My first step to serendipity

[Warning: This is a long one, composed on my flight from Anchorage to Taipei, and posted from the airport in Taipei, while waiting for my connection to Bangkok.  In the future, I’ll try to keep them much shorter.]

The numbers in the lower right-hand corner of my screen tell me that it is 12:50pm EST.  This means my plane took off from New York just over 13 hours ago.  I have barely noticed them go by, having taken full advantage of my ability to sleep virtually anywhere, anytime--an ability I’m sure will be tested to the extreme in the coming months.  The remaining 5 hours of my flight from Anchorage to Taipei and 4 hours from Taipei to Bangkok are likely to pass decidedly slower, as my need for sleep appears to be temporarily sated and my entire body is brimming with anticipation.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind.  After finishing up work at CWV, I spent two weeks finishing up travel preparations and saying goodbye to all the wonderful friends I am leaving in DC.  I flew back to the Berkshires for the weekend to celebrate my dad’s birthday, say goodbye to my family, and drop off all my remaining belongings besides the contents of the one backpack I am taking on my trip.  On Monday, I took the train into New York with my dad and crashed in Brooklyn for the next two nights with a friend, Moe, who was my brother Sam’s roommate on a kibbutz in Israel five or six years ago and has since become a regular and highly entertaining visitor to Chez Elitzer.  Wednesday morning, I woke up and followed the advice of my youngest brother’s (Jake‘s) girlfriend (Tiff), an intern at The Daily Show, and managed to score 4 tickets to that evening’s taping.

At this point, I was set to have a terrific sendoff: catching a taping of one of my all-time favorite programs and then heading straight to the airport to hop on a plane to Thailand and begin my adventure.  Unfortunately, that’s where things started to fall apart.  You see, The Daily Show begins shooting around 6pm, but they always give out far more tickets than they can actually seat in order to ensure a full house, so you have to start lining up between 3-3:30 to have a good chance of getting in, and they won’t let you jump up in the line with a friend after 4:15.  I had already made plans to meet another friend and frequent Chez Elitzer visitor, Eliran, near Lincoln Center for coffee at 3.  With his busy schedule, this was the only time he would be available to meet, and despite my love of Jon Stewart, I was not going to back out on seeing Eliran before my departure.

I hoped that Jake or Moe, also big Daily Show fans, would be able to go stand in line and have me come meet them before 4:15, but Jake had class until 6 and Moe had a meeting that he couldn’t reschedule.  I reached out to some other friends in the city and Jake and Tiff texted around to their friends, trying to find somebody who wanted to go and could get in line early, but apparently committing 4 hours of your afternoon to go watch a television taping on short notice is difficult, even for college students.  Disappointed, I resigned myself to meeting Eliran and then rushing over to The Daily Show studio, hoping against hope that for some reason, this would be the day that none of the other ticket holders would show up early either.

The coffee meeting was pleasant but brief, and I allowed myself to start to believe that maybe I really would make it to the studio in time to have a shot at getting in.  When I arrived just after 4:00, however, the line was already doubled up and wrapped around the corner of the building.  Dejected, I walked to the end of the line, figuring I would at least wait it out another 30 minutes or so just to make sure I wasn’t underestimating the seating capacity of the studio.

A minute later, a middle-aged woman came up behind me and inquired whether I was the end of the line.  “Well, I was,” I told her, “but I guess now you are.”  She smiled, and, in the hopes that like me, she had reserved multiple tickets, but unlike me, had managed to actually print out the email and bring it as instructed, I asked whether she might have any extra tickets, because I would be very disappointed if it turned out that I could get a seat but was then denied for only having a reservation number on my phone but not physical ticket.  “Oh, I’m sure they’ll take it as long as you have the email on your phone.  And actually,” she explained, “I don’t even have a ticket for myself.  My sister and her friends are near the front of the line, but they didn’t have enough tickets for all of us, so I’m just hoping to get in.”  As you can imagine, with my 3 extra tickets, we quickly became friends and rushed up in line to join her sister.

A couple hours later, I was sitting along the center aisle on the second row of The Daily Show studio.  After a mildly entertaining warm-up act left the stage, Jon Stewart came out and spent about 15 minutes taking questions and joking around with the audience, clearly enjoying himself and displaying all of the warmth, wit, and mildly self-deprecating humor that one would expect from seeing him on his program.  Then the taping began, opening with a segment poking fun at Tom Delay and his recent withdrawal as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars, then segueing into an amusing but biting piece calling attention to the pathetic excuses the Obama administration has been giving for delaying a meeting with the Dalai Lama (presumably to appease China), setting it in contrast with their willingness to engage in talks with folks like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez.  I was impressed by how quickly the taping advanced, with the only delays occurring during commercial breaks, and even those were about the same length as the commercials themselves.  The interview was with William Kamkwamba, a 22-year-old from Malawi who at the age of 15 built a power-generating windmill in his village, using only spare parts and diagrams from a library book.  Jon Stewart was so impressed with him, they decided to go back and re-film the opening segment, eliminating the bit on Tom Delay in order to allow time to air the interview in its entirety.

When taping was finished and the audience released, I bid farewell to my seatmates, thanked Tiff for her suggestion to attend the show, hopped a subway to JFK, and boarded the plane on which I am now typing this dispatch.  I couldn’t have asked for a better sendoff.

Several people have asked me for an explanation of this title, and I think the circumstances leading to my attendance at The Daily Show illustrate my intention beautifully.  I chose name because I felt it captured the spirit with which I am undertaking this journey, one that has led me to do much advance preparation but little advance planning.  I am not a religious or even a particularly spiritual person, yet the faith I have in myself, my support network, and the existence of enough well-intentioned people in the world, leads me to embrace the notion of leaving a large element of chance and uncertainty to this trip.  Although I know some troubles will inevitably arise (digestive problems and theft being the most likely), I believe this approach will lead me to some fantastic discoveries and unexpected encounters that will ultimately be far more exciting and memorable than anything I could have planned ahead of time.

I understand that my ability to have this faith and approach this trip--and, to a lesser extent, my life in general--from this perspective is due in no small part to having lived a life of extreme privilege compared to 99% of the world.  That I am able to take this trip at all is proof of that fact.  Yes, this trip is highly indulgent.  But I am determined to live up to the spirit embodied in a quote which I have seen attributed to Albert Einstein: “It is every man’s obligation to put into the world at least the equivalent of what he gets out of it.”  I have gotten a lot out of the world, but I am determined that over the course of my life, I will do my best to put back into it a whole heck of a lot more.

At the moment though, I’d be lying if I said I’m not looking forward to running up my tab just a teensy bit further… Thailand, here I come!