Two Minutes for Travelling, Five Minutes for Holding

Hi. So tonight I tried hard to eat all the things in my fridge that will be rotten in three weeks time when I get back to LA. For dinner, I had: tomato soup, a hard-boiled egg, some spinach in an onion-garlic concoction, red peppers, tomatoes and balsamic vinegar. Ice cream. I packed in all these veggies while watching a screener of Wallace and Gromit, Were-Rabbit, which has a strong over-indulging-on-vegetables theme and also includes some really fantastic rabbits with pig noses who say "wheeee" and wave a lot and eat carrots vorasciously.

I should go on plane trips more often. The morass of my inability to motivate myself into any gear but putt-putt-yawwwwn has evaporated in the face of impending travel. I did my backlog of dishes, I tidied my room (finally), I packed, I took care of a bunch of bills, I wrote several emails I'd been meaning to write, I sorted through some files, I set up instructions for watering the plants and I generally was very orderly and organised. I think one of the things that is so damn satisfying about travel is that it's so orderly and easy (usually) to do all the things you need to do to pull everything off. Especially when travelling alone, I feel like a complete person, self-contained, on a clear trajectory through the world which offers up washrooms, notice boards, and lunch so that all my mundane needs are met. Travel in the Western world is an excercise in the beauty of infastructure.

The immense pleasure I get from being a good traveller is the same immense pleasure I have from having a well-ordered and small bedroom or office. It's so simple to know the right thing and do it.

Unlike everything else in life.

And the thought of all the people in Vancouver for me is such a warm thought. Yes, LA is full of people who delight me, but Vancouver is full of people that I've known since I used to be a union worker, since I used to write papers on Beowulf, since grade seven homeroom, since I was born. People who won't let me get away with bullshit, unless it's our own special brand of homegrown bullshit.

And there's also skiing, watching people watch hockey games, the trees in the damp cold and that ugly winter light.