S. Plots His Next Move

I got here about 3 hours late. The plane from Houston to Frankfurt was delayed, which delayed my connection from Frankfurt to Vienna.

You know how it goes.

But pity my poor seatmate, who was on his way from Houston to India. The delay REALLY put him in Fucked Up Position #1, but that didn't stop him from being an interesting person and a delightful seatmate. Which is what you want when your ass is glued to the middle seat on a 9.5 hour flight.

S. works as a trader for a major international oil company. He lives and works in Houston. He came to the US just after college in India to pursue his post-graduate studies. He stayed and married and now has two kids, and he and his wife are US citizens now.

And he likes the US. The family visits India every so often, to connect with the grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc. but S.'s kids are AMERICANS and the idea of ever going back to India to live is pretty much unthinkable....

But as we talked, I saw obvious conflicts. It wasn't so much that India was pulling S., but he does miss his parents and feels a kind of guilt for leaving them behind---though they have no interest in leaving India. He feels bad that he can't see them as often as he'd like.

Mostly it seems that S. feels the conflicts that anyone in his position feels----the corporate culture giveth, but it also threatens to taketh away if you don't "perform." That means working weekends, and being tethered to your fucking Blackberry 24-7. And, hey----even though you've got six weeks of vacation saved up, how DARE you take 2.5 weeks of it to travel to INDIA when we need you HERE!?

That kind of bullshit.

We talked about modern life, how people are more and more expected to perform like machines. How the things that make us human seem less and less important to more and more people. I told him about my idea of hosting small dinners at my house every two weeks. I've done this five times so far and it's been fun.

"See, that's another thing," he said. "My family hardly ever gets together with our friends anymore. Everyone is so busy! And when we do see each other we complain about this, because being together reminds us that we're hardly EVER together." The feeling in our section of the plane was: Something has gone wrong with modern life. Seriously fucking wrong.

Bruce Lee was an innovator of martial arts training methodology. His big idea was to replace traditional outdated training methods and concepts of unarmed combat with modern, workable concepts. HIs observation was, the traditional methods try to turn you into a robot when what you need to be is a free-flowing thinker and mover. More like a dancer.

Bruce had a fake tombstone constructed and he displayed it in his school for his students to think about.

It said: "In memory of a once-fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess."

I thought of that tombstone as I listened to S.

But I also had the idea he was planning his escape.