Head Space

People are difficult to understand – their motivations are so obscure.  At times, I see more clearly than the people themselves what they're searching for in all the wrong places.  At others, I can ignore a plea for help in perfect innocence.  I suppose this is the human condition.

And sometimes it's just because people are bat-guano cray-cray and I'm the only bastion of sanity in this fire-lit cave.

One of my friends (I use this term loosely – she's a sweet teenager who talks to me as if I am a normal person instead of avoiding me like the plague as most women here do) was recently telling me that her fiance didn't want her to be a doctor.  I choked on the sheer injustice of this.  She sings beautifully, is personable, and could be successful if she is not married and impregnated within the next year.

Not that there's anything wrong with either of those things!

But if the choice is between looking like a homewrecking feminist or aiding and abetting casual misogyny against women who 'only think about money and marriage and children,' I guess I'd better get my pussy hat.  If she cannot become a doctor on her own merit, that's one thing (thanks, organic chemistry); to be warned away from the medical field by a man who doesn't want his dinner disrupted by night calls is a very different, very bad thing.

I joked that she should study medicine if she could, go overseas if she could, broaden her horizons if she could before getting married.

I wasn't joking.

I joked that if he loved her, he'd support her decisions and wait for her.

I wasn't joking.

I joked that if he didn't, she should choose someone who would.

I wasn't joking.

Another night, I somehow found myself begging The Beatles' albums from Butters while he read the book of Ecclesiastes by the light of his cellphone.

...I know, right?

To be fair, I only wanted their good songs, and I think Butters was on some sort of heroic quest to see how many times he could prove me wrong – he'd been collecting examples all day.  Family is so beautiful and sacred and hard to strangle.

So I started listening to the album, thinking this would make him happy, and the first eerie strains of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds had just begun to ring when he appeared at my elbow.  I stifled a shriek.

“You remember when you told me I couldn't pick and choose Bible verses?” he murmured softly.

Oh, heavens, he's started reading the Bible in his spare time and talking to homeless people and now he's going to kill me and keep my skin as a curtain.  “Um.  Y-yes.”

“That's how it is for these songs.  You're listening to, like, the third one.”

I stopped planning how to use my already mosaic laptop as a weapon and glanced at my playlist - which had, indeed, mixed up the order of the songs.

“O-okay.  I'll listen to the first.  Right now.”

He was as childlike and adorable as Chucky in his reverence for this band.  Survival instinct told me to listen to the album for the rest of the night, and like it.  I'd planned on a soundtrack of Luis Fonsi's Despacito for a Pretend to Bellydance routine, but decided on a Pretend to Kickbox in Self-Defence routine to When I'm Sixty-Four instead.

Luckily, Butters has now fractured a rib – I've watched enough crime shows to know that I have the right to remain silent - and may be slightly easier to vanquish, should it come to that.  When he first informed me - holding a baguette and grinning happily - I'd ignored him, assuming he was waxing enthusiastic about groceries as he too often does.  When he asked why I wasn't surprised, I assumed an air of superiority – and hurried to find out what I should probably be surprised by.

Why doesn't Timbit ever have to babysit was my last thought before I saw an xray, panicked, and fought the urge to croon nonsense about band-aids.

We soon agreed that I should carry his buckets of water, as long as he doesn't pretend guilt - he's obviously been working up to being a toilet paper-stealing welfare case in our middle-class Canadian system.  However, playing Spot the Fracture on his xray was a nice touch – I even pretended I found it.

Foreigners.

Obsession notwithstanding, Butters was right in that most of the songs in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club are a velvet addiction.  And I was right about Ecclesiastes in that I'm always right and Butters always misunderstands me because his aggressively messy hair protects him from any and all sense in his immediate vicinity.  (Very well, I fail spectacularly at cohesively verbalising my thoughts, and he's remarkably contrary as a skinhead as well.)

Sometimes it's the language barrier that foils me.  During my English Bible study, one intrepid learner said that we would finally be at peace in heaven because we'd be 'in God's underwear and not in our own underwear.'

I appreciated the general idea, but was lost on the specifics.  “Wh-what?”  My voice was a bit breathy, but I hoped he'd attribute it to confusion instead of mad laughter.

He obligingly repeated himself while while I wheezed gently to keep my throat closed.

Once, in my early teens, I'd been forced to hide in our kitchen for 10 minutes during a dinner party because my mom had heard elephant instead of a friend.  Social situations already induce a certain level of anxiety in me, and I think this is why innocuous errors send me over the edge.

Sometimes, even basic sign language is beyond me.  This morning, on the way to work, a friend saw me and waved.  I smiled and waved back.  A random older man walking in my direction thought he'd give it a try too, stopped, beamed, and gave me a thumbs way up.  Surprised, I stopped smiling, but continued showing my teeth because I felt it was expected.

At work, I heard about a province where ordinary villagers used gold they'd mined to trade for livestock – two grams a goat.  I prefer the look of silver on my dark skin, and yet my little South Indian heart still went into spasms of joy – blood will out, as they say.  Now that my mom knows this, I expect her to visit with a khaki HAZMAT suit, gold-panning equipment, and seismic hot flashes any day now.

Motivation is everything.