Category: Observations

Some stuff I have come across while living out of my car.

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The Best Place I’ve Ever Been

Being that I spend a lot of free time scourging travel blogs on the Internet, there is one phrase that I often come across that really gets under my skin…

It was the best place I’ve ever been. 

Oh yeah, really? The best place you’ve ever been, huh? The most beautiful, fraught with culture and life, brimming with excitement hiding underneath the budding underbelly? Somehow, I doubt that.

Not that I don’t believe a place can be like that, because they are. And that may be the exact issue… that there are many places like this. There cannot be one best place you’ve ever been, because that’s like throwing every destination into prepackaged, nicely organized ribboned boxes, when let’s get real here, Seattle doesn’t have a whole lot in common with Sydney. More accurate phrases would be New Orleans is the craziest city I’ve ever been to. Paris is the most lovely and lacy city I can imagine. I’ve never had so much barbecue as I did in Kansas City. 

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I can’t really blame people though when they ask me what’s the best place you’ve ever been? because as a journalist, it is exactly these questions that must be asked, this searching for extremes, simply because we want to hear what the hell you can possibly say. On the contrary, being trained as a journalist, you learn to never yourself state these extremes, because you lose your credibility with these dramatic and overused phrases when you’re supposed to stay without a side at all times possible.

However, the way a person responds to these questions says a lot. But a quiet wonder, a shrug of the shoulders, a damnnn I really have no idea… Now it’s those responses I listen awfully closely too. Because those are the ones who have seen the world and live to tell it enough that you have to ask first.

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Heart

I haven’t slept in days.

Night after night, I lie awake in the various beds that I call my stopping points in my never-ending pilgrimage across New Jersey, and although I wake up before the sun can be seen and I lie down long after I ever wanted to, I can’t get my heart to stop beating so ferociously although my eyes are begging it to just be quiet so that maybe, we can get to work on time tomorrow.

No matter where I was or what I was doing, the most fruitful sleeps that I remember are the ones where I worked alongside the world by day, exploring and smiling, whether it be in the sunshine or beneath a faded blue poncho. I think of running into the various places I called home after breathlessly working to open the locks, my friends and I stumbling through doorways and collapsing on unclaimed beds, so tired we could barely bear to put up our hair or take off our boots. These rests were the ones that only came after a day climbing up mountains, battling the rain, running from misfits, and doggy-paddling the Atlantic and dingy ponds alike.

They didn’t really have much to do with waking up to a blaring alarm, strapping on a pair of heels in the parking lot, or packing a lunch. It was those days, back in the day, where I don’t really remember feeling my own heart beating out of my chest, but instead I felt it blaring in my brain, saying, Wow, isn’t this place magnificent or How did we ever end up here?

Never in my life have I been so tired as I am these days, never in my life have I worked so hard to achieve a dutiful eight hours rest. Ironically, never in my life have I moved so slowly, either, and for the first time, I find myself trying to pull free the heart in it all.

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Facing The Morning Pilgrimage

When I die and go to Hell, I will spend an eternity sitting on route 80 in bumper-to-bumper traffic, making bets to myself on how long it will take me to get to work as I slump behind an 18-wheeler and a beer-bellied plumber.

As rogue travelers, we spend a lot of time on the road, usually going somewhere cool (or cool in theory). However, I don’t think “a lot of time on the road” should translate to 30 miles and an hour and a half to work each way.

Am I the only one that sits in an obscene amount of traffic twice a day, everyday? No, I’m not – because if I did, route 80 would be empty for at least some of that strip of 30 miles. And honestly, that’s the part that really irks me. According to a 2011 Texas A&M University study, traffic congestion caused Americans to travel 5.5 billion hours more and to purchase an extra 2.9 billion gallons of fuel, which adds up to 56 billion unnecessary pounds of carbon dioxide released during that year.

Hard to grasp? Yeah that’s probably because it is. Also, just so you know, this adds up to an average of 38 hours per commuter per year, according to Adam Werback in The Atlantic. Personally, I spend about 480 hours in my car each year just commuting to and from work, so this figure sounds pretty awesome to me, as well as my 100,000 mile ’02 Ford Focus.

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This picture actually gives me anxiety

In America, we go on about how we have to save the environment, about how we should recycle, drive hybrid cars, and use reusable products, which is all good advice since Americans make up for five percent of the population yet use 20 percent of the world’s energy, according to the World Population Balance. However, also in America, train station stops aren’t necessarily accessible, nor are they necessarily fairly priced, or necesssarily reliable.

Conversely, we are also constantly told we need to put more time and effort towards our personal lives; that we need to spend more time with the kids, take the retriever for a walk, have dinner with the wife. According to the International Labour Organization, Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers. Somehow, I highly doubt that every single one of those Americans chooses to work an extra ten hours each week.

What great advice! Too bad it’s totally unrealistic, especially considering there are three unemployed people competing for every position, says Fox News, which makes for slim pickings for jobs.

To top the whole thing off, many of us come home angry, frustrated, and anxiety (and back pain) ridden – just from coming home from work. Exhibit A: Today at about 8:00 pm, a 60-or-so-year-old man in a small yellow convertible car actually followed me back to my apartment complex, parked behind my car, proceeded to walk up and then bang on my windows screaming “You know what you did,” and then trying to physically open my door. Luckily, I had locked the doors, feeling like the fact this guy had been behind me and then drove into my complex for six miles or so was kind of weird. Then after he left and I went inside, I looked out the window and saw that he had come back and circled around, most likely copying down my license plate so that he could find me and kill me. True story people. If I go missing, you know why.

I’m no genius (obviously). I’m not an engineer, I don’t know the makings of how to build a highway, or how to manage traffic issues, or how to deal with energy usage in this country or any other problems that I have mentioned here. But I do know one thing for sure – something isn’t quite right, and it’s not the residents of 740 Park who are seeing the effects. It’s you.

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The Five Best Things About Nomad Life

There are tons of travel blogs and websites out there that will advise you on lots of really great information for people with disposable income – like the most luxurious wedding destinations, the most fashionable cities, the coolest airlines flying the skies. However, as you probably already know, Life Aboard The Traveling Circus isn’t about jet setting middle-aged bores who wear fur coats and drink cocktails in first class – it’s about dingy wanderers with used scarves and unclean hair hopping trains and sipping cold beer.

However, even though this kind of life is always new, always exciting, and always dirty, it sometimes can take a toll on our heavy and tired hearts. Once in a while, we yearn for a stable spot to sleep, a clean pair of drawers, and a toothbrush that hasn’t been sitting on the bottom of a backpack. Unfortunately, sometimes we get a little stuck. We’re already on the road and the option to lie in a bed that only we have laid in isn’t an option. So for those days, when even you, ever-exciting you, would kill to wake up in a room that isn’t shared, here are some reminders of why nomad life is freakin’ awesome.

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1. You will never have too much junk. Actually, you will never really have any junk. You may have started out with birthday cards, vacation shot glasses, and bobble heads, but let’s be serious, when you started living out of a backpack all that stuff slowly began trickling away. Without any junk, your life becomes more clear, unclogged by material items that don’t really have much meaning after all. Plus, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to travel light when you’re not paying overweight baggage fees.

2. You have the coolest friends all over the globe. When you’re stuck in one place, you probably hang out with the same people most of the time – they’re probably good kids, they’re probably an okay time, and bowling and movies on Saturday night isn’t so bad. But when you travel, you meet people in a whole new ball game. The people you will come across have no fear, no ties, and no regrets. They’re down to work hard and play hard – everyday. They want to stay up all night, they want to talk to every person in the room, they want to jump in the ocean at midnight, and then they want to do it all again tomorrow… in another country.

3. You make yourself built-in parents. I don’t know about you, but at this point, my parents are kind of over me. They don’t want to make me lunch anymore, they don’t want to pay for my dinner, and they don’t really want to listen to my boy problems. However, parents across the globe never get tired of taking care of new scavengers. Once they have empty nests, they love having some lost kid to take care of for a few days… before they get sick of them, too, so in the meantime, it’s nice to have someone tell you about back in the day for a little while and bake you some cookies.

4. The little things in life stop mattering. When you don’t have much else going on, it’s easy to get irritated with the dumb chores you have to do – doing the laundry, going to the food store because you ran out of instant coffee, putting the dishes away after dinner three days ago. However, when you’re traveling, none of this stuff matters anymore. You can revert back to being a kid, when you ran rampart, jumped in mud puddles, and ate Pop-Tarts for dinner. There is something incredibly liberating about having a day free enough that you can literally just do whatever you want, whether that be cliff jumping, biking the ramparts, or drinking wine before five… Just because you feel like it.

5. You always go to bed tired. Living nine-to-five life can be rough in more ways than one. You’re tired all day long, but by the time you go to bed, you lie awake with your mind running, wondering what the hell you’re doing with your life and where it’s all heading. However, when you’re traveling, no matter if you’re sleeping in the Four Seasons or on some rando’s couch, every night, you go to bed dead tired, fulfilled, and surrounded by the mess of the day. No salary is worth more than that.

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Who I Am in Sweet Valley, Arkansas

Reading awakens a thirst for the world.

It is probably for this reason that many of us read books, blogs; basically anything we can get our grimy little hands on to read and devour, to escape from one place and live as another, even if it’s only for just an hour before bedtime.

Probably one of the odder things about this is that books can take a place that didn’t seem very enticing before and somehow, make it a place where we crave to be. If you have ever read one sentence of anything I have ever wrote, you probably know that I’m from, and am currently stuck in, a small farm town in the woods where it takes 20 minutes to get to the gas station. However, today during the office Internet outage, when I finished up the last few pages of my newest read, Windchill Summer by Norris Church Mailer, I had a real craving for visiting the little Southern town where the main character, Cherry, lives and goes to school.

Cherry lives in Sweet Valley, Arkansas, and her life really isn’t anything exceptional. She works at a pickle plant and studies Art Education at the local college during the peak of the Vietnam War. The book deals with a local murder, the wants of those with wasted youths, and the horrors of war. However, the writing is so real, so compelling, that even with these tragic issues, the books made me, and probably other readers, feel a compulsion to want to visit this little town, where I can almost feel the hot wind blowing in the dry summer and see the corn stalks swaying and hear my friends with their deep Southern accents laughing and talking.

It’s a life like this that seems so peaceful, so relaxing to even just breathe in and out, so simple. I feel like if I were Cherry and I lived in Arkansas, I wouldn’t grapple with questions like where is my career going? Where am I going to live? How is this all going to work out? What the hell am I doing? 

I actually have to kind of hit myself when I think these things, because I already live in a town like this and guess what? These are my exact problems. But this is all besides my point. Reading and writing awaken the joy of travel, of learning, of living a new life when you really aren’t happy with your current one. In reality, this written life probably wouldn’t even be that great. But for now, for this hour before you fall asleep, it feels pretty nice to just pretend.

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Five Reasons to Cruise the Open Seas

Let’s get serious here… I have been on my fair share of trips (although I’m certainly nowhere near finished). I love running ragged across the world, carrying my $20 backpack filled with old t-shirts and a toothbrush, living by, quite honestly, the seams of my dress. However, every once in a while (i.e. when my parents pay for it) I enjoy a good ol’, carefree, luxurious, and easy, cruise.

When cruising, the only map you need is the (overly complicated) deck map. The only decision you need to make is which colorful drink will accompany your breakfast. The farthest you need to walk is up a flight of stairs.

Cruising isn’t for everyone, nor is it fitting for every trip. However, here are a few reasons why it’s worth the indulgence every once in a while.

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1. The only line you will stand in is one for the buffet. Cruises are a ready-made vacation. See it as a positive or negative, but the security on these babies is incredibly lax. You’re not going to be patted down by a man named Harmony and it is scarily easy to sneak liquor in. If you’re like my large Sicilian father or you have a hard time staying in a seat for eight hours, cruises are a great way to get the fun of a vacation without the beforehand hassle.

2. Drinking at breakfast isn’t only accepted, it’s expected. I’m not totally sure why only some cruises are classified as “booze cruises,” because really, all cruises are like this. Let’s be serious here, what else are you going to do for 5+ days on a ship. There are more bars than there are restaurants and grandparents, grandchildren, and everyone in between drink together in one happy (and sloppy) union. They are truly the great equalizer. Plus, the heavy cabin shades make it easy to sleep in the day after… and after.

3. You can make neighbor friends you can ditch at will. Cruises are great for making friends because everyone is drunk (see above) and you see everyone over and over again, making the ship kind of like one big family hangout. Since everyone is on vacation and obviously wearing their favorite outfits, they’re already in a great mood and everyone is easy to talk to. If you depart from a port close to where you live like most people do, you will also probably make friends with people who live close enough to that you can hang out with them again later. And if you don’t want to see them again… well you’ll be home in seven days anyhow.

4. There’s a lot of free stuff. Well I guess it’s not really free since you shelled out somewhere in between $500 to $1000 for this (or your parents did) but the nice part is that you don’t have to hand out a lot of money once you’re onboard (you’ll just pay the bill later, when you’re sober). No paying for meals, shows, towels, movies, tastings, room service, etc.

5. You don’t have to do anything yourself. If you’re an overachiever like me, you probably run around like a maniac all day organizing all the idiots you know who remarkably haven’t fallen out of an open window yet. It gets pretty tiring. However, cruising is a lot like being a kid again, only this time, your parents let you do whatever you want, because you’re a damn adult now. Cruises tell you where to go, what to eat, what time it is, and what you’re doing, so for the first time… there’s nothing to worry about. Now that’s a vacation if I ever knew one.

 

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This is how you get on the Titanic without the whole iceberg thing

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The Weight of The World

“How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.”

– Up In The Air (2009)

I’m not sure if I can ever say it quite so eloquently or quite so sadly as George Clooney did when he played Ryan Bingham in “Up In The Air,” but after the last few days in the hoopla of the final and rather surprising selling of my house, not the only house I’ve ever lived in but certainly the most significant, I can say that I agree with our handsome friend.

Traveling is a funny thing. When we’re on the road, we depend on the little we have on our backs. Which is probably why many of us sweat wondering what we’ve forgotten, double-checking for our phones and our keys and our credit cards and if you’re me, a pair of ear plugs and extra underwear. By the end of a trip, as much as I always love the destination I had the pleasure of visiting, I’m always a little relieved to be free of this stress and to be back at my house, my house, where everything is where I put it and everything is comfortable, familiar, and ordinary. In a life of uncertainties and insanity, it is this ordinary, this average, that is effortlessly grounding. 

However, when you have to give the place you live to someone else, a total stranger, your life is at ends with itself. When I think about someone else who I don’t know and never will know sitting in the exact place I’m sitting in now, closing a broken window that is mine and running down hallways that are mine and stumbling into doorways drunk that are mine, it makes me pretty uneasy.

Unfortunately, this is the way of the world. I’m a 22-year-old postgrad living in my mother’s house so quite honestly, I have zero say in the matter, and rightly so. I can’t make my family and my childhood toys stay in a place that I would desperately love to move out of just so that I can always know that they are there, my life, my ordinary, waiting patiently for my return on a particularly gloomy weekend.

It’s at this point where we have to ask ourselves: How much do I weigh? When your house is gone, when your life is gone, you have to restart. You have to look at your life and arm yourself with what items, what memories, and what people matter, and you have to create a new home within yourself.

And this is travel. When scavenging the open road, we don’t have our comfy beds and our mother’s cooking and the safety of our locked windows at night. Instead, we will stay in unfriendly rooms with people we will never see again and we will pack our toothbrushes up after using them. In this way, what we do in our travel is what we must do in life when it is time to reevaluate, move on, and restart. We create homes inside ourselves while packing as little as we can possibly fit into our patched backpacks.

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Because, as always, for an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself. 

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New Jersey: Only the Strong Survive

Following Super Storm Sandy and leading into the summer, most New Jersey beachgoers were hesitant about what the season would bring and what the aftermath of the storm would mean for all of those who call the shore home every single weekend from June to August (and probably September… and maybe October). And, even though that “Stronger than the Storm” song that always plays on the radio is especially annoying, the message remains just as relentless as New Jersey itself.

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The world was trained to be New Jersey haters. I’m not exceptionally mad about it, mostly because I know that they’re jealous since we boast beautiful beaches, bustling city life, precious little hometowns, and picturesque mountain ranges. However, I am happy to see that following Sandy, the world stood by us and, like siblings, were the ones to have our backs when  just weeks ago they were making fun of us for being a wee bit smelly. No biggie.

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This past weekend, I hung out in Bay Head for a few days, making some pit stops in Seaside Heights and Island Beach State Park. Last week, I chilled in Asbury and Neptune for a little, and next week, I’ll be in Belmar and Long Branch. Finally, I’ll finish out this precious July in Wildwood and Cape May. When you love the beach, nothing can keep you away.

Throughout the trips to our shore I have been on during the past few months and my awesome time living there once again from January to May following my return from Italy, I have seen people wrought with disaster, their homes and lives in absolute shambles after a devastating storm. I have seen people living in hotels, applying for assistance each and every month, camping out at my own Monmouth University. However, the silver lining is that in New Jersey, you don’t see people crying and complaining about it. They take action. They rebuild. When driving down those streets still filled with rubbish, you’ll also see them filled with people collecting money for relief efforts, men at work repairing fallen homes, and people busy doing all they can to make their lives normal once more. The Jersey Shore Summer will never be diminished by a little rain. 

People often complain about the East Coast’s fast-paced lifestyle, where we are constantly working, maybe a little too much. But when this comes to the threatening of our own lucky lives in this great state, we jump to the scene. We do all we can to help our neighbors, to report on what’s been done so far in recreating our lives, and rebuild the homes and places we had so many memories in before that slut Sandy tried to take them away.

So take that, Sandy. You picked the wrong state to try and squash. New Jersey: Stronger than the storm… and anything else that comes our way.

What are some of the stories you have heard or experienced about New Jerseyans rebuilding in the aftermath of Sandy?

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Rushing the Road Trip of Life

Road trips are difficult for a lot of reasons. You’re trapped in a car filled with Cheerios crumbs (ew), you’re trapped in a car with other people, you’re trapped in a car with weird fake air, and, oh yeah, you’re trapped in a car. When you’re from New Jersey, and the East Coast in general, I assume, you’re up against a whole new demon: People Who Drive Like My Grandparents. 

In the South, people speak slower. They walk slower. They eat slower. And, most annoyingly, they drive slower. They actually go the speed limit. Now what the hell is that? And most frustrating of all, when I finally pass them flying by going 85 with the music blasting and the windows open, I can see that they’re happy. 

One thing that really hit me in study abroad in Florence, Italy was that after sitting down for three hours for a meal, casually sipping a glass of wine, and even strolling about the city, I realized that I had never really experienced anything before because I had never stopped to. In Italy, I tasted food I had one hundred times before that I felt I had never tasted one of those past times. I breathed in air and actually noticed it. I spoke to people and I was listening to what they were saying.

Now America is no Italy, let’s get that straight, but the South does have something on their side that goes beyond driving annoyingly slow. Southerners drive slow, talk slow, and eat slow because they’re enjoying it. They’re not always in a psychotic rush looking for the next best thing; the next most interesting person to talk to at a party, the next best meal they can ever have, or the next meeting they can squeeze into an already packed day.

Instead, they’re happy to be where they are. They can enjoy that cornbread or that nice breeze or the old lady they’re chatting with next door. Somehow, in that nice, sunny, downtime, I think they got a little farther than us up here going 20 over the 65 speed limit ever did, even if I do get to my destination five minutes quicker. 

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Fly Away Home

When I sat on that eight-hour plane ride home from Italy back to America last December, wedged in between a 300-pound man and some guy designing Nike sneakers on his laptop, I took a deep breath and I did the unthinkable– I finally added up my expenses from my semester.

Luckily, I took note of every dollar and euro I spent in my handy notebook, which most inconveniently, took quite a while to get all in my calculator. Watching those numbers add up, and up, and up, feeling my brow chilling, and finally seeing that final number, I realized… I didn’t really spend all that much.

I was pretty proud of myself, looking back from that moment, patting myself on the back for refusing to buy the beautiful clothes, some of the more expensive meals, the extra glass of wine. Actually, the only things I really did bring home were bottles of wine and olive oil for basically everyone that I know… and one Italian leather bag, that I bought for myself. I came to regret this sole purchase as time went on and I realized that all I spent the remainder of my money at home on were uglier clothes and sushi.

Unfortunately, my beautiful leather bag soon broke, its strap coming unhinged from the bag itself. I tried stuffing the strap back in myself, gluing it, and many other temporary solutions that would mostly last a grand total of five minutes. So today, on this rainy, miserable day, I brought it to Johnny’s Shoe Repair, a dilapidated hole-in-the-whole semi-apartment I found on the Internet.

I was pretty surprised to walk in and see not even what you could call a shop, but more of just Johnny himself, a squat old man with glasses, holding up one shoe amongst the thousands that were hanging from the ceiling, sitting on the floor, sitting on the desks, all intermingled with one another. I handed him my bag and explained what happened to it and went through my long list of ways I had tried to fix it, in which he just looked it at me like a disappointed father, telling me that if he fixed it, it really wouldn’t look as good as before.

“Look man, I really don’t even care if the button doesn’t look the same or the strap doesn’t move or any of that stuff. See, I studied abroad in Italy, and all I brought back for myself was this bag–”

Apparently, that was the game changer. All of a sudden, Johnny understood. He asked me why the hell I ever left Italy, because it was the most beautiful country in the world. He told me about he and his wife were born and raised in Calabria, and a lot of his family still lived there, and would always live there. I told him I was Sicilian, and he pulled me in and smiled when he whispered, all of his wrinkles crunched, “We’re neighbors.”

At that point, Johnny told me to come back in two days for my bag. He didn’t need my number, he didn’t even need my name. He said it would cost three dollars, and it would be beautiful again. Because that’s what neighbors do, no matter how far from home they happen to be.

La mia casa è la tua casa.
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