Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "Counsel is to be given by the wise, the remedy by the rich." - British saying

Reading: assorted short stories

Listening to: nothing

Decluttering accomplishments: threw out some old magazines

15 May 2002 - Not So Amazing a Race

I just watched the end of The Amazing Race 2 and am profoundly relieved that Tara and Will, both of whom are total jerks who spent the whole time yelling at each other, lost at the end. While I find the show oddly addictive, I also find it disturbing. One of the teams mentioned having done a decade of travel in one month. And that is precisely why the whole idea doesn't resonate with me. I'd always rather spend a month doing something normal people could do in a matter of hours.

It reminded me of the guy who came into a lodge I was at in Swaziland and appalled everyone by talking about how he never spent more than 48 hours in any one country. His excuse was that he had to go everywhere before the world ended. He explained that his friends in the C.I.A. told him a major war was coming. That's got to be a pretty safe prediction, but there are always places you can go. At least competing for a million dollars is a better excuse for racing around the world. But only one of the teams ended up with the million bucks and the rest have snatched glances of places they didn't have enough time to appreciate.

Faster! They're always screaming at drivers and boatmen to go faster. I find that I'm usually screaming at taxi drivers to go slower, personally. Incidentally, that's how I learned that musical terms don't work in real Italian. Shouting "lento" has no effect on the driver barreling across Rome, forcing Vespas onto the sidewalks to avoid his path. Not that anything else slows them down either, but it's more frustrating when you think that umpty ump years of piano lessons should make them understand what you want. In the end, it's better to stroll leisurely across Piazza Navone, savoring tartuffo gelato from Tre Scalini, and not even trying to come up with any reason to attempt using the word "arpeggio" in conversation.