Meditations on the “Jet Setter” tag while sipping a beer @ O’Hare

A couple of my friends recently referred to me in conversation as a “jet setter.” While it’s true that I’ve earned an obscene amount of air miles over the last few years, I must admit that the term grates on me, and I find myself thinking back to a very specific memory about “jet setters.” There’s a horribly overpriced discotheque called “The Jet Set” in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the city where I spent the bulk of my adolescence. The bar is located in what was Dhaka’s only 5-star hotel, and although it wasn’t the kind of place I spent a lot of time in, I did go once with a collection of friends. I recall venturing into it fully armed with a 17 year olds’ practiced bohemian disdain of the scene, and flanked by a circle of rich and beautiful high school buddies. We ventured into that world in search of the alcohol that was readily available and served up without the slightest regard to a customer’s age. Not a bad place for seniors in high school looking for cheap thrills, in a Muslim country where legal prohibition results in alcohol only available on the black market. Sadly, the experience remains in my memory not because of the booze or music, but because of the vivid impression the clientele left on me.

Who frequents a bar called “the Jet Set” in a 5-star hotel in a 3rd world country? The place was largely empty on the night we visited it, save for a few hotel guests emanating such a palpable sense of desperation that loneliness hung over them like a visible cloud. Written across their faces was the unmistakable haggard look of jet lagged, disoriented, homesick travelers, seeking to find some semblance of solidarity in their fellow displaced disco patrons, or lacking that, to stumble towards a drunken oblivion as a haze of familiar 80’s radio hits blared in the foreground. Most were business travelers, and you could tell by looking at them that they’d lost their equilibrium at some point on their journey. Rather than venture out of the safe confines of their hotel to confront reality, they chose to kill their remaining time in Dhaka encased in the glitzy plastic dreamworld of a pretentious discotheque, hoping to find someone who spoke their language, who they could communicate with, who would affirm their tenuous hold on their own origins. The businessmen hit on my gorgeous 17-year old female friends with all the awkward grace of game-less guys used to throwing money around to get what they want. The spectacle was simultaneously amusing and revolting, partly because my friends, a savvy foxy bevy of fine women with souls aged beyond their years, were well adept at deploying their jailbait lures to get whatever they wanted. And so it came to pass on that night that a bunch of sleazy strangers wielding corporate credit cards ended up buying round after round of free drinks for our whole crew…

…drink after drink, as the predictable music pumped out…Madonna, Prince, Donna Summers, Abba…we soaked it in and let it take us… All of us aiming for oblivion, to wipe out the pervasive poverty we were surrounded with, to forget our own troubles, to transcend our circumstances and drown our sorrows and possibly to discover something meaningful on the path to the porcelain god… Such is life amongst certain echelons of sick societies, and as the night grew later, this disco was suddenly rife with it: drugged out playboys, high priced skanks, people with money to burn and privilege to spare who had exhausted the city’s supply of cheaper thrills and had moved on to pricier means of self-negation. This is the lifelong snapshot I will always carry with me of “the Jet Set,” a memory so ingrained that it immediately comes to mind every time anyone happens to drop the words. And so when good friends start calling me a “jet-setter,” based on my frequent overseas trips, I can’t help but cringe, thinking of the caricatures I saw that night. I don’t want to be a displaced, disoriented, desperate business traveler, and yet more and more often, I find myself sitting in a bar in a land that seems very foreign, feeling a sleep-deprived sense of isolation setting in. Perhaps it’s an inevitable part of the spending a week somewhere stuck in conference room…but I don’t think so…

Somewhere in all of our experiences, there’s a choice we make, a decision regarding where we draw our boundaries and how we anchor our personalities. The worst travelers, the ones who tend to be the most obnoxious tourists, are those who’s “otherness” is overwhelming to both themselves and the people they come into contact with. They fundamentally cannot adapt to their surroundings. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be transparent. I want to be amorphous, racially ambiguous, innocuously woven into the tapestry of wherever I’m at. I want the locals to ask me for directions because they assume I’m one of them. I want to walk the city streets at all hours of the night and be safe within the anonymity of shadows. I guess what I’m saying is I want to belong to every place I go, by not belonging exclusively to any place I’ve ever been. To anchor my soul in the transient nature of the culture smuggler… Is that a sick ideal? An impossible goal? Maybe… but maybe it’s just a reaction to growing up around foreigners who never made an effort to fit in to their surroundings. I practice what in my more pretentious moments consider to be the ethos and modus operandi of the shapeshifter… Call it confused, incoherent, untenable, I don’t care. Whatever it is, it’s the antithesis of the beleaguered business travelers I saw that night two decades ago in Bangladesh, bouncing idiotically to bad disco music at the “Jet Set.” So please, don’t call me a “jet setter.” I’m just another gypsy with skills for hire and sketchy goods for sale…