this is a picture of the last tattoo i got, 4 years ago – it’s a bit abstract to some, but for the purposes of moving things along i’ll tell you it’s an elephant. (ah, there’s the lightbulb!) i got it in thailand for what were, at the time, very meaningful, very sincere reasons. a) i love elephants to a completely illogical extent and b) it was meant to remind me of my travels. or, to be more specific, it was meant to remind me of who i was during my travels.

sounds silly, right? i mean, “who i was during my travels”. clearly, i am me. i harbour no illusions of being some mysterious person, nor do i have any additional personalities that live in alternate realities. i guess what i meant was that part of me that i was able to be during a time when i was unfettered by the grind of daily life. because without any ties or responsibilities, it turns out, i’m actually quite a fun, easygoing (!), adventurous person. (i know, i know – i too was shocked by this discovery!) when footloose and fancy free, i can be very laidback, whimsical, and confident. who wouldn’t want to keep that jen?! she’s much more appealing than the set-jawed, furrowed-brow, anxious, and unhappy person than i am these days.

so as i am contemplating how to break out of this rut that i’m in, and suppressing an overwhelming desire to run away, i made the mistake of re-reading our round-the-world travel blog. big.fucking.mistake.

i’ve been here in london for over seven years now, and fairly soon, i will have lived here longer than i’ve lived anywhere else as an adult. i lived in new york city for eight years, and i loved new york. i’ve lived in london almost as long, and i’ve never loved london.

but even if i did, i would be feeling itchy. i’m convinced that wanderlust is in my nature. in fact, i have a theory that those who grew up in one place as kids, are drawn to a mobile lifestyle as adults, and those who were bounced around as children, want nothing more than to put down roots.

i spent 17 years in the same house, wanting desperately to leave america behind, and my ideal lifestyle would be to move to a new city or country every few years. jonno moved about 30 times as a kid, has lived here in london for 11 years and *still* says that he feels like he’s living out of a suitcase. i would love to do more extended travelling, jonno has to be forcibly dragged on holiday for a few weeks every year. i go to places like paris and rome, and find myself saying, “i’d love to live here for a few years.” i turn to him and say, “wouldn’t you?” his answer is always a flat, unequivocal “no”. i see my maroon passport and think about all the places we could retire to. jonno is emphatically *done* with europe. i have never been interested in owning a house, jonno browses the real estate listings in vancouver. i still daydream about joining the peace corps. jonno has made it clear that while he’s happy for me to do that, he would not be joining me.

how do you reconcile those incredibly disparate desires? i don’t know.

neither of us wants to be here – and moving there is proving much harder than we thought. this difficulty is compounded by the fact that my idea of where “there” should be, seems to change every few days. do i want to live in vancouver? yes. am i also terrified of finding myself feeling trapped in vancouver? undeniably. and in the back of my brain, i still have all these wild impulses to just go somewhere (nyc, nz, spain), find a job, and make it all work. (don’t ask me what “it all” is, by the way, or how exactly i would make it work – details are the devil of dreams.) or alternatively, to cash in my half of our savings, throw on a backpack and head off into the unknown (or as much of the unknown as one can see with that meagre amount of money – in other words, a few weeks of seeing not much!) these may not be realistic or mature impulses for a late-thirties-woman-with-husband-job-and-cat, but these days they predominate my brain nonetheless.

it’s all making me feel so mixed up i can’t think straight. i look at the tattoo on my wrist, and feel such a desperate desire to get back to that person i was. that warm, laidback, wide-open jen is locked inside this uptight, unhappy, pinch-faced facade i see staring back at me in the mirror, and she’s being starved of oxygen. something has got to happen, but i don’t know how to break her out of the shell…and i don’t know what that means for our future plans.

and yes, i’m going to leave that big giant question mark hanging there. there is no other way, at the moment, to end that thought.

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america has made me angry these last few days. well, america can make me angry most days, if i let it, so perhaps my skin is just thinner lately, because every time i check the news, or log onto twitter, i feel this slow, hot burn begin in my stomach and spread up through my chest and into my brain.

sarah palin’s anti-woman sentiments cloaked as “feminism”. dr. laura’s hostile need to spouting the n-word at will. the naked racism on display over the manufactured “ground zero mosque” controversy. the 20% who claim to believe, in spite of all evidence, that obama is muslim.

all the intolerance and attacks and wilful, deliberate, obstinate ignorance just sends me over the edge. it makes my pulse pound in my temples, while the hot fever of shame and embarrassment at being the same nationality as these people crawls over my body.

i recently spouted off something to that same effect on facebook, and one of my stateside friends commented that it must be the distance that contributes to my naivete. not being around it all the time, only seeing it from afar, i am not jaded through enough exposure to be able to shrug it off like they have to. living in an environment where you’re surrounded by people who genuinely say and think these things, you must develop a sense of resigned antipathy. after all – you can’t spend your whole life being angry at ignorance and fear, or you’d do nothing else with all your days.

but what can i do? there’s precious little i *can* do. instead, i just get wound up, with no real place to channel my frustration, no way to effect change. i just seethe quietly (or not so quietly), raging away futilely on the internet, and hope that public sentiment will change with time.

i am powerless to do much more. and weeks like this, it feels like there’s nothing worse.

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ah paris! it never fails to enchant. the sidewalk cafes, the grandiose buildings, the magnificent art, the impeccable style with which they carry out everything – it all makes me long to spend my days sipping coffee by the seine, smoking galluoises, and waxing poetic.

more photos here.

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things have been coming to a head in my life. the dissatisfaction that i’ve alluded to so often here, has been building, swelling – i can’t ignore it any longer. change is needed.

there are unexpected catalysts for epiphanies that reach out and force us to pay attention – songs that come on the ipod, out of the blue, that you turn up to thunder in your ears and shake up your heart. and suddenly the ground beneath your feet begins to shift, the tide sucks the sand from under your toes, everything which was solid becomes dangerously uncertain as you get caught in the undertow, and find yourself lifted into the middle of a tidal wave of unimaginable magnitude, tumbling, tossing, unable to tell up from down, all sense of direction lost, horizon and landmarks topsy-turvy, until suddenly the music smashes you down upon the sharp rocks of clarity. the lights explode in your head, fireworks blossom in the darkness of closed eyelids, and you are left gasping for breath on the shore, with everything in precise, crystalline focus, as bright as if seeing everything for the first time.

and once you know what must be done, there is no escaping it – revelations can be postponed, but they cannot be ignored forever. you’ve got to suck up your courage and brave the rocks again – risk being bashed about by the unknown, risk losing yourself to the force of an endless ocean of uncertainty.

i’ve been scanning the horizon for it, and now the sea change is here, the current is pulling me, and i can only trust that i am strong enough to hold my head above the water.

ready to start – arcade fire

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(h/t to Chris for endorsing the new arcade fire album)

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