Byebye Taiwan. Hello SE Asia!

I worked in residence life during college, and once I proudly went on about my wonderful organizational skills in front of my boss. He laughed/snorted and said, "No, Mel, I'm pretty sure that's called being anal retentive." He sugar-coated a lot of things--probably a coping mechanism for living in the same building as 186 college kids--but when it came to my neurosis, he called it like he saw it.

In college classes, this probably worked in my favor. I never lost assignments or forgot exams, and my notes were essentially transcripts with doodles in the margins. But this behavior predated college by about 18 years. As a child, I kept my book series in numerical order and used a ruler to underline things in textbooks (to avoid squiggly lines of course). One Christmas, my gifts were "organization themed." I got an electronic organizer, Mary Engelbreit Post-its, and a markerboard. This might sound like lackluster parenting, but I was delighted by these presents. ("This organizer comes with a stylus?! SCORE!")

There are some upsides to trying to keep life mess-free. I rarely do things I will regret, like drunk text or paint my nails neon orange. And I've never gotten an overdraft fee or choked on poorly-chewed food.

But the downsides suck. I approach everything in life with the same attitude I have about gynecology appointments: "Let's get this over with so I can check it off my list." This has led to me missing out on some key rites of passage, like streaking or dating a bad boy. OK, I don't mind skipping the bad boy drama, but do wish I had run across the soccer field topless with my friends in college that one time. It was only streaking in the strictest sense of the word (It was the middle of the night and no one saw them except each other.), but I opted to sit in the running car and keep a look out for campus security.

It's not that I want to radically change who I am. Structure keeps humanity from imploding. Deadlines keep the world moving forward. Aspirations give people something to work towards.

I just want to stop getting nicknamed "Mom."

I have lightened up over the past few years. Living with another person has required it. Once Josh and I started splitting laundry duty, my once colored-coded underwear drawer turned into a mosh pit of mis-matched socks, men's T-shirts, and other miscellanous items such as plastic bags and ripped mittens, all bouncing out like a bunch of Bieber-crazed teens whenever I opened the drawer.

After about a year of such household mayhem, I realized two things.
1) Spending a few minutes a week searching for matching socks or re-sorting the recycling is not worth an argument.
2) Josh spends half as much time planning his life as I do, yet the vague plans he has in his head work out about as well as the bullet-listed ones I write down on sticky notes.

Since these epiphanies, my life has gotten a lot more relaxed. It started with small steps--mixing darks and lights, leaving the house without mascara, shaving ONLY once a week during winter--and now I've moved to the big leagues: backpacking through Southeast Asia for four months.

Yes, that's right. Josh and I are leaving Taiwan on Monday to traipse through the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam until July (or until we run out of money). We've been planning on this trip for almost a year, and I have been super excited. Until last week, when we went on a two-day trip to a friend's house. I was in the shower one morning trying to figure out which bottle was the shampoo.

This one? No. Facewash.
This one? No. Silky bodywash.
This one? All Chinese. Let's try it.

As I lathered up my hair with the mystery liquid, I thought, "Man, I can't wait to shower in my own shower again. [ Pause. ] On our trip, I won't have my own shower. Our trip is four months long. OMG. FML.*"

I don't miss sleeping in my own bed so much, but there's something about showering in other people's showers that freaks me out. That tile is caked with dirt and sweat and dead skin cells that countless strangers have scrubbed off their body, likely after peeing down the drain first, all sealed in by a thick coat of soap residue and mildew.

Also, I can't see in the shower. I'm pretty near-sighted, so to find the bottle I want, I have to either hold it a few inches from my face to read it or rely on the senses of touch, smell, or taste, which is not ideal.

Even without communal showers, this trip's potential for messiness is HIGH.

We are living out of backpacks.
We are staying with a couchsurfer for the first three days of our trip. After that, we're just rollin' into town / village / island without a plan.
The timeline we have put together ends abruptly on May 27. I typed up a timeline, but it has a lot of question marks. Like, for example, underneath "Return to U.S." Hell, we haven't even decided where we're returning to.
During the next four months, we are just going wherever the wind takes us.

WTF?!?!?!?!

I am terrified. But I'm also excited. I'm excitified.

The anal retentive me would have only felt sheer terror. So, even though I wish I could just be excited, I guess this is--albeit meager--progress.

I am excited for obvious reasons, like new cultures, top-notch snorkeling, and alcoholic concoctions in coconut shells, but I'm also excited for the personal growth this trip should bring. I have long envied the process-oriented, the ones who do for the sake of doing. They are the chalk-street artists, the sky-divers, the casual daters, the ones who do not live in a tiny drab box.

Really, it's the reason this blog is titled what it is--I am not bohemian by nature, but the idea is appealing. It always has been. My grandmother has a picture of my sister and I dressed up in my mom's old clothes when we were kids. My sister is button-cute in my mom's old Brownie dress. And I am dressed in a black sparkly top and a multi-colored tulle skirt. My grandma says I look like a gypsy. I guess part of me has always wanted to be a roamer. I just wasn't ready to embrace it until now.

Now that I think about it, I am brandishing a bejeweled wand in that picture, so I was probably going for princess. But I look like a gypsy. We'll just go with that.



*Yeah, I think in text lingo.