Flashbacks to 2011 [traveling]

[rebeccmeister]

Oh 2011. Year of the Dissertation, the Failed PBP, the move to Texas to the Villa Maria Dump House.

I am currently working on sorting out housing accommodations for Arizona this summer.

For the Failed PBP, somehow I wound up being the person in charge of finding a place for 7 of us to stay, somewhere on the outskirts of Paris. This was because of the people involved; I was the main connecting point.

That was before the real rise of the Disruptive Outsourced Hotel Room Industry (DOHRI). However, at that time Europeans had already established a custom of renting out their houses to each other for vacations. The place where we wound up staying was someone's real house and was wonderful in all respects except for the fact that the owners used some form of awful insecticide that caused really bad problems for S. At least they had yard space.*

And except for the fact that I was not in a great emotional state during that trip, exacerbated by the Thought Tragedy of the Commons.

For 8 months leading up to that trip, some of the other people on the trip were very persistent in wanting to know all of the exact details of our travel plans, all without being the person in charge of actually making the arrangements themselves.

There are very good reasons for this. If you plan out your travel well, it can be much less expensive.

But it is a lot of work and a lot of responsibility to do all of the searching and booking AND dealing with the questions and comments.

That is why people hire travel agents, no?

Anyway.

My DOHRI experiences in the US have been mixed, at best. Depressing, sterilized dwellings. A horrible, passive-aggressive negative review due to a person who traveled with me, forever tarnishing my internet reputation.

In spite of the summer being the off season where I am heading, everything anywhere near where I'd like to stay near the University looks horribly expensive. I suppose people just pull their listings or something. The closest things that look anywhere near reasonable are all near Old Town Scottsdale, which seems silly. Could be worse?

I will get over all of this.

I just need to whine about it for a few minutes first.

Most likely I will book something tomorrow.


*Also, for the record, the 2015 PBP was glorious in that I just stayed in youth hostels by myself and didn't have to arrange anything for anybody else. Aside from that one mishap where I wound up on the Metro with my bicycle in tow, ahem, whoops. I am 100% fine with my misanthropy.

Comments

[graydon]

Is it perhaps the case that you are systemically refusal-impaired?

(I hope both the plans and the travel goes well!)

[rebeccmeister]

Hahahahaha, you could be onto something there, yes.

And yes, I will confess that I am.

The current situation is motivated by ambitions to earn tenure, which does lead immediately to the question of, "But at what cost?"

Actually, not just earn tenure but do good and fun science, which is what will happen once we get there.

[graydon]

Good and fun science is an outcome devoutly to be wished!

It might be the case with respect to refusal impairment that one is permitted to stop.

[rebeccmeister]

It might be the case with respect to refusal impairment that one is permitted to stop.

*laughs*

I should probably write that out and tape it to the top of my computer. Or maybe my forehead.

By the way, I did take your remark to heart about thinking about the stopping point for my rowing leadership role. You made me realize that what's most realistic will be one more three-year term after this term is up (so, up to 4 more years beyond this year). I am starting to see more of the rewards of being patient + stubborn this year, finally, but I still need to plan out my exit strategy.

[graydon]

Glad you've got a plan!

One of the many rarely discussed things about volunteering is that there are more of them than there are of you. The organizer positions are thereby pretty much guaranteed eventual burnout, even when there's a lack of contention in the group. The trick seems to be stopping at the right time; post-sense-of-accomplishment, pre-burnout. (And preferably absent grudges. :)

[moodyduck]

When my parents and I traveled to Switzerland and Germany in 2017, I selected the flights and train tickets. Once there I was also the one that sorted out public transportation and navigation, since I am the one that has had experience with navigating foreign cities on my own. And am a total nerd about transit systems. (My parents have traveled abroad, but almost exclusively with guided tours. They've never lived where public transit was a viable option in the US, either.)

For my mom, this was fine. She had no problem just following me. My dad, however, had a hard time grasping that I (or really, anyone) could just show up in a foreign city they've never visited and...manage just fine? Normally I'd have obtained a map and mostly played it by ear, but I ended up over-planning because any uncertainty on my part would freak him out, even if it was an easily-solved problem. Even if the only consequence would be having to backtrack (which never happened). We didn't have to worry about ending up somewhere dangerous, or not being able to get back to the hotel. Once on a platform he'd ask which direction the train would be coming from (it doesn't matter!) or how many stops to our stop (I don't know! I just make note of what stop is before ours and read the signs!)

It drove me crazy that he couldn't just trust that I knew where to go and when. But he didn't want to spend the time to figure out the transit system and do the advance planning either. It made things that should have been stress-free rather a lot of work, and really tried my patience.

[rebeccmeister]

It's the absolute worst when it's family members, too! Ahh, family.

[moodyduck]

Yes, such a loaded situation!

Odd though since you'd think a family member who knows you so well would not trust you, while friends who have never traveled with you before contentedly follow you around like ducklings because they are happy they don't need to figure it out. (I don't mean that in a bad way, it was very low-stress! Though in Japan, at least, they knew if I lost them anywhere, Sensei would kill me, so there was that.)

[graydon]

Sounds like your dad does construction-of-security through control -- knowing all the states and inputs of the system -- and you do construction-of-security through predictability -- I know what's going to happen next, and if that doesn't happen I have this handy decision tree which will work.

That is such a miserable situation to be in; extensive commiserations.

[rebeccmeister]

Although I would agree that it's a miserable situation to be in, I have to say that I appreciate this interpretation of behavior patterns involved!

[moodyduck]

Interesting, I wasn't familiar with that terminology but it makes sense. Weirdly, we are both anxious types, but his solution is knowing the exact plan and mine is knowing how the system works so that I can figure out the details as I go and adjust the plan if needed.

Obviously I prefer my method, but to each their own! Just...do the homework, I guess? It took me almost to the end of the trip to figure out that I should walk him through the map the night before instead of expecting him to learn to trust my navigation. But he also could have asked me to instead of grilling me on metro platforms.

[graydon]

The terminology comes from a team building course from approximately a thousand years ago; it turned out to be more like team assembly, as though from small parts. If people had torque specifications, it would have quoted them. (The other construction of security was collective or cooperative or collaborative, something that started with "c"; people who are quite happy to assume you're doing your job. These people are great until they decide you're not doing your job, at which point there are intractable problems.)

People with a control-construction who won't do the homework are difficult, yeah; the thing that's necessary for them to feel like they're secure is what they refuse to do. Though it's often somewhat unconscious; constructions of security do seem to be. (And in your dad's case it doesn't seem implausible there were some expectations of hierarchy creeping in.)

All that said, yeah, he absolutely could have asked.

[moodyduck]

"If people had torque specifications..." If only they did!

I think in this case it was so hard for him to imagine going to a foreign country and finding your way without running into problems (and without the usual US reliance on vehicles) that he didn't even know how one would go about it. Kind of the same way he has trouble learning new tasks on the computer because real comfort with computers requires messing around and maybe making a mistake here and there. Keep in mind he was a pilot, flight instructor, managed large incident response teams and coordinated things like "where to send the helicopters when your state is on fire" so he is able to handle complex systems, just not necessarily _new_ complex systems.

I'm sure not being able to speak the language didn't help with the fear. That's less of an obstacle today with smartphones, but that would require comfort using smartphones... That actually kind of makes me wonder what he'd be like visiting, say, London instead of Berlin.

[graydon]

Security construction has nigh-nothing to do with competence, at least that I've ever seen; one of those goals intelligence is a tool for achieving but which intelligence rarely selects.

Give your dad's background, I can entirely see how a combination of not having a checklist and purely not thinking that you can make your own checklist -- someone gives you the checklist! you must not write your own! -- and probably also a habit of being in charge of things with much worse consequences than getting a bit lost would combine to make that difficult, yeah.

And there you are writing your own checklists and that's both wrong and something to be proud of and the greater-emotional-complexity-than-capacity-for-articulation wants to be sure they're proper checklists so he knows how to react and it's call all the social utility of a rain of fish parts even before the fear of fucking up gets into it. (Said fear being generally both deep and impossible to acknowledge.)

Getting through all that without any shouting strikes me as an entire accomplishment.

[moodyduck]

There were some close calls, but we are not People Who Raise Their Voices in Public Places so no actual shouting. Some heated words during a train delay though. It was a poor choice on my part to select a train schedule that didn't get in until 6 pm, which is when he wants to be settled somewhere with a beer, not wondering how we are getting to the hotel.

I suppose it makes sense that we ended up on opposite ends of the spectrum of natural resource management--he on the orderly state management side, me on the fuzzy and ambiguous research/advisor side. At least we both can commiserate about the joy of working with stakeholders.

[mallorys_camera]

PBP?

[rebeccmeister]

Paris-Brest-Paris.

Now I'm wishing I'll get to go back and do it again! It was grueling but also full of incredible moments.

[scrottie]

"I wound up being the person in charge of finding a place for 7 of us to stay" I remember that. I wound up in charge of collecting money from everyone, which turned in to a discussion culminating in dividing up the daily cost between people there that day so the stay was not only pro-rated to length but to the number of other people there that moment because anything less than absolutely completely fair is not good enough and everyone is a bunch of nerds. Then I still had to collect. Predictably, Wizard was the most difficult to catch. Rodney Dangerfield is the patron saint of organizers.

Wish I had ideas for Tempe but I fell off of that horse once already.

[rebeccmeister]

OMG I remember that spreadsheet!

I wonder if I will ever attempt to travel with such a big group, ever again, on as involved an expedition.

Retroactively, I should be more grateful for all of the times that other rowers have organized travel for me.