Obligatory Wrap-Up Post

It's Sunday night. Tomorrow, I will go back to work and retrace the patterns of daily life that I summarily ditched two weeks ago.

After arriving in San Diego on Amtrak (I emphasize: only take Amtrak anywhere if you have a lot of time on your hands), I made the short ride from La Jolla to Del Mar, where my parents live. In anticipation of my brother's wedding, my family became completely entropic. We ensued to drive each other nuts for the next couple of days. Then, the wedding came around: calm, sunny, smelling of flowers and lawn, and about as stressful as sitting on a porch swing. A few hours after the exhanging of vows and wedding cupcakes, the bride and groom peeled out in a red Firebird, and the whole affair was over.

My brain, having nothing left to grovel over, shut down in a huff. I spent the next day-and-a-half in powersave mode, interacting with the world around me as though I were swarthed in cotton. I confess that I'm still operating in said state.

In ending this blog and this trip, I have one thing to say: whoa. I did it. That was not easy. I plan to go back to SLO one of these days and finish the trip the way I intended.

People said the trip was crazy. It was. Nonetheless, I wouldn't hesitate to do it again. My housemate has a placard on her bathroom wall that I think sums up what this experience meant to me. The placard says that "One needs to have chaos within oneself to give birth to a rising star" (Nietzsche). I embraced my own chaos, and now I've come back to a place where I can appreciate calm. And when I get bored of the calm, which I almost invariably do, I'll know that I have the will and stamina to do something crazy for a little while. Perhaps that knowledge is all I need.