[This is an excerpt from a larger, admittedly kind of weird piece. If you must know, it's from the Fixing You manuscript, a couple hundred pages of stylish/aggressive nonsense-or-possibly-genius in this vein. Please enjoy. --wa.]
the main difficulty with traveling, other than being eaten by carnivorous fish or having an "everyone here is very tan and speaks in gibberish"-related panic attack in the middle of the world's largest shopping mall or something, is adjusting to the little things, the tiny cultural differences that make life living: don't touch the food, don't look directly at sweet bitches or someone will cut off your hand, the mosquitoes have AIDS, there is no internet access unless you go to the city, nearly three hundred miles downriver, past the golden temple. THERE IS NO GODDAMN INTERNET. not 2.0, 1.0, little-known intermediate web technologies like web 1.5. nothing! plus there are sensitivity issues to worry about: how do you approach tiny japanese without being crippled by guilt, knowing that they've already lived through the 21st and 22nd centuries once, are aggressively fixing up the 23rd century with nanobots and thermonuclear magic spells at the moment (contemporary japan is what the 23rd century will look like if we make cloning not only legal but *mandatory*), and now here you come with your stupid questions about "how do they make tempura" and "why did the police outfit me with this GPS-enabled dog collar when i got off the plane in tokyo," things like that. plus, cultural solidarity is one thing, open-mindedness is one thing, but why are all the muslims dressed like assholes? you see? you dropped out of georgetown's medieval studies program before getting the degree, which was the right move, everyone thinks so, but you never did take that acting class you'd been so excited about - so how are you going to convincingly act like you don't know how much better your country is than, uh, theirs? all of them really.
worthies, the world is just too difficult to understand. did you see the part about no internet web? it's not available in alaska, indeed most of the u.s. west of the mississippi river (minus san francisco, obviously), so what are the chances they've discovered the internet in bangalore, paris, the picturesque mountains of switzerland? answer: the chances are very very small, and you can't take that kind of risk. you're not a gambler, you're an exceptionally talented and stylishly-appointed urban elite. you can't bring mohammed to the mountain because he's been put in a secret government prison on the floating magical island of west frandisco. but someone has to be brought to the mountain; the gods demand it. it just doesn't have to be you. nor do you want the mountain brought here; it's trivia night at Foster's and you can't duck out of it, not when you have to defend your "80's sitcoms"-themed record-setting title last week. someone else can babysit the mountain.
well so the alternative is to make like a grownup and stay home. but how? no american is truly cultured unless he or she has traveled the world, and yet we've shown through careful logic that travel is impermissible if not simply impossible, never mind pricy - god even if you can lifehack your tickets into a first-class upgrade from coach you're still looking at ten, maybe thirty thousand american dollars to get a seat on a giant spacegoing quantum shark-jet, and who has that kind of money lying around? other than famous personal american productivity guru/authors who spend their nights covered in locally-grown honey and rolling around in four-foot-deep piles of authors'-advance cash, "lucre" really, who has that kind of money in today's enlightened western world?
so if you can't go abroad - and you can't - you have to find a way to make HERE more like THERE, without all the "charming" local "flavor" that the emaciated non-digitally-savvy citizens of THERE think is so special precious dear to their ancestors in the dreamtime or whatever but is, when you get down to it, basically las vegas with cheaper whores and lower production values. which, sure, *awesome* in a way, but remember: no internet.
ok, to recap:
* be brave
* stay home
* america
it's a little unusual for a lifehacking project to intentionally downgrade performance and style, but when it comes to worldliness and open-minded cultural exchange, the western hemisphere is willing to take one for the team.
as is traditional, we have a set of easy-to-follow lifehacking tips'n'tricks in clear, jargon-free language - ready to be implemented by the post-digital post-national hardcore american digital freshmaker/coolhacker/raconteur now reading this volume, i.e. probably you. possibly not you - have you come down from the lsd yet, hasn't it been twelve hours? how much goddamn lsd did you take? - but *probably* you.
* food: american food isn't terribly fashionable unless consumed ironically, post-nationally - e.g. designer mac and cheese with a bottle of very delicate absinthe you got on your celebratory trip to bhutan when your post-college startup shipped version 0.02beta4 of the social-network app you guys had worked up and you just had to, like *unwind* - so we have some major changes to make here. luckily, most foreign cuisines are easily duplicated using american ingredients. for instance: to make delicate taiwanese curried poultry, buy some general gao's chicken at the local chinese take-out place, head down to your local organic/macro food mart, get a little green curry paste, and mix it in using a limited-edition quantum-plastic japanese designer stirring spoon. for authentic taiwanese texture don't mix it in, just pour it right on top, then call one of your chinese friends to wave nuclear weapons at you menacingly while you eat your food huddled in the corner of your small but efficiently furnished and stylishly laid-out loft, furtively looking around all the while to make sure no local warlords have beheaded any of your neighbors tonight. taiwan has warlords, right? or to make indian rice, buy chinese rice and give it smallpox.
* dress: ever since the second world war foreigners have been required by law to dress like americans, only funny in some small way - e.g. french clothes are always a little too tight-fitting at the crotch; all swiss wear baggy fleece workout pants cinched below the knees, known as "lederhosen"; amazon men and women wear dish towels; all germans have lots of piercings but in a refreshingly non-aggressive way; there's nearly a million chinese, two million, and they only have about 300,000 outfits between them - all grey tracksuits with "china!" written in big letters on the back, we saw it at the olympics - so in china you only get to wear any clothes at all one day out of three, which is actually ok because four days out of five it's illegal and unwise to breathe chinese air. (confirmed! on the internet.) you have nothing to worry about clothing-wise; most of your designer shit is made in sweatshops anyhow, right? so just pretend YOU'RE the sweatshop worker - easy, go around acting all grateful you have a job at all, even if that's a weird feeling for a progressive urbanite - and make believe you STOLE your featureless grey china-blouse from the factory, you're so worried about getting caught, and friendly subversive Commandant Chang can't cover for you forever, they'll catch you, FOOLISH xiao ming, they're sure to catch you...
* money: no problem. american dollars are good everywhere. however, to maintain fictional coherence on a fake stay-at-home world-travel vacation, you can't find or use an ATM, and will eventually have to barter to eat. this is standard in most countries of the dark, exotic east ("exotique" in french). you'll do fine; your body still has that undergraduate firmness, you'll fetch upwards of ten dollars a day. (sidenote: really? if you're offering, contact our publisher. IF you're offering.)
* internet: WHAT DID WE TELL YOU. NO.
* local customs: you went to graduate school, right? "culture is a conversation." you can more or less make shit up as you go along; for instance, refuse to believe that streetlights are real, or always turn left. if anyone asks what you're doing, call it "subaltern chic" or "just like mama xiao pan used to make" and then steal their wallet, but in an adorable, culturally authentic ("authentique") way.
* attitude toward americans: as with most things, you already know what to do here, you just need to maintain a constant high level of very cromulent mindfulness about it. assume that everyone on the street is an actual cowboy (ladies too) who bathes in liquid gold, nanobubble baths made from forcibly-aborted fetuses, and middle/near eastern crude oil; do not hide your disdain at people's inability to follow your language; marry a tiny cow-eyed babychild to preserve its honor post-defilement; occasionally mourn the death of a beloved uncle or grand-niece, wailing and ululating as their little coffin is lifted out of the pickup truck and lowered slowly, so slowly, into the blood-soaked earth that is your ancestral home - where you someday will rest as well. then vow bloody vengeance against whomever the hell; according to our fashion/historical sources, jews will do nicely.
obviously this will yield nothing even remotely like travel, will expose you to none of what makes other countries worth seeing (if you believe that marketing hype). but ask yourself: do you *really* feel like leaving home right now, right in the middle of things, when your favorite web-cartoon is probably updating tonight, and all your friends are talking about really important things on electronic digital mail? you really want to give that up?
well we don't either. never, ever, ever.

