Airport Security Romance

Well here I am yet again staring at a month since my last post. A whole lot of things have happened since this time in November when Jordi and I were still cruising down the California coast looking for another place to set up camp. We made it back up to Livermore for Thanksgiving after 5,714.4 miles of driving together. Five thousand, seven hundred and fourteen miles. I wrote it out for a stronger impact. We didn't get any speeding tickets, no flat tires, didn't get lost all that much, and we still like each other. A lot. And he's on his way to Central America for 4 months and I'm here. In Livermore. Trying to earn money for whatever I do next.

Saying goodbye to Jordi at the airport in San Francisco was tough. I got used to his constant presence for 3 months, and the prospect of spending an indeterminate length of time on different continents is a scary one. But this is how it has to be. I need to be here to work, he wants to travel, and it's good for us to spend some time apart to focus on ourselves. But as much as my rational brain understands that, there's a part of me that questions it, resents it, fights it like a teenage girl who's been grounded right before prom.

I stood there by the security line at SFO watching him through the plexiglass partition like an animal in a zoo. It's a shame people don't still travel on huge passenger steamliners like the Titanic. I feel like goodbyes must have been much more poignant and romantic back then. I'd be waving my handkerchief and gathering up my skirts so as not to trip as I fluttered along the dock to get one last look at him, tall and dashing in a three-piece suit, before he disappeared on the horizon. Instead I stood there with a couple other weirdos and watched as he removed his belt and shoes, placed them in the plastic container, and stepped somberly in his old black socks through the gray plastic gateway of airport security.

But maybe in a hundred years people will be in their spaceships daydreaming about how romantic it must have been to bid farewell to their loved ones at those primitive, non-galactic travel hubs where people still had to manually remove items of clothing for a security screening. I guess real life is never as romantic and perfectly scripted as we want it to be, and I'm sure people felt the same way a hundred years ago and that farewells at the departure of the Titanic were not as romantic as James Cameron wants us to believe.

Ultimately, the here and now is as much as we can hope for and we ought to be pretty damn glad to have even that. It's ours and the romantic thing about it is that no one else really knows what's going on in your own personal reality (not even the pierced, tattooed lady with a partially shaved head who stood next to me at the airport watching her beloved trek through the TSA line before removing his Dr. Martens).

I just hope Jordi, who I believe is in a plane somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, is enjoying his here and now and will have good stories for me when we see each other again.

Eeny meeny miny mo

So the current happenings in my life are... um, let's see... mostly just trying to figure out WHAT THE HELL TO DO WITH IT. I spent a shiftless year in Europe, my greatest ambitions to maintain sanity while two heart-stealing little boys (or vampires, if you'd rather) sucked all the energy right out of me, and to see as many different places as I could cram into 3-day weekends.

Now I have a 2-3 month road trip with a foreigner planned (more on that later) around this vast, American wonderland we call the wild, wild West. After that, your guess is as good as mine. It'll either be more travel (possibly funded by teaching English to eager learners on a continent I have yet to explore) grad school (should I be foolish enough to undertake the application process while on the road), or moving to San Francisco or New York and knocking on doors until some merciful soul hires me.

Here, ladies and gentlemen, are the options I've laid out before me. The first step is to choose one, then narrow things down within that vague selection, then figure out how to make something work. Sounds easy! Now, where do I begin...?

Oh right, I have no clue. 

This is where you come in, my older and much wiser (or is it wiser and much older?) readers. I'm not shy to admit that I'm currently floundering in a rough sea of possibilities, so I've certainly had advice dumped on me before by those who will listen to my wretched 23-year-old woes. Most people just smile and shake their head at me, fondly recalling that happy-go-lucky time when they had nothing but freedom and a rusty volkswagen.

They say, "Don't worry! Follow your heart and the right opportunity will present itself in good time. You just have to make sure you take it." Then I nod and breathe a sigh of relief before I go home and make myself blind and dizzy sitting in front of the dim computer screen scrolling through ten million job postings, university websites, and volunteer abroad programs waiting for the "right opportunity" to present itself. Then, my brain explodes. This has happened more times than I can count. Apparently, the internet does not have all the answers. Maybe I should try searching 'my soul' on Google or Wikipedia.

So what I'm wondering is this: how did you all come to decisions back when the world was your proverbial oyster? The way everyone else talks about it, you'd think they rolled through life without any stress at all over what to do next, where to go, or who to go there with. "Oh, I moved here, then got this job, then we met, then we went here, then we traveled, then we got married, then he got this job, then I got my masters here, then we moved..." Were things actually simpler back then? Or do people just tend to forget how hard it was to decide (and agree on) all that stuff?

If you have a nugget of wisdom you'd like share with me, please leave a comment. I promise, anything would be appreciated. Maybe you want to tell me to get a grip and be a grown up and stop dicking around on Blogger when I could be doing something productive. If so, that's fine too. I'll take anything.

My bathroom calendar didn't prepare me for this.

After a 24 hours of travel, I am now back in California feeling appropriately strange after having spent a year on another continent, with just one stateside visit over Christmas. It's been a while, and I found myself searching for the flush handle on the toilet at my parents' house because it of course isn't a plastic button to push on top, like I'm now used to. Welkom in Amerika!

The night before I left Amsterdam, my boyfriend finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig's popular 1974 philosophical memoir. He closed the book and sat there quietly watching me pack up all my things, my face red and tear-stained from a few emotional goodbyes earlier that evening. It was hard for us not to be nostalgic as we thought about our time in Amsterdam together and separately. It's been his home all his life, and now having finished school, he'll be traveling and living out of a backpack indefinitely so he's got some goodbyes to say too.

I told him I'd rather not think about any of it if I can help it, that leaving is hard enough as it is and I can't be getting all choked up over good times that ended too soon. Then he reached for his book again and showed me the beginning of Pirsig's afterward about the ancient Greek view of time.

They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.

When you think about it, that's a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

I wonder if the Greek say anything about how fast the future comes upon you from behind your back. Do they mention how even with a calendar hanging over your toilet, a countdown widget on your dashboard, and every rational molecule in your brain reminding you that time is passing, that September is here, you'll still be blindsided, rammed and plowed over by the future?

But it's here. It's September. My year of few responsibilities and European escapades has come to a close, and I'm back in the States getting dangerously close to decision-making time. How the hell did that happen?

I guess all I can do for now is take baby steps backwards into the future, blindly groping for the best choice, the best opportunity, and hope I don't trip on the way. And I suppose I'll allow myself a little nostalgia. The memories of my past are fond, and they deserve some attention.