connect the dots

chicago, london, roma.
roma, bari, santa maria del sole.
santa maria del sole, alberobello, martina franca.
martina franca, napoli.
napoli, pompeii, positano.
positano, ravello, amalfi.
positano, napoli, firenze.
firenze, siena.
firenze, la spezia, riomaggiore.
riomaggiore, manarola, corniglia, vernazza.
riomaggiore, genoa, nice, marseilles.
marseilles, madrid.
madrid, barcelona, montmelo.
barcelona, sant cougat.
barcelona, valencia.
valencia, milano.
milano, firenze, siena, monteroni d' arbia.
monteroni, siena, firenze, venezia.
monteroni, siena, colle di val d'elsa.
siena, milano, madrid.
madrid, miami, chicago.

Back in the Fishbowl

How long can jetlag serve as an excuse for malaise? I've been back at home for over a week now and I'm still tired and wishing I were anywhere else. It's shitty to be at home for the holidays – Mom's making cookies, lights blink on the tree – and wanting to be in a foreign country, alone in the drenching rain, understanding nothing. It's ungrateful and foolish and it's how I feel. I've even been nostalgic for my backpack with its leaden contents, so heavy that every time I wore it, I was inspired to stab someone – anyone! Of course, my nostalgia didn't start upon my arrival home to the US. During one of my hundreds of bus rides through Italy, I found myself wishing myself off the bus, away from the man with his head in my lap, and back at home. But in that same moment, I knew that when I got home, I would want to be right back on that bus, stiff from sitting, nauseated from the winding roads. How sad to be human, to desperately want something with the knowledge that its attainment will only bring more wanting.

Meditation helps. It helps by allowing me to let go of my thoughts, which I do because all of my thoughts are bullshit. So what if I miss Italy and the man I met there? If I moved across the sea to be with him, I would miss the US and the men I could have met here. If I lived in Italy, the delicious food would grow tiresome, the beauty of the land would fade, the charming, passionate people would make me crazy. And so what if I miss traveling? Near the end of my trip, I was ready to be at home with people I could converse with; now that I'm here, I want to run away again, back to the place where I can't understand every excruciating detail of every overheard conversation.

It doesn't matter who I am or where I go – the mind wants to generate displeasure. That's its job. For the mind, displeasure means problems to solve and judgments to cast – stuff for it to do. It's job security. When I can relax into the moment and feel just as content shopping at the McHenry WalMart as I am admiring the art at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the mind is out of work: nothing to complain about, nothing to compare against. Just boring old happiness. Not that I experience this phenomenon very often: my mind still thrashes about as I shop at the McHenry WalMart, a store which still drives me fucknuts.

Although the mind works this way for all people, all over the world, I more often notice the busily-

complaining mind among Americans. For example, at Barcelona's La Sagrada Familia, Antonin Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece of a cathedral, tourists commonly take an elevator up to the top of one of the towers, shoot a few photos of the Barcelona skyline, and exit by walking down one of the narrow, winding staircases. I went at sunset, which is a marvellous time to see Barcelona from above, its sky magic with pink light. However, going at sunset meant that it's too dark to see the steps on the exit down, and of course there's no handrail. Started in 1882, La Sagrada Familia is the quintessential work in progress – from spires to floor, it's still not finished after 126 years – and so installing a handrail for the tourists hasn't been a priority. As I inched my way down the tower, enjoying the novelty of having a mildly dangerous experience inside a church, I was treated to loud complaining noises from the Americans in front of me, who planned to “write a letter” to somebody in response to this grave violation against American safety codes. “They really need to put lights in here,” one of them observed, and I politely kept my response to myself: “No, they really need to finish the facade before the world comes to an end. You just need to walk slower.”

But we've done it to ourselves, in our overly-alerted paranoid paradise. I know that it's a cliché to talk about styrofoam coffee cups with “hot liquids can burn” warnings, but I had to pause at the olive bar at the Oak Park Whole Foods. Nostalgic for Spain, I wanted to purchase some fresh olives, but I got this very American warning on a sign posted on the sneeze shield: “Careful: some of our olives may contain pits.” You would think that the sort of person who can drop $10, $20 on fancy olives would be willing to take that risk, and may even be educated enough to expect a pit within an olive, but I suppose a grocery store's lawyers can never be too careful. I bought the olives anyway.

As I waited for my connecting flight from Miami to Chicago, I overheard an American who had given up complaining for something better. It seemed she had been waiting for planes numerous times over the past day or so and had come to a resolution: “I'm just going to eat my way through this airport.” Pizzas in hand, she and her three companions clinched it for me: I saw more seriously overweight people in my first hour back on American soil than I did over two months travelling in Mediterranean Europe. (I use the term “overweight,” but I wonder – does it still fall within the parameters of political correctness to call someone obese, even without a medical opinion?) Not that Europeans are rail-thin: I saw plenty of round bellies and thick thighs, but nothing particularly grotesque. OK, I saw one obese man at an internet place in Madrid. He had a mustache, which I remember because it was so odd to see someone outside of the realm of normal human proportion.

As a blogger, I suppose it's my duty to theorize on Why Americans Are So Fat, though the topic has been done to death. So I will make this quick. It's hard to get So Fat – Fat, yes, but So Fat, difficult – when one eats Real Food, that is to say, food without a label. Meat from the side of an animal, cheese made by hand, freshly-baked bread, fruits and vegetables with the dirt still on them. In Europe, one can find all of these things daily, not just at the weekly farmers' market or on a special trip to the apple orchard. At a fast-food stand in the Madrid airport, I could choose from sandwiches on homemade bread, tapas of olives or anchovies, and freshly- squeezed orange juice. In the Miami airport, I searched hard for Real Food and had to settle for nuts in a bag.

Let it be known that I do appreciate the irony in my complaining about American complainers, especially as I go on to complain about American caution, American obesity, and American food. I haven't even gotten to my anti-TV tirade, inspired by the constant CNN blaring from the Miami airport television screens. Did you know that in European airports, they don't even have televisions? My mind is working overtime, bitching about all the differences. Home sweet home, let the complaining begin!

Seriously, though, I treasure this moment of returning to a familiar place with new eyes. When I got on the plane to Miami and heard the flight staff speaking English, and watched American television on the tiny screen in front of my seat, and flipped through a New Yorker – which one can get in the Madrid airport, if one wants to spend 8 euro – I remembered many things about American living. Even if Americans can be excessively polite, we are not so excessively nice. Those jokers on The Office are funny because their pranks and put-downs remind us of our fellow coworkers. The boss burns his foot and obsesses on his injury while ignoring his worker's concussion-fueled delirium. And is anyone in the world more self-referential than a writer in the New Yorker ? I started circling all the winking asides and self-deprecating humor and blackened up my costly magazine. I did this because I know that very soon, my foreign perspective will be covered up by my old habits of thought, as surely as the December snow has blanketed my parents' lawn.

When I first stepped back onto American soil, I had to go through Passport Control, where several Passport Controllers sat in their glass boxes, waiting. Even without anyone in line, a security guard chided me to “hurry up!” I stood there for a moment, confused. Hurry up? Where had I heard that before? And why? Hurry? Why on earth would anyone do such a thing?