Late night, when my housemates have gone to sleep, is becoming my time to do a little last bit of reading, and also collect my thoughts (such as they are these days) and do something with them, like now, type in another quick blog entry. (Katie envisioned this being more her blog than mine, I think, when we started it, but I'm a garrulous kind of guy and I've taken to it. Writing to me, I guess, is like blues guitar to House.)
Anyway, a little over a month ago, I posted my rationale about going away for a while, seeing
new places and new people, and bringing the spirit of the adventure home with me to Kate. Now that's a fine idea, but really, my life out here is made up of stoplights, pickup trucks, Windows Vista, Wal-Mart, frozen pizza, gyms with freeweights, and espresso. (To say nothing of the work, which is in some cases new to me, but mostly what I know already.) So, basically, this adventure ain't all that adventurous.
Sure, Alaska's got its unique features. The omnipotent mountains. The eternal daylight, giving way at an astonishing clip now to surrounding night. A city like Anchorage, housing nearly half the state's population, which still has something of an edge-of-the-world feel to it. The log-cabin style homes and buildings, with their especially defiant huge front windows...and you can see, that I'm lapsing into more and more familiar, human things. What little I've seen of Alaska is the inhabited part, and I'm in no immediate hurry to wander into the uninhabited parts. "Into the Wild" isn't really a story I admire (though the soundtrack is pretty good and "Big Hard Sun" is a fantastic song). I'm not nearly that much of a misanthrope and I don't really care to put my survival skills to the test.
There's plenty of awe-inspiring and fascinating natural history for me to pay attention to, which is why I'm being a bit of a bookworm. But the upshot is, the spirit of adventure I bring home with me to Kate in Rhode Island won't be the, I-met-dragons-and-fought-with-ogres variety, but a quieter, more patient kind of spirit: that of learning new ways continually to keep my eyes and mind open to what's around me. The kind of spirit which itself leads to adventures.
Anyway, a little over a month ago, I posted my rationale about going away for a while, seeing
new places and new people, and bringing the spirit of the adventure home with me to Kate. Now that's a fine idea, but really, my life out here is made up of stoplights, pickup trucks, Windows Vista, Wal-Mart, frozen pizza, gyms with freeweights, and espresso. (To say nothing of the work, which is in some cases new to me, but mostly what I know already.) So, basically, this adventure ain't all that adventurous.Sure, Alaska's got its unique features. The omnipotent mountains. The eternal daylight, giving way at an astonishing clip now to surrounding night. A city like Anchorage, housing nearly half the state's population, which still has something of an edge-of-the-world feel to it. The log-cabin style homes and buildings, with their especially defiant huge front windows...and you can see, that I'm lapsing into more and more familiar, human things. What little I've seen of Alaska is the inhabited part, and I'm in no immediate hurry to wander into the uninhabited parts. "Into the Wild" isn't really a story I admire (though the soundtrack is pretty good and "Big Hard Sun" is a fantastic song). I'm not nearly that much of a misanthrope and I don't really care to put my survival skills to the test.
There's plenty of awe-inspiring and fascinating natural history for me to pay attention to, which is why I'm being a bit of a bookworm. But the upshot is, the spirit of adventure I bring home with me to Kate in Rhode Island won't be the, I-met-dragons-and-fought-with-ogres variety, but a quieter, more patient kind of spirit: that of learning new ways continually to keep my eyes and mind open to what's around me. The kind of spirit which itself leads to adventures.
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