Traveling empty

I feel like I'm not allowing this blog to reach its full potential. I checked out one of the featured blogs the other day--one by a journalist--and his was very slick. It was more of a website than a text file, as mine is. Also, one of my best friends, Dan Dorman's, website puts mine to shame.

I just got back from Minneapolis after spending almost a week there with Chrissa and her family. It was a much-needed, much-welcomed holiday. It's not like work's too difficult or anything...just that I am never quite as happy as when I'm traveling. If I ever became fabulously wealthy, I would just travel. That sounds like an excuse, I guess. Really, I'm planning on traveling anyways...and I'm not really planning on becoming fabulously wealthy. The point I'm trying to illustrate by saying that is that I really don't care for expensive cars, homes, or anything of that nature. What I really yearn for is the leisure associated with wealth. The opportunity to not work. To pursue other activities besides putting bread on the table.

Ever since I got back from the Middle East...and probably before that, in Guatemala, I've had wanderlust. I fell in love with being part of another culture. That, and seeing historic sites. That's what made me love history: a nostalgia for past times, a seeking of truth, a sense of romance...plus to understand the underlying machinations of current affairs.

This vacation was good for other reasons as well. I wrote in my journal the other day that I "have turned a corner" and I really feel I have. I'm trying to re-create myself and it's been a long, arduous process (At times, reminiscent of Jeckyll and Hyde).

But I feel like God floating on the face of the waters now. I've torn down my ego, scrutinized it under a microscope, judged it, discarded it. I've torn out the inner workings of my mind and sorted them into categories: emotions, logic, confusions, memories. I feel both empty and purified.