A little taste of life on the field. Racers, former and present, feel free to add your own in the comments.
If over 75% of these are your reality, you might be a World Racer (or just someone who lives an exceedingly strange life).
- Nescafé Fine Selection is your idea of gourmet coffee.
- Carrying toilet paper in your hand is as normal as carrying a wallet or cell phone.
- You are legitimately surprised when the bathroom already has toilet paper in it and you can save your personal roll for long bus rides.
- Your clothes are clean as long as you can't smell them from a couple feet away and as long as they aren't stiff.
- You own three outfits and will wear them in any setting.
- You can tell when someone has borrowed an article of clothing from someone else because you know that that shirt belongs to someone else's three-outfit collection. Nice try.
- Anything other than plain bread and butter for breakfast is a delicacy; jelly is a definite bonus.
- Eggs or any other source of natural protein are shadows from another life long past, and you aren't sure if they ever really existed in the first place.
- You dream of rice.
- And potatoes.
- Your idea of one serving of chicken is as big as a golf ball — where 90% of the golf ball is bone.
- Transportation has never been and never was intended to be comfortable. It would be abnormal and frankly wrong to have an entire seat to yourself in any sort of public transit vehicle.
- The number of seats in a vehicle are not, in fact, indicative of how many people should be in said vehicle.
- Personal space is a figment of your imagination.
- Doing dishes is a privilege because you get to sort through the scraps pile to eat whoever's chicken still has meat on it. (That one might just be me.)
- Germs are not real, and hygiene is to be taken lightly in all situations.
- Showers are not a daily priority.
- Your idea of a good bath is a public bathroom stall, a WetOne and fabric refresher. A luxurious bath includes all of the above and body spray.
- Your alone time involves at least two other people.
- And they're probably having a deep conversation about their spiritual processes.
- Your day includes construction, children and another language. And it's normal.
- Process, processing, Myers-Brigg and E/I, S/N, F/T, P/J, echo, team time, feedback, "I need to write a blog," "I encourage you to…," "I challenge you to…," "thank you for your feedback," "we could have a dance party" and "healthy living starts tomorrow… no, really this time" are integral, regular parts of your conversations.
- You travel everywhere in groups of six or seven and tend to stand out everywhere you go. Not always in a great way.
- It takes you and your friends approximately twelve seconds to crash a café's wireless router.
- If it doesn't crash, it only works for one of you while the rest of you reenter the wireless password frantically for thirty minutes until you bump the first guy off.
- The thought of traveling for over two days in a bus doesn't make you blink twice.
- Neither does shoveling hundreds of pounds of sand into wheelbarrows in the desert sun for six hours a day.
- Neither does having donkeys, sheep, chickens, horses, roosters, geese and turkeys roaming around your house.
- You can turn a two-plug wall outlet into a twenty-device charging station in less than three seconds.
- You are a person of high courage, high integrity, high character or high anything else.
- Your idea of going to the movies is twenty people on the floor crowding around a 13-inch laptop screen hooked up to someone's portable speaker.
- Seeing people praying, crying, hysterically laughing, dancing or singing at any time on any given day is just normal.
- So is seeing people in the same clothes for a week. You just have to hope the underwear changed.
- Sharing bottles, plates, utensils, napkins, clothes, car seats, books, candy, shoes, chicken bones, toothbrushes, razors, deodorant and even showers is part of daily life. Basically, sharing every single thing you own is not just normal but expected.
- You don't ask to spend time with anyone. You ask them for a one-on-one.
- You don't think it's odd when you have multiple flies and/or bugs on your body at one time.
- You live your life out of a backpack, you move locations every month and you can't remember what life was like when you woke up to do the same thing every day.
I'm looking forward to many more of these bullets in the next 9 months.
m
