ppt

I feel really uncomfortable when people say they like to travel. It becomes something of a game of waving one's privilege around. I find myself quite disgusted when people become engaged in 'I've travelled more than you have' pissing contests.

That said, I also like to get out and see new places. And I'm privileged enough to be blogging from Botswana, for heaven's sake. I'm not unsullied by this kind of garbage, however much I might critique it in other people.

So, on the one hand, I'm amused that my passport was full enough that I had to trot down to the embassy this morning and have more pages pasted into it. (This has never happened to me before, and it has more to do with my frequent travels to South Africa and the South African government's gigantic visas than it does anything else.) On the other hand, I feel like my feelings of amusement belong in the same basket as the icky travelling pissing contests I dislike so much.

It's a bit like how I feel about looking through the Crate & Barrel catalogue. Part of my mind is making all sorts of sophisticated noise about consumerism, the commodity fetish, and late capitalism, while the other part is like, Ooh, that pseudo-colonial glass-fronted bookshelf would be great for holding all my social theory and the odd bottle of scotch and things like that.

Such are the contradiction of modernity. Or maybe just of my over-edumacated brain.