Conferences: Vacations that Aren't

It all sounded pretty good: get off for Friday and head to San Diego, just me and Corrie, company sponsored hotel, and spend the weekend at a conference at the "majestic" Catamaran Hotel.

I do like my job, surely more now than in careers past, and I am generally loathe to miss days, but a Friday? In San Diego? All weekend? (Most) expenses paid?

Sounded pretty good.

Still does.

But the conference started at 8 each morning and ran until 6, except Friday in which it started at 2 pm and went until after 8. So now it's been kinda like kitchen work, as in working a dozen days in a row without a break.

Anyway, the conference was about Mindfulness, a discipline and topic I'm actually very interested in despite the misgivings I have about the name. Too much Gilbert Ryle's discussion about the Cartesian duality being both incorrect and dangerous and the mis-use of the word "mind". Notice how little I use the word "mind" during the eight years I've been keeping this blog---I even use my own creation "brainally" instead of "mentally."

Anywho...this was the fifth annual Bridging the Hearts and Minds (d'oh!) of Youth conference. It brought together the leading folks in the movement with us practitioners, we educators, shrinks, yoga teachers, and social workers.

I heard a very many definitions of the term "Mindfulness", nearly all of which I won't bore you with here. It's basically the combination of meditation and "I (Heart) Huckabees" Pure Being (the ball thing). We learned about breathing techniques and centering techniques and calming notions and all about self compassion. I'm a proponent, fully (I've seen the benefits with youth firsthand), but I was probably the edgiest, lets-crank-the-rage-Against-the-Machine-or-Primus-and-mosh kinda guy in attendance, and that was noticeable.

Being outnumbered thirty-to-one by yoga chicks was also pretty noticeable.

There were some good stories heard and useful practices learned and glad-handing that was accomplished. I met folks from Nebraska, Wisconsin, rural Pennsylvania, New York, as well as some San Diego locals. LA was very well represented.

For the folks from further afield, 68 degrees in February on the beach is pretty damn awesome and novel, but we live at the beach and are duly spoiled.

The Catamaran Hotel is in the Pacific Beach region of San Diego, itself a strange collection of hills, lagoons, bays and harbors. Pacific Beach, or colloquially PB, is on a spit of sand between the surf on the Pacific Ocean and the far more calm Mission Bay to the east. At night, the muggy fog that hung in the air salted your lips, reminding you where to avoid during a tsunami.

Imagine the rundown beach towns from the north coast. The shabby eateries, the houses disintegrating in the flavored air, the sad plumbing in nearly all commercial places. Some of those north coast locals are a odd form of trashy--I've met a share (far fewer than Norm, of course), and I don't even know what I really mean, but not really "trashy" in a disparaging way. It's a kind of small town blissful ignorance blended with a smugness that develops when that kind of ignorance is surrounded by breathtaking beauty witnessed routinely.

Now take that tiny rundown town and stretch it to three miles long by a half-mile wide, triple the prices for things, warm up the air, bring in the frightening proximity to serious international debauchery, and take that mostly fake trashiness and replace it with mostly real trashiness supplied by Bakersfield mentalities and you have Pacific Beach.

The internet tells me it is one of the pulsating centers for nightlife in San Diego proper. In the fifties and sixties when surfers and fisherman were the only inhabitants, and all the coats of paint were fresh, I'm sure it had some charm. And I guess it's not without charm, and maybe I'm being far too harsh---like I said only yesterday: I wanted to like it---you know how much I love a dive! And an entire divey neighborhood? On the beach? Why was I so annoyed?

Maybe because I live on the beach in a community that somehow exists nicely in establishments that aren't falling apart surrounded by a nice buffer zone of murderous 'hood keeping out the really rich folks. That, and downtown Long Beach is far more urban that Pacific Beach. Pacific Beach is what you'd get if you doubled the population but shrank the area of Crescent City, and then put it in southern California a half-hour from Mexico.

For Jimmy's bachelor party we did some downtown San Diego stuff, and that zone is certainly more urban than anywhere in Long Beach. It was pretty nice for what it's worth.

Back to the Vacation that Wasn't...

I had realized before that, sure, while we were away from home and in "tropical San Diego", I would be busy for most of the time, and getting to play shmoopy snuggle-games with Corrie would likely not be how the majority of the time would be spent.

And of course, that's how it played out.

The Catamaran Hotel is a themed resort hotel from those days in the fifties and sixties when only surfers, fishermen, and tourists came to the PB region of SD. Outside, as I mentioned earlier, was a breezy and crisp 68---if such a thing exists---but once inside the lobby, guests are treated to a little slice of Hawai'i:

There is a rocky waterfall right inside the lobby, complete with a coy fish pond and actually blooming orchids. The temperature is held steady between 78 and 82 with rather solid humidity. Outside there is a secluded duck pond with separate species of ducks as well as some caged tropical birds on the offer for gawking. The decorations are all Polynesian or Hawai'ian or some other Australnesian language family identifier who would be upset that I didn't name them accurately. The conference rooms had names like "Kon Tiki Hall", "Macaw" and "Toucan." It seemed shabby and rundown also, but only mildly so compared with the surroundings.

We stayed not at the Catamaran but, because of when we got the okay for the funding and had to wait to book, at the lovely Hotel Iris, a few miles away on I-8. The Interweb photos were pretty neat--it looked like the place we stayed in in Portland...or Seattle...maybe it just brought up those memories for me, and since I wasn't paying, I didn't really do due diligence on it.

I'll have a separate post about the Iris coming up, as I've already gone on longer than planned.

Long story short: it was a nice learning experience in both subject matter and beach-village-living (despite what I said), it was a nice getaway, and it turns out Corrie and I are notoriously hard to impress with beach communities in southern California.