Think Globally?

Greetings from the other side of the planet. The posts have been rare lately because I’ve been traveling. A buddy of mine from law school and I decided to take a break after the bar exam and do something adventurous. Ergo, I’m in a rented van in New Zealand. There has been so much going on that even though plenty of things deserved some observational humor I’ve either been sans writing materials or didn’t have the time to write anything. Anyway, thoughts on the world from the other side of it. Broad strokes.
Globalization is a Middle Eastern guy standing in an Irish pub in New Zealand drinking a Corona in the middle of winter and bobbing his head to Ja Rule. (Note… this dude is not a creature of my imagination. I drank a beer next to him yesterday.) There is nothing like traveling to make you realize how big/small the world is. You can be driving into a glacier-carved fiord that is literally as far away from home as it is feasible to get without a team from NASA, turn on the radio and listen to Pink. (here of course I am referring to the white trash turned rapper turned pop starlet turned my stomach) It gives you the feeling that as a species we are becoming really homogenous. Honestly, if you are going to adopt a piece of another culture, the least you could do is try not to adopt the worst shit that we produce. The fact that I have to listen to Daughtry in New Zealand is a monument to the suggestibility of the human animal. Basically, if somebody tells us something is good then we bite. This does not bode well for the tourism industry. Once everything is the same all they will be able to market is the weather.
More to come…

You're the One Who's and Adult

The original focus of this blog was going to be about getting older and coming to terms with things like responsibility and “real” life. I’ve pretty much given up on a motif but I felt like a return to my original mission was overdue. So here goes…

They say you are only as old as you feel. I feel like I’m thirteen, a thirteen year-old with the beginnings of a beer belly, a mortgage, and a hairline that’s fighting a losing battle with his forehead. Aging is a strange experience. I guess I shouldn’t say that because it is a universal ordeal. Still, actually going through it feels unnatural.

Some people are born as adults. They seem to transition into their responsibilities and adult roles without effort or contradictory impulses. However, it seems like a lot of people in my generation (myself included) are very much in a round peg, square hole situation. I’m not talking about irresponsibility or foolishness, that’s too simple a view of the phenomenon. I know plenty of people who are very capable and responsible contributors to society who are very much children masquerading as high powered adults. I can only describe it as a disjoint between my conception of what I thought being an adult meant and the reality of my existence as one. There’s a gap there. As a child I assumed my parents knew how to do everything. My understanding was that there were knowledge and skills that were somehow inherent in all adults. Like a built in time-bomb of maturity that would go off when you reached a certain age… kind of like pubes. You just wake up on day and there they are… profound evidence of getting older. Naturally, I just accepted that when I “grew up” I would acquire adulthood in a similar fashion, roll out of bed one morning to find that I hate loud music and have an overwhelming desire to tuck my shirt in really tight.

Instead, I wake up to the same person I was yesterday, albeit a little balder and slower. I find that rather than my own maturity level rising it seems like my opinion of the general adult population gets lower. It’s not that I get more mature. It’s that I realize that other people are just as juvenile as me. Adulthood is not a transformation into a competent and responsible human being, it’s the slowly dawning realization that nobody else knows what the hell they are doing either.