permanency is a facade

playing life on loop is boring

going back to my hometown in the east bay makes me really uncomfortable. the culdesac i grew up in has the same manicured trees, my childhood friends live in their same childhood homes and inbreed among the same pool of monoculture people. my mom goes to the same gym everyday and gossips with the same friends' parents. every time i come home she recites the same set of questions to try to fast-forward my life.

driving through suburbia and seeing the same infinite scrolling of kohl's, mcdonald's, starbucks, and walmart makes me feel like i'm stuck in a time loop. it reminds me of how uninspiring my childhood was and how desperately i turned to the games as a refuge for stimulation.

traveling and seeing the world has always felt like making up for the childhood i didn't have. it's impossible to space out feeling the thunderous crash of niagara falls, chase the edges of the fog in the san francisco bay, or trace back the early doodles of an artist who started scribbling the same way as me.

perhaps i'm attracted the the temporary nature of cities. cities that i'm not sure will last into the next century. perhaps the 'limited edition get it while you still can' quality makes it feel more real, makes me take in each and every street more fully, pushes me to savor every moment while i still can.

last summer, i visited taiwan in part because of my fear of rising US-china tensions. the bookstores in taiwan did nothing to deter my fear of the inevitable.

when i was in seoul, walking through the dual purpose fallout shelter shopping center subway stations, climbing through the tunnel that north korea built to try to invade seoul in the dmv, seeing the empty 'pregancy seats' affirm the dreadful fertility crisis made me seriously wonder if korea would through my lifetime.

perhaps this temporary nature is also why i like san francisco, a city more than due for an earthquake. every time i'm in the city, walking through downtown, i can't help but wonder, 'is this it?' and so i cherish every bite, hoping it's not the last.

perhaps i find kinship in the fleeting nature of cities, cities that grow as i do, still growing and changing and alive.

i like to think that things in life are not permanent and that people who obsess over predictability and planning have just induced their anxiety onto others. there can be prediction markets and weather reports, but no one knows what tomorrow holds, and that's okay.

it's this unpredictability and risk that makes life worth living. that makes tomorrow not feel like yesterday.