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Sunday, February 20, 2011

Metropolis

The city challenges our individual vanity. Its edifices, incidents and crowds constantly remind us of the people who have come before us, those who are with us now, and those who have yet to come. In other words, our species across time and space.

The city is the abandoned cigarettes by the entrance to the subway, perhaps from smokers who ran down the stairs to catch the train just before this one, the one I, being neither a smoker nor in a hurry, am not forced to abandon my lit cigarette to catch.

The city is the word "mustache" carefully inked in black cursive on the upper lip of an airbrushed actress in a poster advertising Hollywood's latest misogynist, homophobic propaganda disguised as romance. The word is a wittier, braver, more absurd, more illegal response to this invasion of our public mental and emotional space than I would have been able to muster in the ten minutes I spent staring at that damned poster. Beneath the paving stones, the beach?

The city presents us with certain tensions - where the shock of difference makes our selves, identities, and personal histories at once more familiar and comforting, and more alien.

The city is a restaurant where I share with a friend a meal of beef rendang, sambal kangkong, and oh chien (oyster omelette), whose smells and tastes remind me of being small and silent, protected and warm. After the meal we return, loudly chatting, shivering extravagantly, to the freezing, gusty, dark street.

The city is a law school where I sit, fighting off jetlag, while all around me other lawyers are talking, about matters that they and most of us consider very important. I notice most of them are white, and many of them display a self-assurance that, while impressive, still betrays its hard-won nature. I wonder if I'll ever be as convincing. I wonder if I already have been. Afterwards over lunch I discover that, like me, one of these colleagues worries about how to date, and I feel more free.

The humanity of a city is inhuman in scope.

The city is hundreds upon hundreds of new faces every hour. The city is a mother caressing and examining her sleeping daughter's braids on the train. The city is a wiry man with full sleeve tattoos watching Saturday Night Live reruns while doing bicep curls at the gym. The city is a tiny brown haired girl who stares at me from her stroller, sucking thoughtfully on a lollipop, while her mother negotiates for a table. The city is a storekeeper watching a Cantonese soap opera, who takes my money with a quick "thank you." Hundreds and hundreds of vaguely significant encounters with people I will never see again. It brings me to life. It is absolutely unbearable.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

on solitude...

...amidst the ongoing strife of daily obligations... professional, romantic, platonic, domestic, there is a room:
where, laying inert but breathing, and deeply,
smiling so sweetly,
is where I have been this whole time,
dreaming my chaos into existence...

I will meet from this place.

How to Be Alone