All I'm Saying there's a joke in here somewhere

Guys, I'm in a big ol' city. I shit you not. This hotel area? It's got an ice skating rink in it. No pool, but an ice skating rink. Tell me how anachronistic that is: I'm in Dallas, which is like 100 degrees out for literally months on end, and there's an ice skating rink here. You'd think Boise, which is 40 degrees or less for months out of the year would have an ice skating rink at every hotel. But no, we have swimming pools. Guess what my hotel doesn't have? Tell me that makes sense.

One of the guys in my training class (he works for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, DC) was asking me about Idaho and where I grew up. I told him I grew up on a 1200-acre cattle ranch and his eyes bugged out. He asked if the area there was like Boise. I said, "Oh, no. It's right on the edge of the Boise National Forest, so the ranch was both forested and full of meadows for grazing and alfalfa crops, and then there is a big river running through." He couldn't believe it; it sounded like something out of a book to him.

But to me, this area is what I can't really believe. Any time I travel to a populated area like this, I drive past or fly over miles and miles of houses and office buildings and I think, "There are people in all of these?!" I truly have a hard time wrapping my head around that, and around the fact that each one of those people has a story just as strange, weird, interesting, mundane as my own.

It's not just me on this planet. It's not just my close circle. There are billions of us, and we're every one equal. My taxi driver tonight (I went to the biggest mall in Texas, heh) was from Ethopia. ETHI-fucking-OPIA! He's been here for 12 years and he likes it, but misses his mom and dad. I almost said, "Screw the mall. Let's go get some burgers and you can tell me what it was like growing up there." I kind of wish I had...

Traveling really gets me out of my own head.

A crappy cell phone picture from my hotel room window.