Hiking Half Dome at Yosemite

I’ve had a lot happen in the last six months, most of which I haven’t found the right words to describe. One thing I can speak to is my trip to Yosemite National Park in September. We got permits to hike Half Dome, and it was an incredibly painful and scary experience. We left well before dawn. My headlight burned out just as the sun thought about rising. Storm clouds loomed at the top, so I rushed the ascent and the descent soon after I felt a drop on my lip. A deer family crossed our path. My feet burned with eight miles to go. It was a painfully long hike, but the landscape was my salve.

Painted Mines outside Calhan, Colorado

My man and I went for a beautiful three-mile walk in the Paint Mines outside Calhan, Colorado. Compared to some of the more breath-taking landscapes in the Wild West, this spot doesn’t stack up, but the fact that it emerges from rolling farmlands is very interesting. Living in this part of the country is a constant gift of perspective with so much grandeur. It’s essential that we respect these spaces and not use them as Instagram vanity backgrounds. We saw plenty of people standing on the rock formations. Please stay on the gravel trails.

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Multnomah Falls outside Portland, Oregon

My man and I went to visit family in Vancouver, Washington over the first weekend in July. We did a beautiful hike to Multnomah Falls on the Oregon side of the river, and the weather was excellent. Check out that beautiful shiba inu!

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Critical Voices on Voluntourism and the Classism of Literature

I’m chipping away at my manuscript one daunting page at a time, but I’ve also been doing some continued hefty research on the topics it addresses. I’m interested in sharing what I’ve found this week in order to spark your thinking. I encourage you to leave your thoughts in the comments so that everyone can benefit from your point of view.

NOTE: If you’ve never considered that voluntourism can have negative effects, the following might be a hard pill to swallow. And if you’ve never considered service abroad to be problematic, I’m very glad you’ve decided to read this post. I wish I would have known about or considered these perspectives decades ago.

Take stock of your writing life with these eight questions

Using Roxanne Gay’s 2013 AWP article as inspiration, I answered these questions for myself as an exercise of reflection in this somewhat solitary practice of writing. If you’re a writer looking to take stock of your own progress and engagement with writing, I encourage you to try this for yourself! It required me to put into words what I had been struggling to communicate with my friends and family regarding the third draft of my WIP and my new stationary writing life.

When you know you're ready to start nesting...

When I left my job and the transient lifestyle, a lot of people were excited for me, albeit curious to see if I might get restless or bored in one place. I wondered the same but was convinced it was my time to test this settled life regardless.

Because for years, I struggled to leave my friends and family behind with every flight, even though I knew how lucky I was to be boarding those flights. Even though I liked where I was headed. And it was tiring—physically and emotionally—to pack up possessions that felt increasingly worthless and sleep in one more IKEA bed. Apparently all that movement, all those time zone changes, and many awkward nights of sleep gave me adrenal fatigue, amongst the effects of constant travel that could be measured or pinpointed.

I think I'm doing "summer break" wrong... ah, who cares.

So I read, adrenal fatigue appears to be a 21st century issue, in that the diminishment of real physical danger in our daily lives has manifested itself into a constant stress that treats all threats as equals. If this is the case, take me back to the days of subsistence farming, jumps in the swimming hole, and dinner by candlelight. I guess I want to be Amish! Or better yet, Fijian!

But obviously I've gained a tremendous amount from this active, dynamic life bouncing around the world. I'm trying to take it easy, give myself a break before Botswana amps up, but as my previous list indicates, I treat "breaks" like stolen time. I will fill the time I have, a compulsive little worker pumped with caffeine to complement a puny trickle of cortisol.

Parkinson's Law, they call it. Well, C.N. Parkinson has officially taken over my wet, hot, American summer break. And even if that means more of this compulsive, fight or flight mode, as long as I have a finished book by next February, I'm fine with that.

110,745 kilometers later: an update on Nomadderwhere

I'm watching the Vancouver Marathon from my apartment window and giggling as seagulls drift by at eye-level. Canada represents my final destination of this academic year, and though it was an exciting year and an important one for my own growth, I am glad it's behind me.

Traveling with a math expert this year introduced me to the beauty of slow data. With every car ride or room change, she plugged miles traversed or beds switched into a spreadsheet. By the end of 220 days "on the road," she presented to us the impressive numbers of our #cdtravels:

110,745 kilometers of transit = 2.76 times around the world
Total hours on planes, trains & automobiles (not layovers or wait time): 246 hours / 6 work weeks
50 beds roughly, averaging 4.4 nights per bed

If you're wondering why I spent the last year making an epic carbon footprint (not proud of that), take a peek at the TGS Changemaker Program and read my post on this curriculum development mission. If you're not sure how I went from travel media to writing curriculum documents for a high school, I understand your confusion. It surprised me, too. Here's something on my evolution.

Last year at this time, I was living in Florence, Italy with THINK Global School, plugging away at graduate school and enjoying as stable a lifestyle as I've achieved in the last decade. Between then and now, I changed jobs, visited ten countries, and wrote two years of projects with three colleagues.

Here's what it was like...

A refreshing update on Nomadderwhere for 2016

I keep erasing the opening sentence of this blog because I don't know who I'm addressing. You, my audience, are unknown to me, but I know I have something to tell you. I know it's time to update you on what has changed since I last applied the necessary time and effort on Nomadderwhere this summer, and now is as good a time as any, here in the Air France lounge at Washington Dulles airport. I have three more hours until my plane departs for Vermont.

Golf cart cruising like a country club boss

While in Miami on official TGS business, I joined my friend Nick on a road trip to visit his grandmother in Boca Raton. We felt like doing something adventurous on our weekend off, and when a spontaneous trip to Cuba didn’t pan out (due to their visa restrictions, not ours), I decided to tag along for his mini-family reunion. The point of the trip wasn’t to craft a story or film anything; we were there to visit a lovely woman and enjoy some peace and quiet pre-Costa Rica. However, when we embarked on an exploration of the neighborhood in a retro golf cart, the inspiration flowed.

Photographing Christmas with the family

Allison and William, Christmas 2014

Sometimes when I'm home, I turn the camera on my family. They like to cheese it up in photos, but when their cheek muscles relax a bit and they get into their element, you can see the real smiles emerge.

Q&A: how to document experiences remotely

One thing I am hoping to do is be able to create some great videos like these you’ve made for THINK. It’s hard because I have few opportunities to capture raw footage myself – only when a program happens to be somewhere nearby like D.C., but I want to get practicing! What kind of programs and equipment do you use? ANY tips you could offer would be so great. I know you’ve spent thousands of hours perfecting your craft just in the area of filmmaking – like I said, I have watched and read about your growth! I also know you are crazy busy, but I’d greatly appreciate any insights or lessons learned you have.

The irony of my lifestyle, part 5

I am an investor in the ephemeral, that which could be gone tomorrow. This could be deemed true of everyone, but I feel arguably more conscious of the inevitable with the existence of my outbound flight. This ticket away from a nest makes me anxious, makes me analyze my underlying emotions, makes me draw connections to patterns, and makes me look at how those few constants affect me. The moon signifies change; it moves me away from an even keel of emotion and routine.

A patchwork quilt of my Boston days

I found this idea while in Buenos Aires and used it to memorialize my little life in the Argentine capital. I tried it out again with the beautiful city and experience of Boston, MA.

Attending my first opening night via the interwebs

Thought it wasn't my first choice to attend virtually, it was my only realistic option, as I was deeply embedded in school on May 1st, the day of the event. But this was a big moment for me, a first exhibition for an art major and with deep significance in location at that. I wanted to be able to absorb these factors viscerally and emerge from the experience enriched and with the sense that I had exhibited work always meant for others' eyes.

From Chelsea to Chinatown, a walk inspires words

Vacation is when watery, oily, acidicjuices are plowed with crusty bread, where butter comes in clumps and goes down in littler ones, flavor bombs, when you have time to pour the second cup of honey with a punch of rose. Aimless and timeless, there might be no other method to managing a day for you.

Tweeting up a storm at an innovation conference

Sometimes working at a school that boasts innovation as its middle name leaves me feeling stale and inadequate for my role. "I haven't done anything new and exciting lately! I'm not ahead of the curve!" This conference looked to be the remedy and something that would benefit all facets of my job, from looking at teaching and learning differently to spreading our name like wildfire.

The conference failed to disappoint. They provided a printed, wire-bound agenda for note-taking, but I was simultaneously shooting great quotes from the speakers up onto Twitter. The hashtag #IUNY13 was lively and often revealed comments I missed or didn't quite wrap my mind around the first time. In this instance, I think my experience was heightened by this digital engagement.

What I would happily quote from Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind

In 2008, I learned about Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind from the father at my nannying job. Not one to chase fruitless endeavors, I knew he was recommending a quality read, especially since the recommendation came after the gushing of my worldview. Well, four and a half years and innumerable reminders later, I have finally checked this book off my "To Read" list. The following are the sections I highlighted and mused about in the margins, many of which I found to be unique sentences, others quite relevant to the constant questions I ponder at work.

Spring Break: the tropical one where I kept saying "What are the chances?"

I booked my ticket to St. Thomas a week prior to going, and one hour after I confirmed my flight, my friend from high school posted a photo of his current view from the same island.