Momentum

There are currently 17 minutes until I can leave the office for the day. Four more days of work. Four. Seven until I leave for a month long adventure in Europe. There's also a good friend's wedding in between now and then. It's all quite nerve wracking. For the wedding, I am so excited and scared for my friend. She'll be happy, I'm sure and I just want this day to go well, to be amazing for her. The rest of her life starts in a week or so. By the time I return, she'll have moved to another city to be with her husband. That's mildly scary. It's something I kind of expected. Everyone thinks of me as the one who travels everywhere and goes away and does all sorts of things that are away from home, but look at me, I've committed myself to at least a year of staying in the city, when most of my friends will be gone. I saw it coming. I'll be honest though, I do want to stay here and settle here, but I also want to move far away, at least temporarily. There is something to that loneliness of a new city. Maybe some day my job will lead me all over the place. This entry has gone in an entirely direction than I thought.

 

In reality, I wanted to talk about how I'm finally getting excited about my trip, even though I don't know what September holds (still waiting for good ol' grad school folk to tell me which courses to take). It'll all work out, won't it? It seems like it always does. I didn't think I'd get in anywhere and everyone somehow thought I was fit for their different and unique programmes. Didn't see that coming. I hope that I made the right decision and that I didn't just take the easy route. We'll have to find out, I guess. Anyway, that aside, I'm no longer too stressed about my life. I'll find a place to live and I'll find some friends and I won't live at home, even if I can't really afford it. During the first week of classes, I'll be jetlagged because I'm a snob who just came back from travelling in Europe with friends. It seems like this trip will never happen, but it hasn't been two years in the making like the first backpacking adventure. That was hype. We'd planned it since we'd met. The second trip fell together within a month and it was an inspiration for this trip - its chaotic nature and location. Each trip we approach with a new attitude as we both enter different stages in our lives. Trip one, I'd just finished high school and she was nearly done. Round two, she'd just returned from 6 months in Australia and I was in University, this time we're both students and ambitious ones. We'll approach things academically and with hysterical laughter, I'm sure.

 

July 2003, we arrive in Florence, Italy and drop our stuff in a 4 bed room in the most beautiful hostel I've ever been to since, my first hostel ever. There's one bag next to a bottom bunk, it's from Mountain Equipment Co-op, a Canadian, how disappointing. We met her later that day and sure enough, she was from Scarborough, very disappointing. She'd finished her undergrad and was heading off to do a Master's in Psych. I was kind of in awe as I was just about to start undergrad. A Master's? She must be smart, I thought. It was still a disappointment that the first person I met in a hostel was a Canadian, she did not feel that comraderie that Canadians often feel in foreign places. She didn't offer me any travelling advice, she just participated in the regular hostel banter. I hope I'm not that person for someone else.

 

Something I've realised is that now that I'm excited, this week will inch away slowly to the sound of This American Life podcasts from many years past as I work in the warehouse. My life feels now that it should be narrated by Ira Glass.