I love life. No matter how long I've lived and how many different tunnels and alleys I look into and how many corners I peruse, I always find something new, a new world of things to get into.
Finding new worlds can happen in daily life, whether it be watching Game of Thrones (the world if Westeros is back in the public consciousness this summer!) to opening up my Korean learning podcast (each language is a world of its own!), so exploring them can be thrilling in itself, like spending 3 hours random nights late at night learning all about YouTube phenoms), you can go deep deep down the proverbial rabbit hole. But nothing, nothing, opens my eyes up to the different worlds this universe has to offer than going on vacation, going to different places. Just when i feel like I have this universe figured out, MJ and I get on the carpet and go for a wild ride in a whole new world! (Cue Aladdin music)
So today in St. Louis, I was so surprised when we went to City Museum, an oasis in an urban jungle that looked straight out of a Harry Potter scene, with broken down buses on a rooftop, snake statues. Outside were tunnels, shutes, in a maze like formation reaching up to the top, with slides going down and ferris wheel at the top. A cross between Chuck E. Cheese and "Chutes and Ladders." Basically, a kids' paradise, and it was reflected in the populace, with kids jumping around and parents getting a well-deserved break on the sidelines while their kids rank loose. It was the kind of place you imagine as a kid but doesn't exist and you wish to build, and one of those kids with that dream was able to achieve it as an adult, finding just the right mix of nostalgia and pure unadulterated fun to attract both kids and their parents but also have be commercially viable. There was a hamster wheel that I tried and was getting good at, but isn't it everyone's dream to live the life of a gerbil/hamster? ( I never knew the difference between these 2) Genius, in my opinion, and allows people to escape the hustle and bustle of a typical urban setting to a kids paradise, if just for a few hours.
I'm constantly amazed at how my life (and I'm assuming others' too) can transition so quickly from one world to another. One minute we were finishing up a lovely wedding weekend for my friends Jibraun and Sonya, a decidedly adult-catered activity full of formality and celebration, and the next we're stepping into kids' zone of frivolity and jolly. In the wedding activity kids don't really exist, and you almost forget about them, like they're not part of the equation, except you get reminded of it full-blast when going to a place like City Museum. It's one of life's many hidden joys, to be able to transition from one of these seemingly separate worlds to another so quickly. It's even easier with Iphones and Uber now.
Handicaps....Also at City Museum, I observed a young girl (around 10 or 11) who had lost her hand for an unknown reason. She looked very healthy otherwise, though, and was having about as much fun as the other kids, except she couldn't use both hands to pull up the many ladders and tunnels, couldn't turn the hamster wheel to help her run on it. It's a sad world, those with disabilities and handicaps, and sometimes I just need to step back for a little bit from my complaining about L.A. traffic and high health insurance premiums and just appreciate the world of a young child with a disability, how they see other kids having fun and doing "normal activities" but can't fully appreciate the same for themselves, how their childhood is shaped by a disease/condition that they did not cause upon themselves. That world is difficult to imagine, and I sometimes hope that if only they could experience my world and how happy it is to fully experience the world, I could sacrifice something and allow those kids the ability to do that, find a little joy in their world since I can't fully empathize with people who are living those worlds. It's a very sobering thought, but that is the world we live in where people suffer every day from things and people like me can enjoy luck and prosperity in my own little world and turn a blind eye on those in their own, so that I was glad I was reminded of that world today.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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