Shallowness

There are things you plan to miss when you depart your homeland for an extended period of time. Things you mental prepare for and gourge yourself on knowing that you won’t find them for a while; friends, family, fast-food, hot showers, driving a car. It’s the things you expected to be fine without, to rejoice in leaving even, that catch you by surprise. The familiarity of gossip, the minor annoyance of traffic, knowing when Beyonce’s baby is due – its these things that really shock you. The minor announces of American culture that you thought you would be better off without suddenly seem so important when you realize you don’t want to learn all the inner workings of a new culture, a new celebrity gossip seen, new political parties slinging slightly redder African mud. I can’t explain the feeling but today I woke up and realized that I missed idle gossip. I miss having cursory acquaintances whose outfit didn’t match or talking shit about someone’s trashy significant other. Compared to the serious occurances of everyday life here I would gladly trade. Don’t get me wrong, Its truly a special thing that I don’t have anything bad to say about my colleagues here, but sometimes you miss the luxury of triviality. I miss frenemies, and passive aggressive texts, and bitching, and gossip rags, and springer. I miss those people in your life who you don’t like but can’t get rid of. I miss the “Karens” of the world who you keep around just to hate. I miss Perezhilton, and TMZ and People. I miss snarky VH1 celebrity specials. I miss having nothing better to worry about. I miss smiling at someone’s face. Despite the fact that it makes me a hypocrite, and I’m sure that I’ll regret saying it when I’m back in America, I miss the shallowness that can infest our first world lives. At the end of the day, I miss small fixable problems that could be easily removed from my life, as opposed to the big intractable ones. The ones that make you reevaluate your principles, and which may never be solved. When faced with AIDs, poverty, inequality, illness, and genocide, I’m not ashamed to say I’d take a two-faced friend or a flaky partner. I guess these are the choices I made, I traded up from irksome to life-changing, and I stand by the choice. But damn, don’t I wish some days that my biggest problem was the boy I like not being interested, or my roommate eating my sour cream.