First Goodbyes

     I left my home Sunday afternoon, seeing many of my friends in person for the last time in a while. I will be spending a week or two traveling around the state to see some friends and family before I officially start my trip.
    There have been a lot of sad moments so far, and I can only expect there are some more to come. While I knew that these moments were in my future, for so long they were just that, in my future. Now that they are here at my doorstep, the hits are somewhat harder. I even spent some time trying to move these expectations from my far mode thinking into my near mode thinking, with little success.
    These events have shown me how little I can expect my future to match my expectations. I can see now that it will be in my best interest to devote a lot of time to moving my decision making pattern to be more reactive to the events of my trip. Although I have tried to do this in the past, it looks like I didn't do it good enough.
    For example, while driving to my parents place, we stopped at a big truck stop/dinner kind of place, and I talked to the waitress about my trip. Her main concern was that I was too pretty, and would be hit on by a LOT of truck drivers. As of now, I had convinced myself that this would never happen, that the amount of gay truck drivers who were forward enough to pick up hitchhikers just to hit on them was to small for me to run into many if not any of them. But I would assume that this waitress has more experience in this area than I do, and I need to deal with the possibility that my trip around the country might be a regular episode of the hills. It is possible that my ability to determine the likelihood of this situation was completely off.

Although I sure hope it isn't

   Anyways, if any of my friends are reading this, please know that it totally sucked to say goodbye, and I totally didn't cry.