http://fortunefavorsthebrave.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/professional-blogger-mareas-guest-post
I’m mere steps away from being a famous travel writer.
Tag: Travel
Comment dit-on…dumb American?
I was enjoying Injun Joe’s hilarious disruption of Porky Pig’s frontier adventure on an episode of Looney Tunes when my father first introduced me to the concept of stereotypes. I was five. From that point on, under the tyranny of my hippie parents, my life became a constant examination of the prejudice already present in my tiny world, from my favorite games (“Smear the Queer”), to my favorite terms of derision (“Retard”), to my favorite tattle-tailing verbs (“My brother just gyped me out of $20!). I have been hypersensitive to labels and the harmful perceptions that accompany them ever since.
Oh yes, this happened.
I Might Lose You
A rainbow sweater AND a bowl cut?! I never had a chance, Mom.
When I complain about my issues with orientation, I am usually talking about one of two things. The first, which I have already used this blog to discuss at length, I only partially attribute to my mother, who adorned me in liberal amounts of plaid as a child. The second is one hundred percent her fault, as my complete lack of directional aptitude is a genetic gift that like my prematurely graying hair, clearly came from her.
My mother, bless her heart, still gets confused picking me up from the airport located twenty minutes from my childhood home. She used to create mnemonic devices to remember how to get from downtown Hayward to places our family drove several times a year:
“We turn on B street, Marea, because we want to BE at the cabin! C street because we’re going to the Little Theater to SEE a play!”
My mom once flew into Arizona and rented a car to watch me play rugby, and finding her hotel and the pitch without incident remains one of her proudest life accomplishments. She still talks nostalgically about Phoenix’s large, well-lit signage.
Michael Flatley, Lucky the Leprechaun and Other Things of Questionable Irish Descent
As a student of Urban Studies (a major I damn near completed) at UCSD, I was introduced to the concept of “tourist bubbles”: urban spaces designed to give visitors an “authentic” regional experience while keeping them comfortably separate from the yucky parts of a city that might compel them to reach less frequently into their fashionable money belts. A vacation in a tourist bubble is like a Small World-type theme park ride; tourists are transported on a track by the city’s most impressive landmarks and dancing stereotypes of its citizens, circumventing anything that may expose the interworkings of the ride, such as poverty, urban decay or actual residents.
Occupation: Cubicle Monkey 
