After another full day of travel with the usual modern inconveniences of bare minimum offerings for exorbitant prices, constant gate changes and delays, topped off with the most sour-faced boarding pass attendant who probably got her customer training as a prison warden (it was Texas, after all), we’re finally home. And it’s good to say “home.” While I’m not ready to return to real life, I’m happy to be back.
This wasn’t my first trip as an American citizen, but, as Christine insightfully put it on our way to the airport, this was my first trip as an American — a bona fide gringo doing gringo things with other gringos talking gringo talk. Americanized with American eyes — experiencing the world from that vantage point. Having the world arranged for me through that lens. Being responded to from the other side of the glass.
Nothing typified this more than my very last day in Guanacaste, when we find ourselves on a catamaran with a motley crew of boomer expats reliving their frat house days, talking at me about how much they love it here and how I’ll be back, how I’ll definitely be back. They talked at me about their properties and how the people who built their homes also built that one over yonder (“that one cost $10M”), and how the police take 15 minutes to get down there from their station on top of the hill. They talked at me about a lot of things, but they mostly kept insisting on how much they love it there in a way that struck me as pathological — the way you make a new thing your whole identity because something about your old identity had fallen apart.
But that could also all be in my imagination. Maybe I’ll gush about my little fiefdom by the ocean if/when I retire one day too. Maybe I’ll call myself “a sun worshipper” in earnest too. Maybe I’ll stop caring what anyone thinks and just talk and talk and talk.
I will be going back because I do have that privilege. But I hope to be more choosy about what I see and do next time around. The place itself is worth it.
I’ll end it today with this series of meditations on labor and privilege as I contemplate checking the work inbox I’ve been dreading to open.