We’re born alone; we teach alone
3月23日 (火ー水) 12:17 am JST
I like to dramatize things by saying, “you’re born alone and you die alone,” but the fact is that the first statement is all together untrue. No one is really born alone. We’re all born to a mother, if only to be orphaned soon thereafter. Because no one is really born alone, no one’s biography really beings at birth. A proper biography must begin before one is born in order to explain how one came to be. There are two philosophical consequences of this. The first is that biography is prior to being. We are a narrative before we are a cogito. Before ‘I think,’ ‘I was,’ and not even as Me, but as a proto-Me. The second consequence is that our biography, and thus our selves, overlap with our parents’. There is a familiar metaphoric sense in which parents are The World for their children. Growing up, the reaction our parents demonstrate to the world naturally influences our own reaction to the world. However, this metaphoric sense is predated by a literal sense in which our parents’ bodies are our own. We not only form our internal world by mirroring the world they show us inside of them, but we were once a part of their anatomy, nothing more than a flutter of feelings inside them, a flaring of passion in our father and mothers’ psyches that led to physical congress.
It is always hard to take stock of one’s feelings towards one’s parents. This difficulty is more easily understood in light of their role as living fossils of our ontogeny. As intriguing and mortifying as it would be to interact with our past selves, parents are even more intriguing, as they represent the parallel evolution of our origins. Our past has kept step with us and takes time to call us on the phone.
3月24日 (水ー木) 1:20 am JST
The Japanese school system is retarded. At the end of school today, S-sensei informed me that she’s being transfered out of the Deaf School. OK, first of all the system of moving teachers from school to school arbitrarily every couple years for no reason makes no sense. It’s up there with putting teachers in charge of clubs at random (aka the “Why is a 50 year old woman in charge of the soccer club?” problem) in terms of ridiculousness. Which I could accept, except they compound their error by applying this system to the special schools as well. It demonstrates that they don’t understand why such schools exist in the first place. The whole point of having a deaf school instead of sending deaf kids to regular school plus an after school “deaf club” is to put them in an environment in which teachers understand the particular needs of their students— aka the teachers must know sign language. It’s not like XHTML; you don’t pick it up on weekend on a whim. S-sensei’s sign language was still only OK after 3 years of daily use. Another 10 years would have helped her immensely, but apparently the geniuses at the board of education felt differently.
Apparently, she knew that she was being transfered all day, but waited until I was on my way out the door to tell me, since this is prior to the official announcement or whatever. She had a going-away present at the ready, so she must have known in advance, but I wonder why exactly I couldn’t have been informed before we started planning for classes next term that I won’t do with her.
One good thing I will say is that when it comes to awkward, formal expression of personal sentiment, Japanese is superior to English. It seemed much more awkward to make small talk in English to a woman from Ireland who toured our school the other day than to say goodbye to my favorite English teacher. This maybe because everything I say in Japanese creates a small feeling of awkwardness that the effect on the whole neutralizes the particularity of the emotion. In any event, gwah, this sucks.
Meanwhile, unanswered questions about S-sensei will continue to haunt me. Was she married? Why did she hide her energy drinks in the drawer? Will she marry me? 〜 Grrr.
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