This summer feels like a complete wash. I did go to Kelowna, true, but it has mostly been spent with my nose in books and sitting in classrooms. I guess I’m putting this work in now so I can be done school earlier, but I just want to be travelling and seeing the world. One friend just finished a study in Ghana and is now touring Germany. Irma my artist friend just finished a one month stint in Montreal. Everyone is headed somewhere or just returning and I feel stagnant.

I suppose I am heading to Kingston in around a month, but I have been to Kingston several times. Hell, I lived there for almost ten years. I am desparately trying to convince my mom to go somewhere (anywhere!!) with me over a weekend or after our trip to Kingston but she is very reluctant (much to my dismay). I know I only have 60 or summers left on this planet and it depresses me to some extent this one has been somewhat wasted so far. 6 weeks left before September brings around a new semester of school, I better make the most of it. Roadtrip anyone?

So Adam and I have been slowly going over the details of our trip to Iceland, but not too much since
1. I don’t know when I can actually go
2. We don’t know if my friend-ette Irma is coming

Now, I am a fan of doing things that make little to no sense. It makes life more interesting. Hence, I desparately want to drive the ring road around Iceland despite it being one way bridges and dirt roads. True there is a bus that goes around it (thanks to one of my lovely commenters) but Adam is not one to take buses. We want to rent a car. Problem is, a car rental even for a few days gets up into the thousands of dollars range in Iceland. Seriously. Why? Iceland, according to Wikipedia, has one of the highest car ownership rates per capita in the entire world. You think some nice Icelandic person with 4 cars would just let us have one on good faith and maybe a nice bottle of maple syrup.

Planning this trip is slightly more difficult than I had originally thought, but I am just going to assume this will make it more fun in the end. Though, to be honest, I can’t stop thinking about that movie about the vampires in the Arctic. Iceland would make a way better vampire destination because it is a tiny isolated island. On the bright side, it would be safe from zombies in the even of a living dead outbreak (at least for a while – zombies can swim/float).

And this is what I think about while planning a trip.

I think by now my list has every continent, and possibly even every country, on it. Of course, like with all things, I have a few favoured destinations, ones that distract me from everything.

Snow = like Iceland. Boring roofs = not like Iceland

1. Iceland
Most people like warm destinations, but being Canadian, I prefer familiar temperatures and not having to buy new clothes to travel. I also like colourful roofs, which Iceland has an abundance of. Oh, and there’s a penis museum.

2. Morocco
Whenever I dream I’m travelling, I dream I’m in Morocco. There was this one time I dreamed I was in Italy but people were trying to kill me and I stabbed someone in the neck, very vividly, so you can see why I opt more for Morocco. One time someone asked me if it was the beaches that drew me towards it, and I replied “Morocco has beaches?”. There’s something about the food, the giant deserts and the culture that I like, all of which I, of course, learned about from Brad Pitt in Babel.

3. Russia
Adam says if I go to Russia I will get stabbed and die. Why does he think I want to go? Can you imagine that twitter message? EPIC! “Landed in Moscow, went through customs, agent stabbed me in the eye”. Really, I just want to go to Russia for two reasons:
a. My Russian history teacher had a mesmerizing moustache and was totally hot.
b. That same teacher told me about a guy who dresses up like Lenin and runs around in St. Petersburg

4. Los Angeles
I’m going to find the Zachary Quinto and follow him around until he files a restraining order. Hopefully he’ll spend some time at tourist hot spots so I can see those too.

5. Cuba
I just want to be a Communist and lay on the beach without abandon.

6. Afghanistan
While I hate to see myself as being too good for a war zone, I can also see how deciding to travel freely to one as people try to escape it is a bit…well wrong. I met a guy from Afghanistan when I was in high school and he was one of the nicest people in the world and looked really good with a popped collar. He told me once about how he had shot a gun and my tiny white 17 year old Canadian brain exploded. I really want to go there, but I think I might wait for it to settle down a bit there, which I hope it does eventually.

7. Yemen
I was once told Yememi men do it better, and I now want
a. a shirt that says that
b. to wear that shirt in Yemen
Plus it might be the closest I ever get to being in Saudi Arabia.

8. Peru
I think a lot about the fact they eat guinea pigs. It fascinates me. I want to see the farms they keep them in. And try eating one, maybe. They also have alpacas which are indisputably the most awesome animal ever to exist in the entire Universe. They do not eat the alpacas from what I understand, except in rare cases, which makes Peru super cool in my books.

mmm Asian stuff.

9. Japan
Adam really got me into Japan. I used to have no interest in going at all, but after Adam kept blabbing on about wanting to go there, he totally changed my mind. And I love Asian stuff, like the food and wonderful English translations on packages.

10. New Zealand
I have a secret passion to be a sheep herder. And they have the steepest hill in the world and I want to roll down it in a garbage can.

I don’t wax philosophical much on this blog, but in real life I’m the love child of Socrates and Plato (the gayest of all the philosophers: fact). And I’ve had a giant mental shift. The other night, laying in my super pink room, worried deeply about my future, Adam told me something that blew my tiny Stegosaurus brain.

And I quote: “Just do what you want”

Of course, I said: “ANYTHING I WANT?” (in caps, I talk in caps).

He said: “yes”.

Naturally, I replied: “okay, well I want to be reborn as a fabulous gay-sian man who can get away with platform boots in any situation”.

Apparently, though, “just do what you want” only can operate within the laws of physics, which honestly is a bigger rip off than the fact I can’t get Google maps implanted in my brain yet.

Anyways, this is something I’ve struggled with for years, the ability to just do what I want, unfiltered from my incessant worrying about what people (read: my mom) are going to think. Adam on the other hand is prone to punching old ladies in the face if they get in his way, because, yeah, he just does what he wants. All the time, doing what he wants.

In reality this conversation has shifted my internal processing, especially when it comes to my very undetermined future as a functioning member of society. I suppose most of the things I want to do (read: giant squid) break this lame “laws of physics” rule. No one has ever told me to just do what I want before. I’ve been told to go to school, to stop being lazy and get a job, and to stop wearing tiaras in public, but never to “just do what I want”. It’s an entirely new concept to me, really, and I wonder why there isn’t a class entitled “Just Do What You Want: The Philosophy of Punching Old Ladies Who Get in Your Way in the Face”.

What is this going to mean for my travels, my future job prospects, my social life? Probably all bad things after I’ve assaulted a flight attendant for looking at me funny, written my resume using macaroni and glue and then decided only to attend functions with the words “super awesome” in the title.

Last summer I packed up my school bag and an over-sized purse, met my friend Chris at the airport and took off for a month. I roamed through Montreal, Toronto, Guelph, Oakville, Kingston and Manhattan. I took the Greyhound, VIA rail and the Metro. I crashed on couches, slept in cramped, stinking hostels, and rested in my mom’s childhood bedroom. I saw cockroaches, watched Central Park become aglow with fire flies, witnessed the tallest French transsexual this side of the Atlantic, and had a conversation en francais with a man about his pen.

That’s all nice. But the best part? I escaped Calgary for the entire duration of the Stampede.

The Calgary Stampede is a 10 day adventure that draws in tens of thousands of people a year, packing themselves onto our already stuffed C-trains and transit system to get down to the Stampede Grounds in order to drink, hurt small animals, and risk their lives riding 40 year old amusement park equipment run by homeless drug addicts (seriously). The best part is that the Stampede Grounds are technically within the downtown limits, which means trying to get to work and back from “the Core” becomes par with having the ability to shit out fluorescent pink llamas.

Most people who live in Calgary love the Stampede. Love it. 10 days of with a city full of foreigners just waiting to have a drinking contests and a one night stand. Or, you know, they own a downtown hotel and make several million in this one 10 day span. I am not one of these people. These 10 days mark the worst time of the year to live in this city.  It makes me feel so badly for people who live in truly hot tourist destinations, like Amsterdam. People who might never see their favourite bar without a loud, drunken buffoon again. Or, even worse, to live in a country where the only form of employment is to serve the rude, self important jerks who think their $900 vacation package bought them the country and all of its inhabitants.

I’m not sure if it’s simply that I was born without the cow-wrangling gene, refuse to define myself as “country western” in any manner of speaking, or that I was raised by liberals in the East, but I seriously have my hate on for the Calgary Stampede. Enough so that I intentionally travel to other tourist destinations to get away from the one I live in.

A photo of my grandmother in her teens. I digitally photographed her stash of old photographs during my last trip to Kingston.

Let me put it this way: the most exciting thing that’s happened in the past few days was Sarah telling me, without even giving detail, about a “sexy” dream she had.

A week ago I was let go from my job, which was my only real source of entertainment. I’m still not sure why I was let go. So far, what I have gathered is that I do not steal and I actually got things done and this mucked with their endeavors to go bankrupt. Yes, I actually had a conspiracy theory where I thought the owners of the company I worked for were attempting to go bankrupt. How else do you explain rubber shoes for $40 and introducing expensive and poorly sewn yoga pants into the ghetto-est mall in Calgary?

I’m not going to lie, I was pretty peeved. At least let me know why I’m being fired, instead of saying “the numbers aren’t there” and then telling me it “doesn’t matter” when I ask what that means. Slowly, within a 48 hour period, I realized exactly what had happened. They had told me not to come back to a job I hated and had tried to quit a month and a half ago. No more selling rubber shoes to the one person an hour who enters the store (yes one person an hour was about the average rate, unless it was Monday and then it was no person per hour). Can you really be insulted at someone telling you you aren’t good enough to sell over priced rubber to welfare mummies and homeless men? Really? No, I’ve decided I am okay with that turn of events. This list is about doing things that make me happy, and I think anyone who knows me can vouch for just how much I hated that job.

Making fun of a company doomed to swallow itself whole aside, what does being unemployed mean for me? Well, I did just book a trip to Kelowna that costs about the entirety of my final paycheque. That pretty much sucks, but at least I didn’t book some crazy trip to hike to Machu Picchu like I really had wanted. It also means that, barring my odd fascination with not having anything to do 4 days a week, I can start hunting for a new job! On my list there are a few job related items so I figured why not make lemonade vodka coolers out of lemons and apply for some waitressing or coffee house jobs? I’ve applied for a few waitressing jobs so far and I hope to hear back. I do need money to fund most of the things on my list and since Richard Branson hasn’t stepped up to the plate yet, I need to exchange my free time for legal tender.

Recently Nomadic Matt wrote a great guest post for Christine Gilbert’s fabulous Almost Fearless that really struck home for me. The piece was about traveling by yourself, without the company of friends or family. As I come to the close of my academic life I’m going to be faced with some pretty big choices, potentially bigger than I imagined they would be.

I always assumed that once I graduated I would be travelling, and beyond that, travelling with my boyfriend. I’m sure you can tell from my list that I want some mix of adventure and backpacking with “normal life” with house and pet rabbit sort of thing. I figure it makes more sense to travel before I invest in a house and decide when and where to settle down and build up my life. Of course, nothing works out how you thought it would, and my boyfriend recently told me that he wants to try and buy a house here in Calgary by the end of the year. Granted, he’s four years older than me and is actually establishing himself in an awesome career that could easily translate to working remotely in a few years. I’ve always had such a blast travelling with him despite our different travel styles, and I was looking forward to experiencing the vast wide world with him by my side. I guess this won’t be the case in the near future.

This leaves me with only a few options.
1. Getting a job I will in all likelihood hate (I have no passion as of yet, other than this list, and sadly it does not pay the bills) to help pay for a house in a city I truly want to leave.
2. Traveling solo
3. Finding that mythical partner-traveler who has as much time and money as you and wants to see roughly the same things

Number two seems to be the most reasonable option, which is where Mr. Matt Kepnes comes in. Traveling alone isn’t something I’m opposed to, it is something I want to try, but the idea of embarking on months, possibly a full year, of gallivanting around the globe solo is pretty terrifying considering I have never done it before. Matt makes it sound like a pretty fantastic and empowering experience, because “[y]ou have to adapt to your surroundings, meet other people, make your own decisions, and plan your life.” Nothing wrong with that. He really encourages the “fuck it” sort of attitude I would love to have and have been trying to cultivate. In reality though, would I be able to touch down in Beijing, Amsterdam, Sydney, or anywhere for that matter by myself and be able to survive all on my own? Could I navigate the Tube in London by myself with my horrendous sense of direction, let alone in a country where everything is in a different language? The biggest lesson I’ve learned in 5 years of academia is that theory and practice are almost always irrelevant to each other. So is Matt’s suggestion of “[j]ust do it”,because in theory it will work, really enough to make it actually work for me in reality?

Photo courtesy of http://freedigitalphotos.com

It scares me a little that I have to make these decisions within the next year. When did all of this happen? I’m suddenly 22 and trying to decide between travelling the world and buying a condo in Calgary, Alberta and I have no idea how it happened.

I was trying to avoid writing about my trip to the Dominican Republic, but I cannot put it off any longer. It was silly, not wanting to write about. I’m just scared to admit the truth about my ridiculously expensive excursion: it was terrible. Not I-was-held-hostage-and-forced-to-eat-raw-cow-pancreas terrible, but I certainly did not get what I thought I paid for.

When I got back I was depressed. Not depressed because it was the end of my vacation, leaving the Dominican Republic made me happy. Getting on the plane was truly wonderful. I was depressed because the best part of my vacation, other than the odd playful dips in the ocean, was laying in the room watching the BBC and bootlegged movies on “Punta Cana TV”. I was angry at myself for letting my money go to waste on what I should have known would be a terribly packaged resort deal. Why didn’t I fly to Santo Domingo and take in some real culture and actually see some of the Dominican Republic? Why did I let myself be duped into an over priced resort with constant noise from helicopters and screaming Germans. Why didn’t I make sure there was ready access to fairly priced or free excursions and activities.
Truth be told, I could have gone to any over crowded noisy beach on any tropical island, I wouldn’t have known the difference. I have to take it as a learning experience though, no matter how embarassed and angry with myself I am. I know now that resorts are simply not for me. I like options, being able to go places, and most of all, being able to leave if necessary. The resort experience, for me, held the feeling of being held against my will. I had no idea where I was, no access to entertainment or the food of my choice. I was paying to be held captive for a week, or at least that is what it felt like to me. It just isn’t my travel style, which I can readily admit I am still learning.

Traveling isn’t something innate for me, I’m learning what I like and how I like to do it on the road. I can’t expect perfection at every turn, but I can expect myself to take crappy vacations and realize how to avoid the same pitfalls the next time I head out into the wide world.

In the end I came back with two things crossed off of my list
#241. Stay at an all inclusive resort
#583. Soak up the Caribbean sun

What do you get when you work 30 hours a week and go to school “full time”? Unhappiness!

I’ve been struggling to find time to live my life, rather than just going through the motions. Being in my fifth year of University, it doesn’t seem like the time to drop out of “regular” life to take on a life of vagabondry or backpacking. I find myself focusing more and more on the future (real or completely imaginary) to compensate for the complete lack of anything exciting in the present. I suppose this is the ascribed destiny for most of the Western world’s population; placid drudgery with a 2 week slice of sweet freedom once a year. I won’t even bring up the people working in free trade zones in the East. Doesn’t everyone dream of escaping it, especially during the idealistic phase we all go through in our 20s? Why is my life going to be any different than that of everyone else?

I wish I was more of the risk-taking type. My personality, my complacency, my unwillingness to attempt anything remotely scary will be my downfall. This list was a first step towards actualizing a thought I had. That I didn’t want to be 80 and have memories of working in a cubicle. I wanted to have awesome memories of drinking with rockstars, climbing mountains, and seeing everything this planet has to offer up. The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion I am wasting the best years of my life on the same kind of drudgery I want to avoid later in life. People I know are doing awesome things: volunteering in Peru for a semester, going to Ghana and South Africa for classes, three month long trips to Europe. I sit instead and plan out how to do this stuff later because in all honesty I am scared shitless of going off the beaten path, of going it alone, of being by myself in the vast spaces that fall outside of my comfort zone.

I need to get over that. It’s a requirement. Fear is not something you can take with you. So! My goal for the next semester is to find something travel related (working abroad, volunteering in a third world country, etc.) that scares me and just DO IT. Hopefully I can work something out for this summer or for Fall 09 semester that will jolt me out of my middle class suburban safety.

Have you ever done anything that made you uncomfortable or scared just to say you had done it?