It's me again, Margaret.

Note that I'm not actually addressing this to anyone named "Margaret" as I don't actually know anyone well by that name. I did know a "Margaret", many moons ago, but that was back in the nebulous past of high school which I'd just as soon rather forget.

Anyway.

I'm convinced that in the course of a blog's natural period, there's a "fatigue" cycle where the author really doesn't have a whole lot to say, probably because he's said everything that really needs to be said, or because he's just too damn tired to say anything of value. And I have to confess, I've fallen into a little of both right now. Real life always gets in the way of a good blog, and it can either push you to blog more or wither away your motivation to blog at all.

When I started the "10 Things I Hate About You" series, I wanted to explain the main problems I have with Christianity which, in my opinion, act as an impediment to the progression of Christianity in our world today. And yet, as I think about them more and more, the more and more angry, depressed, and jaded I become, especially when I see examples of the problems I've recognized get thrown in my face again and again, especially when I see them done in the name of the Greater Good. I seem to be at crux I keep on coming back to, where I find myself with the dilemma of either being true to myself spiritually and lose more and more of the parts of myself that I've come to connect to instituional Christianity, or being true to what others view as "truth", finding myself more and more at odds with what other people seem to define as being what a true Christian is.

I really don't think I'm alone. But more and more, I really don't think I can do anything more about this. Perhaps it's one of those things best left to a higher power to deal with, but at the same time, it's hard to just sit back and trust that everything will all be okay when you know from personal experience that things only seem to get worse and worse.

Still, there is one thing I know. Too many times I've started things only to see them unfinished, and if I can't at least finish a series of ten blog posts, how can I possibly expect myself to finish my Masters thesis?

August 4, 2007, 12:37 am (or, My attempt to blog like John Hodgeman: Thoughts from cleaning the downstairs room.)

Once upon a time, in a past life, I opined about some of the issues I took with writing about personal affairs on one's own blog. Having lived through several years of an emo-ish phase of my blogging, and having taken inspiration from people like the (in)famous P.Z. Myers, I resolved to turn over a new leaf, as it were. However, with almost Hodgmanian resignation and acceptance of what must inevitably come to pass, I have decided to write, "that most loathesome and wretched thing": a personal blog post.

I've spent most of my time alone lately. In fact, I don't remember spending this much time alone since what happened to dad, but even then I was surrounded by people, in class. Many of the faces weren't so familiar, but the places were, so even if I didn't know the people, I knew the places and positions they were in, which was almost as good as knowing them, since in many cases you never really did separate who you were from what it was you did.

For example: I will present as fact that the average University of Toronto undergraduate life sciences student will spend at least 80% of his or her waking life thinking about school, in some capacity or another - 19.5% of that remaining time will be dedicated to the consumption of nutrition, either food-based or alcoholic in origin, and the remaining .05% is conscious effort required to remember to engage in specific activities such as breathing.

I will also present as fact that their very identities are defined by the fact that they are average University of Toronto undergraduate life sciences students, and are little else in terms of the niche they fill in contemporary society. They do not, and verily, cannot limit their personas as pursuers of knowledge within the confines of the 9-to-5 work day. They are what they do.

Going back on topic, I was surrounded by such people, and they melded with the places they were in that knowing where they were was almost to know the people who inhabited them. Walking down St. George St. on a busy day, you may not know the hundreds of students who you will pass you by, but you do know of the cavernous grey-matter factory that is Convocation Hall, or the musky aroma of Ringer's Solution and Formaldehyde of the Ramsay Wright building, or the sizzling of sausage weiners on rows upon rows of hot-dog vendors. That is where these people make their living, to take a snapshot of that would be to know volumes of who they are, and what they do, from their eating habits to their study habits, to their personal hygene habits (and on that note, such knowledge is a double-edged sword in that gives one insights they may wish they never had). It is who they are. It is what they are.

Several months from the point at which I decided to make my life here, I am still finding myself in a conspicuous absence. I know no one here, but I also know not the character and pulse of the buildings they inhabit. This still all seems alien to me. I find myself avoiding social gatherings, removing myself from the personal lives of others, partly out of guilt over sins committed, both real and perceived, and partly out of the feeling that such interactions require a level of energy that I am either unwilling or unable to generate, an energy that all of the coffee in the world could never either supply or induce.

And so I am here, alone, not so much complaining, but pondering on the chain of events which led me to this particular state and time of place, and if, in the grand scheme of things, there is some meaning to this, asides from giving me an object lesson in the rapid pest consumption of artificially raised greenhouse plants.

Sweeping up in the growth chamber room downstairs, I realized that the short and small sense of pleasure I got from it was that I was making progress at something. Ultimately, that progress is swamped against the tide of entropy, but it is visible progress, progress I can point to and say, "Yes, I did this, and because of this, this world, my world is a better place than it was before."

When an attempt at friendship is met with indifference or mock appreciation, or some feeble try at reaching out received with a look askance, I ask myself if such gestures are as futile as my attempt to keep the growth chamber room clean. I feel invisible, like, as I said to another friend in Ontario, I could simply evaporate away and no one would notice I was gone. I feel more and more like parts of my emotional core are withering away and dying, and as I try harder to keep them alive, I wonder if perhaps it would be best to let things die, as they do in their natural course. If everyone is so concerned for themselves (and are so deluded in themselves to even be aware of that), then there is little incentive present to be concerned for others.

The weather has been classic August and June these past few days - but it already feels like November inside.

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.

How does it feel? (When you're alone and you're cold inside...)

I landed in Fredericton on Monday just in time to catch the rain. A light spitting rain that would ebb and flow into something bordering on a torrential downpour that stayed somewhat sane. I ventured out, with my supervisor's umbrella in hand, to somehow make some sense of this predicament I've found myself in.

The campus is on the side of a hill - you're greeted at the front gate bordering Beaverbrook Street by a large hill with the building housing the Registrar's Office (Sir Howard Douglas Hall) up top, immediately to your right. To the left is the Faculty of Kinesiology, housed in the Lady Beaverbrook Gymnasium. Note to self: find out who these "Beaverbrook" people were. I think I'll need to make a local investment in a bike; the hill is going to be a killer on my poor knees.

The campus was completely deserted. I mean, totally. Here and there I could get a glimpse of people who'd already moved into their dorms - I couldn't figure out if they were grad students or not. The only other activity consisted of a few brave souls running errands, and two rather comely girls working the front desk at the empty and diminutive bookstore. I don't know why the girls here seem so much more prettier than the girls back home. There must be something in the water, I suppose. (Man, I know someone who's going to chew me out for that comment, I'm sure). It was a mixed blessing, I guess. Wandering about aimlessly, while not having to worry about looking like you're wandering about aimlessly. All you needed to do was to just hide your map the moment a car or truck drove by. Then again, maybe they were passing me by wondering what on earth could possess someone to be out here in the rain.

And all the while, as I walked the empty walkways and streets, I couldn't help but think of a song which seemed to fit my general mood and sentiment so well...