Well, I checked the weather forecast for Paris for the time we are going to be there, and it is mostly clouds with temperatures in the 60s. So it looks like we might not see any of those famous Paris sunsets over the Seine. But I'm sure we will find plenty other things to fire our romantic imagination and get us in the mood if that's where we want to be.
Final preparations are underway for me: laundry tonight, filling in some of the last gaps in the itinerary, that kind of thing. When I left my office this afternoon, I could feel it: I'm already on vacation. I can do anything I can imagine or nothing. I can sleep in all my clothes and spend the day mostly naked. I can read books or stare at the ceiling. I can contemplate the universe or the hairs in my nose.
And for me, the challenge is to try to rearrange my sleep cycle a little bit. See, when I take airplane flights to Europe, I can never sleep. I'm too excited, and also, I'm used to being up way past midnight anyway, so if the plane lands at 7am in France, to my body that would normally be about the time I would want to sleep.
The websites I read about how to sleep on planes all said, don't take drugs. Instead, get up as early as you can, have a full long day before you get to the airport, so that by the time you are on the plane, you'll be ready to sleep. Which means for me to get up at 6am tomorrow and be up all day, without a nap, until my 9:45p departure from JFK airport. We'll see how it works.
I just get so excited when I'm traveling. It's just the most fun thing to discover new countries and cultures and see history right in front of you. Even after I get to Europe, I sometimes have some trouble sleeping. Like the last time I went to Spain. I didn't get to my hotel until like 1pm, on pretty much no sleep, and it was hot, and my room wasn't ready. So I dropped off my luggage, went for a walk, bought a cold drink from a cart, sat down in the shade and immediately passed out. I woke up an hour later, went back to the hotel, checked into my room, unpacked a little, and passed out again, this time for a few hours.
Finally, I woke in the evening, took a nice shower, put on some clean clothes and went out to search for food. Some take-away from a kebab place, procured, it was back to my room to watch, what else, the US Open tennis tournament for a few hours, then a movie. Then I couldn't get to sleep. So I read a book, finally going to bed around 5am Madrid time, and by the next day, I was finally on a somewhat normal sleep schedule.
The difference this time is that I'm traveling with someone. So hopefully whatever happens with my sleep won't bother her too much. But I think that will work out ok. Therese doesn't sleep too much, so I bet she'll be doing some reading and exploring while I snooze, whatever time it is that I end up snoozing.
And the most important thing is to be on vacation, and do somewhere between everything and nothing, enjoying each other's company while we do it. For what else would be the point of traveling with somebody, especially someone you love, other than to share whatever you end up doing with each other. It could be peeling a grape or getting lost, but sharing it with another makes it special.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
In the midst of life is death
In just a couple of days I am leaving for a trip to Paris for 5 days with my girlfriend Therese. Part of the reason I am posting is to get back into the swing of posting, with the idea that I will do some blogging while I am on vacation, to let you know about the adventures we are having in France.
But I also in the middle of all this excitement acknowledge that I am also feeling a great deal of sadness these days, as a roommate of mine goes through her last days after undergoing treatment for breast cancer for about a year. Her West Coast family members are here in New York with her in the hospital, and the end is near. She is a very private person and for a long time she expressed to me that she preferred I not share her struggle with people. But at this point, I feel it is doing a disservice to her not to say something about her since she is important to me.
We have never been very close friends. She has rubbed me (and my other roommate) the wrong way on a regular basis during the time we have shared an apartment. She is very proud and a bit of a control freak, so that attempts to reach out to her and give her a hand with things were often rebuffed. She would love to tell us at great length about the dramas going on in her life, and it wasn't always clear whether she cared very much what was going on in our lives.
Nevertheless, she is a very intelligent person, a person with many interests similar to my own. At one time we used to watch episodes of Battlestar Gallactica, a tv science fiction series, together, for example. After she displayed some jealousy toward me when I started dating somebody, I rooted for her to find a boyfriend. She is definitely someone like many New Yorkers who needs a sounding board, someone she can share with all the little things going on in her life, and it seemed like that has often been lacking.
So when she became ill, I was rooting for her very hard, and I was happy to lend a sympathetic ear to her and listen to the trials and tribulations of negotiating the minefield of health care and hospitals and doctors. And for a long time, she seemed to be almost holding her own - if she was slipping, it was so gradual as to be almost undetectible.
Recently that all changed. She came home from a trip to the hospital a different person. I hoped that my sense that she was spiralling downward was wrong. But sure enough, things were not going well. And now, it is just a matter of time.
There are all the logistics to eventually grapple with - paying the rent and utilities, applying the security or returning it to a family member, clearing out her belongings, eventually thinking about getting a new roommate in. All those things I will deal with when I return from my trip. Everything will be sorted out in time.
One last point. I thought of an ironic coincidence or parallel. Four years ago, my cat Hobbs was deathly ill and ended up dying less than a week before I left for a vacation to the Southwest U.S. with a previous girlfriend. He struggled for a long while with illness, but in his last week all of a sudden his body was riddled with cancer.
Here again, I am going away, carrying with me the sadness of knowing someone who is at the end, who took a dramatic downturn. Until a week or so ago, she was telling me about optimistic diagnoses, about further treatments that were expected to turn the tide for her. Now her body is so riddled with cancer there is nothing to be done.
It's a cliche, life being a miracle. Something that can be snatched from us in a moment. Every moment a gift. It feels idiotic to even bring up these cliches at a time like this. But the older you get, the more you see all the people who mean something to you, all the things that mean something to you, disappearing. And our own bodies grow frail and begin to fail us. So I for one will celebrate life while it remains the arena in which I operate, knowing that one day things will be different. Or to quote Walt Whitman, "the powerful play [still] goes on, and [I] may [yet] contribute a verse."
But I also in the middle of all this excitement acknowledge that I am also feeling a great deal of sadness these days, as a roommate of mine goes through her last days after undergoing treatment for breast cancer for about a year. Her West Coast family members are here in New York with her in the hospital, and the end is near. She is a very private person and for a long time she expressed to me that she preferred I not share her struggle with people. But at this point, I feel it is doing a disservice to her not to say something about her since she is important to me.
We have never been very close friends. She has rubbed me (and my other roommate) the wrong way on a regular basis during the time we have shared an apartment. She is very proud and a bit of a control freak, so that attempts to reach out to her and give her a hand with things were often rebuffed. She would love to tell us at great length about the dramas going on in her life, and it wasn't always clear whether she cared very much what was going on in our lives.
Nevertheless, she is a very intelligent person, a person with many interests similar to my own. At one time we used to watch episodes of Battlestar Gallactica, a tv science fiction series, together, for example. After she displayed some jealousy toward me when I started dating somebody, I rooted for her to find a boyfriend. She is definitely someone like many New Yorkers who needs a sounding board, someone she can share with all the little things going on in her life, and it seemed like that has often been lacking.
So when she became ill, I was rooting for her very hard, and I was happy to lend a sympathetic ear to her and listen to the trials and tribulations of negotiating the minefield of health care and hospitals and doctors. And for a long time, she seemed to be almost holding her own - if she was slipping, it was so gradual as to be almost undetectible.
Recently that all changed. She came home from a trip to the hospital a different person. I hoped that my sense that she was spiralling downward was wrong. But sure enough, things were not going well. And now, it is just a matter of time.
There are all the logistics to eventually grapple with - paying the rent and utilities, applying the security or returning it to a family member, clearing out her belongings, eventually thinking about getting a new roommate in. All those things I will deal with when I return from my trip. Everything will be sorted out in time.
One last point. I thought of an ironic coincidence or parallel. Four years ago, my cat Hobbs was deathly ill and ended up dying less than a week before I left for a vacation to the Southwest U.S. with a previous girlfriend. He struggled for a long while with illness, but in his last week all of a sudden his body was riddled with cancer.
Here again, I am going away, carrying with me the sadness of knowing someone who is at the end, who took a dramatic downturn. Until a week or so ago, she was telling me about optimistic diagnoses, about further treatments that were expected to turn the tide for her. Now her body is so riddled with cancer there is nothing to be done.
It's a cliche, life being a miracle. Something that can be snatched from us in a moment. Every moment a gift. It feels idiotic to even bring up these cliches at a time like this. But the older you get, the more you see all the people who mean something to you, all the things that mean something to you, disappearing. And our own bodies grow frail and begin to fail us. So I for one will celebrate life while it remains the arena in which I operate, knowing that one day things will be different. Or to quote Walt Whitman, "the powerful play [still] goes on, and [I] may [yet] contribute a verse."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
