Finding Mecca

This Saturday the Anthropology Department at my university is sponsoring a field trip to Houston, TX in order to see the Lucy exhibit at the museum. For those of you who don't know, Lucy is kind of a big deal to anthropologists. She's the skeleton of an early hominid, Australopithecus afarensis, one of the earliest ancestors of Homo sapiens. What's so remarkable about Lucy is that, while only about 40% of the skeleton was recovered, that 40% encompasses all of the primary body parts (i.e. there's an arm and a leg and a foot and a skull). So, Lucy is able to tell us an extraordinary amount, like the fact that she is about as tall as a kindergartener or the fact that she was bipedal (walked on two legs...VERY important to evolutionary biology).

Whether I'm going or not is still up in the air (although it unfortunately looks like I'm going to miss out), but what's so funny is nearly ALL the anthropology students are going. Seeing Lucy is a big deal to us; it's kind of like being able to talk to Adam Smith if you're an economist or smoke crack with Freud if you're a psychologist. Lucy is one of the cornerstones of our study of prehistory. For many of the students, she's a kind of Mecca.

The hardcore anthropologists have Lucy. The gay population has San Fransisco. Catholics have Vatican City, Jews have Israel, Muslims have...Mecca. But as I sit here, typing, it occurs to me that I don't really have a Mecca. I don't have some place that's so important to me that I have to see it before I die. I'm not too terribly concerned about seeing Lucy. I've been to San Fransisco and although admittedly I wasn't out yet I still the thought the city was ok. Just ok. It didn't inspire a religious-esque awakening or anything. Neither does Lucy. Or the Vatican City, New York, Israel, London, Cancun, or the People's Republic of China. I have nowehere that I want to go.

It feels to me like I'm still trying to find my Mecca, the place I want to go to, to be in. And maybe I even know what my Mecca is: a relationship with a guy that I can say "I love you" to, a man that I could fall asleep with every night with his arm wrapped around me. Cue the corny music, I know, but it is what it is. My Mecca is a happy, fruitful relationship, and I can't find it anywhere. How long do I have to journey before I reach my destination?

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,
Your Spy