It's been months since anything has appeared on this derelict blog. I figured those of you that followed it loyally over the past year and a half have probably long since written it off, and justifiably so. Yet when I returned home from Asia I was surprised by the number of people who expressed disappointment at my apparent abandonment of this writing endeavor. When I looked at the statistics this afternoon I was even more stunned to see 40+ people still visiting on a daily basis. I'm astonished. I'm flattered. You've put your time and effort in to read this when you could be reading, doing or watching countless other things. I've let you down. For that I am sorry.
To try and make amends, today marks the resumption of this long neglected project. Before I resume, however, I feel I owe an explanation for my extended absence. From nearly right out of the gates I was struggling to keep pace with this blog during Stint 3 for a number of reasons. One, Jon and I were filming a show which was to be our primary priority. The purpose of this show was to provide nearly identical information I covered in my European blog entries, namely exploring places, activities, people, sights, sounds, tastes, and everything that one would anticipate experiencing on a journey of this type. It was meant to be informative, humorous, and lighthearted.
Thus, in order for Wanderlust to proceed I needed to change my writing style, content, and perspective as to not duplicate efforts and results. No one would tune into the show if I gave away all the best bits in my blog. Jon and I both agreed to this and so I developed an alternative narrative style. Namely, my goal was to gear the Stint 3 version of Wanderlust toward a more circumstantial experience format. Meaning, I was attempting to present less of the WHAT was happening and more of HOW such things were happening and HOW they were impacting me.
The problem with this approach was threefold: (1) thinking back to and describing certain situations and my reactions and feelings to them in present tense is significantly more time consuming than simply jotting down my experiences and slapping in a few nice photographs; (2) coming up with said photographs that wouldn't jeopardize the content of the show but would at the same time relate to what I was writing was exceptionally difficult- and I often had no idea that a given point in time would be significant and, ergo, I took no photos; and (3) the time commitments to planning, scripting, setting up, and filming for the show proved to be too much for me to be able to squeeze in the blog. The filming was so all-encompassing that much of the time both Jon and I felt more like we were at work than on a fun jaunt (that said, I certainly won't endeavor to complain about this variety of "work.")
So just from the perspective of the show, the blog was essentially unmanageable. On top of this I was doing virtually all of the planning and execution for the trip itself. Between managing the trip as well as co-contributing the brainstorming, planning, and execution of the show filming, it was nearly impossible to drum up time for Wanderlust. And just to make matters worse, for the nearly two months we were in China, I was blocked from using blogger. By the time I reached the sunny shores of Japan I had simply waived the white flag. I want you to understand that the decision to stop work on the blog was not one made lightly nor was it one I did not regret.
It was always my intention to some day get caught up and fill out the remaining unwritten portion of the adventure. However, it just never seemed feasible in the immediate future- even when I returned. We had approximately 26 episodes of the show to cut and edit and I had numerous other projects that deserved attention. But after talking to a number of people I could see the demand to complete the blog was strong. Then, for many reasons I won't get into here, Destination Insanity was indefinitely shelved. With the time available and the demand there, I decided that finishing this project should be shifted to my number one priority. The question, then, becomes how do I approach the unfinished Stint 3?
I've given this question a considerable amount of thought over the past weeks. When I started this blog my objective was to give you the reader a vehicle for following me around on my travels, a seat on my shoulder if you will. I wanted to give you details about the places I went and why, the people I met, the things I did, the food I ate, the beer I drank, the places I stayed, and all other pertinent travel information one might expect to hear about when someone is recounting their adventures. I wanted it to be, in a word, topical.
I wanted to open up to you what I was doing with my days in this odd and tumultuous period in my life. It was never my intention, however, to open up myself in this forum. Reading back through Stints 1 and 2, I feel I did an adequate job conveying my travels. But what doesn't come through in any consistency are the actual feelings and thoughts I experienced as all of this was happening around me. That was all filtered out to keep it straightforward, streamlined (as much as I could ha), and with as little personal and emotional bias as I could muster. And while I consider the result informative and mildly entertaining (both up for debate), I think all will agree the experience I provided in my retelling of Europe was far from intimate.
Going forward I plan the rest of Stint 3 of Wanderlust to be personal- as much as the entries already written and well beyond. My hope is that you'll get to know me- my thoughts, my feelings, and my ups and downs over the nearly 7 months in Asia. I've told many people in passing, "an extended trip around the world isn't as easy as it sounds." Usually I just get laughed at. Maybe rightfully so, maybe not. But my hope is that by the end of this next series of entries you'll have a better understanding of what I went through- the physical, mental, and emotional toll it takes to try and do something of this magnitude.
Before I ultimately threw in the towel, I wrote several additional blogs that I never published. I intend to revive them, edit them, and publish them more or less in their entirety. Since it has been so long since I've done any substantial work, however, I will not alter the time stamps. From this point on I will be publishing them as of their date of completion.
Finally, to set the tone, the following is an excerpt from some notes I compiled during my travels in Asia. If I aim to be straightforward and honest with what transpired, I first owe you a starting point. This was how I was feeling before Stint 3 even began. This was my jumping off point. This was the man pulling the ripcord:
When the wheels of the plane touched down in Singapore I felt I had just barely collected my thoughts from the prior year's 8 months in Europe. It was like someone took my head and shook it so vigorously that every thought was mixed up, upside down, and backwards. I could hardly remember what had happened on a prior day- or even hours before a given moment. Yet random memories of the past 5-6 years would flash into my mind and just as suddenly be gone. I wasn't sleeping, I was hardly eating, and it was all I could do to retain sufficient mental fortification to embark on this endeavor- let alone spearhead it for both Jon and I.
The past years in New York and everything that had transpired therein were weighing heavily on me when we landed in Asia. Still haunted by those ghosts, I hadn't even begun to process the complete mayhem that was the past year in Europe. Adding a perpetual feeling of impending doom, the second we hit the tarmac I felt a clock begin ticking down on my fledgling life of freedom. Questions like "what's next for you? when are you going back to work? what do you plan to do with your life? when are you going to settle down?" were already echoing in my ears. I was being devoured from both ends- the past and future simultaneously chomping down, squeezing me into an inescapable corner.
This was my state of mind at the outset of Stint 3.
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