Leaving LA to go to SF really didn’t have any, going-on-a-journey feel to it. It felt like, “ho hum, another frakking bus trip to the tenderloin.”
Of course I love a good bus trip anywhere. And SF is so full of amazing people I adore beyond words, including a totally awesome gf, that I always enjoy going there.
But enjoying going to SF is different from the feeling you have when embarking on a big, crazy journey.
Or more accurately, the feeling I imagine I would have when embarking on a big, crazy journey if I wasn’t so emotionally repressed that the very concept of feeling is essentially just that, a concept, like infinity or Africa.
So, this feeling I’m always hearing about, “I’m so excited about going on this trip,” “aren’t you excited to be going on a trip?”
If I had the capacity for experiencing any form of emotion, that’s the feeling I expect I would have had. But, instead I was waiting for the bus thinking about how much shit I left unfinished in LA, how much shit I had to do to prepare for the trip, how much work was left before I can frakking graduate, and how much work I had to do for my primary client before leaving the bay area. And how much I needed the money from that work if I was actually going to be on the road longer than a fortnight.
Which is my normal thinking state, because I extract a fair amount of the joy in my life from thinking about how much work I have to do, because I really love having a lot of work. Especially, since, as you no doubt noticed, the “work” I have to do in my life is stuff like

Get ready to go on a four month trip
Finish writing a kick ass thesis about intellectual property that everyone loves
Prepare for a bunch of recording sessions with amazing musicians across America
Write a bunch of stories about myself
Take a lot of photos with nice equipment
Make field recordings of all the things I love
Make mix cds of love songs
Work on a database of holistic medicine, and feminist and ecological activists
Edit videos of awesome lectures on eco-feminism
Finish a huge installation art work
Prepare a bunch of proposals for upcoming installations

I mean, really, the shit I think about is almost exclusively self-indulgent and self-absorbed and totally awesome.
So you can see why thinking about all my shit is a lot of fun.
But, it was distracting me from thinking about, “oh, how exciting, I’m going on a trip.”
But, mostly,
See, I can’t believe we’re still basically in LA here. Lame.

So, the trip either began on December 10th or the 17th. The 10th through the 17th I was in SF. And the original plan was to visit something like fifty people in eight days. And do some school meetings and work on thesis and spend quality time with my gf for her birthday.
Clearly I’m not so good at realistic planning. I get that.
But, then everything went in the toilet because this job for my client, it totally saved my butt, because I am a disaster with money and had totally missed a check that was cashed months after it was sent, and suddenly I had half as much money as I had budgeted for my trip. And at 122 days at $5 a day, you can’t have half your money disappear. Because that half is more than the $5 a day. It’s part of your actual transit money and your paying cell phone bill money and IRS back taxes money and that-last-frakking-installation-cost-me-a-lot-of-future-moneys money, so you simply can’t suddenly be missing half your money.
So, this job was, well, for me it was business as usual, because I have only a few skills - I am very good at making friends, I am able to learn anything in no time at all (but will apparently never be able to master anything), and money just always appears when I need it (being a member of the dominant class, gender and race means never having to say you’re hungry) - but despite being business as usual in that I needed money and money appeared, it was sorely needed, because without it I would have embarked on the trip and miraculously have had to receive money some other way.
But, this job totally aborted my plans for SF to see a bazillion friends I really wanted to see. So, I started to think,
“Maybe the trip didn’t start on the 10th. Maybe it starts on the 17th, because really, the time in SF I’m mostly working, so that’s hardly like going on a trip.”
Plus I wasn’t doing any of the things I had laid out as the daily activities I was obligated to engage in while traveling:
Blogging
Photography
Field recording
Composing
Burying time capsules
The only thing I managed to do, was start dropping off the love mix CDs I had made.
Maybe I’ll try to write a post on each of these activities, because this hardly seems like the place to start explaining them.