For my 12th birthday, my parents took me to Washington DC because I was a huge nerd and I wanted to see the elephant shrews at the national zoo and I wanted to visit the Smithsonian. It was a terrible trip. Unbeknownst to me, my mother had recently found out my father was cheating on her, my (now lifelong) depression was beginning to kick in, my mom and I came down with a terrible cold at the beginning of the week and the vibes in the hotel room were miserable. I was so unhappy I cried. Walking around museums is a lot less fun when your nose is running like a faucet and you’re so tired and you want to go to bed but that means you’ll be trapped in a room with your parents who hate each other. To top it all off, the small mammal house at the national museum was CLOSED. All suffering, no shrews. Still haven’t seen an elephant shrew in person and I’m 25.
There was a group of 5 or 6 middle aged Japanese men staying in the same hotel as us. I don’t know if this was a boy’s trip or if they were there on business and working hard while they were playing hard but they were having a GREAT time. We kept bumping into them because we were staying in the same hotel and doing a lot of the same touristy activities and they seemed to be having the time of their lives every time we saw them. They had a visible lust for life I cannot put into words. I had traveled one state over and I was so miserable and just wanted to go home and they had come from across the globe and seemed to be on the trip of a lifetime and it occurred to me that yes, DC is beautiful, America is a vast and interesting place and if I got out of my own head, I could enjoy it in the way they were enjoying it.
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