Catching Up

This blog really started seven months ago. Seven months ago, I boarded what I'm convinced was the world's most cramped jumbo jet and flew 7,000 miles (or so) from my last known residence in Buenos Aires, Argentina to my hometown of Portland, Oregon USA. I had another blog while I was living and working in Argentina (www.algomasargentina.blogspot.com), but the distance between my life in Argentina and my life in Portland felt much greater than a mere 7,000 miles. It's a whole different moonscape. Somehow, it just didn't feel right to continue pouring out a steady dribble of everyday insights when most of my friends and family (the vast majority of my audience) were once again within shouting distance.

I think it was the right decision. I would have a hard time looking at pictures of myself in various South American locales now anyway. Yet over the last seven months, I have discovered quite a few things. Not least of which is the fact that through my travels, I have somehow established a whole world of friends and family at various far-flung ends of the globe who are suddenly very far away, and who find the everyday insights of life in Portland to be just as fascinating and foreign as my South American adventures appeared to my stateside loved ones.

So this blog is for you: R in Mendoza (you can stop sending me text messages asking if I'm dead now!), F in KSA, K in Rome, J& M in Mendoza, P and E in Santa Barbara, M and K in Denver, S in Mexico, J, L, S in Japan, L & N in Virginia, S and N in Eugene, R in India and all the other wonderful, warm and well-traveled friends who I am blessed to know, love and miss in my everyday adventures here in Portland. You don't have to comment, you don't have to follow, but if you ever feel nostalgic for the adventures we've shared together, I hope you can come here and feel a sense of intimacy or insight that makes the distances between us seem less daunting.

But this blog is also for me. I really miss the forum of a blog. I've been writing in journals these past seven months (or more often book margins and dirty restaurant napkins), but I find it's just not the same. I have a tendency to get lost in my own darkness when I'm writing for an audience of one. Even if this blog only provides the suggestion of a public forum, I think it will help me stay positive about my experiences, even when I'm feeling blue. That's another thing I've learned recently: there is a beautiful element of projected hope experienced by a blogger, or anyone who makes their insights public: even the possibility of a solution arriving from outside ourselves is often enough to allow us to solve our own problems.

So that's it! Now, we just wait to see what sort of things fall out of my atrophied mind. I wish you all fortitude for your return visits.