[Author’s note: This is a reprinted blog from 2007. Sorry about doing 2 reprints in a row. I had a late meeting (ironically about blog writing and one of the topics was how to plan my blog more efficiently) and had to scramble for a filler post.]
September
Work piles up. It always does no matter how far ahead you think you are, you’re never really ahead. Clients in Canada, Germany, India. All of them want their products and want them now. The boss wants a proposal ready for one of the companies biggest clients and wants it today so you drop all the other urgent projects and work on that.
22 miles to work and 22 miles back and always traffic, always, no matter if its 4:30 AM in the morning or 4 PM in the afternoon. 240 hours driving per year, which works out to 10 solid days of nothing but driving.
It all boils down to stress and plenty of it. It’s been a rough year. Not financially but physically and mentally. Specially mentally. I’ve gotten to the point that I sometimes try to open the office door with my house keys. A Freudian psychologist would call that a slip and a sign that I have begun thinking about the office as my real home.
Whereas last year I was excited about exploring New England, this year nothing appealed to me. When the word vacation came to mind all I could think about was plane schedules, taxi cabs, hotel checkout times, renting cars, all the garbage that comes with a trip. Made me exhausted just thinking about it. I put it off and waited till finally I said “Screw it. I’m having my vacation at home.” A new trend becoming more and more popular. The staycation.
Houston: The new capital of the southwest
I usually make fun of tourists that come to Houston. It’s not much of a touristy city. Oh sure it’s as modern as any in the US. The hospital system is the best in the world, giant buildings downtown, hundreds of miles of freeways, and it has all the requisite major sports teams. But when you come down to it, that s all it has. There’s no Hollywood hills(there’s no hills period), or Times Square, or Golden gate bridge or anything. We ourselves don’t have a beach or mountains or hundreds of years of accumulated charm and history. It’s a modern factory town (with office buildings replacing the factories). A nice place to live but you wouldn’t want to visit.
But like any big city dweller there are things out there that you could do but somehow you never end up doing. I suppose you take them for granted and tell yourself that you will do them another time. So I had that in mind for my staycation.
My body woke me up at 4 AM Monday morning as it always does. I tossed and turned but it’s no use. So I wandered round the house and finally decided to get breakfast but not in the house somewhere that I would never go on a weekday. I went to the 59 diner on highway 59 and Kirby, about 15 miles from where I lived in the suburbs.
If you ever saw the movie pulp fiction, the diner scene, you got a pretty good idea of what it looked like. Mid century design and lots of memorabilia from that era. A 50’s menu that hadn’t heard of low-fat diets, and waitresses that were probably here when the diner opened up so long ago. A large and filling breakfast but nothing special.
Returned home around 8:30, and I saw a pack of teens and pre-teens kids hanging around near my house. At first I thought this was a group of gang kids but then I saw the backpacks and books and it dawned on me they were waiting for the school bus. Then I noticed a lot of people were just taking off for work. How odd I thought. All this stuff happens here while I am at work. Back at the office I would have been working for over 3 hours by now.
I took the money I was going to spend on the trip and put all of that into my savings account. After that I was out of ideas for the day, so I watched TV and tried to lay around. Suburbs are eerily quiet during the day. I would look out the front door and see nothing going on, and I would listen to the house creak every now and then. Not a healthy situation (from a mental health point of view), so I decided to find something to do.
I took a spin around Loop 610, the main bypass freeway that rings most of inner Houston. Not just part of it but all of it. Seeing parts of town I hadn’t seen for ages. The Astrodome, the east side of Houston, passing by north end and then back by the Galleria.
Wednesday on a whim I went to the Galleria. This was the premier mall of Houston. Other malls were larger but the Galleria was the “it” place to shop in Houston. In the well to do part of town. Back in the oil boom days, the well to do of Houston would come here as they do now and put in a hard days shopping and lunching.
I though it odd since I remembered a story I had heard years back when I was a stock boy in a supermarket. An old Mexican that worked with me told me back when he was a kid in the 40’s that the land where the mall lay was all bayous and forests and his dad used to take him hunting rabbits. Now its all concrete and steel, Jaguars, Beemers, and Mercedes.
Back in my high school days the truant from my school would head here to basically loiter round the mall till the school day was done. I hadn’t been to the Galleria in about 8 years, and I wasn’t prepared for the changes. I always knew it had been a high-end mall but this was pure culture shock. They had expanded the mall, added tons of new shops. It was all gleaming and shiny.
Clothing boutiques of all sorts, jewelry stores with more gold, silver, and gems than was ever dreamt of by any pirate. All the old stores like Foley’s and Joske’s were gone replaced by Macy’s and Nordstroms. And people, tons and tons of people. What were they doing here? Didn’t they have jobs? It was 11AM, why weren’t these people at work? It was a mixture of culture shock and outrage. Was I really so out of touch?
Dining
My life is fairly regimented. Go in to work, do your job, go home. Every week day and then on the weekends you can do something different. Always the same thing every week. When you have this siege type mentality about your daily life you dream about simple pleasures.
Going out for a simple steak dinner is one such pleasure. The Outback steakhouse is just a step above Chili’s really. But since I hadn’t been to one in so long it was like an oasis for me. The steak was tough and ridiculously over salted, the baked potato was a cluster bomb of sour cream, bacon, and butter but I didn’t care. Such a long-long time. And that was the problem. A couple of hours passed and my stomach wasn’t doing so well. Maybe its eating the same bland diet month after month or just overdoing it. Close to losing it but I didn’t.
Kaneyama, a wonderful sushi place with Miso soup to die for, colorful and tasty sushi and sashimi, and teriyaki steak that seems to melt in your mouth. Kasra’s Persian grill with light pillow bread and a Persian salad. The Palm Club, another steakhouse with over the top prices but with a classic atmosphere that makes you swear you were in a Fitzgerald novel in the 20’s. So many good places to eat yet I never go to them.
Liquor. My drinking days are past me. I had some wine during the week but nothing else. Back in my heyday I could down a Long Island Ice tea, a couple of shots of three wise men, and a flaming Dr. pepper (remind me to tell you bout that one day), Nowadays….I had a couple of glasses of wine Wednesday night and had a mild headache on Thursday morning.
People Watching
People watching is a bad habit of mine. Whether it’s at a mall or a park or at the museum like I did this week. Always on the outside looking in. Hordes of school kids at the museum being chaperoned by a frazzled school teacher and a curator who seems like she’s past the point of total boredom. Cliques of upper class ladies at lunch in some fancy restaurant in the Galleria next to the skating rink, complaining about how rough life was while next door at a pizza parlor there’s a young couple trying to make lunch out of a single slice of pepperoni pizza for them and their 5-year-old kid. Little vignettes of life.
Epilogue: Thoughts and plans
This type of vacation gives you a lot of time to think. Is this the type of life I want for myself? Am I just going to count down the weeks till next year’s vacation? Why was it that I took things so seriously while others just seem to cruise through life without a care? After seeing all this can I really go back to the 10 to 12 hour work day with nothing waiting for me at home?
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