Whenever I get into a conversation about travel I mention how I have a map of the world on my wall that I like to stand in front of and stare at. A few times people have asked if I put pins on all the places I’ve been to. I have not.
The reason is because I can no longer decide what is pin-worthy or not. Is it stepping foot in the city boundaries? Staying overnight? Or maybe I have to live there to add a pin.
Calculating notches is easy because it’s objective. If a guy crosses the plane of the vagina with his manhood, he has a notch. Case closed. He can add as many pins to that as he wants because he has both physically and mentally affected another animal through this guided and purposeful action, for all eternity.
But doing it with cities or countries isn’t the same. It proves nothing except that your body existed in a certain geographical coordinate for a particular amount of time. It would be the same as chopping up the current city you live in into 1,000 square boxes and seeing how many boxes you can step into. Can a man who stepped into 800 boxes make a claim about knowing the city more than the man who stepped into 799? If not then what’s the point of keeping count of such things as countries or cities visited?
Plus we’re not accounting for the location of the Earth around the sun. When you step in a country it will be in a different spot in the universe than when I stepped in it. There’s an infinite amount of ways to measure how we fill space. Therefore you cannot use mere presence at some point in space-time as a judge of experience or knowledge, something that people who have been to a lot of countries tend to do. I remember the time a guy wanted to play a game called “Let’s name all the countries we’ve visited.” Not surprisingly he had been to the most.
But vagina… that’s different.
