5/14
So it occurs to me that I spend an inordinate amount of space talking about food and not enough time talking about the place itself. Maybe I know places through my palette. I do have a baseline obsession with food. They say a hallmark of an eating disorder is being preoccupied with food. I don’t have an eating disorder but I get the preoccupation part. It’s like breaking up with a guy, insisting you don’t care that he’s up to, but surreptitiously checking his Facebook status updates.
I do have thoughts about my thoughts about traveling. I often think that maybe I’m doing it for the wrong reasons and then I think there is no wrong reason (well, traveling with the intent to exploit the people and ravage their land would kind of suck, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s going on with me). I was at a museum yesterday, ‘learning’ about Chiang Mai, and I had the attention span of a toddler. Now if it was a modern art museum, that would have been more my speed and I’m going to see what exhibit they got going on at the University. But am I supposed to be learning something? I do travel to learn but it’s to learn about me, not them. And that seems narcissistic and misguided (kind of like this blog you are reading).
(Ok, I know this is about food but I am writing this as the fancy coffee place and I just had an iced mocha and a ‘scone,’ which is really a biscuit. I don’t know if it’s because I’m hungry and tired but this just made me very happy.)
*Now back to our regularly scheduled self-indulgence.
I take note of the abilities of other people. Whenever I’ve met someone able to travel alone, I’ve felt humbled and impressed, and I’ve wanted to hone this skill as well. By contrast, when I hear about someone skydiving, I am impressed, and have absolutely no urge to try it myself. With travel, I imagine it’s so contrary to my up bringing and so in conflict with the low-grade anxiety I deal with when things get out of the routine. Basically what traveling means is being able to figure things out, respond to surprises, negotiate in a way that is not my baseline (even if it just is about a language barrier). My father recently said something about me not being afraid to travel. What I should have told him was I travel because I am afraid and I don’t want to be. So I make calculated baby steps.
And really, much of this is made so much easier traveling to places that are used to foreigners, specifically English speaking foreigners. I had my first glimpse of seeing myself through the eyes of the annoyed wait staff at the sushi restaurant last night when I tried to communicate about the food (used my phase book and everything) and when I had to cancel part of my order because I realized I didn’t have enough cash on me. I’m usually better prepared. But that kind of stuff is going to happen occasionally. I have to be ok with it. The people here are very sweet and patient with the language thing and I guess what happens when it does not go smoothly is not so much that I am caught out as being an ugly American, so much as I am seen at all, which is something I am not entirely comfortable with. When I make mistakes, people see me. If I don’t make mistakes, I can go on not being seen. Pretty easy here considering I’ll never see these people again. But in my regular life, that is a constant struggle.
A major reason this trip is going smoothly in the emotional realm is because I got to much info from Tim’s friend Nicole, who spent months in this very city. She was incredibly generous in her multiple emails in response to me. I don’t know what my level of anxiety would have been without it. Maybe this is just picking at the scab of displacement and discomfort (that metaphor really does work for everything). This is my first trip traveling completely alone but I had a lot of help easing into it. Now that I know I can do it, maybe next time I don’t need as much handholding (although handholding is always sought and appreciated). Now that I’ve done this, that 3-month long trip traveling to different countries doesn’t seem so out of reach. All I have to do is figure out that whole employment thing. But that’s a conversation for a different time.
What I’ve been thinking about is laziness. Pretty much anyone who knows me thinks it’s crazy that I have some kind of deep down belief that I am lazy. And I get that it doesn’t look that way; I am constantly busy. Even my downtime is scheduled (by the way, I wouldn’t recommend this as a emotionally healthy way to live). But laziness- yes. During my every day life I have a lot to do. People were surprised when I quite Poet as Radio, how quickly my schedule still filled up. But the laziness is in the routine. And I love my routine. I have a good job. I have my writing. I go to the gym with an obsessive consistency that has been the subject of many an therapy session. I love all those things. I love seeing my friends. I love books. I LOVE books. And knitting. And eating out. And saving money. And the farmer’s market. And walking around my little neighborhood, knowing the best cafe to write in and the best time to visit the shoe store and when the grocery store is most likely to be giving out samples and what sushi place has the worst service and what person at the post office might be working while drunk. But they all have their place and they are familiar and so on a day to day basis, I don’t have to engage with the construction of their place in my life. I don’t interact with these tasks, I just perform them.
When I am here, I have to figure everything out. That is probably part of that high I mentioned about figuring out the market and getting done what I wanted to get done. I can’t locate exactly where that happens during that event or its exact shape. Is it pride? Relief?
I know we all have routines and if we had to analyze and figure out everything we need to do everyday, then nothing would get done. But I also think I am someone who is a little too comforted by it, perhaps because my internal world can be very busy and not always kind (not that this particularly distinguishes me among others). That is what mediation is for I guess.
Of course the other part of this, the part that I habitually ignore, is that this is a vacation and on vacations people relax. When Krista and I were traveling in Central America, we had a flow of doing something one day and just hanging around the next. So visit the volcano one day, the next day, walk around town and eat ice cream. It was a good way to go. Because there is so much to do and see here, I don’t want to waste the time. But if I don’t recharge before I go back to my sometimes quite stressful job, I may have wasted something else. Just relaxing is hard for me to do at home, never mind when I’ve paid money and traveled thousands of miles. In this way, it’s good I’m going somewhere with a pool. It
provides me with a socially established structure for relaxing.
In the end, if one day I evolve into a totally self-assured and un-neurotic sort (*cough*never-gonna-happen*cough*), then I’ll believe there is still value in travel. Maybe that travel will change meaning for me, from teaching me resilience and independence, to teaching me about the world. Although I’m sure the world still seeps in from time to time. It’s got to.
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