"If this video doesn't inspire you to plan a trip, nothing will."

Buzzfeed offers this "Facts That Will Make You Want To Travel." Since questioning traveling is a big theme on this blog, I'm going to embed this before watching it. I'll get back to you on whether it consigns me to the category Buzzfeed considers uninspirable.



UPDATE: Second-by-second reaction.

0:02 I realize I have seen this video before.

0:12 I've seen reports of those "studies" and am skeptical. People misjudge how much buying, say, clothing will make them happy, but they also may misjudge how much happiness they got from a trip. The strains of traveling are over, and they are now nurturing the memory they made. What's really being compared are 1. material objects that you have in your possession and come to view as not such a big deal anymore and 2. past events that are only in memory and can therefore be massaged into a form you enjoy. This is testament to the power of the mind and the value of the intangible possession that is the past.

0:16 That music thinks it can juice me up. Instead it makes me more aware that I am watching propaganda. And this is propaganda for the travel industry. It must convince me to drop money into things that won't last — like the $300 shoes that I'll "eventually forget about." Yeah, but meanwhile, I'm always going to need some shoes. They're not just for the purpose of memory-making. And: 1. Money saved not buying expensive shoes doesn't have to be thrown into travel. 2. For $300, I could buy, instead of expensive shoes, a pair of shoes, a skirt, and 2 tops or some other combination of useful wearable things that will make daily life comfortable and nice. 3. I actually do have some happy memories of specific shoes, in fact, only yesterday I was contemplating a particular kind of shoe that we wore circa 1960 that I'd love to find today.

0:21 I don't need to spend $300 to gaze at a sunset over a beautiful landscape. I can walk or bike to many beautiful vantage points, and I can drive an hour or less and get to really scenic places. If I'd spent money and time getting to somewhere farther away, would I be more likely or less likely to arrive at the elated expression seen on that woman's face? I think a less planned and more subtle experience might produce greater joy. But the contrast made in the video is to $300 sneakers. That's not the relevant comparison.

0:31 "A short trip will make you feel just as happy." Yeah, that's the argument against travel! Go for a walk in your own town or to the nearby state parks. You don't have to make a big deal about it.

0:33 Those people look like they could be enjoying sitting out on Union Terrace, having a drink while the sun sets over Lake Mendota. We love to walk there.

0:39 This shows that what is important are relationships with other people. Travel is presented as a means to that end, but there are obviously many other means. And there's a correlation-is-not-causation problem with "Regular travellers get along with people better." Maybe people who avoid travel do so because they don't get along with other people. Those who love interacting with other people may go in for travel because one of the stresses of travel isn't so stressful for them. You can't necessarily infer that traveling will improve your ability to get along with other people. I'm picturing a crowded plane with the usual annoyances.

0:46 Here we see how nice it is to have an intimate partner in life. What's the connection to travel? I see they are in a car. Meade and I are often in a car together. It's always nice, around town or off on some longer trip. But the surtitle is trying to nudge us to think couples have sex more if they go on a trip. Sex — or some other "intimacy" — is the end. Travel is offered as the means. That strikes me as a bit pathetic.

0:51 Another argument in favor of having someone to love. This is classic advertising propaganda. Put the product with something else that's good.

1:05 Oh, great. Che Guevara. I should travel because Che Guevara. Blech. He "found himself." Do you seriously think your self is out there somewhere you need to travel to find?

1:11 Monet didn't travel to Argenteuil. He lived there. Relocating your home isn't travel.

1:16 "The ticket is usually the only big cost." Oh! The money we have spent in hotels and restaurants. That's where you hemorrhage money.

1:19 "A massage in Bali is $6." Why the hell would you spent all that money and time going to Bali and then lie around with your eyes closed and have a passive experience that you can get at home? Yeah, it's more than $6 at home, but why'd you go to Bali? And do you really want to extract the pleasure of a massage from someone you are exploiting economically? The argument the video is making here is that you should give a lot of your money to the airlines because they can take you to places where the people will sell themselves super-cheap. How about avoiding the (terrible) airlines and spending the money in your hometown, on people who are your neighbors, who contribute to your community, and are asking a fair price for their work?

1:32 Eh. I'm smart enough.

1:37 "It's time to plan a trip." Planning. I don't like planning. I like spontaneous. Make an equivalent video about living spontaneously in the present. Won't that bring more happiness and intimacy, and won't you be more likely to find yourself and to get along without spending too much money? I think so.

"Do I really like reading?"

"Perhaps it is a failure of attention—there are times when I notice my own distraction while reading, and can, in a way, feel myself forgetting. There is a scarier question, one that might seem like asking if one is good at breathing, or walking. Am I actually quite bad at reading after all?"

"We thought it would be sitcom-style hard — not necessarily with a feel-good resolution at the end of every episode..."

"... but at least punctuated by those frequent moments of uplift indicating that, in spite of everything, life really is beautiful, isn't it?"

I'm pretty sure it's like that for some people, but for many of us, it's not. For many of us, it's not good hard, as in a "good hard workout"; it's bad hard, as in, it sometimes feels like something bad is happening to you.

But does anyone really remember this? I don't. I only know it's true because I remember saying it out loud, and because I wrote the previous paragraph almost three years ago, with Rosie sleeping at my side, in a typo-filled document titled "Before I Forget."

"I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s..."

"... and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands."

That other sentence — "At the hookah bar, Jordan and Emily Wernet, a 25-year-old freelance illustrator of comics and tattoos, joked about the grotesqueness of a hand appearing inside a belly and about 'parasites,' 'popping one out,' and 'horrible little grubs' in the midst of more serious conversation about their fears of relinquishing sole ownership of one’s own body" —  made some readers feel that there was a "Gatsby" sentence gestating somewhere inside the womb of my Blogger account, so I thought I'd better pop out this post. I hope you don't find it grotesque, this string of words that F. Scott Fitzgerald, in full possession of the autonomy of authorship, determined to be, in fact, a sentence, worthy of a place in the pages of "The Great Gatsby."

And I hope it's not horrible that I ripped it out of his context and put it in my context as I, clasping tightly to my bloggerly autonomy, decided that this — this! — is a blog post. It is not for the professors, journalists, and literary critics to resolve the difficult question of when some quotes from this-or-that tossed together with some connective prose amount to a blog post. It's enough to say there's a divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question, and therefore it's up to me to decide what is worthy of publication here. My blog, my choice.

This "Gatsby" sentence has a simple structure. The subject is "I" and the predicate is "remember." How many sentences in the history of humanity begin "I remember...."? There's no end to where you can go from there (especially if you're not hung up on nonfiction and truthtelling). So string along the memories — the memorabilia, the "things... worthy of being remembered."

I remember the Michael Jackson memorabilia, the Bruce Lee memorabilia, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorabilia, Malcolm X memorabilia, the Jimi Hendrix memorabilia, the $43,350 Rolex watch, the fur capes and parkas....

I mean... I remember the fur coats.... They — the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s — weren't wearing their fur in cape or parka form back in 1922.

Things remembered: fur coats, chatter, hands waving, matchings of invitations, and long green tickets. These remembered things give the reader a sense of the incompletely delineated human beings. Who are the unnamed girls and who are the "we"? There's the overspecificity of the people offstage, Ordways, the Herseys, and the Schultzes. There's the silly half-specificity of Miss This-or-That. These people — or, really, places (hence the possessive) — are, like fur coats and gloves, appurtenances to the human beings we are trying to see in this picture.

This is a mass of faceless humanity, cluttered with hands, waving and clasping. Hands appears twice in the sentence — the grotesqueness of a hand appearing — first, waving (connecting with others), and second, clasping a ticket (intent on getting to one's predetermined destination). The hands of the others reaching out are grubby and horrible and we've got a fear of relinquishing sole ownership of our long green tickets.

"Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength..."

"... if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information," writes Oliver Sacks in an essay about memory.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

Joseph Brodsky "used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester."

"He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972."

From "Why We Should Memorize," by Brad Leithauser.

(In 1972, Brodsky became the poet in residence at the University of Michigan. I was a student there at the time and remember a grand assembly with Brodsky received as a great hero.)

"As she struggled to reclaim her memory, Shawnda discovered she had been a life-long keeper of journals."

"She found them stashed in a box in the spare bedroom... She had taken meticulous notes on her entire life."

Shawnda learned of her troubles with her husband and read in detail about all the pain and depression she had lived through the past several months, and then forgotten. She read of people in her life who were now like characters in a novel she was starting from the middle.

"And as I get older, I like [flying] less and less. I don't much like driving either. I prefer to be driven."

"And, when I'm in London, I don't even like walking on the street. I can never get used to looking the right way when I cross the street. When we're over there, I always say to my wife, 'Stay in the hotel. Don't go out there. It's too dangerous.'"

Says Christopher Walken, who'd like you to know that he's not the creepy guy he always seems to be in his movies. He's  "a regular guy. I stay home a lot, I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing, the openings, the parties. I try to live in a calm way."

I can see why a fearful, avoidant sort of person could manifest as oddball on screen.

How has he survived in the cut-throat, hyper-ambitious world of Hollywood? "Well, you know, I've always found it to be an honest place. They either want you for a role or they don't. It's pretty simple. People talk about Hollywood being this place where you can never get straight answers, but my experience is the opposite. If they don't want you, it's very clear."

What's the worst thing about his job? "Learning lines, for sure. I don't know how people learn their lines quickly. It's always been a tedious, agonising chore for me. I hate it. It takes me ages to know my lines. I just wish I could do movies with cue cards. That way, it's easy. Not lazy, but easy. You know what? I wish I could live my whole life with cue cards. I really do."

Maybe what we're perceiving as odd is his struggle to recall the lines. As for cue cards: 1. Marlon Brando used cue cards, and 2. What's that quote? Life is a play for which there is no rehearsal and only one performance. Something like that. Or am I merging 2 or 3 famous quotes?