Departure Avoided
January 13th, 2010

Brooklyn -- Nick is avoiding his departure today, packing sluggishly and pausing often to undertake distractions such as this first log entry of his trip written in the voice of a news article. 

He has boxed and stacked the majority of the things that he is leaving behind, but has only just begun to pack his suitcase with those things that he is taking with him.

“I should think through the first few days to make sure I’m not forgetting anything essential,” Nick recalls thinking earlier, looking away from a stack of shirts that he had been considering putting into his suitcase.

During the day Nick has also prepared his old iPod to take with him in place of his iPhone, which will be left behind, unchecking in iTunes a number of albums that would not fit and which he does not listen to. 

He also read the New York Times, New Republic, Talking Points Memo, and New Yorker home pages, and a selection of articles within each publication. He also watched the full interview of John Yoo by John Stewart on The Daily Show.

Nick could recall a number of times when he had delayed preparing for a move, which he considered his trip to Venezuela to more closely resemble than a vacation, given its length.

Often when leaving for college, moving to new apartments, or relocating to new cities, Nick has delayed packing until the day of his departure, ultimately doing so in a disorganized flurry. 

This runs counter to Nick’s usual approach to large tasks, which is significant advanced preparation and planning based on the visualization of likely scenarios.

The lack of any basis from which to visualize the coming scenarios was likely a primary cause for this behavior.

Whether due to a personal reliance on a home base or an inherent necessity in all people to have such a base, this behavior was clearly attributable to the fundamental nature of home to the process by which changes are accommodated in life.

“I can’t wait to get home and watch whatever’s on Hulu after all this crazy bullshit today,” Nick has been quoted as thinking.

Experts, who requested anonymity due to their role as a device for expounding this reporter’s theories, offered that something must be fundamental to a daily life, be it a person, group of people, or place. They surmised that, while everything changes or disappears ultimately, human thought does have an operative notion of constancy, particularly in the self.

They elaborated that our understanding of change was linear, that things changed in a sequence, from one thing to another, and could be understood to ‘have been’ a thing once they had changed into something else.

They went on to suggest that some aspect of a thing must remain constant in order for us to recognize that it is the same thing and has merely changed, and that often that aspect is the thing’s location. 

This, they added, could explain the avoidance experienced by Nick, though they were hesitant to take any firm conclusions, stressing that may have been simply manifesting Nick’s rationalizations.

Reached for comment, Nick was considering getting some lunch while perched tentatively on the only corner of the couch that was not covered in his new transience’s detritus, and staring out of the window at a point beyond the horizon.