Matador Network's Blog, page 2250

Why you should drive across the USA

Photo: Jocelyn Catterson

1. You’ll get to know your own backyard.

A former road trip copilot once told me she yearned to drive across the country after spending college on the East Coast. For four years she had flown back and forth across the US without ever knowing what existed in the composite of the countryside below her. Most of us are eager to travel abroad without even knowing what adventures await in our neighboring states.

2. America is wonderfully weird.

From Salem Sue, the “world’s largest Holstein cow” in North Dakota, to the Cockroach Hall of Fame in Texas, there are startlingly bizarre sites in this country. Embrace them. Just pull out your bible (a Rand McNally atlas) and let it guide you to all the quirky eccentricities your mind could never even dream up on its own.

3. You can tackle multiple national parks…

The easiest way to see the diverse landscape of our beautiful country is to set your destination as the nearest national park. From the Mars-like terrain of the South Dakota Badlands, to Yellowstone’s Mordor-esque geysers and the mind-blowing contours of the Grand Canyon, you can experience the America’s versatile natural beauty and feel like you’ve traveled to another world.

4. …and check “traditional” sites off your bucket list.

Before I went to Niagara Falls, I imagined it to be one big kitschy bathtub — a Water World for adults where lost souls Honeymooned. How wrong I was. I was floored by the impressive natural power of the falls. Mount Rushmore, on the other hand, proved to be one landmark I’m now relieved no longer compels me to visit. It felt more like the gimmicky backdrop of a casino town than the powerful historic façade eighth-grade history class built it up to be.

5. People you meet at American watering holes (commonly known as gas stations) will change your perspective on your fellow patriots (or at least give you a good story).

You’ll come across all kinds of characters when refueling. Plus, after being trapped in a vehicle for some odd hours, you feel a sense of liberation at a gas station that makes you more inclined towards interacting with your fellow travelers. The beauty of it is you’ll almost certainly never cross paths with said folk again. So that conversation you had with the leathery biker dude that just rescued a part-time bartender kidnapped by her boss? Yeah, totally normal.

6. You’ll enlighten yourself on stereotypes.

A road trip is a pseudo history lesson. The next time you meet someone from the Midwest and automatically think of Fargo or your roommate’s fun-to-mock Chicago accent, maybe you’ll be less inclined to jump to such stereotypes after a day spent boating on a Wisconsin lake with the down-to-earth locals.

7. It’s still a relatively cheap form of travel.

While we now live in a tragic world where a gallon of gas is much more expensive than a bottle of Charles Shaw, a road trip still leaves little burden on your bank account. Make your meals from local produce bought at roadside food stands and take advantage of campsites along your route. You’ll have an incredible travel experience at half the cost of a flight to Europe.

8. Without actually doing much, you’ll feel an immense sense of accomplishment.

It’s hour nine and you’re starting to wonder if you’ll ever lie prone again. Yet, you don’t resent your circumstances. Just by sitting all day and playing “which cloud looks most like Marge Simpson,” you’ve crossed three state lines. The best part about a road trip is you’re always moving forward. Revel in it.

9. It’s a good lesson in learning to go with the flow.

A road trip gives you the freedom to change your mind, make mistakes, and follow your daily whims. When you abandon any desire but that of just driving forward, you open yourself up to all kinds of unexpected adventures.

The problem with travel quotes

Photo: Nomadic Lass

REGARDLESS OF WHAT our social media bios would have us believe, you can’t sum up your life and life philosophy by cobbling together a mishmash of vaguely meaningful quotes purportedly originated by famous people. And as much as I hate to say it, travelers are among the worst offenders.

Here are 9 quotes you’ve likely ‘liked’ at some point during the age of Facebook, and why, if you really think about it, they’re kinda full of shit.

1. “Every few hundred feet the world changes.”

-Roberto Bolaño

…said the man who had never driven through Nebraska.

2. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

-Mark Twain

This is a popular one, and overall, I agree with the sentiment. Travel can make you a better person, and more people should be traveling. The problem lies in the second word: “is” should be “can be.” Because if you’ve traveled long enough, you’ve met people who use their travel experiences as a confirmation of the worst in people. One French guy sneered at me, so all of France is snotty and uptight. I got robbed in Brazil, so all Brazilians are thieves.

A much better quote is this one, by Thomas Fuller: “Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.” Or hey, it’s the internet, you can just give the Twain quote my tweak and no one will ever notice.

3. “Not all who wander are lost.”

-J.R.R. Tolkein

While this is undoubtedly a true statement, the people who tend to quote it are generally obliviously, irretrievably lost. Because it’s usually quoted by college students abroad, or travelers in their early 20s who would see no irony in both using this quote and, in the same breath, telling people they are “finding themselves.” It’s okay to be lost. It’s good for you every now and again. Just be willing to admit it.

To use a better quote from Henry David Thoreau, “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”

4. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel only read one page.”

-St. Augustine

The world is not a book. And you can learn a lot more than a page’s worth by staying in one place.

5. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

-Gustave Flaubert

To be fair, college students just returned from studying abroad weren’t a thing in Flaubert’s time. But a lot of people — including myself, at my worst — have used the places they’ve traveled to more as items on a resume than as places they’ve lived and learned from.

6. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

-Henry Miller

He meant to add, “unless your destination is the grocery store,” right?

7. “I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full.”

-Lord Dunsany

I…I just feel there’s a better simile out there. I’ve never seen any worms in Irish bogs during full moons. Maybe, “like the urge that drives salmon upstream,” or “like the urge that makes teenagers wanna bang” would be more universally understandable.

8. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”

-Paul Theroux

While I think the tourist / traveler distinction initially came from a place that was trying to make people better travelers, it has turned from that and has become an elitism and a snobbery on the part of self-proclaimed “travelers.” It’s a distinction that needs to die, and it needs to die fast.

For one thing, you can never truly, fully experience a place without living there for a very long time — so to some extent, all travelers are tourists. And for another, you can never go someplace and not be touched, in some way, by something authentic — so to some extent, all tourists are travelers.

Anyway, as much as I admire Theroux, and as much as I don’t want to take this quote too literally, I know plenty of travelers with itineraries, and plenty of tourists with old travel journals.

9. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”

-David Mitchell

There are way too many quotes about travel and self-discovery. Danny Kaye once said, “To travel is to take a journey into yourself.” Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” And there are a million others along those lines, including the Henry Miller one that’s already on this list. So my opposition to this quote is on the grounds of cliche.

I also think there’s a tendency in these quotes to make travel a magic prescription for becoming a better person. Maybe there are elements of travel that force you out of your comfort zone. Maybe that forces you to confront yourself in different ways. But all new experiences do that in some way, including awful ones like the death of a loved one, or getting diagnosed with cancer. Travel is wonderful — but the change is your own, it’s not a result of the change of your position on the planet.

On the scourge of 'ocean confetti'

Plastic is a relatively new material to the world, and as a result, we’re still learning what happens to it over time. It’s an incredibly durable material, and it doesn’t rust or biodegrade, which is why we’ve produced so much of it.

But the very features that make it so useful to humans make it dangerous for the rest of the world, and it turns out that about 10% of the plastic we use each year ends up in the oceans. While a lot of this is the stuff you’re thinking of — six-pack holders choking pelicans, for example — most of the plastic actually hardens under the constant exposure to sunlight and seawater and cracks up into millions of tiny, equally durable pieces.

The YouTube channel MinuteEarth looked into the problem with this short video, and one thing is clear: If we keep throwing away plastics without recycling them or making them biodegradable, we’re just going to keep adding more of this plastic “confetti” to the oceans.

Something you can easily do to help prevent more of this pollution is to cut back on using plastic grocery bags — bring your own environmentally friendly bags — and make sure you recycle your plastics as much as possible.

10 signs you're from Atlanta

Photo: Terence S. Jones

1. You’re definitely not a redneck.

The Atlanta area has a population of over 5 million people, including the third highest LGBT population per capita in the United States. Our residents include large concentrations Korean, Latin American and Middle Eastern communities. You can get pho that tastes straight out of the stalls of a Hanoi market or kimchi alongside huevos rancheros at one place: Buford Highway.

2. You have a MARTA Breeze card, but only use it for games and concerts.

Atlantans freely admit that we have a terrible public transportation system, and that blue plastic card is little more than a space saver in our wallets. MARTA doesn’t cover most of the metro area, and where it does it’s not reliable. But there’s no better way to get to a Braves game or concert in Piedmont Park.

3. You know “Coke” means nearly any type of soda, and “tea” is always cold and sweet.

Atlanta is the land of Coca Cola; it was originally created here. If we’re thirsty for a Sprite or Mountain Dew, we really have to be specific. Pepsi is an absolute no-go.

Sweet tea was also pretty much perfected here, and should always be served ice cold and full of sugar. The most refreshing thing we can drink on a blistering summer day in Atlanta is a Styrofoam cup of Chick-fil-A sweet tea, or a Coke.

4. You can tell the difference between someone who’s from OTP vs. ITP.

The city is made up of “ITP” and “OTP,” which describe whether your part of town is inside the I-285 loop (“the Perimeter”) or outside it. OTP usually means the suburbs of Cobb or Dekalb counties, and the ITP crowd want it known that they’re the “real” Atlanta. You may also make friends depending on if they’re OTP or ITP, because sometimes the traffic isn’t worth the relationship.

5. You know what “scattered,” “smothered,” and “covered” means, and know the answer to “What’ll ya have.”

Atlanta has its own lingo for ordering at places like Waffle House and the Varsity. At WaHo, you’ll want your hashbrowns scattered on the griddle, smothered in cheese, and covered with onions, peppers, and anything else you can imagine. Over at the Varsity, the world’s largest drive-in, you’ll immediately be bombarded with the question, “What’ll ya have.” There’s only one real answer: a frosted orange, and a chili dog.

6. You don’t want to talk about Michael Vick, Super Bowl XXXIII, John Rocker, or anything about the Thrashers.

We’re fiercely proud of our sports teams, specifically the Braves, Hawks, and Falcons. They’re great at having a strong season, only to choke at the last minute. But every new season brings back our naive hope and memories of the 1995 World Series.

And yeah, we don’t really mention Michael Vick, or John Rocker, the infamously racist / homophobic pitcher who caused controversy in a Sports Illustrated article about his experiences in New York City. And then there’s Super Bowl XXXIII, when the Falcons had a chance at glory and blew it. We should have known better than to bother with the Thrashers, our former hockey team that has relocated to Canada.

7. You identify “Church” as a bar, not a house of worship.

One of the Old Fourth Ward’s most bizarre bars is Sister Louisa’s Church of the Living Room and Ping Pong Emporium, called “Church” for short. Inside this odd spot, we’re used to seeing borderline offensive artwork created by the owner, people wearing choir robes while playing ping pong, taking a seat on a pew drinking a tallboy of PBR, or scouting out celebrities like Jessica Alba, who has been spotted here.

8. You lived through Snowpocolypse 2014, Snowpocolypse 2010, the 2009 floods, or the downtown tornado of 2008.

Our weather involves many bizarre acts of God. Not only do we not know what to do with snow and are completely unprepared for even a dusting, but anything bad that can happen will happen here. Ice coating the roads, floods causing rivers to overflow all over the city, and a tornado striking just the downtown area? It’s amazing we get any visitors here at all.

9. You have everything you need to “shoot the Hooch.”

The Chattahoochee River, affectionately named “the Hooch,” runs through the city and is a great place to cool off in the summertime. Just get yourself a few inner tubes, a cooler full of canned Sweetwater 420s rigged to foam “noodles,” and some friends for the full experience.

10. You get to the airport at least two hours early for domestic flights.

Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is the busiest in the world and can be difficult to navigate, even for short flights. Security lines can be long, and if you think you can make a connecting flight from two different sides of the airport, think again.

26 countries and 4 years later, watch the awesome way this guy proposes

THIS VIDEO HAS been pretty hot on the internets lately. I could see why it’d be charming for some — Jack Hyer clearly put a lot of thought into the process and production, and he stuck to his original vow of, “I’m going to marry this girl some day,” written in his travel journal so many years ago. I wonder though, did he always intend on using this video footage for his new fiancée? Or was it more the thought of, “I’m going to make this video in the hope that I end up with this one girl, but if it doesn’t work out, I can still use it for someone else”? Because not going to lie, the gamble of a breakup was certainly there.

I’m glad it worked out though, and props to Mr. Hyer, who upped the ante for all men in the prospective stage of planning a proposal.

10 images of people living on $1/day

IT IS ESTIMATED that 1 billion of our global population survive on one US dollar or less a day. Although the road to extreme poverty is hugely varied and intricate, the everyday struggles faced by the planet’s poorest are sadly all too common.

A new book produced by Thomas A. Nazario (creator of the nonprofit The Forgotten International) and photographer and Pulitzer Prize winner Renée C. Byer offers us a glimpse into the lives of these people.

A direct call for action, Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World’s Poor is a welcome reminder that collaborative change must be driven forward on a global scale.

All photos courtesy of Renée C. Byer

1

Romania
4-year-old Ana-Marie Tudor's family face eviction from their home in Bucharest, Romania.





2

Ghana
6-year-old Ninankor Gmafu, from the Volta region of Ghana, herds cattle. He does not attend school and it's unlikely that he ever will.





3

Bangladesh
27-year-old Labone works at a brothel in Jessore, Bangladesh. Her daughter was fathered by a client.












4

Bolivia
9-year-old Alvaro Kalancha Quispe works with his family's alpaca and llama herd before school, and returns to do the same in the evening. Alvaro and his family live in the Akamani mountain range of Bolivia, where they face harsh weather and tough conditions, with little or no comfort.





5

India
Subadra Devi, aged 40, works on a construction site as a laborer in the Himalayan foothills of Dharamsala, India.





6

India
These two children, Hunupa Begum, 13, and Hajimudin Sheikh, six, beg for food and money in New Delhi.





7

Ghana
Fati, aged 8, suffers from Malaria. She joins many of the children searching for metal scraps in Accra, Ghana.





8

Romania
Hora Florin, aged 28, grew up in Romanian orphanages. He now spends the night underground the heating vents to keep warm.





9

India
6-year-old Vishal Singh takes care of a baby while her mother is away in a New Delhi slum.





10

Ghana
The Kayayo Girls of Accra, Ghana, travel to cities to collect waste or serve as porters. They often live as a community near or on top the city dump.

10 things you didn’t know about the FIFA World Cup

WHATEVER YOUR OPINIONS are of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, these facts are pretty amusing. I can’t wait to see what ridiculous information is added to this slideshow once the event in Brazil is over. But damn, to be a scoring player on the UAE team in 1990!

Learn guitar: The campfire awaits

Photo: NessieNoodle

GUYS, HOW CAN you sit idly by while guitar dude swoons all the girls? And ladies, you do know how sexy it is to see you pluck out and sing Me and Bobby McGee, right?

Previously, we brought you the 50 Greatest Campfire Songs of All Time (more like 100 with all our readers’ great additions).

Now it’s time to learn some yourself, and it ain’t even that hard.

Guitar lessons schmitar schmessons

Yes, you can easily go down to your local laundromat and find a handwritten ad with tear-away phone numbers for guitar lessons. And yes, you can hop on Craigslist and have someone over in a jiffy, eager to take your money and teach you Blowin’ in the Wind.

But why pay for what you can have for free? All you need is a cheap guitar and the Internet. So, assuming you now have both, let’s begin.

Tablature: Sheet music for dummies

Dummies like me, that is. I pretty much learned how to play guitar solely through tablature (‘tab’ for short). What’s this you say?

Tablature is a graphic representation of the strings and frets of the guitar, and where your fingers go to make pleasant sounds when you strum the strings.

In this way, you don’t need to know how to read sheet music. All you need is a tiny bit of patience while you work out how to place your fingers on the guitar.

First, some basics you should know

Guitar strings are numbered 1 to 6. 1 being the first string from the bottom — when you’re holding the guitar in a normal position (as opposed to swung over your head like an axe?) — and 6 being the topmost string (lowest note). When each string is plucked open (nothing pressed down) they each play a note. From top to bottom (6 to 1) the notes are: E A D G B E (this last E is an octave higher than the first one — don’t worry if you don’t know what an octave is, just know it’s higher in pitch).
A fret is a section of the guitar neck. When a string is pushed down inside a fret, it produces a lovely note. Frets are numbered starting at the first fret, which is at the top of the guitar. To make things easier, most guitars have little markers indicating the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 12th frets, so you can quickly find your way along the neck. After the 12th fret, the notes repeat themselves.
For the purposes of guitar tab, your fingers are numbered: 1-index, 2-middle, 3-ring, 4-pinky (you would rarely have need for your thumb).

So, here is an example of how to make an E Minor (Em) chord — chosen for its simplicity:

Screenshot: ChordBook.com

From the above graphic, you place your 2nd (middle) finger on the 5th string/2nd fret, and your 3rd (ring) finger on the 4th string/2nd fret. Now strum all the strings. You’ve just played an Em!

A website like ChordBook.com is money when it comes to learning how to play a specific chord. You can also hit strum to hear what it should sound like. If you know the tab for a chord but don’t know what the chord is, you can also do a reverse lookup to find out what the chord is called.

Say you want to learn how to play Neil Young’s Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World. You could pop over to UltimateGuitar.com, search for the song and find that the verse is simply Em, D, and C (chuck in an A for the chorus).

Now go find those chords at ChordBook.com, take a few minutes to learn them, then play along with the song.

So where do I start?

Find artists/songs that use minimal and basic chords, played in the “open” position (this means forget barre chords for now, which are harder to play for beginners). For this reason, most of the first songs I learned were Bob Dylan and Neil Young; both musical geniuses. Perhaps the most genius thing is that their songs were so simple. Here are some very easy songs to get you started:

1. Bob Dylan – Knockin on Heaven’s Door (G, D, C)

2. The Wallflowers – Three Marlenas (G, D, Am)

3. Neil Young – Keep on Rockin in the Free World (Em, D, C, A)

4. Guns ‘n’ Roses – Patience (C, G, A, D)

5. Bob Dylan – Blowin in the Wind (G, C, D, Em)

Online resources

There is no shortage of websites that teach you how to play guitar, all for free. Guitarnoise.com and Learn-Acoustic-Guitar.com both have a section for beginners with easy songs to learn.

YouTube is fantastic. There are all sorts of people dying to teach you how to play songs for free. And besides learning how to play guitar, you can also learn how to bake naan bread, change a tire, and unclog a drain. But you’re here to learn guitar songs, right?

Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here

The Beatles – Let It Be

Pearl Jam – Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town

Lastly, don’t listen to what anyone says about Stairway to Heaven. It’s not an easy song to play, and when done right, is pretty sweet. The truth is, most guitar players know how to play it. So it’s kind of ironic that they make fun of it.

While it’s not difficult to learn to play guitar, it’s not super easy either. Don’t get frustrated and let the guitar sit in the corner gathering dust. Keep at it.

Rock on!

This post was originally published on August 5, 2009.

35 reasons you're not getting laid

Photo: Zach Dischner

1. Your boner is your #1 pickup tool at the club.

2. Immediately after orgasm you get up and do a series of air punches.

3. You consider the fact that most women have ears a sign that they want to listen to you talk.

4. You’re scared of a girl’s period. But you spent your entire Sunday watching a Quentin Tarantino marathon.

5. The last girl you brought home had to watch you pee in your sock drawer and pass out on your comic collection. Too many Twisted Teas.

6. You take it upon yourself to remind women to “Smile!”

7. Your best travel story begins, “This one time, at Punta Cana, I blacked out.” And that’s it.

8. You don’t think the clitoris is all it’s cracked up to be.

9. You don’t believe a woman should be president.

10. You didn’t crop your camera or your toilet out of your Tinder profile selfie.

11. You have at least three pictures of your penis on your phone. Ready to go in case any female shows interest.

12. Your tattoos are either tribal, Celtic, or fraternity-related.

13. You cannot say the word “vagina.”

14. 80 percent of your workout routine consists of standing in front of a mirror and flexing your biceps. The other 20 percent consists of watching YouTube videos of weightlifting.

15. You think Daniel Tosh is hilarious.

16. When a girl doesn’t laugh at your joke you assume she doesn’t get it.

17. You have no idea what a “pay gap” is.

18. You ask girls if they are “DTF” and expect a response.

19. You drive some variation of a bright yellow vehicle.

20. You still wear Abercrombie & Fitch. Getting dressed every day feels like squeezing into a PVC pipe.

21. You’ll talk any girl’s ear off about your “intense drug past” (the two times you tried cocaine in college).

22. When you get drunk you start speaking in a Boston accent. Not because you’re from Boston. Because you consider Mark Wahlberg to be the man.

23. You see a girl you like at the bar. So you buy her a Jagerbomb.

24. You don’t have a job.

25. You don’t have a job because you still get a weekly allowance from your parents.

26. You believe the key to every woman’s legs is “interesting accessories.”

27. Your mother still does your laundry. As soon as you get a girlfriend, though, she’ll take over.

28. Your go-to story on a date involves winning a raffle at your bank.

29. The last time you read a book was when the seventh Harry Potter came out.

30. You use the pet name “muffin” for most interactions you have with females.

31. You own a “Cool story, babe, now go make me a sandwich” t-shirt.

32. You don’t tip 20 percent. But you’re still entitled to slide your arm around the server’s waist.

33. You often mistake a sympathy laugh for a real laugh. So you tell your joke again but louder.

34. You’re a member of this Facebook page.

35. You think feminism is a thing of the past.

25 things to know about Georgia

Drinking that sweet tea. Photo: Rachel Carrier

1. The weather here is just as inconsistent as your ex-girlfriend.

2. We call all interstates in Georgia, “The Highway.”

3. Only in Atlanta is everything named “Peachtree” without a single tree with peaches around.

4. Terio and Honey Boo Boo were born and raised here.

5. “Knuck if you Buck” is the song we will always get hype to no matter the age.

6. White girls wear Nike shorts with big t-shirts covering their shorts. (How many can you spot?)

7. Zaxby’s is what you eat.

8. We call it a “rag,” not a “washcloth.”

9. Going outside at anytime during the summer instantly guarantees a minimum of 7 bug bites.

10. In Georgia when someone asks, “Where you from?” people usually reply with a county not a city.

11. The speed limit is 65mph, but if you’re not going at least 80 you’ll be run off the road.

12. In Georgia it’s not a shopping cart, it’s a buggy.

13. We get more inches of pollen in a week than inches of snow in a full year.

14. You say Georgia, we say Jawja.

15. Sweet tea is our water.

16. The night has been a success if you ended up at Waffle House.

17. In Georgia it’s necessary to look at the weather before picking out an outfit.

18. We pray that we get snow during the winters.

19. We are the creators of “turn up.”

20. Here in Georgia white girls can twerk. No Miley Cyrus.

21. You will usually be 30 minutes away from just about every destination you’re heading to.

22. There’s a Waffle House in walking distance of every Waffle House.

23. Any dark soda is simply called “Coke.”

24. We pronounce it “Atlanna.”

25. Braves, Falcons, and UGA are the teams we really care about.

This article originally appeared on Thought Catalog and is republished here with permission.