14th
Totally deep, man.
I feel like this entry should be epic. We are back in Iowa City and the void of road-trip-less-ness is huge. It’s weird not to be spending kilowatts of brain energy figuring out where north/the nearest coffee shop is, weird not to ever motor over 75 mph with a Sony boombox on my lap, weird not to wake up to Carolyn’s sweet little sleep-deprived face in the morning, weird not to be constantly figuring out what happens next.
But it might not be an epic entry. It’s hard to sum up this trip in any sort of a final blog way, as I am still ingesting all the new thoughts I had about the Pacific Ocean and about meeting new people and about corndogs and about best friends and about my life up until this point. Our last few days of tripping involved at least 10 hour stretches of driving across the flat (and snowy!) plains of Wyoming and Montana and North Dakota– an activity that lends itself to thinkingthinkingthinking. And those thoughts still need to be processedprocessedprocessed.
One thing I can talk about from this trip is how much tougher it has made me. This is about to be an odd admission from someone who agreed to go on a month-long cross-country trip, but before this I wasn’t a very good traveler, and I knew it. Um, sorry I didn’t tell you before we left, Lady Smarmalade. I like(d?) being around my own familiar things, and knowing I wouldn’t have my own private space to go back to at the end of the day made me super uncomfortable. Carolyn says my voice was higher pitched for the first week plus of the trip and I kept overusing pet names like honeybunch and sweetie pie– sure signs that I was kind of nervous/uncomfortable and dealing with it. By the end, though, I was a thick-skinned, wise-cracking road WARRIOR, totally comfortable sleeping on a random bunk bed and sharing all facilities with like a million other people. Totally comfortable with being damn brave and taking on obstacles and [insert other college application-worthy statements here]. So, yeah. Positive stronger-human-being-type change, check. Awesome stories, check. Totally in love with CMA still, double check.
And despite the earlier claim of weird feelings, somehow being back in Iowa City also feels incredibly normal and comfortable and right, although the sudden lack of direction (literally and figuratively) has thrown me. It’s like, “Whoa, I can do whatever and go wherever I want today OR not do anything or go anywhere.” Which is nice for now, although my sneaking suspicion is that it will get old quick. I definitely have to get a job and some cool projects to work on post haste. And I am still staying at my dad’s house, so I have to keep trying to carve out my own space there. And um, what else… I don’t know, if you’re in Iowa City CALL ME, cause I really wanna hang out. But I might invite Carolyn and insist we drive around in a crunchy gold Volvo, or I might wear the same tee shirt I’ve been wearing for days and have a sudden hankering for gas station “cappuccino” – cause that’s just kinda my thing now.
nello
