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Monday, April 4, 2011

Being away from the sheep--a rambling rant on leaving your home and then coming back

I'm thinking these days that I've become kind of snooty, which I don't like.  But I have a serious problem.  I can't relate that well to folks who haven't travelled or lived somewhere else.  It's very strange because I used to be without a passport but longing to travel but for $ reasons or whatever reasons I just never left the US more than 2 weeks to Germany when I was 16 and across the border to Canada to go eat Ethiopian food near Ottawa when I lived in northern NY.  Actually I remember a fantastic story about a friend of a friend who was crossing the border with us and for some reason she forgot her passport? which now looking back why did we even try to cross....but anyway when we got to the border control of course they asked for all of our passports and at that moment the friend of a friend said she didn't have one.  And of course we all had to get out of the car and go inside and get questioned.  When the friend of the friend was asked what her name was she said "Vedana Wadawa".  Now to you this may sound like a name that she just made up on the spot, and well, the border control guy thought the same too and his face got all squished up and confused and mad at the same time and I don't think he really knew what to do.  Of course I knew her name was really that because when we met she introduced herself as that and I didn't see any reason why she should make her name up to me (you're thinking, maybe to cross the border??).  But seriously it really was her name. So anyway the border control guy after 15 minutes of checking on some computer came back to us and I remember this like it was yesterday, said, "Vedana Wadawa I'm afraid you won't be crossing into Canada today."  And at that moment we all burst out in laughter which I guess was a little risky being that we were already looking kind of shady, but we were twenty and clueless and well it was pretty darn funny.
But I digress.
So back to not relating and being snooty.
I recently was reading Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind which is THE book that every person living right now should be required to read. And in it he was talking about the archetype of the hero, the hero who makes a journey but is first resistant, then struggles a bit, and then is successful and heroic and this idea is the total inspiration to Star Wars (think Luke Skywalker).  I'm no Luke Skywalker but I feel kind of Jedi like, and I definitely relate to this hero idea, since Rome was definitely my struggle and now I'm back doing what I love.  It's kind of also like The Alchemist by Paolo Coehlo--he's first a shepherd bored to tears, and then he needs to travel and see the world, and then he comes back to the sheep and loves them like nothing else.  Strange how life is.
So I need to be around people who understand this.  Who have been away from the sheep.  And also, folks who wanted to leave the sheep in the first place.
I went to get my passport renewed at the UPS Store and they asked me, why do you need a passport? I just wanted to say look, lady, I am going to pay you 20 bucks to take my photo, I don't need to be interrogated here.  But I said because I like to travel, and the woman said, yea, it would be so nice to travel but I just feel I have everything right here (you see what I mean?)  Some people don't have a need to leave the sheep.  Anyway, back to my passport renewal.   Then they had to move like 10 boxes away from the white screen they use for passport photos and they had to call some guy in the back of the store to get a chair that he was sitting on 10 miles away that I could use for the photo because it was the only chair in the whole store (they really said this), and then they had to do the photo over two times because they weren't used to doing it, and well there is some new software on the computer and it's the first time we've ever used it.
Another thing that happened about a week ago was I met a group of some very nice and welcoming people, and I was asked to tell something about myself, and I said, well the most interesting and exciting thing has been that I lived in Rome, Italy for 8 years, and I just relocated here to Pittsburgh.  And then someone said, and moving to Pittsburgh was the thing that was the most exciting, right?
You see what I mean?  They don't even want to leave the sheep.
I guess that's ok, not everyone wants or needs to leave the sheep.  But now I feel snooty and not able to relate because that's what I did.
Any thoughts?
Baa-baa