I brought you typhus

I’ll be taking bets about how long I can bear my 5 shirts and 5 skirts before I detest everything and throw it all away. Nevertheless, for the next seven months, I will be able to carry everything I own on my person at one time, which is the kind of feat you can’t really put on your resume but is exceptionally useful if you’re on the road. Once again, as with every other time I’ve moved (out / across countries and continents), I realize just how much random shit I’ve acquired the last year. I’d been happily squirreling it away, bringing back from every trip to Germany some utensils or shoes or something I’d purchased, along with the last bag I’d stored with someone months or years ago. At least now, everything I own is either with me now or in Geneva, which helps as it is no longer scattered across continents and countries.

It’s like camping: once you’re out there with just what you can carry on your back, you realize just how little you really need. You can get by with very little, and the less you have the easier your life is on the road. However, there is a difference between getting by and doing well, and just because it is possible to rotate among three outfits, that gets old quite quickly.

Happily, I can now announce that I am officially transient again. I am, as the French say, sans domicile fixe (s.d.f.), with no fixed residence. I am not homeless in the literal sense, as I have lots of homes in lots of places, those to which I now return and those to which I have not yet ventured, and in any case I’m not on the streets. I am not heimatslos in the German sense of being without a home (think of a sort of primal concept of ‘home’ rather than ‘the house in which I live’). I just have no residence, and currently receive post in three countries but don’t currently live in any of them.

I’ve been trying hard to figure out what exactly makes me unable to live anywhere for long. Perhaps ‘unable’ is not the word. It’s not really ‘push factors’ that drive me away, but rather the lure of faraway places that inspires me to pack it all up and move out. If I have the time or a particular opportunity, as with both my current voyage to Asia and my previous sojourn in Egypt, the unknown calls to me.

People sometimes ask me what I hate about the States that I don’t want to live there. To make it clear, while there are things I dislike about the States – just as there are things I dislike about Germany or Switzerland or Egypt or anywhere else I’ve lived or will live – it is not out of hate of the place that I leave. On the contrary, being abroad makes me feel a bit more connected to “the country I know best” as I am confronted with stereotypes, people’s impressions gained on their voyages and invariably shared with me upon learning where I’m from, or people’s frustrations or enthusiasm for our country. Coming from the US is a bit like living in a glass house – our culture and politics are spread everywhere, and everyone feels somewhat entitled to an opinion about it all. Everyone has an opinion about the US, I would dare to suppose, for better or for worse. While I have met many people whose conception of the US is based on bad Hollywood movies and Bush’s polemic foreign policy, I have also met with an exceptional number of people who are interested in and know better than I US politics, current popular culture, history, literature, or anything else you care to know.

Going through security at customs was kind of like shopping at Aldi – everything has to be placed as onto the belt, you are quickly shooed through the scanners, and as soon as possible you have to recollect your liquids, put on your shoes, find the loose change and contents of your pockets, and get the heck out of the way before everything falls off the back end. But at least it went quickly. Passport control was manned by an ill-tempered serf whose sole purpose in life was to rag on people who don’t move quickly enough, towing children and suitcases, to wait in the proper line to have their passport stamped. All the while, on the TV screens above the massive lines shuffling resignedly but quickly towards the blue-uniformed officers, US propaganda videos loop showing smiling families and individuals, of appropriate ethnic and cultural distribution, interspersed with US landmarks and clichéd cowboys and NYC skyline shots, culminating in a series of grinning people repeating “welcome”. It’s all a bit frightening.

All the while I’m trying hard to babysit my “Petri dish”, a typhus vaccine which is supposed to be refrigerated. Apparently airplanes don’t really have refrigerators (?? Makes no sense to me, but okeee), so I ended up with a barf bag full of ice at one point in which to place the tiny box. The ice proceeded to melt everywhere and soak the packaging, but kept the vaccine cold. The bar in Dulles gave me a little plastic tray with ice cubes which I refreshed on the plane to Denver. Instead of normal take-off worries, I was worried that my little plastic tray under my seat would slide back and douse the feet of the passanger behind me in icewater. Luckily, my typhus made it home intact, swimmingly happily in its basin of water. I’ve mistreated it enough, I’ll probably get typhus itself instead of immunity against it….