Everyone Says Goodbye

1/10/14

Whenever a trip ends, I become a bit melancholy.  It is a deep melancholy that pulls me back into the past; to moments of my life that were once meaningful, but are meant to stay behind me. The end of something always seems encourage the ghost of the past to float around in my brain. I think that this kind of depression is just a part of my being. In order to have such high moments in life, it has to be balanced by the memories and feelings of the past. For most of my life, I have lived internally, experiencing the world from the confines of my own thoughts. As a young person, I was much more comfortable within the confines of a book with my tape player sounding out the accompanying soundtrack than with people my own age. I still associate certain Dave Matthews tracks to specific chapters of books. In many ways, I am still that pudgy young kid that would rather fantasize about a novel rather than deal with new scenarios and unfamiliar faces.  However, as I have grown older I have found myself open up quite a bit.  Many of my work personality tests show that I have turned into some sort of half-crazed extrovert that has to constantly walk around the office to chat with lots of people and pastes images of himself with important people all over his own office space. I guess I have changed quite a bit. I know that I have grown up because I have to budget money (although I did that better than my parents when I was young), maintain a car (I still would prefer pretending to drive a car with my legs hanging out of the front of my bottom bunk bed.  One of my favorite things to do when I was a child was to turn on the windshield wipers for my rather then it rained. To this day, I use my wipers at an exorbitant amount simply because it reminds me of the past), and have a big boy job (although my job rarely feels like work because often I get to do things that are incredibly relevant to my interests).  

My mind is constantly running a projector of multiple scenarios and fantasies that help me cope and hide from serious things like death. You don’t really have to think about death when you use your force powers to open the sliding glass grocery store doors. Death maybe an overly dramatic example, but it really is a large part of my life.  I try to live my life knowing that I could die at any moment. I am charitable because I know that I only have so much time to do good things for others and that it makes me happy. I try to experience as much as I can now because it makes me happy. I travel a lot because movement is often better than standing still. What I like most about traveling is that I get to live out my imaginations and fantasies in real life. To be honest, sometimes the reflection back on the experience is sometimes more powerful then the actual episode itself, however, I am much better at living in the now than I ever have been.  My trip to Hong Kong showed me that I am ready and capable to take control of the next steps of my life.  I feel my confidence has been reinforced and I am ready to become a world traveler and business person. I need to keep reminding myself to live and breathe in this moment and to let it soak into my mind.

Getting off the plane, I ran to the bathroom. My guts have been constricting and contracting and gurgling for far too many hours.  I blame the copious amount of raw fish that come with just about every meal you have in Hong Kong. I nervously speed walk through the sterile hospital like terminal in San Francisco (I hate United). I really hate being late to my gate and although I know that I will still be early, my anxiety is still high.  Nobody wants to go to the bathroom in a plane, NOBODY. I finally find the nearest men’s room and Dick Van Dyke my way over several rolling suitcases on their way out the wrong side of the bathroom.  I notice that there are so many white people here…where am I?!  I run around to the back section of the bathroom where there are only stalls.  There is a line!!!  Luckily there is only one man in front of me, so I quietly take my turn.  Growing up, I was never a man’s man. I never really felt the urge to bro it out with others of those who shared the same sex. I particularly had issues with men’s bathrooms, in that I refused to use public ones for the first two decades of my life.  As a grown up, I still don’t like it, but sometimes you just have to.  The man in front of me was middle aged with a bit of a potbelly wearing the American uniform of jeans, t-shirt and worn baseball cap.  He impatiently tapped his foot and kept pacing in front of the stalls.  Finally, he raises his hands in disgusts and says,  “They need to pinch that shit off and get off the pot!” and he saunters away.  As the man is halfway buy me, he turns, laughs and smiles at me in order to share the moment. I am pretty sure that if I had raised my hand we could have high fived at that moment.  Welcome back to America.

            At the end of my journey, I need to spend a moment to thank those that have made it possible.  Firstly, thank you to Daniel, Monica, Selena, and Rebecca (although your contribution was mostly drooling on my leg) for supporting us financially and, most importantly, also being our family in Hong Kong. I really treasured our moments together and I hope that we all get to meet up together soon.  Thank you Eric and Coleen Slosberg for the finances and for encouraging us to take this long journey.  You both helped us figure out a budget that worked and emphasized the significance of family in our travel plans.  See you both in London in 2015!  Thank you to my boss, Jon, for helping me to see what we are doing as an organization in Hong Kong and showing me many great places to eat.  I will never forget the Sushi place.  My life will be spent trying to relive that event.  

            Well folks, I hope that you have enjoyed my ramblings.  Many of you have comments on the length of my posts.  You do have to remember that I wrote a 300-page dissertation and that details are kind of my thing.  I write these diaries because I believe that someday I will go back and edit them into some sort of book.  I really do enjoy writing for an audience, so that you all that have taken the time to read.  You should all start writing your own blogs so that I can have more junk to read myself! I already read both Mike Chin and Manan Shah’s lovely blogs and I would love to add more to the list.

            Should you travel to Hong Kong?  Yes – it will change your life. I would move to Hong Kong if I could manage to get a job that would pay for me to live in a flat that wasn’t the size of my current bathroom.  If you want to see a city that blends both East and West in a way that is worlds beyond what you would find in any American city, go to Hong Kong. If you want to find a city that incorporates nature into its very being, then go to Hong Kong.  If you want to see what the future is going to be like, then go to Hong Kong and start learning Chinese. 

Go travel, love and write.