SEA → SLC → CDG
Writing this en route to Paris, via Salt Lake City. (I volunteered to give up my seat for $500 and my only penance is getting in three hours later, which feels somehow like a scam.)
I need Paris, both the city and just the week free from It All: from the perpetual waterfall of bugs and features and emails and tweets, from the hedonic treadmill of annual sales. This will be my second trip there, which is great because I’ve already done so many of the requisite bits — the Louvre (though obviously I’ll be going again), the Musee d’Orsay, etc. — leaving me more time for the true tourism of wandering and getting lost, to leave my mark in cobblestone grooves and emptied bottles of wine.
I had jokingly told a friend that I’m only going to work a couple hours a day on vacation, and that’s more or less true. The stress of unanswered emails is a nettle I’m still trying to weather; the joy, abstract as it may be, of cosplaying as a “person who sits in Paris and does business things on the corner of Rue de Seine” certainly doesn’t help.
(I’m doing a lot of medium-picture thinking about Buttondown lately (evidence one, evidence two), and one of the things I need to do is get back to the fun of building: I think a couple hours holed up in the sun with a notepad and Clean Code will do that, because I am an insufferable person.)
But mostly I’ll be reading and jaunting and staying sated. I’ve got the last entry in the Neapolitan Novels; I’ve got running shoes and a Vitamin D deficiency; I’ve got an empty tank.
Boarding my flight to CDG, two teens behind me in line were talking excitingly about the flight. One had mentioned that this was their first time on a plane in eight years (Do you think they’ll have water?, he asked) and his compatriot advised him on what now for me is secondhand knowledge (Look above the seats, you’ll see a letter and a number…). x
It is a marvelous and terrible thing to get inured to your own fortune! It is a lovely March day — I have just had a decent burrito bowl, I have my dream job, I’ve built a tool that folks want to pay money to use, and I’m about to spend the next six days stumbling my way. around Left Bank cafés. It is too easy to take these big and little things for granted.