Destination: SIN city

The fine city of sin - where bodies get dismembered and the statistic is higher for getting murdered than mugged on the streets.

Is there some kind of irony we're missing out on?

Someone once told me every country has its own set of problems... it's just a matter of which set of problems you choose to live with.

All this and more have surfaced in the last two months or so - and I sent L off at the airport today (lucky ibiza-bound babe, i'm very jealous!) which reminded me of the last time I was there sending someone else off.. I've said this about the airport before, but it's such a non-place, where the atmosphere of transition and loss and hope simultaneously juxtaposed gives it such an ephemeral quality. It's like stepping into a portal from one dimension and entering into another where you get lost somewhere in time and space, where your clock gets messed up and some kind of semi-conscious crisis is lurking in the recesses of your mind.

I don't think I've ever thought so hard about the future as I have this past summer - albeit a very jammed-packed fun-filled and eventful one - it is probably one of my most sober ones too. Remotely, I start thinking about Anderson's theories of the imagined communities and the so-called nationalist movements, the emergence of nationalism after the disintegration of belief in the meta-truths and the higher order... is it one big fallacy that we're believing in - a constructed ideology designed to help mankind deal with his indentity crisis and insecurities?

I've never considered myself a big fan of SIN city. I was in constant rage before I left - which somewhat disappated when I was living somewhere else - then was revived again in the first two weeks I got back. I remember raging down the streets in town with D, completely disgusted and agasht with the state of civility and general lack of ability for enunciating words. But, the rage would go on and then it will suddenly go away as sudden as it came on. And then I found myself re-integrated back to where I grew up and would call home and suddenly it all didn't matter anymore.

I find it slightly ludicrous that I have never been one to call myself a nationalist or claim to have any sort of vague national consciousness... but it seems when the situation arises that a foreigner passes a comment on my (like-it-or-not) homeland, I find myself rising in anger, all ready to defend any barrage of words or criticism that comes my way like a true soldier fighting at the pointless front line. Especially if that foreigner happens to be someone close to you... It doesn't happen all the time... but each time it does it makes me acutely aware of the different dimensions I'm living in and the sublimal feeling of insignificance one gathers in thinking about the 6 billion and growing people living in the 194 countries of the world. Has anyone wondered it might be like had Columbus never had his stupid adventures and modes of transport never invented. We'd still be living in our little igloo communities oblivious to any form of existence other than the existence we're living in - there wouldn't be a white or black or brown or yellow, the concept wouldn't make sense. Would we have been better off?

The crisis of place is at once limiting and irrelevant. How difficult is it to be mobile... how hard can staying at one place be? My friends are suddenly getting married and being pregnant. Everytime we have a conversation it's I can't believe we're actually thinking about things like... houses, property, investment, incomes, bonds, marriage, kids... the future. Such an emblematic, enigmatic, exciting word. Scary, too.

I think when the time comes that I no longer express any surprise or fear that we're thinking about such scary 'adult' issues, that's when we finally accept it and just grow up. Sleep is no longer an innocent bliss where responsibilities are shouldered by immaculate parents and it's all just plug and play.

I'm going to savour every single second of this coming academic year. I crave some stimulation. It's with trepidation that I embrace my small-girl-in-a-big-city situation, but how exciting would it all be. A dizzy array of stories to be discovered, contacts to be made, networks to be established and grades to be got.
I hate the underground but I've got to get over it.

Forget about the back-for-good and think about the life-changing-year.

So bye SIN city, Destination: LON. Here I come!