FREYDAYS

[freydays]

LIST: Things I Would No Longer Be Able To Do If I Were The Female Lead In a Rom-Com

Unzip my dress without the help of others

Resist the urge to drunk dial a person I am interested in

Walk down stairs without falling

Cook dinner and not light my kitchen on fire

Choose an outfit on the first try

Comprehend the results of a pregnancy test

Use my cell phone to call someone and explain that there has been a misunderstanding

Solemnly vacuum my house with pants on

Be repulsive

[fugifness-blog]

When you wish upon a star…

[freydays]

A friend of mine makes a series of GIFs solely dedicated to telling people to go fuck themselves, and I can’t think of anything more perfect. 

[freydays]

Welp, I made it back from Burning Man last week. I would tell you some stories, but I’m looking for a job right now, and I feel like nudity, implied drug use, and sleeping in dirt are generally frowned upon in the business community. So let’s agree to come back to that later!

[freydays]

The Ments...

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[freydays]

[freydays]

Finding Myself Was a Bad Idea

There's a lot of inspirational bullshit on the internet about "finding yourself" when you travel. The problem with this, is that it assumes that you are somehow a lost person to begin with. But for me, I think it's the opposite. Previous to leaving, I felt like I had my shit pretty together.  I could write jokes, participate in conversations about popular culture, and had an above average vocabulary. But now? Not so much. I would argue that since traveling, instead of finding myself, I've completely lost touch. Just one year away from real life and all of a sudden I've turned into my parents. I have to consult Urban Dictionary every time I have a conversation with my little brother because I don't know what anything means. The word 'vernacular' has left my vernacular. I now communicate my thoughts and feelings in broken english. "You have toilet?" I say.  And "what time bus? " I feel like the same person on the outside, yet somehow on the inside, I'm different. In Thailand they have a saying for this. It's called, "same same but different." You mean "similar?" I would ask. NO. They say. Same same but different.

Sure, you could say travel has taught me a lot of things, or made me 'grow' or whatever, but most noticeably, it's made me socially retarded. In group texts, I often have to leave and start a separate side conversation to clarify what people are saying. I'm off to the side whispering "What does on fleek mean? Is it like a fleet week thing? If my outfit is on fleek does it mean my outfit is nautical?" I have no fucking clue what anyone is talking about. Also let me catch up… Bruce Jenner is a woman now, men are feminists, and there was an emoji update? The emoji update actually explains a lot.

But besides pop culture, I feel like I'm really out of touch with my peers. Everyone has really stepped shit up a notch since I left. I went home for a week and it was like WELCOME HOME EVERYONE IS TAKING KETAMINE NOW. Whoa whoa whoa. Back. The Fuck. Up. What happened to just good Ol' fashioned coke? Is coke not cool anymore? Why do we have to snort horse tranquilizers? What if I'm not ready to go into a K-hole??? Help me you guys I DON'T UNDERSTAND! I feel like I'm in 7th grade again watching all my friends starting to drink and make out with boys and I'm over in the corner like GUYS WHO WANTS TO BUILD A FORT?! I am not ready for this. I'll pass on the dissociative anesthetics for now, thanks.

And onto a lighter topic, let's discuss the issue of wedding hashtags. What the fuck happened there? I was willing to accept 2014's emergence of the punny hashtag as a wedding day tradition, but it's gotten really out of control. I scroll through instagram like, let me get this right, you have THREE engagement hashtags, FIVE bachelorette party hashtags, and another FOUR wedding hashtag? Reel it in people. Get your shit together. Am I the only person that finds this behavior insane? Not only is it annoying, but it defeats the entire purpose of a hashtag, which is to consolidate your photos into one easily identifiable place. Now look what you've done. Your photos are in 12 places and you're probably heading for a divorce. Extreme? I think not. Agreeing on a singular hashtag should be a requisite of pre-marital counseling. If you guys can't agree on one, you're not allowed to get married. After all, this is a major life decision and you guys are acting like a bunch of 5-year olds hopped up on Adderall. Next thing you know you're going to start having babies with 11 names (see: Akon), and as a society, I don't think we need that. Baby names are fucked up enough these days.

See what I just did there? I'm not even 28 and I say things like, "these days" as if I lived through the Great Depression or something. I'm out of touch socially, I don't understand pop-culture, and I'm suddenly a prude. This is what traveling has done to me. Now that I think about it, maybe traveling has made me find myself. My true self is just an 87 year old man waving my fist in the air, yelling at kids to get off my damn lawn.

[freydays]

The day started out nicely. I heard of a place called Kalamanggan island that appeared to be in the vicinity of Malapascua, according to my map. I walked down to the water to see if I might be able to arrange a boat over and immediately a fisherman told me he could take me there for 650 pesos ($15) if I could be ready in 20 minutes. The ride was 2 hours each way. Steve and I didn't know anything about the place, but we decided to go. We hastily threw all our shit in a bag. Bought a sandwich and a gallon of water, and met our dude back on the beach in 10. When I saw our broke ass tiny little yellow boat with no seats, I was mentally berating myself for not asking about the boat before I gave him the cash, but it was too late to back out. Rookie move on my part. It was also very clear to the three of us (Steve, myself, and the captain) that there was a storm on the horizon, but we all just acted like it wasn't there. Plus I'm not going to let the weather dictate my day. You can't tell me what to do weather, YOURE NOT MY REAL DAD! So we got on the boat with our dying, toothless captain and set out to sea! 

On our way we had to pick up three drowning Japanese tourists who got caught in a rip tide couldn't swim. They didn't die, which was cool, but they lost their cameras and shoes and one was still holding onto an iPhone 6. I hope they have iPhone insurance. Those are expensive. Other than that, we made it to the island without a hitch. After we dropped the failed drowners off, Steve and I jumped off the boat and walked around the island and took a bunch of cheeseball photos on the sandbar. We were swimming at the sandbar when Steve decided he had to poop. So, like a gentleman, he got out of the water, walked 3 feet, then went back into the water on the other side of the sandbar. Although he was technically on the other side, we could still easily make eye contact. We did make eye contact. This is what relationships are.

After Steve’s aqua-dump, we decided it was time for lunch. I asked a woman if I could borrow her knife to cut my sandwich and she obliged. She also gave me a plate of cake and a large portion of pork from a whole roast pig her family had brought to the beach. SCORE! The rest of the story is boring, because it's one of those stories where I tell you about how on our ride back it seemed like we were going to capsize and die, and everything leading up to it seems like, "WOAH, what is going to happen on that boat?!?!" but then the story ends with us making it to shore safely and no one actually dies. Personally, when someone is telling me a story, unless their plane crashes and they have to climb out of the wreckage, or their boat actually sinks to the bottom of the ocean, I don't really want to hear that story. So that's it. I thought we might die, but we didn't. I'll spare you the details, because it's a non-story. Here's some pictures though, to make up for this complete waste of time. Cheers!

[freydays]

My Fancy New House

I'm currently all JAZZED because I'm moving to Sydney (surprise!) and I get to have my first real grown up apartment. Just like everyone else I know in SF, I've been living with roommates for way too long and when it comes to making your place look nice you just don't. You might try to spruce things up at first... paint a wall... maybe hang a mirror.  But inevitably, by year two of living with roommates you're all eating cereal with a fork and ignoring the blood splatter on the TV and everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else like THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS. Eventually the vacuum breaks and the blinds start to fall off the wall and your couch is just a wine dumpster and we all just mentally resign ourselves to living in a crack den until each of us eventually gets our own places which in our heads we 100% know will look like Gwyneth Paltrow's summer home. 

So that's the phase I'm in right now. The excited, unbroken dreams phase. In my NEW apartment I will eat out of bowls made of 16th century reclaimed wood. I will have silk shower curtains. I will refurbish vintage furniture. No part of me believes that decorating will be too hard and I will just cave and buy everything from Ikea. Nope. This new apartment… this new apartment is going to be different. How do I know? Well, I've been looking on the Internet and Pinterest and it says that even if you don’t sleep on bags of cash it's easy to make your house look amazing because DIY. How great of news is that?! According to the internet, my dream rental apartment is within reach!

No, I don't have power tools… yet. But just you wait. By the time I get to Sydney I'm going to be a DIY design savant. In no time I will become an expert at welding, sawing, pouring cement, and electrical-ing chandeliers and shit. Because that’s what happens when you live in your first real grown up apartment. I still need to grab a little more INSPO from the web, but here’s a room-by-room breakdown of what I’m thinking so far. Let me know what you think!

Mediterranean Bedroom that doesn’t get wet despite being outside:

Entry Hall Pool:

Living Room (with live monkey):

Bathroom:

And much MUCH more. I’ve already run all of this by Steve and he says it’s totally doable. He hung curtains once, so, you know. We’ll be looking good in no time. 

Just kidding, my whole house will probably look like this... 

Can’t wait for everyone to visit! Bring alcohol

[freydays]

Meanwhile in the Philippines...

The “ISIS Restaurant” management team really knows how to make a splash with their employee uniforms.

[freydays]

So in case you were wondering, the Philippines is the prettiest place ever. It's also the creepiest, if we're being honest. I'm positive I've seen at least half of the old white men walking around here on the show "To Catch a Predator." For whatever reason, in this part of the world, there's no need to live in the shadows. You can just wear white sunglasses with cargo shorts and ask 14 year old girls to sit on your lap and get down with your creepy self! I guess perverts need love too. So if beautiful beaches and/or being rapey are kind of your thing, I highly recommend this country!

There’s also whale sharks here, which I feel is worth mentioning.

[freydays]

Runnin’ Around Asia

By Asian standards, I am obese. Before arriving I was worried that I'd have to keep my shopping in check, but after visiting at least a dozen stores in search of a pair of shorts, it turns out overspending won't be a problem because Big & Tall hasn't reached the oversees market yet, and the only things they sell come in size ‘baby.’  Now I'm ok with 'being obese' by asian standards, but I draw the line at 'morbidly obese.' So after months of living abroad and being mocked by the baby sized clothing, I figured I should probably start some kind of exercise regime. I thought I could do yoga, but it turns out yoga overseas is a) only in heavily touristed places, and b) targeted towards broken white girls who have read "Eat, Pray, Love" too many times and are trying to 'find themselves' or 'heal' at an overpriced retreat owned by Europeans. On principle, I refuse to pay $10 for a one-hour yoga class in a place where the weekly salary of an employee is less than that. So with yoga out of the question, and gyms still being non-existent here, by process of elimination, that left running. Fuuuuck.

I've never been a good runner. I track my progress in minutes versus distance because for me, it's not an achievement of how far I've come,  it is a painfully slow countdown until I can stop. But besides being generally bad a running, attempting to run in the remote corners of SE Asia has its own set of problems which I will outline for you here. I should say upfront that most of these are personal problems, which a more competent person could probably easily overcome. So let's get started!

Problem #1: Attire

As far as workout clothes go, I packed a single pair of tiny spandex shorts. I guess I was trying to save space or something? Regardless, they look like a homosexual European man's bathing suit, and I'm pretty sure wearing these in my current, very Buddhist location, makes me look like Borat at the beach. I would love to buy a pair of workout leggings, but the Hmong hill tribes don't happen make those, and even if they did, I'm sure they wouldn't make them in size 'obese'. So for now, homo-euro swimwear is my only choice. In an attempt to be culturally sensitive, I actually try and "sprint" past or duck when I see a statue of Buddha, as if this will minimize my chances of going to hell, or whatever the Buddhist version of that is.

Problem #2: Getting Motivated.

Music has always been a big motivator to work out. Usually I'll put on my headphones with an embarrassing Pandora radio station like Deadmau5 or Calvin Harris and just pretend I'm in da club getting fucking PUMPED. Easy right? Except I don't have 3G over here. So instead of getting AGG with streaming rave radio, I'm stuck listening to the Garden State soundtrack because the last time I purchased music was in high school and I was going through a lot of emotional shit ok? Whoever said that jogging is supposed to clear your mind clearly wasn't jogging to Bon Iver because that shit is SAD. Every old man, bird in a cage, or stray dog I pass sends me on an emotional roller coaster and I need to take a break already because I think I have something in my eye.

Problem #3: Explaining to locals that you are not in any immediate danger

When you get into the more remote parts of southeast asia, the concept of exercise becomes more and more foreign. For me, exercise is like a kind of repentance for living a life a leisure. I can't just ride motorbikes and eat out at restaurants and go sightseeing all day. I must temporarily punish myself for having it so easy. For the locals on the other hand, simply getting by is exhausting enough and running is only done out of extreme necessity.  My first time jogging in Vietnam  I was staying in a jungle town that doesn't see tourists.  I'm used to the local people being curious about me, but this time, they weren't just curious, they were worried about me and wanted to help. Within the first few minutes of my jog I was chased down by an elderly man on a bicycle who actually got off and offered it to me because he thought I must have an emergency. None of this of course is in English, but you can get pretty far with  hand signals. I tried my best to mime that I was ok, but this only led to more concerned citizens coming to my "rescue" on motorbikes. Someone actually offered me a beer to cool down. Someone else gave me their baby. I don't know what that was about, but it was a cute baby, so I held it anyway. At that point, my jog was over.

Problem #4: The Entourage

I attempted my second jog in a less rural area. This place had a school and a main (dirt) road and some kind of religious facility so I thought I might be able to fly a little more under the radar than my last attempt. Of course I was wrong. The people didn't try to stop me this time per say, they simply ran alongside me. I guess when you see on average less than one white person a year, this isn't something you want to miss. Children in uniforms left their classrooms to trail behind me, yelling, "HELLO MISTER!" (kind of a blow to the ego) along with about a dozen stray dogs. I was like the Forest Gump of Vietnam! Unfortunately, the parade didn't last long because after 15 minutes I was already maxed out. Having an entourage in itself isn't really a problem, its just a lot of pressure to put on a good show. Perhaps it was all in my head, but when I turned back I had the distinct feeling that what I previously thought were words of encouragement might have morphed into something more akin to aggressive heckling. I guess I’d be pissed if I ditched class to watch a white woman run and she didn’t make it three blocks. Better luck next time I guess. And by next time, I mean never.

The moral of the story is, don't exercise in a 3rd world country. It's culturally insensitive, emotionally draining, frightening for locals, and in the end, you will only end up a disappointment. Just accept your fatness for now, and move to somewhere like Kansas when you get back. I've heard that by Kansas standards, I am a super model.

[freydays]

How Not To Be A Travel Writer

Photo Document Everything

A good writer always has a notebook on them. A bad writer, has an iPhone. Use this iPhone to take tons of photos. An Asian amount of photos. This way, you can properly document all the things you saw, and places you visited, that you won’t be writing about.  Also, you can check Instagram. 

Take Lots Of Notes

Detailed notes are unnecessary, and a waste of time. They also lead to a significantly higher chance that you’ll actually write something, which is exactly what we don’t want to do. Instead, I suggest leaving yourself cryptic fever-dream comments in the notes section of your phone. Here’s an abridged list of the meaningless notes I currently have in my phone:

- Fuck Dynasty

- Buy everything in Skymall

- Corn dog legs

- Let’s not turn this rape into a murder

- Boner = sincerest form of flattery

- I <3 petty theft

This way, when you actually sit down to write, you can pull up your notes to remind yourself that you’re not a writer, you’re a fucking psycho! Bravo. Now lets close that laptop.

Always Be Drinking

When experiencing new environments and cultures, be sure to drink heavily to ensure that any unique or worldly observations you might have are quickly erased from memory. ‘Sober You’ notices things like the beautiful Santorini sunset or the smell of seaweed being harvested in a Vietnamese fishing village. ‘Drunk You’ notices the #SelfieMirror at Club Super Paradise, and the 7-11 across the street selling toasties until 4am, which are the perfect things to not write about.

Strengthen Your Not Writing Skills

Not writing takes practice. Everyday when you wake up, make a list of all the things you could potentially write about: your sunrise hot air-balloon ride in Laos, exploring shipwrecks off the coast of Thailand, or sleeping under the stars among to a herd of camels in the deserts of India. After this exercise, immediately open Facebook and mindlessly scroll until you forgot what you were doing before. Do this everyday for weeks on end, until eleven months have gone by, and you’ve written almost nothing.

Stay Uninspired

If you’re like me, and you prefer to write about things you hate, staying uninspired while traveling is easy. I have almost zero things to complain about while traveling. And nothing to complain about equals nothing to write about! On the other hand, if you’re someone that loves pouring over every detail of your super cute outfit-of-the-day, or bragging to your friends about the amaaaazing meal you had on the beach, then we have nothing in common and will probably never be friends.

Stay True To Yourself

Finally, remember that not-writing isn’t for everyone. Beyond discipline, it takes an overwhelming sense of insecurity and feeling like your writing isn’t good enough to keep on not-writing. If after following all of these tips, you still find yourself chomping at the bit to spew your bullshit all over a page, then just embrace it!  There’s nothing wrong with grabbing yourself a cliche two-part blog name like “Cupcakes & Caviar,” or “Sequins & Sass” and writing about things you’re currently “OBSESSED” with. You’ll probably have a million followers and a ‘Sponsored Giveaway’ in no time - well deserved I’m sure.

[freydays]

11 reasons you should quit your job and travel the world right now

because you're pretty sure you're about to get fired

because you want to upset your parents

because you think you're better than everyone else

because you have way too much money you don't know what to do with

because you hate hot showers and reliable cell service

because you want to gain 15 pounds

because you want to run away from your problems

because you've never had food poisoning and want to see what it's like

because you want people to comment "omg can i plz have ur life?" on your instagrams

because you just broke up with your boyfriend and you want to seem like a strong, independent woman

because you read a list of reasons to quit your job and travel the world on a website written by people who have never quit their jobs or traveled the world

[freydays]

In Defense Of Doing Nothing

I've been traveling for about 10 months now and the thought of blogging has rarely crossed my mind, besides the occasional feeling of guilt, which I'm quick to dismiss. Updating this thing means being on my computer, which means finding a legitimate source of wifi which means I don't want to deal with it. Of course, before I began my trip, I had high ambitions for the blog. Traveling the world seemed like pretty good material, and I assumed that without a job I'd have the time. But as is the case with traveling in general, things never pan out the way you plan them. After Portugal, I traveled around Europe for another 6 weeks, spent 4 months scootering around South East Asia, trekked and trained my way through Nepal and India for 2 months, and for the last 3 months have been bussing around South America. Yet in all this time, I haven't posted a single thing. I ask myself how I let this happen. Is it pure laziness, or something more deliberate? After all, it's not like I stopped writing entirely. I just stopped posting entirely. 

I tried explaining why I haven't put anything on the blog to my mom, and the best analogy I can come up with is this: It's like being at a concert and everyone in front of you is holding up their phone taking shitty quality videos to Snapchat to their friends. Have you ever watched someone's concert video? They're horrible. It's a blessing that Snapchat deletes things immediately because there is no way that anyone would ever want to watch that twice. Everyone knows this, yet now every time you go to a show you can't even see the stage because there are a million phones blocking your view, and you can't help but be annoyed by it. Why can't people just enjoy what's happening in front of them, without having to document it? A video is not going to adequately capture the sounds and the lights and the energy in the room. Just put the fucking phone down, and take it in. If you're so busy trying to experience the moment for other people, before you know it it's going to be over, and you'll have missed the whole thing. And that's sort of been my attitude about travel blogging. There are so many people trying to put their experiences into words, and it's just not really the same. I suppose there's a shorter way to capture this sentiment, and it would be called "living in the moment" but that gets thrown around so much, that I don't think people even know what it means. For me it meant putting the fucking phone (and laptop) down, and just experiencing it for myself. 

On top of not really wanting to write, traveling is actually a lot of work, and there's less free time than I expected. I considered myself fairly well-traveled before I left for this trip, but looking back on it, everything before this fell more into the realm of vacation. When you're doing a trip for 3 weeks, you set aside the real world until you get back. When you're backpacking for a year, this is it. This is your real life. Things break and need to get fixed. Taxes need to be filed and visas need to be applied for and DMV late payments need to made because you forget to renew your registration on time. It's all the same stuff you do at home, just without the convenience of a reliable internet connection. And all of that is not even including any of the real "travel" part.

Last week, I was in six cities in six nights. It's a constant game of mapping out your next destination, figuring out where the bus terminals are (in another language), shlepping your shit through unknown cities from hostel to hostel to find somewhere with a bed, and then packing it all up before 10am the next day to check out and start it all over again. The reason I have time to write this right now is because my overnight bus last night was cancelled due to, from what I can understand, "people blocking all the roads out of the city with rocks and sticks." A proper Bolivian protest. At first I was annoyed. Why couldn't the vendor have told me the roads were blocked that morning when I bought the tickets, instead of waiting to tell me after I'd checked out of my place and trucked it (for the second time that day) 2km outside the city to the bus station with all my stuff? But things like this happen all the time. Sometimes I forget I'm in a 3rd world country, and the only way to cope is to just be adaptable. Go back to the city. Find a new place to stay. Make some calls to let people know you won't be coming tomorrow. Hopefully the next day. But it's fine, because even though plans didn't go accordingly, I couldn't be happier. Right now I'm sitting in a cafe and it's raining outside and I have no intentions of leaving my spot for the foreseeable future and that's fine. When you're traveling for this long, sometimes it's really nice to just do nothing. People who say that they live "everyday to the fullest," are frankly, full of shit. Can't it just be OK to live every-other day to the fullest? That seems like a fair compromise to me. If I had to live EVERY day to the fullest I would have been hospitalized months ago. Even Beyonce needs a down day.

But now that I've depressed you and told you all about the unglamorous side of traveling, I'd like to leave you with the part that makes traveling amazing. Those "every-OTHER" days, that I get to spend 'living to the fullest.' Not just drinking wine from the bottle, watching Game Of Thrones, and waiting for someone to remove rocks in the road so that I can get back on the bus - days.

Unfortunately, until I get around to putting all these experiences in words, I'll just have to leave you with photos. Most people are too lazy to be bothered with a big chunk of texts these days anyways, so hopefully you won't mind. Who am I kidding, I bet you're not even reading this. You probably scrolled right through this from the beginning. You little...

[freydays]

[freydays]