Dad's Advice

(Written a few weeks ago)
As conicidence would have it, I have ended up working in the same field as my father. I was on the phone with him a few days before I left for Houston and he offered me one piece of advice. He said, “Fight the temptation to get done with work, and then go back to the hotel, order food, and fall asleep watching TV. You are getting to travel on someone else’s dime. Don’t waste it.”

Well, I love to travel. I always have and it’s one of the reasons I took the job. So I thanked him for his advice and brushed it off as only useful for people with the unfortunate condition of being much more boring than I.

And yet today I find my super-interesting self in my hotel room, sitting on my bed, watching TV with a bag of fast food, and feeling very sleepy… … … for the fourth night in a row. I’m so annoyed with myself. Its a much easier temptation to give in to than I had imagined.

Houston-less-ness #3

(Why Houston feels place-less)

On a more interesting note (at least to me), Houston has no legal zoning laws. Most cities are sectioned off into residential, commercial, and industrial zones, and if you want to build a certain kind of building, you have to do it on land in the corresponding zone. Not the case in Houston. You can put up whatever you want, wherever you want it. This makes for a very random and sprawling city. Nothing better demonstrates this than Houston skyscrapers. Most large cities have a business district where all the cool skyscrapers are grouped, creating an impressive skyline. Well, Houston does has a business district like that, but then, as you drive away from downtown, you see random skyscrapers littered around the city. Two here. Three over there. A single, thirty-story tower just sitting all by itself around a bunch of one and two-story buildings. The lack of zoning isn’t a “bad” thing but its awkward and, I think, makes the city unfriendly to pedestrians. Common words used to describe cities like “center,” “spine,” and “edge” mean a lot less here.

Houston-less-ness #2

(Why Houston feels place-less)

The city’s major roads make giant loops around it. This is awkward and, even before I knew why, contributed to how lost I felt driving around for the first couple of days. When you drive around in a giant circle, you are always chaging directions, but it FEELS like you are going straight. It’s really hard to develop a sense of place like this. If you think about it, roads are normally used as landmarks. “I live on (your street here)” generally gives some kind of geographic bearing to a conversation. But in Houston, saying “Oh there is a great restaurant right off of 610” simply means that the restaurant is in North, South, West, or East Houston. Good luck.

Houston-less-ness #1

(Why Houston feels place-less)

Houston is HUGE. It is the 4th largest city in the U.S. Houston proper has a population of 2.2 million people in an area of 600 square miles! The Houston metropolitan area has a population of 5.6 million. This kind of size is a bit shocking when it isn’t expected.

Mental Map-less

“You can’t know who you are until you know where you are.” – Wendall Berry

Normally, there is a linear gathering of information when traveling across a city. You start to piece together a mental map. Your “sense of place” begins to develop. It’s usually incorrect and disproportionate, but it’s a start and you make corrections as you go. You immediately start to gather information on the essense of a location. You start to understand what it means to be there. This process, for most people, is largely sub-conscience. I happen to be very sensative to this process because of my city-planning classes, and, as I drove across Houston, I realized that it wasn’t happening... at all. It was disturbing. If you had asked me, “What is Houston like?” after my first few days here, I would have responded, “It’s not like anything.”

The concept of “place-ness” has always fascinated me, and it is affected by so much more than architecture and planning. I think that traveling is only enjoyable when you are experiencing and learning, on whatever level, the essence of where you are.

The good news is that I have since found parts of Houston that are much more interesting (more on those later).

I have also done some research and figured out some of the reasons why I felt so Place-less (more on that sooner.)

Urban Nothingness

The core idea of modern nothingness is that the more difficult our rational effort to understand an event (place) gets, the more our reference categories (sense of place) crumble in our hands.  – Paul Auster 

My first impression of Houston was bleak.  The airport I flew into (Hobby Airport) is old and very ugly, as was the adjacent Enterprise-Rent-A-Car, where I had a reservation for a compact car.  As the saying goes, “Everything is bigger in Texas” and so I find myself, somehow, driving a mid-size SUV for the next month.  It has a sun roof but no cup holders.  I like it. 

 

Making do, I held my soda cup between my legs as I attempted to navigate an old and ugly interstate system.  As I continued driving, I had a growing and inexplicable discomfort about my surroundings - and about my pants, on which soda had splashed when I made a sharp turn.  I couldn’t pin a word on the former feeling though. (Latter feeling = wet.)  Everything seemed large and sprawling and random and tree-less.  I couldn’t shake it, and later that night it hit me.  “Placelessness.”  I never got a feeling of actually being anywhere or passing anything.

Because I'm not that good on the phone...

I work as a fundraising consultant to Catholic churches, schools, and charities. This job requires a great deal of travel. I really believe in what I do, and I love to travel so, in most ways, it’s a perfect fit. And yet, on my first extended business trip, I seem to be spending a great deal of time wishing you all were here.

Well… not all at once, honestly. Ideally, I’d like you all to take turns visiting in small groups. And then once a week, we’d have large communal dinners and go out together... but only at locations of my choosing.

But you are not here and I want to share my life with you as best I can. And so, I am starting a blog. Not very original, but more effective than calling each of you every time I eat at a cool restaurant or have a story about work.

I want this blog to be a lot of things. Travel blog. Work blog. Personal blog, Photo blog…

A Place Blog.

I need to keep thinking about what that means exactly, but I know I’m on the right track. I’ll talk about it more as this blog develops I’m sure.

More than anything I’m really hoping you will all read it and keep track of me while I’m away. I want to keep sharing my life with my friends even though I’m away from home. (I’m also very much hoping that you will all feel comfortable giving suggestions.)

I miss you all almost as much as I miss new episodes of Sons of Anarchy. (My hotel doesn’t get FX.)