Where am I?

Earlier this year in July, I was sitting at the international airport in Quito waiting to board my flight to Buenos Aires. Having just cleared security, and with only a backpack and a duffel bag, my first thought after settling into my seat was, "What the hell am I doing going to Argentina?"

No itinerary. No plans. No friends to visit. Not even reservations for a hostel.

Perhaps there was some vague romantic notion of what it means to be a traveler, on the road...

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Since coming to San Francisco, I've been shuttling between San Francisco and Stanford pretty regularly. A lot of times, I drive along I-280 late at night on my own, and my car is the only one in sight. Outside the driver's window, I can see the lower third of the night sky. On clear nights, the stars and the moon give the hills that surround the freeway a faint outline. On cloudy nights, it's the orange city glow that emanates from San Francisco. Ahead of me, I see only what my headlights illuminate, lines of reflectors extending miles and miles ahead.

At some moments on these drives, I see in my mind's eye a Google satellite map of the road where I am driving. And the map keeps on zooming out and zooming out until it truly is a satellite view, one oblong circle of light moving slowly through surrounding darkness. Myself separated from my parents by the Pacific Ocean and from my two older sisters by hundreds of miles.

In these moments, I think, "How the hell did I get here?"

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A job interview, at least of the behavioral variety, often turns out to be a lot like storytelling. The interviewer asks you questions about your resume, various decisions that you've made, why you are interested in his/her particular company. And in response to these questions, you are expected to believe one hundred percent in the narrative fallacy. You package yourself, you tell a story about where you have been and why you are where you are at that particular moment. Causality in the stories that you tell about yourself is made out to be simple, fairly straightforward, rational and thought-out. The purpose is to convey passion for where you are going and that you know what you want.

But during the "What the hell?" moments that I am describing, all your defenses collapse. All the energy required to believe in your self-narrative dissipates, reasons evaporate into the air.

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Rational Choice Theory? Fuck that. Causality can only be assigned retrospectively. Randomness (what we do not know and cannot explain) overwhelms.