Surroundings: Unpleasant tiny fluorescent bulb in lamp, as white as light can be. So white it sucks the color out of everything it hits. Myself included. Headphones in, music blaring. Cheap office chair not built or adjusted or whatever for someone my height, or width for that matter. Large glass of water.
Sounds like a decent setup for writing something mostly pointless and putting it on the internet. All that’s missing is mouthbreathing and acne. Those I can do without.
I can’t say I’ve been terribly active since last writing. I’ve been living, breathing, reading, writing, but not… doing. Which is alright. I needed a bit of a break, some me-time, as they say. It’s interesting the relationship we all have with personal time. On some level we feel guilty, as though we should be doing more. Thus taking time for oneself is often viewed as pointless or selfish. At the same time, we relish in it. We need it.
Personally I think it’s necessary to maintaining sanity. If I didn’t have those quiet hours of decompression, I would likely be in jail by now. I get an itchy feeling when I’m in constant contact with civilization. All that chatter and useless content–More useless than anything I would call pointless on here. I’ll give an example.
Like any show that has been nation-franchised and tailored to suit the “needs” of the target audience, American Idol (or Pop Idol, or Indian Idol, or Deutschland sucht den Superstar–Those are all real, by the way) has been repackaged for Australia. It is in no way different from American Idol. The accents aren’t even noticeable, when everyone’s doing their “heartfelt” rendition of the same pop song from the night’s appointed era. You get the same broadway belt, the awkward “vocal pyrotechnics,” with slightly different inflection and haircut. It’s interesting.
But, these are the type of things we need to escape. Globalization is all well and good, in its ethical and communication aspects, but the mind-shaking same-ness of it is offensive. It has been said that we all create our own world in our perception of things we see. What if we’re all seeing the same thing?
I feel like that will be our undoing. It won’t be nuclear war. It’ll be the loss of diversity. True diversity, not college-approved racial quotas or gender percentages. The regionality of things: the idea that you can only get this thing in this town. It’s the only place to see it, or at least the only place touch it, smell it, feel it.
And thus I find myself ruminating on park benches, on scraggly ground. The earth here is cracked from years of drought, despite recent rain. The rain actually makes it look stranger, a cracked map of dark brown, the consistence of chalk. The bench is painted the same forest-y green as any other bench in any other park in the world. I sit there, under a sky that is basically foreign. It’s too big. The sunlight feels ever so slightly wrong. The smells are those of flowers I don’t know the names of, a different species of grass. Et cetera. It’s a whole experience of difference. If I give into that for a while, I feel recharged. Different myself. I’m conscious that the atmosphere has a slightly different make-up. That the sun travels still East-West, but along the North side of the sky.
This is what me-time is all about. The details. If you can come to appreciate anything, really take a look and evaluate it and decide it’s not-half-bad, then it’s a good thing. I don’t care if it’s me marveling at the horrible krakkawing of a magpie or you studying the scaly top of an acorn. It just helps.
Helps us escape the franchised same-ness of everything else in the world. Little unique experiences, holistic and sensual. Not in the backrub way, in the using my 5 senses way.
At any rate, I’m rambling. So I’ll stop with the simple claim that in your life, you should make time to sit somewhere you’ve never been and, as clichéd as it sounds, just be. Take it in. Recognize the foreign qualities, and the similarities.
And for fuck’s sake, don’t watch Australian/American/Canadian/Singapore/Malaysian/Vietnam/Croatian/Indonesian Idol. Again, all real.
RJC
Comments are disabled for this post