Living a Dream

If I can pare travel down into one thing and one thing only, it's that traveling successfully is a mindset. While going to cool places helps you enjoy it, you have to be OK with the fact that something will inevitably go wrong. Embrace it, or else you'll be pretty upset. Rain happens. Foggy, smoggy, hazy days happen. Awful tour guides in the group next to you happen. Trains run late, buses don't run at all, flights get cancelled. Open your mind a bit and realize that some of the most fun memories you'll have can happen when things are going completely wrong. Last night I was reading through my own notes from our 9 months abroad and realized just how much I had forgotten from a trip to a place called Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. If you recognize the name, it's because you've read a lot of "10 European Towns You HAVE to See to Believe!" articles on god-knows-what website. Cesky Krumlov makes those lists because it looks like this . It's ...

Candidates are rounding into form ahead of the 2016 election – some are showing their sensibilities,  others are pulling out of the race. One question remains for all of them: Why in the world would you – or anyone else – want to be President of the USA? Simply by being elected, you’re guaranteeing that an entire political party will dislike you on general principal, and that’s not including independent voters and voters who would’ve preferred someone else from their own party. In fact, 1824 was the last time a president garnered more than 65% of the popular vote, and only about a half-dozen since then have cleared 55% . Simply stated, you’re lucky if 50% of the population actually wants you to be president. Beyond being generally disliked, let’s think about what a president can accomplish in the four years they’ll be in office. Let’s keep thinking about that… If Donald Trump is elected, he will not be able to garner the votes, pass legislation, pro...

Italy is a pretty cool place, as you might've noticed from all the photos I've been posting and blog entries I've made. With that in mind, we decided to try a road-trip weekend. The plan was to pick out some notable hill-towns in/around Tuscany and just drive. We'd also booked an Agriturismo for two nights because that's something we'd heard about doing. An Agriturismo is essentially a farm-house that rents out rooms. Some are more luxurious than others, including pools, hot-tubs, and more. Others focus on the agriculture aspect and are working farms where wine, jams, meat, fruit, and much more are produced. We opted for a small place outside of Florence because it featured an onsite dinner. We'd heard that the best part about Agriturismos were that they serve seemingly endless dinners for a flat-rate that gets added to the price of your room. We wanted that. The dinner did not disappoint, but that's going to show up in photos in a subsequent post. ...

After everything we covered on day 1 , day 2 , and day 3 , it's hard to imagine there'd be much left for us to do on day 4 in Rome. But, as the eternal city lives on, so does the adventure. The day started off rather gloomy and a bit rainy, but we marched toward the imperial forums again to just...soak it in. We took a walk around the Colosseum and up onto the Oppian hill, where the former "Golden Palace" of Nero stood, and now we saw remains of the Baths of Trajan . One remarkable thing about this area was a set of impossibly green birds, which a stranger pointed out to us on a few brief occasions. He kept trying to get closer, ultimately scaring them away, as if he thought they would just sit there and let him pat them on the head or something. Somehow, more notably, the thing we remember most about this was that there was a man walking a golden retriever, but the golden retriever believed it was a lion. It walked more proudly than any dog I've ever seen: Ch...

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about hosting people on AirBnB and how it's been really cool to trust people and meet strangers who are moving around in the world. To revisit the topic, it's a pretty eye-opening thing. One of our first guests was a family of four. They had spent the past several weeks at the woman's parents' house in Parma (that's about 15 minutes from our house, for those who don't know) and just needed to get out and be a little closer to the city for a couple of days before they moved to the Congo. To provide a little more insight, this was a girl from Parma and her husband who she met in Madagascar while she was teaching English. They now have two unbelievably well-behaved (and adorable) children who were about to stomach a 24+ hour trip from Cleveland to Newark to Brussels to Kinshasa, which is the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The husband was from Guinea (that's in west Africa) and before they departed, he ga...

Yeesh. Rome is exhausting. We already covered day 1 here and day 2 here , now we're on day 3, and then there's a day 4 next week. I would've loved to have crammed this all into one post, but there's just so much to see and so much to say because, hi, it's Rome and there are millions of things to say. On what we knew would be another tiring day of endless walking, we left the hotel around 8:00 and made way toward the Vatican. We'd inquired about tours, and most folks agreed that tours were the best bet: You could skip lines, breeze through the museum seeing the highlights, pop into the Sistine Chapel, and then they drop you off inside St. Peter's - and during all of that you would hear information about the history of it all from a professional tour guide. We planned to do this. On our way we strolled past the Quirinale, which is like the Italian White House, although not terribly impressive when you consider what else is in Rome. We then passed Trevi Fou...

Not like that fake 100th post from a week or two ago. This is actually my 100th post at kevinpaulnye.blogspot.com, which would be more of an accomplishment if it didn't actually take me 6+ years. That's right, the first post on this site was in July of 2009 - about seven weeks after I graduated college, which is a seriously distant memory at this point. There've been some ups and downs along the way. Originally it was meant to be a journal of finding some legs in the entertainment world: I talked about my first ever stand-up comedy audition , talked about the week-long trip I took to New York with Lou-Chaz Bitsko, and even what my life would look like if it were a movie . Life changed: I moved to Chicago and wrote about people on the train biting each other's ears and just being gross , posted a total of five times in 2011, pretended to get back into blogging in 2012, then left this old thing dormant from August 2012 until November 2014. Oops. But now that I...

(See last week's post for Rome part 1 , which covered the following: Outside the Colosseum, inside the Forum, first trip to the Pantheon, Torre Argentina/Area Sacra, Piazza Navona, the outside of Castel Sant'Angelo, and a few other incidental visits.) After a wild first day in Rome, we jumped out of bed early for an over-fill of our hotel breakfast because we knew we'd need calories. By 8:30 we were queued for the Colosseum and were inside before 9:00. Of course, it was still head-scratching to walk there and pass Trajan's Market, the various forums, and the Arch of Constantine to get there, but that's just part of being in Rome. Inside the Colosseum though...that place is a trip. They do a pretty good job of loading the concourse-area with information and artifacts, allowing you to learn about the building instead of just rushing to the inside area and looking around (which is obviously what everyone wants to do anyway). There's not a whole lot I can say ab...

One of the best things about having a wildly popular blog is that celebrities from all walks of life find their way to it and express their gratitude for what tremendous work I'm creating. On rare occasions they even express interest about how they can get involved. Unfortunately, I don't accept guest posts from these attention-hogs - I know they're just trying to use me for publicity and that's not how it works here at LaD. However, I'm a man of the people, and I know what the people want. With that in mind, and with the presidential race taking center stage over the last couple of months (and continuing to hold center stage for the next year), I was able to get some time on the phone with a man very familiar with presidential races: Former President of the United States of America, Billy Bob Thornton . Me: Mr. President, thank you for taking some time out for me - I know you're a busy man. POTUSA BBT: Well you're certainly welcome, although I feel li...

One thing I probably didn't do enough of while tutoring in Italy was to actually tell stories about tutoring in Italy. Of course there are plenty of posts about where we went and what we did in those places, but not much about the actual teaching, save the vespa disaster . Shortly after we arrived in Italy we started making flyers to advertise our services, and we proceeded to post them around the city (near schools, mostly). We received a few bites from these, including one from a woman named Flaminia*. She wanted to meet me to talk about a few things and she had specific questions in her attempt to learn English. I agreed to meet her at a bookstore which held a cafe in the basement and we began talking about what might be a good way to get her started with the language. She very quickly began asking me specific questions that I was completely unprepared for: Things like "how is my pronunciation?" or "When these 2 letters go together, how do I make that sound?...

People ask if every idea has been had before by someone else. The theory is that there are so many people in the world - and so many who have already lived - that you don't have a truly original thought in your head. In response to this question, I pose a question of my own. Who cares? It doesn't matter if no one has ever thought the exact things that you're thinking, because you're you and that means that it's different. No one has the exact experiences and lenses that you see the world through. When taking improv classes at Second City and iO Chicago, there were plenty of recurring themes, and while the majority of the lessons centered around freeing your mind and being in the moment as you're onstage, there was a specific explanation that stuck with me. As per Colleen Doyle (a teacher I had/genius whose shows with Dummy at iO were/are absolutely incredible), the characters you play are affected by your own life; you see what the character sees, but you...

Ever have one of those days when you wake up and something is a little bit off? Maybe the blanket has bunched up around your knees, maybe the alarm clock didn't go off, or maybe the person you thought you were sleeping next to is already awake and in the bathroom...or doesn't exist. Whatever it is, the day just starts wrong. Ever have one of those days when it gets worse? Maybe you're out of cereal, maybe you miss the train by 30 seconds and end up late for work, maybe someone spills coffee on you - if you'd made it onto the first train you probably wouldn't have had a stranger with coffee right next to you, so this is technically your fault. So things get worse. So work starts and you suddenly realize you forgot about a presentation you were going to give and have to scramble to piece it together. It doesn't go well, and the proof is when your boss gives you a resigned *sigh* instead of a congratulatory handshake before walking out of the room. You need ...

The Eternal City, the birthplace of seemingly everything, one of the most history-rich places on the planet, and a hell of a place to spend four days. We planned to visit Rome for a while but we needed a long-weekend to make it work. We found that long weekend in February (normally the worst month of the year, but it wasn't bad in Italy) and headed out Thursday morning with a return train Sunday night. The train to Rome took us farther south in Italy than we'd previously been, so that was cool. We got to see more countryside from the train than before and even spotted a few hill-towns off in the distance. The difficult thing with writing about Rome, and the reason I've been putting this off for months, is that everything in Rome deserves your attention. Everything that we took a photo of has a story, and those stories are slightly more familiar than they are in other places. Everything is so grand, so incredible, so ostentatious, so brilliant, or so classically lovely, ...

It's hard to deal with things. That's OK, but it's hard to deal with things.  There's a lot of stuff going on in the world, and a lot of people are saying a lot of things (most of them are kinda stupid and rash, but that's another issue). These things make me think things, and blogs are a good place to express thoughts, but I don't think I want to do that. I'm not interested in ruffling your feathers, changing your opinion of me/a situation that you don't want to be influenced on.  As a result, I've been staring at a blank post for quite a while, trying to figure out what to say. If I don't talk about what's going on in the world - in Paris, in Beirut, in Maryland (student with gun on campus today, Monday), in Syria, and in about a thousand other places in the world, then I may be ignoring the problems and bottling up my emotions. If I do talk about what's going on in all of these places, then I'm putting my stupid opinion out ...

I got very excited to make this post today because Blogger informs me that I've completed 99 posts before this one. I was on blog post 100 on this particular blog! I had written two paragraphs telling how I was going to do a clip-show like on any sitcom that has ever reached 100 episodes and I was going to include links to my most popular and least popular entries. I had it all figured out. And then I noticed that 8 of those 99 were drafts, so I guess you're all gonna have to wait for my look back at what this blog has become over the years (!) that it has existed. Instead I'll keep it short today and make this a weekly round-up of things that I've written here and elsewhere, plus a few links that have really tickled me from around the internet. Maybe this can become a Friday-thing for this blog, or maybe (likely) it'll happen once and then I'll forget that I tried to make it a thing. First, over on partner-site RobotButt.com, you can take a look at volume...

There's a popular phrase when people talk about improving themselves: "Be the change you want to see in the world." It's attributed to Gandhi, although that's pretty suspect ( source ) and there's no proof of him ever saying it (welcome to the internet!), and it appears on bumper stickers, motivational screenshots, and Facebook posts of girls aged 17-22. Since it's not Gandhi, and there's no really telling who popularized the phrase in the first place, you might think that I'm in the process of making fun of it and our culture for making "something" out of things that are really nothing. But that's not what I'm gonna do. Instead of being my normal angry-old-man self, I'm going to actually support this quotation and give an example. Everyone seems to think the world is trending in the wrong direction: gun deaths are up, religious insanity is *way* up, intolerance of LGBT/women/minority rights is somehow both up and down at ...

I know I haven't posted about travel in a while now, and that's a shame for the handful of you who liked looking at photos from around the world. On the other hand, it saves you from having to read about it all the time. I'm going to try to temper all of that by instituting Travel Tuesdays. I'll post something about travel on Tuesdays and Tuesdays only. In a happy accident, I posted a brief write-up of our honeymoon last Tuesday, but we're pretending that this whole idea starts today. To start off this new idea, it only makes sense to start close to home. Upon returning to the USA, Jenna and I moved to the west side of Cleveland despite how it has almost nothing in common with Italy. She got a job on the far-west side and I followed. While there are ups and downs in Cleveland, we've picked out a couple of favorite, beautiful spots. And then we bought a nicer camera than our cell phones so we could take some cool photos, starting with the Rocky River reservat...