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some junk mail August is here and I don't mind. Time has yet to catch up with me as I continue to ride out my post vacation high. Those three weeks on the road made me feel truly alive and I don't want that feeling to fade. It would be far too easy to let myself slide into monotony again so I try to keep as busy as possible. I want that momentum to keep going. While I was away everything around me was new and I was free to do whatever I wanted. Time had no meaning and I didn't even want to know what was going on back in the United States. None of that held my interest anymore. Only what was in front of me was important. Nothing else mattered. Being able to feel that way for as long as I did made this the best July that I have had in years and I hope that my trip next year goes just as well if not better. ... From talking with my parents yesterday it sounds as though my brother would have preferred a few more creature comforts on our trip, but he still had a good time. I could sense of his resentment on the trip and I amazed myself, but how muh of it I took in stride. What usually sent him over the edge was when we got lumped in with a group of people in a dorm room at a hostel. He always wanted a double and sometimes we got one, but not always. The other slightly sore point was money. I am fairly positive that I had much more than he did and he let me know that every once in a while. ... Part of me likes to think that I was much more talkative while I was on the road. I wanted to hear about where these other people had been and where they were going next. These were people that weren't tied down to anything and seemed to prefer it that way. For me it was real and unreal at the same time. One good example of people that intrigued me would be the couple that had met one another while they were traveling and had been together ever since that time. When I first met them in Prague they had already done a week in Cairo before starting on a tour of Europe. Then after they were done with Europe they were going to return to Africa for a four week safari down through the continent and I almost envied them. Being able to get a small taste of that lifestyle no matter how small or brief it might have been was amazing. ... Ever so slowly I am taking care of some of things that I left behind while I was traveling. I had already sorted through most of the mail on Saturday by making sure that all of the bills were taken care of first, but today I went through the rest of it. There was the usual mixture of catalogs, grocery store flyers and missing person mailers. Personally I feel that my junk mail to real mail ratio is much too high, but I'm probably not the only one that feels that way. For some reason I find it hard to imagine how many different mailing lists have my name on them, because I seem to be the target for all kinds of things that have nothing in common. Then again I suppose that all that it takes is one magazine subscription to get my name out there circulating from one list to another in an endless cycle. ... Jose appreciated the German comic book that I had brought back for him. He had requested matchbooks, but I never saw any while I was in Europe. Then again I wasn't really looking that hard either. As silly as it sounds I don't know if I could teach myself German by reading a comic book. Even with the visual clues, I still have a very hard time understanding what is happening in the story. |