Trilogy of ah-ha’s

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Albert Camus

I am going to continue on from my theme of yesterday of writing about three things to be grateful about.

1. I went to see the shrink today. We talked more about the two most significant losses I have dealt with over the past 13 years. I have let my guard down with him now and he is really challenging some of my beliefs. Like the fact that I had a termination that coincided with the date of my brother’s death, it did not follow or  mean that his soul was caught in some sort of limbo.

I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.
Albert Einstein

We also talked about my desire to have a child but my dilemma about having a child as a single woman. The idea of artificial insemination doesn’t seem good for me (I have no judgement about people who choose this method) just that I would be too damned curious about the identity of my child’s father. I would be obssessed.

CURIOSITY, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.
Ambrose Bierce

I talked about adoption as probably the best option. He reminded me that alot of people (just like me) would use the business in their life (full time work + full time study + volunteering) to fill up their empty lives and provide great excuses not to take the leap to actually take action. He encouraged me to get out as previously discussed. He said, I have no doubt that you will meet someone. I laughed and appreciated his faith in the possibility. I told him I looked up book clubs on line but with no success. The sites were all about "setting up" a book club. I left feeling like small change was happening and I guess that is better than were I have been for months, which is stuck.

2. After the shrink I had a university class with my nutty professor. He has a white afro and he has a laugh like Beevis and Butthead. He has told us that he has no interest in grading the class, that if we read certain texts (non-uni related) or go to see certain movies that he will reduce the word count on our assigments, provided we discuss them in the work.

I am in a class of mostly men. It doesn’t matter where I look in the classroom, there is always one of them looking at me. It is disconcerting. I feel like it is a sea of testosterone and I am the lonely oestrogen ready to be pounced on. I normally don’t speak or try to draw attention to myself in this class but tonight I did and I could see this strange phenomenon. I think I was the only person there that had completed the readings, I was interested in the topic and I really like chatting to my nutty professor (which I normally do after class). Tonight when I spoke up, I could see people kind of being on a knife’s edge of curiousity to hear the chick speak for the first time in 6 months, along with a mild disgust that I was being such a know it all. 

"The male sterotype makes masculinity not just a fact of biology but something that must be proved and re-proved, a continual quest for an ever-receding Holy Grail".
Marc Feigen Fasteau

So what went well about this, well it was the realisation that I didn’t really give a crap what any of them thought of me. Also that I wasn’t too overcome with paranoia, perhaps they were not thinking anything about me speaking up at all. Maybe they were just transfixed with a hint of cleavage and the smell of perfume.   

"Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not been able to answer… the great question that has never been answered: what does a woman want?"
Sigmund Freud
3. In class I was thinking about some of the topics of discussion and it made me realise how powerful the internet and sites like these are in changing the tide of people easily digesting government or media magnate propaganda. That people do seem more willing to question authority, to put events in their own words and have uncensored debate.

I remember starting my first diary here in 2001 just before 9/11 and how powerful that one event has been in shaping history to come. The history I have in my memory is of diarists personal reflections or experiences since then. For the past 5 years onward there has been a deep fear to speak up and question, until now.

We have an opportunity in a place like this to share our insight into our reality. It might seem like a mundane microcosm to you but it never ceased to amaze me with my old diary how people from around the world would read my diary and find it interesting. It is interesting that despite all of the division and fear in our society that we can read someone’s diary, whether it be in Hungary,  in Iceland or Hong Kong and see common human experience. Themes that we grapple with being reflected on around the world. The personal is political.