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It's raining outside, and it has been for a while. The asphalt is shining white.
Sometimes, like now, I leave Pat Metheny spinning and wonder why it feels so lonely to converse in English. This country so isolated within itself, only seeing itself, crying within itself. All day you hear people say 'hi how are you good thank you', and it's been eight years and I still haven't gotten over that. Still haven't gotten over the 'not my problem' syndrome. The 'go fix it yourself' ideals.
Surfing Korean blogs I can find people who live in the US, creating islands, talking, living, listening to good music and talking about soul and rhythm and choreography and art. Art. Expression. Something different, more full, more within.
In literature you always hear people talk about the inherent emptiness of the self. The unbearable lightness of being. Inevitable isolation. I wonder if this is strikingly Western, in the US and Europe and such; there are things in the East that are like that, but it's as if we have something that still fills us up. Don't leave your fingernails anywhere becuase foxes will eat them and turn into an impersonation of you. Get up in the subway for an elder. Don't kneel and bow two times because it symbolizes disrespect. Hold the soju glass with your right hand and drink swerving your body to the left.
Respect is one of those words that are so exotic from the western point of view, like Samurai or Ninja or Elders or Legend, translated into language are perfectly normal. Steak is one of those words that is so western from the eastern point of view, like bread or hip-hop or gang shootings or casual sex.
I don't know. What are you doing, how everyone likes to stay in isolated islands, briefly touching each other at short quiet tangents before launching again into personal voids? Why, can I ask, does the western world attribute the meaninglessness of human existence to the entire spread of humanity, regardless of whether or not it's true? What ego, I think.
You guys know, those among you who say 'country' and think 'the world'.