Note: this was written in 2014, in the Before Times.
I stayed home for a change, setting a record of three months in a bed that I have to make myself. If you’re one of my friends from back home, stop reading now so you don’t hate me.
Hey, airport people, are the others gone? Good.
Things that you have to learn how to do again when you’re at home for a stretch:
Buy groceries. I forget how to adult when I’m on the road. The best way to prevent a return to a science experiment or fledgling civilization in your refrigerator is to avoid buying food (other than frozen burritos, of course). For the first few days, you may just go to the frou-frou sandwich shops that you’re used to, until you realize that a baguette with brie on it is a) approximately a zillion dollars and you can’t expense it and b) going to give you a heart attack if you eat one every day. You’re at home now, so you can buy cereal! Milk! You may even finish the carton! Hey, people from home, I told you to stop reading so if you’re enraged that I get excited about bran flakes you have no one to blame but yourself.
Do laundry in a machine. OK, this is not really that hard, but not telling the people in your building how excited you are at washing TEN! SHIRTS! AT ONCE! and then DRYING THEM OMG IN A MACHINE THAT DOES DRYING! …is a challenge. Your neighbors won’t get it. Talk about the weather or something instead (engage normal human mode!). I return to hotels based on low humidity. Sure, anxiety over whether your clothes will dry isn’t the worst travel-related fear (though kidnapping does interfere with the laundry thing as well), but if you’ve ever had to buy polyester pants in a former Soviet Bloc country because your hotel room is a damp closet without a hair dryer, you’ll know that the struggle is real. This makes up for the fact that no one is going to sneak into your apartment and switch out your IKEA sheets for bazillion count linens.
See friends!
“Hey, want to go out for coffee next week?”
“Of course! When?”
“Saturday? Of the ten coffee shops that have come and gone in your absence, the one around the corner from me is really good.”
“I’ll be on my way to Elbonia then.”
“Week after?”
“Over the Atlantic watching bad movies.”
“How about next month?”
“I have half an hour free between the train back here, packing, and heading off to Arstotzka for a week. Can you finish a carton of milk for me?”
“I hate you.”
When you’re not traveling, you can do many things with friends. Often, several of them will be in the same place at the same time! You can even see a movie on a big screen, while not wearing headphones, and there will be no screaming babies around!
Keep plants alive. Though the “plant them all! God will know his own!” method of gardening may count as amateur science, it’s still sad when the survivor is surrounded by brown leaves and sticks. When I saw three months on my calendar sans airport codes, I bought a plant. I feel more responsibility towards the Ficus of Irrational Exuberance than the other plants. Damn it.
Learn to solder and program again so you can rig up micro controllers, sensors, and lights to take care of your plants, since you don’t want to meet a friend in a coffee shop carrying a small tree, only to have said friend keep the tree upon your return because you’re not stable enough to commit to a plant.
Plan your next trip, because while it’s been nice sleeping horizontally every night and not having to enter a new code every day for wifi, you’ve become accustomed to shoving yourself in a metal tube, wrecking your circadian rhythms, and eating ridiculous amounts of cheese. Besides, at this rate you’re going to lose your airline status. There’s a Zone 5. It’s real. It lurks in the shadows, and it waits for you.
Recent Comments