Ode to the road

Ah, the sweetness of travelling and unravelling. While my clothes ravel up in my packpack, I unravel. People say that when you are addicted to travel, you are running away, but I don´t feel that way. I think you learn more about yourself when on the road. When in a rut, it is easy to develop tunnel vision. A rat in a rut, running a race for someone else, chasing a light that will never be. By removing yourself from your comfort zone, and placing yourself in a foreign surrounding, you see the contrast instead of the grey.

But I guess some time I will have to return, just hopefully not to grey.

Not a game

Someone that I worked with at MEC died on the weekend, from an ice climbing accident. I am wondering whether writing it will make it seem more real. At the moment, I just can’t make it real in my head. He was there one day, healthy, young, happy… and now he is not. The human mind really has a hard time registering this kind of news. We somehow seem to fool each other and ourselves that everything is permanent, and it is not. Paul’s death is definitely a reality check. It is also a reminder of the dangers that exist in climbing. A reminder that it is not a game. But then again, neither is life.

Thoughts are words that define worlds

I was wondering the other day. Is it wondering or wandering? I never know. To wander is to walk about and to wonder is to ponder, I think. But each is a bit of the other. Anyhow, I was wondering how I would describe my job to someone who, not only had no concept of IT, but had no language. I would try to say that I fill up blank space with words, symbols and code. But that the space is not physical space, but temporal and made of bits and bytes. Dots and dashes. Blanks and solids. Two contradictory opposing opposite entities bound together to make something that is nothing...

But then, how would I even get that far without language. Not just without the English language, but without any known language for the purpose of communication.

Imagine being the sole survivor of a lost and finished tribe, with no language. No peers. No family. Nothing and no one to serve as points of reference. Nothing to define, limit or outline you.No parameters. No boundaries. Nothing to show time passing, moving, shaping...

what would that be like? I can't even begin to imagine, as all my thoughts are words.

Melancholy moment

Loneliness and unease has been creeping in under the extra winter covers and through the fogged up windows. Perhaps the unease comes from the fact that it is cold and snowing when it should be hot and sunny, and that I feel things are coming to an end. I wonder what it will be like when I get home. Will I have left a space, like an imprint, that I will just fit right back in to? Or will I have to forge a new space?

The loneliness is a strange one. We have met plenty of really friendly people here, and made friends, but those friendships are written into temporary contracts. Meanwhile I feel so removed from my friends back home.

But it is not all melancholy. There are beginnings. I am meeting up with an old friend over Christmas, and we are heading to South America for 7 months next year. I am just always so unprepared for melancholy moments in my usually joyful rush.

This blog has become such a navel gaze.

The air violin and ticking clocks

I have been playing the air violin for myself a lot lately. (shhh... can you hear it?)

Despite all my talk about how age does not matter, how it is just abstract and separate from our identity, I am freaking out about turning 30. (Hear violin)

It's not that I am unhappy with where I am. I have never been happier. Its just more that there is a clock ticking louder with each year, and this year it is more of a throb in my head than a tick. Yep, the biological clock. This hormone powered mechanism that is set to ring alarm bells at the turning of 30. There is only so long I can keep turning up the party tunes to block out the ticking.

Oh, the photo is of me at work with a hot water bottle strapped to myself, after having injured my shoulder at the gym. Something that seems to be happening a lot more lately, as I near 30. (Hear the violin strike another chord.)

Flying

Wow. Has it really been that long since I wrote in here? I don't believe it. I think I could be a terrible mother if I was ever going to be one. I might just put the kid down somewhere and forget to pick him up, only to get carried away with life until someone asks me about little Frankie.

Time is flying again and leaving me with a bit of motion sickness. Homesickness is a little like motion sickness, come to think of it. It is something inside you that wants to be back home while the rest is wanting to be in motion. The pull between the two is what makes you sick. Like when you are driving, your brain can not quite keep up with your eyes and the difference between the two makes you ill.

We bought our tickets to South America last week. Soon we will be flying again. I wonder if that is how you can stop time from flying on you - you fly away from it instead.

What kind of wings would time have?

Swell

These days daze me. My smile, more natural, spreads right through my body. My step is lighter. I think I have become that balloon. My skin has not really changed colour or texture and I am not floating about in a highway. But maybe I am. Maybe the cars are all the other people being stressed and busy all around me scooting by hooting and tooting at anything in their way, playing packman with the dotted line they blindly follow without ever questioning why or where it is leading them.

I am happy to go my way, not the highway. Life is swell, and I am swollen with it.