Halloween......

....pretty much solidified the underlying suspicion that I need to get a PhD in sociology/anthropology/cultural studies and possibly be an ethnographer. Everything that I am interested in involves living life on the margins, watching, noticing, observing, learning via empiricism, being a sort of perpetual ethnographer.. even towards myself. I feel like maybe this is what I am prepping myself for with all of this fascination with identity, with emptying myself, with unconditionally loving everyone, with being a person who can navigate multiple terrains, who is impartial to any one lifestyle (sort of, not really??). Halloween in the city was extremely enjoyable this year because I approached it from this standpoint. I went to the city intending to watch, to notice trends, to watch society in action, the tick, tock, tick, tock of people in motion, of time moving forward, of life happening at this weird intersection of identity and pseudo-identity in the amorphous city of a thousand faces, with no preconceived notions of what the night might have in store, with no real plan of action. It was cool, too, just to watch. Unlike last year, when I consciously created a costume with a different intent (to embody a paradigm - namely One man's trash is another man's treasure), this year I basically closed my eyes and threw on whatever expressive, colorful, weird shards of clothe first migrated to the surface of my closet (since my entire wardrobe is basically a halloween costume this was not hard) not so that others might look at me, but more so that I might look at others. So that I might fit into the schema of Halloween, enter this terrain in an authentic way, catch a glimpse from inside, much like an ethnographer in say, the Middle East, might sport a Hijab in order to enter into the cultural space of Muslim women. It was like, a practice session for me. Sort of like when I go to Arizona I bring western clothes with me and conceive of myself as a cowgirl or when I went to Bonnaroo and wore shards of clothing and conceived of myself as a hippie or when my mom gives me advice like "if you want to be a dancer then you have to dress the part" and in the back of my mind I know she is pretty much right, or when I wore a yankees hat to a sports bar this week and drank beer and ate chicken wings watched the yankees lose the first game of the series. Life is about playing and looking the part.

I loooooooooove theater! I love the theater of life! Who needs to be trained in acting when life is a giant opera house full of multiple stages on which to receive your training? Being an ethnographer will, I think, allow me to be an actress, to wear different hats in a way that is not self-serving, but rather mind-opening. To explore rituals and traditions and partake in different lifestyles and seek to understand, to explain through observing and experiencing, to, above all else, love.

I have a friend who doesn't wear name-brand clothes. He rocks.

Along the same grain of thought, I've been contemplating cyberspace recently (this includes the internet, text messaging, .. uhh.. I guess that's it.. basically ways of communicating that are highly mediated). Here's a hypothetical situation: Imagine if all of the pictures and status updates that I posted online were angry, full of hatred, malicious, spiteful, speaking of horrific things like death and self-destruction. And my pictures were all of the "why, why, cruel world!" sort. And now imagine if all of the people I encountered in the "real world" were my facebook friends and had access this "image" of myself that I was projecting online. And now imagine, still, if I were actually an extremely happy person in real life, and was only using the internet as an outlet for my anger and not for my happiness. How would the people who had access to the one-dimensional aspect of my manifold nature react upon encountering me in real life?? Would they already enter into communication with me with preconceived notions about me as a person. Would they communicate with me as if I were an angry person and would I be thus interpellated into being one?

in cyberspace, identity can be an artform....but this also has ramifications in the real world.

Facebook has a "like" button that I've never used, ever. I think this falls under the category of the culture industry offering me things and me not wanting to be herded into communion with the masses or something like that. My relationship with facebook is so multifaceted that it almost drives me insane. There are people on it with whom I always communicate genuinely, others to whom I serve as a role model (cousins, gymnasts, theater peeps, younger people in general, church peeps), others.. omg just so many different kinds of relationships. Sometimes it serves as a business portal, a social portal, an advertising portal, etc. etc. etc. It is so strange to think of the many purposes it serves...

The internet is weird. The fact that a thought on a facebook status can linger long after the thought or emotion has passed is weird.  I hope that once I am situated into a way of life with another person someday that my online identity becomes entirely separate from my real-life identity.

On another note, my brother has been pestering me for a virtual shout out so here it is. 
HI NICK! 
I guess this is a good opportunity to meditate on reasons why I love my brother, my best friend. #1 reason: because he is so, so driven and does such great things, yet is probably the most humble, grounded person I know (after T-O-M). And also because he let me hang his underwear out the bathroom window when his friends came over when we were younger hahahahahahaha.