When it’s unclear where to draw a dividing line, it’s often better not to draw one at all. Such uncertainty is usually a sign that “the rules” for when to draw the dividing line will collapse when faced with too many cases, or when the rules are examined. For example, the concept of a word turns out to be so difficult to define lingiustically that the field doesn’t use it as a fundamental concept. Instead, linguists talk about building sentences from “units of meaning,” which might be roots, affixes, or processes like moving words around or changing sounds. Once fundamentality of the word is abandoned, it turns out to be something that varies greatly across different languages. Some languages, like Turkish and German, combine a great many units of meaning (suffixes in Turkish, massive noun compounds in German) into a single word, while other languages (English, Chinese) use lots of small words.

Almost two months ago, I found myself in China, Hong Kong and Macao over the course of three days. I traveled by plane, boat and bus. I used three separate currencies. My passport was scrutinized three times. Where my friend lived in China, the villagers spoke a language incomprehensible to the people in the nearest big city, where they in turn spoke another language incomprehensible to the Mandarin speakers who run the country from Beijing, or the Cantonese-speaking majority in the south and Hong Kong. Yet these people are all said to speak “Chinese” and all legally live under the authority of the Chinese government.

Two days ago I crossed from Hungary into Slovakia, then Austria, and finally Germany, by train, car and plane. I used three currencies and encountered three languages, but didn’t see a single border official, passport control or customs officer. At one train station in a small town, I wasn’t even sure what country I was in — not until checking the prices on a dusty vending machine did I know to pull out my Slovakian koruna (to buy my daily ice cream, of course)

It’s hard to see how these two snippets of my trip are really so different; each border I cross seems more like an abstract line on a map in a bureaucrat’s office somewhere than anything of much substance. A nation, like a word, is really just a locally convenient but globally poor abstraction, defined slightly differently in different places by different people.

In both places, the borders are evaporating. Hong Kong and Macao’s “Special Administrative Regions” will be abolished in 2047 and 2049, respectively, ostensibly once the different adminstrative and political processes there have been synchronized. And crossing three borders inside Europe so easily is made possible by the expanding European Union, bringing with it a somewhat easier sort of synchronization.

The concept of a nation seems to be slowly being abandoned in this globalizing world. It will clearly take decades, if not centuries, and won’t be without disagreement, but perhaps it too is an abstraction that truly needs to be thrown out.

Apparently the Obama campaign heard I was going to be in Berlin, so they scheduled a stop there just for me (and maybe for a few other Obama supporters in Deutschland). How thoughtful.

A friend asked me in email, “What’s your mental state like?”

There’s not much on my mind… I am more or less living between yesterday and two or three days from now.  I don’t worry about life back home. All my belongings fit in an airplane carry-on bag. If anything sucks, I just leave the hostel or the city or the museum or the room or stop talking to the people who suck and do something else. I take pictures of things that I think look cool, and draw pictures when there’s a quiet moment.

Sometimes I meet cool people and hang out with them. Other times I’m all by myself and only speak when I stumble through a few phrases of the local language. Sometimes there’s a fantastic place to eat for cheap, other times food is yogurt and bread from the corner store.

Oh, and I eat ice cream every day.

Early this morning, on a deserted backstreet in Sofia, just after navigating an ATM in a foreign alphabet, as I was feeling particularly staggered by the sheer weirdness of the geometry of the universe, a song made very familiar to me from countless mornings at Pancake Playhouse burst out from some unknown Bulgarian basement or bedroom. At the same moment, I realized that a flyer on the back of a street sign right in front of me said “Antichrist” (Антихрист) on it in Bulgarian. Funny how many emotions, like a confluence of deep alienation, wistful nostalgia, and unexpected comprehension, don’t have proper names.

And then you get on a bus and ride hundreds of miles through sunflower fields to end up somewhere else. The feeling fades, but the realization that your repertoire of words is woefully limited lingers.