I’ll be in New York next week! If you’re there, I hope you’ll come to my reading in Brooklyn on Saturday, March 3rd or maybe to Cringe on Wednesday, March 7th.

Andreas, meanwhile, will be in scuba diving in Bali next week. If this east/west separate spouses travel plan gives you a WTF?! moment, you’re not alone. Even our closest friends are like, “Wait, one of you is going on a tropical vacation and the other one isn’t? Buh?” Dre and I are pretty independent, but this is definitely a little extreme even for us. Here’s how it all went down:

A crew of friends started organizing a trip to Bali last fall. Dre was immediately into going, while I looked at the timing and wasn’t sure how it would work with book promotions. I stalled for as long as I could before Andreas was like “Dude, are we going or what!?” and I finally had to balk and say that it just didn’t seem like the right time for me to leave the country. I’m paying for all my book tour travels out of pocket, and the prospect of trying to swing an international vacation with several domestic trips just wasn’t feasible financially.

I also knew I’d get burned out and exhausted from all the traveling, and that I’d have trouble enjoying myself in Bali because I’d spend the whole time thinking about my book and trying to compulsively check my email. I don’t do this because I have to — I do this because I love it. Tropical vacations are great for escaping from the ho-hum of daily life, but when your shit is in high gear and you’re all excited about it, the last think you want to do is escape it.

So no: I wouldn’t go. But Andreas isn’t promoting a book right now, and is a consummate traveler who’s been stuck in the USA for several years, and why should I keep him from going a trip with a big crew of our friends just because I don’t want to go? It’s not that I couldn’t go — I just knew myself well enough to know that the timing wasn’t quite right for my brain. But the timing for Dre was just fine, so of course he should go, right?

(In the middle of all this I got laid off and was like “Holy fuck, I’m SO GLAD I’m not staring an international vacation in the face while I’m on unemployment.”)

I did have a brief flash of sadness and I realized it wasn’t being jealous of Andreas going to Bail (I made the choice not to go) but that there was some sort of “I don’t want him having fun if I’m not there” response which, HELLO: ew. I’m a solipsistic only child, but even I balk at that level of selfishness. I may be a narcissistic asshole sometimes, but I am NOT enough of an asshole to keep my favoritiest person from having a wonderful vacation just because I’m busy with other stuff. Picture that: me keeping him home so that I can run around and blabber about my book?

That said, I didn’t want to sit at home clacking away on book stuff while Andreas was gone, so I timed my East Coast trip during the time he’s gone. So now I have my own kind of wonderful vacation trip coming up, in exactly my flavor: a trip to two cities where I have many beloved old friends to see and meetings to have and business dealings to finagle and Cringe readings to do and books to pitch and reality television producers to chat up and a bazillion other things to do. While drinking cocktails in the Balinese sand sounds wonderful, for right now a trip to New York is exactly my brand of heaven.

And so this, to me, is what love is really about: wanting what’s best for your partner (him: bali! me: new york!) and being excited and tickled to see your beloved go off and do their thang while you go off and do yours, knowing that when it’s all over, you get to reunite and combine inspiration superpowers and take over the entire world with your creepy happy cult. That said, he will be the tanner cult-leader, that’s for sure.