The Big Idea

2004-05-01 - 7:26 p.m.

Okay, so Pookie has gone to the grocery store...we're going to share a meal together, in the strictly platonic sense. But while he was here, we talked briefly about the big thing I alluded to in the last entry.

I was watching The Corporation, and at one point they were talking about how one South American country ended up losing their water rights to a privately owned California company. I guess, for a time, it was even illegal for people to gather rain water. They revolted, for obvious reasons, and eventually got their water back, but the story had an effect on me.

The whole movie had an effect on me.

It's too soon, really, to know if this is just a whim or something, but the idea's occured to me in the past, just a whim, but today it's kind of whapping me in the head repeatedly.

I think I want to go Away and do the "humanitarian thing" in an under-developed country, in South America or Africa. I don't even have the vocabulary to talk about this sort of undertaking, and I feel kind of helpless in the face of the idea, out of sheer ignorance. But I want to do this.

Part of it is wanting to get out of my culture for a bit. Pookie said, and I agree with him, that I've lived a pretty sheltered life. Intellectually, I'm relatively aware of what goes on elsewhere, of injustices that I take part in by taking part of the consumer culture, but I don't have the actual experience. I don't actually know what happens elsewhere.

And I'm feeling, more and more, kind of suffocated by Western culture. I'm so fed up with corporate-speak, with being constantly bombarded with the demand that I consume, with news that I know only gives part of the story...I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but I feel like I'm becoming exhausted just by living here. I know I didn't always used to feel like this, and that it's more than depression...it's not like I'm losing my ability to be happy...just...it feels like something essential is being depleted, and I think part of that is living in a plastic world, so disconnected from what most of the rest of the world experiences.

I had planned to sort of list the reasons why I want to do this, but I'm kind of seeing that they're all tied up together...bear with me as I ramble, I guess.

Part of it is that I don't really have anything to do right now. Work is anything but fulfilling, I won't be able to go to university for a few more years at least, and the editing thing is more of a way to make money while still being close to what I want to be, which is a writer. I can write anywhere...there's nothing keeping me here in Canada, except my past...and maybe I need to find a future for me.

I also want to make a difference in the world, and I don't always feel like I am. The life I live right now takes more out of the world than I put in: attending the odd protest and writing a self-indulgant and sometimes-preachy online journal can't make up for the resources that I get to use every day at the expense of people thousands of miles away. I feel like the things I've tried to do (attempting to start the paper, the L.E.T.S. program I'm working on with a friend) are just different ways to spin my wheels. I want to go somewhere where I can see the effects of my actions, where I'm directly helping people. I want to get my hands dirty.

Obviously, I'm not packing up and leaving tomorrow. What I'm going to do is spend the next month mulling this over, maybe sending out a few feelers to figure out if this is really something I want. At the beginning of June, I'm going home to Halifax for my best friend's wedding and to visit family, and then when I get back I'll start to look at this seriously.

The very, very sketchy plan would be to be somewhere else within two or three years. I know that I'd be going into this with some heavily romanticized notions, and that it's likely that I wouldn't gain anything from it, and that I'm probably off my rocker....

Anyway, Pookie's back from his grocery mission, and so I shall end this here...

Cheers,

The Magus

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