The other day I went to Kirirom national park, a beautiful, cool, scenic kinda place about two and a half hours north of Phnom Penh. This was for a 'team-building' exercise with my co-workers. Play games, bond, share experiences -- with the hopes of a better working relationship for all. A nice trip, a nice day, with the required breaking-down-of-the-van-on-the-way-back which is typical of Cambodia and might even be mandatory. But there were gorgeous moutains and wide, endless green fields that stretched in circles around us, and kids in white shirts bicyling back from school, staring and smiling at the unfortunate foreigners, far from home, so it was a moment to remember, despite the breakdown.
On the way out of the city, we passed a billboard advertising a local Cambodian beer -- 'Your country! Your beer!' -- the ad shouted, with a group of twenty-somethings clutching cans of beer and smiling and looking for all intents and purposes as if they had just won the lottery, if the grand prize happened to be a couple of bottles of suds.
I thought of most Canadian beer ads, and how they, too, tie in nationalism and patriotism and whatever ism you want to call it with getting blitzed, hammered, shredded. (Heck, even the names are patriotic -- Molson Canadian, comes to mind. As do 'I am Canadian!' ads so popular a few years back.)
Everybody loves their country. Everybody loves their beer.
Which got me thinking: Everything always seems to come back to, or revolve around, the name of the country on our passports. Why is that? Why are we obsessed with our nationalities?
I guess it's natural, and inevitable, and necessary -- we need to feel like we belong, and we need a sense of place. It's natural to be proud of where you are and what you do. Nobody wants to feel like their family is composed of a bunch of schmucks, and nobody wants to believe that the country they live in is on the wrong side of morality, truth, honor.
But I think there is a thin line between pride and arrogance.
The good thing about living abroad is that you are forced to look at your country anew. You start to realize that the stereotypes people have about your own native land are completely false and, more often than not, truer than you ever knew.
The other day I realized that I had not spoken to another Canadian in Phnom Penh for a good two, three months. Wow. But on a daily basis I speak to Americans and Finns and Dutch and Japanese and Singaporeans and even Burmese.
And don't think twice about it.
That's worth raising a glass too, isn't it?
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Last night I watched CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND and THE INCREDIBLE HULK on t.v., both of which I really enjoyed, and both of which came out, like, a year and a half ago. (Okay. I'm a little late.)
After the movies I was flipping around the channels and I came across that old SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE 'Weekend Update' host Dennis Miller, who I was surprised to see hosting a talk show because a) who knew he had his own talk show still? and b) this is Cambodia, so it's always shocking to see anybody western, in some sense, let alone someone you used to imitate while in junior high school. (I was also flabbergasted to see that John Macenroe has his own bloody talk show -- and it's available, via cable, in Cambodia. As a host, he's not half-bad. When he tries to make jokes, well, let's just say he was my favorite tennis player as a kid, and leave it at that.)
Dennis Miller still throws out these arcane, obscure references that may qualify as jokes if you have the time to search the Net to locate their sources as you're listening to his routine.
But truth and insight comes from the strangest places, and as his first guest he had that familiar character actor Hector Elizondo, who some of you may know and others may not, and he was talking about this play he was performing in at some Burbank theatre, and it was about an older man dying, and a young nurse who soothes him, yada-yada-yada, and he quoted some of the lines of the play that are actually quite, well, provoking.
"Cultivate confusion," the old man tells the young woman. "Confusion leads to questioning. It leads to searching. Certainty leads only to dogma."
Fantastic, insightful stuff.
I remember getting a tour of my new junior high school when I was still in Grade Six, and the place seemed mammoth, monstrous, because there were, like, two floors, not one like at Pine Grove Public School, which had been the land of my learning for the past seven years, and Kenny Savoie, a likeable, scruffy character who I have not seen since the age of thirteen (and does that make me feel old, well, I guess it does) was just as bewildered as I was: "Scott, don't lose me now!" Half-joking, half-not. He grabbed my arm as we wandered from room to room.
Then, much later, came Japan, and Cambodia, and if you ever live abroad, or even travel abroad, you will be confused, and you will question, and you will wander, and you will grow.
So, I wish you all a little bit of confusion. You may even find yourself in an endless series of perpetual, perplexing cycles of confusion and uncertainty, leading you to constantly seek out the answers to questions that others neglect to even ask. You may contain within yourself those seeds of restlessness that sprout ambition and courage. You may be forever wondering if you are now the person you were meant to be.
You may always be confused, if you're lucky.
