last windup in California

Having returned from one last vacation I have the feeling of winding up the family grandfather clock for one last go of it in California before I emigrate to the island of Academia in Boston. I have about three weeks to get in all the thrills of being back home (for the last seven years) and do all those things I never got around to. I'll be showing off the home state to my cousin and her husband who are visiting for the first time in a week or so. On the agenda is a quick trip to Yosemite, so that I may visit it for the first time as well, and break one of my more ridiculous virginities. I've pretended in the past that having missed Yosemite thus far but having gone to more remote places says something about my personality. The truth is my family was supposed to go visit about twenty years ago but the dishwasher broke, so it's just dumb luck.

The other things I want to do this month have nothing to do with California, except for maybe one last backpacking trip. I had the idea of taking Amtrak up to Mount Shasta for a weekend of wandering around and camping on the lower flanks of the mountain. Maybe next weekend. Mostly I keep thinking about reading, and picking the piano back up, and really learning some more German.

I wonder if I should be lonely, about to uproot myself from the warren and try to join several new communities that will intersect for me in Somerville, MA. I'm abruptly surprised by a dearth of loneliness in my life right now. For an emotion that has been so prevalent in my adult life it ought not to have slipped away without me noticing. Certainly I have no romantic relationship, no emanicipation by way of new friendships, and no new social activities. It is the anticipation of a move, admittedly an escape, that keeps me calm right now. My aneremophobia, or lack of fear of solitude, doesn't comfort me because the pain solitude inflicts is usually what gets me out of the house and into a new adventure. But maybe this time, finally, it's some good old fashioned planning that is going to land me in a place that's good for me.

I've proved reticent when I think about losing the close contact to the friends and family I have here. When I'm in Boston I don't feel far away though. Between texts and cell phones and six-hour cheap nonstop flights, I'm really the villager that moves over a town and visits on his mule every few months. With a notable exception or two, I don't feel that much of a need for physical proximately with my life in California. I mostly expell thought bubbles that try to figure out why I stayed here this year, and whether Boston will be the right match. It's a self-centered approach, and I fear that as I get older and accumulate years of unanswered bachelorhood that I'll harden into a quixotic academic with little tolerance for anything but the heaviest and unhealthiest of romantic and railroad related crushes. Or, like that whence derives quixotic, I'll be busy chasing windmills and tidal generators.

If life is one of vast opportunity, of which mine seems capable, then I am surely wasting my time here in California. If, on the other hand, we are robots of environmental molding, I should be happy that I'll be making one big move after seven years of conservative programming.


Mental note: learn how to use drawing program.