seeing.

I’ve just read Indi’s entry about a spooky morning with Noe.

Gees. Well, a friend told me about the daughter of a friend, who, when she was 3, talked about how she had three other pair of parents before her current parents. Now that was scary. She also talked in her sleep about other weird visions. That story (besides my partner-hopeless disease) often made me think six, even seven times about having kids. Hehe. I’m such a scaredycat really.

But “seeing” is always an interesting topic. Even as adults we often translate undiscernible patterns to figures that are familiar to us. That’s how we see the man on the moon and the pack of those smiling cats on those moldy walls. When we face unfamiliar figures, physical or non-physical (meaning, just an energy, or just a breeze of anything), we feel the need to translate those figures into something that’s more familiar to us. When we can’t do it, that’s when things get a bit weird – and feelings a bit, er, challenged.

As adults, though, I think we’re trained by our society to leave them alone. I think people with Paranoid Personality Disorder might be ones who keep struggling with this habit (of needing to clearly perceive everything and leaving nothing in the dark) in their minds.

Remember that story about how an indigenous tribe failed to see a foreign ship that was coming on shore, because that particular shape of the ship was simply not in their visual vocabulary? That makes a lot of sense. Our perception is doomed to be biased.

Imagine being The Other, though. Those figures that people try to see, but just can’t discern. That’s like, almost, the story of my life.

–

One day I was queuing in a bank in Jamaica Plain, MA. I was the only Asian-looking in the line of the all latin-american neighborhood. There was this young mother with her little girl playing around in front of me.

Wanting to be considered ever-friendly-to-children, I made the effort to attract this little girl with my smile (you know how it is; I am nice by nature). She never responded – she just kept looking at me with her straight face before starting to run away and play around again. After a few minutes of my doing this stupid smile to that straight face, finally the little girl walked back to her mom hesitantly, and said “Mummy,” pointing at me, “What is that?”

What, my dearest brothers and sisters. Not who. I thought, yeah right. What am I.

Ask me again. Please. That’s like, almost, The Question of my life.

I was hoping that it was just a glitch in god’s videorecording of the whole scene. Or that – oh please let this be – that the little girl was pointing at an attractive pimple on my nose … and that she has never seen such an attractive pimple before.

Unfortunately for me, though, I had no pimple.