I’ve always been a homebody, paradoxically because I don’t like to feel trapped. I mostly hated family vacations growing up because I had no real control over what I did and when, and I also resented how often we were trapped at church with nothing to do. Getting a car heped, but what was really intoxicating was moving to Chicago and realizing that they had a system that could get me home at any time, with no car, without waiting for a ride, without having to stand awkwardly as the driver cleared stuff out of the seat, etc., etc. And when I was in grad school, trips were associated with either visiting home (hence the trappedness again) or attending conferences (mainly the AAR, meaning the constant humiliation of the job market) — and, above all, with a high degree of financial precarity. Traveling seemed like a good way to get money extracted from me in unlimited quantities. Overall, for many years I followed Socrates’s example, never leaving the city limits of Chicago (sometimes gerrymandering in Evanston since you could get there via the L).
Hence it’s somewhat surprising how big a part of my life traveling has become. Continue reading “The traveling life”