4.22.02 – decentralizing me

the upside to having a terminally fucked-up neck and a specialist who lives in redwood city is that i get lots more trips to the bay area to visit friends. i’m hanging out with my brother at stanford now, and tomorrow i’ll head up to the city to see lauren & co. hovav is my literary hero of the day: he traded me a coffee date for british editions of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy imported directly from blackwells in oxford.

it’s disorienting, all this moving around to places that i’ve once known well. i spent the afternoon wandering around stanford’s campus while chris was in class. it’s not so embarrassing to return to campus now because the chances of bumping into someone i know and getting that “what are you still doing hanging around here?” look are diminishing with time, allowing me to wander around, drink jamba juice and do the daily crossword behind the coffee house in relative anonymity. later this evening chris and i drove up to san francisco to have dinner at ti couz, which is not far from where i used to live. in order to get back on the freeway we had to drive right past my apartment on oak street. technically i live in boise right now, a place where i spent the first 18 years of my life but now feel like a frequent visitor more than an actual resident. this ability to move freely from once place to another so quickly – it almost makes me feel like i’m moving backwards and forwards in time. it’s not a sense of rootlessness so much as a sense of having roots spread so far and wide that i feel pulled in all directions – back to every place that i’ve known, and yet pulled forward always toward somewhere new. i’m decentralized. it’s not that it doesn’t matter where i am – it’s just that there are so many options, and each one has an infinite number of possibilites attached to it. how am i supposed to choose wisely? i wonder what life was like at a time when there were no options; there was a place where i was destined to be born, to live and to die and be buried, and that place defined me.

airplane travel always makes me feel a little stretched out, as if the spirit can’t quite follow as fast as the plane goes, and it takes a day or two to catch up and be whole again.