These past few days have just brought to mind how many unresolved issues I have with my brother, and perhaps with all my siblings. I suppose that this would naturally be the case considering that they are all much older than I am, and that they were rarely home when I was growing up. Sometimes I feel closer to my friends than I do to my own flesh and blood. That's an odd feeling for a Kenyan; I mean, your family should be closer and dearer to you than life itself, and yet I feel so distant from them. It does not help that my brother has to take the "I'm older than you so you better do what I tell you" attitude with me, because it just makes the gap between us seem all the larger. Does he really know so little about me that he thinks that kind of attitude will get me to listen to his advice? Right or wrong, I feel very patronised when he makes comments like that, when I confront him he tells me that he's just looking out for my best interests....Does that mean I have to put up with being treated like a 9 year old?
That's how old I was when he left for Canada back in 1990, he was a stranger then, and he is a stranger now. He calls me up in Buffalo, and over my protestations and attempts at explanations orders me to
demand of my fave professor that she find me a job/graduate school/manna from heaven, like it was her fault in the first place that I did not get funding from the graduate schools I applied to. By what logic does she now become responsible? What "duties" to me has she somehow shirked that I should chide her like a scullery maid who scratched the Bedford crystal? Sheeeshh..is this how he behaves with other people on a day-to-day basis? No wonder he's been single all this time! No sense of give and take with this man..it's all capitalist exchange value...gah! He just drives me nuts sometimes...
And then my poor parents are just stuck in the middle, they of course follow his advice because he's been in the US the longest of any of us, and I do love and respect them so much so when they take his side I'm torn about what to do. I want to give my brother the finger and say that I'm going to do what I think is best (and I've not been sitting with my thumbs up my arse while all this has been going on thankee very much), but on the other hand I still want to follow my parent's advice....it's like going through puberty all over again..
I've always suspected I have late onset pubertal rebellion against authority syndrome and here it is...I mean, Ihad no reason to really rebel back home because my parent always treated me like an adult: if I respected them they gave me respect back it was as simple as that, and I love them for it. So why rebel against that? My brother on the other hand represents everything that a person could rebel against: domineering authority, patronisation, lack of respect and plain old fuddyduddy-ness (someone tell me they've heard 'fuddyduddy' before).
Here comes my rebellion 7 years late. Whenever my brother begins to give me a laundry list of do this's and do that's, I have to fight the urge to yell "Screw you!!" into the phone and hang up. I think he really sees me a child and I cannot stand (!!!!!) that, it irks me to the core that he of all people should be treating me this way at this point in my life and boy I wish I could tell him this to his face...
We went through the same thing back in 2001 when he snooped around and outed me, somehow the conversation that was very difficult for me to initiate with him (for obvious reasons) got hijacked by this
in loco parentis persona that I can hear come over him over a phone line...it's bizarre how I can hear his persona literally change right before my ears (?)...
Why can't we all just get along? Aiyaiyai, all this drama...
Back, tired and writing what maybe one of the best papers I have ever penned (or is that typed?)
Oh yes, my brother still sucks...
Apparently my DJ name is DJ Pervert..
go figure
And for hoots and giggles, voila! A Personality Test! Thanks Derek.
1. When do you feel your best?
a) in the morning
b) during the afternoon & and early evening
c) late at night
2. You usually walk...
a) fairly fast, with long steps
b) fairly fast, with little steps
c) less fast head up, looking the world in the face
d) less fast, head down
e) very slowly
3. When talking to people you...
a) stand with your arms folded
b) have your hands clasped
c) have one or both your hands on your hips
d) touch or push the person to whom you are talking
e) play with your ear, touch your chin, or smooth your hair
4. When relaxing, you sit with...
a) your knees bent with your legs neatly side by side
b) your legs crossed
c) your legs stretched out or straight
d) one leg curled under you
5. When something really amuses you, you react with...
a) a big, appreciative laugh
b) a laugh, but not a loud one
c) a quiet chuckle
d) a sheepish smile
6. When you go to a party or social gathering you...
a) make a loud entrance so everyone notices you
b) make a quiet entrance, looking around for someone you know
c) make the quietest entrance, trying to stay unnoticed
7. You're working very hard, concentrating hard, and you're
interrupted, do you...
a) welcome the break
b) feel extremely irritated
c) vary between these two extremes
8. Which of the following colors do you like most?
a) Red or orange
b) black
c) yellow or light blue
d) green
e) dark blue or purple
f) white
g) brown or gray
9. When you are in bed at night, in those last few moments before
going to sleep, you lie...
a) stretched out on your back
b) stretched out face dow n on your stomach
c) on your side, slightly curled
d) with your head on one arm
e) with your head under the covers
10. You often dream that you are...
a) falling
b) fighting or struggling
c) searching for something or somebody
d) flying or floating
e) you usually have dreamless sleep
f) your dreams are always pleasant
POINTS:
1. (a) 2 (b) 4 (c) 6
2. (a) 6 (b) 4 (c) 7 (d) 2 (e) 1
3. (a) 4 (b) 2 (c) 5 (d) 7 (e) 6
4. (a) 4 (b) 6 (c) 2 (d) 1
5. (a) 6 (b) 4 (c) 3 (d) 5 (e) 2
6. (a) 6 (b) 4 (c) 2
7. (a) 6 (b) 2 (c) 4
8. (a) 6 (b) 7 (c) 5 (d) 4 (e) 3 (f) 2 (g) 1
9. (a) 7 (b) 6 (c) 4 (d) 2 (e) 1
10. (a) 4 (b) 2 (c) 3 (d) 5 (e) 6 (f) 1
Now add up your total number of points.
OVER 60 POINTS: Others see you as someone they should
"handle with care". You're seen as vain, self-centered, and who is
extremely dominant. Others may admire you, wishing they could be
more like you, but don't always trust you, hesitating to become too
deeply involved with you.
51 TO 60 POINTS: Others see you as an exciting, highly volatile,
rather impulsive personality; a natural leader, who's quick to make
decisions, though not always the right ones. They see you as bold
and adventuresome, someone who will try anything once; someone who
takes chances and enjoys an adventure. They enjoy being in your
company because of the excitement you radiate.
41 TO 50 POINTS: Others see you as fresh, lively, charming,
amusing, practical, and always interesting; someone who's constantly in the
center of attention, but sufficiently well-balanced not to let it go to their head.
They also see you as kind, considerate, and understanding; someone
who'll always cheer them up and help them out.
31 TO 40 POINTS: Others see you as sensible, cautious, careful &
practical. They see you as clever, gifted, or talented, but modest.
Not a person who makes friends too quickly or easily, but someone who's
extremely loyal to friends you do make and who expect the same
loyalty in return. Those who really get to know you realize it takes a lot
to shake your trust in your friends, but equally that it takes you a long
time to get over it if that trust is ever broken.
21 TO 30 POINTS! : Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy.
They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady
plodder. It would really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or
on the spur of the moment, expecting you to examine everything carefully
from every angle and then, usually decide against it. They think this reaction
is caused partly by your careful nature.
UNDER 21 POINTS: People think you are shy, nervous, and indecisive,
someone who needs looking after, who always wants someone else to
make the decisions & who doesn't want to get involved with anyone or
anything. They see you as a worrier who always sees problems that
don't exist. Some people think you're boring. Only those who know you
well know that you aren't.
I scored a 36, surprise surprise...
Ressentiment will get me nowhere.
On to my spirited defense of Irigaray! Will she fall before a genealogy of power? Or does the divine woman instantiate a new discursive space for women? Stay tuned, I'm sure you are dying to find out.
Tomorrow I go to Buffalo for a Social Theory Conference with some of the other students from my class. What that means is I have to present for about 5 minutes on my slowly progressing term/conference paper that I will present in more depth in Tampa in May. Perhaps it would ease my anxieties ever so slightly if I typed up something close to a summary of remarks rather than trying to wing it on Friday morning. Of course, being the lazy bum that I am I will do nothing of the sort and will probably spend most of the 5 minutes humming and hawing trying to piece together a coherent thought, and make a fool of myself. Whoopeee.
At least I get to leave SLU for a coupla days! :-D
So madness has cooled now to simmering resentment..I can sense my eldest brother's hand in this, he's never been the most trusting of my relatives. I suppose that's what siblings are for in some sense, but he stubbornly believes, deep down, that nothing I do is good enough. There is always some way that I have messed up, or some route I have not explored, or some person I have not yelled at sufficiently. While all that is well and good when dealing with certain people at Res Life, it doesn't work so well when you are trying to figure out what to do with the rest of your life.
It's a simple series of choices really: work, school or deportation. I'd much rather grab the chance to go to school than work at some bullshit job or have to go home to cool my heels for a few months. So be it then, if he feels that I am not worth taking a chance on...
He always seems to be perfectly assured about what I need to do or say, I just wish he would go ahead and tell me rather than wait until I'm almost in
extremis gravis
Anyway.
I think the sunny weather yesterday was conducive to insightful thought.. my conference paper is going to be a doozy. Ever have those moments of insight when you can lay out an argument with crystal clarity and know that you have it dead to rights? Well, yesterday was one of those days..now all I have to do is write it out just as I saw it.
If I can stay focused....*mumblegrumblebrothermumble*
I'm so mad right now
I'm mad and I'm hurt
Your family is supposed to be there for you no matter what, they are supposed to help you realise your dreams, and be there for you when you need them the most. Well, thanks a lot guys, you really came through for me today.
Hmmmm..so now I'm fascinated by Foucault again, I'm reading a biography and I bought two new books of lectures, interviews and public talks, here's a fun excerpt;
"What, indeed, is the meaning of the death of God, if not a strange solidarity between the stunning realization of his nonexistence and the act that kills him? But what does it mean to kill God if he does not exist, to kill God
who has never existed?Perhaps it means to kill God both because he does not exist and to guarantee he will not exist - certainly a cause for laughter: to kill God to liberate life from this existence that limits it, but also to bring it back to those limits that are annulled by this limitless existence - as a sacrifice; to kill God to return him to this nothingness he is and to manifest his existence at the center of a light that blazes like a presence - for the ecstasy; to kill God in order to lose language in a deafening night and because this wound must make him bleed..." (Preface to Transgression)
Pretty, eh? Imagine what that would have sounded like in the original French. Whoops, did I just say a bad word? Here it is again, French!!! Idiotic politicos, I fart in your general direction! Now go away before I taunt you a second time!
On the homefront, I am no closer to determining my post graduation fate than I was last year. When everything is a possibility, nothing gets decided..multiplicity might be theoretically fun but in practice it is a biatch.....grrrrr...
Well, I'm back from my weekend trip to Boston, and I had a blast...I bought a cellphone (yikes!) and wondered why I hadn't done so sooner. I had one in Denmark and it quickly became an essential little toy..much like an extension of your hand or a psychic prop...I think of someone to call and viola! I dial the number and there they are at the end of the line, no matter where you are...pure niceness..
Wheee! The parental units are in the country safely, now all I have to do is ensure they actually have a graduation ceremony to go to...I just hope the weather holds out....
Ooh Oooh! Before I forget, last Thursday the Sociology dept held a Theory panel and afterwards a few students joined the panelists at the Glass O for drinks and light deconstruction (hehehe). Well I had fun and yacked about everything from sadomasochism to mob justice and then today just before class my prof says to me, "You know they were really impressed with you last Thursday" and I say, "What? Just me?" but it did feel nice I will admit, I've been feeling slightly vulnerable in that regard ever since the application debacle...so thank you Theory guy(s), you just made my day :-)
So where is the Butcher of Baghdad now? Probably lying under several tonnes of rubble...One dictator is gone now, but will anarchy and tribalism now hold sway? I am anxious to see what kind of government will be put in place, and I hope that Iraq will not be neglected as Afghanistan has been...when was the last time you heard news from Afghanistan that didn't involve US military action against "Al Qaeda elements" ?
Mmmmhmmm, exactly.
But seriously,
"[We must go] further than a sense of [our] own good fortune in the face of someone else's misfortune. [We need to] begin to recognise our own direct responsibility and involvement. It is our own value system that is contributing to the destruction of the sociocultural and economic foundations of the African nations." (Aoki Yayoi)
Substitute Africa for any "Third World" country you like: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Palestine and you begin to realise that the world capitalist economy really is a genocidal; both culturally and economically and the only recourse for those facing a juggernaut like that will be to lash out with violence...
Hehehehe...heard at dinner tonight, "You know the British Empire is in decline when they get kicked out of India by a guy who refuses to eat."
*Giggle*
Makes me mad enough to spit.
I watched a documentary on the Mau Mau uprising, and the same kind of racist, intolerant and self-serving rhetoric that the Israelis use against the Palestinians, the Americans use against the Iraqis and Saudis, the British against the Irish was used against the Kikuyu freedom fighters: 'savages', 'barbarians', 'destroyers of civilisation, culture and everything we hold sacred', 'unChristian'...
It just powerfully reminded me of the sacrifices that those brave men and women made to gain independence, and of the corrupting and perverse nature of political power.
What is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter?
Great galloping Buddha, tonight was blathering idiot night at J-Board..a finer collection of verbose, unintelligible, moronic dimwits could only be found on Capitol Hill...aaargh!!!
Oh and here's another addiction I just picked up:
Chinese Chess (Xiangqi)
I got persuaded to go to Boston this weekend..which will be nice, I get to see A&A, eat some chowdah, and go shake some booty at the
Avalon!
Have I mentioned
this to y'all yet? Check it out!
Seen tonight in the chatroom:
"Don't talk to those guys, they have HIV"
I mean, seriously...what is this, 1986?
In other news I have finally found an author who agrees with me,
"Although feminists have identified gender as a social institution oppressive to women, the most radically deconstructionist feminists tend, ironically, to reinforce heteropolarity, since 'woman' - inevitably- constitutes a
privileged sign within feminist discourse, and since radical feminist constructions of gender tend to be organised around a definitional -albeit anathematised-
masculine norm." (Tamsin Wilton)(italics added)
You go, girl
Maybe I should mention SARS just so I can get some Google hits...SARS, SARS, SARS, but on a serious note, I wonder how many cases China actually has that they are not reporting? Why is it that SARS does not have the same pattern of infection in the US/Canada that it does in Southeast Asia..something does not compute here...
It makes no sense for an infectious (presumably viral) disease to have such divergent patterns of incubation and transmission, unless there are hidden factors or vectors we don't know about that make it much more successful in China than in the US. Strange.
And my readership grows...
I don't think I'll bore you all with my thoughts about the panel on the war in Iraq last night,(which I thought was excellent until the Conservatives started calling us all liberal mucky-mucks) or on the Diversity Coalition meeting that 'Che and I attended after that.
Why won't I bore you? Because I may fall asleep typing it myself! My God it was awful...
I think I will take a little time to weigh in on just one issue: what does it mean when you say "I support the troops, but I don't support the war"?
Well, to me there seems to be one obvious thing being overlooked; the troops that you are supporting are the ones doing the actual shooting and bomb-dropping and van spraying, much as we would like to divorce them from their actions (just following orders, have no choice) the fact of the matter is, when we begin to see soldiers as neutral and impeachable instruments of state policy, then we should be prepared to allow them to perform any kind of atrocity and shrug it off as following orders.
Wasn't this the same argument that the Wehrmacht leadership used at Nuremberg? Just following orders...
I think that support for the troops need not be conflated with sympathy or concern for their safety,or a strong wish for the soldiers to be home; barbecuing, drinking beer, bashing their gay/lesbian counterparts, riding around in Hummers...
You support the troops? Hold the government responsible for sending them to fight this foolish war in the first place! Regime change begins at home...
I've just had a thought about the amazing campus response to the hate letter sent to Margaret Bass recently. My thought is this: is all this outrage directed against the anti-black vitriol in that letter or does it spring from a sense of insult directed
inwardly?
Here's what I mean, the letter compares Dr Bass to " a fucking ape from Africa" and charges her with turning SLU into a "nigger loving college". Is all the rage being expressed by those rallying against this kind of hatred springing out of a realisation of the profound hurt and systematic wrong that this letter stands for, or is it a reaction stemming from taking that letter as if it referred to one's self?
Basically is it a reaction based on, (1) "Oh my God you just didn't call me an ape from Africa!" or on (2) "I just can't believe that this kind of stupidity still exists" ?
Why am i worried about this? Well simply the fact that if all this is in reaction to some form of (1) then sadly nothing has changed, in fact, it just serves to uncover what kind of ugly, nasty stereotypes are still held about Africa: my dear "dark continent"....if being compared to something from Africa is the ultimate insult then what does that reveal about our hidden prejudices about Africans? Or anyone else for that matter?
Nothing that I would want to see or hear about, that's for sure. I sincerely hope that I am reading too much into this, but I have a suspicion that I am not, and that makes me feel just awful :-/
