For better or for worse, when I write, I often hear Anthony Bourdain's voice trying desperately hard to make the words I write sound better. One of these days I am just going to have to my peace with the fact that I am no Bourdain.
Chilling by the Mekong while writing this post. Why do I love this dirty river so?
I....am nonthreatening?
And can we just take a moment to recognize that cilantro is, science will one day prove, just the worst thing people use in their cooking. Cilantro is to food what glitter is to art.
Did I ever tell you about the time I got to where I was going with no hang ups? Why are you making that face?
For starters, the experiences he has as a late-middle-aged, famous man with a TV crew and local fixers will be impossibly different from mine, a thirty-year-old, single, female teacher.
His show revolves around food, the eating or making of. Well, I am not officially banned from any kitchens around the world, but I am no cook. As far as eating goes, never mind the seafood allergy which seems to exclude me from half the menus in the world, no. I don't like a lot of foods. Onions, mushrooms, meat still on the bone... Yeah. I'm still six years old. I'll eat these things, but I certainly don't enjoy food the way a lot of people do. In fact, I dread going to restaurants or cafes alone. It's just so awkward.
I am not cool. I am not edgy. I'm sarcastic, but isn't sarcasm just the lowest level of intellectual humor? "Oh, you have a basic grasp on the concept of irony. How impressive." So if I can emulate the styles of authors I like, but I at least know about styles I hate, where does that leave me in regards to developing my own writing voice?
As Family Guy once said, every fat girl with a camera imagines she is a photographer and every dead-end career guy with a pen thinks he is a writer. Or.. Well. I've probably mutated that over time.
Put another way. I talked to my mom, kind of (bad wifi), briefly this morning. She went on a pretty epic camping trip and was showing off all the cool rocks she found. (petrified wood and opals. Actually cool.). At one point she interrupted herself to say, "but, now, wait. Where are you? You must have a ton of cool stories, too!"
Huh. Do I? I don't think so. While I am not afraid of venturing out alone, I am also fairly cautious and lucky about putting myself in certain situations. Which means, in the end and to quote a favorite character, "nothing ever happens to me."
It's been in my head for a few days now, and if I was disciplined, I would have gathered a bunch of little notes on this topic and addressed it on one go instead of three posts. What sort of traveler am I? Why am I doing this? I don't have wanderlust. I've met people who do and I am not them. The idea of being a very selfish traveler came up in my head the other day. I was chatting with someone about Where You Going and Where've You Been and I could tell him hardly the names of places I went. "Uh, I went to this really cool geological area in a national park outside Taipei. And I took a bus to a nice beach... Bai... Something. Baisanan maybe? I pretty much just walk around cities." I'm not collecting names of places of people. I'm just... Going.
And that's not really something worth writing home about.
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