hide and seek.

I am currently into listening to memoirs on tape--it's an interesting approach to literature as you can hear the tiny nuances simple written words and syntax cannot always convey as they are originally written.

I am in the last chapter of the first part of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. I know this seems grossly romantic and highly unconventional for my seemingly macabre tastes in Modernism, Gothic Romance, and cruel non-fiction. However, I find this travelogue to be a nice preparation for my next journey...it allows me moments of introspection as it poses thoughts and questions that I keep concealed within the insecurities that often plague my existence.

People think I am heading to China for various reasons: to learn Chinese, to teach, to enjoy my favorite culture, to be with my family, to invest in my life. These are the very things I have verbally vomited to others during the moments of unconscious, simple conversation.

But none of these express my true reasons for running away from an ideal job, beautiful love, and life of comfort.

In the last chapter of the first part of Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert discusses how every city has a word that defines it...Rome=Sex; New York=Achievement; Chicago=Success. More importantly, every person has a word. She thinks her word is seek, but it could also be hide.

I think her analysis is a bit naive. No person's existence is defined by a single word, and no city can truly be encapsulated in a single adjective.

I believe our lives are an amalgamation of stages. Each stage is unique and can be represented by particular diction; however, all words should in the end--when we sit in the moment before death--reveal a single word: a word that needs to define every human existence. Content.

Be careful. Contentment is not happiness...it is much harder to achieve and it can be unsettling when one knows his goal is to arrive at such an enigmatic state of existence.

My goal as of right now is to find the word that will my frame my life for the next few years. I am seeking and I am hiding. I am fleeing and I am finding.

My new word for the next year is understand. I want to understand what I want. I want to understand what I need. I want to understand what brings me happiness. I want to understand what roots me in sadness.

I need to know myself as others think they know me.

Shanghai is not my city; I know this. Like Rome does not belong to Gilbert, Shanghai will never be mine. Shanghai's word--in my context--falls into a strange lexical category: the gerund. Becoming. In becoming. At becoming. To becoming. Add any adverbial marker (or simple preposition) and the word becomes what I believe Shanghai to be for me: A place of becoming.