Home Again, But Not Home
8 January 2021
Over the holidays while much of the world was enjoying time with their families I watched a lot of movies. One of them which I especially enjoyed was Up in the Air, where George Clooney's character spends a lot of time traveling. He popped up in airport after airport, hotel after hotel, city after city, and I could really, really relate to the way he felt at home on the road. His dumpy little apartment in Omaha is like my hytta. The hotel rooms are nicer. From 2014-2019 I spent an increasing number of days traveling and I loved nearly every minute of it. From the symphony in Vienna to glaciers in the arctic to the Aegean beaches to running around Central Park to that night in Vegas where we lost Joe after karaoke. Clooney's character in the movie just jets about the US, but he travels first class whereas I'm always traveling on the cheap.
In the movie, Clooney's character has a crisis when his company decides to switch to a virtual meeting rather than in person business model. In real life 2020 hit with the lockdowns, quarantines, and all the rest of the soul-killing restrictions. Instead of visiting Latvia, Cyprus and London in March after taking off January and February, society shut down. But I got back out there with boat and driving trips and then domestic flights. Well, 2 flights. In the movie the company scraps their plan in the end and Clooney happily gets to get back out there. Naturally I'd hoped the same for myself, but the new January lockdown in Norway is harsher than any so far. I'd planned a Dry January to start off my training calendar for the year anyway, but Norway has even shut down the serving of alcohol! Can we call the pandemic a religion yet? It sure seems like one when officials use it as an excuse to make rules about all the things they've ever wanted to.
Entering the sad, empty airport today it feels like a hollowed out version of home. Usually entering the airport means feeling the energy and the excitement, rather than the somber, sober mood pervading the place today. Maybe that's because you're only supposed to fly for funerals or something. I stopped paying attention to the asinine declarations of the overlords who are systematically destroying society with prohibitions. Today I'm getting on a plane to Tromsø to run a half marathon there. I plan to keep on living life and ignore those who want to treat us all like Typhoid Mary, and maybe someday I'll get my happy ending Up in the Air.
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