Betwixt and Between, as they say
By admin | July 5, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
7am Taipai, Tawain
We lost Monday. At home right now, it’s 4:00 yesterday. We’re in the future, and it’s good, says one of my travelling companions.
On Sunday, July 4, I woke up anxious, which only got worse after Rebecca brought over chai to see me off. I drove in to Ocean Beach as a friend was just leaving, scoring the best parking spot ever right at the acrogreens. I had so much excess energy, I thought I might even go surfing. Of course I didn’t. After biking between Fiesta Island and OB, and flying at Ocean Beach (making progress on high hand to hands!), Jack drove me up to the Solana Beach train station, where I joined three other teachers heading to LAX en route to Shenzhen, China. I left him with vague instructions to keep the cat and the chickens alive until Kate and Monetta make it home from the Black Rock Desert, fiddled with my luggage, and started my journey.
Trains are a pretty relaxing way to travel anyway, but stress of the last few days became pretty irrelevant as we all agreed the teaching was great and all, but mostly we were excited about going to China. I tried not to think too much about the impending 14 hour plane flight.
We flew out of LAX about 2am, hoping to sleep most of the way. It was reasonably comfortable for having to stay in a seat for that long. I slept a lot, and also read a new book, an ethnographic study of the relationship between Burning Man and spirituality. Reading it while in what I feel I could now argue is another common form of liminoid space, the in-between world of airports and airplanes, felt appropriate.
As my first post, I mostly want to get something up. I hope to be more interesting in the future.
1 Comment
Nicole Hickman on July 5, 2010 at 5:11 pm.
Hey Jenny,
I thought that was a great post, not uninteresting at all. I’m looking forward to reading more about your travels, so I’m hoping I can subscribe via RSS.
By the way, your last paragraph (or technically penultimate paragraph) reminded me of an essay I recently read in Harper’s magazine, called “Arrivals”.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/05/page/0019
Let me know if you want me to send you a PDF, I’m a subscriber so I have full access, not sure if that’s the case for non-subscribers to certain portions of the magazine. I think you’d like the piece.
Nicole