embrace the chaos

Adit's contribution to my to-do list - he determined that all of it could wait, or never be done at all, and that I should enjoy my time off instead.

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After a journey of >1000 miles and seven nights spent sleeping in unfamiliar beds, I'm back in Palo Alto. I was on the road straight from 10am to 6pm yesterday, made a brief stop at my apartment to talk to Adit and change clothes, and then drove up to the evil city to spend some quality time with my former expat friends (the 'former' applies to our expat status, not to the quality of our friendship).

Those same friends exhorted me to be more concise in my blog posts, and complained that I give them too much to read. That's too bad! If I'm more concise, you would have no way of knowing that they tried to convince me to use 'Baroness von Swampler' as my pseudonym, or that (at the behest of Nathan) I got some more mileage out of the story about the time that I saw that live sex show - and some amazing muscular control involving a Sharpie and John's chest - in Amsterdam. You also wouldn't know that I got to spend some quality time with Heather, Salim, Arod, Jenni, Shadie, Lauren (aka Subz), Nathan, Alaska Matt, and Kia. And wouldn't your life be just a little bit emptier if you didn't know the minutiae of my life?

Anyway, I spent the night on Heather and Salim's couch, came home this morning, and had a late breakfast with Adit, in which he tried to convince me that I should relax and live my life rather than making lists. Instead of accomplishing anything or living my life (whatever that means), I took a nap, had dinner with Terry, and read a romance novel. Appropriately enough, the romance novel ('Breathing Room' by Susan Elizabeth Phillips) was about a woman whose self-help empire crashed around her because she was too controlling and too unable to deal with spontaneity, who finds redemption in the arms of a gorgeous movie star during a sojourn in Tuscany. Not that I think I'll find a gorgeous movie star anytime soon, but I could probably spend a little bit more time thinking about how to let go, rather than trying to plan everything in my life down to the smallest detail.

Letting go will have to happen after I take care of all of the errands involved in packing up my stuff and moving to the Midwest. Even then, living in my homeland will likely not encourage me to let go of anything, except responsibility for my own laundry and perhaps my tendencies to apply makeup every day. It should be interesting regardless!