the traveler's new year

I can't recall ever making even one official New Year's resolution. I think it's because I find them a bit arbitrary: if you want to change something, change it. It needn't be the first day of January. Today, in fact, happens to be the fifth day of January, and I am stuck in a suffocatingly hot, mosquito-infested four-bed dorm in a Buenos Aires hostel. It's well after midnight, my roommates are (somehow) asleep, and it occurs to me that, New Year's or not, it's time for me to make some changes regarding how I travel.

To that end, listed below are my 2011 Traveler's Resolutions.

1) No more hostels. Why? First and most obvious reason - at 26, I'm really a bit too old for the entire concept. Yes, I'm aware that there are 50-somethings slogging around Latin America in backpacks and bifocals, crashing in a $10-per-night bed in a 12-bunk coed dorm for weeks at a time. There's one in my dorm right now. Good for him. Second reason: I'm afflicted with a broad snobbish streak that now irresistibly compels me to forthwith seek out better accommodations. And by "better," I don't just mean bigger, cleaner or generally nicer. I refer to the clientele. Snobbish streak, like I said. Third reason: I forgot to pack flip-flops on this trip. Take a moment to let the blood-curdling grossness of a flip-flop-less hostel shower sink in.

2) Clearly define my goals. I identified long ago my tendency to run away and call it traveling - something I hope to eliminate or significantly decrease in the coming months. Being with Sam has helped with that. Peru has not been what I wanted or expected it to be, and if I hadn't met and started dating him, I'd be writing this from a flat in Eastern Europe.

3) No more comparing myself to other travelers. It didn't occur to me until tonight that traveling, like many other activities, has an element of competition and even skill. It's true that I can go through airport security with record-breaking speed and that I am completely, 100% fearless about dropping myself into a strange new place without so much as a CouchSurfing acquaintance to chat with, but I don't have a personality that enables me to make friends quickly and casually wherever I go. I wish I did. For years now, I've watched other travelers do this with enviable nimbleness. My friend Jaemi can make a stump laugh; my other friend, Keenan, can create a warm and cohesive social situation literally wherever he goes, whether it's a jam-packed nightclub or a remote Somalian farmhouse. Are they better travelers? In those ways, absolutely. But all of us do this because it feeds something inside. Regardless of our individual strengths, we are all travelers. We keep doing it because we love it, period.

4) Plan better (or at all). I tend toward impulsiveness when I'm on the road, resulting in split-second decisions that I frequently regret. Example: Having not bothered to plan in advance a trip for a one-week vacation when I was living in Ukraine, at the last second I bought a train ticket to Budapest. The result? Probably the worst travel experience of my life: a combined 54 hours in a claustrophobia-triggering train cabin, a horrifyingly bad stay in the only available hostel in the city, and a week of lonely, aimless wandering by day and wallowing in self-pity by night.

Happy 2011, everyone. Don't feel that you have to emulate my stupendously ambitious resolutions, by the way. Just lose some weight or something.