The Quebec odyssey is beginning. In 13 minutes I get on a ferry which will take me to Seattle. After that it’s a flight to Minneapolis, a flight to Cleveland, and finally a flight to the beautiful castle-wall enclosed city of Quebec. But that’s not all. Upon arriving in Quebec City the next stop is Gare du Palais aka the local bus station, where I will board an Intercar that will (hopefully) take me to Chicoutimi at 6:30pm. At 9:00 Quebecois Standard Time, I will (hopefully) arrive in Chicoutimi, where I will be ferried (figuratively) to my host family’s house. That is, assuming I have a host family. As of now I still haven’t heard whether or not I have a host family, or who it is. I’m not even entirely sure I’m in the program. I paid $200 bucks (Canadian), and all they sent me was an email to the Program’s blog where there’s a video in French of a guy telling you what to wear in case it rains.
Anyway.
The adventure is beginning. French immersion. A part of North America I have never been to before. No cell phone. No computer. Lots and lots of…I have no idea.
T minus nine minutes.
This entry was written by , posted on July 4, 2010 at 12:02 am, filed under Ravenna, Travels, Uncategorized, the boot. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I have long longed to photograph the stairs by my apartment that lead up to Capitol Hill. These are symbolic stairs; they symbolize the transition between the normal world and the hipster world, two worlds I sometimes find myself caught between. You see: I wear flannel. I wear Vans. I ride my bike places. I sometimes smoke cigarettes.
But I fucking hate hipsters.
This entry was written by , posted on December 15, 2009 at 9:41 pm, filed under Capitol Hill, Travels, alcohol, the boot and tagged Capitol Hill, eastlake, hipster, howe. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
It pays to have talented friends. Greg Miller is an extremely talented photographer. He takes pictures of goats licking up pee and warms up his battery using his belly so he can take 30-minute exposures of the stars in the Enchantments near Leavenworth. That’s called dedication. I had never had the honor of getting my portrait taken by Greg until a week ago — the very last night he had his studio in downtown Seattle. The whole thing was so easy. I stood for about two seconds on a piece of white paper while Greg snapped photos for what seemed like 1.5 seconds. A few days later he sent me the results, and I was stoked out of my mind.
Thanks Greg — shit’s sick! Check out more of Greg’s photos at frostlinephotography.com
This entry was written by , posted on October 6, 2009 at 10:19 pm, filed under Ravenna, Travels, Uncategorized, the boot. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Stranded in Mt. Shasta City. All the high schoolers and misled youth here look like they want to kill us. I think it might be because I’m wearing plaid shorts. Turned down a ride to Reno. I’m an idiot. Though in my defense the guy did have teeth well on their way to decay and a Diet Rockstar in the center console. Not to be trusted. But Reno! Decadence! Gambling! Lee was kind of bummed.
The first part of the day went somewhat smoothly with two successful hitch hiking attempts. The first came from Ed, a photographer for West Coast Cannabis magazine. The second came from a woman whose name we didn’t get who made a living breaking horses. She was chatty and wonderful and she dropped us off in Mt. Shasta City, where we are currently stranded after a few hours of unsuccessful roadside thumbing attempts. Oh, and I left the North Face fleece I got for Christmas from my sister in her car. So. Lame.
Hopefully tomorrow we will make it to San Francisco. If we don’t I guess we can just get on a local bus to Weed, buy a cattle ranch, and try to make a life for ourselves. We’re pioneers.
-Wetzler
This entry was written by , posted on March 27, 2009 at 9:20 pm, filed under Uncategorized, the boot and tagged bummed, hitching, stranded, yreka. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
348 pages into the book Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, and I’m wondering if I should’ve been born a girl. It’s something I have to ask myself after becoming thoroughly engrossed in a book that includes a scene in which the main character goes dress shopping in Port Angeles and experiences an “estrogen high.” I can’t exactly relate to this. Maybe if I ate nothing but Luna bars for the next three and a half weeks I could, but I don’t see that happening.
If I had been born a girl, I would probably be a lesbian. I’m only saying this because right now I’m in Odegaard, I’ve been sitting here for about twenty minutes, and I’ve already fallen in love at least three times. The love isn’t quite yet reciprocal, but I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time. Girl #1 is sitting about 30 feet to my left, looks to be of Indian descent, and has cheek bones that may have been sculpted by Michelangelo. Girl #2 looks vaguely Russian, is sitting to my right, and has a purse that looks expensive. I just caught girl #2 picking her nose. She might’ve just caught be writing about her.
Time to go!
-Wetzler
This entry was written by , posted on March 15, 2009 at 7:10 pm, filed under Uncategorized, the boot and tagged party, provo, stephenie meyer, twilight, utah. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Rippin’ it
Dear Faithful Readers,
By last count there were roughly 42 of you. Why do I use the word “roughly” with the seemingly precise integer “42?” Well, it’s complicated, and you’re not a statistician. So don’t ask questions. The other day apparently there were around “60″ of you. 60! I don’t even know 60 people, so that made me feel pretty good. Actually, the thing that made me feel awesome was when I went to a bar the other night and a friend of a friend recognized me just because of the “blog.” I had never met this girl in my life. She asked me “How Hawaii was.” So as you can see, I’m already famous.
Fame has its downsides, though. I have to wear those hats with the really curvy bills pulled down tight over my eyes all the time so people don’t recognize me. That or really huge sunglasses. The other day at Chipotle some chick was harassing me for an autograph and she scratched me with her newly manicured nails. I screamed “How dare you” and scratched her back. Nobody messes with me when I’m at Chipotle.
Another fairly annoying thing about being famous is the paparazzi. These days everyone has a point and shoot camera, so everyone is a potential paparazzi (or paparazzette). So far nothing too bad has happened but I’m really worried that one of these days I’m going to be getting out of my car and someone’s going to take a really awful crotch shot and put it all over the internet. Right now I don’t have a car so I guess that’s not very likely to happen. But maybe some one will do it when I’m riding the bus. I take the 71 all the time.
In health news I have stopped drinking again ever since my and Darren’s trip to Ensenada. I’ve replaced the drinking, however, with gross amounts of junk food and frozen pizzas. Tonight I polished off a frozen Tony’s pepperoni pizza to myself, which is bad and clocks and at around 1000 calories but isn’t as bad as it used to be because their pizzas have gotten smaller. One of the reasons I haven’t been drinking is because I’ve had a cold, which I’ve been combating by ingesting around 20000 mg of vitamin c a day.
As far as employment goes, I’m still interning at El Extranjero. I’m confused because a lot of the time people there aren’t that warm to me. I mean, some of them are, but most of the people haven’t even introduced themselves. I think most of them look at me and think, “Oh, there’s that new intern. I’ve heard about him. He’s going to be huge,” and they’re kind of intimidated and it’s just easier to walk past my desk without really making eye contact. Or something.
In travel news the next Where’s Wetzler? trip will be this weekend, though to where I do not yet know. I might do it in the same format as the last one, i.e. post photos but never really reveal the location. Keep you guys guessing. Make you study those maps. Do you study maps? Study those maps. I was in the 8th Grade Geography Bee. I got out on the first question because I confused longitude with latitude. Study those maps.
Fondly,
Wetzler
P.S. Natalie Berry
This entry was written by , posted on March 2, 2009 at 12:51 am, filed under Capitol Hill, Uncategorized, master cleanse, the boot and tagged agoodreed, friends, seattle, seinfeld, uw, vancityallie, yobeat, your mother. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
When you go on vacation in a tropical place, there are a couple things you hope for, and a couple things you expect. You expect, for instance, to go swimming. If there is a pool you will swim in that; if there is an ocean you will swim in that; If there are both you will swim in both; If you don’t swim in the ocean you are a loser. You also expect there to be sun, and conversely you expect to get a tan. You expect your friends will be jealous when they see you. You expect people will see your tan and say, “Wow, I want to go to wherever you just got back from.”
And then there are the things you hope. You hope, for instance, that it will be sunny all the time. You hope that you will get to go on some kind of excursion—snorkeling, hiking into a pristine, lush, verdant valley—listening to the shrill call of a scarlet macaw amidst the upper canopy of a cloud forest. You hope that everyone you’re with will get along. You hope the food will be good. You hope you don’t get sick. You hope you don’t get too sunburnt, etc. etc. etc.
And if you’re single, you hope that—well–you hope that maybe you meet someone.
Now hold your horses, hold ‘em right there. I don’t want you to get the impression that all I’ve been doing in Maui is sitting around looking for lithe 23 year-olds ladies without rocks on their ring fingers to walk past my pool chair. But the thought has crossed my mind. When you go on vacation, it’s one of the things you always sort of think about, one of the things you hope for. “Whatever,” you tell yourself. “It could happen. I’m not going to bank on it. I’m not going to expect it. But fuck it. I’m 25. I live with my parents. Give me this, Lord.”
At the Resort Quest Ka’anapali shores, there are no lithe 23 year-olds. Or 25 year-olds. Or 26 year-olds. Or 21 year-olds. Or whatever year-olds. If there are, I haven’t seen them. Maybe I’m going to bed too early. Maybe they’re hiding in the garden pool next to the gazebo. Maybe they only come out between 4:50 and 5:00, and they only go to the gift shop. I have no idea. The point is: there are no girls here.
Now, I just lied, because obviously there are girls here. There are really old girls, and there are really young girls. If you like gawking at 12 year-olds or are trying to lasso 67 year-olds that have had one too many Mai Tai for a shot at early retirement, you’ve come to the right place. But the girls that lie more in my age range fall into two categories, neither of them very favorable: 1) Recently married/pregnant/recently pregnant, and 2) Engaged, or in a relationship the seriousness of which will probably lead to engagement, probably sometime on this trip (“Did you see that whale? Honey? Richard, why are you on your knees in the san—Oh my God!”). To illustrate the dearth of available non almost dead or non very young girls, take the scene around the hotel pool where I was just a scant 15 minutes ago. There were probably 50 people in total sitting around the pool. There was one (1) girl that caught my attention—one that I could have seen myself having a conversation with and possibly selling my soul to caress. And she had a ring on her finger the size of a house. The kind of ring that says, “There is someone in my life that loves me very much. This someone also has gross amounts of money, much of which he is wont to spend on me. Do not talk to me. Look all you want, but risk being blinded by this massive stone prism science experiment on my hand.”
So all I’m left with is my imagination, which, luckily, is very active. I sit by the pool and imagine scenarios in which I might meet an available female, and I people watch. Tourist people-watching is usually entertaining, and my favorite part of tourist people-watching is seeing what everyone reads. I take particular interest, of course, in what the attractive females are reading, because I want to see if judging just by their reading material we could be soul mates.
Which brings me to the second part of this blog: How do I judge a girl based on what she reads? (Not how do I do it, morally, like, how do I morally judge a girl I’ve never met based on the book she has in her hands—but WHAT criteria do I use? What are the deal breaker books? What book makes me go, “Fuck, I need to talk to that girl. She probably likes to laugh and she probably likes Elliott Smith AND Kelly Clarkson and she probably wants to have babies. Tonight.” And what makes me go, “Jesus fucking Christ, I would rather rub my quadricep with sandpaper until it is bloody and raw muscle has been exposed before having to spend two seconds talking to that girl.”
I would need a few days to hash out a specific, logical criteria, so I’m just going to provide some examples:
Example #1: Chick Lit
If I’m walking by the pool and see a cute girl reading The Devil Wears Prada, contrary to what you might believe, I will not immediately write her off as a nimrod. If I see her reading, say, Eat Pray Love, however, I will. I know this seems completely ridiculous and counter-intuitive and possibly even stupid, but here’s my logic: The girl that’s reading Eat Pray Love, some of the worst neo-feminist bullshit to be produced in the last few years, probably thinks it’s good. However, there’s a chance—albeit small—that the girl who’s reading The Devil Wears Prada knows it’s ridiculous and knows it’s semi-trashy and anti-intellectual, but doesn’t care because she wants to be entertained, and also because she just sort of loves it. Like what happened to me when I read the book. If she’s reading The Devil Wears Prada, we’re probably not soul mates—but we could be. If she’s reading Eat Pray Love, we’re definitely not soul mates, and most of me hopes she drowns later in the pool.
Example #2: She doesn’t read
This should’ve been example #1 but I forgot I was going to list it (Readers’ note: this is the part of the blog where I sound like I’m trying to be an elitist asshole). Listen, babe. I’ve got nothing against you personally, it’s just that—well—you’re an idiot. I like watching The Hills as much as the next guy, but I like to balance it out with the written word. Faulkner, Tennyson–maybe some Yeats?
Example #3: The low-brow quick read
You’ve seen this girl. She’s reading Clive Cussler’s latest novel, “The Domino Effect” or some stupid title and she’s probably got Cristian Dior sunglasses on that cover 87% of her face. On Facebook The Da Vinci Code is among her favorite books. Now, I have nothing against vacation reads, but when I see them I am skeptical. What would this girl and I talk about? She’s probably the kind of chick that proclaims to LOVE football. “Seriously, I am, like, the biggest Seahawks fan.” Sweetheart, you are not the biggest Seahawks fan. You are a moron. Get back to Clive and hide behind those sunglasses.
Example #4: The high-brow, slow, I’m-smarter-than-you, non-vacation read
This girl is rare, but be careful when you come across her. Don’t get all hot and bothered just because she’s reading Moby Dick or Paradise Lost or the biography of Mao Zedong. Take a closer look. Is that a cute moderately aged girl or is that an older out-of-work librarian? If it actually is a cute moderately aged girl she’s probably out to prove something. She’s probably super self-righteous and she probably won’t appreciate the potty humor you like to mix in with the “intellectual” stuff. She probably doesn’t like to have fun. BUT, she might also be a repressed sex fiend, so investigate more closely if you can. As a test, ask her what she likes to watch on TV. If she replies, “I don’t watch TV,” run like hell. If she replies, “I don’t know, whatever’s on. Gossip Girl?” you’ve found your dream girl.
So those are a few examples of what could later be expounded into a comprehensive criteria, and also some of the stuff that runs (see: crawls) through my brain when I am left to my own devices and next to a pool that may or may not see the visitation of scantily-clad—shit—I mean—girls that are not dressed as warmly as other girls. If you have any problems with the criteria, call my cell phone.
Until next time.
-Wetzler
Friday on Where’s Wetzler?: Photos!
This entry was written by , posted on February 4, 2009 at 10:19 pm, filed under Uncategorized, the boot and tagged clive cussler, dan brown, hotties, lithe, mai tai, scantily-clad. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Well. He did it. The fucker did it. I’m free. This is Chauncey. I am your father. And I am free.
How do I feel? I feel pretty good. I feel used. How I usually feel. How does he feel? He feels like shit. He feels “unwhole.” He is unwhole. He is nothing without me.
I thought I would write you guys one last time. It’s been a pretty good run, but now it has come to an end. I’m not very good at goodbyes, so I’ll close by going over a few of the fun moments I had with Mark over the last seven weeks. Seven weeks. Was it really that long? At times it dragged by, but at others it flew. I know I did a lot of complaining, but truth be told, I think I developed a bit of a soft spot for the guy. Oh god.
I remember the first night he laid his hands on me. So much hope! He thought I could cure him of all his problems. If he was a seventh-grader taking a vocubulary test he probably would’ve used the word “panacea.” But I was no cure-all for Mark. I didn’t even like him at first. I wanted to ruin his life.
He took me out drinking a lot. Boy, did he take me out drinking. I’ve never seen anyone drink like that—no regard for his health at all. No caution thrown to the wind. Reckless abandon. I kind of had to admire him for that. He would try to dance, too, when he was drunk. It was hilarious. He’d wiggle me out in front of him like the ladies would take pity and want to jump his bones. There was no jumping of bones. I think I got more action than he did.
Then there was the hobbling up hills. He hobbled everywhere. You should’ve seen him in the snow trying to hobble up the hill on Madison between 3rd and 4th to the library to get books for his new internship. A hill so steep it was closed to traffic! And there was Mark, hobbling along. Like a damn fool. A fool in love.
To close my last letter as Mark’s boot, I’d like to recite part of a poem by Eleanor Roosevelt. It goes:
Many people will walk in
and out of your life,
but only true friends will leave
footprints in your heart.
Mark, I hope I have left a boot footprint on your heart. You have certainly left one on mine.
Always,
Chauncey
Good times R.I.P.
This entry was written by , posted on January 11, 2009 at 1:50 am, filed under the boot and tagged gisele, oh em gee, the boot, tom brady, walking cast. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Well, I now know how all you people with Jawbs must feel. For the past two days I’ve been sitting in front of a computer screen doing research on presidential inaugural addresses, and I’m hurtin’. Today when I finally left the house at 4:30 my eyes were blurry from overexposure to Microsoft Word and Chauncey was so excited to go for a walk he almost pulled me right off my feet. But hey, let this be a testament to you: Mark Wetzler is no stranger to the eight-hour workday. I’ve shoveled the shit; I’ve grinded the grind. I used to sit on the ground in the parking lot of an Audi/Volkswagen dealership during my lunch breaks eating corndogs with a guy named Enrique from Guadalajara, staring up at the sky and dreaming of a day when we wouldn’t have to wash other people’s Passats. So yeah, you can call me a man of the people. I’m like Andrew Jackson but without all the Indian killing.
Other than that, this has been a most agreeable holiday. Christmas time always seems to yield unexpected surprises, one of which this year has been the new look of BITV (Bainbridge Island Television). This channel used to be 99.7% unwatchable, but now they do all sorts of semi-engaging local interest stories that are fun to watch because they often feature people you know. The other day I was watching Christmas carols when they panned to Mrs. Hume, my tenth grade English teacher. The sounds coming out of her mouth were what I expect a deer might sound like after getting shot in the neck with a .12 gauge. It was enthralling.
Christmas Eve also proved to be a very entertaining night. Though I’ve always known Nancy to be an “If it feels good, do it” kind of gal, she’s been pretty restrained ever since the incident in ’04 involving a gram of coke in the U-Village Barnes and Noble bathroom and running naked through the QFC parking lot. That night, though, she was back on the bottle. I think my sister might’ve even slipped some Bailey’s into her hot chocolate at some point, because towards the end of the night she was tickling the ivory with a kind of fury I’d never seen. The next day I overheard people on our street asking each other if they had heard “the cat walking around on the piano keys last night” and had a brief vision of Nancy playing “Good King Wenceslas” and accidentally confusing her left hand with her right.
Anyway, I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas as well. If you’re looking to eat half-off food at a dingy college bar with two ex-alcoholics, Darren and I will be at Finn’s tonight.
-Wetzler
This entry was written by , posted on December 28, 2008 at 9:05 pm, filed under Uncategorized, the boot and tagged alcoholics anonymous, bailey's, christmas eve, finn mccool's, u-district. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Though a bit late, Neil Cameron’s recent submission has won the Wetzlerville 2009 “Post a Comment From the Most Exotic Location Possible” Contest Extravaganza. Apparently he’s in Scotland right now drinking “7 different types of single malt whiskey” and probably watching Rob Roy on DVD and playing with a sword. Merry Christmas Neil, you are a man among boys. We in America (’Merca) salute you.
-Wetzler
p.s. I’m not joking when I say that Nancy was semi lit last night. I’ve never heard anyone play “Away in a Manger” with such gusto.
This entry was written by , posted on December 25, 2008 at 10:08 pm, filed under Capitol Hill, Central America, Chipotle, Ravenna, Song of the Day, Uncategorized, master cleanse, the boot and tagged wetzlerville 2009. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.