My Awesome Life

My life is awesome. It wasn’t always that way — I had to work at it. In High School I was super shy and a complete pushover. When I started respecting myself, following my dreams and not giving a damn about what anyone thought, things started getting better.

While on our 5 month motorcycle trip, Kim and I made movies with my little Canon digital camera, and edited them with Movie Maker. We originally made them just to send to our parents, but we had so much fun with it that I think I’ll make movies for all my trips from now on.

This is one from early in our adventure. And yes, Kim and I are very proud of ourselves for picking music that fits so well with the video…

Jack Kerouac Syndrome

My friend Charles and I have Jack Kerouac Syndrome. JKS.

It’s okay, it’s rarely fatal. We can live like normal people for the most part.

Did you ever notice that in Kerouac’s novels, he’ll talk about a girl that he meets at a cafe or a party, and he’ll go on about how beautiful she is, how her personality is electric, and she brings him to life again? And then five pages later, the venue changes, he meets a different girl and falls for her all over again. Rinse and repeat every couple of pages. The poor girls.

This is Jack Kerouac Syndrome. The state of falling nearly in love with every beautiful, charismatic girl one meets, believing them to be your life force, your raison d’etre, and then forgetting about them the second the next beautiful flower comes along.

Yes, it makes relationships difficult. But in fact, Charles has had the courage to face the disease head-on and actually take steps to have a long-term girlfriend. We all wish the best for Charles, and hope that he can somehow overcome this sometimes debilitating illness.

Hitchhiking Canada, Age 20. Part 1: Drop out of College

I was 20, and had enrolled for my third year of university in Halifax. I didn’t want to go back to school. I felt I was spending a lot of money for an arbitrary piece of paper that I wasn’t sure I really needed. I also had a sneaking suspicion that after all the nights hanging out in bars with classmates, all the lounging around in study halls and great discussions of politics, world issues and women we thought were hot, that I was somehow insulated from “real learning,” although I had no idea what that meant at the time.

On the last day to withdraw from classes without financial penalty, I cracked. At 4:45, fifteen minutes before they closed, I ran to the financial office and “de-registered” for all my classes, and got a full refund.

Fuck it, I thought. I’m finished with classrooms. I want real, tangible experience. I’m going to hitchhike to Montreal (yes, there was a girl there…).

The next day I told my concerned parents I was a college dropout, and that I was getting a ride with a friend to Moncton (a two hour drive from Halifax) to clear my head and figure out what my long-term plans were. (My real destination, Montreal, was a 12-14 straight drive. At this point in my life, I didn’t feel like I could tell my parents about what I was really doing, as the
dropping out thing seemed to affect them enough)

Although fate would have nothing of Montreal, while in northern New Brunswick, I got a ride from a truck driver who was heading all the way to just north of Toronto — an offer I couldn’t turn down (as an aside, I actually don’t believe in fate in day to day life — I feel that we are all 100% responsible for our own actions and circumstances, but the appeal of hitchhiking for me has always been that your trip is very dependent on the people that pick you up, hence I believe in a kind of hitchhiker “fate”).

(to be continued…)

富士山との戦い

I re-wrote the last entry (Miso Soup on Mt. Fuji) in Japanese for a speech contest I entered two years ago while I was studying in Kumamoto (I managed to walk away with the audience-voted Best Speech Award and a few other trinkets). Here’s the Japanese for those who can read it:

Read more

Best. Miso soup. Ever.

In the summer of 2002, I spent a few weeks hitchhiking town to town from Hokkaido (the northernmost island in Japan) to Shizuoka (near Tokyo), with the vague goal of climbing Mt. Fuji, the tallest and most revered mountain in Japan.

It was a beautiful summer day when I finished the final leg of my hitchhike to Mt. Fuji. The driver who picked me up and drove me there seemed confused as to my destination: the bottom of Fuji-san. He dropped me off on a small side road – “Zisu.. izu… bottom… Fuji-san” — just as the last rays of sunlight were fading.

I hadn’t really read much about climbing Fuji, except that most people climbed it at night — to view the sun rising from the peak in the morning. I soon came across an old rusted sign that read: (in Japanese) “Mt. Fuji 1st station” and a small overgrown hiking path. Okay, I thought. I’m on the right track. By this point, the sky was almost pitch-dark so I fished out my trusty flashlight — which I had bought the day before at the 100Yen store (the Japanese cultural equivalent of our Dollar Store). After passing the sign for the 2nd station and not running into a single person, I began to worry I had started up an old, now-unused climbing path. The more than occasional spider-web-to-the-face only added to my suspicions. I nonetheless decided that the path would eventually have to meet with another path, at the very least at the summit.

Read more

« Previous Page