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57. How I Almost Ran iHOP's Twitter

Day 57
Location 13: Barcelona
Dec. 27, 2022

I'm 56 days into this trip and it's been amazing. But along with all the beautiful sights, new friends, and endless fun comes exhaustion. There's real, physical fatigue from staying up late and waking up early. There's social fatigue from meeting someone, building a friendship for three days, saying goodbye, and starting all over again in the next city. Despite this exhaustion, I've already committed to friends, family, and myself to stay here for another 7+ months. There's pressure to keep traveling, even if I don't want to. It's like I'm walking down a road that goes on and on and on, no matter how far I walk. Like a treadmill. But I can't get off the treadmill because I'm strapped in by a harness. And I have four legs for some reason. And I'm covered in fur. And I'm a dog. And...


 
My history with iHOP is storied (for international readers, iHOP is a breakfast chain. i.e. International House of Pancakes). For years, it would be the destination of me and my dad's Saturday morning routine after playing basketball all morning. Years later, I landed an interview at the prestigious Manhattan marketing firm Droga5 to run iHOP's social media accounts (this was right after their mega successful campaign to supposedly change their name to iHOB (International House of Burgers). Years later even, during a bonus round of bar trivia, the category was "Menu Options at Popular Breakfast Restaurant Chains". Before the restaurant list was even shown, I blurted out "Split Decision" (and I was correct). It's the world's greatest food establishment.

Today, I didn't play basketball, but I did walk into a store with basketball jerseys and apparently that was enough to trigger some long forgotten pavlovian response to eat a huge breakfast. It's like in Jurassic Park where dinosaur DNA was extracted from a mosquito that had been trapped in amber for millions of years. Except instead of finding DNA, they found my hunger and instead of creating an ultimately ill-fated dino-centric theme park, they cooked me a similarly ill-fated eggs, bacon, potatoes, pancakes and sausages.


And here's the mock social media posts I put together for the job interview in 2019:


 
Later, I found myself at a church that looked like a giant drip castle displaced from the beach. The ones where kids fill their hands with wet sand and let goops drop from the cracks in their fingers like fist droppings. Past the church was a familiar statue (see: The Great Wall of Vagina). Past the giant vagina was an arena. Can you guess what sport they played inside? Basketball? Football? Wrong. Shopping! The arena was a mall. America and Spain aren't so different after all.

 

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