A Primer on Booking Adventures - Kona, HI (Part 1)

Booking adventures – where booking can be either a verb or part of a compound noun.

As a frequent flyer and also a lifelong Econ major, I can tell you that prices of flights can be really weird in a good way sometimes.
       For example, a trip from Boston to DC can cost around $450 which is equivalent to going from Boston to Iceland or to Puerto Rico if you book about a month ahead.
       DC to Austin and DC to Seattle are about the same price, even though one is almost double the distance.
       Portland to Atlanta on some flights can cost more than one grand and you might spend less going from Portland to Seoul, South Korea instead.

Economists love studying airlines because each flight route is a "market" that can be priced almost independently, so prices for different routes don’t always relate in an intuitive way as demonstrated.

Okay fine, flight prices are weird and separately, Hawaii is exotic, so you want to go, sure why not. Well you know what else is not intuitive – the Hawaiian islands. In fact there are several popular islands, and unlike most of the United States, you can’t drive between some of these cities, so booking a hotel on one island and a flight to another is a major no-go unless you have a way of being in two places at once or plan on swimming through the Pacific to get to your hotel for the night.

I am obviously speaking from experience here and had a panic attack over the fact that both bookings were non-refundable, yet useless to me if they weren't on the same island. It ended up working out, but just remember that Maui is not the same island as Honolulu is not the same as the Big Island.

On a random note, the airport in Kona is completely outdoors (and the terminal looks like the gift shop area right after you check into a theme park). They can do that, I guess.

These people look like they wanted to be in this picture.

PSA on New Blog Subscription Feature

As per requests and in consideration of the fact that I, *whisper*, backdate many posts such that I actually post less regularly than it appears (don't you dare tell me I'm overthinking things, again), I have developed an email subscription feature.

The account that collects the email addresses is mine, so no worries about spam. Everything is set up so that subscribing and unsubscribing works like every other email list.

Use the "Subscribe" box on the sidebar to sign up. You'll get an email ping on the day that I post and nothing else, simple as that.

If you subscribe, welcome, if you unsubscribe, it's fine - this is for you not me!

Small Quirks About Traveling and Birthdays - Salt Lake City, UT

Spending these past few weeks in the western states, there are several things I have learned that I have never thought to consider:

Firstly, my current location is at a high altitude and quite dry. I'm sure mountain climbers are well familiar with these challenges, but as a green traveler, by the end of the first day here, I was completely worn just from regular breathing and remaining upright. By the time I was in bed, I thought I was miserable, trying to intake oxygen but unable to escape the parched and enveloping air. As it turns out, this was dramatic as I became accustomed to the climate and resumed normal breathing by week two. (And now, why is home so humid?) I've never contemplated that locations could differ not only visually and spatially but also in the way that it physically affects you, even while indoors.

Secondly, time change. I understand the concept of time change, so the issue is getting the direction of change correct. Especially since I'm not on vacation and the time of day actually matters, it is deceptively unintuitive to keep track of whether to add two hours, subtract two hours, or do nothing because the clock is correct. More important yet, should I eat lunch during the lunchtime of the current or former timezone?

Lastly, I realized this week that this is the first year I will be away for work on my birthday. I was reminded of this by the lovely cake pops that were placed on my hotel bed at check-in.

In a way, it feels like a rite of passage as I join the ranks of business travelers who either impressively or unfortunately spend more nights in a hotel than at home each year. That's a subject for another day.

The thing is, I like to perceive myself as a highly practical person. In that sense, a day is a day is a day. For example, I don’t care whether I have celebratory dinner with my family on my actual birthday or if it's two weeks past.

I remember once in an Econ class in college. I’m sure I should have been paying attention, but was momentarily distracted by my inability to recall my own age. I think this occurred in March, or some month that was significantly past my birthday, and I spent a good several minutes trying to calculate from my birth year whether I was 19 or 20. I definitely settled on 19, which was totally incorrect, and I attribute at least part of this forgetfulness to the failure to celebrate age changes properly. The years all start to blend together.

I say all of this half offhandedly, but of course, thanks in large part to the wonderful people around me, I’ve always managed to feel very loved year upon year. I don’t overhype the date of my birth, but I feel very fortunate when people celebrate a day that’s special specifically to me (and my same-birthday cohorts). 

People have been known to ask me cryptically but insistently what kind of cake I like, and I just assume that they’re interested in learning about my preferences. A week later, the exact type of cake shows up, and surprise – my housemates are celebrating my birthday. (2015)

A good friend comes to my house after I’ve had a day full of in-person birthday wishes from all my favorite people - it's the first time that college is in session on my birthday. My friend brings me a tall bottle of chai latte, because she’s younger than me and couldn’t buy alcohol yet as I was turning 21. I obviously love chai lattes. A long letter is attached, which I read and kept on the mantel above my bed until I moved from that apartment a year and a half later. (2014)

I’m not sure what will happen this year, but you know, it’s a long weekend, I’ve accumulated another year of life experiences, and in a way, I'm easily pleased: I need to celebrate only a small amount to be richly reminded that I'm thankful for the people who care about me and also to remember that I have to up my age counter by one once again.

A Stage of Development - Main Update January 2016

Recently, I’ve been wondering about New Year’s resolutions and why they’re so popular, to realize that it signals hope for change and provides a logical deadline of one year to accomplish your goals. Resolutions have never really worked for me because the Gregorian calendar timeline isn’t particularly motivational. However, insofar that each day of each week in life has its own mini-resolution, things have indeed undergone change and progression.

Speaking of all these plane pictures, I was on a recent flight in which it was nighttime and we were descending. As the plane dipped and turned, the pinpoint stars spun as if we were soaring through the cosmos, the sound of silence gracing peace to the anchorless motion. It was incapturable on camera.

In the past six months since I started this blog, one of the defining arcs has been that I have become more acclimated to my job, a point of focus in my life and a source of satisfaction at this step of success.

After new job training in the summer, my first project had all the ingredients of a great transition project to a post-college full-time job: it was locally-based with a small team, and was quite short. Still, in that period, I was surprised by two things related to change. One was how surprisingly challenging it was to manage change and how unfamiliar I was with it due to an apparently very stable past few years. The second insight was that despite an extraordinarily new environment, my internal self and preferences remained very consistent, even though one thinks they will adapt with the surroundings. Really, these two realizations funnel into one insight which is that I overestimated my ability to adjust, and in that process, I discovered myself a little more by noticing the parts of me that remained impervious to environmental shifts against the parts of me that did change.

After the first, my second project was in Boston, which was another good stepping stone in the sense that I have several good friends who moved to Boston post-college and their proximity helped me feel less displaced. Compounded by the fact that the burden of the travel logistics each week was fairly low, this was a good opportunity to acclimate to the travel aspects of my travel-heavy job. I leave out the several ways in which this period of time was not optimal, because the point is that I continued adjusting.

As an aside, Boston is interesting in that many things operate like a big city but it has a smaller city feel. It’s well-developed with good food options and an easy transportation system. The speed of the assembly line at popular lunch places is in my mind ranked one-two with the speediest cities in the country, based on anecdotal observation. On the flip side, the city isn’t full of steel and glass and the streets aren’t all packed and dirty, so one could conceivably describe parts of Boston as “quaint” if that isn't offensive to the Boston sensibilities.

Following the Boston project, I helped with internal work in an industry that I hadn't worked in before. This turned out to be a great way to take a temperature of how much I liked that industry, which is really the whole point of the first few years of consulting. There are lots of other points, but a big point is exploration.

Now, I’m on my third project, quite far across the country. As I become increasingly familiar with my projects and my company, my brain will continue to release more space to process new questions and new information, the themes of which will inevitably trickle into the next main update I’m sure.

In other random news, I rolled over most of my vacation days from last year because I still don’t really understand how to use them. The concept of self-selected breaks is foreign after a lifetime of schooling. Also I’m the kind of person who rarely spends my loyalty points from any brand anywhere, because if I spend them, it has to be darn worth the irrecoverable points. It's slightly irrational, but still, the same concept applies.

These are the tough issues that we contend with in the adjustment to adulthood. Onwards and upwards to the next six months.