Porn is quite easy and safe to attack because it can be kind of sloppily applied into a number of undesirable areas. There are the anti-porn feminists (of course, there are also pro-porn feminists), concerned parents, religious concerns, and various other crusades against deviant social mores. I say deviant, and I mean it, because the society I see every day still has the ridiculous inability to approach sexual behavior as the complex world that it is. My generation is, thankfully, seemingly freer than our predecessors, a fact continuously bemoaned by the New York Times as a destructive hookup generation incapable of making meaningful sexual relations and instead hellbent on—gasp—having fun. Of course, my generation isn’t just the hookup generation enabled by myriad apps that allow us to conjure a fuck with the flick of a finger. We’re also the first to have an almost continual saturation of porn available throughout our formative years.
Read MoreI prefer not to be the kind of traveler who has a detailed itinerary for every place that he visits, or even necessarily any place at all. It is my guaranteed movement from this place to the next that guarantees any type of action within the present. I find this gives me enough spontaneity to enjoy my current locale and generally reduces the stress that can make a return from some vacations a vacation in itself. Relaxed enjoyment of a place is my goal, not a collection of sites seen.
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I'll never be able to forget the Pantheon, for as long as I live. And I'll never want to. I can't number the times I've been to that building. I used to stop in for 2 seconds before going to the paninoteca next door for a quick lunch on the fountain steps. My friends and I used to meet up at that fountain before nights out. I remember one, but don't remember which one time, walking into the middle and thinking how incredible it was that this space—not just these materials, but the area bounded within them—had seen so much of history. Hadrian stepped on this pavement. Brunelleschi did. Michelangelo did. Who knows who else did?
And thus my career as an art historian was born.
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If you had told the awkward, socially-anxious 14-year-old that spent Forensics trips listening to the Postal Service on his iPod that he'd be seeing them in Paris 9 years later on the first left of a 3 month trip that would take him across Europe for the fourth time to spend 2 months on an archaeological dig in Turkey, I don't think there's a chance that he would have believed that that was my future.
But here I am.
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