polynesian paradise

In what became a fairly startling revelation, I learned today that an acquaintance has sold off everything she owns and moved to French Polynesia. For a moment, I was surprised because, locked inside my own little mind, I often take for granted that there are other people in the world who feel precisely as I do, who yearn for escape and adventure. Then, of course, I was beset by envy. She just did it, without thinking of the practicalities of it, without doing it "correctly," without working out how she would live or what she would do. She said that she realized, after visiting there last month, that she needed something more out of life and thought she would find it on the islands.

I have never been there nor ever really considered it an option but I can imagine the beaches and the lush overgrowth, the supersaturated color of the water and the warmth clinging to the backs of my knees and my spine. I can imagine riding a rusted old bicycle and waving to women dressed in white, I can imagine the smell of the thatched roofs and the jungle after a rain.

It is no longer enough to suck at the drippings of the imagination when, with a bit of effort, I could pick the fruit and taste its meat.

Read more after the jump.

vagabonds

First, a link: VW Vagabonds

Recently, I bought their book about their travels through Central and South America and Africa in a 60s VW van. I became enraptured by thought of pure, unadulterated exploration and bolstered to learn that they made their trek on average earnings, saved over the course of 6 years. I could maybe do without the old van but it seems to have worked out very well for them.



Today, I quit my job. I was plagued by nightmares all night, some of them during which I told my boss that I was leaving to disastrous effects and others were unrelated in subject matter but no doubt stress-induced. As these things typically happen, the actual resignation was swift and painless, eliciting the tiniest of flutters in an otherwise un-noteworthy day. I left with the mostly solid promise of a position at a local retail outfit that was established for fashion designers from the city to sell their clothing. A kind of boutique/showcase, I will be directing it down whatever path the partners decide to steer it. I am filled with trepidation and excitement at the prospect but it is, in the pit of my stomach, what I would most like to do.

Between when I leave the museum and begin at the shop, Remy and I will be taking a brief vacation to Missouri to visit his brother and to meet his brother's fiance before their August wedding. As per usual, we're trying to cram far more into the trip than is humanly possible so that we can visit friends, old roommates and the IKEA store along the way. We're also hoping to do a bit of camping outside of Kansas City, so long as the weather permits. And, to add to the mess, we're taking both of the cats with us, convinced that they would prefer a long car ride to being left alone in the house for a week.

The first order of business is renting a van, unnecessarily large for the trip down but big enough to hold the sofa and shelves we intend to buy on the way back. Then we have to figure out where we will stay. Ideally, we will stay outside of Chicago on Friday night and visit friends, then spend Saturday night in Indiana on our old college campus. We want to hit up the CD stores that we frequented during school, visit with some friends who still live in the area and arrive in Kansas City on Sunday afternoon. We would head back on Saturday night, spend the evening in Chicago again, so that we can shop on Sunday morning, meet friends for lunch and head home with our booty. In between, there would be camping and exploring KC by bike (yes, we're taking those, too), maybe some video game playing and definitely some sleeping in past any decent hour in the morning.

What I love perhaps more than the travel itself is the planning and preparation. I love to determine an itinerary, make reservations, work everything out down to where we will stop for dinner. Of course, plans are simply a guide for what will go wrong and I enjoy ruining them by stopping on a whim at a roadside antique shop or taking the scenic route. This trip, as complex as it is, will likely be full of precisely the kind of detours that make traveling grand and I will be sure to have my camera at the ready to document every last bend in the road.

Read more after the jump.

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

I haven't written in what appears to be well over three months now and I thought for a time that I would give this up. I'm terrible with maintaining these kinds of things and doubly so this particular journal because the prospect of escape seemed too remote. Every day I finger the dream, roll it around with my tongue and then put it to bed to explore again tomorrow but I get nowhere closer to the goal.

While running away to a foreign land is a somewhat distant prospect still (though we are saving like fiends), I realized this morning that we still travel a great deal and have recently decided that we should visit the last few places in the US that we haven't been before departing for indefiniteness. Though I might have little of international content to report for the time being, I have been yearning to write about the places that I have been, the things that I have seen. In each place that we have lived, I have had the inkling of an idea for a book centered around the people, the ghosts, the structures and the culture as each region is unique from another and I have been unique in those places, reaching into a different part of my soul, welling up as a different caricature of myself to reflect and ultimately survive in my surroundings.

What made me come to this conclusion about this journal, what brought this desire to my attention, was a question that Remy asked me this morning about our last trip. My mind ignored the last three journeys and went all the way back to August when we rode out to Las Vegas in a crowded, pungent bus and then drove home in an overstuffed moving truck. It occurred to me then that our circumstances are unique enough to warrant mention, that our experiences are truly our own, that we travel at the drop of a hat and force ourselves into the unlikliest of places and that even those little weekend trips where we drive 12 hours there and 12 hours back just to say "hello" to a friend, dead or alive, deserve as much mention as longer journeys, that they all speak to who we are, who we are striving to become. They are stages in a sometimes crooked evolution and they need to be chronicled so that one day, when memory no longer serves and we are asked how we came to be in such a place doing such things, we will have a record to prove that we weren't just born from nothing.

Read more after the jump.