Our generation has a loneliness problem, and we stutter articulating it. Every successive crop of people our age has a tiny Romantic desire to engage in something so profound that it can only be miscommunicated. For us this takes the form of placing an upturned hand on a sweaty forehead and declaring that we must work one-hundred-hour weeks at an investment bank, or uproot and move to the Oregon wilderness, or flee to Germany, etc, etc. Getting a job isn't enough. There is a new requirement of cool for college-educated millennials that is enough send us all over the world and into the bowels of office buildings. Basically anywhere away from each other.
So our kind of loneliness is not the T. S. Eliot I-will-show-you-fear-in-a-handful-of-dust kind of loneliness. We have mores, we have values, we have friends. Tons of friends. But we don't get to see them after we graduate, because they're either at work or in Japan or some other place comically far from and different from New York.
One way that our generation tries to combat this stupid, completely self-imposed but still completely woeful loneliness is the travel blog. Ah, the travel blog. The travel blog is a totally self-indulgent declaration of self-importance. A travel blog is a very loud, very annoying assumption that people actually care about what you're doing and what you had for breakfast and what color your shit was on Tuesday. Nobody does. But time after time, over and over, dull, myopic millennials believe themselves to be the exception. "I will write a travel blog that isn't super fucking annoying," they think, quite erroneously. "Generations to come will read my shitty travel blog to better understand the human condition."
Well, Leo and I are not so susceptible to these delusions of grandeur. In fact, we find the idea of a travel blog completely abhorrent. Which is why I would like to say loud and clear--in my most unequivocal tone (and I have many)--that this is not a blog. Yes, we are using Blogger to write it. Yes, it has all of the normal accoutrements of a blog. But these are purely logistical tools, and you can rest assured that this is, once again, definitely not a blog. Really this is more of a self-published literary magazine with only two contributors. Or it might gratify you to think of this as a Greek epic, written in English, stripped of its meter, broken up into smaller bits and entirely based on true events. Still others prefer to understand this as a series of short films without all of the pesky images and sounds.
However you'd like to understand this entity, just keep in mind that it is absolutely not a blog. And we will not bore you with trite anecdotes or hackneyed philosophical musings. We will not succumb to twenty-first-century loneliness. We are absolutely not millennials falling into the same trap that befalls the rest of our g-g-generation. And we will not stutter articulating it.
So our kind of loneliness is not the T. S. Eliot I-will-show-you-fear-in-a-handful-of-dust kind of loneliness. We have mores, we have values, we have friends. Tons of friends. But we don't get to see them after we graduate, because they're either at work or in Japan or some other place comically far from and different from New York.
One way that our generation tries to combat this stupid, completely self-imposed but still completely woeful loneliness is the travel blog. Ah, the travel blog. The travel blog is a totally self-indulgent declaration of self-importance. A travel blog is a very loud, very annoying assumption that people actually care about what you're doing and what you had for breakfast and what color your shit was on Tuesday. Nobody does. But time after time, over and over, dull, myopic millennials believe themselves to be the exception. "I will write a travel blog that isn't super fucking annoying," they think, quite erroneously. "Generations to come will read my shitty travel blog to better understand the human condition."
Well, Leo and I are not so susceptible to these delusions of grandeur. In fact, we find the idea of a travel blog completely abhorrent. Which is why I would like to say loud and clear--in my most unequivocal tone (and I have many)--that this is not a blog. Yes, we are using Blogger to write it. Yes, it has all of the normal accoutrements of a blog. But these are purely logistical tools, and you can rest assured that this is, once again, definitely not a blog. Really this is more of a self-published literary magazine with only two contributors. Or it might gratify you to think of this as a Greek epic, written in English, stripped of its meter, broken up into smaller bits and entirely based on true events. Still others prefer to understand this as a series of short films without all of the pesky images and sounds.
However you'd like to understand this entity, just keep in mind that it is absolutely not a blog. And we will not bore you with trite anecdotes or hackneyed philosophical musings. We will not succumb to twenty-first-century loneliness. We are absolutely not millennials falling into the same trap that befalls the rest of our g-g-generation. And we will not stutter articulating it.
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