one box of matchsticks that i got in a restaurant in florence, and i could live without them. she rifled through my dirty socks forever, but in the main part of my suitcase she glanced at the folded clothes for a fraction of a second and moved on to the inner pocket, where she became obsessed with my soap. i had packed it in its original cardboard box, which she turned over and over and over, stopping occasionally to sniff at it with great suspicion. at long last she worked up the nerve to open it, and when she saw that it was indeed soap and not an incense-scented wad of plastique, she tucked it back in its place and waved me off. she never looked into any of the three small bags that i had packed inside of my larger book bag, which, of course, are where i would have stashed the explosive i had tidily tamped into eyeshadow compacts so i could then light it in the airplane bathroom somewhere over the nothingness between montreal and boston with the firenzian matches she had failed to find, were i the sort of awful person who wanted to use my genius for ill. but i'm not, and don't any of you be, either. random acts of destruction are wrong, unless they're committed by nature, who tends to have an excellent reason. i'm a good girl, and that's why i'm so annoyed with the impotent renditions of safeguarding we're supposed to feel protected by. if you're going to search me, for pete's sake, do it well. otherwise you're wasting everyone's time.

best job of rearranging an entire apartment in a single free afternoon: that done by my bad, bad roommate, who: removed all of my and toadie's belongings from the shower and hid my little waterproof radio under the towels; threw away all of our sponges and replaced them with one wedge of pepto-bismol-pink foam; threw away half of our food and moved what was left to the back of the bottom shelf of the refrigerator; set a nauseating mango candle on the kitchen stove, where it was free to compete for air space with the even more revolting chocolate-mint candle burning in her bedroom; took all of the kitchen chairs away from the kitchen table and stacked them in a corner of the living room; put toadie's cat's empty dishes next to the sink after, presumably, failing to locate her food (and the faucet?); dumped an entire box of scoopable cat litter into the litter box in the bathroom on what we think must have been the day we got home, because under the layer of bright new litter was much more than a day's worth of unpleasantness; threw away whatever mail had been left by us on the front hall table, because if we had deemed it too unimportant to open before we left then it couldn't possibly have been worth keeping around; threw away the cardboard boxes by the living room windows that the cats like to sleep in; and came into my room and turned on my laptop, which i had shut off and removed the power cord from. many months ago, when i started coming home and finding every application on my computer open because bad roommate doesn't know how to operate a mac, and after twice having to reload my internet software, i implemented a password. i know she didn't give up hope that maybe it was a phase i was going through, or even a mistake, because she kept sneaking in while i was out. you can't shut the computer down once it's up until you've logged in, you see, so she had to just walk away from it with the log-in screen up and do what she could to act like nothing had happened. one time i came home and the computer wouldn't turn on, and it was because she, in her desperation to get online and buy more hideous crap from old navy, had turned it over and seen a little dial with a picture of a locked padlock at nine o'clock and an unlocked one at twelve, and had turned it towards the unlocked one, thinking this would, of course, be the solution. but all it had done was pop the battery out, and she just left it that way, set the computer back down on its table and walked out of the room. it's like living with a three-year-old. anyway, since she had so much time with the place all to herself she must have decided to try to crack the code, because when i got home monday night the computer's sleep light was winking at me, and when i opened it up i saw that she had tried and guessed incorrectly so many times that the computer had offered her a hint. all of this computer business would be sort of funny if she didn't consistently deny having anything to do with it. THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE HERE. the hint now reads, "give it up, you sneaky rat," and that mango candle is in her closet where it belongs.

best thing to come home to: my little cat curled up on my bed, and no trace of anxiety-induced regurgitation anywhere in the house. i expected her to be prissy and snub me for a bit, but she didn't even, she just ran on over and started up her engine, and she's been pasted to my body ever since. i'm a crazy cat lady and that's fine with me, i've embraced it, and i have no qualms about admitting to you that i was in knots about leaving her with a fairly lousy person and not having any way of being reached. it led to some unsettling dreams, in fact, and i'll tell you about them later on. but she's healthy and lovely and didn't pull out any fur, and we're both pleased as punch that she's back on my shoulders.

best future jaunt already in the works: mine to nyc to see the lemonheads in two weeks. yay! and i won't even have to worry about scraping cheese off of things, because my hotel room has a full kitchen, so i can pack a little cooler with two days' worth of nummies and nosh with an easy grin. double yay! i wuv my toadie, but everyone needs a little alone time now and again, and i haven't taken a trip on my own since i moved to boston almost four years ago. that's too damn long. and anyway, any road trip that ends in two consecutive nights of evan dando is a mighty fine road trip. how long do you think it takes to walk from the bowery to central park? i say i can do it in an hour and a half, if i get onto park avenue at union square and don't have to wait too long at intersections. you all place your bets now, and we can divvy up the pool in time for you to spend your winnings on last-minute holiday gifts.

there's going to be a disgusting amount of in-depth travel narrative over the next few weeks, and eventually some (hopefully attractive) photographs, but i'll try to break it up with more universal material. thanks to all of you who have been checking in, and i'm sorry if my procrastination in announcing my safe return made any of you nervous. i'm sure you understand if i needed some silence.

i missed you.