Living a Dream

Some time around 2010 a friend of mine was explaining his Eurotrip and mentioned going canyoning in Interlaken, Switzerland. I'd never heard of it. You apparently throw on a wetsuit and helmet and throw yourself off of cliffs, under waterfalls, over waterfalls, between rocks, and other things in rivers/streams in mountains. It sounded incredible. I regretted not finding a way to do it when I visited Europe in 2012, but planned to find a way eventually. So for my 28th birthday, Jenna agreed to humor me and give this a try. We contacted my Austrian cousin Norbert (who is a bit of a thrill-seeker) and tried to match our schedules so he could join. Unfortunately, while Interlaken was a few hours from us, it was about a 12 hour drive for him, so we'd have to look somewhere else. Norbert knew Austria well enough to know that we could find a place near Innsbruck, and so we met him there for a 36 hour stay in the home of both the 1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics. For our part, we ...

To try justifying that post-title, I want you to consider something with me that I've not really delved into. Most of this blog has been about bits and pieces of the teaching experience and I haven't really done much to tell you about the 20 weekend trips we've taken to the 10 different countries we've now visited. That's partly selfish of me (for not telling you) and partly unselfish of me (for not rubbing it in anyone's face).  I want to make a slight change. I want to tell you about these things, but I want to do it in the right way. A lot of times I make jokes, and a lot of times I downplay important things (hi, I'm a defense mechanism, what are you?), but I want everyone to experience the things that I've been lucky enough to experience. So in order to make that happen, I'm going to make myself vulnerable.  See, the theme of this entire trip/move/experience has been to grab life by its metaphorical horns and really do something when the c...

As someone who goes into people's homes and does homework help and things like that, I guess I have a certain responsibility to be, you know, a good person. In most cases, this has gone swimmingly. In my short time teaching, I've been invited to Switzerland twice, I've been offered more food and drink than you can imagine, I've been given suggestions of vacations, I've been congratulated, hugged, kissed (the cheek-things that they do in Europe), and high-fived. I've been laughed at and laughed with. I've generally been pretty OK at this job. Last week I made a tactical error. I scared the living crap out of my student. I help him with his writing assignments, and last week's assignment was to write a short story about basically anything. He was given a few genres and we decided that crime stories would be too hard to write in 250 words, so we kicked around maybe a ghost story or a horror story. We played around with ideas and thought about how to...

I don't have a lot of tangible fears. I'm not trying to be a tough guy, but I don't have legitimate phobias or anything like that. In fact, I'm not a tough guy, I just don't think I have a lot of tangible fears. But now and then one will come to mind - and it just did about eight seconds ago - for no good reason I am terrified that all my dreams will come true and I will feel more isolated than ever. If you know me really well, you might know that I dabble in depression-related thoughts now and then - you could say "light depression," not unlike "light treason." Sometimes it's actually depressing, sometimes it's looking at depressing things when I feel fine to see how I might remedy them if I'm actually down in the dumps. Point is, for myriad reasons, I have moments where I feel totally isolated, as I imagine most anyone does. But I was watching Parks and Rec a few minutes ago and thinking about how much I'd love to be on a show l...

Sometimes I think all day about something I want to write when I get home. It might be something funny that I saw/heard/read/took in by using one of my senses. It doesn't have to be funny...it could elicit any emotion, really. Or it might be something that I just kinda thought up during the day and wanted to elaborate on. What invariably happens is that I think about it during the day, lose some steam on what I wanted to really get into, talk for about 20 minutes with someone about that thing, and don't bother writing it. So where does that leave me? It leaves me with a good conversation and nothing to write about. It's a blessing and a curse. Curse because I like writing and generally want to write about these things I think up. And blessing because I'm not so painfully alone that I have no one to talk to and am forced to write it out instead. (Not that I'm suggesting that all writers are the lonely/reclusive type...but have you seen most of these jokers?) Here...

I'm not trying to be manly, but I don't consider myself as the type who is afraid of a lot of things. I'm not afraid of heights, spiders, truck drivers, or even Germans. So I'm not going to write a post titled "fear" and tell you all about any kind of standard fear (like my fear of dirty dish-water and how when I touch it, it triggers my gag-reflex). Nor will I pretend I'm great because I went skydiving on Sunday. Yes, it was completely insane. And no, I'll not soon forget it. And yes, I get sick on roller coasters but still thought this was a good idea. That's not the kind of fear I'm talking about. I do have one or two very real fears, though. I want to try to dig into one of them. We'll see how this goes. I have a paralyzing fear of being like everyone else. Anyone reading this, whether you know me well, have only met me in passing, or only know who I am because you stumbled upon this and have never met me in a face-to-face environment, ...

There's a commonly used expression that says you should do something every day that scares you. I'm not so sure that this is a safe practice because I don't have the money to do a lot of scary things like parachuting, alligator wrestling, heli -skiing, or asking someone to marry me (easily the scariest on the list). That leaves me with less expensive fear options like driving on the wrong side of the road, walking into the Crip neighborhood with Blood colors on, or what I did today; stand on the top of a really shaky ladder and paint a barn on a very windy day. I realize that painting a barn isn't gonna get me the street cred that Coolio has, but I'll be damned if I didn't feel a gust of wind, wobble a little bit, feel my heart skip a beat, and then laugh about how awesome it was. My point is this: How great is that feeling? How cool is it to know that something could have gone horribly wrong, but it didn't? Does anything make you feel more alive than that...