Evening Thoughts: What time is it there?

If there were a single theme I could muster from the past few years of my life, it would be "displacement."

Funny, because it's all relative to the years spent in high school. Even before those years, though, displacement has always been a part of my everyday. Growing up in Inwood, moving to Riverdale, and you know, they say it only matters as much as you make it matter, but I'm not so sure they're right. Being Asian-faced, having parents who have lived much of their lives in a distant Korea, and not relating to any particular face, class, language, or location, has always been a part of the feeling that I'm constantly shifting from one place to another.

But what marks these most recent years so special is that I've really pushed the extent to which I have moved from here, to there, to somewhere else. Geographically, I've never traveled so much--I lived in Seoul, Korea by myself for three summers, moving from a small apartment there, to college or home here (in New York), again and again. I've gone from New York to Seoul, from Dorm to Dorm, from Home to Apartment, from College to Work, from Relationship to Single, from Friends to other Friends, from Downtown to Uptown, from here to there, to somewhere else.

All this movement is really interesting in that it's like a sifter. You shake it from side to side, and the more vigor you exert the more you:

sift (sĭft)
v.sift·ed, sift·ing, sifts
v.tr.

1. To put (flour, for example) through a sieve or other straining device in order to separate the fine from the coarse particles.