I believe this is because I am no longer truly traveling. Rather, I am living in another country. I have a mother here who cooks me nice, hearty meals. I have a brother whose Macbook charger I sometimes borrow. I have a university where I take classes that except for the language difference are much the same as the classes I take back home. Really, I am enjoying myself immensely.
I read a lot. I practice my Spanish. I write some short stories. I drink coffee or a beer outside cafes in the late afternoon and watch the people who walk by and imagine who they are. I’ve become used to girls in high heels that drive mopeds and the noise in the streets when Barca has a soccer game (sorry, fútbol). It is all very charming and interesting but I don't know if I'd call it thrilling. That’s okay. That’s fine. Actually, that’s great: I’m having a safe, enriching, and wholesome intercultural experience. But in having this, in being here, I am in no way unique or, for that matter, particularly interesting.
I’m a college kid whose parents can afford to send him abroad (speaking of which-- mom, dad: thanks!). I can write, but I need something to write about.
So, where does this leave us? What exactly am I saying? Am I quitting the blog? Bowing out early? Going all Bjorn Borg on you guys?
Not quite.
I just want to be candid with what my intentions are moving forward. When I started this, there were a couple things I wanted to get out of it.
First, I wanted to let friends and family know what I was up to. When you could all read and experience some of what I had seen and done, it made me feel like you weren’t quite as far away, and that felt good.
Second, I wanted to document my travels and practice my writing. The public nature of something like a blog encouraged this. I was motivated to keep writing because people kept reading what I wrote, so thank you all for that.
Third, I wanted to see if I could make this any more than those first two pieces-- and in some ways I think I have. To all of you I’ve never met in countries I’ve never been to: hello, I’m Curtis Lee. It took me a while to show a picture with my face on it not because I enjoyed anonymity (I did) but because I didn’t want you all to realize how young I am (almost 21). I thought it would invalidate the whole enterprise but so much for that I suppose.
Still, I haven’t come any closer to answering my question: where does this leave us? What’s going to change?
Not much. So far this has pretty exclusively been a travel blog (of sorts) except for that awkward pubescent stage when it was a quotes blog (of sorts). Now, it’s neither. It’s just my blog. Hopefully I’ve written enough interesting things that you all trust me to keep doing so, and if this means changing the focus a little, I hope you can deal with that. If you can’t, I probably never entertained you much anyways. I’ve been writing some fiction so now and then I’ll be tossing that up here—something I already tested out the waters with a couple days ago. And absolutely I’ll keep writing about when I travel or experience something interesting and different. And then, just to give myself more than a little liberty, I might also write about just about anything else: how I’m feeling, a thought, a quote, etc.
The title Wayward Gentry is not supposed to be an idea or a style or a clever disparate combination of two words. Rather, I think it describes a certain group of people. I would like to think and certainly like to say that money does not mean a whole lot to me, and it doesn’t. But I’m silly and naïve and plain stupid if I think that I could be where I am right now, writing what I am, if I hadn’t had parents who were willing to invest the capital to cultivate me to do so.
There is a strange paradox between wealth and freedom. Having money grants you liberty, but in order to gain the liberty that comes from being able to buy yourself a little chunk of land where you are autonomous enough that you can tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself, you have to sacrifice a lot of that freedom and go out into the world to make enough money to buy the chunk of land in the first place. Here’s where the children of wiser parents who have already confronted and compromised and done something with their lives come in: the kid only gets plugged into half of that equation, at least until they’re self-sufficient. This is why it is so damn easy for us (us being the kids) to talk about ideals and values and how we’re going to live our lives—we haven’t lived them yet; we haven’t had to compromise ideals; and we haven’t had to blemish our values. We stand on a hill in a flood and yell about how people should be bailing water.
It’s hypocritical and stupid, yes, but it’s also exactly what we should be doing at this age. Because if we don’t, if we don’t question the system and how it functions and who pedals the million little bikes that makes the one great wheel turn, well then, we’re just going to buy into the whole thing in bulk without choosing which ideals we are not willing to compromise and which values we are unwilling to blemish.
That is exactly why it’s important that we are wayward, that we get out and see the world and begin to understand how different and the same all of it really is. It makes us question and think about and decide which ideas and beliefs truly belong to us and which are just a part of what we’ve been taught and told and taken for granted. The two are not the same (unless you attend Vanderbilt University, zing!) and it's up to each of us to figure out where they're different.
So, if you were wondering, that’s what I think of the title to mean-- the name is an oxymoron and difficult to reconcile but then again, so is a lot of growing up.
No comments:
Post a Comment