of travels
Hmmm...I've been blessed with a job that can bring me to a lot of the country at no cost to me. I've met a lot of people formally and informally, ate a lot of stuff tasty and nasty, spent mornings, afternoons, nights travelling alone and with company, had much time to sleep or to talk to myself, I've been basically running around town.
Provocation to this piece is Kafka. In "The Metamorphosis," the sales agent who travels around a lot has suddenly woken up to discover that for some reason, he's been turned into a vermin. Cockroach to most of us. There is a particularly disoncerting thought in the novel how the protagonist travels a lot, meets a lot of people in transit, in stations, in trains, thousands of them in his entire life as a corporate slave, yet he rarely connected in a human way with any one of them. He still remained isolated, holed up in his own room, of no particular consequence to no one, and therefore if he remained a vermin his entirely life, nobody would bloody care.
Once in a while you really do feel that way when travelling. When travelling economy class, it's the destination that drives you. The plane ride is always stomach-churning and ear-popping. The bus ride is boring and bumpy. The tricycle ride is short but dusty.
You don't care a shit about the people who sit beside you unless their being there poses a clear and present danger to your sanity. You know, stuff like having a bad case of smelly armpits. Or that one time an executive sitting beside me was whining about PAL's low standards throughout the flight from Manila to Butuan and talking to me and all those around him as if he wanted the entire cabin to rise up in arms and storm the cockpit! With styro coffee cups!
I particularly hate plane rides. A swerve here or there always gets on my nerves. Of course it doesn't help that I watch quite a lot of Nat Geo's "Air Crash Investigation." I better stop that to calm me a bit. PAL's snacks onboard are particularly annoying: chichiriya you'd be lucky to find in the backmost of grocery racks. I didn't even know these brands of cupcakes existed!
Yet I feel travelling has made me a lot wiser.
Travelling exposes you to a lot of things. For one, if you were on a plane with the GM, you basically have your twin fates tied together. If for some reason God calls you back to Heaven (let's assume for once that I am "heavenly"), the GM has as much chance as you of being blasted into smithereens.
In travelling you find that the GM loses his baggage with as much annoyance as you, notwithstanding his Priority status. In fact, being non-priority benefits your sense of anonymity in the same way that you don't feel bad lining up behind an ATM machine with all the rest of the people: you're just better at grinning and bearing it because you've been doing it all your life!
However, what I find most revealing in travel is how it has changed my concept of time.
When I was still teaching, time flew slowly. Weeks would go by using lesson plans as measures, tests and papers to be graded on a quarterly basis, events to be put up, meetings to attend. But everyone basically stayed the same. The buildings stayed the same. The grounds were maintained by the same routine. Only the kids grew up fast. EVen then, when they could already smart enough to stand up to my bullying tactics, it would be time for them to go off to college!
But now, i would think something needed to be done in two months' time and I would be thinking two months is coming in real fast!
Darting back to a town on a regular basis lets you see changes you otherwise wouldn't have seen if you were in it all the time. Places change. People change. You see them and talk to them and think you got them but when you get back you see them in a different light!
It seems memories are there to keep you busy, but never think it's going to be accurate.
Suddenly it is time to leave again, and you wonder, will these things be here still when I come back?
posted by dyeproks @ 11:15 PM
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