The Everywhereist

The sink in our hotel in Australia. SPOILER: the water went straight down.

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I have some disappointing news.

Are you sitting down? You should probably sit down. You aren’t going to like what I have to say. This piece of news is up there with learning that Santa and professional wrestling are not real (if I just broke the news about either of those things to you just now, then I am very, very sorry. Life is easier when you believe that men come down your chimney armed with presents, and that karmic piledrivers do happen to bad people).

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Spoiler: this skybridge will get you NOWHERE.

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This WTF Weds takes us back to London. But I start out with a little anecdote about Portland. It’s cool if you get confused. That’s how I spend most of my life.

Last weekend I was in Portland, and despite being a city that I know and can navigate quite well, the following happened:

• I walked four blocks in the exact opposite direction that I needed to go, and didn’t realize it until I literally collided with a posted map of the city and saw that I was no where close to where I needed to be.
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• Despite Rand telling me to “Keep going straight”, I kept asking him if I should take every single turn that we passed. At one point he just stared at me and said, “You are joking, right?” I wasn’t.
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• We’d been to our hotel so many times that the valets recognized us. I still required directions to get there.
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• Even while in possession of a map on which directions had been traced out for me in black ink, I got lost.
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• I forgot where I parked the car and so our friend Matt had to drive us around for 20 minutes in the middle of the night trying to find it. Even though I knew the name of the street where I’d left it, I still couldn’t figure it out.
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Years ago, my friend Rachel was telling me a story about her then-boyfriend (and now husband) Adam. I can’t quite remember what it was about, but she paused halfway through and said, ”Do you ever have those moments where you look at someone and realize how much you love them? Well, I had one of those moments.”

I, of course, knew exactly what she meant.

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I know this picture is blurry, but it’s still kind of magical. My mom was angry because I was doing dishes in her house.

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Dear Mom,

Please don’t read this post, okay? No, no, it’s not because I talk about how crazy you are. Sheesh, mom … Yes, I know you aren’t crazy. Yes, I realize I make you out to be crazier than you actually are on the blog. The reason I don’t want you to read this post is because it’s about your Mother’s Day gift. We don’t want to ruin the surprise, right? Of course we don’t.

So go browse some other site, okay? Like Facebook! You love Facebook.

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A powder is mixed at a township apothecary shop.

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I need to relay to you the events of the last few hours. In doing so, I hope that these events will somehow seem more real, that I will have less cause to deny that they ever happened. Because right now, they seem to be the fabrications of a madman.

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Rand, sniffing my coat. Though to be fair, it kinda looks like he’s licking it. Which is gross.

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I had hoped that I would be able to get my post about our visit to the townships of Cape Town up before we left for Australia, but that didn’t pan out. I was rushed for time, and found that I just couldn’t give the tour the attention that it deserved. Rather than draft a post that didn’t do the experience justice, I figured I’d wait until I got home.

Also, between researching the history of Apartheid in South Africa, and Wednesday’s post about the epidemic of rape that’s currently plaguing the country, I needed to switch gears. To talk about something lighthearted, if only for a little bit.

So I want to tell you about how I freaked out and was convinced that I sat in pee last week in a Dublin cab.

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Note: all of the links below are safe for work, but they deal with some pretty serious issues. I read through a lot of the articles and can tell you, it fucked with my head mightily. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read them. If anything, you probably should. I just wanted to properly prepare you for what lies ahead: it is not funny. It is not lighthearted. It will not make you feel warm or fuzzy inside. But it’s a discussion we should nevertheless be having.

A road in one of the townships outside Cape Town, where rape is an epidemic.

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I loved South Africa. I really did. I had a lovely time there, and I sincerely want to go back to both Cape Town and Bushman’s Kloof. I’d like to see more of the country, and, if possible, more of the continent of Africa as a whole.

But I feel like I’d be doing everyone a disservice if I didn’t discuss the issue of rape in South Africa.

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Going through my photos from South Africa, I noticed that a large number of them featured our friend Kurtis. Sometimes this was intentional. Other times, it was not:

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