strike that

general mayhem

So once again, I started the day with a very different plan than the one I am finishing the day with.

It began innocently enough with the monthly mass email from my friends who run the fabulous travel site bootsnall.com. They started the site in Eugene, and I wrote for them from New York, and when I was checking out grad schools they gave me a crazy welcome and showed me all around.

Now the monthly mass email usually contains a list of new travel blogs, and ads for travel deals. But this month it started with a solicitation for travel writers for a new project: a series of Logues for popular destinations, like the wildly successful one they already have going at baliblog.com. They are looking for people to write about London and China and Hawaii and lots of other places I don’t live.

But it was a dangerous email for me to get just now, with the considerations of big irresponsible adventure fresh off my tongue. Because suddenly there I was thinking, how little could I live on in Costa Rica? And if I went there, or to Hawaii, for a month or for a year, could I possibly think of anything productive and even vaguely tangentially career-related to do there?

Not because I feel obligated to, although that might be appropriate. But because I actually really truly love the shit I’ve just spent four years preparing to do. I mean, I love it. I am a big shameless urban planning geek. I visit cities and document their public plazas. I draw little maps in my journal. I like to talk about Jane Jacobs. And I am beyond anxious for a chance to start working, given that I find some sort of work that involves making socially successful, aesthetically kickass, ecologically functioning urban space.

And in fact just yesterday I found an advertisement for one such job, and have been giddily assembling an application for it.

Yet. For some reason that I can not exactly put my finger on I am nearly, but JUST NOT QUITE ready to start such a job this very moment. Perhaps because I know that when I get off that plane in Portland, a grittily beautiful city with bridges and brunches and Powell’s, I will not want to quit this awesome job, and I will live in some small central house with lots of bookshelves, and I will bike around and take swing dancing lessons and barbeque with my long lost friends, and date some dorky hipster boy who makes satirical music or selfmocking art and agrees to learn sign language with me so we can make fun of people in crowds. And all of this will be Good and I will want it to Last. For which reason I am clinging to this current little bit of reliable uncertainty.

And furthermore, I got all geared up for a Big Summer Adventure. And though the improvised substitute summer has been fun and altogether wonderful, I need something before heading west again: a dose of stunning, breathless excitement. But, you know. Not from anaphylaxis.

So the current plan, the plan as of right now half past midnight, is that I’m going to New Orleans.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:02 PM