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I’m result number one on Google for oversharing.

I really don’t know how I should feel about that.

Great. You can always count on your friends to share the bad news with you. Thanks, Michel. Grrrr…

Maybe I should have shaved my head.

Note: You know it’s Friday when one of your friends sends you celebrity gossip stuff while another one sends you dirty e-mails.

« It’s great geing a tourist. Guidebook and camera in my bag, a bottle of water in the car, the map spread out on my knees – what could be finer?

[…]

By the time we’re back at the hotel, I’ve begun to descend into what I’ve come to call traveller’s melancholy, a profound displacement that occasionally seizes me for a few hours when I am in a foreign country. The pleasure of being the observer suddenly flips over into a disembodied anxiety. During its grip, I go silent. I dwell on the fact that most of those I love have no idea where I am and my absence among them is unremarkable; they continue their days indifferent to the lack of my presence. Then an immense longing for home comes over me. I imagine my bed with a stack of books on the table, the combed afternoon sunlight coming through the curved windows, my cat leaping up with her claws catching the yellow blanket. Why am I here where I don’t belong? What is this alien place? I feel I’m in a strange afterlife, a haint blowing with the winds. I suspect the subtext of this displacement is the dread of death. Who and where are you when you are no one? »

From Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes.

Our tickets are booked: I will be spending my (big) birthday in Italy. Twenty days of touring Italy in May during which I’ll have plenty of time to experience traveller’s melancholy.

But for now, it’s back to winter melancholy.