This is Don’t Remember Me Like This
I’m Nathaniel Barber. Don’t Remember Me Like This is a homemade, nonfiction podcast and diary thing. Every episode I’ll read a work of nonfiction (and occasionally, some non-non-fiction) prefaced by updates and goings-on from a life observant. All episodes are written, and produced and performed by me (for better or worse). Thank you for listening.
I’ve been thinking a lot about vacations lately.
I love to travel, although we don’t travel often. Traveling can be super expensive and a hassle to schedule but since we’ve been hunkering down during COVID, just the idea that travel is now restricted makes it a thing.
It wasn’t a thing before, and now that you can’t, or it’s harder, or it’s prohibitive, now it’s a thing.
It’s like The Streisand effect. For those who don’t know this delicious nugget of trivia, The Streisand Effect is what happened when Barbara Streisand sued the California Coastal Records Project for taking pictures of her home and expansive waterfront property and displaying the pictures on their website which they’d done not because they were creepin’ on Streisand, but as part of their project to document the steady erosion of the California coast – of which Barbara Streisand’s property is a sizable chunk.
Previously, nobody had looked at the pictures. Nobody even knew that was Barbara Streisand’s house, until she sued to have them removed, and because she sued to have them removed, she inadvertently drew everyone’s attention to the pictures and the thing went viral.
To summarize the Streisand Effect from the Wikipedia page, “Once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, they are significantly more motivated to access and spread that information”
That loosely, and so deliciously, applies to so many things in life: It’s not a thing, until you make it a thing, and then it’s a thing.
Like you never notice a man who is balding. But you notice the man who has a combover. You never notice if someone’s a little short, but you notice if they wear lifts in their shoes to make them taller.
Rather than effectively covering up or disguising the thing that’s making us feel insecure or ugly, it amplifies it, makes it worse, makes it a thing.
As a side note: I’m pretty sure there’s a word for this kind of thing in German because Germans have words for everything you can’t put into words, like that little line of dust you can’t get into the dustpan with your broom, so you end up chasing it all over your kitchen floor like an asshole. I’m like 99% certain there’s either a german word for that little line of dust, or there’s a German word for the futility of chasing a little line of dust around your kitchen floor.
Or, I bet there’s a German word for when you hand a tip directly to a clerk instead of putting it into their tip jar because you know as soon as you reach out to put the tip in the jar, they’re going to turn around or look elsewhere and they won’t see that you tipped them. There has to be a German word for that. And if not, I think they thoroughly covered that in an episode of Seinfeld.
One German word my sister Gwyneth told me that I’ll never forget: a person who sits down to pee is “sitzpinkler.” It kills me.
Or maybe the Germans just didn’t bother putting a name to the Streisand Effect since it’s already called the “Streisand Effect.”
I love the way the Streisand Effect applies to so many things in life. Or, at least, some weird version of the Streisand Effect – it’s not a thing, until you make it a thing – and how it also applies to travel, or vacation. Especially now that, as I said, COVID has made it inaccessible or prohibitive or just an overall pain in the ass, it became a thing.
It becomes even more of a thing, I think, because of social media, and, I know it’s pretty dumb to drop the blame on social media, but it also seems a lot like the algorithms are only focused promoting happy people with suspiciously healthy teeth having fun in the sun, relaxing beachside or exploring fantastic new places.
I see so many of my friends out there, in the world traveling and having fun, and that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s also a reminder that travel is a thing.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about vacations lately.
More specifically, I’ve been thinking about why we go on vacation – at face value, it seems like a weird question because there’s several obvious reasons we’d go on vacation:
We want to get away.
We want to escape for a while (many people here in Minnesota want to go somewhere warm (florida or Hawaii) in the winter).
We travel because we want to see something new, new experiences, new foods, new people, a new routines (if only for a short while).
We want to relax, and so on.
All of these things are true, and they’re also great, yes, fine, all good reasons. But it’s more complicated than that.
Or at least I tend to overcomplicate everything.
I think one of the neatest things about travel are the things you didn’t plan on, the thing you paid for when you bought a plane ticket, or hotel reservations – or, at least, you didn’t know you paid for them, and that is disappointment, or even worse, tragedy.
Tragedy is most often the one thing missing from all the pictures we post on social media of our travels. And that tracks because, disappointment and tragedy are a lot less glamorous than a selfie in front of the Louvre, or standing with friends at Machu Picchu (pronunciation?)
And I guess it follows that we wouldn't exactly feel like broadcasting our tragedies abroad since often they’re embarrassing, or in some of my travels, incriminating.
But when I recall some of my favorite travels, one of the things that sticks with me the most, is maybe not the best of times, though, I can remember those well, and I remember them fondly, but it's the disappointments, and the tragedies that I can often remember in the best detail and which had the biggest effect on me.
I can remember, after losing a backpack on a train, a Dutch lady selling newspapers in front of the train station, how she called out the same headline over and over for an endless line of people coming and going from the station .
I can remember the smell of these flowers in a small town by the sea, and this was after wishing I could just not travel anymore with my then wife, and the flowers smelled exactly like tomatoes.
I remember the heartbreak of, like, after weeks of eating nothing but meat and cheese, I ordered what I thought was a vegetable platter at a restaurant, and when what I was hoping would be this big plate of vegetables, when the waiter put it on the table, turned out to be a huge pile of assorted meats and cheeses.
I wonder if I would have noticed any of these things any other day, or if the seemingly insignificant memories are actually insignificant, and they just stuck with me all these years later because I’d encountered them in a fragile place.
Maybe we didn’t know there’s a built-in amount of disappointment and tragedy in our plane tickets, like, down there in the fine print. But both are likely going to be an integral part of our trip, and I believe, the sooner we give in to the inevitability of disappointment and tragedy, the sooner we’ll be able to really enjoy our trip.
Still, people, myself included, especially myself, go to all sorts of measures to avoid discomfort or disappointments or tragedy or anything that would otherwise ruin our trip.
I think we go about this one of two ways:
1) We might either try to buy our way out of discomforts and disappointments, or somehow outsmart them.
Like this one time, a friend of mine told me about a trip he took with his wife and their friends to a foreign country and how it was ruined by Yelp.
Or, maybe the trip wasn’t ruined, but every decision of every day was a debate between four people and the reviews they pulled up on Yelp.
Breakfast couldn’t just be breakfast, it involved four people looking up local breakfast spots on yelp, comparing their reviews, pictures, dietary options, with each person finding a different place and lobbying for their choice, and debating with anyone who didn’t want to go to the restaurant of their choice.
The arguments from this routine sounded just exhausting. Inevitably, one person who’s restaurant wasn’t chosen by the group spent the meal grumbling and being just generally dour until it was time to choose another restaurant. And then it started all over again with the Yelp.
And that was just for restaurants. There were tons of things to see, places to go, and tourist attractions to visit. All scrutinized under the lens of Yelp: What if they don’t take credit cards? What if they don’t have wifi? What if this review is right because this person sounds like they expected one thing, but when they got there, it turned out to be a whole other deal and it made them upset enough to write a lousy review.
The technology is useful, for sure. But also, to say “technology is useful” seems like something middle-management would say, “You know, Nate, technology is useful.” But that’s a good example of how the technology also gives us this false sense of security that we can completely control our experiences, which we can’t, and to a certain extent, shouldn’t be allowed to. But still, we try, to often comical and highly unfortunate results.
And then:
2) There’s just living in denial.
Like this one time, I took a train to New York with my cousin and her boyfriend.
As we were pulling into New York, I think it was Grand Central Station, I was telling my cousin’s boyfriend this story about how I got royally ripped off on this one trip. And as we were getting off the train in New York I was telling him, “You know we’re going to get ripped off, right?”
And he was like “No no no no no no,” and he went on about Rudy Guiliani. While he was no fan of Rudy, he mentioned how Rudy Guiliani ruled New York with an iron fist and he cleaned up New York, and crime was down, and New Yorkers, or at least white New Yorkers, were very pleased about this, and so on.
Plus, we were smart, we weren’t just a bunch of yokels, we could figure this out. We could do New York, no sweat.
And as we got off the train, a man came up to us, a very nice man, and the nice man asked us if we needed a taxi.
We said yes, we needed a taxi.
And the nice man said he knew where the taxis were and he would take us there. The nice man even offered to carry our bags.
And my Cousin’s boyfriend said, “You see?! This is New York! People here are great, and we’re not going to get ripped off.”
I was like, alright, but still, skeptical. Because while I might believe in the good of people, I also have like zero faith in people.
So, while we waited at the curb with this, again, very nice man, he hailed a cab. He asked my cousin’s boyfriend where we were going, Brooklyn, and he even had a calculator, and he typed in the mileage and multiplied the mileage by a rate-per-hour. It looked like, super official.
And the nice man quoted the price, which my cousin’s boyfriend paid. And after we and all our luggage were in the taxi and the driver was pulling away from the curb, like the very moment we were pulling away from the curb, the driver said “Hey,” he said. “You didn’t give that guy any money did you?”
And again, I’m not saying I look forward to the disappointment, or the tragedy, but it’s different when you just accept it’s coming rather than thinking it can be avoided, or, if you just whistle past the graveyard, it’ll skip you and hit the next guy in line.
That’s why I believe every vacation begins with a little tragedy. I mean, likely, we’ve been at home, in the hometown routine for how many months or years, it only makes sense when we throw ourselves into a whole new place, with no work, and maybe more money to spend on drugs than we’d ever regularly budget for on a normal like, normal routine, we’re gonna fall from outer space into this new dimension – so if somebody puts a knife to your throat in a foreign alley, it just makes sense to give them everything in your wallet.
Really, get it out of the way at the very start of the vacation. Nothing teaches you how to travel leaner and meaner than tragedy. Again, I mean, if it can be avoided then, mazel tov. But it’s the perspective with which you begin your vacation that makes all the difference.
Because, what’s worse is that when disappointment inevitably arrives – after you went to such lengths to avoid it – it arrives as so many self-fulfilling prophecies do, with mockery and this sense of futility that all the measures you took to have the best time ever, the most relaxing time, the most rewarding vacation, they were all for naught.
There’s a line from one of my favorite books by Kurt Vonnegut: “Dancing lessons from God” I think the actual quote is “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from god.”
It’s one of the things I remember the best, because I read it during the middle of one of the shittiest legs, in one of the shittiest trips I’ve ever taken. Though, it is worth noting that it was also one of the best legs of one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. So, I dunno, life is nuance and gray areas, depending on your blood sugar at the time, it can be a real toss up.
That Vonnegut quote so succinctly puts into words a perspective that can not only help us to travel better, or take better vacations, but we can apply to real life, like the everyday life, when we’re not on vacation.
And at risk of sounding like an asshole, it might even help us live our lives better. Or just enjoy more of life, and all the shitty contradictions in a life that’s all nuance and gray areas.
That’s what this story is about, dancing lessons from god. Or, more succinctly, how it’s the disappointments and even tragedies we didn’t know were included in even the most well thought-out travel plans that can potentially have the biggest impact.
I wonder if there’s a German word for that?
Fleugrabbenfeld? Kleinschlabber? Eine hoffengrould? Droltsleiben? Veiftrodten? (and other gibberish that sounds like German)
Dancing Lessons From God
“Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.”
About the time my soon-to-be-ex-wife and I arrived in London, our luggage was arriving in Istanbul. After spending a couple days in some Turkish holding room, our bags – with everything we needed for three months of travel – were sent to Arizona, and then back to Seattle where they stayed, inexplicably, for another week.
For eleven days, my future ex-wife and I languished in dreary/expensive London with only one pair of socks and underwear each. We tried our best to enjoy the city between excruciating phone calls in English phone booths (2001) with the non-existent customer service at British Airways.
When we got the news our bags had finally been flown from Seattle to Heathrow airport, we were beside ourselves with joy. They told us, we could pick up our bags first thing in the morning. And you can bet, we took the early train to Heathrow. But when we arrived at the British Airways luggage kiosk, we were informed our bags had been taxied to our hostel. Another minor inconvenience, but whatever. We were promised the bags would be there at the hostel waiting for us.
We rushed back to our hostel (over an hour away by tube and taxi) where the front desk clerk vaguely remembered somebody coming by with our bags, but shrugged. Since we’d not been there to claim them, our bags had been returned to Heathrow.
Nobody was answering the phone at Heathrow. So, again, we took a taxi and a train back to the airport, back to the luggage kiosk. The kiosk clerk seemed genuinely/punchably happy to see us again. He apologized because, after nobody was there to claim the bags at our hostel, they were considered abandoned. They were removed from the shuttle on the way back to Heathrow. Their whereabouts were officially unknown. Probably lost.
It would take another day and a half for British Airways to locate our bags. They’d been pulled out of circulation and condemned to a half-way home for orphaned luggage. We rushed to the address, an unassuming flat in a London suburb. We were allowed inside, and shown upstairs to a creaky attic where, thank God, a hitman for British Airways would shoot us both in the back of the head, execution style.
Actually, the musty attic was packed full of luggage. And there, in only the dim glow of a single chain-pull murder light, were our bags, obnoxiously over-stuffed, just hanging out between a surprisingly large stash of lost bags.
I remember falling to my knees and tearing open the bags, half expecting them to be full of chopped-up people. But there, in that dank little attic, were all my clothes. Just as I’d meticulously packed them.
It was a vision! Clean clothes! Socks! Underwear!.
To this day, I cannot travel without packing at least 30% more socks than any trip could require.
Also noteworthy were my flip-flops, which I brought for showers. As I found the flip-flops I remembered how, just before getting on the plane in Seattle, I’d considered living dangerously and wearing them for the flight, since shoes and socks on a flight from Seattle to London can be claustrophobic and gross. Thank God I decided to wear my shoes and socks like a not-sociopath. I shuddered to think of spending the time I’d just spent in London in goddamned flip-flops.
There in the attic of lost luggage, we were reeling from waves of relief and euphoria. It’s hard to explain the feeling – being reunited with a lifeline to civilization. We cried and hugged each other. I even paused for just a moment, in observance of the epiphany: for better or worse, something in me had been irreversibly changed. Either broken or built (a tossup), I was undeniably a different man than the one who boarded that plane in Seattle.
Like most true epiphanies, its catalist was unwelcome. It’s gravity overly hard-won. Certainly it wasn't the kind of life-changing experience I had in mind when I bought these plane tickets. But here it was. And to not pay your respects was to turn your back on the universe.
Nobody bothered to check if these were even our bags. Apparently this was a free-for-all and we could have just helped ourselves to any poor soul’s bag. Of course, we did not. (But still, it is noteworthy.)
After finally being reunited with our luggage, we set a pox to the entire British Isles and escaped on a ferry to Holland.
From the ferry we took a train to Amsterdam, which had a transfer in Rotterdam.
At the Rotterdam station, walking to our next train, my soon-to-be-ex-wife stopped.
“Where’s my backpack?!”
Her eyes were wild with panic.
“I don’t know, where did you have it last?”
“In the overhead bin. On the train. I told you to get it! Did you forget it?”
“You told me nothing of the sort.”
“Well did you get it?”
“No! I didn’t get your fucking backpack. It’s your backpack.”
And with that, she dropped her bags and began running after the train, for a train that had departed almost the instant we got off. By now, it was miles away. But still, she ran.
I gathered all of our wheeless luggage (again 2001) and our various coats and whatnot and waddled to a corner of the train station to wait. We were going to miss our train to Amsterdam, but we could catch another. No big deal. By this point, especially after the fiasco in England, I was officially bullet-proof.
Thank goodness, there was nothing critical in the backpack. No passports or traveler’s checks or credit cards. Just a journal, a camera, snacks and other nic-nacs. There in my luggage bunker at the Rotterdam station, I had sufficient time to mourn the loss of the backpack and move on. My future ex-wife however, returned from her fruitless search of the platform determined to, by any means necessary, locate and retrieve her lost backpack. Even if it meant an all-hands-on-deck for the entire Dutch rail system, she would find and be reunited with her backpack.
“What are we going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“You need to go talk to the clerk. Get ahold of somebody on the train who can go look in my seat.”
I tried to imagine that conversation. We didn’t have assigned seats, only tickets. So I’d be making a rough guess, out of the whole train, which car, which seat we’d been in. I curdled at the thought of accosting some poor station clerk over something that really wasn’t that important (it’s not as if we left a baby on the train) with so little useful information to run with.
More to the point, after being the primary fixer – the phone-caller, the explainer, the yeller, the arguer, the arranger, the name-caller – for the whole London fiasco, I was definitely done with moving heaven and earth to chase down errant baggage. Especially that baggage which was our own fault for misplacing. Especially that baggage which was most certainly gone forever.
Instead I decided to do nothing.
Here is why I thought that was a good idea: there was a valuable life lesson here, for both of us. Several probably. The kind of lessons you can’t learn in any school, or buy in any store. To try and fix this situation was an attempt to avoid soaking-in that valuable life lesson. From best I could gather, my role in this cruel vignette was to provide emotional support, to be there during what was about to be a very ugly moment for my then wife, but to lift not a single finger in finding the backpack.
I said, “No.”
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
The event that followed – a very loud, very hysterical breakdown that lasted almost three hours, and offended the majority of commuters passing through the Rotterdam station that day – would live on as a tender spot for the remainder of our impossible marriage.
I tried to offer logic, or at least, perspective. It was just a backpack. It was gone. The sooner she could get over it, the sooner we could get on with our super fun vacation.
What I failed to grasp was, this wasn’t really about the backpack. Sure, the backpack was the catalyst, so it seemed like it was about the backpack. But this was about so much more. What exactly it really was about was anyone’s guess. But everything here – the London fiasco, the lost backpack, the prospect of being trapped, alone in a strange land for three months with Dad 2.0 – it was the perfect storm, just the right combination of elements to tap into all the substantial traumas of her childhood and adolescence. All of it.
Eventually, things calmed down to the point we were able board another train to Amsterdam. We found a pair of seats next to a window and, holding tight to our luggage, I read my book, she watched the scenery outside. We didn’t talk.
The book I was reading was Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Somewhere just outside Amsterdam I came across this quote, ‘Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.’ It is not, by a long shot, Vonnegut’s best quote. As a quote, it is okay. But at the time, it so perfectly put into perspective our thus far catastrophic journey abroad.
The rocky start (to put it modestly) to our three month travel abroad revealed, in a jiffy, how poorly equipped we were to handle life, and each other. We’d been not only rigidly incapable of rolling with the punches, but we took them personally. We believed British Airways had a personal vendetta against us, to fuck us into the ground. In retrospect, it seems almost comical, how quickly we’d turned on each other for our misfortunes.
So when I stumbled over Vonnegut’s timely quote, it was an emotional moment.
My soon-to-be-ex-wife was still fuming, radiating hot heat in the seat across from me. But she noticed I’d just read something deeply moving. Foolishly, I offered her the book as an olive branch. (Maybe a little Vonnegut would lighten the mood?)
I turned the book and leaned over, with my finger on the passage. I watched with anticipation as her eyes narrowed, moved over the words, first without expression, then taking the book from me and reading closely, further puzzled. Then she closed the book (without a bookmark) and limply handed it over, returning to her window, the bucolic Dutch countryside of lowland canals, tree-lined roads and actual windmills.
After a while she said, “I fucking hate your guts and I want to go home right now.”
But we both knew this was basically impossible. Even if we could change our plane tickets for a much earlier departure, we’d have nowhere to go. We’d sublet our rental back in Bellingham, Washington. It was full of people – three boys who were living in the house for a premium with the agreement they would care for our three cats and not burn the place down.
She said it again, “I want to go home.”
I nodded in acknowledgment, but said nothing. I resumed my place in Cat’s Cradle.
The actual date here, September 10th, 2001, is noteworthy. We were only hours away from learning a great deal about perspective, and the insignificance of a disrupted itinerary. We were still raw of course, but also embarrassed by how selfish we’d been.
The news was everywhere. In every coffee shop, and every grocery store and restaurant. On a walk through the bustling commercial district on Nieuwendijk, arguably the busiest part of Amsterdam (during the daytime at least), the news streamed into the thick crowds from the open shops. Dutch, with the occasional English words: World Trade Towers, and President Bush and so on.
And then, as if on cue, everything just stopped. Everyone just stepped to the side and crossed their hands and said nothing. I thought at first everyone was making way for a delivery truck, but there was no noise. Everything was deadly quiet and stayed that way for a very long time. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved, not even kids. It was so quiet and so clear I remember hearing a pigeon’s footsteps, a sound I’d never heard before, like grains of rice on cobblestone.
The observed silence lasted for three minutes, or one minute. I can’t actually remember how many minutes, which seems like a big detail to overlook. But these were not standard, earth-minutes. These were minutes that stretched into a small lifetime. 9/11 and the spell it cast seemed to be turning both time and space into malleable abstractions.
It was during this impromptu memorial I thought again of the quote from Cat’s Cradle, ‘Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.’ It sounded very different then, rolling around my head in silent Amsterdam. I imagined this God, and couldn’t help but picture a gigantic infant who extracts a cruel joy from wheeling us around, pushing us into one another, knocking down buildings, freely dispersing cancer and plagues. The god-baby hands out a promotion here, a line of green lights there. All of it chaotic and whimsical, given with both love and vengeance, depending on the God Baby’s mood or blood sugar at the time.
I stole a look at the crowds lining Nieuwendijk. Everyone quiet. Hands clasped. Looking down. I can only imagine the mysteriously coordinated quiet stretched on and on, and stretched over the whole world. People, it seemed, had all been switched off and were downloading new software. Eventually, we would turn back on again. The gaudy city of Amsterdam took only three or four seconds to hum up to its awful speed. The crowds, again by some unheard signal, snapped out of it and resumed their dance, having been recalibrated for a new age of cruelty and impossible beauty.
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