Can’t hurt to share this website, since so much entrepreneurial advice I read could be boiled down to that.

A great new study was recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about the relationship between living abroad and creativity. There’s now abundant evidence to add to what generations of expats have known all along: living in a foreign environment, or in a multicultural experience, mitigates creativity. Interestingly, this increased creativity doesn’t hold true for people who had spent time traveling abroad, just for those who had lived abroad. The level of cultural immersion, not the length of time spent abroad, emerged as a key factor determining creativity.

Living abroad, in my experience, is an exercise in 24-hour creative problem-solving. The daily activities of going to the bank or eating at a friend’s house, while time-consuming, become repeated to the point of automation. In contrast, living abroad–

-makes you break down each activity and rework unmanageable steps
-prompts you to navigate cultural or linguistic unknowns on a regular basis; try talking to the guy at the hardware store when you’ve completely forgotten the name of what you’re looking for
-relax your ideas of functional fixedness, wherein you are only able to conceptualize things according to one set of norms
-lets you pretty much second-guess everything you do the entire time, which in turn prompts different ideas about how to walk, eat, etc.

While it’s certainly true that the study may have been an examination of correlation and not causation–the kind of person who would live abroad may have already been more open to new experiences–but even priming the experience of living abroad raised the participants’ creativity level. My theory that living abroad is cognitive calisthenics still stands.

On my trip Bogotá last month, I brought some heavy duty reading material with me demonstrating my general lack of ambition regarding the Spanish language:  Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. “Are you going to review that?” I was asked, jokingly, as though anyone in the Spanish-speaking world had to be told about Harry Potter.
“Have you read it in English?” someone asked me.
“No.”
“You could read that, and the English version, and then compare the two.”
Blank stares.
“No, I’m just kidding, that would be dumb. Unless there’s a plot difference.”
“Yeah,” I joked. “In the Latin American version, Harry gets a mullet and then dies at the end.”

Oh, but there are cultural differences when some pieces of pop culture get translated. Who knew? Originally appearing in Great Britain, the TV show The Office now has a host of international spin-offs in the U.S., France, Germany, Quebec, and Chile. Yes, I knew that, but the cross-cultural comparisons seem starker than previously pointed out, possibly because the stories have since been given time to develop.

Looking at a Google translation of the German version’s Wikipedia page–admittedly not the best source, but it’ll do until someone wants to pay me to find out–reveals one of the major characters missing from the U.S. version:

Erika Burstedt is due to its corpulent exterior is a popular target of jokes Strombergs. She is competent and a good soul, like on the occasional jokes against Berthold laughs. For many years, with an unfaithful husband, married, is to a flirtation with employees not averse. Erika is a member of the SPD and the trade union and calls to their superiors Stromberg, of which it often was dismissed, again and again of their rights as a worker one. At the end of the third season Erika died from the effects of a heart attack in hospital.

Yes, a woman conscious of workers’ rights with an unfaithful husband dying of a heart attack. Much more like it.

“One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.” -Sir Richard Burton

After spending several consecutive months in Buenos Aires and then about a week in Bogotá, I had a craving for silence and repeated the perennial traveler’s slogan–I just wanted to get away from it all. And so, a hostel owner in Medellín recommended that I go to Santa Cruz de Mompox, also commonly known as Mompos, a colonial town of 20,000 that’s liminal in every sense of the word. Getting there from Medellín required getting a bus to Magangué, a ferry, a taxi, a canoe, and yet another car. The bridge had fallen out a month prior (“Just sunk slowly, like a movie in slow motion,” said a few locals), adding a few extra legs to the journey, each involving someone grabbing my backpack and throwing it into the next form of transportation before asking me for money.

“I could have done that.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“I’ve already got it—”

It’s better to just pretend like you don’t know Spanish and grab your own bag before you duck through the crowd to find a taxi headed towards Mompox. Of course, once I got there, the atmosphere was what you might call “zen.”

This is a place that’s known for–wait for it–its artisan rocking chairs. It’s as if Mark Twain, Gabriel García Márquez, and Italo Calvino had invented the picture perfect sleepy town that’s both right in the middle of Latin America and fully disconnected from this world. Mompox figured prominently in The General in His Labyrinth, the historical novel by García Márquez about Simón Bolívar. Remnants of Bolívar, who assembled an army of 400 men from Mompox to defeat the Spanish in Venezuela, are all over town: “If to Caracas I owe my life, then to Mompox I owe my glory.”

I spent five days wandering around Mompox, getting lost, sleeping in the hammock at the Casa Amarilla, and straining to imagine a time when the people there moved quickly enough to engage in a war. Like anywhere in the world, it’s far from perfect: the mosquitoes at night were particularly determined to wage war with my skin. Then there was the humidity. And the heat. I’d been reduced to a sort of sashaying saunter by the end of my stay.

Being able to enjoy whatever it is about a place that makes it unique, whether we’re in Mompox for the architecture and a getaway or in Paris for a conference: that’s why we travel. But no place on earth is perfect, and the second the honeymoon begins to fade and our shins have been transformed to puffy, blood-scratched mosquito motels, we get to leave. That, too, is why we travel. We get the good parts, and we get to leave before any of the bad parts sink in. Having hosted my fair share of friends in Buenos Aires since moving there, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the naive joy of being a tourist completely removed from their home. Everything seems wonderful (“Yes, I’m dehydrated, unsafe on this a roof…. I don’t know who any of you are, and I may have gotten my passport stolen, but I’m in the South Pacific!!!“) because you’re in the honeymoon stage. Always.

You think: stuff is cheap! My dollars buy many of this other type of currency! And even though the Lonely Planet may have mentioned something about a ‘country in conflict’ in its section on history, well, what country isn’t in conflict? No one is going out of their way to hear a grim economic ramble about the real cost of living there. You see a couple walking slowly, in colorful clothes, and think that they know about the good life. These are a people who can slow down and enjoy each minute. You don’t think to go up to them, where you may discover that his foot is infected, her shoes are too tight and they’ve forgotten where they’re going.

When we travel, we get the raw, direct experience without any of the hang-ups that accompany knowing something well. No one I cared about deeply in Mompox betrayed me. I never got in a fight with a friend or had my ego crushed in front of people I had to live with forever. I never had to see anyone I loved there go through a difficult time, or hear from the widows of the men who followed Bolívar into Venezuela. I just heard the part of the town’s history worth repeating.

As a part of my ongoing, seemingly never-ending book proposal, I was doing more research today on tourism. (Sometimes “research” can mean “reading your email.”)

According to the esteemed Travel Agent Central, “Mental Health Tourism could be the new niche.” As Mark Rogers writes:

The Bangkok Post is reporting on the contents of a paper presented by Japanese researchers at the Asia Pacific Tourism Association annual conference held last week in Bangkok on mental health tourism. This form of tourism will primarily target city-folk suffering from depression and stress, largely as a result of spending too many hours staring at computer screens.

Obviously, vacations and relaxation at destination spas or practicing a favorite activity go a long way toward reducing stress. Mental health tourism takes de-stressing a step further, although it’s not targeted toward the severely ill. Instead, it will help those who are feeling stressed.

And now, for the coup de grâce:

Mental health tourism will involve the activation of all five senses to restore the imbalance caused by too many hours interacting with your computer.

Let me get this straight: mental health tourism involves using your senses. (How novel!) But just how remains unclear, as the article adds that “further studies” are being conducted to ascertain exactly what would be needed to obtain the maximum benefits of this.

So what is mental health tourism: a trip on a cruise hosted by John Mayer? That might give some people a rash.

First of all, if we’re talking about de-stressing, all tourism can be considered mental health tourism. Tourism implies freedom from obligation and a choice of one’s destinations and activities for an extended period of time. (I’d argue that visiting your in-laws, reunions, and crap like that does not count as pure leisure, tourism or vacation, since it’s motivated primarily by obligation.)

Secondly, this fragmented, all-or-nothing attitude is precisely what’s wrong with so many people’s perceptions of vacations or traveling in the first place. Why would one trip you’re fully choosing be considered a “mental health” trip over another–because your travel agent or the people at the hotel said so? The benefits you get from that would be from the placebo effect, people. But it works the other way, too.

Say you’re stressed but don’t have enough money to go on a “mental health vacation.” The very existence of such an asinine trend might make those people feel like their own vacations just aren’t cutting it. You know the drill: you buy a blue pen online, and five seconds later you see a pack of “Blue Pens Made for Awesome People Who Read Random Blogs” going for ten cents less. Now you’re thinking, “that’s the pen I should have bought! Mine suck!” Creating the perception that one choice is superior to another is called asymmetric dominance, a marketing and psychology trick that hooks people into buying.

Japanese researchers aside, one idea is to step away from the computer on a daily basis. And on the weekends, take two-day respites. Humans are sort of like the opposite of cell phones: we must go unplugged for an extended period of time to charge up and get restored. Vacations can provide health benefits, but because gas prices have made driving, boating and flying so much more expensive, they can also be an added source of stress. (Which would be why some people just wouldn’t choose them in the first place.)

What’s lost in the ‘is traveling a right?’ discussion is the idea that it’s a luxury not everyone can afford. For every American who’s having a hard time commuting from their house to their job right now, there are countless people around the world who could never even pay for a car in the first place, let alone a vacation around the world. But lots of people who don’t have money to travel at all are just fine. Instead of segmenting their “play” or “fun” time into bite-sized bits a few times a year, they know that the key is to prevent burnout on a daily basis. Take it easy, gringos. Even if your job was taste-testing donuts, only allowing yourself to rest for two weeks a year—while feeling tense and on-the-go the other 50 weeks—would never be enough.

I did an article on music recommendation a while back, and have been reading a lot about the subject lately for another article. One thing that always bothered me about looking at someone’s listening history–a list of songs they’ve listened to, and how many times they’ve listed to each one–is that you have no idea about the timing.

LastGraph, creates timelines and nice graphs that chart your listening trajectory. This way, you can see musical obsessions that have come and gone. Even though two people might have Cut Copy on their list, one might have just discovered them while another person stopped listening to them a year ago.

Here’s what I’ve been listening to for the past two months:

Compare that to the chart:

Yes, much better!

Anyway, apparently I’m really lazy busy studying Spanish lately, because I’ve been fairly obsessed with graphs and charts. Maybe a visual culture is making me dumb in some ways, but if it can convey better information in less time, I don’t see what the problem is. My favorite site is Wordle, which takes any chunk of text you have and converts it into a tag cloud; the more frequently a word appears, the larger it is. (They do you the favor of removing common words, like articles.) Here’s what my book proposal looks like thus far:

Lastly, there’s a public art project that draws heavily on visualization that I’m quite fond of, called We Feel Fine. It’s amazing how a few words can make you feel less lonely.

I decided to work a little bit on my book proposal today, which is going to look at vacation and traveling and every day life sorts of things. It’s based partly on an article I wrote for an upcoming issue of Budget Travel. In researching a bit, I read this ridiculous article today in Forbes, “How Authentic is Your Vacation?” It describes a woman who typically spends between $5,000-$8,000 for authentic experiences, like the ability–

to marvel at the Sistine Chapel for a full hour before the doors opened to the general public. Another time, she watched a Bengal tiger–a notoriously elusive animal–sleep for a half-hour while touring India’s Ranthambhore National Park by jeep. Most recently, on a trip to Syria in November, she spotted a man selling fresh flat bread.

Wow–a man selling fresh flat bread? That’s definitely something you can only see for $8,000!

I’m also heartened to know that there are independent management consultants in the world who still have the ability to go to national parks and see wildlife. But I find it hard to believe that getting to a sightseeing spot before other tourists makes your visit more authentic. You’re seeing the same famous crap as the other people with fanny packs you’re making fun of–you’re just getting there an hour ahead of them, lady. In fact, you’re participating in the very definition of artificiality that’s being railed against in the same article: “They also harshly judge experiences that seem fake or contrived.”

So how is arranging a visit to a tourist spot earlier than other tourists not contrived? How is that not fake or created just for your benefit? In nearly every bit of tourism or travel literature that I’ve read for my proposal, the art of traveling authentically, or the act of traveling itself, seems on the edge of perpetual extinction. And unsurprisingly, the tourism industry (occasionally billing itself, to everyone’s horror, the “experience industry,” as if experiences only count when your mother has a hard time calculating the time zone difference separating you) finds a new way to bill foreign experiences as authentic, thus raising the financial standard for what counts as authentic. It’s only authentic if only a few people can afford it; everything else in the world is just a tourist trap.

This has been the tourism industry’s goal since the beginning, when the goal was to go where you couldn’t see others of your socio-economic class, and to push the boundaries of danger while doing so in relative style or comfort. Initially this just had a geographical dimension, but now it’s imperative to add layers of history or politics to parse more meaning. At the end of the article the practice of touring slums in Mumbai, India is detailed, because poverty is “real.”

Of course, this is only an inexpensive way to experience authenticity if you don’t factor in the plane ticket. Would these people pay $10 to take a guided tour of the ghetto in their own city? I’d assume not. I bet they’d say that they’ve already been there and already know what it’s like, or that it’s not interesting to them. But what could be more interesting than something so close to you, so important to your everyday life, that you know absolutely nothing about? Apparently, for these people, it’s the ability to display your wealth and world savvy. A photo of you in a slum in India is a notch in your belt, but a photo of you in a slum in your own neighborhood is just confusing.

At the end of the article, the management consultant advises:

“You have to stop acting like a tourist,” she says. “We’re just here as a guest.”

Diane Haubner, do you really want to stop acting like a tourist? Put down your credit card and frequent flyer miles. Go to the slums in your own city. (To be fair, this is mentioned as a ‘thorny issue,’ but never examined.) Give them the money you would have spent on the plane ticket. Don’t be a wealthy dipshit; just be a good guest in your own backyard. Unless you’re on lots of peyote, isn’t it all real?

In the first installment of “Cultural Miscellany,” I present a true work of surrealism:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXT2E9Ccc8A]

About seven years ago, a friend of mine whose brother was a producer at a cable news channel told me about one of the jobs they had interns do: prepare footage of celebrity obituaries before the celebrities had actually died. Older and more important celebrities got priority. (He noted that there were, oddly, no preparations for Ringo Starr.)

I’d forgotten all about this until earlier this year, when I heard a rumor that Britney Spears’ obituary had already been written by the Associated Press. Just recently, I found this great story by the obits editor of the Washington Post, which tells the story of Joseph Yeardley “J.Y.” Smith. Although Smith died in 2006, he filed plenty of “advanced obituaries” and is still getting his name in the Post on occasion.

Much more disturbing to me than the Britney Spears fiasco was finding the Wikinews page of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s obituary, still in the works. And, at least on Wikinews, obituaries aren’t the only bit of “prepared news.” The list of “Prepared stories” reads like a list of stories from parallel universes:

-Flash floods hit mainland Britain
-Microsoft’s social network platform goes Live

And one from the “They can go ahead and publish this” department: “Global food crisis causes unrest.”