Don't cry for me.
I'm still not used to spending $30 on a dinner for two at some ubiquitous chain restaurant in a suburban hell. I have used "con permiso" and "si" repeatedly. And upon hearing "Mana" on the radio while returning home from Joshua Tree (OK, to HER home as I have only spent about twelve total hours at my home since I got back here), I suddenly found myself dreaming about Argentina.
It's still a bit unreal being back. I have to wonder just how "free" we really are. Sure, our choices seem limitless, but when everyone shops in the same stores for the same products and eats in the same restaurants serving the same food and everyone drives the same cars and views the same television programs and everyone lives in houses that look the same in neighborhoods that look the same, I have to ask, is that really choice? Is it better to live in a society where you have limited choices but an unlimited number of vendors or to have unlimited choices but no choice from whom you buy? Are the trendy, efficient, unremarkable, and indistinguishable suburban homes of America really all that different from the non-descript concrete boxes of the second and third world? Are our pink stucco and faux finishes just a way to mask our own concrete boxes, is it just an illusion of individuality?
Perhaps this is all too deep for a quiet Sunday night. Perhaps I'm just anxious to be back out on the road. Perhaps I'm just having some weird psychological reaction to losing my voice as a result of this annoying head cold I picked up somewhere over Texas and being unable to talk for two days.
Ironic, when I have the best stories to tell and the most people interested in hearing them, I suddenly find myself unable to speak.
So it goes. I'm dizzy from the Day-Quill. I'm off to bed.
Comments
unreal, surreal, getting real, really willing, free will, will you free me?
welcome home.
Posted by: dvl | March 14, 2005 01:57 AM
You are my Day-Quil sister today. I too am cracked out of my gourd on the stuff.
I hear you on the sameness and lack of choice in the U.S. When I was in the former Soviet Union, I lived in a typical Soviet planned neighborhood of four apartment buildings surrounding a square, part of 4 other similar 'qvartals'. On the 1st floors of each of the qvartals were stores with all the same products, and I didn't find it to be all that dissimilar to strip malls in the U.S. In either hemisphere, everywhere you go you'll find the same stores, with the same products, everywhere. Parallels in economic development in a so-called Capitalist system and a Communist system.
Posted by: jimbo | March 14, 2005 02:25 PM
we build our own prisons, grasshopper. nothing can be unless one allows it. and one cannot permit what one does not accept.
funky cold medina.
Posted by: SEAN | March 14, 2005 08:21 PM
Isn't it all your own choice? Your options are out there, if you choose to notice them. How often do you go to a chain restaurant rather than a family owned place? You have to look harder, but they are out there.
Same with the houses. You can choose a tract house that looks the same as your neighbors or you can choose a yurt in the middle of no where.
Your choice. Just harder to make the choice when you are in the states, trying to keep up with the Jones.
Posted by: k | March 14, 2005 08:42 PM