Lactose intolerance and me

Believe it or not, this and the previous entry are linked, somehow.

I never officially got a diagnosis of lactose intolerance. But growing up with my mother and my older aunts, discussions about stomach ailments were legion. Digestive digressions. Medical terms half-remembered, out of context, but ominously inflected. "Heliobacteria." "Ulcer." "Sigmoidoscopy." Self-reported ratings of upper vs lower GI examinations. (Evidently the lower is more challenging, though the geography still escapes me. Is it counterintuitive, in the way that the definitions of Lower and Upper Egypt were? Is the analogy of the river correct? What precisely is the source and what is the delta in this strained metaphor?)

So I did grow up with some paranoia and perhaps even hypochondria regarding things stomach-related. These seemed to be borne out by a tendency to fart intensely at school. Rare was the audible, public trumpet, though I sweat now, dear Reader, when I think about that terrible afternoon in the high school library when I was suddenly surprised by a loud one, leaving me hovering two inches above the unforgiving wooden chair, my face the only answer needed by the thirty faces turning with a united question.

Less publicly, but no less to my shame, was first period sophomore year. World History Honors, first period. I sat near the front, and the damnable infernal chairs were made of hard plastic and metal. No cushions. I tried valiantly to preserve my classmates from what seemed like roomfuls of foul fumes, especially as these represented the brightest and, in many cases, most attractive members of my graduating class.

If they ever let on, they never told me. I feel especially sorry for Julie. I think you sat behind me, either directly or one chair back. So if you ever wondered

IT WAS I

I was the flatulent fiend
I was the malefactor of mists
I was the Boyd bombardier
I was the doubled-over, thrice-damned doofus
I was the gastard
I was the shart attack
I was the World War I recreationist

If you didn't get an A in that class, I was probably the reason.

I don't know how I connected my challenges to the milk I was drinking in the morning (accompanying a reasonably priced and nutritionally questionable school breakfast). But at some point, before graduation, I did, and didn't look back. What lay behind, other than shame, smells, and stains?

So yes, if you are facing the perils of lactose intolerance, I empathize. Like the smog of 1970s Los Angeles, it colored my experiences in high school, its social and psychological scars lingering like a brown dog, at once familiar and repugnant. This was pre-Lactaid (or at least pre- my understanding of medical options). Consider yourself blessed that opportunities abound, not only for probiotic remedies, but also cow milk substitutes.

There may come a day when public and unremitting flatulence is no longer a source of shame, and perhaps even a source of some energy. But today is not that day. Learn from my mistakes, educate yourself, and do your best to live a normal, healthy life.

Hijab

A week ago I was at a Panera near Cal State Fullerton. I passed by a woman wearing a hijab. I might've paused half a second. She noticed me, and perhaps noticed the pause. I wondered how she had interpreted it. Did she give it any thought? Is she used to it? It passed, though it lingered. I had a vague sense of guilt or sorrow about the whole thing.

How does one go up to someone and say:

I looked at you, but did not intend to gawk. I looked at you not because I am a fearful reactionary, nor because I'm an objectifying male. I perhaps looked without any present emotions, because I wasn't really looking at you. But you weren't an abstraction of a race or a faith. You were an echo of a specific person I had met in college, a woman who I didn't really know, and still don't, but who, ten years after we had graduated, had engaged me in a conversation that convinced me that we understood each other and our younger selves better.

I look at you, or through you, to the past, and realize that I had never talked with her about the hijab, though she had explained at the beginning of school (coincidentally, a few days before September 11) that it represented modesty, though then, and now, I did not know if it represented an act of modesty or itself served as a reminder, a totem, to be modest in our endeavors.

I had not talked with her about faith, or family, or hardly anything. A small school can seem so impossibly vast sometimes.

And now I did not see you, or her. I saw an idea -- that the people I had met, I had treated as representatives of types, used them to understand the identity or identities they claimed, or disclaimed, or reclaimed. And too, too often, I didn't see the person.

And yet how grateful I am, that I have pokemoned my way to some rude decency and understanding, that I would find it at least somewhat difficult to ascribe broad traits to swaths of society. Grateful at good moments -- smugly self-satisfied at worse moments -- and dangerously vulnerable and reactionary on matters of identity in the worst moments of all. But my judgment seems somewhat sane, even if my advocacy is timid.

To know how a person values and weighs their identities, which ones are superordinate or subordinate, how contextual is that ranking, how unstable and self-contradictory are the weights in the expression of thought or deed, I might have to know them better than I have known any person. Perhaps I wouldn't be equal to the task. Perhaps it would destroy the relationship; there is, of course, a difference between empathy and dissection.

When I go into the world, am I the example floating in someone's mind of the Japanese ethnicity? Or of a scientist, laughable as that possibility seems to me? Maybe. And maybe that knowledge will, or should, change me.

This is a bizarre and self-indulgent entry, even by the standards of this blog. And yet, the gulf between the dominant identities I carry around within my own head and those projected onto me is probably the source of most of my major failings.

So to the person of the past -- I'm sorry we never had a chat about you, or what you wanted me, or others, to know. I neither want to assume that these fifteen years, or thirty years, have been difficult for you, nor communicate that a complicated and variegated sense of self can or should be summed up in any one aspect of external appearance, even, and perhaps especially, clothing. And yet I fear that I have abstracted away the actual you.

And to the stranger of the present, thank you for setting my thoughts along a different course, one that will hopefully get me out of my headspace and into the world.

The lines and internet are always slow there, at the Panera.

The lines and internal thoughts are always slow here.