What Possessed Me

Warning: This post contains insufferable whining and petulance

Fauxhawk and I stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up five flights up.

We were home.

Our bags lay in disheveled heaps all around us. “Where is the porter with the lovely mustache to help us carry them up the stairs?” I cried, with alarming petulance. “Who will pre-fluff our pillows? Who will bring us breakfast in bed?”

Fauxhawk looked vaguely amused. “You’re spoiled,” he said. “How quickly you get used to a little luxury…”

It was true - I was spoiled rotten. I approached the stairs up to Fauxhawk’s apartment like I was heading to the electric chair. Cowboy the fuck up girl and quit yer whining, I thought. I remembered the girl who trekked solo through Ethiopia this summer - cold, wet, muddy, and wearing two pairs of underwear in bed to protect her lady parts from fleas. Despite a conspicuous lack of luxury, that girl had the time of her life. But with the sudden introduction of pre-fluffed pillows and pre-threaded needles and pre-warmed sheets – of impeccable service and supreme graciousness and sweetness beyond measure – I had gotten soft. India had spoiled me.

And now we were home.

Suffice it to say that the pillows were decidedly unfluffed. The bed was made, thank God, but no one – not even the imaginary maid - had bothered to turn down the sheets or place warm slippers on a silky mat. I was, however, cheered to see that Roy and Verne had not peed in the shower or played hockey with their poop while we were gone, though I realized that this was only because they were boarding with our beloved friends.

The next day it was cold and dark and gray. I stayed home, stewing in my pajamas and sporting an epic hair helmet. Fauxhawk the Intrepid went to work and called to check in.

“It’s bad out here, P.” he warned. “I don’t recommend it.”

“I know. Not going out there. Ever.” I said. “I miss India.”

By “out there” we meant what is commonly known as “real life.” Work. Reality. I haven’t the foggiest idea what this really means, because the parts of my life that I’ve spent traveling have felt the most real to me. The intensity of discovering new places and new people makes me feel more alive, more inspired, more spirited than almost anything else in life I experience.

At work, I am determined to capture the magical feeling of India and keep it with me, like a firefly in a jar. I sit in my drab little cubicle, slowly sinking into the quicksand of the quotidian, and I am buoyed by an occasional flash of light. It keeps me company. It reminds me that inspiration and adventure still exist somewhere.

But fireflies don’t live forever in a jar. Eventually, they fade and leave us with an emptiness that wants to be filled, once again, with light.


Poster from the May 1968 student movement in Paris, featured on this site, which I learned about from Maybe Maven, a fabulous design blog I discovered yesterday.

On the devil in the details

I admire people who are visionaries and strategists. They understand how things connect, how the story will unfold - and they plan accordingly.

Somehow, these qualities were written out of my genetic code. I am afflicted with a strange kind of life myopia. I see the things closest to me clearly, while anything in the distance appears as a blurry, formless blob. As a result, I seem utterly unable to make a plan for next week, much less next year. On the street, I fixate on the way the sidewalk sparkles, oblivious to oncoming traffic. At work, I produce - deadline after deadline – without any clear vision of the future. I watch one foot land in front of the other as the world goes on around me.

The details in front of me are certain and easy. It’s the bigger picture that baffles me; the future that scares me.

Looking at my India photographs this weekend, I noticed something typically …myopic about them. At the world’s most famous monument to love, millions of people step back to capture this architectural ode to symmetry and balance. I, on the other hand, zoomed in to snap pictures of tiles and inlaid stone and marble arches.









Perhaps I found the details more captivating than the larger context. But I think I also felt a strange kinship with those thousands of laborers from India and Central Asia who worked for thirty years to put each tiny piece of the Taj Mahal in place. I imagine them bent over their work, day after day, year after year, obsessing about the cut and color of a stone, the curve of a decorative vine, and then – suddenly - looking up to see what they had built. The surprise. The delight. The delicious sense of satisfaction. The idea of this touches me.

Will I feel the same way in thirty years, when I see what I’ve built?

Agra-vation vacation?

This is a picture of the Taj Mahal before things got really bad.



Before we ate glass at a tourist trap. Before our books and bags were confiscated waiting in an endless and pointless line. Before we got fed up with being followed, hounded, ripped off, ignored, and herded like cattle with hundreds of other tourists in Agra. Before we got into a snit and wanted to wring each other's necks.

By the time we had walked through the archway where the Taj Mahal suddenly and unexpectedly revealed itself like a beautiful mirage, we were ready to firebomb the joint. Fauxhawk and I wandered about silently in our own private funks as scores of couples posed for their Taj shots. We posed for our own, camera held at arm's length, and oh my - did we look pissed.

It was our only bad day in a string of beautiful days. We can't complain. For a traveler, India is as stressful and exhausting as it is fascinating. Every sense is overstimulated, every emotion rises to the surface. At the end of every evening, we fell asleep in taxis on our way back to the hotel, and collapsed into a dusty, bedraggled heap. But in the morning, we were renewed and ready to embrace the beauty - and the intensity - that waited outside our door.