Your Wanderlust, Always Important

May 26, 2021,

Immersion in the scenery of the incredibly vibrant San Francisco Bay Area may be the perfect vaccine for wanderlust sadness, but we say, try not to protect yourself from this virus.

Continue to allow the feelings of adventure to flow through your body.

No matter how great life can be in San Francisco, and it so often is, allow the wanderlust virus to spread.

We have a friend in our circle who we will call Denise.

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Denise was very fortunate when she was young in that her parents traveled from the West Coast of the United States to the Atlantic Ocean of the East and took Denise and her sibling along for the ride.

They shared many adventures together, and as you might guess, bonded closely as a family.

So often along the way they emotionally had to rely upon each other yet also savored the experience of meeting new people, some of whom became life-long friends.

Always a responsible person, as an adult, when trapped in a loveless marriage that she stayed in for the sake of the children, due to budget constraints, Denise could no longer travel as much as she once did yet she still had a wanderlust.

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To vaccinate her from the pain and sadness of a temporary but very constrained life of duty, Denise built and escaped into her own movie room where she covered the windows with black curtains and purchased a huge flat screen television which allowed her to electronically travel the globe.

It is not the same as traveling to those intriguing places yourself but as a vaccination, it helped reduce the severe wanderlust symptoms.

Here are some films and television that she loved along the way.

Without a Trace is an American police procedural drama television series that originally aired on CBS from September 26, 2002 to May 19, 2009, following the cases of a Missing Persons Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in New York City.

Each episode followed the search for one individual under tight time constraints.

Denise liked the characters and found the series to mostly be well-written and as she watched, she couldn’t help but wonder, in every episode, what if the person who is missing does not want to be found?

What if they loathed their current life, as she did, and just wanted to quickly pack up and leave.

Not wanting to ever be found again.

Have you ever felt that way?

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With children involved, Denise would never seriously consider doing that. Behaving like that would be incredibly selfish and the children most likely would never forgive her and they shouldn’t. Denise reasoned, at a time they need you the most, you’re gone. For selfish reasons.

It is for those reasons that Denise never remotely thought about having an affair.

Still, she dreamed of wanderlust. In her movie room.

A film that she escaped into, that may surprise you, is Someone to Watch Over Me.

Someone to Watch Over Me is a 1987 romantic crime thriller film starring Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers and directed by Ridley Scott. The film's soundtrack includes the George and Ira Gershwin song from which the film takes its title, here sung by Sting, and Vangelis' "Memories of Green", originally from Scott's Blade Runner.

Denise loved Sting’s musical version of Someone to Watch Over Me. It set the mood.

The film reminded her of the Richard Gere classic, American Gigolo, in the sense that the first half of both films are intense and time era cult like. American Gigolo captured upscale Los Angeles in the early 1980’s to perfection as Someone to Watch Over Me captured the elite Manhattan lifestyle in the mid to late 80’s with insightful flair.

Both of those worlds are places that Denise knew that she would never exist in, but if she was honest, desired to.

Wanderlust is not always about traveling to foreign countries or the remote wilderness to find yourself. Sometimes, as in the case of Denise, it is about experiencing a way of life that you shamefully lust for but will never ever partially partake in.

Then there was Broken English.

Once again a penetrating song resonated long after the film ended. Marianne Faithful’s Broken English.

Broken English is a 2007 American romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes, in her feature directorial debut. The film stars Parker Posey, Melvil Poupaud, Drea de Matteo, Justin Theroux, Peter Bogdanovich, and Gena Rowlands.

The film was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards: Best Female Lead for Ms. Posey and Best First Screenplay for Cassavetes.

Here is the storyline.

Nora Wilder (Parker Posey), a single career woman, works at a Manhattan boutique hotel where her excellent skills in guest relations are the complete opposite of her lack of skills in finding true love.

If it is not her loving and dominant mother (Gena Rowlands) attempting to set her up that consistently fails, she has her friend's (Drea de Matteo) disastrous blind dates to rely on as a backup for further dismay.

She's surrounded by friends who are all happily engaged or romantically involved and somehow, love escapes Nora.

Out of nowhere, at an obscure party, she meets an unusual Frenchman (Melvil Poupaud) who helps her discover life and love beyond her self-imposed boundaries.

The operative words here are self-imposed.

Nora allows her new love to leave and go back to Paris.

Desperate and sad, for the first time Nora takes a true risk, flies to Paris and finds him.

There are some key parallels in Denise’s choices.

Have you viewed any of the above features? You might be able to guess.

None of the above main characters have children. We analyzed that pretty quickly.

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Our pop psychology on our friend is that, when she was a young adult, instead of getting married and doing what was expected of her, she wished that she threw caution to the wind, traveled to wherever her heart took her and met intriguing and unpredictable handsome strangers.

We came to that conclusion because three other films on her list, Voyager, starring the legendary Sam Shepard (whose character is not aware that he has a child), Kissing Jessica Stein (childless) and There Is A New World Somewhere with Agnes Bruckner (childless).

Oh, Francis Ha, as well. Childless too.

All of the characters are searching for something and leaving behind their previous life of quiet desperation to find it.

In Voyager, Sam Shepard’s Engineer character travels Europe after an important breakup and meets a beautiful and mesmerizing naïve young woman. The music here is soft, sad and memorable.

Kissing Jessica Stein presents a young woman (Jennifer Westfeldt) bound by traditions (like Denise) who has to make a very tough decision in the face of massive family expectations.

The toughest one to sit through was There Is A New World Somewhere. Agnes Bruckner’s character is leaving behind a failed experience in New York where previously she left her small town to pursue her big city dreams that didn’t work out.

In free fall, she returns home for a friend’s wedding, which makes her even more miserable. Like Nora in Broken English, all of her friends are either happily married or about to be. They would love to match make for our heroine but she’s not having that.

She has wanderlust and hasn’t been vaccinated yet.

At the party she meets a handsome stranger, voids out her obligations to her friends and travels the American South on a wanderlust adventure with a handsome stranger.

It ends very painfully, as most of those encounters do.

Still, we feel it was worth the risk and the journey and though for the moment, it may feel like a failure, in the long run, if she does settle down and heaven forbid, settle, deep down inside, no matter how her new traditional future turns out and all of the constraints that go with that, she will know that at least she had the courage to try and was not a coward who played it safe.

We will never be young twice. Try and get it right the first time.

Life is about choices. We sense that once Denise’s children have left the home, she will get a second chance to make a wanderlust decision amidst hard marital choices.

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The San Francisco Bay Area is so enthralling, it can dull the pain of wanderlust. Everything seems to be there in abundance. The mountains, breath-taking hikes, the ocean, theater, the wine country, incredible restaurants, shopping malls, professional sports and intriguing people walking by to watch and salivate over.

All at your fingertips.

Wonderful. Enjoy it. As much as you can. Immerse yourself in it. We do have a few words of caution. Don’t delude yourself. In terms of wanderlust?