Strange to go from my tiny little 50s retro style apartment to this big spacious family home. It almost seems wasteful to have a staircase when really a couple of rooms could do. For the first hour or so I was extremely pissed off at myself for zooming straight for the newspaper and television when I arrived home. But I shouldn't have worried - I flicked through the paper and was bored a few minutes later. It's nice to have a kettle instead of boiling water on the stove, but I'm not hugely fussed. It's also nice/a bit sad to know that as long as I have the Internet and access to film and theatre and literature I can be happy anywhere. We'll see what happens when I wake up tomorrow and have to deal with suburbia. And returning to a single bed...oh man...!
My brother's hair is longer and he's got a part-time job. When we picked him up I got a bit of a shock. I don't know if it was because he seemed older or if it was the shock of seeing someone who looks like you. After not having seen my brother for ages it was strange to see my reflection. Sometimes I forget that there are other people on this earth who are like me.
Earlier today, when I was waiting to catch the bus to the airport, I went to a shopping mall to pass the time. In the air-conditioned centre people milled around looking for a bargain. As I dragged my suitcase through the crowds, a sudden feeling of disdain came over me. I have always known this but the knowledge that I have never aspired to or would never want to aspire to a numbed, air-conditioned life like those led by the people around me. I never want to measure my success by the achievements of others. Of course I want a family and security and to love my work but I never want to judge my success by the money I earn or the number of status symbols I own. I want to live an exciting life, a life not anaesthetised by technology, but one in which to feel my sweat on my body is to be exuding the elixir of life, one in which to feel strain in muscles is to be unlocking a deep and unchartered power, in which to concentrate one's thought on a task is to transcend the activity to the realm of enlightenment, and a life in which sleep is deep and simple and pure because it hasn't been tainted by the attention deficit speed of modern life. I want to travel and meet new people, and discover what it's like to live in someone else's skin. I want to discover beauty, capture it, concentrate and distill it until it shimmers with a new truthfulness. I want to find myself in extraordinary experiences, and never take for granted the gift of life. Then I realised that I was living that life already, and I left the shopping centre jaded by my retail experience but also beaming with excitement at my luggage dragging, sweat-exuding, muscle-straining life.
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