Sometime in the past I have written about the sadness one feels upon passing beautiful strangers - beautiful strangers who will remain strangers and you feel that deep, curious wave of regret and loss and the kind of haunting that one cannot put a finger on but can sometime recognize with such tender clarity in the gravelly creaking of a Billie Holiday song.
Last year, in one of the most absorbing conversations collected from the Vietnam-Cambodia-Bangkok-Laos digressions, a question was solicited by a restless transient that I remembered while idling in Yangon's airport last month:
"Do people really travel to find themselves?"
Walking home from tonight's dinner with friends, I again suddenly remembered the question. I searched my memory and cannot recall what insane reply escaped my drunken mouth at that time, but the question hit me.
What if the same question was asked of me now?
What if I can revise my inebriated, clumsy reply then?
What if I can say:
"What if...what they are trying to find, they already possess, and all they really need is someone to point inward and remind them?"
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Non sequiturs
Whenever I hear anyone mention the words “New Year Resolutions” I have this overwhelming twitch to grab anything blunt and aim three direct swings on whoever was speaking’s head. But that’s outlawed. Which is a shame considering that in so doing you are extending humanity a big favor. Instead, I would remove any form of expression in my face, stare dead on, but in my mind I roll my eyes and start humming a subversive rock song.
So it is my resolve not to make any resolutions. Devoted readers usually crowding the self-help shelves will of course view me like an irresponsible aberration but I am finally getting better at not giving a flying fig about what anyone thinks.
Though quite liberating, this can be a source of mild terror too.
-
Not enough memory.
That’s what my Blackberry groans, impersonally, every time I try and snap a picture.
To which, the delinquent brat in me would flirt with the impulse to stomp on the underperforming device or fling its sorry whiteness on the nearby wall. Partly in resentment, partly in protest and partly because that cold auto-response is a goshdarn lie.
The BB memory card is bursting to the seams with memories.
In there swims images snapped from last year’s Ho Chi Minh, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Bangkok misadventures. The uncooperative memory card holds random notes that will help shape stories to be transcribed should there be a window in the immediate future to do so. Confined in its bytes and computing algorithms are archives of faces of strangers, curious objects and anything considered to be exotic as tokens and testaments fueled by restlessness and the desire to leave comfortable rooms.
It is loaded with memories; it’s the availability of storage legroom that’s just missing.
-
January 2013, I found myself in Myanmar. A multi-sensorial paradox.
But I am not giving Yangon justice by summing it up just so.
All I wish is for summer to come soon, a little spot somewhere with a hammock and, in the lazy afternoons, write properly, contently, retracing the misadventures and rediscovering them like a box of childhood trinkets, then to drown in the gush of familiar feelings you thought you have misplaced.
-
Pretoria, South Africa popped into March’s work itinerary. High time to invest in a proper camera. Though the mind can amazingly pickle things for eternity but when a memory blurs, what comes out of a proper camera will be cherished familiarity.
-
Authenticity.
The very word that induced tears from a smart, overly-achieving, energetic woman who at a very young age was a delegate to this year’s World Economic Forum.
We have decided to meet in the obscenely-priced hipster café slash bar slash deli and the meeting was framed around the idea of catching up, explore a collaboration and map a strategic branding initiative for projects of common interest.
What we both haven’t predicted was how, without admonition or preamble, the antiseptic formality of the business agenda drifted into a conversation on authenticity.
I was talking, without noticing, that my vocal decibel changed tack. I was speaking in a cadence that, I wasn’t aware until too late, bordering into an odd alternate of bruising guilelessness and emphatic tenderness and when I looked up from stirring my cup her eyes were not only welling but streaming.
She told me that I hit the nerve and I totally nailed how she felt about the complex partnership she had with her co-founders in a social enterprise. The difficulty to assign proper words for all the struggles. That I spoke the truth and articulated everything she was grappling to come to terms with.
I told her I wasn't pulling a gambit. I was describing the things the way I truthfully saw it. And there should be no other way of putting it.
I walked home, a block away from the café, authenticity, that seemingly innocuous word, floating in my mind like a dandelion hovering in the eye of a hurricane .
So it is my resolve not to make any resolutions. Devoted readers usually crowding the self-help shelves will of course view me like an irresponsible aberration but I am finally getting better at not giving a flying fig about what anyone thinks.
Though quite liberating, this can be a source of mild terror too.
-
Not enough memory.
That’s what my Blackberry groans, impersonally, every time I try and snap a picture.
To which, the delinquent brat in me would flirt with the impulse to stomp on the underperforming device or fling its sorry whiteness on the nearby wall. Partly in resentment, partly in protest and partly because that cold auto-response is a goshdarn lie.
The BB memory card is bursting to the seams with memories.
In there swims images snapped from last year’s Ho Chi Minh, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Bangkok misadventures. The uncooperative memory card holds random notes that will help shape stories to be transcribed should there be a window in the immediate future to do so. Confined in its bytes and computing algorithms are archives of faces of strangers, curious objects and anything considered to be exotic as tokens and testaments fueled by restlessness and the desire to leave comfortable rooms.
It is loaded with memories; it’s the availability of storage legroom that’s just missing.
-
January 2013, I found myself in Myanmar. A multi-sensorial paradox.
But I am not giving Yangon justice by summing it up just so.
All I wish is for summer to come soon, a little spot somewhere with a hammock and, in the lazy afternoons, write properly, contently, retracing the misadventures and rediscovering them like a box of childhood trinkets, then to drown in the gush of familiar feelings you thought you have misplaced.
-
Pretoria, South Africa popped into March’s work itinerary. High time to invest in a proper camera. Though the mind can amazingly pickle things for eternity but when a memory blurs, what comes out of a proper camera will be cherished familiarity.
-
Authenticity.
The very word that induced tears from a smart, overly-achieving, energetic woman who at a very young age was a delegate to this year’s World Economic Forum.
We have decided to meet in the obscenely-priced hipster café slash bar slash deli and the meeting was framed around the idea of catching up, explore a collaboration and map a strategic branding initiative for projects of common interest.
What we both haven’t predicted was how, without admonition or preamble, the antiseptic formality of the business agenda drifted into a conversation on authenticity.
I was talking, without noticing, that my vocal decibel changed tack. I was speaking in a cadence that, I wasn’t aware until too late, bordering into an odd alternate of bruising guilelessness and emphatic tenderness and when I looked up from stirring my cup her eyes were not only welling but streaming.
She told me that I hit the nerve and I totally nailed how she felt about the complex partnership she had with her co-founders in a social enterprise. The difficulty to assign proper words for all the struggles. That I spoke the truth and articulated everything she was grappling to come to terms with.
I told her I wasn't pulling a gambit. I was describing the things the way I truthfully saw it. And there should be no other way of putting it.
I walked home, a block away from the café, authenticity, that seemingly innocuous word, floating in my mind like a dandelion hovering in the eye of a hurricane .
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