I have the least amount of wanderlust of anyone I've ever known. Of course I didn't personally know Emily Dickinson, say, or Franz Kafka. When I lived in San Francisco friends would tell me, in the voice of having just about had it, that they needed to get out of the city, if only for a weekend. Or they'd make plans for trips abroad, or "back east," or to Mexico, hoping to return rejuvenated and revitalized. I always imagined on any given Friday several hundred people barely escaping the city limits before the mental crackup occurred, another potential episode of spontaneous mass psychosis narrowly averted. I guess it must be like a form of cabin fever, except that the cabin is a sprawling metropolitan area covering hundreds of square miles. Personally, I've never felt it, neither the need to escape nor the pull of a faraway locale. I mean I always nod in sympathy but I don't feel it in my viscera the way some people do, or maybe even most people. I am quite content to remain where I am with my hands folded neatly in my lap, until I'm not anymore, at which point merely going on a trip isn't going to make any difference. Another way to say it is that my wanderlust is more like a very mild wanderitch, it's there but develops so glacially that I'm more likely to say something like "yes, I can probably stay here only ten more years before getting thoroughly sick of it."

I've never loved where I am, but I've never hated it either. Places don't arouse passions in me, at least not the places I've lived, which makes me either lucky or unlucky. International travel doesn't interest me much. I'd like to do some traveling just so I can talk about it later; the actual experience doesn't intrigue me. For some reason many people treat news that you've traveled as some kind of special personal achievement, unless you traveled to foreign lands in a manner which is deemed too touristy or sanitized, or culturally imperious, and then the excursion swings back past neutral and counts as a demerit, a damnable infraction against something or other, some standard of authentic immersion. Going on a cruise, for instance, is worse than going to Graceland, even if it's an "exotic" cruise. You can go to Graceland ironically, but you go on a cruise to eat well and drink a lot and basically be a big drunk baby, and no one would believe you if you claimed to have been slumming.