The two are generally unrelated, yet I spend a lot of time contemplating the graffiti above me as I suffer a lousy fever blister. Standing several freezing hours by the side of a road hasn’t helped, and neither has the events of the last few days. The surprising thing about this hostel bunk is that there is no graffiti. I contemplate writing ‘Justyna is a sexy bitch’, but it’s already been done in the hostel comments book. I’m nothing if not original.
The hard-hitting scenes of Auschwitz linger on through a grey couple of days and do my melancholy no favours. Only I can juxtapose meeting a nice girl with feeling miserable about it. This is largely due to the thing that has ballooned on my bottom lip. They have been the bane of my life for as long as I can remember, always as a direct result of some kind of stress. Quite what I have to be stressed about is beyond me, although the fact that she didn’t let me walk her home the other night is gnawing at my over sensitivity.
A week before my dads funeral and this behemoth of a cold sore appears in the same place it always does. It was hideous, and I was to be meeting and greeting friends and family, some of whom I’d not seen for years, some of whom I’d never seen. I was mortified. I was walking around with a huge blister plaster hanging from my bottom lip. It looked like my zombie skin was dangling off. Previous to this I was trying every home remedy under the sun; rubbing garlic on it, tea bags, tea tree oil, salt, toothpaste, urine, paint stripper, battery acid, you name it. I can only assume the stress of the situation had caused such an embarrassment. There were more important things to fret over.
So here I am yet again feeling some sort of upset and stress, enough to cause the little bastard to form. It’s not so bad if I’m shut up in my own flat, but out on the road meeting new people in hostels and it’s a nightmare. Consequently I’ve hidden myself away, regardless of the invites to party, and do my best to speak with a hand over my mouth when the nice girl is chatting in my room.
Of course it’s all trivial problems, especially concerned with what I saw yesterday, but at its root is something boring a hole into my soul. After seeing the heartbreak at the death camp, I have an overwhelming sense to do some good in the world and be a better person. Yet I’m beginning to question what it is I’m actually looking for, which is ultimately related to whether or not I am doomed to walk the earth alone. Isn’t there a nice girl out there who wants to paint an orphanage in Romania?
I’ve been looking at how to earn some money online, or teach English, work abroad, earn money travel writing, earn money from this blog, earn money any which way how. There are millions of jobbing travelers out there who all want to get paid for writing some shitty article about nice places to eat cake in Paris. Everyone has a travel blog, everyone wants a slice of the pie, and everyone is sucking each others dicks to get you to read theirs. Where do I actually want to be? Who do I want to be with and what can I offer them? I’ve not been working for so long I’ve probably forgotten everything I ever learned. My CV would be largely blank, with ‘will pose nude for food’ under my contact details. What happens if I do randomly meet the girl of my dreams in some backwater town and she’s a goat herder who yearns to go to Harvard to study Bio-metric science? Do I try for a position as a Boston freedom trail tour guide? How can I form lasting relationships on the road, when so far it’s just been flashes in a pan and instant friends in a cup?
The cold sore chuckles its satisfaction. It’s surfaced for a reason, to highlight my current discontent with my circumstances, and pointless worrying for nothing. I’ve got to keep this girl interested long enough for it to go away, then I can get rejected for a smoking hot Aussie and leave for Slovakia. I wish I had all the answers. I knew someone who would have.
Cold sores and the underside of hostel bunks
The two are generally unrelated, yet I spend a lot of time contemplating the graffiti above me as I suffer a lousy fever blister. Standing several freezing hours by the side of a road hasn’t helped, and neither has the events of the last few days. The surprising thing about this hostel bunk is that there is no graffiti. I contemplate writing ‘Justyna is a sexy bitch’, but it’s already been done in the hostel comments book. I’m nothing if not original.
The hard-hitting scenes of Auschwitz linger on through a grey couple of days and do my melancholy no favours. Only I can juxtapose meeting a nice girl with feeling miserable about it. This is largely due to the thing that has ballooned on my bottom lip. They have been the bane of my life for as long as I can remember, always as a direct result of some kind of stress. Quite what I have to be stressed about is beyond me, although the fact that she didn’t let me walk her home the other night is gnawing at my over sensitivity.
A week before my dads funeral and this behemoth of a cold sore appears in the same place it always does. It was hideous, and I was to be meeting and greeting friends and family, some of whom I’d not seen for years, some of whom I’d never seen. I was mortified. I was walking around with a huge blister plaster hanging from my bottom lip. It looked like my zombie skin was dangling off. Previous to this I was trying every home remedy under the sun; rubbing garlic on it, tea bags, tea tree oil, salt, toothpaste, urine, paint stripper, battery acid, you name it. I can only assume the stress of the situation had caused such an embarrassment. There were more important things to fret over.
So here I am yet again feeling some sort of upset and stress, enough to cause the little bastard to form. It’s not so bad if I’m shut up in my own flat, but out on the road meeting new people in hostels and it’s a nightmare. Consequently I’ve hidden myself away, regardless of the invites to party, and do my best to speak with a hand over my mouth when the nice girl is chatting in my room.
Of course it’s all trivial problems, especially concerned with what I saw yesterday, but at its root is something boring a hole into my soul. After seeing the heartbreak at the death camp, I have an overwhelming sense to do some good in the world and be a better person. Yet I’m beginning to question what it is I’m actually looking for, which is ultimately related to whether or not I am doomed to walk the earth alone. Isn’t there a nice girl out there who wants to paint an orphanage in Romania?
I’ve been looking at how to earn some money online, or teach English, work abroad, earn money travel writing, earn money from this blog, earn money any which way how. There are millions of jobbing travelers out there who all want to get paid for writing some shitty article about nice places to eat cake in Paris. Everyone has a travel blog, everyone wants a slice of the pie, and everyone is sucking each others dicks to get you to read theirs. Where do I actually want to be? Who do I want to be with and what can I offer them? I’ve not been working for so long I’ve probably forgotten everything I ever learned. My CV would be largely blank, with ‘will pose nude for food’ under my contact details. What happens if I do randomly meet the girl of my dreams in some backwater town and she’s a goat herder who yearns to go to Harvard to study Bio-metric science? Do I try for a position as a Boston freedom trail tour guide? How can I form lasting relationships on the road, when so far it’s just been flashes in a pan and instant friends in a cup?
The cold sore chuckles its satisfaction. It’s surfaced for a reason, to highlight my current discontent with my circumstances, and pointless worrying for nothing. I’ve got to keep this girl interested long enough for it to go away, then I can get rejected for a smoking hot Aussie and leave for Slovakia. I wish I had all the answers. I knew someone who would have.