Mountain Climbing and Diving

You are probably thinking; what do these three things have in common? To me, they are all the same, or I should say interchangeable. You’re thinking how could that be?

Ninety five percent of all western men won’t respect your gaming and traveling.  Most of these people’s lives are uneventful as an overgrown cemetery.  Most Americans live horribly boring lives of watching TV addicted to sitcoms, sports, computer games, the internet, or taking care of the kids on weekends.

If I took a long weekend trip, on Monday when returning to work, my coworkers would say, “oh it must be nice to have the money to travel.  I never get to go anywhere.”  Instead, these assholes had a big house, 3 kids, and a Mercedes or two.  So after listened to their “shit” a few times, I decided I would never tell anyone, when I went to the beach, New York City, or a music festival.   I decided that I would try to outdo their boring lives!    My new story of how I spent my weekends was always that I did boring household responsibilities or chores.  I started coming in on Monday telling them I did household chores all weekend:  mowed the grass, cut the hedges, worked on fixing the toilet.  My favorite was cleaning out the basement.  I didn’t even have a basement, but I used that excuse many weekends to make my work comrades feel important because they had been free to watch football all weekend and the wife only made them go to the store with two long “honey to do” lists.  So I learned to play their game.  They began to think that maybe I was the most boring single man they had ever met!    I let them think that my only interest was work!

People at work are really jealous if you have an exciting life.  Never tell them about your exciting travels.  If you go on an exotic trip tell them you had to visit family out of town.

I can remember doing a cross country road trip from Los Angeles to Illinois with my girlfriend.   In the morning we had hiked around Arches National Park in Utah.  When you’re on vacation with a pretty girl and seeing spectacular sights the last thing on you mind is Monday morning work.  It was now 4PM on Saturday afternoon, and I was still in Moab, Utah.  I had to be back at work Monday morning which was only 1487 miles away!   We drove like crazy people so we could get back for work on Monday morning.  We were just hitting Vail, Colorado at 10PM on Saturday night and I still had more than half of the state of Colorado to cross, and all of Nebraska, all of Iowa, and Illinois.  We spent the night at some small town in the eastern flat half of Colorado, near the Nebraska border.  The place was flat as a pancake and looked exactly like the Midwest.   We got back up sometime Sunday and we kept driving, across the eastern flat part of Colorado, then across the whole state of Nebraska, then Iowa, then Illinois.  I rolled into home at about 7 AM on Monday morning after driving for almost 2 days straight.  At 8 AM, I went into work.

“How was your trip?” the girl that sat next to me asked. “When did you get back?”

“Good”, I said, “7’ o’clock”.

“Good you got back early and got to rest and take care of things before going to work the next day.  I always like to take it easy before having to go back to the office after a vacation”

“yeah, me too,”  I answered.

There was no way that I was going to tell anyone that I just gotten back an hour ago and I almost missed work!  I was useless for the next couple of days at work.

I’ve learned that to keep the jealousy at bay, by keeping my life private.  I don’t tell anything:  they don’t know who I’m with, if I have a girlfriend or not?  Am I straight?  Do I travel?  If I take a good international vacation, usually I tell them I went to Oklahoma to visit my father or just stayed local.  I use the sick relative story to shut down nosy people quickly.

Originally, I thought that I could tell my friends about my travels.  I’ve found that it doesn’t make any difference if you travel with a girlfriend or travel without a girl and game girls.  Almost anything will make them jealous.  Most guys have loser lives and it doesn’t matter if they make more money than you, own 3 houses, or are better looking than you.   They are still jealous if you do some interesting travel and especially if it involves girls!  Guaranteed!  I recently have received so much jealousy from guys that I considered my friends, that I’ve had to drop one totally, and I’ve distance myself from a couple of others. I will no longer tell them about my travels or girls.  These two things make them extremely jealous since they don’t do either.  Even though they could!  On the surface these guys have everything going for them, but they’ve always got a thousand excuses.  Their favorite excuse for not doing anything is, “ I’ve got too much responsibility to get away!”

My good friend, who is a world traveler, tells everyone he travels to mountain climb and scuba dive only, because most people have little interest in these activities.  So now when I travel, I no longer show pictures to my friends because they seem to be in that American competitive mood, where they have to challenge me on everything that I do and try to one up me.   So now when I’m away, I just say, “I went mountain climbing and scuba diving!”  My travel stories are now a thing of the past, because they don’t deserve them.  As in the movie, A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson said, “you want the truth?  You can’t handle the truth!”  That’s it, “mountain climbing and scuba diving!”   I even found out that didn’t work sometimes, because I could tell my friend was jealous that I was away, while he “had to” work.  So I came up with my best story yet.

“Jim I had to go Bangalore to do a software upgrade,” I said.  ”It sucked, I had to work nights and weekends too to get it done on time.”

Jim smiled and said, “Well, that doesn’t sound like too much fun.”

“Yeah, I got sick with food poisoning, and my boss was a total asshole and yelled at me the whole time.”

I could see him smiling more now.  Then his smile turned to a frown, and he asked,

“How much money were they paying you?”

You can’t win for losing!