excerpt from old love letters

""i am not bi-polar
i am not emotionally unstable
and i am not depressed
i am just a sensitive wondering soul
that drinks to much liquor
dos'nt exercise enough
and dose'nt eat greens
simple
i seem to haven given up on the pursue for truth and happiness
and i am fucken great""

sometimes

today a friend gave me a ride home from visiting a mutual friend's new baby. in the car she told the story of how she and one other sister managed to graduate from college while her other 7 siblings did not. the amazing thing was that, as she told it, her own daughter in the backseeat kept piping up to say "why didn't you ever tell me this before?" she would stop and then say, "i never thought about it... i never stopped to wonder why."

as a little kid sometimes i'd ask people how they got their names and often they would say they didn't know; they never thought to ask.

sometimes i wonder at the meaning of something all day long... it follows me. "why?" is a big part of how i relate to people, myself, and the world. funny hunh?

the performance of belonging, loss of language

"Ms. Sotomayor had grown up in the Bronx speaking Spanish; Mr. Thomas’s relatives in Pin Point, Ga., mixed English with Gullah, a language of the coastal South. Both attended Catholic school, where they were drilled by nuns in grammar and other subjects. But at college, they realized they still sounded unpolished.

Ms. Sotomayor shut herself in her dorm room and eventually resorted to grade-school grammar textbooks to relearn her syntax. Mr. Thomas barely spoke, he said later, and majored in English literature to conquer the language.

'I just worked at it,' he said in an interview years later, 'on my pronunciations, sounding out words.'