A couple more things

In a less narrative form, a few things happened today that might be interesting for discussion.

Today has been a dance party. I mentioned that we listened to awesome Europop on the drive to the mountain. Yeah, so thanks to Rhapsody music I looked up one of the songs- Blue, by Eiffel 65- and listened to it three or four times before finding a link to an excellent dance playlist. I have been sitting in front of my laptop most of the day working on my trance robot/ car commercial dancing. It has been a well spent day my friend. I have learned so much.

At some point Marcy started talking to me on MSN and we ended up talking about travel and she linked me to the "Where the Hell is Matt?" page. I had heard about this guy on the news a couple of years ago but never really looked into it. I watched the dancing video on the homepage, and then, in typical Alisha fashion, I watched on youtube about a half hour of the lecture the guy gave at some college about his experience. He has some really interesting insights on the benefits of travel, and especially about Africa. Next I went to his blog. Its neat because the entries are organized by country, so I looked up a bunch of the Africa and Japan ones. I really enjoyed reading Ned's blog last term while he was studying in South Korea, and this guy has a similar style. I was thinking about travel blogs, and how fascinating they are, and it reminded me of a website that I used to frequent, back in middle school, called cockeyed.com. If you go look at it, its really dizzying at first how much stuff is on it- science, pranks, travel blogs, random blogging. This was one of the first interweb sites I really explored, and that was in 2002 or something, when it was way smaller. I love this site because I wish I was that random and awesome.

I'm getting way off topic. The topic was travel. Marcy sent me that link because the girl's got the travel bug. She's doing some soul searching and asking those dangerous questions like "Why and I really in college?" and "Why can't I just go travel?" Great questions Marcy, I commend you. I wish I could pause college and just go to all the places I've always wanted to go. Europe, Morocco, Africa, Thailand, the Philippines, Hungary, Tokyo, China, New Zealand, Dubai, India, Turkey, Argentina, South Korea, France, Spain, Tunisia, Jamaica, Australia, Egypt, Ireland, Israel, Lebanon, Taiwan, heck, even Chicago or New York. One thing that really stuck with me was when Matt from the website said in his lecture that Australia, and Europe really also, are very different from America in that it is widely accepted that when young adults finish school they just take off for a couple of years and travel. In fact, parents usually save up money for their kids' trips like they would for college or something. I think this is brilliant and I want to do this. My dad did it, why can't I? It would be so great to just travel, not doing humanitarian work, not studying, but just traveling and thinking and experiencing. And then come back and get a job or go to grad school.

Until then though, I'm stuck reading about other people's adventures. I'll get there. The future is really unlimited. The only thing that's impossible to say is what I wont do. Does that make any sense?

This whole conversation was really the highlight of my day, but it couldn't have come at a worse time. This is likely to be the busiest week of the term and I really need to be doing work or at least reading about international issues and paying attention to stuff about the economy instead of daydreaming about travel. I have a lot to do tonight.