Target and Strangeness

In order to actually be ready for our trip, JR and I went on an errand-running trip of epic proportions yesterday. We borrowed KJ's car and more or less spent an entire 9-5 workday amongst the soul-crushing strip malls that form a terrifying ring of consumerism around the suburban outskirts of Madison. In a weird way, it was the most compelling pre-trip thing that we've done so far. More than shopping for coats online, or researching the cost of a Navimag ferry in Patagonia, or booking hostels in Valpo, buying all the little things for our trip was what made it hit home that we were leaving for six months. There was something about buying toothpaste and razor blades and deodorant and Ziploc bags which made this all strike home as being, well, real. The past few weeks have been abstracted and dreamlike and, despite constantly reading travel blogs and trip suggestions on the Internet, I've never been able to put myself there. The research has felt like a mental exercise or a kind of fiction that I've built around myself to preserve my sanity in grad school; but that sense of dislocation, that patina of disbelief that hung around this trip, all that fell away the moment I picked up a bottle of sunscreen and thought to myself, "Just how much sunscreen do I actually need?"

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am lousy at projecting forward. But I'm at the point where I can see myself brushing my teeth in a hostel sink somewhere in Patagonia. And even as that dispels one kind of strangeness - the strangeness of planning for something I can't quite envision - it invites an altogether different one. This new strangeness is much more exciting, though it bears an accompanying sense of anxiety (an anxiety that very easily gets caught up in the usual end-of-semester and pre-holiday anxieties). But it's also made everything here feel even more bizarre.

On an unrelated note, it's snowing again - another 2-4 inches tonight. (That's what she said.) Or maybe that's a related note after all: looking at the snow, all I can think about is the fact that I'm going to a country where it's currently summer. And that the only snow I'll see in the next few months will be on the tops of the Andes. And that I'm happy it snowed so much before I left, because watching snow fall on sparse, gray days reminds me of snow days as a kid and traveling in Germany. Part of me is going to miss Wisconsin. But that part of me is definitely not the toes on my left foot, which are currently frozen due to Thieves poor heating system.