Monday, February 29, 2016

College Applications

Any teenager can tell you that preparing and submitting college applications is an unpleasant experience. Recently I was thinking back to my own high school days and I remembered one particular part of the college application experience that stood out. Growing up in California, it was a no-brainer that I would be applying to one or more schools in the University of California system. My English teacher was one of the staff at my high school who had the responsibility for giving suggestions and help to students to improve their applications and thus give them a better shot at getting into the universities they were applying to. One day my teacher was talking to the class specifically about the University of California Admissions Board and what they liked to see on application essays. She told us they favored essays with stories about how applicants overcame hardship and then read us an essay that apparently had gone over very well with the Admissions Board. It was an essay by a girl who came from a poor family that couldn't even afford to buy her a calculator and who, despite all the social and economic factors working against her, triumphed and graduated as one of her high school's top students. It was the sort of heartwarming story we all love to read about, but my teenage brain was immediately bugged by a question. I raised my hand, and when called upon I asked my teacher what this affinity, on the part of the Admissions Board, for tales of hardship meant for the rest of us. What about those of us whose parents had worked their butts off to make sure we never had to go through any of that? Had they unintentionally put us at a disadvantage? There were no answers for my questions - the discussion just moved on and I didn't try to press my inquiry. Later on, though, I did joke with some other students that I would one day be an intentionally horrible father who destroyed my family's livelihood, just so I could give my kid a good sob story for his college application essay.

Friday, February 26, 2016

Big Friday

For the last few weeks I've been keeping to a the publishing schedule for this blog of putting up a new post five days a week, Monday through Friday. If you've read this blog for awhile, you know that most of the writing pieces I publish are on the shorter side, but on occasion I'll type up something longer. Granted, when I say that a post is "longer," that is relative to the normal length of my posts. I read a number of blogs whose authors regularly crank out posts that are at least 2,000 words, and compared to them my big posts are minuscule. Still, as part my practicing the craft of writing, I've been thinking that I ought to publish more of these longer posts, so for the month of March I'm going to try to commit to publishing one longer piece of writing per week and just see how it goes. I'm thinking Fridays will the days when these somewhat longer pieces of writing will go live, and in my mind I am referring to this as the "Big Friday" project. This year March has only four Fridays in it, so it should be a good testing ground to see if I can consistently produce longer posts over a short time frame. Depending on how it goes, I might continue the Big Friday project in the future months, or I might discontinue it if it doesn't work out.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Return To Sender

Last week a box arrived in the mail from Groupon. Inside was something that I have desired for well over a year now, however I did not open it. Instead, I printed out a return label, and two days after the box came to my door, I took it to the post office to have it sent back. Inside that box was a PlayStation 4. As a gamer, I had wanted to get a PS4 since it launched, but various things have kept me from doing so up to this point. Two weeks ago it looked like the waiting period was finally about to end. I saw online a notice that Groupon was running a good deal for a PS4 and I clicked the link to investigate further. A standard, new PS4 costs $400, however a vendor had new PS4s on sale for $350, and Groupon had an online code you could use to take an addition $50 off the price, bringing it down to $300. There was free shipping, so with the applicable taxes the final bill for purchasing this PS4 would have been about $309. This PS4 even came with a game as a nice bonus. It was a limited time offer, but there was more than 24 hours before the offer ended, so I thought it wise to take a day and think it over. I slept on it, and after some more pondering the following morning and afternoon I decided that this was probably the best deal I had yet seen on a new PS4, so it was time to take action and make the purchase. The only downside I saw at the time was that I would have to create a Groupon account, which I knew would flood my email inbox with all their email offers. "That's ok," I thought to myself, "I'll just unsubscribe as soon as the emails start showing up." So, I created an account, and started the transaction. I clicked the Buy button, applied the discount code, put in my credit card and mailing information, and after double-checking everything I clicked the button to finish the transaction. The processing screen came up and lasted a few seconds. When that finished I was expecting to get an order confirmation screen, however instead I got a notice that the order had not processed and instructing me to contact Groupon's Customer Support, along with a reference number which they could use to find out what had happened. Now, I completely understand that technical glitches sometimes occur, so I sent a detailed message to Customer Support with the reference number and an exact description of what had happened. I figured that it should be a simple problem to fix and I thought that within a day or two everything would be resolved and my purchase would be pushed through as originally intended. Sadly, this would not be the case. The next morning I had an email reply from Customer Support, which was the start of a long chain of emails that demonstrate what happens when Customer Support does not carefully read what you type, despite your best attempts to be clear and concise. They understood that I was trying to buy the PS4, but for whatever reason they didn't understand that I was trying to purchase it with the discount code, so they eventually pushed through the transaction at the non-discounted price. When I learned this, I sent a polite but distressed email letting them know they had made a mistake and asking them to cancel the order before it shipped. However, they were not able to fulfill that request either, so my card got charged the wrong amount and the box with the PS4 was on the way to my residence. I sent Customer Support a final (again, polite and professional) email letting them know that they had made a mistake, and later in the week I went ahead and printed out the return label, even though the box had not arrived at that point. I was going to send this PS4 back. The PS4 inside that box was something I had desired for awhile, but Groupon had botched the order and as a matter of principle and personal integrity I could not give business to a company that had screwed up on such a basic level and then repeatedly failed to fix the problem. Also I wasn't going to pay $350 (plus tax) for a PS4, as I knew that with patience I would eventually find another good deal. When the box arrived I didn't open it - I just held it for a minute and then put it on the table. Opening the box and seeing the PS4 inside would tempt me to keep it, which in my mind would be akin to letting Groupon get away with their little debacle. No, there would be no opening, no reconsidering. Two days after the box arrived I drove to the post office and handed it off to them to deliver it back to Groupon. I was close, so close, to owning a PS4, but unfortunately I had no choice but to send it back.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

2016 Writing Project - The Format

This is the first of three or four short posts I'll do, one per week, on some of the general ideas I have for my 2016 Writing Project.

When thinking about the story in my head, one of the first things I've considered is the format of the story itself. While it could exist in a more traditional book format, in my mind I've always thought of it taking an episodic format - something like you would find in a tv show, web series, or even like what you'd see long ago in magazines where a story is split up across several editions. Along those lines, the story has slowly been emerging as a series of smaller stories that add on to each other and push the plot towards its conclusion. The story also covers a period of several years, which I know books can do, but I think the episodic format better handles the time jumps that I have in mind. Since everything related to this project is still in the embryonic stage, lots of things are still open to change and maybe I'll end up taking yet another format for the story, but right now episodic is how it looks.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

International Audience

When I was gathering the word count information I used for a previous post, (found here) I took a look at the audience statistics and was quite surprised by what I found. This blog doesn't get a ton of views, but it has gotten visitors from some unexpected places. Below is a screenshot I took of the breakdown of lifetime visitors to this blog.


While it also shows the different types of browsers and operating systems used by visitors, my primary interest is the list of pageviews by country. The United States, as expected, holds the number one spot with the vast majority of visitors, but after that comes Russia, which I've never visited (I've never been to Ireland, Australia, or China either). Just a little further down the list are a number of European countries that I've traveled to and written about (France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, and at the bottom, Spain). These countries are more understandable, as I know many of the visits were actually the result of me logging into the blog while I was overseas and then viewing it after publishing a post. That said, I know for a fact that I did not visit the blog 17 times when I was in Germany back in 2012, so a few of those views from European countries must be people from there checking out the blog.

Until I had looked at these audience statistics I honestly had no idea that this blog had any international readers. I'm both humbled and flattered to know that there are a small number of people who have read this blog from outside the United States. If any of you international visitors are reading this, I just want to say thank you for visiting and reading. Hopefully you've found something here that you enjoy.

Monday, February 22, 2016

Let It Go

While on the flight from Paris to Minneapolis last November, I finally saw the movie Frozen. I also for the first time, and in context, heard the whole length of the hit song "Let It Go." I stopped regularly watching Disney movies sometime when I was a teenager, but I remember many of the songs from those movies, and I can't deny that Let It Go is an incredibly catchy song that will likely rank among the most popular songs in any Disney movie. Awhile after returning home, I went to Youtube and looked up the song to listen to it again. I quickly found it on one of Disney's official Youtube channels, but I also noticed that Disney had produce many other versions of the song in various foreign languages. One video that Disney had produced had the song being sung in 25 different languages (not simultaneously, but with a different singer singing different sections of the song). I was quite impressed with this video and noted that Disney had even gone so far as to include both Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish, making a distinction that not everyone knows about. There are even a few sections for languages from smaller ethnic groups, such as Catalan and Flemish. After watching the video it occurred to me that Disney is one of the few entertainment companies with means of producing something like this, and I scrolled down to the comments section to see what other people thought. I mean, this should be the sort of Youtube video that ought to get a lot of positive feedback, right?

Oh, silly me. I had completely forgotten that the Youtube comments section is the internet's cesspool for hatred and inflammatory remarks. Instead of celebrating the achievement of this video, there were instead a large number of commenters complaining about how their language wasn't in the video or how terrible a particular section was. This was rather disheartening and I soon closed the tab with the video and moved on. I haven't revisited the video in some time now, so hopefully the comments section isn't so abrasive now, but I do wish people could stop complaining for a minute and just appreciate when a person or organization goes through the effort to make something like that video.

Friday, February 19, 2016

2016 Writing Project

For the year 2015 I made a list of goals to fulfill by the end of the year and on December 31, 2015, I finished the year having accomplished most of them. For 2016 I think I may do something similar, but the list of goals will be shorter. One goal, however, stands out amongst the rest. There's a work of fiction that I've been meaning to write for many years now and I'm thinking 2016 should be the year I finally get serious about working on it. I've had the idea for this project since around the end of my senior year of high school, and over the years since then I've slowly come up with and written down ideas for fleshing out the plot and the characters. The last few months, however, I've been getting a flood of thoughts in my head about this project and I'm feeling the urge to get writing before the stream runs dry.

Now, before any of you get excited about this project of mine, I need to warn you that the story in my head is not a particularly good one. Much of it is either cliche or blatantly taken from other pieces of entertainment I've seen/read/heard over the years. If it was ever sent to a publishing house, it would be relegated to the "slush pile" - that massive expanse of terrible writings that publishers get every year from amateurs like myself. Then again, seeing as how works of fiction like 50 Shades of Grey and The Da Vinci Code somehow became successful, maybe my garbage writings actually stand a chance.

I'm going to try to do this. The project might never get finished, but I feel compelled to give it a go. It will likely never get published anywhere, not even on this blog. At the moment I'm not quite ready to discuss too many of the details, but as part of the project, over the next few weeks I'm going to type out one post per week with some of the generalities of what's in my head. I have no idea how this is going to turn out, but if nothing else it should be a good learning experience.

Thursday, February 18, 2016

2015 Word Count

This past weekend I thought it would be worthwhile to collect a few basic statistics on my blogging from the year 2015. Specifically, I was curious to see how many words I published last year and the average word length of my posts. Unfortunately, Blogger does not seem to have a word counter amongst the analytical tools it offers, so I had to do this the hard way, by copying and pasting each post into a Word document, doing a word count there, and then logging the data into an Excel spreadsheet, from which I could get the statistics I was seeking. This is what I came up with:

In 2015 I published 67 posts, with a total of 51,508 words. I know that's rather small compared to a lot of people, but it's quite an achievement for me. The average length of a post was 769 words. Granted, the average is skewed by several of the longer Europe 2015 posts. I would guess that the average for non-Europe posts was closer to 250. Below are the six longest posts from 2015, which were all the ones that came out to longer than 2,000 words. No surprise, five of them are Europe-related.

1. Venice: Dream's End  -  2,842 words
2. Siena: The Battle of Tuscany  -  2,200 words
3. Zagreb: Stone and Water  -  2,153 words
4. Remembering Big O  -  2,133 words
5. Paris: The Three Day Campaign  -  2,097 words
6. Cinque Terre: Ascension  -  2,067 words

I had known that the Venice post was the longest of the year, but I didn't realize just how far ahead it was of all the others. Whereas the other five are all close to each other in the low 2,000s, the Venice post came close to nearing the 3,000 word mark.

Looking forward to 2016's writings, I think I'll end up doing this exercise again, though hopefully I'll have found an easier way to do it by then.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Breaking the Rules

Believe it or not, I actually do strive to be a better writer, despite what the quality of this blog might lead you to believe. Every now and then I read what other writers have to say about being a better writer and try to learn from them to improve my own craft. Some time back I read an article by another writer and one of the tips he listed for being a better writer was to learn the rules of writing, and then break them. When I read that I felt a wave of smugness washing over me. Even though I don't know all the rules of writing, I'm pretty sure I'm breaking lots of them, so I feel like I'm already a step ahead.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Scalia

This past Saturday, the United States Supreme Court lost one of its judges when Antonin Scalia passed away. Scalia was at times a controversial figure, adored by many on the political right and reviled by many on the political left. At the news of his death I knew that some of his detractors would break out in celebration, but I have to say that I'm dismayed, indeed disgusted, with the sheer level of vitriol I've seen coming from some of the people who did not see eye-to-eye with him. If you were to believe the things going around on social media, you would think Scalia was the worst traitor to America since Benedict Arnold and should have his corpse dragged behind a car and paraded through the streets. Never mind the fact that Scalia's friends and family are now mourning their loss and coming to terms with the ever-present reality of death that infects this planet we live on. I know I shouldn't be surprised that a figure like Scalia would be on the receiving end of this much hate, but it still horrifies me to see what some people have written about him since the announcement of his death. My only hope is that Scalia's family might somehow be shielded from the worst of it.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Photography and Memories

Back in December I was having dinner with a friend and the subject of photography came up. We had both spent time overseas and taken photos in the respective countries we had visited, but in terms of volume we had gone to opposite ends. I had taken over 8,000 photos (and a few videos) on my trip, while he had only taken a few dozen during his. At first I just assumed that he wasn't big on photography, but he then explained that the reason he took so few photos was because of a study he had read about. According to this study, taking more photos seems to reduce the number of concrete memories created by your brain. Though the reason for this is not certain, it is postulated that perhaps the brain recognizes that you are taking a lot of photos and thus doesn't exert itself to form memories, believing that the photos will do all the memory work for it. I find this theory very interesting and can understand the logic behind it, though I'm not sure I believe it. My counter-theory to this is that taking photos does not so much reduce the creation of memories, as instead it just moves memories further down into our subconscious, and then the photos themselves serve as a key to bring them back to the forefront of our minds. In my particular case, I would even go so far as to say that I my brain behaves in the opposite fashion of the study's theory. The more I photograph something, the better I seem to remember it, and maybe the reason for that is that my brain recognizes that things that get photographed more have a higher priority for me, and thus it works harder to create and maintain those memories. This is all pure conjecture, of course, but I thought it was an interesting topic at the time.

Friday, February 12, 2016

Facebook Purge

I have 60 friends on Facebook. That's rather small compared to a lot of people, but in my opinion it's too many. Once a year or so I go through my Facebook friends list and purge remove a few people that I don't talk to anymore, and today it's time for another purge. The goal is to whittle my friend list down by removing around six to ten people. This shouldn't be too hard, as I added a number of people while I was in Europe who wanted to see my photos, and now that that's over I have no reason to maintain the connection with them. Everyone has their own policy on Facebook friends, and mine is that I only keep friends that I actually talk to or that I'm interested in staying current with what they're doing. If you're reading this and for reason concerned that you might be among the persons getting purged, don't be. Anyone who actually reads this blog and is friends with me on Facebook (all three of you) should be safe. And if I do accidentally delete you, just send me a friend request and I'll add you back.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

I don't want Pacific Rim 2

Back in 2013 a movie called Pacific Rim came out. The basic premise of the movie was that inter-dimensional aliens were sending giant monsters through a portal deep in the Pacific Ocean and humanity built giant robots to fight them. Having grown up watching Godzilla movies and other films and tv shows with giant monsters and/or robots, Pacific Rim was right up my alley and I liked it a lot when I saw it. Pacific Rim did modestly well in American theaters, but it made a lot of money overseas, and last year I read an article online about the studio behind Pacific Rim mentioning that it was considering making a sequel. You would think with how much I liked Pacific Rim that I would be enthusiastic about a sequel, but I'm not. Pacific Rim worked perfectly as a stand-alone film and I'm afraid that if it a sequel was ever made it would be something like The Matrix Reloaded or the second Pirates of the Caribbean - a movie that certainly has its cool moments but is fundamentally unnecessary and a step down from the original. The way Pacific Rim ended is also be problematic for a sequel, as it seemed to give a pretty definitive ending to the movie's storyline. But, knowing the way Hollywood works, there's a decent chance Pacific Rim 2 will one day get made. If it does come out I will probably see it in spite of my reservations. Maybe, just maybe, I will be proven wrong and it will actually be good, but I'm not counting on it.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

A little over a week ago I went with a friend to the movie theater to watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I had already seen the movie three weeks earlier, in January, but my friend had not seen the movie yet and I thought it would be worthwhile to watch the movie a second time to further reflect on it and double check to make sure I was remembering it correctly. While I have my opinions on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I'm not going to talk about them here. Rather, the purpose of this post is to tell my story leading up to when I first saw it.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out in the fourth quarter of 2015, and in the weeks and months leading up to its release more and more media relating to the movie appeared on television and the internet. A few months prior to the movie's premier, I decided I didn't want to know anything more about it and stopped reading or viewing material related to it. I wanted to go into the theater knowing as little as possible and experiencing the plot as it played out. Since I'm not a movie person I normally only see a small number of films each year at the movie theater and usually have no issue with people spoiling films, as the vast majority of them I'll never end up watching anyway. With Star Wars: The Force Awakens, though, I was intent on avoiding spoilers. Something about this film, being such a major pop-culture event, and the fact that I like Star Wars in general, made it seem worthy of special treatment.

This would not be easy, however. My normal movie policy is to not watch a film in theater until three to five weeks after it has come out, so that I don't have to deal with crowds. Keeping to this policy would mean I would have a long stretch of time whereby I would be vulnerable to people intentionally or unintentionally ruining the film for me. Social media in particular would be a veritable minefield of spoilers, so services like Facebook and Twitter would require extra caution when I was using them. I even went so far as to deciding to not read any reviews of the movie when it came out, as I knew that other peoples' opinions might color my own and I wanted my thoughts on the movie to be mine, not a remix of the views of others.

On November 18, 2015, Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out and my gauntlet began. Over the following weeks I was able to maintain my vigilance against spoilers, though there were perils along the path. While it was fairly simple to avoid any online article with Star Wars in the headline, on social media it was hard to not see stuff that people would just blurt out. When the time finally came for me to watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I had come out of my spoiler-dodging ordeal having avoided the worst of the possible spoilers, though one of the movie's major twists had been ruined. On the day that I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens I went to a morning showtime and once inside the theater I sat down to experience the film that I had been eagerly looking forward to seeing. Delaying my gratification had the positive bonus of there only being four other people in the theater when I saw it, so I didn't have to endure the annoyance of other people talking or distracting from the film. When the movie was over I emerged from the theater and it felt safe again to use the internet. I had seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens. My life could now return to normal.


Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Europe 2015 Finished

With the publishing of yesterday's final side story from the 2015 Europe trip, this blog will revert back to its usual purpose of me writing about various topics as I think of them. I probably won't be publishing every day, but I'm going to try to get something out at least once a week. Thanks for reading.

Monday, February 8, 2016

The Worst Part of Travel

We've finally reached the end of the road in terms of posts related to my time in Europe last year. I think it's fitting for this post be on my least favorite part of overseas travel; returning to America. While the end of a journey is certainly a sad thing in of itself, what I'm referring to in particular is going through immigration and security when I arrive at the (American) airport. For some reason, it always takes longer and is harder for an American to come back to America than it is for one of us to enter Europe. It always takes an hour or more and for some reason it's not enough that I went through security at the airport in Europe. I understand that in our post 9/11 world, airport security is more extensive and rightfully taken more seriously, but we've got to find a way to speed up the process for American citizens coming home. When I was in Paris in November and looking ahead to the end of my journey, I was feeling a little down. Part of it was the knowledge that the dream was coming to an end, but the other part was knowing what was waiting for me upon arrival back in America.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Traditions

Having traveled to Europe twice now, there's a number of things that I noticed I did on both trips. I guess in a sense I now have things that can be called traditions with regards to European travel, and I thought I'd share a few of them.

* Going up the Eiffel Tower on my first day in Paris
* Eating an absurd amount of gelato in Italy and beyond
* Going for a swim in the Adriatic Sea while in Split, Croatia
* Hating Venice when I first arrive, but then loving it after getting settled in
* Getting pooped on by a bird
* Taking thousands of photos, and still wishing I had taken more
* Walking until my feet and legs feel like they're going to give out
* Missing at least one train or bus
* Reading through the Old Testament Book of Psalms
* Keeping a journal of my experiences
* Wishing I had spent more time in one place and less time in another
* Having a train ride in Spain that was as long or longer than the flight to Europe
* Eating unusually good fast food in the Balkans
* Slowly recovering my Spanish language skills while in Spain and then completely forgetting them after leaving Spain
* Walking from the Pisa train station to the Leaning Tower, getting some photos, and then leaving Pisa because there's nothing else there even remotely interesting
* Unintentionally having ten euro left over at the end of the whole trip
* Falling behind on blog writing
* Brainstorming the next trip before the current one is even over

Saturday, February 6, 2016

The Umbrella of Constantine

If you read my post on my time in Istanbul, you might remember that before I left for the airport I bought a small umbrella in expectation of rainy weather in Spain. You might also remember that I ended up never using the umbrella in Spain, as everywhere I went the rain would either stop when I arrived or any rain in the weather forecast would suddenly disappear. Although I would eventually use the umbrella while in Paris before returning to America, the uncharacteristic lack of rain during my time in Spain led me to jokingly say that I had in fact bought some sort of magical Turkish umbrella with the power to stop rainfall. Perhaps it was some sort of ancient relic. Every relic needs a legend behind it, so over the course of my time in Spain I concocted such a story, and below is what I came up with.

This is no ordinary umbrella. It belonged to the Byzantine Emperor Constantine. Hence, it is known as the Umbrella of Constantine. Blessed by the patriarchs of the eastern church, the Umbrella of Constantine can stop rainfall and divert storm clouds away from the one who wields it. Lost after the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Umbrella of Constantine faded into memory and legend and was believed to be gone forever, until it inexplicably came into the possession of an Istanbul umbrella merchant, who unwittingly sold it to an American tourist. That tourist, at first not realizing the sacred relic he now possessed, traveled onward to Spain, where the Umbrella of Constantine finally exerted its power again after hundreds of years of remaining in dormant obscurity. Today it hangs in that American's closet, waiting to again do battle with rain clouds.

Friday, February 5, 2016

"One day, I will write my story"

Each day while I was overseas, normally before going to bed, I would spend some time writing about the day's experiences in the notebook I had brought with me. I didn't try to hide my journal writing and inevitably a few people asked me about it when they saw me writing. Most people, after I had told them what I was doing, would give me a reply along the lines of "Oh, ok." Sometimes they would compliment me for my diligence and sometimes they would just move on to talking about something else. There were, however, a few times where someone would take a genuine interest in what I was doing and talk about their own writing or aspirations for writing. The one that stands out the most is a person who told me "One day, I will write my story." I guess this person felt inspired to see me writing about my travels or just reminded of an old goal of they had set. Whether or not that person will ever do the writing they want is beyond my knowledge, but from my own experience I have to say I have my doubts. Writing seems to be one of those activities that if you continually postpone, will simply never happen. If you want to be writing in the future, you need to start writing today.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Room full of thieves

I have never had anything of mine stolen from a hostel room. In fact, I don't think I've ever been in a room where someone else got something stolen them. Despite this track record, in every hostel I stayed in I still acted like I was in a room full of thieves. At all times anything of mine was locked down, directly on me, or at least within my sight. We've all heard or read stories of people getting their stuff stolen from their hotel/hostel room and that may have been part of what drove my security paranoia. Whatever the case, I trusted no one. Perhaps I was excessive in my vigilance, but on the positive side I never misplaced anything because I always knew where everything was.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Carnivore

My normal diet has little meat in it. This is not because I'm opposed to eating meat, but because I'm not willing to put in the time and money to purchase and properly prepare it. When I was in Spain, however, this policy was completely upended, and I found myself eating meat almost every day. Spain, as some of you know, has a strong tradition of producing high quality meat, particularly the various sorts that come from pigs. Perhaps most famous is Spain's Iberian Ham, which comes from pigs that are given a lifelong diet of only acorns. Within the first few days of arriving in Spain I had tried out a few different kinds of meats and liked them so much that I kept buying more during the rest of my time in Spain. Along with Iberiam Ham, another favorite of mine was the Spanish Chorizo, which if I remember correctly, is smoked pork. When I left Spain my meat consumption returned to it's normal levels, but for those three or so weeks while I was there, I was a carnivore.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

It's ok not to like it

I, like many people, oftentimes feel the need to justify my purchases even when they don't turn out as expected. This is especially true when I travel. Because travel doesn't happen all the time and requires a major investment of planning and money, the thought of spending funds on something that ends up not being worthwhile is anathema. And yet, despite all my research and investigation, there were a few times where I spent money on something while overseas and was not satisfied with the final result. When this happened my immediate psychological reflex was to put a positive spin on it and try to prove that I had in fact not wasted money. It took awhile to finally break out of that tendency and allow myself to just admit that something was either not to my liking or not worth the time and money I used on it. "Remember," I would tell myself, "it's ok not to like it."

Monday, February 1, 2016

Pro

I take a lot of photos when I travel. Lot's of other people do the same, and if you're observant you'll notice that different people have different levels of seriousness about their travel photography. While I generally take my photography seriously and think a fair amount about what I'm going to photograph and how to compose the the shot, there are others that take it more seriously than I. And then there are people who take their travel photograph way too seriously. It's not hard to see them, as they stand out in a crowd. You'll see some people (normally men) walking around with a fully extended tripod over their shoulder and the camera already attached to it, so it looks like they are always carrying a strange looking staff. When composing photos they also have this visible look of impatience and/or disgust on them, like they are on the cusp of taking the cover photo for National Geographic, but everyone and everything around them is screwing up the shot. I refer to people like this as "pro," and I mean it purely sarcastically as they are trying to look the part of a professional photographer but are clearly not. Oftentimes when I noticed a pro trying to get a "perfect" shot but being frustrated by whatever he perceived was getting in the way, the thought in my head was "Hey, relax pro, you'll get your National Geographic cover photo yet."