Remember those halcyon days when I discovered BTS? Rabbit holes of dance videos, learning the members’ names which wasn’t easy because of their ever-changing hair colours, and the late night deep-dives into K-pop business culture and the costs of becoming an Idol in South Korea.
Here we are again but these days are more bleak. I'm becoming obsessed with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, NATO, and American foreign policy. What the actual flip?
Hi Michelle, what did you do with Old Michelle?
I asked myself this very question while tearing into an Amazon package containing Jonathan Haslam’s Hubris: The Origins of Russia's War Against Ukraine and Jeffrey D. Sachs' A New Foreign Policy this afternoon. Neither are anywhere close to my wheelhouse.
Living in New Zealand can feel disconnected from global affairs most of the time. That distance is only an illusion, of course. The decisions made in the rest of the world do ripple down to eventually lap at our shores. These bees get in my bonnet – like Trump's plans that include Antarctica for drilling for oil and digging up rare Earth minerals, or worrying about my retirement investments nose-diving during this geopolitical upheaval and potential World War when my retirement is on the horizon and being welcomed with open arms.
So here I am, trading my BTS Army Bomb (if you know, you know) for highlighted passages in my newly acquired serious books.
My fixations might say less about what interests tickle my fancy and more about how I always want to dig deeper, seeking systems under surface, even if in unregulated bursts of energy.
Or maybe I'm just old and cranky.
Has your obsession focus shifted dramatically with what’s going on? Or am I the only one who is more and more swapping popular culture for politics?