Break from self!

I journal incessantly when I travel.

It's partly the traveler's impulse to document the journey, so I won't forget any of the good stories, and how completely out of my everyday world I got. (....we rode in a train compartment through rolling green Polish countryside with the hot wind blowing us around, accompanied only by an elderly man with crazy white hair and beard [made much crazier by the wind-blown effect, no doubt] and an ENORMOUS white shepherd dog, easily 200 lbs or more, that took up the entire floor of the compartment and left 5 inch-long white hairs on our pants everytime he walked by. They were on their way to a dog show in Krakow, having started in Vienna. On the train. In the wind. So simple, really, yet just a few hairs away from being anything that would ever happen at home. Don't even have to get in to any of the 2-AM-maze-like-train-station-in-cyrillic-where-are-we stuff.)

There's also some touch of an artist's vanity in there, or a student's part study, part show off - like someday, someone will read this and be very impressed by my powers of observation, the depth of my genuis insights on culture and history and politics and art, and the gritty eloquence of my writing! Arrr! Of course, that will only be if they can read the handwriting, which is becoming less and less likely the older I get. I was once an amateur calligrapher!! :::sigh:::

And, I can't deny that journalling is also just a way to constructively (and inexpensively) use the looooong stretches of time spent on trains or waiting on lines that would otherwise be spent sleeping, stressed out, spending money, bored, or some combination thereof.

But more and more, I think I use journal time when I'm traveling to observe myself, which is interesting, and leads to important insights I'm sure, but also gets very exhausting. How do I feel? What am I thinking about? What am I afraid of? What do I miss? What's hard? What's fun? It's part of the whole traveler-as-observer thing - I observe new places and people, I observe the art and the architecture and the landscape and the food, and while I'm at it, I observe myself, much more closely and in much greater detail than usual, and I start to get sick of myself. Bleh.

So, this is a long winded explanation for why it's been a solid month+ since I put keypad to blog (or pen to journal) and wrote anything. I've been on a bit of a hiatus from the self-analysis that makes up a good portion of my journal and blog entries, taking a little break from me and seeing what's new with everyone else. It's been lovely!

I do love writing, and though the break has been nice, I don't think it's ever good to just up and ignore my internal life like that for very long! It's funny, how not writing really IS like I've ignored what's going on in there - ah, the introvert's brain is a strange, strange place indeed. So anyway, I'm ready to come back now!