Travel

On Writing, Art, and Carving Your Own Bear

The other night, I stayed up way too late reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone, a book I devoured and savored at once. Devoured: I wanted to stuff myself silly. Savored: I wanted to take small bites to make it last. I loved each small flavor and the way they worked together to create something much, much more filling. When I finally closed the book, it was after 2 AM. And I spent the rest of the mostly sleepless night mired in something close to despair. Much as Franzen’s writing inspires me, it also stirs up a whiney anguish and hopelessness: The guy can write circles around me, what’s the use? Why do I bother writing at all when there are voices that are infinitely more articulate and infuriatingly more precise than my own? His writing is inspiring. But what it sometimes inspires is resignation. I love Jonathan Franzen’s work. […]

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‘Content’ Isn’t Just ‘Marketing’

“Content” isn’t just things we think of as “marketing.” A great example is Virgin’s new pre-flight safety briefing, which my friend DJ Waldow Skyped from on board a Virgin flight to share with me last week. If you haven’t seen it, check it out here: There’s much to love about this video. I detailed why I think it’s brilliant (and what companies of any size can learn from it, over at LinkedIn, in 4 Things Your Business Can Learn from a ‘Boring’ Pre-Flight Safety Briefing. (Check it out, and please subscribe to my updates there if you like what you see!) But over here, I wanted to highlight one key takeaway from the Virgin music video safety briefing. Notice Content Moments Everywhere For all of us, it’s important to notice content moments everywhere. Or, as the image on this page suggests (to me, anyway!): Content blooms everywhere. Even in unexpected

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JetBlue: When a Marketing Slogan Is More Than Marketing Slogan

Most commercial air travel experiences are exercises in endurance, not anticipation: “I suppose vacation will be fun, but I really can’t wait to spend 6 hours bouncing around in a cramped tin tube getting there!” said no one ever. I would feel this way even if I didn’t hate to fly with a passion, which I do. There’s simply too much out of a passenger’s control to make flying most commercial carriers anything to celebrate: Tightly packed with strangers who may (or may not) be a pleasure to sit close to; mechanical delays; weather issues… It was the latter that caused my flight from Chicago’s O’Hare to Boston to be delayed by two hours on a recent Friday night. Severe thunderstorms in the originating city had delayed our JetBlue plane, so it was late getting to O’Hare, which meant that it wasn’t where I expected it to be when I

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My Out Of Office Auto-Responder

Well, this is a disappointment. You dispatch an email to me only to have a response im-frickin-mediately — Holy cats! That. Was. Fast!! Then you realize it’s just a dumb auto-responder. Nothing remotely personal about it. The bitter truth rises in your gut when you realize: Ann’s on vacation — not holed up (as she usually is) just waiting for something to respond to. Like your email. Point being, I’m unavailable. (I just switched confusing between first and third person, if you noticed. Things are running fast and loose this week, aren’t they?) Point also being, even if you tried to hide your disappointment and resulting hot tears of frustration at my absence, you’d be powerless. Am I right? There, there. Buck up. I’ll be back. Next week. And I’ll do my best to get back to you then. Or maybe before. I will be checking email and Twitter and

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I Don’t Want to Go, But I Can’t Wait to Get There

“You can want one thing and have a secret wish for its opposite.” ―Deb Caletti, The Six Rules of Maybe Tonight I leave on an 8 PM flight for a six-day trip from Boston, Massachusetts, to Istanbul, Turkey. It’s a 10-hour flight—almost 5,000 miles—and when I say it’s a world away I mean it both literally and figuratively. I woke up uncharacteristically early this morning, pre-dawn, and as the sun broke over the trees and slowly swabbed the sky from pink to red to blue, I thought, “I don’t want to go.”

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Same-Sex Discount

We are standing in line at Westminster Abbey, waiting to pay the admission fee. Up ahead, the cashier is housed behind glass in the entry vestibule, which is a small area with a cold, stone floor. It’s chilly and damp outside and much the same inside; when we finally slip past the door and inside, it’s like walking into a refrigerator made of rocks. It’s £16 for an adult admission for me and my friend Beccy, and another £6 for each of the three children with us. In total, that’s £32 + £18, or £50. But then I notice an alternative: The family rate for 2 adults and one child is £32, plus £6 for each additional child. Or, in our case, £44, in total. That saves us £6 in admission—roughly $10 US. At the time of our trip (late winter of 2011) each US dollar is worth about half

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Scavenged

We set off on foot, the six of us, under an azure sky as big as the ocean. The breeze off the water smelled of salt and September, and the dune grasses bent toward each other, whispering the news that fall was coming. It was a picture-perfect, precious August day, the kind of day that a talented someone with a camera might photograph and print onto a postcard, which someone else might then buy to send to a friend, to show how big the Maine sky can look over an endless sea; and how the line from the midday crowd snakes lazily out of the soda fountain, through a squeaky screen door propped open all day, in turn, by the backside of whoever happens to be waiting for service next; and the way the wild beach roses that grow straight out of sand (impossibly) cascade over a split-rail fence, tumbling

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10 Things I Hate About You, Travel Edition

The flight from Boston to Los Angeles takes six hours, during which there is a kind of caricature of intimacy that develops, at least in Coach. You might not even know the name of the guy sitting at your elbow, but still: You know his choice of reading material; what he drinks with his meal; the way his face, erased of its wakeful composure, slackens when he nods off after lunch. Every once in a while, your thighs touch, or you get a whiff of his cologne, and it’s all at once completely normal and yet weird: Here we are, two people randomly seated together. We begin the journey as strangers and then, hours later, we part knowing more details about each other than many of our casual acquaintances—even if we haven’t exchanged a single word. We’re not friends, exactly, but we’re something. Six hours is a long time to

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Summer on the Coast of Maine, Doggy-Style

I’m spending this week on the coast of southern Maine. If I had a choice, I’d spend most of the week as I am right now: in a low-slung beach chair, toes buried in the warm sand, and book propped open on my lap, pages ruffled by the strong wind off the water. Every few minutes I look up to inventory the surf, scanning for two heads—one belonging to my dark-haired daughter and the other her blond-haired friend—who are bobbing in the waves ahead of me. I have to squint hard to keep sight of them, in part because the sun is glaring, and in part because the tide is so low they seem a football field away. The girls appear as tiny figures, no bigger than lawn jockeys. The seagull stalking crabs a few yards in front of me seems as large as they are, as if this were

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