Happiness Journey!

Oh my GOD. I’m sitting at gate 104 in the international terminal at LAX, struggling through the layover that positively will not end. I’ve hit the bookstores, the duty free stores, and the donuts to the point that my luggage is bursting, and I will never be able to carry all of it. Want to see something impressive? Here’s what’s coming to China with me:

Maybe it’s not that impressive. And it definitely weighs all of seventy pounds (a little more than half of one Anne Gresham, for perspective), which I will be hauling all by my lonesome all over creation in about eighteen hours (creation=Hong Kong airport). By the end of this, my luggage is probably going to weigh considerably more than half of one Anne Gresham.

Um, let’s see (you’re going to have to forgive me, I’m feeling about as cracked out and crazy as I ever have in my entire life, and this is going to be incredibly stream of conscious-y). Friday, the moving crew showed up at my house, and moved all of my junk and a piano out of my house. I followed the truck to Harrison with my screaming cats in tow, and proceeded to spend the next twenty-four hours or so in an advanced state of freaked out craziness. I went back to Fayetteville on Saturday to clean out my apartment. It was one of those projects that never seemed to end – I thought I was needing to spend an hour or so, tops, on it, but it wound up taking all afternoon. While I was throwing things out of closets in the middle of the floor and running back and forth from the dumpster, I started feeling a little bit like I wasn’t voluntarily relocating to an awesome city in pursuit  of a great opportunity, but rather that I was fleeing the country… I decided to roll with that, since it made the time pass much faster, and spent the rest of the frantic final touches pretending like I was some sort of ruthless mercenary/double agent character who’d just found out that the game was up and was trying to stay a step ahead of her enemies. Her enemies, of course, being everyone. That wound up getting really detailed – some overseas military organization had found out the one human weakness in my steely heart, and I was desperately trying to make it across the world before said bad guys were able to capture that person. Then it started involving a plucky hooker sidekick named Candy who lived in New York and gave me a place to stay and never asked questions but let me know that she cared, in that hooker with a heart of gold sort of way, and my Short Round-esque contact in Thailand, and I had a big nasty German shepherd who’d saved my life more times than I could count, etc. Everybody else still plays in their head, right? I’m not a complete lunatic? Anyway, the truth is that I’m not a timid or passive person at all, I just expend my considerable levels of machismo daydreaming…

End of story, I did get my apartment close to satisfactorily clean and empty. And it was really weird.

Every time I opened the apartment door and two cats didn’t run out to say hello, I died inside a little bit. Look, I promise, I’m not going to spend all of my time in China crying about my cats, but WOW has that one been a little rough. I mean, just look at them.

However, things should be good for Parker and Ipso. They’re both staying with my parents, they’ll be able to go outside eventually, and they’ll have more room and more stuff to do. They really upset me this morning by not understanding that I needed to say goodbye to them and being more interested in breakfast than me, but I understand that cats aren’t the sort of animal to say goodbye. And I’ll see them again, I guess. It still sucked.

Then I went out with my peeps Saturday night, and that got extremely emotional eventually, but most of the time it just looked like this:

It was Halloween weekend, and so there were a lot of costumes, the best by far being Amy and Justin as Moby Dick and Captain Ahab, and Shaun as Jesse Custer from Preacher, somehow managing to look even hotter than the comic book character.

(I don’t really know those other people, but don’t you absolutely love them? I became completely hypnotized by Wonder Woman’s bottom – I mean, I realize it’s trashy to take pictures of people’s bottoms and then post them on the internet, but WOW!)

Ack, good grief, I was really planning on taking a lot of time with this post and summing up what it felt like to drive out of Fayetteville for the last time, how hard it was to leave my apartment and turn in my keys, what a hard time I had trying to pack, how mushy I got realizing that I was taking Battlecat on his last voyage, etc., but I just don’t feel like it right now. I’ve been sitting in this airport for several hours, and I’ll be here for several more, and then I’m headed to Hong Kong, and then to Nanjing, to find out whatever aspects of my personality I never knew existed are waiting for me on the other side of the world. It’s been a pretty rough few days, honestly – I absolutely detest saying goodbye, and there’s been a lot of that.  It’s not that I don’t want to say goodbye to everyone, I just really hate doing it, and I was feeling pretty rotten and upset in the middle of all of that. But the second I was on the plane, it got fun again – every thing’s taken care of, and I am well on my way.

My coworker made me a going-away card that had the Chinese characters for bon voyage, although the closest she could get were the characters for “happiness” and “journey.” So this is my happiness journey! I love it! And I’ve got a cheeseball title for my travelogue, should I write one. Because if there’s one thing the world needs, it’s another account of a white American teaching in China…

So yeah. Moving on/up/over/out, feeling a little spastic, but excited.

The next time I talk to anyone I know, I’ll be somewhere very different.

~ by Anne on October 29, 2007.