I love to travel and am constantly thinking about it. Even more than something else.

If you are actually foolish enough to read my blog and you notice the voice seems personal, it is because all of my entries are virtually verbatim copies of my emails to friends at the time. In essence, they are stream-of-conscience, freestyling, spontaneous, and unedited (for the most part, I did correct mistakes and cleaned up -censor- some inappropriate stuff) writings/musings intended for those whom I am close to. I never had any notion whatsoever of publishing this crap publicly.

Until now.

About my portrait: I'm the one on the left. The one with the really soft skin that can tear easily and that's a shade over 100 pounds. The one on the right is a tiger. The one with the pointy fangs, sharp claws, and that's well over 200 pounds. Well, I think you know where I'm getting at. All I have to say is that the only thing we have in common is that we're both wild animals. Okay, so this photo was taken at a animal sanctuary run by Buddhist monks somewhere in Thailand in 2005, which was my virgin voyage overseas. The funny thing about how this photo happened is that as my tour guide and I approached this group of people standing around a napping tiger, he says "Hey, go sit down with the tiger, and I'll take a picture." Now rather than contemplate the potential consequences of chilling out with a wild animal, I go sit down with the tiger to have my picture taken without missing a beat. What the hell, I'm on vacation. No one else was taking any photos with the tiger. In fact if you notice in the picture, everyone else is standing at a pretty healthy distance away from me. You may also notice that I've dropped a load. Seriously, you can tell in my face that I was scared crapless. Good thing I was wearing brown shorts. And that's the moral of this stupid story: always wear brown shorts when posing with wild animals.

---

---

---