Lump sat alone on a bench in the park

I rarely shave. Or cut my hair. But I did last night. It was too humid to go on with a thick, scraggly beard and a mop of hair. My friends can hardly recognize me. I tend to do this twice a year now. So I can see where they get confused.

I look like two different people. One is bigger, fuller, and seems to have a bigger appetite. The contrast between my eyes and beard, the way my hair never stays in the same place, these things, I think, help to create a persona. When my hair is short and I am (relatively) clean shaven, I look more severe. My head looks taller. I look more like the scholar-athlete I once was. Though, ironically, when I was a scholar-athlete I looked like a crazy hippy.

I go through two or three days of people running up to me to feel my face. I get compliments and comments. “Did you lose a bet?” “You look gorgeous!” And so on. It’s interesting, because I don’t see much of a difference. For me, it’s just hair, despite the apparent perceptions I’ve noticed above.

The one difference I notice is this: I pay more attention to my appearance. It’s a habit thing. I don’t often look at myself in mirrors. I don’t often pay attention to how I look. My self image is fueled nearly exclusively by how I feel. I feel great about myself when nothing hurts and I am full of energy. I feel down on myself when I feel sick or pained. However, when I have to pay attention (to make sure I don’t cut my ears off or something), and then double check to make sure I don’t have an accidental and asymmetrical soul patch, I pay attention to myself. Then, for the next few days, I look at myself in mirrors. I notice how my body changes throughout the day. I even wear clean clothes and pick them out based on how they look on me rather than on what’s closest to the top of the pile.

Strange, right?

I like the way I look. I understand that I don’t demonstrate many excessively aesthetic physical qualities that people tend to look for, and that’s not me being self-deprecating. This will probably sound pretty egotistical, but I don’t look for those things in other people, so I don’t look for them in myself either. I have never met another human being who agrees with me on who is beautiful and who isn’t. My girlfriend and I come close to agreement, but usually only on famous people.

I don’t give a fuck about the size of her tits or the shape of his ass. For me it’s about the whole. And how a person moves in and thinks of themselves. I am not physically attracted to someone who isn’t physically attracted to themselves, though I’ve made mistakes there in the past.

What I’m saying here is not that beauty is completely subjective or relative. I am just convinced that it is more comprehensive than the particular.

For example: types. What the fuck? “I only like tall blondes.” “I only like younger redheads.” And so on. What does that even mean? It sounds like something they heard someone cool say when they were young and decided was cool to imitate. Where do people learn this stuff?

For me it is a lot like only being attracted to one sex. Limiting and silly. Maybe you’ve never been attracted to anyone from the same sex, or the opposite sex. Does that necessarily mean that you are never going to be? I’ll never understand straight people. Or gay people.

What I’m saying is this – these designations are arbitrary. “Straight” really means “relatively straight.” Just because you are attracted to redheads doesn’t mean you won’t fall for a brunette. And in the end, I think that people will realize that their so-called types are really just what remain of their young fetishes. Maybe you like tall blondes with big boobs. What you are probably saying is that you are abstractly/generally more attracted to tall blonds with big boobs. In reality many particular people, of many different ‘types’, attract you to them – regardless of blondness or boobness. And there’s probably a pretty big psychological component. The social component makes sense. You seek to emulate those you look up to, and they say that big boobed blondes are the way to go, so you hold that up as the shining light of beauty.

I am, needless to say, not a big boobed blonde. I am a mid-sized, brownish-haired, athletic-ish, young man. And I like my body. I joke a lot about my enormous ego and inflated opinion of myself, but in reality I think it’s just the right size. I tend to judge myself by the same metric I judge others. And vice versa.

Those poor fucks.

I'm so happy, 'cause today I found my friends

Have I become the character I once created to entertain?

That's the question that's been haunting me for the past (let's see now) three minutes or so.

Listen.

I'm the kind of person that really likes to make people laugh. When I find that a certain style of joke or an inflection in my voice or whatever elicits more laughter than something else, I use it more often. I continually seek to improve this, but I occasionally get stuck in habits and sometimes I just think about other things and let autopilot kick in.

In effect, what happens is this. I create a character - a clown of sorts - in order to make people laugh. I create this character intentionally and with the explicit purpose of entertainment. I assume that everyone still knows me. I assume that everyone knows that I do this to play and that this isn't who I am. When I say shit derisively or in mock angry tones I expect that my friends will understand the distinction I have drawn between the joke, which they usually laugh at, and how I feel. I'll make fun of movies that I really love if someone else likes them and I'm feeling playful. This is not to make the other person feel bad about liking this movie, but instead to make them laugh with me about it.

I forget sometimes that not everyone can read my mind. I am often told that I am nearly transparent. I prefer being transparent. I feel like it is more honest. This is one reason why it confuses me when people tell me that they can't tell if I'm joking, or say that I often behave like a dick.

So what to do? Have I become this character, or is it just that my friends and so on are too quick to judge? Have my jokes become more subtle? Un-fucking likely. Should I quit the character and playing and just deliver things straight up? I feel like that'd be boring. Plus, I don't often perform in my life unless it is in this venue.

I think I have a better idea. I will be me, as always, and if who I am is distasteful to others, they can tell me to my face, like I would them. Is it bravery or honesty that makes you tell your friend when they crossed a line? For me it is honesty. Bravery implies you are doing something extra. Honesty implies that if you don't do it, then you are being dishonest. If you aren't brave people forgive you. If you aren't honest, there are negative implications. Perhaps it is also brave to be honest.

Doesn't everyone think like this?

A crisis of faith

What the fuck am I doing?

When you spend five to ten hours a day in front of a computer screen, you sometimes lose focus on why the fuck you are there in the first place.

So, I was browsing facebook for the first time in weeks when I happened to glance at some new feature or whatever that lists recent posts or whatever that your friends have made. I recognized a good friend of mine in army fatigues in an album labeled "Iraq". I new she was headed out, but seeing her with a gun in her hand, smiling on Saddam's old throne and so on, was way more than I was expecting.

Facebook does this. It is like the New York Times, but all about your friends. You are looking for one thing, but meanwhile several other things catch your eye, and half of them have to do with the cruelty of man. It's like riding your bike too fast in a densely wooded area. You are focused on the path for fear of falling otherwise, but you want to focus on avoiding all of the branches that keep slapping you in the face.

Seeing her there, all purposeful and full of purpose and so on, really put into perspective all of my sitting and writing. What have you done in the past few months, Lis? Oh, just traveled to Iraq, led a squadron of men, and disarmed some IEDs. Probably saved a bunch of lives. You know. The usual. What have you done with your fucking life, Chris? Um, I wrote some papers.

I am nothing but potential. What the fuck is potential, anyway? It's a pretty amorphous thing. I could potentially contribute to the discourse about conflict resolution and peace making. I could potentially attempt to spearhead a local educational reform movement. I could potentially open a great local bookstore. I could potentially be the one who finally normalizes relations between the US and Cuba, or Iran, or whatever the fuck. But I haven't. And I probably won't. At least not any time coming soon to a theater near... and so on.

I don't know, man. I just feel disgusted sometimes. But what the hell else am I to do? Somewhere inside I do feel like these theses can contribute to making the world a better place. Sometimes I am really convinced that this bookstore is going to happen, and that it will be the stimulus for the community to rally around when I finally launch into local educational reform.

I just don't want to be locked into mindless academia, producing bodies of work that will be read by no one but those who grade it. Fuck that. The stakes are too bloody high. What will I say when some kid asks me, in ten years or so, what I did when I saw injustice? What I said when I saw a system that was broke beyond recognition? I feel like Lis will say, "I stood up for what I believed in, fought the fight I thought was right, and did my level goddamn best to make this world better for all who inhabit it." And I'll stand convinced. What the fuck will I say?

Depression shmepression

Who's gonna save my soul?

I've dropped off the face of the earth for a while. Didn't see it coming, but then again, who does? If you saw the end of the earth, you'd probably stay the fuck away. Maybe you'd post a huge sign saying "END OF THE EARTH. TURN BACK NOW, YOU SILLY MOTHERFUCKERS" so that others could hope to avoid it.

A professor (and I like to think a friend) of mine died last Thursday. They say it was cancer. I say it was his body's jealousy of his mind. The man was chock full of wit, energy, and insight. He was 70, so his body must have been looking at that mind and thinking to itself, jealously. It must have been thinking, like an old man whose beautiful wife ages much more gracefully than him, "this is unfair. Just a few years ago I was the coveted one, I was what people were attracted to when they sought me out." And like that jealous husband who eventually goes insane from the jealousy and the paranoia that his disproportionately beautiful wife sleeping around behind his back, his body may have reasoned that simultaneously ending its and his mind's lives was the only way they could be equal and together again.

Yeah, that was fucked up.

I miss him. I keep thinking of his laugh, his tangents during class, his mocking and provoking emails, his passion for his work, his ability to fuck with you. He understood wit in a way that I've never seen before.

So I fell off the edge of the world. Didn't see it coming. And now I'm scrabbling back up. I met with my therapist earlier in the week. She remarked that she hadn't seen me this bad before. Which got me to thinking about times that I was much further down than this.

Quite a few people I know have died in the past year or so. Steven was the most recent, but my uncle died last term and my great-grandfather died over the summer. My step-father's grandfather died over the winter. My girlfriend's grandfather died in the winter as well.

Losing my uncle was probably the hardest for me. To some degree all of the rest (except for Steven) were very old and not completely present. My uncle was in his thirties and he was gunned down by a friend of his. It's fucked up to think about it, but I think I may be more upset about Steven's death than my uncles. I was closer to Steven. My uncle I hadn't seen in years and when he was around he was pretty peripheral to my awareness. Steven was front and center of the classroom, he was in my inbox, his comments were on my papers, we met in his office to discuss politics and the state of the news-media.

I feel like this is some kind of grief-quantum. Attempting to measure how much grief I have experienced over certain people's deaths. Yes, I get that it is disrespectful and a bit disgusting. Hey, the US did it with blood back in the day. Blood quantum anyone? If your father was full-blooded Cherokee and your mother was full-blooded European you were less than 1/2 white (or something) because the man has more power or something. I don't really remember. I do remember that it was racist and arbitrary.

To be perfectly honest though, the worst depression I've ever had was after a girl broke up with me. I feel like I'm saying this a lot in this post but, how fucked up is that? Great men die and I am sad for a time. A girl I dated for a year and a half breaks up with me and I descend to the greatest depths of depression and don't even attempt to crawl back up for months. I remember laying on the floor of a shower in a hotel in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, crying because I was so feverish and delirious that I thought that girl was in there with me, still breaking up with me. Or something.

So I've been worse, even if worse was less justified.

The trouble with this depression now though is that I need to write. I can't focus when I feel like this. Or maybe I can't focus and I feel like this? I can't focus and so I feel like this? I'm not sure. The bottom line is that I am still struggling on a chapter for my thesis that should have been done on Wednesday. At least I can put pen to paper now. That's an improvement. I just need to be able to write more than a page a day. Unless I get an 80 day extension.

I'm beginning to look at graduation with the hungry eyes of someone who has been inside a really comfortable and engaging jail for the past 17 years. Academia is really all I know with any experience or certainty. My academic career has advanced in fits and starts like a kid learning to run. I'll get up and start running, fast enough to escape my protective mother, and then promptly fall on my face. I'm ready to get out of here and fall on my face somewhere else for a while. Then I'll probably come back. I've heard that prisoners who have been in jail for a substantial amount of time crave the bars and the routine when they are finally released.

Anyway, every day is a little easier than the last. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut;

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

I miss him too.