resurrection ship

Hello again, and Happy New Year.

I'm sitting in Gabs after a month's absence. The Equatorial Coffee Co. at Riverwalk (the nearest mall) has undergone some serious re-decoration, and now sports wireless in addition to orange paint and leather couches. There's a new Portuguese restaurant, I'm told. And it has rained. Gabs is ridiculously green (though that's a relative epithet). And it's hot. Quite toasty, actually, and humid. I'm not one to complain of heat, but after a month of North American winter, my body's a bit confused.

As confused as my body might be, it's nothing compared to my poor mind. Being in the U.S. -- in Metropolis X, in particular -- was like waking up from the most realistic of dreams. Going to and from Botswana isn't traveling. Traveling implies some sort of slow, transitional passage through a varied landscape. This is more like a hallucinatory state. Movement is scary, and sudden, and thoroughly disorienting. I have an entire world in Metropolis X that I had largely put out of mind over the past year and a half. By world here I mean not just places and people I know, but trajectories, goals, objectives towards which I am supposedly working that are founded on assumptions I and others make about what I am doing now, and what I am doing next.

Holding the one in my mind while I'm in the other is very, very hard. I had been in the U.S. for only a few days when I met up with an American colleague I know from Botswana. She asked after M, a mutual friend, and it took me minutes of struggle to figure out who she was talking about. I had seen M fairly recently, but my frame of reference had made my life in Botswana so remote in my consciousness that it frightened me.

While it was exhilarating to find my world in Metropolis X, it was also bewildering, because I didn't remember how it worked. It's hard to describe this feeling, but it's something akin to walking into a house after not having lived in it for years, and reaching out only to realize that you no longer possess the embodied memory of the light switch's location.

And as unreal as Metropolis X felt at times, Botswana now feels. I think I will be OK when I get back to work, but the past three days of jet-lag compounded by stomach flu are compounding the question in my mind, Do I really need to be here? After months of panicking that I had no data, I found myself at the conference in DC realizing, I could throw the towel in right now and be fine. But I'm here, and I might as well make good use of it. I just need some time to re-adjust.