Mood Swings + Inspiration

I have very achey feet. (or is that 'achy'?). For a few years I didn't realize that I had been wearing the same shoes day in day out. As time passed, and my feet hurt more ( and then my back) I assumed it was mostly stress... for some odd reason, and relegated myself to a regime of deep breathing mixed with listening to introspective audios. After a while, I figured out it was my horribly flat shoes (complimented by my horribly flat feet) that was causing a significant portion of my back and foot pain. So today, TWO years after realizing this fact, I went to the DSW to buy some shoes. I wasn't sure which DSW to travel to. There is the one is Silver Spring( a place laced with memories of me and my ex), or I could go to Pentagon City (uglier shoes, other stores to browse through). I decided to go to Silver Spring, because I wanted to pass by Border's book and see what they had on screenwriting.

Walking to the metro, I realized my mood was already changing since I had come back from Jamaica. The Washington DC landscape is a sprawling mass of land connected loosely by highways, smaller roads and a metro system. The more time I spend here, the less like an individual I feel. I'm one of the American collective, a series of drones that walk around shopping and eating Chipotle every alternate Tuesday. But there is a sense of individuality here( yes, i am sounding a tad contradictory). I think America is a place that truly promotes individuality in the sense that you really have to fight to get a spot in the social circuit. Not to say that breaking in to Jamaica's social scene is any easier, but the task sometimes seems a bit overwhelming. There are so many millions of people walking around, all with their own agenda, all trying to have fun, work and build famillies, as a young student from another country I realize I float between feeling glad to have the opportunity to be in the states, and then frightened at how alone I can feel sometimes. Sure I know people, and I have family in a few scattered states, but its the walking around, looking at large groups of friends, people who are so unlike me culturally its scary. Racial perceptions, fashion, capitalistic ventures and a bunch of other cultural norms are also things that can swat a foreigner in the face a few times.

In Jamaica I feel content and sometimes even powerful. I know the areas to go, I know a lot of the people and i'm familiar enough with the odd racial tensions there to feel comfortable in my socializations. After seven years up here, I'm getting somewhat used to the system, but its a mixture of race, money and status. The obviousness of classism in America is probably one thing I can say that leaps out at me when I walk up and down sometimes. If I enter a richer area, say Georgetown, I immediatley see a see of people in Khakis and Polos, big cars everywhere and the place is cleaner and more well-maintained. Shoot twenty blocks Northwest and you reach where I live, which isn't "seedy" but its not as clean and the fashion, the momentum of everything is very different.

Anyhoo, its a thought that can affect one's mood. Here I'm more displaced, more uncertain, especially since I'm nearing the end of my tenure in the states. Mix that in with nothing to "hold on to" (i.e a serious girlfriend, or a job-offer) and the world becomes one's oyster. Now all I can truly focus on is the near future and the goals i've set. To make myself reach somewhere, I must use my natural abilites of writing and being creative.