LOL! This Is Gold.

My feelings (by that I mean pure jealousy) towards hot-shot bloggers who “travel”. Yeah yeah, they worked hard for it, too. Whatever.

WHY I QUIT MY JOB TO TRAVEL THE WORLD

By Joe Veix, JUNE 6, 2016

On paper, my life seemed great. I had a dream job, a swanky apartment, and a loving girlfriend. But something was off. I couldn’t bear being chained to my desk in a stuffy office any longer. So I decided to quit and travel the world, bringing only my passport, a small backpack, and my enormous trust fund.

My co-workers were shocked. How could I so casually throw away everything I fought so hard to achieve? But I don’t expect everyone to “get” me. I’m a free spirit, whose father owns a South American rubber empire.

I set to work packing my bag and throwing out most of my possessions. Whatever didn’t bring me joy went straight in the trash. You don’t need to own a lot of “stuff” to be happy, especially when you can buy whatever you later realize that you need with your massive inheritance.

Then I reserved a business-class seat, sent a quick text message to my girlfriend telling her that I was leaving the country forever, and was off.

My first few months roaming the world were life-changing. Every day, I updated my Instagram with photos of my favorite sights: cones filled with scoops of glistening gelato; my hand lightly resting on a café table, near an early edition of “On the Road”; selfies of me hugging depressed tigers too stoned on sedatives to drown themselves. Still, I needed to see more. My wanderlust had turned me into a wanderslut.

As a citizen of the world, I rarely get lonely. Everywhere I go, I meet such diverse groups of people. In hostels, I’ve shared beers with friendly British and Australian twenty-somethings. In hotels, I’ve sipped wine with friendly British and Australian forty-somethings. We all became lifelong friends, despite the language barriers.

Once, outside the train station of a small fishing village, I met a humble man named Greebo who sold flowers and various cheap trinkets for a living. Unburdened by the trappings of modern life, his hospitality was unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in the States. Greebo was happy to open up to me about his life, as long as I kept buying roses. Intrigued by our easy chatter, some of his friends wandered over to join the conversation. All of our superficial differences soon melted away. Inside, we are just human beings, after all, exchanging a powerful global currency.

As I left town, I cast one final glance back at Greebo. One of his friends playfully tossed him to the ground and thumbed his eyes as the others snatched all the money I had given him. I couldn’t help but smile. It felt good to make a difference in the lives of these simple people.

Of course, this “no reservations” life style isn’t for everyone. In many ways, it’s harder than the old corporate grind. Many stores don’t accept my Centurion card. Sometimes it’s difficult to get even one bar of cell service, which makes Instagramming more gelato a real struggle.

But don’t worry about me! Whenever I start to get homesick, I remember the old rat race and shudder. All those bleary-eyed suckers packed into the subway, going to their lousy jobs, wasting their whole lives to afford useless things like “rent” and “health insurance” and “student-loan payments.”

That life style isn’t for me. Maybe I’m just a crazy dreamer who also gets a monthly no-strings-attached sixty thousand dollars deposited into my checking account, but I won’t be tied down so easily.

Italian Pasta in Japan

Basically, the Japanese LOVE noodles. Like, more than NZers love alcohol or bacon or Iranians love kebabs or rice. Though probably even more. Cause they have noodle festivals! Entire festivals dedicated to noodles! Noodles of several kinds but mostly there are 4; ramen (the thin and yellow fast-food Chinese noodle), soba (the healthy brown one made of buckwheat flour), udon (round and thick like moi) and somen (supermodel thin like moi in the future). Which are eaten hot, cold, on their own with dipping sauce, in a soup, in a stir fry and even as a patty in a burger bun! So you’d think after a life-time of living and breathing mamas home cooked Japanese noodles, they’d venture out when it came to dining at Bona Petito… No. What do they order? What SOLE pasta CAN they order? You got it, SPAGHETTI.

It’s funny, even their supermarkets, only sell spaghetti in their Italian/pasta isle. To be fair, on the odd chance, I might see shells or bow-ties, though I’m sure it’s not the Japanese buying those. As for all of the other good pastas; fettuccine, ravioli, tortellini, gnocchi etc they are only usually found in international import stores. Oh and when it comes to lasagne sheets, only the tiny square sized ones are sold because Japanese don’t have full-sized ovens in their homes.

So you go to an Italian restaurant and the only sort of pasta you can order is spaghetti.Which is fine… only a firstworldproblem and all but like, they’ll have packets of tagliatelle displayed around the restaurant for fun or as decoration to tempt you but they don’t actually serve that, no. Or any other pasta for that matter. Just spag. Just more fu&king noodles. #myjapanlife

How to be a successful health-food blogger in 13 straightforward steps:

Step one: acquire one but preferably two appealing children (one of each gender is best). That, or an attractive man-friend (man-bunned hipster is preferred) or cute furry creature or both.

Step two: dress children and/or boo-thang in trendy attire.

Step three: promote over-priced actually-high-in-calorie-regardless-of-health-factor raw “bounty” bar/“Nutella” spread/ “caramel” “cheesecake” through them.

Step four: assemble cooked (or in this case, uncooked) food in a creative fashion: alongside inspirational typography, fresh flowers, loose ingredients (scattered nuts are popular), macbook, engraved spoons, patterned cloths, charming children and or shirtless and smiling (both important) man-thang.

Step five: capture food using expensive high-tech photography gadget

Step six: zoom in.

Step seven: put a filter on it

Step eight: add a pinch or two of common every-day middle-eastern ingredients to blatantly Western dishes to fancify them: saffron CHEESECAKE, turmeric ENGLISH MUFFINS. Pistachio SOUFFLE, pomegranate PORRIDGE etc.

Step nine: appropriate Asia while you’re at it: sushi, matcha, tofu and black rice are currently on trend.

Step ten: occasionally dine out at hipster restaurant and photograph your symmetrically placed order making sure your raybans are in frame.

Step eleven: frequent farmers’ markets making sure to capture the morning light as it gently caresses the purple carrots.

Step twelve: do yoga.

Step thirteen: last but not least, travel far and distant. For it is not the vegan cannellini bean stuffed sweet-potato in your kitchen but the vegan cannellini bean stuffed sweet-potato on a bamboo raft in the now-not-so-authentic tropical forests of Phuket that guarantees followers.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“When winter came, I decided to read.”- Anisa Kazemi

According to Mark Haddon himself, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) is not based on Asperges nor any other specific disorder, “if anything it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way.”

Which is an accurate way of putting it for it’s definitely not the same as another. Firstly, the chapters aren’t like usual chapters. Instead, the story progresses through prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 etc. Next, Haddon challenges typical story conventions. His chapters are often too short, his sentences too lengthy and his prose/his protagonist, Christopher’s prose, too random. However; that is what I (and many others since he’s won loads of awards) consider so refreshing about it. Haddon’s mystery novel really does make you see in a new way.

Haddon achieves this by comparing most people’s thought processes to that of Christopher’s: which is paying immaculate attention to detail and living in the moment. While most people would be thinking “I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on,” and “I wonder if Julie has given birth yet,” in a cow field, Christopher would be inspecting/admiring the different shades of grass and the contrast of the surrounding flowers, sky, animals and architecture against them. In other words, Haddon/Christopher examine the every-day and the mundane so closely and so objectively that they become extraordinary again – since we tend to overlook/ignore them in this busy busy day and age.

I laughed, I cringed, I empathised with the Christopher and I continued to think about him after the book had ended – all the good things. I totes recommend it and so does good ole Ian:

“A superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy” -Ian McEwan, author of Atonement.

3.8/5

lit bums

How can one stress
about boys
weight
money
and deadlines
when there are
billions of fireflies
sporting lit bums?