2024.06.17 by Josh Erb; 659 words.
Whenever I'm about to leave the U.S. for an extended period of time, I find myself craving things I know I will not have access to while I'm away. Curiously, it's usually things I don't have very often. Things that, while here day-to-day, I just don't think about. It's usually laughably stereotypical. Pop tarts, peanut butter, &c. This time around it's root beer. I don't really drink soda that often, it's much too sweet and makes my teeth tingle. Despite this, my anxiety about the future has caused me to go out and buy a pack of root beer from my neighborhood grocery store.
I'm sipping on it right now. Questioning whether it tastes this good because I know that I will be forced to go without it soon. Maybe the threat of scarcity induces a heightened experience for my taste buds?
And now my teeth are starting to tingle and I realize that this is a silly little game I'm playing.
Consider this a random walk to a brief announcement. I'm moving! By the end of this Summer, my family and I will be in Mumbai, India where we'll be living for the next couple years. Not much time to write in the lead up to the move. Currently we're all running around chipping away at the mountains of paperwork necessary to make sure that they actually let all of us into the country[1].
If you've poked around the #archive tag for my blog posts, you've probably noticed that a good portion of my original blogs were all travel themed. In fact, that was my intro to blogging back when I was a teenager. It started as a way to catalog & process the experiences I was having as I navigated new culture and modes of being in the world that being an exchange to France was bombarding me with. Perhaps more importantly, it was also a handy way for me to keep family and friends up to date on my life without having to maintain a list of email recipients. I think it's only fitting that I return to this format for this next chapter in my life. The great advantage this time around is that I have built every aspect of this website myself and I own all my own data. As a result I have more control over the experience of reading it.
All this to say, if you like travel, and you want to keep tabs on what it's like to be a mid 30s U.S. tech worker who's suddenly transplanted to a city that's ~31 times bigger than the one he's lived in for the past decade, be sure to keep an eye on this blog[2].
I wont' make any promises about how often or when this feed is going to get updated. That being said, here are a few aspirations I have to make this more fun for everyone involved:
[ ] updates at least every other week[3]
[ ] better navigation with tags/filters
[ ] inserting a static map at the head of every post tagged #travel that indicates the current location of the post
[ ] will try to burn down my site's backlog before we get too far into the trip
Perhaps the most fraught part is that this includes bringing our dog, Myron, along. It's my first time bringing a family pet along for an international move, and it is already turning out to be a sprawling maze of vaccines, documents, and fixers.
Might be a good time to subscribe to the new RSS feed I just built.
Going to admit right out of the gate that this might slip to once a month depending on what's going on in my life.