In Japan, people hate:
Stealing. You can leave you purse on a table in a nightclub and wander away for 45 minutes and it will still be there when you get back.
Wearing short sleeves
Their teeth, they always cover them when they laugh. People say this is because of some ancient tradition but really it's because it's snaggletooth city.
Eating in public
Talking on cell phones in the subway

Tokyo is like being in a roomful of people whose cellphones are all going off at once.
Tokyo is like a stuffed animal is humping your skull.
Tokyo is like being in a pinball machine waiting to be flippered.
Tokyo is like every car on your block being an ice cream truck all playing different songs.

So as you can probably infer, Tokyo is complete sensory overload. The vending machines have TV screens and shout at you. The giant screens on the buildings that are just a few feet apart are playing different advertisements, loudly. Arcade games beckon you from six-story game parlours in high-pitched, improbable voices. Women stand outside stores with loudspeakers, trying to cajole passerbys inside. The street cleaners play "itsy bitsy spider" to warn you of their presence.

Tokyo is the most amazing city I've ever been to, it's a complete mind-fuck. I spent my first two weeks in Japan there and had to pry myself away to try and see some more of Japan. I've been hiking, I've seen temples, I've seen shrines, I've eaten ramen. And then, I rested.

Now I'm in Yufuin, in the middle of nowhere. During my explorations today I did not find anyone that would cop to knowing English, including any of the guests at my hostel. I spent the day watching the leaves change color, which is a major draw around these parts. Oh, Japan.

• Excuse me
• Thank you
• I like tripe
• "All you can eat"
• "All you can drink"
• Can I have some water, please?

I love trains. Trains in Tokyo are particularly exciting. First of all, I will spend the majority of my time on them completely lost. Also, there's a 99% chance that I will be the only Westerner (read: round eye) on any given train. The majority of my fellow passengers are wearing suits or uniforms of some kind all seem to be very busy, despite it being 11am. People here love wearing suits. When I was here last summer they were having a campaign to try and get men to stop wearing ties or at the least, loosen them. Apparently it had something to do with a heat wave and trying to cut down on excessive air conditioning. I don't think it worked though, because they sure love their ties.

Last summer Bla and I wanted to go to the Tsukiji fish market. The deal is you have to go at five in the morning if you want to see men shrieking at each other over tuna the size of 5th graders. The night before our planned visit we were perched in a bar called 'Ghetto' in the Golden Gai--a bar that could seat only four people and that was owned by the star of a Japanese action film who also owned a restaurant called 'Horse' that only served the flesh of that mighty beast--we realized that we'd be fools to leave and try to wake up so early. We'd have a much better chance of staying awake with our new friends at Ghetto and going straight to the fish market from there.

Of course we hadn't considered the effect of the fish market on our compromised systems--compromised by Japanese action film stars teaching us exclamations in Japanese accompanied by shots of soju. Needless to say, the visit was terrifying and exhausting, and we hopped back on the train around 7 or 8 to finally get back to our hostel and go to sleep. Of course we hadn't realized that this was rush hour and the train would be absolutely, horribly jammers. Despite the stories of women getting groped on such trains, the other passengers gave me and Bla a wide birth. Reeking of ghetto, soju and salmon, I can't say that I blame them.

You can't take that away from me, I thought, while knowing, of course, how easily they could. Because really, for today at least, that exit row seat was all I had. A ten hour flight begs for a bulkhead. But as I sadly relinquished my boarding pass, I saw the new seat number. 4D. Oh yes, I had gotten the coveted upgrade and have begun my backpacking trip in the front cabin drinking champagne and swaddling myself in cushiony duvets to try to sleep. Try, of course, because I was attempting to go to sleep at 6pm my time.

Two weeks ago I had a brilliant idea that I was going to avert jet lag by waking up 20 minutes earlier every day before I left, with the end goal of being up by 3am for the few days before I left. This would be another example of my attempts at self-improvement through unrelenting self-abuse. Obviously, the plan did not go as hoped, despite me programming my ipod to play Bobby Brown "My Perogative" at full volume in the early hours of the morn. The best I did was waking up at 4am. That night I fell asleep at 7:30pm, and is if to mock my attempt to violently wrest control of my own circadian rhythms, slept for 12 hours.

So despite the plush reclined seat, a couple of valium and some bubbly (only after the sushi, miso soup and soba noodles, of course), your valiant hero tossed and turned for hours before drifting off and dreaming of frequent flyer miles.

And of course, desperate to prove this fact, I decided that I could manage my round-the-world trip with a carry-on size bag. When I go visit New York for a weekend, I can't keep it to a carry-on size bag. So why I thought I could do it now is anyone's guess. The two people I showed my bag to before I left both started laughing hysterically when they saw it. "You're fucking joking," one of them said, flabbergasted.

The other said, "Well, it will be a great conversation starter...like, so, you here for the weekend, mate?"

I had made a well thought out and very conservative list of items to bring. At T-24 hours I started panicking and adding things willy nilly. I need to bring a thermometer, right? I'm not playing Russian roulette with my health, here. I've brought at least 8 or 9 over the counter remedies for various ailments that I like to diagnose myself with frequently, and another 3 or 4 under the counter medications to help me "chill out." In the last few hours I added a self-help book, a polka dotted tank top, a collection of gummy candy that looked like pizza, a grimy white t-shirt, compression bags, hair serum, nighttime moisturizer (to compliment the daytime moisturizer, body lotion and hand lotion I already have) and a guide to reading menus in Japanese. I had to sit on my bag to get it to close.

The plan had been to "travel light" but by the time I made it to Paddington Station I knew that I had royally fucked up. Once I boarded the Heathrow Express I sat down on the floor and unpacked my entire bag. "Be ruthless," I kept muttering to myself under my breath, trying to avoid the stares of the businessmen wondering why I was counting and recounting my underwear and talking to myself. "Be ruthless." By the time the train pulled up to Heathrow I had filled one of the compression bags up with items that I had ruthlessly abandoned and made a solid commitment to myself to divest myself of even more of my possessions on arriving in Tokyo.

One of my friends was trying to understand why me, of all people--me, who considers a trip to the mall a sacred journey, me, who thinks of bric-a-brac as a fundamental human right, was even bothering to try to travel light. The only reason I can give is that I like challenging myself. I like putting myself in situations that I find very difficult, like Thanksgiving dinner with my family. I have a believe that the more excruciating I deliberately make my life, the better a person I will become. And this is why I have packed this child-size bag.

But when filling out my customs forms, I came to the question "What city to do live in?" I have no answer to that. I also have no answer for "Occupation?" When I checked into my hotel today I struggled over "Address?" for ten minutes. Where do I live today?

From there I go to Korea and then China. After that I will try to go to Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in no particular order. I'm thinking of making it a full-on RTW and going to Africa and checking out some of the parts of Europe that I haven't been to yet. I'm not sure how long I will travel for. I mean, I've emotionally budgeted around 12-18 months. I think if I start working before then I will probably kill myself, and quite possibly take out the entire typing pool in the process. But I don't actually want to say "Oh, I'm going traveling for a year." Because honestly, I might decide to go crawling back to my parents after four months.

The thing is, I am fairly certain that I hate traveling. I really like having my own space and my own things and my own sheets and my own pillow. I also know that this trip is going to be very difficult for me. I plan to spend 3-6 weeks in China. I don't like spending more than 45 minutes in Chinatown. It seems that me and the Chinese have very different ideas about personal space, for one. So I'm not sure exactly how I will handle this extended trip. Probably the same way I deal with my trips to Chinatown--with a snotty look on my face and trying to fit as much food in my maw as I possibly can.

But don't get me wrong, I am really, really looking forward to this. Just the fact that I have the opportunity to do this makes me so happy, and dare I admit, proud of myself. When I was 19 I never would have dreamt that I would have been able to do something like this on my own. I thought this was the sort of thing that only people with rich parents and chaperones were able to do. Six or seven years ago one of my biggest resentments was how little I had traveled, how I hadn't been able to do an exchange program in college or live abroad. And now I've been living abroad for three years, had to get extra pages added my passport and have enough frequent flyer miles to go around the world. And that's pretty amazing.

So last week I finally cut the cord on yet another shitty relationship and told my boss I'm quitting. This was very exciting, because I've essentially been playing a game of last man standing at work. Of the ten people that I started with, as of two months ago, I'm the only one left despite the betting pool putting the odds on me going first. This is because I love to hang around in a bad relationship feeling sorry for myself. Anyone who has ever seen me with a boyfriend can attest to this.

I've long compared my job to an abusive boyfriend. Or like, a really, really cute abusive boyfriend. A boyfriend that's so cute that all of your friends and family are really impressed and secretly surprised that you landed him. And they all tell you that you'd be a fool to dump him because you all suspect that you'll never do this well next time around, and you should really try and make it work and appreciate him more. But in your heart you know that he's actually a really shitty boyfriend and that being really cute isn't quite enough. And that's sort of what it's like to work for one of the top companies in the world. It's not really quite enough. And the fact is, you shouldn't live your life terrified of change--there are way cuter jobs out there.

So I told my boss (and his boss) that I'm leaving to go travel. It's weird how emotional it all feels. My job has been the one constant in my life for five years. I've lived in three countries, the boyfriends have come and gone and I've gotten one meaningless promotion after another. And even though my job is about as empty as a job can be, it was something to hold on to. Because when you are at a loss for what you are doing with your life, having a really cute job is still something.

The way I usually test this out is to head straight to the ladies room and try and flush a few things down the toilet. If it works, I know I'm home.

In America, murderers have gotten rid of dead bodies by flushing them down the toilet, bit by bit. In Europe, they haven't figured out how to design plumbing systems that can handle a tampon. I kid you not--the boxes in the States that proudly proclaim "flushable!" in Europe advise you to keep the reminder of your lost motherhood opportunity in the trash--the toilets won't take em.

But tonight, as I disembarked and ran headlong into Newark's sweaty embrace, I couldn't help but think about how amazing America is. The plumbing! What plumbing!

I know I’ve written about Bangkok street food before. But like all obsessive, boring people, I like to come back to my favorite topics time and time again, worried that if I don’t mention it, it might just disappear.

The street food in Thailand was phenomenal. There were the dumplings, delicately balanced on a Styrofoam tray, doused in soy sauce and with nary a utensil save for a toothpick. They weren’t dumplings so much as thick rice noodles wrapped around a variety of vegetable fillings, and they weren’t delicious so much as they were mysterious. How is it that in a country where a vegetarian could starve to death (at a minimum, there’s fish sauce on everything) I managed to get dumplings filled with greens?

My first night in Bangkok I was alone and terrified. And by terrified I mean hungry and by hungry I mean ravenous. I was too timid, of course, to try and get food at any reasonable time, and my traveling companion wasn’t due to arrive until nearly midnight. So sometime after ten at night I ventured out of my hotel and wandered onto the streets of Bangkok. I needed to be at the hotel when my friend arrived and didn’t want to stray too far from there. I didn’t have a map, and between the jetlag and having no sense of direction to speak of anyway, making more than one or two turns could be disastrous. So I walked up and down the same street a few times, checking out all of the street food vendors and wondering how I was possibly going to order anything. These are the sort of things that paralyze me—not knowing how to communicate and being nervous about acting like an American dickhead, saying the same things over and over in English more and more loudly in the hopes that someone will finally understand me. So instead I just walked around until finally starvation drove me to stop at one of the cart vendors and attempt an order. This is probably a good thing because if I had walked up that street one more time, they would have taken me for a farang prostitute.

I pointed at a ground pork dish with chilis and holy basil, pad kaprao moo, which was served with a pile of rice for less than a dollar. It was so spicy that my nose was running and tears streamed down my face, but I was nonetheless grateful for the fact that I was gorging myself alone on a plastic deck chair perched on the curb of a nearly empty street, save for the woman cooking over a sterno flame under a tattered yellow and white umbrella.

At the Khao San Road (which we went to just to see what all the fuss was about, and hated) there were woman standing every ten feed or so holding giant woks and expertly frying eggs into steaming piles of pad thai. After watching a few of them, I finally realized why the pad thai I made never tastes quite right—apparently a least a cup of oil is required for each portion. I thought it was delicious and disgusting, but I’m known for having a stomach of steel. My traveling partner was less resilient, unfortunately.

There were little sweets that looked like miniature tacos, ready-made curries on carts parked on roads teeming with cars and minicabs. Sticky rice with all types of fillings and toppings, savory and sweet. There were the grilled bullfrogs on skewers that we avoided and the grilled everything else that we couldn’t stop ourselves from stopping for every ten paces or so. There was mangosteen and unripe mango and green papaya salad and bags of cucumbers with nam prik sauce. There were plastic bags filled with ice and condensed milk and flavors ranging from tea to blue raspberry, hollowed out coconuts with straws sticking out of them and plastic cups filled with all kinds of fruits, from limes to pineapple to watermelon and others that I didn’t recognize.

But more than the food, it was the whole street food scene that I was impressed by. A vendor would have a cart, some source of heat and possibly a few chairs. Sometimes they would have their husband or wife as their sous chef, some of them would have a friend standing their chatting their way through the curries or sometimes they would be alone. Some of them had terrible food and some of them had dishes to rival anything I've ever tasted. My favorites were the women with the blank faces wearing shirts with nonsensical phrases on them sitting on stools, gripping giant cookers with their florescent shorts-clad thighs and frying skewers of just about anything. I think about my current job, which involves skewering nothing but my soul and I pine for my own food cart.