Things I have traded; wherever you go, there you are...

These are the things I have traded...

my friends for my family
new friends for old ones
a full sized desk for a dinette table for 2
a hot country for a cold one
char kway teow for burgers and fries
hawker stalls for pubs
my sense of hedonism for my sanity
my passport for my driver's license
brown men for white ones
my own flat for my own room
twin towers for 1
an ocean for a lake
dangers and risks for financial security

Here I am.

I sit in my room. My one room in a shared house in the city of Toronto. Don't get me wrong. It's a nice room in an acceptable house on a great street in a fabulous neighbourhood in a big city, legendary and hated in my country for being big and metropolitan. Yet somehow I have sat here for 2 and a half months not answering email from very many friends back home (and yes, when I say back home I want to feel like Malaysia was it) And what do I say? Did I trade too much? Did I trade all I had for something that I don't even want?

I talked with ... someone I know here. (Despite the raging facebookery of the world now, I don't believe that he is really my friend) I told him that I wasn't sure if Toronto was the place for me, I didn't know how many times more I could move. I didn't know how many more times I could lose my friends. It takes me far too long to get them, it has always taken me so long to make them that to lose them again in so quick the purchase of a plane ticket is unbearable. He said he knew how important my friends were to me. I said, "do you?" He said, "Yes."

I never really hear from that guy, oddly enough.

So there I was and now, here I am.

People who talk about "degrees of separation" are really talking about people. People as degrees. When did people stop being people? I'll tell you when that happened.

It happened the day we became numbers in a disaster.
(355 killed in Peru earthquake)
It happened the day we became contacts on an email list.
(dmccoy1976@hotmail.com)
It happened the day we became something you request and add on facebook.
(+add friend)

There was a time that people only knew those close to them. Then when we were able to find out who people far away were, when news had just begun to travel fast, people became numbers. Knowing all those names got too hard, I think.

Then, when being able to talk to anyone anywhere became easy, people became codes on a page and messages got shorter. (Why send long messages when you can talk anytime -- just not at the moment)

Then, when we developed our profiles, and we became lists of data. We became, virtually, anything we wanted to be and we allowed ourselves to be lists of facts and interesting things to be looked at.

We sat ourselves up on a great long table and made ourselves into a buffet of faces on profiles. "Pick me!" "Poke me! See if I am tender and juicy!" "Add me to your plate, your ever-growing list of friends!" "Please, include me!"

I came home from Malaysia to help my family move. I came to help them dig up 200 years of family history and move. I wonder if I traded something I didn't like anymore for something that was almost gone.

The past is gone.

The future is here.

Time to make a new home.