snow :)

Lord I sometimes miss Thailand. There are moments where I ache for that place. But tonight, as the snow falls down softly upon my Richmond, as the white of the sky and the white of the ground create a different shade of night, I can't help but be ridiculously happy to be home.

I hope I will always be madly, truly, deeply in love with snow. I hope it always makes me feel this way, because tonight, even in the midst of such change and uncertainty in my life, I am filled with a renewed sense of wonder, connected to that thread of childhood hope that is so often missing in the adult world. I hope the sound of snow falling always breaks my heart in this, the most wonderful way. Because my God, is there any more beautiful sound on earth, that soft half silence as the world stops?

Snow is one of my favorite things, if not my absolute favorite thing. It makes things new and fresh and beautiful. It makes everything quieter, gentler somehow.

I never want to see snow as a nuisance or a bother or inconvenience. I only ever want to see it as that singular, perfect thing that keeps me standing at the window, unable to get enough of the sight of it, unable to ever want it to end.

gratitude

Tonight I am thankful for many things, among them;

• The existence of my niece (even if she's techincally still in her mother's tummy)
• My loud, beautiful, big extended family who fill a room with energy and warmth. It has been far too long since I've been in their presence.
• The freak November thunderstorm outside. I fell asleep so many nights in Thailand to the sound of thunder. Lightning lit up the sky and rain lashed against the windows for hours and hours. Without realizing it these noises became a comfort to me, something I expected, something that made me feel safe and secure a million miles from home. Hearing them tonight brings a tiny piece of Thailand to me, back across those million miles.
• Turducken. No explanation needed.
• Lee Brothers Mac n' Cheese-basically some elbow macaroni and 5 tons of cheese, including just the right amount of funky aged gruyere to keep it from baring any resemblance to the macaroni you get out of the box.
• Live tennis on television. And not just any old live tennis but the top 8 players in the world competing. Oh how i missed watching this, the most beautiful and wonderful of sports, when I was gone.
• Reading three books simultaneously including David Sedaris, Elizabeth Gilbert, and the new Agassi autobiography
• Pictures of my beautiful Charleston on my wall, and knowing that in about two weeks I will return to this place I miss with every fiber of my being.
• Scarves and tall leather boots and other cold weather items.
• Sparkly cardigans.
• Flats.
• Mashed potatoes.
• Fresh, practically right off the boat seared tuna on the Thanksgiving table (tuna you ask? yup that's how my family rolls)
• The scar on my knee from nightswimming in Ko Samet. I rammed my knee into an underwater rock. My purse was stolen with all of my important belongings. But I'm fairly positive I wouldn't change a thing if it meant I'd have to give up the memory of that warm water, how good that ill advised swim felt. My scar will always remind me of it. I wouldn't want it any other way.
• New oppurtunities.
• Not knowing where I'll be in a year.
• Reuniting with friends, both old and new.
• The dozens of handmade cards from my Thai students, all incorrectly spelled and poorly punctuated and absolutely, unassailably beautiful.

I am thankful for these and a million other reasons. I am thankful that over and over again during the last six months, I found myself overwhelmed by gratitutde, bathed in it, smothered with it. I lost count of the number of times I found myself too grateful to even speak, forced to close my eyes and simply breathe an unspoken, fervent, even desperate prayer of thanks. I should feel that way every day. Every day we have so many reasons to be overhwelmed by our gratitude.

the perfect ending

So this probably came on television a really long time ago, but I was out of the country and I missed it. It's the series (or at least Zach Braff version) finale of Scrubs and I watched it tonight on hulu and it's pretty much the perfect ending to a show. I loved this show, and even though I haven't been as loyal a watcher in recent years this made me bawl like a baby. Yes I'm still in kind of a sentimental place after leaving Thailand, and the absolutely gorgeous Peter Gabriel song playing doesn't help, but well, just watch.

Traveler Tales: Part One

I filled out a lot of guest book ledgers in the five weeks I spent traveling through South-East Asia. Always I filled in my name, my passport number, my nationality, etc.. When I reach the vacant spot for "occupation," I would hesitate, but only for a moment. Then in one swift motion I would fill the blank in with the only possible word to describe myself at that moment, "traveler." I wrote this down as my occupation so many times that I started to convince myself it was an occupation, that a life could subsist on hotel rooms and passport stamps and one gorgeous, soul altering location after another. Of course this isn't true. There are several minor details such as money, overstays on visas, those kind of trivial things. But for five beautiful weeks I was a full time traveler. That was my place in this world, my mission, my agenda, my raison d'etre.

 I retired as a traveler two weeks ago. I hung up (literally and figuratively) my backpack. I stopped carrying around half of my possesions in plastic bags. My sun burns faded. My bug bites stopped itching and begun the inexorable process of turning into scars. I stopped wearing my weathered, dirty, travel battered watch and started relying on a cell phone to tell the time. I've spent entire days in doors, where for weeks the only time I was consistently indoors was at night (and even then I was often nearly still in nature, with lizards crawling over the walls or the sound of waves crashing in from only yards away). I don't even have a Lonely Planet in my possesion, something no self respecting backpacker would ever not have at his or her side. I have gone two weeks without seeing something new, after five weeks where every day brought something so strange and different and wonderful that the word "new" couldn't even do it justice.

It's been two weeks, but sometimes when I close my eyes, I can swear it's not over. I can almost make myself believe that I'm dirty and sweaty and exhausted, sun burnt and covered in insect bites. I can almost feel the soreness from lugging my heavy backpack down the streets of some new town, looking for a tiny guest house whose name I can't pronounce.

And it was exhausting and sweaty and full of bites and bruises and burns. But can't you understand how perfect that makes it? In my opinion if you travel luxuriously or as a true adult, your experience runs the dangerous risk of being smooth and pain-free. And that's great of course. You'll probably come back home relaxed and calm and not covered in the aforesaid burn/bite/bruise combination. But a smooth, pain free trip will never be perfect, because the only kind of perfect I understand in this world is the kind that's haphazardly created from the imperfections we experience. It's the perfect that comes together at the end of something, when you look back, and despite losing things or having things stolen or getting lost or getting sick, you understand that there's not a damn thing you would change about it. I wouldn't change a single thing about my travels in SE Asia. Because in my memory every single second of it is beautiful. Every single second of it was beautiful.

And it all started with Railay...

Stay tuned.

back to the routine of commenting on life's inconsequential things

So I know it might be a little jarring to go from a travel all the time blog to a post about the movie, Pirate Radio. But as I've been home more than a week now, it's time to get back to the business of dissecting life's pleasant little things. It is after all one of the purposes for which this blog was started more than two years ago. I fully plan on posting in detail, probably way too great detail, about my travels, but until then, let's chat about life's minutia shall we?

So last night I saw the film Pirate Radio (also called The Boat that Rocked). Which to sum up was a lot of fun and had perhaps one of the best soundtracks of any movie ever (the whole movie is a loveletter to the rock music of the 60s, so how could it not?) The cast was utterly fabulous, lots of very rakish, charming, very talented British actors plus Phillip Seymour Hoffman (who could read the phone book and still make it compelling). And depite being set primarily on a junky old ship, the whole thing was kind of eye candy.

One reason,

Tom Sturridge who plays the lead role of Carl, and who is in a word, delectable.

But other than young Mr. Sturridge, the whole movie is a feast for the eyes, full of vibrant, bold late 60s outfits that fill the screen with texture and color.

And top it all off the movie features Rhys Darby (also known as Murray from Flight of the Concords) And he is one of my favorite people ever. I mean how could you not love a man in blue, striped pants?