I am only a few weeks from leaving my fairly established life in New York to whisk myself away to farther reaches of the world than I have yet visited. Some of you will read this and think that I am cuh-razy, and some of you will read and think how adventurous I am, which, let's face it, is just a euphemism for crazy, but before you judge so quickly, let me give you a brief insight into my character, or, my character as I see it. (Feel free to judge away on the run on sentences, seems my parents read me Ulysses every night in my infancy)

In college I took a seminar on Ovid's Metamorphoses and was particularly struck by the re-telling of the myth of Europa as there were parts of it I found myself completely identifying with. In the story, Europa is pursued and seduced by Zeus, king of the gods (I said I only identified with parts of the myth). Hera, Zeus' wife, suspects and goes into a jealous rage and turns Europa into a cow, and THEN, as if matters aren't bad enough for poor Europa, sends a gadfly to harass her for all her days, driving the human in a bovine all around the Ovidian known world, which is basically following the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea. If some of you didn't know, this story comes fairly early in the book, so, get his underlying purpose? That's what you call a creative way to lay out a geographical exposition-orienting the reader through Europa the physical locations of where all the other stories will take place. That Ovid-he was a crafty one!

Now, some of you might be familiar with what a gadfly actually is, but I personally have not had any experience with one or indeed, ever seen that word or breed of fly referenced in anything other than Ovid's book. But what is the point of having an imagination if not to have your mind's eye go off on a tangent on how monstrous a fly would have to be to drive a cow crazy enough to trek around the world in search of a little peace of ass, right?

The entire point of my re-telling this myth in a woefully inadequate manner is to say that Europa's gadfly? I think it finally stopped bothering her when it caught sight of me instead. Although these days people refer to having a gadfly chase you around the world by the million times more user friendly term wanderlust, I think the long drawn out version of why I feel the urge to keep digging up shallow roots in order to acquire more stamps on my passport so much more, hmmm, what is that word that people are always using whenever I am just out of earshot? Oh yes-I am always forgetting! Dramatic.