oh the places you'll go!

I was driving 'round town today, and I realized how relative distance can be.

Back in high school, I used to think my friend jane lived SO far from me. In fact, my friends and I would call go as far as to calling her house "China."

"Jane wants us to go pick her up..."

"Ugh we seriously have to drive all the way to CHINA?!"

But in fact, according to Googlemaps, her home is only a measly 2.5 miles away from mine. That's less than a 5k mini-marathon! (I should know... I ran one this past Christmas...) But you have to understand this was back in the day when all my buddies lived within walking distance from each other... Back when all we knew was Wilson High School, Puente Hills Mall, Thomas S. Burton Park, etc. Back when Brea Mall was quite a venture and a drive to Third Street Promenade was practically considered a road trip.

But now that our worlds are bigger and better, "China" is only a busstop away.

Having explored the far ends of the earth (or more like bits and pieces of Europe on the most haphazard Spring Break tour & a few more substantial trips to countries/islands in Asia), my standards have gotten higher as well.

I have this wanderlust... hence my blog url and headline. And it doesn't help that I carry this (sometimes misleading) romantic notion of faraway places. That's why I was so happy living in Seoul for the 5 months I was there. Even if I would be spending an average day walking around on the streets all by my lonesome and reading a book on the subway, it would feel THAT much cooler because I was in a different country. If I did the same here, I would just feel like a loser.

That's why the thought of moving back to this small armpit of a hometown made me die a little inside. I associated this town with everything ugly. Ugly street signs. Ugly houses. Ugly people with ugly driving. Ugly fob haircuts.

And I tried everything in my power to stay out of it. But now I realized I cannot fight it any longer. Whenever there was the option of Fight vs. Flight, I always chose the latter. Even in my relationships, when I didn't want to deal with people, I just fled. The main reason I moved out to West LA initially was because of a conflict I didn't want to deal with at home.

But I realized I cannot flee anymore and must embrace the ugliness. Or find some kind of beauty in it- whatever that may be.

From the wise words of Alain de Botton in his essays "The Art of Travel":

Home, by contrast, finds us more settled in our expectations. We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about our neighborhood, primarily by virtue of our having lived there a long time. It seems inconceivable that there could be anything new in a place where we have been living for a decade or more. We have become habituated and therefore blind to it. De Maistre tried to shake us from our passivity. In his second volume of room travel, "Nocturnal Expedition around My Bedroom," he went to his window and looked up at the night sky. Its beauty made him feel frustrated that such ordinary scenes were not more generally appreciated: 'How few people are right now taking delight in this sublime spectacle that the sky lays on uselessly for dozing humanity! What would it cost those who are out for a walk or crowding out of the theatre to look up for a moment and admire the brilliant constellations that gleam above their heads?' The reason people were not looking was that they had never done so before. They have fallen into the habit of considering their universe to be boring- and their universe had duly fallen into line with their expectations."

There are some who have crossed deserts, floated on ice caps and cut their way through jungles but whose should we would search in vain for what they have witnessed. Dressed in pink and blue pyjamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistres was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we've already seen.

ps. totally unrelated but i saw yann tiersen (amelie soundtrack guy) this month and he was amazing.