Coloring the Map

The amazon wish list? One of the most fantastic inventions ever, as far as I'm concerned. I use mine primarily for three types of books:

1) Hardcovers that I really, really want to read but refuse to buy since I loathe toting them everywhere. I generally wait for paperback but during the year's worth of time that it takes for a softcover edition to be published, I've generally forgotten about it. But no more! It's really quite thrilling for a book nerd like me.
2) Paperbacks that I'm on the fence about, but save just in case I ever miraculously make it through my pile of unread books and need some new material.
3) Books that I lust after, but can't justify a real purpose in buying.

Now, it's a book from this final category that I spent a good long time looking at last night. All the linkage to similar books brought me to this one, which I promptly added to my wish list as well. If I had a coffee table, both of these books would be mine, $60 list prices be damned.

I don't know why I'm so obsessed with maps and borders and all things geography. Yes, I've expanded my horizons in the last few years, but it wasn't until the age of 21 that I left North America. But still, I have memories of map obsessions from a long ways back. I loved the days in social studies where we'd be given maps of this country or that continent to color. I would turn mine into mini-masterpieces. I would have colored neatly within the lines just the way my dad taught me - carefully using a color to trace the inside of all of the borders before gently shading the interior. I'd never (ever!) accidentally use the same color for any countries that shared a border, unlike some of my less anal third-grade peers. If I started coloring the water blue, I'd finish it, never leaving a random blue blob out in the middle of the Pacific like a lost continent. My right hand usually ached when I finished and the ever-present writing blister on my ring finger puffed up from all of the pencil-skin friction.

As the years went on, I learned all 50 state capitals and didn't realize I had forgotten them until my sophomore year of college. It was then that I was told that the big gold dome downtown that I could see from my bedroom window was indeed the state capitol building. (But, to be fair, who knew that a state's biggest city could be it's capital? Definitely not the case in New York, California, Illinois, Texas, etc, etc)

I'd study the globe in my dad's den for longer than I care to admit, tracing the veins of the Nile and the Amazon as they crawled inward towards the center of their continents. I'd scour the earth for appealing desert isles in tropical climes. I laughed last summer when I figured out I was moving to Sardinia and realized I could finally put a name to an island that I had previously only known as "the bottom half of that big semi-colon in the middle of the Mediterranean."

I even took a geography course for half a minute while at BU thinking that I'd get credit for looking at maps all day long. I promptly dropped it after realizing that real geography wasn't just shading maps but included analyzing climates and regional characteristics. Ew.

Today, my map-love is alive and well. The only facebook application that I have is the "Where I've Been" one, and I get giddy when I get to (electronically) color in a new country every other month or so. I love my passport because it's concrete proof of all of the places on the map that I've traveled. During a particularly harrowing recent customs experience, I flipped through the little blue book during the long wait to pass through border control. 26 stamps of varying transparencies spread over more than half of the pages (although to be fair almost half of these are for UK or Italy - my two main ports of call over the last two years).

I know I'm inevitably going to be disappointed with my eventual return to the States. This will be for many reasons, but chief among them will be the knowledge that I won't be accumulating any new countries or passport stamps for awhile. This Esquire article suggests that our nation's borders could be redrawn within my lifetime and supports more fluid movements between countries. While the prospect of a new map excited the kid inside of me, I can't help but be disappointed at this push towards a dissolution of borders. Europe is fantastic for someone like me who craves change. Within a few hours' drive, I can be somewhere with vastly different food, language, and customs. It's exhilarating, to say the least. But even this is falling away quickly with shared currency and open border agreements. I understand the benefits of unifying certain aspects of government, but I just hope that the culture doesn't get kicked to the curb as a result. I don't want to be left with a map that can be filled in with only a few colors.