ianp622

For some reason a porn star getting to 19 without having a girlfriend makes me feel better about myself.

You focused on the accuracy of media reporting, but not the morality of this vulture-like descent upon and continuous preoccupation with a tragedy such as this one, and the glorification of murderers by constantly showing their faces and making up stories about their life - thus providing an incentive for future killers. They will get to be famous!

The whole trip lasted two weeks. We start out in Georgetown, the capital city, then take a plane out to an ecolodge and stay there for a day before we head into the jungle. Then five days at a cozy campsite (some shelters already built, holes in the ground, etc.), then move to another campsite that isn't as developed and stay there five days before the Isolation phase. Then we go back to the ecolodge for a night, take a stop at Kaieteur falls, and finally go back to Georgetown to get hammered (I've never drunk so much in my life).

There were two significant things I learned. First, I learned that I could survive on my own in the wilderness and that I wasn't entirely dependent on the niceties of everyday living. Second, I realized that living in a first-world society means a diffusion of responsibility for our lives. When you're in the jungle, being lazy gets severely punished. Being reckless, even more so. Back home, everything is so easily available that when I first got back I felt useless. Everything was basically a trip to a store away, and my entire life was set up so that I had to do as little work as possible. You begin to wonder what your purpose is, if you don't even have to make sure you survive. So I guess I had a bit of an existential crisis, but it really just highlighted the fact that in a society such as ours, self-actualization is vital and is almost expected given that we have our basic needs taken care of.

The survival things are nice to know, but I don't know if I'll ever really need to use most of them. I think what's more important is the mental fortitude I gained (in some aspects - I am still rather sensitive emotionally) and the confidence that I could survive in a similar situation.

A large part of my original motivation for doing a course with an isolation period was to find out if I could live my life alone, by facing something difficult with no one else in sight. I had recently been let down by someone I felt close to, and felt like if I could do this, then I'd be stronger and less reliant on others. It helped, but I have more recently found that loneliness is never something you can truly conquer. Thinking that you are self-sufficient is never really true, in my experience, and I think it's important to think about the people that have supported you and continue to.

When you're walking around at night with your headlamp, you always see a whole bunch of blue shiny specks everywhere. Each pair of those is a spider :)

But they don't make a habit of crawling over you. I never touched one while I was there.

I uploaded this picture just for you: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/CUf6-wMHDuAJ-FX6ADN4ynzmZav5JYm-eM3JQmeiHiY?feat=directlink

Here's another one - a little scarier, so maybe you shouldn't click it. I happen to like spiders. But it's really okay to go, as long as you don't stick your hand in any dark places. https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/7X5d49tXHsgHeFS1OwUtTnzmZav5JYm-eM3JQmeiHiY?feat=directlink

They flick sharp hairs in your eyes.