Pretty excited about Big Sur this weekend and hiking into the Sykes hot springs, and Death Valley at the end of the month. I miss going camping/hiking more. I don't think I've ever regretted skipping a weekend's worth of happenings in town to go get stung by nettles (and then drink it as a tisane o' vengeance), barge through shrubbery, and shiver side-by-side like popsicles in a tent. And this is just car camping and all its shining luxuries, so wait until I convince you all to go backpacking.
I still have my scrappy sleeping bag from fifth grade that has taken me through Asian summer camp, Boy Scouts, and law school sojourneying. And I now own a new backpacking sack and a nifty 3-person tent, which a friend pointed out was essentially the first house I bought with a boy (it's my Commitment Tent!). All that remains is my ever-vigilant quest for an affordable camping stove, and I'm set to become an outdoor vagrant (are there other kinds?).
It's not that I'm even particularly good at camping. If there were ever a need for humanity to move back into caves, I don't know that I would last long. Namely, I can barely use a lighter, and this skill is even a recent development. I distinctly remember sitting in the darkness after hiking Half-Dome, staring at uncooked pasta, and then going to bed hungry, simply because we failed in Promethean fashion. As usual, it's partly my willingness to bear with things, being cold, being grimy, but in larger portion, it's clear that we get huge bonus points to Life when we wake up at 4 am because it's too hot in the Mojave desert, or when it's warm enough to leave the tent flaps open so that the ridiculous amount of stars and planets can just sink into our eyeballs.
And on a deeper (or more shallow?) level, I'm getting itchy to move along. Don't get me wrong. I love my job, and I feel like my ENFJ-self is being satiated by the friend clouds I like to have swirling around. I've just spent twenty-three years here in this awesome little city by the bay, and while on a daily basis, I smile at some ridiculous "only in SF/Portland/Minneapolis" moment that cheers and inspires me to ever-greater levels of kombucha crunchiness, I suspect that there's a big part of me that won't grow if I stay here in Kale n' Blue Bottlelandia.
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| Nettle tea |
There aren't greener pastures that I'm looking for, and SF will always be home base, Red Leader, but part of me wants to have taken that job for two years in Nepal or the summer in Namibia. It's also not about regrets because I'm very happy with each turn I've taken to get here, and to do it all over, I'd do the same. Last year was really good for me travel-wise, and I honestly could not stop grinning (in a shit-eating manner) whenever I woke up in the middle of the South or in the bustle of Bangkok.
Opportunity costs must always be accounted for, I know. It's just that work travel got lonely last year and it's not like you can cuddle with your escalating pile of frequent flyer miles. I'm going in circles now, but action plan is to branch out for my next employment stepping stone and to do more travel with friends. Burning Man and Canada are scheduled to consume my vacation time this year, but I want to somehow fit in Taiwan. Israel and Cambodia/Vietnam are somewhere in the mix, though probably not this year.
Lagged in blogging for the past two weeks so that I could catch up with my reading vows. I'm in the midst of Dancer From the Dance, and the novel is seriously trying really hard to make me go shop at Hot Topic. In other words, I love it and I really should just grow out the full emo hairswoop. Funny what a book on gays from the 70s still skewers today.
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