A sore arm, a visa, and four packs of probiotics

Mark and I leave for India this Thursday, and it still doesn't quite seem like it's really going to happen. But everything is in order, including the visa that I was freaking out about getting in time and the last-minute tetanus shot that has made my arm sore and annoying for the past few days. The goal today is to get some Chicago souvenirs for my coworkers in Mumbai while we're down on museum campus.

But stepping back for a moment, I had a conversation with a couple of coworkers yesterday in which we were talking about people who somehow have all the weird and inconvenient issues happen to them. Isn't that strange, that some people just chronically have crap for luck and have to deal with all the random dilemmas that life seems so eager to throw at them, while others of us just kind of coast through with only an occasional blip of a problem and whine when those blips come up? I think that in my family, my sister has often been that random dilemma person, and I have to say that while I think that she is probably better suited to deal with it than the rest of us, I don't think it's very fair.

Sleepy in Chicago

So Mark and I just got back from our weeklong vacation to Seattle, which was incredible. I don't have the energy or patience to describe all of the details at the moment, so I'll stick with the two biggest highlights for me:

1. Seeing Salman Rushdie read...Mark spotted the announcement in the paper that he would be reading from his new book, and so we took the bus down to Elliott Bay Book Company on Thursday and got to sit about 10 feet away from him. For those who don't know, Rushdie is my favorite novelist, and I was pretty much beside myself to get to see him. And he didn't disappoint -- he was really captivating, both when reading from his book (I have an autographed copy!) and when answering people's questions. The sense of humor that comes through in his books is also part of his natural conversation style. It was fantastic to get to see him, although I opted not to stand in line and gush all over him since we had other places to visit (the line was quite long), and I really preferred not to make a big fool of myself in front of him. Here's a picture of him:

2. Seeing mountains in Olympic National Park from Hurricane Ridge...it was a sort of scary drive up since I'm terrified of heights, but it was worth it, as the view was stunning. We were actually above one layer of clouds, which kind of hung down in the valley, and a higher layer of clouds, which was above us and the mountains. We got up to the ridge after just about everyone else had left, and there was a deer grazing in the meadow not far from us, which made the scene just that much more idyllic. Here's a photo of me at the top:

Flaky, Unremarkable, but Still Competitive

I've been too old and corporate lately to feel interesting enough to blog, thus the flakiness. Work has basically taken over every vacant brain cell I have, and then I can hardly stand to Qwerty my way through a ramble here. But next week I'm on vacation, which brings with it a brand new excuse for neglecting to share my thoughts.

One of the things that I've been realizing lately through my relentless introspection is that I'm not terribly remarkable. I think that over the course of school and childhood, and even since then, it was easy to see the ways in which I'm different from other people, and I was given a lot of praise. I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, but I now realize that there are plenty of other people who are better than me at about anything that I do...I'm ashamed because it's taken so long to really, consciously realize that. It's not that I'm devaluing myself, it's just that I've got too many examples of truly extraordinary humans in my consciousness to think that I'm a stand-out at all. So now I have to learn to be okay with it, but I still would like to be the best at something, because I'm stupidly competitive.