My Moleskin

I was always a tedious note taker.

I like highlighters in different colors, red pens that I alternate with black pens. I like .75 ball pens because it's more fun to write with them than with the .50 ones.

Bullet points were a great way for me to think about subjects, even essays. I always called it my German urge for order.

It's kind of funny to think that that is how I process the death of first my grandmother and now the imminent exitus of my grandfather.

I'm making it into a project, a step-by-step visualization of what started out as an essay about my granny's funeral and is now a clumsy attempt to understand my identity via genealogy.

I've sent out an excel sheet for my family to fill out and it fills me with joy.

Dad got Mom

When my father's high school friends all got together a few years ago they were all surrounding my dad, asking him how he got my mother. Apparently, my mom used to be considered the 'hot chick' in Saigon. My father replied: "Everyone tried to surround her at all times. I just dug a tunnel."

Wanderlust and other diseases that perpetual travelers suffer from

The 'perpetual traveler'. A term I first came across when my London roommates designed a hotel room for jet-setting business types who have the option of re-ordering the same room all over the world via an online portal. It was one of the many master's projects they did for their degree in 'Creative Practice for Narrative Environments.'

Only later did I find out that the term 'perpetual traveler' applies to people who travel for tax evasion. People that reside in Hong Kong or Switzerland without a proper visa status in any country. An ever changing residency, so fleeting it's hard to call it permanent.

'Perpetual traveler.' Strangely enough, I always thought it had a positive ring to it. As the internet envelopes the globe and mobility becomes more of a life style than a luxury, I had come to accept constant wanderlust as a state of life. My oxygen was instability; my dream was marriage, a PhD during pregnancy, a house in a place where people around me speak a language I don't.

And now I am once more confronted with just that mundane definition of the perpetual traveler. I will have to do my taxes, admittedly/ashamedly for the first time. 'File as a non-permanent resident,' I remember being told on the phone by an accountant.

My New York driver's license says I'm a temporary visitor. My vacation plans remain unknown depending on my visa status. And my mind wanders off to memories of singing in Berlin, cooking in London, learning how to play the guitar in Houston. And my mind wanders off to goals of a correspondence in Hong Kong, a humanitarian post in Africa, a happy hippie life in Cuba.

I have never been told so often as in New York that I'm young.
'The world is your oyster.'
Even my far-away mother has adopted that view, realized that her children, who both moved out in their mid-teens, won't stay put in one place for very long.

A residue of teenage restlessness is amplified every single day by the cups of black coffee I consume. I feel part of a generation so willing to seek, so unwilling to procreate, so ... as New Yorkers would tell me... young. But by that I don't just mean the physical age. The chronology of life no longer applies, fuck biological compulsions.

And yet, I wish for settlement. Is that still tied to geography?

And I wonder, wander, wonder.