Sunday, March 20, 2005

Today is Hangover Sunday

Sometimes I just have to throw all my Saturday plans out the window and spend the day shoe shopping and bar hopping on Haight Street. Turn around on the barstool three whiskey sours later and the sun is starting to set. But that doesn't stop my friends from declaring another toast - the same toast we've been blubbering to each other all afternoon. "To Kenya! To art school! To France!"

It was only the beginning of a long, long evening of friends, booze headaches, lasagna. It ended with a late, late, late bedtime on someone's squeaky pullout couch. At 8am this morning I stumbled to the Muni station. With my ears ringing and my head cloudy, I went grocery shopping. I assessed the day's fish selection, I ate lukewarm over-the-counter dim sum, and I fumbled my way through a conversation in Mandarin with a Cantonese guy at the bus stop. By 9:30am I was lying face down in bed, wearing yesterday's clothes, trying to make a comprehensive list of everything I need to do before May 23. Four hours later I woke up to that crappy feeling of just having rescued myself from a traumatic moment in a bad dream. Something about my boss taunting me for being an incompetent, hopeless failure in the field of law. And an administrative assistant named Julian (no relation to J Wimbush) who was actually a robot with four arms.

I wonder if this weekend, in some ways, was about escapism. I have a lot of things to resolve before I leave, and they're not just items on a to do list. I have a lot of anxiety about leaving the country for two years, despite all my ranting about how we're all going to hell in a Republican handbasket and how I'm hopping the border to Canada. (Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank? Cover your eyes.) But I don't know how this brand of anxiety is supposed to feel. I just described it to a friend in an email:

I keep trying to imagine it, and feel it, but I really can't. What is it going to feel like to get on a plane knowing I'll be away for 2 years without my friends or family or anything familiar - like running water, electricity, garbage service, tile floors, porcelain toilets and English speakers? I have no experience to serve as a frame of reference, you know? Backpacking around SE Asia for 2 months is just not the same thing. So it's just a very weird, uh, non-feeling to be where I am right now.


It's Sunday night and my to do list is the same length as it was on Friday. Trying to shake the brain fuzzies, I went for a long walk through the park and saw an elderly Asian couple tossing a frisbee together. They couldn't have been younger than 60. I smelled the flowering plants and eucalyptus groves and damp mud that mingle together to create that familiar Northern California smell, and wandered along trails that I've walked scores of times but still have no idea how to find on a map. I followed the sound of bongo drums thinking it was the Sunday drum circle on Strawberry Hill. Instead I found myself in a dark tunnel, with the rich sound of a flute and a single bongo drum swirling around me, blanketing the walls of the tunnel, filling my lungs and grabbing hold of my hand. I wanted to stand still and listen to them play, the flautist on one side of me and the drummer on the other, at the far mouth of the tunnel, but despite feeling a sense of having my spirit lifted to the surface of my being, I was still untranscended from my self-conscious introverted self, and I kept walking. The light from the evening sun made all the plants glow a vivid green, and I watched three guy ducks trolling for pond scum on a still lagoon. Golden Gate Park is my home.

2 Comments:

Blogger Travelgurl said...

What countries in SE Asia? I have spent heaps of time there (several trips through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Burma). I love SE Asia and it killed me to see the devistation from the Tsunami.

1:29 PM  
Blogger Justina said...

Hey there, ME. I finally have blogger.com friends! I spent 2 months traveling in Malaysia, Borneo and Thailand. Also spent a week in Korea. I'd love to go back and hit the other countries, spend a year in China, visit Nepal and Tibet...

12:26 AM  

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