Through The Window (Vancouver April 30th - Los Angeles May 6th)

Come.

Come if you will.

Come play a game.

Come play a game with me.

Look out your window.

Tell me what you see.

Tell me how it is different than it was a few hours ago.

Tell me how it is different now from yesterday.

Tell me how it is different now from the day before yesterday.

Is it really different?

Now let me take you to my world.

Let me show you what I see out the window.

Out my window, this particular day, which was April 30th, 2013, was beautiful Vancouver, Canada. I don’t think I ever realized that the city had bustling water airplane service. I saw many planes landing out my window that day.
The next day’s view was not quite as romantic. Victoria, Canada was lovely, but my view… not so much. (The following day, May 2nd, is missing a picture.)
May 3rd, a look outside my window and beautiful blue ocean I did see.
You hate your alarm clock. (And by the way, who the hell has an alarm clock anymore? Just sayin’.)  And I, well, I am not terribly fond of mine. But on May 3rd, it gave me a delightful gift. I woke, looked out my window, and do look at what I did see. We were sailing underneath the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco two minutes after the alarm clock rang. (Or more accurately my phone played Ben Harper fittingly singing, "It's all right...")
May 5th, May 5th was unfortunate. I love with great affection, my home of Santa Barbara California. But man if what Santa Barbaran’s call “May Gray” was not in full force. The ship was at anchor, off the coast and my room looked out toward the islands, not that they can be seen.
And then there way May 6th, oh the charms of LA.

So do, do take a look out your window, and tell me what you see.

Over the next few months I will post collections of what I have been seeing, sets at a time.

It is a fascinating perspective of life, looking out the window, awaking every day, never knowing what you will see out your window.

Stupid: Only knowing that one day I will return to a life where I look out my window ever day and find little has changed.

Cool: Enjoying a different site every day for now.

Odessa, Ukraine (July 19, 2013)

Opera House

Odessa, in the Ukraine, is strangely enough one of those places I have been to so many times I have run out of things to do. I have seen the Opera House, the City Gardens, the Passage, Deribasovskaya Street, the fortress, the stairs, and on and on. I have the pictures of the sites, I have sought out and found the magnets I wanted and most importantly I have the absolutely required picture of me with a hawk on the stairs. I have even posted on my favorite site in Odessa, which I have found back in 2007. 

Potemkin Stairs

So I ran ashore today, navigated the maze through the terminal, up the stairs, over the bridge above the railroad, down the stairs, through the subway, up the Potemkin Stairs, past Duke de Richelieu monument and to the main park promenade, Prymorska Bulvar. As I did this, I thought about what I was going to write. Mostly, I thought about my mastect-iversary.

Yet, as I raced across town to find a secluded place to write, I couldn't help but be overwhelmed by the intense ambiance Odessa radiates from its paving stones.

Odessa is all about mature lush trees, and colorful ornate neoclassical  and rococo buildings, and women.

The open green promenades, nicely planted with rows of flowers, punctuated with Soviet-style monuments, are filled with people enjoying the summer weather, though you would never know it from their stern facial expressions. 

The green spaces yield to wide tree-lined, cobble-stoned streets with old, stout, ornate rococo and neoclassical buildings of every color imaginable.

Everything is beautiful about this city with one undesirable, underlying tone, like the faintest scent of something sour or off. 

Street seen, notice the building color.

There is an austere feel that permeates everything. I am not sure if it is the solid building edifices, or hard stone streets and walkways, the metal monuments, or the chain link street dividers, the decorative but hard wrought iron window bars, or or or…

I think perhaps all of these are secondary to the real stark, cold, rigid, reality of Odessa which makes it so uninviting.

No one smiles.

Green space.

No one.

Ever.

I realize this is a cultural divergence and that in fact, all of these people are not as overwhelmingly bitter as they appear. Nonetheless, their naturally thin, chiseled features coupled with stern, harsh expressions make the entire beautiful city callously uninviting to this American. 

It is a confusing duality. The city is so visually appealing, and yet subtly not just uninviting, but nearly repelling.

After returning to the ship, I was speaking to a colleague. We tried and tried to put our finger on “it,” the source of the not-quite-right, nearly overt in-hospitality which was somehow simultaneously so subtle and vague as to be undefinable. We came up empty handed. But it is there, like a lingering odor or electricity before a storm.

No conversation of the Ukraine would be complete without a mention of the women. In general, the severe, unsmiling women are either young, tall and unattractive or short, stout, old and unattractive. However, this is punctuated by a surprisingly high number of breathtaking women all the more noticeable for their plumage. Generally tittering atop sky-scraping high-heels, these women often wear skin tight, brilliant colored clothing, showing every last inch of their incredibly long stilts (where their legs should be), emphasizing near emaciated bodies and long torsos. (I say near emaciated, but I don’t for a second think these women are all anorexic. I think it is just a different body type than chubby Americans are accustomed.) 

Notice the heels.	Bright colors.	She looks happy, doesn't she?

I tried to figure out how tall also seems to mean long legs and long torsos simultaneously, somehow each element seemingly more that 60% of body composition. These women, have no hips. Their legs and torsos both seem long as their hips are comparably very short. 

Any one of them could be on a runway in Milan, but they are so eye-catching with their flashy ornamentation and plumage. 

The unfortunate part is their carved, hard facial features, perpetually slightly disgusted or disinterested, and their slightly hunched shoulder shape, somehow wafting the “I can’t be bothered” attitude leave the observer so conflicted between visually desirable and emotionally repellent at the same time.

My biggest regret was not noticing this sooner and taking pictures. I pulled the above from the background of other pictures.

I would never choose to go to Odessa. Nonetheless, it is one of those places which is so experientially thick and rich that I am very grateful to have gone, again, and again, and again.

A Day, July 11th, in the Life (Taormina)

05:40 – Wake up

06:15 – Go up to the gym, watch the sunrise over Italy as I use the elliptical

06:45 – Shower and change

07:00 – Run to the mess for coffee

07:15 - Arrive at work.

10:45 – Sneak out of work early.

11:00 - Catch the tender (the little boat which shuttles people ashore when the ship is anchored off the coast) with some friends

11:15 – Arrive at a place I am sure has a name, though I don’t know what

11:30 – Grab a taxi to Taormina, a delightful old Italian town clinging atop a Sicilian cliff side

Taormina as seen from the ship.

12:00 – Pizza, Formaggi

13:00 – Wander the town.

13:15 – Buy magnets.

13:30 – Get to the Greek Amphitheater (where we decide none of us can be bothered to pay 8€ to see yet another set of ruins.)

Amphitheater picture stolen from colleague Micah Hervada
Ackerman who did actually pay the eight euro

14:15 – Obligatory Gelato

14:45 – Taxi back to the port

15:00 – Tender home.

15:45 – Work.

20:00 – Officer’s Bar with a coworker to pick up drinks to take out to “Deck Six Aft” effectively the outdoor patio for crew.

20:45 – A friend passes by and invites me to the steam room at 21:00

21:00 – Steam room with the girls

21:45 – Quick shower and change

22:00 - Back out to the back patio to watch Stromboli as we pass (an active volcano)

Cool: July 11th.
Stupid: Blogspot's handling of pictures, so annoying!

The Underlying Meaning of a Haircut and Style (Istanbul)

Stupid cool was always really meant to be a fun, somewhat travel-oriented blog, so I have tried to keep cancer out of it.

But as a two time cancer survivor having trouble with what my oncologist calls survivorship perhaps denying this element of me exists by excluding it from my writing is an impediment to my moving on.

The view of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul that I basically
ignored while reading a magazine and getting my haircut.

Today, overlooking the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, I had my hair cut. A mundane experience for most, for me, it was one conflict. For all of my life, I have been the girl with very long hair. 

All of my life until cancer.

Cancer took my hair three times. First, I donated it to my aunt who ultimately died of cancer. Then I lost it myself to chemotherapy. It was right around the time I had a nice bob again that cancer resurfaced and took it once again.

My hair has since grown back, surprisingly resilient, healthy and lush. But this time it is curly, curly, curly.

I have what is known in cancer circles as “chemo-curl.” My last chemotherapy regiment results in super curly hair.

As someone who has always had board straight hair, these curls were mystifying, messy and enigmatic.

I don’t mind them, they just seem foreign.

Today, having my hair cut, when all I really want is it long, seemed a bit of an odd choice. But this curly enigma, I just don’t know what to do with it.

The stylist said, for best results, he would straighten it to cut it. OK, I thought. I really didn’t care.

So after an hour of washing, and straightening and cutting and styling, while I was engrossed in a magazine I would be embarrassed to even admit to reading….

I 

looked

up.

And my eyes absolutely welled with tears, and tittering on overflowing, I hid them from the stylist who would no doubt be horrified that his diligent, artistic, perfect haircut and style had reduced me to gushing tears.

In the mirror, reflecting back at me, with board straight hair, was my image, in perfect health, cancer-free.

Cool: Seeing myself in the mirror and thinking I look the image of perfect health.

Stupid: The profound, ever present, terrorizing fear that it is just “a look” like a picture snapped in a moment in time, before cancer.

Stupid: What I have come to call, "Cancer PTSD," which somehow morphed a simple haircut into a traumatic reminder of two years of cancer.

Wonderful: Living in an environment, ship life, where true friends are just a few minutes’ walk away. A thank you to Katherine Henderson, my shipmate, who I ran crying to after my haircut.