i have been rather uninspired lately. the ephemera of traveling, the cloud of drugs and booze that has taken up permanent residence in my already waning head...and for those of you who know me well, the lethargy that tediously follows me around gently prodding and usually succeeding in placating any sort of intrepidation i can muster. but today, after a few calm and reviving nights in sofia, bulgaria, i have composed myself enough to form thoughts somewhat supassing the level of, "what type of alcohol shall i drink tonight?" and i am sitting at the communal computer, which auspiciously never seems to be occupied, here in this hostel which has treated me with the utmost hospitality and warmth, and i will now emit.
chance. and flow. chance bestows the opportunities in life, well... in fact it is life. chance lifted me up by my suffocating jacket lapels in iran and benevolently set me back down in beautiful istanbul, turkey when i had planned to waste away in incarceration, iran for the next four months of my life. what happened next is entirely directed by some incomprehensible force which i will call "flow" and which i will introduce as "the one in the driver's seat." i have resigned myself to two facts as of this very moment: a) never trust anything i say, as it is nearly always a fleeting thought, subject to change on a whim and at any moment in time. and b) i have given up control of my life completely to this so-called "flow" because there is no use in fighting the tide. what is the point? what is the point, really, of trying to orchestrate some kind of plan for your life? this is not a rhetorical question, and if someone has answers, i would really love to hear them. but i have been injected with this sense of classless, boundless freedom since coming to eastern europe where the word "freedom" means not only being able to do what you want to do, but being percieved for who you are, not what you have made of your life. in a sense, "accomplishment" is not neccesarily a word with much value to it here. likewise, your "group" may consist of anyone, ranging in age, economic status, and nationality because these classifications are absolutely and irrefutably invisible here. i often feel utterly ridiculous even thinking about asking someone thier age here because it just seems so peripheral and irrelevant. and so, with that said, i probe the culture which generated me, a cuture in which life is defined by "the dream" or shall i say the quest for "the dream," moving through the system (or outside of the system) in order to achieve the goal, to achieve a place, a name, a title, a life, which is wrapped up in silver wrapping, gold if you go to school for four more years, and platnum for two more years after that, and tied with a neat little bow and set at your feet to open whenever you are ready. i am a literature major, right now i am traveling, and i plan to go back to school for creative writing in boston when i am done. i am 24 years old, half vietnamese and half iranian, and whole american. i have not achieved anything yet but all the people who are holding thier breath for me can rest assured because i have a plan. after all, i am only 24. real "status in life" can potentially be deffered until your early thirties without any real social backlash or recoil. so, they sip thier coffee and breathe easy for the time being with the tangential assurance that my spurious plan provides them.
but why spurious? it seems like a good plan, doesn't it? easy and mindless enough, and then there is the platnum wrapped present at the end and who doesn't like presents? but then there is that little thing called chance. this thing that lifted me up by my suffocating jacket lapels and benevolently set me back down in beautiful istanbul, turkey when i was planning on wasting away in incarceration, iran for the next four months of my life. that little thing that completely disrupted the original plan and now has sent me spiraling into god knows what i will get myself into in the next three to four months. that thing that took me to spain, such a detour, for 15 days, and romania, and bulgaria after that. why did i go to spain? because by chance i met someone in istanbul that i liked enough to chuck "the plan" for to go to spain and spend some time with them before leaving this side of the world. and why did i go to romania and bulgaria? because by chance i found a cheap plane ticket to romania from spain, and bulgaria was an afterthought mentioned to me which i actually followed through on because other plans happened to change. i am closing in on a point here.... and now i am in bulgaria, immune to classifications, boundaries, and what essentially amounts to a contemporary caste system which we have adopted in the states, and i am thinking of chucking the plan again to go to vietnam for a year because of a chance conversation. and flow.
chance and flow. chance bestows the opportunities, and flow is what comes after you take them. you can be bestowed with an opportunity and not go with the flow, not take that chance, and not change the plan. and here is the crossroads. or you can go with the flow, take the chance, change the plan, and be lifted up by your suffocating jacket lapels from wherever you are and be benevolently set down in some other beautiful place when you were planning on wasting your life away in incarceration, (insert wherever here) for however long and your life can take you somewhere and into something completely different. but what do i know?
now, someone is waiting for the computer so i must go. tootles!
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