Spring Break Sobriety Tour 2009

I´m going to try and make this quick because this Internet booth seems to be filling with gas fumes. Tonight I was going to go on this space tour, where they show you all the constellations. It´s amazing how many stars you can see here. I forget about the stars sometimes in New York. The tour, however, was canceled because it is cloudy, and it is actually raining a bit in the driest place on earth. Amazing!

The trip has been incredible. There has been a good mix of Serious stupidity (typical move of getting ripped off by a cabbie after many hours of traveling and not knowing the exchange rate), serious sunburn, excellent romantic intrigue, language lessons, sweeping landscapes, freezing temperatures, contemplation, sober conversations with drunken individuals, and more. The one thing that hasn´t been happening has been SLEEP.

Yes, that´s right. I´m on fucken vacation andI haven´t been able to sleep more than a few hours a night. I brought with me a bunch of my knockout pills but refuse to take them. I don´t know why. I guess this kind of insomnia just doesn´t bother me that much, because when I get up, I can face the day because there´s so much to do and it´s exciting. I guess I don´t want to take the pills because I don´t want to be groggy. The other night I couldn´t sleep and I lay awake thinking about this boy, and how much I love the desert and photography and traveling and blah blah blah and wondered if I could possibly make this my life. Like, how can I make a living like this? And will I ever see this boy again after this trip? How can I make my life all about travel and photography and cute boys? That´s what I want my life to be like.

It wasn´t until the next day that I realized...huh...this is my life. At least, for the moment. That´s the big human condition though, isn´t it...not being able to enjoy the moment...struggling to prolong it always...staying up late at night wondering, worrying about how to make it last...

I will write some more about this romantic intrigue but I can´t now because it still feels like a fresh and lovely gift and if I write about it I think it will start to feel like a loss. So I will say that the desert is so humbling. I will have to ruminate on it some more, but it makes me feel like an idiot for living in New York. It makes me realize that so many of my most important and enjoyable moments in life happened in the desert.

I realized this as I wrote this in a postcard to Wonder Woman that I came here to figure things out, and all I´ve figured out is that it is pretty misguided to think that you can just sit down and think things through and come up with solutions...at least for me. I can´t just sit down and make plan that will work for me. All I can do is tell myself that as long as I have my wits about me, and can continue to wander the way that I want, everything will be okay. No, better than okay.

Solo travel is incredible. I don´t know what I was so worried about. Now that I´m away, I remember the scariest part of traveling is returning home, or¨re-entry,¨as Sharp calls it. I miss everyone, but I miss this feeling too...