Hrm. I love traveling. Airports are like the twilight zone. There’s a disconnect between the world outside the airport and the world inside. Really, airports are magical. You go inside the airport in one place, you put your self in the trust of strangers and engineers and all the best of American industry, and when you walk out of the airport, you’re in a completely different place. Sometimes, when you’re flying across time zones, it’s nearly the same time when you walk out of the airport as when you walked in. It’s like a magical building of portals–you walk in one side, through a specific gate leading to a specific place, and bam, you’re there.
And airports are timeless. Sure, sure–there are clocks on the wall. But time inside the airport is disconnect from time outside. Because airplanes play tricks with time. Time inside an airport is only pertinent with respect to your departure time. Once inside the airport, it wouldn’t matter if time was measure in minutes or flippids, in 60 second denominations or 100 second denominations. It’s all quite relative. People eat dinner at 9:00 am. They’ve been up all night. People fall asleep at all hours of the day. The bars never close. It’s really a timeless place.
So I’m eating a slice and drinking a beer. It’s 10:00 — in the morning, but it could be 10:00 at night, and it’d be just the same.
On another note–you know what I’ve never understood? People who use napkins to dab the grease off of their pizza. Just doesn’t make one lick of sense to me.
Hrm.
That was weird. I just added something to my Google Calendar, and a context message appeared, and it was this narrative, something about palpable air … and then it was gone. I read the first words of these paragraphs … and then it disappeared. I have no idea where it came from, or where it went. A glitch? I searched the source code, but found nothing…
There’s a ghost in my Google Calendar. That’s OK. It just goes along with the random events that pop up on my calendar. For example, at 11:00 am on August 11th, I’m supposed to “Get Dominated.” At 11:00 am on September 30th, I’m supposed to “Visit Aunt Sally and get some peaches.” Where do these come from? Who is my Aunt Sally? What’s so special about her peaches? More worrying, do I get drunk sometimes and add random events to my calendar?
Hrm.
Mountains. That’ll be nice. It’s been a while. I nearly forgot to pack anything warm. I was doing my last sweep, when I found all my warm stuff. Glad I found it. Haven’t seen it in weeks. Might be cold in the mountains. Who knows.
Did I pack my gaiters? Did I pack my hiking pants? Is that even how you spell gaiters? Who knows. I’ll find out when I unpack in Cheyenne.
Hrm.
That one sales rep seems to think I should write a white paper on the clinic’s EMR search. Maybe he’s right. Instead, I’m writing nonsense and drinking a beer. This is a productive use of my time. Seriously. No, really. Really.
Cheyenne. Are you here in Wyoming now? I am unemployed. We should play. I have endless amounts of time right now…. Have your ghost put me in your calendar.
Nope. Definitely didn’t pack my hiking pants. Good thing my Dad had an extra pair.
An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls ‘non-space’ results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of ‘supermodernity’ to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena – a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible. Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.
“There’s a ghost in my Google Calendar. That’s OK. It just goes along with the random events that pop up on my calendar. For example, at 11:00 am on August 11th, I’m supposed to “Get Dominated.” At 11:00 am on September 30th, I’m supposed to “Visit Aunt Sally and get some peaches.” Where do these come from? Who is my Aunt Sally? What’s so special about her peaches? More worrying, do I get drunk sometimes and add random events to my calendar?”
Hahahaha… I was wondering when you would find those. Seems like at least a year ago when I added them when you randomly left yourself logged in on the computer in the fire room. I think this was after you had given me a particularly creative Facebook status after I left myself logged in. 🙂