I am not very well traveled. I think.
I’ve lived in many, many dozens of places. A lot. Possibly hundreds. I’ve gone to twenty primary educational institutions, if one counts half-way houses for teens (another story I will get to sometime). Interestingly I’ve only lived in four states.
I’ve never left the country. I used to see the radio towers in Tijuana on my way to a middle school, and I’ve been to Calexico, but not Mexicali (it was across the street). I don’t have a passport.
It is a badge of shame I wear, but I try to make the most of it. I try to live as a person who can attain all they need intellectually, without resorting to biases and stereotypes. I feel that I have an opportunity to shine, since one poor view of Americans is that they are not as well-traveled or culturally exposed as other people in our world class (if first, second and third worlds exist in one’s vernacular).
In a way I feel both un-American and proto-American. There are things about this country that really rock. I take my ability to express myself very seriously, and it is a travesty that I feel in my heart when I hear about it being suppressed in other places. However, I feel that dissent is seen as treason at worst, or annoyance at best. I wish Americans were less adverse to change, and accepted that this is a young nation built on the discourse and contention of constantly re-defining itself. Just reading that last sentence makes me want to live in that country! 
I am thinking about this because today I was in a group of six people, and I was the only one who hadn’t left the country. People spoke about riding the train to Paris, or some interesting aspect of Delhi. My brain, sent in to overdrive because of the great conversation, began to draw up facts of these places.
If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you know that my favorite website is Wikipedia (meta!). I prefer to link heavily to subjects that I talk about, because I want there to be one less step for you to find out everything people agree on about a given topic. It is a part of my process.
However, today I felt melancholy. I didn’t think of myself as a bad person, which is my normal neurosis (again, another story). I just felt slightly left out. I didn’t want to have others presume I was well-traveled, it felt superficial.
I tell myself that I am American in geography, but internet in nationality. I hope that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can see that the causes I take up, concerning autonomy, privacy and expression, are partially because I believe they are very important (and I really do: use public key encryption, and support the EFF and Creative Commons!). But there is something more there: I need them to mean something. The internet is more than just a network of aggregated and syndicated information for me to digest. It is an additional sensory organ. It is the literal, if also digital, net that I cast out into the world to make sense of it.
The positive note of this is that I have a whole lot of time to travel. Tonight I felt a person, that I helped create, kick and stretch with unbelievable strength from within a person I am in love with. Some people say our lives will never be our own again, as if a warning that we should prepare to be bored for the next 18+ years.
I reject that. For all kinds of reasons. But most of all, I think that while it may have been unfortunate that I didn’t get to travel when I was younger, I also have different tastes, and that is all that matters, in any given moment. And I will travel this little planet of ours with a person who will be just as amazed as I am by all the wondrous things in it. Also, Emma will be there.