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Note that I DO NOT WANT advice, sympathy, condolences, or criticism.
I came on this trip not really knowing if I liked travel or not. I’d never had a “real” travel experience before – never really left America and never really left the hotel – and I wanted to find out if I actually liked it or not. I figured if I was unsatisfied so far with my hotel experiences then I should probably do something else to try to get a feel for a place, which is to basically just try to see the best I can how people live every day. So I’ve been doing that, trying to talk to people in coffeeshops and on the streets and stuff like that. And I’m not particularly satisfied, and don’t really feel like I get a much better understanding of a place by being there and talking to people firsthand than I do by reading books or watching documentaries or what have you.
It’s not like it’s a bad trip that I’m having – it’s great, I live on a cruise ship, I don’t even have to make my own bed or do my own dishes or even take the tray to the conveyor belt – it’s just that I think I’ve discovered that I don’t particularly care for travel. I guess I should have known before I left. I always like it when I have my own comfortable little corner in the world, I never watch the travel channel, I’ve never really aspired to travel before, I always hated going away on breaks, and so on.
I also wonder how responsible travel is in general. It seems like one of those things that you have to say in the “Interests” sections of dating websites when you’re a middle-class white person even if you don’t believe it. It kind of feels like a way to affirm your status. Oh yeah, so you have enough money to have gone where? And what resort did you stay at? And what pretty things did you see when you were there? It’s like it’s not good enough to be rich in our own country, so we have to go be rich in other places, too, and then come back and brag about it.
When I ask people what makes them happy in all these countries, literally not a single person has said “Travelling.” Actually, not a single person has said anything that involved something outside of the place where they lived. I think that’s interesting.
But yeah. Maybe I’m missing something. I don’t know. Fifty days left.
I don’t really have a best friend on the boat, and I feel like it’s a different and sort of difficult path here to actually make a best friend. There’s a lot of social schizophrenia about “meeting new people” through the whole trip, and so even when you’ve found someone that you really click with, both of you still sort of feel a draw to “meet new people” instead of just form a really meaningful relationship. I guess there’s value in meeting new people, but I think I value strong relationships a lot more personally. And it’s rough because it’s really nigh on impossible to say to someone, “Stop hanging out with new people and cultivate your connection with me instead. Okay great thanks!”
There are some girls on the ship that I could definitely enjoy being in a relationship with, but they all live very far away and I’m graduating soon and I don’t know what I’m going to do afterward and I don’t really want to drag them along for the ride and the whole situation is just kind of confusing and annoying. I kind of just want to go up to the girls I’m thinking of and be like, “Hey I think you’re really great and normally I’d pursue you and maybe ask you out, but circumstances suck on my end so it’ll never work out. But yeah, you’re really great!” Maybe that’d go over okay.
I’m excited for when I get home again. I have a whole list of things I’ve never done before that I want to do, and in my head I’m building a little list of awesome things from home that I want to do (enjoy a lightning storm, eat a Genuardi’s doughnut, bake cookies, screamsing in my car, listen to NPR, etc…)
It’s hard to get one-on-one time with people on the ship, especially when you don’t have a single and everyone goes to bed early and when they’re up, everyone hangs out in groups. I miss that more than almost anything.
I play guitar outside late at night, and I would have done so tonight if it weren’t raining.
I performed in the talent show the other day. First I did a thing with the bagpipes girl, which was pretty cool. Then I was up all by myself. Rob, one of the LLCs, introduced me. He’s really cool. He said that was playing and singing a song I wrote, Difference, then what it was about, and then my fun fact. I had given it to him the other day, so he said, “He doesn’t believe in god, but he does believe in Jenny Finn.” It was half-way meant to get a rise from the crowd, but more importantly, it was half-way because it’s true. Sometime I’ll tell ya’ll about Jenny Finn. She’s amazing.
I started playing, and for the first time, even though I was probably playing to roughly 850 people, I really wasn’t nervous. I just pretended I was playing alone in the Union like I always did. Except I had a microphone in front of me, I guess that’s the only difference.
In the middle of the song, where usually it’s just music, I talked instead. It was something like this:
“So, I get scared of really ridiculous things. Like when I’m in the basement at the bottom of the steps, and I turn all the lights off, I run up the stairs as fast as I can, because I’m afraid that something will drag me down and kill me. And I really hate doing dishes in the sink at night when it’s dark, because there’s a big window right in front of my sink at home, and I feel incredibly vulnerable to sniper attacks. …This has nothing to do with the song. I just thought I’d share.”
And then I hit the huge downbeat for the next section of heavy music, and everybody applauded, and I was glad. I had agonized over what to say in that section since I knew there was going to be a talent show. And I only came up with what I had said that day. All my best speeches seem to be written the day they’re performed.
Jenny Finn said it brought tears to her eyes when I mentioned her in the beginning. My friend Jenn said that she actually liked the song for really, and even mentioned the line that made her start really paying attention (second verse, third and fourth line). A lot of other people said I did a great job, but even more people talked to me about being afraid of dark basements and black windows at night too and they liked that I talked about it up there.
There are a few other really serious musicians on the ship, but I was the only one that performed totally solo last night, and that was kind of upsetting to me.
I’m confused about photography sort of at the moment. Toby, like I said, did inspire me to get a better camera and make more videos and stuff, but I don’t know how I feel about taking pictures on this trip, which is weird considering my graduation speech. I realized that I only took 260 pictures in all of India, which is seriously nothing. I think I noticed it after Vietnam and Cambodia when I saw those two scenes on the streets at night, and it turns out that the most beautiful things you’ll ever see around the world are totally impossible to take pictures of, and it sort of makes all the pictures that you take instead feel like empty substitutes, and it makes me way less interested in taking them. But I still take some pictures, just in case.
HI MOM AND DAD.
Okay it’s 1AM and I don’t think I feel like writing much else.
There are 32 sunsets left from the ship.
Peace out.
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