2001-05-15 - 12:25 a.m.

I saw another program a few days ago about one of China's ethnic minority groups. I don't remember the name of the group, but there are 52 of them and this is one. The people live around a lake in the SouthWestern corner of China and a thousand years ago or so they migrated there from Thailand. They now live in about 10-20 villages around this lake and all together they total 50,000 in population.

Anyway, the amazing thing about this group of people is that their culture is entirely matriarchal. They have had the same social structure since the dawn of time and in this culture women run the finances, family and make all the important community decisions. But what's even more amazing is the way they make this work. In this culture there are no such thing as husbands or fathers. There are plenty of men who live there - but noone ever gets married. Instead men live out their lives in the homes of their mothers. When mothers die they leave their home and property to the youngest daughter. Women in this culture never marry. They can take as many lovers as they want. But the man has to leave the house by dawn. Couples in love can set up a system of committment where they don't take any other lovers but each other - and these relationships can stay committed and last 20-30 years. But they live in separate households the whole time. When a child is born it is raised entirely in the home of the mother. Its male influences are their uncles. They know who their father is, but the father is not expected to contribute financially or socially to the child's development. Women in the community technically have a higher social status, but men's lives center around hunting, fishing, or as religious role models (monks).

The point here is that love is freed from financial or social obligation. People are free to fall in love and no strain is put on their relationships at all - The daily pressures of dividing chores or earning money never tear a relationship apart - because those pressures are never placed on a couple in love and are only placed on the household of mothers and their children/siblings, who would never turn you out. Women and men are therefore freed from financial dependencies and love relationships are more honest and longer-lasting. In turn, there is no shame in the culture for not getting married, finding a lover, or being monogomous. WOW!

This sounds like the perfect culture. It reminds me how arbitrary our Western culture is and how all the rhetoric about the typical nuclear family (where couples marry and live together and husbands work and mothers stay home) and how that is the natural way to live is just a social construction of our culture. Other cultures do things differently and other ways that work for people make just as much sense. I pressure myself to want things that I think should be natural for me to want (like a husband and nuclear family) for no reason. Because different cultures have addressed the same social dilemmas with different answers and maybe other answers are just as valid and maybe I'm not ever going to naturally fit in to this one.

Which brings me to the point of all this culture talk. The point is that I love to travel!

And it brings me to the main question of my identity which I keep returning to again and again - what the fuck am I going to do with my life?

Obviously, the answer to this question is not a pat one. Getting a job and moving to a pretty city is not specific enough for me. My question to myself is - what should that job be? What field should I work in? Where should I live? What should I do next? What should I do when I leave Vancouver?

So I'm starting with the answer to the question What interests me? and the answer is travel. and creativity. My little logic problem is to brainstorm a list of jobs that include travel, and then pick one i want to go for, call someone up who does that and ask them how I could break into that business, then I'm going to go to school or get a low level job wherever or build my resume to do whatever it takes to break into that field, and then I'm going to work my way up. It really isn't too complicated. I mean, it's going to take years to do all that, but that's not the hard part. The hard part is deciding what I want to do.

All the time I think about so many things I'd like to do. I'd like to be an actress. I'd like to be a writer. I'd like to be a songwriter/musician. I'd like to be a diplomat. I'd like to be a university professor. I'd like to be an editor. I'd like to be an archeologist. I'd like to be an explorer. I'd like to be a field-researcher. I'd like to be Bob Dylan, Katherine Hepburn, Jane Goodall, Thurgood Marshall, Warren Christopher, Bonnie Raitt, Jack Kerouac, and Mother Teresa all in one.

And I'd like to go everwhere. I want to travel Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, Australia - I'd like to go everwhere from Albania to Tibet to Urugauy.

But unfortunately, I only have one life to live. And I've already been through school with a history degree and I'm behind 30,000 dollars in student loans. So I've got to make choices. I've got to pick one country or one area of study or one job and get to it. Because life is short and I want to make the most of it.

This novel I'm writing is coming along more slowly than I expected - because I get distracted often and don't make time each day to write on it. I wait for the mood to strike and then write a few hours straight instead of writing like a couple of hours a day. And the content of it is so personal that I end up re-reading old journals or re-writing and in general getting lost in memory instead of into the writing moment. I sometimes think that maybe my problem is the subject matter - but then again I know that a writer can write best what she knows from experience and also I think I've learned some important lessons from my experiences that I want to share. But of course I can't even think about depending on this novel for a career in publication because its a long tedious process to get published and I've got to feed myself in the meantime.

So what am I going to do with myself?

The answer in the short term is - Keep writing my little novel. Allow myself to rest and to grow this year in Vancouver. Make an action plan later, at the end of the year. Keep all of this in the back of my mind and allow ideas to frolic and see what takes root.