Traveler's Manifesto

"Peculiar travel suggestions are
dancing lessons from God."
- Kurt Vonnegut

So this week I've decided to take a break from Fulbright related things and talk about travel in general. Last week I got back from a bit of an adventure I've been wanting to do for years. I left Thursday morning straight from work to Penn Station and rode to Washington DC to visit my friends Mike Davis and Jose Neuman and met his friends Adrian Moncini and Brandon Fitzgerald. From there I went to Chicago on a night train. I was supposed to leave at the end of the day to go to Indianapolis, where I'm from, but my friends Marko Loncar and Paul Helfen convinced me to stay a bit longer and I left by bus next day. (Big shout out to Amtrak who refunded my full ticket on such short notice!) Then I relaxed in Indianapolis staying with my sister, Samantha; her boyfriend, Danny; and their kids, Jada and Eric. I also reconnected with my friend Luisanna Rodriguez (who I met in high school Spanish and have stayed friends with since) and met her friends Daniel Gillespie and Paul Levy, who are now my friends too. In addition to, of course, visiting my mom, her husband, and some other family.

As you might be able to sense by now, I love meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends while traveling. I even met up with Aleks Sierakowski, who I met at last year's American Literary Translators Association conference in Bloomington, Indiana, and met his friend M Echeverria. On the train, I had interesting conversations with my next door neighbor, a cute construction worker from Wisconsin who talked like he was from Michigan; some moms on their way back from acting as chaperons on a middle school DC trip who I sat with in the dining car that night after they learned I could understand what they were saying in Spanish; and I had the bizarrely pleasurable experience over-hearing a lesson from what can only be described as the Hispanic Sarah Connor on how to select and grip throwing knives. You see, these strangely beautiful things never happen when you stay inside your house. The world has such amazing things to experience if you only just show up to them. Everyone has a nugget of truth and wonder, a piece of existence’s beautiful tapestry that they’ll willingly show you if you're open to it. These are the things that recharge me when I’m feeling a bit drained, when my job wears on me, when life has stopped being a series of discoveries and has turned into a monotonous grind.  Speaking of grind, here’s some footage of me from the security cameras at work:

I saw museums that taught me about Africa and the ice age, ate some of the best vegetarian food I've ever had at the Chicago Diner, waxed nostalgically over Spanish tapas for my days in Madrid, got sloshed on margaritas with my family, and read a bedtime story to my niece, none of which does my life permit me to do on a regular basis. It reminded me how important travel is to me, and so without further ado, I give you mon petit manifeste du voyage:

Traveler's Manifesto

This is a statement,

simple and direct:

An object at rest stays at rest,

and an object in motion remains in motion,

until some outside force acts upon it.

We’re born in motion,

entering life like an arrow loosed from the bow,

and over time, things stop us:

air resistance, friction, social mores and others’ expectations.

They tried to stop the nomadic Natives;

they tried to stop the moving sands

with grasses that root in the dunes.

They tried to put us in boxes:

houses, fences, cubicles, personality types and mortgages.

This is not without its merit,

but we should never forget

that no form of growth is without some form of motion, movement.

And that standing water often breeds disease and stagnation.

So, please, go, go, go!

because you’ll never learn anything till you see what you’re missing.

And now, I'll leave you with this, a song about people traveling on the back of a whale to different places and having adventures. (If you have this whale’s number, please send it my way!)