dear good people at kellogg's of battle creek,

about a year ago, my taste buds and i were walking, gingerly, among the good people of france, my original countrymen, when our shared bipedal locomotion system unexpectedly took us to a carrefour city market on avenue de la motte-picquet which seemed, at the time, no more or less enticing a mix of design, shopping experience and well-packaged foods aplenty than any other parisian suppliers of the time. ...
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i guess i could easily inflict upon you this morning a cool 5000 words attempting to explain to joy of having been in another place for the last month with theaptFAMILY, about how i went through just about every stated goal, about how the view from barcelona rooftops changes more than idle ...
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we are prisoners.

not of any penal institution in particular but of self-perception. stuck there by what i would begrudgingly admit to resembling obvious, lazy, predictable comfort. lucky or unlucky to have been dropped off by the holy vagina in a land that we grow to alternatively love or hate, a lot of us seem to willingly glue our own feet to the ground in the name of patriotism, xenophobia or transportation angst and, in so doing, forego what is, in my opinion, a tremendous opportunity to unveil and understand the connections between the microcosmic world of our little lives and the macrocosmic world of everything else: foreign-soiled experiences. mere traveling, in comparison, pales to the aforementioned for it pre-supposes a journey unstoppable, bursting with tours along the way, photos in front of leaning towers and guide-recommended cafés. but i believe that our current set of circumstances, chiefly technological and financial, affords us the luxury, unheralded for the most part, to care more for the globe and less about the trotting.

nothing helps us predictable species to step out of ourselves to make considered choices better than stepping out of the over-valued, over-flattered and over-sung country in which we were born. escaping our familiar contexts seems to me one of the better and most tangible reset buttons that life, in its wise wisdom, has seen fit to make us believe was our idea. better than movies, better than meth, better than the internet. it was instrumental in my, and probably every immigrant’s, path to take the opportunity to restart, to re-consider not only mere causes and consequences of a self unborn or gone astray but notions of citizenry and how they might affect identity. such migrations do not necessarily have to mean visa-stamping and language-learning, they can start within the hallowed boundaries of a single ...
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