well my bags are packed

But I’m not ready to go. The guy with the truck came and took away my boxes (10 in all, the packing list reads: books; clothes; books; clothes; books; clothes; teapot) this morning and a little while later the guy in the suit came and took the papers about them. The lack of documentation on my end is a little bit discomfiting (everything is supposed to be sent to me later, over email) but I know people who’ve gone with this guy in the suit before and so I still expect to see my stuff sometime around the end of January. All three or four items of warm clothing are in my travel backpack. They will surely not be enough to keep me comfortable until whenever I get to my storage space and dig out my winter jacket. There’s something nice about coming back from Taipei to Chicago in the winter, I think, I like it when the physical world mirrors the emotional. I’m alone in the apartment and am wandering around, brewing a second cup of coffee and singing Leaving on a Jet Plane at the top of my voice (the Peter Paul and Mary version, which is the one I had on tape, from a mix someone made me in high school, although of course the first way I heard it was the famous David Kramer in-the-car version of which, as far as I know, there are, alas, no recordings). The way I prefer to leave is to make myself so exhausted through busywork and goodbye-saying that I am on the one hand effortlessly emotional (everything is heightened when I’m tired) but on the other hand too spent to really take anything in (a little bit of twisted self-protection). This time though I have this unfortunate interlude in which I must be cogent: tomorrow lunchtime I am due to present myself to the Ethnology Institute at Academia Sinica and talk about my research for forty-five minutes, and then live through another half hour or so of discussion. If you have any ideas about what I should say, please let me know. I certainly don’t.

In a life-level kind of way, I think I am gradually becoming reconciled to the fact that wherever I am there will always be somewhere else I want to be at the same time (that's not how the phrase goes, I know). I had this little realization at some point that if I were not busy being sad about leaving Taipei to go back to Chicago, I’d probably be busy being sad about not leaving Taipei to go back to Chicago. And not really so busy—it’s just a small undercurrent of melancholic realistic longing. Even now, I really am looking forward to getting back, to having a good library and decent lighting and toilets you can flush toilet paper into and cheap salad provisions and nice architecture and…well, there must be some other good things about Chicago, I’m sure I’ll think of some later. But this reconciliation is much stronger in the in-between times when I’m not actually leaving somewhere but only realizing that I will soon. Right now the undercurrent is swelling up into the sort of leitmotif that can be said to swell, and I start choking up talking to the nice doorman, or last night in The Neighborhood saying goodbye to people and finally being able to make the little speech for the camera that they have been wanting me to make for two years, about how much I love them and miss them and how I won’t forget and will come back. Someone handed me a tissue as a joke, but it turned out there was actually something to mop up with it.

Well, my apologies, this is not a funny story. Maybe there will a funny story tomorrow, depending on how badly I screw up the lunch talk at Sinica. Check back and see. Also tomorrow I am having dinner with the city government people to say goodbye. Last year this event was a delicious lunch with my main section; this year it's a dinner to which the department head, deputy head, chief engineer, and several other high-level people are coming, so although it may not be funny it will certainly be excruciating.