My Old Blog

I went to Barnes & Noble today to look at travel guides. There is a sense of anticipation when you read about some far off place and know you’ll soon be there.

I’ve used every major budget travel guide in existence at one time or another. I favor Let’s Go because it is written by Americans and they rank their picks from best to worst. It is a judgmental travel guide, and that is useful most of the time since you often have no basis for your own judgement when you’re in a new place.

The problem with Let’s Go is that it doesn’t have the permanent staff that Lonely Planet does. Let’s Go is published by Harvard University Press…only Harvard degree seeking students are allowed to be contributors (I know this because I contacted them once about a job); they simply don’t have the manpower to cover every country.

Lonely Planet is a worldwide network of grizzled veterans who have managed to make their living in and around the travel industry. They are often expats, writers, and photographers that settled in a country or were raised there. Lonely Planet guides are not opinionated and are more like reference guides, meant to facilitate, not really recommend.

Because Lonely Planet is written largely by adult expats who no longer live in the US and probably haven’t for years, it has a very different feel than Let’s Go, penned by a bunch of over-achieving Harvard undergrads on an extended Spring Break. Travel veterans enjoy discovering, they do not like to be told where to stay or what to do. They want to stumble on great places, not be herded to them. Lonely Planet is terse and full of facts…not really a great read. Let’s Go is full of interesting stories and dinner table trivia. Let’s Go spoon feeds you. Lonely Planet treats you like an adult.

I still like Let’s Go, but even though they had a Let’s Go Peru (didn’t have one for Bolivia), I still chose the Lonely Planet. I have come to expect its dry delivery and extreme attention to detail (although on occasion I have found it to be wrong). Also, I know that the Let’s Go crowd is not even likely to GO to Peru. I wonder how successful that title is.

In this case, choosing Lonely Planet ensures a greater chance of running into other travelers. I figure mostly Australians and some S. Africans will travel to Peru and Bolivia. It is too far for Europeans and all the Americans will be at Panama City for Spring Break. Everyone outside the US uses Lonely Planet, and it is an Australian company.

Any American that happens to be down there will likely follow the same logic as me, so they’ll have Lonely Planet too. If I remember, I think I’ll keep track of how many Let’s Go guidebooks I see.

There is also the possibility of traveling without a guidebook at all, which I did one time. It still works out, but it is nice to know where the Internet Cafes are without having to search all over the city/town/village.

Slightly related to all this is that I found out my cell phone would work in both Bolivia and Peru wherever coverage is available. I thought for about half a second to bring it; maybe get a picture phone or something. Then I realized people might actually call. That isn’t really a vacation if you’re available 24/7. As always though, I will be available by mental telepathy.

Also, I think I will put together a very simple weblog for my trip separate from this one. I will base the interface on one of two pictures.

Which do you like the best??

 

Work, sofa, beer, tennis, work, sleep, food.

That pretty much sums up my life. It is much less exciting to be “settled”. Maturity seems to me to be largely the inability to break away from one’s routine. That isn’t really mature at all….it is just inflexible.

The routine isn’t always bad though. I like work sometimes. They certainly need me, so I feel a certain responsibility to make sure it doesn’t all go to hell in a handbasket. I like tennis. I like to sleep.

So am I complaining? I don’t know. I enjoy parts of the frantic, endless achievement of work. I enjoy my distractions that keep me sane.

I’ve partly crossed this bridge before. When I was younger I had a self-reinforcing need to examine the significance of what I did. Every answer I found, I asked another question. It was intellectual quicksand. The more I asked, the deeper I sank.

Because at some point, many questions away from the original reality, you come up empty. Every line of logic, no matter how elegant, ends at vanishing point where reality meets the great unknown.

Everything is made of the 4 earth elements: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water. No, it is all made of Atoms. No, Protons, Neutrons, and Electrons. True, but all of that is made of Quarks spinning in different directions. But Quarks are made of Cosmic Strings vibrating at different frequencies……keep asking the questions and one day we’ll make a telescope that can reach so far out into space you’ll see the back of your own freaking head!!

And then we’ll back to the original question: Would someone remind me what the hell we are supposed to be doing here??

I got a lot happier overall when I starting policing how many questions away from reality I would allow myself to venture. If you can answer the first few with any satisifaction….I say that is enough.

When I started work last March I imposed on myself a one year question moratorium: No questions for a year. Whether or not I “like X” or if “Y is meaningful” was only allowed as a means to pass time. I could ask just a few questions, and I was not allowed to take action on anything I thought.

I think this has been a sound policy and largely successful. However, I don’t want to be ostrich and my year is about up.

I wonder if I will continue my question cease-fire?

Is a drug-induced sense of well-being the same as “real” happiness?

I think the likelihood of something like this happening is quite high. I also think it might be sooner, rather than later.

If you could take a pill that would make you feel happy, would you really be happy? Would you care? Is there really a difference?

What a great question!! Actually there are already a wide variety of measures that can get you close to the happiness pill: Sleep, exercise, beer, leisure, and sex to name a few.

But with a cool pill, even in the absense of all those things, even if everyone on the planet hated your freaking guts….you could still be happy.

That is bad news….for civilization. If people could be happy doing anything, then they would do everything. Cause and effect could be decoupled. You would no longer have to take prudent action to make yourself happy…you could do anything under the sun and it wouldn’t make any difference….you’d have a smile on your face all the way to the end of the world.

Or maybe if everyone got happy, they’d all want to do good things?? When we are happy we feel nicer, and more inclined to treat people with respect. Maybe the world would be a better place if we all got drugged up on happiness. Imagine being stuck in a traffic jam all morning yet showing up to work with a wink and a smile! Maybe it would be like one big Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

And productivity?? Economic output would plummet. People use money as a surrogate for happiness. They buy stuff to make them feel better temporarily, to alleviate the anxiety of life….but that is only if life makes us anxious. No need to buy our happiness when we can swallow it in pill form….although I bet the pills would be expensive.

Or maybe productivity would go up? Recent business research shows that happy, positive people are more engaged and creative in their work. Maybe we’d all get rich? Although I’m unsure what we’d need all that money for if not to divert outselves from our unhappiness.

I think we’d spend it on video games….and in these video games people would be really unhappy. It would be novel and entertaining to us. Regardless, if we were all happy weekly status meetings at the office would be alot easier to sit through.

You know what I really think would happen?? I think the brain would revolt. It wasn’t made to be happy all the time.

And I know this is an imaginary drug. You could make it non-addictive…and non-damaging, right? Wrong. I don’t think we have the wiring for that. If a pill makes us happy, then two pills would make us happier. Sound familiar? We already have happiness pills….most of them are illegal and come from Amsterdam or Colombia.

If we were happy all the time, the part of the brain that makes us happy would get tired and unable to sustain the effort of all those endless days of smiles, candy canes, and bunny rabbits.

And in some sense happy is just the absense of negative emotions anyway. If you were always happy, I imagine you wouldn’t be quite so happy about it. Happy is a better than average mood. How can we be better than average all the time?

And besides, being happy all the time isn’t all its cracked up to be. Who doesn’t enjoy waking up in a shitty mood and drinking oneself into a stupor of self-pity?? I know I do!!!

I’ve spoken in the past about the quest for happiness. I admit it amuses me to think about. At the risk of appearing narcissistic, I will quote myself on this matter:

This brings us to today, where it is assumed that happiness is a birthright. It is no coincidence that unhappiness has increased as a result. As I have found through experience, thinking you must always be happy can itself become a source of unhappiness when you find it is impossible to attain, thus believing that it is some defect in yourself or unfairness of the world that is impeding your eternal inner peace.

As far as the question of whether or not I would care that my happiness was fake: Although I have no experience in this matter and it is purely a mental exercise…I would say it wouldn’t much matter to me.

I could sit peacefully on the hillside enjoying the view (which might be of a trash dump for all I cared) while the non-pill-users could get together an angry support group to protest the “reality cheaters”. Misery loves company. Thats why people keep telling me to get married I figure.

As far as whether or not there is a difference between “real” happiness and pill-form happiness: I think not. Only the unhappy would be troubled by such a question.

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What do you think? What would happen if they came out with a happiness pill? Would you take it?

I’ve already written my next entry, but I always promise myself not to post after I’ve been drinking.

I always end up rambling about nothing and it makes no sense. I’ll clean it up and it’ll be online by this evening.

On another note, I’ve decided to move out of my apartment complex and move in with someone I know that has a house nearby. I’ll end up saving about 300 bucks a month. Thats a lot of money.

I could say a bunch of crap about the history of Peru, the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, the mines of Potosi, or the jungles of Bolivia…I’m great at looking up all that information….but I don’t feel like it.

I haven’t the slightest idea why I picked Peru. I also thought about Ecuador, Panama, Nicaragua….I also wanted to go back to Eastern Europe…but decided at least I want to go somewhere I can brush up on my Spanish a bit.

Although that is largely wishful thinking. I’m sure spend most of my time talking to English speaking travelers and use my Spanish to say things like, “Cuanto cuesta?” “Donde esta el bano?” and “Otra cerveza por favor”…..and perhaps a few less well known phrases like “Quieres acostarse conmigo?” “Creo que me voy a desmayar. El cuarto esta girando.” and “Come mi culo”. Learning a foreign language in the United States is largely a waste of time…at least as far as practicality is concerned.

Another thing that is largely useless in the United States is knowledge of geography. Where is Iraq? It is in the Middle East. Where is the Middle East? Just left of the Far East. It doesn’t matter anyway. It is just some far off place where people make our Gap jeans and drill oil from the desert to fuel our traffic jams.

That last comment was brought on by the large number of people that have responded, “Where is that?” when I told them where I was going.

Here is a map of Peru in relation to the rest of S. America. If you don’t know where S. America is, it is just south of Central America, which is not coincidentally located Centrally between North and South America. If you don’t know where North America is…..then it is unlikely you have the intelligence to read what I am writing.

You can look at the pictures though:

I’ve planned a lot of trips in my day. Actually, I’ve gone on a lot of trips in my day. Sometimes they are haphazardly planned….but not always.

I’m probably going to take 3 weeks off in March or April and go somewhere foreign. That really doesn’t narrow it down much. It is fairly difficult to look at a map and just pick someplace to go.

You’ve got to ask yourself a lot of questions: Is there anything to see? Is it safe? Do I need a visa? Does it have tourist infrastucture? Has the government been overthrown lately? Is it the rainy season? Is it expensive? Are there any necessary vaccines and/or medicines to take? Can I get a cheap plane ticket?

It is a bitch to track down all that information. It was easier in the old days. Or at least is seemed that way. I never really had to pick destinations out of a hat like this. I travelled in Europe because I was already living there. You can’t miss in Europe anyway. If you’re already in SE Asia (which I was), go to Thailand. It is the backpacker capital of the world. Living in Israel?? Go see Jeruselum or take a trip to the Pyramids. Who doesn’t want to see the pyramids?

What I’m doing is like throwing darts at a map. And, seemingly, I’ve already been to many of the can’t miss travel spots. I’m running out of places…sort of.

I could always try to get to like Papua New Guinea or something…but I’m not so sure being surrounded by a bunch of midget cannibals with plates in their lips shooting frog poison darts at me sounds like fun.

Maybe I’m getting old though. Travel is always a mixed bag like that. You want to go somewhere exotic, but not too exotic…otherwise you’ll die of cholera in some backwater swamp in Sri Lanka.

Its just that the “exotic, but not too exotic” countries are always changing. It is those countries with a rich history that are past third world but not quite modern that are still happy for the tourists but have not yet realized that they’re all super rich by their standards and so should be swindled out of everything they own…along with a couple of other balancing acts….if you can find somewhere like that….you’ve found a backpacker’s Mecca.

Too many tourists and the locals are jaded and dishonest. Too few tourists and there is likely no infrastructure (and probably a good reason why no one is visiting). Too poor and they’ll rob you at knife point in the streets. Too rich and it isn’t an exotic travelers destination anymore (not to mention it is really expensive).

It all seems sort of ridiculous doesn’t it?

I figure this will be one of my last backpacker-like vacations anyway. It is really tempting just to pay a lump of money and have someone do all this for me and have no decisions nor worries for the entire trip….all guaranteed safe and stress free.

That used to never tempt me. But money is very good at eliminating these types of hassles….and now I have money, so why not use it?

Besides, we get more cautious as we get older. I don’t know why really. Maybe we were just dumb when we were younger. Maybe we realize that the percentages are bound to catch up with us eventually. Probably the more things we are responsible for the more things we realize can go wrong.

Whatever the reason, living here in the US lulls me with its comfort and safety. I would hate to be kidnapped in some S. American jungle. It would be humid and I’d likely be tied up…no bed, no computer, no hot shower. That sounds like such a hassle.

Maybe I’ll just stay in my apartment for 3 weeks in my pajamas, drinking beer, order pizza after pizza, and play Xbox over the Internet until I waste away into nothing.

That would require no planning at all.

Anne Marie wrote the following quote. She is one of my favorite people and so I gave her question some thought in the useless roundabout way at which I excel:

“Anyway…yeah…sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m doin here in Germany…wasting time getting a masters that, actually, I am not sure if I like it because all I dream about now is opening a restaurant in the south of Italy somewhere…do you have some advice for me…I’ll take some if you’re handing it out Elliott…”

I am not a big fan of giving out advice, although it has its uses. Fortune cookies give advice. Only friends can support each other.

Your dream of opening a restaurant in Southern Italy sounds a lot like my dream of opening a traveler’s hostel in Eastern Europe.

I’ve deconstructed my dream a lot. Is it a dream of escape? My form of a primal subconscious dream to escape the responsibilities of life? I’m sure everyone has such a dream in some form. Does anyone every follow it and if so at what price?

Is it simply a fantasy that serves as an outlet for everything in my life that isn’t what I want it to be? In that case the dream is just a symbol of what more I want to achieve, and is safe because it is distant and can take on whichever qualities I need it to at the time. If that is the case, then following my fantasy wouldn’t satisy it. I would simply invent another one.

Is it a dream of fulfillment? Do I actually, in practice, prefer that life to this one I now live? Would I embrace the advantages and accept the disadvantages of that life better than the one I have in the US?

I’m not so sure any of those are the answer, probably some combination and a few things I’ve never thought of.

I used to talk to Peter all the time about the “right” thing to do…or actually he used to talk to me. He always did, and often still does, refer to his decisions in terms of right and wrong…as if there is some objective measure or a predetermined path to discover and fulfill.

I never understood that thinking. To me there is very rarely right and wrong…only many options, each with their pros and cons, but none of them is RIGHT in any objective sense…not even RIGHT in a subjective sense. Better or worse sometimes, yes…but right or wrong??? History books decide that, and they are written by the winners and so aren’t to be trusted. And no one has hindsight of the future.

At the time, there is only a decision, and how firmly and whole-heartedly you commit to it.

Of course, given a bit of time, I could deconstruct that statement too. I think the point here, if there even is one, is not to listen too much to what I have to say. I know I don’t.

Ask Peter, he might be able to give you the right answer.

I used to joke about seceding from the Union and forming my own country. I’ve know about Sealand for a few years, but I was doing some reading tonight and was reminded again.

This is Sealand, a sovereign nation:

It has its own passports, stamps, currency and a flag. Its just like a real country….only a little smaller.

It consists of a rusty steel deck sitting on two hollow, chubby concrete cylinders that rise 60 feet above the churn of the North Sea. Up top there’s a drab building and a jury-rigged helicopter landing pad.

During World War II, the United Kingdom decided to establish a number of military bases, the purpose of which was to defend England against German air raids. These sea forts housed enough troops to man and maintain artillery designed to shoot down German aircraft and missiles. They were situated along the east coast of England on the edge of the English territorial waters.

Some of them, actually one of them, was built outside British jurisdiction in international waters. After the war the bases were no longer needed so the British Navy dismantled them, except for one.

On 2 September 1967, former English major Paddy Roy Bates formally occupied the “island” and settled there with his family. After intensive discussions with skillful English lawyers, Roy Bates proclaimed the island his own state. Of course, he proclaimed himself King.

I keep asking myself….what the fuck did they do all day?? I understand wanting to “get away from it all”….but this takes the cake.

The ILO is the best. They need to make their research cheaper though.

New ILO book explores “Decent Working Time Deficit” in the industrialized countries

Twenty per cent or more of the workforce in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Japan work at least 50 hours a week, compared with fewer than 10 per cent in most European countries, according to a new publication authored by the International Labour Office (ILO).

“Working Time and Workers’ Preferences in Industrialized Countries: Finding the Balance”, produced by the ILO Conditions of Work and Employment Programme, argues that there are substantial gaps between the hours that people are actually working and the number of hours that workers need or would prefer to work.

During the late 1990s, people working in excess of 50 hours per week in the US and Australia increased from 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the workforce. Among those countries included in the study, only Japan (28.1 per cent) and New Zealand (21.3 per cent) had a higher proportion working more than 50 hours per week.

By contrast, in most EU countries (prior to the 2004 expansion) the number of people working 50 hours or more per work remains well under 10 per cent, with figures ranging from 1.4 per cent in the Netherlands to 6.2 in Greece and Ireland. The only exception is the United Kingdom, where some 15.5 per cent of the workforce spends 50 hours or more at work.

The overall pattern underlying these variations is that countries with relatively limited regulation of working time, such as the US, the UK and Australia, tend to have a much higher incidence of excessive hours than other countries, according to the book.

So….this is really more of an academic study than a book. It costs 132 bucks….not exactly a Barnes and Noble special. I can’t afford it anyway.

The ILO is a branch of the UN that promotes labor rights, social justice, and human rights. It was founded in 1919 and is the only surviving major creation of the Treaty of Versailles which brought the League of Nations into being and it became the first specialized agency of the UN in 1946.

Of course with a spelling like “Labour” and the promotion of labor rights, it is not a creation of the US. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Does anyone know anyone that works at the ILO or the UN?

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but I’m drowning in work again. They’re not scoring any points with me. I have a performance review this week, and I’m guessing it’ll go really well for me. How ironic.

In the meantime, I just reminded myself that right after my work hours ballooned the first time I bought a new domain name: PlanningMyEscape.com.

Maybe I’ll start using it.