how's it gonna be when you don't know me

I'm dreaming of foreign lands. All those old urges to pack up everything and move, to chop off my hair (and even dye it, which I've never done, some sort of flame-red Christina Hendricks color) and run for the hills, to endure months of that strange dislocation from reality that comes from extended, unrooted travel -- it's all coming back. I thought I had cured myself with my overly hectic travel schedule this spring, but it's easy to write off those experiences because I was deathly ill, and Paris just was not as fun when I couldn't walk for more than half an hour without taking a break to regain my breath. I also thought I had cured myself by moving into a wonderful, perfect-for-me Abe Lincoln cabin in Palo Alto -- and by quitting my job, which at the time felt like an ultimate act of lighting a match to my safe life and setting off into the unknown.

But I'm too much like Pa Ingalls, always ready to move off to the next place on the prairie (where prairie = Europe). The urge struck me hard during my blogging class tonight -- partially because I wanted to stab myself in the face out of boredom because I am way more familiar with WordPress and Blogger than my classmates, and since tonight's class dealt with such fascinating technical topics as "how to upload a photo" and "how to insert a YouTube video", I spent most of the time daydreaming rather than paying attention. I found an awesome WordPress blog theme for travel blogs, and spent the rest of the class thinking of all the places I could go, how long I could spend there, and which of my friends (that means you, dear readers) I could convince to meet up with me at various points along the way.

I don't know if this will come to anything; I need to finish this damn book first. But if it does, you will be the first to know -- and you'll benefit from months' worth of travel blog posts, rather than the inanities of my Palo Alto life, so you should be hoping that this happens!

Anyway, the rest of my day was productive, but not as productive as it needed to be; I got up at a respectable hour, did about thirty minutes of work for the freelance project, and worked on my book for the rest of the morning (plotting, not writing). I made a 4x6 notecard for every scene that I think happens between now and the end of the book, based off the brainstorming I did yesterday, and then stewed over the ideas while working out at the gym. When I got home, I gathered up my stuff and then went to the Stanford CoHo, which is basically unrecognizable due to all the renovations they've made, where I had a surprisingly good chicken sandwich and spent another hour and a half arranging my notecards so that they are in the right order and I know how the scenes are structured.

At the CoHo, though, they were playing hits from the early/mid-nineties, such as Nirvana and Third Eye Blind. While listening to Nirvana, I realized that for the freshmen at the CoHo, they were only one or two when Kurt Cobain died, and so it's sort of the equivalent of if I had gone to the CoHo as a freshman and heard them playing Pat Benatar, Bob Seger, Hall and Oates, etc. Granted, I love the '80s, but I was a little sad to realize that the music of my high school days is already becoming oldies.

After that depressing realization, I went to class, came home an absurdly long time after that, messed around on the internet and tortured myself by reading travel blogs, and now need to go to bed. Either tell me to stop thinking about traveling, or tell me you're coming with me!