The Great Peregrination

Let's All Go Change Our Lives Now Hooray!

I've been meaning to start this blog for a while but have been waiting for something interesting to pop up that might be worth writing about. Here's a little blip about who I am and why my life over the next year might be worth following. I'm a recent graduate of Kalamazoo College -- a small, Liberal Arts School in Southwestern Michigan -- having studied Theatre, Art, and Media Studies. So, I've been ready for four years to leap out of college and land in a sizzling pot of indefinite unemployment. Thus, more prepared than the average unemployed 2009 college graduate, I'm hoping to use this to my advantage. As long as no one's expecting me to get a job, I'm going to spend the next two months traveling across America, staying with friends and checking out 6 (maybe 7) of America's great cities (including one in Oregon - the one state with greater rate of unemployment than Michigan's), and capping it all off in Lawrence, Kansas for a laugh. My ultimate goal by the end of this trip is to pick a city and move there. In Planes, Trains, and Automobiles style, this whirlwind tour will get me back home just in time for Thanksgiving dinner with my horrifying specter of an 80's wife and three kids. This is particularly appropriate because I am a perfect cross between Steve Martin and John Candy (RIP John Hughes)

The other tasks I'll be 85%-heartedly undertaking this year are laid out in a book I was gifted for my high school graduation called This Book Will Change Your Life. It offers a task a day for a full year including take a pregnancy test, demand a free drink at a bar, and get a celebrity autograph (three randomly selected pages). I say 85%, because some of them are really asinine, like dig at the end of the rainbow, and others of them are simply rude, like cut in line. That's not what Johnsteve Cartin's all about. If it's immediately apparently life-changing, I'll throw it up on this blog here too.

And here's day 1 -- not life-changing, but I'll write about it today because it's the first. They offered 20 possible options for the day from do one press-up to nickname you genitals, both of which I'm sure we've all done. So I opted to do a striptease. Not life-changing, but I did learn a little something from it, so here's my advice to impart for your first striptease:

1. put music on (even if you can't dance, it'd be better than total silence, let alone sad little humming and dum-dum-dums).
2. clear enough room for yourself.
3. take your socks off ahead of time.

Laura, you didn't miss anything: it was a mess.

Well, I leave for Washington, D.C. tomorrow morning at 4:30 AM, so I'd better pack. But check back in, you can expect to see silly pictures, deep ruminations, and a list of tracks that would be in the video posts if I were able to upload video onto my computer. Here's today's:

Summer Days - Bob Dylan
Travelin' Man - Bob Seger
All I Want - Joni Mitchell
Ticket to Ride - The Beatles

This one's to Lo for the computer and D for the tech support.

Rock over Kalamazoo, Rock over Rochester Hills.
State Farm Insurance. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.