A couple of weeks ago I went on a road trip with my friends Thomas, Raphael, and Dino. We went up to Harvard for a “job fair” which was actually an internship/fellowship fair, as we should have expected going into one of these things for the journalism industry. We all agreed that regardless of what we got out of the fair, however unfair it may have seemed, we would enjoy the trip for its own sake. We enjoyed the drive up from New York to Boston, when we stopped off at a mall in Connecticut and one of us threw up in the parking lot. We enjoyed the pouring rain on the road at night, and then, in the streets the next morning as we walked around Cambridge. We enjoyed the burgers at the place across from Harvard’s campus (I got the People’s Republic of Cambridge burger). We enjoyed the naps we each took, sometimes involuntarily. But for me, it wasn’t easy to enjoy the passing time, because we were on this trip to think about the future and the best we could make of it was to appreciate the present. And even as I tried to enjoy the present, anxiety about the future clouded my thoughts.
But a trip is supposed to be a vacation from your typical conception of time, right? In strange surroundings, you feel motion at a different pace and you see attractions that fascinate you and pull you away from your everyday experiences. You perceive things in particular moments of transfixion, I think, that seem outside of time. You’re alienated from the place you visit, as a visitor, but also from the place you come from, having left it behind.
Only I can’t seem to leave all this behind when I go on a trip. Or for that matter, I can’t seem to properly imagine distancing myself from anything that is integral to my everyday life. Like journalism for example…
I need a vacation.
