on the road again...

No matter how minimal, my body always ties itself up in nervous anticipatory knots before I travel.

Tomorrow I leave for a brief jaunt to Morelia. I will present a paper, which has been neatly dispatched, over 36 hours before flying. This is good.

Meanwhile, and perhaps precisely because I have trying to at least make a half-assed effort toward religious observance, or at least quiet, community self-reflection, I feel like I am falling behind in every way.

The dissertation wall of immobility has given way to a wave of onward rushing waters, but meanwhile the minefield of the job market haunts me, if quietly, subterranean bombs requiring my detonation pulse.

So, after a weekend spent in the sun, watching water polo, I keep her home with me, this one last night, so we can finish her book report, and put her homework in order. I feed her a special meal of Indian food (mine is not nearly as good as what we can eat at a restaurant, but she concurs that it is better to eat up what is already in the house). My work is done, and the next few weeks are neatly laid before me, prepared, over-prepared.... and yet, I feel a vague nausea, or perhaps a prickly itch, I want to go, want to be removed from my current reality, if only for a few days, back to a place where colonial architecture surrounds me, and sounds and smells, familiar and forgotten, inundate my senses.

So we curl up together for our nightly chat(ter) and we talk about the ways in which friendships sometimes need to evolve. And I wish I didn't have to leave her behind because I am, indeed, quite fond of her.