A Beginner's Guide to Gridskipping
Blogs define the undefinable -- that's why they're blogs and not logs or frogs. Monsieur, you might ask, mais, qu'est-ce que c'est le gridskipping? Indeed, all these years and nobody's had the balls to just ask. Is it because Gridskipper is a loan word that only cool, edumacated people know and practice, or is it because just like the word zeitgeist, gridskipping is nothing more than a zeitgeist for a generation of jaded travelers? Someday, when Martian archeologists are dusting nuclear fallout dust from our petrified servers and piecing together the human spirit for a touching museum exhibit on Earth people, they just may come upon these motheaten annals of travel debauchery and wonder, as we sometimes do, just what this was all about. In their search for real answers, the future bubble-helmeted historians might sift through the Rosetta stone that is Wikipedia, or maybe even a real dictionary. But for the sake of them and future generations of Chinese people, let me lay it out for you in this handy-dandy time capsule format. Forgive me for just cutting and pasting stuff from off the net, but that's all that writers are good for these days.
gridskip v. (gridskipped, gridskipping) 1. to cross boundaries, imaginary and real, as well as measures of distance on a grid, notably lines of latitude and longitude. 2. [figurative] to travel so casually that the experience of transcontinental goings and comings can only be fully annotated online 3 a. the irony of traveling without the realization that one is traveling (e.g. "The Wal-Mart in Jackson Heights was out of pizza pockets, so I drove to the one in Greenland"); also b., the irony of not traveling but having the sense of traveling (e.g. "In one single whiff, the all-you-can eat buffet below my building alighted my taste buds to the angled streets of Karachi"). 4.the post-postmodern way to travel 5. to cross a line, to make a point that lacks any and all innuendo. [from the Old French gridiron and the English boy's name Skip]
gridskipper n. 1. one who skips grids, or gridskips. 2. cool people who travel the world without guidebooks. 3. Young adults who as children found meaning in the passive-aggressive geography lessons painted on the tetherball courts of their school playground; who, during physical education classes, thought "Hey, I'm crossing the Himalayas" and who also noted the gross misrepresentation of Papua New Guinea versus South America in said asphalt murals. 4. [Slang Gr. Brit. offensive] A person with unhealthy passions for baby animals and/or strippers.
In short, Gridskipping is:
- Putting your own damn chocolate on the pillow, sometimes smearing it in real good so that it looks like some unsightly stain.
- Buying used postcards.
- Therapeutic massage practiced by a professional
- Comparing the best french fries in Washington, DC with those in Los Angeles
- Touring prisons
- Staying faithful
- Civil disobedience
- Cutting-edge travel journalism
- Good pastry
- Polar bears
- Running with the bulls
- Doing drugs
- Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
- Moleskine products, esp. the fill-in-the-blank kind
- Photoshopping your sunsets and landscapes
- Fashion
- The New York Times
- Georgetown
- Eating, Praying, or Loving. Just drinking.
- Orlando, Florida
- Bespoke anything, except when it is
Gridskipping is NOT:
Feel free to chime in, while you still can.
