I Must Be Doing It Wrong

I was reading the travel section of the New York Times today. I like to read and I like to travel so, naturally, I like to read about traveling. Not as much as the actual traveling but it's still pretty enjoyable. I'm not sure you could travel about reading. I'm not even going to try.

The great thing about reading is that you get to create your own mental image of something. Movies are great, too -- good ones, anyway -- but you are force fed the imagery. If the guy is skinny, the guy is skinny. The director wants you to see a skinny guy. The printed word lets you hallucinate up your own images. Now that I think about it, I like to hallucinate and I like to travel. I used to like to hallucinate while traveling but I don't do that anymore.

The writer was very good. She was describing a villa she rents every year in Italy. She describes the beautiful view and the wonderful day trips to impossibly cute towns and the fantastic meals of fresh food prepared simply and enjoyed with an endless stream of intimate friends.

I want to do this. I want to have the time and money to do it, and I want it to turn out exactly that way. Perfectly.

The author doesn't talk about mosquitoes or lumpy mattresses or boring dinner guests or how fucking expensive it must be to rent a villa in Italy, the bitch. And I don't draw that picture in my mind's eye. When I project myself out into the future, everything is a catastrophe. When I imagine someone else's life, I see no flaws.

That's messed up. I need to quit doing that.