The Act of Being Prolix: What the Hell, Another Travel Blog? Yeah, Like We Don't Have Enough of Those

It is a fact: travel writing is one of the most sought-after, but rarely realized, glamorous professions. Getting paid to travel to foreign and exotic places and then merely have to retell in detail all the great times you had in these places, thereby implying that everyone else's lives suck because they are not nearly as glamorous or awesome enough to get this kind of gig and instead have to resort to looking at those generic, "this is paradise" tropical island posters in their work cubicles with sad, mournful faces, not able to fully believe that such a place could exist, much less get paid to visit there? The overwhelming despondency accompanying such a realization would drive such a person to slit their wrists long before they even realize that the previous sentence was one fat run-on sentence.
The truth is, the fantasy of travel-writing hardly matches up to the reality. Most people have to pay for their own travels while maintaining a job that pays the bills (which are the modern, more numerous version equivalent of fascist dictators) and then after painstakingly sorting all their introspective, artistically driven photographs of "Buddha statue: cool" into folders sorted by day and location, will have to write up an exhausting recount of every stone touched and every temple visited, proofread it (loosely) and then send it off to a travel publication that gets a thousand of the same entries every day. Is it of little wonder, then, that most people stick to the posters and hoard the National Geographic novels instead?
With the age of the internet, photo sharing and social networking sites have made "amateur" travel writing more prominent, and where people feel inadequate when their verbose travelogues are refused for professional printing, they feel vindicated when they have the power to post all their soul-searching ramblings with a blog. And dear god... here's another one.
So why prolix? First of all, what the hell does it mean? Really, I just wanted a travel blog that was separate from my personal one. Where I could organize all my travel notes and hopefully finish the ones I started (ha! I'm hilarious sometimes). I had to come up with a great name, of course. A literary name. An original name. I'm very concerned about being original. I hate cliches, so there was NO WAY I could have the word "wanderlust" in the title (though I had to seriously restrain myself, really. "It fits me so well!" I would exclaim. "I'm a Sagittarius, for goodness sakes!" So, in my desperation, I even tried to run it through babelfish to see what it would be in German. It translated as "Wanderlust." It was like the English language was mocking me. LET ME USE MY CLICHES WHEN I WANT TO, GAWD).
So what I came to realize was, that in any real publication, travelogues are short and sweet, usually containing an asinine list to appeal to ADD readers, such as "Top 10 Bier Gardens in Munich!" or "10 tourist blunders to avoid!". Rarely are they in first person - they have to appeal to a wider demographic, so you're likely to not be able to go on in detail about hard-hitting issues like cultural taboos or social strife. Conciseness is key, and I've always found that I was not very good at being concise. Not unless I have to be. In all my professional writing, I have to mince words like it's the depression and words are rationed. I can do it, and my writing is nearly always better for it, but I don't like doing it. I like talking. It's fun.

BOOBS.

That was to see if you were still reading. Probably not, but hey, I have to check. So anyway, I simply went to www.rhymezone.com and looked up the antonym for concise and "prolix" was pretty much the only suitable result. Perfect. I slapped it on my blog name and we're good to go. So you won't find minced words. You may find yourself reading forever, but I guarantee it will be interesting. Or at least, opinionated. And in case normal words fail, SAYING THINGS IN CAPS NEVER FAILS TO DRAW ATTENTION. HAHA!

So sit back, relax, and take it all in. This is not Reader's Digest. This is Prolix, BITCHEZ.*


*I'm sorry, I try to speak rap sometimes. I hate most gangsta rap, except Tupac Shakur, whom I absolutely adore, like he's a cute wandering puppy. No really, I love him. Oh and Biggie. And Snoop sometimes. Ok, old school gangsta is cool. Like when they were really killing people and shit. The authentic stuff. Not wusses like 'fitty-cent'. Oh yeah. I went there.