A Personal Note

Just a slight personal diversion from my usual travelogues, and I hope you will bear with me. I know it is odd to be a late-middle-aged American with a comfortable home and secure job and be in the midst of this. Everyone else seems to have some context or reflective "other". They talk about their future plans, about graduate school in international educational development or going back to start a teaching career. The younger members of our troupe are curious. I am an oddity and all my touchstones differ so vastly from theirs- which is not something I am complaining about. It is nice to be exposed to new ideas and the culturally contemporary, and it is fun for me to decry, "What?!! You've never heard,seen,read,visited..." They mention me on Skype to their own fathers, to whom I am frequently compared. Apparently one father commented that I "must have balls" (which in this heat I am all too unpleasantly aware of...). And part of me wants to embrace the idea that I am a modern day Odysseus, off fighting the battles against the economic inequalities of the world while young Telemachus is holding off the various suitors at home,

But then the other part of me is reminded of a segment of the Werner Herzog documentary about the Arctic when a lone penguin's radar goes haywire and it makes a beeline away from its fellows towards the vast empty arctic wasteland and its sure doom.

 If that is all a bit extreme and dramatic, I guess I should also mention that tonight we hooked up a projector and watched Anchorman and I am probably most like Ron Burgundy, just an average, good-hearted guy in search of a perfect tagline.