summer 2013... in december!

Finally, I am approaching this blog entry. The final post for a particularly epic journey.

I always have trouble with this sort of culminating thought process because it doesn't exclusively feel like a verbal exercise, but also... it is, somehow, an existential exercise. Look At How Is This Is. Reminding myself that time is coming and going, and places are coming and going (or perhaps I am coming and going, and the places are staying still--one can never know for sure?), and before I know it, it is this winter and I am running somewhere else.

My favorite quote from Breakfast at Tiffany's addresses this sentiment.

You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, "Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness." You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somaliland. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

But, perhaps it is better to run into yourself then remain stagnant in front of some sort of intangible psychological mirror. (It certainly keeps you in better shape.)

I adore traveling because I find packing a suitcase very therapeutic. 'These are the only physical things I absolutely require.' This backpack and I could make it out there (particularly in an English or romance language-speaking country) by our lonesome selves. At least for a bit. Long enough to write something in the spirit of John Steinbeck or Jack Kerouac.

Next, in December, I am going to Costa Rica to live on an organic farm for a week and a half. I will slowly but surely eat the entire property... like a very ambitious locust.

This post wasn't about Rome or Prague or London at all. But they never really are, are they?

...I suppose not. I wish I had more fingers for rings; which might require more hands, but it seems to work for Hindu gods. It's because I love totems/symbols/tiny markers of time and space. Collecting them is a reason for being (among others.) It's like collecting stamps, but if each of the stamps were a different interpretation of yourself in portrait form. It's fantastically conceited when phrased that way, I know, but it still somehow seems to be the appropriate metaphor.

No, this isn't really a travel blog at all. But if this truly were a travel blog, I would advise you to always bring a small tube of Neosporin! Perhaps even two, because my antiseptics have never made it through a trip without being stolen. But I don't mind that at all, really. I just bring two tubes, one for myself and one for the Universe.