A Long Journey
Yesterday I spent what amounts to about a dozen hours on a bus from DC to Toronto. I've come to the great white north for the TEDxLibrariansTO conference. I've been psyched about this conference for weeks and the fact that this is my first trip to Canada as well is also a kind of joy. Counting the United States I've been in five countries this year. U.S., Japan, China, Thailand and Canada. That's kind of surreal for me. Having grown up in a small town this amount of global movement is something I never expected of myself. But I'm loving the hell out of it!
I left the house around 9:30 yesterday morning to get down to the Megabus stop. I was crazy early and so I was just basically standing there in my jeans just sweating to death waiting and hoping that they would start loading the bus. Contrary to my original thought, it was not a straight through route. No, we stopped in Harrisburg, PA, the PA/NY border, Buffalo, and then Toronto. Which as things go, that's not that many stops, and they're all kind of in a straight line. It was pretty good, except for the fact that the bus didn't stop for a rest/lunch until we got to the NY border around Corning. It was like 8 hours before I got to eat anything since breakfast.
The ride up I was sitting next to a cluster of women who all were coming to Toronto for a kind of girls weekend. And damn, they brought a shit ton of food. Like cooked shrimp in hot sauce, barbeque chicken, potato salad, sliced fruit, deviled eggs, multiple kinds of beverages, plastic cups. They were basically just having a damn picnic right there on the bus. As someone who packed no food, assuming there would be food stops, the 8 hour ride next to the constant flow of food was maddening. By the time we got to that Subway restaurant at the gas station I was ready to eat anyone in my way. Seriously, I was fucking starving.
The whole trip I was trying to figure out how best to amuse myself, so I downloaded like 24 hours of podcasts and was listening to them on kind of a random cycle. I listened through the entirety of the BoingBoing Gweek podcast. That was kind of cool, especially the episode where they interviewed the folks from Feral House Publishing. I bought Adam Parfrey's "Apocalypse Culture" book back in the day, and it is still on my bookshelf. They had a lot to say in there about book craft, and the inability of eReaders to fully capture art books properly, mostly due to font scaling and the focus on text-based literature. It was a really great interview.
The rest of the trip I was listening to hours upon hours of "Sex Is Fun." As always there were some hilarious moments where they put out some real zingers. While listening to the Mormon Porn episode they were discussing the method by which these young men were recruited to do these photo shoots and they discussed how the site director approaches these guys. Laura Rad made the most hilarious and poignant comment along the lines of "Oh my god, it's just like when my mom told me when I was nine. 'Now if a man comes up to you while you're alone, and tells you that you could be a model you tell him NO.'" And yeah, it was just like that. The fact that that line actually works is kind of creepy.
But the episodes that were the most engrossing were the ones focusing on the relationship between one of the show's hosts and his wife and a violation of trust in their open marriage. It was some of the most raw, honest, and productive conversations that I have ever heard. And the fact that the follow up shows come back and discuss how the relationship is bouncing back was just phenomenal. I have recommended this podcast to numerous people, and I honestly feel like everyone could gain some kind of knowledge from this show. It's just been brilliant audio work, and I love how everyone is so cool and honest about things in there. I hope they keep things going for a long time.
I was sitting there laughing, crying, and the woman eating her deviled eggs next to me just thought I was crazy.
Crossing the border was no big deal. But I had no idea was a city that was so sprawling. Seriously I think that we were driving through the outskirts of the city for like 2 hours. I don't even know. But it looked like every suburb you've ever seen with malls and home depots and furniture stores and and and...
I got directions to the hotel from a very nice Canadian girl named Sam. I told her what hotel I was staying at and she pointed me in the right direction. I just had to walk up Yonge cut over to something else, Bay I guess, and then go up to Carlton and take a right. Apparently I have booked the hotel in the gayborhood. I'm two blocks from Church street, and there are like 30 gay businesses and all the street signs are rainbow. Too bad Toronto Pride is NEXT weekend! Booo!
When I got to the hotel I just totally crashed. I could barely take my clothes off I was so damn exhausted. I just laid there on the bed, bleary eyed, looking at my cell phone.
And I just gotta say one more thing. International calling rates being different between Canada and the US is completely stupid. I mean, seriously, completely stupid. The US is RIGHT THERE! It's all a fucking scam to take your money. Grrrrr.... Also, we need global mobile data plans with realistic price structures. This shit is ridiculous. I was looking at my Verizon bill, and discovered that I used 4 million kb of data transfer on my phone. Neither of the other two phones on the plan cracked 500,000. The proposed scaled data plans from Verizon are making me want to cut somebody. No way do I want my plan to be like an extra hundred dollars just for the data. If they don't grandfather my plan over I'm going to switch to Sprint, which is the only mobile carrier left who has no data caps.
More to share later!
I left the house around 9:30 yesterday morning to get down to the Megabus stop. I was crazy early and so I was just basically standing there in my jeans just sweating to death waiting and hoping that they would start loading the bus. Contrary to my original thought, it was not a straight through route. No, we stopped in Harrisburg, PA, the PA/NY border, Buffalo, and then Toronto. Which as things go, that's not that many stops, and they're all kind of in a straight line. It was pretty good, except for the fact that the bus didn't stop for a rest/lunch until we got to the NY border around Corning. It was like 8 hours before I got to eat anything since breakfast.
The ride up I was sitting next to a cluster of women who all were coming to Toronto for a kind of girls weekend. And damn, they brought a shit ton of food. Like cooked shrimp in hot sauce, barbeque chicken, potato salad, sliced fruit, deviled eggs, multiple kinds of beverages, plastic cups. They were basically just having a damn picnic right there on the bus. As someone who packed no food, assuming there would be food stops, the 8 hour ride next to the constant flow of food was maddening. By the time we got to that Subway restaurant at the gas station I was ready to eat anyone in my way. Seriously, I was fucking starving.
The whole trip I was trying to figure out how best to amuse myself, so I downloaded like 24 hours of podcasts and was listening to them on kind of a random cycle. I listened through the entirety of the BoingBoing Gweek podcast. That was kind of cool, especially the episode where they interviewed the folks from Feral House Publishing. I bought Adam Parfrey's "Apocalypse Culture" book back in the day, and it is still on my bookshelf. They had a lot to say in there about book craft, and the inability of eReaders to fully capture art books properly, mostly due to font scaling and the focus on text-based literature. It was a really great interview.
The rest of the trip I was listening to hours upon hours of "Sex Is Fun." As always there were some hilarious moments where they put out some real zingers. While listening to the Mormon Porn episode they were discussing the method by which these young men were recruited to do these photo shoots and they discussed how the site director approaches these guys. Laura Rad made the most hilarious and poignant comment along the lines of "Oh my god, it's just like when my mom told me when I was nine. 'Now if a man comes up to you while you're alone, and tells you that you could be a model you tell him NO.'" And yeah, it was just like that. The fact that that line actually works is kind of creepy.
But the episodes that were the most engrossing were the ones focusing on the relationship between one of the show's hosts and his wife and a violation of trust in their open marriage. It was some of the most raw, honest, and productive conversations that I have ever heard. And the fact that the follow up shows come back and discuss how the relationship is bouncing back was just phenomenal. I have recommended this podcast to numerous people, and I honestly feel like everyone could gain some kind of knowledge from this show. It's just been brilliant audio work, and I love how everyone is so cool and honest about things in there. I hope they keep things going for a long time.
I was sitting there laughing, crying, and the woman eating her deviled eggs next to me just thought I was crazy.
Crossing the border was no big deal. But I had no idea was a city that was so sprawling. Seriously I think that we were driving through the outskirts of the city for like 2 hours. I don't even know. But it looked like every suburb you've ever seen with malls and home depots and furniture stores and and and...
I got directions to the hotel from a very nice Canadian girl named Sam. I told her what hotel I was staying at and she pointed me in the right direction. I just had to walk up Yonge cut over to something else, Bay I guess, and then go up to Carlton and take a right. Apparently I have booked the hotel in the gayborhood. I'm two blocks from Church street, and there are like 30 gay businesses and all the street signs are rainbow. Too bad Toronto Pride is NEXT weekend! Booo!
When I got to the hotel I just totally crashed. I could barely take my clothes off I was so damn exhausted. I just laid there on the bed, bleary eyed, looking at my cell phone.
And I just gotta say one more thing. International calling rates being different between Canada and the US is completely stupid. I mean, seriously, completely stupid. The US is RIGHT THERE! It's all a fucking scam to take your money. Grrrrr.... Also, we need global mobile data plans with realistic price structures. This shit is ridiculous. I was looking at my Verizon bill, and discovered that I used 4 million kb of data transfer on my phone. Neither of the other two phones on the plan cracked 500,000. The proposed scaled data plans from Verizon are making me want to cut somebody. No way do I want my plan to be like an extra hundred dollars just for the data. If they don't grandfather my plan over I'm going to switch to Sprint, which is the only mobile carrier left who has no data caps.
More to share later!