"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all." ― Helen Keller
Well, Amanda has started back to work, and seems to despise the second-shift schedule on Monday-Wednesday. Me, I don’t like having to remember to make something easy to eat on these days. This was Monday, the first dinner at work, and, like an asshole, I roasted cornish hens. Probably the most fiddly and messy thing you could possibly try to eat during a meeting, over a keyboard.
A fourteen-day self-quarantine strains the willpower horribly when you’re dropped into a new city and want nothing more than to explore. The weather is nice, thousands of things yearn to be discovered, and I’m holed up in this–admittedly really nice–apartment making shitty artwork with leftover Ikea boxes and a sharpie. I feel tied to the mast, listening to the enchanting music of the city.
One avenue of investigation does remain, though, and that is food delivery. Fine cuisine brought right to your door by some rando on a bicycle! Here’s our second meal in the flat, on our newly-assembled table, from the first Uyghur restaurant I’ve ever seen.
I also appreciate the truth in advertising: spicy means spicy. After a decade and a half in Portland, OR I have come to look with derision and contemptuous disdain for “nuclear” sauces, hot wings with bullshit waivers, and those milquetoast Balls of Fire. But Kanway? Kanway brings the pain!
And, finally, we arrive.
It’s probably not possible to pinpoint exactly where or when this journey began, as it hasn’t ended, or really, even properly began. As I type in our new apartment in The Hague, listening to the echoes my fingers make in this room devoid of furniture, everything seems to have inexorably, if fitfully, led us here from as far back as I can see. I think my own naïveté was the seed that finally led me away from the sararīman lifestyle, but there aren’t really true ends or beginnings, I don’t think. Life seems to start in medias res.
