Category: blog

[estimated reading time 4 minutes]

I hear a lot of people speak about being at peace with your life lately. That’s a very important thing to do. It’s often people who have just discovered Buddhist teachings. Sadly, many of these people think of it as a religion rather than what it really is, a set of teachings on how to have a better life in harmony with the world. It’s not about worship or reverence or prayer — those things are definitely the domain of religion. It’s about intention and outcome and walking a pathway from where you are in this moment to where you should be in the next. Making decisions from a place of acceptance.

But that’s where the danger comes in, too. Some people find accepting the world around them extremely hard. Those are the people for who the teaching of acceptance is extremely difficult but just as important as how hard it is to conceptualize. If you can’t accept your current situation, there is no way you can find peace in it. Without peace, all change will be for the worse. Accepting where you are as a starting point makes positive change possible.

More dangerously though is accepting where you are as a destination rather than a starting point. It is important to make where you are today better than where you were yesterday. Being a better person in this moment is vital for progress. And you should certainly be happy and thankful for the fact that you have done that. But being satisfied isn’t useful. You are never perfect. Never good enough. Good, yes. Worth loving and caring for, especially when you’re loving yourself, absolutely. But never enough. No human is. We can always be better. And the day we give up making ourselves better, every day, every choice we make, that’s when we might as well give up and die. Because not trying to be better means we’ve given up on humanity.

So where does this meet intention? Many places but the one that comes up all the time is about death. Killing. Slaughtering living beings. There is an absolute prohibition on causing death in the precepts. I would suggest that this is indeed the foundation for all Buddhist teachings — life, all life, is interconnected and to cause harm of any sort, not just death, is to hurt all life, including yourself and those you love.

But, of course, death is a natural part of existence. If I build a house, I am certain to cause harm to insects living in the ground. If I grow vegetables, there will be worms and ants and spiders, also quite possibly larger beings harmed in that process. If I have a window in my home, a bird is likely to eventually fly into it and be hurt. If I have a garbage box, a cat may climb into it and become stuck, dying of suffocation or simply starving to death trapped in the box. These are possibly avoidable but not with any reasonable degree of certainty. We are humans, after all. Our lives are lived on human scales. That means that sometimes we will dig a hole in the ground and crush a worm. Sometimes we will step on a spider on the ground. I don’t mean we are intentionally crushing every bug we see. I mean these things happen. Nobody, least of all a serious Buddhist teacher, even the Buddha himself, is going to tell you that you’re a bad person for these accidental harms caused.

Causing harm is necessary for life, to ourselves and to others. But the point of the teachings is to know the difference between accidental harm and intentional harm. To eliminate intentional harm and minimize accidental harm. So I try to avoid driving over an animal on the road. I buy an electric car and charge it as often as I can from the solar on my roof. I buy locally grown vegetables when I can rather than causing them to be transported large distances. Of course, it’s unreasonable to expect that we can eliminate all sources of harm from our lives. We are duty-bound to do as much as we can. We are not condemned to spend our lives desperately wishing we could do more. Making ourselves miserable is not part of the deal. We do as much as is reasonably possible.

That’s accidental harm. If I hit a badger on the road, it happens. I tried to avoid it. I wasn’t driving too fast, nor was I driving without looking. I didn’t try to hit it. I didn’t drive for the purpose of hitting it. I will certainly cry. I will recite verses for it. But my life will not become all about the death of the badger. I am sad and I am sorry. But causing its death was not my intent and I have to live with that. It will become less troubling in time. (No badgers were actually harmed in the writing of this article.)

But then there are people who cause death by design. They ensure that harm is perpetrated for their pleasure. They cause animals to be hurt, often killed to provide food for them. They not only cause this death but take the products of that harm and put them inside their own bodies. This is not accidental, nor is it cultural. This is simply causing harm to life, causing death. There is no excuse for this behavior. We know better.

So it is vastly important to remember that not every insect we happen to accidentally cause harm is the source of our karmic destruction. And it is just as vital to remember that those things that we cause to happen, such as the pain and death of living beings, are our fault and that we must take responsibility for these actions, if we are aware of them happening, if we benefit from them.

The teachings are in many ways highly subtle and complex. This one is not. It is quite simple and straightforward. Cause no harm intentionally — intend to cause as little harm as possible. If you intent to cause harm, you no longer are following the path. There truly are moral absolutes. There are not many. But here is the most basic. If you cause harm, cause death, cause suffering, you are wrong. Stop doing that. Now. The perhaps you can find the peace you seek. But never before.

[estimated reading time 9 minutes]

What did you find out wasn’t true?

The instant answer that comes to mind is the Torah. But that’s not really the answer to anything. No, of course the story that’s told in there isn’t true. We know that. Ask any non-Orthodox (and even many Orthodox) rabbis if it’s a true story, if it’s history and they’ll immediately tell you it’s not. But, if they’re smart, they’ll tell you it wasn’t meant to be in the first place. It’s far more than a document of prescriptions of law and it’s more than simply literature. It’s the history of a people. But it’s not a history in the modern sense — mostly, I suspect, because the modern idea of history simply didn’t exist when it was written, when it was experienced, when it was spoken. And the people who were meant to be reading it (or hearing it, as often would have been the case) didn’t expect it to be true. They expected it to be something far more important than being true. They needed it to be illuminating.

In the beginning, we understood stories to be told for a purpose. Now, we expect there to be a sharp dividing line between truth and fiction — between journalism and artifice. Which is why we get so angry when someone at the New York Times leads us in a direction that we don’t feel is accurate. It’s why when someone on Fox (as often is the case) spins a story to favor an interpretation that isn’t simply misleading but genuinely racist and xenophobic — I’m not really sure just how much Fox News hates Mexicans but it’s staggering to me just how much they hate the Chinese. It may be more apparent to me, though, as I know few Mexicans, all of who are completely apolitical, but many Chinese. And I’m a wholehearted communist. Not the Maoist variety but at least it’s a lot closer to my idea of how a state should function than the populist mob mentality of contemporary Trump-land.

We scream about fake news and on the other side of the coin whine about cultural appropriation when a piece of self-proclaimed fiction hits too close to home. We talk about journalistic integrity when a reporter speaks accurately instead of telling a story in the way that provokes the intended response. Or the other way around. People complain regardless. It’s what humans do lately, complain and whine. Whining is the new breathing. Perhaps we can start breathing again soon. I don’t hold out much hope for it.

That being said, though, we have to keep a few things in mind. One is that language is fluid. Another is that knowledge is not just cultural but contingent and relative. Perhaps more important than these two, though, is that you can teach something to someone or you can tell someone the truth but you can rarely do both at the same time. If I tell a child that two and two is four, they will soon forget. If I, instead of telling them, give them two blocks and two more, letting them practice, I haven’t told them the truth. I’ve told them a far more complicated story about blocks and counting. But they’ve learned the right answer. That’s the Torah. It’s a teaching tool for how to live a better life.

I know, you’re going to ask me what right I have to talk about this — today or any other day. As a committed secularist, you’re going to say that I shouldn’t be criticizing religious texts. But while I’m committed to secular expressions of ethics and thought, I’m a huge proponent of traditional expressions of understanding those ethics and thoughts. There is very little in western civilization worth keeping. This scroll, however, I would propose as one of the high points.

Let’s start at that beginning. Not Bereshit. I mean, where did it come from? We think of Biblical Hebrew in the same way as we think about Vulgate Latin and Attic Greek. Dead languages, things that aren’t spoken anymore. Things that have structure and form and meaning that never changes. But that’s not even slightly the case. No, the words and grammar don’t change. But the meanings certainly do. I’ll give you an example. Let’s take a word you think you know the meaning of. I’ll use Latin transliteration for anything I’m talking about here to make it easier to read. Adonai. In Latin, that is usually rendered Deo, in Greek Theos. That becomes, in English, God. And that seems altogether simple.

Which is where you’ve become so lost and confused. First, Hebrew, like Chinese, Japanese and many other languages of the near and far east, is a contextual language. That means that words have no meaning outside of their present situation. English is a non-contextual language, like Latin, French, German or Spanish. That’s not the most important differentiation at this point for this example but it’s something to keep in mind. It means that there’s no exact meaning in the mind of the writer that we can pin down for the word Adonai when it’s put on the paper as each time it is written (if you’ve counted them, you’re doing far better than I am). But when you cross the linguistic boundary, things become even more confused. Taking the Hebrew, contextualized version of a word and translating that into English, which has fixed, dictionary-style definitions, then using those translations for each time the word appears, means that you are losing the overtones and context. The flexibility of the language is lost in that programmatic interpretation that takes away the necessity of understanding the place and time it was written, implying that there is a fixed nature to the text.

Beyond that, though, there is a far larger problem. The definition of “God” in the first century of the common era is different from that of the sixteenth century, different from the nineteenth century, extremely different from today. Your definition of it is different from mine is different from my mother’s and yours. So which version is it that you’d like to use. Words don’t remain fixed in their meanings. This is an example that I have selected because it’s hugely obvious that there has been a shift in definition over time. But almost all words have this temporally-contextual quality, even in languages that aren’t inherently or time-independently contextual. In tribal times (I am getting at, in tribal Hebraic times, in the pre-Moses days), any notion of a universalized deity would have been completely anachronistic. Even in the time of the First Temple, such an idea would have been remarkable — the Hebrew God was certainly powerful in their eyes but that didn’t preclude the existence of others. By the time of the revolt of 70CE, such was still much the case in some ways. But the whole notion of deity had been shifted in much of the world — some may say thanks to cultural innovations from India that were permeating the Roman world, some saying that it would have happened anyway. But the notion of deity was dying in the intellectual classes and really only kept around to serve as a placeholder for the masses as a reason to be ethically minded.

There was a shift from active deity as creative force and existing object to archetype and notional entity as a collective representation for all life. This is the Buddhist notion of “all living things” as a collective. In Second Temple times, we could see this as the new secular (the wrong word, as it’s completely anachronistic, yet it’s definitely a good description of cultural life with no more need for deity intervention and the use of temple worship and sacrifice becoming completely culturally motivated rather than belief-focused) version of God. When Christianity three centuries later was grafted onto Roman cult worship, it broke with this trend and that is something that I am happy to discuss at a later time but suffice it to say at this point that I’m going to look at this from a purely linguistic perspective and not pay particular attention to what is or is not useful to take from scripture. (If you’re curious, I believe there is an incredible amount to learn about ethics and history from scripture of all faiths but you may feel free to agree or disagree as you desire.)

I had a discussion today about the problem with Orthodoxy. It’s an interesting issue. Most people have a serious problem with the idea of not doing work on the Sabbath. Not even making music or driving a car. Not that you usually think of those things as doing work but music is, of course, a creative act. A very narrow reading of the Torah prohibits work on the Sabbath, sure. But that is all dependent on a few things — one is your definition of work, another your definition of creation, still another on what the purpose of that prohibition is and whether it is relevant in this environment. If you define work as creation, every act of speech becomes prohibited. Every thought is prohibited. We can’t speak or think on the Sabbath. Which means we have to die after only six days of life. That doesn’t seem sensible. If you define it more broadly, is music any more or less a creative act than speaking? Can you drive if it’s not work? What about reading? While it may not have been two thousand years ago, many school-aged members of society certainly think of it as work now. But this is certainly not my large problem with Orthodoxy.

Nor is it the notion of gender segregation. My problem with that, of course, as I have discussed at length in writing many times is not that people believe that woman and man should be separated. It’s that people still have the notion that there are actual things such as woman or man that are not simply defined by the culture that has created them. Biological sex is a definite thing, although it’s only one (and often a very unhelpful) way of dividing members of a species. When looking at something other than reproduction, it’s often more misleading and not a source of anything useful. But the segregation in an Orthodox shul is no more troubling to me than the identification of one person as “he” and another as “she”. It’s the same problem — division of humans by an arbitrary and silly procedure.

The real problem that I have with Orthodox belief is in the fixed and defined nature of scripture (or of anything). This is certainly not restricted to Orthodox Judaism — it is true of fundamentalist Christianity or Islam, for example, among other things. The notion that the meaning of a text is fixed, unchanging, even if the words themselves are not fluid, is nothing but a misinterpretation of how language works.

We use language as a shorthand for the communication of thoughts and understanding. If you are speaking to someone, you can say the same words on ten consecutive days and they will hear ten different things. You could record yourself saying them so the source would be identical and they would still hear ten different things. The context is important. So if you are reading a passage — let’s take the first verse of both the Torah and its inclusion in the Christian Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” I know, there are many different versions of this but this is probably the one most of you know best so I’ll use that. Taking the important words here just to start, we have “beginning”, “God”, “create”, “heaven” and “earth”. There are some interesting things to be said about words like “and” and “the” but we’ll leave that aside for any of you who want to take one of my classes on the theory of translation.

I’ll just ask you a few questions to show you where this is going and what it has to do with truth. Is beginning the beginning of time, the beginning of earth’s existence, the beginning of God’s existence, the beginning of recorded history or simply the beginning of the story? Is God a deity or an archetype, the sum of all life, all sentient life, all life current alive or all life that’s ever happened or something else altogether? Do you create simply by making something out of material or by giving it name or by thinking about it or speaking of it or some combination of these? Is heaven a place or an idea, an ideal state of life or something that happens when life disappears? Is earth a planet or a state of being, a place or a period of time? You have answers to some of these, perhaps all of them, in your mind, I suspect. But I can promise you that your answers won’t be the same as everyone else’s. If you aren’t sure the person who wrote those words the first time, the person who spoke them, the person who translated them, the person who edited them (and I say person but I mean the hundreds, thousands in many cases, of each there were) held exactly (and I mean really exactly) the same answers to all of them as you do today, you don’t know what the meaning of that sentence is. One sentence. Out of millions in scripture alone, not to mention all the studies and sermons. Do you really understand this line at all? And if you do, when your understanding of the nature of God or earth or heaven changes, even slightly, were you wrong now or wrong then? What about everyone else? Is everyone wrong but you?

Language is flexible. Truth is a matter of understanding and is contextual, time-dependent. My truth isn’t yours and yours isn’t mine. It can’t be. We can try to understand each other and I certainly hope we will continue to. The Torah is a stunning example of how a teaching tool can be relevant for thousands upon thousands of years to untold generations. As long as we don’t forget that it’s a teaching tool.

The point of faith isn’t to answer questions. It’s to ask them. We will only ever understand the world around us and how to live better by asking the right questions and hoping that our answer in this moment is better than our answer yesterday. Of course, tomorrow we must search for a better answer than today’s. That’s what life is for. To ask a better question and search for a better answer.

Perhaps a better truth?

[estimated reading time 5 minutes]

Two thirds of the way into this, I’m going to talk a bit more about why it’s important to write every day but I shall start with something I was going to leave until the end. It’s been long enough. I mentioned at the beginning where this month-long daily writing/blogging challenge came from. Yuki Tejima writes a fairly new blog entitled Book Nerd Tokyo. Being a fellow translator and from an immigrant Japanese-North-American background, I find her work highly relatable and her reflections on contemporary Japanese literature to be absolutely spot-on. I’d highly recommend anyone with an interest in modern lit to follow her blog and go back and read the back issues when you get a chance. You’ll likely find some books you didn’t already know about and good places to go and discover more if you happen to be in the Tokyo area any time soon.

Anyway, she did a month-long writing challenge to coincide with Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), which I’ve done several times before — as a novelist and a poet but never as an academic or teaching tool. I was inspired but I spent the last couple of months of last year in a rather medically-unfit state to be committing to any projects, writing or otherwise. I told myself that I would follow her example, though, in the new year, when I was again capable of putting fingers to keys (does anyone use pens anymore for anything other than outdated forms and the creation of visual art?) take it up and get it done. Being twenty days into the challenge now, I have a few pre-finishing reflections to share.

Writing every day is important. Whether you’re an academic writer or just looking to explore writing as a hobby — or if it’s a profession you’re deep into or just beginning — you owe it to yourself to write something every day. That doesn’t mean that what you write every day needs to be five thousand words or make it into your next book or formal article. Certainly not. If we each wrote that kind of volume, it would be wonderful but I suspect we would quickly run out of things to say or ways to say it. Perhaps not. But if you write a thousand or two words of new material, that’s a good start. Write a blog post, something self-reflective. Something creative. Write some poems. Write a group of couplets (please, not rhyming, for the sake of all that is peaceful in the world) and keep going. But here’s my advice. Don’t just write for the sake of putting words on the screen. Write something that has depth and meaning to you and make sure it sounds good to your ears. If a sentence sounds like crap, you can certainly go back and fix it later. But this isn’t a first draft of anything. This is what it is. If it takes you ten minutes to get a sentence right before you move on, so be it. Maybe you’ll only write one sentence today. Make it a good one and write another one tomorrow — you might write two. Give yourself the goal of making whatever you write something you feel is worth being shared. Because writing for yourself, realistically, is a massive waste of time and effort.

Some people really enjoy writing a journal or keeping a diary. Most people just do it because they think they should and that there’s some value in it intrinsically. There isn’t. If it gives you pleasure, that’s fine. But writing for an audience is what’s going to make your writing improve. If you write for yourself, there’s no pressure or reason to make it better with each passing day. Write for the public and you’ll always be striving for improvement. It won’t always come and it will never come quickly enough that you are satisfied by it. But that’s what taking up a craft is all about and what making art is. You make things for an audience and each thing is a learning experience. Writing every day is an excuse to be a better writer. Whether all you’ve got is ten minutes or can devote a couple of hours to it, every minute helps, truly.

One other thing to keep in mind. You’re writing for an audience but that doesn’t mean you have to connect with one. Giving yourself an audience means that you will make your writing the best it can be — making sure there are no glaring errors, choosing your words carefully, being insightful rather than just trying to hit a word count. If it takes you a week to write a single post, sure, no problem. More isn’t necessarily better. Better is better. But this doesn’t mean that you need to invite criticism (or praise). I have no interest in what others think of my writing. Sure, I’ll read the reviews of my books when they’re published but when it comes to the things that I write on my blog, it’s a blog. They’re not perfect. They’re not meant to be. They’re as good as I can manage in a short period of time and they’re written to be consumed in the spirit of a one-sided conversation. I’m not asking for a response or a comment. I’m putting them out there. Much like how I write poetry. I’m not writing poetry for the people who don’t like my poetry. I’m writing it for the people who like it. They can read it and enjoy it. The ones who don’t, I’m not trying to convince them of anything. They can read someone else’s. It’s their choice. What I don’t care about is why they don’t want to read mine or what they want me to change.

If you listen to your critics every day, you’ll just become miserable and think your writing sucks. It might, sure, but you’re working on it and getting better. Someone learning to draw in primary school doesn’t need the neighborhood artists critiquing each drawing. You (and I) don’t need the internet troll crew destroying our reason for writing. There will be people out there who read what you write and some of them will enjoy it. That’s who you’re writing for.

Of course, you would be well advised to seek some assistance with your writing, especially if you’re just starting out. I teach writing. It’s what I do. My translation work is academic and secondary. My job is to teach people how to write and how to write better. But that doesn’t mean I stick my foot in other people’s business. I teach the people who ask me — whether in my classes or just people who find me and ask questions. I will offer suggestions and opinions when requested and only when requested. Being an expert in something means you know enough to talk about something intelligently and know when to stop. Being an asshole means you don’t care if you have anything to say, you can’t shut up. Avoid the assholes — even if they’re intelligent, which they rarely are.

To close, though, I just want to say another thank-you to Tejima-san for her inspirational writing prompts (and those who inspired her to do it in the first place, although I will let you go and discover her inspirations directly) and to those (far more than I imagined) who have read these daily reflections. I know I usually write poetry and about social justice issues and I may indeed return to those posts once this challenge is completed but I’m hoping to continue to write far more frequently, not just the examples I create for my students but articles on here. Perhaps I’ll take the daily writing examples I create for class and put them here, too, rather than just on the class pages. Shall have to give that some thought. Anyway, until the next reflection, Sato out.

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

Where would you start telling your story?

In the beginning was the word. The word, in fact, was immigration. That may sound rather odd, since I’m not what anyone would call an immigrant. But my mother was. My father, in fact, one might say also was, since the borders of the country he was born in weren’t finalized until a few months before his birth but, technically speaking, it was a few months before he was born rather than after. In her early twenties, though, my mother came to Canada for the first time and soon met my father — teachers at first sight, one might say. The rest isn’t so much history as failed attempts at birth-focused procreation followed by mindbendingly useless paperwork to gain custody of a child put up for adoption. Two, if you really want to get technical about it. But my sister came along years later and we’re not at that part of the story yet. Ten years, many liquified trees and the same unreasonable dose of government bureaucracy later that is typical of a western country with its makework projects and seemingly unlimited lack of understanding of the uselessness of office work. By nineteen-eighty-two, though, they had waded through the generic hoops long enough that they were the proud and joyful recipients of a phone call informing them that they would have to make a lengthy trip to collect their pound (four of them, realistically, making me a rather tiny child) of flesh. And they did.

That’s not the only beginning, though. Let’s look at it another way. It wasn’t young love. It was young lust. An inability to think coupled with an inability to put down the (many more than four pounds of) flesh. The eighties were a time of sexual abandon. I don’t mean people abandoned sex. I mean they abandoned everything else. Drugs and rock and roll certainly had their place in society, much as they had in the previous couple of decades. But more than anything, the eighties were a decade populated (and repopulated endlessly) with a freedom not just to sleep with someone with or without marriage or commitment but to do so as often and as vigorously as possible. One might say that the sixties were a competition to be the most free, the seventies were a competition to be the most cool and the eighties were a competition to be the most fucked. Certainly throughout a lot of human history, especially in the twentieth century and beyond, sex has been used to sell and convince, manipulate and coerce. But in the eighties, it was no longer subtle and it didn’t need to be. For the first time, female sexuality wasn’t seen as a threat but something to be rejoiced in and male sexuality was exactly what male sexuality had always been — possessive, violent, coercive, aggressive and compulsive. Along with obsessive. Female sexuality just happened to be given permission to catch up.

What happened wasn’t so much a sexual revolution as a procreative free-for-all. Add to that a brutally stupid society that didn’t accept the necessity of birth control, sexual education and abortions and you get what I usually refer to as the late-century rabbit effect. Boy-craziness, bouncing and babies abounded. Mothers less so. Sure, mothers in the biological sense of the word but this was the beginning of the helicopter-parenting generation where children could easily identify their teachers but forgot their mothers’ faces rather quickly. No longer was it hard for kids to go to school for the first day — they’d been left alone most of their lives and by that point in time were old hands at the whole leaving-the-nest thing. Not that mothers shouldn’t be completely free to work or feel any pressure to stay at home with their children. But someone should take care of them. This isn’t a question of gender or social roles. This is a question of the fact that large-group education of preschoolers doesn’t work and babysitting leads to criminality. If you want a study on this, there are thousands. I’ll just leave it at the fact that the largest determiner of criminal behavior later in life isn’t race or gender or social status. It’s preschool education. Of course, the ability to acquire the time to take care of children one-on-one or one-on-three rather than one-on-fifteen-or-thirty has a lot to do with economic status and we can certainly blame inept governments and social programs for that. But it doesn’t mean that every family needs to have one parent stay at home with the children — or that any family does, for that matter. But preschool education needs to be individual and constant with no more than three or four children, not only per adult but per space — open play areas are all well and good but children need to be safe and within a single space where they can develop a feeling of safety and security centered on a single adult figure and, potentially, a very small group of other children, whether their own age or similar.

Anyway, this is all to say that two extremely young people decided that instead of being responsible adults, they’d stick parts of their bodies into each other without either protection or birth control and then compounded their error by not taking the most sensible course of action and terminating the pregnancy once it occurred. And we’re talking teenagers here. This wasn’t a place for careful deliberation and planning just having slightly slipped up once. This was simply lack of education and societal assumptions that not talking about something would make it go away. Young people in our culture are pressured more and more to have sex. They’re absolutely going to. If we talk about safer sex, they might do it. If we don’t talk about it, they’re going to have just as much sex, just without the precautions. If we don’t talk about abortions, they don’t stop happening. They just happen in unsafe ways and the people who should be taking advantage of them to save themselves from truly unpleasant experiences are the small minority who don’t get access to them or end up suffering through unnecessary pain and trauma — often referred to as pregnancy and childbirth — without understanding that these things are optional. This is inexcusable in our age — or even in our grandparents’ age, for that matter. Gone are the days when this is anything other than a political issue of conservative silliness. If you don’t want to have an abortion, don’t. Much like if you don’t want to have a tattoo or a piercing, don’t. But standing in someone else’s way is like saying to someone with a lung infection, tough it out, antibiotics weren’t created for people to use, especially not people who did dangerous things like going outside and breathing dirty air. See my point about the silliness? Yes. I thought so.

Nine months after the backseat nightfest, I was become flesh and bone. It was a little more gradual than that, of course, but if you’re adult enough to be reading stuff on the internet, you’re also adult enough to know how a baby forms. Either that or you should be and I blame the school system if you don’t know how a mammalian embryo develops, as that’s a fundamental piece of knowledge that any five year old should have a pretty good grasp of at the basic level and any fifteen year old should have a detailed understanding of. I’m told that when I was born, I didn’t cry or scream or really make any noises — except the rather obvious lung-clearing ones, given nine months of existing in bodily fluids and suddenly coming into contact with the air. That’s not surprising, though. I’ve never been much for loud noises or being noticed. It hasn’t stopped other people from noticing me, sadly. But I’ve definitely tried pretty hard to make it happen. I don’t know which hospital this happened in, nor do I particularly care. Or which city, for that matter. I know where the agency was where I was collected but it’s just down the road from an airport and nobody ever really asked much in the way of questions. Mostly because it simply doesn’t matter.

I had a family, not for the second time but for the first. And I was happy. As were my parents. They were absolutely overjoyed, in fact. They had spent their whole adult lives desperately seeking children and they had succeeded despite governmental roadblocks and societal judgment about “natural birth” and “being fertile” being hot topics in that time — and still today for some reason, as if a child who’s adopted wasn’t born naturally or from a place of fertility. Usually being so fertile that a child appears unexpectedly is half the problem and people are obsessed beyond any reasonable measure with natural birth to the point that that’s the whole reason the child is born rather than aborted. It’s time for these people to either stop being judgmental of adoption or stop fighting against abortion — you can want every potential child to be born or you can want only those who are planned to be born but you can’t want both at the same time because they’re mutually exclusive. Not every person who gets pregnant wants a child — they either need to be able to give the child to a parent who wants one or to terminate the pregnancy. I would suggest that it’s a basic right to be able to do either but if you’re going to be against one of them, you certainly can’t legitimately be against both.

So I was brought home in one of those typically-eighties infant car seats in the back of a little Honda (yes, I know, late-seventies Hondas were pretty shit but Japanese cultural traditions die hard and, hey, they’re pretty sweet rides now), a dozen hours and as many pit stops later. There was certainly more story to be told but as I was settled into a crib and the nighttime lullabies began from both my parents, I couldn’t possibly have had any doubt that I had, indeed, found my people. For the first time, I could close my eyes.

Of course, then and for the rest of my life, sleeping for more than about an hour or two in a stretch was realistically impossible and my parents, who had far more typically human sleep cycles, would be tortured for years by the sleep depravation that being around me at night tends to engender. Again, though, a story for another day — one with more snoring and nightlights, I suspect.

In the beginning the word might have begun as the necessity of immigration for work and marriage for love. But that word quickly (for me, at least, since I didn’t exist through the hard-work phase of the problem) became family. They’re still there. A little older, a lot wiser, far more tired. But my story begins with coming home. Where does yours?

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

When did you pretend not to care?

Every day, I pretend not to care. I have tried many ways to express this — I am not male, I am not masculine, I don’t think like a man. But I look like one. At least, to me, I look like one and often sound like one, too, as my voice is rather deeper than I would prefer it to be. That’s a huge problem for me because no matter how I dress or act, neither of which is realistically very masculine, I am assumed to be male on sight without question. Of course, some people also see me as a woman on sight, often because of the clothes and makeup. But I get the former far more often.

So when this happens, I have to ask myself the question — how much do I want to have to talk about this today, in this moment with this person? There was a time when I would discuss my genderless status with every person I encountered. It is a painful discussion to have, as anyone who has even had to do it once can certainly attest. But to have it a dozen times a day, often far more often, is exhausting and makes me want to hide at home, preferably under blankets and sobbing into my own hair (in the absence of traditional sleeves, which do indeed work as well for wiping sad eyes as is implied in Genji and the like).

Anyone who knows me well is well aware of my absence of gender. But even that is an ongoing battle with my on need to feel comfortable, balancing that need against my need not to be confrontational. When people use words like “he” and “she”, it is almost a physical pain within myself, not my ears but my head, a dull throbbing that feels very much like a sudden change in pressure during a flight. There’s no escaping that until people stop doing it.

The only way people are going to stop doing that is if I constantly explain and remind — especially people who didn’t grow up with an understanding of gender being a completely socially-derived concept that has nothing to do with biology or body parts but is about performance and expectation. How many times have I had a lengthy conversation about why “it” or “they” is acceptable but gendered words are not? How many times has the person looked at me with a blank look of utter confusion, not as a way of rejecting it but clearly unable to comprehend that a word like “he” is as loaded and aggressive a term as those deprecating words used for races or sexual orientation. There is one major difference, though. It is very rare that people use racist terms without knowing that they’re racist. Sometimes they use them without thinking but they are definitely aware of it when they have their attention drawn to it. Even if you are a racist, you know that that’s the content of those words.

Gender, though, that is a very confusing one for most people. They think that gender is something that is connected to biological sex. It’s not. Biological dimorphism is certainly a thing but we are differentiated not simply by sexual traits. You could classify humans in any number of ways and the differences would be just as obvious and just as biological. You could group people into classifications by hair color, by skin color, by height, by bone density, by face shape, by blood type. All of these are biologically deterministic markers of differentiation that would be quite easy to divide humans into — those who have A-type blood and those who have O-type blood (and I am aware there are several others but I’m just using this as an example) are easy to separate and have distinct medical profiles. Those who have high bone density are easily separable from those with low bone density and their health concerns are different, growth patterns varied, etc. There are many things that you can determine about someone’s body by their hormonal balance (their biological sex) but just as many that can be determined by many other genetically-determined division markers. Why have we as a society normalized sexual dimorphism as a basis for constructing expectations for behavior? Mostly because it provided a convenient way for one half of the population to own and subjugate the other and, once that was programmed in for enough generations, the subjugated half accepted that and this balance remains to this day — how many people who identify as women fit the stereotype of love-obsessed, man-crazy wedding-focused child producers? Many. Not all, by any stretch of the imagination. But a huge proportion, maybe even as many as half, even a hundred years after democratic emancipation in many western countries.

That basic lesson in historical cultural dimorphism aside, the older you are, in general, the more difficult it is for you to understand that your idea of linking physical sex and societal gender has no basis in objective reality. For example, my parents love me deeply and always have. And they make a serious effort to call me “it” or “they” (most genderless people prefer “they” but I prefer “it” for reasons that I can certainly explain if that confuses anyone) but they don’t know why it hurts so much. And they frequently, when not making such a concerted effort, call me by gendered words. So when they are talking to their friends, for example, they might not think to call me “it” — in fact, they have told me on several occasions that their friends seem to judge them as disrespectful of their child when they use genderless words to refer to me and they don’t want to come across as unkind. I have many friends who are religious leaders, too, and they more than most seem to have a lot of difficulty making genderless references to people the norm, even when talking about or to someone like me, who has openly expressed a preference for it. In the case of Jewish and Christian leaders, I suspect this has something to do with the fact that they have a gendered notion of divinity and find it difficult to think of humanity in a genderless way. In the case of Buddhist and Hindu leaders, I suspect it has something to do far more with the notion of the separation of religious communities by gender in a historical sense — still today, there is an awkward problem whenever I visit a Buddhist temple that the scholars are separated into “monks” and “nuns”, neither of which is an appropriate place for me to be situated and it is even more awkward for me to go to temple at an Orthodox synagogue or, perhaps more throughly difficult, a mosque, almost all of which are gender-segregated with no place for those who don’t have one — seriously, if you haven’t seen my passport or birth certificate, it legit has an X in the gender box, something that has caused me untold questions in immigration lines, I can assure you.

So I pretend it’s not a big deal. There are other, far larger questions. For example, it doesn’t show that people I care about don’t care about me. There’s no need for me to turn every conversation into one about gender identity — I don’t want to have the conversation and I’m sure other people get quickly rather tired of it. Yes, we need to fix the issue that people aren’t using genderless terms automatically but that is something that will take time and it will, more importantly, take cultural change that hasn’t happened and that most people don’t seem to want to make happen. I can’t fix this problem, even for those directly around me, without driving them completely crazy on a constant basis, unless the cultural norms themselves shift and those linguistic and behavioral standards recondition the people who are (usually inadvertently) causing me pain with their speech and writing.

Most people, I have noticed, pretend to care. I believe that’s probably the most recognizable trait of the modern idea of relationship — two people who have completely different goals and dreams, ways of life and interest, pretending to be interested in each other for more than the stability of the relationship and the sexual contact that comes from it. There’s a line from a movie, although I can’t for anything remember which one — and I’ve searched but the internet is often lacking, as it is at this time. “Boys dance with girls so they’ll have sex with them. Girls sleep with boys so they’ll dance with them.” It’s not necessarily true in terms of the gender roles or specifically relating to dance but it’s absolutely the norm in modern relationships where there’s an expectation of commitment, a forgiveness of infidelity, a general understanding that friends will be independent and together-time will often be relegated only to planned dates and sexual encounters and a premium put not on quiet time or peace but on “emotional space” apart from partners. People are pretending to care when what they really want is a stable partnership with the additional option (implied necessity?) of sexuality.

Me, though, I have to pretend not to care. Not about people — I care very deeply about those I am close to, definitely more than most do. I make up for that caring by having an absolute lack of interest in the general public. I will help people, certainly, strangers included. But I don’t care what people outside my close friend network think or feel or do. I pretend not to care that the words from the mouths and fingers of the people I am closest to hurt me deeply. I pretend not to care that they don’t understand how vital it is to me to be accepted without the expectations or viewpoints of gender. Because if I don’t pretend, my whole life becomes about it and my whole relationship with everyone in my life becomes an ongoing and repetitive discussion of my lack of gender. And that’s something I wouldn’t want to put anyone through, including myself.

Shakespeare is vastly overrated. But he did get one thing right — all the world, indeed, is a stage and we are nothing but players. We pretend to care, pretend not to care, pretend to be many things throughout our lives, often shifting minute to minute. Some days, I just have to accept that either I’m going to fight or I’m going to be fitted into categories of “woman” and “man” in people’s minds. Someday people may stop thinking of the world in a divided way. Someday we may also have outposts in Alpha Centauri. I wouldn’t put money on which will come first, though, but if you want to insist, I’d have to expect the second.

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

Tell me about silence.

Silence is what happens when you express your love for yourself. I am happiest when it is silent. That’s when I can breathe, when I can think, when I can be happy alone.

I live in an apartment. While that’s a fairly common thing to do, it’s not by choice — it’s not that I don’t want to live in an apartment but that I don’t want to live in this apartment. It’s incredibly badly built with thin walls, drafty windows and no noise isolation. So I’m always cold and it’s never quiet. It’s a painful way to live. As some of you may be aware, I spent a relatively long time without a home, living in my car — for many reasons, most of which were because I had become too ill to work but couldn’t get government assistance to have a place to live that I wouldn’t have to share with others, which is an impossibility for someone like me, who truly cannot spend large amounts of time with anyone else due to my mental state. It was in many ways a far better situation than what I am currently experience and in other ways, it was a complete disaster.

Firstly, it’s not really feasible to cook and eat when living in a car. Beyond that, not being able to stretch out to sleep often results in long-term pain. But this is where it was a huge improvement — silence. A car isn’t a perfectly sound-isolated box, as you have certainly experienced with the road noise when driving on the highway. But it’s intended to be one, within the limits of material and weight constraints. While you’ll certainly have a lot of humming and the like when you’re doing a hundred kilometers per hour with gas burning constantly in front of you, that same noise isolation works far better when you’re not moving. It might feel like you can hear far too much outside when you’re in your car but you quickly realize just how much was being blocked out the moment you open your door and step into the world.

It’s certainly not a perfect solution and you have to actually go and park in a place that’s relatively quiet to start with but the peace that comes from sitting in the car, half an hour outside the city where the noises are few and far between already. It’s a perfect place to meditate — also a great place to work.

I have tried to solve the silence problem in various ways but none of them have been effective in the least. White noise blocks out the outside noise but I have to make it so loud that after a few hours my ears are ringing from the volume. Noise-cancelling headphones block out most of it but they’re either so painful to wear, if they’re in-ear headphones, because of the pressure they create by sealing to the sides of your ear canals, or they are heavy enough to give me a headache and sore neck, if they are the over-ear variety. The obvious solution, of course, would be to get my neighbors to shut up and stop playing loud video games and movies but if you know anything about western society, you’ll be well aware that people will very quickly become angry if you try to get them to be quiet at any point, even at nine at night when I’m lying in bed wondering why I can’t sleep as sounds of gunshots and explosives echo through the wall from the latest FPS on the other side.

They say silence is golden but it’s not that simple. Silence gives us something that we need that’s beyond relaxation. I can write in silence or think in silence. So can we all, unless we can’t do those things at all, which I am rather afraid in the age of Trump, we’re giving up on — not that we don’t have the ability but that the desire is seen as so shameful that we decide to forget how. Silence gives us the opportunity to speak and that, while not strictly silence at all, is absolutely necessary to learn. If I didn’t have the absence of noise into which to ask a question, how could I ever expect to receive an answer? If the person I ask doesn’t have the silence into which to speak in return, what use was my question?

There is an ancient Buddhist tale that is quite likely artificial but beautiful nonetheless about the Buddha standing in front of his followers and they ask him a series of questions, one at a time. His response to each of them is, loosely translated, “that’s an excellent question — what are your thoughts?”. What the story is getting at is that, given the silence, the opening to think for ourselves, we already know what’s right.

There’s a similar story in the Tanakh where Elijah has two identical conversations with God. In the first conversation, God asks Elijah something that loosely becomes “what do you want me to do about it?” and gets a reply like “just fix it, you’re all-powerful”. So God sends fire and earthquakes, wind and rain and stones crack and the world shakes and then it’s over and life hasn’t changed in the slightest. So the conversation is repeated verbatim. There are many lessons that can be taken from this but I think the most important is the same as what we’ve already discovered. The answers to our questions come out of the silence of thinking — the opportunity to think gives us two things, the first being that we can find the question, the second that we can hear the answer, whether that answer comes from within ourselves or from the friend we’ve asked to teach us.

Silence is the foundation for learning. If the thoughts running through our minds are full of expectation and certainty, there is no space, no silence into which a new thought can be brought to life. If we’re not prepared to listen to another point of view, there is no possibility for learning, for change. Things can’t get better.

Life is pretty bad. It’s mostly about pain and misery. That’s not to say that there’s no happiness, no enjoyment. But all things end, whether they’re good or bad. Most of the time, when a bad thing ends, we just ignore it and find something new to complain about. When a good thing ends, we blame everything from ourselves to others to supernatural forces — how could my child die? It must have been the devil. It wasn’t the devil. It was disease or a drunk driver. It’s no less painful, no less sad, but we as humans are focused on the negative impacts of things in our lives. That doesn’t mean we should ignore them or that we should only focus on the positive. That’s also no way to live. If we don’t focus on the negative, we can never fix it. But we have to be aware that we are biased in that direction and understand that it’s not unfair that bad things happen, not some punishment for our thoughts or desires. It’s what happens, good and bad.

What’s the point? Things can always get worse and they can always get better. They will do both. If you want to make positive change, you have to be open to listen to the silence into which new ideas and new thoughts can flow. You have to have silence within yourself to think, to understand, to change your beliefs and learn new things. You have to have silence in the world to get to the point where there are new ideas and concepts and cultures and histories and futures that you haven’t already thought of. That’s not to say that you should invite criticism or that all ideas are created equal. Most aren’t. I don’t have any desire to listen to the great masses tell me things. But I am also not stupid enough to think that I already have the answers to all my questions. I ask many questions and get many answers.

Whether the answer is right or not, that’s beside the point. You have to have the silence within yourself to figure out what it is that needs to change and what you need to learn, to know, to understand to get there. Without help, we will just enter downward spirals and eventually die without ever getting better. With help, especially help that we are prepared to ask for from those we care about and who care about us, we can change our lives — and some of that change will indeed be positive.

I try to do myself the favor, give myself the gift of spending at least an hour or two a day in complete silence. I would, given the opportunity, spend far more time that way but I try to go and sit in a place where there will be no real noise, no unexpected sounds, and let myself drink in the silence that renews my thoughts and shows me the places where the silence should be filled with questions, answers, doubts and change. You may not need as much silence in your life as I do. But we all need some and most of us go from sound to sound, fearing silence as we fear the Spanish Flu and whichever new virus is floating around because of generic human stupidity.

Do yourself a favor and shut up from time to time — turn off the music and the television, go somewhere free from noise and interruption and learn to live with yourself, seeing inside your mind and exploring your own thoughts. You don’t have to spend all day doing it but it will give you a perspective on the world that you never had before. Every day, my viewpoint changes. Every moment of silence is a beautiful gift that can’t be taken away once it’s over. Out of that silence, happiness can flow. Perhaps it’s time to give it a chance?

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

It’s Valentine’s Day. If that’s not a concept you’re familiar with, let’s summarize it for you. The name comes from a Christian saint that nobody really cares about in the least because, realistically, he didn’t do anything worth talking about and is filling out the already-massive named saints list that is mostly populated with questionable figures who shouldn’t have qualified for an acknowledgement by their high school principal, much less an international religious organization. That, however, appears to be much the point of such organizations, turning useless people into role model figures to perpetuate their own influence. Rather sad, when they have so much power to do good in a world sadly lacking yet use it to expand dogma and supernatural silliness. A thought for another day, though. Onward we go — this is a day when a capitalist west has done what it does best, creating a reason for people to spend money or feel guilty not spending it. If you don’t demonstrate in an expensive and time-consuming way, everyone from your beloveds to your friends will feel left out and ignored, something that I have spent most of my life trying to achieve but apparently something that is not on the positive side of most humans’ experiences. You could go to a massive amount of trouble and put in the effort to make touching expressions of compassion and love. And I think that would be a very useful holiday.

Enter the Walmart generation, however, and you see gaudy pink hearts and overpriced chocolates, oversized flower baskets and perhaps the year’s most hypersentimentalized greeting cards. All in all, the laziness of people in the west is matched only by their all-consuming desire to be made to feel special. What is lacking in effort and work is quickly made up for by the application of huge amounts of money — if you can get away with flowers, chocolate and greeting cards under a hundred bucks, you’ll be doing pretty well and since this is completely additional compared to the already-mindless consumerism of Christmas, birthdays and the like, it’s probably not even figured into your lover-pacification budget.

What bothers me even more, though, is actually not the stupidity of the holiday itself, the overreaching of the church in creating a memorial day for a saint with no saintly characteristics or the sheer cost, which would be easily eliminated if people would simply look at it for what it is — perhaps it’s a nice excuse to express your love for someone but if you feel the need to receive gifts to understand that you are cared for, it’s time to reevaluate your life. The problem? I’m asexual and aromantic. This is a holiday designed to propagate many things — the economic benefits of a guilt-based culture and the notion that love is something you signify with your wallet rather than your words to name just two. But more than anything, it’s a holiday designed to indoctrinate each new generation with the necessary performance of romantic love.

While I certainly love people, I have no desire to go on dates with them, press my lips against theirs or have parts of our bodies rub against each other amid sweat and panting. I just don’t. I’m not that unusual in this, although I am well aware and reminded every day by the existence of popular culture just how much of a minority we of the ace/aro persuasion are.

To put that into a bit of perspective, though, romantic and sexual love is far more culturally-derived than you might imagine. There are no animals out there (not just most, absolutely all) who are not of the human species who engage in romantic love. It just doesn’t happen. I can even tell you why — you have to have symbolic language for the concept of love to exist. Humans have symbolic language. Animals can communicate, certainly, and their level of communication varies wildly by species. Whales and dolphins, for example, have incredibly sophisticated communication systems while cats and walruses don’t. Not that they’re stupid — you can only be stupid if you have the capacity for symbolic thought and communication and you don’t use it. They simply react to stimulus in the moment and learn through pattern-building. That’s how children learn, too, by the way, especially until their ability to learn is supplemented and eventually mostly-replaced by symbolic and theoretical structures.

So we created the notion of love through our human-specific thinking and cultural patterns. Animals definitely engage in pack behavior. Some even mate with long-term partners (and humans could definitely learn from some species’ devotion, given that most anonymous surveys put the percentage of adult humans who have engaged in an extra-relationship affair in their lives at somewhere over 80% — that’s four out of five people who have cheated on their partners at least once). But they don’t love their partners. Because they can’t without a symbolic, theoretical construct. So they can’t have romance because that, a symbolic and theoretical idea in its own rite, is based on the notion of love-for-sexual-contact. Animals mate. They don’t pursue with poetry and flowers, trying to convince their potential partners to be attracted to them. It’s almost always a male-desires-female pattern in which two things can happen. One, the male simply forces itself on the female. That’s quite common and it’s the norm in the overwhelming majority of animals — dogs, cows, cats, sheep, horses and the list goes on and on. Two, the male pursues the female until it either gives in and “allows” sexual penetration or selects another male. Lack of mating contact isn’t an option in the animal kingdom. Mating is a requirement and sometimes there’s the ability to select a mate but it’s relatively rare.

In humans, though, in theory there’s a difference. Sexual coupling has been culturally normalized to be about consent. It’s a bit of a myth. With sexual violence an almost-complete segment of the female component of human society (it averages out somewhere between 85% and 95% of women having or being expected to experience coerced or forced sexual activity in their lives), you could certainly think of humans in the same category as dogs and horses, where forced-penetration (otherwise known as rape) is the predominant human method of sexual activity. It’s certainly not that simple, though. Just because most women will experience it in their lifetimes, which is a horrendous disaster of its own and one that I have devoted much writing to already, doesn’t mean that most sex is rape. It might be but I suspect that’s the wrong word for it. Most sex is culturally-conditioned. If your potential partner isn’t coercing you into having sex, which does seem to be the norm — the times when both partners are enthusiastically consenting is far less than the times when one is trying to encourage the other who isn’t particularly interested but just doesn’t have the will to resist or the desire to be subjected to the moods that will follow, whether they be open aggression or the passive variety, the lack of sexual activity, which people have been taught is something they have a right to expect.

But that’s not where most of the pressure comes from. Society says we’re supposed to have sex. It is pressed on people by the use of sexuality to sell products and ideas. It’s an expectation. You get old enough and if you haven’t had sex yet, you’re mocked. If you’re not desiring it all the time, you’re told you’re not normal. You’re encouraged to pursue, expected to want it. We are all aware that if a child is told over and over that they’re stupid, they’ll believe it. If you tell someone every day they’re fat, it won’t be long before they start looking in the mirror and seeing the Michelin Man, regardless of their actual body shape. Someone might hear that they’re stupid a few dozen times before they start thinking it’s true. How many sexual references do you experience in a day? Whether it’s clothing designed to show off as much exposed skin as possible, especially around the breasts or high skirt lines to get as close to the genitals as possible without showing them outright, or jokes about sex, making it seem exciting in its forbidden and dirty implications or one of a thousand other versions of sexual discussions, there is the implication that if sex isn’t the focus of your every single day, you’re not normal.

People will change their behavior to be seen as normal. If you do that long enough, you’ll forget that it’s pretend. You’ll believe it’s part of your real self. That’s certainly not to say that having sex isn’t a natural thing or that it’s shameful. It can certainly be part of a completely normal human life and for most people it’s likely that it is a positive experience, preprogramming aside. But our society’s obsession with sexuality has led to huge, overwhelming problems. Firstly, it has propagated the notion of sexual partners as property. Secondly, there’s the assumption that sexuality is the measure of adulthood. Thirdly, perhaps most distressingly, it has led to people thinking of sexuality as a right, causing people (mostly men but not exclusively) to pursue with guilt, violence, shame and rumor their selected sexual partners, leaving them no effective way out other than submission to penetrative dominance.

Valentine’s Day is a celebration of an entire species subjugated into the cultural norm of sexual coupling. It leaves those of us with no sexual interest completely out in the dark and propagates the notion that asexuality is a defect, making us (whether ace, aro or both) valid targets to be ostracized and mocked — if sex is the norm, lack of sex must be a reason to see us as the other to be hated and to be punished. We are continuously forced to have sex by cultural or physical means and it is not at all uncommon for those of us who are young enough to still be in school to be outright told by educators that sexual desire is perfectly normal — that an absence of sexual desire is something we should hide and we need to pretend — that we’ll get used to it. There is a hateful notion that those who don’t want to have sex can be “cured” by being forced to do it. It happens every day, all over the world.

By all means, make the people you love aware that you love them. Give them whatever you desire to make them happy. Cook them beautiful meals and present them with chocolates and flowers. But for the love of all that is good in this world, don’t do it all on the same day and give those who are completely left out the freedom not to be forced to participate.

[estimated reading time 2 minutes]

I have received a fairly large amount of odd comments of late on my blog posts. Some of them have been positive, which is always pleasing to see, yet a few have been intensely critical and intentionally hurtful. I really just have one question — why would anyone be so interested in what I write here that they would take the time to read something they don’t get any enjoyment out of and compound that by writing vicious invective in a public forum directed at me? This is not an open discussion forum or the international print media. It’s my personal writing blog.

Some people will certainly justify this by saying that I’m a public figure, a respected Canadian author and poet who has a public persona and that makes me an open target. While I don’t agree that anyone should ever be such a target, the question of motive arises.

I write books, mostly poetry, and those are edited, published and refined for a particular audience. I know who my target audience is and those people are invited to buy or not buy, to comment or not comment, as they wish. When I put something out there for serious consideration and — and here’s the important part — sell it for money, the motive shifts from “what I want to write” to “what you want to read”.

What I write here is a writing exercise. I do this to demonstrate, mostly to my students, that frequent writing doesn’t have to be painful, doesn’t have to be damaging to the self or an exercise in constantly-modified tedium. You can just write and you will gradually refine your prose style. Good writing isn’t about saying something. It’s about saying nothing well. Our job as writers is to capture your attention and hold onto it. It’s not our job to tell you something, to convince you of something, to speak the truth. The truth is important in life and irrelevant in writing. If I happen to fall into the truth, it’s a happy accident and has no relationship to whether what I write is quality work. This is a demonstration to my students just like I create on the board in class, on the fly.

So here’s the takeaway — if you are enjoying what you’re reading, you’re more than welcome to keep doing so and you’re encouraged to share it with anyone else you think might. If you don’t enjoy it, what in the name of all that is good are you still doing here? I’m not writing for your pleasure. I’m writing for the pleasure of those who actually take pleasure in it. So if you don’t like my writing, that’s fine. You’re certainly entitled to disagree, to dislike my style. There’s a lot of writing out there and much of it is free.

Today, read things that you enjoy. Not because they’re classics or accepted as amazing work. Not because they’re by your friends. Read what brings you enjoyment and never stop doing it. Don’t take time to criticize others. Just read what you like. You’ll thank yourself later for it.

[estimated reading time 4 minutes]

Tell me about your mother’s hands.

My mother is a musician. I don’t mean she fools around on the piano and sings in the shower. She’s a serious, professionally-trained musician and started her career educating the next generation of musicians long before I was born. That’s meant some really positive things for me. First, from the first day I came into my parents’ lives, I was surrounded not by generic radio crap, whatever happened to be floating around on the top-forty charts or classic rock (which, at that point in time, was probably Elvis and company, given that this was the early eighties, a time that is now quite popular on classic rock stations, making me feel dramatically older than I would otherwise prefer), but by the most sublime and impressive classical and jazz performances human artistic perfection had achieved. And Abba. Cause fuck yeah.

But it’s not just an appreciation for music and the arts in general that was instilled in me at a young age (and distilled in me for the rest of my life, more like a beautifully clear water than one of those silly delusional beverages that is popular with those who don’t follow the precepts well enough). It’s live music that I remember.

When I was really little (crib little, I mean, not what is esthetically pleasing to refer to as “smol”), I fell asleep to lullabies and much of my day was backed against fingers on keys. My mother’s absolute prize possession was (and still is) a natural wood Yamaha baby-grand that lived in our basement. I have played a lot of pianos in my life — definitely hundreds, possibly thousands. I did, after all, work in a music store and go to music school. But after all those testing times on the keys, I can say in all honesty that the only things that played better for me were full-size concert grands that cost nearly (and often well into) six figures. So it was quite a thing to learn to play piano on. That was the soundtrack of learning to walk and read and not to put everything in my mouth. Something I think every child must learn. And, given how many people are now spending their weekends, it appears most people never took the lesson to heart.

Anyway, there were guitars and flutes and various other instruments but the image I have of my mother that remains pretty constant, even if her age changes in the mental video, is her sitting at the piano flipping through books of Scarlatti and Mozart and turning pages of black and white into sounds. I have spent huge amounts of time listening to her play and watching the joy that she gets from it. So when I think of her hands, I see them flying over keys and filling every bar with love. I heard the same kind of playing from her students, actually. There really is something to be said for teaching by mirroring.

Many of the happiest memories I have of time with my parents are in that room, standing at the piano. Whether it was learning and practicing my audition pieces to get into music school or singing much later, listening to my mother play or standing around the piano (or the organ but that’s a story for another day) singing hymns and chorales in three parts. I have to admit that the missing alto line was rather obvious but it didn’t take away from the fun of making music as a family. When my parents visited me last year, one of the things we managed to do in their all-too-short visit was to stand around my keyboard (I have neither the money nor the space for a piano, even an upright) and make some recordings of singing together.

There’s more to it than that, though. My mother is a committed worker. She never stops. Not for a second. I don’t think I’ve seen her take a break before pretty much collapsing out of exhaustion at any point in my life. So every image I have in my head of her hands is of them moving, usually with calm confidence in whatever they were doing. She’s a phenomenal cook. I know most people have a general love for their mother’s cooking but that’s not it. I don’t mean she cooks things that I like to eat — with my extremely simple diet, my mother actually truly abhors preparing the bland food that I consume every day — she’s recognized among all our friends as the one everyone wants to visit at dinner time. Every meal is a serious endeavor, usually very creative. So I have memories of fingers quickly dicing and flipping and mixing and pouring. I don’t know what most of the things were in those memories — although I suspect chocolate chip cookies and banana bread were frequent items, since that’s what I am smelling as I write this.

My grandmother was a prodigious baker. Her shortbread recipe is the stuff of legends. In the postwar world my mother grew up in with food shortages and rationing, brutal lives and constant hard work, not to mention the new threat of the cold war and a sheer intensity and terror that had gripped all of society, she learned to turn cooking into an art form regardless of what it was.

Whether it was playing music or performing in the kitchen or one of thousands of other tasks, I can honestly say I’ve never seen my mother put her hands on anything she didn’t absolutely master. Those are the hands that held me when I cried and encouraged me as I grew up. I have nothing but love for my parents but the respect I have for my mother’s ability to turn her hands to just about anything and make it work, that’s beyond impressive by any standards.

[estimated reading time 5 minutes]

Actually, it may be several of them. I have lately been talking about some of my favorite movies — not so much the ones that I truly love but what I recommend. So I’ve avoided talking about the ones you’ve likely already seen or that have made a huge splash recently in the mainstream press. I love Star Wars (likely because, apart from the truly astonishing cinematography and brilliant dialog, it brings back memories of Sunday afternoons in front of the television with my father, who’s also a fan) and various other mainstream movies — not many, I must admit but some. They rarely give me much in the way of satisfaction and pleasure, though, especially the more recent ones. Being gritty and normal and focusing on sensation and the like simply triggers all the unpleasant responses in my mind and body and ruins the experience for me.

Movies are about escape — really, they’re beyond that. They’re about escapism. The desperation to get out of a place and a mind frame. And I’m all for that. I live in a place that I have abhorred since first I set foot in it and I can’t wait to leave. The reasons why escape is difficult are myriad and complex but most of it comes down to the fact that I haven’t been offered a job in a place I want to be, despite hoping and working toward that goal. Someday, though, I will be successful and say goodbye to this place permanently. But I can do it temporarily on a screen, a couple of hours at a time. If a movie doesn’t let me have a peaceful and pleasant escape, it’s useless. It might be something other people want but for me, the only reason I’m watching something is to escape my life and find something better. If I don’t want to be living the life of one of the characters, there’s no motivation for me to watch them live it. I’ve never understood the point of watching reality television or anything along those lines. I don’t enjoy laughing at other people’s misfortunes and I simply don’t find it funny in the first place. I’m looking for someone’s life to inhabit for a couple of hours instead of my own. If their life sucks, I’ll just keep mine and save myself the bother.

The one that’s on my mind today, though, is mostly motivated by today’s writing prompt about the changing seasons. This is a hugely significant part of Japanese culture and probably the one that I most thoroughly don’t understand. I don’t enjoy change of any sort, especially environmental change. It being bright and sunny all day every day, nice and warm without wind or rain or, horror or horrors, snow and ice, that is perfection for me. I don’t want to see leaves change color or blossoms fall. I want everything to remain absolutely static. That way it’s not shocking or painful. It just is a background and that’s lovely.

One of the most impressive animated productions of the last decade is, in English, The Garden of Words (言の葉の庭 in Japanese) and it’s admittedly nearly a decade old but I have still seen nothing else, except perhaps Weathering with You, which still hasn’t released outside theaters at this point for some reason, that can compete with its beautiful artwork. What’s more impressive is that it has such an impact while being a short film. It’s only about three quarters of an hour long but you’ll feel like you experienced an entire feature-length film when you get to the end.

I’m not going to get into the subtlety of the title and its various possible interpretations but, unsurprisingly for a Japanese production, the hidden meanings are myriad and pregnant with context. The plot is relatively simple. It’s a love-or-friendship story, something that is extremely common in eastern cinema and nearly completely absent in its western counterpart. In short, two characters come together and become something that is either friends or lovers without necessarily being explicit about it going either way. When something tips the balance for one of them in favor of one or the other designation, the whole thing falls apart and the rest of the story is about trying to resolve the ensuing conflict — if you’ve seen Your Lie in April or Snow White with the Red Hair, both beautiful and recent productions, you’ll be familiar with this trope.

Takao is a high school student who skips class when there’s rain but makes himself go and show up when it’s sunny. It’s an interesting exercise in self-discipline but really it just works out to be that on depressing days, he sits in the park and eats, sketching shoes. He wants to learn how to make designer footwear — a side plot that has little to do with the rest of the story but definitely shows just how far outside the norm of expectation he is compared to others in his generation. He’s all about the beauty, the esthetic perfection of fine crafting while everyone else is showed to be focused just on modern flash. He meets Yukari in the park who is skipping work, drinking beer and eating chocolate on those same rainy days. They develop a passing friendship without having to speak (in a garden without words, one might say) that eventually develops how one might expect. He’s probably younger than he seems and she’s by no means old.

What happens next, though, is rather surprising. While most of these pseudo-relationship stories focus on some sudden impact on the couple-to-be that makes further closeness difficult (they find out they’re quite possible related or one of them has a terminal illness, for example, in two movies you may immediately be able to think of), Yukari already knows they can’t have a relationship of a more physical and traditionally-penetrative nature. She’s a teacher at his school. But he’s the one who’s mature and stable, focused on his future and already responsible for his life. She’s broken from the student body torturing her, a fractured relationship and an inability to cope with daily life in general. How they overcome this is surprising and, in true Japanese fashion, without satisfactory conclusion. It’s hard to say whether, at the end of the story, they will remain best friends or head toward married pseudo-bliss.

It doesn’t matter, though. I would say that this is one of the most emotionally touching things I’ve ever seen. The story being simple doesn’t take away from it. Actually, it may do quite the opposite and make it easier to get lost in the words and movement and artwork as it floats by. It has some of the most beautiful contemporary drawings of Tokyo that I’ve ever seen — strikingly accurate, too, I promise. It’s not the underside of the city and gives a bit of a rose-colored perception of what you can experience from a place that is, in many ways, a bit of a disaster once you get outside the squeaky-clean tourist-focused areas and financial districts. But for what it shows, it’s true-to-life — there was a local blogger who actually went and took photographs of many of the scenes from the movie just after it was released and the accuracy was staggering, right down to the placement of traffic signs and the proportions of the buildings.

If you happen to have an hour to spare at some point and want to spend some of it crying, coming out of the experience smiling broadly and thinking the sun is shining a bit brighter, I highly recommend it. You won’t need to suspend your disbelief — it’s highly realistic in pretty much every way. Unlike typical love stories, especially western ones, it’s not idealized or contrived. This is the kind of relationship that can easily develop between people, confused and unpredictable with the knowledge on both sides being partial and unevenly spaced. If you don’t want to stand up and cheer when it’s done, I swear you have no soul.