Yesterday we made the sudden, awful decision to let our cat Suitcase cross the rainbow bridge. As we speak, she and Lola are giving each other a single, friendly sniff and then napping on opposite ends of the great Ikea couch in the sky.
She showed up unannounced at my friend Ryan’s apartment complex back around the beginning of 2013. I declined multiple suggestions that I adopt her before agreeing to house her for a weekend while Ryan was out of town. Well, that did the trick.
She went without a proper name for a surprising amount of time. For a good long while her name was Cat, because when she had her 4am meowing concerts, only yelling “CAT!!!” would shut her up. Even when I adopted a second cat—only to discover after agreeing that the cat’s name was also Cat—they quickly became Cat 1 and Cat 2. Finally at the end of 2016, when Billy Kissa visited from Greece, she (the cat) slept on top of Billy’s suitcase the entire week. Billy flatly declared that Suitcase was her name; Billy was right. (Cat 2 was eventually named Sabado, which is a different story.)
She was extremely low-maintenance, even training herself to poop outside instead of needing a litter box. Her flop game was strong. She was approximately 70% fur with a possibly-illegal amount of floof between her toes. She successfully trained me to leave the faucet dripping while I brushed my teeth so she could drink from it. (I explained to her how wasteful this was and spent $50 on a pet fountain, but she was undeterred.)
Letting go of the cats was, no surprise, one of the hardest things about my move to Amsterdam. What made it a LOT easier was Cortney and Jonathan, who became amazing foster parents to Suitcase, and—at the last minute—Sabado as well. They fell madly in love, and when I made the call that it was best for the cats to remain in Texas, they were only too happy to drop the “foster” from their titles. I’m sad that they had to handle the hardest part themselves, and that Kiki and I could only say goodbye over the phone, standing outside Mike’s Theater in Amsterdam after a Coach Rookard show. But seeing her cuddled up against Jonathan in the Zoom window, feeling loved and comforted, was a great comfort to us, too.
Editor’s note: There are a lot of Star Trek references in this entry. I’m not gonna explain them all.
It’s a given that I’m a Star Trek fan1, although with a healthy ironic distance. I’ve long said that Star Trek is better in theory than in practice. For every “Measure of a Man” there’s a “Rascals.” For every even-numbered movie there’s an odd-numbered one. For all its idealistic futurism and exciting technobabble, Star Trek is often extremely… oh, what’s the word… silly.
I say all that not to present myself as “cooler than Star Trek”—that ship sailed on the day I got a fucking improv tattoo—but to acknowledge that the things we love, however unconditionally, have their flaws. And yet, from the debut of “The Next Generation” in 19872 to “Lower Decks” today, my love has persevered. I vividly remember my mom explaining to me what a “clifffhanger” was when Riker told Worf to fire and the chyron said “To be continued.” (I reliably get goosebumps any time I think about that episode, including just now.) Silly or not, Trek is in my blood… and, to come around to my subject matter, Trek has brought me to some truly, deeply weird places in life. Here are the greatest hits.
The USS Legoprise (2002)
My passion for Lego is equal or greater than for Star Trek, and worlds collided in 2002 when I embarked on a slightly quixotic goal to build the Enterprise-D out of Lego.3 Unlike 99% of such projects I undertake, I saw this one through to completion, ordering Lego from Bricklink (then an upstart little website; now a Lego-owned subsidiary) and tinkering on and off for the better part of a year. Then I made a rudimentary webpage with a gallery of images and emailed a link to a couple dozen friends whom I thought would be interested.
“Going viral” wasn’t yet a term, but that’s exactly what happened next.
My little webpage was featured on Slashdot and Fark, the closest things we had to social media in 2002. Tweets and comments didn’t exist, but emails poured in from around the world for months (at least one written in Klingon). I even got a message from Wil Wheaton, who told me the Legoprise was “the coolest version of the Enterprise I’ve ever seen.” By the time my 15 minutes of Internet fame were up my page counter (remember those?) topped 50,000, truly impressive for the time.
As Lego’s popularity has multiplied exponentially in the last 20 years, I’ve had to remind myself that I was far ahead of the curve with this whole project. Nowadays you can find many, many renditions of the Enterprise in Lego which (I say with no hurt feelings) are much better than mine. But, as far as I could tell in the days before Web 2.0, my Legoprise was darn near the first.
Star Trek Las Vegas (2004)
Right around the same time in my life I had discovered improv, which I somehow loved even more than Lego or Star Trek. (I was a straight white man in my 20s. Of course I discovered improv.) At the Hideout Theatre I was fortunate enough to be a part of Start Trekkin’, the Original Series-flavored show that was a sporadic production there for years afterward. My timing was lucky, because in 2004, Andy Crouch somehow snagged an invitation for the Start Trekkin’ cast to perform two shows at the official Star Trek convention in Las Vegas. A whole gang made the trip.
I don’t remember too much about the shows (besides the bad acoustics) but to this day it was the largest crowd for whom I’ve ever performed: perhaps 500 on the first day and maybe 1,000 on the second. I played the villain, Captain Kronkite, in the first show and was a nameless supporting player in the second. We earned enough fans to get us stuck in the convention hall for 20 minutes posing for pictures. One boy, perhaps confused, asked our “captain” Ben to autograph his 8×10” glossy of William Shatner.
On our last day in Vegas I was riding the elevator alone down from my room, and after a couple of floors a woman got on with me. We rode in silence for a few seconds, and then she respectfully nodded at me and said: “Captain Kronkite.” I blushed.
Mortified (2018)
Wrong franchise, but you get the idea.
When I was younger I wrote my diary entries like they were Star Trek-style captain’s logs. That’s not even a mild exaggeration.
It’s the sort of nerdery that nobody should ever find out about, that even I myself might only half-remember as an adult. Fortunately for us all, though, “Mortified” exists. That’s a live show where people read their actual childhood diaries onstage—it’s hilarious and cathartic, and as you’re realizing already, my Trek diary was “Mortified” gold.
I received multiple invitations to perform at “Mortified” shows in Austin. As if that weren’t enough, in 2014 they flew me to New York for a special performance at New York Comic-Con where I shared the stage with Amber Benson, Pete & Pete, and other nerdy luminaries. As if that weren’t enough, the performance was recorded and later became episode 3 of the now-popular “Mortified” podcast. (Listen now!) And as if THAT weren’t enough, two years later, I had a TV crew in my goddamn house to film the reality series “The Mortified Guide”. (Alas no longer on Netflix, but you can rent it on Amazon; I’m in episode 5.)
Decades after I’d put pen to paper, my nerdy love for Trek earned me another quick 15 minutes of fame. I was recognized twice by strangers on the street!
Star Trek Las Vegas II: The Wrath of Kevin (2021)
Just when I thought life might be done throwing me Star Trek curveballs, after 17 years, Vegas (or more literally, my friend Eric) came calling again. Improbably, it was the exact same gig as before—improvised Trek at the big Vegas convention. There were a few key differences though: the troupe was now “USS Improvise” out of Portland; the performing genre was TNG rather than TOS; it was musical improv, my first such show since the pandemic; and, most incredibly, I was going to play Captain Picard.
Don’t sleep on drag queen Lwaxanna Troi back there.
This silly one-hour show opportunity felt like the culmination of all my life’s Star Trek nerdery. I’M PLAYING CAPTAIN FUCKING PICARD AT A STAR TREK CONVENTION. Finally, I understand why I went bald.
Of course the pandemic made this a more muted affair than it’d otherwise be. (In fact, this was my second invitation to perform with USS Improvise; the first was in March 2020, and we all know how that went.) As the Delta variant and anti-vaxxers have tag-teamed their way across America, this show too balanced on a knife’s edge, with literal last-minute changes. But on Saturday night in front of a couple hundred enthusiastic Trekkies, it happened. My Portland castmates did a great job supporting their jet-lagged guest captain as we improvised a tale about the Enterprise crew dealing with a species of sentient furniture. Data decided he wanted to live in an armoire, Riker did a sexy tango with a chair, the chair’s husband got jealous, and so on.
And I can’t prove it, but I like to think there was at least one person in the audience who saw me onstage and thought to themselves: “Hey, that’s the Mortified guy!”
I smartly moved to Northern Europe at the worst possible time. If you’re going to transplant yourself to a different climate, dive into it head-first, I say. You’re already bewildered by your new surroundings, and the suboptimal weather can be part of the bewilderment. Then you put on a brave face, and many many layers, and wait for the temperature outside to sloooooooooowly increase.
And the daylight! I’m still not used to the daylight. These days the sun rises to the northeast around 5:30 AM, pinwheels *around* the sky, and sets to the northwest about 10 PM. And even then, it never gets much darker than twilight before brightening again. The situation has its downsides—the morning sun shining directly into the apartment does a number on my sleep pattern—but, for a sun-loving Texan, it’s generally fantastic. Besides the occasional shower, highs are in the 70s (Fahrenheit) and humidity is low. Perfecto.
And yet, my inner Ned Stark is gripping his sword and looking stonily into the middle distance. We’re past the summer solstice, and from here on out, the days are getting shorter and shorter. Six months from now—right around my one-year Amsterversary—the sun will be as fleeting as the stars are now, with temperatures to match. I’ll be enjoying the summer as hard as I possibly can, storing up as many gallons4 of vitamin D as my body can muster.
In other news, after 1,028 days without interruption5, I finished the entire Dutch Duolingo course. It’s good timing that our COVID restrictions have finally ended, giving me the chance to interact with a lot more Dutch people mask-free. Just like everyone learning a new language, my comprehension is moving a lot faster than my speaking ability. HOW ARE THERE SO MANY RANDOM TURNS OF PHRASE I GOTTA LEARN?
Next in the Dutch reading list: the tall stack of Donald Duck comic books that our niece Sophie keeps giving me. Like a Dutch Billy Madison, I’m hoping to rapidly progress through higher and higher reading levels. My friend Ash recommends Dan Brown novels for Dutch reading, because—to put it gently—he doesn’t use big words.
Robert Langdon’s got a case on his hands.
I got my second COVID shot on Friday (Kiki’s is coming soon) and like everybody, we’ve begun tallying up “firsts since the pandemic”: first staged improv show (Kiki’s medical drama: fantastic), first indoor dining (George Marina: overpriced), first movie in a theater (A Quiet Place Part II: really good). Kiki and I were also featured in Het Parool, Amsterdam’s largest daily newspaper6, as part of their food critic’s regular “food you miss from home” feature. Honestly the bomb-ass breakfast tacos were as good as or better than anything I’ve had in Texas. Having a professional photographer documenting the experience was a nice bonus.
Honderd procent authentiek.
And it’s just about time for my first birthday as a full-time Amsterdammer. My cruise director Kiki has a dozen different surprises planned, so I’d better post this entry quick before I need to add them to it.
Money, I’m glad to see you again. Funemployment, I miss you already.
This week I joined the Dutch workforce as an instructional designer for Mambu. Mambu sells cloud-based banking software, which admittedly doesn’t quite have the sexy cachet of “I work at Apple.” But after 17 years at the World’s Biggest Corporation, they’re just the sort of employer I’d been hoping for: a smallish company that’s growing fast and gives me the opportunity to contribute in a foundational way.
On Monday morning I biked, trammed, and walked my way through the spitting rain to the super-slick office building on the river where Mambu (normally) occupies the 14th floor. As you’d expect for pandemic times, I was ushered across an empty floor into a conference room with three other new hires, where an IT guy handed us MacBooks and helped us complete our onboarding process. It wasn’t the grand entrance one would hope for with a new career, but there *were* free snacks and a welcome box with Mambu-branded trinkets.
By Monday afternoon I was back home and seated at my new home office—that being the corner of our bedroom with a space just big enough for the smallest desk Ikea sells. I’m facing the window, so it’s not the worst WFH situation, but I’ll be more than ready to at least occasionally visit the HQ.
I neither expected nor got a riveting first week—it’s been a lot of app downloads, password setups, and hi-how-are-ya’s with my new coworkers7. I’ve also completed a bunch of required new-hire training courses, which is rather meta, since my team wrote the courses; I’m meant to understand the content but also to own it moving forward.
I’m excited about the job. It’s a warm fuzzy feeling to feel qualified for the work I’m doing, to have smart ideas about how I can help make the training better. I’ve got good first impressions about the company too, which has strong diversity and anti-harassment policies and just hired a Director of Sustainability (she was one of my three fellow new hires!).
Meanwhile, my residency in Nederland is past the five-month mark. I’m less than a week from reaching a 1,000-day streak in Duolingo, and coincidentally am almost done with the *entire* Dutch Duolingo course. Final verdict: while Duolingo will IN NO WAY make you conversational in a new language on its own—and is often frustratingly obtuse about how Dutch people *actually* speak8—it’s still a great way to soak up common words and phrases to the point that you can almost-but-not-quite interpret the latest De Speld headline.
Which reminds me: we are officially OVER the weather. I knew what I was in for, moving to northern Europe in the wintertime, but I’d at least hoped for a lovely spring as a reward. Instead—with a few gloriously sunny days excepted—Amsterdam had its coldest April in 35 years, and May isn’t doing much better. But it’s spring just the same: tulips and peonies are in abundance, and the days have reached an alarming length, with light lingering in the sky well past 10pm and starting up again around 5am. I’ve got to wear my eyemask to have any hope of sleeping until the alarm goes off. By midsummer it’ll almost never be completely dark outside.
(This might have been a bad idea. It works better on a laptop.)
I woke up at about 8am9 and got some work done10 before biking11 to the fysio12. On the way back home I bought some nuts13 per Kiki’s request. Back at the computer14, I read through some of my Safari tabs15 and shot some zombies16 before Nardje showed up17 in the afternoon.
On the advice of the fysio I took an hour-long walk18 around Amsterdam, getting feta cheese19 for dinner on the way home. Kiki made a delicious shakshouka20 while I built an Ikea cabinet for the bathoom21. We were in bed before 1122.
The (finally) finished product. No, that’s not a bidet in the background.
From the beginning of the Big Move planning process, I intended to spend a significant chunk of money on improvements to the Hoendiepstraat apartment. It started with a large Ikea closet to hold my clothes. In short order after my arrival came an “American-sized” TV23; a new dining table; and the most non-negotiable item, a clothes dryer.24
And then, in the middle of discussions about what should take priority next, the toilet started to leak.
Feel free to make the obvious joke about my American poops overwhelming European bathrooms. Given that the toilet was now being flushed more than twice as often as before, you wouldn’t be far off-track. But the toilet was old and in poor condition anyway, so it was time for a new one. And—all you homeowners will nod in agreement here—if we’re swapping the toilet, why not do the sink as well?
This would be the fateful twist in the story. As James Breakwell recently wrote, “The key to any small, reasonable renovation is to keep adding to it until both of those adjectives are a lie.” In this case, all it took was a sink.
Now, unlike those free-wheelin’ Americans, home-improvement stores are currently closed in Nederland, so your only option is to order online. Praxis.nl is no homedepot.com, but we were eventually able to pick a toilet, sink, and faucet from their online shop. I successfully booked a plumber (no small feat) who had a delightfully thick British accent for the following Tuesday.
Then on Thursday, the sink arrived. It sounded like this.
Now let’s not kid ourselves: that is hilarious. But it meant that I had to cancel the plumber, letting him know I’d let him know when I had an intact sink. It also meant that, when the toilet arrived the following day, it had nowhere to go besides our living room.
We found ourselves at a standstill as Praxis customer service remained consistently unhelpful and unresponsive about getting the sink replaced. (One customer service rep hung up the moment I asked if we could speak English. Another told me via email to call their shop in Heerhugowaard, 45 minutes north of Amsterdam; when I did, the shop was as confused as I was.) Days stretched to weeks, with the toilet and shattered sink going from comedic conversation pieces to unwanted freeloading roommates.
In desperation we ordered a second sink from Praxis, which arrived in one piece and allowed us to schedule the plumber once again. Finally on Wednesday, March 10th, five weeks after we’d started the process, a very nice, ridiculously good-looking plumber25 arrived. In four short hours, the toilet and sink were installed; by the end of the night, so were the cabinets. (Small bit of bragging: thanks to my double- and triple-measurements, the cabinets fit in with the new sink down to the centimeter.) Our new bathroom looks fantastic. So happy the ordeal is over.
I’m still trying to return that broken sink, though.
1 Okay, y’all. I had a WHOLE BLOGPOST written about what it’s been like adjusting to the cold Dutch climate—from standing on my first frozen pond to learning the joys of dry cracking skin—only for all of Texas to become a goddamn ice planet on the very day that it all melted here. I never thought I’d be wishing happy warm thoughts from NL to TX, but these are strange times, my friends.
So that long whiney post got deleted. The short version is: we got a solid layer of snow on February 7th, and—as a native Texan, this was new to me—it stayed snowy. The canals and river were mostly frozen, ducks and pigeons and occasionally humans sliding around on top. I saw kids being pulled on sleds for function rather than fun. We mostly stayed indoors.
Pretty though.
2 When I arrived here in mid-December, the sun set at 4:30 in the afternoon and I was confused why delivery drivers kept showing up after dark. The tides are turning, though! Our days are now about 11 hours long, and in the summer we’ll have blissful 17-hour days and the sky will *never* be fully dark. Latitudes are crazy.
The weird time jumps are daylight savings time. Yeah, we got that here, too.
3 Dutch update: I’m still at the level of knowing just enough to get myself in trouble. Like, I’ll absolutely nail the first line of a conversation—“Goedemiddag, ik heb een afspraak om half tien”—and then the person will respond in Dutch and… I’ll have no idea what they said.
But I can eavesdrop on Dutch conversations (usually Kiki’s) and more often than not grasp the topic—sometimes even entire sentences at a time. Progress!
Fun Dutch vocab of the month: the Dutch word for latte is “koffie verkeerd,” literally “wrong coffee.” The Dutch word for Easter is “Paas,” which explains the weird name of those ubiquitous egg-coloring kits when we were kids.
4 On the 24th we rented a Mini Cooper and road-tripped two hours south to Maastricht, a historic town in Nederland’s weird little appendix at the border with Germany and Belgium. This city is a thousand years old if it’s a day, with charming buildings by the dozens and literally more churches than they know what to do with. There was a full-sized church sanctuary behind our hotel with no apparent means of entry. Elsewhere in the center are a bookstore and a grocery store, both inside churches.
It was a charming couple of days in a truly charming city, and also a good example of the COVID-tourism paradox: though the city center was blissfully free of tourists26, all the shops and museums were closed, which explained the emptiness but also made things a bit boring. Then again, “boring” gave us ample time to explore virtually every street of the old city with time left over to relax on the hotel balcony. Also I discovered the magic of vlaai.
On our way back north to Amsterdam we zig-zagged through a variety of small towns, any of which might be the setting for the Dutch edition of “Hot Fuzz,” with their own 500-year-old churches and unironic thatched roofs and war memorials27. The weather was glorious, peaking around 20C/68F. We’ve got to do it all over again when things are open; I’m sure we’ll grumble about how many tourists there are.
6 I’ve thought a lot about how the pandemic has made me miss my casual friends—the ones I never texted with or even think much about (or even know the name of!) until they weren’t around. The improv acquaintances and regulars at the bar. This article is a good read about that very subject. Some of them I’d probably never see again even if I’d stayed in place; moving to a new country might ensure I’ll never see many or most of them again. It’s an odd angle on homesickness I hadn’t considered. Whenever I can finally-finally start haunting local places here and making new friend-quaintances, it’ll be a relief.
7 After two-and-a-half months in the Netherlands, I finally finally have a working Dutch phone number and bank card. It wasn’t the highest priority since we never go anywhere, but it’s nice to be able to pay for groceries myself at last. Ik ben een grote jongen!
1 I had a simple revelation when I was younger that I still think about now and then. Seeing a herd of cows standing in the freezing cold, I felt pity for how chilly they must be. Then it occurred to me: those cows have no concept of not being chilly. They don’t know HVAC systems even exist. They’re cold, and that’s just the fact of the matter, and they probably don’t think too much about it.
On a totally unrelated note, I think I’m getting used to the weather here.
The sun is like, “That’s as high as I’m gonna get, sucker!”
2 This weekend we took a semi-staycation to Utrecht, a city 20 minutes south of Amsterdam with historic architecture and one charming market street after another. It is of course a ghost town right now.
The main thing I want to tell you about in Utrecht is the big cathedral, which was one of the tallest buildings in the world when it was finished in 1382 and then in 1674 got fucking bulls-eyed by a tornado. The citizens of Utrecht wisely decided against rebuilding, so it’s now a weird half-cathedral and a standalone tower with a public square in the middle. Check the before-and-after:
Scientific proof of a vengeful God. On the other hand, nice of God to leave the tower standing.
3 This is my neighborhood! It’s called Rivierenbuurt, and it’s a short tram ride south of the city center at the bend of the Amstel river. It was built from scratch in the early 1930s and is almost entirely comprised of four-story apartment blocks with shops at the corners and gardens28 in the centers. Everything was designed in the Amsterdam School architectural style, a know-it-if-you-see-it melange of modernism and geometric flourishes straight out of Middle Earth.
See if you can find Kiki in one of these pics. It’s like Where’s Waldo, but for Kiki.
4 On a related topic: of course I’ve had to shift many of my expectations moving from a standalone house to a densely-occupied apartment block. Some of this could be expected no matter where I’d moved: adjusting to the smaller space, cursing the loud music playing from god-knows-where late at night. But some of it feels distinctly European. I’m always walking past ground-floor apartments, and a surprising number of them give zero craps about keeping their shutters open and their home life plainly visible to passers-by. On a recent walk down the block, there were more windows uncovered than not. From my couch I can see what the neighbors across the street are watching on *their* TV. I’ve had to train myself not to look.
But you get to meet some of the locals.
5 One of my house-husband duties during funemployment is to make Kiki her tea every morning. Yeah, I’m doing it out of love, but I’m also doing it because I get to pour in the milk.
I know what you’re thinking, and yes, she really does want this much milk.
6 Dutch update! I gave myself some practice by translating the Dutch article about Rivierenbuurt into English. Check it out (but fair warning, the World War II bits are unpleasant reading): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivierenbuurt_(Amsterdam)
My favorite way to learn Dutch one headline at a time is De Speld, Nederland’s version of The Onion. Translate a headline and you get a joke!
Your delightfully-literal Dutch word of the month: liquid is “vloeistof,” meaning (and sorta pronounced) “flowy stuff.”
7 The Netherlands isn’t a safe haven from COVID. You’re thinking of New Zealand.29 It’s a relative improvement over the US in that each household is allowed one visitor per day, so we’ve experienced the novelty of “having friends over for dinner” for the first time in a year. Still, sad to say we’re fifth in the world in COVID cases per capita (though deaths are thankfully low). The recent spike in cases has resulted in a 9pm curfew, which naturally—that’s the point—limits my social opportunities even further. On the one hand, yeah, that sucks. On the other hand, it’s nice to be in a country that’s actually responsive to a public emergency. It’ll get back to normal soon enough, and hey, sitting on the couch all day isn’t the worst way to spend unemployment.
8 I included a pretty Netherlands video last time, so let’s keep the party going. One of my very favorite sights in the world (after milk in tea) is starling murmurations. Now I live in a place where I might actually see one!
