September 2009 Archives

From there I go to Korea and then China. After that I will try to go to Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in no particular order. I'm thinking of making it a full-on RTW and going to Africa and checking out some of the parts of Europe that I haven't been to yet. I'm not sure how long I will travel for. I mean, I've emotionally budgeted around 12-18 months. I think if I start working before then I will probably kill myself, and quite possibly take out the entire typing pool in the process. But I don't actually want to say "Oh, I'm going traveling for a year." Because honestly, I might decide to go crawling back to my parents after four months.

The thing is, I am fairly certain that I hate traveling. I really like having my own space and my own things and my own sheets and my own pillow. I also know that this trip is going to be very difficult for me. I plan to spend 3-6 weeks in China. I don't like spending more than 45 minutes in Chinatown. It seems that me and the Chinese have very different ideas about personal space, for one. So I'm not sure exactly how I will handle this extended trip. Probably the same way I deal with my trips to Chinatown--with a snotty look on my face and trying to fit as much food in my maw as I possibly can.

But don't get me wrong, I am really, really looking forward to this. Just the fact that I have the opportunity to do this makes me so happy, and dare I admit, proud of myself. When I was 19 I never would have dreamt that I would have been able to do something like this on my own. I thought this was the sort of thing that only people with rich parents and chaperones were able to do. Six or seven years ago one of my biggest resentments was how little I had traveled, how I hadn't been able to do an exchange program in college or live abroad. And now I've been living abroad for three years, had to get extra pages added my passport and have enough frequent flyer miles to go around the world. And that's pretty amazing.

Near the end of my trip I started to tell my friend Iris my list. "It's funny that none of these American foods are actually from America," she began. Of course I had anticipated her attack and had only said that I personally associate these foods with America, but make no claims as to their actual ethnic associations or origins. She backed down in fear and took another nibble of the fried Oreo we were sharing at the feast of San Gennaro.

Highlights:

I've known about hoarders before seeing this show. I used to live in the flat next to one in California. This poor woman was a complete nutcase. We both had flower boxes outside our doors. I filled mine up with herbs and watered them every day and used them for cooking and was pretty pleased with myself for having such a green thumb. She put bark and plastic flowers in hers. The backseat of her car was filled with garbage that obscured the windows and she'd cover it with a blanket, as if the rest of us wouldn't notice.

One time she was locked out her her apartment for three days because a pile of her stuff fell over and blocked the door. Of course she was too scared to call the landlord--if he saw what she was doing he'd have kicked her out--so she sat outside for three days trying to dislodge the stuff behind the door by pushing sticks through the mail slot. Eventually, she got back in. She was completely insane in this really suburban, middle-aged hippie sort of way. She asked that I never knock on her door, but that I call her special voicemail line if I ever needed anything. I suspect she didn't want me to see her "stuff."

I never had any concept of what was truly going on in the next flat over until I saw this show. I had always assumed that hoarders were collecting worthwhile things. For example, my father has a tendency towards hoarding but it's always German antiques and cookbooks. My mother refuses to throw away armchairs that clutter the living room, but from an objective standpoint they aren't junk-heap material. I thought that's what hoarding was--having too many things because they're still nice enough to keep. (I'm consciously trying to not mention my father's collection of phone books). But on Hoarders, people are just collecting garbage. Rotting pumpkins, empty Coke bottles, pizza boxes, scraps of paper, dolls with no heads. It boggles the mind. And what is most unbelievable is how some of these people find someone else that compliments their complete insanity, like the compulsive shopper who is married to a compulsive hoarder. She brings stuff in and he won't let it go. It was really terrifying.

And everyone on the show eventually breaks down weeping because of their "stuff." They don't want to get rid of their "stuff." "It's my stuff!" they wail. "I don't want people touching my stuff!" "My stuff is all I have!" It was profoundly depressing. I saw this on the back of reading an article in the New York Times Magazine, The Self-Storage Self a few days ago, while at the same time waiting for all of the storage companies I called to get back to me with price quotes. I'm going to go travelling around Asia for a while and need somewhere to put my "stuff." And now I'm gripped with fear.

Stuff is one of my obsessions. I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a compulsive shopper, but I certainly love accumulating. Out of fear, I've counterbalanced this habit by being a compulsive thrower-outer. I throw a lot away. I go through my apartment and donate bags to charity. I'm so terrified of being one of these people where their entire lives are controlled by their stuff that I throw things away and get rid of things constantly. I get rid of more than I buy and manage to hold on to the sides. But just barely. And don't ask about the boxes I have in my parents' garage. That's my stuff.