Checking in – I’m a bit disappointed that I haven’t posted anything in nearly three weeks, but, as might be expected, it has been a very full (and mostly very awesome) few weeks. Will make this one a bit long to compensate :). Just uploaded a bunch of new photos on Facebook too.

Barcelona’s Sonar Festival and Off-Sonar parties were exceptionally great, as was the company I kept during that week – highlights were the tINI & the Gang beach party with Matt & Marco, enjoying the only “American” DJ set of the month from Ryan Hemsworth after lots of European music, Plastikman’s world premiere of new album with crazy light structure (pictured below), spontaneously deciding to go to the night festival on Saturday with Gonzalo and crew (thank you for being so great and welcoming!!) with really awesome sets from James Murphy, Lykke Li and Rudimental among others, and of course closing things down with Lee Burridge’s All Day I Dream pool party on Sunday evening – I was completely wiped out by that point but naturally Lee & Co kept me moving for hours.

Last week I had the rare pleasure of 4 full days with some of my very, very best friends, Jordan, Jodi, Josh V and Jemima. We had a few travel setbacks but spent all of it loving each other greatly, having amazing thoughtful conversation, and generally having a great mix of adventure and chilling out. There is a lot I could say about the quality of this community and how grateful I am to be a part of it, but I will save it. Highlights though would be biking around Paris (even though I hate biking), frisbee with 100 little French kids in the Rodin sculpture garden, sangria and guacamole on the beach, getting our entire badminton set (shuttlecock and both rackets) stuck in a tree, and chilling late night at the Triumph Arch park in Barcelona. It was also really fun to play tour guide and resident expert for my friends in Barcelona after my last couple weeks in the city.

This past Sunday I had a reallllllllly crappy experience with Vueling Airlines, where they basically cancelled my ticket without telling me just before boarding and then were completely unapologetic about it, making me feel very devalued and also resulting in 7 hours in the airport with nothing to show for it. I was pretty upset about it for an hour or two. But of course, as might be expected, it turned out to be a great thing in the end once I calmed down and self-soothed a bit with a really long walk and good tunes – the extra day in Barcelona helped me decompress a bit more, find a great living arrangement in my next stop (Ibiza) that I would’ve missed otherwise, and experience the Night of Sant Joan in Barcelona, which is basically this crazy festival celebrating Solstice + John the Baptist’s birthday. How do they celebrate this? Pretty much exactly how you might expect – selling a ton of fireworks (from poppers up to professional grade rockets) to anyone and everyone including little kids, setting bonfires on the beach, and then everyone getting drunk and partying on the beach and in all the public squares while said fireworks are launched in all directions (more often than not by little kids) at a rate of several times per minute at a minimum, all night long. I’m sure John the Baptist is super stoked about all of this, wherever he is. I ended up falling a little bit into “spectator mode” for this which was a little disappointing, but so it goes, and the energy was really awesome to absorb.

Finally, I spent the last 3 days in Ibiza, which (at least as far as I can tell) seems to be exactly the sort of fantastical paradise place I imagined it might be, although the clubs are by far the most expensive I have ever been to (after euro->dollar conversion, something like 2x more than NYC in terms of cover and drinks). The island is great to explore, the beaches are INCREDIBLE, the people are friendly and of course the music is ridiculous and everywhere. Sa Trinxha on Las Salinas beach might be one of my new favorite places on earth, as it combines all 4 of the above things. I did waaaaaay too much walking so only danced about 10-12 hours the 3 days I was there, but really enjoyed seeing some of the less obvious parts of the island that I was able to explore as a result, so not mad. The first night I went to one of the couple mega clubs (Amnesia), and the only thing I can really compare it to is one of the burning man mega-stages on the corner – e.g. Opulent Temple 2012 or similar. Just ridiculous effects and scale. It ended up being a great night, because several of the DJs I didn’t care that much to see didn’t show up, so Eats Everything (who I was most excited about and have never heard spin before) laid down a breathtaking four hour set, and I was basically just glued in one place enjoying it for the duration. So good!!!

And now, I am arriving in Berlin for the weekend, to stay with Marco that I met during Sonar. Very stoked for this!! And also, getting excited to decompress a bit in Paris and head back to the good ole USA this coming Thursday and see some lovelies that I have not seen in what feels like forever.

I have been doing a lot of reading, thinking, and some writing over the last few weeks, as I alluded on facebook most of the writing has been fairly personal in nature and so may not make its way onto this blog. But I will share a few of the observations I have come to:

As some know, two summers ago was a fairly big turning point in my personal life and development that has shaped a lot of my experiences and interactions since then, including kicking off the evolution of my friend circle that has been a very definitive part of the last 20-odd months. There are some areas where I’ve grown a lot out of this in terms of prioritizing my focus on much healthier things, having more confidence in myself, treating others better and generally being more satisfied with my life. But there are some other ways where I am still not very self relient and can put more burden on those around me than I would like. Particularly as I get really close to people (e.g. immediate family, couple closest friends, or someone I am dating) this can still lead to more neediness and less trust on my end than I generally display in life. I want to get better about this.

Along similar lines, I have seen affirmed that I am very much a loner (Dad would say “lone wolf”, hah) in many situations, despite evidence to the contrary in much of my daily life in Seattle. I am pretty okay with this, although I think there are some elements that are a natural, healthy part of who I am to be embraced, and other elements that may be fear/anxiety based. Still trying to tease those apart.

I HAVE noticed that I’ve been way more healthy, deeply thoughtful, and in some ways more satisfied (certainly in others less so) while alone on the road than I was 6 months ago while working full time. In addition to reading a ton (which is awesome), I can concretely say that I feel physically better than I have in a long time and I think have managed to get non-trivially more fit in the past month – or at least that is my perception. My working theory is that this is related to much more time on my feet, wandering, dancing, exploring, combined with a much healthier relationship with food – just eating when I am hungry, eating less and better, rather than mixing elements of reward in with food and making eating choices while tired at the end of the day. All of this really reinforces my existing desire to find situations in the future where I can get by on significantly less weekly hours of work – on the order of 20-25 instead of 40-50 I was doing over the last few years – in order to try and continue this trend. I am going to continue doing some major research on this when I get back, but of course this goes back to one of my favorite essays of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell’s, “In Praise of Idleness”. Also thought about this some in the context of this solid (if a bit hyperbolic in some of the language) essay that popped up on my feed this week (hat tip Dustin Wong).

I’ve been reading Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” on the history and nature of fiscal and social inequality, which is excellent. And I found it really interesting that his conclusions are very similar to those of Ramez Naam in “The Infinite Resource” (my favorite book I’ve read this year, probably in the past couple years). The topics are similar, what I would contend are the two greatest barriers to the future health, wealth and happiness of our children and grandchildren – the deep problems of continued fossil fuel consumption (climate change and the inevitable energy crunch) in Naam’s case, and the growing gap between the rich and everyone else in Piketty’s. In both cases, the fundamental argument is that capitalism provides a lot of wonderful benefits as a method to organize society, but in the long run market forces also encourage long-term very destructive behavior that can be very rational from the perspective of the self-interested individual looking at the short/medium term (e.g., the shareholders of every major corporation). Both authors surveyed the landscape and concluded that acting inside the system has a relatively low likelihood of profound effect, and the ideal solution for both problems is tax reform – progressive capital tax and a carbon dividend, respectively. It seems likely that this reform will happen in the next hundred years or so, although whether through legislation or public uprising is unclear and probably depends on our generation. What is the most effective path for us, as educated and empowered individuals, to make such tax reform a reality? I need to think and research more on this topic…

And in closing, I’ll refer to this excellent letter by a 22-year old Hunter S Thompson that I read yesterday (hat tip Xan Lucero) and really follows the spirit of a lot of my trajectory of the last several months – affirming that I feel like I am on the right path! And very interestingly, also referencing Sartre’s Being and Nothingness which was the subject of my last post. If I am thinking along the same lines as HST than I must be doing something right :).

-E

Music for this post: This mix by Eats Everything, who had maybe my favorite DJ set of the trip thus far (and of course is generally a badass dude).