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.