Selections from the trip so far
This is a travel blog and I have OCD, so I wanted to start it at the start of the travel, but I am sufficiently confused about how many layers of travel I am undergoing that I just went for my birth. But I also don’t like to skip huge pieces of time, especially whole layers of traveling. So to give you an idea and get to recent times quickly, a non-exhaustive selection of things that happened in the intervening time.
After being born half way through a world trip, I took half of a world trip with my parents, to Tasmania. I am told some minor royalty tried to buy me in Europe, but failed.
My mother bought a restaurant in a ghost town. I lived in a movie prop ‘house’, there were bats in my bunk bed, I missed so much school that I thought for years that ‘roll call’ was a thing from fiction or in America (I now think it actually happened every morning in my classroom). I abruptly ceased coping with life for several years after being read a horrifying book at school. I was so scared of e.g. the deadly snakes that I would use something like Bayes Theorem to work out e.g. how likely I was to die if there was blood on my leg. A snake killed my dog, and my other dog chased a babysitter with a live snake in its mouth, so the inside view on snake safety genuinely looked bad.
We moved to town and I looked after my three younger brothers in a house that was about as tidy as you would expect if it were inhabited by three boys in a state of constant war brought up and accompanied by their older sister who also had little actual upbringing to speak of, and a rapidly developing appreciation for ‘tragedy of the commons’. I decided I should give all of my money to the very poor overseas forever, minus anything really necessary to live. I insisted on cycling or walking everywhere, and was very confused about why everyone else in the world continued driving, given that they seemed to fairly universally agree that it was bad.
At school I accidentally joined a wannabe-wiccan-cult, intentionally joined anti-forestry activism, was surprisingly good at academic contests once I went to school enough to know that e.g. decimal points are a common convention, and not a code that you are meant to logically deduce the meaning of from context as part of the problem. I can’t remember whether or not I used to dress in a Viking helmet and flowery blue cape on days that were not assigned for that. I moved to a tent in my family’s (fenced) front garden, and then left home.
I went to university at ANU in Canberra. I figured I would henceforth know an entirely new set of people, so I changed my name to Katja and cut off my hair and decided to make a go of being gregarious. I hadn’t really tried talking to people at school before, so it was not super smooth, but to my delight I relatively quickly mastered causing other people to hang out in my room.
I went to America on holiday, then on a really long holiday, then as a student in Pittsburgh, then as a temporary worker. While studying in Pittsburgh, I went to Berkeley on holiday and then on more holidays and more holidays and took leave from my PhD program and haven’t been back or talked to my advisor about whether I will in a while, so it seems safe to say that I moved to Berkeley at some point. Then while living in Berkeley I visited S near Detroit for a week, and then a longer week, and then stopped buying return tickets, and got around to going home less and less often.. until now I think I just went on a holiday to Berkeley. And I am probably about to move there. Moving to Berkeley was amazing the first time, so I hope if I move there twice without moving away my life will be really very good.
Originally published at worldlypositions.tumblr.com.
