Seven months ago, I decided to start a blog.

I had to do something about my methamphetamine caliber addiction to travel, airplanes, airlines, and airports. I was working my first job out of college, and finally had a bit of money (well, after what the feds took for student loan payments) to actually travel recreationally with some regularity, and wanted to talk about it. I had been blathering to friends and family about my affinity for travel and airplanes for years, and even once announced at a Christmas dinner with family friends, much to the mortification of my mother, that my life goal was to become an airline pilot. I figured a blog was the best way to channel my raging interest.

Blogging also seemed like a courageous and gutsy undertaking: to inject my written thoughts, opinions, and perspectives into the blogosphere, a world that already measures its inhabitants in numbers needing scientific notation, was indeed a formidable task.  I felt it would imbue me with a voice, a chance to hone my writing skills, and something to keep my mind off my job as a legal assistant, a position that was so astonishingly awful that, were Dante alive today, he’d have to produce a revised edition of the Inferno and add a new circle of hell.

As an English major in college, I had always loved writing, and knew that a blog gave me the chance to enter the writing world on my own terms, my own time. I wouldn’t have to deal with the spectacular rigamarole of landing a paid position as a writer, where some pretentious jerk who drinks Franzia and wears skinny jeans orders you around, thinking he has the credentials because he was the editor of his school’s literary arts magazine that no one read, and likes to pop Xanex recreationally at parties.

Like many of life’s projects, it sort of drifted in and out of my mind, and I never sat down to write the first post.

Now, I feel a sense of urgency to stop dreaming about writing, and to actually begin writing. In January, I entered a post baccalaureate pre-medical program at Columbia University, a program in which I hand over a sum roughly equivalent to what a kidney fetches on a Malaysian black market, and I receive all the premed requirements in about a year and a half. I now sit in a room that’s barricaded in with MCAT review books, books of physics review question, and a tome entitled, “The Humongous Book of Calculus Problems.” Instead of meter and metaphor, my mind is now filled with formulas, equations, and graphs that tell me where I am most likely to find an elementary particle in atomic orbit. At a recent presentation given by a dean of the program, she informed us that we would have to abandon our previous (read: literary) perspectives on life, and learn to see the world in purely scientific terms. While I realize that for this program, I will have to ingest a great deal of science, I’m not ready, at all, to shut out my previous world of literature and writing. It’s time to begin this project.

So, this will be a blog of travel experiences, commentaries, trip reports, and even a crack at business and industry analysis, even though my business expertise only ranges from concepts such as “supply and demand,” and the cost cutting benefits of dollar mai-tai night. It will be a blog filled with the humorous side of travel, tips, tricks, ways to secure low fares and lock in low hotel rates, and dispelling rumors of the industry. It will provide insight as to how to make travel more enjoyable, more accessible, and explore how to reap benefits and perks previously reserved only for well-moneyed individuals (though, admittedly, I am now starting to sound like a salesman hawking a line of water filters as your window to financial freedom at the Tulsa Airport Ramada Inn). I built most of my own travel experience on a budget the size of an electron. I want to share my personal outlook on traveling, write about my own adventures, and even think about some answers to the question of why people travel, but not to the point of being preachy or didactic.

Of course, I also want to answer reader questions, and interact with readers. You will have an important role in driving this blog. I hope to gather readers of vast travel experience and little travel experience, and who possess a fervent interest in the industry, to those just stopping by to find out how to locate a cheap fare. The work will grow, change, morph, and adjust with time.

I’m sure I have already lost any potential readers with lengthy manifesto and will thus sign off now, with a final invitation to join, read, and share. I’ll do my best to post several times a day, and post a wide range of material to satisfy different readers’ levels of interest. Of course, feel free to write in at the blog’s own very professional e-mail address, waapblog@gmail.com.

Thanks for coming along. (And, I’m still getting the formatting and aesthetic kinks worked out – such as a crisper header image, and why the hell some paragraphs are indented, and others are not). Bear with me.