What's so incredible? Why is she so awesome? How does she do it?

I don’t have all the answers. But I do have an awful lot of ideas and a few experiences in my short life that have proven happiness really is what you make it. The challenge for me is to follow my enthusiasm, because doing what you love is a whole new level of happiness that permeates everything, like a dusting of snow in winter, or like the smell of baking pie. There are the big happiness generators, of course, that usually involve not selling your soul and standing up for what you believe in, giving back to those you love, the simple pleasures in life, all that sort of stuff. There are also a few small-time hidden happiness generators that lurk in a closet, waiting to spew golden bubbles and skittles when you finally get around to turning them on. For me, there are few little tweaks here and there that may not seem like a big deal at first, but have ended up being some of the biggest happiness generators for me. Here are five of them that keep me smiling.

1. Clean as you go.
Some people leave the cleaning for later, or tackle that pile of dirty anything with one epic blitzkrieg, but I’ve always been more of a clean-as-you-go gal. In the kitchen I like to trick myself into emptying the dishwasher while I’m waiting for the next batch of scones to get golden brown, or I race to see how fast I can get the dishes done while I’m waiting for the pasta water to boil. Then, after my piping hot meal is safely resting in my stomach, I don’t have to fight too hard against the food coma since I’ve only got a few easy dishes left to do. I’ll vacuum my apartment one night in between TV shows and I’ll wipe down the bathroom before my dinner plans another night. Not only is cleaning as you go a good way to keep all the nagging chores from piling up, but it’s a good way to turn a day’s worth of work into ten minutes over the course of a week. I like to clean everything as I go too, including my mental riffraff, my cyber space, and the insane number of lists and piles I keep at work. I do it all so I never feel bogged down by the size of my inbox or the mess of my files, and when I don’t have to give up a Saturday for errands I hate to do, I get to take a picnic instead, or meet friends for coffee, or just sleep in.

2. Do it anyway.
There are at least one million reasons why you should eat less wheat, go to the gym more, and call your mother regularly. There are even more reasons why you shouldn’t have another chocolate chip cookie, spend another hour on facebook, or buy that nifty new camera. If you’re anything like me your brain has very little trouble producing a mile-long list of why you don’t feel like going for a run, and I’m certainly good at coming up with thousands of pros for sleeping another hour, but if I’ve learned anything about happiness, it’s that what you want right now and what will make you happy are often two different things. The bit that makes me most unhappy isn’t that I spent too much money on that plane ticket, or that I still can’t run less than a 13 minute mile, it’s the part of me that feels wrong for the aeroplane reservation and feels incompetent for not running fast enough. The key to making yourself happy in the face of a mountain-sized pile of suckage is to do it anyway. You don’t want to exercise today. Okay, great, but do it anyway. You really shouldn’t have that piece of candy. Probably not, but do it anyway and then move on. You might not really need that camera, but get it anyway. Meditation’s hard and your inflexible muscles hurt. Do it anyway. I’m not saying you should be irresponsible or forget your priorities in life, but rather that you should stop agonising over simple dilemmas. Either do or do not, and stop worrying about it either way. You’ll stop making everything an ordeal and get on with your life, because our time here is far too short to spend it mired in regret and it’s far too important that we pay attention instead of wallow in procrastination. So, no matter your fears, regardless of your excuses, do it anyway and make that, that.

3. Drink a cup of tea.
There is very little in this world that cannot be righted by a strong cup of hot tea. Tea has a calming effect and, since it cannot be swigged and instead must be sipped, a unique ability to slow us down. Feel terrible? Drink a cup of tea. The heat is soothing to rough throats, helps kill off a lot of microbial wrongdoers (by sending them to their stomach-acid deaths), is comforting in times of need, and if nothing else, will keep you hydrated, and it’s best to stay hydrated even on your worst of days. Want to show your gratitude to a loved one? Drink a cup of tea with them. Giving your time and attention over a communal pot of tea is one of the nicest things you can do for anyone. Need a break from life? Drink a cup of tea. To make tea, first the water must boil, then the tea must steep, then the beverage must cool, and then you can finally begin to drink it. If you need a break, the patience required to make tea provides a nice, long one. I think tea is good for the soul, so when in doubt, drink a cup of tea. It’s bound to do you good.

4. Ask for directions.
Feeling lost, alone, and as if you’ll never arrive where you’re heading is one of the worst feelings to endure. Facing a fork in the road, or an empty field with no idea of where to turn is more than daunting. I’m all for figuring things out for yourself and I’m a huge supporter of heading out for the endless horizon, but that doesn’t mean you have to be above asking for directions. I regularly feel asking for help is often harder than bumbling around in the dark by myself, but there are also many times when a point in the right direction could have saved me hours of frustration. Getting lost isn’t always a bad thing, since it can lead you to places you’d ordinarily overlook or help you get better at navigating, but always thinking you know better, refusing to reach out to others, and fighting your own private pride war is foolhardy at best and life-threatening at worst. Asking for directions helps you connect with others, helps make you more aware of where you are, and helps get you where you’re going in a much more pleasant way. I used to shy away from asking for any kind of help, now I relish asking for directions as a way to start conversations and meet people.

5. Browse.
I think one of the best ways to milk life for joy is to enjoy browsing. If you can learn to love browsing for books, music, clothes, and other material goods as much if not more than you love buying those same things, then you’ve essentially quadrupled your fun. I personally love everything about travel, from picking dates and destinations, researching the best airfare, and haggling for the sweetest hotel deals to studying the subway maps and bus routes, writing about my impressions of the city before I go sightseeing, and organising my photos from my trip when I get home. Not to sound like a maxim from a bad kung fu movie, but it really is about the journey, not the destination. The more you can love the journey in its entirety — preparing for, embarking on, and having taken the journey, wherever that may be — the more opportunities there are for happiness. Start enjoying the browsing, the observing, the being there and you’ll find you’ve added a big spoonful of happiness to the mix.

I’ll be travelling 21 days in November. That’s 70% of the month. Yowzers. posted on 28 Oct 2009 by Leigh to twitter

That’s no exaggeration. I will be away on travels for 70% of November, 74% if I count a camping trip I cut from the calendar once I realised how insane it was to spend more time on planes and trains, open roads and busy hotels than falling asleep in your own bed. I feel like I’ve reached a new pinnacle in my status as traveller now that I’ll be essentially absent for the better part of a month. And I’m not just embarking on a 21-day trip, either. I’ll be taking four separate journeys (each of which has their own mini-stops), touching down on home soil for sometimes a week, sometimes just a few hours. It’s a good mix of travel as well: I’ll be visiting friends and family just as often as I’ll be going solo, I’ll be travelling for work and for play and for in-between alike, and I’ll be hitting up the east cost and the west coast and some of the turf in between. I foresee needing a small library of books, a case of granola bars, and my own pillow.

Do not for one microsecond think I’m complaining, because to be honest, I’m thrilled to be travelling this much. While I wouldn’t want to make a habit of tuckering myself out in such a short span of time, a little excitement is nothing to balk at. To the outsider it can seem like I’m rushing about from place to place, but let’s be realistic, travel is a much slower beast than the calendar lets on. There’s the waiting to do, see, or go, and then the sitting while you’re getting from point a to point b, and of course periods of intense activity when a deadline presents itself or an event occurs, followed by leisurely periods of downtime before you get up and do it all again. I love the single-taskedness of travelling; right now I’ve nothing to do but pass the time by working or reading a book, now I’m working on the task at hand, now all I can do is sit back and observe, now it’s time to interact with the world around you, right now it’s time to unwind, explore, create, etc. You never have to choose because travelling limits what you can do. So when I was in Amsterdam, what I was supposed to be doing became incredibly clear. During the day I was supposed to explore. When I was hungry I was supposed to eat. When I got home it was time to work. When others were available to meet up it was time to go out. There’s no balancing act required.

Things are certainly simplified when travelling, as described above, but travel also amplifies other things. As Alain de Botton describes so acutely in his book, “The Art of Travel,” you cannot help but take yourself with you when you depart. It’s impossible not to check your emotional baggage along with your suitcase and even when you thought you’d left it behind, there it is, circling the luggage carousel, waiting to be carried on your back into paradise. De Botton notes that, without the distractions of our familiar surroundings and with the added expectations of our unfamiliar ones, our problems grow louder, our fears grow bigger, our outlook, darker, until they are impossible to ignore and you could be in Barbados but it isn’t going to make a fight with your wife any easier, especially if your rented cabana has no doors to slam. To some extent, this is very true, but there’s another side of it pessimistic Botton likes to ignore. Your laughter is louder, your joys are bigger, your triumphs, brighter, until you find yourself with a curious sensation you’d thought died with childhood. From this experience, some people, like Botton, write books, while others, like Edward Hopper, paint on canvas. Stephen Shore takes pictures, Che Guevara fights revolutions, Edward Ruscha throws typewriters out of speeding cars. It affects us all differently. Today, with travel so accessible, there are even more fruits of the travel labours. Tom Kevill-Davies cycles, Lindsay Nash and Whit Altizer blog, Gary Arndt publishes podcasts, Mariana van Zeller makes movies, and both Davey and Matt dance.

“It must be nice…”

I travel a lot. And as anyone who travels a lot knows, I hear this phrase a lot. “It must be nice you can afford to travel so much. The rest of us have to live responsibly.” Yes, because liking to travel automatically implies I’m irresponsible. “It must be nice that you can just leave whenever you want. I have a job to hold down.” Of course, because all trips just happen without planning, and the only people who travel are unemployed. “It must be nice to be able to do what you want all the time, when I have a spouse and kids to think about.” Sure, because I don’t have anything else to worry about in my life just because I’m child-less. “It must be nice to be so young you can travel like that.” Absolutely, because Melena RTW and Jason Harris aren’t at least twice my age and travel more than I do. It must be nice, because I seem to like it, and I seem to do it, but I also seem to not be the only one. It bothers me that travel is still associated with something only the upper crust or collegiate get to do, when it’s become something so much more accessible than it was years ago. And it is nice to travel as much as I do if you like it as much as I do, but it isn’t nice because I’m independently wealthy (I’m not), because I’m so unencumbered (I’m not), or because I’m in some magical life stage that makes mine so much easier than yours (it’s not). I have an edge over some folks who have a mortgage or a dog or a bum leg, but that doesn’t mean travelling three-quarters of the month is out of the question for you either. You just have to want it.

Now, I’m not saying simply the will alone is enough to find the way, but rather travel is a question of priorities. You can have many interests — I’d like to (and am trying to) learn Japanese, along with 42 other things — but they aren’t priorities, because your decisions can only be motivated by a choice few things you care about, and your priorities are it. I have not found a magical beanstalk or genie, I have just made travel a priority because it is so fulfilling to me right now. I have other priorities, and sometimes my priority to make rent and feed myself takes precedence over visiting Buenos Aires, but just as often my priority to go somewhere pushes me to buy that ticket. Having travel as a priority doesn’t mean I drain my bank accounts just to get away, it means I spend my money on hotel reservations and train tickets instead of shoes and books. I spend my free time combing Travel Zoo and researching destinations instead of browsing facebook. I spend my energy planning the next excursion and I spend my brainpower daydreaming about what Croatia is really like and I spend my hard drive space on my travel photographs. There’s nothing wrong with spending it any other way, it’s just different, and it’s different for me because travel is a priority. So if you’re going to say “its’ nice that…” say it’s nice that travelling is one of my priorities.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I had heard a lot about the KCCLA, the Korean Cultural Centre of Los Angeles, where the Korean government subsidised language lessons that were so absurdly affordable nearly everyone had heard of their highly successful programme. I desperately wanted to learn Korean (one of my life aims is to become a polyglot fluently speaking Korean, Japanese, English, Spanish, and possibly French) but it wasn’t until my last year in LA that I had a Tuesday evening free to pursue KCCLA’s Korean language programme. I didn’t just like it, I simply adored it and would highly recommend the programme to anyone interested in learning another language. The classes went at a reasonable pace for someone completely unfamiliar with eastern languages, the professors were super fun and kept engaging us with real-life, practical vocabulary that I could immediately use on the street, and I fell in love with the language to go along with my pre-existing love of Korean movies, music, and soondobu, all of which I learnt to properly spell in hangul.

Sadly, there is no KCC in Washington DC, though the myriad grocer’s, restaurants, and tae kwon do gyms in Annandale more than rival LA’s Koreatown. Instead I discovered there is a JASWDC, the Japanese-American Society of Washington DC, which offers Japanese language classes. My intense love of Japan and Japanese culture is no secret, and I jumped at the chance to experience the same fulfilling language studies in another favourite culture of mine. In fact, I have another lesson tonight that I’m feverishly studying for whenever I can grab a free moment. I think the JAS, especially here in DC, is a wonderful society that does some pretty amazing stuff. I have no qualms with the people there, but if I were to be completely honest with you, I’m debating whether or no to continue my lessons.

At first glance it looks like my quandary is merely a squabble over values: I paid so I should go. This assumes the expense of classes is equal to, greater than, or somehow comparably worth my time, effort, and the payoff I’m getting out of the experience. Logistically, my list of excuses is long —I was out of the country for last week’s class and am already behind, I’m ill prepared for the current class, I don’t feel I’m progressing well, my time would be better spent catching up than flailing about for another hour and a half, my need to go the grocer’s is arguably greater — but my list of reasons to go short. It’s the same reason I paid what is to me a hefty fee to enroll in classes; I don’t want to punk out because I want to learn Japanese. And while all of these factors are vying for weight in my head and thus decision, a simple thought occurred to me. Just wanting to learn Japanese is not enough.

Pause. Let’s go back to Korean. I had two successful terms at KCCLA when I would have been terribly disheartened to miss a lesson, but that last term before I left was a complete botch. I went to maybe three out of ten classes, and they were the first three to boot. I like to pretend it was a slippery slope after I missed that fourth class, or that I had too much else on my plate outside of funtime (yes, I did consider language lessons and my language homework my free/fun time), but the reality is that there wasn’t a compelling enough reason outside of the desire to learn Korean to make me drive the 45 minutes to the centre, sit through the two hours of class, and do my homework for the next week. Just wanting to learn Korean wasn’t enough, I needed the children’s songs, the menu translations, the soap opera analysis taught in my previous two Korean classes to engage me. I needed the payoff of knowing I could walk into the Korean Galleria and complete a shopping transaction in only Korean, or that I would understand the answer when I asked if there was meat in the so-and-so, the simple joy of hearing someone answer you back in Korean when you say hello, or thank you, or goodbye. I stopped having that. Was it because Korean suddenly got hard? I certainly thought so. But that’s a big, stinky, heaping pile of hogwash and we both know it. It wasn’t fun anymore because my professor wasn’t making it fun.

In the world of educational professional development, we talk about letting students “take ownership” of their learning, understanding intuitively that no teacher can make them learn, they have to take on the responsibility themselves and then, through inquiry and experimentation and hopefully some teacher guidance, they push themselves to actually learn instead of memorise and regurgitate. Was it my professor’s responsibility to make learning Korean fun? Yes and no. It was his responsibility to make language lessons be about more than language. It’s about communicating ideas and not about subject markers and using the appropriate polite form. The grammar comes intuitively after the ideas, not in their place. Going to classes stopped being fun, so I stopped going. That’s not a terribly illogical logos. But what I had already learned in my Korean studies was how to make learning Korean fun. It was supposed to be hard, but my other professors showed me that focusing on the ideas behind the words made the language become invisible, and instead of being a math equation it was TV show. You didn’t have to simplify a bunch of variables, you just had to learn which actor was which.

Now we return to Japanese lessons, something which, from the little I experienced in Tokyo and my early Korean lessons, should be fun. I should want to go back to class. I should be searching for Japanese music and humming “The Rabbit and the Turtle” and failing miserably at restraining myself from going to yet another sushi restaurant just so I can say “Okanjo onegaishimasu!” I should be looking forward to my homework, like solving a puzzle. I should be trying to use my Japanese whenever I can and searching for furigana manga. If I’m not enjoying my Japanese lessons, which are at present pretty much rote repetition straight from the textbook (not helpful in making things sticky aka: easy to remember at all), it’s a shortcoming of the environment I’m in, not of my brain or my desire to learn the language. It should be fun, and if it isn’t, it’s up to me to make it fun. If that means not going to Japanese class and instead watching Train Man then so be it. Another way to look at it: If language class isn’t teaching me much, continuing to attend just because I want to learn Japanese is like standing in line at the Sprint store to fix a problem with your AT&T phone. It seems related, though it’s really just a waste of time. On the other hand, if you are learning something significant in class, or if your reason for going is something else, like to hear a native speaker for an hour and a half, then having a perfect attendance record might be worth your while. That’s the real question: what am I getting out of my class time?

It all boils down to my initial revelation. Just wanting to learn Japanese is not enough to learn it. It’s foolish to think sitting for 90 minutes a day will teach you anything as all-encompassing as a language as fast as the textbook or JLPT says you should. It’s about what you do outside of the classroom that matters (please direct all arguments to AJATT), and the plain-ol’ desire to learn Japanese is insufficient to guarantee I’ll actually learn from this class I’m debating to attend, or any other formal learning structure to begin with. My problem with this class? It’s not teaching me anything I couldn’t alone in my room with nothing more than the textbook in hand. I’ve been to three classes already (see a the similarity with my final Korean classes yet?) and I’ve had a hell of a time trying to get the vocabulary to stick in my brain. Yet in my independent kanji studies from Heisig’s book, Remember the Kanji, I’ve had no trouble whatsoever retaining the 200-odd kanji, seemingly one-off and random heiroglyphs, I’ve learned thus far. It’s no mystery to me why the difference; I have fun with the Kanji. They fit into stories and sentences and they build off one another and I got chills when I looked up from my book in Amsterdam’s Chinatown after lesson 8 and realised I could read the Chinese poster (hanza and kanji are similar) advertising fish ball soup for 8 euros because I knew the kanji for fish, and soup, and eight. Contrast this with class, where I can’t remember the word for “international relations” because it’s dry, isolated, and I won’t read it on a poster anywhere. I’m not even in college anymore, so asking Elgin, my speaking partner, what his major is eighteen times doesn’t help either of us.

So am I going to go to class? Probably not. Sure I feel bad wasting throwing my money away, worry I’m missing an opportunity, lament I can’t get more out of the class, and chastise myself for falling behind, but it’s not a complete waste, because while I didn’t get the best Japanese instruction ever, I did get schooled in something far more important. It’s not, “no pain, no gain.” It’s, “no thrill, no will,” and without the thrill alive and well inside the classroom, I just haven’t the will to learn any of it. The answer? Seek the thrill somewhere else, which is exactly where I’m going to go instead.

One would expect a place with the hype of Boston to be far less unique than the beloved city happens to be. Whatever you’ve heard about Boston, it’s true — the big-bellied Red Sox barflies, the hippie-cum-yuppie-foodies, the strong historical shadow, the supreme collegetown vibe forever fighting the townies, the lovely Boston lagers, I mean all of it — and in fact, despite multiple visitations, Boston continues to delight me.

The scape of the city is recognosable well beyond the numerous iconic neighbourhoods, and despite the incredible variety of its residents, Bostonians exhude a certain, not entirely unwelcome mojo. The city crawls with their escapades and their hangouts (a priveledge granted exclusively to places urbanised on such a walkable scale); even for a true city as surprisingly small as Boston, the anteceding culture is unexpectedly dense enough that the neighbourhoods themselves might as well be their own city-states for all the fierce loyalty the inspire.  My most recent venture lasted a mere weekend and still I managed to amble through just about every quarter in search of the full Boston story.

The Boston I know is full of fairly conservative art, a healthy dose of wealth and all that entails, and die-hard sports buffs. It’s all cold weather and humble history. But the Boston I witnessed firsthand on this spin through the area was the Boston of comminist t-shirts, marijuana music festivals, and pirate cabarets. It was the Boston of stuffed French Toast, of microbrews, of Newberry Comics, of an impressive public library, in short just the type of off-the-cuff complexity you want in a repeat visit. Sure there’s that romantic Boston, the one filled with old-world architecture and strolling parks, apple cider at the farmers market, and “pak the kaa in Haavad yad” but to rely on a textbook image of Boston is to discredit the adaptive ability the region has, making the Boston of yesteryear just as poignant as the Boston of today. It’s not the cobblestones or the quaint churches but the way they are side by side with shutter shades and breakdancers, where English Premiere League fans and Patriots fans are vying for the same territory, where diner-dripping cream pies are just as likely to be accompanied by 19 cent coffee as by a 12 dollar cocktail.

Let’s not forget that Boston has a long history supporting such diversity: even the 1920 immigrant version of Boston had subcultures in spades, a cournicopia which, though perhaps only tolerated back then, has been wholeheartedly embraced today. The result? Same old authentic Italian-American fare and Irish pubs a-pleanty, but you’ll no longer incite anyone’s emnity from frequenting both, nor from sampling the Ethiopian, Nepalese, or Chinese so abundant in the city.  Back then like stuck to like, and playdates were easily accepted or denied based on who attended which church, but today it seems hard to imagine a Boston without the black coat-clad assertively vocal aetheists or the Kamboucha-swigging mystics on their way to Bihkram Yoga practice. While other, maybe even more worldly metroplises (New York, Los Angeles, Paris, et al) claim to host the same spectrum of personalities, to do so in a place with as big a pool as NYC or LA is a feat not nearly so admirable as when Boston pulls the same off wih a mere 1.4 million people and 12.9 kilometer reach.

That’s the real power of Boston; it’s kept up with the changing American face. Just as our grandparents and great grandparents needed it back then to usher in their Dream, so too did we need it to pop up international businesses and engineering schools and hipster bookshops to foster our own Dream. We needed it to keep that real-world, salt-of-the-earth feel but grow some skyscrapers and new-money boutiques and restaurants to cover up the spots the 1950s left bald. Luckily, Boston, being the giving spirit she is, obliged and kept Boston very much alive.

There seem to be about a googleplex of personality mappers, strength finders, and character tests that are supposed to tell you how you are, but I find none are as telling as the personality traits, strengths, and character values that you see in yourself.  I could tell you where I fall on the Myers-Briggs scale, but that is woefully insufficient to explain my internal motivations.  I could give you my score on the Gallup’s rubric, but that will completely fail to inform the origins of my personal belief structure.  How can a stranger successfully categorise me when even those close to me fail, let alone let a set of questions tell me who I am?  No, while others may be able to compliment or complete your self-identity, I truly think only I can accurately assess my deepest core values, and in turn hopefully shed some light on why I am as I am.

Before I start listing off my intensely private and personal values like flavours of ice cream, I should preface with a small measure of my frustrations.  I have no delusions about how difficult a person I am to put in a box of any shape, size, or use.  While I try to be as consistent as possible, I am all too aware of how often I contradict myself.  I say I don’t like chocolate yet one of my favourite desserts is chocolate covered fruit or pretzles.  By all accounts I am intensely social, yet I never have more than a handful of friends.  But if you look deeper and take the time to think about it, you’ll discover that I don’t like chocolate precisely because it’s too sweet, so coupling the dark version with a salty pretzle or cup of peanut butter suits me just fine.  You’ll notice that my smile is bigger when we go get coffee together and I can actually listen to what you’re saying than it is when we are screaming at one another from across a dance floor.

Essentially I’m explaining why calling someone an introvert or an achiever or a whatever the test result is has little to do with their decisions, actions, and patterns.  It’d be easy to slap on some obvious labels and progress to the next great existential question, but while I am a tech nerd, and I am a traveller, and I am an artist, such words are so much more complex.  Dreamer I may be, but nearly everyone I know doesn’t understand how serious I am as a person, even about my wild and fantistical ideas.  They fail to predict my disappointment when a trip doesn’t come to fruition simply because I propose a lot of ventures to take.  They assume my investement in activities such as videogames exclude me from the pursuit of financial stability or faith, or that my pious meditiation and vegetarianism means I don’t drink or go out on the town.  They mistake my interest in one area of technology such as user interface for all of technology and are confused when I don’t follow tech news as closely as expected.  Do I fill the roles I never intended to have?  Some of the time I too expect myself to dream instead of do, and I read up on the newest bizarre specifications for the whatever-gadget because I know people will ask me about it.  Yet some of the time I refuse in staunch rebellion and instead think quietly to myself, “don’t you know me at all?” for it is becoming exceedingly important for me to be surrounded by those who are flexible in their expectations and will let me change as often as my chameleon skin decides to shift.  Perhaps that double-edged Gemini nature in me will forever reveal I am dead centre on every personality quiz out there, but I have complete faith that a number or a letter or a colour or a word isn’t nearly enough to explain there’s so much more going on under the surface.

Balance
Perhaps the very thing I struggle with executing the most, balance is also probably of the greatest importance among my core values.  To me balance isn’t just about calling a truce between two sides of an argument, but it’s about the ongoing exploration to find what works. Balance is about the act of seeking stability, reconciling your logic with your intuition, and gaining wisdom along the way.  I do believe practicing moderation is the easiest way to keep your life in balance, but it is not the only way, and two decades into it, I’m still encountering great difficulties with keeping a healthy balance.

Things I do in the pursuit of balance: meditate, turn down invitations, take vacations from things, journal and reflect

Peace
Peace is also something I am constantly aiming to create in my life. It’s so easy to be caught up in all the details, the stressors, the cruelty we dole out to ourselves when we make a mistake or “do something anyway,” but just a few solitary moments of peace can right the world in a way nothing else can.  Just a few seconds to stop and breathe and focus on where you are can bring back mindfulness to even the most hectic of moments, and in my opinion, being mindful of what you are doing and what choices you’re making is the start of bringing peace into everything you do, which in turn breeds compassion to others and to yourself, you know, all those warm fuzzy feelings of contentment and stillness and joy at just existing.  So, mindfulness and compassion and peace are really all tied up into one neat little value.

Things I do in the pursuit of peace: chant, do chores slowly, listen intently, take walks, show appreciation

Integrity
While peace and balance are more internal than anything else, integrity can be a highly external thing.  I care deeply about integrity, about aligning your intent and your actions, which often manifests itself to others as reliability, dependability, loyalty, sincerity, and other such honourable adjectives.  But to me integrity isn’t just doing the right thing, it’s a merging of your intent, your state, and your execution.  I won’t take on something I know I cannot do, just as I try to say what I really mean and thus mean what I say.  As a result, I’m terribly honest with others most of the time, because I see it as an act of love.  Of course not everyone sees my intense commitment to being impeccable as so noble, and I’ll admit my techniques are rough around the edges at times, but I think there’s little as important as not only seeing what really is, but facing it without turning away.

Things I do in the pursuit of integrity: speak honestly (sometimes brutally), carefully consider commitments, accurately estimate, stick with my decisions, constantly re-evaluate

Growth
I tend to go through phases where I focus on one core value or another, and right now I’m in a serious growth-centric phase. Growth and learning aren’t the same thing, though they are similar, since growth is so much more than just the cerebral. Growth is often uncomfortable, difficult, disheartening, and quite trying, but the payoff of stretching oneself, of rising to the challenge, of making progress at all costs, that is the most intrinsic reward I know of. In some ways I believe that’s my purpose in life, to keep challenging myself, for I certainly find I am antsy and unsatisfied when I am not reaching for some new and higher fruit, but I try to level the growing pains with enjoying the fruits of my labours. It’s hard to keep climbing up, to finally let go of that trapeze and fly through the unknown darkness to catch the next one, but it’s this terror and excitement and growing period that makes the whole circus worth sitting through. After all, it’s a constant journey and wouldn’t you rather take pictures and have fun along the way?

Things I do in the pursuit of growth: create new projects, travel, write and otherwise document my life, try new things, teach myself, let myself fail

Creativity/Passion
As Howard Thurman suggests, “Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.” I wholeheartedly believe that the world needs more passionate people, people with fire in their hearts, and with that thought, both passion and creativity have become one of my core values. The difference between the two? Passion is the bit that makes you come alive, and creativity is what you do with that spark. I have many passions, those few pursuits that immerse you in a complete flow experience when you forget time and lose your perspective on the world. It’s the most powerful intrinsic activity, the kinds of things you do because you enjoy the act as much as you enjoy the result. I feel lucky that I am able to put my passions first in my life, and have found so much success every time I do. With the journey so satisfying, it’s almost impossible not to be a creative person every spare second of the day. Every time I let my passions take over I find myself completely refreshed, mentally relaxed, and 100% excited without fail, which in turn makes me better the world around me. So when I start to feel selfish or frustrated, I turn to my passions and the creative process transforms the angst into compassion and joy.

Things I do in the pursuit of creativity/passion: draw, photograph, write, make time for art, collect inspiring items, speak with other creative people, explore the world, follow my enthusiasm, play like children, have fun!

These five values are what I cherish the most, and what in turn guides my actions and determines my interests.  I keep a cleanly house because it promotes peace of mind but it is also integral because it shows others how much I value their presence. I blog because it allows me to express my creativity and passions, but it also ends up pushing me to grow further. I take naps because it helps me keep things in balance, but it also creates the space and time in my life for my passions to blossom and my busy brain to find peace in the extra time. Essentially they’re all intertwined, and while I may have other values I hold in high regard (such as connecting with others, minding my personal health, and cultivating communication, among many), they always come back to my five core values, these big headings which are buried so deep, like enormous age-old roots, I pale in the face of their strength.

Inspired my fellow blogger over at Tiny Thoughts, who wrote an amazing post a while ago on the same subject, I thought I’d bring you something a little different today, a few words highlighting the things I learned from hip hop. I dig music, as will come as no surprise to avid readers, family members, and even longtime chums. Listeners of my college radio show might have noticed my musical tastes are eclectic at best and schizophrenic at worst, while a recent gander at my last.fm page will puzzle the eyes with a “Recent Tracks” list that sandwiches über-cheery Japanese pop with laid-back instrumental hip hop. To the skimming eye it may seem that hip hop and house are my two greatest loves, but peruse my artist affinities from one time period to the next and it becomes very clear that hip hop is a recent love of mine.

Just how recent? Two years ago I hadn’t ever heard a Lil’ Jon song and I hadn’t the slightest clue who Louis Logic was, and to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t quite place who they cast as Ford Prefect in the movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Just how how avidly do I love it now? I can get into any forum flame war over ’90s rap, debate the finer points of contemporary underground hip hop with a manager at Amoeba, defend any region’s scene as worthier than the others, and spout out nominations for the most innovative turntablists currently producing music.

I knew there was a better alternative to mainstream hip hop (wasn’t Common proof?), and somewhere along the way I went from knowing nothing about a subgenre to being where I am today. I didn’t sit down and read an encyclopedia of hip hop, nor did I take many recommendations, and I certainly didn’t listen to anything I thought wasn’t up to snuff. I found one artist that I enjoyed, which led me to another, and then to another, and to another…and before I knew it I had a pretty large collection of names I had some faith in. I kept going back to those names and suddenly I had a huge underground hip hop collection of artist from everywhere — the Netherlands, Japan, France, Morocco, Korea, and all over the US &mdsah; that played the kind of hip hop I truly enjoyed kicking back to. I immersed myself in the world of hip hop and the stuff I liked just sort of popped up. It was musical synergy at its best.

I thought nothing of it at the time, not realising that to go from completely incompetent in a subject to entirely knowledgeable in about a year is no mean feat. The truth is, that’s some incredible progress, progress that I’m reminded I can make in other areas besides hip hop, such as going from knowing no Japanese to being able to speak Japanese, or going from being pretty hopeless at motion graphics to being a pro. If you immerse yourself in the world, you can clear some serious headway, making room for larger jumps from platform to platform and higher altitudes to reach. Or you can just learn to kick ass at Halo, it’s really up to you. And that was the first lesson I learned from hip hop.

The more I think about it, the more I see my experiences with hip hop have presented me with some pretty valuable life lessons, and while it may sound a bit contradictory to suggest, a few life skills reinforced by what is otherwise considered a violent, crude, and negative format by newsreels and naysayers especially. Of course there are some sides of hip hop that I don’t entirely approve of, and many I downright detest, but the genre has more than its fair share of innovation and maxims you can take to the bank. For example:

1. Ask yourself, WWKWD?
Okay, let’s get the controversy out of the way first. Yes, I am telling you to call to mind what the loose canon of hip hop would do before you make a life decision. No, I’m not crazy, or suggesting you wear shutter shades or humiliate yourself on national television. Don’t idolise any part of Kanye because he’s a complete dick, but idolise him precisely because he succeeds despite being a complete dick. Think about it. “I’m going to make an album with nothing but my auto-tuned voice and a vo-corder!” Don’t do it, Kanye. “I’m going to write blather on a weblog that makes me look like an idiot!” Stop it, Kanye. “I’m going to get on stage and steal the VMA I didn’t win!” You’re stupid, Kanye. And yet, he still makes front pages, he still gets played on the radio, and his clothing line is still selling well. 808s and Heartbreaks found surprising success, his blog is still going, and he ended up holding the moon man in his hot little hand. Why? Well, as Tiny Thoughts explains, because he’s Kanye West. The man has no fear, and because of this he doesn’t fail. In fact, he succeeds, and he goes on to achieve more than any of us timid creatures could ever fathom. So I say again, what would you do? What would happen? What would Kanye West do? Why would the result be different? You may find it wouldn’t be. Perhaps some of his success could rub off on you too if you just ask yourself WWKWD first.

2. You don’t have to say something to make something
I call this the lesson of Pete Rock and Jazzy Jeff. Rap is not hip hop, and hip hop is not rap. They’re not two separate genres exactly, but they’re two different characters in the same story. There’s a lot of bad hip hop out there, but the good stuff that’s floating in the ether is unbelievable, and surprisingly, some of the best hip hop is instrumental hip hop. As in, no words. They don’t have an opinion on racism in America or other social injustices, they don’t come up with fancy slang words or novel dances, and they don’t throw their wealth and success (or lack of) anywhere. Most instrumental hip hop just sits back, maybe scratches here and there, throws up a heavy backbeat and wicked baseline and quietly rocks out in a corner. Fat Jon, Shinnosuke, Shin-Ski, Pete Rock, Nujabes, Jazzy Jeff, C-Mon & Kypski, the Visioneers, Omega Watts, my list of amazing instrumental hip hop artists could go on for longer than this post, and the truth is, they don’t say anything profound. They don’t enlighten us to the meaning of life, they don’t push an agenda, and they don’t use fancy vocabulary to sound deep, but man is what they make awesome. It’s quality product. You can make something awesome even if you don’t feel like you have anything valuable to say. You just have to do it anyway, and you never know, it just might kick tail.

3. Collaboration is key
Have you ever noticed that hip hop artists rarely work alone? Of course they’ll throw out their first solo album, but even then few albums escape without featuring another mate or mentor (whether mentioned or not). The nature of the music is to collaborate. Take J Dilla, the producer that did some reputable solo stuff, but more impressively brought our famed Chi City crew (Chicago rappers like Kanye, Common, and Lupe Fiasco) into stardom. Even though he’s gone his legacy lives on not because of what he did alone in his studio, but because of the magic he made working with artists in Japan, and the knowledge he dropped on club hip hop while collaborating. The stuff he produced with others is almost always considered the best he or they have ever made. Think of it as clinching proof that 1 + 1 is actually more than 2. Kanye’s best album? Produced by Dilla. Common’s best album? Dilla. Apani’s best single? Dilla. That sweet song you heard on the radio? Dilla. The most highly respected producer in the game? You guessed it. It doesn’t matter how great your gift is, how solid your stuff remains when you go it alone, collaboration can take you farther than your own mind, how ever brilliant, ever could.

4. Lose your roots, lose your cred
Forgetting where you came from is hip hop suicide. In fact, usually your roots are just fuel meant to propel you straight out of the ghetto or down from your city on a hill, in other words out of oblivion and into the spotlight. Don’t bother denying, hiding, or ignoring your roots. Embrace them, use them, move on. Made it already? To forget where you came from (whether you’re Jenny from the block or just a skateboarder on the corner) is always a recipe for disaster. Change your tune from politically charged accusations to placid celebrations of summertime, or forgo your jazz-heavy early style for something more gangster and you’ll look more ridiculous than Vanilla Ice (I’m talking to you, CL Smooth solo stabs, particularly “I Need a Boss”). Your integrity is entirely dependent on you being honest with the world (and yourself) about who you are and where you came from. Try to take any one piece of that out of the picture and something begins to stink. It’s as simple as that; keep your roots, and fight to hold onto everything that makes you who you are. To try to do it any other way would keep you from the credibility and the success you really deserve.

5. Don’t stop. Ever. If you have stopped, start again.
Jay-Z must have retired about eight times by now, but he’s still on stage throwing up rhymes, he’s still appearing in videos left and right, and he’s still legendary. He’s had fairly large periods in his impressive career when he hasn’t penned, produced, or popped in to feature on anybody’s track for ages, but these lulls are quickly overshadowed by whatever epic mastery he throws at us when he comes back. He can’t quit the game, nor should he. Nor should you. Even if you have taken a break, for however many years, for whatever reasons, come back from India with Panjabi MC and blow us all out of the water with Mundian Bach Ke, and single-handedly start a desi-style resurgence in the states. Got swept of four feet? When you finally hit the pavement, make sure you hit it running and drop both “99 Problems” and it’s remix with Linkin Park through the stratosphere to once again redefine how popular hip hop is consumed. Promised the press you’d be gone for good? Surprise! Here you are, with a Bonnie & Clyde single that, contrary to the image, solidified your status a standup guy and ensured your lady was untouchable. It doesn’t mater what you didn’t do, or what you did, or what you said you were going to do, just don’t stop doing.

“As I see it, language is not an act, nor is it a skill; it cannot be possessed. Language is a habit. You don’t ‘learn’ a language as such, you live it. You don’t need to get ‘good’ at a language, you get used to it. You don’t become fluent at a language, you become it.”

There’s this cat on the internet (literally, he goes by Khatzumoto) who wanted to learn to speak another language and did it. This feat in and of itself isn’t particularly remarkable, but how he went about it is a story I was so blown away by, it warrants retelling right here, right now. Khatzumoto, like so many of us trying to speak in a nonnative tongue, got so sick of being told your brain hardens at age 12, of classes and classwork that didn’t get you any closer to fluent, of foreign language speakers that couldn’t hold a conversation in their purported language of mastery, of outdated textbooks that make you speak like a news anchor, ex-pats of several years who still can’t speak the native language, in short of all the hogwash out there that makes even the most spirited of language students feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle. So instead of buying into the idea that he couldn’t do it, Khatzumoto staunchly believed he could, and when the traditional means of lecture and memorise, of writing tables and making flashcards didn’t work, he came up with a method that did.

He calls this All Japanese All the Time, essentially a total immersion experience that does not require selling all your possessions and moving to a foreign country before you can speak the language passably. In fact, in just 18 months Khatzumoto went from knowing no Japanese to being able to hold business discussions, have casual conversations, find a job in Tokyo, and navigate the tricky and at times unfriendly world of moving to Japan. How did he do it? By watching TV. Okay, not just by watching TV. Khatzumoto also watched movies, and anime, and read books, and found Japanese friends, and pretty much anything else he could get his hands on. His reasoning? Learn like a child learns: through context.

The seed makes more than perfect logic to me. In my own experiences growing up with Spanish spoken around me, I heard certain phrases like “Quieres ir afuera?” when it was time to take the dog for a walk, or “Awwww, mi pobrecita hija, lo siento.” I just learned these patterns, and when I began to learn Spanish academically, suddenly the meanings of these phrases were more clear. “(Do) you want + to go + outside?” was easy enough, but the equivalent of “sorry” literally translates to “I feel it.” Unlike my classmates, I had the upper hand because I intuitively knew how to use these phrases in the proper context. Instead of trying to formulate how to ask if you wanted to go outside by first thinking of the verb I needed to use, then conjugating it, then picking out the vocabulary, then ordering it correctly and checking for errors, the phrase came naturally to my mind in a single chunk. I had associated the meaning of the phrase with the actuality of it, while my colleagues were still grappling with making the individual words make sense.

Of course even now it’s been several years since I’ve been halfway decent at the language, it’s now fairly safe to say tengo muy olvidado el Español, to the point where I’m once again inept. Why is this? Because I’m not using it. Spanish isn’t being spoken around me, I have no reason to ever break into the language, and I’m not trying to expose myself to it in the day to day. If I wanted to improve my Spanish, I’d have to start using it again, immersing myself around people who spoke it and finding opportunities to practice. It stands to reason then, that to learn a language with proficiency, the same method must be employed.

“It’s a cause and effect; it’s not ‘I learn this so I can do this,’ but instead ‘I do this, therefore I learn that.’ I made it like a game: how much more can I Japan-ise my life, and then suddenly, snap I can read Japanese, someone would hand me something in Japanese and I’d think oh snap I can read all of this.”

Khatzumoto seems to despise the classroom, and while I understand his point, I don’t think it’s a terrible place to start. But the classroom alone is not enough. In 2008 I began learning Korean essentially on my own (with some help from the good ol’ internet) but found there were just too many snags that held me up. So I broke down and signed up for a class. Having done it both ways, I can see why academic learning is inadequate, yet for those of us who don’t have a lot of opportunities to speak a foreign language (say, Russian in the US or Svenska in China) a class is an excellent place to work on speaking comprehension, the only skill of Khatzumoto’s four — reading, writing, speaking, and listening comprehensions — that cannot be done alone in your room. If you lack confidence to talk to strangers yet, a class is a great opportunity to test the waters in a fairly safe environment. Everyone knows you’re a student. Best of all, classrooms offer feedback, the most important point often overlooked by those self-taught. You might only be a hair off on how to say X or how to pronounce Y, but you’ll probably never know until it’s been ingrained in your neuro-pathways unless you find someone (a teacher, a language partner, a native speaker buddy, a homeless vet, your 3rd grade teacher, anyone) to correct you. Sometimes the letters themselves are pretty confusing to figure out; I know that while I could associate a symbol with a sound pretty well on my own, I could not for the life of me figure out how and when to break up syllables in Korean, so having a teacher explain it to me enabled me to pursue more learning on my own that I could not have before.

“The real problem lies in ideas and attitudes…Someone who thinks they can’t do something, can’t. and someone who thinks they can, can…change the philosophy, and you change the behavior; change the behavior, and you change the results. It’s not touchy-feely; it’s simple cause-effect.”

Classes will only take you as far as you want to go though, and often textbook teaching is fairly wide of the mark. I’ve heard horror stories from friends with Mandarin majors only to discover they could only talk in a formal mode and were ridiculed when they arrived in China. I’ve heard of Japanese students who are fluent speakers but essentially illiterate, of Korean students that only use the -yo form. You cant just write down a bunch of declensions, memorise a bunch of new vocabulary words, and only speak when spoken to and expect anything close to proficiency. This is why you need the immersion experience. Enter All Japanese All The Time, where Khatzumoto urges you to consume all the Japanese media you can, to think in Japanese and create situations for yourself where it’s sink or swim, the same way it would be if you were a child learning language for the first time. You’ll start to recognise patterns and to pull out the few words you know, and before you know it you’ll start to pulling out the few words you don’t instead. It’s a more useful lexicon to pull from anyway because, unlike a textbook, Japanese products are organically Japanese and not some crazy construction of a bilingual speaker.

Khatzumoto’s methods are more common sense than anything else, but the fact that his ideas surprise me is further proof that we’ve got some serious societal barriers to gaining fluency that could do with a revisit. Why shouldn’t we try to learn not just a language, but anything by doing? As children that’s how we try on new hats and pick up new skills, we observe, we imitate, and we adopt. It’s aligned with many other principles I’ve spoken of before: stop distracting yourself or falling prey to your fears and distractions and just do. Khatzumoto makes a wonderful point, “On the one hand it’s so magical, but it’s also so predictable. If you put in the time, it will happen.” I think perhaps the greatest barrier to people learning foreign languages is not that they lack the resources, or the time, or the means, but that they don’t put in the time. You expect it to take you several years, it takes you several years. When it gets hard we don’t have anything but the necessity of a credit or the need for a good mark to pull us through, and in the meantime are being constantly reminded of how inadequate we are and how far off our ideal is.

“The whole process is one of sucking, you’re sucking the whole time and you’re trying to suck less each day, to phrase it negatively…so basically the time you spend inputting [the language] is directly proportional to speed at which you’re going to reduce your sucking. This is just what children do; if you think about the incredible amount of time even just a four-year-old has heard the language before they get to the point of speaking, it’s really pretty mind boggling.”

If it makes you feel so rubbish, why bother? It’s maddeningly frustrating to feel inept and to be unable to communicate, and even moving to a land where no one understands you doesn’t guarantee you’ll pick up the language quickly, though most do out of necessity. That’s because trying to remember how to say “the plane took off of the runway” from a book is pretty dry, and most “practice conversations” are painfully dull. I fully agree with what Khatzumoto suggests, which is that you have to make learning fun or you won’t do it. I know from my own experiences that you have to treat yourself like a small child and learn songs, watch movies, and reward yourself with marshmallows and lemon drops (or whatever your Kindergarten teacher fed you when you got a math problem right). For a long time I’ve thought traditional academia has been sucking the life out of learning that we forget to take joy in as we once did in childhood. If you’re having fun, not only does it stick better, but you have more learning stamina, it’s easier to do, and use it more.

Ideas
Listen to music, like Cornelius or Pizzicato 5 or even J-Pop like Heartsdales and Full of Harmony. Watch movies of any variety (without subtitles) like Hiyao Miyazaki movies or cult classics like Ringu. Watch anime that you like; I learned how to say “good day” and “are you okay?” from Maria-sama ga Miteru, and various types of bread from Yakikate! Japan. Take advantage of free resources like JapanesePod101.com or language tapes at your library. Watch Japanese youtube videos whether they’re video blogs or Hard Gay episodes. Read all the manga you can find in Japanese and childrens books if you can get your hands on them. Find a language buddy or language exchange online to practice your speaking skills, usually for free. Take up a Japanese pen pal. Attend the Japanese service at a local temple or church if you’re town has one. Make friends with Japanese mates, or enroll in a big-brother style programme for Japanese new to the US. There are tons of ways to immerse yourself complete in a language, and these are just some to get you started.

“New York was gone. He felt nothing. Then again, Arthur hadn’t really believed it existed anyway.” Douglas Adams, describing Arthur Dent coming to terms with the Earth’s destruction in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I have both a number of passions and quite a few pet peeves, and there’s little I despise more than when the two collide on holiday. It’s easy to see me as a high-maintence posh jetsetter who wouldn’t be caught dead in a Motel 8 or without a guidebook, as a go-see-do-er who (given my track record with new places) actually enjoys the one to two day max citystay, as someone who likes to draw up timetables and pack the sightseeing in tight. Alack, if you had these impressions I am sorry to inform you they couldn’t be farther from the truth. I enjoy the six-day minimum layover and like to spend my hours in a new places ambling through various neighbourhoods, stopping in cafes to savour beverages at every opportunity, and browsing bookshops, art museums, and parks and gardens. That’s what I like to do on holiday.

The museum especially can be so many things; the subpar art in Sydney set the tone for my cultural experiences in the state, while the incredible experience I had in Mori Tower ensured Tokyo would be my new love in life. A museum can thwart a promising vacation like the Uffizi did for me in Florence, or redeem a potentially disastrous experience like the High Museum did in Atlanta. Partially an ode to history in the least boring way (The Museum of Modern Art), part preservation of our culture (The Louvre), part respite from the pressing weight of our own lives (The Seattle Art Museum), museums are more than just a place to host some famous works, they’re opportunities for political statements (Banksy), a fight for non-traditional arts to be recognised (The Getty), even a litmus test indication society at large (The Art Institute of Chicago).

Crowds contemplating an Ellsworth Kelly exhibit in Atlanta, Georgia

There’s a brand new set of crises springing up everywhere from the Galapagos and Macchu Picchu to Tibet and Taipei; the city is sinking into the mountain, the erosion is too severe to continue tourism in the area, the political tensions are at an all time high, the immigration and visa laws have become stonewalls, the borders are closed, the train employees are on strike, the region is quarantined, and one hundred other events that mean birthright will be revoked soon, the DMZ will be closed, and the ruins will be entirely erased by human hands. There’s an equally intimidating set of old and often overlooked disasters from the great depression to the invention of mass production and photography to the end of art with value in and of itself. A museum is that liminal space, with its white walls and silent commentary that allows us to keep our eye on the horizon and weather the storm; the enlightenment and the industrial ages changed life and art forever and the DaVincis and Dalis who deviated, once labeled heretics, are now considered visionaries. We survived the revolutions, and the wars, and so too will we survive this, though the means are not yet clear and the radical solutions seemingly absurdist, just as cubism, surrealism, modernism were all called crockery in their own day, so too will Dan Flavin and Ellsworth Kelly, Murukami and Basquiat eventually be vindicated. I find peace in these places, reverent of people who saw the world in a different way, places that will mark the end of eras with a passing nod and perhaps a plaque but will retain the precious relics with expansive security systems and extensive CCTVs. Like a library, museums and I share the same values, here in my home country and abroad equally.

Which is why the flash of a camera as a tourist tries to capture the essence of the Mona Lisa ruins the whole experience. Your rangefinder, even your DSLR could never do the painting justice, and instead of admiring it for what it is, looking at Starry Night or Haystacks from various angles and distances, and soaking in the wonder that is The Birth of Venus, instead you’re using inadequate means to try and take the image’s soul. It’s not the act of photography that disturbs me, it’s the misunderstanding, thinking an image like the Sistine Chapel ceiling is just an image. Let me try to explain.

The hallways of the Louvre in Paris, France

When Edvard Munch’s famous German Expression painting The Cry (as well as his Madonna) was pitched out of a second story window and stolen form the National Gallery in Norway, nothing happened. No on rioted, no one mourned, no one weeped, and few papers broke the story at all. And though it found its way back into Norway’s hands, again it was lifted ten years later in 2004. This seemed to incur even less notice. I’m still trying to figure out why such an iconic image didn’t evoke more of a reaction the two times it was filched, why there was no eulogy for Munch when NPR wrote a one-hour show about Vermeer’s “Concert” stolen from the Gardner in Boston, never recovered. More astounding yet, when you look around for one of Munch’s own lithographs of the work, you instead find Warhol’s mass-produced prints, and The Simpson’s references to it, Erro’s renvisioning, Scream movie posters, and M&M advertisements. It’s Walter Benjamin’s worst nightmare; the idea has become more meaningful than the work itself. I wonder, does the same go for our ideas of other locales? Is our idea of China so prevalent that if it disappeared tomorrow we wouldn’t think twice? When Siem Reap no longer has recongnisable carvings, and when all the unique species of the Galapagos die out, will we not flinch, or blink, or even pause? Or will we say, “the flights were too expensive” or “I’ve seen it on TV”?

Even as I say such foolish phrases now, I sincerely doubt anyone would think our idea of China or Kenya and their actualities are even comparable. I would hate for anyone to think the American stereotypes are the same as the reality of the American experience, and that idea alone is justification enough to go see The Cry for myself. And of course, seeing it is a very different experience. That’s my whole point.

Bust of Nero in Rome, Italy

Every poster I’d ever seen of the painting was large-scale and incredibly vibrant, and I had built up in my head this idea of The Cry as an impressive sight to behold that I would surely have to contemplate from a modern wooden bench halfway across the near-empty room. That idea couldn’t be further from the reality. The piece itself is not even three square feet, a mere smattering of oil paint on a single-ply board that although clearly artfully crafted is entirely underwhelming to those expecting a James Rosenquist-scale masterpiece. I had to restructure my idea of The Cry completely.

Going to Amsterdam is a completely different experience than knowing about Amsterdam in any capacity, and just knowing about an image, iconic or not, is not enough. Fortunately, with art, seeing the image isn’t enough either. Taste, context, and historical period come into play. That’s why it’s important to go see Picasso’s work not just when it comes to your city, but in Barcelona, the place so formative to his early periods, in a time when you can just imagine him, in his reconstructed room in the Picasso museum, sketching thousands of cubist Las Meninas duplicates and feverishly pacing around the room, peeking through the drawn curtains at the sunlit and tiny alleyways below. You feel one hundred times closer to him, and his work, and you leave the Barri Gotic feeling like you understand him that much more. Don’t believe me? I don’t expect you to. After all, you have to see it, nay, feel it for yourself.

The Barri Gotic by night in Barcelona, Spain

Do not for one moment try to tell me that football (or soccer for some of us) is anything but the world’s best sport. It’s a game with enough big names to constantly draw a crowd and enough community-originated clubs to spark serious competition. As it was once said to me, “Rugby is an animal’s sport played by gentlemen, while football is a gentlemen’s sport played by animals.” Players ears may not be ripped off during play, but man will a footballer take a hit for the team. It’s fun to play, fun to watch, fun to follow; with sentiments such as these it’s no wonder my favourite feel-good movie is Goal! the Dream Begins. I think it’s the best sport in the world.

World Cup Allianz Arena

I suppose you could say I’m something of a football nut, though I pale in comparison to, say the Screaming Eagles or the Gunner Hooligans, but it’s the one sport unathletic me actually participated in willfully during my youth, I’m competent enough to argue the merits of a foul with any Brit, and I do piously follow Manchester United, even when it involved getting up at 6:00 on a Saturday morning when I lived in LA, or if it meant watching the game in Spanish, as I had to in my last apartment, or waiting until tea time to take my lunch break and surreptitiously setting my browser to auto-refresh ESPN Soccer Net every 15 seconds. While I’d never care to even check the scores for the World Series, I check the EPL, MLS, and UEFA standings daily, and though I may politely decline an invitation to watch ice hockey, I’ve yet to turn down a ticket to a football match.

Americans tend to only have one or two things to say on the subject of football, namely that the US’s entry for the World Cup is always embarrassing, and that it isn’t a fast enough game. There have been numerous lobbies to change the rules so that we might better get behind the league; among the more preposterous suggestions have been to widen the goals, to disallow a draw as the final score, to incorporate instant replay, to abolish overtime, and other such stabs in the dark that fight a simple truth. Football hasn’t caught on in the US.

F.C. Bayern fans swarming the metro station post-game

Oh the American clubs have fans, they have lots of fans, and in fact the four largest fan bases are the Seattle Sounders, the Houston Dynamo, the Chicago Fire, and DC United in the MLS, who tend to pull consistent attendance at their home matches. The difference is scale. Look a little closer and it will come as no surprise that the fanbase of all four teams is predominately of latin descent. There’s nothing wrong if the majority of American soccer fans are hispanic-Americans, but it does suggest there’s something about the game that the rest of the population is missing. The Superbowl is our biggest television event of the year, and yet the world’s biggest, grandest, toughest, and most universal sport is all but outright ignored. Even here on the east coast, where Chelsea fans have their own satellite radio channel and AC Milan fans get discounts at certain clubs, it’s often hard to find a broadcast of whatever team you follow during the World Cup qualifiers. The world’s most famous footballer, David Beckham himself, still couldn’t draw a crowd playing for the LA Galaxy, and I know several Australians who would have sold their kidneys to see him play for thirty seconds, over the hill or not. All this can be maddening to us big fans of the game, leaving us only the Big Four and a few other international powerhouses to follow while teams like Hull CIty might as well be fictional for all the recognition they inspire.

D.C. United at the US Open Cup

But you go to a game, and much the same way being in the stadium transforms painfully dull baseball into an exciting sport, being at an MLS game can make you feel okay about America’s humble take on the age-old sport. Of course there are more empty seats, and our team cheers may be piecemeal from Latin America, England, and Italy, but there are still a few hooligans and a few ruffians and a few glorious moments when the crowd unites in horror or in honour alike. That’s what the sport is all about, isn’t it? We form these rivalries, and pay these deathmatches, but it’s really about uniting under the sport. In the olden days, so I am informed, football was a way for racial tension and economic rifts to be played out, making it one of the most aggressive and at times socially charges sports out there. Patrick Kluivert makes an offhand comment about an all-black dutch team and the league goes haywire because we’re still trying to wrestle our social problems into submission on the pitch.

Practicing in Parca de la Ciutadella in Barcelona

It’s not an inferior game here in America, it’s just a different one. Sure the players have less stamina (as was apparent watching DC United take on Real Madrid earlier this summer), and probably worse handling, but the technique and the strategy are entirely different. They should be, because to play in an MLS bracket like you’re in the Champion’s League or Serie A would be as unwise as it would be ridiculous. So stop depreciating American football as a failure of a great institution and start accepting it as a new take on an old protocol. Sure in the Bundasliga and the Premiere League you get large bank accounts and at least 6 million viewers tuning in every week, but then you also get some players that get the large bank account and the 6 million fans an start playing for them instead of for their team. American footballers aren’t heroes over here, and while they’re underrated, they also play a different game. We may not have any Jermain Defoes or Cristiano Ronaldos or Adrian Mutus, but we’re in our own league, which is in so many ways just as close to the park pickup game and to the crosstown mining town rivalries as the lesser leagues in the European game.

A Hanover fan waits intently for a goal

I’m a fan. A football fan. I’m a die-hard fan of the Red Devils, but after a few games cheering along with the Barra Brava I think I might become a respectful DC United fan too. I’ve always found it trying, following Man U from over here, knowing that I’m missing a much-needed dimension of sport by sufficing games via 1D radio or web update, and the occasional 2D TV cast when available, and having a home team to root for and a stadium to call home, colours to wear, chants to shout, it’s a nice feeling. I’m tired of everyone turning their nose up at American soccer. It’s time to stop denying us the pleasure of the only true universal sport and time to start cheering us on!

Not sure if you want to take that first jump across the puddle? Positive you couldn’t be an international playboy or playgirl? Unwilling to commit to one and just one company’s rewards programme? Forget it all and jump into the new era of travel by unleashing your inner frequent flier. For the how and why, read on.

Travel is synergistic.
You really can have it all. You can dodge blackout dates and airline restrictions, travel to your preferred destinations, and do it for cheap without having to promise your firstborn to anyone. You can do this because travel is synergistic: the more you do travel, the more you can travel. That’s only half of the snowball effect. Any long-term traveller with half a brain will tell you that the more you travel, the more you want to travel too. You can certainly plan your first big excursion, thinking “and then I’ll come home and that’ll be it,” but, pardon me for laughing in your face, we all know that’s a lie. Extensive travel changes you in ways non-travellers can’t seem to fully comprehend, and it’s only natural that once you’re a traveller, you become more of a traveller by nature of the game. You start to crave it. You sign up for things you’d never had interest until you stretched your travel legs, and get angry at yourself for not even considering a visit to remote backwater X before. It’s not all up to your destination dreams though, because travelling extensively actually makes travelling easier. You get more offers, coupons, and deals, you meet new people with available couches to crash on, you get a feel for the patterns of what the trends are and when the bad times occur. More opportunities to travel personally and professionally arise, and your tolerance for sweaty bus rides and for two-hour train delays becomes impressive. If you travel, and I mean really travel, it starts to fund itself, even if you aren’t paid to do it.

You don’t have to deny your preferences.
I am of course talking about frequent flier programmes. I have trouble understanding why they get such a bad rap, though I wholeheartedly understand that people get fairly intense about their air travel experiences, and I absolutely think American aviation is dicking us around instead of leveling with the customer. But why all the debate? If you don’t travel all that much, don’t even bother enrolling, but if you spend any significant percentage of time scrunched into an aeroplane seat, it is you that these programmes were made for, and you undoubtedly have strong opinions about your aviation experiences already. I know I do; I’m loyal to my preferred carriers to a fault, I refuse to fly anything smaller than a Boeing 737, and I think the absense of a personal entertainment player on a transatlantic flight is the first horseman of the apocalypse. Am I a high maintenance traveller? By no means, but I have spent an inordinate amount of time with my butt in 7A, or 16D, or 38F, enough to turn down a flight if only middle seats are available. Trust me, the longer the flight, the more willing I am to pay for extra legroom, a more convenient commute to my gate, and separate lines at security. Strangely, every traveller’s least favourite part of travelling is always the part that gets you there in the first (well, that and the intestinal perils involved with living somewhere foreign since even a reputable, first-world, western country can target your duodenum). And if booking the flight is half the battle, why would you willingly raise your white flag and surrender the war before you even get there?

Your hassle will eventually become habit.
My best guess as to why we let airlines treat us like redheaded stepchildren is because our tolerance for sorting through the thousands of flights out there is already incredibly low; we’re just happy to be going somewhere. Let’s face it, planning a trip, large or small, is kind of an ordeal. There are plans to be made, large numbers to massage around to an acceptably smaller figure, and a boatload of concerns that pop up with anywhere new. I’ve done it so much I’m now unphased. I couldn’t pack in anything larger than a carryon if I tried, and I guarantee that wanting fewer souvenirs and getting free upgrades comes simultaneously with bitching about the guy who didn’t know he needed to take his shoes off. There’s a synergistic secret hidden in all this. The more you do it, it becomes less of a hassle and more of a habit, until you don’t think twice about shelling out for nonstop, you no longer get to the gate 3 hours early, and you think any flight under 10 hours in duration is short.

The world is smaller.
You should absolutely get to this point. It’s a globally interconnected world out there. I consider myself a citizen of the world since I now average about two trips a month, two extended international jaunts a year, and few weekend escapes here and there on a penny. But travelling so much doesn’t mean I’m running off to hide under a rock or in a nightclub or behind a business conference. I stay connected with the contacts I need to via skype, I have a reachable voicemail via Google Voice (formerly Grand Central), and I can submit work to clients from across the country just as easily as I can from across the ocean. Nor does my exhaustive travel schedule mean I’m throwing fiscal caution to the wind or selling parts of my kidneys on craigslist. Not all. I travel smart when I can, keep a weather eye on ticket prices, and know what my lines to cross are from the start. I take lots of weekend trips, bum lots of rides, and sleep on lots of floors. But I am young and spry and to see the world for myself is more important than to stay in a four-star hotel. Of course when the opportunity to stay at the Bellagio in Las Vegas for a fraction of the usual price knocks, of course I’ll answer the door. Which is how I get to go to Las Vegas next weekend.

You deserve premiere service.
For people so willing (and so oft pursuing) travel, I find myself slightly peeved at how I’m being treated a as a customer. It’s one thing to book a JetBlue, Sun Country, or AirTran flight and get more than you were expecting. These are, after all, budget airlines that never offered amenities; it’s the Southwest model, where you buy old planes, offer no service, and fly places that are almost, but not actually the airports people want to go to. It’s another thing entirely to pay more or less top dollar for a large-name carrier and get shafted of a meal, have to pay extra for your one piece of under 50kg luggage, and get hot coffee spilled on you while you’re trying to watch something on your iPod. Essentially the travel industry should be treating us better, which was why I decided almost exactly one year ago that it was high time I became an elite member of some programme or another. Then of course, comes the vicious debate over which one: Star Alliance or OneWorld? Domestic or international? Who do I hate the least? Who has the best rewards programme? While internet forums seem to be riddled with people running their keyboards off about either, all the heavy travellers I know (and even some I don’t) had little to no problem deciding, enrolling, and reaping the benefits of fresh fruit, discount massages, and free wifi at their frequent flier’s airport lounges.

There are fewer choices to make.
In fact, for me it was easier to just pick one and be loyal than it was to keep touting whichever carrier offers the cheapest deal of the moment. So years ago, before I was the jetsetter I am today, I had a Continental OnePass account. I use it more than anything else now, in fact I just booked a trip to Boston using my OnePass miles and haven’t once been disappointed by their customer service. For those of you in the know this will come as no surprise, since Continental’s customer loyalty has historically been unusually strong, and the company has won at least 10 Freddie Awards for Programme of the Year. Their Frequent Flier programme has been around for over twenty years, and best of all the carrier is (soon to be was, much to my chagrin) part of the SkyTeam allaince, a third contender in the world of airline alliances that offers codeshares with, eligible miles for, and global perks on flights of other SkyTeam carriers I already like, such as Korean Air, Air France, KLM Royal Dutch, Virgin Atlantic (though not strictly a SkyTeam member) and even Delta airlines. This includes three out of my top five airlines (KLM, Virgin, Korean Air, Singapore Airlines, and Lufthansa in no particular order) on top of already being my favourite domestic carrier.

Airlines are bigger.
Thus it’s understandable that with all those miles accrued and all that history with a carrier and an alliance I wholeheartedly like, I feel some sense of loss at the company’s choice to leave SkyTeam and instead join the Star Alliance. Sure Star Alliance has more airlines in its association, including my all-time favourite Sinagpore Airlines (and apparently the rest of the world’s, they’ve been voted number 1 several years running) and dealing with United and US Airways domestically sure beats OneWorld’s American Airlines, but the international options are nowhere near my top choices (Air Canada and bmi is really the best you can do?) and I can no longer rely on access to the superb Air France lounge in Charles DeGualle when I’m there in October. There’s a bigger lesson in all of this. The alliances, some of which are barely going on a decade, offer travellers a level of connectivity that was previously unavailable. You don’t have to fly Southwest and only Southwest to make those frequent flier miles work for you anymore or charge insane amounts to amass enough miles you could use on something besides a magazine subscription. With such cooperations expanding every year, travel is getting easier and more accessible, a trend I hope continues onward.

Travel means something different now.
We’re working against some longstanding cultural myths as well, that although founded thoroughly in fact are nonetheless highly outdated. Maybe travel was a luxury reserved for the supremely wealthy back in the day, but travel means something entirely different in today’s day and age. More and more students are taking gap years or travelling abroad (it was 25% at my university), more Americans than ever hold an active passport, and the new generation of youth are expected to cope with a global world well before they’ve even come of age let alone dabbled in the workforce. I’m mildly surprised that since travel is so “affordable” now all the air companies are and have been tanking since before the recession, and though there are exceptions, Continental among them, we’re getting even more corners cut — no more complimentary checked bags, no more meals, only one beverage service, only one bathroom still — and are expected to pay on average $150 more for the same 2 hour layover at JFK. Noooooooo thank you. Why is this so appalling? Because travel means something more than it did half a century ago. Like the internet is fast becoming, travel is no longer a luxury but a necessary service for business and commerce, for cultural progress, and for some of us, our own mental health and life purpose. Think about it, without aviation the world would fall apart.

So go ahead and let yourself become a frequent flier and a traveller, because it doesn’t matter if you’re constantly commuting or taking an extended vacation, if you frequent the Indian subcontinent or your family a few hours away, we all have our reasons to travel. It’s changed out there, so make your own travel habits work for you and unleash your inner frequent flier.