On boredom and buses and a mild obsession with Molly Wizenberg

A friend recently called me out for not writing enough on this blog. A slacker, she called me. (It was meant lovingly, I know, dear.)

Well, that friend was right. I am slacking off. Considerably.

But I'm not lazy. Not really.

I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of being boring. Despite my love of food blogs, I do not particularly want to read about what someone had for breakfast this morning. People don't come here for recipes, so I assume that my readers – all five of you – don’t really want to know what I ate this morning, either. (Besides, all of you should know me well enough to know that I’m not really a breakfast person. In all likelihood, I turned off my alarm and overslept and rushed to leave the apartment at 12:40 to make it to the office on time and somewhat put together.) And so, instead of writing something boring, I write nothing at all. It's easier that way.

I'm afraid of being boring.

My life is out there for all the world to see. And I want people who come to this blog -- whether they're loved ones who come here on purpose to check up on me or people who stumble here accidentally -- to like what they read. I want them to be entertained. And, because it's my name up there in lights, I'm the entertainment -- if not with my day-to-day life, then certainly with my perspective of Hong Kong. After all, it's a wildly exotic place for some girl named Anna.

Isn't it?

I’ve spent more than a year waiting for culture shock to hit me in the back of a head with a 2x4, but it hasn’t happened. I expected Hong Kong to be wildly different from anything I’d seen before. In some ways, it is, but mostly, the patterns of my daily life are largely the same in Hong Kong as they were in the U.S. My work is the same. The people are different, but the ones who have a major role in my life here are, for the most part, American. Every once in a while, I’ll see something strange and snap a picture, thinking I’ll maybe write something on it later. But most days, the only sign I live in Asia is the presence of a lot of Chinese people.

Hong Kong is funny like that. The best description of this city I’ve ever heard is “The world’s largest Chinatown.” It looks like China and sounds like China and feels like China – in the right neighborhoods – but it’s not China. China is easy to find here, but it’s just as easy to get away from. My daily life mostly happens in those non-China-like areas. And I've been happy with that, content with the pattern and the routine and ease of using English.

Because of that, I haven’t really made much of an effort to get to know the other Hong Kong. I haven’t even made a serious effort with the language. I’m a creature of habit and routine. Why learn more than basic Cantonese when English works just fine? Why would I want to wander around some other neighborhood when I know mine so well?

I know. Slacker.

Excluding trips to the airport, I can’t remember the last time I made it off Hong Kong Island. And that’s a shame. Hong Kong is a vibrant, exotic city, and I should make more of an effort to get to know it.

I was thinking about that on the bus tonight. I know the route well; I take it home from work every single night. But there’s more than one bus that runs that way. There’s also a minibus. I have yet to ride a minibus here. (See? Slacking again. Mostly, I’m afraid I’ll die in one. But if I live, what a great tale I’ll have for the blog!)

Mostly, I was thinking about Orangette. I’ve been reading the archives lately and loving them. They’re fun because of the subject matter (which often centers on what Molly ate for breakfast. Or dinner. But, since hers is a food blog, I feel like she can get away with that…). But going through the archives this way is even more fun because, after reading several months’ worth of entries, I’m seeing Molly discover her voice and begin to develop as a writer. (A very, very lovely writer she is, too.) I thought about Orangette’s evolution as the bus began to chug up the hill toward Midlevels, and I began to wonder if someday, far, far into the future, some half-crazed fan of mine would be trolling the archives of this blog, noticing the same thing. (If I say hello here to that half-crazed future fan, does that mean I’ve been watching too much “LOST”?)

Of course, for that to happen, this blog needs some, shall we say, um, more substantial archives. And there’s a whole city out there, just waiting to be turned into blog posts.

I’ll try to get on that.

Maybe I should start by taking a minibus.