![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jun. 30th, 2007 08:43 amI'm a reluctant traveler. I took my job at Microsoft back in 2004 knowing it had a heavy element of travel, and it was a bit intimidating. Being a control freak, riding in an airplane is far too passive an experience for me to take lightly. Over the years since I've gone to South Korea four times, to Moscow, to London, taken regular flights to California, done occasional flights to the East Coast, and returns home to Texas at least once or twice a year.
I have clocked a lot of frequent flier miles in that time. If I had a wife and children, it would be a great hardship to be away from home so much. I'm a bit of a homebody and I don't like being away from routine that much as it is, but I've tried to enjoy it as another phase of my life despite my trepidations about new-fangled heavier-than-air flying machines that travel in defiance of nature's laws.
One of the interesting side-effects of all this travel is that many things that get in the news are about places I've actually been. It's somehow surreal when so much of what is on TV is about 'far away land'. Sometimes it is disturbing, like Friday's news about the London car bombs found in the West End and near Hyde Park. Up until a few months ago, those were just names of places in books I read like That Darn Squid God or Sherlock Holmes.
Now they are physical places that I've personally walked, and I could've just as easily been someone walking by those parked cars as anyone else if the timing were a bit different. One of my co-workers is living near Hyde Park for the summer in fact.
An unsettling realization indeed.
I have clocked a lot of frequent flier miles in that time. If I had a wife and children, it would be a great hardship to be away from home so much. I'm a bit of a homebody and I don't like being away from routine that much as it is, but I've tried to enjoy it as another phase of my life despite my trepidations about new-fangled heavier-than-air flying machines that travel in defiance of nature's laws.
One of the interesting side-effects of all this travel is that many things that get in the news are about places I've actually been. It's somehow surreal when so much of what is on TV is about 'far away land'. Sometimes it is disturbing, like Friday's news about the London car bombs found in the West End and near Hyde Park. Up until a few months ago, those were just names of places in books I read like That Darn Squid God or Sherlock Holmes.
Now they are physical places that I've personally walked, and I could've just as easily been someone walking by those parked cars as anyone else if the timing were a bit different. One of my co-workers is living near Hyde Park for the summer in fact.
An unsettling realization indeed.
