All of my TV love may be finally converging. Without being spoilerish–though I hold contempt for spoiler crybabies–my favorite storyline of Mad Men’s soon-to-end final season is Don going full hobo. I’ve lightly touched on hobos before, not in any meaningful way. Escape and reinvention are so very American.
Those traits aren’t part of my natural personality, though I feel the tug, and get occasional hits of panic over having tied myself to this apartment and NYC despite it being a very sensible and smart (enemy qualities in the right light) decision that not everyone can even make, which I have to remind myself as I’m on my third episode of Million Dollar Listing New York in a row. Really, I just need to not be here for a while, which is to say a vacation, something that realistically can’t happen until the year is half-way over because I am smart and sensible and have responsibilities and deadlines and that makes me a little angry. I don’t even want to wait until my birthday (late July).
The thing is anywhere really amazing is also really fucking expensive in the summer. If I hold out until September, airfares go down considerably. In the meantime, I have these Emirates points that are going to expire by my birthday but they aren’t enough points to go anywhere Emirates flies so I’m going to transfer them to JetBlue and try to go someplace weird or boring or maybe kind of horrible where I’ve never been before like almost immediately. I don’t really care. The point is to be somewhere else.
This week my idea was Albuquerque where JetBlue flies, with exploration around New Mexico, more TV character reinvention maybe, but also I’d like to follow the green chile cheeseburger trail, re-remember how to drive a car, see some adobe, sweat to death, and possibly come back wearing caftans and turquoise jewelry. It’s a shame my silver hair is long gone.
The above book was referenced as the title of last week’s Mad Men episode and I am in no way a Mad Men nerd (I didn’t even watch the first season until recently) but I think that cover art would make an awesome tattoo, especially done by Duke at East River Tattoo. I never thought that was exactly my style, a little too old-timey, but I love the concept.
(Honestly, I’m not even sure where I would put a prominent tattoo–the tiny blurry Hello Kitty smack in the middle of my left arm has really messed things up over the years and as my arms look increasingly ham hocky–a photo taken over the weekend really drew this issue to my attention–I’ve been working on my triceps, seriously, at the gym and little free weights arrived from Amazon today, and have also been trying to come up with an idea that could incorporate Hello Kitty and a stork carrying a man over a cityscape is not it.)
Ok, but the whole reason I started writing this post at all was so I could share what online dating looks like in New Mexico. Once again, it’s easy to complain about what you have. Is it that I’ve been in NYC too long and this just what white people look like in the rest of the country? Or does Santa Fe just attract middle aged outdoorsy gingers with goatees and glasses? I used Okcupid to rank my matches ages 30-52 and these were my 4th, 5th, and 6th best contenders. Seeing this row of Southwestern eligible bachelors laid out like this knocked the hobo’ing spirit right out of me.
Not that any of it may end up mattering. Emirates ended up rejecting my chosen flights and I suspect it’s one of those deals where you’ll have to jump through hoops to actually get to claim your miles. I will probably have better luck on a route that’s not just one flight a day a not short notice.
*I can’t figure out how to fix the formatting in these captions.