resolutions...

Updates on my Christmas travels to come shortly, or maybe after England (Jan. 10-19)...

I am truly shocked and most certainly a little proud of myself to look back on the last few months and want to congratulate myself for how very little I’ve lived inside my head during this time. I can’t take all the credit of course because being in a new place with all its sensory overload makes it much easier to mask the baggage we generally carry around with us once we’ve become happily complacent with our surroundings.

Of course, there is always a warm bed and cup of pre-lactarian tea waiting inside my head which welcomes me with open arms when I dare let my guard down and revisit the old, existential babble that has not changed since I left it a few months ago. Here in Spain it is much easier to focus on where my next trip will be, how much will my laundry dry in my insanely cold and humid room, who took my tinfoil, what’s the point in watching a parade where dastardly children throw hard candies like bullets to the idiot masses bellow and I swear to God if they crack or scratch one Versace lense I will sue the whole town, but this doesn’t matter because it’s the first few days of January and culturally we are taught to look back with nostalgia and wonder what we will do differently the next time.

I used to harrang several friends-cum-acquaintances, of the male variety, for always persevering forward at such a lightning speed that they learned nothing from their pasts and this bothered me because I think that women are much more likely to pain themselves with questions like why? Closure? Am I not good enough? What could I have done differently/better/more/less, etc.? But this is not to say that the males were all wrong and perhaps this just means that I was due a change of approach.

So here’s where the danger lies when I start running my mouth off (oops, too late!) and start waxing poetic about resolutions and nostalgia and that warm bed up in my head. No. Here and now, in my desperately cold room where laundry hangs like banana leaves in the Amazon Basin so thick you can barely breathe, I have decided for the upcoming year to continue moving forward, not to return to that warm bed in my head where I lay around in a metaphorical opium lull to criticise myself for being too weak/strong/stubborn/blind/sarcastic. Instead, I choose to, like the cliché states, Live, Laugh, Love and encourage all those who want to join to do so. But no, man my English vocabulary has disappeared, spraying the ground with candy-coloured bloodshed, the Versaces couldn’t take it.