gone living

Back in December, when I was making my final decision to leave my job, my apartment, and everything else behind to travel for a while, I found this fortune at the end of my Christmas Eve chinese dinner:

While I try not to base my life around fortune cookies, I took it as a positive sign for my decision to change my life around completely and pursue the trip.

And less than two months later here I am, packing boxes strewn around my apartment, much of my stuff sold off to friends, and down to my last few days in San Francisco. My life's sole focus at the moment is boxes (and how much stuff I can fit into the least number of them), logistics, innoculations, insurance, and sendoff parties.

It's hard to believe that in two weeks from now I will be on a tropical island somewhere in Fiji, instead of packing up my last few things in a suprisingly cold San Francsico apartment. Can't wait to get there.

Something that has really struck me as I prepare to leave the country on my trip (only 36 hours to go before departure!), is how supportive my friends have been as I have gotten ready to leave. From great attendance at my party (located at a watering hole far from our usual neighborhoods -- the Fairmont Hotel's splendidly kitschy Tonga Room, if you must know), to enlisting several people to help me load up boxes, haul stuff in their cars, put me up in their apartments and houses, sell the stuff that i'm not keeping, and give away the stuff that didn't sell, my friends have been GREAT. plus they've put up with my panicked phone calls when my planning went awry and I needed some help to have everything in boxes before the movers were due to arrive.

Most of the big to-dos are now done... i've moved out of my apartment, loaned away my car, seen my last look at San Francisco for the next year (and made a ridiculously pixelated phone video of it) and am now standing by in LA getting ready for tomorrow night's flight to Fiji. And by "standing by", I mean trying to get my year's supply of music to copy over to my f**king iPod without having it crash and reset partway through the transfer or having the music files get corrupted in some weird static-y way, getting over this darn last-minute cold, and consuming as much LA junk/comfort food as possible before I depart.

I'm trying to prepare for the total reality shift that will happen when I arrive in Fiji by reading the blog of my friends Allyson and Brian (Allyson and I ended up, my complete coincidence, deciding within a few months of each other to leave Yahoo and go on around-the-world trips), but of course it's not really possible to anticipate "the change" that happens when you go into travel mode... it just happens.

To all of you who've helped me get ready for this trip - you all rock! And i'm looking very forward to seeing my sweetie in May for some island-hopping...

I'll post again tomorrow before Jean and I head out to the airport to catch our flight to Fiji.