After finding some will today, expectations
started to burden me…telling me that I should find a way. I chose the
modification of my reality, I took it upon me to change everything. I went to
the store, bought a ticket to Egypt, scaling three countries on my way.
For
reasons inexplicable, I can’t be in one place for very long, and therefore
choose to replicate or ape some young female traveler in a Forester novel,
exalting the architecture in obnoxiously exuberant statements, musing upon
whether or not (and what a travesty if it were so!) the locals appreciate the
color and majesty in the surroundings.
I’m too hard on Forester. Travel writing
should neither be appreciated nor discriminated in a vacuum. It gives context
to my own travels. Using home as a comparison to, for example, the frightful
disaster that is the Cairo Airport; the hopelessness and panic in explaining a
forgotten [in my desk drawer] airline ticket to a Czech Airlines representative
who, it seems, was capable of offering me nothing but the icy glaze of her wet,
blue eyes. Yes, I live here as The Ugly American (if we’re keeping it literary)
and find that my U.S. passport burdens me either in reality or all in my
too-well-read-over-educated head.