Having Fun All The Time

A thought: The key to my door is really weird. It’s not like a normal key, where you have a flat object with two edges that are all curvy and bumpy. The bumpy, key-blade part of it has another plane that intersects the main key-blade at a perpendicular angle (so that if you point the key at your face you see a plus sign). It’s extra difficult to fit into the door and for the longest time it took me several minutes to get the door opened in the dark. I wondered if I would ever learn to open the door smoothly without a struggle and a full minute of cursing under my breath. I noticed today that I open it smoothly now, with a minimum of jabbing at the door.

This weekend I went to town on the bus to run some errands, and on the way back it was getting dark out and it was raining and the people on the bus, even though we were packed together closely, were more or less quiet. I was listening to music on my headphones and looked around at all their faces and realized that I was unimaginably far from home and still alive, and I got a little rush of joy but also dull, quiet sadness because, also, I could see how unimaginably separate and different I was from the people on the bus.

Another thought: What would happen if there were technology that could translate one spoken language into another orally, on the spot, so that you could have a conversation with someone without a translator present, without knowing any of their language or they of yours?

Another thought: What is the point of travel? Why does it feel so intrinsically interesting to some of us, and not to others? Why do I feel, now, so ambivalent about travel for travel’s sake, as I have for as long as I can remember, and yet then also why am I now so far away from home?

The bus stops. A woman I watched get on carrying a thick bamboo stick over which were slung two large plastic bags filled with blankets and vegetables straightens up and lifts her stick of bamboo and struggles to get the bags back onto the two ends of it, and as she does this the bus begins to lurch forward. But all the passengers around me shout at the bus driver to stop, and he does, and the lady slowly gathers her things and lurches, herself, towards the exit. We all shuffle aside and press against each other to give her way. Everybody pays the same, 1 yuan, about 15 cents, to ride the bus, even these people who bring on large loads of clothes, food, machinery, I assume in most cases to sell somewhere, with them.

The bus rolls forward again and the driver turns out the cab lights. The drivers do this whenever we are on the road and won’t be stopping for a while, and when they do, everyone on the bus seems to get sleepier and quieter. There is a young girl sitting on a cardboard box on the floor of the bus, next to an older woman who is standing next to a few similar boxes. I’m not sure what’s in the boxes, but I look at the girl. She is staring straight ahead, with no expression that I can discern on her face.  I feel like I recognize this girl, but I don’t know why. She doesn’t appear to be sleeping, just absorbed in some kind of thought. Or maybe no thought at all. I keep glancing down at her face, to see if it will reveal something to me about what she is doing or thinking. I keep expecting her to turn to the woman next to her, since I think they are together, and say something. She just sits there, staring off at nothing. She sits there for ten minutes like that.

Finally we come to my stop, and I get off with a bunch of other students who are all going back to the school too. I open my umbrella and walk in front of the bus and look both ways to see what cars are coming. It is clear, except in the distance, in the lane opposite the bus, a silver car is gliding fast through the rain and shows no sign of slowing down for me or the people around me. We walk across the rainy street and about 100 meters away the car starts laying on its horn. By the time it reaches our stop we are all on the other side of the street, and I hear the ragged sound of its horn bend as it passes behind us.

I walk slowly in the rain. I have very little to do with the rest of my day, and I feel tired. I walk up the hill on the rain-soaked dirt road that leads back to campus. There are little pockets of students all walking the same way, and I walk by some of them and some of them walk by me. There are palm trees on both sides of the road and run-down houses and an old brick factory where plastic is burned and recycled. The walls and the window frames of the building are black with soot and a thick smell of urine and trash seeps up from the stream that flows along the road.

I feel old all of a sudden, but very new, in a way, too, because somehow I know that I was never really supposed to be here or to see any of this. It is all a choice you make, to go somewhere far away like this, and I think about how I made that decision some five-odd months ago. It feels like I didn’t really decide so much as let reality decide for me, while I sat by and weighed the reasons for going or not going as if they had perfectly equal weight. They still do, as far as I can tell, even now that I have put the decision behind me. It made itself, or anyway I don’t feel like I had anything real to do with it.

Robert Frost’s old famous poem says, “And sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth”. These lines are so haunting because they hit at precisely what it is to look at a life–your life–and have decisions before you that are so obviously serious and important that it’s impossible not to feel just a little bit outmatched by them. Like it’s unfair that anyone could have that much power over his/her own life in her hands.

It is also about the recursive nature of time; how you can regret things that you did or didn’t do in the past, but you can also regret things you are not doing now; hell, you can regret things you know you’re not going to do in the future.

But that has nothing to do with whether they actually happen. That has more to do with chance, with how you feel on a particular day, with how important you decide it is to think about the road you’re taking. And with how far ahead and how long you stare down that road.