I recently visited Malaysia on vacation. It was my first time back in five years. Here are some feelings that I felt:
- You know how you’re out at a party and you come home and take off your pants and your socks and do that old person sigh/grunt as you sit down on your favorite chair? And you know how you only realize how stressed and emotionally jittered you were by how suddenly tranquil you feel? And how you’re still half-drunk, petting your cat, feeling the smoothness of his fur, drinking a tall glass of ice water and feeling at home, your true self again? The moment I landed, it felt like that. Like I had taken my pants off at home.
- Malaysia has changed a lot. There are new buildings and new stores and new roads and new bridges and new museums and new malls. It was like seeing an ex who has a new haircut and new job and new lover. There’s a longing and wistfulness for what could have been. In another life, I would have stayed in Malaysia and been content and watched all those changes from the inside, instead of melancholically seeing them all at once. And then I left, leaving Malaysia to change more without me, while I change more away from it.
- There’s a part in those shitty spy movies, when our erstwhile hapless hero suddenly realizes he knows kung fu and how to shoot a very long gun and has been a sleeper cell all along. Like he’s watching himself fight bad guys and is just as surprised as you. If the movie is delightfully trashy enough, he may turn to the camera and give you a little look. That’s how I felt about Malay. I just opened my mouth and language I didn’t know I knew poured out of it. If you had asked me to translate a phrase into bahasa, I wouldn’t have been able to. But put me in that situation and somewhere in my lizard brain is a section that barely lights up anymore, telling me what to say and how to say it.
- My superpower: I am capable of being unhappy anywhere. Within a handful of days at my favorite place in the universe, I got grouchy and tired of dumb touristy things. Mostly I just craved a routine and some time alone to process. The chemicals in my brain that make me sad continue to impress me with their potency. I should bottle them and sell them to people to feed to their enemies.
- Globalization bums me out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a nativist. Globalization is coming, or I guess it’s already here, and we need to figure out how to mitigate its more brutal effects. But when I see soulless condos going up, blocking ocean views and trampling what used to be dope shit underneath, just so Singaporean businessmen can keep an empty weekend apartment, I’m like what’s the point. There’s an old snake temple, where vipers have lived for generations. Now it’s surrounded on multiple sides by garish buildings 30 stories high and the sounds of construction concusses down into the tiny rectangle of foliage where the snakes climb tree limbs. It’s just a bummer, man. Also, inflation really made me sad, but I think that’s just more a nostalgia thing.
- Physical distance from work is key to emotional distance. The farther away you go, the less you’ll care. I recommend going roughly half of the circumference of the globe. As we were flying over the Pacific, I could feel my stressors shrinking. And as we flew back, I could hear their static, like the volume knob on a radio turned up as we got closer.
- How do married people do it? I spent two weeks caring about another person’s desires and nearly lost my damn mind. The only thing I wanted by like day 10 was a couple hours to be alone, in quiet, without having to vote on our every damn activity.
[Migration.]