In which I try to explain my travel needs.
A few people have given me light-hearted shit about being able to ‘just take a week off and go to New York,’ like travel’s a non-essential behavior and I’m somehow lucky or greedy.
Well, I’m not. Looked at from a certain angle, my life could easily be described as shit. I happen to choose to spend my money on travel rather than other things because I need change to keep myself from going totally batshit.
I think “normal life” is cloying. I don’t want to think that, I just do. I can’t help it. (My gravestone will say, Familiarity bred contempt. Hah!) I need to run off and do something different every so often or I can’t pull off normal life with any degree of, ah, normalcy.
Normal life is boring. When I’m bored I disengage, and when I’m disengaged I sleep a lot and drink a lot. Which, as you know, is not really a worthwhile use of a life.
I’ve realized that I’m happiest when I’m dealing with new input. If I can get out of town once or twice a year, then I can deal with my 9-6 life, I can deal with sending off a third of every paycheck to my debt reduction program, and I can deal with mundane shit like laundry and cleaning the tub and doing the same stupid things day after day after day.
There, yeah, I said it: it’s stupid shit. Get up, bathe, eat, dress, work. Get off work. Eat dinner. Fuck off for a few hours. Go to bed. On the weekends, clean all the things dirtied during the week. Rinse and repeat. Suddenly six years have gone by! What’s the fucking point? Seriously.
C, writer of a blog I read, has suddenly gone off to the Middle East to be a civilian contractor. He’s living on a military base. I can’t stand how cool he is for having decided to go do that.
It also makes me jealous. He’s getting to work and travel at the same time. Since I never managed to get my shit together I don’t have the documentation to sell my skills that way. (Am I getting old enough now to have what they call regrets?) It’d be so cool to make money in different places all the time! I’d like to try getting sick of change for a change. That’d be a new one!
I’m also jealous of her; she, another blogger I read, was, like me, all boring and stable and mildly depressed. But then she broke up and has been footloose ever since. Every time I check up on her she’s somewhere else, and while she’s always broke she is also always grateful. Change is good!
I found a traveling support/hardware deployment job on Craigslist, but it’s based out of DC and requires top secret clearance (because the actual installations take place in government offices). I wonder if I could pass top secret security clearance? (Maybe. Hard to say. I’ve done a bunch of shady shit in my life, but none of it ended up on my permanent record.) [Actually, I’ve never really done anything shady. Just drugs. I just wanted you to think I’m interesting.] Of course, other than having a decade in tech support under my belt I don’t have any certifications that would make me an ideal hardware installation candidate… all I have is maturity (ahem) and an unfettered availability to travel. I wonder if that’s a salable commodity?
In other words: BASED ON THE COMPLAINING IN THIS POST, GUESS WHO NEEDS HER GODDAMNED VACATION ALREADY?!?!
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* I talked about wanting to be a flight attendant here.
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I’m so excited for you! And maybe a little bit jealous. 🙂 I remember having a thought like this when I bought that house (what, four+ years ago now), something like: “but I’d really rather live in a cheap-o apartment for a while and just travel whenever I feel like it!”… and man, I really should have listened to that thought. Now, I’m finally getting out of that house (seriously – we MOVED OUT), and it feels so freeing. Really – why didn’t I do this sooner???
It’s coming up soon enough, and will be gone before you know it. Enjoy your time in NY, doing cool things that you don’t get to do in WW. 🙂
*SMOOCH* -m
Also – LOVE the picture. Did you take that one?
I wish! No, I stole it off of google images. I didn’t attribute it because I don’t know who it belongs to. -m
I love that picture too!
Yay! -m
i want pics of new york cuz you’re doing what i find infinitely difficult, leaving home.
as to the job, apply for it. the worst that can happen is that they’ll say no. you’ll be no worse off and if you get it you’ll be infinitely better off. live the adventure. 😀
I’ll take mad pics. You don’t like going places? Srsly? -m
srsly. it’s hard work for me to me to be away from home. i don’t truly relax anywhere but in my own space. travel is exhausting. i love the stimulation of being around cool people, but getting there is hard, especially if crowds of people are involved in the process. i need to have a place where i can be alone to refurb my psyche.
What ever happened to the flight attendant plan?
I think about it every time I fly. It’s basically a waitressing job. I could do it. Boring, probably. Free tickets! -m
Amen! (Or Boy Howdy! depending on your spiritual leanings.) We could save a lot of money if we stayed home more, but we’d be grumpy, old bastids. No fun that.
The benefit of travel, IMO, beyond, of course, having new experiences, is that it causes one to appreciate her home when she returns to it! – m
OMGawdz! Don’t fret! I too get irrationally jellerz of peepz who seem to be more out-going than me. However, I try and turn that jealousy into motivation to get my shiz together.
This morning I woke up to get an email from a friend who informed me that he has been asked to read his poetry at some festival in Nueva Nueva. After sulking for two minutes, I went onto Craigslist and found/applied for a real person jerb. I felt better immediately afterwardz!
Ooh! Good luck with the ‘real’ job! -m
I took that pic when I went to NY. I didn’t wanna say anythin….. lol
As far as clearances, some companies would be willing to sponsor you for one. As long as you have no criminal records, I think you’ll be fine. Though when they do investigations, they DO go back to where you lived and interview people that you put down as references.
You can check this site out: http://www.gdit.com/career_center/career_center.aspx
Some of the Helpdesk slots are in Europe.. Germany, England, etc and they would even pay for your relocation.
Nice picture! You’re a genius! Have you done any traveling tech work? Did you like it? -m