There's a reason that there are oodles of young Aussies, Germans, Japanese, even Chinese backpackers traipsing around the world. They are unencumbered by debilitating student loans. No such luck for the American Theater Arts major with $120,000 in loans.

J. Maarten Troost

Categorized in : Student World Reason Luck

Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.

J. Maarten Troost

skills people way

Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

J. Maarten Troost

home years moving

I was simply restless, quite likely because of a dissatisfaction with the recent trajectory of my life, and if there is a better, more compelling reason for dropping everything and moving to the end of the world, I know not what it is.

J. Maarten Troost

compelling-reason world moving

Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish." "Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish.

J. Maarten Troost

two country lying

Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.

J. Maarten Troost

invisible airplane fairy

It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.

J. Maarten Troost

american-life deprivation appreciated

Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.

J. Maarten Troost

civilized-society civilized virtue

No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.

J. Maarten Troost

small-world claims world

It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.

J. Maarten Troost

college tea war

I had grown accustomed to life being interesting and adventure ridden and, rather childishly, I refused to believe that this must necessarily come to an end and that the rest of my life should be a sort of penance for all the reckless, irresponsible, and immensely fun things I’d done before.

J. Maarten Troost

fun adventure believe

You can read and read, but nothing eclipses experience.

J. Maarten Troost

read nothing you experience

Few things are more enjoyable than lingering over the atlas and plotting a trip.

J. Maarten Troost

than over more things

It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

J. Maarten Troost

i-am money people way

I have been called many things in my life, but if there has been but one constant, one barb, one arrow flung my way time after time, it is the accusation that I am, in essence, nothing more than an escapist. Apparently this is bad, suspect, possibly even un-American.

J. Maarten Troost

i-am my-life time life

The gift of sobriety is clarity and a sense of connection - and travel only enhances that.

J. Maarten Troost

connection gift clarity travel

So you've decided to travel around the world. This is an excellent thing to do. It's a precious place, this planet. We should see it.

J. Maarten Troost

place you world travel

We don't think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms - Katrina, Sandy - are dismissed as once-in-a-century events.

J. Maarten Troost

think climate-change change sea

Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.

J. Maarten Troost

you failure character people