Author Archive
“Wanderlust 4 Life”
Mel here…
I miss you Wanderlust! In Oakland, working too much and trying to not get *too* overwhelmed in this gigantic family reunion that is overtaking my life and lasting over a week. I think this is FAR too long for any kind of family gathering (except of course a Wanderlust one), but that’s just me….Anyways, I took out some of my overwhelmed frustration on the road today, but as a road-rage biker 
Naw, just kidding- I didn’t cuss at anyone loud enough for them to hear! But damn, after Wanderlust I feel super strong and super fast on my bike, it’s totally empowering, and then in Oakland you have all these (dare I say this?) wannabe bikers who are SO slow and weave back and forth, and all this traffic that thinks you are also slow and don’t know what you’re doing, which means they don’t actually pay attention to your signals! But not to worry, since I always wear my helmet and I know what I’m tryin’ to do out there so cars and slow bikers can’t get in my way 
I wanted to be able to post something rather extraordinary, something that could approach the extraordinariness of Wanderlust, and yet now that I’m here writing I just feel overwhelmed because how could I even begin to approach the extraordinariness of Wanderlust, much less explain it in words? I think that what’s needed at this moment is a list. I’m not sure what exactly this is a list of, but I know that these following things are on it:-
-bicycle tattoo with six stars over my right kidney, drawn by Alex who is also left-handed and loves birds almost as much as i do
-New York hustle bustle concrete jungle, me walking zoned out in its wake, dreaming of bicycles and remembering i have a life waiting for me on the other coast
-a greeting from one of my students the first day back at work: “you flew all the way home to us, melon! your wings must be SOOO tired!” (they long since identified my bird alter ego)
-riding Remedios to work and friends and errands thro the streets of Oakland, feeling kick ass and listening to Paper Planes by M.I.A. on repeat while i slam up the steep hills
-delicious breakfast at Blackberry Bistro with my parents, my sister, and…my girlfriend (this is after they were visiting for the huge family reunion and came early to my house to bring me coffee as a sweet surprise but instead caught me and Remedios coming up the steps to my house after a night out at my girlfriends’ house….at which point, i decided honesty was definitely the best course to follow and i told them i had spent the night at someone’s house and then i told them her name and THEN i asked them if they wanted to meet her for breakfast the next morning, at which point my mom answered “i KNEW it would be a girl!” and my dad did his best accepting shrug, which after seeing it several times i take to mean that he is totally freaked out by me being a dyke but he really loves me and is doing his best to be supportive)
-looking at the full moon out my window: feeling again the moon/ stars/ dark sky/ rustling leaves/ shared lives/ communal slumber
-Monterrey Market in Berkeley, eating peaches and drinking peachy drinks at a celebration of the 40th birthday party of my best friends’ Sun Crest peaches, tears coming to my eyes as she beats loud and angry on her taiko drum while her dad reads about destructive hail storms, and then later she talks about power & privilege and a food revolution and- eyes closed- i touch hands with a stranger, following an exercise she makes us all do, and i feel wanderlust rising within me and i feel her powerful dynamic energy and i realize it’s the same thing and damn that’s like a mind orgasm
-hot tubbing with my family and sharing a glass of red wine with my mom (Grapefull Sisters, Noras’ aunts’ house both come to mind)
-browsing the library catalog this afternoon for “Dreaming the Dark” by Starhawk
Maybe I’ll get the neck tattoo after all. Maybe the list’s name is: Until Wanderlust ’09. Maybe I’ll do a solo, self-contained tour up to the Arctic Circle and back in Sweden.
Maybe I will start making good on my dream to “write something.” Let’s go tho, y’all, cuz i’m ready! xoxo mel
Ready! Waiting, waiting, waiting…
Mel here, writing out of Oakland, California. Yesterday morning was our last conference call (yay! I’m tired of getting up at 8:30 AM on Sunday mornings!) and it left me feeling calm. I suddenly realized all the things I’ve been stressing about- equipment, my return plane ticket, fund raising and money, my roles for the trip, not enough training- are completely extraneous. I AM going on Wanderlust, I HAVE raised a lot more money than I thought I would, I RODE almost 30 miles yesterday, and all the other stuff is totally manageable. So, here I am all stoked to finally meet the other participants, rather than just hear their lovely voices on the telephone every Sunday morning.
Well, that’s when I got a little bummed, cuz I remembered that I’m not leaving until June 13th. Boo. Almost everyone else leaves this Friday May 23rd for New Orleans, and I’m not meeting up with them until Charleston SC in almost three weeks. Why? I work at a school, and way back in February when I heard about Wanderlust from Nora, I told her I really wanted to participate but couldn’t leave until my students got out for the summer. I am just lucky, though. In the end, I AM going, even if not for the whole time.
Yesterday I biked with another Wanderlustian, Miss Elisa. She calculated that we biked about 30 miles, but neither of us have our cyclometers yet- they’re travelling in the SAG wagon with Nora- so maybe we’re overly optimistic. Regardless, it was a lovely sunny Sunday afternoon of anticipating Wanderlust, sharing excitement, and contemplating many random thoughts such as: degrees of tiredness of my thighs, degrees of pain in my nether regions from 3 hours in the saddle, whether or not traffic would hit us since the Bay Trail we were on goes through an awful lot of streets with fast drivers, the tweet-tweet-tweeting of songbirds at the Berkeley Marina, a crunched little gopher snake on the road side, and the spectacle of the Port of Oakland’s cranes rising like giant giraffes on the horizon. Or are they horses or egrets? I know they’re a looming herd of animals roaming the shore, but I haven’t exactly decided what species. They’re kindof an entity unto themselves. This might be a good time to mention that one of my trip roles is “Naturalist on the Road.” Yes, I go a little overboard on the animal observations. And likening mechanical things to animals.
To bring it back to Wanderlust…being at work today reminds me what I’m going on the trip for: to listen, to speak, to share, to learn, to remember. Presently, my job consists of acting out these verbs, as I’m a classroom counselor working with emotionally disturbed kids, so I have a lot of practice. I’ve also had a lot of experiences teaching sex education in one form or another in the past few years, so I consider myself knowledgeable about the politics of sexuality. Meaning, I think I’m prepared psychologically for this trip.
More importantly, though, I’m a body situated within a complicated network of legal codes, social constructs, and realities. On the trip, I’ll be exposing myself to being changed by the realities I travel through, and I’ll also be changing those realities by exposing them to colorful little me (I mean this literally- I’m short and I have purple and orange hair). I’ve been thinking about ways Wanderlust will affect me, and ways I will affect it. Of course, it’s all a big unknown until I’m actually there doing it. But I do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Wanderlust will change and grow me. I’m ready! And waiting for June 13th….
