The Blog I Started to Avoid “Unsubscribe” Responses to My Mass E-mails

It’s a snowy New Year’s eve afternoon back home. Distracted halfway into or out of an outfit, I am clad in a bizarre sundress/sweater combo, cupping a mug of sweet warm jasmine tea and have tunneled deep into the fever of my good friend’s travel blog.

Having picked up his ordinary engineer-working, Ultimate-Frisbee playing, rock-climbing existence and transferred it to enchantingly alien Chennai, India, he is by all accounts having the time of his life.

A man of my own priorities, he has taken to describing each day’s meals with the thoroughness of an Audubon field manual. Categorized by genus and species, each exotic dish is described in vivid, Technicolor detail and is flanked by annoyingly casual explanations of its place in his lovely new daily routine. In my cold kitchen, even the names roll around my mouth delightfully and generate salivation – the Masalas and Chutneys, the Dhals and Sambars, the Curries and Dosas.

I can almost smell the traffic choked streets clogged with jostling, un-EPA approved taxis and motorcycles. I can almost feel the heavy wind on my face in the back of a rickshaw, stuck next to a bull drawn cart in rush hour. Even worse, I find myself desperately wanting to mimic his charming Indi/Brit colloquialisms which somehow just sound awkward and Madonna-ish back stateside.

Suffice it to say, I am deep in the bell jar of travel-envy.

Frankly folks, I am greedy.

I want the world.

I want to feel the juxtaposition of strolling in silk saris next to the world’s most frenetic streets. I want to know if the green waters of Zanzibar are as balmy as I have been promised. I want to sleep in the open air of the Namibian desert and see if I missed a single star in Mali. I want to see for myself if peace is bestowed upon you like a lei in Bali. I want to see the worst we are capable of, soak in Bosnia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone as a warning or a spring of perspective. I want to wander like a local in Dubrovnik, Praia and Cartagena, Tehran, Vienna and Havana, collecting history, proverbs and second hand goods.

I want to lose myself in the Mekong Delta, on the Silk Road, through the Bhutanese Himalayas and gather a veritable hope chest of unfathomable experiences in return.

For every slightest mention of a friend (or stranger’s) next foreign destination, I am sent scurrying back to my laptop in a state of jealous euphoria to begin investigating the feasibility of my own visit.

I am aware that a timely resolution to be content with my past travels and patient with imminent journeys is in order. I also imagine that resolution is less likely to be fulfilled at next year’s end then is my vow to stop interrupting and eating candy in the bathtub.

Ces’t la vie. There are worse obsessions.

For today, I’ve plum worn myself out with the fervor of fantasizing and am ready to go celebrate the here and now with some of my favorite people. At least for this one day, I will be happy for my friend and his Indian endeavors, I will be satisfied to sop up his brilliant recounts and I will try to wait my turn for life’s next unreal adventure.

It is one of those sternly cold mountain nights, where the air seems frozen to the stars which seem frozen to the steely blue, hovering clouds that promise morning snow.