I can't sleep because I'm thinking about hotel rooms. This is often a problem; not that thinking about hotel rooms is a problem but I often get something random into my head and then can't sleep so I thought that I'd best write it down. I've been trying to figure out why it is that I like staying in hotels so much. If I was rich I would live in a hotel but I'm not so I only get to stay in them very infrequently. I stayed in one in Paris recently which was not too bad; although it was a hostel I had my own room.
So I've been trying to come to some sort of concrete decision about why I like them and I think it may be because they're blank spaces. When you stay in a hotel you arrive and the space is completely impersonal; even if it's really fancy its still a hotel space with no mark of personality. It's as if one enters a transient and between-world, a white space of no fixity. You have no general stuff there, nothing to attach you to the world. Like when I was a kid and thought that if you walked to the edge of the universe you would walk into a white space with nothing there, just white. There's no belongings and nothing to note that any other person has stayed there (except if it's really scummy and you find something encrusted on the sheets but thankfully I've not stayed anywhere like that in my memory). You get up in the morning and go out to go about your business, when you return the room is back in its original position as if everything that has happened in the duration that you were there is entirely wiped away and you start with a blank space again. At around 12 noon every day everything that has happened in any hotel room vanishes and the room is empty... kind've like one of those etch-e-sketch toys where you make a mess and pull the slider across at the bottom and the slate is clean for you to make a mess again.
I think that that is possibly why I like hotel rooms so much. And maybe people trash hotel rooms because they can't stand the impersonality of it all and demand to make a stamp on it. Or maybe they're just bored.... who knows?
So I've been trying to come to some sort of concrete decision about why I like them and I think it may be because they're blank spaces. When you stay in a hotel you arrive and the space is completely impersonal; even if it's really fancy its still a hotel space with no mark of personality. It's as if one enters a transient and between-world, a white space of no fixity. You have no general stuff there, nothing to attach you to the world. Like when I was a kid and thought that if you walked to the edge of the universe you would walk into a white space with nothing there, just white. There's no belongings and nothing to note that any other person has stayed there (except if it's really scummy and you find something encrusted on the sheets but thankfully I've not stayed anywhere like that in my memory). You get up in the morning and go out to go about your business, when you return the room is back in its original position as if everything that has happened in the duration that you were there is entirely wiped away and you start with a blank space again. At around 12 noon every day everything that has happened in any hotel room vanishes and the room is empty... kind've like one of those etch-e-sketch toys where you make a mess and pull the slider across at the bottom and the slate is clean for you to make a mess again.
I think that that is possibly why I like hotel rooms so much. And maybe people trash hotel rooms because they can't stand the impersonality of it all and demand to make a stamp on it. Or maybe they're just bored.... who knows?
posted by Siobhan at 12:29 am
2 Comments:
sounds like you need a house-boy, Gluey...luckily, iam available, but the French Maid uniform thingy will cost ya extra
:)
Well sounds good. I can't pay you anything more than a few pieces of paper with expletives written on them though. I have to keep most of my money to sustain my decadent lifestyle.
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