Language and it's Sex Appeal

You wouldn't know it just by looking at him, but former Gov. Jon Huntsman, is dead sexy.

This silver foxed Mormon with the grin of gold is pushing his way into my heart with only one charming attribute. It's not his conservative financial reform plan, no, it's something that makes him hated by the other 2012 GOP Presidential Candidates.

He can speak Mandarin.

I watched him weasel his way out of telling us what he really thinks about GOP pick Mitt Romney, on the Colbert Report yesterday. . . in Mandarin! Of course, the man was an ambassador in China from '09 to '11, so he must of picked something up!

But like I said, this is something that makes him reviled within his own party. This "living abroad with Mao" among other things is despicable to the "new" American Conservative. Nevermind, a certain soulless Henry Kissinger was in China so much, he probably had a second family over there.

This resentment towards other languages is boiling over into our political sphere and it's threatening our global relationships. You can see how our relationship with Mexico has colored our perception of language dramatically. "Why the fuck do I need to know Mexican?!" You can picture anyman Redneck spitting this question on to the pavement.

One of the many things that attracted me to my husband, Noah, was his grasp of language. If I asked: "Hey babe, what language family does Bantu come from?" And without skipping a beat or looking away from the television, he'd give me an intelligible answer and that's hot. But maybe I'm just a word nerd.

To me, a man that can speak another language outside of English, is a game changer. Would I pursue married, Mormon Jon Huntsman? No, not at all, but this makes his political message slightly more palatable. He's not a total dick.

I'm currently in Noah's grammar class learning about the history of English. Listening to him challenge his students on what they think they know about English is fasinating. He's showing that there is still a need to know something outside of our borders. At it's most basic, learning another language gives us a better appreciation and understanding of English. Do you know how many different people battled and married so we could get our beloved English? Quite a few! The Normans, Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, the Romans! JEEZ!

So yes, there is a need for learning other languages. Don't be arrogant enough to believe that English is the lingua franca and that the rest of the world will come to you. Don't think that the invention of cool new translating software will make learning unnecessary.

Well think about it like this, if I were still single and a guy approached me trying to "spit game" with this: "Hey girl, you are lookin' fine, head to toe. You need some of this." I would promptly laugh in his face. (Of course, there's a good chance that men don't even speak like this anymore, not since 1987.)

But maybe things would be different if same guy "spit game" in this manner: "Hey girl, tu es si jolie, la tête aux pieds. Vous avez besoin de cela." (I hope that this means the same thing I typed into Google Translate. THIS IS WHY I SHOULD LEARN FRENCH!!)

Burning Books

I had a long day of working at the university bookstore. School has started and the students are filing in to buy their textbooks. Some are also coming in to sell back some textbooks from the previous semester. I had an experience with a customer today, that was a especially interesting.

She wanted to sell us a couple of books, one was a text that we could use, the other was obsolete, an older edition. When I told her that we could only buy back one of her books, she seem fine with it. Which is nice because some students can get really disgruntled over that.

What was amazing was, the customer next to her chimed in to say: "Aw, that sucks when that don't take books back. My friends and I had a huge book burning party last year for the books we couldn't sell back!"

My jaw dropped. My customer also looked a little puzzled by the statement. "That's okay," she said slowly. "I'm pretty sure I can donate them somewhere."

And at this point, I could have (should have) held my tongue, but I'd never heard anything so. . . obtuse. "What are you," I asked (shrilly). "A Nazi?"

Of course, the young woman didn't know what I was talking about. She was about 20 and very proud of the fact that she socked it to the establishment. She shrugged. "I don't know, we thought it was fun."

Still amazed and still unable to keep my bloody mouth, I told her: "That's what fascists did during World War II." Again, the young lady didn't know what a fascist was or when World War II happened. Sigh.

Anyway the whole thing made me a think about how important books are. Even the ones you don't care for. To me, a chemistry book is the same as a copy of Moby Dick. Both are vital for society even if I can't see the importance in chemistry.

People burn books because they are afraid of the knowledge contained in them. They're afraid that knowledge will be read by people who will change the world. That is a real threat for those in control. Slaves in the American South weren't allowed to read because they might rise up and decide: "I might not need to be ruled by another human being."

The Spanish Inquisition burned the Muslim holy book, the Qur'an, in order to suppress a religious idea. The Nazis burned books to suppress a political ideology. A German writer by the name of Heinrich Heine, once wrote: "Where they burn books, so too will they, in the end, burn human beings." The Nazis burned a whole bunch of his books too.

Books were burned because of their filth content. Anything deemed pornographic by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (founded 1873). They were responsible for the destruction of about 15 tons of books for being "lewd."

Oh, and parents have partied around a bonfire of Harry Potter novels.

I'm just saying, there's enough trouble getting real sources of information in the world. There's no need for a college student to revel in the torching of information. When people in different parts of the world can't get a hold of books or freely print news, it doesn't make sense for us to just throw it all away.

So the next time you've got a textbook, any book, just laying around, and you don't want it. . . don't throw it in the trash, don't burn it! Donate it to ANYONE! Drop it off at the library, so something! Just let someone else learn something.

A Pallbearer for a Dead Poem

The eulogy is short.

I thought I was invited as a spectator.

I expected no audience participation

on my part,

but they asked me to be a pallbearer.

I politely declined.

but they refused my refusal, insisting

that I couldn’t stand on the side lines.

“You murdered the poem, now take it

to its grave.”

No one expects a dead poem to be

so heavy, laden with sour metaphor,

unnecessary dialogue, and lack luster

subjects.

But I lift with the rest, shouldering

the blame, all the while thinking:

“You did this. You even dug the plot.”

My heart is just as heavy during the

slow stumble to the hearse.

But I can't cry.

A murderer cannot cry,

she closes her moleskin and forgets.

And if she has enough gall, she turns

the page and starts the killing all over

with the witless stroke of her pen.

I load it up and shove it away expecting

a thank you for my services.

I am met with silence.

Don't Be Afraid of the Boogie Man: Identity Creation in Mos Def's The New Danger (Which is Dope)

I’ve been listening to Mos Def’s 2004 album The New Danger almost exclusively for the past 6-8 weeks. If you look in the front seat cup holders in my discolored, shaky 1996 Honda Accord, you’ll find the CD case propped against the gear shifter, the faded insert artwork revealing Mos’s long right index finger pointed at his dark right temple like a 9-millimeter. During my drive to work/school/Thought-Land, I ritualistically play tracks 9, 15, and 18 (entitled “Sunshine,” “Life is Real,” and “Champion Requiem,” respectively), and almost always in that order. The medley has become a type of intellectual prayer, a meditation that settles my mind into a bluish black calm. And the calm has enough poetry to drown out the suburban static sizzling up from the summer asphalt. Here’s the doctrine behind the practice: The first track in the lineup gets me ready for the thinking of the day, the second gives me the courage to keep thinking in the face of the alluring pleasures of not-thinking, and the last track promises that all the thinking (the struggle) will be worth it at the end of the day.

            

Mos Def (birth name Dante Smith) is listed as one of the 150 “things” white people “like” in Christian Lander’s aptly titled 2008 book Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. In the hip-hop artist’s half-page entry, Lander hypothesizes that Def’s popularity among “hip” young white folks stems from the fact that he is the perfect combination of underground coolness, poetic genius, and crossover appeal (did you know he co-starred opposite Mark Wahlberg in the 2003 remake of the Italian Job!). While in months and years past I have worried about what being a Mos Def fan says about my socio-racial identity, after having The New Danger on blast for the last 40-60 straight days I have come to prioritize how the artist’s music works to self-identify over how being a fan of said music helps me identify myself.

           

Most rappers perform under assumed names, and Smith is no exception. He has long been known as Mos Def, “The Mighty Mos,” or simply “Mos,” and I recently read that in the future he would like to be addressed as Yasiin Bey (a nod to Smith’s Islamic roots/ties). But throughout The New Danger, Smith/Def/Bey introduces several new monikers/personas/characters into the fray, the most interesting and ominous being the mysterious Boogie Man. On the album’s first track, Mos croons, “I am the most beautiful boogie man,” and in the process introduces listeners to the artist’s contrasting and at times paradoxical identity representations.

            Traditionally, the boogie man (or boogey man) is the amorphous representation of everything humanity is most afraid of. It is the darkness that lurks under our childhood beds at night, it is the thing that scares us into acting according to social or authoritative norms (if we didn’t behave our parents the boogie man surely would have gotten us at some point in our childhoods, right?). In announcing himself, or his rap alter ego, as Boogie Man, is Def warning us that we should fear him? Or is he ironically using a culturally understood representation of fear to play on the historically terrifying notion of a black man who can speak his mind whether white folks like it or not?

            

Besides being the modern(ish) rap world’s “favorite nightmare,” Mos makes several more identity claims throughout The New Danger. He calls himself “Black Dante” on one track, and then on another (track 06 – “Blue Black Jack”) he tells the blues tale of a bad man named “Black Jack Johnson” who may or may not be a heavyweight champion archetype the rapper connects with in his moments of lyrical brilliancy.

But beyond the explicit identities Mos Def claims in the titles and hooks of his songs, it is the subtle self-evaluations sprinkled throughout The New Danger that make the rapper’s identifications the most compelling. Take, for example, his bombastic, contradictory self-definition on “Ghetto Rock”:

I am a fighter and a lover

I’m the freaky baby daddy

I’m a bad motherfucker

I’m the earth, wind, fire, and the thunder

I said I am, go ask my mother

You don’t believe that shit

Believe what you wanna

Def tells us he is what he is, and if we don’t believe him we can ask the woman who birthed him (or we can simply check the weather patterns). And herein lies the strength of many of the songs on The New Danger. So many rap songs involve a man (modern rap music in all its fractured glory is unfortunately often, as Suge Knight once said “a man’s game.”) talking about what he could be or what he would be if he had this car or this amount of money or this sexual conquest notched on his mahogany bedpost. Mos Def bypasses the speculation and preaches what he is: a conflicted human being, a child of the universe, and at the same time a force of nature. Shouldn’t all artists/writers strive to identify in a similar way?

           

Over the past several months I have realized how important it is for word-people to identify themselves when they create stuff, even if this means creating personas to create under/as (like Def’s infamous Boogie Man). “Why,” you may ask, “is it important for us to understand who we are when we’re making stuff? Isn’t it only important that we’re making stuff?”

            Reality is a bastard. By this I mean, for many creative people, the real and the unreal tend to blur when they make their art. “What’s more real, the stuff I see in the ‘real’ world or the things I think in my head (I feel like we need another I Heart Huckabees clip here for clarification)?” “Is it better to be a realist or an idealist?” “Do I make stuff because I think things, or do I think things because I make stuff?” These questions can haunt the artist/writer, and sometimes it’s good to lay down the existential law:

  

  1.     I exist.

  2.     How do I know for sure?

  3.     Because I have this identity (be it “natural” or created).

  4.     How am I sure I have an identity?

  5.     Because my identity makes stuff

  6.     (Insert stuff made.)

In a mode of backwards reasoning, Mos declares in “Life is Real”

            What I spit and I write is real

            Cause my life is real

As creative people, we don’t need to completely freak about reality (I hope), because we can always be sure that our works exist and our identities exist (even when, or perhaps especially when, we can’t wrap our head around the existence of anything else). The two (our identities and our identities’ work) work in tandem to prove each other’s is-ness, and they also work to do good work for other people (I hope).

            Ok so we have our identities and we have their created works, so what? Surprisingly, an answer can be found in the first bars of Mos’s “Ghetto Rock.” The answer is: the work and its creator function at their highest level when the work is undeniable.

            The haters can’t fuck wit it

Cause they mom and they sister

And girl in love wit it.

The goal as creative people is to make things that editors/professors/critics/various Powers-That-Be/haters can’t quiet/stifle/ “fuck wit” because of the work’s universally powerful appeal. Work like this is difficult to categorize/compartmentalize/name because even if critics don’t like it personally, all the people in their families and friendly circles can’t get enough of it. It is this work that we should strive to create. No longer is it enough to simply “write what we know.” We need to make what others want and need to know and, most importantly, what they can’t deny. This work will be remembered and recognized as culturally helpful, the stuff people can’t or shouldn’t do without.

Dumb It Down!

Noah gave an exaggerated sigh this afternoon and waited for me to ask him what was wrong.
"What's wrong?"
"I don't want to plan my coursework this semester!" I agreed with him, I didn't want to plan his coursework either. I'm not a very good planner and that showed when I was an English teacher in Bangkok. As my first teaching experience ever, I didn't realize how badly my usual procrastinating would effect my work. I tried my damnest to stay just one lesson plan ahead of my students for seven different classes. By the way, Charansanitwong School of Business, thank you for hiring me!

Noah was concerned about that but was a little depressed about another aspect of planning a semester for four classes. He worried that his lofty creative plans would be shot down by his students. His students are not English majors and do not find his critical thinking useful. He was mentally preparing to dumb down his coursework for his students. If he didn't, there was a good chance a mutiny would rise against him. Apparently his students get resentful if they're pushed into thinking too hard.

If you think this is too harsh of him to admit, then consider the general intellectual climate of America today. Rick Santorum thinks going to college is for snobs. Texas is decides to do away with critical thinking in schools. Remember how G. W. Bush was able to lead the country? Average citizens didn't care about how frighteningly stupid "W" was. They just knew "this is a guy I can get a beer with."

Dumbing it Down is a sobering reality that critical thinkers have to deal with. But is there a way to cut through the layman bullshit with some serious dialogue on subjects we NEED to talk about? There has to be! Because those subject that we refuse to broach (because they're so damn hard to think about) are still going to be monkeys on our collective backs. Racism, Labor Rights, Global Warming and other "things that go bump in the night" are not leaving any time soon.

The subject made me think of a Lupe Fiasco song I'd heard a few years ago. It's aptly named "Dumb it Down." Give a listen.

Lupe Fiasco - Dumb It Down .mp3

Found at bee mp3 search engine

It sounds like Fiasco has his own coursework planning woes. His projected audience, listeners of hip hop, are just as disgruntled as Noah's students.

You goin' over niggas' heads Lu (Dumb it down)
They tellin' me that they don't feel you (Dumb it down)
We ain't graduate from school nigga (Dumb it down)
Them big words ain't cool nigga (Dumb it down)
Yeah I heard Mean And Vicious nigga (Dumb it down)
Make a song for the bitches nigga (Dumb it down)
We don't care about the weather nigga (Dumb it down)
You'll sell more records if you (Dumb it down)

And if that's not enough, Fiasco's getting it from the other side, from recording execs

You've been shedding too much light Lu (Dumb it down)
You make'em wanna do right Lu (Dumb it down)
They're getting self-esteem Lu (Dumb it down)
These girls are trying to be queens Lu (Dumb it down)
They're trying to graduate from school Lu (Dumb it down)
They're starting to think that smart is cool Lu (Dumb it down)
They're trying to get up out the hood Lu (Dumb it down)
I'll tell you what you should do (Dumb it down)


It's mighty hard to be an artist, a creative person, who is stuck in a box of societal norms. It's difficult for an artist or a critical thinkers to dine and be satisfied with mediocrity. What does ingenuity mean if we aren't able to evolve and push the limits of our minds. People say that ingenuity is what built this great nation. Where the hell did it all go? Why are we so proud to be ignorant?

Scratch that, being ignorant isn't necessarily a bad thing. The pride you feel when you know you're ignorant and refuse to do anything about it. . . that's a terrible thing. Watch yourself. If you feel like something you don't know is not worth knowing, if you feel that easy roads always work better, if you get angry with an intellectual and demand she Dumb it Down. . . you might be in trouble.

It's hard for me to advice Noah in situations like these. I don't want him to compromise his integrity as a thinker by inviting mediocrity into his classroom. But I know that's got to be some boulder to push up a mountain. I say stick to your guns. Some people will fall by the wayside but there will be others who trust that you're up to something good. I still like Lupe Fiasco even if he's not singing about his cars. I'm hoping someone in Noah's class will cut him a break.

Writing Then and Now

I've noticed in the last few years that my writing has been a lot less prolific. This is compared to my time in high school. Back then, age 16 or 17, I thought it was no problem at all to pump out a novel in a year. I'm not bragging, I just had a lot less worries and quite a bit more time on my hands.

Now that I'm 28, a wife and mother of a rabbit, things have changed. These days writing poetry is a lot more labored. I have to find time, inspiration and the editing process is much more involved. I'd like to think that my lack of writing has created some better quality work. I'd like to think that I treat my writing a little more tenderly.

Let's talk about younger Charish's writing. It. Was. Terrible. I was reading a lot of Anne Rice and Stephen King back then and that colored my poetry and the dialogue of my stories. Poetry was epically long and about handsome vampires wooing human girls. Sound fuckin' familiar? It's been done before, Stephanie Meyer!

Novel ONE: I don't even remember the title
Synopsis: A young girl with a rich archaeologist uncle is taken on a wild ride. As she searches for Egyptian treasure, she meets a handsome man and brings an evil pharaoh back from the dead.
Result: I had to immediately scrap the book once I saw The Mummy in theaters. It was a depressing moment to find out I'd written a Stephen Sommer film and didn't get paid for it.

Novel TWO: Gals on a Soundtrack (ugh)
Synopsis: Three high school BFFs, (narrated by aspiring writer, Mickey) drive a car cross-country after graduation. Hi-jinks, romance and life lessons ensue.
Result: It was rejected by 6 publishers. One publisher sited, "This needs a lot more development. Are you 16?" You'll notice that this also sounds like a movie from around that time.

Novel THREE: Accidentally Planned
Synopsis: Lucinda is a former wedding planner turned photographer, escaping the debacle of her last horribly planned wedding. When she finds out her twin brother is impulsively getting married and needs a planner, Lucinda is thrown for a loop (oy vey!). She meets a man though, he sweeps her off her feet and makes her believe that there's still a planner in her yet.
Result: It was definitely the longest of the three novels. That's all I can say about that.

Joe Spann Runs the Meat Counter

She purses her lips and surveys
her surroundings.
She knows something feels off.
A tension hangs above them
like a trickster fog waiting
for an inevitable crash.
She gropes around for a safe
handle, he stands still, hidden,
waiting for her to crash.

It must be satisfying to know
your country will be fine
so long as blacks don't 
lose they minds,
my great grand father muses
as he carefully folds the missus'
pork tenderloin in crisp white
papers. Individually. Taking care
not to touch the meat.

"You washed you hands,
didn't you, boy?" she asks
nervously.
"Yes'm"
Being head-nigger-in-charge
is hard enough without
some nervous ninny standing
over you.

"Where's Charles? He usually
takes care of this." She wrings
her hands and looks around the
butcher shop.
"Mr. Jeffries stepped out and
 left me in charge."
My great grandfather says this
more to himself than to her.

I'm in charge. 
And you will be fine. You will
all be fine so long as I stay 
behind this counter and do 
what I'm s'posed to do. 
"Anything else for you today?"
She shakes her head. 'That's all."

And Now We Take You to Libya. . .

"That girl who was stripped by army officers 
didn't just reveal her body but she revealed 
the brutality and atrocities carried out by the army."
The television is still on as she sinks down to the bed.
These are thing her husband never notices.
He will make love to her to any background noise,
it doesn't bother him, knowing that the whole world
is still alive.
She knows that things are still alive and lurking,
villains still haunt small village and large squares.
While he nuzzles her neck, her hand gropes the
darkness for a controller.

"ABC (aka Human Communication), It's Easy as 1, 2, ..."

            “It’s not cool to hate contemporary country music.” So goes the explicit thesis of Chuck Klosterman’s essay “Toby Over Moby,” in his pop-criticism collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. While I don’t know if I can completely agree with his argument (of the small sample of current country music I hear in passing [radio, shopping center background noise, CMT Sunday morning music video flip-throughs, etc.] the overwhelming majority of it seems to promote a consciousness dominated by what many conservatives refer to as the “3-G paradigm” of guns, God, and gays [the first two entities being fervently supported and the last being adamantly opposed]. This paradigm does not lead to me “hating” country music or the people who make it, per se, but it makes me uncomfortable in a way similar to how a vegetarian would feel if (s)he took a part-time job working at a butcher’s shop. It provokes me to accept an attitude of “live and let live, and maybe I’ll even periodically take part in your aesthetic norms while we cohabitate, but when it comes to aligning myself with your tastes, I’ll pass”), Klosterman makes an interesting closing remark that addresses “high-” and “low-” brow art and how it addresses and affects/reflects the intellectual lives of its connoisseurs:

“But whenever I go back to my hometown and see the people I grew up with—many of whom are still living the same life we all had twelve years ago as high school seniors—I realize that I was very much the exception. Lots of people (in fact, most people) do not dream about morphing their current life into something dramatic and cool and metaphoric. Most people see their life as a job that they have to finish; if anything, they want their life to be less complicated than it already is. They want their life to only have one meaning. So when they imagine a better existence, it’s either completely imaginary (i.e., Toby [Keith]’s nineteenth-century Lone Ranger fantasy) or staunchly practical (i.e., [Trisha] Yearwood’s description of the girl who just wants to get married without catching static from her old man). The reason Garth Brooks and Shania Twain have sold roughly 120 million more albums than Bob Dylan and Liz Phair is not because record buyers are all a bunch of blithering idiots; it’s because Garth and Shania are simply better 

at expressing the human condition. They’re less talented, but they understand more people.”         (184)

What fascinates me most about this declaration is not what it says about country music and the people who make and listen to it. In fact, I think this statement has little to nothing to do with music at all. Instead, Klosterman is drawing a philosophical line in the Jersey Shore sand; he’s saying that there are roughly two kinds of people in the world.

  1.     Those who see reality/living/the world as something inherently simple that should be enjoyed and/or toughed out.

  2.      Those who see reality/living/the world as something inherently complex that should be analyzed and/or suffered (and enjoyed if there is any time left over after the analyzing and suffering. And there’s never any time left over [trust me]).

Klosterman uses music to categorize these types of people (People in Group 1 listen to contemporary country, and maybe bluegrass and folk, and maybe Top 40 in their cars. People in Group 2 listen to classical and jazz, and maybe classic and/or progressive rock, and maybe blues while they ride their bikes to work), but who these people are as thinking and feeling human beings is more important to me than what kind of music they listen to in their free time. Klosterman doesn’t give us any hints as to what contributes to the psycho-social makeup of people in Groups 1 and 2, and thus we are left to speculate on our own.

           

I suppose I have to preface my following thoughts by saying that I am a Group 2 person who openly wants to be a Group 1 person. I’ll call myself a Group -2 person (since I’m in Group 2 but don’t find it a positive character trait). For the most part I find reality/living/the world to be incredibly complicated and filled with unforeseeable joys and sorrows, most of which come and go without the input of human beings. I think too much, I overanalyze everything, and, perhaps proving Klosterman a visionary, I like listening to classical and jazz music because their frenetic structures and executions remind me of my thought life. When I listen to country and most popular music, I find myself agitated that more isn’t “getting done”; I find myself reaching the end of a country or pop song and wondering why the artist didn’t leave room in the 3-minute track for an impassioned improvisation. In the end, I suppose I listen to the lovely simplicity of much good country music and quietly think to myself “This is all too good to be true.”

While many contemporary writers and critics (almost all of them undoubtedly Group 2 people), write to bolster the identity and power of Group 2 (and, at the same time, express complete contempt for Group 1), this is not my purpose. Many Group 2 people are intellectual and cultural snobs who think Group 1 people are philistines because they didn’t go to a liberal arts college somewhere on a coast. In short, many Group 2 people think Group 1 people would be Group 2 people if they had more intelligence and/or taste and/or class. I find many Group 2 people (including myself) to be disillusioned, bitter, depressed quasi-narcissists. On the flipside, I find many Group 1 people to be hopeful (even though the hope often seems misguided), happy, ambitious quasi-narcissists (but is my perception of Group 1 and 2 people skewed because I’m a Group 2 person?).

            

Third-tier (I think that’s the lowest) academia trained me to be an analytical, critically thinking, socially-conscious human being, and for this I am grateful (pre-college my ideology was soaked in Protestant heteronormativity, Midwestern racism, and Coca-Cola). But in the process of aiding my intellectual and artistic growth, academia also trained me to be a staunch Group 2 person. It said, “You need to be analytical, and people who are truly analytical overanalyze [just in case regular analysis isn’t enough]. You need to be a critical thinker, and the best critical thinkers are those who most brutally criticize themselves and everything they hold dear. You need to be socially-conscious, and the people who are most conscious of others are unconscious of themselves.”

            

As much as I want to be a Group 1 person sometimes, I have recently realized that one of the most traumatizing parts of being a Group 2 person is that there is no going back (I don’t like the notion that going from Group 1 to Group 2, as Klosterman kind of alludes to, means going “forward”, while going from Group 2 to Group 1 means going “backward”). Once someone tells you that reality/life/the world is fractured, relativistic, and meaninglessly flawed, and you even remotely believe it (maybe because you have to get a good grade in a course or complete a certain advanced degree program), it seems impossible to coherently make sense of things like a Group 1 person. As a wise colleague of mine once said, “School [the heart/brain of Group 2 culture] teaches you many ways to take things apart, but it never teaches you how to put them back together again.”

            

I want a way to put things back together again. I think most Group 2 people who are happy being Group 2 people take a certain kind of joy in intellectual/political/social cacophony; they look at a box of scattered puzzle pieces and say, “So what? Maybe they weren’t meant to be put together.” I see the same puzzle pieces and say, “What’s the bigger picture?” Group 2 culture says there is no bigger picture, or that each piece is its own bigger picture, or that only Group 1 people search for a bigger picture because they’re too stupid/afraid/dependent-on-the-system to accept the individual pieces in all their random, incomplete glory. These ideas aren’t working for me any more than my childhood militant-Group-1 upbringing did [i.e, The scattered puzzle pieces aren’t actually scattered at all. They form a complete picture that you can’t see because you aren’t looking correctly or you misbehaved or you’ve been over-influenced by evil members of Group 2]. Group 2 culture took my peace of mind and I want it back (preferably without having to leave my small niche in Group 2; adapting to a Group 1/Group 2-hybrid could be even lonelier than living in Group 2).

           

In the end, I know that people can never be broken down into two simple groups (That’s too Group 1 of a thing to do. But does recognizing the flaws of dualism confirm my status as a member of Group 2?) Human beings always exist on a continuum of infinite possibilities, and this makes for infinite frustration as well as infinite potential. Hip-hop artist Mos Def was on point when he called his life a “beautiful mess.” But what do we do when we want to clean up the mess (even just a little)? Do we risk disrupting the beauty? And all of this gets me wondering: is there a Klosterman-numbered group for people who prefer hip-hop music to country and jazz?