Go West, Young Man!

Delta's wildly unpopular "if one of us sits near a baby we all do" policy in effect

"Good bye, proud world! I'm going home."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

Friends, countrymen, lend me your couches! Your restless wanderer is returned to you, and he's as homeless and jobless as the day he left. Now, I know what you're thinking - why haven't they wrapped up How I Met Your Mother yet. I mean, how many chances is this guy really gonna get? Rest assured, we're all equally concerned about the situation and I promise now that I'm back in the states I'll start up an aggressive letter writing campaign to the powers that be at CBS. Oh right, you may also be wondering where I've been and why the hell I'm back in the US of A.

A bit of necessary exposition on my recent absence and sudden reappearance in an entirely different hemisphere of the world. First, please accept my sincerest apologies for the sudden blackout and just know that I missed you all lo these past three weeks. I was actually clipping along at a really hot pace in Geneva, and Dear Lonely Planet even hit the amazingly rewarding 10,000 page views mark just a couple weeks ago. When last you heard, I was eating cheap pita and hummus in Tel Aviv and reeking havoc with my continuously successful "halvah for my men and arrack for my camels" campaign when I received some troubling news about a brewing family emergency back home. This is not the proper forum to go into great detail, but to accent the severity of the situation I was on a plane to Geneva a mere 8 hours after receiving said news, and back in the states just 12 hours after that. Things are settling here on the home front but I will be NYC based for the foreseeable future.

Given the sudden shift in schedule, I had to cram a massive amount of self reflection and looking back into just a few short hours as I tossed everything into my suitcase and raced to the airport. After a few restless hours of fitful sleep in the rank dorm room my brother was trying to pass off as a viable shelter, I grabbed an overpriced taxi to the Tel Aviv airport and settled down in the main rotunda to wait for my flight.

Overwhelmed by a sudden sense of deja vu, I took stock of my surroundings and realized I had in fact been there before...even in the same seating area perhaps. Just about three years prior to this hastened Israeli exit, I took full advantage of Jewish philanthropy's boy-we-hope-you-marry-another-Jewish-person campaign popularly known as Birthright to visit the homeland and get free schnitzel. I sipped my fresh squeezed orange juice and the vitamin C jarred loose some long forgotten memories of my trip, and suddenly it was clear to me that I sat in this very food court 1,095 days earlier on my way back home. Then, as now, my great adventure was drawing to an abrupt close, and I was left only with the pulpy innards of 8 oranges and my thoughts.

Personally I love it when things come full circle like this, so I gave a little nod to the universe so as to thank it for its ham-handed attempts at existential subtlety. I kicked up my feet and tried to unpack everything that had happened in the past three years since the last time I sat in this chair, drank this OJ, and window shopped at this duty-free store. Unsure of where to begin, I defaulted to counting the countries I had seen since last I fled Israeli's shore.  Eight, by the way.

I reminisced about the weddings I had been to and strained to retrieve the bachelor parties I had drank away. I recapped quickly all the friends I had visited, and recalled slowly all the women I had kissed. I chastised all the decisions that led me to work at a law firm, and barreled angrily through the bumps in the road that drove me to Sri Lanka, Geneva and now Israel.

I sat for hours in the Tel Aviv airport, exactly where I sat for hours just three years before. And for a few more hours I remained, kept company by three years of memories and an orange juice.

As the pre-flight procedures started up and my cup ran dry, I rose from my post and took my leave of Israel. I knew that I was returning home but almost nothing else was certain...I wasn't even sure then if I would be back to Europe. Thanks to a frisky Malaysian security guard, I had no phone, and thanks to my insatiable need to find fulfillment from my life I had no job or apartment waiting for me upon arrival. Here and I thought burning down my life to leave for Sri Lanka was intimidating. Turns out that coming back home proved to be even scarier.