A still murky conception of love notwithstanding...

I have this psychosis-inducing fantasy of meeting a girl in Thailand I could really, truly--like objectively--love. This fantasy seems just as (un)realistic to realize here as anyplace. Different than desire, I never expect fantasy to come to fruition. The criteria I maintain for the fantasy girl I could fall in love with in Thailand is very tight. Observation of the slightest foul audio or visual cue triggers a psychosomatic response that starts with crestfallenness, moves to resignation, onto post-Thanksgiving-day-turkey-feast fatigue/nausea, and finally resolves at term-paper-due-tomorrow-noon anxiety. It is too often that my desires, language, cultural points of reference, and predisposition to what I consider gauche, non-verbally (un)communicative gestures don’t interface well with most people, which is actually fine. Well, it is fine here, in Thailand, because my frustrated expectations I usually find to be wrapped up in some kind of culturally interesting observation, whereas at home, they--my frustrated expectations--are wrapped up in nothing, and so kind of depressing. Moreover, I don’t need to find the fantasy girl I could fall in love with in Thailand; it would be a dangerous thing if we all made such demands of our fantasies. That I come deceivingly close to finding what I think is the fantasy girl I could, once again--objectively--fall in love in Thailand triggers psychosis, or whatever is that arrests my words and breathing and mental chatter when I think I'm visited by one of these specters.

(a)nationalism

I'm from America, and yet I don't feel like an American. The whole idea of a nation state is bogus, outdated, an idea over some 400 years old that followed a continental war, divided power among a handful of power lovers, created identities that the rest of the world would inherit by virtue of being born at a certain place and time. There is no agency involved in assuming this identity; we are elected or banished according to something like divine grace, happenstance, entropy. National identities still hold water for many people, but for those who live in and between the continually expanding pores of different cultures and places, for those who have a stake in creating themselves, such constructs feel unrepresentative and transparently thin.

If I am outside a place, what does it take to be inside it? Being born there? A family? A job? An address? A skin color? A mastery of a language? Or can it just be a choice: this is where I live now. If and when I leave, it will also be where I am from.