Like I've said before, I've been at home lately--for more time than I have been since high school. I still consider myself an adventurer (and the real adventure will resume at the end of the month, Argentina bound) but I think I've been adventuring in new territory still, territory unused to the inquisitive stomp of my jackboots (purely figurative, I still wear flip flops everywhere).
That territory is American society. Honestly, I would be skeptical of anyone that claims to be "adventuring" in their own society, but frankly my own interactions with nearly everyone and everything I come into contact to have such a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity it makes me recall vividly the experience of being in another country. On top of that, I am most definitely isolated from the bulk of society by my current living situation. I live by myself and can claim no strong connections to any of the social fixtures of society. I go to a jam session once a week where the other participants have usually forgotten my name in the intervening week and play table top games with a host of nerds whose names I have difficulty remembering at the local gaming store. I don't watch TV, another massive way in which it seems Americans can relate to each other, except for Univision, the hispanic channel, which I don't really pay attention to anyway, and I meet precious few Latinos with whom I can chat about the happenings in that day's telenovela.
Hell, the video games I play are at least five years old (check out my other blog/project www.bigboxofgames.blogspot.com) adding to my feeling that the last time I was truly interlocked with society around me, I was in high school.
Furthermore, I am leaving in a month for overseas (over the Gulf of Mexico anyway) and this seems to cause many people's interest in me to be cut short. I am a temporary fixture for them. It could be coincidence or an observation born of isolation and paranoia, but the new social connections I have made are ones to whom I avoided mentioning that I was leaving the country.
So, hopefully, I can claim some of the authority I usually wield as an outsider in issuing claims about the world around me. The claim I'd like to make in this writing is something that has been on my mind since graduating from college.
When I went to college, I had hoped that I would end the part of my life where I was absorbing, or preparing (those being the terms I described it to myself). I felt this way through and about my writing in particular. In school, we were learning tools and things to improve our writing; we discussed why the techniques of some writers seemed to work and why some didn't. Our own writings were primarily written explorations of these discussions. I had hoped that at college, we would be encouraged to produce our own ideas and writings rather than continue to dissect the existing ideas of dead or tenured men. Needless to say, this was one of the many disappointments of college. It was, as I thought of it, to be another period of absorption. Ultimately, I was dissatisfied. When was the period of time that I would be "emitting"?
I was assured, at the end of college, like I was at the end of high school, like I was at the end of middle school, that this was something that would occur at the next stage of education. As you can imagine, I was somewhat skeptical of this claim at this point. And viewing my age-mates move through grad school, I feel like my skepticism was justified. (Too be sure, they are being given the reins, but slowly, bit-by-bit and only after those who would guide the cart elsewhere have been weeded out).
As my latest explorations have revealed to me, this tendency to absorb rather than emit reaches beyond the confines of academia. Every where I look around me, I see people caught up in particular varities of absorption and rarely involved in the making of what they are using. We go to the theater, but we don't act, we watch the movies, but we don't know how to work a camera, we love to read, but can't write, love music but don't sing, or can't even pluck a guitar. We love to eat, but we can't cook, we love chase scenes and action movies but can't do skid turns or know how to fire a gun. We watch sports but we don't play them. The list goes on and on.
I realized at some point in my meditiations that my battle with absorption would be better be described with one of hoary grandfather words used by the dissedents of American society: consumerism.
That territory is American society. Honestly, I would be skeptical of anyone that claims to be "adventuring" in their own society, but frankly my own interactions with nearly everyone and everything I come into contact to have such a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity it makes me recall vividly the experience of being in another country. On top of that, I am most definitely isolated from the bulk of society by my current living situation. I live by myself and can claim no strong connections to any of the social fixtures of society. I go to a jam session once a week where the other participants have usually forgotten my name in the intervening week and play table top games with a host of nerds whose names I have difficulty remembering at the local gaming store. I don't watch TV, another massive way in which it seems Americans can relate to each other, except for Univision, the hispanic channel, which I don't really pay attention to anyway, and I meet precious few Latinos with whom I can chat about the happenings in that day's telenovela.
Hell, the video games I play are at least five years old (check out my other blog/project www.bigboxofgames.blogspot.com) adding to my feeling that the last time I was truly interlocked with society around me, I was in high school.
Furthermore, I am leaving in a month for overseas (over the Gulf of Mexico anyway) and this seems to cause many people's interest in me to be cut short. I am a temporary fixture for them. It could be coincidence or an observation born of isolation and paranoia, but the new social connections I have made are ones to whom I avoided mentioning that I was leaving the country.
So, hopefully, I can claim some of the authority I usually wield as an outsider in issuing claims about the world around me. The claim I'd like to make in this writing is something that has been on my mind since graduating from college.
When I went to college, I had hoped that I would end the part of my life where I was absorbing, or preparing (those being the terms I described it to myself). I felt this way through and about my writing in particular. In school, we were learning tools and things to improve our writing; we discussed why the techniques of some writers seemed to work and why some didn't. Our own writings were primarily written explorations of these discussions. I had hoped that at college, we would be encouraged to produce our own ideas and writings rather than continue to dissect the existing ideas of dead or tenured men. Needless to say, this was one of the many disappointments of college. It was, as I thought of it, to be another period of absorption. Ultimately, I was dissatisfied. When was the period of time that I would be "emitting"?
I was assured, at the end of college, like I was at the end of high school, like I was at the end of middle school, that this was something that would occur at the next stage of education. As you can imagine, I was somewhat skeptical of this claim at this point. And viewing my age-mates move through grad school, I feel like my skepticism was justified. (Too be sure, they are being given the reins, but slowly, bit-by-bit and only after those who would guide the cart elsewhere have been weeded out).
As my latest explorations have revealed to me, this tendency to absorb rather than emit reaches beyond the confines of academia. Every where I look around me, I see people caught up in particular varities of absorption and rarely involved in the making of what they are using. We go to the theater, but we don't act, we watch the movies, but we don't know how to work a camera, we love to read, but can't write, love music but don't sing, or can't even pluck a guitar. We love to eat, but we can't cook, we love chase scenes and action movies but can't do skid turns or know how to fire a gun. We watch sports but we don't play them. The list goes on and on.
I realized at some point in my meditiations that my battle with absorption would be better be described with one of hoary grandfather words used by the dissedents of American society: consumerism.
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Also, hope your time in Argentina is amazing!