brb, traveling.
Two from tech on a radical sabbatical.
T-minus five hours to Myanmar. I awoke at 5AM after a night of fever dreams, having sweat through everything. I emptied the entire contents of my body, again, and ran a cold shower. Standing in the dark, near tears, I steadied myself against the glass wall and leaned into the water. The only rational thought I could muster was "Will this get better before it gets worse?"
I gently woke Emily and mumbled the dreaded words:
"I need to go to the hospital."
Weezer's "Holiday" is playing in my head as I'm watching the surf drag along Kaikoura Beach's block rock sand. For real, I'm right there, right now, writing this. My trip camera, a Sony RX100-M3, my iPhone and Squarespace's Blog app are awesome teammates for mobile content creation.
Lights out. Our senses raced to process while our eyes recover. We inhaled the dampness of the air as its coolness tightened our skin, while the roar of a distant waterfall grew closer. One-by-one, then cluster-by-cluster, the watery corridor was illuminated by tiny blue lights. We'd entered a literal wormhole to a galaxy inside the earth.
Whenever we, Josh and Emily, would have a less-than-optimal day, we'd joke about dropping everything and heading to Southeast Asia. To brighten spirits we'd laugh it off and dive into a bowl of pho, or flip on an episode of whatever Anthony Bourdain was producing at the moment. After a bit of attrition, and some stellar alignment, suddenly that gentle ribbing didn't seem so far-fetched.
