Travel Log: Day Zero

Everyone keeps asking if I'm excited about my upcoming travel, which I suppose is fair.  The thing is though that this kind of travel is vastly different than anything I've ever done before so the situation is a bit overwhelming to the point that my brain hasn't fully caught up to the idea of what's about to happen.  I've spent a couple months away before, but it's been back in the safety of where I grew up, which meant I knew exactly what to expect.  The house I grew up in, my old room (with different curtains), and seeing familiar faces.  It was very comfortable.  Almost like being on summer break, but as an adult.  This trip is completely different because I'm leaving the country and going to a place I've never been, don't know the language, and am not quite sure what to expect.  Thankfully I'm not going alone.  Having someone with me who's been before will be a great way to hold onto home and who I am.

Right now we're standing on a ledge, getting ready to leap off the side.  We're pretty sure that it's safe down below, but we can't be sure until we've made the jump.  The whole thing has me thinking about how my perception of things is likely to change with this trip.  A part of me is nervous about how this new version of me is going to look back at my current life.  My life is pretty safe and on any given day I can predict how the next several weeks are going to play out.  The adventures we have in the every day world are fun and exciting in their own way.  I wonder though how I'm going to relate them after this trip.  The current me hopes that I still enjoy the things I enjoy now after having been exposed to a different world.  I like the things in my life, but is that because they've always been there and I've not experienced something completely different?  Will they have the same meaning to me when I return?

Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to what's about to happen and I'm working on not spending too much energy thinking about what's being left behind.  Life will go on while we're away and I think that will be one of the harder things.  Because we'll be having fun off somewhere else, the people in our every day will be living their lives without us.  It's a bit like leaving for college the first time and then returning back home.  The place you knew has been going along fine without you.  It's the same place that you left, except just a little bit different now.  You realize that the world you thought you knew was so much smaller than you could have imagined, making you question your place in it.

I guess the only thing left to do is see what happens tomorrow.

Rocky Canvas

On the Familiar

Maybe it's a symptom of getting older, but I find myself seeing people in a crowd and thinking I recognize them.  Then I spend a few minutes trying to figure out where I know them from.  Finding that context for recognition and then finally coming to the conclusion that I don't actually know them, but they apparently look like someone I've met or at least seen in my time on the planet.  Then again I've met and seen enough people that the laws of large numbers would suggest that maybe I have seen them before and my brain knows that while I'm still clueless about it.  Or maybe it's possible that what seems like an infinite combination of facial configurations nature has finally given up and just started reusing combinations to save time.  More than likely though it's just that I've seen enough people that while I may not know that person, they are a close enough match to someone I have seen before and that's enough for my brain to categorize them as "known".

It's not just people that this happens to.  Another thing I've started to notice is that I'll hear a song that sounds familiar, but it claims to be new.  Then I realize that it's not a cover of a song I know, but the people playing it heard all the same stuff I did growing up and now they're making their own music so of course they're going to be influenced by what came before.  They just happen to have the ability to make music while I do not.  It's not much different than how we pick up the speech patterns of the people around us.  We tend to mimic what we see and hear.  The problem when it comes to music and movies though is that I've seen the original, or at least the original for me, and most of the new stuff feels like a pale imitator for some reason.  I know that Han Solo wasn't the original roguish anti-hero, but for me he was my first instance where I understood that while he was a bit of jerk, he was actually a good guy, even if he didn't know it.  In the thirty plus years since he was introduced there have been plenty of other iterations of that character type.  You finally get to a point where the character you see is essentially the distilled version of Han Solo or Han Solo version 27.  So you have kids today, who are growing up with Peter Quill as their version of Han Solo.  That's not to say it's bad or anything because I like Peter Quill.  It's just that I'm finding myself looking at both and saying to myself "Yeah the new guy is good, but you can't beat the original."  Is this what getting older is going to be like?

I won't say that I've lived all over, but I've been a lot of places here in the U.S.  I've lived in a few key places multiple times.  Each of those places have been long enough that it's created a sort of context for all memories there.  The problem though is that as time has gone on those start to get mixed up.  I'll see someone who is out of context and my brain can't figure out what's going on.  It's like seeing a friend from high school twenty years later while you're standing in line for lunch at your company cafeteria, which is two thousand miles away from that high school where you knew them.  You know you know them from somewhere, but they aren't where they're supposed to be.  I guess it's just something that happens when you move between the same few places over and over.

In less than a month I'm going to be traveling to someplace entirely new for me.  While it won't be impossible for me to see someone there I know, it's highly unlikely.  This is both exciting and a bit disorienting because after all this time there is a strange bit of comfort knowing that things will seem familiar most of the time.  The problem with the familiar though is that it's entirely possible for it to eventually become boring.  I've seen enough movies where it starts out with a character who seems like they're going through the motions.  They have their routine down and the world is in order, but something isn't quite right.  It's about this time in the movie that some wacky character storms in and shakes up their life or they are forced to go on some journey of self-discovery.  Even that story feels familiar at this point, but this time it's my turn to go on that adventure.  Next time you read this, it will be from somewhere halfway around the world and I'll be looking out at a crowd of people and knowing that I don't know any of them.  It's time for a little unfamiliar.