“I’m going to travel 300 days with 0 money. I’ll follow the
sun. I don’t want to have money coming in or going out,” she
announced proudly.
It’s easy to think of all the obvious ways that staying in
unfamiliar cities on strangers’ sofas for an entire year might not
work out well, but she was unconcerned. My first thought was to
say “be careful,” but no one is careless on purpose – are they? The
words jumped out before I had a chance to pull them back.
“Definitely the first thing everybody always says to me is,
‘Be careful,’” she sighed. “As if I don’t know I have to be careful. As if
I’m some sort of naı ̈ve young girl who’s just going to pack her bags
and go and hope everybody’s going to be happy and friendly. I know
there’s a lot of danger with it, but that’s the thing I love the most.”
Where is she looking forward to going? Buenos Aires for
sure. And then there’s Ubatuba, (between Rio de Janeiro and Sao
Paulo).
“Apparently that’s a little village somewhere in the rain
forest, and a guy, he texted me on CouchSurfing and said, ‘Hey,
I saw your project. Maybe you want to come here and explore my
point of view of the local life here, because it’s really wonderful.’
I’m like, ‘Hell, yeah.’”
I asked her about Disney World. She frowned, “Not Disney
World. No, definitely not.”~
One of the last things I hope for when I’m traveling is that there will
be danger. But it’s no surprise that the White Rabbit, like other
people with high sensation-seeking personalities, who thrive
in situations that others might find scary or overstimulating, seek
out traveling experiences that include the thrill of the unknown. As
this chapter illustrates, high sensation-seeking personalities influ-
ence a person’s everyday habits in all sorts of ways, including the
way one thinks, eats, spends leisure time, socializes, and yes, tra-
vels – and these habits come with both benefits and pitfalls.Funny You Should Ask
I’m about to do something every comedian, even the youngest
knock-knock joke novice will tell you never to do – explain a joke.
But this isn’t just any joke, this joke has been calculated to be the
“Funniest Joke in the World.” Not necessarily a joke that YOU will49 / The Everyday Life of a High Sensation-SeekerDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:13, subject to the Cambridge