The New Normal

Welcome to my kitchen table.

Here you can find a ukulele — it’s orange — and a giant jar of honey and a 100 peso note and a red accordion file that holds the bills and receipts for things related to my band. There’s a iPhone 4s, a delay pedal, a bottle of iridescent nail polish and some chocolate bars that I got in Mexico — while I was there I rappelled in a parrot filled sinkhole, hiked through a waterfall, and gave a talk on the value of storytelling.

On the kitchen counter behind me? A five pound bag of brown Basmati rice, a package of spice rub from Oahu’s famous Rainbow Grill, a very good bottle of whiskey. I’m wearing a Cheap Thrills t-shirt (a long lost 70s punk band) and jammies that have pink elephants on roller skates. Friday night I played a show and on Saturday, I had a huge dim sum lunch with two of my band mates. My hands are still kind of sore. I have some social plans for today, but I don’t actually know what I’m doing in the coming week because the project I was going to start — cloud services documentation — got put on hold about 24 hours after it kicked off. Something about paperwork.

A few months ago I agreed to do a Q&A with an adventure travel writer, Alastair Humphreys. To my amusement, he called me “normal.”

The strapline on Pam Mandel’s website reads “a camera, a passport, a ukulele”. I like that. I wanted to ask Pam for her take on adventure as she lives a far more “normal” life than many of the other crazy folk I feature on this site for the Adventure1000 project. I hope this will be reassuring for “normal” people reading this site who are nonetheless dreaming of adventure. (Here‘s the interview.)

I do have a fixed address.  I have a car that’s paid for in full and a mortgage on a house that is not paid for in full. I went to art school — I hold a degree in Fine Art: Painting and Drawing. I am married; my husband and I have been together for nearly 20 years, though we have lived together for only 50 or 60 percent of that time. We don’t have kids. Neither of us have Real Jobs. I’m a freelance writer, I have been for almost 15 years now and with the husband’s work, well, “It’s complicated” doesn’t even begin to explain it. We each hold residency status in the other’s home country (his, Austrian, mine, American).

Here are some things I like: Indian food, traveling alone, ukuleles, The Simpsons, Wes Anderson movies, saying yes to invitations to go places at the last minute, good grammar, old typewriters, my electric bicycle, the poetic language of Pico Iyer, comfortable shoes, vintage guidebooks, the hammock in my backyard, brown liquor, pho, wonky discussions about how advertising is affecting journalism, social media, mastering public transit in cities that aren’t mine, pre-Rennaissance European painting, playing a raging rock and roll show with my ukulele cover band. To name a few.

There’s a running joke around our house in which I say to my husband, “… but I’m just like everyone else!” He used to respond by listing the ways in which I was not, but now, he just raises his eyebrows. Sometimes he’ll point to some nearby object — if this were happening today, the kitchen table would be a good place for this. He could point to the delay pedal next to the jar of honey and say nothing. I’d have to concede that, yeah, okay, maybe I’m not like everyone else.

Or rather, that there’s no normal. Not really.

When I started to feel like I didn’t suck at playing live music, I began to eye the slobs on the bus differently. I would be on my way to client meetings and I would think, “I have no idea what these people did last night, who they are, what they do.” It was thrilling. I loved the idea that I could be sitting next to a rocket scientist, a woman with a best selling series of sci-fi novels, a dad who was coaching his daughter’s soccer team to the regional championships, an acrobat. Anyone could be Clark Kent, a costume change away from unleashing their inner superhero. I started to wonder what everyone did when they were not wearing their bookish glasses and their not quite stylish work clothes, when they got the call to be their best selves.

It’s hokey, I know, but I would hear that 90s song — What if God Was One of Us? — in my head.  “Just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home.” All these normal people, they could be anyone. There’s a Seattle story that happened the year David Byrne had started to ride his bike everywhere, literally everywhere. Apparently, he rode backstage to his show at Bumbershoot (a big Seattle music festival) and the crew told him he couldn’t be there. They didn’t recognize him, he was just some leggy guy on a bike, another trespasser who skipped security. I was at Folklife, another big festival, the day after Neil Young had played at the arena. All his rigs were parked backstage and I thought, any of these guys, these ragged leather hat wearing music loving rough around the edges old hippies could be Neil Young watching the bluegrass kids throw down in their Grapes of Wrath outfits. Neil Young could be standing right next to me.

It’s a popular theme among the self declared “location independent” that they’ve thrown off the shackles of “normal life” to do, oh, I don’t know, even. I wouldn’t presume to know. From my perch at my boring fixed address, it looks like they’re a lot of marketing consultants and SEO consultants and web site developers and copy writers — the same kind of work I do. In the US, over 30% of workers are now freelance, too, so that “normal job” thing? Redefined. The big difference? Where you get your mail. That’s about it. The corporate life we’re throwing away to live free range is increasingly diminishing, so I don’t see this rejection as particularly special or groundbreaking. That life people swear they’re rejecting is a relic of the 50s; it doesn’t really exist anymore.

I’ve hopped from address to address, living in foreign countries, trying to dodge the (nonexistent) day job. I think of this roaming as a “normal” phase for a certain class of privileged adults in our time. And I still don’t have a real day job, not in the traditional sense. So I don’t see those who swear they’re breaking the mold as doing anything particularly special.

But how do I know that those same people are not weaving great imaginary worlds out of words or color or three chords and a prayer? I don’t.

You’ll see me on the bus. My hair is kind of a mess, but it’s clean, as is my wardrobe, a weird collection of thrift store and retail, though my shoes, my shoes will almost always be cool, I like good shoes. I’m probably looking at my phone, just like everyone else. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m middle aged, it’s weird, but whatever. You think I’m normal, whatever that means, that I’m just like everyone else who’s on the express to an office, a desk, a computer, a disconnected conversation at the coffee maker because it’s Monday and everyone’s shaking off the life they lived over the weekend.

But you have no idea of what’s being swept aside in my brain to make this facade of Monday normal. The ticker tape and glitter and spilled drinks and drama and spattered paint and feedback noise and joy and pain and magic and the mess of a three dimensional life.

I could be god, but more importantly so could you.

And that is totally normal.

What’s on YOUR kitchen table?