Becoming evil was never quite apart of the plan. Becoming evil is the three hundred pound gorilla descriptor I'd like to use to summarize all the other adjectives people have used to describe me: nonchalant, distant, regal, polished, cold, weird, careless. There's never been such a gap in my own perception of myself despite an unwavering phase of selfishness, but I'm pretty sure those adjectives are close to queen bee bitch at this point. I guess that's what being selfish is all about. In order to tone it down a notch, I'm going to practice the following:
1) Smile more 2) Read more 3) Work less
I kind of want to go back to New York for a little bit just to make sure that I'm still a real person. Was I even real in New York? Did we really sleep on a Ikea mattress pad for like, half a year and folded laundry as a Sunday afternoon ritual? Does that make us real? I met a friend of a good friend in New York and he talked about biking to Fort Tilden, living in Chinatown, and food trucks. It made him all flesh and bone. It made him not Beijing but New York, as if the sticker of permanence is still between Gramercy and Upper East Side. I wonder if that's partly why I love Joan so much, that some corner in my brain has programmed New York as home, and that I know one day I will curl up on her couch probably, back to the place where I had a role, a place, and where tacos are nearby.
All of a sudden I get what he means when Ryu said, "I wish we'd known each other in New York instead of Beijing, not this crazy place." It's appropriate that he forgot he ever said such a thing.
Everyone of us talk with so much ambition about living and working and striving in Beijing, but let's be honest, on some level we're all running away a little bit. On some level, we're not just looking for opportunities and help change things here. We're running away from Ohio, from New York, from stability. We're running away from parents, from the hurt, to pull revenge by being the best we could ever be. We're running away from dead ends, routine intersections, boredom and mediocrity. Does that make us cowards? No, I don't think so. I think it makes us a very deeply conflicted group of well-meaning, idealistic, lost kids who are too bold for our own good.
I want all of us to be ok. I want the idealists in all of us to be in tact even if we fall and break our pride and bruise our courage. We're too lucky not to.