Back from the Southern Hemisphere

And I don't know what to do with myself.

Before leaving, I thought that a trip might be really productive just because I seriously needed to get out of Poughkeepsie. It worked out better than I had expected. I still don't have any idea about a career path, but at least now I feel motivated to find work, just so I can save up to head back to Buenos Aires for at least a few months. I also want to learn Spanish.

At the hostel, one of the people I met was a fairly successful writer working on a project about global belief systems. I was a little jealous because she seemed pretty young and said that she didn't have any unpaid internships. Editors just called her based on her work in college. She seemed to have a pretty easy go of it, getting paid to travel for a full year and conduct interviews. But when I looked up the project (utruthproject.org) I had some misgivings about it... instead of attempting to "discover commonalities within the human drama that supersede surface differences" so many of the answers just reinforce past assumptions, such as women from Southeast Asia claiming that family is most important. Maybe it was just the wording that bothered me ("going where no woman has gone before") as if leaving the United States is some huge accomplishment, or that people from other nations are just scenery to be discovered and not "men" or "women" themselves. When I spoke to her about it, she said that she disliked Southeast Asia the most because people there seemed more cold and unwilling to respond to her. But if the only way to get answers out of them is to ask them to fill in the blank: I believe that ___, the wording already allows for very few answers. Also, why should people be willing to share their deepest beliefs to a near stranger, before said stranger has made any attempt to humble herself and respect the people she meets? I think her intentions are admirable, but its so privileged and kind of egotistical to assume that all the people she meets should respond to her in the way that she's looking for. Her inability to understand that, and her inability to accept potential language/cultural barriers kind of shows how her project is faulty.

I guess she can be lucky as a writer, but that doesn't make her that much more enlightened than the rest of us.