About Me

April 27
Yesterday I read About a Boy, the Nick Hornby book where Hugh Grant floats around life without any responsibility or care. It occurred to me my life in not dissimilar. For one, I was able to read a whole book in one day while lounging about. I’ve gone years of my life without finishing a book.

I am doing something, I know. Traveling around the world is by no means a waste of time but as I mentioned a couple entries ago it does make you feel like a spoiled brat to fill your days with coffee shops and sleeper trains when the people around you are trying to scrape out sustenance and shelter.

Grant’s character says something in the middle pages about not knowing how working people have time for a job and a life when he fills his days just with the life part. That’s the situation I’m in too and the life part now seems like my job. I take long bus rides. I take walks. I talk to people in cafes or shops. I rent a boat with a friend and paddle around the lake for an hour. It’s a good gig, no doubt.

The thing about this kind of job is at the end of the year instead of saving up some money you’ve spent everything you have. If I went home now I would have four months of memories and eighteen thousand dollars. If I continue with the trip I’ll have twelve months of memories and just enough for first and last month’s rent. I don’t plan on going home but it strikes me that I could get out while I’m ahead.

I do sort of have a job and that’s making the documentary. It’s really nice to have something to pour energy into when I need to. If the documentary is good and I sell it (or even if it’s bad and I sell it) then the year can be seen as a wonderful coup where I took a 50-week vacation and still managed to advance myself financially and professionally. If the movie fails then I will be broke and all the equipment I carried and time I spent on the documentary will be a colossal waste.

Two feelings hang in the air for me: 1) I’m doing the most amazing thing I’ll ever do and at the same time I’m going nothing and 2) this could be my greatest success or my worst failure. It would be a pretty okay failure, all things considered, but that’s how I feel sometimes.

Now I’ll walk down the street to the café with the $.85 breakfast, drop off my laundry, check out the CD store, maybe rent a bike, and then pack up for my six-day Jomsom trail trek around the Himalayas. Cry not for me.