Who was Grimes Posnik, part 2

A week ago, I bought a battered fountain pen at the Alemany flea market for $3. I can safely say I’ve gotten my money’s worth.

A quick search on Google turned up an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle. A quick email to the reporter who wrote the obit led to an hour with him over coffee. And that led to — well, read for yourself. And now, if you’ll forgive me my brevity, I have to get back to the flea market to return an old fountain pen to its rightful owner.

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Travel Tuesdays: fun with frequent flyer miles

In my determination to find ways to travel more often for less money, I just joined this new website called Travel Hacking Cartel. It’s all about earning and leveraging frequent flyer miles. They guarantee that if you spend 30 minutes a month applying their tips, you’ll earn 25,000 miles each quarter — that is, the equivalent of one free domestic round-trip ticket through most frequent flyer programs.

Joining involves subscribing on a monthly basis, but they promise you can cancel at any time with no hassles. I like no hassles, so I signed up last week at the $15/month level and poked around for a bit.

Right away, I learned three things that wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise:

1. Domestic US airlines often fall short on service compared to a lot of international airlines, but they’re the most generous with their frequent flyer miles, and they’re almost all in one of three alliances within which miles are interchangeable to some extent once you’ve reached a certain minimum number of miles. Thus you can redeem your miles on Delta for an award on KLM, because they’re both part of the SkyTeam Alliance. Or your miles on American for an award on British Airlines, because they’re both affiliated with OneWorld. Or your miles on United or US Airlines for an award on Lufthansa or SAS, because they’re all in Star Alliance. Why does this matter? Because it increases your options for getting where you want to go, and improves your chances of getting there in a bit more comfort and style.

2. Right now, Southwest is offering a credit card that gives you two free round trip flights as soon as you make your first purchase. Yes, it has a $59 annual fee and 14% APR, two unattractive traits in credit cards. On the other hand, you also earn points toward flights with every purchase, and if you pay it off monthly, you get the points without paying a penny in interest. And if you don’t use it at all, then cancel it when the year is up, you’ve still gotten two free round trips anywhere SWA flies for less than $30 per trip. Not too shabby if SWA flies somewhere you want to go, which (for me) it does.

3. If you use your American frequent flyer account to sign up for the AAdvantage Shopping Mall, you can earn AA frequent flyer miles by clicking through there to various online merchants. This may not be the most efficient way of earning miles at 3 or 4 miles per dollar spent, but it adds up over time — and I already shop with several participating merchants, like 6pm.com and Victoria’s Secret. Hey, I have to buy socks and underwear anyway, so why not pick up 100 miles in the process?

Travel Hacking Cartel is offering a launch deal of a two-week trial membership for $1 through March 14. The wording on the site is confusing; I think it’s just that the trial membership deal ends on March 14, but it seems to suggest that after that date, they’ll be closing enrollment completely for a while. If that’s true, you may as well splash out a buck just to get your foot in the door — I feel like I’ve already gotten my dollar’s worth, and it hasn’t even been a week yet.

<– This badge is an affiliate link. If you click through and decide to sign up, I earn miles, but if you don’t like affiliate links, I’ll be none the wiser if you go ahead and visit the site directly.

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Who was Grimes Poznik?

It was a beautiful day in San Francisco — freakishly beautiful, 75 degrees and clear in what’s ordinarily our rainy season — and I needed to be out and about in it. So Audi and I went to the Alemany Flea Market in search of, you know, stuff. They have lots of stuff at flea markets. She got some lovely costume jewelry. Her man Mark snagged a power saw. And I spotted a black Esterbrook fountain pen which the vendor sold me for all of $3.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I like vintage fountain pens. I have a special place in my heart for Esterbrooks because they were the Bics of their era — there are thousands of ‘em out there, readily available for $40 or $50 at most — and because they have little nib assemblies that just screw right out so you can swap in a new one with a different point if you like. I own two Esties myself (one belonged to my grandfather), so I know what little workhorses they are; that’s why whenever I see one, I snag it to sell on eBay to hobbyists more ambitious than I who want to do their own restoration work.

This one’s body was in rough shape, but the nib looked plenty salvageable, and I do love a bold stub nib. So home it came with me. When I got my find home and looked it over, I discovered a name engraved on the side, a very unusual name: Grimes Poznik.

Thanks to Google, I now know who Grimes Poznik was. It seems he died in 2005, a homeless, mentally ill addict. But before that, he was famous in the ’70s and ’80s as a San Francisco street musician called The Automatic Human Jukebox. Before that, he was a Cornell student, class of 1969, who got himself arrested at the infamous Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 for climbing up on a statue in Grant Park and playing “America the Beautiful” on his trumpet to accompany the rioting going on below him.

I learned all of this from an obit on the Cornell College website, which is the only hit Google turned up. (Edited to add: At some point he apparently changed his name to Poznikov, under which name I found his obit in the Chronicle.)

I know the pen I bought today is too battered to be worth much. But it occurs to me that Grimes Poznik has family members somewhere, and that maybe they’d like his pen back. I kind of want to have it restored so I can find them and return it to them properly.

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Down payment on an intention

When there’s something you really want to do, how do you promise yourself you’ll make it happen?

One of my grand life intentions is to travel more. Last week, having just gotten paid, I finally ordered the carry-on bag of my dreams to replace my battered backpack. Then I trotted myself down the street to Office Max for some passport photos. They’re unflattering, naturally — if I look like that, I’m too ill to get on a plane — but I still mailed them off to the State Department with my old passport (which expires in two weeks), the proper renewal form, and the requisite fee. In a month or so, I should get two envelopes back from the State Department — one containing my old cancelled passport with all the stamps from my 2001-2010 wanderings, and one bringing me a fresh new passport ready for fresh new adventures. And then nothing (except money, of course) stands between me and another trip, once I decide where I’m going.

For me, nothing solidifies an intention like taking a concrete baby step toward it. See, I have a bad habit of talking myself out of doing things and denying the real reason for balking. I’ll say I can’t afford to do X when I’m really just not sure I’ll enjoy it enough to justify the expense. I’ll persuade myself I’m too tired to do Y when the truth is I’m having a fit of social anxiety brought on by, say, a bad skin day. So the point of making these small commitments is to bolster my resolve, to give myself consequences for backing out, or just to convince my subconscious I really am “all in” for whatever it is I intend to do.

Sometimes all it takes is a small action — for example, I bookmarked a page on Amazon.com with the Frye boots I was longing for, then kept visiting the URL to make sure they were still available. When I finally had the spare cash to treat myself, it took just one extra click to put them in my shopping cart and make my desire a reality. Other times, it takes a bigger commitment: telling someone I’m definitely going to do something so I have some ‘splaining to do if I decide to back out, making a cash deposit, signing a legally binding contract. Or buying a new suitcase and getting my passport renewed.

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Tacky texting

I am a big fan of the text message. Here are some of the ways in which texting has been very useful to me:

• Alerting a friend to a great sale.
• Soliciting opinions about whether to buy a pair of shoes at said sale.
• Letting people know I’m running late because I’m at the mercy of Muni.
• Letting people know I’ve arrived somewhere early and will save them a seat.
• Telling a friend, “Hey, I’m in your neighborhood if you want to grab coffee.”
• Asking a friend a quick question that only requires a quick yes/no answer.
• Letting people know when my flight/train/bus/ride is leaving/arriving.

Here is an inappropriate way to use the humble text message:

• Contacting someone with whom you’ve had one date in order to suggest that on the second date, you “have dinner/drinks, and then maybe sex.”
• At 2 am.
• I wish I was joking.
• This happened to me last week.

Here is how I was tempted to respond:

• “Seriously? SERIOUSLY???”

But because I am a woman of dignity and grace, here is how I responded:

• “I was thinking more of spending a few hours getting to know each other better. I’m not comfortable skipping over that to get to the sex faster. I don’t think we’re looking for the same thing.”

People! Don’t drink and text!

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