Tomorrow, Everything Changes

Write, and you glue your thoughts. Thoughts that would often flee into myriad directions and shift form, become trapped. This process, which I've embarked upon only a week ago, has proven foremost that I've become a different person. I was too energetic, had too many outlets of creativity as a teenager. At one point, writing was only a half-step above a complete waste of time. Now, writing has encouraged my ponderings to sustain, to bleed into every other decision I make during the day. And whether I like what it's done or not, it's certainly fueled my convictions. Travel is on my mind, always. And if it's not at the surface, it is undeniably sulking not far below.

Tomorrow, I act out a move I may not have been bold enough to do had I not written about travel, encouraged my resolve, and pursued my options.

Tomorrow I leave behind my stake as an an undervalued but essential pawn, dragged along into the voodoo economics of a bay area startup, making a product for a dubious niche, of little value but to the company partnership's dreams of a Yahoo buyout. I leave it behind for fewer hours of work, better pay, a noble goal, a better lifestyle, and, perhaps best of all, a deadline. At the end of 2006, I will be free of obligation.

Tomorrow is a milestone day. I build the cairn. To only know what form of ag'ed eyes I will regard it from... I can see it forming now. Before it was just a hope. Now it is a defendable probability: 2007 will be the year I return to my vagabonding. Ho!

The only thing that stands before me now is a confrontation. I must throw it all down and walk out. Leave these idlers of a different nature to their idling ways.

Jonathan Raben on Traveling Alone

Glad I finally got around to reading Shapiro's collection of interviews with travel literati. The one with Jonathan Raben is a gem. For my year abroad, I became quite practiced at explaining why I was traveling alone, but apparently not as good as this British expat:

Traveling with a companion, with a wife, with a girlfriend, always seems to me like birds in a glass dome, those Victorian glass things with stuffed birds inside. You are too much of a self-contained world for the rest of the world to be able to penetrate. You've got to go kind of naked into the world and make yourself vulnerable to it, in a way that you're never going to be sufficiently vulnerable if you're traveling with your nearest and dearest on your arm. You're never going to see anything; you're never going to meet anybody; you're never going to hear anything. Nothing is going to happen to you.

Whereas travleing alone, everything happens. And also traveling alone puts you in this position where you will do almost anything to make contact with other people. My experience of travleing with somebody else is that you just hang around with them. Half the point of traveling alone is that you get so lonely you need to talk to other people. And so you find yourself hanging around late at night in bars talking with strangers, which you 'd never want to do. It would seem an insane thing to be doing.

He's on the mark. I wager the magnitude of a traveler's experience is indirectly related to his comfort. While I have met couples who were having the times of their lives abroad, there are certain activities, usually the most intimate or awkward of exchanges - the ones you'll cherish! - that close off to couples, and especially groups.

To be fair, I would hesitate to say this is the golden rule of travel, since I don't believe the enjoyment of travel comes from a unilateral path of decreasing comfort. What couples gain in emotional bond would, to some people, outweigh the joys of solo travel.

And if you'll forgive me a metaphor, one other highlight:

I think the thing about the journey is it's a very nice scale model of a life. But it's a life that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the person who makes the journey metaphorically survives his own death to write about a life posthumously.

Don't forget one for the trivia board:

"Fiction" comes not from this imaginary verb fictia ameaning I make it up as I go along. It comes from the actual Latin verb fictia meaning, I give shape to.

Finding some peace then, I suppose I am, in these thoughts I haven't spilled in a long while.

My constitution often gets me in trouble.

At 20, I was shocked to grow an extra half-inch, by that distance I would best my father. Sometimes I feel as though sheer will pushed the vertebrae. I wish I could put the brakes on.

Uncommon spurts of growth are not uncommon. But I find my current age to be a strange one to have suddenly unlocked the tethers around my wrists and unlocked a new level of speed to my typing. Likewise, I cannot explain what has changed that has made programming, for me now a fundamental ease. If only this development wasn't concurrent with an equal perception that coding is inherently, ultimately, a fundamental bore.

I got a Monday-morning tongue-lashing for not working the weekend, which was also boring in that "shut the fuck up, coach" way. Full of middle-age baggage and masked condescension. In order to prove that I was listening, I had to work till 8pm. I can only hope the head pitches I made today were confused for headbanging (god bless in-the-ear headphones).

The only thing not boring about today was the feeling I had about 6pm, when any other 40 hour shifter would escape to their families, vices, or passions. No, for me I was stuck for two more hours. But for some reason, as the rooflights lost their sunsource, my shoulders lightened. I awoke, and time flew, for there was nothing more to grieve for to-day.

Myopic appeaser of my tyrants, I am. Can I go now?

I'm going to wait.

One of the books has arrived, just in time for the weekend, unexpectedly free of corporate demands. I'd sit down to read, but I'm too weary for the moment. And it would behoove me to explore the cause of the weariness, this a week of heavily variable emotions.

The hours I used to take leave of mind, those in the bookstore and the Indian restaurant would also be the hours I would be asked to rue by my new employers. I am young and single, and know no one here, so I should be foremost on the chart of late hours, it was said. Their audacity brought out the tactless in me, as I haphazardly implied that I would feel better about doing so if they offered more share in the company. The fireworks that ensued were nearly enough to end my work here, more abruptly than I could have guessed even the day before.

But I have healed somewhat. Following this exchange, the next morning I was offered more incentives in the company, but it was reiterated that my hours will be long over the next month. My relations with colleagues and inspiration for work has returned to its passive and patient tenor. And as has so often proven to be the case, my passion for returning to a life of travel has flamed out before I really put in much effort to make it happen. The lacking component might be constitution, but I think it may as easily be a lack of bellicosity. One level less of restraint during that row and I may have made my course one of default. And in restraint I always seem to pull out when it's most needed. It may be the ticket to a life of success, or a life of dull stagnancy.

However this unfolds, it's likely that the safe course - diligently continuing work - will be financially very helpful. No doubt a sudden departure then would have meant thousands lost. And one thousand is about 3 months of sustenance in India.

Questions are still open though. Perhaps today was an improvement, but there is always the inkling that this worklife is a long illness that must eventually be cured. The contractions come closer and closer together, and while it might seem that I have other options, they may be equally as unlivable as this one.

For now, I can only continue to wait. And maybe read.

The appeasement/inspiration continues...

Ordered this and this tonight.

Could It Be Tamil Nadu?

I know I said that the decision can remain open, but I couldn't help but think about "where?" today. Sterns has officially left, as of yesterday. We had a rushed chat over the phone. She amongst the chaos of boarding the plane. Me amongst the din of commuter trains outside work as I escaped a needlessly verbose design meeting, stepping into the peninsula heat wave. I wish I could join her.

India might be the perfect location. My tireless love for that land was once an unrationable lust. Visiting it, even for those three short months, transformed my sentiments. And two years later, the lust has matured into some type of faith, just as unrationable, but with a dash of confidence.

Tonight, I made a deliberate round of exploration amongst my new suburban surroundings. One, nestling my nose into the bindings of Lonely Planet's new edition of India. Two, solo'ing at the local Indian dinner buffet. Joked with the owner about his driving test in Bombay, where he was told that he had failed because he didnt use his horn (which he remarkably translated, accurately, as an invitation for bribery where he successfully bartered the gold-plated pen in his shirt pocket) It made me laugh heartily.

It's hard to say if all of tonight was inspiration or appeasement; hard to say if my resolve to leave is stronger or weaker. I could go back. I could drop my job right now. But it would be better to hold out a while longer. I think I can make it. And despite the magic, it may not be the right place. Sterns or no Sterns. I reckon the embers will mantain their warmth a good while longer.

And as a statement of my uncertainty, buenos noches.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

Placing a temporal range on how long a slumber this has been seems futile, and, after all, over-simplified. There have been peaks where something new felt as though it were starting, and there have been tunnels that I traversed as if with no sense of time. I have no idea how long it's been, because there is no cairn on the horizon to look back upon, and I certainly don't have time to construct one that represents today, for future reflection. Do I?

Today's patience expired around 1pm. Earlier than any of the last few days. And it expired with a resonance that signified more than just the passing of today's patience, but perhaps this week's. Maybe this month's?

And it's a shame. The new job is better than my last. It demands a good balance of challenge and education. It's with three other caring but hard-working co-workers. But it has its shortfalls, as any job will. And I just don't have the patience anymore.

I thought the four days off followed by six days of driving across the country would be enough. What do I need from a vacation in order to enjoy my work again? It seems the longer my vacation, the less ready I am to return. And maybe it is only understandable, that after a heartfelt talk with a lady in Wyoming about chili, and the tearful farewell to a great-aunt I haven't seen for 23 years, and the day of pulling my limbs across sunbleached Badlands. Yes, maybe it's understandable that I have only confirmed the insignificance of my daily toil.

But I have no choice, so the refrain goes. I must have money in order to live any alternative. And I would rather work what I do, and work half the time that a deli carver needs to in order to have enough to feel safe, confident in starting over again. Of course it's a paradoxical excuse. The very solution entails escaping a sense of safety, living a mantra of abandoning safety as soon as I feel it too strongly. Frugality will set me free. Hard work combined with frugality will set me free even sooner. If I can stomach it.

The where is still open. It can remain so for now.