{"id":9570,"date":"2014-09-07T10:35:31","date_gmt":"2014-09-07T17:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=9570"},"modified":"2014-09-10T18:57:02","modified_gmt":"2014-09-11T01:57:02","slug":"normal-is-the-new-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/07\/normal-is-the-new-god\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Normal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to my kitchen table.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

The strapline on Pam Mandel\u2019s website reads \u201ca camera, a passport, a ukulele\u201d. I like that. I wanted to ask Pam for her take on adventure as she lives a far more \u201cnormal\u201d life than many of the other crazy folk I feature on this site for the Adventure1000 project. I hope this will be reassuring for \u201cnormal\u201d people reading this site who are nonetheless dreaming of adventure. (Here<\/a>‘s the interview.)<\/p>\n

I do have a fixed address.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Or rather, that there’s no normal. Not really.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n