All the vegans were eating starburst
There should be a
picture of an appetizing
orange right about here
but the photo upload
is broken
A case of wanderlust hit me last night, and in general made me think of the unfettered freedom that comes with travel and the daily opportunity to reinvent oneself it presents. Say what you want about encountering a different culture, being taken out of your comfort zone, experiencing the shock of working within a grid whose coordinates you neither recognize nor have the means to understand – a large part of intercontinental travel (there are other kinds, but for our purposes we’ll stick with IC) is creating a new identity and knowing that no one you will encounter has experienced your particular brand of screwed up, vicissitude-laden, idiosyncratic self. They don’t know you! You are an unknown commodity – you can make it up as you go along!
The old saw about taking a backpacking trip to Europe to find yourself inverts the chain of causation: you go there to lose yourself, find a new self, and clutch it close before the inevitable return to everyday life slowly dissipates its vitality. Now, to be fair, some people never experience the dissipation – when they rise, they shine, and they tend to rise early and keep their existential engines revving their entire waking lives. These people are puzzling. One I know is type A from top to bottom – he teaches here, walks out the door, goes to farm with the Amish, does chores at another small farm, stays dirty, talks a mile a minute, has that Southern gentility/amiability that amounts to never being closed off from the goings on – and he is on his way to England to hike across the green hills and dales of the English countryside. I am jealous. I am going to North Dakota. The post-wanderlust activity to which I generally succumb involves plotting hypothetical itineraries: Africa and Europe have limited pull at this time; South America has some pull but is not magnetically attractive yet; Asia – don’t even know what to think about that. There are a lot of people there, right?
I do have a thesis, and it involves death and the enlivening effect that comes from encountering it, even in refracted form. I will not go into the thesis too much other than to say that realizing you’re going to die should make it easier to quit your job and go bum around Nicaragua for a year or two. Maybe not, though.
POSTSCRIPT
My tall rock'n'roller/studio engineer friend just sent an email with an invitation to go to Peru with him. Our travel history together includes the eastern seaboard, Canada, greater Chicagoland, Minneapolis, and extensive gravel road travel in or around hometown. The email arrived forty five seconds after I completed the text of this post in MS Word. Sounds like fate, eh? How does one spell Mantua Pichu?
picture of an appetizing
orange right about here
but the photo upload
is broken
A case of wanderlust hit me last night, and in general made me think of the unfettered freedom that comes with travel and the daily opportunity to reinvent oneself it presents. Say what you want about encountering a different culture, being taken out of your comfort zone, experiencing the shock of working within a grid whose coordinates you neither recognize nor have the means to understand – a large part of intercontinental travel (there are other kinds, but for our purposes we’ll stick with IC) is creating a new identity and knowing that no one you will encounter has experienced your particular brand of screwed up, vicissitude-laden, idiosyncratic self. They don’t know you! You are an unknown commodity – you can make it up as you go along!
The old saw about taking a backpacking trip to Europe to find yourself inverts the chain of causation: you go there to lose yourself, find a new self, and clutch it close before the inevitable return to everyday life slowly dissipates its vitality. Now, to be fair, some people never experience the dissipation – when they rise, they shine, and they tend to rise early and keep their existential engines revving their entire waking lives. These people are puzzling. One I know is type A from top to bottom – he teaches here, walks out the door, goes to farm with the Amish, does chores at another small farm, stays dirty, talks a mile a minute, has that Southern gentility/amiability that amounts to never being closed off from the goings on – and he is on his way to England to hike across the green hills and dales of the English countryside. I am jealous. I am going to North Dakota. The post-wanderlust activity to which I generally succumb involves plotting hypothetical itineraries: Africa and Europe have limited pull at this time; South America has some pull but is not magnetically attractive yet; Asia – don’t even know what to think about that. There are a lot of people there, right?
I do have a thesis, and it involves death and the enlivening effect that comes from encountering it, even in refracted form. I will not go into the thesis too much other than to say that realizing you’re going to die should make it easier to quit your job and go bum around Nicaragua for a year or two. Maybe not, though.
POSTSCRIPT
My tall rock'n'roller/studio engineer friend just sent an email with an invitation to go to Peru with him. Our travel history together includes the eastern seaboard, Canada, greater Chicagoland, Minneapolis, and extensive gravel road travel in or around hometown. The email arrived forty five seconds after I completed the text of this post in MS Word. Sounds like fate, eh? How does one spell Mantua Pichu?
posted by am at
9:49 AM
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