Interference

One of the problems with being a "serious blogger" is when you plan out something and life just ends up horribly messing them all up, and then you have to explain why your latest post isn't chock-full of professional-sounding insight but instead filled with personal introspection. Rest assured, for all those interested, I haven't forgotten about my original plan, but the one thing I haven't forgotten about, sadly, is some excess baggage I've brought with me from Toronto - excess baggage I've seen dealt with all too well in two articles I've read at Salon.


I'm a singer in a band - but I'm also a nerdy Asian guy"

This idea of uniqueness implies that it is the individual nature that is sacred, not the individual's place in a matrix of family and culture. If that is true, then we need not trouble ourselves trying to make ourselves appear to fit into one or another categories posited by others. Instead, we leave it to them to try and perceive our essential nature. And we make the assumption, by extension, that all others around us are equally unique, and that their attempts to make themselves understandable to us as a certain type are actually having the opposite effect, of obscuring their nature; that by adopting certain styles so they can be recognized as a type, they are actually obscuring who they really are.

So, armed with this understanding, we go out and, by our individual expression, we try to awaken the sacred individual in others, and speak directly to that individual, or that soul, bypassing the trappings of race, culture, class and type.

So this is a sacred thing, what you do. What you do is the expression of this unique nature.

You are Asian and I am white. What unites us is our shared knowledge of the mystery and power of our individual natures. Your true nature is unknowable to me except as I perceive it in your actions and your gestures.

That is what binds us. We are thus citizens of an idea.

We are not members of a tribe. We are not linked by blood or soil. We are citizens of an idea. We constitute, together, a proposition: that as humans we have value and rights, and that to be happy we must have the freedom to manifest who we are.

Something I've talked about repeatedly both here and with my friends is how the image I've formed about myself has changed compared to how I viewed myself before I moved here. In what's probably the newest in a set of wildly imaginative ironies I've found myself in, I realize that having come out of Toronto disillusioned with my life as a Torontonian, thirsting for a new and different challenge, I've gotten the challenge of my life - a life in a place where I, a Catholic, Leftist/Socialist Evolutionary Biologist of Asian descent (who also by the way, happens to have a stuttering problem) seemingly couldn't be more different from those around him.

More and more I realize that for all of the problems I feel, or at least, think I feel, sooner or later I'll have to realize that I can't let the barriers that I see between me and others define who and what I am. Despite all of the labels which I carry (both voluntarily and involuntarily), are those labels really indicative of what makes up me as a person? I don't think so, and I refuse to believe that my entire personality can be summed up in a 15 min. sound bite, a simple listing of labels that people have made up to pigeonhole me into a convenient category (to which they can either attach their pride or scorn).

I know what I am, and I know what I'm not - or at the very least, I like to think I do. And try as I might, I couldn't change that to make others like me better, even if I wanted to. At the end of the day. if I can live at peace with myself, I can do a better job of living at peace with others, and, that's something I can take with me, if nothing else.


I found my father dead

The circumstances are a little different - but the context remains the same. I'm thankful for the original writer and Cary for expressing what I haven't been able to put into words for the last three years of my life.

Why do you weigh an extra stone when you are dead? Why does your death weigh upon us so? You would think with you gone we'd be lighter but no. We feel heavier, as though you had draped yourself over all of us, weighing us down. It's tempting to say that in this way the dead must experience the carefree joy of flight -- leaving us with all the weight of their lives. We become their sullen but devoted porters, carrying their baggage to the hotel. If so, it would be a wonderful feeling for them, to leave all this behind, to leave it behind so palpably that we are so bowed down with what they discard.

That has been the great surprise to me about death, how physically it weighs one down. It is simply a heavy absence -- pierced, at unexpected moments, by upheavals of unimaginable sadness.

So what do we do, how do we help? Again, literally: We support. We hold each other up.

So we do need people around us when there is a death. We need the strength and we need the support and we also need the food. People bring food when there is a death and there is always too much to eat. That seems the right thing to do, to bring the food.

So we stand and regard the absence together. People have their moments when it washes over them and makes their knees buckle and we allow for that.

Last week, at Christian Fellowship, the thought of my own dad lying in bed came upon me out of nowhere, like a sudden rememberance of something I'd obliviously forgotten - a door unlocked, a key left on a countertop somewhere. I suddenly felt so hollow inside, devoid, like all of the positive feeling I'd had in my body suddenly had been drained away from me. I think I spent 15 minutes or so in the men's washrooom of Alumni Hall, quietly crying to myself, wondering what I was doing here, so far from home, so far from someone who'd given me a sense of direction and purpose in my life for so long.

Many times, I wished I'd had someone to regard his absence with me, someone to come with me when I'd visit where we put his ashes at Mount Pleasant. It pains me to say I haven't, though I don't know if that's more my fault than the fault of those around me. I still haven't gotten used to it. Damned if I ever will, I think.