My Darling Clementine

I've long since had a love of being in transit. There is just something completely romantic about the notion that you and a bunch of people are moving in this one direction together. It's why when I start talking about the best parts of India, I talk about the trips to and from Varanasi (Benares) I took in 2009. The train ride from New Delhi to Varanasi was completely different than the train ride I took from Varanasi to New Delhi. On the way to Varanasi I was in a lower class coach with a bunch of tourists (a couple from Brighton, a pair of women from Frankfurt and a woman from Normandy). On the way back to New Delhi, I shared a first class coach with upper class East Indians with their families or on a business trip. Radically different experiences, but the sheer ability to watch a foreign landscape pass you by while you're talking about Monty Python to a British guy in India or reading some schlocky science fiction novel is an unimaginable privilege.

However, trains are not the only transport I like taking on my way to or during a vacation. I also enjoy buses, sharing taxis, airplanes, and, if you twisted my arm, elephants (even though I still say riding that camel in Australia was awesome). And, me being the romantic and admittedly very single, I also am attached to this idea that I'll somehow meet someone while in transit or on vacation. It makes me think of the scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind when Jim Carrey's character meets Clementine for the first time.

It's at a train station, too. He also says something along the lines of 'when I see a girl, I immediately fall in love with her'. That is, at the core, me. While I am incredibly shy and awkward with women, I am strangely myself and completely uninhibited at work. Seriously. I dance in the elevator when no one else is in it. When I see someone I like, there's just this no holds barred emotion related to the experience. Granted, as I get older, I realize with a little bit of realism that they probably have nothing in common with me. But in a way, neither did Joel and Clementine. It was partly the 'in transit' aspect that threw them together. Which is why I identify with Carrey's character more than most other characters in film and television. Sometimes I feel like Charlie Kaufman goes into MY mind to find story material, because honestly, there's a scene between Nicolas Cage and Tilda Swinton when we're hearing Cage's thoughts in a voice over that, word for word, could easily be my own thoughts.

Then there is Paul Giamatti's character in Sideways (who is also in transit, also going on a road trip with his friend). His character in that incredible film is (albeit almost heart-breakingly so) much like myself. There are also aspects of characters that Paul Rudd has played, like in I Love You, Man, that are very similar to me as well. A little charming and more than a little man-child-ish. I have always clung to this not-so-secret hope that I'll find my Clementine when I'm traveling.

In fact, I was really hoping that I'd meet someone in San Diego this year, too. The closest I came was talking to the woman from New Zealand about the trip she had been taking for the past five years to come to San Diego for the Comic-Con. It's not like I'm being totally fantastical. I know it would be hard to actually begin a relationship while in transit because of the clear rules of being in transit. We're all going some place, but the problem is, it's not the place we actually live. But, at the same time, I still want to have a moment where I meet someone on a train or in a plane and have this connection (I'll also admit I haven't seen the Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy Sunset films because it may just drive me crazy by dashing my romantic notion to the wall).

I guess I'm still pretty darn idealistic and romantically inclined when it comes to these kind of notions. I also stick by them. They are very much a part of who I am as a man and I make no qualms about it. So when I'm on a train to Padua or on a bus to Missiano in September, I will still be looking for my Clementine. I just hope I have enough courage and wherewithal to talk to her if I meet her.