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[zubird]

i usually find something useful in Slate, but it's never in their travelogues. it might be something about how i'm against travelogues on principle, or that somehow Americans' perspectives on places foreign [no matter where the place is] end up sounding the same, or i just don't like things that mix expository and personal writing [which rules out

Comments

[misonou]

i have many things to tell you, and i'd be doing it more often if i had net access more often then rarely.

first i think you have an amazing ability to be very impartial, and you seem to think a lot about many things, and you're a delight to read, all the time. i have a very, very high opinion on you (i know it means something only if you care about who i have a high opinion on, and i don't assume you do, just in case). and it makes me sad that you're not ridiculously influential so that i know many people will read this now and we'll make some kind of difference.

i didn't recognize the quote, although i've read the text already. what striked me the most was the emphasis on free time and slow eating that Americans seem to often put, when in Western Europe. especially since in Western Europe people generally complain they don't have enough free time, and people in Eastern Europe generally think people in Western Europe work way too much.
and this food thing. call me romantic, but i thought we work to eat, not vice versa. and if you cut down your eating time, what the fuck do you dedicate your life to? eating is the basic life activity. eating is life.

as of history. i searched my computer to be sure i'm not misquoting, and here: According to Geographer James Howard Kunstler “Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading.” i won't make judgements about quality, but 80% of anything is a lot, and it's obviously not just about America being a freshly colonized country. it's older than 50 years in any case.
it seems to me like a very childish belief that Future is always better than the Past, and Technology is like whoa!, and nothing ever repeats. but mostly, obviously, i don't understand. history is not here to opress us. history is here so that we remember the rules of How Things Happen. i think.

one thing about being proud. alright, i noticed this when i started hanging out with Israeli people at my university. and they would talk about how they were persecuted in WW2, how Moses got THEM out of Egypt, how THEY wandered in
the desert for 40 years, and in the end i had to tell them, look, Moses didn't get YOU out of Egypt. that's when i realised there was something wrong about the linguistic structure.
this is my enlightened conclusion: they have nothing with Moses, Egypt, nor WW2. just like Australians have nothing with British criminals, Italians have nothing with Ancient Rome and you, Elmira, didn't slaughter any Indians. since it wasn't our brilliant choices that got us born where we were born, there is nothing to be particularly proud of. it was just an accident and having any emotions over the matter is pretty irrational.
you can be proud for accepting certain values, or happy for being surrounded with certain people, having a nice welfare state etc, but that's a whole different matter.