It’s so indivisibly part of that phrase, but it doesn’t mean anything. Like, why is Chevron always offered with Techron? Has anyone ever walked in to pay at the cash register and been like “Hi, I’d like my Chevron without Techron, thank you.”

I have never seen Techron with my own two eyes. My first thought is that it’s some secret formula, some chemical they put in the gas to make it extra-effective. So saying “Chevron with Techron” is like labelling a food item, like, “Orange Juice with Vitamin C” or “Brownies with Pot”. I’m pretty sure that’s what I passively believed Techron to be when I was a kid. But that doesn’t make much sense. So then I thought, maybe Techron is a mascot. Like Tony the Tiger. There are, after all, a lot of drawings of animated cars in Chevron propaganda. Maybe one of them is Techron, so when you get gas there it’s like, “Get Chevron with Techron! [TECHRON smiles and winks a windshield wiper at the camera. Cut to black.]“

I think that idea is my personal favorite for Techron, even though there are other possibilities (insurance policy? special automated pumping system?). If I ever get a dog I might name it Techron, so that I can bring him in the car and say I’m going to get Chevron with Techron.

Well… maybe it would be too dorky to say. But I’ll think it.

Techron would be a good name for a dog, actually. You could call him Tech for short, which I think has a nice ring to it. It sounds like one of those douchey 50s names, like Skip and Rush and… I dunno, Mitt. (Why do Republicans always have douchey names?)

The gas was so that I could drive to Santa Cruz and tie up a few loose ends with the registrar and my rock climbing membership and so forth before I leave for the Amazon in two days. I know that where I’m going is a place of sweltering tropical languor and heat, but for me driving over the summit of Highway 17 is driving into endless summer. It was a clear day in Santa Cruz; the green was starting to creep back into the meadows; the sun was crisp and bright; and from the linguistics offices in Stevenson I could see down the green sweep of the town all the way over the blue, blue waters of the Monterey Bay to the land on the other side. The Moss Landing smokestacks 40 or 50 miles away, usually a hazy silhouette of a thing, were in sharp relief. I don’t know when I last saw such a clear day. And it was… well, I’m going to miss it. I went to Bry and Annaïs’ place in the Porter apartments and they were there along with a bunch more of my friends, and we had salad with blueberries and pot stickers for lunch, and hung out. Everything was all clean and bright from people having moved out and then moved back in. And… I’m just going to miss it a lot. Going to miss them  a lot.

On my way back I was listening to a mix CD I just made. Now, before I tell the rest of this slightly embarrassing story, I need to say that songs almost never make me cry. Maybe I’ll be listening to a sad song for a specific reason which is making me cry, but for a song to emotionally create something out of nothing? It doesn’t happen to me. Maybe this wasn’t “something out of nothing” because it had to do with the trip I’m about to take, but the song “3×5″ by John Mayer came on, and to my own bewilderment I started to tear up. I have to stress that I’m honestly not mentioning the I-never-cry thing to be all macho, it’s just that the first reaction I felt was “Wha–?!?! whoa.” When you think about it, 2 minutes really should not be time enough for you to build up enough emotion to cry. It’s weird and abrupt. That’s how it felt: abrupt.

But anyway. This song, this song is so perfect, and something about it caught me by surprise. Part of the reason I’m so excited to go to Peru is because lately I’m feeling dizzied by the crush of technology and staying connected, and the pace of life when some important news about my 992 friends on Facebook breaks every twenty minutes. Five different passwords. Three different e-mail accounts. Keep in touch via Skype with your friends from this class, and that class, and that summer…. I just want to get off the map and really live. And this song, the title is after a common print size for photographs – 3×5 – and it goes, “Didn’t have a camera by my side this time/ Hoping I would see the world through both my eyes.”

Yeah, I’m bringing a camera to Peru, but the camera isn’t the point. Some combination of the experience I’m looking for and what I know I have in Santa Cruz – friends that are always there to share food with you when you show up at their door; something that can’t be photographed or quantified in Facebook posts – really hit me. The friends that are really worth something have a connection with you deeper than what you can share and describe. Just as I know that my time in the jungle will mean more to me than any blog or photo could ever share or describe. The magic is in realizing that, and not trying too hard to share and describe it anyway. As the song goes, “You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes/ it brought me back to life…” The idea that stopping to really see something, even something ordinary, can save you. I heard it as if for the first time. And I… well… sort of…. um. cried.

Yup, that was embarrassing. I’ll be going into hiding in Peru now. Be back in 2 months.

(P.S. John Mayer is hot, isn’t he? That’s not a rhetorical question; i’m staring at him and I honestly can’t decide… but. don’t look at the video while you listen to the song. Hot or no, John Mayer’s smoldering Zoolander lips will not reduce you to tears. but this song might.)

I don’t have a bibliography or a source for this. My dad told it to me; he said he read it in the book Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin, which he picked up after seeing the movie “Temple Grandin.” Temple Grandin was an autistic woman who felt an instinctive emotional connection with animals and so made a niche for herself in the world revolutionizing the farm industry.

Apparently all emotions felt by all animals are based on a mix of the following 4 instincts: fear, curiosity, sexuality and pursuit of prey. The interesting part is, I think human emotions fit under that umbrella as well, and I started thinking about how.

FEAR: Self-explanatory. I imagine we feel fear much the same way animals do.

CURIOSITY: This was the one my dad brought up, because he was commenting on my insane thirst for travel – you know, the burning passion of the young. It makes a lot of sense then, why young people have such weird and consistent desires. Wanderlust. The desire to see the world. Experimentation. The desire to know what’s beyond the horizon, turns out, is a basic evolutionary need.

SEXUALITY: I kind of like thinking of this one when I’m incredibly horny or sexually frustrated or whatever, to put things in perspective. Society tends to look down on people who let their sex drives get the best of them. Feeling obsessed with your sexual pursuits is a little less embarrassing when you think of it as simply one of four, a thirst as basic and pressing as curiosity, fear, and ambition.

PURSUIT OF PREY: Which brings me to this last one. At first it gave me trouble, because humans certainly don’t pursue prey anymore; economics has done away with that. We just show up at In’n'Out or whatever, and the prey comes to us. Not much predator cred to be had there, even if you did order it animal style. But think about what basic part of psychology is missing from the other three, and the answer sort of writes itself. Ambition. Competition. Any sort of will to achieve is, I think, a human manifestation of the pursuit-of-prey instinct. Nowadays our prey is money and acclaim, but we’re still fighting for it, much as we’d like to pretend we’re not. And in fact money is what we used to feed ourselves, so no surprise that the predator instinct translates over.

The whole thing makes me dream about an incredibly simple, straightforward perspective on living life : live with the four instincts perfectly in balance. And why shouldn’t it work? Have adventures, stay safe, get laid and be successful. But never let one compromise the other three. They’re all there for a reason. (except for sexuality. in my case, cause i’m gay. I went there.)

I thought that was a really cool idea when I saw it, but I’ve never been able to picture God as a girl, just because of simple lack of imagination. We are made in God’s image. I am a boy, so I see myself in God’s image. Kind of like how as a boy, most of my stuffed animals as a kid tended to get dude names as well. Make sense? Maybe it doesn’t.

But the point is, just now I had an interesting thought that challenged my way of imagining God as a male. This is sort of how it happened.

I’m reading The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and they make a foreshadowy joke about some chick (a mistress of Alexandre Dumas’) being really good in bed while she’s possessed by the Devil. I say foreshadowy because I’ve seen the movie based on the book, “The Ninth Gate” directed by Roman Polanski, and there’s a really memorable scene near the end of the movie (and presumably the book too) where the main character, played by Johnny Depp, has sex with his creepy protectress/demonic guardian angel, a blonde femme fatale with dragon-like green eyes that glow maniacally as she fucks him in front of a burning castle. Hottest straight sex scene ever. But I digress. Near the end of the movie (and this is why I’m stoked to read the book) the narrative dissolves into weird, unclear, very speculatable twists and turns that dump you out to the denouement a little too fast and leave a lot of things unexplained. One of these unexplained things is the sex scene, and when I got to that line in the book I was like “Oh. So she was possessed by the Devil.” After which, being about as mature as a 15-year-old boy, I immediately thought, “Hah. It’s like he had sex with the Devil. Kind of gay.”

Except is the Devil male?

This instantly (and I mean instantly) bloomed into a full-on pro-and-con list in my mind. What is feminine about the master of all evil, and what is masculine? You can start with symbolism, a list which looks something like this.

FEMININE: Eve. Temptress. Garden of Eden. Delilah. Femme fatale.

MASCULINE: Fallen angel. Lucifer. King of Hell. Red man with horns.

But the lists quickly got longer and more complicated. I thought to myself: could the source of all evil be masculine or feminine? The answer, of course, is no. Women, with their backstabbing and judgments and passive-agression and cunning and command of lies and mind tricks, have such style that a male Lord of the Flies could never truly be said to know everything about evil. But women are also life-givers, evil though they may sometimes be. War, maybe the ultimate evil, is inherently male. There is a certain brand of cruelty – the cruelty of dominance-asserting torture, of beating people up and stealing their lunch money and faking the basketball at them so that they flinch – that is 100% male. The Whore of Babylon may have been a home-wrecker, and she may have murdered an ex-husband here or there. But Attila she wasn’t.

So, I suddenly saw with blatant clarity how an embodiment of all evil, the “Devil”, could be a sort of two-faced being, a male avatar and a female avatar both at once. And suddenly it made sense that God could be the same way.

And my mind jumped to how these two images of God could be constructed. But where my mind had fountained with examples of male evil and female evil, I started to think about quintessential male goodness and quintessential female goodness and…

FEMININE:

MASCULINE:

Maybe thinking about evil makes it hard for a moment to switch tack. Because given a moment I could of course come up with a list: mother and care-giver as opposed to righteous and honest, et cetera. But the hesitation to me was just as interesting the answers, and I wanted to end this thought by mentioning it.

Why is it so much easier to define people in terms of the bad than the good? Why are bad things just more memorable? Maybe it’s because a character is defined by flaws. Funny, isn’t it. God protects and nourishes us all that, but it’s in terms of the Devil that we are… us. The Devil is in the details.

I think I might actually be in love with you. I know it’s wrong, you being computer-animated and all, but I just can’t help myself. In my defense, the animation in your world is pretty realistic. Except for the noses, but those were mostly weird on the supporting characters. In fact you look even more ridiculously charming and handsome next to all the other funny-looking folks, like Captain Haddock with his bulbous nose and cartoonishly chubby body.

I have to thank Steven Spielberg for introducing me to you in person, because I have to admit, when I saw you drawn on paper I didn’t think of Hergé’s button-eyed little dude with the baby-like tuft of yellow hair as attractive. In fact when I first saw the trailer for your movie I scoffed, because I thought, “Tintin can’t be that realistic!” What I must have really subconsciously been thinking was “Tintin can’t be hot!” Because real talk, you are hot. I’ll confess, I spent most of the movie staring at you. I don’t know what it is. You just have such a boyish charm. I love the flush to your skin, like a white boy who’s outside having adventures a bit too often. I love your little gash of a mouth and its crooked smile. I love your suave mystery-solving trenchcoat. I love your gingery-blond hair, and I even love your signature tuft. Out here in the non-animated world, I have a thing for guys with fauxhawks. True story.

(c) 2011 Paramount Pictures

I think, though, this crush goes way beyond looks. You travel the world having adventures and fearlessly chasing mysteries like a badass. I’m not sure whether I want to be you or date you. The fact that you’re so young and innocent-looking only makes your antics more adorable. When your eyebrows furrow together and your piercing blue eyes narrow because you’re thinking about a clue, I almost swoon. And damn, you can throw a punch.

Besides, I have a thing for French-speaking guys. (Not French, because I know that you’re Belgian!) See, I get you. When you and Haddock were escaping from the ship, the friend I was sitting next to griped, “Why didn’t he grab the machine gun?!?” I knew why – because you’re just a revolver kind of guy. Now don’t get me wrong, I definitely dug your English accent, but rest assured that I’m used to following your adventures in your native tongue. I know that his name is Milou, not Snowy. I think “Rackham le Rouge” sounds more epic than “Red Rackham”. And I get why Dupont & Dupond is funnier than Thompson & Thomson. (In fact I get it more than most, since as a native English speaker who was torturously introduced to French spelling, I have a special soft spot for humor about dumb silent letters.)

Tintin, let’s keep it real here: if you existed I might even have a chance with you, because it’s very possible you’re gay. Why are there never any girlfriend subplots in any of your comic strips? Not even any sexualized girls – no femme fatales, no cute love interests, no nothing? In your adventures there’s no time for girls, and even though I spent most of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” wishing for Marion and Indy to realize they’re meant for each other, I totally respect that.

So the point is: I could be that girl. Well, boy. I could be a totally awesome sidekick/buttbuddy. Together we could forge a new hegemonic standard for the romance dynamic of an adventure-solving group of main characters.

I want to be clear, this is not lust, this is a crush. Activities I want to do with you include cuddling, solving mysteries, hugging, co-authoring newspaper articles, going on walks, flying kites, and maybe hitting up the shooting range so you could teach me some of your crack shooting skillz. Kissing is near the top of a fairly long list, but I won’t even mention anything more sexual until I get a glimpse of you shirtless. Not that I’m pulling for that, or anything. I could follow you through ten more cinematic adventures clad in your usual polo/sweater vest (no offense, but further proof that you’re gay), and my crush on you would stay strong.

I know you’re not real, but I’ll keep you alive in my heart. If you’re ever in my neighborhood, look me up – I wrote for a newspaper once; I could be useful on your adventures! Until then, stay awesome.

And if you’re sleeping with Captain Haddock, don’t tell me. Yeauch. May as well just break my heart into a million pieces like the wreck of the Unicorn.

Sincerely,

An Admirer

(c) 2011 Paramount Pictures

I think writing blog entries from strange places (and thus, having a laptop) is pretty much the coolest thing ever, because so many of my thoughts have a sense of place. This is one such entry.

I’m on my way back to L.A. after a crazy whirlwind two days crashing at my friend Sean’s timeshare in Palm Desert. One of my favorite things about the drive to Palm Desert was how on the way you pass a freeway sign that says “Indio – other desert cities – right lane.” Desert cities! Cities in the desert! It’s so… I don’t know, it just grounds you as to where you are in the world. Not where you are like, take exit 91a and then exit 46b and get off on the 405. That’s how people travel nowadays; using an iPhone with Mapquest you can circle the world and never know the name of a single town through which you passed. For some reason being more vague helps to be more descriptive. On the way back we passed under a sign pointing towards “Newport Beach – other beach cities.” If I ran the world all signs would be like that.

One thing I noticed about Orange was how there are no such geographic landmarks. I get that to an outsider most suburbs look like a blank slate, but even then I find you can get the hang of a place by thinking of it terms of landmarks that are, you know, not manmade. A lookout point on a hill. The county park. The edge of town. Orange County doesn’t have any of that stuff. It’s just a flatland that goes and goes, strip malls and strip malls with orangey stucco and lines of rustling palm trees between the stores and the parking lot. Each of the towns have names and little slogans. We dropped Sean off in 70-degree weather in Yorba Linda, “Home of Gracious Living”. Then we passed through Plascentia, “All-American City”, as proclaimed by a red, white & blue sign along the wide parkway we were driving on.

Here are the few observations I made for myself about the O.C.:

1. They don’t say “hella”. (let’s start with the basics)

2. Unlike in L.A., there are protected lefts.

3. Part of what makes these SoCal freeways such a hot mess is that exits branch off to the left and right. For my first few hours on Mapquest duty I was confused when my friend Sierra kept asking of a freeway merge, “Which side will it be on?” Even if you’re staying on one freeway you have to be in the middle lane just to hedge your bets, because at every merge there’s a riot of lanes going different directions, like fraying ends of a string.

4. All of the street names are in Spanish – usually precious developed-community names like “Calle de las Penumbras” – which casts a funny light on the “All-American” thing.

5. At the same time, everything is so American. We passed by Valencia High School, its baseball diamond shimmering with heat, fronted by a sward of manicured lawn and elegant monterey pines, and I couldn’t help but imagine a bunch of attractive people from a 90’s chick flick hanging out on the grass talking about where the big party is on Friday night.

Everything is just so pretty. It’s like Dulock from “Shrek.” I think the only thing that really irks me about the place is (was? We’re now safely on the freeway passing downtown LA) how green and perfect everything is, in light of one very specific thing about this weekend: the views of the OC kids toward water. They would tend to leave faucets on while washing dishes, turn on the shower and go fold their clothes while it got hot, that sort of thing. And when I called them out about it, they’d be like, “Oh, you Santa Cruz hippies. Bitching us out for squandering the gifts of Mother Earth or whatever.”

Those words echoed through my head as we passed by the green, green lawn in front of every house. I imagined the people in the houses turning on their sprinklers every morning, letting them go and go until the grass runs with mud and the extra water gurgles bleeding out onto the sparkling pavement, and not thinking twice about it because if you want your front yard to be pretty, that’s just what you do. It’s just so… bubble-brained. As my English teacher from high school would say, they live in Fantasyland. Like, these people have all the money in the world and all the prestige in the world, and they just don’t get why they’re lucky. They don’t get who pays for Orange County to be beautiful.

This traffic is ridiculous. I can’t believe I have to spend six hours driving home on Highway 5 tomorrow after this weekend’s GPS-failure shenanigans. I’m hella ready to get back to NorCal, brah.

Except that I am complaining, because cleaning sucks. Especially cleaning floors. The thing about cleaning dust and dirt off the floor is that it’s a catch-22: if you try to do it with a broom, the dust is too light and it dances away from you every time you move and you can’t pick it up. If you try to do it with a wet washcloth, it gets all wet and sticks to the floor and you can’t pick it up. In this department, hair is the worst. Add that to the large list of why I secretly want to get rid of the Enchanted Forest of hair on my chest. I’ll let you in on a secret: when you find it on your floor, you can’t tell the difference between chest hair and… well, this is getting gross.

The point is, as I cleaned I realized that people should give Cinderella more credit. Yeah, maybe it’s an anti-feminist story, but you know what? If you did nothing but wash and clean for 20 years (or 16 or whatever ripe young marriageable age she was in the Disney movie), I think a hot prince who’ll keep you from ever working again is a fair reward. Like, why do we need to see her go through some bogus hero’s journey specifically AFTER the cameras start rolling? She works her whole life and suddenly we think she needs to be all proactive about finding a man for 5 minutes? Isn’t that a little superfluous? What I’m starting to think is, maybe Cinderella isn’t about anti-feminism. Maybe it’s about karma. Progressive feminists of the world: get with the program. You think you’re all modern and you haven’t even considered Eastern philosophies. Puh-leeze. Buddhism is all the rage these days.

Anyway, my work of the past four hours has given me not just a greater respect for Cinderella but a respect for cleaning people. It’s a seriously impressive skill set to walk into a house where you don’t know where anything is and somehow clean it in a manner that is satisfactory to the people that live there. I find it hard enough to clean my own house without asking my mom every 5 seconds where something goes. Besides, cleaning an entire house is an uphill battle: How can you stand to scrub-scrub-scrub until a single faucet is mirror-bright, when your work will disappear literally the next time someone takes a shower?

Not to mention that cleaning people don’t have mice, birds and woodland creatures to help them.

Finally, this exercise in futility has caused me to develop both a respect and a totally mystified awe toward my mother’s obsession with cleanliness. Like, she just notices things that nobody else sees or cares about. Spots. Stains. Scratches. She just wandered into my room as I was writing and found a dust clod behind the door. ”I’ll get the dust-buster. Just because it might travel to my room,” she said.

Her room is 12 feet away down the hall.

So long story short, our house will never be satisfactorily clean. And not just because of my mother. In other news, my dad recently came home from the store with a surprise in tow: he ducked into my room and said, “Hey Ben, could you help me set something up?” “Sure,” I replied. Thinking that I was going to spend 5 minutes with a printer or helping fix a bike, I walked into the living room to find this guy floating around near the ceiling:

His name is Bruce, and he is a remote-controlled inflatable shark. He actually swims. Through the air. He also has an annoying habit of floating in front of you when you’re trying to watch TV, or nuzzling you from behind when you’re on the computer or something. d’aww, isn’t that adorable?

Once we’d set up the remote-control features, I took him into the next room where my sister was studying for finals. Her jaw dropped. “Mom’s not gonna like this…” were the first words out of her mouth.

But turns out our mom didn’t care. In fact, she thought it was funny. My dad was the first one to get antsy: as Bruce drifted towards the mantelpiece (he tends to drift everywhere when he’s turned off, including into people’s rooms at night), my dad exclaimed, “Bruce, no! Not the Lladro!” But it didn’t matter. Since Bruce weighs less than a gram, he just bounced harmlessly off the crystal statue and drifted up to lurk in the skylight.

My sister and I spent the last few days doing things with Bruce you can’t do with a real pet, like playing Bruce Limbo and teaching Bruce guitar (don’t ask). Unfortunately, there are some things you can’t do with Bruce where with a real pet you could. My best friend and I tried to take Bruce for a walk, for instance, but even the faintest whisper of wind batters him like the sails of a ship on the Atlantic. Also, the cold air made him shrivel up. We were worried he had sprung a leak, but when we got him warm inside again the molecules inside the balloon heated up again and he reinflated. Thanks for the science lesson, Bruce!

So yeah, that’s about all. Until next time, my very own Shark Week continues (or at least it will until Bruce runs out of helium). My dad and I already have plans to scare our dinner guests tonight by swimming Bruce out of the hallway. I’m so glad he did this instead of buying a Camaro or something.

The other night I went to the library to pick up all the Sammy Keyes books written since I was in middle school. It’s a mystery series clearly oriented towards teen girls, and let me tell you, there’s nothing more awkward than having to repeat 3 times to the librarian, “Yes, it’s called… Sammy Keyes and the… Cold Hard Cash. Uh, no. No, it’s not on the shelf. Yes, I looked.” It was 8:30 at night and slinking around the library with an armful of books labeled “for ages 11-15″ under my arm, I felt sort of naughty, like I was out past my bedtime. But nerdy-naughty, like I was up reading underneath the covers. Nerdy-naughty was a specialty of mine once upon a time.

It’s incredible how fast a place can take you back. My first thought was, man, this library has changed since I was a kid. But then the layout of the place began to flood back to me, the layout of the shelves that I knew like the back of my hand, in terms of where all my favorite authors used to be located – Coville on the third or fourth shelf back, Vande Velde in the middle near where the Dewey decimals started, Wynne-Jones controversially under W right nearby, Anthony forty feet away in the creepy, towering avenues of the adult fiction section. And I realized that the library hadn’t changed - I had.

I am now nineteen, and I tower over the shelves of the YA section, making it conspicuous for me to peruse them without the librarian at her desk regarding me with what I still feel to be a judgmental gaze. In third grade the message I was sure she was beaming at me was “Another fantasy book? Shouldn’t you be adding some variety to your summer reading list? Shouldn’t you be reading something more appropriate?” Now the message is more like “What are you doing in the young adult fantasy section? Are you some kind of creepy child predator? Shouldn’t you be reading something more appropriate?” I didn’t care then and I don’t care now, and nineteen-year-old me carried an armful of books with brightly-covered colors past her desk just as shamefully as nine-year-old me.

See what I mean? Going to the library makes me revert. It makes me think back – way back to the days of elementary school where my life was a string of pastel rooms filled with books and boring adult obligations where I could get away with reading in the corner. I felt a sort of sadness, a guiltiness, like I was hanging out with a group of friends I had sort of ditched, and seeing where they had all ended up. And wondering what I would be like if I was still part of their group. In this case, those friends were books.

What did make me stop going to the library? I’m still a nerd, but something snapped – one day in high school I woke up and I wanted adventure, I wanted friends and partying and love and everything there is to have, and faster than you can say “puberty” my real friends replaced my paper-and-ink ones.

What changed? Well, for one thing, I turned out to be gay.

It’s weird and it’s a connection I’d never made before, but now that I think of it, that was a catalyst for a lot of my changes. Because yeah, I was bookish, I was quiet, I was bad at sports, but for some reason my self-esteem could handle all of it; I never felt a need to be more than I was. I would have been perfectly happy to thus live out my days, becoming a novelist and marrying some cute outdoorsy girl and living in a cabin in Boulder Creek with a lot of books and a dog and a well-used library card, dreaming the day away. But somehow this one final difference between me and all the other guys was the last straw. Somewhere during the struggle between me and my masculinity, a spark was kindled. A spark of competitiveness and determination like I’d never felt before.

Determination to go to parties even though I was shy. Determination to learn a new sport even though I was chubby. Determination to get out of this town, no matter what. Being gay gave me an ax to grind.

What would my life be like if I were straight? In the past I’ve usually answered that question in my mind with “perfect” and then grumblingly shoved it off. But now, for the first time, I’m exploring the options. I wouldn’t be friends with people as cool as the ones I’m friends with, that’s for sure. I’d probably be in Crown playing Skyrim all day. I wouldn’t be brave. I wouldn’t be adventurous. I wouldn’t have so outlandish a life plan. The list goes on. I’d be content with it, but… I wouldn’t be this version of me.

For the first time in my life, I am thankful for being gay.

That’s right, I’ll say it again because it feels good. I AM THANKFUL FOR BEING GAY. I’m GLAD I am. Thank you, Fate! Thank you, God! Thanks for making my life go on this direction!

I see it like this: there’s this life into which I was born where we’re raised to spend our days toiling uphill towards a good university and a gleaming white wedding and all this stuff. And then one day I was suddenly teleported onto some godforsaken vista point far away surrounded by mist and rain, able to look over a world of chasms and mountains and see that gleaming white hilltop in the distance, utterly unreachable. I was not normal, and I was cast out. And it sucked. I figuratively curled up in the dirt and cried for a few hours because I’ll never make it to that white hilltop. But there are trails here, and paths through virgin forests, and ancient stairs leading down through the mist to cities I’ve never dreamed of, and you know what? I’m going to have a look around.

The world of the outsiders is a lot bigger than the world of the insiders, and if I hadn’t been forcibly cast out, I would never have known. I would just have marched like a zombie to the simple little wedding and family that I was raised to want.

Once upon a time, I zoned out at school so I could read books about the Amazon. Next quarter, I’m taking time off from school so I can go live in the Amazon. So you see? A prophecy is fulfilled. It’s not that the new me has ditched libraries. I’ve just discovered that nerdy-naughty isn’t the only type of naughty.

Ever since I went to Israel this summer, I’ve been meaning to write an in-depth post about what I learned about Israeli-Palestinian politics while I was there. I feel like I learned so much – and was made so aware of how little people know – about the issue, and so I was going to make my blog post about it into a sort of history lesson; all the facts about Israel from an unbiased perspective – or at least, a perspective that admits to being biased, that explicitly separates the facts from the analyses.

Only recently did I realize how fruitless and stupid it would be to write that post.

I just had a long conversation with my housemate about politics. He’s a politics major and basically, he was saying how he strives to have no opinion about issues whenever he’s in a conversation listening to people argue about them. We have sort of a joke-for-joke relationship; I think a really good relationship; but I’ve always known that I was sort of holding back from calling him out on his opinions (lack thereof?) on some things, and tonight, for some reason, I just did it.

Long story short, I hate it when people are apathetic. It just seems silly to me: we are rich and American and vote and we have a chance to change the world. So if we choose not to take that chance, isn’t there something inherently wrong with that? That’s how I was raised, at least. It always drives me crazy when people are, say, environmental science majors and I call them out about leaving the sink on while they brush their teeth and they’re just like “ehh”. Same idea. How can you be a political science major and not have an opinion about politics?

My housemate said something about how he keeps quiet about his opinions because young people like us are always the loudest about our opinions, but also get our opinions almost exclusively from our parents and from those we were raised by, rather than actually being informed. He said that to him, it seems arrogant to mouth off about an opinion when there’s no way you’re informed about the whole story. Basically where the conversation went is this: apparently there’s a psychological principle called “cognitive bias” which states that if you go into an argument with one opinion, it will be (his words) literally impossible to be convinced that you are wrong. It has been psychologically proven that our brains work so hard to prove us right that when we truly believe something, facts bend themselves to fit that belief.

Of course this gets us into an endless catch-22. If you go into an issue with an opinion, there’s no way for you to change it. But if you go into an issue without an opinion, you’ll just be eternally more and more intimidated from having an opinion because you realize you’ll never truly know all the facts. And then nobody ever has an opinion, and nothing ever changes. Ever.

This is what I’ve been thinking about lately. After my trip to Israel I had a conversation with a French girl at a party, and for honestly the first time in my life I was faced with hard-to-hear facts about Israel’s war crimes in the Palestinian territories. What really haunts me about that conversation – and it haunts me, oh yes that’s the word – is how purely each of us started from ground zero. “I was just in Israel,” I said, “and­–”

“Palestine, you mean?” she said pointedly (I want to say bitchily but who knows, I had my hands full functioning in my second language, and anyway I was a little drunk).

“No. Israel,” I said, just as pointedly.

There. Right there. Don’t you see it? She had no idea, none, that any more background was needed on why you wouldn’t want to acknowledge Israel. I had absolutely no idea that I was walking into politically controversial territory; I had been about to segway into some lightweight party story about Israeli hotels. How could we come from such different worlds that not only did we both think we were right, we both had no idea that there was even an issue to be right about?

It’s the media. The French media tells such a vastly different story about Israel than the American media; they don’t even overlap. But no, it’s not the media; it’s so much more than that. It’s our upbringing, it’s our socialization, it’s everything about everything that we’ve ever been told.

All I can think about ever since that conversation is truth. When everybody on this planet Earth is biased, how can anybody know the truth? I don’t mean truth in the existential meaning, like “we all find our own truth”. I have my own truth. I know my own truth. It is a liberal, Jewish, upper-class, individualist American hippie Santa Cruz sort of truth. I know who my friends and enemies are and what I think of people I meet on a day-to-day basis. But what about other truths? What about the many different truths of the people around me? If there’s a California-truth about Israel and a France-truth about Israel, and they are so desperately disconnected from one another, how can I know which one to believe?

I feel like I’m alone. Alone in a world of people who are all screaming out and none of whom wants to listen. I want to have a voice, but I also want to listen, and I’m going crazy because it feels impossible to do both. The point of political debate is to learn. Political debate is not meant to be a zoo of opinions you’ll never believe in, all on parade for you to high-5 the animals through the cages. I admire people with strong opinions, but… what about what’s REAL? Isn’t the point of political debate finding the truth?

All I want is to do the right thing.

I’m just so sick of writing about myself, caring about myself. Of this pathetic culture that goes me me me me me. It’s the worst when you scroll through Tumblr. If it’s not “I baked a delicious apple torte on this rainy morning, I love my housemates” it’s “Why do you not love me anymore?” written on a scrap of paper or something. Or it’s a meme about something – anything, be it politics of Twilight – that makes brutal fun about something. HelLO, people! Is anyone out there, listening? Maybe there’s someone in the world who likes Twilight, what’s the big deal about that? Maybe there’s someone out there who thinks abortion is awful and kills babies, maybe you think it’s stupid but why should it be so stupid it’s funny? But we don’t think about other people’s perspectives, we all live exclusively in our own separate realities and we don’t even give a shit. Me, me, me, me, ME.

At every other step of my teenagehood I’ve really understood that everyone else goes through the same shit, but this is a new and terrifying angst because I honestly feel alone. Think of the mantra of youth in Moulin Rouge: “Freedom! Beauty! Truth! Love!” I find myself scoffing at it a little bit because it’s so hedonistic. Freedom, that’s easy. It means getting drunk on absinthe because you don’t live with Mom and Dad anymore. Beauty, just as easy and just as shallow. And love? Don’t even get me started on love. Love, love, love, that’s all anyone talks about. The satiny feeling it gives you inside. The way it turns the world all to roses and diamonds. But truth? What is the truth of the young, but a wide-eyed exclamation of “Why doesn’t the rest of the world see that this is true?” Truth shouldn’t be about spreading the truth. It should be about finding the truth.

In the end, all I know is this: the world is not a good place, and we have the power to make it a good place. When a Palestinian dies of malnourishment and hunger in Gaza, that’s true. And when an Israeli mother will never see her son again because the bus he took to school every day got bombed, that’s true too. That’s why it infuriates me when people talk of “truth” like it’s something you can never find, like you have to make sure you’re right, like truth is a relative exchange of opinions and it’s really naïve to think otherwise because of everything you don’t know. As if truth was about you! As if it were a question of you being right!

There are a million possible ways the world could go from here, and in one of them, there will be peace in Israel someday. Knowing which one it is, and thus knowing what we have to do to get there, is not relative. It is truth. I do not have an opinion about Israel for me. I have an opinion about Israel for all the people there who do not know peace. Because if you know something is wrong, and you have no opinion about it, then you are… not human? A bad person? I don’t know how to finish that sentence because I fear one of my best friends fits into it. No, I can’t use him as a scapegoat just because he had the balls to say it straight out. That’s one of the reasons we’re such good friends, that penchant for frankness, and I can respect at least that. No, I’m afraid a lot of my friends fit into that sentence.

I think my Israel trip this summer was when I truly grew up. Because ever since then, I have begun to question things that I always believed to be true; that I was socialized to believe were true. For me the issue is Israel, but there are a million other issues and the point is, through the lens of my own blindness I’ve realized how little anyone knows about all of them – and how pathetic it is that that makes people feel so helpless.

Am I arrogant for thinking that little old 19-year-old me, knowing nothing about the world, could ever do anything to help fix it?

Yes.

Is it impossible for me to change my opinions? For an issue like Israel, am I doomed never to know the truth simply because I was raised with an opinion?

Maybe.

These are the questions that haunt me, and when I ask myself these questions that’s when I realize that I’m a man now.

But the second question – I can’t answer yes to it, and that’s the thing. There’s hope, a tiny sliver, a light in the darkness. Maybe psychiatric theory forbids it, but I fundamentally believe that people do change. If I could truly change one of my opinions, just once in my life, the tiniest tiny bit – even if I never find any sort of truth, that would be enough for me to feel like I looked hard.

The thought that for a single person to change a single opinion is that epic of a battle, that it’s the greatest goal anyone could ever hope for? That’s depressing. It does not bode well for the principles of free speech and dialogue and open-mindedness and compromise.

But I still have my own opinions. I can’t help it. And still, despite myself, I don’t think you should be able to help it. Because there is no act that makes you neutral, it’s as simple as that. If you don’t vote, you vote against the man you might have voted for. There is a mathematics of apathy from which there is no escape.

If you do nothing about an issue, you might as well be fighting for the prevailing side. And if you don’t know what side that is, you’d better figure it out.

“Oh no,” grumbled a girl at the table next to me. “They’re Occupying the dining hall.”

As the influx of protesters slowed, one of them unfurled a 10-foot banner adorned with the single word: REVOLT. A kid turned on a megaphone and started addressing the crowd. The landing at the top of the stairs was his impromptu pulpit.

“Last Thursday, students at UC Davis were pepper-sprayed while holding a peaceful protest,” he said. wait were they really? we don’t live in the Internet age or anything… All sassiness aside, in fact he and the crowd chanted the speech in a repeat-after-me style. “Last Thursday” – “LAST THURSDAY” – “Students at UC Davis were pepper-sprayed” – “STUDENTS AT UC DAVIS WERE PEPPER SPRAYED” – “while holding a peaceful protest.” “WHILE HOLDING A PEACEFUL PROTEST.” “And that fuckin’ sucks!” he added in a fit of inspiration, pumping a fist in the air.

“THAT FUCKIN SUCXSSKJBKL%&*UGSBDJ36^*B YEAH! yeah! yeah it does!” the repeat-after-me-ers attempted to echo, and the attempt went fairly well before dissolving into a chorus of assent.

A friend who had been milling about the dining hall sat down next to me to watch the debacle. “What do you think about all this?” he asked in a low voice as the kid in the megaphone continued.

I had to think about that for a second, but the answer came to me pretty quickly. I get that “no! cost! no! fee!” rhymes with “Stop Police Bru!-ta!-li!-ty!” … but I don’t think I agree with both of them. There was a giant rally at our school last year called Free Education where a couple hundred people got naked on the main field and spelled out the words “Free Education” with their bodies. (Typical Santa Cruz.) Around the time when that protest was hot news on our campus I had a conversation with a friend about it, and asked him what he thought about “free education.” ”Well, I think lower-priced education is a good place to start,” he said.

Since then his words have grown truer and truer in my mind. To everything being protested I say yes, yes, yes – but I’m just not as extremist about it. “No cost, no fee”? That’s a great idea, but then where the fuck is the money going to come from? Free anything is a rarity in the world. People hoard up coupons and bottle caps to get a free sofa, a free electric fan, free Albertson’s brand frozen fish sticks with the purchase of one item of equal or lesser value. Every free thing is a treasure. Free education? Keep dreaming. I’m not saying it’s ridiculous, but right now, in this state, it’s ridiculous. The UC system has a bazillion problems – excessive debt, corrupt regents, restrictive and outdated allotment-of-funds laws – and a whole lot of them will have to be solved before free education can even be back on the menu. I get that peaceful protest is based on the highest and most naïve of principles, it’s always been that way, but staring it in the face I can’t help but ask: what’s the use of protesting for something impossible?

The other half of the mantra, of course, is the half I agree with: “Stop police brutality!” Of course I was horrified and angered by what happened at UC Davis. But I have trouble synthesizing it with everything else happening in the world right now. Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the UC system; what do they have to do with each other? What does police brutality have to do with the 1%? You can say that it’s all connected, that the police are the tool of the 1% and the Regents are Wall Street and Wall Street is the Regents – but I’m not sure I can buy that it’s all a conspiracy. I feel like the synthesis of the #Occupy movement with the UC system reformation movement only weakens both of them. I know there’s something wrong with the system, and I want to change it. But I want to stand behind a cause, not just stand in a crowd. I want to change the system, but first I want to know how. I desperately want to know that. The Occupy movement in its current form is not giving me the answers.

The megaphone guy ended his speech by declaring a general strike on campus the Monday after Thanksgiving. “We’re going to shut – it – down!” he called, and the crowd echoed, “WE ARE GOING TO SHUT! IT! DOWN!!!!” This announcement left plenty of people muttering darkly about ‘what’s the point in not going to a section we pay $150 for?’. I think I’m going to class as usual on Monday, but not for the same reasons as the grumbling dissenters. In truth, I have enormous admiration for what the boycotters intend to do. But at the end of the day, what they’re calling for requires a consensus of the masses, and I don’t feel moved to believe that that exists. The #Occupy movement is the zeitgeist around here, but I remind myself that it’s still totally opposed among Republicans. To them, this movement must look as silly as the Tea Party movement looked to us. Or does it? What does it look like to the international media? To the analysts that sit in the office of the President?

I watched the sign screaming “REVOLT” fold itself up between two poles and be carried out of the dining hall, and I thought about the implications of that word. People are comparing the throngs of people camped on Wall Street to the throngs of people rioting right now in Tahrir Square in Cairo, and the comparison makes me facepalm a little bit. Maybe it’s just because I’m rich. Maybe I’m the top 10%, maybe I’m in the top 5%. The idea makes me feel guilty, and the only penance I can think of is to try to be very aware of that blind spot. But I’ve been to Egypt, and you know what? To compare us to them is stupid as fuck. You walk down an average street in this country, and people are not suffering. Sure, people are suffering everywhere, but this isn’t a system so broken that it needs to be purged by fire. I don’t even think it could be if we tried. People just aren’t suffering enough. If people aren’t angry enough to skip class for one day, they sure as hell aren’t angry enough to revolt.

I say “I’ve been to Egypt” like oh my God, I know, I’m so worldly about these things, but really I’m not. My family is pretty well-off and I grew up in an area that’s pretty well-off, and watching people get their pants all twisted about this Occupy business really fascinates me, because it makes me wonder just how bad my blind spot is. Sure, I don’t see people suffering here like I think they suffered in Egypt. But I don’t know. America is too big for any one person to know. Only time will tell. Ultimately, the protest in the dining hall tonight left me asking myself one question:

Is this how a revolution begins?

IS.

HERE.