pre-trip scribble

I write this with approximately two and a half weeks until my departure. Sitting to my left I have a to-do list with bullets so seemingly ceaseless that I wonder if I am on my way to transcribing Moby Dick from the written word into Braille. We will have to see. That would be an awfully tedious task, however equally as tedious (albeit necessary) is the act of crossing out the aforementioned "to-do's."

The list consists primarily of rather mundane tasks, such as making photocopies of potentially important documents, purchasing and assembling a binder to house said documents, packing precisely 4-6 cardigans in my luggage like a savvy traveler (as opposed to the overly cautious traveler's 5-7!!), and other trivial things that I will bore neither you nor myself with mentioning. There's already Tylenol PM for that. Or a Larry King special. Thank god he's not on air anymore.

At any rate, on to more pressing things. I'm equal parts nervous as I am excited. At night, when I'm not dreaming of Granada and the fateful (and free, thanks to Andalucian law) tapas that will enter my belly, I dream of crashing cars, burning homes, tidal waves, and missing teeth. Those, according to the google god to which I pray multiple times a day, are all indicative of stress. Which I, the self-diagnosed hypochondriac, surely must have. All jokes aside, I probably have a mood disorder. All jokes aside again, unnecessary amounts of stress and an ungodly desire to always be in control are two things on which I need to work, and two things that will hopefully be serviced upon my five month stay in Spain. Courses are tentative, subsequent moods and emotions are tentative, housing is surprisingly planned but depending on how scratchy my rented sheets are may be tentative as well, and frankly, all future experiences are tentative. All throughout life (I say this as if I've half the age of an old Galapagos tortoise) I have despised ambiguity (its power on the human thought process, I suppose, is what I envy most about it) as well as the thought that most things are and should be both grey and elastic (though I am more or less a relativist), so hopefully my bones won't break upon my shift from a rigid, plan-based world to that of the formless fluidity that is la vida Español. Again, we will have to see.

Ultimately, I know that everything will be all right. Everything will always be all right, and well, it will have to be anyway because (pardon the melodramatics) death rights all things. After all, it's what people have in the back of their mind when they say "After all." On another note, I also know that I am unnecessarily nervous when I mention that death, as opposed to a taxi cab or a glass or three of sangria, is what will make everything OK. Silly, silly girl. Anyhow, the to-do list still antagonizes me with its dark blue bullets piercing at my rods and cones. Time to shut the planner. An itinerary is based on time, anyway, and what the hell do people really know about that? People try to reassure me by saying that I've got a lot of it yet also that I have so little, and frankly I find the concept of simultaneously having a lot and a little of the same thing quite confusing, so I'm going to ignore both sides of the coin and take my own advice. Which is, tentatively, to stop trying to quantify time but rather to simply start enjoying it. Could this be, dare I say it, progress?