Help Me Get to Antarctica!

I've just entered a contest for a chance to win a trip to Antarctica with Quark Expeditions as a blogger.
You can help me win by voting for me. You have to register to vote but it's for a good cause!
You can also help me by telling your friends. Here are a few ways:

1. Share this link on Facebook or in an email to your friends:
   http://www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com/blogs/view/340
2. Share this link on Twitter:
   http://echothis.info/12B
3. Or view my profile on Twitter @avoidingregret and RT my posting.

Here's a reprint of my essay entry, which you can also read on the voting page:

Seeking Grist for the Mill

A great storyteller said to me, "I'm a writer. I don't want to do; I want to observe." She explained that she wants to rewrite an ending she doesn't like - turning reality into fantasy. But I want to dive into reality, no matter how hard or unhappy it is, and convey that experience to people who are too scared, too responsible, too poor or too sheltered to do it themselves.

As a teenager, my biggest complaint was, "I have no life." My parents scoffed at it, and in retrospect I think it was because they had no lives too. My father worked two jobs; my mother did laundry. Neither had friends. They never traveled, and to this day my mother has never flown. My father still defines happiness as the absence of sadness. That's just existing.

After college, I moved to New York City, the most exciting place I could imagine at the time. I got a job in the music industry. I met celebrities and drank free liquor at parties. Still, I don't think I had much of a life.

After years of wondering what the point to everything was, I'm finally setting out to find out what LIFE is. I've just spent a month in the California desert and now I want to experience the extreme opposite: the bitter cold, wet environment that brings out a similar set of survival instincts among humans and animals alike. I want to tell people about it. And show them my photos.

I will not settle back into my old NYC lifestyle, away from nature, alone in a sea of humans barely living or needing to do anything to survive at all. In my attempts to live while avoiding regret, perhaps this could be the next adventure...

To help me become a blogger in Antarctica, vote here.
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