On Being Stared At

I am a tourist by every stretch of the imagination. Yesterday and today, I dragged myself and two of my course mates around the subways of India, sightseeing and generally trying to get over our collective jet lag.

What I didn't anticipate was the odd feeling of being a tourist attraction myself.

All day yesterday, I noticed very keenly that people stared at me constantly. I realize that I look quite different from the average Indian, but in a place like Delhi, with its embassies and scores of incoming international flights, I'd just assumed that there would be an easy commingling of Western and Indian alike. Not so. I am always the only westerner in my train car, and I rarely am in a restaurant or on a street that has other Americans/Europeans/Canadiens.

It's odd. At first I thought I was being stared at because I was a woman, which I thought was incredibly rude. But after so many pleasant and helpful experiences with Indians, and a quick outing today with some of my course mates, I realized that it was just my skin color that made me stand out. Never in my life have I been so profoundly aware of racism. It's a unique perspective to have thrust upon someone like myself who has always been able to blend in. Often in New York, I get mistaken for any number of South American and Mediterranean ethnicities of course, and have almost (but not yet) tired of answering "No, actually Italian Catholic." to the astonishingly frequent inquiry by potential I-Banking suitors "Are you Jewish?".

And so, today, as I grit my teeth and smiled for a myriad of photos with my fellow course mates (prompted by a different inquiry of potential Indian suitors), I realized that maybe I don't blend in quite as well as I thought I did. I'm still pretty sure if I get a tan, though, no one will be able to tell the difference.




quote from the Buddy Bear Park which we stumbled on today. This was after I was photographed at length by my adoring Indian fans.


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India: Hour Zero

This is the scenario that I just experienced:

Guy on Bus: Where are you heading? Anywhere good?

Me: Oh, um, just India. For like two months. Expeditioning in the mountains. No big.

cut to thirty-five minutes later in which we discuss his travel habit, pilates instruction, and chain of southern restaurants

Guy on bus: My name is Jack Keller. Feel free to look me up on Facebook when you get back!

This is what I love about traveling. The absolute absence of barriers that we have when we're in unfamiliar environments. It's why I feel such a pull to leave New York. Because I know that I do my best, am at my most honest, my most vulnerable and open when I'm unfamiliar with my surroundings.

I mean, it's only hour 3 of my journey and I have met a woman who works for NYU in Madrid and a man who has a chain of restaurant in the southern US.

Just about to board...see you on the other side!

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Thoughts on Leaving New York

Look at me being worldly and not-at-all-touristy in London.

I'm having all sorts of crazy emotions and doing wild shit before I take off for India in a few days (riding around with windows down, shades on despite severe clouds, screaming "Valerie" by Amy Winehouse. Whattup, Rochester!)

So I've got nothing inspirational or smart right now except that the past week has been one of the best and worst of my life. And it feels hot and awful and so good to know that I have the ability to feel this way at all. Because the last time I left New York was under similarly difficult circumstances and I think I just blanked everything out and flew to Bali without even telling anyone. So mature, 25-year-old Lauren!

This week, I said goodbye to my Grandmother who helped raise me, quelled my boredom almost everyday during summer vacation, and was the only adult who actually hurried to find her purse when the ice cream man jangled down her street. She taught me how to pick blackberries from the wild bushes behind her house, and she helped me clean fallen deer antlers so that I could take them home and my mother could promptly throw them away. She taught me to be a fierce card player, and always lost in Connect Four so that I could win. She let me tease her mercilessly and she never got mad. Except for when she did and then she'd go into her room and yell at the mirror instead of at me. I am sure she is responsible for my insatiable sweet tooth. She was a fantastic lady and my time with her will never be forgotten. It has made me the nurturing, emotional, funny person that I am today. And I will miss her so much.

I said goodbye to my home for the past five years. Up until this week, I was so ready to leave New York. Eff you, terrible lady on the subway who stands right in the center of the door when I try to get on in the morning. I'm outta here and I don't have to deal with your neck snapping EVER AGAIN! But it was a terribly emotional realization that it was another chapter in my life that was ending. It was akin to the way I felt when I left college: I know the streets in New York, I know the subway system, I know the Central Park loop like the damn back of my hand. Ugh, Central Park. I remember when I was dating the guy who lived abroad who taught me how to surf and I was so confused by his antics and his crazy Dutch-Aruban accent that I would go run for six whole miles and not be able to sort out a thing about our relationship. Central Park was the cheapest form of therapy that I ever experienced. And by the end of 2009, I was wicked fast.

New York, as much as I put it down and get mad at it and want to live somewhere uncomplicated for a while where I am perhaps a big fish in a little pond instead of the reverse, it has very much become my home. Not to say that I can't find a new home (I've done it twice before) but this is one that has been rife with so much personal and spiritual and emotional growth that it will be difficult to close the door on New York -- at least for the next six months.

And I said goodbye to some amazing people. To some roommates who made me really realize how amazing true friendship can be. How we can go through breakups and new boys and terribly drunk Saturday nights and dance parties in sweatpants and stopped up toilets and sinks and mice and other life ruining vermin (They Who Must Not Be Named) and all that other shit and come out funnier, more humble, and only a little bit more neurotic than before.

Thinking about it like that, I remember in 2009 and early 2010 I was traveling a lot. I traveled almost every weekend to visit friends and various pseudo-boyfriends. I was trying to find someone to rescue me from the difficulty that was my own life. And then in 2011, I traveled hardly at all. I stayed around and built relationships and really stuck my meathooks into New York. And now that I'm leaving I truly understand what a beautiful place it can really be. All of us, just trying to make sense of our lives, feeling like were in this whole big shitstorm together.

They say you can never really appreciate something until it's gone. The next few months will be excruciating and transformational and exhausting in a different way than New York was. And I'm so excited. Perhaps it will show me that my true path is somewhere out west. And maybe it will show me that New York isn't that bad after all.

Life is A Collection of Happy Moments

See? Look how happy I was! Also, I need a haircut

I was bitching on the phone the other day to my sister. If you don't know about her, she's much older, arguably wiser, a little OCD when it comes to hand washing, the mother of my two nieces, and, oh right, a relationship therapist.

So due in part to that last thing, she catches the brunt of my bitching. It's almost like real therapy without co-pays.

I was bitching, and it was probably about this "I don't know where I'm going with my life" and how I think my "baby gene" has flipped on because now I see small children everywhere and practically impregnate myself with the thought of caring for a mini person in jeggings and Uggs. (Sorry that was graphic). Also, I've stopped working out and being fun and basically I don't yet have a job after August.

And then she got tired of listening to me bitch for like the 800th time and she dropped a nugget of information, like she normally does when she's sick of hearing about my three-year-long quarterlife crisis and said:

"No one is happy all the time, 24/7. That would be really exhausting. Life is just a collection of happy moments."

To which I said:

"Huhh. Well, what about Kate Middleton?"

To which we agreed that this rule did not apply to Kate Middleton.

It's true, really. I go around, stressing and weighing myself and counting the calories, and getting teary when I see families with two bilingual children cute-ing it up on the subway. But I also do have happy moments: when I sit on my couch and throw my head back in excruciating laughter-pain while my roommate imitates her Indian parents; when I get absorbed in the book that I'm reading; when I realize that my time in an office job is winding down very, very quickly.

So bring it on, life. I'll try to do a far better job of remembering your happy moments and try to forget that email from the guy I went on a date with once asking if I would pose for a series of artsy Instagrams with his rescue kitties.

(That happened.)