Aaaaahhh!
I just finished reading in Time magazine - er, skimming through it - and I'm exhausted. It's not the hopelessness of it all, it's that it's all so predictable - all this political bullshit - that it just makes me see the future as predictable as well. There seems to be no such thing as change in this world; there are just inexplicable drifts as humanity approaches certain extremes. Who could have predicted that Asia would usurp Africa's place in the international HIV/AIDS community as the biggest problem? And not because the African "problem" got solved? Anyone could have predicted that a leader who speaks like his constituents, would be popular enough to get reelected no matter what; but who could have predicted that "what", and how little it really seems to affect things. So a new president gets elected, does the world take a deep breath? So what about me, sitting in the middle of one of the world's worst health crises, this deadly combination of malaria and HIV? Does it matter here? And if not, what does? I can't even see the worst of it, nor do I want to. You want to see suffering? Just to know it exists? To feel human yourself? This is what really changes the world, right here. People who get embroiled in the lowest common denominator and have to reconcile it with decadence. It's we who change the world because we are changed in a society that accepts us, make that two societies, and we maintain influence in those spheres over those we know well. That's how change happens.
Aaaaaaaahhhhh!!!
Change. I babble on about it as if it is a purely positive thing, unalterable in its very nature, promoting some sort of wonderful future. What if it's all wrong? What if the very idea of changing the world from the group up, little by little, is just fundamentally flawed. What if influence really is Hollywood...the majority of human beings in the world are more likely to trust Toby Maguire than someone like me? That my voice, that my presence, and that of thousands of my neighbors is just a presence that is fleeting and mortal and like me, will pass along with time.
I made peace with the fact that we are all in search of immortality, quite a long time ago. Inevitably, it leads me on a search for my own. And it must have been that this search eventually led me to come here and just do it - to keep pushing the boundaries of what I have tried in my life, in order to find that one thing I can dedicate myself to and completely dominate. Have I accomplished that? No. I have just stretched the boundaries further, predictably, making it harder to figure all this out. Because I'm not sure that the basis of my decision was valid. Who's to say I need to choose something? Who's to say that the change I might exact would be good? Maybe the lack of moral compass in my life has sent me into a recursive tailspin. I have no compass to follow other than my own, and it keeps changing as I keep trying to follow it. I'm not sure whether I feel like a blind man in a vision-based world, or the only person who can see in a tactile world. I prefer the latter. The idea being that what you're seeing doesn't make sense because nobody prepared it to be seen, so you don't know which way to go or what to think, because there is no plan, there is no right solution. And you're not sure you're seeing anything because nobody's there with you to confirm it all. But I see it, I really do. I see how my interactions will affect people here - I see how people will react. I see my emotions and my fears and I deal with them well before I have to. I know myself intensely well. And maybe all this is enough. To see - in a blind world. I'm not so arrogant that I think I'm the only one.
And I'm not so tunnel-visioned to ignore the fact that a day's events can turn emotions on a dime to an unrecognizable state.
One of my students had an epileptic seizure today, and so we rushed him to the hospital before we knew what it was, or why. I had to ask my director for a ride, which he agreed to do somewhat reluctantly. I think his tune changed when he saw the student he was transporting. And when we got to the hospital, after giving the student a proper bed, I sat in the waiting room and watched his doctor take a smoke break of sorts. He's fine, but I nearly lost it when an old chapa came by, practically flinging a woman bleeding from both hips, out of the back onto the steps of the hospital and left her there. The hospital moved slowly - I considered helping her, but I was too stunned to move (partially by the psychological phenomenon of thinking someone else would do something, but I've conquered most of my group conditioning for that.) The hospital eventually brought her in, but only after she had taken six steps and collapsed again. What's wrong with me? She made it in and everyone in the waiting room was babbling that she had AIDS. (You want to know why there's problems here? This is a large, urban hospital, and the mentality is that she must have AIDS. Western-style education has done nothing.)
So I visited my student, who was with two of his friends, went back to school to teach two more lessons, home to eat lunch for an hour, back to school to meet with a teacher, then back home for dinner. And with this teacher I found out that the room of the epileptic and also that other girl I helped a month or two ago, as well as that fight I had to break up last year, is a cursed room. Apparently, someone died in it some years ago. And it's room 13. That number doesn't have any meaning here, but I explained what it meant to this other teacher and she couldn't believe it.
And I just thought of it now, but the kid who died last year at school was on his way to that room. Yes, coincidence, I know.
Peace
John
