Time On

OK, here are the parameters:

New job starts the second week of April.

I had pushed out the start date so I could take leave, for a full week, starting tomorrow.

I got several thousand dollars in state and federal tax returns this year (already done and deposited).

I am due roughly a full month's pay in cashed-out leave time once I quit my current job.

I will have to start from zero with my leave once I start the new job, so this is my last opportunity for a real vacation for a while.

I've kind of had a rough go of it lately with some personal stuff, so I could really use the break and re-set.

I'm also feeling the anxiety of a massive life shift changing jobs, so running away is always a solid mental health solution option.

I'm single, I'm oddly flush with cash, I have free time and essentially no restrictions. I could go anywhere or do anything. Let's consider all the options!

Well, last-minute direct flights to London are about $1,000 nonstop. I could go to New York for less than $400 if I left on a Tuesday. I've never been to the Grand Canyon. Las Vegas is always a fairly close option, or would be if it weren't entirely repulsive not just as a place but as an idea. There are weed dispensaries all over now and I've already cleared by pre-employment drug screening, so I could experiment with a new hobby of being absolutely baked out of my mind, for like nine days in a row.

Let's be honest, though: if any of that were going to happen, I'd likely have started making plans way ahead of the Thursday before the Friday. Right now, what I'm doing is sitting in a raggedy-ass blue recliner in my bedroom, working on this while the cat sleeps on the corner of my bed, about four feet away and I have to say... this feels kind of like the dials are all tuned to exactly the kind of vibe I'm going to be looking for.

I've been to London, I've been to New York... and truthfully, there's nothing like the feeling of your feet first hitting the sidewalk outside the hotel of a city that isn't yours, especially a walkable one with exotic features like public transit and neighborhoods. The entertainment on the ground is pretty cost-effective with the right proclivities. For me, it's enough to have a journal with some blank pages, a reliable pen and a spot in a public place to park yourself and let the current of human endeavor zip past you in its natural state of inexplicable hurry. Some people find mountain streams or cabins in the woods calming or centering, but I'm never more Xanax-ed than when I'm sitting still amongst waves of people trying to get places when I don't have to. While I was newly separated/divorced and I still had a valid Disneyland annual pass, I'd show up for a few hours and very specifically not ride a single ride or even walk around. The right bench in the right spot, watch all the families trundle and flow past, with those smiles that said "I'm definitely having a good time!" and simultaneously "If we don't squeeze the maximum amount of efficient fun out of this experience, I will never forgive myself or my useless spouse, whom I now situationally hate," while I sat there enveloped in a state of full observational passivity my therapist would call "dangerously detached" or "borderline sociopathic." But we already established I don't do THC, so you get yours, I'll get mine.

Yes, the honest answer is that I'm not planning anything. Part of is indecision paralysis. Nothing is pulling at me so strongly that the impulse to do is overriding the default compulsion to cocoon. And yeah, there's some money at hand, but I'm still paying for car repairs, setting some cash aside for future ones (who even fucking knows) and considering finally taking one or two steps toward turning my backyard into a non-fire-hazard of overgrowth and human apathy.

These options aren't sexy. And they make terrible postcards. They do not feature any of the feelings of whisking or enrapturing or transcendence. I suppose I could try to replicate my pebble-in-a-human-stream feeling of urban invisibility during my staycation, but it's not as easy to accomplish in a far-flung exurb, even if it is a city of 300,000+. An early spring afternoon around the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park is difficult to replicate in a Stater Brothers parking lot, and not just because the volume of passers by is notably smaller.