history

Table of Contents
1. Emotional vs. Intellectual History
2. Reflections on Narrative Theory
3. Intellectual Friendships
4. Control
5. Half Person
6. Conclusion
7. Afterward

1. Next week, I'm sharing my story at my church. Last night when I was on a long car ride, I was thinking about what I was going to talk about. I realized that what I was thinking of talking about was really only one half of my story, or one half of my life experience, and I noticed that what I was thinking of talking about was mainly my intellectual history, and that there was little or nothing to do with my emotional history.

2. But that absence fits in with how I tell my story on a daily basis, the image of myself that I create rather consciously or not by what aspects of my life I choose to talk about. And I don't mean that to sound sinister, or like I'm trying to manipulate people by showing them something other than the truth. But there is no way to completely render your life to others, or even to yourselves, and picking and choosing what to repeat is something that everyone does every day with or without sinister intentions.

3. Anyway, all that to say that I have what I would call "intellectual friendships," which sounds much more snooty than it did in my head. It basically is just friendships where I don't talk about my more visceral side or what I'm dealing with on an emotional level, unless it's what I'm going through on an emotional level because of intellectual or theoretical problems, something like that. Similarly, I don't really talk to my friends about trouble that I'm having with other people, relational trouble, and I don't usually talk about experiences in the past when I was going through relational or emotional problems.

I realize the existence of these intellectual friendships most powerfully when I actually do talk about something and my friends are shocked because either they had no idea or they're just shocked that I experience certain emotions. I guess that's funny, but it also makes me a little sad, like it makes me sad how little fun I have with a lot of my friends here.

4. One of the reasons I don't talk about these things is that something in me is embarrassed by being out of control. I don't know how to explain this properly, but I'll give it a go. I'm not a control freak, I very rarely try to control the outcome of situations, but I do have a lot of resentment when forces are acting on me that I can't control. I think that is how I think of emotions, as a force that is acting on me that I have no control over me, that I don't ask for, and that has a major influence on my actions. Funny enough, the emotions I'm thinking of aren't really "negative emotions" like hate or anger, I feel like I have much more rational control over those than I do over "positive emotions" like happiness or excitement or just having a crush on someone. It's easier for me to talk about how I used to hate people than to talk about good times that I've had. Some of the times in my life that I'm the most embarassed of are the times that I was most excited or most happy, because when I look back it just seems empty in a lot of cases. And I feel like it shouldn't be that way, and there's something very sad for me about being able to write that and know that it's true.

5. What's funny for me is that I've never been an unemotional person. I'm not an ogre or a caveman. Maybe it's just normal human experience, but I feel hyper-emotional: crying isn't an unusual experience for me, I used to listen to Dashboard Confessional, I often feel like throwing things at people, etc. I feel like half a person. Not in the sense that I have no emotions, but that half of me is relatively unknown. Not completely unknown, because there are friends that I talk to about all of this, but they're typically people that are removed from whatever situation I'm involved in.

6. I need to tell more sides of my story, and everyone I'm involved with will benefit from that, including me. I do think, though, that it would be a mistake for me to go around intentionally bringing up things that I feel embarassed about to try to live up to this principle that I've created for myself. I don't think that's healthy. It has a lot more to do with me having faith in other people and trusting the relationships that I have with them, and trusting that they actually care enough to listen. I also think there are frequent moments in my life when I think of something that I'm going through or that happened at some other point in my life, and I choose not to bring those up. Sometimes that's good, but not always.

7. I've been realizing this whole year that it's really critical for me to have faith in my relationships, in a very similar way to how I need to have faith in God for that relationship to function, where faith is trusting that God actually does care about me, or maybe that he just likes me on a personal level.

lessons

So my day starts out bad, and maintains that same basic funk until the afternoon. In the afternoon, I go and buy pants with Javier. I felt a lot better afterwards. Lesson: buy more to have a happier life.

Side note: When I left the changing room, I kept feeling like I was going to walk out in my underwear. Javier thought I was going to as well.

At cadre today, we broke into groups and talked about our lives. I was grumpy about this initially, and thought about abstaining because I didn't want to talk about feeling shitty. Then I remembered what I wrote about the need to tell my story. So I talked about it, some. Lesson: my blog provides practical, immediate solutions for your real life problems.

Side note: it is getting easier for me to tell people that I don't walk to talk about something. I feel that this is a healthier alternative to pretending that some problem doesn't exist.

dogma

I'm much more dogmatic than I would like to believe, and much more intolerant than I would like to believe. That's something I've been noticing lately. The irony for me is that tolerance and ambiguity are things that I value a lot. And I am tolerant, in some ways, but I'm basically tolerant to people who are like me.

Over spring break, I sat in on a session at my friend's old Bible school. At the end of the session, the speaker challenged the students to live a certain way, and asked for people to stand to show their commitment and willingness to accept the challenge. Getting people to stand up as a sign of commitment is something that I've resented since I was around 13. Anyway, I realized in that moment that I had a lot more love and compassion and even respect for the people that chose to stay seated rather than the ones who were standing.

I have a lot of understanding for the people that are like me, for the skeptics and questioners and lamewads, for the quitters and the apostates and for people who leave the faith and who are uncertain about the truth. I don't have much respect for believers who never question and who believe they know truth.

I'm intolerant of those who believe they know the truth, the ones who are certain about what is good and what is wrong, the ones who are certain about how they should live and about who God is and what the Bible says and what the Bible is. And this intolerance scares me. It scares me that when I encounter the people that I resent the most, I begin to express the attributes of theirs that I find the most repelling.

I need to let go of my beliefs just as much as I'm asking others to let go of their beliefs. More importantly, I need to let go of being right. The flip side is that I need to start telling my story, in the sense that I'm relating where I'm at and why I'm there.

human

Today in my globalization class, we were talking about an article which argued that identity is changing from local or national to civilizational. In other words, that my identity is no longer as much about being Washingtonian (or Thai) or American as it is being Western. Which got me thinking.

I realized today that my sense of identity as a human is becoming more and more strong. Not as Christian, or white, or American, or male, or Western, just as a human. I'm happy with that, because that is the identity that I want to be most aware of when I encounter others. It's not that their race or ethnicity or religion or gender or economic status are unimportant, but those qualities necessarily create divisions in a way that human doesn't. I don't want to be "color blind," but I don't want to be color-blinded either, where I lose track of a person because I'm so caught up in these descriptions of them and so caught up in dividing people along different lines.

Incidentally, if someone asked me what it means to be human, fallen and sinful is not how I would respond. When I think of someone as human, the point isn't that they're messed up somehow. I'm beginning to wonder if humanity's sin is a lot more important to humanity than it is to God. Then again, maybe I'm just confusing myself with God.

interpretation

Sometimes I wonder if the primary tool of literary or Biblical analysis is superstition, creating meaning out of what may be entirely coincidental, and creating patterns of cause and effect where they don't actually exist.

I'm becoming more and more suspicious of cause/effect theories. Why am I becoming this way? Jeffrey Sachs and his idea of differential diagnosis, the idea that poverty (or anything, maybe) has a multitude of causes, rather than one all encompassing explanation.

That was a joke. But it's probably also true, in the sense that Sachs pushes me along that way.

Anyway, here's another way I'm suspicious. Last night I was thinking about how I'm grateful that I grew up in the trans-sexual capital of the world. At the time, I wanted to say that that experience had a lot to do with me not being a homophobe. At the same time, I realized that that's not enough. Talking to my friends who have had similar experiences, I don't think they would have the same level of comfort as I do. It's simplistic to say that I'm not a homophobe just because I grew up in a country that embraced homosexuality and trasvestitism.

More about meaning in stories. I was reflecting in class today on the idea that there is no inherent meaning in stories, that meaning is essentially invented. In a lot of ways, that makes sense to me. Every story has a point of view, but point of view is just the rhetorical strategy that is telling people how they should interpret it. That's not the same thing as inherent meaning, because the rhetoric and point of view also has to be interpreted, and so the rhetoric itself cannot define what a story means.

Example: I could tell a story about how I used to always eat rotten cherries, then one day I got really sick from eating rotten cherries, so I stopped doing it. My intent? Probably to show the risk in eating bad fruit. But that doesn't mean the meaning of the story is that eating rotten fruit is bad. Someone else might hear the story and think the meaning is that there's a relatively low chance of getting sick from eating bad fruit, and so it's okay to do. And that would be a perfectly valid reading, not based on what I intended, but based on what the story is actually saying.

Here's an equation I'm also uncomfortable with:

authorial intent = meaning

I think that most people would be uncomfortable with the idea that stories have no inherent meaning, especially followers of various religious traditions who are trying to find out how to interpret the stories within their scripture. That's a question I'm not sure how to answer yet.

I do know, however, that I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that there is one monolithic and authoritative interpretation of scripture. Especially because I would have trouble not scoffing at anyone who believes that they know what this monolithic interpretation is. This is why I have trouble with a lot of sermons. It's not that I disagree with the conclusions that a preacher comes to, I just often think their whole method of interpretation is invalid.

Back to that equation: Biblical interpretation should be informed by authorial intent, but it should not be contained by it. That's more to do with the stories in scripture, though, and not something like the epistles.

An early lesson I learned in English classes is that it's basically nonsense to try to speak about what so-and-so meant when they wrote something. For one thing, it's impossible to know what anyone intended. For another thing, no one owns a story. If I tell a story, I don't own the meaning of that story (my rhetorical strategy here is obviously repetition). Context is more important.

Also, I wonder if people miss the point of interpretation. I was sitting here thinking about Leviticus, and how people argue over whether they're supposed to follow the laws in Leviticus or not, and which ones they're supposed to follow. But maybe that's missing the point. I don't think it matters which laws we're supposed to follow, or that it bears anything good to try to figure that out. Maybe the picture of God in the book of Leviticus is more important: a God that is deeply concerned with how his people live, down to the minute details of their lives, and and who is deeply concerned with the health and well-being of his people.

I've been so caught up with trying to understand how to read the Bible that it's hard for me to actually read it. Hmmm.

touch

Tonight I saw a very short film about a camp for youth with AIDS. The film was talking about the dehumanization and humanization of AIDS victims, and how the camp was a place of acceptance. The ways they seemed to be trying to do this at the camp were through touch and just having fun, and I thought that was super interesting. I've realized that when I dislike someone, I'm really reluctant to touch them, because touching them will mean I accept their humanity, and that I have to accept them in some way. I've also noticed my own reluctance to let people touch me when I'm sick or contagious or cosmetically off or feel weird about my own body. I imagine this issue becomes even more important to a person when they're suffering from a disease like AIDS. But I think that touching someone has a lot to do with choosing to not be afraid of them any longer, and that's one of the reasons why touch is so important. I think it's really significant that in the gospels Jesus often chooses to touch the people he's healing.

learning

I hate being watched when I'm trying to learn how to do something. Actually, that's not quite it. I hate being watched when I'm trying to learn something that the people around me can do well. I think that's why I enjoyed my drivers-ed back in Thailand so much: the driving instructor left me alone and didn't pay attention to me most of the time. That was a comfortable learning evironment for me. Tonight's extremely uncomfortable learning experiences: slacklining and fixies. Other situations that immediately comes to mind: yoga and music.

body

I want to write, because I feel like there's a lot on my mind that I want to process. At the same time, I don't know what to write about.

Here's one thing: I'm finding that it's really necessary for me to sit still, even if its just for a few minutes. If I'm not careful, I go through the whole day just doing things, even if that's spending time in my room online or playing games or reading or guitaring, with no pause in between. Unhealthy. I think it's good to spend time at night just sitting before I go to bed, because I don't think straight once I'm trying to sleep, everything gets a little loopy.

Another thing that I've been slowly realizing is how I view my body. Not like body image, just how I think of it. And I've realized that I think of my body as something that is outside of my control or outside human intervention. I think this began from an early age with my sinuses. I don't know how long my sinuses have been bad, but for as long as I remember I've only been able to breathe through one nostril at a time, except when I'm exercising. When I was little, we went to doctors to try to find out what the problem was, and to fix the problem. Nothing they did worked. The way I eat has also given me the feeling that what I do to my body doesn't matter. The last time I got my cholesterol checked (5 years ago) I found out that it was really high, but that the good cholesterol was really high, also, so it didn't really matter. Basically, I used to eat really poorly, a lot of fatty foods, but nothing I ate changed that I was skinny.

The most clear sense I have of human control over my body is with surgery, when my tendons were reconnected and when my teeth were pulled. Other than that, my medical history is one where when I have problems, the doctors don't know what's wrong or how to fix thing, and I think this is part of why I'm always reluctant to see doctors. Or, on the other hand, I have injuries that are permanent, which is another loss of control.

I've wondered if my insistence on not using an alarm this quarter, and my attempt to detox my body, is an attempt to have a sense of control over myself.

advertizing

I'm tired of advertising. I'm not really thinking of billboards and commercials, but they are a part of it. What I'm more tired of is advertizing by specific issue groups who ask me to be involved in what they're doing, to come to the events they're planning, to donate to their causes. I know that in a lot of cases the work they are doing is good, but that doesn't change that I often feel like I'm being bombarded by people who are demanding one thing or another from me, when I don't have the energy or motivation to give what they're asking. On the flip side, this makes me very reluctant to try to get other people involved in anything, because I don't want to be another voice adding to the cacophany.


Here's another thing: I feel very uncomfortable when employees in stores ask if they can help me. It makes me want to leave whatever store I'm in. If I see an employee coming towards me, I'll often just try to leave. That's how I am with a lot of groups that are advertizing one thing or another, whether it's study abroads, jobs, activities, or causes. I'm much more likely to look into what they're all about if they leave a sign up that has information to read. I probably will not look at anything if there's a person there promoting it.

This is how I felt back in Thailand, too. The community was so small that everyone was hounded to be involved, and it got very tiring. The funny thing was that when I came to America I felt very out of place because I wasn't involved in anything.

sex

I woke up this morning, and soon afterwards realized that I've very resentful of the way that Christians talk about and think about sex. At least how they talk about it in public speeches, sermons, and environments. Most of the time the topic is sexual purity. I'm so sick of that topic. Not because it doesn't have any importance, it just has been given way too much importance in Christian living and in the way that Christians talk about sex and sexuality. The conversation needs to open up a little more fully than that.