Take me away

Travel is what I want to do with my life. I want to go places and see things. Tourism isn’t what I mean either. Just seeing the same things other people can see or will see so that I can impress them when I know about it too, doesn’t seem like fun to me. I want to mention places that no one else has heard of. I love Anthony Bourdain’s show as well as Andrew Zimmern’s, though his not as much. It also may explain my love of space and space travel. The downside to seeing the world is that unless you are quite well off, it is incredibly costly, rather uncomfortable, and potentially dangerous. A good friend of mine wants to climb Everest which is a great example of all three rolled into one. My unique health concerns also preclude me from being nearly as daring as perhaps I once was, but I don’t think it will keep me out of all travel. I mean no more so than any other limiting factor would. One new factoid I just read about however just might make me think twice before I whip out my Passport…Baggage. I have learned to travel light and it seems that the further from civilization you get, the less you actually need to bring. (Material possessions are for westerners.)

I know for a fact that people are stupid. It is intrinsic in us. We have no instinct, we have no skills. Everything humans accomplish is a learned ability. It is why we had to learn to write while other species don’t. Imagine your surgeon trying to do a Liver transplant without ever reading a book, but only “shadowing” another surgeon for a period of time? Actually the more I think about it, the more feasible that seems, but I tell you what..I don’t want to be there first patient. So when I see that there were 25 million pieces of luggage lost for good last year it doesn’t really surprise me. But that breaks down to a total number of 3000 pieces per hour! I have no way of knowing just how many people fly each day but with each state averaging lets say, 3 major airports operating each day, then that means 20 bags/airport get lost each hour. That number small as it may be is still fairly large and you could say that maybe half are due to human ineptitude. So that leaves 1500 bags per hour getting truly lost, stolen, or misdirected by the airlines. This leads me to just one conclusion.

Never check anything of value. Ask DJ’s, they know. DJ A-Trak blogs about his travels often and he makes sure that when he gets on a plane he always carries his most essential items. I also love how the list above does not include employee theft or Plane crashes. If I had to do a break down it would look like this:

- Human Idiocy: 42%

-Airline Mistake: 51%

-Theft after check in (by security): 15%

-Pirates: 13%

The maximum value insurance will cover for a lost bag is $5,000 USD so make sure if you’re carrying around your gold brick collection that you spread it around. Though with gold coming in at right around $1,100/oz and most bars weighing in at 400oz…you may want to find some other way of transporting those things.

The Prelude

I just spent about an hour writing a post detailing the events of perhaps one of the worst valentines days of all time. It revolved around a story of my ex-girlfriend (or as I like to call her, 145lbs of hell) and I, and I used words like “consummate liar”, and “wholly disappointing”. Tomorrow marks the 2 year anniversary of that fiasco and in my head the story was going to illustrate that Valentines day for me is a crappy holiday not because I’m single this year but because it’s a day built on flawed principals and sucks no matter what. I then wrote a follow-up to it because I felt like I somehow needed to balance out the good feelings I had included in the post going up tomorrow with an expression of my displeasure with the way things ended.

However once I finished, I realized what I had written didn’t sit well with me. I could just post the story, and the part about how she had a new boyfriend before my birthday that year which was only weeks away. But increasing my readership and lashing out aren’t really my goal here. I think my Official Valentines Day post entitled "Think With Your Heart" is a well-done post. It is partly something I dug up and decided to use here because it’s honest and accurate. Harboring feelings of anger and trying to exact revenge are really signs that I’m bitter and I don’t want to be that. More importantly, I was only mad because I made the right choice to walk away once, and got burned by going back on my own promise to myself. If there is anything I hate it’s being a contributor to my own demise. Not to mention I felt in large part that the excitement I once felt would be unmatched. When we first met my ex was still kind of in the stages of finishing her break up from before me. (I guess I should have seen this as a clue for the future) She had tickets to see her most favorite band, and was planning to go with him. However we were in the early stages of our relationship, this being the summer of 2005, and she told me she didn’t really want to go because she’d rather have been with me. I honestly barely knew her, but realized quickly that this wasn’t an insignificant thing. We were friends first so I knew enough to know that she wasn’t just going to choose not to see these guys perform live.

It was when I remembered this story that I decided to scrap the last post because it was then I knew that no matter what happened after that day, she had done a lot to show me she was serious right then and there. I had not done enough to capitalize on that and coupled with my desire not to carry any further into this new year with a now tired story, I came up with this third post. This is also a product of the fact that I have met someone who makes me feel those feelings again. I didn’t think I could, and I know part of me didn’t want to. I’m not afraid because I felt joy ending my last relationship, I didn’t. What worries me is that I may not have any feelings of joy starting my next one. This girl may one day read this so it’s slightly embarrassing, but she knows it is no secret I love her shoe collection nearly as much as mine, and while there’s nothing serious about it right now at all, just knowing there are people in the world I can feel special about it a really big fact for me. I’ve long been a slave to the fear of not being comfortable moving on because I had such strong feelings before. But now I really feel like I can close that chapter and be fine with it.

In closing I’ll have a post for Valentines day, this post today, and that other thing I wrote…I’ll just sit on. Maybe next year I’ll look back at it and be glad I didn’t post it, or maybe I’ll be glad I saved it, and decide to use it then. We will just have to wait and see.