at the airport, the guard, who the kind of person who probably has two eight-year-old daughters, checks my boarding pass and does a double take, looks it and exclaims at me with arched eyebrows: you're going far! and so I say: I'm going far! with a shrug.

once I get here, though, I am here. there is nothing else. I am, obviously, not far from where I am. what was here is now there. there was a flight, and then another flight, and then the flight touched down at sunset, orange light penetrating through the cabin and exiting out the other end like a neatly fletched arrow. arabic everywhere, and I roll them around in my tongue, trying to remember each letter of the alphabet.

after customs, and the immigration counter (which is two meters away from the customs counter), we get our bags. we are eleven people, a little pool, coagulating in corners, high surface tension. we move like amoebae. we get into a van. Hassan drives us to this hotel, and he is quiet, but we are talking, and meanwhile the world passes us by, a sliver of a crescent moon. it is Ramadan, which means that everything is open late because everyone has just started eating, drinking, talking. there are many cars on the street. (beautifully paved asphalt, I think, thinking about Mongolia.)

and then we go and eat, and it is full of hummus and baba and tabouleh and all these familiar things, and then my itching legs take me down and I wander, we wander down the street. what is jordan, amman? what is this place? again, of course, what comes to me directly, bluntly, is the differing quality of infrastructure, the colors of license plates, power plugs, these small little things.

but this time - this time - something about this seems immensely familiar, and I can't decide whether it's good or bad, whether it means the shock of the new has receded into a healthy appreciation of the different, or whether it means a numbing-ness of wonder. but look, you see: there are underpasses, there are roads with and without lanes, there are the usual western franchises, the black-and-white striped road curbs. this makes sense. this kind of sidewalk, this makes sense.

what is important to note, I think, may be not the difference, or the not-difference; it's not surprising that starbucks, or chilis, or kfc, mcdonalds are here; it's not a tragedy, not so much the sign of an extreme american imperialism. someone with money wanted to make a restaurant here and thought it would be popular if it was a foreign brand. gucci bags and prada operate the same way, except that 'identity' for items are thought to reside within the item, while 'identity' for a restaurant may probably always be thought to refer back to the originating country. but that's not so much it. the natural forces of desire, business, imagery, and idealization working in concert. in other words, the change is not top-down; it's bottom up. it's probably better or interesting to think of, maybe maybe, a country as having these very specific levels of development; and these are not incongruities but just a different list of expressed priorities. for example, 'wireless internet without drinkable tap water' is not necessary weird, it's just an inversion/flipping/change/reordering of what is possible and what is done.

tomorrow, we cross the border into palestine.

back to korea.

I am here, I am the lightest I have ever been. my hair is the longest it's ever been.

I am in limbo. I am confused. I am confused partially because I am so here. do you know what I mean? I am so here right now, and although I got here hardly 36 hours ago it's as if I've been here forever, and I don't like that right now. I was there, then. I am here, now. one day there was this dusty dusty day in irkutsk, where I was wandering around that small city so aimlessly, doing nothing. staring at a wall of ice cream ads. sitting in front of a fountain. and now I am here and it is as if nothing ever happened.

if I am so enamored by this phenomenon it is because it is so visceral.

-

there are some things I have decided: it's easy to want a home, it's easy to want to be negative, cynical, it's easy to slip away into internet-routines of thought-absence. it's okay to give myself away. it's okay to have some sense of loss of self. it's better than to always be on the positive side of things. it's okay to want to count on myself but it's also good to believe in others. and also a healthy disrespect for everything I count as absolutely necessary, is key.

-

earlier today my friend S asked me that morality dilemma: "if you were on a life raft, and had to save one of two things: a person you didn't know, or a legendary 'masterpiece' work of art, who would you save?" and in a flash of inspiration I asked her back: "if you were the person floating in the water about to die, and the person on the raft asked for your advice, saying 'who should I save: you, or the masterpiece?', what would you say?"

and suddenly as she opened her mouth I knew my own answer: it was me, myself, me, I would say, "me, me, ME, ME" with increasing urgency, "this is me, me, I want to live, forget this work of art, I would like to say me, me, fish me out from this water, let's go live, let's go walk and run, stay up all night and pour my head onto paper, I'll leave the city, go travel the world", and that's what I thought about on the way home, listening to rather ripped (sonic youth), reading about melanie klein and wilhelm reich on wikipedia, rocking on my heels, watching seoul slide by.

(and still there is this ____ in my ____)

music: carsick cars, you can listen you can wait. We are in Beijing, the royal we, we are wandering, seeing. I have so much to say but have no idea where to start.

--

Tonight I was walking around Nanluogu Xiang, wandering into shops, picking up little trinkets. The night is nightly night, and there are tiny little cafes that are just lit so nicely, that make you want to take the arms of your dearest friends and pull them in, sit down in a lovely worn couch, have a beer and talk into the night with your faces aglow from a side, half-silhouetted, noses casting shadows across a cheek, yellow lamps in the corner, the sound of glasses against a wooden desk, the stirring chords of some appropriately familiar music. Amidst this all I was alone, walking, and very happy to be alone, but feeling very lonely, feeling a sudden ache wash over me.

It struck me at one moment walking along the street, as a specific choice available to me, that I could have jumped into a bar somewhere, had a beer, met someone randomly, injected myself into the conversation, could have started laughing together and said something like, 'let's go to another bar!', and all of a sudden things would change, and I would be drifting together within a group, happily. I could have done that, like I did in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Ulan Bator, or the night before in Beijing, but tonight this night for some reason I didn't want to, was too tired to. When I say tired I don't mean physically tired, of course, I mean people-tired, I mean I'm not super eager to meet people, and this comes and goes in waves, sometimes I am, really am, but tonight I was content to be here and curl into myself, content to move on a whim.

And so tonight I walked alone in the streets, just me, and my thoughts, and there are thoughts:

a) I don't know why every time someone does something really great I look at their age and mentally calculate the difference in years between me and them. I don't think it's a good thing. b) I think desire is a muscle, I have this theory, and I think it's a good one. c) I dream worryingly of impending heartache. d) I've been having crazy irrational dreams lately, like yelling furiously at people because they bought the wrong kind of bottled water, or greeting people I've never met before. e) This place feels like home, lately I feel like home to myself. f) I love the city slipping by g) what is it to live and have ambition? what should my relationship to ambition be? ambition is desire solidified as a direction, a concrete arrow cast and stuck in the ground, both productive and constraining, and I can feel myself wanting things, and I want to want things, and I want things already, but also I worry that the path of wanting things all the time = constant nervewracking narrowmindedness (the calculating age difference stuff, and more), and this pace right now is so precious, a few hours at a time, a walk here and there, a little slowness so precious. h) everything can be thrown away, a little, and when you start to think of something as absolutely necessary, that's where I should question it and nudge it a little, because there's always something larger. i) I need to go back to new york and get rid of everything in storage; just throw it away; it's such a metaphor. j) maybe I should meditate regularly, find a method, fall into a routine, thank you herman hesse for the tip. k) maybe I should have routines for routines and routines that are anti-routines of me-not-doing-things-I've-done-before. 

and there's l) and m) and n) and o) and p) which are so so so very important but I can't mention here.

later tonight I took a taxi home and the world slid by and we passed by a street with restaurants and lit red lanterns everywhere, and I took out my phone and recorded some video, and the driver noticed and slowed down, and so we glided through this street, awash with red flecks moving rearwards, leaving trails, going 'home' coasting on streets to the sound of carsick cars. now, now, I go to bed dreaming of bikes, trains, ferries, and a loved city halfway across the world.

I am here and it is a center and I am in a whirlwind and know not what to think.