Microaggressions

When I graduated from high school, they told us that a lot of people were going to mention where we came from. So far, I've been reminded in certain ways. I say, "Yeah, yeah," I say, and try to mess up the paint they splashed on my face.

I am rooting for my Queens hometown in some made up contest of neighborhoods. "Says the guy who went to Thatplace."

"Hey, David. You went to Thatplace?" "Yeah..." "Fucker. Kid on my floor did, too."

"Where did you go to school?" "Just around here." "Where?" "It's on the Upper West Side." "Yeah, like which school?" "It's called Thatplace?" She goes off on how she tutors these kids from there and their curriculum is so intense, almost like where she grew up and the curriculum was also intense, even if just by American standards because she's not from this country.

"Oh, you went to Thatplace." "Yeah, I switched schools in middle school..." "Did you know this guy...?" I've forgotten. We're talking about education in low-income communities. I talked about how I switched out of public school. "Well, you know, not everyone has access to those opportunities." He goes off on statistics, his experiences at a public school Fewblocksover, and how Teachingorg is going to finally fix how different that is for someone like me. My mouth is not agape, but I'm fighting off a wrinkle in my eyebrows.

"I can't believe you're a private school kid." I'm not worried about that. This is the stuff they must have been talking about.

This is too much.

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I feel like

Every song I put up here will attain a significance more profound than I realize at this moment. I'm going to hear it again, and it's going to sound like today. I can almost hear it now, but in the future. Auditory fates.

Peace of mind

I met the mayor of a city once. He was a gallant, ambitious man. He was convicted in his views on urban welfare, interesting for his dramatic stories of political heroism, and just admirable overall. He fought things, like drugs and poverty and corruption. When you hear him speak there's no end of feeling, the kind that moves you to believing that cities are places where people are degraded and are revived, and that this is a man who cares for their fundamental human redemption. We all sat there and we were wowed.

He wasn't mayor when I heard him, actually, but our school practically had a love affair with him. My history teacher invited him to class after his first talk in the auditorium, just to have him tell us stories. So our tables in a circle around this leader among men, but boys really, we were rapt in attention. That's how I remember it. I sat on the lip of this curl, next to my teacher who giggled at every quip he made. The boys in the middle in front of him were tilting their chairs, but their mouths were agape. I sat there because my friend sat there with me, or I with him. We didn't tilt our chairs. We also kept our coats on and tied our ties tight, because there was little room to get comfortable when the trains were cold in the morning and they will be again when it's dark. But our teacher told us to take our coats off for the mayor.

He must have talked about serious things. I didn't pay much attention in history class then, because learning this stuff felt stifling. When he was done, a lot of kids had real questions about things that he might do to fix things in the future, but when they were done and we were unraveling, my friend asked what use were these political goods if the overpopulated human race could do with some depopulating. Oh, don't do that, I thought, I just want to leave. Our classmates pretended not to hear him and gathered their books.

This mayor courted him earnestly and privately, as if he had stepped up to share his thoughts. He entreated my friend not to be cynical, and to believe that every human being has a right to peace and happiness.

We remained friends for a while. I never saw him outside of school, and I heard publicly that he didn't make it back for the next semester. By then I had found belonging in my studies and my love for poetry. I made other friends, I dated, and I still talked to our counselor sometimes, as we misfits both once did.

In two years, he passed away. He had become depressed and took too many pills. Some of us went to his funeral, although his family didn't really know who we were. His mother cried so hard. We were asked eventually to leave, and on my way out I saw his face. In his note, he wrote that he was at peace. I know that and I know we all deserve that, but I wonder who thinks about it when we fix problems and fight fights and say things.

We find out there are more things than we can handle. Rest in peace, my friend. I know you live.

Sunset, Morningside

Au Revoir Simone - Shadows (Tanlines Remix)

I was here before, one late summer evening. On the roof of Teachers College, I looked south quizzically at the setting sun. To my right was Grant's Tomb, which I tried to find but it was too cold. In front of me were a lot of trees. I never found out how that tomb looked like. There were a lot of places in this city that I didn't care much about. Being here before made me impatient, obtuse, dull and boring. What was this river, these pacing students, those hallways and passageways. All toward places outside my scope of concern.

If I had made the right connections, I could have seen the windows of rooms where I'd sleep, where I'd meet people who changed me, other places where I would never show up. These places could have haunted me from a different time. I sat in a lawn chair on that roof, looking up at the skies and away from the architecture below me. I had convinced myself that three helicopters above midtown were stationary spaceships, waiting to descend. I was as absent then as I am now, sleeping days and fretting nights.

I walked along 116th, turned on Amsterdam, and smelled winter the way I did when I was fourteen. I can hear songs that make my heart beat the same way. When I close my eyes, I can see the spaces and moods I will inhabit in years that have yet to arrive. The details change, but the feelings will play themselves out exactly as I see them now. I know this, better than I know people now in their transient humors, their idle talk and their material projections. Better than I can see shapes whose contours will change. I can travel years and not move.

Jealousy

This is a bit overdue, but I was going to write something about jealousy and how I've been trying to grapple with these impulses. My process came at a good time, when I've been met with problems of distance and personal space, coinciding with moving back to school and a chance to free myself from some rigidities of summer.

I moved back in to facilitate consent discussions. We were given a reader to look at, and in between articles on dating violence and behavioral patterns of sexual harassment, I found this article about jealousy and how it's rooted in the things we grow up believing about relationships. I found it a bit out of place at first in the context of sexual assault (this advice is directed to people in polyamorous relationships), but of course these things are related.

I can't write it any better than the following...

Our society is addicted to three core beliefs about relationships that are almost guaranteed to create jealousy even in the most well-adjusted people. Most of us have absorbed these beliefs without even realizing it. Identifying and dismantling these beliefs in our "heart of hearts" is the single most effective way to short-circuit jealousy. Ask yourself how much of you believes each of these three statements. Is it 90% of yourself that believes them? 50%? Notice which belief is most entrenched in your subconscious mind and which one youíve made the most progress on:

Core Belief #1

If my partner really loved me, (s)he wouldn't have any desire for a sexual relationship with anyone else.

This belief sees any interest your partner has in anyone else as a direct reflection of how much (s)he loves you. It is a quantitative view of love which equates the amount of love with the ability to be interested in having another partner. When you break it down, this is as absurd as saying that a couple that gives birth to a second child must not love their first child or they couldn't possibly have any interest in having a second one.

Core Belief #2

If my partner were happy with me, and if I were a good partner/spouse/lover/etc., my partner would be so satisfied that (s)he wouldn't want to get involved with anyone else.

This belief is even more insidious. With the first belief you can at least blame it on your partner for not loving you enough. This belief says that if your partner is interested in someone else, it is your fault for not being the perfect lover or spouse and your relationship must be a failure. If you truly believe that your lover could only be interested in another partner because youíre inadequate, you can see how that will generate jealousy big time!

Core Belief #3

Itís just not possible to love more than one person at the same time.

This belief is built on the "scarcity economy of love", the belief that love is a finite resource, there is only so much to go around, and there is never enough. Therefore, if my partner gives any of her or his love to anyone else, that necessarily means that there is less for me. Because most people already feel there are some areas in their relationship where they are not getting enough of something (time, love, affection, sex, support, commitment) they are fearful that they will receive even less if their partner gets involved with additional partners.

Some of this I feel like I've known. Some of this, on the other hand, I really needed to hear, especially then. And this would be great to read and read again, even if I never choose to have more than one partner. What else could make as much sense? What else could keep us away from fear and sorrow?

But the worst thing to take away from this would be the idea that you were wrong all along, and you have to get back on track in order to do things right once and for all. It will always take serious mental work to truly believe that those you love deserve everyone else's as well. And maybe that love cannot involve you.

This is so incredibly difficult. To do this, I really think we're attempting to subvert our minds and our bodies together. Jealousy is biological. [Edit: Jealousy is learned, too.] To do this, we need to be better than human.

But all I've ever wanted to do is love a person in an eternal, transcendent, immaterial kind of way.

What am I doing

Reading an article about science, struck about this point about neuroscience in particular.

Or look at neuroscience. Only a few decades ago, scientists were putting forth confident conjectures about "the bridging principle," the neural event that would explain how the activity of our brain cells creates the subjective experience of consciousness. All sorts of bridges were proposed, from 40 Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex to quantum coherence in microtubules. These were the biological processes that supposedly turned the water of the brain into the wine of the mind.

But scientists don't talk about these kinds of bridging principles these days. While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain--we are a strange loop of kinase enzymes and synaptic chemistry--these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don't experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.

I don't know... maybe the biggest miracle will be to prove that this is what we cannot find. It might be religious, even.

Pensive puppy

School has started. I'm taking six classes. Not much time for thoughts.

Trust

I've started these last two school years with training for discussions on consent culture. I find the actual discussions awkward and a little forced, because the first-years are never fully engaged and the material is so important, and also because as a society we're still not prepared to talk about intimacy and respect. Of course, you try to change this, but you have just one hour.

But the trainings for the workshops, to me, are among the most inspiring and visionary experiences I've had the fortune of being part of. I've just finished my second day of this year. I've reached a lot of conclusions before today or yesterday, I think. That socialization imprisons one's body, mind and soul. That we deter our own happiness when we don't treat others with humble, giving love. That battles aren't won by villianizing the people who aren't fighting with you.

The training this year is twice as large, at almost 160 people. There are only five people (two undergraduates) conducting all of it, and it is a testament to their skill, brilliance and power that they succeed as they do. Still, a little control is lost when a guy who just wanted free housing for a week with his girlfriend contends that women find reasons to accuse their lovers of assault even after consent has been achieved. Triggered members of the movement shout him down, and his damaged ego defends a falsehood he is still unsure of.

I spoke up. We like to believe that truly loving relationships are built on top of the most basic rocks of human ideals: trust, respect, the like. Trust your partner at least of fair dealings, and the rest need not be discussed. Trust...

Quickly my plea for honest dealings was dismantled by some more wary people. Love's logic doesn't, has never conformed to neat foundations. Assault, as it happens most with acquaintances, overwhelmingly depends on a trust that may not even be false. And you cannot blame these feelings over those who exploit these feelings. I should've known that before I even spoke.

Trust is loving. But trust is also violence.

I sat nervous and pensive. I felt terrible, it sucked, and I was not okay. Not because I was corrected (I really love learning), but because I realized we as humans can be abused even when we surrender to love and lovers with an open heart. There is no safety in trust, most nurturing of emotions. God, it can't be.

I struggle a lot with love. There's too much out there, everywhere and I just don't know what to do with all of it. I'm going to post later about an article I read in the consent reader about jealousy. Guess what my post will be called.

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the praires and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Edit: Wild geese... they fly south.

Visiting my grandmother

After eating with my parents today, my dad coaxed me to go visit nai nai with him once before school. My mom offered to take home the leftovers from lunch, but I gave her a confused look, so we all went. I never knew what the deal is with the two sides of my family.

We ran into her on her afternoon walk, outside the Selfhelp building she lives in. She smiled such a big smile, the kind that consumes your face from the eyes outward. I don't get moved the look; I think about how I'm going to inherit her protruding eyelids. She said it's so nice to see us. And that I never seem happy seeing her. I feign a smile and say hi.

She's so happy. She lives alone, but is not lonely. I don't think she's seen her spouse in years, maybe at least decade even. I don't think they talk to one another. For most of my life, she's been around my neighborhood, visiting us and our cousins, being warm and saying nice things. She brought me and my sister to church every Sunday for a several years when we were young. She bought me my first Bible when I had to memorize the names of all the books for Sunday school. I think she's not lonely because God is with her all the time. She brings Him to her when she chants the (Chinese) name of Christ almost every minute.

She used to babysit me. We would go around Flushing, and she'd put quarters in the rocking Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck because my parents thought those games were too pedestrian. When I grew up, she'd remind me of those adventures literally every time she saw me. Recently, she does it less because I made a note of it to her, but she still brings it up self-referentially. I don't think it comes from senility, we just don't have that much to talk about. She told my dad to visit ye ye when he's in China, but ye ye passed away a few months ago. Never really knew him.

She asked me if American schools teach me how to treat one's family, beyond worldly matters like history and politics. She warned me about high maintenance girlfriends. She reminded me about my dad's temper, and how he's gotten better. She said my mom was very frugal. When she chanted Jesus Christ, my dad brought her a chair to sit on. She said that God was giving her a chair because she loved Him, but my mom just laughed, derisively.

I know more intimately what my other family members mean to me. Not her.

Moments

Moving back in two weeks

Things I'm going to do before then. Consider this self-inflicted public humiliation.

• Apply for driver's permit. Vision test and written test on Monday.
• Swimming classes. To, uhh, relearn how to swim.
• Driving school. Pass.
  
• Road test.
• Read some books. Now including Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook.
• Learn some more MATLAB. Cry.
  

Excellent.

Writing like Hemingway

I noticed a book at Barnes & Noble yesterday to teach people how to write like Hemingway. I sat down with it for a while. It spoke a lot about how literary devices, his writing style, sentences structure, Iceberg Theory. Then I noticed I really don't want to write like Hemingway. Aside from our subject matters, I don't think it's cool to be evasive, indirect and short. Words already fail us so often, I just don't have the patience to create something out of other people's imaginations rather than the ideas that I already struggle with transmitting. Better pick up some Fitzgerald or Poe.

And speaking of writing, I just read John Richardson's piece in Esquire: The Last Abortion Doctor. One might think this is an article about abortion, but it spoke so truly about related topics such as medicine, politics, gender and pain. It's really hard to read. It's probably the best thing I've read in a long time. I do think that all feeling human beings need to read it, especially now, just to understand a little bit more about what life is.

Superhero fantasies

My sister used to say that I could turn any object in my hands into a spaceship. Ballpoint pens turned into rocketships and wristwatch buckles became dragons. I had a collection of beads that I'd sort by color and have them wage war upon each other on a shaded political map of the world, Risk-style. Even the holes in these beads played cannon mouths in my insanely militaristic daydream games. My family members know that I have a rich collection of sound effects for jets, guns and explosions.

I had absurd superhero fantasies, like every boy between the ages of five and thirteen, I'm sure. I had one in particular that involved a sword and a Superman-style Fortress of Solitude. The way that it goes is a twelve year old me would find a sword in the stone in some remote mountainous region near where my parents are from in China. (Swords were important to this, ever since Crouching Tiger.) I would be on a quest to imbue this weapon with magical abilities, a la Cardcaptor Sakura. (One character specifically. I adored that show.) I drew broadswords on sheets and sheets of paper. Then I created my Fortress of Solitude. There were a few versions. One version was a domed platform floating in the sky. Another version required another dimension, accessible by a closet. They would all be foresty, full of wildlife and waterfalls.

My paradise was designed to be eternally and emotionally sustainable for my immortal superhero self. I considered whether to bring in family and friends into my immortal oasis, but it seemed an arbitrary privilege; I can't bring in everyone.

It became one of few complicating factors that brought my fantasy to the ground. I thought about creating people in my world. (Of course, I could select for physical characteristics and personality. Omniscience over bioethics.) I knew I need people, but I also couldn't decide whether ultimately I could tell the difference between a community of many conscious, sentient beings and a self-centered universe populated by characters that may or may not exist in their own right, but only seem to be. I hope my friends aren't scared of me yet.

The other complication that brought my Fortress down was what I saw outside the window. Superheroes don't grow up in Flushing. I had yet to attribute meaning to my location. Without a location, I could be anyone. I guess this is why people leave this place. I don't think Flushing has been home to anyone more than two generations at a time.

It's funny. My sister asked Chang-Rae Lee why he wrote about Flushing. He said that this is a magical place. In my life, I've thought about magic the most in middle and high school, commuting to school on the 7, dreaming about getting out. Now I get homesick when I'm away.

Wow. I need to think about this.

On Facebook, wonderful thoughts take people and hold them still.

Following Virginia activist/filmmaker Annabel Park's posted item about very personalized ethnic conflict in China, a thoughtful someone writes:

heart wrenching... but the equivalent of this is an equally heart wrenching story about israeli settlers in palestine or even us settlers on indigenous american soil... ultimately, the chinese shouldn't be in xinjiang, and the israelis shouldn't be in palestine.

i tried to read the story understanding my privilege as a Han Chinese, and as a settler in N. America occupying Native American lands. It's hard.

Goddamn. Something a lot of people (like me) need to think about. The privileges of being Han Chinese are extensive, and I've only begun realizing this. You have a cultural history that won't be washed away. The numbers of your ethnic population are not under threat of extinction. I've been thinking about the "concentration" that I have to do within my concentration. I think I'll do it on internal colonialism.

Concentration is such a word. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.

Now is always the time for immature idealism.

I reject anything else.

I find myself reading a lot about Obama's visits to see Putin and Medvedev. I know about Obama's youthful idealism. I'd bet a lot of people empathize and identify with it. It's something I feel like I know.

What would it be like if we always had a foot in what is impossible? What good could we accomplish? Would we mess it up? Maybe, but I don't usually consider that. What if we recognized this in everyone, at all times? Could we be more honest? Could we let go of what holds us back?

I'd also like to take the time to say that this article is really, really worth reading. If only I could write with my feet nailed to the concrete.

I'm afraid of people.

There, I said it. I'm absolutely terrified. There are stories like this one. It doesn't have to be about family, and it doesn't have to be about Michael Jackson. But what scares me is that these sagas of trouble and hurtful waters can be about anyone else. It happens all the time. Most of the time, we only summon the courage, at best, to write about it.

What a shame that we don't develop our social minds with perfectly identical connections and thresholds, so that we can always see and predict the mutual effects of people on people just by examining ourselves. Instead, we must learn how to express ourselves and our concerns in the dark, and be limited by what we don't know. The fact that this is frustrating doesn't bother me as much as the fact that it's dangerous.

We are really, really powerful beings. Like giants, we don't always see what we break under our feet. We grow into such great creatures by wrapping ourselves in layers and layers of socialized tendencies like onions. We don't know what is on our skin, sometimes ever. And it's scary walking with giants who can't feel their skins. It's absolutely terrifying.

And so by my theory there's a bunch of large, clumsy, lumbering creatures who step on each other and don't truly feel the way we interact. We hurt and punish, even loving all the while. We can treat other people like how we'd like to be treated ourselves, but unless we understand ourselves, we don't have the right to treat anyone in any way at all. Maybe it's safest to be awkward and evasive.

If you're wrapped really tightly, please, let go. I'm working on my own layers, but I'm also getting really paranoid.

25 of May, I could not sleep

I was in a sleeping bag, my last night in Berlin. For two hours, my mind leapt around many things. I sat up, stared at the clock with a still restlessness that I couldn't really understand, grabbed my notebook from my bag and went to the bathroom. I'm reading what I wrote then right now.

I wrote: What does it mean that, in pursuit of ideas, I can only travel from one continent to another on this water-bearing planet when the edges of the universe have not even been conceived of yet? When we still don't have the means to understand fully what creates, entraps, defines and captures us, as captivating, ethereal, and wholly coincidental as it is? Obviously being on another continent does things to my strange sense of place.

I also wrote about superhero fantasies, adoption, connections, a letter to a lover... and things I need to do this summer.

I'm not sure what was going on then. Above the margins I drew a little diagram with arrows that went... thought > anxiety > more thoughts + no sleep > more anxiety. A few lines below that, I wrote: I'm approaching the limits of cognitive function. Enough said?

Nostalgia by consumption

It was the birthday of the girl I was dating. We made a huge dinner together, and I took her to a surprise birthday party an hour or so late. That weekend, we broke up. The next week, I bought a box of bagged teas that I used to drink in her room. I finished half of it before beginning to see her again.

I'm drinking this tea right now. Ordinarily, I only drink loose leaf teas. It's flavored "lemon ginger", but only contains "natural lemon and licorice flavors" and citric acid. It smells like pepper and cinnamon. I don't know why I drink this.

I'm the angriest I've been in weeks.

I cannot find a single recipe for scallion pancakes online that I trust.

I'm not asking for much! Neither Epicurious and Allrecipes.com (my go-to sources) have a single recipe of straight up scallion pancakes. Not one. And I'm not touching things that people have copied off About.com or the Food Network. These Asian food staples tend to be put online by people like, ergh... I don't have a blender or fucking cake flour, can't understand rolling dough in three different ways, and don't want to produce the fried crackers that I grew up eating. What the fuck?!? This should not be so difficult!

Almost tempted to attack Ollie's. ARGH.

Retrospect via Gmail

I keep running into things I've written in the past to friends and confidants. Often they come in the form of old GChat conversations, buried within my email, congruent hits for search terms more emotionally pertinent in my memory.

Man, everything bothered me back then.

The way we love

I grew up in more or less a prude, sans-romance family setting. The kind where mothers cover their kids' eyes when kissy scenes are on television. This was never lost on my sister and me. Even though out loud we said "ewww" to a lot of these things, we always wanted have crushes, kiss people, all those good things we'd been hearing about.

I think my first relationships were a little dangerously conducted as a result. (This is also where I stop being able to speak to my sister's experience.) The only thing to do was to carry out the motions rehearsed to us and set ourselves up for a crisis each time. So people came and went, with varying levels of acceptance from the parents. We never heard their story, how they met, how they grew close, how they came to love one another. (We know now.) We just knew to find people by ourselves, to be attentive and devoted, to give unconditionally, until personal neuroses were revealed and pain takes hold, and then quit and start over.

A few months ago, my mother found out about both of our relationships at the time. We were both about to steal away with our romantic counterparts somewhere far from home. She didn't disapprove this time, but didn't understand why we would do things like this to ourselves. It's not like you're going to marry this person, she said. Why trouble yourselves? Why put so much effort into improbabilities of sentiment and emotion? Sitting next to her, I felt silly for having grown up at all without her wisdom. Kind of sheepishly, I told her that this is how we love.

We love as if there is only one soul out there for us. We look for people as if the world is so small and so cold that it'd be wiser to hook onto the nearest body and hope mutual fascination occurs. And we risk everything for this. We love as if it's a limited resource based on functions of population, time and age. What we really can do now is to unlearn everything.

This makes me so happy.

via the Lost ROFL blog...

Dualisms stun me

... because they're sooo true. The enlightened folks who have tried to teach us this... they were probably correct all along. To know how intimately this applies, to deep thinkers and non-spirituals alike, in every facet of experience is so real, powerful, and awesome.

When the duality of fear and love presents itself, you know which one to choose. Both are true, proud and inpenetrable. Both must exist, but you're allowed to choose one to be happy.

I could've put this more tangibly. I really could have.

In unrelated news, first comment! Aww. :)

Bodymarks

Lately, I had a conversation with my sister. It went like this:

Juliana just WON a game of ssb brawl. <3ing> 2:07am

David at 2:08am

sick game. always gives me a blister on my left thumb.

Juliana at 2:09am

ME TOO!
also, you always made me play until i blistered my left thumb. thanks.

David at 2:10am

that can only be attributed to noobdom.

Juliana at 2:10am

we're not on speaking terms anymore.

Obviously, these marks don't just leave a physical memory. Let me give a list of the ones I have.

- blister scar on the first segment of my left thumb. only nintendo controllers do this.
- real knee scars, still red. it's been almost three years since biking in the dolomites.
- surgery scars. i had a surgery done in third grade that should've come much earlier.
- acne scars. i had no help through puberty.
- writer's callous on my right ring finger. like my writing, it developed early, but never got very strong.
- left tibia that sticks out a little. when i was playing soccer in middle school, my knee got swollen. it was diagnosed as osgood-schlatter disease, but the inflammation has stopped. there's still a little pointy bone there.

Edit: I forgot a few, I'm sure. Perfect bite? You pay a price in having had braces. Tooth fillings? As a boy, I drank apple juice before bedtime. Terribly dry skin? I generally take bad care of myself.

Just have to say...

The economy probably never got so bad until people started saying it was bad.

I know it's probably going to be heavily analyzed in the future, and all sorts of things are going to be said about it. I'll write this just for the (my, I guess) record. People probably stopped spending when they started hearing about how bad things were. Doesn't mean it wasn't going to get as bad eventually, but talking about it probably changed a lot of people's decisions.

Forgetting

Ms. Williamson wrote in the book I mentioned previously that the mantra we should really be following is to let go. Okay. But letting go is a strategy that starts to smell. Isn't it relinquishing the urgency of now? Won't I lose what little I've grasped from the situation at hand? Letting go is awfully hard right now.

Letting go will feel like forgetting. I'm afraid that to relax is to not learn how I may better conduct myself. Will I suffer less in the future? Will I make the same mistakes? How long will I have to keep trying?

And ultimately, won't we all forget?

Reflections on A Return To Love

A few things have stuck out to me.

1. Loving feels pretty good. Giving even more than receiving.
2. Fear, indeed, is the antagonist to love. Being fearful or afraid sucks a lot.
3. Judgment is disgusting. To judge another is a sad thing.
4. Money is nothing. Not good or bad, just nothing.
5. We have a long way to go towards knowing love. And God, for that matter, though this distinction really a disguise.

After I took out this book for the first time with my family in China, my sister pounced. "Why are you reading a spiritual guidance book?" Lol. I said, "It's not really a spiritual guidance book."

Gaza

There are few news items that have caught my heart as closely as what's going on in Gaza right now. I need to write a few thoughts about what is going on.

Since middle school, I've always kept a respectful distance from the conflict(s) from which this arises. I've always known that there are truth and there are lies, that "both sides" disseminate their fair share, and (most complacently for me) these players all share in wrongdoing. (I forgive myself by thinking that these basic levels of understanding were just a function of my awkwardness receiving a liberal UWS education.) And then, I'd say, there was college. I tried much harder to get my information promptly, to be responsibly informed.

Which is why feeling the sharp pain of an occupied people is new and pretty unusual to me.

The lack of a developed history in my epistemology has left me with very reductive ways to look at this conflict. I guess most of the world thinks this way now, with the soundbite-friendly internet and political erasure of histories, etc. But certain inalienable truths do come out.

Disproportional? Yeah. But I think what's more important is... If you need to kill a thousand to protect fifty, you only reveal a belief that the lives of your own are worth more than the lives of the other.

What a disgusting way to think. I remember hearing similar thoughts voiced by classmates in high school... When reflecting on the rich man's dilemma in La Barca Sin Pescador by Alejandro Casona (he was offered the choice to kill a poor man he didn't know far away, in exchange for wealth and power), they said, pretty flatly, that they would kill the man. Not only pretty fucked up, but it says so many other things.

A few other things before I'm done: I really don't know how a legitimate operation is conducted without basic, internationally-established humanitarian concerns. I don't understand how a successful operation is conducted without regard for public sentiment inside or outside Gaza. Shouldn't these be basics? Is anyone working for peace, instead of hit-me-I'll-hit-you-back?

Love is in a dire state.