I have to wake up in less than three hours. I wish my body would understand that and let me go to bed, but sadly it seems to have other plans tonight. So after a second attempt at reading and an nth attempt at nodding off, I've convinced myself that this is the most valuable thing I can do at this point. Whether that's true seems besides the point.
Being at Ellen's is always strange. As much as I love it for it's international feel and cheap American eats, oftentimes the plasticity of it all gets to me and I feel a little uneasy. Maybe I'm just cynical and refuse to believe that such a place actually has any of the soul it pretends to. Usually at a place like that, I'm in awe of the plethora national pennants as I crane my neck to read every bit of Sharpie scribbled about the walls and ceilings. And that's it. But the more times I go, the more hollow it feels. I feel like I'll look back at Ellen's and see not an Occidental oasis in an ancient Chinese capital city, but just it for what it is: a niche bar playing (and profiting) to the desires of the select expats in Nanjing. The walls, fun as they are at first and fifth glance, will fade into monotonous exclamations of national pride and private romances. The American Top 40 that's always on will make me cringe at the cheesiness of radio hits in the homeland. And the regulars will in a strange way make me a little sad, with omnipresent hat guy and faceless cocktail dress-clad native women emerging as particular paragons of a lifestyle that seems to me more than a bit off-putting.
But then again, all this is a bit dark and making me sound a lot more sad than I actually am at this point in my life. In all honesty, Ellen's is a fun place where I had fun times with fun people, and penultimately that is what I will remember. I don't intend to look back on it as a place where I had deep thoughts about deep issues, but I'd like to record these thoughts now before the gross superficiality of the place glosses over it's more subtle details.
Struggling to find a sentence that captures what these thoughts suggest about the intended aim of this blog as a whole. Continuing to struggle as I realize that I can't comfortably posit any sort of encompassing notion that really ties this into the larger thread of the blog. Realizing that I don't really need to make any grandiose conclusions because this is a blog and Bonnie Talbert isn't going to read this. Memories of arduous yet worthwhile treks to the SOCH flooding into my consciousness as I wince at those hellish trips out to the Harvard hinterlands. Finally content with how this is ending.
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