life, the universe, and everything

This is pretty much going to be a ramble... and a multipart ramble, unless I can type it really fast.

I love travelling alone. I think there are all kinds of advantages to it, and few disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage, though, is having five people a day ask you, "Oh my god, you´re travelling alone? Aren´t you scared? Aren´t you bored? Aren´t you lonely?" Now that I´m used to answering that question five times a day, I just smile and say that it´s the only way to go, and then enumerate some of the advantages for their edification.

Recently, though, I´ve been getting some more intelligent variations of that question. A couple of people asked if it was weird to meet so many people and then never see them again. The answer is, yes, it is weird, but more in an unusual way than an uncomfortable way. I like talking to strangers. (I like talking to friends too. It´s acquaintances I have trouble with, because then I feel stupid if I forget details about them. Like their names.)

So with all these people passing through my life every day, sometimes it seems like they are reduced to... ideas. Ideas about how to live and how to travel. Last weekend I was in Alicante. I hung out a lot with this guy Dave, who has a travel style almost identical to mine. But there was this woman there from California, a completely over-the-top New Age flaky woman who was obviously recovering from a bunch of really bad breakups. She whipped out a joint after dinner and started doing yoga while she was talking to us.

New Age Woman was against the American rat race, which to her included any kind of agenda, to-do list, or planning for the future. If we started talking about what we were going to do tomorrow, she´d yell at us and tell us to live in the moment.

She told us this story about when she broke up with some guy and drove down to Mexico to get in touch with herself again, except that she brought her guitar and her books and her painting and all the things she normally never had time for. When she got to the beach, she realized that all those leisure activities were just one more to-do list. She locked them all in the car and spent some time doing nothing at all on the beach, and learned to amuse herself by just looking closer at nature.

Where the hell am I going with this? Tune in tomorrow for either the middle or the conclusion!