Captain’s Log: First Entry

How in the hell did I get here? I’m less than 48 hours away from my journey of Latin America. It’s almost like a movie, one day I’m going through the same rituals of my daily life and instead of life happening and disrupting the status quo I decided to do it to myself. Unlike a movie this didn’t happen in the course of two hours and thirty minutes (I have no idea if that’s the average of movie lengths or not). This journey that came to its realization in March of 2019 actually started in 2013, it was the Spring or Summer. That was when I took my first international trip to Barcelona. While the conference that I attended was great (WebVisions) the real experience came from going to Barcelona. It was my first international trip, the first stamp in my passport, the place internationally I’ve been that wasn’t apart of a cruise. I spent roughly five days there with some cool co-workers where I realized a few things about myself. First and most important, I’m very comfortable going off on my own and immersing myself in the culture around me (my mother would freak out about that). Secondly, I’m interested in learning about worlds unknown to me. To quote a Childish Gambino song “there’s a world we can visit if we go outside.” I rented a bike and left the comfort of my co-workers and decided to ride around Barcelona seeing many of the the architect’s creations, Antoni Gaudi the dude who started La Sagrada de Familia.

Before I get into the quick time lapse of how I got here let me share what my thoughts were when I returned back to the States. “I want to live in Barcelona for a year.” Yup that was it, my personal legend (if you’re familiar with The Alchemist) was to see my pyramids. It was all fine and dandy but then life happened. More accurately I kept finding excuses why I couldn’t do it then life happened, I bought a house, but to the untrained eye it appeared that I was gearing up to make my time in Orlando a long term play. Guess again my friends the only reason I did that was because I read Rich Dad Poor Dad and began to think about home ownership differently (I’ll save that for another post). Through the years of working with co-workers that have been working remotely I began to internalize why I thought couldn’t do it. Outside of not seeing a black male do it, at the time, that was my only reason. A few international trips later (DR, Cuba, Mexico, Ireland) and trialing working remotely I finally found my stars aligning. Now here I am at Cafe Iguana, enjoying some hookah and Jack writing this thinking, “yo I’m really about to do this.” Will I enjoy it? Honestly I don’t know, but not knowing can be a beautiful thing (another post on that later).