Sweetzerlandt

 Folks!

The semester began with a flurry, including a week of auditions slamming right into the first week of rehearsals slamming right into weekend trips back to Chicago for various personal and professional reasons, so Once More We Languish Online.

However! As a placeholder! Here's a video I cut together waaaaay back toward the end of my travels, marking the crossing from Italy to Switzerland on the Bernina Express route. (Not the Express itself - this train was cheaper AND open air. Double win!)

All of which is to say: please bask in the joy of my beloved Trains, and next weekend - which as of now looks to be my first weekend with no unpacking, city-shuttling, or major non-school-related projects - maybe I'll even use WORDS to describe my time IN Switzerland! What a time to be alive!

Grab Bag III: The Regrabbening of the Bag

OK, so, life is once again in ultra-high gear as I prepare for classes to resume on Tuesday, but rather than leg this blag totally languish, it's time to blearily update once more! After the jump: we're gonna talk a little bit Ravenna, a little bit Milan, a little bit scattered Bologna time - basically all the fugue state Italian time that led up to my arrival in Switzerland, which we will be discussing later and not today thank you very much. First, pre-jump: a little video of mostly Ravenna and Milan for a hot second!

Bologna

Hellooooo, I fell off the planet for a bit there. Longer than I expected or planned, in part because my "sometimes music is nice" post didn't upload properly as I sped into Switzerland. Yeah, well, you design a world-wide web and see how it works.

But we're still playing catchup and the good news is, this post pulls us up an entire [kinda hazy, honestly a little blurry] month, because Bologna was mid-June to mid-July and boy howdy let me tell you it was stupidly hot and slightly overly busy. After the jump: what kind of creep complains about how busy he was while getting work done in Bologna, Italy! Especially when he starts describing the rest of the month and realizes he actually had an incredibly lucky time of it all! Wow! Gratitude practice much??

A blurry view of Bologna from Patrick King on Vimeo.

Follow the music

It's a cliche to say that Italian life is lived in the streets, and like most cliches about Italy, it's really a cliche that's mostly true as you head south from Florence. But it's also one of those cliches that's basically true, and on this trip the thing that struck me most as a delightful outcome is the way that outdoor culture pulls you back to a time when circumstance and luck had the most to do with what music you heard. Italy's very much not an earbud-heavy country; after the jump, a brief sketch of what's in it for you when you follow the music.

Nature is healing (my brain is mush)

Pleased to note here that we've officially hit that point in my summerlong travels when my brain fully becomes deranged! 

Usually this is down to a little bit of travel fatigue: I have very strong homebody and wanderlust instincts, and much like my introvert/extrovert split, I never quite know which one needs to be fed until it flares up. In 2017, by the time August rolled around, I had begun ordering (new) English-tailored pajamas off of eBay to ship to my friends Kate and Stuart (my final stop before my trip back to America) and only after I'd done the same with a pair of travel slippers did I pause and think: what's going on here. The answer, clearly, was that my brain was frantically engaging in retail as a way to The Secret a home into existence: if I owned pajamas and slippers, then surely that autumn in Chicago I'd be padding about in them on a Saturday morning, listening to LPs and drinking coffee. (That this did come true doesn't necessarily mean the one manifested the other. Probably.)

Grab Bag Vol II

After the jump: random memories and conversations from my pre-Bologna travels! (Real-time update is that I'm writing this in Milan as part of a few scheduled posts since I'm heading into a more unplugged path that'll take me up through Switzerland to visit friends in the UK. Today's temperature is 107 degrees! I'm very calm and normal about this!)

There's basically one remaining hand-painted signmaker in Naples, and once you recognize his work you see it everywhere! Also make sure you visit Lello's mozzarella-focused salumeria in Naples! It changed my liiiiiiife!

Agriturismi amore

This trip has been a real avalanche of glorious moments, vistas, and encounters, but I do think that staying at an agriturismo (namely Le Mandrie San Paolo, crazy-highly recommended) has to be in the running for "if you could only save one stretch of the trip in your memory, which would you hang on to forever?" After the jump: what exactly an agriturismo is, and why at least this one made me an immediate convert to their glories!

Not the agriturismo itself, but a park trail that begins on the property, did I mention this agriturismo was located within a national park on a dang mountain seems like a pretty cool combination of things as far as I personally am concerned!!!

Umbria and its Contents

 Moving back in time to a pre-wallet-loss time (situation fully resolved by now, which is: grand!) let's click past the jump and see what Umbria is all about! SPOILERS: it's dreamy and grand??

What happens when you lose your wallet in a foreign country?

Well, it was bound to happen, as much time as I've spent on the road, and as bleary-eyed as I've been at times: my wallet went on a Forever Walk here in Bologna, and this post is a little guide to What Happens Next. After the jump: I just explained what's gonna be after the jump, why am I restating it here?

Portrait of the author upon having seen his wallet go astray

Naples

After the jump: Naples!

Palermo

Hi. Hi hello, hi. Welcome. It's been... a minute.

Lots of stuff afoot as usual (the swirl of trying to get some work done, a series of days in the upper 90s and low 100s, an unexpected film festival and some personal adventures here in Bologna) that has me once more falling behind in updating this account of What Exactly Have I been Up To, to the degree that we gotta go alllll the way back a month to my arrival in: Palermo! Which, not to give anything away, might be my favorite city on this trip, and very possibly my favorite city in Italy. (Don't like it? Write me a grant to revisit your faves and retabulate! I'll be very rigorous!) After the jump: um, why?

Nightmare

So, the SCOTUS overruling of Roe V Wade is unsurprising (the GOP long ago became a fascist party devoted to white supremacy and misogyny, the criminalization of pregnancy has been a longstanding openly-stated policy goal, and they will absolutely come for birth control, same-sex relationships, and anything else that isn't nailed down next) but it's enraging and horrifying nonetheless. We all have an obligation - including the conservatives out there who have some sense of "what if other people were also human beings," and certainly Christians whose faith binds them to service to others - to fight them at all costs and in as many ways as possible.

Please donate to Planned Parenthood, whose work has saved the lives of millions of women and whose work remains essential as states criminalize medical care and install surveillance regimes designed to police and punish women in as many ways as possible. I'd also urge you to donate to this collection of abortion funds, to support the women whose states have already enacted draconian laws that negate their personhood.  Press your local government to pass legislation prohibiting cooperation with investigations into pregnancies that did not lead to a healthy birth. If you have Republican representatives at any level in government, please organize and volunteer to get them removed. If you have Democratic representatives, let them know you are not accepting their passivity in the face of the GOP's total disregard for democratic norms, and insist that they do everything in their power to limit the slide this country is currently facing toward an absolute collapse of democracy. (This has already functionally taken place in places like Wisconsin and North Carolina, and the Supreme Court has already indicated they're perfectly happy to attack democracy anywhere it threatens GOP power elsewhere.) The hour is very late, and while a lot of people in this country were already suffering, a lot more are in the crosshairs now.

There's [ceramics? I guess?] in them thar hills!

After the jump: Ragusa! And a little bit of Noto! It's hill town time, cats and kittens!

Catania: I can take to dreaming like a fish in the sea

I've finally arrived in Bologna, my monthlong home as I try to get all my prep work for the coming year of teaching (and directing, and who knows what-all else) done ... so maybe it's time this blog at least caught up to what country I'm in, if not my actual current geography. To that end, after the jump... Catania! Sicily! Trying to remember things that happened three weeks ago in an era of brain mush and heat stroke!

Athenia

Ah, Athens! The cradle of western thought! The very birthplace of theatre and its Dionysian revels! A sort of too-hot under-vegetated rocky mass surrounded by dense clusters of touristic activity! O how mixed my feelings were on this spot, and o what a contrast it was to the idyll and joy of Lesvos! After the jump: my bad attitude and also some extremely lovely corners amidst the general "weh!"

Grab Bag

Pals! I write this on a sleepy and mandatory-no-running-off-into-the-world-or-doing-schoolwork morning, as I near the end of a few weeks moving faster than I'd like. I'm writing the last of a few scheduled updates to keep the posts coming in their lackadaisical pace while I - and I hope this is Actually True - unplug and abandon my laptop until I arrive in Bologna for my month of remote-work semester prep. It felt like a good time to drop a post with a lot of fragments that didn't feel substantial enough to merit their own post and may not in fact merit this one but guess what, idiots, it's my blog and I will tank my own traffic if I want to! OK! To the jump! To the things!

Lesvos! A whole post!

OKAY! Wow! I left Greece altogether over a week ago, and Lesvos over TWO weeks ago, but that's how it goes in this miserable slog we call Blog Business (we all call it that, but the other bloggers are too cowardly to admit it, which is why most of them quit blogging and started substacks instead). Maybe that means it's time to.... CLICK THROUGH FOR A LOT OF DISORGANIZED THOUGHTS ABOUT LESVOS AND ALSO A VIDEO? Gosh! Boy howdy!

The beauty of Lesvos, as viewed from the Women's Cooperative in Petra! (You, the reader, are the Teen about to fall into the Aegean sea of nonsense that I am about to type at you, if we choose to interpret this photograph as a metaphor.)

Read All About It

People sometimes ask me about trip logistics and planning when I get back on one of these travel sprees, and while I've addressed that in general before, lately I've had folks ask how I plan for trips in a non-budgetary sense, and so I figured I'd blab here a second about That Process. After the jump: what I said I would do!

A Bit of Banter

After the jump: fragmentary conversations from Lesvos, and a reminder that social bravery is worth faking prior to, as the fellow says, making.

I don't generally photograph people (unless they are PALS or have expressly suggested it) so pretend these cats are various Lesvian folk and visiting Brits for the sake of this post. (Pretend also that I took it with my camera and not my dang PHONE already.)

Method of organization

Presented without comment, two recent calendar alerts that give a pretty good window into how functional my brain is these days (it's very functional, how dare you, go back to bed)

Landing

Sometimes you breathe in the air of a place - you step off a bus or a plane, inhale - and you suddenly feel everything has been put right. I tumbled out of my Alibus from the Catania airport, pulled over under the arch of a bridge a short walk from my lodgings, and some packet of neurons in the back of my head started screaming a fanfare of "WE'RE HOME!" 

I am, obviously, way behind on my updates here, and have a bunch of stuff about Greece that should be showing up in the coming week or so, as I have the time for it. But first: last night's arrival in Sicily, my home for the next few weeks before I move on to Bologna.

The trip

Having recovered from a miniature food bug of some sort, I'm writing this from a balcony in my €30-a-night hotel in Athens, which is pretty Spartan (HEYO GOOD CLASSICISM JOKE IMO) but does mean that I get to blog my idiot thoughts from this view, which is: not terrible!

"Acropolis schmecropolis, how's the baklava" as my father wrote to me

 

After the jump, a quick rundown of my trek to Lesvos, with more about that wonderful island in posts to come. (Spoiler alert: IT'S NICE.) Oh, and a video, cos WHY NOT MAKE A VIDEO.

Proof of life

Folks, it's been Real Quiet here for a few reasons - I've been slamming through some work that needs doing by early June to keep my "ok also I will end this summer PREPARED for the coming year" course on track, and it also turns out that the several articles I read about digital nomadry back post-vaccine when I was daydreaming about working my day job from afar were entirely right in their assertion that "maybe you want to do this somewhere other than Greece, on account of the wifi, she is a-notta-so-good." 

 But as much as any of that, it's also that in the wake of the latest utterly senseless and brutal slaughter of human beings in Texas, I have had a real hard time feeling like posting about Gosh Islands Sure Are Certain Ways. I had a dim memory of a gun-related mass killing happening in my first month abroad back in 2016, but had to go back into the archives to see which one it was. (A good feeling, that.) It was Orlando. (Do you remember which one that was?) Needless to say, what I wrote then is true now: it feels strange and impotent to be so far from home when things like this happen, but increasingly these events stir up infuriatingly helpless feelings, knowing that our country is populated by just enough cultish monsters who prefer to sacrifice hundreds-to-thousands of human beings to the altar of But I Deserve A Very Cool Gun to ensure that nothing will ever happen. I hope I'm wrong, but given that horrible people across America continue to feel this way in the wake of multiple murder sprees at elementary schools, I... am not optimistic. Regardless, it remains important to do what you can to fight the tide even in these mid-fascist times, and so... you know, there's that donation sidebar to the right, to which I'm adding Everytown (please reach out if you know of a better, more efficient, or more-targeted organization) and hope you'll throw them some bones if you're able.

I will, eventually, get back to the main business of this blog (documenting transnational stupidity on my part and marveling at, like, "did you know they have sandwiches in Italy, they just call them different things, pianos I think") in the coming days, since I know it's helpful to have an escape. Thanks for hanging in there while I get myself sorted. And be kind to yourselves and others (save fascists) while we endure whatever these coming months entail...

Refuge in Lesvos

 SO! I am here, in Lesvos, having navigated a mildly whackadoo travel screwball en route (short version: ferry pushed back a day, leading to a three-flight changed itinerary to arrive on the island about 12 hours earlier than originally scheduled, with zero night spent sleeping on a boat) and that whole journey and some attendant travelogue/photography/videography is forthcoming once I get a few work-work odds-and-ends done (yes, I'm doing a little work on this leg of the trip in the hopes of fully unplugging weekends and even a full week or two later on). But first, after the jump, some key context on why I opted for Lesvos (or Lesbos, or Λέσβος, however you wanna roll with it). Spoiler alert: this is going to be one of those "hey, if you're flush with cash could you throw some bones to some good folk" deals? So DO THAT even if you couldn't POSSIBLY care less about why I'm on any particular island at any particular moment in time!

And we're off.

Well, friends, here we go again.

 On Tuesday this week, I wrapped up my last on-site responsibilities at the college, drove back to Chicago, and spent a solid 36 hours or so packing, prepping, and wrapping up the last loose ends before departing for O'Hare, where this time I plan to actually catch the flight that will wing me to Europe until late summer.

Genuinely a bit overpacked, mostly due to the work I plan to do while on the road, but hoping the overhead-friendly backpack and books-and-a-camera messenger bag get me where they need to get me...

I think I laid all this out in my "I made a decision" post about this, but the basic shape of things is: a couple of weeks to thoroughly unplug and brain-wipe in Greece with nothing but books and walking on my mind, and then off to Italy to try to live well as I get my prep for next year underway. I'll be moving around a decent bit, adopting my favored model of "get up at dawn, walk everywhere, come back and write/read/work in the post-lunch heat of the day, get out for the passeggiata and evening exploration" as I make my way from Sicily up to Bologna, which will be my long-stay base at the center of the summer. I'll keep nudging northward (yes, I plan these trips specifically around running away from heat, leave me alone) with a quick gosh-everything-is-so-spendy week in Switzerland en route to the UK, where I will collapse in gratitude on the doorsteps of a few much beloved and long-missed friends.

I'm pretty excited (among other things, to have all but the Athens-Catania leg of the trip be on surface transportation, including sleeping on both trains AND boats! my actual dreams) and eager to see how it all feels after these strange intervening years to be back in a mode I last experienced during the chaos and uncertainty of grad school, before I got better at accepting that chaos and uncertainty are kinda baked-in. My travels were a big part of that journey, so it'll be interesting to see how it all feels now that I'm where I am, and who I am.

Anyway, if you're reading this, thanks for tagging along. And hey, if you come into a sudden inheritance or realize you've got points just sitting there waiting to be redeemed on flights, uh, hit me up, let's get an aperitivo or something.

Marseille'n away

OK, so the caveat here is that I only spent one day scrambling around a corner of Marseille, but I: loved it pretty overwhelmingly? And so we're doing a whole separate post about it, and a separate video, and we will NOT apologize for loving port cities more than most things that are available for us to love!! After the jump: The South Of France, But Not In A Beachy Way!

He Ain't Lyon

 Oh yeah! I said I was going to catch y'all up on my spring break week in France, and now I am going to actually do that thing! After the jump: Lyon, and the unending stupidity of Pat. First, tho, a video with a song dedicated to uhhh anybody who might be going through some extremely complicated times this year not that I'm thinking of anybody in particular! Hey let's all have breakfast!

Sur Thing

I'm drowning in grading, editing a final video for my online Intro to Theatre course, admin reporting, and putting my entire life into storage, buuuuut I also need to take occasional breaks, so a quick report on the Big Sur Marathon after the jump!

Away We Go

Folks, the semester has a few stray threads to tie up as I finish grading and an ocean of administrative reporting, but it's safe at this point to say that I've survived my first [and, they tell me, NOT only] year of teaching. Teaching an 8-7 course load, as I insist on pointing out to anybody who knows what that means, because the panic in their eyes helps me know I'm right to feel the way I do!

Anyhow, this means I'm finishing the process of throwing my belongings into storage and vacating my apartment for the summer in between rounds of paper-grading and responding to the inevitable "I haven't turned in any assignments this semester, what would I have to do to get a C" emails. But the end is very much in sight, and the heavy lift of the teaching and showcase work is at an end, and I am ALMOST ready to breathe a sigh of relief. Coming up next? After the jump...

No clever titles, just fundraisin’

 Friends,

A quick frontpage note to let you all know that when my dad and I run the Big Sur Marathon at the end of April, we’ll be doing so to raise money for the Teal Foundation. This was a sort of late decision (“why not see if we can do some good while we do this thing,” was essentially the pitch), but we were inspired by my sister Kat and her husband Brian, who took on the Teal Walk in 2021 to raise money in support of better diagnosis of ovarian cancer, which disease’s late diagnosis is one of the many literal fatalities of our culture’s refusal to prioritize the health of women or invest in reproductive health.

As y’all likely know if you know me well enough to be a reader here, Kat was herself diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2020, and after surgery and chemotherapy she was given a no-evidence-of-disease pronouncement that all-too-quickly fell to a recurrence. She is doing outlandishly well under the frankly-unimaginable circumstances, working through indefinite rounds of chemo and immunotherapy, and (have I mentioned I admire and love her to the ends of the earth and back?) has been a vocal and engaged advocate on this issue, as she has so many others in her cheerfully morally engaged life.

All this is to say, while there are obviously many causes worth donating to (hey, check the sidebar on the frontpage here!) and many organizations doing great work, if you’d consider throwing some cash to the Teal folks, I would consider that a great and mighty kindness. When I collapse at mile three of the marathon (“I didn’t know there’d be so many hilllllls” I’ll whimper) I will collapse with your name on my lips and in my heart.

Thanks as always for being your goodhearted selves. Whether you can pitch in on this one or not, I remain stupid-lucky to have you all in my lives! Let’s live like we know we only have one chance to love each other properly in this life!

Sumer is icumen in

So, yes: this space is dormant and probably will stay that way during the chaos of the semester that has (as of this writing) about six breakneck weeks left. BUT there is, as there sometimes will be, some horizon to look forward to, and after the jump, I'll fill you in on all the Future Wonders...

This post is something of a BRIDGE to the future of this blog. (DO YOU QUITE RECEIVE MY MEANING)

Gilmore Guys

Welcome to probably the most non-sequitur post we are likely to see on this blog, or maybe not maybe it's about to become a pop culture blog sending missives from 20 years ago back to today?? Anyway, I was recently persuaded to dive into Gilmore Girls (which I've always been curious about but never had occasion to try) and I've torn through a season and change in just a few weeks. Rather than continue to annoy my friends with my Takes, I thought I'd drop by here with my Official Ranking of Gilmore Girls Dudes, circa Season One. After the jump: who could possibly care about this!

Gratitude: 2021 edition

 On the eve of spring semester, my second as a full-time faculty member, and marginally better-prepared than I was for my first (at this time last semester I was literally trying to find an apartment and move a first week's worth of living supplies while continuing to work my day job back at Loyola; truly psychotic that this was only four months ago), I wanted to pause and commemorate in this space a few of the memories, moments, events, whatever-you-want-to-call-em for which I'm grateful.

Longtime readers and pals know that this became an annual exercise in 2016, and it's the one thing I have done every New Years Eve since then. I'm not much of one for resolutions; I usually have a handful of projects toward which I'm working, and this grateful look back is always a good reminder that it's literally impossible to chart a linear course, and far more rewarding to pause and reflect on the unexpected swerves that shaped my life into something far better than I'd have sculpted for myself.

If I'm lucky, I'm writing this list in a corner of the world I've never visited before, or at home before I trek out to meet up with close friends; but even if I'm unluckily holed up thanks to a COVID variant quashing multiple rounds of plans, it's one of the most soul-feeding, mindset-correcting habits I have, and I'm glad for it!

Excerpts from the handwritten (and long!) list of grateful 2021 memories after the jump.

Sunsets over Lake Michigan: did NOT make the cut for the gratitude list, but probably should have!