"A dream of cake is a dream, not a cake, but a dream of a journey is itself a kind of journey"
-Marek Halter
I just got back from a 4-week vacation through Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Thailand. I don't wish to write much about what I consider to be the 'boring' details of vacation: What did I do? What did I see? What was my favorite part? Roses and thorns…? Etc. To summarize, highlights included rock climbing on ocean bluffs off the shore of Thailand, eating loads of Indian food, Chinese New Year festivities, and taking a Thai cooking class. What I mostly did during my vacation however, was just feel downright uncomfortable. For me at least, the best way to describe something uncomfortable is to use an analogy. So here we go…
I think people are like pencils. We have something in our core that allows us to leave our mark on the world around us. Sometimes we leave a beautiful mark, and sometimes we make mistakes. We have the ability to fix our own mistakes, but only for so long. If we make too many mistakes, we end up just smearing our problems around and making them all worse. Also like pencils, we regularly need to be re-sharpened in order to leave the best impression possible and avoid mistakes. When I went on vacation this winter, I left my pencil sharpener in Kaili. (Not literally [Well literally, yes, I did.] But for the purposes of this post, I left both my physical pencil sharpener and my metaphysical pencil sharpener in Kaili. OK…?) So, when I'm close to my (metaphysical) pencil sharpener, there is nothing to fear. I am always at my best, I feel comfortable, and if I need a quick refreshing, my familiar sharpener's right there. On vacation, as I felt myself getting duller and duller, leaving a nasty, flat smear in my wake, I found no way to sharpen myself. I just kept grinding down my lead in frustration and using improper sharpening techniques (like chewing the wood away with my teeth) just to get through each day. In the moment, it seemed to be working out pretty well, but now that I'm back in China and can see how rough a trace I really left. I realize that it didn't work well at all, and I need some serious re-sharpening.
To clarify a few things, I don't speak Malay or Thai, nor do I know my way around any part of Southeast Asia that's not China. For vacation, I pretty much threw myself to the wolves and just hoped for their mercy. In this case, the majority of the wolves were conniving racists who saw anything white as a wallet with legs. Unable to use my silver tongue or golden pipes* to prove myself to be otherwise, I constantly found myself in a role I wholeheartedly detest… tourist. *(See previous post entitled "Just to be Frank)
Getting back to China was like cleaning out your ears and suddenly realizing how much the sound had actually been muddled before. I finally had the confidence to approach people, express myself, and ask for/receive help. I guess my vacation gave me some perspective in exchange for 4 weeks of my mental well-being, and for that I'm somewhat grateful. I still think I got ripped off, but, hey, I'm used to it after traveling through Thailand.
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