Again I’m treading into the waters of writing without the foggiest idea where I’m going. Bad metaphors aside—I assume they’re just a given now—I feel good. Weirdly good. Able-to-do-a-handstand good. No joke, I checked earlier.
I don’t necessarily think Australia is the reason for this, but I think decontextualizing myself (leaving everything I know, normally inhabit, and do behind) has been an extremely cleansing experience. Australia is incidental. It’s scenery; it’s things to do. But it’s not what I want out of life. For one thing, I miss a lot of my home life dearly. Things like late night rant-offs with friends; the shared excitement of watching a fight, of planning an event or simply of being in the company of people I have selected to be my peers. Not that I would be peerless outside of my context. I just don’t have my pick of the litter, if you will.
I miss standard measurements. The metric system, while great for scientists and Europeans, is simply foreign. Buying pants in centimeters, attempting to explain your height and weight, trying to figure out why “27 degrees” means a nice day— These are all things that are hard to do when you’re wired with inches, feet, pounds, and Fahrenheit. Frankly, I surprised these people never figured out a way to tell time that wasn’t impenetrable to those of us still brazen enough to use non-base 10 systems. I can imagine it now.
-What time is it?
11:30
-Oh, so it’s 9.75, metric.
Bastards.
Anyways, what the hell was I on about? Ah yeah. My stay here, now at about 6 weeks, a little over half way. This has kind of done some interesting things to me. It began, obviously, as a vacation: a heap of new places, new experiences. Then there came a bit of bitter homesickness, combined with the odd sameness of English speaking culture. At that point what differences there are (brand names, slang, etc) seem more like inconveniences than anything else.
The third state, which I seem to occupy right now, is a bit different. It is a strange source of mental power for me. I am a bit transient, which gives me confidence. I am not long for this particular world, this Australian sphere. I can do most anything I want. There’s no self-confidence when out in the world. I can stroll through the mall with head held high, speak to people in my intriguing “foreign” accent, and be on my way. I can chuckle on my walk out, thinking how the girl working the counter at the supermarket seemed legitimately clumsier in my presence. Americans are interesting here, apparently.
Back home, I would have trouble working up the nerve to skulk into a place of business to buy something I desperately needed. Here I spent 15 minutes sitting on a bench in a mall, drinking a Diet Coke and people watching. Even made eye contact with a couple. Today I picked up a belt and a phone, because I needed them, but padded the excursion with culture-soaking. I didn’t learn much, but how much is there to learn from a mall, anyways? They’re all the same, although here McDonald’s is charmingly referred to as “Macca’s” instead of “Mickey D’s.” Big culture shock. But that sense of familiar alienness is what’s tickling me right now. It’s fun, without the thrown-in-the-deep-end sense one imagines getting in other places.
All I can hope is that I can hang on to some vestige of this when I return. If I can make it through Christmas without my spirit being crushed, I should be good. This trip has inspired me to move to a city where I don’t know anyone, to pick up a strange job and live a strange life. I will smile easily, and one day have rippling six pack abs. I think, in a really weird way, when it all condenses here on a computer screen: I found the American dream by looking outside of America.
People in America (meaning me, mostly) seem to languish for motivation. Fear of success outweighs fear of failure. Ambition is a sign of derangement. To be truely free is something no one seems to be able to experience. No one says what they think, I’d be shocked if most people really think what they think. I was what I’m talking about. I might have been the worst. Wasted potential, scuppered energy. I refused to do anything, on the grounds that it would be work, or that it would be difficult, or hell, that it would simply be. I didn’t want to see the other side of the mountain. I had lost that basic nugget of monkey curiosity that makes humanity great.
I don’t know if it’s because I was forced or if it’s because I just did, but here I got ahold of something. Some energy, some vitality. I don’t really do anything different, other than be harangued by small children, but I get the sense that that isn’t it. I think it’s the thing I’ve needed to get from every seemingly life-shaking event I’ve experienced: distance. Hard-fact, physical distance. Not that emotional “closure” bullshit, with it’s multiple steps and confrontations and endless nagging. Just some simple removal. Absence.
That’s the best part of being here. I know that my life is going on as it would have. Someone somewhere is in America, probably in NY or CT, bored, fat, lazily contemplating big dreams with a knowledge that he’ll never go after them. But it’s not me. I’m here, doing something else. Not even anything better. Just something else. And when I go back, I will be changed. I’ll be a different shape, and I won’t slot back into the soporific ennui, the yawning failure.
And that, more than anything else I encounter (more than echidnas, wallabys, friendly drunks, women with neck piercings, whatever) makes me smile. A broad, unconscious smile. Some might even call it a grin, if they were so inclined, but I always thought that word has an oddly sinister spelling. Too close to grimace, to grim, to grind. In fact, a quick google of its etymology suggests it comes from an Old English word meaning “to show one’s teeth in pain or anger.” So it does indeed fit somewhere between grind and grimace, in the teeth-word-starting-with-the-letter-G spectrum. Which is a scary spectrum indeed. Anyways, enough of me and my Googlings.
Back to the point, to anyone who has the means, or the opportunity, or as I did, the luck to get out of your own life. Do it. Take the chance. Go abroad. Get lost. Be ridiculous in the face of judgmental strangers. Don’t pretend to be Canadian. That one’s important. Not because Canada is terrible, or boring, or entirely populated by hockey fans named Doug. Those aren’t even true. Mostly. But because pretending is all anyone does in America. Sure, we were a great nation of revolutionaries (for about 8 years 230 years ago). Now we’re fake tans and political correctness. Inner selves and outer veneers. A much more profound and shattering dualism than DesCartes’.
Get out of that. Learn how to be yourself. It does wonders for you.
A note of self-commentary: This is very likely to be the most positive thing I ever write on here. While I don’t think I will sink back into the cesspool of self-doubt and neurosis that I used to occupy, I also doubt that I will feel a need to express most of this again. I feel a great hope that it will be background—a subroutine running unseen in the recesses of my brain—or if I’m truly lucky, part of a new context which will be formed when my old one is blasted out of shape by my newness. So, if you ever take anything from my scribblings, take this one. Print it out, bookmark it, make a mental note to be less of a jerk, whatever form it takes. I don’t demand great applause. Only slight changes to the lives of others.
Someone asked me recently, or at least ranted at me, that she didn’t understand the point of so many pursuits. The things people build their lives around. Academia, careers, that kind of thing. I replied with a two-fold objection. The first is that there is no point in arguing that there is no point to something. The second is that the best we can hope for is to positively affect the lives of a few individuals. To be remembered as someone who helped. In a possibly delusions-of-grandeur-based way, I’d like to think, as I come up on the 1 year renewal for this domain, that some portion of what I wrote here sank in. Made a difference.
If it did, tell me. Not for egotistical reasons, but simply because I like to know someone’s reading. You’re also welcome to inform me that I’m a useless meandering twat who doesn’t know how to use a semicolon. Although I will take objection to that; my punctuation is proper.
In closing, I will say that that’s all I’ve got, and I’m off to sleep. Good night, and good luck to you all.
RJC
