Sunday, January 06, 2008

Noteworthy

     Honestly, I'd be willing to engage in some form of meaninglessness if it meant that you would buy shit for me. And I'm not talking about any cheap shit. My moral righteousness and my material needs can be interchanged at your leisure.


     Hong Kong made me who I am, in multiple senses. But I guess the sense that is most fitting is that Hong Kong is, as Anthony Bourdain puts it, a giant pinball of consumption. Mad for food and cash and style and substance, I can't wait to visit Hong Kong again. My sense of "home" has evolved over time. There's the suburban sense of "home", a place deserving Steve McQueen-type escape attempts. There's the university sense, where the alternate self holds court. Then there's the overseas sense, and it's calling me, I swear to God. There's this alternate me that rides the Metro, that uses his Octopus card, that shops at Lane Crawford, that stuff his face full of ji dan zai at every available opportunity.

     But we're talking about separate selves, spanned across time and space in very inconvenient fashions. I'd like to think that my current preoccupation with money has more to do with temporality than materiality. I think it's just the future manifesting today, but these little plans don't belong (obviously) and get a bit twisted as they're breaking the rules that govern the time-space continuum. That's the most rational and least honest explanation I'm able to conjure. It'd be a lot easier—but less creative—to just say that I've become addicted or obsessed.

     But obsession is glamorous. Obsession, when taken seriously, turns one into a delirious caricature of the self, a blow-up doll granted some measure of autonomy. But the blow-up doll has been blessed with a brain, albeit it a plastic one. God, what a stupid transformation this has been.

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1 comment:

Angela said...

Yeah, I've always felt that obsession strips you of yourself, to a point. Unless it's narcissism, but that's no good either.