This Saturday, I leave Vancouver, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. The Saturday after that, I get married on a jetty in Surfers Paradise to the most awesome chick in Aus. The Saturday after that, my new wife and I will be toting backpacks on a boat to an island in the Andaman Sea. I don’t know where we’ll be the Saturday after that.
It’s definitely a time of changes. In the past few weeks, I’ve handed in the final, revised draft of my PhD thesis, co-planned a wedding—a modest wedding, to be sure, but a wedding nonetheless—and I’ve moved out of my East Van apartment and onto a West End sofa. I only lived in the apartment for two and a half years, but it seemed longer. The thesis felt a lot longer than that.
Our plan is, post-wedding, to travel across Asia with no real fixed schedules other than what’s required by the imposition of the seasons and our own ability to deal with where we find ourselves. I’m not sure how long it’ll take, where we’ll go, or what we’ll find there. I don’t mean that in some romantic way, of peaking behind a curtain of the unknown. After all, we now live in an age where information is essentially free and instantaneous. And I’m not shy about using it. I’ve looked at blogs posted from well-trod paths, and Googled remote villages to check out the local guest house situation.
But while information is free (monetarily), experience still has to be earned, and it’s paid for in change (not the monetary kind). I have not the slightest hesitation about getting married, but I’m curious what will happen to the bachelor incarnation of Eric. Travel, I have a few more qualms about, but I’m excited, too. What will be the relationship the married Eric getting sick in a Mumbai toilet—for I will be getting sick—has to the Eric who currently sits in a Strathcona office debugging Objective C code into the evenings? Will the earlier Eric seem naive? Foolish? Pretty much the same, but with a bigger bank account? Google has no answers. I know. I checked.
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