In my mind, one of the greatest technological advancements is the advent of the map function on my phone. I am a person who has very little sense of direction, and before this incredible feat of technological engineering, I would write down or print out directions to a place, and panic every time I thought I might have to turn, trying to keep one eye on the road and the other on the piece of paper. Is this the turn? I can’t read that sign. Oh goddammit, that’s a crescent, not a drive. WHERE AM I. The kids have known from a young age that I am a stressy driver in certain parts of the city, and my husband is constantly amazed that someone who has lived in one city her entire life still doesn’t know how the main thoroughfares work.
My husband, by the way, is a person who could be dropped anywhere at all, in any city, and would figure out exactly how to get to his destination within minutes, often without a map. How he does this I do not know, but it feels like not being on the Amazing Race was a missed opportunity.
When I was young, my dad would helpfully give me directions or draw a map on a piece of notepaper, and those directions would include things like “turn east” and he then would sternly say that “the sun rises in the east” when I asked if it was a right or a left hand turn. Thanks, Dad, I am aware the sun rises in the east, but my old car didn’t have directional indicators on it. Now, of course, if someone gives me such a direction, I look at the direction I am going as indicated on my rearview mirror and mentally say Never Eat Shredded Wheat as I figure it out.
All of which is to say I have a lot of gratitude for modern technology, wherein I can tap an address into my phone and it directs me there, taking into consideration current traffic and everything. I think we should all take a moment to sit silently in awe, thinking about how people like me are no longer a menace on the road, driving in circles and crying, tears smudging our handwritten directions that are uselessly crumpled on our laps, wondering how to get back home. Now we just have to think about the other menaces on the road: people who are using their phones while driving because god forbid a comment on Instagram goes unanswered, people who illegally drop their kids off in the bus zone at the high school and then block off the intersection as other cars try to turn down the street, which reminds me so much of when I visited Cairo in 2001, cars going everywhere but with no acknowledgement of the rules of the road, people who have road rage and aggressively tailgate and pass in residential streets because they are in a hurry and more important than everyone else. But at least I – and others like me – are relatively calmly driving in new areas, listening to our phones tell us what to do.
I don’t really go many new places these days, but I had the opportunity to use my Map Overlord twice this week: once to drive to my niece’s Brownie group where I was guest-teaching outdoor yoga, and once to meet a friend for a walk in a beautiful part of the city that I had never been to.
As a sidebar: I had never taught kids’ yoga OR outdoor yoga before, and it was quite different from my usual demographic, albeit very fun to teach “unicorn pose” and “rainbow breathing” and make up stories about Brownies with magical wands who could transform frogs into unicorns into dolphins.
Other things that happened this week, other than being grateful to live in the modern age, is that we had a brief snowfall that melted away soon after, it officially became legwarmer season, and my neighbours had a plumber to their house.
I watched intermittently out the window for a long time, hoping to catch a glimpse of Hot Rod, but I had to go to the aforementioned Brownie meeting, and I missed him.
Pandemic Reading
Back in August, I put all my library holds on pause, as I wanted to work my way through a few books on my shelf that I wanted to read and reread. The pauses have all ended now, and this was the result:
After taking this photo, two more books came in, and when I went to pick them up, I saw this book, which was recommended by Swistle, (HI SWISTLE) just staring me in the face on the New and Notable shelf and honestly, I am not made of stone. In other words, I have a problem. Oh well. Game on, challenge accepted.
Little Fires Everywhere. This was one of the books I was wanting to reread, and I was blown away anew. IT IS SO GOOD. Celeste Ng is an incredible talent, a brilliant writer. She shows that people contain multitudes, and that there are many sides to a story. This book is about motherhood in all forms, but so much more – identity, secrets, appearances. Before you ask – no! I have not seen the show. It is highly unlikely that I will, mostly because I love the book so much and I find that I am inevitably disappointed by movies or shows based on books that I love. The sole exception to this rule is Little Women, both the recent film and the 1990s one, and I will also accept Sense and Sensibility as an excellent film.
Of Women and Salt. Oof. This is a very heavy, but ultimately hopeful, book. It’s a short, quick read but it contains so many layers and so much difficult material. Intergenerational trauma, the cycle of abuse, sacrifices made for a chance at a better life – all making the usual complexities of the mother-daughter relationship more fraught. The main characters are Cuban women, but there is an intertwined story about Salvadoran refugees that is heartbreaking and breathtaking.
People We Meet On Vacation. This was a very sweet best-friends-who-fall-in-love, opposites-attract book, just totally fun and fluffy. I mean, you know how this is going to turn out. It’s a perfect weekend/ beach/ vacation/ comfort read but there was a scene that got me thinking. The protagonist meets an old middle school nemesis who apologizes for being a jackass, and it reminded me of similar occasions in my own life. Specifically, I remember the advent of Facebook, and being “friended” by an old frenemy who treated me with the kind of emotional manipulation that certain girls wield in a terrible way. Do you hold onto grudges or let them go? People change, we are all in this journey together, I think. Shit happens and it’s rarely about US, you know? Mean kids had their own shit going on, that’s what made them mean. I remember accepting that woman’s Facebook friendship, and then thinking we are all just moms now, just going about our business and it was so freeing. Let go of that shit, is what I’m saying. The past is past. Anyhoo, this is a sweet little book about finding your home and happiness.
Have a beautiful week, friends! We have a birthday coming up in the house, so there will be cake in my future – how can that not be a great week! xo
HI NICOLE
I have What Fresh Hell Is This on my to-read pile, too!
That sunset photo – OMG!!! I love the idea of you teaching Brownies about unicorn pose and rainbow breathing. That sounds amazing for all involved.
May I briefly try to persuade you to watch the Little Fires TV show? I enjoyed the book, very much, and felt that the show illuminated aspects of the book in new ways. I don’t remember liking Mrs. Richardson very much, in the book, and in the series she remained deeply unlikable, but I felt like her impotence was highlighted in a moving way. I also felt like the TV series brought out some of the nuance about race that I either didn’t catch or buried underneath some of the other plot lines. It also made Mia deeply unlikable for me (I loved her in the book), which added – I thought – a really nice balancing element to the Mrs. Richardson character. Perhaps you will still wish to avoid it, for all the reasonable reasons you have, but it was such a well-acted show and I came away thinking it added to my appreciation of the book and how brilliantly Ng wove together all these various elements of family and race and social standing.
My husband ALSO has a map in his head — in fact, I think everyone in my family and his family does, and I am the sole exception. I get VERY turned around, even in this city (I have lived here for more than a decade), and I rely MUCH too much on my navigation system. Like you, I remember all too clearly the days of multi-page mapquest printouts that I would clutch in my hand, trying to stay on course without dropping the papers all over the place. Things are much better now. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.
Hmmmmm….I MAY have to give it a try!!
I am also grateful for GPS on my phone. Where would I be without it? Quite literally. My mom drives a jaguar with a GPS map on the dash that she refuses to learn how to use. Talk about stubborn.
I have no doubt that those brownies will now be Yoda lovers for life.
I agree that most of the time a book is much better than the movie version. Your examples are definitely the exceptions.
Hahahah “quite literally” me too!!! I might be in your city, who knows, if not for GPS.
This is one of the main ways I use the map feature of my phone: When I got tired of taking the same walks all the time, I instituted something I call real estate walks. I take one of those mailings you get from realtors listing recently sold houses in your neighborhood and I pick a new one to walk to whenever I feel like it. I just type in the address and every now and then it interrupts my podcast to tell me to turn left or right. It gets me onto streets where I’ve never been before and it feels like a little adventure. (I explained this to North once and the look they gave me said, “I am never growing up.”)
Hey, that’s kind of fun, I’m going to try that (North cracks me up)
I feel your pain about maps. It still boggles my mind that I once mapped my way through a good chunk of Europe but got very lost in the Hinterlands of Pisa when we had no map for the area whatsoever and had to rely on directions from a bunch of villagers (who ended up arguing amongst themselves!).
I’m impressed, Julie!
GPS changed my whole entire life and I would have either been lost forever or not gone many of the places I have gone without it. I still can’t believe I lived in Toronto and found my way home most days.
I’m with you 100%!
Oh Nicole, my sister in directional confusion, I consider it an age of miracles that I can enter an address on my phone and get directed there. I have positively the worst sense of direction and am able to get lost virtually anywhere. Both of my kids knew from a young age that we always left 5 minutes early to give me time to inevitably get lost/turned around/miss the turn. Even with the GPS I’ve still become lost (although in my defense it happened when I was driving in an unknown neighborhood, missed a turn, and discovered there was no cell service so the GPS couldn’t recalibrate – also the time the GPS told me to go through a cemetery, which I refused to do, but I digress). Youngest had a soccer tournament in Seattle this summer and the GPS was the only thing between me and a total breakdown due to driving in insane traffic to fields in unknown areas where 1 million other people also seemed to be driving. Technology has a lot of problems to answer for but I am so thankful for the GPS on my phone.
I didn’t say this in the post but of COURSE I took a wrong turn for each of my destinations, but luckily it all recalculated. I panicked, what can I say.
People who give directions like, “…then turn east on Main Street” literally are flummoxed by people like us. My GPS is my saving grace when I decide to venture somewhere new, particularly on my Sanity Drives…because I can always find my way home!
“Turn east,” just tell me left or right!!!
Yes! Please just say left or right. My husband also seems to know where to get everywhere and often starts to tell how to get somewhere I’m going. This is often left with a blank start because I’m still plugging it into the gps and can only seem to understand the directions in short bursts just before I need to turn Left or Right!!
I think you owe us all a photo of Hot Rod.
Living in Florida for most of my life, directions were fairly simple because I know where the beach is, which was EAST when we lived on the east coast. Now, the beach is WEST, but the sun still rises in the east. What I’m saying is, I get confused on occasion as to where I live. East or West? When I go to the mountains, there is NO beach, so I’m a lost puppy. I praise the map Gods daily.
I’d love to have a magical unicorn, dolphin outdoor yoga session with the brownies.
Like you I don’t know which way is north or south or whatever. My mother tried to teach me, but I am a doofus about directions explained with directions. I like the new technology that allows me to get to places while being clueless about where I am. [Somehow I think that last sentence might explain me as a person perfectly.]
I completely feel this statement and I am 100% with you. I will blindly follow the directions on my phone, without really absorbing where I am.
This is so interesting to me how some people intuitively know their way around a city (me! I look at a map beforehand and go in having a general idea how to orientate myself) and others have no clue (Jon! He still asks me step-by-step directions to the doctor’s office where he’s been many times!) – LOL. But thank God for GPS and Map Apps. 🙂
Thank god for GPS indeed! I have tried to orient myself with maps but I think I’m missing some kind of spatial awareness in my brain. It just doesn’t seem to absorb for me!