an explanation is in order

right, so i'm gonna go ahead and blame my lack of writing (as if anyone cares) on having to read and write a good bit for a couple of my classes. basically these two classes boil down to a critical (read: foucauldian) look at hiv/aids and healthcare discourses, respectively. anyways, to rectify this disappointing dearth of reading material (i'm just being an ass: ignore me), i've posted those two research proposals i've been working on the last week or so. i think they're good enough to stand on their own, at least as presenting an argument and working as an introduction to something that will (hopefully) include some actual evidence rather than relying simply on my poorly-documented claims. ah, the demands of the academic discourse. right, so, please read, and let me know of any insights/criticisms you (all two of you reading this) might have.

The representation of women and the spread of HIV

The spread of HIV throughout the world has certainly served as a screen against which preexisting power modes of power been projected, power which has defined and controlled the production of identity of a myriad of “risk groups”, presenting us with the “homosexual”, the “IV drug user”, the “prostitute” and the “long-distance truck driver”, to name but a few. By creating these discrete groups (which are generally understood to be mutually exclusive, not only to each other, but also with the “norm”), subjects have been created, subjects whose possible trajectories have been pre-determined, whose “otherness” as been taken for granted and whose voices have all but been lost in the crowd of the researchers and academics who have written the definitive accounts of “the AIDS epidemic”. While this paper will certainly only be adding to that crowd of academics (though nearly imperceptibly), I hope to elucidate some of those modes of power which have created distinct groups by simply the application of a name, thus cordoning off certain behaviors, nationalities and even genders from the “general population”.

This paper will seek to understand the contradictory representations of “women” in HIV/AIDS discourse. While Treicher notes the lack of research interest in, if not the outright denial of, women’s involvement (or at least the involvement of “normal women”) with HIV in the 1980’s, attitudes have shifted significantly in the 1990’s and the 21^st century, where women have frequently been portrayed as “vectors of disease”—prostitutes transmitting HIV to their clients, mothers transmitting HIV to their children, and, more generally, women holding “the key” to preventing the spread of HIV to the “general population”. Beyond merely placing blame or responsibility for the transmission of the virus, women have also been denied a place among the ranks of “victims”, appearing as carriers or not at all it would seem.

Moreover, HIV is a very strongly sexed pathogen. Due to its beginnings (in the North) as a disease of the gay man, it became and has remained a male disease. Women were reassured that this STI would not be transmissible to them, that this was simply the “fatal price of anal intercourse” (interestingly, also defining heterosexual sex as purely vaginal). Through this characterization of HIV, men were defined from the outset as the primary concerned population.

This “male disease”, it will be shown, is a product of a consistently patriarchal system of symbolic representation, as described by theorist such as Irigaray, Beauvoir and Butler. In the theory of Beauvoir, women are linguistically defined as the sex which is not male (which is defined as the “universal”), they exist as the only marked sex, indeed, they exist as the classic “other” which the “normal” uses to both construct its own identity and obscure its very construction. Irigaray takes a seemingly oppositional approach, seeing women being left as the undefined and undefinable completely outside of an uncompromisingly patriarchal linguistic system; indeed, women are everything that fails to be male, thus defining women as a multiple gender (or the “sex that is not one”). These two theories, however, seem to converge in agreement that the male is the “norm”, the “default”, leaving “female” to constitute something “abnormal” and certainly, leaving it simply as “not-male”.

Under the lens of these theories, it will become clear how this disease, first described in the “all-male” world of the homosexual community in the United States, consistently failed to be given a designation of anything other than this false universality of masculinity. Though very little has actually changed in the representation of HIV infection (as a “gay”, or “male”, disease) in the North, the representation of HIV as a male disease has had to undergo significant modification to “fit” the pattern of transmission in the South, especially in Africa. In Africa, HIV infection, most often transmitted through heterosexual exchange of fluids, has been characterized as a disease of displacement (echoing, perhaps, the 19^th- and 20^th century discourses on tuberculosis as a “disease of civilization”?), affecting primarily those displaced and living along the paths of major population shifts. Here, there is much talk about long-distance truckers and migratory labor (including mining and agriculture), where prostitutes, beyond receiving blame for their infection and transmitting it to others, are consistently relegated to the position of the passive “pool” of infection which spreads then to the more “active” individuals, ie, the mobile males. Further along the represented chain of infection (which is in no way merely linear), women are again left out, receiving no mention as receiving HIV from an infected partner, but again garnering blame in passing HIV on to her innocent unborn offspring.

Throughout this paper I will also refer to the contradictory roles defined for women, both as the dangerously sexual deviant (or temptress) and as the impossibly passive maternal caregiver, and how these defined roles are both a product of and productive of the discourse obscuring the role of women in the global epidemic of HIV infection (whether or not one chooses to “believe” in AIDS as such). Overall, I hope to show that the rigidly binary production of identity (male/female, gay/straight, the norm/the other) seriously obscures both the mechanisms by which these designations are produced and the effects of these designations, especially in the transmission of such a “political” disease.

[check out:

Butler, Judith (1990) Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. (New York: Routledge).

Foucault, Michel (1973) Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (New York: Penguin).

Treicher, P. A. (1999) How to have theory in an epidemic: cultural chronicles of AIDS. (Durham: Duke University Press).

that should get you started, but if you're still needing more, check out books by Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray or "Bodies that matter" (so i'm told, i haven't actually read this myself) by Butler (above)]

The Gaze, Advocacy and the God-trick

Chagas’ disease, a parasitic infection of the blood and internal organs endemic to the Americas, plays a largely silent role in the lives of millions of rural people, from Argentina to the southwestern United States. Although present in the blood of up to 80% of the population in affected areas, and although this infection often leads to heart and intestinal failure, little attention is given to containing this plague outside of the rural communities themselves.

Doctors without Borders (or Médecins sans frontiéres, MSF) is a large international non-governmental organization (NGO) which defines its mission as twofold: providing necessary medical relief for underserved populations, especially in poor or war-torn areas; and advocacy on behalf of those populations served, both on the national and international stages.

In the department of Tarija, in southern Bolivia, these two narratives intersect. MSF (along with other NGOs, such as CARE, PLAN and Esperanza/Bolivia) is involved in an attempt to eradicate Chagas’ disease as a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the rural areas. This attempt generally consists of biomedical interventions in identification and treatment of cases (ineffectively—Chagas’ disease is able to “hide” in the blood of adult hosts, and pharmaceutical treatments are considered prohibitively dangerous in patients under 6 years of age and above 15 years) and pseudo-biomedical interventions (public health interventions) designed to improve housing conditions and thus prevent re-infection. In doing so, it involves itself in advocacy, which at least in this case has manifested itself mainly as “consciousness-raising” attempts, especially in the production of photographic expositions which have been shown in the major cities of Bolivia.

This dual role for MSF presents an interesting opportunity for analysis, in which the “gaze” (as defined by Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic) consciously represents itself as the speaking subject, “I”. This involvement/detachment, inherent in the positions of both observer/advocate and interventionist/participant, provides the perfect opportunity for the observation of the “god-trick” as described by Haraway (and though certainly noted, the contradiction inherent in the observation and analysis of the “god-trick” risks unrestrained recusivity and is anyways certainly not within the scope of this paper).

MSF paradoxically presents itself as both the provider of “healthcare” and “development” (as understood within a decidedly Western context) and the voice of those who require its assistance, who are presumed unable to speak for themselves (or even completely voiceless). Within the framework of postmodern (or –development) analysis, this seemingly contradictory stance serves to both preserve and mask the rigid power relations inherent in the positions of developer/developee (or, more specifically in this case, doctor/patient) and advocate/one-who-requires-advocacy. The advocacy both raises awareness of the problem and underlines the need (of representation) of the population, thus justifying its own existence. Meanwhile, this advocacy further justifies continued intervention, which, especially under a Foucauldian lens, serves to create the population to be “developed” as a discrete organism and subject of study. The constant reports, censuses and studies undertaken as the “baseline”, status reports and final achievements of the development project are incredibly self-justifying, constantly promoting the extension and deepening of intervention, all the while selecting, filtering and channeling the flow of subaltern voices and narratives, lending “authenticity” to the dominant narrative presented by the advocates themselves. This uninterrupted flow of information and further involvement preserves the hegemony of the “norm”, the “developed” and the “healthy”, defining its “target population”, inscribing its own boundaries and barriers around this population while pathologizing the living conditions of rural Latin Americans.

This self-evident definition of those in poor countries as “in need” preemptively blocks off any policy options other than those which can be seen as “top-down”. This limitation, in the best case is a self-perpetuation of development discourse which is out of control (because it is out of view) of even the most powerful actors (in the view of Ferguson), or, in the worst case, a systematic perpetuation of current, unequal North-South power relations.

[for more info on this, check out:
www.msf.es --> click on "Especiales: Chagas: una tragedia silenciosa"
www.doctorswithoutborders.com --> click on "Country: Bolivia" or "Programs: Chagas"

or these books:
Escobar, A (1995) The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Ferguson, J (1990) The Anti-politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticisation and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Haraway, Donna J. (1991) Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. (London: Free Association Books).]

debt relief

I've not written much lately (and i certainly won't until i can get some sleep later in the week), but here's an article i found on bbc that's just plain disgusting. honestly, who owes what to whom?

here's a longer piece from indymedia.co.uk on the same thing.

voyeurism

watching a documentary today, even though it was quite well-made, relatively, made me think about how much we really do want to see others' pain. i've had very well-intentioned friends say they want to go to india (especially) with me because "it would be good for [them]". i can't even definitively say that that's not why i've studied, worked and traveled where i have. i would hope that it's been for more noble reasons than this, but who can really tell?

seeing the other in a state of misery always holds a sick fascination for us. car wrecks. natural disasters. grisly crimes. fat celebrities. look at the free papers littering the weekday cars of the london underground for proof if thats what you want. and documentaries, in their own highbrow, "concerned" way, perpetuate this. we watch documentaries to basically inform ourselves; not, mind you, so that it might inform our actions, improve the world, etc. (though many films have a definite political agenda, i would argue that this is secondary), but to inform ourselves of the other and thus derive entertainment from this. because basically, that's what it is. entertainment at the expense of others.

now i'm at least as guilty of this as most. during my "work" in bolivia (i'm also guilty of using too many air-quotes and parentheticals), i have to admit, i was basically useless. in fact, at my most helpful, i was actually there to document what was happening--the state of the garbage pits being done, the success of the campaign against chagas, etc. literally, my job was to listen and take pictures. to see how the other half live, and (at best) to witness it to the world. but during most of my time there, i would say roughly 5/6, i wasn't directly useful to my employers (and this i use in the loosest sense of the word), i was there as an outsider, gaining more personally (in the form of a boosted resume) than i could possibly give. and why did i go? what does it mean if i say "because i was curious"?

curiosity often drives us to the furthest reaches of the world. we go to see, to take pictures, to "get off the beaten path" (har har), and to "connect" with the "locals". but we certainly go for ourselves. i recently went to bosnia & hercegovina and croatia for a couple weeks' vacation. ostensibly, to get away from it all (sounds familiar? it should). find a few mountains or beaches where i could sit or walk undisturbed and be quiet for a while. which i did. i was very quiet. but i also went, and i knew/know this, because i was curious. i went, to put it most bluntly, to see what a country that was recently at war with itself looked like. i'm not proud of that. in many ways i feel that seeing something, experiencing something firsthand (and i know that's in many ways disingenuous, but let's at least say "as firsthand as reasonably possible") is important for personal growth and, at the very least, a context of what we see on the news. it challenges us and inspires us. but we're also growing personally because we're viewing the misery of others? sounds callous, because it really is.

and what of advocacy? msf is an organization that dedicates itself to "raising awareness of the plight of the people [they] help". of the two awareness campaigns that i've witnessed firsthand (chagas in la paz and cholera in oslo), that means they put on photographic exhibitions. which, in the case of both of these, brings the image to the forefront of the mind, but also in an "artistically brutal" manner. it's meant to evoke sympathy, support and eventually involvement, yes, but it also seeks to entertain the middle classes strolling past the exhibition centers on their sunday promenades. to give them a taste, in black and white (artistic photos are inevitably black and white at these events, while portraits of the children who drew the drawings are in color), of the "other", and let us visualize their suffering. at least 95% of those who pass through do nothing afterwards (and i'm one, i'm sorry to say), other than going out for an ice cream to cheer themselves up. sure, you can't expect everyone to be moved to their pocketbooks at every one of these events, but what does this predictable, apparently acceptable majority tell us? either that msf is doing a piss-poor job of advocacy (and i would not say that), or that the distance between the subject and the viewer is, and probably always has been too great.

we go to the slums, take pictures, keep the camera either always in front of us (like a plastic and glass shield, or better, a filter) or keep it always out of sight, embarrassed both to show our wealth, to display so openly our not-belonging, and to realize that we fear these people, as if their poverty is communicable (it is, but not in such casual circumstances: it effortlessly passes from mother to child), and, more precisely, we fear their jealousy, their wrath, their latent power. because in going to "bear witness" to misery, we always must assume ourselves separate and superior, assume that we must bring their experiences up to our level. in doing so, we also assume that that is their wish, to be like us, live like us, to be us. and that frightens us, because we're so devoted to our binary systems, our zero-sum games, that we fear their improvement. and we, in the development community, fear working ourselves out of a job.

[note: sorry, at the end, for just randomly throwing in thoughts. it's a lot less incoherent in my head. i think]

write what you know

let's start out with an old essay/combination of emails that i wrote a few months back, at the end of my placement in tarija, bolivia with CARE and Esperanza/Bolivia.

This first excerpt is from an email to a friend who had lauded me for spending my summer doing what I’ve been doing. She herself is planning on a career in something that could be construed as service work, though she’s had very little direct experience in the field, especially outside of Atlanta.

your comment about living around/experiencing poverty (you were talking about me and your brother traveling to bolivia and south africa) sparked a line of thinking for me over the last week or so (since you emailed me, anyways). ive been trying to reconcile my gut reactions to poverty to the way i know i should act and the way i think i do act on the outside. when i see poverty (and here i mean poor people, but its quicker to write one word than two), my immediate reaction is to put away my camera, to be conscious not to stare, to try to act normal. but why should i have to act normal, why should it bother me? i thought about this and realized that for some reason i've internalized the notion, and i cant seem to dislodge it, that poverty is something that is shameful, and if they're not going to feel ashamed, then i'm going to feel ashamed for them. but still, thats not right, its not something shameful, its simply a result of a confluence of thousands of different factors, from global political economy to the distribution of certain disease vectors to racism and simply bad luck. so here i am stuck with all these preconceived notions about what it is im looking at and how i feel about it, and i dont want these notions, but i cant get rid of them, and then i realize i dont even know what im looking at. i mean, what is poverty here? right now i live in a house that i share with 6 other people, 7 cats and a very old dog. there's one bathroom, i have my own bedroom, and everyone else is two to a room. i can see significant patches of light through the door and walls of my room, and my only furniture is the bed and two shelves that i try to pile my clothes on. the bathroom is outside, there's no hot water to speak of, and i wash my clothes every week by hand in the sink and hang them out on the patio. in atlanta that housing situation would put me one step above homeless, but here, though im by no means in a wealthy neighborhood, im a long ways from indigent. so is something poverty in the us that isnt poverty in bolivia? not even talking about income, which depends a lot on exchange rates and purchasing power parity and all kinds of other economics-type stuff, but talking about actual housing situations, the way that i live, it seems poverty is relative. but how can it be relative when its based on such exact, non-relative material things? i know, i know, poverty many times is measured by the ability to access basic necessities, like nutrition especially, and in that case neither i nor anyone in the neighborhood around me is in danger of indigency. maybe the dogs, but certainly not the people. so then i start thinking about my specific situation, not that of the people in my neighborhood, but my state of wandering and doing volunteer work because i was rich enough and lucky enough to be smart enough to get rich people to give me even more money, money which would probably be better spent on bars of soap in rural areas than my actual labor for care. so i was born incredibly lucky, in probably the 99th percentile of luck in the entire world. what does that mean? does that mean that, since it was all dumb luck anyways, since its not my fault that im rich, that i am exonerated from any debt to society? or does it make my burden of debt even greater? thinking about it as dispassionately as possible, i cant really say that either one of those is the right answer. but i do feel a certain internal pull to simply leave the world a better place than when i found it, and the most direct way that i can think to do that (in a way thats pleasing to me, of course, which might not be fair to the people whose lives im trying to improve) is to work in public health in impoverished countries. so that brings me back to me in the act of seeing poverty. what are my responsibilities there, what is the right response? i know the wrong response is to look away, i do know that at least (i think). but is it my responsibility to bear witness, to spread awareness, or is that some sort of sick capitalization on their poverty, is that something like poverty tourism? i guess what im trying to say with all of this is that i have a hugely difficult time taking pictures of people, because i know that im taking the pictures because i find them different, i am in fact taking pictures of them because i conceive of them as the other, but i dont want to be seen as the other, and i wonder what people realize about my motivations (or people's motivations, in general) for taking pictures. while the camera allows me to bring a part of this world with me, to show it to other people and spread awareness, it also separates me, it gets in the way of interactions. so what it all comes down to is the fact that even though you talk about my experience abroad, my experience working with poverty, i worry about what kind of experience im getting. i mean, its so difficult to even define what im looking at, much less to define my relationship to it, and then im even ignoring (you will notice, in this entire email), the relationship in the other direction. there's just too much to think about already that i cant even begin to think about what other people think of me.

In this next one, I had actually forwarded the above to a different friend, to get a second opinion as they say. I got a response back, but I wanted to clarify a few things that I had said earlier, since it had been running around my head in the interim anyways.

anyways, it does seem like you understand what i was trying to say, and i appreciate very much your thoughts on the subject. the only part that i would want to add to what you've said is when you were talking about why we look away when we see someone who is less fortunate (and here im using the phrase to connote generality, not a euphemism) than ourselves. you end by noting that maybe its because we're taught to not stare, and i think that rings very true. but then that begs the question (in the common usage of the phrase, not the logical sense....just wanted to throw that in there for you) of why we're taught not to stare. we're taught not to stare because its rude, right? why is it rude? i'm thinking of this mostly in terms of the seeing-and-being-seen dynamic. if we stare, that is the most obvious (to the outside world) way to see. with it, it brings along a strong probability that the subject of that seeing is going to realize that they're being seen. this goes along with what i was saying about the camera, in a very literal sense. i think we are taught not to stare because we dont want that person, the subject, to know that they're being seen. why shouldn't we want that? quite honestly, im coming to a wall here. i dont know. but i think it has to do with the reaction that we expect our seeing, and thus their knowledge of being seen, to evoke. i think its like seeing someone naked. unless there's an obvious reaction, like a scream, or an erection, you dont know if that person is glad to be being watched, indifferent, or uneasy. however, we're taught that you shouldnt be naked, and thus that you shouldnt want to be naked, and above all that you shouldnt want to be seen naked, or better phrased, you should want to not-be-seen when circumstances dictate that you must be naked. why do teenagers and young adults, more than any other age group, get a rush out of skinny-dipping? clearly because of the mix of the erotic (which i would actually suggest is the less motivating factor) with the transgressive. we're not supposed to be naked, but lets fuck the man, we're going to be naked just to prove a point! ok, that metaphor's been extended enough. so we're looking at this poor or disabled person, and we've always been taught that you shouldnt be poor or disabled. not necessarily because there's a societal taboo like with nudity, but because we're taught that its intensely undesirable. and in that way it does go against all of our socialization. so because we realize this without thinking about it, without really even realizing that we realize it, we expect this to be a shared value with the person that we're seeing. we expect them to view their condition as intensely undesirable as well. and thus we expect them to realize that they are different, that they are lesser, because they are going against what society tells us is right, and therefore that they realize that the reason we're looking at them is because they are lesser. but then we've got this conflicting instinct, this thing we're taught about equality, and how better to pretend that we're all equals than by pretending that we're all the same. and thus to pretend we're all the same, we have to pretend that we don't see differences, and thus we have to not stare. i guess its not completely conflicting, because both of these instincts, the one about judging and the one about equality, have a strong underlying current of conformity. so you could probably look at it another way. if you've got two people, or better, a crowd, a group of people, and they're all looking at the same thing, they're all experiencing roughly the same external experience, and thus they feel strangely united. now im bordering on crowd psychology, which fergus tells me is actually a load of crap, but i dont know enough about anything to know why it would or wouldnt be crap, so ill continue. so there's this equality of looking at one thing, a speech or a performance or a fight or a plane crash or whatever. but then if you cause any two people to look at each other, they are forced to become separate entities, to understand that they are two people and that they have external differences as well as internal difference. they are forced to see different things, and this puts us in an uncomfortable position. we really just want to be connected with people, to share experiences, but not to impart different experiences. if two people are looking at people, they must come to terms with their nonconformity. thus begins the judging and the conflicting desire for equality and the uneasiness about the unknown factor of what the other person is experiencing, and what they're getting out of that experience.

This last one is certainly the angriest (again, sorry for the profanity). Beyond being frustrated with my placement (I was getting bored, and this is just before I made plans to start working with Esperanza/Bolivia), I was also frustrated about the situation in the Middle East (which directly affected someone very close to me) and a conversation I had had with a Peace Corps volunteer a day or two before. Basically, he seemed like a good guy (as I’m going to assume that most people who would donate two years of their life to service work in a developing country must be), but I was a little turned off by the inflexibility of his goals here. In addition to his normal project (beekeeping, basically), he wanted to teach rural adults (in a community that I’ve been to frequently) basic literacy in Spanish. Basically, as soon as he offered that, they told him no, they didn’t want to learn to read and write in Spanish (in my opinion, that community anyways is by far one of the more literate that I’ve seen), but they would like him to teach them English. Which I don’t think he took very well. Anyways, this little encounter really drove home the point that its not nearly enough to just have good intentions, you also have to somehow know what is best, and this idea of what is best must be agreeable to everyone involved. Or, to put it more simply, you can make some serious mistakes even with the best of intentions. So anyways, all of this, plus everything else I’ve seen and felt and done this summer made me seriously question (and I’m still questioning) what it is I really want to do with my life. For the past few years, I’ve been convinced it had to be something non-profit, for the common good and all that, that I couldn’t understand the people who just want to work to make money. Now, it’s not that I’m becoming more desirous of a comfortable life in the suburbs somewhere, but I’m certainly feeling a certain urge to run away from it all. OK, I think that went a little beyond context, since I explain most of that in this part, but here you go:

sorry for all the cynicism. i wrote jennie an email a week or so back, and she wrote back that she was really surprised by my writing style, because it didn't have a hint of any of the normal "patrick-cynicism". not a great way to be labeled, but i guess if the shoe fits. i think i'm more or less at the point where you were just after getting back. i'm so fucking angry and frustrated after seeing just a small, small view of how completely fucked up this world is, and my head hurts from banging it up against the wall and not getting anything changed for what i think is the better. it's too complex for me to totally understand, even after (what will still hopefully, i think, be) a lifetime of trying to figure it out, and as i start unwinding the threads, they just tangle themselves at the other end. i guess that's what "development" work is. the eternal firefighters, running from one blaze to the next, but always secretly fearing that the fires will finally go out, because then what will we have to worklivegetpaid for? a guy today was talking about something he saw on the internet, about how in 70 years there will literally be wars (as if there aren't already) over water. the destruction of the environment is progressing at a ridiculous rate, and what are we doing? my parent's generation is busy trying to get the last few drops of resources out before it's all run out. a few people just younger than them seem to be doing their best to help the people who have been ruined by the ruined environment, but knowinglyunknowingly placing greater burdens on them to preserve the few wild places left than were ever placed or are currently placed on the people bent on destroying those places (care, im looking at you), while the rest of the generation does their best to not see. and then there's us. it's our turn and i can't think of anything better to do, i'm ready to go back to atlanta and open a hookah bar with you and stick my head back in the sand where it belongs. my parents say often "we're so sorry for the world that we've left you and your children" and quite honestly, the best i can think of right now is to pass the buck. things aren't going to be better for my children, and certainly not for my grandchildren, in fact, they're almost guaranteed to be infinitely worse. i'm going to end up another old fart sitting around, dying of some sort of cancer (at least with smoking i can choose which type, with pesticides and petrochemicals i can't even hold on to that bit of agency), musing about how much better things were back in the good old 2020's and apologizing to my grandchildren about the shit that i've passed on to them. god, i hate it when people start things with "before, it was [like this, different somehow]". i've gotten into what i think is the good habit of always asking "before what?". here, the question is usually more pointed, being "before the arrival of the spanish? before the arrival of the incas? before independence? before the tin market crash?". still, even with such pointed questions, people can't usually answer. in fact, i don't ever remember getting some sort of satisfactory (for my curiosity) answer.

gargh, i don't know, everything is just too complex. life is really overwhelming, if you think about it. i mean, first you've got to eat, but make sure that everything that you're putting into your body is a) something it needs and b) something that's not carrying something that's going to hurt you. then you need to worry about expelling everything you take in, either as waste or energy or whatever. then you need to worry about keeping your outside, and limited parts of your inside, as close to sterile as possible, so as to make sure that what you don't choose to put in your body doesn't somehow get in anyways. then you need to find a place to sleep, and in more general terms just places to live, which aren't going to negatively affect the fine balance that you've constructed with all your selective intake/output. after all that is satisfied (or perhaps before), you're expected somehow "contribute to society" in a way which will merit society giving you these silly little slips of paper that tell the people in the grocery store and the pharmacy and the gas station and the apartment complex that you have been deemed fit to possess all these things that are necessary for your body. and simultaneously you're expected to actually be a part of the society that you're supposedly contributing to, but first you need to define what this "society" is that i'm talking about, it's limits and limitations, and then you need to go about locating yourself in this made up, bounded entity (or perhaps better: this entity with made-up boundaries). and then there are some of us that are stupid enough to think that we can somehow keep all these flaming, screeching llamas flying in the air above our heads while we reach for the flaming, screeching llamas of other people's necessities, trying to lighten their load because, for one reason or another, we have decided two very arbitrary things: first off, that these people are either incapable or unfit to juggle their own flaming, screeching llamas. and second, that for some reason we are. so then on top of all of that, first of all i've (now this is back to being a self-centered email) got to figure out why i've made these two arbitrary decisions, but i've also got to somehow decide for these people, whose flaming, screeching llamas are whirling over my head, the best way that these people's flaming, screeching llamas should be whirling. in this decision over the whirling, i'm supposed to balance something between what my desires and ideas are for the proper whirling of flaming, screeching llamas and whatever i can find out (and thus try to understand, but always wondering if it's really for my own purposes) about these other people's flaming, screeching llama whirling preferences. how do i weight whirling preferences? is one necessarily better, eclipsing the other, or do i need to find some middle ground, which would then be based on both my always faulty understanding and my equally (or perhaps more, but probably not less) faulty judgment of the merits of both sets of preferences? and then as if that weren't enough, i need to worry about the juggling of other people of other flaming, screeching llamas, because the way they make their llamas whirl might cause them to crash into mine, or vice versa, and if i really care about the flaming, screeching llamas of one set of people, shouldn't i care about the flaming, screeching llamas of all sets of people? or is ok to bound my concern for the juggling of flaming, screeching llamas? does the exclusion of one set of concerns based on supposedly pragmatic grounds call into question my concern for all others? does it even really matter, since these concerns have already been called into question in other steps in the process? all i can really say that is some days it seems like a really ridiculously huge burden to just have to wash my clothes, or brush my teeth, or eat or poop, knowing that i'm just going to have to do it all over again the day after that and the day after that and the day after that, and so on and so forth and forever and ever amen. why can't i just get all my sleep out of the way right now, sleep for 20 years straight, then get up and live last 40 or so years of my life without having to worry about it? it would thrill me just to eat one big meal that will keep me for the next few weeks, let alone the next few years or decades. it's enough to want to stick my head in the sand while i start up some useless cafe or company or whatever that serves clientele that could be just as well served at the cafe a few blocks down the street. but hey, at least i could sleep at night, rather than staying up all night writing stupid, desperate, crazy, barely intelligible emails to my best friend. and even now i know that i'm not being fair to people who are in no way hiding from the world by running a cafe, but really they're just following a dream, a calling, a lifegoal, however you want to define any of those things.

self-knowledge is a bitch, even severely limited self-knowledge like mine, if it even merits that label. so i guess the best thing i can do now is just to put my head down, not quite in the sand but certainly at least enough to keep the wind and burning sun out, and just head right on. yeah, i'm still planning on going to public health school, in fact, i've got something of a 5-year plan worked out. the problem is that i can't decide if i'm doing this because i really think it's the best thing for me to be doing (or for that matter, if i even care anymore) or if it's really just a lack of imagination on my part, an inability to imagine myself on a different track. yeah, i know stuff never goes as planned, and the some of the best trips i've taken have been approached with a complete lack of expectations, but i've got to have something to fix my sight on, mostly because i'm worried that without some sort of fixed point, i'll end up going knowinglyunknowinglyuncaringlyevenhappily in circles.