Plan Z

There are a lot of words swirling around in my head right now. They flutter around like kites taking off from the ground, twitching and flipping over in defiance. They refuse to let me pin them down into real sentences, much less the vague ideas that they've become.

It started with The New Yorker. I was reading it in class today and people just kind of stared, some venturing to fling the word "Intellectual" at its cover as if that were a bad thing to be, but that's not really where it started. That was just a random side note. It started with an article about diamond thieves that are internationally known as the Pink Panthers, then another article about a restaurant in Turkey that makes old-style food so authentic that it brings people to tears. There was a story about a photographer who takes pictures of the landscape while flying around in his red, engine propelled paraglider, and a thin column about the effect of one painting on a person's whole life. And these are interesting stories in themselves simply because they are stories that seem more like a novel than a piece of nonfiction. That's the best part of them: these are all real stories.

Based on ingenuity, sincerity, good tips, and some luck, these journalists tunneled into worlds unseen by anyone not originally part of them. They travel the world and, if something like a tiny Turkish restaurant interests them, they schedule an interview with the owner and suddenly find themselves accompanying him to market day at five in the morning. The Pink Panther article was all the more intriguing-- imagine meeting up with gangsters renowned throughout the Balkans for lunch and scribbling down your notes in the bathroom instead of right in front of them to avoid arousing their suspicion of you.

Imagine paragliding through the air for twenty two seconds.

I think the reason all these words can't cement themselves into sentences is because they're too fantastic, too quixotic to be real. But they collectively translate into this: How did they get there? How did these people a) end up at The New Yorker and b) end up reporting from wherever they are?

And then there's c)How do I get there? Not The New Yorker, specifically, and definitely not chasing Serbian gangsters, but there, in...at...what?

That's the blurry part. How do you yank the words out of the sky by their kitestrings and pin them on the wall?