A trip to Europe can only end in one way: Chainsaws.

The last year has been tough for everybody. With threats ranging from economic meltdown to swine flu to octomoms, it’s time for a break from the stress of the real world. It’s time for a summer vacation.

When planning a summer getaway, there are plenty of choices to pick from. From the budget-conscious safety net of SeaWorld to the extravagant escapism of a sunny island beach, there is no shortage of summer travel destinations.

When picking your summer vacation getaway, why not turn to the greatest source of insight mankind has been blessed with since the Magic 8 Ball: Movies.

The aisles of your local video store are filled with solid advice for planning the perfect summer vacation. For example, here are some places movies have taught us never to visit.

Europe

Whether you’re being bitten by a hungry werewolf on the English moors, having your daughter sold into sex slavery by fiendish Armenians or just being taken from your hostel and tortured by a group of wealthy and powerful businessmen looking to get their jollies, your European trip will end in tears. Guaranteed.

Movies have taught us to fear the unknown and the old equally. Europe is chock-full of both. Between cults that are all too willing to sacrifice you to their pagan gods and the French, there are few reasons to jump the pond and visit the old country.

If you’re looking for a taste of culture, why not take a trip to Epcot instead?

The Cabin in the Woods

Your boyfriend’s uncle has a great cabin in the woods that would be just perfect for a kegger? You know of an abandoned shack in the forest to which you can bring those girls from class for a make-out session? Sounds too good to be true, right? It is.

That cabin may seem like the perfect place for a party, but chances are you won’t be getting down with boogie fever. Instead, you’ll probably be exposed to flesh-eating bacteria, some kind of crazed supernatural slasher or demons called forth from the pit by a curious archaeologist who reads aloud from the Necronomicon.

Your standard “cabin in the woods” scenario almost always ends with death, mutilation and quiet sobbing. If you’re not being disturbing by a Blair Witch, your car is breaking down on the way to the cabin and you’re being hunted down by crazed rednecks.

Instead of exposing yourself to that kind of horror, why not just suck it up and spend time with your parents this summer? There may not be any less quiet sobbing, but nobody will chase you around with a machete. Probably.

The Future

Back to the Future Part II may have sold you on the idea of a time- traveling vacation this summer, but trust me: Hovering skateboards are not worth the risk of ending up in any of the other post-apocalyptic futures humanity has waiting for it.

The lure of jetting into the future to pick up sports stats with the intent of making a killing in the present day may tempt you, but when you’re being hooked up to wires and used as a battery for robots, you’ll be wishing you’d listened to my advice.

If you do decide to travel to the future, you may come across Christian Bale (either battling SkyNet’s robotic armies, fighting off giant dragons or acting cold and emotionless as he displays awesome gun-fighting skills). Whatever you do, though, don’t adjust the lights while he’s making an important speech. Do that and you and Bale might just be done, professionally.

Read more movie related posts

Home is where the mess is.

In thinking about a topic to write about today, a few idea nuggets sprang to mind. Nothing, though, grabbed me by the metaphorical balls.

That usually means it’s time to talk about the subject that’s most on my mind right now: me — today and tomorrow. By tomorrow, I don’t mean the far-flung future where I will be an superstar pissing on the peons as I fly overhead in my shining new hover-car. I’m talking about a future that exists a month from now. Who will I be? Where will I be? What will I be doing?

So many questions that you would think I have an answer for.

I don’t, though.

Not really.

I’m sitting in my room surrounded by boxes. I began packing my room a few months ago (it always pays to get a head start) but I only recently started consolidating the boxes along with my furniture in a pile in a corner of my room. The purpose is to ascertain the exact size of my possessions and to get an approximation of what size vehicle I will need to move. The result is a sinking sadness. I have lived in my duplex for two years.

It’s seen some exciting stories and some sad days. I’ve laughed and I’ve cried (not the manly tears that accidentally leak while pumping weights; I’m talking about big sissy sobs). The carpets are stained with proof of the fun that’s been had. Beer stains mingle with pre-leagal drinking age soda marks. A dark splotch that used to be rabbit urine is only a few feet away from bright red vomit stains. A bloody handprint marks the stairway. Tiny dart holes litter the walls. I was moving an entertainment center and I found a homework assignment from a history class I took two summers ago.

Today, while sitting amid the evidence of my past two year’s negligence in cleaning, I was embarrassed when I was interrupted from watching television by two prospective leasers led by a real estate agent. The agent was hoping to lure these young men into singing the lease to my soon to be vacant duplex. While there are currently only three guys living in the duplex (at one point, it felt like we had six people living in the pad), the place looked like it had just hosted the area homeless convention. Beer cans littered the floor. Dirty underwear hung from doorknobs. Even dirtier dishes were piled in the sink.

Home sweet, dirty home.

Despite my embarrassment at watching the real estate agent fluster about trying to explain that the duplex would be much cleaner after we moved out, I was struck with a sense of homesickness two weeks before I actually left home. Despite the hefty rent and impossible to keep clean nature of the beast, I have grown to love this duplex. Fun memories don’t grow on trees. They are as hard to come by as excuses as to why there is a knife-sized hole in the AC unit.

I don’t know where I’ll be two weeks from now, but I know it will be hard to recapture the sense of belonging that I’ve felt in my duplex. It’s the kind of feeling that can only come after a long day of work and school and nothing seems as attractive as a cold shower and a soft bed. It’s the kind of feeling that lingers in the air as four roommates sit around a living room and bullshit with each other about our sexual histories (or lack thereof). It’s the kind of feeling that you get when you realized you’ve screwed over any chance of getting back your deposit by making your house a well lived-in home.

Read more stuff I wrote during college

I have always known what I wanted to be when I grew up.

When I was five, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I couldn’t pronounce the word (I’m not sure I even can today), but I knew that I wanted to discover dinosaurs for a living.

It was my heart’s desire to chart and list the varieties of the great thunder lizard. I bought books on the subject, collected plastic models and filled my head with countless possible recipes for cooking brontosaurus eggs in preparation for a lifetime of dino-hunting.

But then it happened.

One day, I was told that dinosaurs were, in fact, extinct. It seems that they had been for quite some time now. My fantasy of having a pet triceratops disappeared along with any future plans of playing with fossils. What was the use of studying dinosaurs if I would never get to meet one — and then subsequently eat it?

When I was six, I wanted to be a ghostbuster.

I didn’t care if modern science and my teachers told me that there were no such things as ghosts, I would spend my life proving these naysayers wrong by discovering spirits and then busting them.

I had daydreams of an adulthood spent traveling the country discovering the unknown … and then destroying it. I would encounter monsters big and small, prove their existence to a previously skeptical world and then wipe them off the face of the earth with high powered proton beams, crucifixes or silver bullets.

But as attractive as my idea seemed, there were still lingering doubts that plagued my mind.

What if I spent my life looking for ghosts in vain? What if I did find a ghost? What if the ghost was really scary? What if I peed my pants?

What finally deterred me from my grand ambition of ghostbusting was not fear, though, it was the empathy I developed as I grew older. No longer feeling the drive to eat or kill everything I perceived as a threat, I put myself in the ghost’s shoes. Did I really want to take these poltergeists away from their unfinished business on Earth and lock them up in an ecto-container for the rest of their afterlife?

That didn’t seem very nice at all.

I decided that the dead had the same rights to afterlife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Every subsequent year, I flirted with a new future profession. During the course of my childhood, I considered being everything from a FBI agent to a secret service agent, an artist to a history teacher, a costumed vigilante to an investigative reporter.

It may not seem like I had any real grasp on my future back then — I was changing my mind more then I changed my underwear. The thing is, when I locked onto an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, I locked on with the strength of a pit bull.

When I decided I wanted to be a secret service agent, I was sure that one day I would take a bullet for the president. There was not a question in my mind. I had already started researching which part of my body would be the best to absorb gunfire.

When I was in high school and visions of filmmaking danced through my mind like celluloid sugarplums, I had no doubt in my head that one day I would be a hot shot movie director. I knew for a fact that the day would come where I would have to give an award speech so I started working on it between studying for finals.

Now things are different. I’m not sure what I want to be when I grow up. The funny part, though, is that to the world at large, I’m pretty damn close to being a grown-up already.

I have a full-time job in an office. I own a suit with a matching tie. I brush my teeth and comb my hair.

Sure there a few things missing from my life that separates me from being a full-fledged, due-paying member of the real world, but sometimes I feel that I’ve already grown up and I’m not any closer to knowing what I want to be. I’m not living a life of adventure or excitement on a daily basis. I don’t have a pet dinosaur or an arch-nemesis. I do not have anything near the life I thought I would be living five or ten years ago.

Does that mean I’ve failed? Have I missed the mark and become something I’m not supposed to be? Or was I way off as a child? Were my hopes and ambitions wildly inappropriate and illogical?

I like to think the answer lies elsewhere. I like to think that I’m just not done growing up. I haven’t reached my final destination. I may be going to a steady job with steady hours and I may find myself paying bills and taxes, but I’m still in the process of growing up.

Who knows what I’ll be when I get to the end of my youth. Hopefully, it will involve dinosaurs.

Read more of my thoughts on life.