My Standby Life

So this one time I was given the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world that I wanted to go. But I had a very limited window to do it in and I wasn't sure how long that window of opportunity would be open. So I did what any sane person would have done... dropped out of grad school and packed a suitcase.

To my school’s defense, the program I was in was great; the students, the professors, the classes, all top notch stuff. But there came a point mid semester when I realized that it just wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. That I would be doing it just to do it and not really feeling any passion for it.

Around that same time, my friend Ben (who works for the airport) had a buddy pass that was up for grabs. Buddy passes are basically Wonka’s Golden Ticket in the airline world. The holder of the pass can travel anywhere in US for free and anywhere worldwide for just the price of taxes. Goldmine right? So he posted the offer on twitter to a few people who he knew would be interested. Naturally I responded to his offer in a very calm, very mature way:

Long story short, I won the auction, got the pass, and started making a list of places I wanted to go (there may or may not have been an in-front-of-the-mirror-booty-pop-celebratory dance thrown in there as well). The only catch with the ticket was this: the magic of the pass would only work while he was employed at the airport. He told me he wasn’t sure how much longer he would be with the airline but that it would definitely be at least a month or so. So with an unbelievable pass and an uncertain deadline, I dropped out of grad school and packed a suitcase...