It was recently brought to my attention that I have not updated this blog in almost two months, and that I was a bad blogger.
That person can kick rocks!
While this may be astonishingly apparent by the nature of my trip, I completely underestimated how much travel for this amount of time would change me while completely eviscerating my ability to form coherent thoughts - or at least my ability to put them on paper. I’ve been working through some much larger concepts that I thought I had already figured out, but the depth at which I spend pondering these ideas have left me feeling more insecure in so much of both my worldview and my place in this world. Thoughts on ethnicity, race, class, social structure, hegemony, capitalism, socialism, educational attainment, social mobility and how all these systems intersect and affect the places I’ve been while absolutely affecting the people that live there and me as a visitor as well. The next four countries I’m going to write about, Cambodia, Thailand, India, and the UAE were all challenging in so many ways and have triggered so many thoughts on them that I’ve basically found myself retreating into some dissociative space in my mind so that I don’t overwhelm myself. But because I seem to enjoy setting unrealistic expectations for myself, I’m going to try to get all of these thoughts out of my head within the next week or so with the hope that I can have a cleaner state of mind when I start on the next leg of my trip (I took a month off and am literally writing this from my friend’s bed in St. Louis, USA). I don’t know what this world is, or rather, maybe I’m starting to fully acknowledge what it is? Either way, it’s a headache, and I need some relief.
