The Reader Travels

My man used to ask me why our gay friends always wanted to hang out at gay bars. After all, we don’t always want to hang out at straight bars. They should live a little, mix it up, you know?

The reason was obvious to me. People want to hang out where they can be comfortable being themselves. And Gogol Ganguli’s parents in The Namesake want to hang out with other Bengali people because there is comfort in sameness. Strangers in a strange land, they cling to home by flocking together.

One of my best friends is from China, and she doesn’t understand her Chinese friends and their need to hang out with only other Chinese people. As far as she’s concerned being from China is just a granfalloon (see Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut).

On the surface my friends all look very different. But despite age, race, religion, nationality and sexual orientation, we are the same in crucial ways. We flock together because we can see that sameness, beyond, above and beneath the surface.

I love you guys!

They call New Mexico the Land of Enchantment, and I don’t think it’s all about the peyote, either. If you want to fall in love with New Mexico, just visit. If you can’t go there, pick up a copy of the movie Off the Map, and you’ll get a small taste of the beauty.

Off the Map enchanted me to my core. I laughed and I cried and I stared in awe. The desert is as the sea. The horizon is endless, and it flows around and connects the world beyond. Deep, right?

The first time I went to New Mexico, I went with a friend whose family had a cabin in the mountains outside of Santa Fe. We had no electricity or running water. We groomed ourselves from a box of baby wipes. We removed our watches. We ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired. She meditated. I wrote.

That was thirteen years ago, and I still refuse to put my watch back on.