An Open Invitation

I have two fixed plans.

Fixed Plan the First: On May 28, I will depart from Jakarta and fly to Delhi for the high school graduation of Brother #1, a.k.a. Hairlessmano.

Fixed Plan the Second: On June 28, I will depart from Singapore and fly, through Tokyo, to San Francisco.

The more perceptive among you may have furiously calculated dates in your heads and
noticed that these two Fixed Plans are exactly a month apart. These same perspicacious folks may then have concluded that I have no Fixed Plans for that month, which is, more or less, June.

Correct! I will go to graduation, of course, which I will hopefully enjoy more than my own high school graduation, where I started and finished Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray during the course of the ceremony, and I will probably spend a few days pretending to help my family pack up and move, and my mom's throwing around some crazy talk about hiking in Nepal, but nothing is set in stone.

So here is where you all, dear readers, can help. I would like, during that time, to travel Southeast Asia. I have a tentative agreement to go with SWMNB(B)N, but since I have family obligations first, things may not quite work out. While I'm quite brave/stupid enough to take on a solo tour of Southeast Asia, I, like misery, would love company. So, if anyone is free this June, and has a couple thousand dollars they'd like to spend riding crowded buses, sleeping in dirty, dilapidated homestays, and emptying the contents of their intestines over squat toilets, please, come join me! (Oh, and we might also see some ancient temples, interesting cultures, and beautiful scenery. But surely all that is just the icing on the Lonely Planet-style travel cake.) The places on my list, so far, are Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, but I'm entirely open to suggestions.

If you're interested, you can contact me at any of my four active email addresses you happen to know. Or you could message me through Facebook or BB, or you could post a comment on this blog, or you could call me, if you, like half the male population of Indonesia, have my cell phone number and care to use it. I guess you could also try sending a message in a bottle, or lighting flares, or designing a semaphore or Morse code message, but I can't guarantee those will be successful. This offer is not limited to those I know in real life, although all those Egyptians who have reached my blog by Googling "swingers AND homestays" are, sad to say, exempt from this invitation. I will also require some sort of reassurance that you are not a) certifiably insane, b) afflicted with any contagious diseases, c) flat broke and expecting me to pay for souvenirs, or d) incredibly irritating. These aren't tough criteria to meet, I don't think, so please! Come join me in Southeast Asia! Your intestines will never be the same again.