The Best New Year's Eve Ever

New Year's Eve carries a lot of pressure and fuss. You need the perfect dress, with comfortable but sexy shoes. You need a "good" party to attend. You need the perfect date to kiss at midnight. It needs to be the New Year's Eve to top all New Year's Eves.

I hate it.

This year was different. I wore sandals and dirty clothes that may have smelled a little as my "clean" (clean being a relative term) clothes dried on a line strung between tents. In place of glitzy cocktails in the early part of the evening, I drank wine from a tin cup, served impeccably by a Frenchman who clearly took great pride in serving wine. I had 9 dates, 8 of whom had morphed from strangers into friends over the course of the past 10 days. We expressed awe over the lion, the rhino, and the parade of elephants we'd seen earlier that day.

In place of Dick Clark (no, Ryan Seacrest now, right?), we watched the waterhole. First a mother and child rhinoceros, then three skittish giraffes who took turns carefully maneuvering into a drinking position (rather like a girl trying not to splash her clothes in the wilderness - too much information?). The giraffes left shortly before midnight, and we headed back to our campsite, toasting each other along the way.

How will I top this next year?

Christmas in Namibia

Christmas Day challenged my traditional notions of Christmas. No evergreen tree with lights, no family, not even a hint of chill in the hot Namibian summer.

Instead, I spent sunrise at the top of a sand dune with other tourists wearing Santa hats and ate breakfast in a parking lot. I received Christmas gifts from a good friend, wrapped in a brown paper bag. Along with the rest of the tour members, I received a clip-on koala from a new friend. Over the next few days, those koalas ended up on shirts, backpacks, noses, and our tour vehicle's windshield wipers.

We decorated our tents with balloons inked with Christmas trees and warm messages. In place of a Christmas tree and ornaments, we saw trees festooned with weaver bird nests. Windblown red desert sand covered everything instead of a sprinkling of snow.

I hiked through the desert drinking lukewarm water instead of my grandfather's lethal Christmas punch. I shook fistfuls of sand from my hiking boots instead of wearing big fuzzy slippers. I listened to Christmas carols from a pocket-sized music box instead of singing in church just before midnight. Our Christmas dinner was cooked over a camp stove, and new friends bonded over boxed wine with stories of their traditions at home.

It was a very different Christmas, but it was good.

More Info Available

I decided to try out a new blog site for my current trip; the site has maps and some other travel-specific features. Internet access is patchy here, but if you're interested in seeing what I write when I'm able, go to http://www.travelpod.com/members/ceedubbva.

Off Kilter

I met a friend in Dupont Circle last night. As I rode the escalator upwards from the Metro, lost in thoughts I was meeting the friend in order to escape, I suddenly realized that I was off balance and needed to shift position. I was leaning on one arm on an escalator in which the handrail moves slightly faster than the treads. My hand had gradually moved farther and farther from my body until finally I was jolted into awareness that I was in danger of falling over if I didn't readjust my position.

It made me start thinking (again) about the last few months. Recently I've been happy and content in a way that seems almost too good to be true in retrospect. I'd found companionship, intimacy, and fun in the same person, and the seductive promise of ongoing happiness hovered within reaching distance.

It was a dangerous sort of happiness, though, given what I knew about the challenges we faced. Heedless, I opened my mind to new visions of what the future might hold. With this person, I willingly embraced new possibilities and redefined my expectations.

Now things have ended, and I'm left with my changed ideas about what I want from life and without him to make them into reality. I feel adrift, off-balance, oddly not myself without him. My new dreams for the future don't fit my current reality anymore, and I'm not sure how to adjust. I'm forced to shift positions in order to find my balance again, but I'm not doing it as easily or as gracefully as I'd like.

Start with the Ending

I've been thinking lately about the lyrics in a David Wilcox song:

The secret of a happy marriage,
maybe you should write this down
If you want to keep a love together,
the best way is to end it now
Because when you both know its over,
suddenly the truth comes out
You can talk about your secret passion,
you can talk about your restless doubt

When there's no pretending,
then the truth is safe to say,
Start with the ending,
get it out of the way
Now there's no defending,
because no one has to win
Start with the ending,
it's the best way to begin.*

It's somewhat flip (especially to hear it sung), but I think there's truth to it. I've been in relationships that became really honest at the end, when neither of us was trying to posture or preserve some facade. Once I knew it was ending, there was no reason not to say exactly what I thought, wanted, needed. By that point, there was too much water under the bridge to preserve the romantic relationship, but maybe if we'd been that honest in the beginning...

And that's the point of the song. What if you took the attitude at the beginning that there's no reason to hold anything back? What you presented your true self instead of who you think the other person wants you to be or even who you'd like to be on your best days? This would require either an immense dose of self-confidence and bravery or a lack of expectations, but how much better could that kind of relationship be? Some relationships might not get off the ground under those circumstances, but wouldn't the one that did be amazing?

*Copyright 2000 published by Midnight Ocean Bonfire Music (ASCAP)/Cindy Lou My Dear (ASCAP), a division of Soroka Music Ltd.

Transported

The Wood Brothers played a local show the other night. They're a guitar/bass duo, actual brothers, who are incredibly talented. I was invited by a good friend, and it took me back to a time in my life when I often saw several bands a week. I miss that!

This was the best type of show, the kind that sweeps you up and carries you along without a sense of time or place. I watched Chris rock out with his bass like he was Eddie Van Halen, making it a full body experience. Now his fingers dance, plucking the strings. Now he glides the bow across the strings, then tossing it away. I watched the strings glint in the stage lights and saw the worn spots where he thumps the body of the bass for the occasional percussive touch. I heard Oliver rasping out the lyrics, watched him bob to the music and slide his fingers over the strings of his acoustic and electric guitars. Time ceased to pass as the music swirled around me.

For an hour or two, I was transported outside of myself and immersed in the music. I should do this more often.

Man on Wire

I saw "Man on Wire" yesterday, a movie that's gotten universally good reviews (an unheard-of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes).

A documentary of a notorious wire (tightrope) walker, the magic of the movie for me was in the characters and the dynamics between them. It's the story of Philippe Petit, a Frenchman obsessed with wire-walking in ever more daring situations. From a home setup, he graduated to stealth rigging of wires between the towers of Notre Dame, across the Harbor Bridge in Sydney, and finally, in his crowning achievement, between the twin towers of the World Trade Center (in 1974). The movie concentrates on the planning and execution of this last caper.

The man is a consummate showman, infecting everyone around him with his enthusiasm: his girlfriend, his friends, the World Trade Center employees whose help he enlisted, and even one of the arresting officers after the WTC prank, who said what he did should be called "dancing." Not content to simply walk the wire, Petit would balance on one foot, kneel down, even lay on the wire halfway across.

The movie was paradoxical and moving.

What should have been Petit's biggest triumph was his downfall in my eyes. His newfound fame went to his head, and his first action after being released from jail after crossing between the WTC towers was to hole up in a hotel with a new groupie, abandoning his friends and girlfriend to wonder where he was. His relationship with his girlfriend and his best friend fell apart shortly afterward. The girlfriend, 24 years later, seems to still idolize him and feel it was inevitable that he would move on to other things. The best friend, however, is clearly still haunted by loss of their friendship, which is never fully explained in the movie.

Petit does not seem to be bothered by the human toll of his obsession. He is depicted as being alone in the world now, save for the wires set up in his backyard, and that suits him fine. Should we be happy for this man who's achieved what he wanted and seems completely self-sufficient? Or should we pity him that his fixation has left no room for the other things he might have done with his life?

While his triumph left me depressed, the images of the World Trade Center were strangely soothing. We've all become accustomed to the scenes from 2001, including the fall of the towers and the steel reinforcements surrounded by debris. The footage in this movie was of those same reinforcements being erected, of the workmen who built them, of the architectural details, and of the intact roofs, with a concentration on how their features could be used to make a man's dream come true. It made me hopeful to remember that there were good elements in the buildings' histories and they're not entirely defined by their ending.