The Death of Innocence

Well, my heart has just been broken by the American people. I thought I was in love, but I found out that it would never work. They are too stupid (obviously I am exaggerating slightly as not all Americans are idiots). Yesterday I was watching a show called 1 v. 100. The outline of the show: A series of questions is asked to a group of 101 people. 1 person is the main contestant. Every time he gets one right, he receives money for every person in the mob (the other 100 contestants) that gets knocked out. He can choose to leave with his money or keep going after every question. If he defeats the entire mob, he gets one million dollars. If he is knocked out, the remaining mob members split however much money he made. Yesterday a young man was on, probably a few years older then me. The question was:

If a person parallel parks their car, which of these sides is perpendicular to the curb?

a)The passenger door?

b)The driver’s door?

c)The back end?

His answer was b. I was instantly cast into a deep and lasting depression until I realized (about 30 seconds later) that his childhood had probably consisted of eating lead based paint and seeing if he could break large falls with his face. Reassured, I continued watching the show. The host then revealed how many of the mob got the same question wrong. 54. Yes, that is the right number. Five, four. 10x5+1x4. I cried that night. It was a blow to my confidence in the idea that mankind was the most intelligent species on earth. I think the title should go to…the dodo. I mean, sure, it built its nest on the ground, but it has a better grasp on right angles and parallel lines than the average person. Plato had it right. If you do not know geometry, please GO AWAY.

Well, I hope to be leaving my grandmother’s house tomorrow. I actually have quite a few things I need to do before I do leave. Laundry, decide what should be taken. I am going to map out a route, decide what roads I can take that will make it easiest to hike along. I want to avoid major cities if I can. They are just a big hassle, full of people. Small towns are what I like. I will be going to see an old friend of mine in Indiana (I think. For some reason I can never remember where it is.) and then back to California for the start of school so I can finish clearing my stuff out of the room. Then I am going to try to do a true cross country trip, starting in California, and ending in New York.

--Andy

P.S. I have left Milwaukee. I have decided to postpone my visit to Chicago for a few days, at least until after New Years. I am now in ?Champaign?, a city south of Chicago. I am in love. Right now I am seated opposite of an antique bookstore, waiting feverishly until it opens. There are many small cafes with WiFi. I am of course sitting at one as we speak. I think I might get a hotel room here for a day or two. Or even better, hike to the edge of town, find a nice deserted spot and camp out. Unfortunately, it is raining. I would rather not get my computer wet.

P.P.S. I have been in the bookstore. The picture above is not very good quality, because xanga will not let me do a high quality upload. That was a corner of a three story book store. Amazing. I bought an old journal which is partially filled in. The previous owner did what I have done to so many of my journals. He/She started to fill it in, and after a few days kind of forgot about it. Since we are starting a new year, I decided it would be perfect. I can't wait to start writing small things in it.
I have decided that I want to live here. It has stopped raining, so hopefully I can camp out tonight. First I am going to try to find a church. Maybe someone in the church will let me stay at their house for the night.

Viva Las Vegas

Well, my day started off very auspiciously, if that word means BAD. Waking up after only 3 hours of sleep, I started to pack up what was left, so my roommates did not have to deal with it. Having reviewed my ticket and travel time, I decided I would start moving towards the airport. I took public transportation (which compared to Brasilian public transportation is horrid), and barely managed to make my way to the airport.

I had already made my first mistake of the day (I went to the wrong bus stop, so I had to walk a mile with all my luggage to get to the right one), and on arriving at the airport found out that I had made another. My flight from LAX to Las Vegas was not at 4. It had been at 12 (which was long past). I had been looking at the wrong part of my travel information. Thankfully the nice lady at the desk booked me another ticket for a plane leaving in 20 minutes. Dashing (and by dashing, I mean waiting in endless lines. YAY Bureaucracy) through the multiple layers of security, each of them which did less then the one before them, I made my flight, and found myself sitting next to a delightfully sarcastic young lady. We made fun of the TV’s, the Christmas music videos, other peoples luggage (someone had a suitcase wrapped in duct tape which she promptly proclaimed to be “Ghetto Bling”.), the safety announcement (pull on your seatbelt to tighten, etc. etc., if we crash at 400 miles per hour, please exit the plane in an orderly fashion, etc. etc.). She started hitting on me, so when she found out that I had a several hour lay over in Vegas like her, she invited me to go to a bar and drink with her for a while. She apparently thought I was in my mid-twenties. After telling her that I was 18, she got tired and dozed off, leaving me with a boring business man sitting next to me. He did not have the appropriate levels of sarcasm for me to talk to him.

After disembarking in Vegas, I was immediately struck by a)how many slots there were EVERYWHERE, and b)how many people were playing them. They are not fun and you have no chance of winning with them. Yay, lets give them more money. I saw an O2 bar, where apparently they serve oxygen??? Of course, that meant I had to try it. My little air stand had air that was flavored like a Pina Colada, Sex on the Beach, Eucalyptus, and something which I can no longer remember. As I was sitting there, I struck up a conversation with the nice girl who was the ???Bartender???. We swapped a few details like age, and where we are from, and then she immediately started telling me about the crazies that live in Vegas. According to her, everyone is either a drug addict or a prostitute. Then she told me of the time she went out for groceries and bum offered to carry them back to her car in exchange for money. After sympathizing with her over the sheer insanity of the world, I suggested that California (her place of origin) might be pretty crazy as well. She told me that I just did not understand. The people from Vegas are REALLY out there. I then proceeded to explain that I had just dropped out of College in order to hitchhike around the country, and my end point would probably be the US Army. Her eyes went wide and she stopped talking to me. Oh well. I can hardly blame her considering what she considered to be dangerously crazy. (As a side note, the Oxygen bar was fun, but I did not notice an increase in sexual prowess, and the security guard tackled me about 300 yards into my attempt at a four minute mile. Kind of a gyp.) Now, I am waiting for my next flight, which is in 3 hours. As a minor, I am not allowed to loiter near the slot machines, and since they are everywhere, it limits me to about 20 square feet in which to wait. (I do not think I have emphasized how many there are. I think it is literally impossible to be out of sight of a slot machine anywhere in the airport. Even the bathrooms. I went into the handicap stall and there were four plus a video poker machine.)

--Andy

Why Amazingosity Should Be a Word

I just finished up a conversation with my family. A few weeks ago I dropped the bombshell that I was going to leave college for an indefinite amount of time traveling around the country, and after my break will join the Army. I have had a few conversations with them since then, but today's conversation dealt very specifically with what was going on.
They were completely supportive. Obviously they were a little less gungho about my journey, seeing as it is a bit out of the norm, and hitchhiking is no longer quite as common as it was, with the rapist and serial killers that wander our nations highways (or at least that is what the news would have us believe). My parents spent some time saying that if I was leaving college because of money, they would of course be more then happy to help me out even more then they already have. After assuring them that it was not due to monetary causes that I am leaving, they started to discuss my trip with me, helping me flesh out the details. Amazing. My mom is not to happy about the whole Army thing being in a temporal conjunction with the whole Iraq thing. But she talked with some people she knew that were in the Army so that she could give me some tips about what my best options were, and how the recruiter might have been a bit under handed with me. Yet another instance of how much my parents rule. I guess all those times when I was thirteen that I shouted "You aren't my real parents" were not true. Quite happily untrue.
--Andy

War and Peace

In a few months, a movie called 300 is coming out. It is a movie based off of Frank Miller's (of Sin City fame) graphic novels which are in turn based off of the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae. I have always been fascinated by this battle for a number of reasons. It is an epic last stand of the little guy fighting for freedom from the bigger guy. It has a bittersweet ending, and on top of that, you have the little guy inflicting losses of 5:1 (or if some ancient historians are to be believed, 300:1).
Greece is being invaded by the Persians, and so it is decided to gather at a narrow pass to delay them. Most of the city-states of Greece send men, Sparta sending a small contingent of 300 soldiers. The Persian Empire is at its peak and fields an army of 500,000 men (given the time between me and them, the numbers might be a little fuzzy. The point is that the numerical difference is huge) of assorted races. Battle ensues, and while it isn't the biggest battle, since the Greeks purposefully only sent a small portion of their total armies, it was extraordinarily bloody, given the size of the battlefield. After a two days of combat, a traitor showed Xerxes a way around the pass. Finding this out, Leonidas (king of the Spartans, who expected to die, as did all the Spartans, at this battlesite) called a council, and sent the allies all away, staying with only the Spartans (Actually 700 Thespians refused to leave. They all voted to stay with the Spartans. They were also awesome). In the end, the Spartans died, as they came to do. A few days later, the Persians met up with about 80,000 Spartans at Plataea. This brings me to the interesting part.
Sparta was not a free society. Athens is known as the birthplace of democracy, but Sparta was a very strict Oligarchy. Slavery was the basis of their society. All men were required to serve for about...70 years (no, really, that long) in the military. Defective children were thrown out to die. But they were willing to die for freedom. Xerxes offered them a position at the head of his troops, but they refused. They decided that they would rather die free. When told that if they surrendered their weapons they would be allowed to live, the Spartans purportedly answered "Come and get them". And they died for the men from other cities. The Athenians lived very differently from the Spartans, yet the Spartans died for the Athenians.
As I am leaving college and eventually entering the military, I keep getting hit with the irony that in the Army, I will have no freedom, yet the Army was established to keep America free. Some give up their freedom that others might have some. This seems so wrong, and unfair. The Spartans trained their whole life under complete, forced discipline so that when Freedom needed to be protected, they could be there (we are ignoring the Peloponnesian War for the purposes of this post). As I struggle with discipline, I keep coming back to the idea that the best way to find overall freedom is to discipline myself in the small things. I do not like doing homework because I see it as a bar to me having fun, but if I made myself do my homework everyday, I would not have to worry about getting it done, and would be able to do the things I wanted to do. Hopefully this lesson will one day move past my head and make it's way into my heart.
--Andy

It Begins (Sort of)

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

— William Thackeray


As great as this quote is, it seems that a modern keyboard does not convey the same advantage as a pen. Having read my share of blogs, it can not even be said that even poor thoughts emerge. They are merely a huge swamp of nothing. Let us see how long I can keep this blog from falling into that. As a trade off, the blog will be almost unbearable pretentious, looking snootily down it's nose at other blogs, much like it's owner does at other bloggers.

This blog will serve as a record of my travels as I spend time away from college. I have some spare tuition money and plan on using it to travel for a little while. If I work up the courage to hitchhike it could well last for a while. Stay tuned for the likely zany adventures and mishaps I will undoubtedly be involved in (assuming America is "as seen on TV"). I will begin travels on the 16th of December.
--Andy