Sunday, July 29, 2012

Please Direct Me To The Mahalo

This is a post about trash cans. Specifically, the kinds of trash cans you see at fast-food places, which always seem to have "THANK YOU" printed on them.

Right now, I'm in Hawai'i for a family vacation--my first time coming here for any span of time less than a year. When I was younger, on three different occasions, my family lived here more or less permanently. I freely admit to having loved everything about it except for fourth grade (long story involving an abusive teacher and two sets of bullying classmates).

One of the things I've always especially loved about Hawai'i is the language. You have to learn at least a little bit just to get around every day, at least enough to be able to pronounce the names of the streets and figure out whether you belong in the "kane" or "wahine" bathroom. Just basic survival matters like that. And it's a beautiful, deceptively simple language (at least until you're confronted by the fact that the state fish is known as the humuhumunukunukuapua'a, meaning "a fish with a nose like a pig").

Of course, in the Hawaiian language, the word for "thank you" is "mahalo." Which brings me back to the title of this post: has it occurred to no one else that someone from another country who speaks another language might come to America and assume based on the tradition of the polite fast-food trash cans that "thank you" means "trash can"? I would never have thought of it were it not for the fact that my dad has made a habit, every time we come to Hawai'i, of joking that "mahalo" must mean "trash can." After all, it's carved into the lid right there.

We attended our old church yesterday, and interestingly the pastor gave us a survey about military families that he wants to use to plan his next sermon series. Oddly, he had a number of possible relationships to the military with checkboxes at the bottom, to indicate one's perspective--but "child of a servicemember" wasn't an option. Perhaps I ought to make a blog post in answer to his survey.

As I finish this post, we are headed to Punchbowl Cemetery. I promised my aunt BabyBlue (of BabyBlueOnline) that I would lay flowers on her mother's grave, and while we're there we are also going to visit Auntie BJ and Uncle Earl's graves (no relation, that's just how Hawaiians talk about close friends of older generations).

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Exhausting Week

So this week I'm helping out with my church's Vacation Bible School! After shepherding sixteen to eighteen kids five-year-olds around every morning, I'm pretty worn out by the afternoon, but I have Responsibilities in the afternoons anyway. Sometimes they even get done...

The kids are adorable, though sometimes they get in fights and a few had trouble adjusting to what we were supposed to be doing for the first few days. VBS closing is tomorrow (it's gone so fast!), and thus we wrap up a fun week.

Maybe I should focus on the wisdom that I pick up from the little church rituals that I didn't quite understand when I was five myself. Like what "This Little Light of Mine" actually means, which I hadn't really thought about in years... until now.

Take this light around the world, I'm gonna let it shine

Take this light around the world, I'm gonna let it shine

Take this light around the world, I'm gonna let it shine

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine

Take it around the world? In some ways, even though I never thought of it that way before, that's what I've been doing in making online friends around the world. I get to have deep conversations with people I might never have met otherwise, and I learn something from them, and they learn something from me.

I feel lucky now.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Daleks

Last year, my family took a trip to England. While we were there, we were delighted to discover a museum-like-thing called the Doctor Who Experience. My dad, who has been a Doctor Who fan since college, had gleefully introduced my brother and myself to the show just the night before, and so of course we were all thrilled by the prospect. (My mom just tagged along with her nerdy family, which she seems to be very accustomed to doing because it happens so often.) Half of the "Doctor Who Experience" was a little museum displaying a wide variety of props, costumes, and even sets from the actual show (I GOT TO SEE THE ACTUAL INSIDE OF THE TENTH DOCTOR'S TARDIS, AND HIS ACTUAL SONIC SCREWDRIVER!!!) and other such things that (as demonstrated in the last set of parentheses) would make a diehard fan scream with delight, but the half salient to what I want to write about tonight was an actual Doctor Who experience, in which the Doctor whisks you away in the TARDIS and you wind up more or less living through an episode of the show. In one instance that starts out nervewracking but turns pretty funny by the end, you get kidnapped by the Daleks.

--Explanatory Note for Non-Whovians--
Daleks are possibly the most famous Doctor Who villain of all time. Certainly they are the most consistently recurring. They are a robotic race that started out as organic creatures, but were so destroyed by a series of disasters (wars, plagues, etc.) that they wound up building themselves protective shells--which look remarkably like inverted trash cans with attached toilet plungers and paint rollers and a few other modifications that are more difficult to identify, because Daleks were created back when the show had a ridiculously low budget to work around--and taking to outer space to wage more wars. They are known to bloviate in mechanical voices in ways that make it clear that they are highly xenophobic, which is not a trait well-suited to space travel in a universe filled with aliens, and thus the Doctor is their worst enemy. They would be terrifying if they weren't so darn funny.

 Being kidnapped by the Daleks, whose plungers can shoot laser beams, is generally a pretty scary thing. I was rather unnerved by it, until the Daleks that had kidnapped the museum attendees got into an argument with another group of Daleks, which mostly consisted of the two groups shouting back and forth at each other, "YOU ARE IN-FER-I-OR!!" At that point, my brother turned to me and whispered that the etiquette teacher I'd had in sixth grade for all of one lesson must have been a Dalek.

Daleks are funny, because a) they're fictional and b) it's hard to take accusations of inferiority seriously when they're coming from an inverted trash can sporting a toilet plunger and a paint roller that c) has been demonstrably defeated at various times with nothing but a wooden floor, or a pastry, or nostalgia. But while Daleks don't exist in real life, Dalek attitudes do.

Dalek ideas expressed in real life--as they were, in exactly the same words, by my aforementioned etiquette teacher--are terrifying. I can't find the words to explain why, but somehow I don't think I need to explain completely. I think it would be enough to say that my best friend and I signed up for an etiquette class thinking that it would be a fun thing to do together, learning about the nuances of old-fashioned courtesy just in case we ever wanted to know that, and were blindsided when we arrived and the first activity on the agenda was to interrogate every person about what ways that student's manners were so terrible as to warrant being forced to take an etiquette class. I was shocked into forgetting why I'd come. Later in the class, as the teacher rambled on about how this class would cause us to have better manners, but we shouldn't make anyone else feel inferior for being less refined, my friend raised her hand and said politely, "But, ma'am, you're making us feel inferior."

It was more than a fair point. It was a way of pointing out, probably mostly from instinct given that we were only twelve and hadn't really had much reason to study the subject before, that elegant manners exist for the sole purpose of acknowledging that other people deserve respect.

But that teacher looked her right in the eye and said, "You are inferior."

That was one of the most shocking things I have ever heard said--because I think that was the heart of every shocking thing that anyone has ever said. "You are inferior" so easily becomes the famous Dalek attitude: "YOU ARE IN-FER-I-OR. YOU MUST BE EX-TER-MI-NA-TED." It's funny when it's a trash can threatening you with a plunger--but it isn't at all funny in real life.

"You are inferior" becomes "it's okay for me to be mean to you," and I spiral into depression at the age of fifteen. Because people told me, for my whole life, that I was inferior--and after such a long time with no letup, I started to believe it.

"You are inferior" becomes "it's okay for me to deny you the medication your mental and physical health depends on if you taking it inconveniences me," and I spend three months of my fourth grade year showing obvious signs of mental and physical illness--and the teacher punishes me for showing those symptoms by further restricting the treatment that would solve them.

"You are inferior" becomes "it's okay for me to declare to the world at large that I hate you and everyone like you, even if I don't have any idea who you are," and thus I and many others have to shoulder the burden of trying to ignore the hate, even though it's still shocking and jarring and painful, especially when it comes up in the middle of a conversation with about something else entirely--they just have so much hate that they have to mention it whenever they can find an excuse.

It hurts every single time, and it shows up so many places--especially that last variation, which hits me right in the face all the time. Because all these things are specifically hurtful, both in themselves and because they are ways of saying "you are inferior."

To everyone who has ever been told that--and I suspect that may well mean everyone ever, period--it's not true. Not even when it's coming from people you respect, people you love. You are NOT inferior.

I was thinking that I'd write this post about this problem with respect to theological criticism, since that was what prompted me to write it in the first place, but I suppose I'll write that one later.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Mater Ursa & the Rubberglue Rule of Hate Speech

Some days, I just start reading and discover that there are bad people out there. Or I'm walking around and I hear people throwing around horrible words, the kind that hurt people and make me wish I dared to turn around and yell "EPHESIANS 4:29!!!" even though I know most people don't have that verse committed to memory. (For the record, though the phrasing depends on what translation you use, it says something to the effect of, "Do not let any harmful talk escape your lips, but only that which is useful for building others up." I only know it because I'm fond of the band Building 429, whose name is derived from that verse, but it's right up there alongside John 15:13 on my list of favorite verses.) Or people throw slurs right in my face, some of which have something to do with me but some of which don't have any connection at all.

Being attacked with insults that have no relation to who I am--or which are concerning a trait that this person clearly doesn't know that I have--bothers me, and when I think about it it's almost worse than insults that refer to some characteristic I actually have. It hurts even when it's someone else being attacked that way, which my parents and teachers don't seem to understand, so here I'm putting it into words so I can explain it better the next time I'm asked to try.

It's because it means that they have some prejudice that's so deeply ingrained that it's become a generic insult. "I hate fillintheblanks so much that I will call everyone I want to insult a fillintheblank." It doesn't matter who they're throwing the word at, when it reaches that level, because the person who actually gets hurt will be the one whom that specific slur denotes. One white boy in the middle of the classroom calling another some Asian-specific slur might be funny to both of them, but it's rare that the Vietnamese boy two rows back will be amused. He might laugh along if he's trying to feel included, but often--far too often for that kind of behavior to be even remotely excusable--he'll feel the sting anyway.

And that's what I call the Rubberglue Rule of Hate Speech. The name derives from a little rhyme my mother taught me when I was in second grade, to wit, "I'm rubber, you're glue/It bounces off of me and sticks to you." It was supposed to be a tool to defend myself from the many insults that I was on the receiving end of back then, some of which were very... weird, but now that I'm older, I see that it applies in darker ways to cruel, stereotype-based arguments.

It may bounce off of me, but the person it sticks to is the person that word means. That applies to all stereotypes. That's why I'm offended by calling people of normal intelligence "retarded," because it's implying that being like my friends who are genuinely slow is an insult. People with severe learning disabilities can be the nicest, sweetest, and too often the most terrifyingly abused people you will ever meet. That's why I'm offended by the use of racial slurs--I may be white, but what about the friends I've practically adopted as sisters who are half-Chinese? What about my friends from school and church who are black? What about my first-grade best friend who was Bolivian, or my friends from the two years I spent in a predominantly-Hispanic community in California? That's why I'm offended by the use of "gay" as a catchall term for "bad," because after discovering exactly how many of my friends are gay how could I not be?

Yes, I left my own identity out of that paragraph, because I react much differently to people attacking me. I've grown so used to being attacked, insulted, and hated on that it just makes me freeze up or cry, so I try to leave myself out of it. My friends, on the other hand?

Don't mess with my friends. Especially the younger ones, the ones I get all maternal about. Mama Bear does not take it well.

Oh, and John 15:13? It reads, in the King James version, "Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Incoherent Ramblings

Sorry I disappeared for a week without warning; I was off doing disaster recovery work! It was awesome, even though we hadn't exactly expected for a natural disaster to crop up right where we'd been planning to have a mission trip for the past year. I suddenly have a lot more appreciation for the luxuries of life, such as drinking water.

So, I'm not doing too well with following Aunt Mary's advice to write something every day... oh, well. I'll get it figured out. Hopefully things are going to get back to normal soon.


The problem with being me is that I really, really like to share my writing. This works when I'm writing, say, a cute little poem about how much my friends mean to me, but not necessarily quite so well when I want to write about the tough questions in my life. I created this blog as a place to wrestle with the hardest questions... but then I went and told people about it. Sigh. Maybe I should go find some less-exciting place to ask the questions I'm not allowed to ask, like "Who am I?" (The correct answer, in my case, is NOT "Jean Valjean," as awesome as he is. You want my friend Scott for that. Though I would have happily stolen his part, even though I'm a girl and have a very obviously feminine voice... and I couldn't have legally pulled off the shirt-ripping thing he did so well in a high-school play...)


Obviously, I'm rambling. I've been letting myself read again, you see, and my thoughts have gotten all disorganized. Focus, Iuliana.


I've been exploring my own secrets in my mind lately. I feel like I'm compelled to talk about them, because I prayed over Workcamp that I would become a more honest person. Because my secrets are part of me too. Because maybe if I tell the truth, maybe that will make life better for someone in the future, who isn't even born yet, who will need less help to get by in a less hostile world.


But of course I'm a coward, and that's part of who I am as much as anything else too. The truth doesn't come easily to me when I believe that it will put me in danger--and there are truths that will.

No, I didn't finish my homework. I didn't finish my college applications either, or my thank-you notes. I still didn't finish my homework. Actually, I don't understand my homework assignment at all; I was embarrassed to ask for help because then you'd see how little I had managed to accomplish. No, I can't do that--my mind just doesn't work that way.

Those were a few of the more benign ones from the past year, the ones that will only get me called a lazy brat who needs to stop acting like a hermit (and meanwhile I'm hiding in my bedroom because it's the only place I know where I can safely have my own thoughts). There are others that would lose me loved ones. There are others that could cost me my physical safety if they fell into the wrong hands, that have nearly cost others with similar secrets their lives, recently, in my city. 


I hate lies, but I would be lying if I said that didn't scare me.


I guess I'm not going to be able to produce a coherent blog post in my current state of mind (i.e. so tired and hungry as to produce effects nearly identical to intoxication). I hope this is good enough.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

"Bring Him Home" and Related Music

It's a little odd for me to listen closely to all the music that's out there about "praying for your soldier to survive," because there's something that's missing. I love these songs--"Bring Him Home" from Les Miserables, "Letters from War" by Mark Schultz, and the first verse of "Pray for You" by Blessid Union of Souls are all beautiful and tender and moving and make me cry every time--but there's still something missing.

I know I'm in the story those songs are trying to tell, that it encompasses me and my brother and John and Carolyn and Amy and Ashley and Kelsey and Alexis and Jacob and Emma and Caroline and Andrew and Peter and thousands more like us, but we're never mentioned in the lyrics. Not even once. I don't know what it is, but, while we're eventually present at the end of the music video for "Letters from War," in the lyrics we're not acknowledged. 

All the praying-for-your-soldier songs I've ever heard focus on the soldier's parents, never children like us who watch our own parents go off on long deployments that in some cases take them into war zones, or like my granddaddy, who at the age of ten on December 7, 1941 literally watched his own father walk into a war zone just outside their house. And I think they're missing something because of it. Not that the parents don't have a worthwhile story to tell, since they absolutely do, but that our story is not any less worthwhile. We have a different perspective, and one that really needs to be told. We are forced to grow up quickly, to get used to living in families that can go from being two-parent to single-parent in a day and back to two parents six months or a year later, and there are families out there where both parents have been deployed at once and the children had to just live with that. We have to get used to grieving very quietly for an entire life we had, everywhere that is familiar and nearly everyone we knew and often a few treasured possessions too, all at once, every year sometimes when we move, and it has to be quiet because even though we don't know if we'll ever see those people and places again, we can't get in the way of moving. And it's all hard on our parents and us at the same time.

On Memorial Day a few years ago, I began a poem about how my father missed my sixteenth birthday because the military wanted him somewhere else on that day. I never could finish that poem, but now I think there's something I have to write along similar but broader lines. And it boils down to this:

The children of those soldiers and sailors and pilots want to bring them all home safely, too.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Reputation

"Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation!"
-Michael Cassio, Act II, Scene 3, lines 281-282 from The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare

I've always loved my church. It's one of the most purely, honestly fun places I know, somewhere I can feel safe and ask hard questions and do good works and sing excerpts from Broadway musicals and drop anime references. My church family is full of wonderful people whom I love being around. 

The hard part is, my brother attends youth group functions with me now, and he's embarrassed by my reputation for being weird and loud and active in every discussion. This is a problem, because he believes my reputation reflects on his, and consequently often gets mad at me for being myself. 

I don't believe that my reputation and his have anything to do with each other, and I resent that he's trying to change mine. Because what he doesn't seem to understand is that the reputation I have is the reputation I want, that I'm more comfortable not reining myself in the way he does, that it's better for me that people expect me to act the way I do naturally. He doesn't want any part of my reputation, but that's okay because I want nothing to do with his. He can have his image. I just want to be seen as myself, nothing else, and definitely not as an extension of my little brother's quest to fake a socially acceptable normalcy.

Home isn't a safe space for me anymore except when I'm locked in my room alone, because of my brother. School was always unpredictable--some classes would be safe, but some I always felt like I was constantly in danger. Church is the one place where I don't want to worry about my reputation, because I have to keep it under control everywhere else just to keep the bullying level down.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Maturity, Autism, and Normalcy

It seems that, though most people don't realize it, the word "maturity" is used as a catchall term for a lot of different qualities that (are said to) become more common among any given group as its members grow older. Some I have. Some I don't.

I've graduated from high school and now I'm looking to leave for college in the fall, but I'm not sure I'm "mature" enough to survive there. I don't even know if I was really "mature" enough for high school, for all I managed to graduate. Believe you me, it took a lot of help for me to get this far, and now a lot of the support I've had to get here is dissolving while I still need it. It's going to be a struggle, and all the more so because I'm slow and I still haven't recovered from a rather traumatic, well... the past six years, really, ever since I first started secondary school.


Compounding the problem was the fact that I was also too mature for high school. Like most teenagers, I spent a lot of high school trying to figure out the answer to the question, "Who am I?" Unfortunately, a lot of the answers I found led me to conclusions that my classmates couldn't even seem to comprehend. I have never gone a single year in my memory without being the target of at least one major bullying incident, and by the time I finished high school I realized that it was because I was so obviously different from everyone else.


I am autistic, and ever since I discovered as much I have been struggling with how much to own the label. It does make me different, in demonstrable ways. I would rather be proud of my strengths than ashamed by the challenges that come with them, but even owning the name "autistic" too much makes me a target to the ignorant and a problem for my friends. But it's my life, built in, not something I can just turn off because I'm bothering someone. It's not the only thing in my life, but I can't ever get away from it even if I don't talk about it. Is it more mature to speak up, like my uncle (technically first cousin once removed) does in being part of an autistic self-advocacy protest group, or to stay quiet and let it just be the background of my life like most of my friends wish I would?


Sometimes even I forget I'm autistic. I believe the things that people say, about how I can do everything that everyone else can, that I'm no different, that I'm capable of anything. I don't look different. I've been forcibly and unpleasantly taught to observe the basics of "acting normal" that don't come nearly so naturally to me as to others. So I push myself to keep up with everyone else, but then I discover every time that I can't always do that. I'm truly good at gathering and memorizing information, but really only on the topics that are meaningful and important to me, and so I'm characterized as "lazy" because it's hard for me to force myself to fill my head with things I don't care about when there's something just one tangent away that's on a topic I have a passion for. And that's part of what my form of autism is: Hans Asperger, the doctor for whom my Asperger's Syndrome is named, characterized the children he studied as "little professors" because each had a deep and thorough knowledge about their own subjects of interest to the exclusion of most else. And I'm not good at socializing with strangers when I don't have someone I'm comfortable with around to make it easier. That's the part that's hit me lately: when too much is happening at once, I go into sensory overload until I can get away to calm down.


No, I'm not normal. And I just have to live with it. That's a form of maturity, too:


God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Hello! Random Hurricane Dropping In Unannounced!

so, you mighta noticed, i haven't posted for the past few days. this is because, while i was writing a blog post friday night, this random thunderstorm with hurricane-force winds came up out of nowhere,knocking down trees and taking a massive chunk of the area where i live off the power grid. now i'm resorting to posting from my phone, because i know some of my friends will be worried about me and hopefully they'll check this blog, you know who you are. i'm fine, but i don't know how long it'll be until we get back online, and as you may have noticed from the bizarre formatting, my phone's interface and this blog's functions do not agree with each other very well and so i might not post much until i can use my laptop for the purpose again. in the meantime, my very prepared father has set up a generator we bought many moves ago in case something like this happened, and it's working well so at least we have a refrigerator and i can entertain myself with pokemon.