this is not me. it's someone else.

Do you ever have those moments, that I call Talking Heads moments, where you're all "This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!"? It usually happens to me when something good happens or when I am about to do something that I just can't quite believe will happen to ME as opposed to someone else who is cool or something.

I can totally handle the bad stuff. That seems more likely to happen, anyhow. Falling on my ass in public, making a mess, getting angry in a grocery store. That's normal. The good stuff? Freaks my ass out.

So here I am about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime and I am so FROZEN. Last night I was reading some travel books Bonnie sent me, and I'm all like, "haha funny stories to exotic places by hip people with cool lives and big adventures....that's never going to happen to me".....then I realized that I have either been to most of the places they are writing about, or am about to go to them.

And that freaked me out.

This is not me!

I am not this traveling gal with the small (yes small this time!) suitcase and the sunscreen and bikini and the passport photos for visas to countries where they only use US Dollars because their own currency is shit.

This is not me who will have to meet the border police for a country that's only had open borders for like, five years, and talk my way in, handing over surreptitious dollars as bribery to some tiny officious official who's probably, like, KILLED people before, and who could steal my passport and make me his giant white sex slave, and here I will have to act cool like I know what I am doing when I barely know how to make a sandwich.

This is not me that might ride an elephant and go to Angkor Wat and Laos and ancient Buddhist temples and be all Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider (though substantially flabbier and without that miracle bra she sported). (Oh and there will be NO tying of knives around my upper thighs. Can you imagine the chafing that would cause? Oy.)

It's not me that now has a startling familiarity with many of the best beers in the world, from the breweries themselves. (Though that sounds closer to me than the others..mmmm beer.)

It's not me that has ridden a camel in the Egyptian desert, bargained in the souks of Marrakech, climbed the ancient temples of Malta, stood in the wild howling winds on the Hill of Slane in Ireland and floated down the Nile at sunset.

So I'm reading these travel books, with stories about girls flying to Luang Prabang and the plane almost crashing (yikes! I'm doing that in a week!)(and thanks, Bonnie, really) and other girls in Paris having strange adventures with wine and men (which has also happened to me, a couple of times) and other adventurous things, and I feel like they are so foreign, these cool writing travel mavens. That they are something I can only aspire to be.

And yet, somehow, another part of me says, you've been everywhere they've been....what's holding you back? Why can't you believe the good stuff?

This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. Who's life is this?