Is this real life

Our last day of work was Friday. I guess. I mean I went to work and then left and now it's the work week again and I'm not at work... So that's a thing.

We said our watery goodbyes to our families this weekend. I mean it was watery all around me - I didn't cry. My mom actually half exclaimed about the fact that I wasn't crying. I just told her that I don't know what I'm doing. It's a little weird because I apparently have no idea what the fuck is happening, but it's incorrect to say that we don't actually know what we're doing. I mean, we have planned out about as much as we can for this trip - we're going to Watkins Glen in NY first. Then Acadia and a few days later, Mars Hill in Maine. Salem, Maryland to visit my friend Jason before farms in West Virginia, Virginia, and Georgia, probably and hopefully some cave shit near there, then Florida to visit Charlotte's mom, Louisiana for a day or two, Texas to visit Charlotte's sister, New Mexico to stay at the last farm we planned for in March or so. Then we'll begin our national park tour, zigzagging up the country until we get to Montana to stay (hopefully) with someone I can't believe I met at work (some guy randomly found our print shop and turned out to be well acquainted with the national parks out west; he is someone who sleeps in remote areas people just don't know about, whose in-laws have thousands of acres of land on which hundreds of cattle graze, who catches 30 fish on a regular Saturday, who currently has a bear and deer and obviously a lot of beef in the freezer). We know that after that we'll be heading to Seattle to stay with Charlotte's great friends, taking a road trip with them to California after which we will likely head down to Nevada to live for a year or so, so that I can work in the Gigafactory. After that I'll hopefully work for Tesla in CA. We have this all planned out, but I just don't get it. I can vaguely imagine the driving we'll be doing (sometimes 13 hours at a time), but I can't fathom all that we will do and see and learn... It's too much for my tiny brain to process. I know, for some reason, that I will grow at least twice as much as I did through college, I just can't quite guess at all the ways I will be different. We will both be documenting our journeys, both physical and mental, with these posts, but I will surely need outside input to really see how much we change.

We are basically beginning our nomadic stint. Except nomadic is the wrong word - we are not aimless. I'm sure the term will be more and less applicable as our journey develops - it will be nice to have a phrase to compare ourselves against. Our friends in Seattle called us pseudohippies and I really enjoy that description. It's pretty spot on and I keep going back to it every several weeks or months, considering the things we do and ways we think and the phrase continues to be applicable, in new and old ways. We are constantly changing and I'm glad that I never fell into the trap of trying to fit the phrase. I never thought of the phrase as prescriptive - I didn't accept the label and try to fit into the shape it provides, rather I constantly look back at it to see whether it is still accurately descriptive. 

Similarly, we are currently "pointedly nomadic" because we have an explicit path along which we will meander. It describes the state of our thoughts fairly well: we are going through the world experiencing whatever it has to offer, gobbling up opportunities to learn wherever they crop up. We know some of what we want to learn about, but the hows and whens and wheres will emerge along the way. That's what I'm most excited about. Now that I don't have a foggy marsh in my brain, I can really see a lot. My thought space is vaster than I have ever known, I just can't wait to cram new thoughts and experiences in there.

I think I didn't cry when everyone else did because this is not an ending for me. I'm not going away, I'm just continuing a little further out. I'm gonna see everyone again relatively soon, and I'm sure we will be able to have visitors some places along the way. Really, I just kind of assume Charlotte and I will live in such a situation that we can have people gravitate toward us and have everyone we care about living within a few hours of one another. We will build it and you will come.

It's Wednesday morning now and the apartment is pretty empty... The trunk is full of shit, just stuffed. I unfortunately imagined that it was bigger than it is, or that our shit would take up less space, but it's all there so whatever. We filled the trunk Monday night and yesterday morning we took apart the kitchen table to bring out to the curb. We went over to the Quick Chek's dumpster to throw out the new tire that burst on us about two weeks ago. We basically packed all the shit up except for miscellaneous little things that wouldn't be a pain to bring out this morning.

And... we're off to Watkins Glen.

Ready To Start

Well.  This is really happening.  It has been a while now that I've wanted to quit my job and travel.  I figured when the time came it would be something I did solo, but luckily I'm dating this awesome person who wants to do this too.  He introduced me to WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) which is an organization that connects host farms to volunteers who come and work part time in exchange for food and housing.  It is an excellent way to see the world and learn really cool things.  It is international, so after this trip around the United States, we could go do this in other countries, and we plan to.  I really want to learn to grow my own food and be able to make things myself.  Could I learn these things while working a 9-5?  Sure, on evenings and weekends.  But I would much prefer immersing myself in this type of lifestyle while also getting to do my favorite thing - travel.  So here we are.  This is also in part a spiritual endeavor - but that seems best saved for another post down the road when I will have an abundance of quiet time in nature to properly gather my thoughts.

Our general route is going to be north, back south, and then westward.  When we settle back down it will be in California.  I lived in Sacramento for 5 years and although I was not a huge fan of the city, I do miss the state and the west coast in general.  Karol wants to work for Tesla and their headquarters is in California, so it's a win - win for us.  I'm such a dork that my biggest anxiety about traveling is not having a local library to linger in.  I have been fiendishly downloading PDFs of the books I have on my Goodreads "to-read" shelf as if I were never going to encounter the elusive paperback ever again.  I'm aware that it is irrational and silly.  Deep down I know I will stumble upon many a great book during our travels.  There are of course more pertinent things to be anxious about:

1) Not having a steady income
2) Getting injured far from civilization (oh yeah, I guess I should figure out that health insurance thing, eh?)
3) Getting murdered by backwoods hillbillies

Despite these anxieties, my primarily feelings are excitement and joy for what's ahead.

While I would not describe myself right now as lost, I am struggling with choosing a way to be happy and make money.  I know that I am capable of getting and holding a job, and even making okay money despite my lack of degree.  However, I end up at jobs that are less than fulfilling, and I know I need to find my inspiration.  For a while I thought that if I just found a steady job that I didn't hate, and that paid well, I could trudge through it as long as I had decent vacation time and the money to travel.  It took me way too long to realize that that is definitely not enough.  Should I get a job outdoors?  I've always considered going to school for Forensic Science, but I didn't want to go to school for that long and I thought I wasn't smart enough.  Is it time to do that?  More than likely I need a job that permits me to travel, but a job doing what?  There are lots of questions.  I know the answer is not going to creep out from under my desk and conveniently hop onto my lap, staring wide-eyed into my face and gesticulating as it blocks the computer screen in front of me. This journey is not for the sole purpose of figuring out the answer of what to do with my life in terms of a job, although I certainly hope it helps.  I just know that sitting here I will absolutely not find the answer.  The time has come to focus on doing things I love.  I love traveling, I love nature, and I love learning.  The rest will work itself out.  Everything in my being is telling me this is what I'm supposed to be doing with my life right now, and I can't possibly ignore all of me.

Preliminaries

Who am I and what the hell am I doing with my life?

I've wanted to WWOOF since I found out about the organization in college. Some time last year I asked my girlfriend, Charlotte, whether she would want to WWOOF with me some day. I had fantasized about traveling west and eventually ending up in California, but that was mostly a last ditch effort of mine to try to find something to do with my life. I had just decided to leave college because I was so depressed that I was either going to kill myself or stop going there and do something else, but I was too depressed to be on my own, WWOOFing with strangers that I spent all of my time with. I did it for three weeks and then just went back to PA, tried to find a job or an apprenticeship in something like woodworking or whatever, but I couldn't. Apprenticeships had long gone out of style. After a couple months of searching, I ran out of money and had to move back in with my family. What a huge step back. I specifically moved out and gave my sister my room (she had been sharing a room with my grandma) halfway through college. Now I had to share the room with my grandma. After I moved back, I decided that I wanted to see whether I could hold a job and an apartment for at least a year. I knew I needed to work on myself and so I found a therapist with my mom's help (and funding). I decided that when I was able to take care of and support myself properly, I would get a dog (still don't have one because money and also traveling but Charlotte and I both can't wait to get one or two or also a cat). Miraculously, a month or so later, I got a job through one of my friends from college, working in her parents' printing and mailing company.

So here we are almost three years later, about to begin a cross-country journey. A few months ago we really started asking people whether they would host us. We've been thinking about this for a pretty long time. I am still not completely aware of the fact that we will be leaving our lives behind completely. I feel like we are dying. Life as we know it is literally ending, and that's been a lot to deal with for me. I just managed (somehow) to stop being depressed in December but this exodus is still a lot to deal with. I don't think I would be able to do it at all without Charlotte and I would have a really hard time if I was still depressed. I mean, I had been depressed since probably middle school - just about as long as I have been a person, a human with real thoughts.

The timing was decided easily because our lease is ending with August, Charlotte wasn't particularly attached to her job, and I am ready to start working more in depth with computers and get back into science in general (plus we're slow in the summer so the transition shouldn't be too bad for my coworkers).  I guess after I realized that I went to college to mostly study myself through psychology and then sociology and then philosophy and finally women's studies, my love of physics returned. I left college partly because it was too intellectual but ironically filled with people who didn't give a shit about actually learning. I didn't feel like I really learned how to do anything, how to produce and work with my hands. I felt like I had no set of actual, tangible skills. Obviously staying on various farms across the country is the only way to do some real work and learn a lot of useful/handy shit, so here I go!

We've been nailing down actual dates and places to stay for a couple of months and I have a shitty little map that I drew one night I was feeling particularly productive (we stayed up until 2 plotting the route and talking about the journey).

I've had a few little moments that ended up being huge markers of change. I stayed with my friend Jason in Maryland for a weekend and couldn't get myself to leave on Sunday because it would mean I was that much closer to leaving my current life. That was the last time I would see him until we pass through Maryland on our way to West Virginia after Maine. I stayed at his house until 9 or something, barely getting enough rest and sleep for work the next day. I meant to leave in the morning but I was nowhere near ready then. There was (and is) still so much to talk about.

I finally sold my car Thursday night and we feel so much better now. We don't care about any of the other shit we have to get rid of. Such a huge load off. This is also where most of our money from the trip comes from. Speaking of which I've been pretty bitter about how much money I put into it and how little I'm going to get for it. I spent pretty much all of my extra money for almost two years on that thing. I didn't get to spend any money on classes (I really really want to blow glass again and I would have tried to find some kind of computer science class or something related to physics/engineering) or on almost anything else, really. It's really nice to finally have it off my hands, though, and I guess it is much better that I get some money than none and get stuck with it. 

I'll also obviously have so much more time and energy to teach myself shit once I have no job I need to go to to pay rent and other stupid bills. Fuck that. I definitely can't wait to not worry so much about money. I think I waste too much of my time thinking about (read: obsessing over) money.

It's fucking scary, though. I am going to feel less in control of my life, I think, but at the same time much more responsible for myself and the things I am doing and thinking about. I'm worried that I won't be spending my time wisely, that I'll be wasting too much of it not learning all the shit I feel like I need to be learning about. (Aside: I think I'll end up partly using this blog to document my mental travels as well, sometimes making lists of shit I am currently learning about and whatever.) That right there is another big problem I have to deal with, and fast. I decided a long time ago that I want to work for Tesla and eventually SpaceX, and it took a while after that to decide that computer science and programming might be the way to do that. I started trying to learn some programming languages and made some good initial progress (I was also taking like three other classes at the same time), but that only really lasted for two months or so. I made a packed schedule for myself and stuck to it for a while, but it was clearly just too much for me to handle quite yet. Unfortunately I also had, somewhere along the way, linked any failure to learn computer science (or not keeping up a quick pace) with death. If I don't learn how to program and work with computers then I won't be able to work for Elon Musk and I will just die. Nothing will go right, I will be a total failure, and I will just shrivel up and cease.

Obviously that's not gonna be the case, but try telling me that. I occasionally feel insane because I know things intellectually to be true but I don't actually believe them or feel them, not one bit. It's some kind of depression residue I guess that will take a while to wipe off. I just have a hyperactive brain and really take things to extremes pretty much constantly. I almost never stop thinking which is tremendous when you're also very depressed (weed helped and I smoked very often until a few weeks ago, but now I just feel like I have big and important things to focus my time and efforts on and can't let myself get waylaid or make too many soft decisions. Besides, I don't need it to help with depression anymore, it was just like an old, comfortable blanket I was unwilling to fling off myself in the desolate wasteland of my mind. It's very sunny there and has been for a few months, I was just too nervous and nostalgic because relapses are horrific. I feel like I'm past relapsing so it's really time to completely move on.). (how about that parenthetical run-on andor terrible grammer its gr8 i luv it)

I should mention properly that the big reason to travel is to end up in California, specifically. We are not just interested in being nomadic, we are traveling to a place. Charlotte has already lived in California and loved it, I want to be where Elon Musk is so I can work for and eventually with him. I learned about him after coming back from a camping trip last Memorial Day (I got the flu right as we hiked in to our campsite which  was fantastic), when I read about him and the things he's doing, mostly on the blog waitbutwhy.com. That was around when I finally started to formulate some sort of direction and aspirations, which actually had a hell of a lot to do with overcoming depression. Somewhat indirectly, Elon Musk is my hero. I was so glad to see someone so brilliant doing such wonderful things for the right reasons and in the right ways. It gave me a great example of someone who can help enact tremendous change. I didn't really think it was possible, I just thought I was crazy for wanting to learn and do everything (though that's clearly still the case). I plan to learn a lot in my free time while we are WWOOFing specifically to become hireable by people like Musk.

Not to mention all that I will learn while actively working on and for all of these farms, homesteads, and communities would be grossly irresponsible. I fully expect to gain a tremendous set of skills during every one of our stays. We have managed to find some amazing people doing wonderful things, and I am very excited to gain most of the skills I will need to eventually be able to live self-sufficiently (something I've wanted since before college). I'm going to see people actually producing for and by themselves. I will no longer need to outsource my own body's energy and nutrition. I'll get to see custom renewable energy installations, food growing and preparing methods, and building practices. I don't even understand how much I'm going to learn and grow, I have just focused on planning things to teach myself with the help of computer and internet. I fully expect to grow more than I did throughout all of college and it's exhilarating and vaguely horrifying to even think about.

I'm definitely ready for some rebirthing.