Went lots of places (last entry)
Trip Start
Jan 26, 2007
1
92
Trip End
Feb 06, 2008
Saratoga, California
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
When I created this thing, it asked me for a name. So I typed "everywhere." As in, that's where I was going. The map above used to (and may still) give a percentage of the world you have visited, based on your country count. People do that, you know. They count the countries they have seen, and they tell other people that's how many countries they have seen. As if you could, one day, say, "I've been to every country in the world" and have it mean that you knew anything about anything at all.
Well, anyway, my country count put me somewhere around 10-15%. Another map on facebook.com somehow put me at around 22%.
That's great. I only have between 78% and 90% of the world left to see and then I'll have seen everything.
"What a small world" is the silliest phrase I know, and I'm not fond of superlatives.
What was my favorite place? Nope. Not going to answer that.
I didn't write much once I got to Australia. I wrote less in my journal and I wrote no blogs at all. I guess I felt like this blog was my giving permission for you to learn a little about what I was thinking and what I thought about the things around me. Once I was around family, I wasn't as sure they would give the same permission - telling the internet what I thought about me and them and their lives. Maybe I was tired of having myself exposed. Or I got lazy, that could be it too.
What did I learn? I don't know. I guess if I learned anything, it's that I don't really know. I am pretty good at guessing at stuff, but I don't see how you can know anything about anything what with the world being the size it is. Plus, what you know might be completely opposite of what someone else knows.
Vonnegut wrote about this in The Sirens of Titan. There were places in the universe called chrono-synclastic infundibuli, and indeed there was one in our solar system. In these places, all those different truths in the world that disagree would suddenly all fit together perfectly. A man who knew for certain one set of things could stand next to a woman who knew for certain the opposite set of things, and they would see how they were both right after all.
Vonnegut always wrote with a backbone of delicate sarcasm. It makes the lips smack.
I'm going to go back and read the first two entries of this thing and then react to that in the next paragraph.
[...]
Wow. How any of you read that crap is beyond me. I will probably think the same thing about this entry the next time I read it. I certainly got more verbose and more emo as the trip went on. That, or I just let you guys in on my inner emo verbosity instead of filtering it HARD whenever I hit a computer. I guess the latter.
One more thing. A year is not a short time. Years do not fly by. Next time you say that last year flew by or it seemed like just yesterday, stop yourself. Years do not fly by. Years do not fly by. Years do not fly by.
Life goes on. I'm doing my dad's taxes and eating bowls of cereal every morning and trying to get in shape by doing 2 by 20 minutes on the erg, or at least one 20' and 10'-20' of intervals or something else to keep me breathing. Every once in a while, it strikes me as strange that I just passed five cars whose values could each have bought multiple properties in many places I saw. When I read the news, I can sometimes say, "oh, I've been there." I think about lots of things that I probably don't want to tell you about right now. Isn't it the same coming back the other way?
So that was my life for a year. A long year. That's it. And now it keeps going.
Comments
hmmm...
I like that open conclusion.
I'm glad you are home safely...