I feel stuck right now. And very frustrated. There is no end in sight. I have projects. I have a 6 page paper. I have 4 finals. And then I go straight into three terms of class, condensed into 11 weeks. I feel like screaming. If I already feel stuck and exhausted, how can I make it through this summer?

I know I am my father’s daughter. Before the bar, instead of reviewing, he disappeared for two weeks and went camping. He had (has?) a history of vanishing to wilderness when life presses in too much. I know I am his daughter, because I find my mind wandering. I’m ending up on lonely planet more than is healthy. Thailand, Australia, Morocco, Mexico. Anywhere and everywhere. I’m ending up at REI.com, looking at pants designed for travel. One pair dries quickly. One zips off to become capris and shorts. One expensive pair does both, and comes with traveler’s underwear. My world just seems too small right now. All I see, everyday, is the same shit I saw yesterday.

I’ve always had the travel bug. This is how I ended up without my family (just 15 classmates and two teachers) in Egypt my junior year of high school. It was terrifying, enchanting, and amazing. I had a dream about the nile yesterday. My group rode a feluca, a chinese sailboat, up the nile for two or three days. Every night we would anchor at the bank and sleep. Once an afternoon we would stop for lunch and to relieve ourselves. One of these afternoons, Saskia (one of the teachers) and myself ended up wandering out to a forage field. We met a farmer there. He didn’t speak english, but it didn’t matter. Saskia motioned to the crop and raised her arms in a shrug, to ask what it was for. He but his hands up like ears and brayed. I laughed so hard tears came to my eyes. He started laughing too. He motioned for us to follow him. Winding through this field of scraggly green plants were little dirt trails. His was clearly the only family in the area. A perfectly packed dirt trail, solely from this man’s feet, year after year. Probably his children too. And his father. We eventually came to his house. It didn’t have a roof. It was packed sand, one big room. There were windows and doors. They weren’t covered. Part of the top was covered by palm fronds. The bed was under here. The rest was open. We sat at a small table, oddly plastic and industrial looking in such a bucolic place. His wife served us hibiscus tea. Chickens wandered in and out of the house. They were ignored. When the donkey poked his head through the window, the wife yelled at him and hit him across the nose with a towel. Then she threw some greens of some kind out the window to him.

It was the strangest and most wonderful experience of my life. It sits in my mind as the ideal of travel. The way people’s lives come together. How hospitality and gratitude know no language barriers. I’ve been dreaming this memory lately. As the real details fade, my mind replaces them with my own thoughts. The wife’s face becomes someone I know. Children may or may not be there. I can’t remember anymore if they were. The greens thrown to the donkey become carrots, or corn cobs. The chickens are mine. It is a weird distortion of memory and the reflections of my own life. All I know is that I want to go. I want to meet more people that hover in my dreams. I want to go to more places, so Egypt and Mexico have company when I close my eyes.

(Photo mine, taken Feb 2006 (I think). All rights, etc etc, you know the drill)