Spirited Away

 

By: Jonathan Seidel

Beer street: super touristy—overpriced food, grace alcohol deals, loud music, colored lights, circus fire breathing and strip clubs

Walk down Bui Vien Street in Ho Chi Min City and your entire perception is transformed. The same experience occurs in Phuket as well on Bangla Street. The regular streets are filled with small shops and malls but turn onto this street at seven in the evening and Vegas takes flight on the other side of the globe.

The long strip of an endless supply of bars and strip clubs. The music can be heard from just behind the street sign. It is entering another world. A block over and silence brews. Darkness fills the air. Sleek quiet as motorists swoop by. Locals sitting down for a supper at McDonalds and others walking from the mall. Bui Vien is a gate to another dimension. Suddenly, colors fill the night sky and booming music is non stop echoing across the pantheon of alcoholic venues. The night sky is no more. The moon is brightened by the color schemes from the disco lights permeating the entire strip. It is a long walk but the new world is an extension of naughtiness. Enter the angelic plaster of color and fun. Away from the gloomy silence outside.

Each side of the strip is packed with different forms of entertainment. Incredibly repetitive and endless. A pattern of restaurant, bar, strip club repeat. Consolidating the naughtiness in a single dimension away from the public eye. A street that scares locals and entices foreigners. Outside each institute is a representative or two attacking the visitor. Come here and try this. Guiding them in their broken English. Don’t worry you’ll like this. We have this deal tonight. You’ll get to see something nice and maybe something naughty. Catering to the western familiarization with jam packed noise and alcohol. You won’t regret your choice to dine with the devil. 

The visitor has no idea what he has gotten himself into. He is hounded at each joint. He can’t even move a few feet before being confronted with an offer. You know you want to. Just try a little bit. There is so much to choose from. Don’t like the dancers here go there, the chairs are uncomfortable here go there. There is but possibilities block after block. As long as the street is straight moving vertically the bars persist. The music bears down on his shoulders boggling his mind. It sounds good, the reps are sweet. They have a good deal why not try. It is a tourist trap. Captivating with a theatrical set. It seems familiar and it seems enjoyable.     

English music and English titles deceive the foreigner. Something that I can get behind. Someone understands me. Sweet for escorting me. It plays on the senses of the foreigner. Loud music and booze. A classic tale of collegiate experience. The fragment of Vegas presupposed on a single street. A multitude of vendors, so much to choose from. Capitalism at its finest. Feel right at home. Don’t find a local area and try something new, go for familiarity. Go for the comprehensible. An area buttressed by its lingo. A directive for foreigners to feel solace. Even the non-partier feels peace for its western mastery.

A plot to gather all the foreigners into a single an area. All tourists meet in this middle. This is where the cool stuff is happening. This is where it is popping. Popular but crowded with tourists. It is a popular place for familiarity. For the homesick to receive relief. A taste of home in a foreign land. Strep through the door and find the humbling recreation of home. A toxic place for expense and experience but a place for relaxation and rejuvenation. So far from home a few extra bucks for a peaceful evening of youthful spirit goes a long way. It is but the western visualization. A paradise in nowheresville. A baseball stadium in a field. 

Yet it’s not home in the truest sense. It is home for the youngster. The collegiate experience re-experienced. The aspiring Tourist to feel young again. Entering a dimension disassociated from the elderly instability. Lost youthful fire. No worries, this dimension is reinvigorating. Here is collegiate experience 2.0. Here is a way to feel young in a foreign land. The fountain of youth in a desert. Young adults to grandparents walk down the strip reliving their glory days and making new memories. It’s a pastime of joy and fun. The strip recreates a new moment. For the elderly to accomplish the feats of their youth. Get a lap dance, chug a bucket. Just have a good time.

It is a circus. Fire breathing and music entice the visitor. A circus of youthful spunk. Representatives inviting though visually incapable to a good time. Come inside and your dreams will be made. You will accomplish and be ecstatic. A great sales pitch but bolstered by the surrounding variables. Engulfed in the youthful vigor. The elder jumps at the chance. Get me two shots no chaser.

The New Normal

By: Jonathan Seidel

Social conformity pushes us to respond to a group identity. The individual seeking a collective moulds into that setting. Different groups value different things. Or rather different groups priorities different ideals. People are placed in varied circumstances that inquire them to devote certain bantering to fit in. Each group compels its own conformity to establish its uniformity and veracity. Pressures will exacerbate to demonstrate likeness and acceptance. 

An age of individualism is merely hopping from one spot to another. We lack the time to be alone. We crave the collective. We need to have a circle of buddies surrounding us professing our slogan. Individualism is a collectivist motto in an identical formula. There is little movement outside the frame of the group’s dogma. There is much overlap between groups and thus we need not change who we are but there is variety how one acts at work and at home. Just think of the soldier who discusses war stories with his comrades and sings lullabies to his children. The sorrow over a beer and the madness of the battlefield versus the joy of a childish fairytale in the comfort of a house and youthful smile. The messiness and craziness of work stressed and deplorable is emptied upon entering the glowing smile of a loving wife in a warm embrace kissing her soft lips in a moment of serenity. Acting according to the relevant standards. An external order imposed on the participant to conform for peaceful reception. 

It is not a two-faced disorder in maniacal disarray. There is an element of dishonesty but such is for the sake of peace. A little lie for tranquil promptitude. A disliked absolution is evidently more reasonably conjured for the utilitarian outcome. It is a knee-jerk reaction. An intuitive relation. The external demand desires a divergent personality expression. It is a heteronomous commandment. The devilish necessity lingers in the soul of transparent relation. Pressure compels conformity to the engaged circumstantial encounter. Situations call for selected hats. It is not so much hypocrisy as dressing up for the occasion. While chess and checkers are both board games they have different rules. Many groups one is a part of are extensions of their prime group. Thinking about WhatsApp groups, if checked there is consistency amongst the people traversing various groups chats. Categorically, as long as the group does not supersede one’s own environmental quarter there is bound to be overlap. Attending a similar college as friends will have the same faces in both the high school group as the college one. 

A new stage in life will place an individual in the unknown. There is as stage of newness for the freshman who chose to attend a school far away with none of his friends, without any connections. An entirely new paradigm, away from everything. This autonomy forces the self to befriend new connections. There may be prior groups deepening the obstacle. Forced as the outsider, the new guy struggles to break in but this is a new start. A fresh moment for everyone. Yet due to the diversity of university campuses it is more than possible that while clicks may exist there will be other newbies like yourself. It is them who you will gravitate towards. People who remind you of yourself. Just as you did when you were younger. Subconsciously will enjoy the company of those who reflect your values. Even with a fully developed cognition, it is inevitable. It is a comfort mechanism as well as an intuitive action. Your ideas and actions will be mirrored and reciprocated. They will feel the same way as you reflect them. A marvel of the interconnected unconscious. While university may demand differences from high school, adopting those values will find those friends who get you. 

Values do not necessarily change. From place to place, there is a symmetry of relations even if they are new faces, values persist. Yet it is important to note that even though values are integral to a person’s being it does not mean that they will not change. It is a matter of conviction. When exposed to the surrounding tenure, the individual is caught between parental nurture and schoolhouse nurture. When the internal household meets the external classroom there is a chasm deflecting the merit of both sides. The encounter creates a weighing novelty prioritising family or society. Individualism enables the self to hop and hope for a new possibility. Beyond the comfort of like-minds there is an external pressure that overwhelms the internal faithfulness. It corrupts the parental record as archaic foolishness. Societal appropriation is the barometer encasing the parental ideals as childish drama to subdue. It is an authoritarian familial fascism. Society is that liberating enchantment to wean off the yoke of parental force-fed nonsense. Traditional order is corrupted by its outdated notions of living. Enlightenment ideals breathed new air into the soul. A cure to impending virus destroying the human mind.     

At every stop a person must ask himself whether he will hold to his current values or desist for the impending ones. Recovering old values over time is possible. It is the encounter with them that persistently inquires the beholder what he wishes to do. It is possible that his household and classroom values are identical. Yet the classroom will provide nuance in its pluralistic attitude exposed to such variety. One is limited to their parent’s tutelage. There is a way of looking at the world. A world that is shattered into divergent tracks in the exposed encounter. The child is exploited to an unprecedented multiplicity. Social acceptance may attempt more than parental loyalty. The teenage rebellion is indicative of individualism and social acceptance. Wishing to experiment for fun and to be liked by others. It is not knock off a checklist for the self satisfaction but for other’s acknowledgement. The latter expresses a more vast jungle than the pigpen parent’s guarded closely. Free to run wild why not enjoy the newfound liberation. 

Each encounter is an experiential moment to reflect on the self. In self conscious pursuit of external acceptance there is an automatic switch internalising the social order. Embarking on a quest will meet different groups at different places. Yet a society demanding status will provoke submission over the respectable kindness of parental education. The familial bubble is a world away from the societal snatching of the self. It is less a brainwashing technique and more a pressurised container gasping for air. Parents will unconditionally love, society only conditionally dignifies. The desire for external acceptance by the outsiders. Playing cards correctly adding up the quantity of fans in your corner. A people pleasing system that consumes the mind as a participant. Once part of the circle feel accepted. Following a specific ideology with specific tasks in mind. Don’t be the outcast, the marginalised individual ignored. Those who disagree are muddled in lunacy, quickly dismissed. Just put in your societally provided nose cancelling headphones to ignore the nonsense spewing from their lips. 

In various sectors the encounter questioning valuational allegiances is necessary and conviction is necessary. Yet society commands more power over countless institutions. From one’s community to the schoolyard to the internet it globally attacks society. The only defence is shutting down electronic use. To desist from social media use. In Jewish circles, kosher phones is an example of restricting any social media access. As well as fervent traditionalists rejecting the internet as Amalek or evil incarnated. In this regard they maintain internal values but shielding from external harm. The encounter is a battling ram into the sea of despair. The overreaching societal influence dominates media forums. Algorithms bring the same attitudes to each viewer engulfing the mind with fire-cracking impulses. The power of social media embraces a monolingual archetype in favour of libertarian excessive action. Media facilitates a single attitude inciting a treacherous jealousy of elite moguls and their materialistic superiority. 

Chaotic transformation embraces the perplexity of foreign external mythos. The external is whitewashed as a superior ethic. Traditional motives are subdued by the overwhelming force of societal declaration. A hypnotic dystopia encased in frivolous monism A systemic interconnected concocted hysteria. Reliance on the internet is the ultimate tool. More than familial derision there is also a shrouded sinister plot. A beloved triangulation nested in the external matrix. Beyond the disillusionment with traditional models hoping for a new destiny. The internet is the core cognition. It is a knowledge more crystallised than one’s surroundings. It is the beacon of knowledge to disseminate to society. School is unnecessary with the bastion of knowledge compilation. Yet it lacks the human experience but the encounter still present. The gifting of knowledge is filled with click bait sound bites of counterintuitive ideals pressing buttons in eager distraught.