scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

23.8.04

on being a first-generation child of a refugee.

which means being the child of a cargo-class traveller but also a really first-class pack-rat (as i may possibly have mentioned before). which means that (a)you bring everything you own and (b)you own a lot. which is fine for them - they had that little period in which they had nothing, so having everything now sort of makes weird psychological sense. But. A refugee's kid gets used to having lots of stuff around, so there are first-generation refugees' kids who notice pack-rat tendencies of their own, as well as those who have extremely well-defined pack-rat habits but who never notice them because you're just used to having massive piles of all sorts of random i-might-need-this-someday kind of stuff and it doesn't occur to you to live otherwise. and then there's me. it's not like i moved to an ultra-modern, super-minimalist, uber-industrial loft somewhere. i have stuff hanging on the walls. i have stuff stacked on bookshelves. i have stuff in closets. but as a first-generation child of a refugee, one really has to nip that pack-rat shit in the bud or it gets away with you. because you don't notice that you're accumulating until it's too late. there are these irrational little voices in your head that say i might need that someday when or but that would come in handy if or if i fixed that then. and the irrational little voices are the voices of your refugee parents, because they say things like that all the fucking time. so you make an effort to say instead, in response, even if i lost thirty pounds ( - not that i need to, Voice in My Head), i'm certainly not going to get any shorter, so that really has no possibility of fitting me ever again in a way that i like in the slightest and i can toss it. But it takes an effort.

And we're done, finally, with the List that Wanted to be Blogged Two Weeks Ago. Phew.

Labels: emptor, family

scrawled @ 18:34