If it’s in Wired, it’s official, and so I’m proud to admit that all the time I spend hunting for YouTube clips at work is making me about 9% more productive. Finding videos on YouTube is a skill that I hone in my spare time, and I try to bring it into the office as often as possible — at least, within the bounds of professional propriety (I wouldn’t want to juice my productivity with too much video-watching; that would be unfair). This isn’t just following the latest memes or viral videos that pop up on my Twitter feed. This means going out and doing research; knowing how to game the YouTube search engine to find what I want; and figuring out when it’s time to go farther afield, to the lesser-known but also lesser-policed corners of the online video world. In happier days, I would use a certain c-word to describe what I was doing, and be able to mean it without any trace of irony or pre-emptive definition.

But in any case, my year in productivity-destroying videos took me from pirated TV clips to freely released documentaries, from historical curios to slick, modern-day advertising. Some of it felt like the online equivalent of dumpster-diving, when I found treasures that meant a lot to me but were viewed by only a few hundred others. These included days’ worth of concert recordings from several European jazz festivals that were aired on a German arts channel and a rip of the opening sequence from one of my favorite childhood games, Darklands by Microprose. Some of it was the re-discovery of videos I’d long forgotten about, such as the 1980s Dating Montage or Sara Carlson’s bizarre, bird-inspired choreography from the opening credits of the Italian variety show Al Paradise. And some of it was, indeed, viral video-watching: Phil Davison’s speech to the Republican Party of Stark County, OH; Nicole Lang and Chrisophile Konstas’s “Pimento Cheese, Please!”, as seen on The Hairpin; the Pronunciation Manual’s not-so-subtle subversion of the Pronunciation Book project.

Maybe the one thing that I re-watched the most, though, was of Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch’s 67-yard touchdown run against the Saints back in last January’s NFC Wild Card Game. It’s not even that I watched one specific clip over and over. I watched versions of the same video with the TV commentary replaced by Steve Raible and Warren Moon’s radio call, and with all commentary replaced by just the crowd noise (many of them, of course, have been taken down due to copyright claims). I watched amateur videos filmed from right on the field and high in the stands. I watched videos of people watching the play on TV and on their computer, and one clip of Marshawn Lynch himself watching the play in the NFL Films archive. I’ve probably seen that same minute or so of football at least 200 times by now — another 20 just while writing this paragraph.

In past years, I would have spent more time looking at great football runs, or maybe even great sports plays, in general; now, though, I put my much effort into looking for as many camera angles, reaction shots, and commentary overdubs as I can for a smaller subset of moments. It’s not just for Marshawn Lynch that I’m doing this, either. I’m finding that my favorites list tends to have fewer of the web’s 100 funniest viral videos or whatever, and more videos that hew to my specific interests: food-related adventures, old PC games, recordings of live music, and yes, plenty of Seattle Seahawks videos. I rely less and less on the “similar videos” column and more on users with similar interests and the various search engine tricks I’ve picked up over the years. So my favorites list is as rich and growing as ever, but I suspect that it won’t do much for anyone but me.

This was emblematic of my year in web consumption in general. I pruned my Twitter feeds to only those that were truly of value to me rather than the trendiest or most popular ones (goodbye Anthony Bourdain and Alton Brown; hello, Gurgling Cod, The Old Foodie, and a ton of local restaurants). I dropped about half of the blog feeds from my Google Reader — older webcomics that had finally caught on but that I hadn’t laughed at in a while, music blogs whose recommendations I’d stopped paying attention to in a year or so.

So this was the year that my internet horizons shrank drastically, that I became less concerned with cool and cutting-edge and more concerned in cultivating a little patch of cyberspace (do people still use that term? do I still care if they do or not?) where my interests alone lived and thrived. After all, it’s easier than ever to retreat into your own little bubble — the virtual equivalent of your own headspace — thanks not only to the rise of limited-interest blogs, Tumblrs, Twitter feeds, and YouTube user channels, but also to the well-intentioned yet slightly sinister algorithms behind most of the web. How easy it is to have the web go from a vast and scary cultural smorgasbord to a comfortable and cozy retreat, where the stream of food-related factoids is never-ending and Marshawn Lynch scores touchdowns ad infinitum…

If there’s a food show on TV, I’ve probably watched it. From the classic such as The Galloping Gourmet and In Julia’s Kitchen to modern-day shows like Cupcake Wars and (ugh) Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee, food-related programming has provided me with some combination of entertainment, background noise, and nothing-else-is-on fallback viewing for years.

Given the thousands of hours of food and cooking shows I’ve watched, you’d think that quite a bit would have rubbed off on me. Now, I’m no slouch in the kitchen. But some things—for instance, making a pie crust or tempering chocolate—don’t stick and maybe never will, no matter how many times I watch someone demonstrate them on TV. What’s going on here?

To quote Erica Gruen, the former exec of Food Network: “people don’t watch television to learn things.” Is she right? Well, I’ve seen plenty of Julia and Jacques and Giada, but I didn’t learn much from them (or at least, their shows). For me, techniques, tips, and dishes leap off of the screen and into my brain only when there is an accompanying spectacle. When I cut up a whole chicken, I don’t see the practiced, manicured hands of Martha Stewart but the flying cleaver of Iron Chef Chen Kenichi doing it. I know the flavor of ancho chiles off the top of my head because of Bobby Flay’s constant reminders that they taste “like a spicy raisin.” And I have the confidence to flambé something because I’ve seen it done dozens of times from a variety of camera angles.

In other words, my ability to recall the actual skills-and-recipes part of food TV pales in comparison to my ability to recall all the food-related showboating, excesses, and grotesqueries that regularly appear on my television. No wonder I glaze over, or change the channel, when we get to the judging portions of Top Chef or Chopped — although I stay tuned for Jeffrey Steingarten’s corpulent crankiness on Iron Chef America, the exception that proves the rule.

My personal highlight reel begins with the kinds of things that test your constitution: the perpetually smarmy Andrew Zimmern choking his way through some of the grossest-sounding stuff in southeastern Asia: fermented rice and fish, rats, and durian (a fruit that, as I later discovered, does not taste all that bad); Sandra Lee’s talent for making gross meat products ; the fact that every McRib commercial features people smearing sauce all over their faces and/or chewing with their mouths open.

From grossness to plain gluttony: the episode of No Reservations where Anthony Bourdain and David Chang eat their way through most of Momofuku Ssam Bar’s menu, and then get inspired to reminisce about their guilty pleasures (Bourdain’s is the “nuclear orange” mac and cheese from KFC; Chang’s is chicken nuggets with sweet and sour dipping sauce); The midpoint of every final challenge of every Man vs. Food, when a sweating, overstuffed Adam Richman has to psych himself up to eat the rest of his multiple-pound entrée du jour. If the mind doesn’t boggle, at least the stomach churns.

But the most enduring memory of televised food I may ever have came on Super Bowl Sunday, 2007. I was stuck in a hotel room in northern Indiana in the middle of a blizzard — temperatures had dipped to 30 below with wind chill, such that it was physically dangerous to go outside for more than 15 minutes. It was hours before the Super Bowl would begin (and the Bears would lose in an unspectacular fashion). So all I could do was watch TV.

Tired of the endless pre-game shows, I flipped over to ESPN2, which was showing basically the anti-Super Bowl: the Competitive Eating Championships. Four or five guys had to eat their way through consecutive dish-based rounds, each served on a gigantic platter: spaghetti bolognese, cheese fries, chicken wings, and the final “combo” round (featuring several different kinds of fried appetizers all at once). The contestants had to devour as much food (by weight) as they could without choking or suffering what was euphemistically called a “reversal of fortune” — i.e. throwing up. Fascinated, I watched all the way through the third round. But there are only so many times you can watch someone else throwing up — especially in a close-up shot against a black background — before you start to feel queasy yourself.

No, it hasn’t been all bad. One episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives inspired me to check out a ‘50s-style diner that was right on my very doorstep, but that I would never have noticed otherwise. And I learned about the Breton pastry called the kouign amann by way of Pat and Gina Neely’s raves about it on The Best Thing I Ever Ate .

In most cases, though, my ability to remember a piece of food-related programming seems to depend on its ability to engage my gag reflex rather than my cerebral cortex. I can’t contend with five-pound hamburgers, twenty-course meals, and cooking shows where exotic ingredients and bursts of technical showmanship are the norm rather than the exception; I’m cheap, lazy, and easily awed.

And I have to say that it’s pretty sobering, realizing that you are constantly proving a television executive right.

I. The Risks of Plagiarism

A group of four roommates each took the same course, an introduction to marine biology, in four consecutive years. It was taught by an old professor who was nearing retirement, and was known campus-wide for being what we called a “gut class” — in other words, an easy pass. Not only was the professor an easy grader, he also never changed his syllabus, the required textbooks, or even the assignment prompts. Cheap, unchallenging, and easily gamed: what more could anyone ask for?

The first of the roommates took the course their freshman year. He attended class faithfully (and even remained awake for most of them), did decently on exams, and wrote a final paper at the last minute that earned him a B in the class.

The next year, the second roommate took the same class. He skipped a few classes, borrowed the books to study, and, when it came time to do the final paper, simply copied his roommate’s old paper wholesale, with one minor change: he added a cover sheet. He earned a B+ in the class.

Their junior year, the third roommate took the class. He only showed up to the first and last classes and on exam days, he read his roommate’s notes but didn’t bother with the books at all. He submitted the exact same paper as his previous two roommates had done — except this time, he added a picture of a whale to the front cover. He got an A in the class.

The last roommate, figuring that he couldn’t argue with three years of success, and having been afflicted with a particularly bad case of senioritis, took the class, at least on paper: despite being on the official enrollment, he never showed up, never bothered with the reading, and memorized the answers from past exams without learning any of the concepts. But he balked at the prospect of turning in the same final paper for the fourth year in a row. Surely, he figured, if the writing didn’t tip off the professor, the cover sheet would. So he went back to the original: no picture, no title page.

But when the last roommate got his paper back, he was shocked — he’d received an F on the paper, and consequently an F in the class. The professor had left him only one comment:

“Still a good paper, but what happened to the whale?”

II. Don’t Believe Everything You Hear

During dinner one evening, one of my friends started to tell us about a recent class he’d taken on genetic diversity in plants, and its consequences for agriculture — specifically, the plight of the modern banana. Wild bananas are full of hard, inedible seeds, so in order to make bananas palatable, commercial banana growers have developed cultivars that have no seeds. This makes the bananas sterile, so in order to produce more banana trees, farmers cut part of the banana’s underground stem and transplant it in a new location.

However, this also means that most bananas are genetically identical to each other, and are susceptible to the same diseases. And recently, a mutation of Panama disease has started attacking the poor Cavendish, which, like the Gros Michel, has little genetic diversity and can’t stand up to this new, improved blight. We may be on the verge of another great banana shortage.

Now, all of this is true: you can find out about it on Wikipedia, or in the pages of Popular Science, or The New York Times. And because our friend was both a reliable source of science news and not given to hyperbole, bathos, or absurdity in any form, we of course took him at his word.

But then he said, in complete seriousness, “The professor said that’s why NASA is going to try to save bananas by launching them into space.”

III. Rules of Thumb

Life lessons are abundant at the beginning and the end of the year, and a lot of them are pretty much the same. For instance, remember that if a school newspaper interviews you, always ask to double-check your quotes before they go to print. Remember that they are students like you, and their budding sense of journalistic integrity has to compete with things like alcohol, laziness, and sloppy note-taking. Sometimes, it makes for harmless nonsense. Other times, you can find yourself with an undeserved reputation for libertarian nutjobbery or promiscuity.Other, pithier advice:

• It is possible to create an ersatz lava lamp with a glass of water, some olive oil, and a few shakes of table salt.
• For one week only, you may take a seat next to a totally random person in the dining hall, talk about the committees you were on in high school, or share your SAT scores. After that, most people will mistake your eager freshman solicitousness for smug nosiness, and will also probably be right.
• If a lot of your peers are going on to Wall Street, it probably means the market is probably on the verge of a major correction.
• Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear. Beer before liquor, also great.

Photo by Kevin Dooley

In August of 1998, to celebrate my thirteenth birthday, my parents bought a TV for my bedroom. It was a used color TV from the mid ‘80s, complete with fake woodgrain sides and a first-generation remote control, and it was a conduit for a cultural awakening. I considered it my solemn duty to stay up until two in the morning so I could watch reruns of Keeping Up Appearances and M*A*S*H. I continued that ritual for three weeks straight, until the night my dad burst into my room in the middle of an episode of Mama’s Family, and whispered, “Come quick, there’s a UFO outside!”

As far as I was concerned, this was entirely plausible. First, Dad said he’d seen an unusual formation of lights moving erratically and soundlessly in the night sky; what little air traffic we got from our small local airport consisted entirely of private planes and commercial helicopters, and pretty much stopped after sundown. Second, we lived in the kind of place that you’d expect UFO sightings to happen: on a five-acre stretch of hillside about ten miles from the nearest town, in between a horse pasture, a cherry orchard, and a quarry. Third, we were right by the town of McMinnville, Oregon, home to the Trent UFO Sighting of 1950, and, consequently, the second-largest annual UFO Festival in the country, after Roswell’s, of course. And finally, I was a newly-minted teenager with an overactive imagination who’d been exposed to a few too many alien abduction stories.

So Dad and I scrambled outside in our pajamas (Mom had elected to stay in bed), with binoculars and camera at the ready. And sure enough, there was a triangular formation of lights off to the southeast. Except that it wasn’t moving erratically. Or all that soundlessly; we could just barely hear the distant but familiar hum of rotor blades. We looked at it through the binoculars and saw nothing more than a large cargo helicopter that was flying unusually low and unusually late at night.

“Well, I guess it wasn’t a UFO,” Dad said. An awkward pause. “Sorry to get you out here for nothing.”

In typical adolescent fashion, I muttered something about not caring that much, trying to project casual indifference. But truthfully, in those few moments, I’d experienced about as wide a range of emotions as I ever had (especially as my first kiss was still some months away): discovery, disappointment, and embarrassment, all because I still believed that yes, there really could be something unexplained out there.

Before I got my own bedroom set, my parents would only let me watch TV with them until 9 p.m. On most weeknights, we’d watch Seinfeld together; on Fridays, we’d watch Unsolved Mysteries.

It’s probably hard to imagine now, but in 1990, about sixteen million people tuned in every week to watch Robert Stack stalk around the screen in a trench coat and talk about murders, ghosts, demons, and aliens. (Here’s a representative example.) For contrast, nowadays a basic cable show about paranormal investigators is considered a surprise hit when it gets only two million viewers, and the major networks won’t even touch anything that takes the occult seriously.

And the show took it quite seriously. Stories about crop circles were presented alongside ones about true crime. Clairvoyants appeared with con men; ghosts with gold miners.

More so than Stack’s gravelly narration, the Gothic backdrops, or even the melodramatic re-enactments, this implied equivalence between reality and the paranormal kept me glued to the screen while the show was on — and thinking about it long after. The show paraded an endless supply of witnesses, experts, and authorities that wore down at my sense of skepticism over the show’s decade-long run on NBC. It was easy to attribute the Nazca Lines and pictographs of Ancient Astronauts to the crazy beliefs of prehistoric people, and to ignore the hokey animated flying saucers as low-budget sexing-up of an unreliable story. But what about the respectable Joe and Jane Six-Packs who claimed, for instance, that they were abducted and tortured in the wilderness of Pennsylvania, or that they suffered debilitating radiation exposure at the hands of a UFO? What about the footage of lights doing mysterious things in the skies over major cities? And what about the real-live physicists and NASA analysts — armed with tape-fed supercomputers and image enhancement software! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2lPrgHT0y4] — who could make something as farfetched as the Face on Mars seem legitimate? Who was I to argue against all this?

For years, watching Unsolved Mysteries was the last real activity I did before bed on Friday nights. And so, while I was brushing my teeth or taking a shower, I’d actually replay the segments from the show — at least, all the ones that weren’t true crime stories — in my head. Aliens populated more than a few of my dreams, and lurked around the edges of my consciousness as I was falling asleep, too: I’d often startle awake when a twig would snap outside or the headlights of a passing car would shine into my room in the middle of the night, thinking that by the time I opened my eyes I’d find a pair of blob-headed humanoids standing over me.

In time, aliens became a waking interest of mine, too. During summer vacations, I would make my way through the occult section at the local library; to this day, I can still remember the standard taxonomy of aliens, from Greys and reptilians to Men in Black and energy beings. My bedroom bookshelf featured not just pristine editions of Robinson Crusoe and The Giver but also books like My Teacher is an Alien and A Wrinkle in Time that were full of extraterrestrials. And yes, I have to admit it, I faithfully watched the last few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (And played the collectible card game, and built starship models…)

But by 1998, I’d glutted myself on all things alien-related, and I was ready to move on. Incidentally, so was Unsolved Mysteries: Robert Stack now shared hosting duties on Unsolved Mysteries with the telegenic Virginia Madsen, and the show now focused more on crime than the paranormal anyway. I quickly got into the habit of drowning out what little dread and fascination that alien abduction stories still inspired with the glut of mediocre syndicated sitcoms that aired after 11 p.m. — goodbye E.T., hello Al Bundy.

Dad’s fake UFO sighting was the last, failed test of my extraterrestrial interest. Of course I was disappointed that we weren’t going to make some kind of first contact, but even more so I was disappointed that I’d let myself believe that it was, in fact, a possibility. My sense of skepticism had been battered into submission by culture and circumstance, but it was time to worry about grownup things like girls, grades, and cars and give my hyperactive, hypersensitive imagination a rest. I got back in bed and resolved never to get spooked by things that go bump in the night again.

Faith is all-or-nothing proposition. As Don Draper put it, “You already know about Jesus; either he lives in your heart, or doesn’t.” And allowing your faith to lapse is not nearly the same thing as disavowing it altogether, whether you believe in God or nature spirits or the existence of extraterrestrial invaders; it can come back at any time, as if you’ve never stopped believing at all.

In August of 2002, the movie Signs came out, and about a dozen of my high school friends and I went to watch it in theaters. It was a sort of valedictory gathering for us: the next morning, I’d be off to my parents’ new place in Ohio before starting college on the East Coast. I felt like I was on the cusp of true, bittersweet adulthood, about to experience not just the highs of starting a new life in college, but also the lows of leaving a past one behind.

For all its faults, the movie unearthed the neuroses that had lain dormant for four years. It’s true that there were plenty of jump-scares, when weird humanoid arms appeared out of nowhere along with a jolt of orchestral noise. But I also saw some of my worst fears — isolation, powerlessness, abduction by malevolent aliens — writ large across the face of Mel Gibson and his family. Even the corny, nonsensical ending didn’t change the fact that I was starting to feel my preteen anxieties start to creep back into my psyche.

If culture conjured up my old psychological demons, then circumstance made them stick around. It just so happened that my parents’ new place was a one-story house in the middle of a cornfield in a nondescript Midwestern town — the kind of place where you might find crop circles and the occasional terrifying alien on the roof. And once again, I found myself bolting upright whenever I heard a little too much rustling outside, or when a car’s headlights shone into my room. UFOs became just as plausible a fear as if I was twelve, all over again. Real adulthood, it seemed, was still a ways away.

Photo by Heather Durdil

Every profession has its own peculiar jargon, but the language of book reviewers probably comes under more scrutiny than that of any other group (except politicians). If you’ve read more than four book reviews in your life, then you’re familiar with their hyperventilated style. A good book can be a “tour-de-force,” “poignant,” “lyrical,” “un-put-downable,” “pitch-perfect”; a bad book can be “woefully inadequate” or “staggeringly bad,” with characters that are “cookie-cutter” and settings that are “derivative.” Ones that don’t quite fit in one genre or another are described like a mashup: “Nicholas Sparks meets Thomas Pynchon” or some other such formulation. The list goes on.

So it comes as no surprise that there are plenty of specific complaints about the reviewer’s argot. My own favorite is from Dwight Garner, by way of Twitter: “To call a nonfiction book ‘magisterial’ is to get an intellectual hall pass; you no longer have to discuss the book in any meaningful way.”

But out of sympathy for the beleaguered book reviewers out there, and in the spirit of offering solutions instead of merely pointing out problems, I’d like to offer them some suggestions as substitutes for the hoarier chestnuts in their arsenal.

Move the goalposts

Instead of prattling on about things like plot and characters, imagine some new criteria by which to judge books and their authors. Any book without a sex scene in the first 20 pages (5 pages for a romance novel), for example, should be described as “arid.” Young adult novels deal out plenty of life lessons about relationships, but where are the ones that provide sufficient personal finance advice? And perhaps we ought to consider how well writers of transgressive literature describe food handling and preparation.

Commit to hyperbole

If you’re going to lie and say you’ve thrown a book across the room, you may as well take such expressions to their logical extreme. A possible replacement: “I put down the book, scratched a curse in Hermes’s name against the author on a sheet of lead, and nailed it to the wall of the local temple, in the manner of a Roman defixio.” Better to be outrageous than predictable.

Use eponyms instead of synonyms

This neatly sidesteps the “elongated yellow fruit” problem. An author whose prose might be called “achingly beautiful” instead becomes “the Delacroix of literature”; a “darkly funny” book is now a “Rabelaisian comedy.” If fine artists aren’t your thing, then maybe American presidents might be a better comparison: “Taft-like excess,” “Cleveland-esque genre-bending” or “Clintonian eroticism.”

Mix highbrow and lowbrow diction

And I mean really go for it.: “Polylogic epistolary novels are the new intradiegetic-homodiegetic narratives.” “Not your father’s textual communities.” “Epizeuxis much?”

Borrow buzzwords from other industries

For example, turn bestsellers into “results-driven novels,” and debut authors into “entrepreneurial writers.” Take a line from restaurant critics and remark on how “toothsome,” “decadent,” or “chocolatey” someone’s writing is. Obviously, “well-crafted sentences” should become “artisanal sentences.”

With any luck, these will all get their own squares in the game of Book Review Bingo sooner rather than later.

Photo by risa-i

Photo by Michael Bussell

After 1 a.m., the world’s culinary horizons contract sharply. At 4, they extend no farther than your front door: to the phone, where you can order delivery from restaurants of last resort, or to the kitchen, where your last week’s worth of meal choices stare back at you from condensation-covered Tupperware and greaseproofed cardboard take-out boxes. The first is not an option. The second is generally not much better. Insomniacs, despair.

Consider the havoc that the refrigerator wreaks on your leftovers. Pasta, once perfectly toothsome, devolves into a gummy tangle; elegant sauces separate into water and everything else, as if centrifuged. What was pleasingly, shatteringly, crisp — bacon, for instance, or fried chicken — generally retains a certain robust chewiness, which can be depressing if you were hoping for some semblance of the original. Foams and infusions, and most things that come from the rarified world of molecular gastronomy, wilt under prolonged cold storage. Best to eat your highly engineered mac and cheese the day of.

There is no time to overthink things; the cold, unforgiving reality of daytime approaches all too quickly. So begin with dessert first: a soft, gently sweetened panna cotta, a last surviving mini cannolo that may as well have been airlifted from Sicily itself. A slice of lemon meringue pie, the meringue a delicate cloud, the lemon curd unctuous and bright. This will satisfy your initial craving for something, anything, but only just.

Fortunately, the night is young, and your fridge is full. Of the slices of jamon serrano that were the only highlight from Tuesday’s mediocre Spanish restaurant. Of half a loaf of cornbread whose best feature is its ability to absorb vast quantities of butter and honey. Of the cubes of safety-vest-orange Pasteurized Cheese Product, refreshingly unpretentious after a day of restaurant food with too much aspiration and not enough consistency.

Rely next on those classic American staples: large quantities of red meat and potatoes, whether baked, boiled, or fried. Leave them cold, warm them up, dress them with lashings of hot sauce or ranch dressing (spare the gravy glop, though), but eat them, eat them! Marvel at how the combination of starch, salt, and fat keeps the night’s chill, real or imagined, at bay.

And yes, Virginia, some things do in fact improve with cold storage. A bowl of fiery pozole takes on a pleasing brininess when eaten straight out of the Tupperware. The ruins of a lump crab tower, freed from the tyranny of its clichéd, circle-molded existence on a restaurant plate, tastes better as a mouthful with a uniformly citrusy flavor profile. These are truths that you feel in your gut, though you may never be able to express them as part of your day job.

At this point, your stomach may be protesting, your blood sugar levels rocketing, your eyelids drooping once again. Do not give in to biological imperatives. Move along to the cereal shelf—you do have your 2% handy, don’t you? Revel in the first great triumph of American food science, the manhandling of pulverized grain into all manner of shapes, sizes, and colors, their deceptive branding (“Whole grain! Great source of vitamins and minerals!”) making it easy to justify the jolts of sugary sweetness being delivered to your head (and heart, and pancreas) in bowl-sized doses.

The takeaway here? That three in the morning — or four, if your kitchen raids take as long as mine generally do — is no time for heroics. Yes, stored foods may lose their textural appeal, or end up further toward the shirt-cardboard-and-sawdust end of the flavor spectrum; yes, you may have to do quite a bit of scrounging and shoveling before your reptilian complex (the part that controls hunger, natch) quiets down.

But it is surely better to face the onrushing dawn, and the vast, alienating world of restaurant criticism, fortified by the remnants of meals past. Fret not, for in the wee small hours of the morning, your reputation as a Serious Food Professional can never be sullied, no matter how many clover-shaped marshmallows or tins of potted, preserved meat you consume. These are the assumptions on which one’s thin veneer of sanity often rests.

Illustration courtesy of the Boston Public Library

In 1996, Keith Lockhart inaugurated his tenure as the new conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra with a tribute to Broadway that featured the singing and dancing talents of Jason Alexander (no joke: he was pretty good). The opening number, or at least one of the first ones, was a rendition of the song “Ring Them Bells” by Liza Minelli, which is about someone named Shirley Duvore, who, on the verge of spinsterhood, decides to leave her Manhattan apartment and travel the world in search of a husband. After dallying her way across Europe, she ends up in the Balkans, where she meets and hits it off with — here’s the kicker! — her next door neighbor, Norm. She gets a husband, Liza gets a show tune, and I’m stuck for the rest of my life with the image of George Costanza doing his best Fran Drescher impression as he sings about the woman “who traveled ‘round the world to meet the guy next door.”

The song, as one of my old teachers would say, is “pure froth.” But I think it sticks with me because it expresses something that most world travelers will recognize: the fear that, no matter how hard you try and how far you travel to find something new, you can never really get away.

It’s definitely not a feeling that most of history’s great travelers would have recognized. It’s almost a reverse cliché, but until the arrival of the jet engine and the television, the world really was much bigger, which is to say that you had to travel to experience most of it. Julia Child couldn’t have had her sole meunière-induced revelation anywhere but Rouen, for instance, and Alexis de Tocqueville wouldn’t have learned, or prophesied, about democracy except in the United States. As anyone who’s read ibn Battuta, or Mark Twain, or Chiang Yee knows, travel writing exemplified what the Russian critic Viktor Shlovsky called ostranenie, which translates as “defamiliarization” — in other words, the ability of certain kinds of writing to make the world seem incongruous or unfamiliar, forcing the reader to dwell and perhaps struggle with deeper truths.

There is much less mystery to the world these days. If I weren’t writing this right now, I could be watching any one of a dozen travel shows that cover topics as diverse as Vietnamese food, Budapest’s nightlife, and African safaris. Or I could go down to the bookstore and buy a variety of pretty comprehensive guides to hundreds of places. Or I could spend an hour or two clicking through the photo galleries on National Geographic’s website.

And it isn’t just that we can see more of the world more easily than any other humans in history. We can also have it interpreted for us in a dizzying variety of ways, from the legions of earnest amateur travel bloggers that populate the web — here included — to the weekly onslaught of glib, travel-induced maxims by the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman.

This is why it’s no surprise that the great old guard of travel writers, like Ian Frazier, Michael Palin, and Paul Theroux, have had to go to ever more remote places (Siberia, Gibraltar) or twist themselves in logistical knots (travel around the world in 80 days, or pole to pole) in order to grab people’s attention. London is officially boring; Mumbai is passé; even McMurdo station in the Antarctic has been the setting for more than a few good travelogues. So where do we go — where can we go — from here?

Allegedly, G.K. Chesterton once said that the difference between travelers and tourists is that “the traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” (Full disclosure: I’ve quoted it once, too.) It’s a great quotation, until you think about it a bit. For one thing, I’ve never been able to track down the source for this quotation, so I am not sure it’s something G.K. Chesterton ever wrote, said, or otherwise thought. But more to the point, I’m not even sure if there is something inherently better or even ontologically different about being a “traveler” as opposed to a “tourist” anymore. Just because you don’t have a sightseeing itinerary doesn’t mean that you’re any closer to finding something “authentic” or “real”; similarly, does standing near or looking at or taking a photo of places where great (or wicked) people did great (or wicked) things somehow create an invisible connection to the past that didn’t exist before, and can’t be found in books, TV, music, film, or the web? In the end, the de-defamiliarization of the world leaves us with even less of an ability to invoke the semi-mystical, self-actualizing powers of travel as they have traditionally been understood.

That’s not to say that we should all give up on going out. But we should acknowledge that, for most of human history, the mere act of seeing foreign sights could be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and now it’s a commonplace. So we ought not to expect that standing in front of Angkor Wat, eating sole meuniere, or retracing the steps of Alexander the Great will automatically lead to a flash of enlightenment the way it has for generations of travelers.

Happily, it is still true that travel compresses a wide range of experience in an extremely short amount of time, and forces us to make, do, and suffer things that we wouldn’t in our everyday life. To the extent that it causes us to look beyond our personal, professional, and digital obligations, it’s still creating that ostranenie. And that means that travel is still a good thing; it still works on us the way it has.

Which brings us, in a rather roundabout way, to that Liza Minelli number. Yes, the song makes Shirley Duvore the butt of a little joke, that she wasted her effort on traveling halfway across the world when all she had to do was go ten feet to find a husband (there’s a feminist critique of this song waiting to be made, too — but in the words of Gertrude Stein, not everything can be about everything). But it’s hard to fault her too much, because she made an interior journey to complement her exterior one. To me, that’s the point of this whole traveling business in the first place.

Illustration courtesy of the Boston Public Library

Last weekend I almost got into a car accident with a Duck Tour. The accident would have almost certainly been my fault — I cut the guy off because I didn’t realize how fast he was going — and my little maneuver earned met a Duck Tour full of (entirely deserved) boos.

Most of the time, I feel bad about my driving-related mistakes. But I didn’t care that I’d almost been killed. I cared that these people — tourists — were invading my space. In fact, what I really wanted to say was something that I’d once heard a random local on the street shout at another Duck Tour: “get the fuck out of my city!”

Ironically, at that moment I was shuttling a friend from out of town around Seattle in trying to show her the best parts of the city in two breathless days. The previous day, we’d done the Space Needle and Pike Place Market and downtown, plus a few choice spots along the Pike/Pine triangle (my favorite pizza place, my second-favorite coffee shop, and one of the 25 Best Bars in America, according to GQ). That day, we were in the middle of a tour of everything north of downtown, just pulling out of our parking spot in Fremont, about a block away from its Troll. Also on the agenda: a couple of parks, a couple more restaurants, and even more coffee shops.

What we were doing wasn’t tourism, though. We, being educated citizens of the world, would never stoop to such depths. We are constitutionally averse to it. So we couldn’t have been tourists. Right?

About a month beforehand, my parents and I visited Prague for the first time. On our first full day there, we took a guided walking tour of the city, starting in the Old Town Square and ending up by the home of Prague’s symphony orchestra. We stayed in a hotel that catered mainly to foreigners, and ate at the places recommended in all the guidebooks. (One particular highlight: the “Old Prague Platter,” which featured two kinds of duck, four kinds of pork products, and three kinds of dumplings.) Even when I went off by myself to see the Frank Gehry’s Dancing House, the Museum to Communism, and the theater where Vaclav Havel and the Civic Forum ran the opposition government during the 1989 revolution, I was still on a quest to see the city’s architectural and historical highlight reel. In other words, my family and I were, incontrovertibly, tourists.

I had a chance to sample, but not savor, Prague. Yet at the end of our three-day trip, I felt like I already knew, and possibly even loved, the city. It’s a familiar feeling, not mere acquaintance but not yet friendship. Affection? Infatuation? Lust? Whatever it was, it left me imagining myself buying a small cottage near Petrin Hill and spending long summer evenings with a glass of Pilsner Urquell and a plate of trdelník, doing whatever it is bohemian ex-pats do.

And then I think hard about what I’d really done in the city. Which amounts to this: I saw some nice buildings, stayed in a nice hotel, learned a few words in Czech (Jedno pivo, prosím; a beer, please), took photos of some Culturally Important Things, and bought a few souvenirs. I went to one supermarket, and at least a half-dozen souvenir shops. I saw the same parts of Prague that thousands, if not millions, do every year. I had only seen Prague’s greatest hits, not Prague itself.

Seattle is my home, which is a bit strange since I’ve lived here for only nine months. Before that I was in South Bend, Indiana for three years; before that, Nottingham, England for one; before that, Boston for four. But this is the first place where I consciously and un-ironically refer to myself as a “local.”

What do I mean by that? I certainly haven’t seen all there is to see in Seattle by a long shot: there are still parks to visit, restaurants to explore, and yes, plenty of landmarks that I still haven’t seen up close. Nor can I put together a guide to the city from memory; I had to look at such local sources as The New York Times to put together a credible weekend itinerary for my out-of-town friend.

I guess what separates my knowledge of Seattle from my knowledge of Prague is simply this: I know enough about Seattle to be let down by it. I’ve had bad coffee at bad coffee places, and have even been served bad coffee at my favorite places. I’ve learned that the Space Needle is overpriced and the view isn’t that great, yet I keep having to go there. I have strong opinions about the local papers. I am tired of rain, traffic, and people who complain about rain and traffic.

And that’s why it was easy for me to get irrationally angry at that Duck Tour. They saw a version of Seattle that’s been dead for me a long time — one that, in all honesty, I don’t really regret losing. After all, disappointment is an inevitable part of life; a relationship without disappointment is not much of a relationship at all. In that sense, I like the hundreds of little defeats that Seattle has handed me, if only because it shows me that the city isn’t all good.

At the same time, I keep Seattle’s disappointments to myself. I almost didn’t want to take her to the grocery store or go back to my apartment except to crash at the end of the day, out of fear that she’d remember only the workaday parts of Seattle — the only parts that really are for locals only. I wanted her to remember the city as a place she vacationed, and to preserve its romance for her.

It’s the same impulse that I’ve felt in almost all of my other relationships. I never fight or air my grievances in public, and I try not to let any of my anxieties and stresses and conflicts break my façade of pure contentment. In private, though, I know that all relationships are a lot of work, and — perhaps to a fault — am constantly worrying whether I’m doing it right at any given moment.

Thus, I want discomfort when I’m away from home but bliss for everyone who visits me, because that’s what differentiates real relationships from superficial impressions. And it’s that dual standard that can drive me into existential fits about the whole enterprise of traveling.

It’s almost certainly a sign that I’m over-thinking things. Even getting a tiny bit of a city’s true character, however “fake” or touristy or whatever it might be, is infinitely more enriching than getting nothing at all. And maybe all this is just a specific symptom of something much larger: the realization that a few days are never enough to see all there is to see in a place. Which, in retrospect, is not a bad thing at all.

Illustration courtesy of the Boston Public Library

It doesn’t help that it’s much easier to recall the bad flights over the good ones. In my head, I can still picture the flight into Cleveland in the middle of winter, where the turbulence on our final approach was so bad that the flight attendant had to stop collecting trash and stagger back to her jumpseat. During another flight over Reno, as soon as we cleared the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the airplane dropped about 50 feet (and my stomach went the opposite direction). And I remember when an airplane started diving so steeply that my book — it was The Adventures of Robin Hood — floated off of my tray table and hung in mid-air, as if I were in zero-gravity training for NASA. All those smooth, unremarkable transits have faded away; each ride I’ve taken through a thunderstorm stays with me as clear as if it had happened yesterday.

All this means that my “normal” mode of air travel is a bit different than other people’s. For one thing, I actually read the airplane safety cards and pay attention to each safety demo, right down to twisting in my seat to check whether the nearest exit is, in fact, behind me. I also have an encyclopedic knowledge of the SkyMall catalogue: during periods of moderate-to-heavy turbulence, I can’t just sit still and do nothing, but I can’t concentrate on anything I actually want to read. So I rely on Hammacher Schlemmer and company to give me enough of a dose of absurdity ($500 Lord of the Rings chess sets! $8,000 electronic massage chair!) to provide a temporary refuge.

That’s just the beginning. Over the years, my brain has developed an astonishing capacity for unpleasant or bizarre airplane-related trivia. Did you know, for example, that the part of the airplane that moves the least in turbulence is supposedly just over the wings, where most aircraft have their center of mass? Or that the National Geographic Channel’s show Seconds from Disaster has two times as many aviation-themed shows than any other topic? Or that the worst accident in aviation history is the Tenerife disaster [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster], when two 747s collided on the runway, thanks to pilot error?

I get that all this is illogical, irrational, stupid, childish, and the classic example of the “misleading vividness fallacy,” whereby people assume that, for instance, things that are more memorable are also more frequent. The lack of control, potential for catastrophe, and disproportionate media attention given to plane crashes makes them much more horrific than heart disease or cancer. And statistically speaking, all other methods of travel — trains, bikes, cars, you name it — are riskier than riding in an airplane.

Since when has reason trumped emotion, though? Notice, for instance, that I’ve avoided certain morbidity-related words in this essay, as if using them will put a jinx on my next flight, which is in just under two weeks — one point in the irrational column. I know that my chances of being involved (euphemism again) in an accident are miniscule, and I understand that air travel is safe. But knowledge and understanding are poor containers for something so primal as fear.

On some level, they feed off of each other. Yes, I’ve learned a lot of these airplane-related facts by chance. But not all. Call it ghoulish curiosity, or anxiety-induced psychosis; either way, I’m so nervous about flying that I start to worry about my next aerial adventure weeks before I actually get to the airport. I don’t know if any of this actually helps mitigate things.

One last story, then. During that flight where my Robin Hood book floated away from my tray table, people were screaming, and more than one person started crying. All to be expected. But what I remember most vividly was the guy who was sitting in the row next to me, gripping his armrests so hard that his knuckles turned white, and laughing — not hysterically or maniacally, but in short bursts that were somewhere between a whimper and a bark. The louder people screamed, and the bumpier things got, the more he would laugh in his weird staccato fashion.

I’m not at the point where I laugh when I ought to be afraid. But I understand the perverse pleasure that comes from reveling in one’s well-cultivated fears. And I know how easily these fears force their way out in the middle of strong turbulence.

Illustration courtesy of the Boston Public Library

My vehicular arrested development began, I think, when I was little and my next-door neighbors got a Power Wheels. Every day that it was nice out (and, it being Northern California, it was nice a lot), I basked in the passenger seat of that bright red miniature Jeep. Still, no matter how hard I lobbied for a Power Wheels of my own, my parents gently refused to indulge me. Disappointment: the first thing I learned to associate with a motor vehicle.

A few pratfalls put me off of other modes of transportation. A pair of skinned knees and a spectacular (I’m told) flip-over-the-handlebars convinced me that a bike without training wheels was a bike not worth riding. The X Games, founded in 1997, inspired my friends to try ever more daring stunts on their new skateboards. I, however, managed to do an ollie once, and after failing to stick the landing, vowed never to try again. I even ended a short flirtation with an ATV after one of my neighbors told me about a friend of a friend who, while riding his ATV in a forest somewhere, was decapitated by a random low-hanging wire.

It wasn’t until I turned 13 that I first fell in love with an automobile. My family had recently abandoned the trappings of suburban life — school bus service, cul-de-sacs, neighbors — for a five-acre ex-Christmas tree farm in rural Oregon. My dad reveled in the isolation; I resented the obscenely early school mornings and the power outages that could stretch for days. Scenic though it was, the view of Mt. Hood didn’t really make up for the inconveniences.

But I soon learned that the country life had some fringe benefits other than fresh air and plenty of room to shoot my .22 rifle. Our house came with a small riding lawnmower and a dilapidated old garden tractor that I quickly learned how to drive. Best of all, my parents let me drive those poor John Deeres all over our five acres as long as the blades were off — which suited me just fine, since they went faster that way. I got used to the wind in my face, the turtle-to-rabbit scale of the throttle, and the fact that I didn’t have to share our little gravel road with anyone (or even stay on it, for that matter).

Maybe those mowers ruined me for other vehicles. Two years later, when I got behind the wheel of my parents’ Dodge Caravan, I felt like I was trying to drive a blimp. Nothing was where it belonged, and nothing responded the way I expected it to. It frustrated me, of course, but it frustrated my mom even more, who was trying, patiently, to teach me how to drive. I think after the fifth time we attempted some rather complicated backing-up maneuvers, and I insisted on performing them no faster than five miles per hour, we both gave up. Which was fine with me: I was glad to never have to parallel park that whale of a vehicle ever again. As far as I cared, I was happier without a car than I could imagine myself with one.

While I remained wedded to the yellow gator seats of my John Deeres, my friends experienced the independence of car ownership, the financial and personal responsibilities involved in buying and maintaining one, and the inevitable disappointment caused by having to settle for a decades-old Civic, CRX, or Metro instead of something flashier (since no one I know managed to con their parents into buying an SUV or a Mercedes). I thought my friends were simply becoming occupied with car parts and gas mileage; I didn’t realize the chasm in maturity that was opening between me and them. They got deeper into the thrall of car culture, and into the mixed blessings of adulthood: the knowledge that they could, if they wanted, pack up and move a thousand miles away on a whim, and the understanding that relationships, obligations, and sheer inertia made it all but impossible to take that knowledge seriously.

It’s tempting to write it all of this off as a symptom of the same form of Peter Pan syndrome that led me to spend four years in graduate school and keeps me from throwing out things of purely sentimental value, all as part of a general refusal to grow up. After all, isn’t ignoring the call of the open road tantamount to turning your back on adulthood itself?

On the other hand, the cynic in me says that car ownership is over-romanticized, its promise of independence a lie (since we can’t really drive without the support of insurance companies, gas stations, washer fluid companies…), that fahrvergnügen — the pleasure one takes from driving — is nothing more than a glorified machine fetish. If I imposed on my friends to drive me to the store every week, at least I knew exactly who I was dependent on, and had no pretenses about the whole endeavor.

It took me eight years — when I was well into my twenties — to get my first driver’s license and my first car. To be honest, though, once I stepped into the cabin and turned the ignition into the car that I now owned and could legally operate, I felt more mature, ready to face new challenges and new experiences that I couldn’t even imagine. The feeling was well-timed: I ran out of gas on the way back to my apartment, and had to get someone to help me push my car 500 feet to the nearest gas station.

Just over a year later, I found myself about to use those vehicular privileges to their fullest: I decided to end what looked to be an unpromising career in academia, pack up everything, and move across the country to Seattle for no good reason except that I knew some friends there and felt like it was a good place to be for a while. I pointed my car westward on I-90, and didn’t really look back until I hit the Puget Sound.

So what took me so long to get behind the wheel? Well, a cynic might say that I was so lazy that it took dire need (the need to go to the grocery store at any time, the need to pack up my life on a whim) to make me grow up. But it might be fairer to say that I was just hesitant to take that last, irreversible step into adulthood until I could actually use the freedoms — and handle the disappointments — that it offered.

Illustration courtesy of the Boston Public Library