Going to heck

Just as Hades is separate from hell, Heck is also its own afterlife sphere. Heck is an eternal Sunday potluck full of under-seasoned potato salad, where everyone wears pastel polo shirts and titters nervously if somebody says the word "lesbian" or "underwear". It's overseen by a middle-aged Midwestern couple who have unexplained Minnesotan accents.

From May: My grandma's diaspora

Blank spaces often scare us more than pain. This is why death is so daunting: because our void of knowledge about it is a blank space. The possibilities are infinite, and infinity stretches out past the horizon of our understanding, spinning with so many colors that they all blur into white. This is why many prefer suffering to nothingness; because at least there's still a self to suffer.

When I think of my grandma, who doesn't have much time left, I wonder how much of her memory is buried under snow and how much has been uprooted altogether. Maybe it's like a page where the writing has been erased and she's trying to piece it back together by the ghostly traces. Her page was the first edition, but she's read it to so many people that it's no longer the only copy. The words have scattered from her page onto those of everyone she has loved.

The words aren't lost. Her family still knows her Yiddish and her made-up expressions like "cuckoopots" (meaning anything outrageous). We still know her winking innuendos and her puns; how sitting on a menu is "ass-essing" it. We know her spirited rants against bigotry, anti-Semitism, and bad customer service. We know her stories about how much she loved her students. We know the time the stock market crashed, her elementary school burned down, she caught the measles, and her widowed father remarried all within the same year. How she lay in bed as a sick five-year-old that year, clutching a little toy fire truck, and said to the ceiling, "Mommy, please make me better." How on the day WWII ended, she went to a party in a yellow dress and re-met my grandpa (they'd gone to school together, reconnected at the party, and started dating). How her first boyfriend had been gay, and she grew to care about gay rights before a lot of people did. How she had six children because she wanted one for every millionth Jew killed in the Holocaust.

We remember these things because she told us. Because her life has been a love letter to the world. Or sometimes a complaint letter. Or a bawdy, hilarious manifesto.

One moment a few weeks ago, in a fragment amid a word salad, she said "I want to be everywhere." And she is everywhere, just not in herself.

She has begun her own one-woman diaspora. She has found homes in everyone else.

Why the friend zone is a myth

When I say that "the friend zone" doesn't exist, I don't mean that leading people on doesn't exist. I don't mean that nobody deliberately flirts with someone they know has unrequited feelings for them, aware it will hurt but not caring because it feeds their own ego. And while that behavior is often exclusively criticized in women, people of all genders do it. Anybody who behaves that way is being selfish and dishonest, not a friend. So I'd rather call it "leading people on" than "friendzoning."

When I say there's no such thing as "the friend zone," what I mean is that people do not become friends with others out of spite. Nobody decides, "I'm going to be friends with somebody who likes me romantically in order to punish them. I'm going to relegate them to a confined 'zone.'" And if a person sees friendship as inherently manipulative or punitive, then the chances are high that they're a pretty sub-par friend.

Also, I suspect a lot of people think they're being led on when they may be interpreting friendly behavior as flirtatious. As I said, it's not that this never happens. It's just that there can be misunderstandings, sometimes due to wishful thinking and sometimes due to entitlement.

The US's relationship status: It's complicated.

There’s a meme that says, “I don’t think America should elect any president in 2016. We should be single for a few years and find ourselves.” I really love that because not only is it hilarious, it can be an extended metaphor.

If the President is the US’s significant other, then the US is also polyamorous with Congress. The Constitution is basically a “terms and conditions” of the relationship, and they really need to write a prenup. Every four years it finds itself in a love triangle which gets voted on like a reality dating show. The US is finally reconsidering its bias toward exclusively dating rich white men, but it has a long way to go. And Republicans and Democrats are its “type”, even though there are plenty of other suitors who could be more compatible.

Life as a list

I've been thinking about why people are inclined to make lists, both physically and philosophically. This is my theory: Our lives are lists. They're catalogs of people we've encountered, events we experienced passively, and events we caused. A lot of these components are random, but we spend years trying to come up with a title for the compilation in order to pull it all together and give it a common theme.

I was going to add that we're often shaped by whether we try to make our lives into "things to do" or "things to obtain" lists. But for a lot of us, experiences and accomplishments *are* things to obtain. Also, a person whose primary goal is to amass things may not be materialistic; they may have very few resources and be concerned with survival. So being able to focus on non-survival based goals is a privilege.

The "life is a list" theory makes our smaller lists very meta. Daily goals and itinerary are lots of little collections inside a much larger one.

Self conscious vs. self aware

I wonder why "self-conscious" has come to mean self-critical or embarrassed, when the words themselves just mean aware of the self--not necessitating a judgmental eye. The usage implies that to be conscious of the self is to be self-scolding, when it doesn't have to be that way. To me, self-consciousness is recognition of one's own strengths as well as weaknesses. It could also include neutral observations.

Animals and ego

I spend a lot of time wondering what it's like to have the mind of another animal. Not a species that exists in a completely different way than we do, like fish or insects. More like the internal life of a cat, or dog, or horse, or bird, or other species that humans are better able to relate to. They're said to not exactly have an ego, because they don't have a sense of self. They don't contemplate themselves or recognize their reflections in mirrors. But in another way, they really do seem to have a sense of self because they have distinct desires, fears, likes and dislikes. They form attachments and aversions to other creatures. Those traits all seem rooted in ego because they stem from the way the animal is treated, and what makes them feel good, and what seems like a threat. If not an ego, that's definitely a will. So I wonder what it's like to live with a will but no ego, and if that's even possible for humans with the ways our brains are structured.