I'm coming home soon. I feel like my heart is being strained through a cheese cloth... with no emotions. My heart is just my heart. The cheese, cheese. The cloth, well, it's a cheese cloth... a cloth with a bit of specification... but you get the point. There's so many feelings that they all mutilate each other like rabid rats. At the Casa there's a plastic toy gun that's been on the couch for about a week. I know because I sit on it just about every stupid day. I was (emphatically) informed by Jacob, my 20-year-old colleague, that it was the "red power ranger's gun... Jason's gun." And yes, I googled that to refresh my memory.
Anyways, I can't seem to focus on the big picture. I haven't blogged for a while because everything that rolls off my tongue (or more literally, my fingers) is word salad. That's actually a term I learned about in Psychology. Word salad. I can just imagine a bunch of men in lab coats discussing it at an over sized, rectangular very official table. Probably with rat cages blurred in the background.
"Yes, yes, we need a term for this." A mouse squeaks in the distance.
"Wordanoia?" a man suggests. His lab coat is one button off and his goggles are steaming up a bit.
"No... no..." the instigator replies. "That's been used for the Wordophomous solomonus." Seemingly defeated, he puts his head in his hands. "They're too similar."
"Spitography!" exclaims another across the table raising a finger. The instigator sighs in unison with another mouse squeak and just shakes his head, still in his hands. Suddenly the doors swing open and a boy enters. He's carrying a brown paper bag with little oil spots seeping through.
"Dad, you forgot your sala..." The men sit up a little straighter and independently look off in the distance with glazed eyes. The rats stop running on their wheels. The boy freezes. Light suddenly streams down onto the boy's hand holding the bag. A rat falls over dead. The men then whisper in unison as if the lightest sound would break the magic,
"Salad..."
I also learned about schizophrenia. My teacher showed us a clip of a schizophrenic man. The things he said were so disjointedly brilliant. They made such illogical sense to me that I started to frantically write down everything he said, starting with the "picture [on the wall] that had a headache." Afterwards I looked up expectantly to discuss what he said when I remembered we were analyzing the subject, not the subject matter.
That made me sad. Trained by society, I feel that we focus on analyzing the subject rather than listening to what it is saying. I guess that's what I'm unconsciously not doing. I'm not saying this to say I'm better than society, but rather, why I don't feel like I'm a part of it. I think I'm not feeling because I'm listening to what South America is saying rather than trying to analyze it. Of course I realize that everyone processes and deals with things in different ways. Mine isn't necessarily better or worse than someone else's... it's just different. I could go into one of my infamous rants about my love hate relationship with the cracks on the sidewalks, but I think you've heard that enough.
I hear South America saying many of the same things the United States would say. That I need to shower in the mornings. That the dust here is also made from skin cells and that gravity still keeps our feet planted in the same way. Don't get me wrong... there are definitely differences. Major differences. But that toy gun will probably still be on the couch when I leave, and life will go on, and that's okay. And somehow that's both a comforting and rip-my-body-to-shreds-ing concept that isn't soaking in. I don't know if it ever will because my head can only soak things in at one place at a time, which never really gives me the full perspective because I can only physically be at one place at a time.
"It's God, not me." I've been thinking about that concept a lot lately, and how much I've used it. I never want to use it again. It assumes that I was something in the first place. Why don't I just say "It's God?" Because I have to be in the equation somewhere. "Here God, I'll let You have the first respective subject in this non-grammatically-correct-sentence because I have reached complete humility." I want to replace that with what John the Baptist said, "He must increase, but I must decrease." Now there's some good grammar. It's a continuous action of decreasing. That's addressing the constant struggle for humility rather than saying I am humble. That's the authenticity I want.
I was going to talk about my English class and how we "analyze" things. The trick to the class is to use "teacher pleasers" such as idealized and passionate and suffering and despair. Bonus points for personification and reminiscence or if you can think of anything longer than 5 syllables. You could pretty much say the same thing about everything to deepen the class discussion.
"Oh yes, I believe the author used personification to idealize the situation of suffering he was in when he was reminiscing in his passion." Maybe switch it up to add a new perspective. But make sure to furrow your brow a bit to make it authentic.
"The author used personification when describing his suffering to idealize the passion because his reality was clouded by despair."
They like it when you use nouns as verbs with quick little suffixes, such as clouded. You could do that with just about anything. Shower-ed. Pillow-ed. Meth-ed... (Maybe not everything). How out-of-the-box and descriptive of me. But as I was writing this I realized it's all I do on this blog anyway. How sneakily hypocritical of me. I surprise myself at my abilities sometimes. Jesus really does deserve to be "increased" and I really do deserve to be "decreased."
That's all.
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