Thoughts on the plane to San Juan - 2026/02/13
I'm writing this on my flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico. I'm not normally a nervous flyer, but there's definitely something spooky about flying over the Bermuda Triangle on Friday the 13th. While we were taxiing, the plane made a big ol' CRACK, which seemed to have spooked everyone, including the flight attendants. To add to the spooky plane vibes, we saw cockroaches crawling out of the seats at terminal 7 in JFK. We're on a budget airline, so I wasn't really expecting anything beyond the bare essentials. But I'm hoping that a well-maintained and security-provided plane is included in that list of a bare essentials airfare. Wish me luck! Wouldn't want to fail Floor-it February due to dying on a plane crash!
It's my first time in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean more generally; honestly, looking at my travel history, while I still would consider myself a well-travelled individual, it's a bit embarrassing that I've never been to South America, Africa, Oceania, Central Asia, South Asia, or the Middle East (beyond Turkey, which is already a bit of a stretch). I have plans this year to hit Georgia which I guess half hits that, but beyond that the only other trips I've got planned in the near future are to Paris and across America. I totally understand why this is the case; I think most people in my spheres have been to at most one more of those listed regions than I have, and that's already among a group of people privileged enough to be traveling international semi-frequently in the first place! But, I guess that's exactly where the embarrassment lies. I like to think of myself as someone who's globally aware and open to adventure/being put in non-straightforward situations, so to look at the record and see not only a list of easy countries, but also repeated trips to them, challenges that assumption of myself. The worst part is that I've had many opportunities to push those boundaries. But whenever it comes down to trip planning, it always ends up landing on a pretty safe destination.
My best excuse is that I often am traveling in groups, where I rarely am the limiting individual when it comes to safety. For example, my most recent trip to Asia was neutered heavily from the initial plans to account for my mom's preference for standard destinations and access to the comforts of developed countries. However, realistically if I were to use this as an excuse, it wouldn't explain why I haven't taken a solo trip by now. I think a truly global and adventurous person would go out of their way to go to these destinations, especially if they had the funds and time to make it work. I guess the reality is that I'm not as adventurous as I thought; the idea of going off the beaten path is exciting in concept, but becomes cumbersome when the anxiety kicks in. I should force myself to try that sometime in the next year though, just to see if maybe the real barrier to solo travel is in fact just the fact that I haven't done it yet and don't have a clear understanding of what that looks like.
In the same vein, I also think it's laughable that I don't speak any languages other than English. Again, it makes sense that I don't, and I think it's pretty common to only speak one language among North Americans. But that being said, I also think someone who has had as much education as I have had, and someone who is as interested in global human geography would have learned another language by now. I know a lot of that burden is honestly on my parents (most bilingual+ people I know just picked it up as a kid), but I think I've also given myself real good shots at learning languages like French and Japanese and have failed to get results that I would be proud of. This "failure" makes more sense to me compared to the fact I haven't solo travelled, as I think that the calculus of language learning in terms of time to value is pretty fucked up. As an English speaker, there's very little real financial or lifestyle motivators to learn another language, unless you planned on leaving the west. Throw in how much time is needed to properly learn a language, and it makes it an even harder long term goal to take on. Sure, I might be able to learn Spanish after 1,000 hours of dedicated time (I know there's some real math on this for the US military, but I can't google it on this plane ride). But I also could spend those 1,000 hours on attaining multiple minor's worth of knowledge or completing substantial personal fulfillment goals such as creating multiple albums, starting a business, reading 200+ books, etc. This is not to say that learning a language is less valuable than any combination of those various things, but I think it really has to be motivated by a love of the process of learning a language itself OR a motivator beyond "hey, it'd be cool to use this skill for 2 weeks every other year on my trip". All that being said, despite logically understanding why I haven't actually invested a truly impressive amount of time into something that doesn't bear as much fruit for me, I guess the embarrassment comes from the fact that I hold no nagging feeling to learn more languages to let me meaningfully indulge in the absurdity of that process.
It's interesting that even when we have the agency to choose what we do with our time, we still can't seem to pick the choices that we seem to believe our ideal versions would have picked. And I wonder if that dissonance is rooted mainly in a misunderstanding of who our ideal selves are (likely motivated by a lack of inward honesty), or if there are more barriers to our self actualization than our supposed agency would suggest.
Anyways, my ass is hurting and there's intense turbulence, so I'll end this one here.