Thought That Came Unbidden

…the sign language equivalent of mumbling?

Is it possible to have an “accent” if you speak sign language?

Random thoughts from the bus ride home.

I’d intended to talk in my next entry on identity how we look at clear markers, such as gender, race, age, and dress to determine someone’s identity from afar and place them in a comfortable little box. Then, I went to see The Matrix: Reloaded.

Now, I find myself wandering down the rabbit hole of existentialism, trying to figure out if there is even a solid interpretive framework to think about identity and what it means.

Damn it to hell when a piece of pop culture entertainment is complex enough to make me have to, finally, go back to philosophy and read something like Husserl. And have I mentioned lately how bad movie theater popcorn is?

More soon…

I realized yesterday that I’m a sexist. Well, more accurately, I realized that when it comes to my own body image I’m a sexist.

One of the best, most decadent pleasures that modern American life has to offer is the ready availability of the full body massage thanks to the proliferation of licensed massage therapists. I can, without a doubt, recommend a massage as the first step on the road to ameliorating some of modern life’s most horrible effects (stress from sitting at a computer all day and night, traffic stress, parking lot stress, moron on cell phone who isn’t paying attention stress).

A good massage therapist will tell you to strip down as far as you’re comfortable. I started my experience with LMT’s nearly ten years ago with one of the most centered, most calmingly spiritual women I’ve ever met. It may just have been me but I have a feeling that even people standing next to her on the subway felt slightly better without knowing why. This, of course, got me immediately comfortable.

After she decided that she wanted to center her practice around her corporate clients, hotels, law firms, and spas, I started working, on the recommendation of a very good friend, with another LMT. She, too, was a very calm, very centered person. Unfortunately, she decided after many years here that this just wasn’t where she wanted to be and that the wilds New England were calling.

So, for two years I’ve been searching for a massage therapist who meets my criteria. Getting a massage is about more than relaxing tight muscles, joints, and ligaments. It’s also about rejuvenating the spirit. On the recommendation of a good friend I went to visit a new LMT yesterday. Frankly, I didn’t expect much beyond relaxed muscles. It turns out that this man my friend recommended shares the same calming, spiritual qualities my other, female massage therapists had. The difference in the experience was me.

Lying on the table, having a physical experience that absolutely was not sexual I found myself worried about how my body looked. Ridiculous when you consider that an LMT sees dozens of semi-naked people a week. And yet, there it was, concern about those hereditary pads of fat on my hips that no matter how much I diet and exercise I can’t get rid of. And just why did I never have this worry when my LMT was a woman? Is it because years upon years of going to PE class and to the gym have conditioned me to not care what my body looks like in front of another woman? I don’t think so given the massive amounts of worry I’ve had every time I’ve gotten naked with a new girlfriend for the first time.

Is it that American society so conditions women to care what men think of their bodies that even someone like me who is so far divorced from the body standards of mainstream society reflexively responds? Or is it some misguided idea about the nature of women and acceptance (trust me, women can be cruel when it comes to judging other women)?

No answers…just another thought that comes unbidden.

The war in Iraq has had some interesting effects. One of them is that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about identity, about how we form the core concept of who we are.

Does identity come from where you are born? Does it come from where your ancestors were born? Does it come from your religion? Does it come from the values your parents tried to instill in you as you grew up? Does it come from the prevailing morays of your teenage and college years?

Or does it come from a distillation by some internal, hardwired process as it filters all the lessons taught by parents, by religion, by reading, and by experience…by success as much as by failure?

In the global world, I very much doubt that identity is solely a function of national boundaries or ethnic heritage. Take a look at the behavior of Boston Irish. They’re more proud of being Irish than a Dublin native, and yet, born of two Irish-descended parents in America makes you an American by birth.

The consideration of how national and ethnic origin inputs into identity is brought into sharp focus by the debate over the war in Iraq.

Proponents of the war will tell you that disagreeing with Bush makes you unpatriotic, makes you less of an American. Opponents will tell you that not only is voicing a dissenting opinion patriotic, the right to voice it is the essence of being an American.

But what exactly does it mean to be “an American?” As Americans, are we all that our overseas detractors believe — ie: loud, crass, culturally insensitive? Are we what our national self-image says we are — ie: strong, creative, pioneering, take-no-prisoners heroes?

The scary thing is, nationality is but one of the two top layers of identity. The other is sex. And that, I still need to ponder.

Two years and eleven months ago I tested gravity with my face (it worked by the way). One minute I was closing my front door to get a ride across town the next I was being loaded into an ambulance, my face skinned and swelling, and four of the teeth in the perfect bite I’d had for 30 years pushed so horribly out of place I resembled nothing so much as a victim of a serious beating.

After the many hours with both the MDs and the dentist I was left with a hole in my memory (apparently I interacted with my loved ones while we sat on the steps and waited for the ambulance; I honestly don’t remember), lips so swollen I could only eat through a straw for the first two days, and braces for the first time in my life. Once the external, physical damage was healed I then moved on to more than a year of orthodontia to correct the damage of gravity meeting cement. The orthodontia was followed immediately by root canals, four of them, and more time eating nothing but soft food. If you’ve never had a root canal, well, basically, by the time you need one, it’s a blessing to be free of the pain your teeth have put you in. The downside is that your teeth then have no nerve endings in them; you can’t sense hot or cold with your teeth, and, with many teeth in a row being desensitized, you’re constantly aware of the pressure of your remaining natural teeth on the ones that now contain steel posts instead of a live nerve core.

The end result of all this dental work is that I had to ease back into eating hard foods. Sandwiches with a knife and fork for four or five months, pizza not in slices but cut up, and nothing but semi-soft fruit. If I never see another grape or a bowl of canned peaches again it will be too soon.

Today though, today was different. Two years and eleven months later I ate an apple. It was a gala, probably imported from South America. Its skin was smooth, a lush red. The flesh underneath was firm and juicy, at the peak of ripeness.

What does this have to do with anything you ask?

It seems to me that Americans have spent our time post-September 11th being afraid. Our government, in fact, encourages us to be afraid through its constant terror alerts, news updates, and cautionary tales. Press coverage of the war in Iraq is designed to make us thank god we don’t live in conditions like that and be thankful when the State comes to take away our rights because, after all, they’re only doing it for our protection.

I guess what I’m trying to say in a very ham-handed, too giddy at overcoming my own fear to be coherent sort of way is that if we forget to enjoy the small things, the apples, the daffodils, the trees budding in preparation for summer, if we ignore all those things then all of the marching, flag waving, and believing in the “important” things is for naught because one day it will be our last day and we won’t know how we got there.