The day before a prolonged trip to another country is always filled with lists. The bills I haven’t gotten around to paying, phone calls I have not yet returned, all the little things that I’ve put off because I could, after all, do them tomorrow.<\/p>\n
But when I’m about to get on a plane to another continent, I realize that “tomorrow” is going to take awhile, and that I’d better get some of those things done now, today, before leaving. I think that on some level I use these trips as a way to organize my life – to do the things that I’d never quite get around to, if time were simply measured from one day to the next.<\/p>\n
In a sense, a long trip is like a punctuation mark in one’s perception of time, a set of tall markers that stand out in one’s personal history like a row of ragged fence posts. They come between the long interludes back on the home front when one day blends seamlessly into the next, these trips to distance places – these disruptive and eventful markers of time.<\/p>\n
Some of these trips can be recalled even from a distance of decades later. I suppose that, without quite thinking about it, I’ve been collecting these trips for years, adding each one in turn to my memory’s attic, like a rare coin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The day before a prolonged trip to another country is always filled with lists. The bills I haven’t gotten around to paying, phone calls I have not yet returned, all the little things that I’ve put off because I could, after all, do them tomorrow. But when I’m about to get on a plane to … Continue reading “Punctuation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1916"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1919,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916\/revisions\/1919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}