When I was really young, I had this thing which every summer when the weather started getting warm, my parents had to take me on together in order to hold me down and put shorts on me. I'd been wearing jeans all fall and winter and had gotten used to them, you see, and the idea of wearing shorts, of letting my legs go bare to the elements, was upsetting. But they usually only had to do that once or twice, and then I was a regular shorts-wearing Calvin, out enjoying the summer days and scraping my knees on rocks and rusted airplanes while playing games with the equivalent of my stuffed Hobbes. Eventually of course, the chill weather would come around again and the day would come when my Mom told me it was time to put the jeans back on, and I'd scream and cry until Dad had to tackle me while Mom shoved those long gross confining things up my legs. Again, after a day or two of acclimation, I was a happy Levi-wearing kid, and was very excited about the new jean jacket, too. I think this became a little seasonal tradition which only lasted two or three years, but that old saying is definitely true: A man is just the boy grown tall.
I don't know of a technical term describing that sort of behavior, but it's similar to that whole grass-is-always-greener thing, with maybe a little bi-polar agoraphobia/claustrophobia in the mix. I was thinking about it yesterday because generally, I'm an indoor sort of person. My favorite daily pastimes are reading, watching movies, and various other sedentary occupations. If I spend enough time inside my apartment, eventually the idea of going out to do something active or social (and I'm not counting normal errands here: going to the Gym and grocery shopping don't factor in because it's easy to avoid people while doing those activities) such as meeting a friend at a bar or even just at Borders for coffee and conversation, I get very reluctant. I'm fairly anti-social, so the idea of purposefully going out and socializing is difficult enough for me to begin with.
But my dryer broke earlier this week and my laundry pile has reached an alarming size, besides which I have a job I'm flying out for this Monday and I need to have clean clothes for it. So I was actually agonizing at around 8pm last night whether or not to go out to the laundromat. The idea of piling my dirties into the car and driving all the way into town in order to publicly air my cotton, possibly having to deal with annoying children and overweight soccer Moms (I find most people agonizingly annoying, but strange little children and loud matrons are the worst) was hard to come around to. But it needed to be done and I was bored, so I got it up to do it. I even brought a book along with me (I'm in the middle of re-reading that Iain M. Banks novel, Excession, finally! It's as awesome as I'd remembered, so far) and on the drive into town began looking forward to sitting in the spin-o-rama with my headphones on and a great book.
Of course when I got there at 8:30, the sign on the door stated that the last load had to be in by 8:00, so I had to turn around and go home. I was feeling disappointed and cheated of my exciting evening out at the laundry, and was even rather desperately trying to think of another laundromat I could go to, and then it became a desperate attempt to just find a place to sit and read quietly for a while before going home. I even considered stopping at Doughboy's pizza place, which would have been nice except that I don't really eat much pizza anymore as I'm trying to eat healthier, and that's when I laughed at myself for being such a weather vane. Am I in or am I out? I guess it depends on what direction I'm headed in.
I do the same thing with everything. It's all about momentum with me. When I'm traveling, I never want to go home. When I'm home (as long as it's my own space and not a couch at someone else's, that is) I never want to go out. It's almost Newtonian. Which is why, if it paid more money, my job would be the best job I could ever have. I travel for a week or two, I'm home for a week or two. It's perfect. I was in Panama City Beach, Florida last week for around 5 days, and I only had about two or three days worth of work to do. It's not a very nice city: It's low rent Spring Break central. The main beach area was disgusting; I walked out there from my hotel on my first free morning, and while there really were not any people out, it looked like the floor of a frat house after their biggest end of the year bash ever. Shallow holes dug in various parts of the sand for who knows what reason were filled with seawater and soaked cardboard beer cases. Beer cans, cigarette butts, weird bits of trash and college-puke flotsam were strewn all over what was once a very pretty fine white sand beach. It was rather shocking.
I walked along the beach with my headphones on for about 5 miles until I came to a State Park beach area, which was much nicer but still crowded with the types of people I generally avoid. I was wearing black sandals, black gym shorts, and a black sweatshirt with the hood up and sunglasses, because I'm not really the tanning type. At some point a really wasted spring breaker girl, squatting in the sand under the boardwalk for reasons I don't wish to speculate on and rambling to herself in that drunken sorority girl squawk which sounds like the voice of a smoker-of-50-years, called me the Unabomber. That sort of made me happy.
On my second free day I went scuba diving. That was pretty cool... I've only ever scuba dived in tropicalish places before, Croatia and Thailand, where the main objective of the dive was to see coral reef and tropical sea life. Panama City, being somewhat junky, doesn't really have that so we dove to see some sunken ships, which was a first for me and was a different sort of cool. Our first dive site was at a ship called the Grey Ghost and the second dive was at a site called The Twin Tugs, so named because two ships, tug boats I suppose, had sunk in the same area and through the work of the tides eventually became lodged together in a mass of twisted wreckage. I bought a $25 underwater camera at the dive shop, and with the pictures I took, I believe I've demonstrated here exactly how much a $25 underwater camera is worth, as most of them look like this:
And this one is me posing in front of the Twin Tugs:
But some of them came out kind of cool-looking, although mostly by accident. Fellow scuba diver:
Fish and deck stairs:
And more deck stairs:
It was pretty cool to swim around the ships. I even swam through holes in the sides and checked out the insides. The only drawback to wreck-diving is that they were about 100 feet down, and at those kind of depths your oxygen goes pretty quick. So I was only under for about 15 or 20 minutes, as opposed to the much longer and more relaxed, shallower coral reef dives.
Anyway, by the end of my time in Panama City Beach, I was DONE with Panama City Beach. The dichotomy of travel / home really works for me, because if I was home for too long, I'd get too agoraphobic and it'd be difficult to leave, even as I was feeling bored and restless, but when I'm traveling for too long, I start to miss the comforts of home. I need my good morning coffee and the gym routine.
Anyway, on Monday I'm flying out to Seattle for a few day's work and a few day's play: Alison & Jordan, friends of mine from my time in Germany, live out there so we're going to do some stuff 'n junk. This is a picture of Allison and I getting our Cappuccino points in Malmö, Sweden while on the famous Hypertrek known as Nimmer's Great Northern Europe Tour 2003.
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