I'm getting old

I never used to complain about weird hours, no sleep, or long drives. I don't know if it's because I got married or because my inner crusty old guy is starting to become my normal outer self.

I also find myself becoming tired of travel in general, mostly because the more I think about it the more selfish it seems. This is less true of touring (where you're supposedly "giving" people something wherever you go, creating value, etc.) than normal post-college travel, but still applies. As I begin to accept my limitations and realize that I will not go everywhere in the world before I die, I also begin to see more clearly the consumptive nature of travel. Of what value is all this "experience capital" anyway, especially to anyone other than myself? Am I really going to bring home some wonderful knowledge from far away that will improve my local community? That's a pretty Platonic idea and one which is all but obsolete in contemporary globalism.

It's more likely that by traveling I'm only spreading the gospel of consumptive late capitalism. It forces a weighing of the potential benefits (to me) of worldly experience, versus the potential benefits (to my community) of staying and investing in a real home. Some might claim that their enlightened transience allows them to be "citizens of the world" and have a community that spans the globe, but I contend that most of those people simply have no real community at all, and are stretched too thin to be much more than cultural leeches to the localities they come in contact with. Their "doctrine of placelessness" is also often accompanied by virulent delusions of their own importance.

I suspect many of these people are trying to escape what they perceive to be a kind of determinism in placefulness --- whereby your homeplace becomes inextricable from your identity, and therefore limits how much of your self you can intentionally construct. Having a local connection is a block to the long-held elite-white-people value of culturelessness (unless the "local" connection is New York or London, which are just nodes in the Space of Flows). I think that's actually a good thing. If that makes me "provincial" or a "yokel," I don't really care.

Favorite words

Epic
-adjective
1. noting or pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style: Homer's Iliad is an epic poem.
2. heroic; majestic; impressively great: the epic events of the war.
3. of unusually great size or extent: a crime wave of epic proportions.

Brutal
–adjective
1. savage; cruel; inhuman: a brutal attack on the village.
2. crude; coarse: brutal language.
3. harsh; ferocious: brutal criticism; brutal weather.
4. taxing, demanding, or exhausting: They're having a brutal time making ends meet.
5. irrational; unreasoning.
6. of or pertaining to lower animals.

Nitro
-adjective
1. Chemistry. containing the nitro group.
2. Colloquial: describes a person, place or thing as being unequivocally, quintessentially spectacular and dumbfounding (UD).

Granola
–noun
A breakfast food consisting of rolled oats, brown sugar, nuts, dried fruit, etc., usually served with milk.
-adjective
A person who dresses like a hippie, eats natural foods (granola), and is usually a Liberal, but in all other ways is a typical middle class white person, and is likely to revert back to being straight when they finish college (UD).

...and, I almost forgot (gasp! thanks, egalitarian-liberated-life-partner!):

SALT
-noun
A crystalline compound, sodium chloride, NaCl, occurring as a mineral, a constituent of seawater, etc., and used for seasoning food, as a preservative, etc.
-interjection
1. expression of distaste or unhappiness about a situation (UD)
2. describing something unfortunate or unfavorable happening, or one's angered mood (UD).