Musings on Life, Episode 1

I am going to try my utmost to make sense, but I make no promises. Consider yourself fairly warned, or else.

Also, I've realized that I'm kind of preachy and/or condescending maybe (is didactic the right word?) and I am trying to remedy this. Please let me know if I do or do not.

So, kind of oddly (although this is eventually going somewhere, I promise), I've thought a lot about the evolution of transportation and its effect on communication between people. There used to be a kind of camaraderie amongst travelers, back when any travel of any length took weeks or months. People walking down the road or riding horses could nod and wave and smile and maybe fall in and chat with other people on the same road. There was even more safety sticking with a larger group in some places. And even with wagons, people were out in the air and could be shouted to or at with ease. Even when richer people were bouncing along in carriages, they would stop at wayhouses and inns and maybe they would take a meal or two in the common room, amongst all the rest of the travelers. (Note: Most of this I have gleaned from reading fiction and not actual research, but I think it holds fairly true nonetheless.)

Now, by and large, we travel around in a little room on wheels. Because that's what a car is. We are mostly completely enclosed in our own space and we can shut out the rest of the world. Also, the speeds we drive at, especially long-distance driving, would make conversation with other cars near impossible. In hotels, many people, if not most, scurry back and forth in the halls from their rooms to the dining room or the laundry or maybe the pool or game room, keeping their heads down and avoiding contact with the other patrons of the hotel. At least, that's what I do, and I think it holds true with a lot of people.
Technology has helped very little. Now in places where we might have engaged in some manner with our fellow travelers (i.e. buses, metros, trains, planes, or walking down the street), we stick in our headphones (or maybe earplugs, on planes and long-distance buses) or keep our cellphones glued to our ears and ignore the other people around us in much the same way as they ignore us. There are still some people who will try to engage their neighbor in conversation, especially, in my mind, on planes, but I know that I would mostly find this an unwelcome intrusion into my life. I would probably be quietly annoyed with these people, they'd probably realize this, and then they'd leave me to Vergil (my iPod, remember) and book.

However guilty I am of doing my share of insulating myself against other travelers (and I do love my Vergil), I find this a little sad. In this day and age, with internet and Facebook and cellphones, shouldn't we be even more connected to the world and not less? Yeah, connection with people we know is different than connection with complete strangers, but it's still a little sad. Especially since travel is so much easier now. I can go to China in however many hours (hours!) that flight is, instead of the sixish months it took to get there, what, a couple hundred years ago? That's amazing! And yet, I barely look at the people I walk past, some them people I probably walk past every day who probably think of me as that weird headphones girl who is always making weird gestures with her hands (faux-conducting classical music) or playing air-guitar or bobbing her head mouthing the words to songs that no one else is hearing. And yet (again), I don't seriously plan on altering my behavior anytime in the near future.

So what am I doing to try to connect to the world? I'm being a jerk.

I am one of those people who loves to drive with the windows down, and I think a large part of that is to blast my music out the windows. Really loudly. (Also, I sing along, but that is less to expose the world to my lovely (ha!) voice and more because I love to sing along with the songs (even classical)). I do this with any music I happen to be listening to, so the people on the street and in the surrounding cars may be subjected to classical, eighties, anime, or the really random amount of music that I have managed to become attached to through the years. I have never found a genre of music that I absolutely did not like. Not country, there is some country that I like. Not rap, because even if I don't listen to any completely rap artist, I am quite attached to Linkin Park and they have a fair bit of rap. More often than not the music will have words, because, as I've said, I love to sing along and it's a tad more satisfying with words to the songs than with classical music (or anime, where most of the words are Japanese, so I don't really know them).
Now, I myself think I have pretty good taste in music, but I would, wouldn't I? And I'm certainly not trying to be malicious with my music-blasting. Mostly, I like to think that I am maybe bringing a little culture into people's lives (if I happen to be rocking out to Mozart or Bach or Tchaikovsky), or introducing them to some music they hadn't listened to before and will spend years trying to track down on the internet. See there? New music and an adventure and a story to tell your kids and/or nephews/nieces and/or just your friends.

This is how I am trying to break down the walls we've built as we travel. This is my contribution to the traveler's society. Being the jerk who blasts music out the windows of her car. Sure, I could try talking to someone once in a while, but where's the fun in that? It's much more fun to be the loud music jerk.

So how do you reach out to your fellow travelers? What're your thoughts about the evolution of travel and communication? Or your thoughts about my method of trying to change our travel isolation? Or your thoughts on anything at all? Really, I'm open to just about anything.