Erry Day

You can't participate to the fullest every single day with long haul travelling. I have days where I sit on my laptop in the hostel all day modelling, coding or just unashamedly killing time. This isn't a short trip for me, I have to pace myself slowly. But no matter how much I tell myself that, I still put myself on a guilt trip for using the laptop.

Before I left all I could think about was the starry, bleached teeth car salesman catchwords of travel. The tumblr pictures with cursive writing and overasturated sunflares cascading through some gorgeous girls hair. My highly cynical bullshit filter managed to beat the majority of these sentiments in to cowering submission but I still had my rose tinted glasses cranked to max. I knew it wasn't like that but I certainly didn't know what is WAS like.

That's not to say that shit sucks. Not at all. And I always knew it wouldn't be all unicorn farts and leprechaun kisses, but the frequency of downtime is a little higher than I had expected.

I think this comes from my own inexperience. I don't know how to travel. I am four months into this thing and so far I have done little to no tourism. Again, not a particularly bad thing, I can't afford and don't want to rush through Souh America with a list to check off. But I just spent the last week in a hostel because everytime I went to leave I just plain old didn't feel like it. It was much easier, and far more enticing, to sit on the laptop punching away lines of code and pumping out meshes.

And here's the catch. I don't know if I regret that or not.

I know that people have their own ideas on how people should travel. People who judge others and their forms of enjoyment. People who think people are wierd if they stay in the hostel all day and never leave. I try as much as I can to dispell all forms of judgement from my mind, but I somewhat share these sentiments. So on days when I realise that there is nothing out there that interests me as much as what I have in here, I judge myself. I feel guilty. Not because of the french couple staring at me, one eyebrow raised as I destroy another three hours on a cantankerous for-loop, but because internally I know there are other things I came all this way to do.

I have long since accepted that the internet and computers are a form of addiction, to which I am a victim. But it is a convoluted, confusing beast. On one hand I make video games for a living and in order do to that I need to anti-socially sit on a pc for days at a time. I need to shun the people around me in order to concentrate. I need to work on projects in order to gain experience and make making stuff a viable form of income so I can continue to do so after I stop moving around. On the other hand I am sitting in South America in a completely new culture on a continent I have never been to before and all I am doing is going through the same motions as I was back on the old dry island.

I remember when a friend of mine had a whole year of paid compensation for some army injuries and didn't have to work. A whole year being payed for nothing. They didn't study, didn't practice an art, didn't do a thing. I have no idea what they did for a year. I don't want to look back with all this sympathetic contempt and see that the target of such pity and head shaking is me.

To that end I am going to have to do a bit of a restructuring of my attitude towards the old lappy. One days lapping, one days travling. Experiences and experience are the two things I have been craving most the past five years and I don't want to throw that shit away now that I am on the road, right in between both.