I wrote this on the Notes app while flipping through my handwritten journal.
Where does my taste come from?
Not that sense that you’re thinking of, but the other one.
The one that’s more about preference.
I read Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True last year and thought about how his experience parallels mine. Or, it parallels everyone who has a smidge of self-awareness.
We want to be able to be different, we want to be interesting, we want to like things that other people like, but not too many people. We want friends who add complexity and compatibility and intimacy. We want those friendships to be partially based on the things that we have in common, but also just enough not in common to be able to still learn from each other, create a little friction.
Hold on to people who are interesting.
I went on an international trip with interesting people who were celebrating an interesting and fun birthday. We traveled to beaches with fine sand and clear water and stayed at nice resorts that felt like an intrusion, almost like a flaw, to the natural beauty that surrounded us. The air-conditioned rooms felt like too much of a luxury amidst the palpable, sticky, heat. It felt intentional to ride past the sheet metal shacks that people lived in on the way to our plush hotel rooms, clean and accommodating. Almost crueler to know that those people worked in the shiny, pristine places that we were about to stay in. Smiling and touching their hand to their hearts in gratitude.
What is the purpose of a vacation?
By the time we arrived at the second location of the second island that we were staying at, I started to feel an ickiness creep into my observations. The second resort looked so much like the first. And the first resort oddly reminded me of the aesthetic that I see, well, everywhere, not just on this island. The clean, neutral colors, the rattan furniture, and the blue tile complimented the ocean surroundings. Why do we like to stay in the same hotel in so many cities over? Doesn’t that remove the purpose of a vacation in the first place? To experience something different and removed from our usual experience? We, or maybe just I, intended to go to a new, international location to develop an appreciation for the rich, large world. To bump up against the things that surprise me into realizing things about me. Yes, the point of a vacation is to relax, but I worried that our going there was actually helping to make the world smaller, repeatable, familiar, and comfortable.
I want a little bit of friction-- to be challenged-- and to be forced to have my worldview shifted a little, even on vacation.
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