Interests and values

A blogger I read regularly makes fairly frequent posts about how what matters in relationships are shared values, not shared interests. Recently, she revisited the topic yet again, and as I read the comments, I arrived at a jaw-dropping realization:

A surprising number of people don’t know the difference between interests and values.

Actually, that shouldn’t surprise me all that much. Look at any dating website. Read a few profiles and notice what people emphasize. They talk about how they love hiking and biking and want to meet someone outdoorsy. They brag about their advanced degrees and say they’re looking for someone who makes a six-figure income. They discuss their swank lifestyle and specify that they want to fall in love with someone tall, slender, and well-dressed. They say they’re looking forward to meeting someone for marriage and kids. Those things are interests.

It’s possible to reframe interests as values, if you dig into them. The people in my examples could say “I value a healthy, active lifestyle,” or “I value security, which I believe a good education and income provide,” or “I value my image, which the right person will burnish,” or “I value family life.” Those things are values. You and I may not share all of them, but they’re values nonetheless.

Interests are what people do. Values are who people are.

Some things are both interests and values. I am not interested in parenting and do not date men with young children; I value a childfree lifestyle. I am interested in good food and good drink, though not to excess; I value reasonable amounts of sensual pleasure. I don’t care what people do for a living as long as they pay their bills; I value being self-supporting and responsible. I’m interested in doing my job well and being paid fairly for it; I value treating my skills and talents with respect. You get the idea.

I know someone who had an affair with a married man. She kept telling me they had so much in common. They were both into baseball, Shakespeare, and punk rock. They both wanted to live in Italy some day and loved going out to eat. Neither of them was especially close to their families. How could two people so compatible not be destined to be together? Except that what she valued was True Love Forever, and what he valued was Getting A Little Sumpin’-Sumpin’ When The Wife’s Away. Bzzt. Irreconcilable difference there.

After a lot of soul-searching, she realized that. She also realized that she didn’t seem to value True Love as much as she thought she did. What her actions said she valued was Sitting Around Waiting For A Lying Cheater To Be Honest And Devoted. (As she said later, after coming to her senses: “Thanks for being such great role models, Mom and Dad.”)

I’m not sure how the definition of “values” got so blurred, but somehow, it has. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not judging, because lordy, have I ever been there. I wrestle all the time with the difference between what I believe my priorities are and what my actions indicate they actually are. I say I value being good to myself, but then I deprive myself of things that would give me pleasure. I try to justify it by saying I value being sensible with my money, but then why do I waste money on things I don’t really enjoy? I claim I value honesty, but my reluctance to speak up when it’s called for suggests I actually value not making waves. I say I value putting my own needs first, but when someone accuses me of being selfish, I default to valuing Not Giving Anyone A Reason To Dislike Me.

So my primary value these days is being clear about my values (and then sticking to them, come what may). And anyone who tempts me to violate them is someone I need not to let too far into my life — no matter how many interests we might have in common.

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Travel Tuesdays: luggage

Let’s face it: it’s called luggage because you lug it around. So if you’re planning to do any travel at all, you want something that’s easy to lug. But if you share my preference for traveling with a carry-on only, that ups the ante.

Of course, I acknowledge that sometimes checking your bag is unavoidable — say, if you’re traveling with tools, a case of wine, or a wedding dress. But if I can avoid it, I do. Why? Lots of reasons. If my luggage is with me at all times, it’s less likely to get lost or stolen or accidentally taken by someone else. I can be on my way while everyone else is waiting at baggage claim for their stuff to show up. I don’t have to pay the extortionate fees some airlines are charging to check in a bag. Besides, when I travel, I prefer to be inconspicuous — and as Rick Steves likes to remind people, nothing turns on the blinking neon light reading “Tourist here! Scammers welcome!” like wrestling with a big suitcase or two.

I consider certain qualities necessary in a carry-on bag:

1. It has to be large enough to hold a week’s worth of clothing. I pack light and will happily do laundry, or at least rinse stuff out in the sink, if I’m on the go for more than a week — but I need to know I can go for a week on what I have with me.
2. And yet it still has to weigh 15 pounds or less when fully packed, because dude, I am not a weightlifter.
3. It has to fit in an overhead compartment. Seriously. I am not willing to be forced to check it at the door when it turns out at the last minute to be an inch over the maximum in every direction.
4. I have to be able to carry it on my back. A rolling suitcase just isn’t as maneuverable or convenient as something I can wear, but a big bag is cumbersome and uncomfortable when carried by a shoulder strap for more than a few minutes.
5. It needs to be sturdy. Rip-resistant fabric. Heavy-duty zippers. Solidly stitched seams. I do not want my clothes suddenly falling out in some filthy subway station (or, indeed, anywhere else).
6. It needs some kind of organizational features. I like useful pockets. Otherwise, I inevitably end up having to unpack everything to find a pair of socks.
7. Ideally, it should have an easy-to-access place to store the stuff we must now carry in a little plastic baggie and whip out for TSA. I don’t want to have to pack, unpack, and repack at every security checkpoint.

You really don’t have to drop a ton of cash on a bag, either. For the last seven years, I’ve been traveling with a big black $25 backpack bought at my local cheap-luggage-from-China store.

Amortized over the time I’ve owned it, that works out to about $3.57 a year — and there’s no question I’ve gotten my money’s worth. I’ve schlepped it to Paris, Dublin, Amsterdam, Venice, London (thrice), Rome (twice), and a bunch of domestic destinations including New York (at least half a dozen times), New Orleans, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Las Vegas, and Portland, Oregon.

However, on its last outing, I cracked the buckle on the waist strap — so I’m looking at the Tom Bihn Aeronaut. This is essentially my dream bag; it meets all my requirements and then some.

I have been lusting after this marvelous creation since I first laid eyes on it several years ago. It’s light, sturdy, and capacious. It has handles, a shoulder strap, and a backpack harness that zips away in its own cunningly designed compartment. It has water-resistant zippers. It’s designed not to spill your crap all over the place when you open it. It has dividers and pockets. You can even buy little packing cubes that fit inside for even more organization. In short, it is awesome.

Sadly, it is also $220.

But here’s the thing about budget travel: sometimes, you have to pay a little more to get a lot more. (More on that later.) Although the frugal side of me balks at the idea of dropping $220 on a bag, even the bag of my dreams, it works out to $22 a year if I get ten years of use out of it. Given the amount I (don’t) travel, I could probably use it for 15 or 20 years, especially since Bihn bags come with a lifetime guarantee. Heck, I’ve been carrying a Bihn Small Cafe Shoulder Bag almost every day for almost five years and it’s still going strong.

So I’m tempted. Perhaps I’ll have a new bag to test for my next trip. Or perhaps I’ll give the big black backpack one final fling before I retire it.

What’s your favorite bag? Why do you like it? Would you recommend it to me?

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Introducing Travel Tuesdays!

With this post, I’m inaugurating a plan to write regularly about expanding both your literal and figurative horizons through travel. I probably won’t manage to do a travel post every Tuesday, but I do plan to limit my travel posts to Tuesdays so people who aren’t interested in travel can skip reading on that day of the week.

I want to start out with a topic that’s especially dear to my heart: solo travel. Specifically, if you’ve never traveled alone before, where do you start?

A lot of people — especially women — react to the idea of traveling alone with some variation of “Oh, I could never.” And it’s true, traveling alone — especially if you’re a woman — involves certain considerations that don’t come up when you’re with others. But by and large, the world isn’t nearly as dangerous as people tend to think, and using common sense will generally keep you out of trouble. And as I noted in a previous post, traveling solo also has unique advantages.

Nonetheless, going somewhere new on your own can be intimidating, so I recommend easing into it step by step:

1. Go somewhere you’ve already been. This gives you the comfort of familiarity — you probably already have a few favorite restaurants, a hotel you’ve stayed at before, maybe even local friends you can see or stay with. I’ve never actually lived in New York, but I’ve visited so many times over the last 20 years that when I get there, it feels like home, subway and all. I can get to at least a couple of well-liked restaurants on autopilot when I’m tired and ravenous — heck, I can actually give directions to tourists sometimes.

2.  Go somewhere domestic that you’ve never been. For my first solo trip outside the continental US, I went to the north shore of Oahu, which is quieter and less touristed than Honolulu. It was familiar enough that I didn’t feel completely out of my depth — the street signs were familiar and everyone spoke English — but I still sat on the white sand beach, eating Spam musubi, the semi-official food of the Hawaiian Islands, feeling like I was definitely not at home.

3.  Go somewhere far away but still English-speaking (or whatever your native tongue is). You might choose Jamaica, Vancouver, or the Australian outback. I chose London because I’m an Anglophile, a history buff, and a city lover. In a single week, I packed in 2000 years of history, a little Shakespeare, a lot of museums, many many Tube rides, a fair bit of sitting around people-watching and chatting with locals in pubs, and more curry than I ordinarily eat in a year. I felt completely at ease, and that trip primed the travel pump for the next step:

4.  Go somewhere far away where you don’t speak the language. Okay, I cheated a bit on this one; I went to Rome, where a lot of people do speak English, and where in any event I could make myself understood in a pinch by breaking out my rusty French. If you don’t share my Euro-fetish and you’re up for it, go to Russia, China, Thailand — someplace where the language is not only unfamiliar, but written in another alphabet. Experiment with having a good time while being functionally illiterate and able to communicate only (or mostly) in sign language.

Wherever you opt to go, you might want to plan out these early trips a little more than you ordinarily would. If you usually fly by the seat of your pants, consider at least booking your lodging before you leave home. If you’ve never ridden Eurail, study the website carefully to make sure you order the right pass. Buy a guidebook or two, even if you only read it on the plane and leave it in your hotel room once you arrive. Unless you’re preternaturally self-confident and relaxed in unfamiliar situations, you’ll enjoy your trip more if you have at least a small notion of what to expect.

More travel thoughts on future Tuesdays! In the meantime, tell me what you think. Was this helpful? Interesting? Inspiring? What do you want me to discuss next?

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Gratification and gratitude

I sold a print! To a stranger! Which covers all my costs of printing and mounting the entire show! More importantly, it proves to me that my decision to take my photography more seriously was a good one. I now have objective proof that I’m good at more than one thing, and that’s never a bad thing to know.

But even without the sale, my opening on Wednesday evening was enormously gratifying. People I never expected would show up came to have a drink. I saw a library professional who writes science fiction talking to a horror writer who takes smutty pictures, an illustrator getting travel tips from a style blogger, a Renaissance woman discussing midlife career shifts with a designer turned future veterinarian… People from all different parts of my life collided and connected; who knows what might come out of it? It was a tasty stew, and the next time I feel lonely, insecure, or isolated, I want to remember that I’m the one who tossed the ingredients together.

I also want to remember, next time I feel like throwing a party, that holding it at a bar lets me enjoy all the best parts of a get-together without any of the tedious cleaning up before or after.

Meanwhile, two different editors praised my work in the last week, I brokered an introduction between two friends who really need to know each other, and Laura gave me some eggs.

I’m a lucky woman. Now I think I’m going to make an omelette.

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Can you dig it?

Look at these beautiful shoes.

Seriously. Look at them. They’re Doc Martens. I just ordered them on Friday.

I haven’t owned a pair of Docs since college. And they have steel toes, which I have never had in a pair of boots, never having been in a situation where I urgently needed to kick anything hard or worry about protecting my delicate little piggies. So why am I eagerly awaiting their arrival now? Simple: because later this year, I am going to be spending a week on an archaeological dig, a place where one is very likely to drop, trip over, step on, or stumble into something hard and heavy. Steel-toed boots mandatory.

An archaeological dig? you ask. Really?

Yes, really!

If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you’ve probably noticed that I love history — the older, the better. I also know an archaeologist who’s politely let me buttonhole him at parties for years to hear about digging up amazing things. When I last spoke to him, he mentioned a phrase I’d never heard before: “field school.” It turns out that a lot of digs actively welcome volunteers and students to help them with the hard work of pulling history out of holes in the ground. Yes, you pay for the privilege of doing heavy labor for them, but in exchange you get to learn the basics of excavation while learning about the era you’re digging up (and, if you’re a student, earning academic credit). It sounded like a damn fine way to spend a vacation: going somewhere interesting, learning something new, and — let’s face it — having an excuse to buy shoes. So I went looking for a field school that would get me somewhere I’d like to go while staying within my vacation budget. And lo, I found one — in, of all places, northern England. To be precise, in the city of York.

The thing about York is that it’s been continuously inhabited for thousands of years. The British tribes already had a nice little settlement going when the Romans showed up in 71CE and built an army camp there. When the Romans left, the Angles (as in Anglo-Saxons) showed up. Then the Vikings came. And so forth, up to the present day. The city is a layer cake of history, and whenever anyone does any major construction, they’re required to do an archaeological dig first.

Right now there’s an urban renewal project going on in a section of the city called Hungate. It’s a big project — housing, shops, green space, the whole mixed-use bag — which means a big dig. In fact, the Hungate dig is the biggest ever to be held in York, at least according to the Dig Hungate web site. It’s been going on since 2007 and will continue through 2011. And in the summers, volunteers can show up for a week or two at a time and stay in the local university’s housing. That’s what I’ll be doing.

For roughly $425, I get a week of daily seminars and lectures, basic dig training, the occasional guided tour of the dig, and cheap lodging with kitchen privileges. My  other expenses, besides food and sunscreen, will be airfare to and from the UK and a train ticket to and from York, which has no airport of its own. And I have enough frequent flyer miles to cover half my airfare. (More on budget travel at another time.) In short, everything is coming together to make it feasible for me to go back to England (which I love), see part of the country that’s new to me, satisfy both my history jones and my curiosity about archaeology, and maybe even dig up something fascinating.

I have no idea what I might find. I could end up digging among the Vikings or Romans, or I could be exhuming an 18th century slum. Maybe I’ll find a pipe, or dinnerware, or an arrowhead. Or maybe I’ll find a toilet.

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