The Social Cost of Free Expression

Free Expression Tunnel at NCSU

(NOTE: The following post includes a graphic depiction of a violent fantasy which I had this week. It should be understood that I have absolutely no intention of acting on this fantasy, or any like it. If you are bothered by descriptions of violence, do not read this post. I hope that anyone that I care about who may read this won't think negatively of me after reading this, should they choose to do so. However, I'm fairly sure that the people I care about already understand my intentions.)

I've railed against hypocrisy in the past. My reasoning is that if you believe in, or otherwise espouse, a principle you should be willing to live with the consequences of that principle because in doing so you will either learn that the principle is worth defending or that it is a stupid principle that no one in their right mind should have supported to begin with. I've even gone so far as to say that, as an extension of this anti-hypocrisy attitude, I have never done or said anything for which I am ashamed. While I still assert that position, I will say that sometimes I do things which, while not causing me shame, do cause me a small amount of regret.

On Wednesday, my friends and I were hanging out in the lounge in Poe Hall as usual before our Psych Research Methods class. In case you haven't already figured it out by now, I can be something of a loud mouth. Most of the time this isn't a problem, and I've even discovered that some people find it to be rather amusing. Those who don't usually are not very happy to be around me, and that typically suits me just fine. Well, on this day some guy who was sitting behind us in the lounge yelled at us (me, in particular, since I was speaking at the time) to be quiet. To our credit, we did become silent while the guy remained in the lounge. However, I was seething with anger. When the guy finally got up to leave, I just couldn't hold in my hate any longer and I flippantly insulted him as he walked away. Needless to say, he wasn't pleased with that and responded in kind. I could have escalated the matter but chose not to out of fear that what I wanted to do would get me kicked out of school.

Father's Day

I was catching up on listening to podcasts today when I heard a recent Father's Day themed episode of This American Life. I had forgotten about Father's Day completely, largely due to the fact that I've never met my father. Occasionally, I think about him, and what it would be like to meet him, but the mood always passes as quickly as it arrives.

My father was originally from Sri Lanka. I've never been there, but I've seen videos and heard stories that the island is gorgeous. My parents met in Asheville, NC under what circumstances I'm not completely sure. I do know that my father didn't intend to get my mother pregnant and that he basically told my mother to choose between him or me. She chose me in a decision which I've regretted off and on for 35 years. Not to get all emo, but the pro-life movement can pretty much eat my ass. I should have been aborted and I wasn't. My father didn't want me and my mother wanted to abuse me. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, people are better off being aborted.

I'm starting to feel really angry as I write this. At some point anger always seems to rear its head whenever I think about my father. I can't even pronounce his name properly. All I have as a remnant of his existence is an old black and white photo of him in a metal frame. He's not even smiling. I know I was an inconvenience to him, but I wish he knew how inconvenienced I've been my whole life because he chose to fuck my fat cow of a mother.

Sometimes I think about trying to find him. I don't even know if he's still alive. There are only a dozen people in the US with his last name and they are all concentrated in two locations, so it wouldn't be hard if I cared enough to try. As luck would have it, I saw a guy I believe is my cousin a few years ago on TV. He was serving as a lawyer in a case that made national headlines for about two days and he was interviewed several times. I could easily ask him if he knows what happened to my father.

Whenever I fantasize about talking to my father it never goes as I expect it too, which implies that I have some expectations which I'm apparently not fully aware. I don't think I really want a relationship with him, but I want him to know me. I want him to understand what happened to me. And as unsatisfying as I know it would be, I guess I'd like to hear him express remorse. I'm not sure what that remorse would be for, but just to hear him say, "I'm sorry you had to go through all that pain" seems like it would mean so much to me in a way that no one else can say those words.

Now I get why I don't spend very long thinking about my father at any one time... Any longer would feel too much like masochism.

Keep living life... or some approximation thereof.

Just Another Day

Today is Mother's Day. It isn't a day that I typically make a big deal about. After all, it is largely just a marketing holiday. As I've already mentioned I am not close to my own biological mother, my grandmother having long ago taken over the responsibility of caring for me. And seeing as I do not currently own, nor have ready access to, ovaries of my own, Mother's Day seems especially superfluous.

That's not to say that I don't have any positive memories of my mother, but all of them are more focused on me and the part of my mother could have just as easily been replaced by my grandmother, my aunt, Gertrude Stein, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, actor LeVar Burton, or a Krispy Kreme doughnut! In fact, one of my fondest memories, which doesn't even involve my mother at all, is of me walking around a mall carrying a cheap stuffed dog with a fireman's uniform and helmet which I had named Sgt. Pepper after The Beatles album. I was four.

Where others have fond memories of lessons passed down by loving moms, my life lessons came from my grandmother, teachers, or the confluence of hours spent in front of a TV while babysitting myself. I learned about life not so much because I was taught but because I was naturally curious and asked lots of questions and looked for lots of answers.

Most of my memories which are unique to my mother involve me being smarter than her. One time she got a wooden cuckoo clock as a gift, but was horribly distressed to find that the clock had to be assembled from a kit in a box. Well, since there were instructions, I took it upon myself to build the damn thing because I felt sorry for my mother's laziness. I was eight.

And while working for AT&T my mother earned company stock each year in the form of actual paper certificates (yeah, they actually used to transfer shares of stock that way before the Internet). One day she needed money for debts and sold her stock. I had to inform her that she should have gotten a loan using the paper stock as collateral so she could have kept the stock which would have been more valuable later in life. She explained that she had asked a stock broker about "stock options" and he didn't mention the possibility of a loan. Of course not, I told her, a loan is a loan, it isn't a "stock option". I was ten.

Please don't mistake me. I don't say these things to elicit sympathy. Instead, with the exception of feeding me and keeping me from living beneath a bridge, I'm trying to explain that my mother's contribution to my life was hardly worthy of celebration. I do sometimes envy those who had close, supportive relationships with their mothers. It's hard not to want to find a woman who can counteract the negative impression of women programmed into me by having to live with my mother. It takes effort to learn how to effectively let go of the years of disappointment and just enjoy someone for who they are. But, still I try.

So, for all of you, I hope you enjoy your Mother's Day with fond admiration. For me, though, it's just another day.

Have fun and keep living life... or some approximation thereof.

Refl-Ex-ions of the Past

I saw Ex again this afternoon. She was walking down Oberlin toward Hillsborough Street, near the NC State Bell Tower. This time it was unmistakably her, which can only mean that she's back in school, probably working on a Master's Degree of some sort. I was tempted to pull over and offer her a ride, but I thought better of it.

For the next few hours I actually found myself fantasizing about a potential chance meeting in some eatery along Hillsborough and what the conversation would be about. Permutation after permutation wound their way throughout my mind like a boa constrictor until the life was drained from me.

I had almost begun to forget about her. The thrice daily prayers for her return to my life to no God in particular had dwindled to perhaps a once a week afterthought, and I was actively weighing options for looking for a new face to fill the loneliness. Then, almost as if by clockwork, Ex walks back into my view to remind me that she's still alive.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want her to NOT be alive, I just don't want to be reminded that she's alive and not with me! Or, perhaps more to the point, I don't want to be reminded that she's still with HIM, the guy she left me for.

It's really hard for me to get away from the sense that I was cheated out of something. I was, after all. But, after all this time (it will be three years the first week in June) what do I think Ex could possibly do to rectify my loss? I mean, she did give me almost a year of her life. But her cheating on me took almost three years away. The problem, of course, is that she can't give me back those years... I took them away from myself. I'm the one who allowed me to become saturated in a thick sauce of sadness and regret. And it was me who allowed myself to subconsciously place Ex in the familiar role of a mother who shouldn't have been my lover and who left me before I was ready.

The anger and misplaced jealousy that have kept me tethered to Ex for the last three years is the same anger and jealousy I experienced as a child, years before I realistically should have. The real tragedy here is that it is the debt of my mother which I have been waiting for Ex, and numerous others before her, to repay. It is a debt that has taken far more from me than Ex ever could. And, unfortunately, it is a debt that no one can ever repay.

So, I suppose if fate were to one day make that chance meeting with Ex occur in real life, rather than waiting for her to apologize to me for any supposed misdeeds, it might be in order for me to offer up my own apology to her. After all, no one should be made to pay for a crime they didn't commit.

Keep living life... or some approximation thereof.

I'm Only Happy When It Rains

Okay, maybe that's not completely true. I'm happy at plenty of other times, but good luck finding a song about rain that doesn't sound like a total downer!

It rained pretty much all day. And it wasn't just rain, it was a COLD rain with a steady breeze just to punctuate how cold and rainy it was. It was the first rain of the fall and I was so not prepared for it. It was in the upper 80s for highs the days and weeks before, but today only got up to 65. I didn't bring a jacket or an umbrella, so I stood for a few minutes inside a building with all the other shmoes who were caught off guard by the rain, as well.

For a moment I realized how strange it is that people will wait inside, or under an overhang, waiting for rain to die down enough to walk outside, as though rain were some sort of toxic waste that must be avoided as much as possible. I remember back when I was a little kid, maybe 5 years old or less, I used to LOVE to stand under the edge of the overhang on my grandmother's front porch. The porch was small and had four or five steps leading down to the yard. I would stand in just the right spot so that all the runoff from the roof would pour down on me and get me even wetter than if I had only been standing in the yard. I would laugh and splash around while my grandmother would try to get me to come back into the house. Eventually, I always did, and Mame, although I still called her May May back then (alot of kids from the South have odd names for their grandmothers, like Me Ma, Mammie, Ma May), would fuss at me for getting the floor wet while she dried me with some almost threadbare towel.

After my girlfriend left, one of the things I tried to do to move my life in a better direction was to try and relive some of the childhood experiences that I used to love so much, or some things which I never really did but probably should have. I climbed small trees, picked up a frog and looked at it up close, played with Matchbox cars, and splashed around in the rain, stomping through puddles just to get my pants soaking wet. If you haven't done any of these things in a long time, or ever, I HIGHLY recommend it. There's something so comforting, and yet exhilarating at the same time, about doing things as an adult that you used to love as a child. There's a bible verse somewhere in 1 Corinthians 13 that basically goes, "When I was a child, I thought and acted like a child, but now I have put away childish things." Now, 1 Corinthians 13 is all about love, which is probably necessary for us to really be happy. But, in retrospect, it seems like bad advice to suggest that we must put away childish things. I can tell you from experience, there is NOTHING that makes you feel as happy as taking the time to just jump up and down in a puddle in the rain while you get completely soaked and you just don't give a damn!

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof!