Addendum

When we drive on the road, most of the time, it's impossible to see drivers of other cars around us. Only if the sun hits at the right angle can I make out the driver behind me in the rear view mirror; only if I take my eyes off the road can I peek at a driver directly to my left or right. Who drives directly in front of me is almost always a mystery, unless I can somehow make out their face in their rear view mirror given they don't have a tinted rear windshield. I doubt most drivers perceive their neighbors in terms such as, "That [person of unknown race, gender, and age] is such an asshole for cutting me." Human perception dictates that we're much more likely to say, "That [red Jeep] is such a dick."

Unless whichever human driver I happened to offend manages to see me personally through the various (and more) methods mentioned above, all they will think is: "Wow, what a fucking retarded Volvo." In fact, it's not just the angry driver who thinks I'm a Volvo. Everyone who sees me really sees only a Volvo, most of the time, under normal circumstances. Does that mean, at any time while I'm driving, that I believe even for a split second that I actually physically look like a Volvo? Do I start believing I'm a car?

What if I have always been in that driver's seat, since birth? It's awkward at first, trying to master the break, the accelerator, the wheel and whatnot. But every new driver gains a sense for the car's motion, sooner or later. Keeping a constant safe distance between me and the car in front becomes habit, instinct, intuition. We feel the engine's struggle when climbing a steep hill; we know when it's too late to stop for a yellow light. We are aware of our car-ly dimensions when we perform a perfect parallel parking into a spot just barely big enough. As drivers, we become (as if) one with our car. After all, we are (largely) responsible for every move it makes. We're able to switch freely between consciousnesses as (driver of) a car and as our human selves. It's never a problem, never an issue of imprisonment or misunderstanding. Neither you nor any other person on the road really believes each other to be cars because everyone can simply step out of one. As soon as the door opens, the unit in perception changes. It's not really a mean red Jeep I was talking about; it's some cueball douchebag. It's no longer a wacky Volvo; it's just another Asian chick who can't drive.

And that is where the analogy fails. But, I ask again, what if I have always been in that driver's seat since birth, and so has everyone else, and it's impossible to ever get out of the car? What if our bodies are actually fused to the car metabolically, such that we are replenished when the car "eats," and our wastes are eliminated when the car exhausts? What if all the windows have always been tinted to the darkest shade on every side, such that no one ever realizes that for each car, there is an inner driver who is a separate being from the mere car? We can believe we're all cars because 1) from what I can tell of myself and others, we're all cars; 2) the car responds to my conscious commands, moves as I do, and essentially is my functional body; 3) what on earth does an inner driver even look like, if one exists at all? No one has ever seen one, much less proven its existence. Furthermore, current science has discovered, with more and more detail, exactly how each part of our car-bodies work. There is some sort of nervous system that connects our external car bodies to an inner command compartment, a centralized computer. There are various ways to relay messages from that central command room to the rest of the car parts. Sometimes weird things happen when we remove one car part and the central command doesn't catch up to the fact and still thinks it's there. The car is a very mysterious and complex system. It might even come up with the illusion that it exists and has a consciousness!

But the presence of a driver is something forever outside the realm of consideration, since science only tests the testable, the empirical. In controlled and limited settings. Only to hypotheses we can create with our limited imagination as cars.

I can and do accept that I'm a car like everyone else. But since very many years ago, at an age that Piaget (another of our limited sciences) says is impossible to have such abstract thought, I realized I could dissociate from the car and, in fact, wonder about myself as a driver. What is that being like? I wish I could strip away all my car fluff and see, because despite what everyone else believes, I know the car is only such a minimal part of what I am, what reality is. Are we thus fused to the car because we live in an environment otherwise uninhabitable, similar to how we have to wear special suits in space? I question the very dimensions of the world we perceive, peeking from behind our heavily tinted windshield. How does the world look like to I the Driver? I cannot begin to imagine, given our so-very-limited perception and imagination from having always lived as mere cars.

I suppose it's a Plato's cave type of thing.
P.S. All vehicular references purely arbitrary. I are an good driver I swear.

Correspondence

"I am frustrated because so much of catching up is the trading of biographical data that, while important and interesting, overstays its welcome and prevents the actual furthering of the relationship itself, so that eventually there is no more relationship, just mutual retrospection."

This. I was so _____ when I read this that I can't even find the word that goes into that blank. Not quite relief, but the wordless kind of exchange where if dimensions allowed, I'd punch you and start laughing. For taking words out of my mouth, I thank you.

I've been...inert, and content with the present situation. Both positive things in my book. I suppose I should be feeling pressure from all that will happen within a month or two (MCAT/application process/wisdom teeth extraction/etc.), but I'm not. Some might call it the calm before the storm, but with me it's more of an oscillation. Almost a month ago I remember singing a very different tune, and again something similar to now before that.

I wish I live with less regrets.

Still unused to the concept that I really can go anywhere I want, now, alone, with my car. It's a very foreign type of freedom that I haven't worked up enough enthusiasm to yet explore. Home hasn't been nearly as bad as I anticipated a month ago, and it's almost a bit silly now to remember how much I freaked myself out over this back then. I'm taking a prep course for the MCAT as well as being trained for the local HopeLine (which operates differently enough for me to truly realize just how much I loved SPS and its people in Columbus), and with some potential future employment down the line.

The parental situation has been manageable. With graduation, suddenly I have gained a few rights to existence, but am still largely seen as being the same age as my siblings. Any time I bother to speak my mind on an issue and happen to disagree with them, they automatically assume it is because they have spoiled me to the point that I think I have a voice. Any time I bother to bring up anything they haven't thought of and they happen to approve, they voice extreme surprise that I can, in fact, think and/or process information.

They seem pretty impressed that Jarek found a 60k job upon graduation despite my claim that we broke up since two years ago, at their request. I wouldn't know what to think if things can actually proceed smoothly here at some point. I've become so used to hiding everything from them that the idea of "coming out" is ludicrous, even though we're at the brink of reaching there...I think. I hope.

In the master bathroom of our house there are three large mirror-walls. I haven't felt this estranged from my body in quite a while, seeing my whole from unfamiliar angles. Too often I stare at that face for so long to become unable to recognize it.

Have I ever told you in specifics about this kind of dissociation? It goes beyond unfamiliarity with the mere physical body that I see so very little of. I am more familiar with these appendages and front half of a torso than I am with the most supposedly-important part that most of the world probably recognizes me by. I have never seen it except in pictures and some videos - but as everyone says, The camera lies. "I" look different in every picture; "I" am different dependent on who took the picture. This stuff is untrustworthy because I never know how it will show up the next time. Mirrors are untrustworthy as well, because there exists some sort of internal impression/idea of how this face is supposed to look, and I (and everyone I notice) would subconsciously morph that face into something consistent with our preexisting impression. (When enough mirrors are combined to correct that mirror-image effect, what I see is even more strange and warped. This doesn't help.)

There are other pitfalls with mirrors as they show just how paper-thin the dimension of our world (that we have become so used to, so ready to claim as objective, as empirical, as real) truly are.

In early Chinese elementary school, there were periodic weekend class time/activities devoted to teaching children basic chore skills. Off the top of my head, I remember sessions where we learned how to hand wash small clothing items and, in this particular instance circa first or second grade, how to sew buttons. I forget the specifics of what happened before I left home, but I was somehow seeing blue smoke at the peripherals of my vision. At first I thought it was too much incense being burned indoors, but it persisted as I went out and walked to school. I kept rubbing my eyes, but it wouldn't going away. It affected everything I saw, wherever I looked. On that walk, I realized how helplessly dependent I was on the state of my eyes, how I counted on them to tell me truth, and how much I'd gotten used to assuming that they did. I thought about how these two small instruments, that can only see a span of 180 degrees of what is in front of them at any time, can never simultaneously perceive the other entirely mysterious and elusive side. Sure, I could turn about face and look in the opposite direction, but it didn't change that I then could no longer see the side I was facing before. The brain holds a memory of the first 180-degree span and stitches it together with knowledge/vision of the other 180 degrees; it creates a completely artificial understanding that the two are connected to form a fluid and ever-changing 360-degree panorama that readjusts itself in perspective based on how the rest of the body moves. We only think we know how the world and our surroundings look like. But really, at any instance in time, all we have to go by is the front ventral half of our physical body and the rest of the 180-degree span as seen from two cameras inconveniently set in our head.

If we had no hands, no means of tactile exploration, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference if we were actually looking through eye-shaped peepholes into another world. But because this "reality" is what we have become used to since birth, and because we have hands that can tell us there appears to be a backside to our head, we have always matched what we see with what we feel and assumed thus that our combined senses perceived something real. On that day, I realized my senses were fallible, fragile. Nothing says I'm not another being apart from the Jing that this supposed world perceives; nothing says there isn't another entity, the real "me", merely looking through Jing's peepholes into her supposed world and reality. This is why I feel strange as her; I'm wearing her skin and flesh, wearing her motile and tactile skills, wearing her limited eyes that only see 180 degrees. She is a moving tower and vessel inside of which I am trapped, even though I control her and can even forget this and become her, think that I am her.

And if I'm not necessarily her, then who is this that looks through her peepholes and lives life wrapped in her skin? Who is this entity that clearly exists but (I) can't find or feel since (my) false tactile sense tells me there is nothing in the 180 degrees that I can't see, other than the back of my head? My hands are part of the panorama illusion. I suspect that I can't find this entity even if I were to dig and tear Jing apart.

As a seven-year-old, I had nowhere near the language capacity required to express any of this. When I was back home, I stumbled over my tongue trying to explain to my parents, but no words could come beyond the question of, Who am I?

They were surprised. And the answer they gave consisted of a surface explanation concerning lineage and family trees, which of course was not at all what I was looking for. I felt inadequate, unable to clarify or make them understand. This may have been the first instance I felt the insufficiency of parents, and that of adults in general by proxy. Nowadays I just lament the uselessness of words and how much of a struggle it is to wrestle with them. I remember trying to describe this to several people through the years, but not once do I think I've managed to have it come out right - including this time just now.

When I say dissociation, it isn't just the alienness of my physical body alone. It's the unbearable panorama itself. I wish I can rip apart the fabric it is projected upon and see what is behind these limiting peepholes. It's the unbearable curiosity and impatience that this play on life and reality be done already. (I am, of course, still interested to see how things in the drama of Jing will turn out in the end, but I've also always been the curious type who skips to read the last page of the novel when a quarter way through the book.) Even if I'm just playing the long and perpetual part of Jing, I think I'd be satisfied to know, even just for a moment, what is really beyond the stage.

I guess it only happens when I'm bored with my present roles. When things become hectic again, fusion into Jing is much easier. It is much more natural to become lost in the face of responsibility, to realize that her problems and dilemmas are my problems and dilemmas, that her dreams during this life here are also things I would want, that her ultimate rewards are really rewards for me as well.

I've been content. And waiting, waiting, waiting without any real idea of what I'm anticipating. I'm interested and heavily curious.

How are you?