Rambly notes
It's a very drab day outside -- it's been a very drab week, in all honesty -- the sky's overcast with cloud and shadow and this wasn't what I signed up for when I came back home to the tropics for the summer. It's July! There's meant to be not a cumulonimbus in sight save for the wafting smog of Indonesia setting itself on fire! WHERE IS THE SUN.
So, instead of baking on a beach or doing something else that might contribute to my early demise via skin cancer I am sitting in the bowels of a shopping centre and discovering the telecommunication marvel that is internet tethering via the iPhone. No one in America knows what this marvel is because AT&T is a company made up of executives who sold their intelligence for greed.
Apparently these days I do a better job scribbling down things about the places I visit than actually doing any real student-y or fic writer-y things, so here I am. In another coffee shop, on another continent, and it's almost weird how much my brain shifts from gear to gear when I swing back to the little island. Over West I call this entire expansive region ASIA, as if I could tool it down as just the place over in the east. I never like calling it Asia; I try hard not to call it Asia; everyone around me calls it Asia-Asians-Asianish and eventually you either have to cave or turn into a roaring monster of semantic usage, and I chose the former. In the interests of accuracy I suppose I'm Southeast Asian; that (again?) is a colonial neologism, a slapped together conglomeration of the Bits of Asia that Aren't China or In Danger of Becoming Australia and Definitely Not Japan or Korea. Or India.
BUT THERE IS A LOT OF US, I mean:
-- and that horrible graphical representation of reality only covers the bits that are within shouting range of the Exaggerated Dot. Go a little fur
ther up and there's Vietnam and Cambodia and Myanmar/Burma and all these other places that are part of the clusterfuck happy alliance that is ASEAN. I don't know the slightest thing about most of these places; I haven't been to a large number of these places; I don't think there's too much in common (linguistically, culturally, ethnically) between most of our nations and if we were to band together as a bunch of post-colonial "been there, done that, got stamped all over by the British/Dutch/French" Thailand would be rather unhappy and lonely in its never-been-conquered-before corner.
I'm home, in mostly-Chinese Exaggerated Dot in the middle of Mostly Muslim South-South East Asia (WE ARE THE FAR EAST!1!1) chilling out in one of the few malls that isn't connected to other malls by some giant underground advertising tunnel system eating at a coffee chain that can be found everywhere else in the world. *HEADCLUTCH* Mostly I should live on the internet, which is where I return to every time I have more than 30 seconds of free time from university life.
So, I'm back. I wonder if it's a weird harmonic thing that led me to making a lot of international school friends in college; the vibrations of not-displaced-displacement?
In other news, my hazelnut drink tastes full of delicious. Now to get off the thinky-thoughts horse to go write some corporate Reno and/or a bunch of original things that involve screaming and torture by education.
So, instead of baking on a beach or doing something else that might contribute to my early demise via skin cancer I am sitting in the bowels of a shopping centre and discovering the telecommunication marvel that is internet tethering via the iPhone. No one in America knows what this marvel is because AT&T is a company made up of executives who sold their intelligence for greed.
Apparently these days I do a better job scribbling down things about the places I visit than actually doing any real student-y or fic writer-y things, so here I am. In another coffee shop, on another continent, and it's almost weird how much my brain shifts from gear to gear when I swing back to the little island. Over West I call this entire expansive region ASIA, as if I could tool it down as just the place over in the east. I never like calling it Asia; I try hard not to call it Asia; everyone around me calls it Asia-Asians-Asianish and eventually you either have to cave or turn into a roaring monster of semantic usage, and I chose the former. In the interests of accuracy I suppose I'm Southeast Asian; that (again?) is a colonial neologism, a slapped together conglomeration of the Bits of Asia that Aren't China or In Danger of Becoming Australia and Definitely Not Japan or Korea. Or India.
BUT THERE IS A LOT OF US, I mean:
-- and that horrible graphical representation of reality only covers the bits that are within shouting range of the Exaggerated Dot. Go a little fur
ther up and there's Vietnam and Cambodia and Myanmar/Burma and all these other places that are part of the clusterfuck happy alliance that is ASEAN. I don't know the slightest thing about most of these places; I haven't been to a large number of these places; I don't think there's too much in common (linguistically, culturally, ethnically) between most of our nations and if we were to band together as a bunch of post-colonial "been there, done that, got stamped all over by the British/Dutch/French" Thailand would be rather unhappy and lonely in its never-been-conquered-before corner.
I'm home, in mostly-Chinese Exaggerated Dot in the middle of Mostly Muslim South-South East Asia (WE ARE THE FAR EAST!1!1) chilling out in one of the few malls that isn't connected to other malls by some giant underground advertising tunnel system eating at a coffee chain that can be found everywhere else in the world. *HEADCLUTCH* Mostly I should live on the internet, which is where I return to every time I have more than 30 seconds of free time from university life.
So, I'm back. I wonder if it's a weird harmonic thing that led me to making a lot of international school friends in college; the vibrations of not-displaced-displacement?
In other news, my hazelnut drink tastes full of delicious. Now to get off the thinky-thoughts horse to go write some corporate Reno and/or a bunch of original things that involve screaming and torture by education.