What's The Deal?
So why the hell am I spending a whole month flying around the country? There’s a few things going on:
1. Jetblue was doing an All You Can Jet promotion: $599 gets one person as many flights as they can manage to book between 9/8/09 and 10/8/09.
The promotion was pretty effective — they closed it down three days early due to overwhelming demand. But not before I decided that flying way too much in a month would be a good idea, and picked one up for myself.
2. Metafilter is an awesome place to work. Though “place” is a weird word to use in this context, since I work on the internet and my office is anywhere with wifi.
Because of that, and because my job has a very informal structure to its hours (the short version is “try to be near the internet most of the time”), I can do this without really having to take a month “off”. My cohorts at Mefi will do an extra share of the heavy lifting, but I’ll be able to be around and help out during the quieter moments of the adventure.
And Metafilter is where I work, but it’s also where I like to hang out, so this sort of thing works out pretty darned well.
3. Meetups are great. Mefites are good people.
Metafilter members like a good meetup. We have them often, and we’ve had a lot of them over the years. Earlier this year we celebrated the site’s tenth birthday weekend with dozens of meetups spread across all seven continents. (Yes, there are mefites in Antarctica!)
I’ve been going to Metafilter meetups — informal social gatherings where members of the site (and, often, their tag-along friends or significant others) get together and kibitz and drink and basically spend some fun, friendly time hanging out as a group — for years now, from well before I started working for the site.
Meetups are among my favorite things about Metafilter. The chance to turn already significant online community interactions into something more concrete by sitting down face to face with folks in person is really thrilling, to me, and has added a lot of extra personal meaningfulness to the time I spend on the site.
This trip is a chance to do a lot of that, and to do it in towns I’ve never been to or never had a chance to spend time in with locals.
So, 1 + 2 + 3 = a plan that I’m surprised to see myself following through on. And man am I excited. And I’ll be using this blog to keep track of as much of it as I can.
