Mappy September!

Quirky Travel Hacks / AI Profile Pix / Haunted House Therapy / Cost of a US Road Trip / Booger-busting NAC / Crystal Ball of Tech / Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest / Beware of Habits / Gen Z vs Boomer Emoji

Well, hello!

You’re reading Mappy Monday, a free monthly newsletter about budget travel, self-help experiments, money tips, movie and book gems, and occasional silliness. You’ll also learn what’s new on my MappyEverAfter website.

• New on MappyEverAfter: My Favorite Travel Tips

• AI Shenanigans: “PicStudio” - Turn Selfies into Professional Headshots

• Experiment: My DIY Haunted House Therapy

• Travel: United Lounge Giveaway

• Health: Snot a Problem - NAC for Colds and Flu

• Money: The Cost of Our 2.5-month US Road Trip

• Watch: Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest Diorama by Bobby Fingers

• Read: Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable: 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

• Mind Hack: Beware of Habits

• Just because: Emojis - Boomer vs Gen Z

• Note: I will always tell you if I’m getting any referral bonuses and how much they are. In this letter, you have 3 chances to drop a few coins into my piggy bank: I get $5 for your first PicStudio order. For the NAC supplement that I use and recommend and for the book Inevitable if you get them at Amazon via my links, I’ll get a few cents. Thank you 🥰

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New on my MappyEverAfter website - My Favorite Travel Tips

I’ve been noting my favorite travel tips for quite some time now. Here are a few to start with, some, hopefully, new to you:

👫 Flying with a buddy? Book one window and one aisle seat in a three-seat row. Chances are, that middle seat will stay empty and you’ll have the 3 seats all to yourselves. If not, the person in the middle will gladly swap so you can sit together.

💄 When desperate for chapstick, try this trick: Rub a finger on your forehead and apply the natural oils to dry lips. For a more romantic option, kiss your lover's forehead.

🚰 If you’re thirsty and tap water in your hotel is not drinkable, sneak into the hotel gym (if there is one) to get free filtered water. And nope, you don't have to pretend to work out - it's fair game for all guests.

There’s more where these came from!

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AI Shenanigans - Headshots

Here’s a fun (but paid) AI tool that can turn your goofy selfies into professional-looking portraits. Upload your photos into PicStudio, pick a style (Linkedin profile, Zen, Wes Anderson, Dating profile, Historical figure, Travel, etc.), and voilà, for $29 (40 photos, one style) or $39 (120 photos, 3 styles) you get a set of pictures. I haven’t tried it (because they don’t offer a free trial) so do your due diligence.

PicStudio generated photos of Tim Ferriss while he was testing it on his show:

You can also set up a referral link (like I just did) and get $5 for each paying friend.

And in case you’re in the mood for conjuring people out of thin air, ThisPersonDoesNotExist website lets you choose gender, age, and ethnicity, and then spits out a random, realistic image of a non-existing person (free to download with a logo).

These people do not exist

As we gear up for the first AI-era U.S. election, keep in mind:

Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.

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Experiment - My DIY Haunted House Therapy

Here's a "fun" little experiment I'm (accidentally) trying:

I’m spending a month alone in my dad's spooky house while he's in a care facility recovering after surgery.

This home has been giving me the creeps for as long as I can remember, but doubly so after my mom died. It's as if the soul of the place left with her.

I'm afraid of being alone in the dark at the best of times, but here we're talking horror-movie-set level: damp basement, dark corners, groaning furniture, and pictures of our dearly departed hanging on the walls following me with their eyes. And to top it off, I swear I saw a ghost of a cat sneak across the room out of the corner of my eye.

Normally, I'd do everything to distract myself—music, funny videos, phone calls, anything—but this time, I'm trying the tool that Eckhart Tolle, Michael Singer, and many Buddhist traditions swear will go to the root of the fear and help in the long term:

Whenever fear pops up, instead of pushing it away, sit with it and notice how it moves through your body—tight chest, quick heartbeat, shaky hands, a cold shiver down your spine. Observe it. Be curious. Breathe. What will it do next?

At first, the fear feels overwhelming and even grows stronger, but if I don't try to escape it and just let it be, slowly, bit by bit, it begins to fade, and the next night does get a bit easier.

I'm still figuring it out, one freaky night at a time in this house filled with memories and shadows. If anyone has tips on how not to imagine your great-great-grandpa's portrait coming to life at 3 am, I'm all ears!

P.S. I find St John's Wort tea to be calming as well, albeit the effect is short-lived.

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Travel - United Lounge Giveaway!

✨✨✨ Giveaway time! I have two United Lounge passes good until October 17, perfect for a couple or two individual travelers.
If you’re flying United and your airport has a United Lounge, you can unwind, eat, drink, and use Wi-Fi before your flight. It’s all free.

• Respond to this email or comment below to apply by October 10 to claim the passes

• You'll need to fly with United on the same day you want to use the passes, from an airport that has a United Lounge

• You need to be a (free) subscriber of this newsletter to participate

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Health - Snot a Problem: NAC for Colds and Flu

Have you heard of NAC for colds and flu? It's short for N-Acetyl Cysteine, a naturally occurring amino acid that boosts your body's glutathione levels (glutathione is a master antioxidant).

NAC helps prevent flu and clears congestion without the rebound effect of other decongestants. I tried it when I had COVID recently, and no joke, it loosened up all that gunk in my chest and sinuses and made breathing so much easier!

Dive deeper into NAC: 1, 2, 3

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Money - What Our 2.5-month US Road Trip Cost

Here's the cost break-down of our recent 2.5-month trip across the US. We covered 10,259 miles in 73 days, starting mid-May.

The total damage? $2,894, or $40/day, or $20 per day per person. This is how it breaks down:

• $1,319 on food (you can certainly spend less)

• $766 on gas (we own a Prius which gets 49mpg)

• $360 on camping fees (but we mostly slept at rest areas in the back of our car, or Hyatt hotels for free with points)

• $112 on souvenirs and postage

• $187 on entry fees and tours (National Parks were free with a pass)

• about $150 on miscellaneous cash expenses

Read how we managed not to strangle each other during those 2.5 months in a small car and a tight budget.

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Watch - Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest Diorama by Bobby Fingers

So f***in’ mesmerizing! Just watch it.

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Read - “The Inevitable: 12 Forces That Will Shape Our Future” by Kevin Kelly

After the first few pages of "The Inevitable" by Kevin Kelly, a tech visionary and co-founder of Wired magazine, I already knew I’d have to share it with you.

It was written in 2016 and many of his predictions have already materialized.

Kelly's book is a time machine ride into the future and a peek at the next big thing (or twelve). These are not just possible but unstoppable trends already underway. Kelly feels this is the best time in history to be alive. It’s the perfect antidote to the doom and gloom of the “AI will kill us all” story.

Here’s a quote from the book:

People of the future will say of our world today: “Oh, you didn’t really have the internet”, or whatever they will call it, “back then”. And they’d be right.

All these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told-me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit, the equivalent of the dot com names of 1984.

Because here’s another thing the gray beards of 2050 will say: “Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an innovator in 2016? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category and add some AI to it. If only we had realized how possible everything was back then!”

There’s never been a better day in the history of the world to invent something.

When interviewed, Kelly likens the birth of AI to the invention of fire or spoken language.

If you want to know what's coming next, "The Inevitable" is your guide.

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Mind Hack - Beware of Habits

Ever noticed how we're bombarded with advice about forming habits? Every other self-help guru says that habits and routines are what a good, productive life is made of. But are we taking the medicine without thinking about the side effects?

Edith Wharton (1862-1937), a badass who’d crossed the Atlantic more than 60 times, and the first woman to ever win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction (for her novel The Age of Innocence), had this to say on the topic nearly 100 years ago:

The producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia.

Habit is necessary; but it is the habit of having careless habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

One can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

-Edith Wharton

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Just Because - I’ve Been Using Emojis All Wrong!

I asked my friend’s Gen Z daughter, Emma, how they use emojis. After one of the most confusing hours of my life, I left with a long list of dos and don’ts but Emma made it abundantly clear that no matter how hard I try, I won’t get it.

And she was right.

I learned that almost all emojis are to be used ironically, sarcastically, or playfully: Don’t ever use 🙂 because it looks like you’re dead inside, 😭 doesn’t mean tears but laughter, and so does the 💀. 👎👍 are only used with irony.

So I turned to YouTube (not TikTok, mind you, since I’m obviously a boomer), and found young Italian racecar drivers explaining Gen Z emojis. Their relationship advice is also adorable, except, apparently, what’s considered cheating has changed: a friendly text can get you in trouble these days.

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So there you have it, that was September for you. Now go plan that last-minute trip so you can snag my United Lounge passes!

Be Mappy,

Mags