Virtually Home

When we moved, I expected the distance to be the hardest thing. Not being able to get home easily or often. Losing touch with friends. I have moved often enough, and experienced enough big life changes, to know that people gradually grow apart when they don't see each other regularly. Even with effort to arrange visits, deep relationships turn into periodic shallow updates. There are no new memories, only a growing number of Skype appointments or text exchanges in which one of you asks the other what they've been up to, until someone finally calls it quits. It's like every long-distance relationship is a little universe expanding until it's stretched so thin it's meaningless. But it turns out the time is the bigger problem. Western Australia is 13 hours away from central daylight time, and 14 hours away from central standard time (on account of WA doesn't practice daylight savings time). This is annoying for business. You lose a day with every email exchange, ...

Arriving in Australia was a surreal experience. If you have never moved to a foreign country to which you have never been, I'm not sure I can relate the experience. It's like diving off a 10-meter board into a pool of unknown temperature, in which there may be saltwater crocodiles. We touched down in Sydney after a 17-hour red-eye from Houston. Getting through biocontrol and customs took us our entire layover. I had just watched six movies and was exhausted. Ever since getting a blood clot on a plane, I can't sleep in a chair. I just watched a bunch of not-so-memorable movies and stood up obsessively to stretch my calf muscles. And all that was between crying jags, since I had received news of a close friend's death immediately before getting on a plane. We ran through the airport and got on another plane, across the Australian continent. I had an aisle seat, so no view out the window, no access to movies, and insufficient bandwidth to read, by that point. It was a lo...

Jacob and Jessie on NYE 2018 was kind of a whirlwind. There were a lot of highs and lows, but mostly highs. I had some wonderful adventures this year. Here are some highlights. January Oberst with Taylor Hollingsworth of MVB We kicked off the New Year in the best way possible: by seeing a Conor Oberst concert in a California. Jacob and I flew out to Los Angeles and met up with friends from all over the country to see Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band play their first show in years. We caught up in line all day in the gloriously warm (by comparison with Minnesota) weather. We ate amazing Mexican food. And the show was brilliant -- the new venue in Silverlake was really cool and made custom cockatils for the show. Miwi La Lupa played a fabulous solo acoustic set to open. At midnight, the band played "Auld Lang Syne". The New Year couldn't have begun in a better way. That day turned out to be the last time I hung out with my friend Christina outside a ...

Phoebe and Harrison in Saint Paul I decided these shows can share one post: Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers at the Palace Theatre, Saint Paul, 9-7-17 Phoebe and Harrison in Milwaukee Saint Paul was a no-brainer. The Palace only recently reopened after having been closed a few decades, and it was my first chance to see the venue. It's an old-fashioned theatre with a standing-room-only pit and a balcony with seating. The vibe is an interesting mix of ornate and run-down that appeals to me. It has a kind of annoying series of ramps and staircases to get to the stage, which the venue implemented so they can check tickets before people get to the pit, but is annoying when everyone is trying to exit at the same time through bottlenecked passageways. "Lua" trio Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers at the Pabst Theatre, Milwaukee, 9-8-17 The Pabst was cool because I had never been to Milwaukee before, and it's the middle of downtown, with a "secret...