Get out of the house. Go to the airport. Meet a girl in a strange city. Drive across the country with her. That’s insane, right? Well, that’s what I did.
A few months ago, my employer called a hundred employees into an auditorium. They were outsourcing our jobs to a different country. I live in Pittsburgh, so my story isn’t a new one. My job left me for a younger, exotic economy. Welcome to the global market. The Internet, they said.
The Internet. The great medium of communication and collaboration that had brought me so much fun and so many opportunities to express myself and to make new friends had finally taken something away from me.
My Internet Friends aren’t like my Kidney Friends. They’re on opposite ends of the Friend Scale. Kidney Friends are a handful of people who can have one of my kidneys — first come, first serve. There aren’t a lot of people there. At the other end are Internet Friends. They’re people I know, but only as well as I know anybody without meeting them in person, which is to say, I wouldn’t let most of them borrow my car.
J. Maureen Henderson was an Internet Person. We had never met because she lives hours away on the East Coast and I don’t travel. No, really. I don’t travel. I hate it. I hate everything about it. Why would I go anywhere else when everything I love is right here? Why would I take myself out of my very comfortable comfort zone? I could think of no compelling reason, so I never went very far.
One day, JMH mentioned taking a road trip and I volunteered to go with her. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Taking a random road trip in your early 30s or late 20s is so common it has a name: a quarter-life crisis, which is like a mid-life crisis that happens earlier. It is a transitional event. Just in case you thought you were still a kid, you’re not. In fact, you’re going to die some day. Things are going to change between now and then. You can’t control most of them, so don’t try. You know that panic you feel when you think the chair you’re sitting in is going to fall backwards? Get used to it.
One way to get used to it is to kick the chair out from under yourself and hope the landing won’t be as bad as it looks
Source: Post-gazette
