"A good traveler has no set plans and is not intent on arriving." - Lao Tzu

I'm terrified, more or less.

Tomorrow, I'll be driven to Pittsburgh and dropped off at Nicky's Thai Kitchen to have dinner with +ERIC AYALA . I will have no car, no phone, and only the two bags I will be living out of for an indefinite amount of time. Three days later, after the  lunches, dinners, parties and the first Penguins game of the season (awww yisssss), I will board a plane and fly first to New York, then to Shanghai, and finally to Bangkok, where I'll meet up with +Melissa W . We'll spend two days there, then several more on Koh Phangan for the Full Moon Festival.

Then? I don't know.

I intended it to be that way. No, really, I did! I wanted it to be open-ended, free of conflict and the constriction of excessive planning. I wanted to step foot into some foreign world, separate from everything (or almost everything) I knew, and simply... exist. But my fear is growing in proportion to the proximity of the flight, the final step that will set me loose on the world.

I feel like I'm standing at the edge of some abyss. I have a vague idea of what lies below: unintelligible languages, strange foods, squats toilets with no means of sanitary cleanup... but man, this is starting to get a bit more real than I had anticipated. It all looked so simple on paper. Hell, I didn't even think this plan would work. Like literally every single person I told about my "plan", I figured it would be disrupted to ruin by some unforeseeable problem, or simply fade either from possibility or my consciousness. Instead, here it is.

Here I am.

Will I jump?

...

Hell yes, I will.