Dear Neil,

Blank paper is a beautiful thing in its own right, but I always feel compelled to add something of myself to it: words and doodles or folds and creases. Perhaps the beauty of blank paper is the potential it has as the source of greater future beauty. Realized or not, this future potential bleeds back traces of its beauty onto the nothingness of paper itself. The potential projects forward and backwards through time, changing our perception of the object. Or, whatever. Origami is the English word that mispronounces the Japanese term origami, which means foldingpaper^*. Actually, a little closer to snappaper or something. Whatever. The other day, I saw a redneck looking man with the Chinese/Japanese symbol for woman on his shoulder^*. I wanted to ask him what he thought it meant, because that’s what it will mean to 99% of the people he runs into, after he explains it to them. Things on paper, things on skin, these things mean what we say they mean, individually and collectively. They have meaning from convention and from personal expression. Which meaning matters more is a point of perspective.
Projection is a psychological term referring to the tendency to ascribe to one’s own motivations to others. Naturally, we assume that other people think in the same manner as us, and unconsciously calculate their motions using ourselves as proxies. This is all fairly natural, but it can lead to mistakes in perception. If you only use yourself as a guide, you’ll deduce the motives of others incorrectly.
A thin membrane separates my selves. Like a sheet of paper or a curtain or cellulose in plants or like the air between people or like anything really, my selves are kept separate. At least, in theory. So, when I’m at home, I look like a good kid, and when I’m at school, I look like me. Or maybe it’s the other way around, maybe the school self is the construct. Anyhow, at school, I swear and drink, whereas at home I don’t. Also, at school, I have more fun, while at home I make monotone ironic statements to see if my mom notices. Recently, “Those kids are so cute… You should buy another dog.”
So, in high school, I heard that you too can have a pretty cool looking Tyler Durden^* hand scar for a couple days by leaving ice and salt on your hand until it burns. In college, I put the theory to a test with my “upper middle class” friend. After some false starts, I left the ice on for maybe thirty minutes of Citizen Kane. Maybe more, maybe less. Anyhow, a couple weeks (months?) later, the scar’s still there. I’m not sure if it will ever heal. It looks like it’s healing sometimes, and other times, not so much. A lot has to do with blood flow and light level. Anyhow, all this is terribly embarrassing, because, much like the cryptic bumper stickers on my car, I can’t take this off when I get home. And thus, through the curtain, a little light is projected from the dark mystery of my life at Furman into my life at home.
The thing I hate about sitcoms is how the people on TV are always getting into these same situations in which there is some uncomfortable truth that the stars will spend maybe 20 minutes avoiding and 5 minutes owning up to. It’s such a lame, poorly thought out plot, and yet, I’ve seen it over and over in show after show. Who acts like that? No one would try to attempt two dates at once in the same restaurant or enter into the long-term deception of landlord Barney Fife-Roper^* or not instantly call the parents upon confusing one babysat infant with another. So, why is that when we see these things on TV we laugh at it? TV is just electrons projected at a screen. Each character then projects an apocalyptic response to truth, and accordingly avoids the truth thereafter.
Anyhow, so my last couple of school enforced returns home have had a bit of personal tension in them for me. It’s like I’m a bizarre reverse hand model, always holding cups with my left hand palm up and sticking my hands in coat pockets and fiddling with long shirt sleeves and crossing my arms for an extended period and on and on. Eating out, eating in, going shopping, watching movies, playing videogames, going to pro-athletic competitions (on multiple occasions), going to church (on multiple occasions); it’s a terrible, terrible episode of Full House. And the only slip was on Thanksgiving Day, when I was standing around outside while footballs were tossed about and my sister saw it.
“How did you get that?”
My dad overhears. I make the backhand slapping motion against the car, as if in reply. My dad mutters, and I think, think, think I heard from his board certified medical doctor mouth,
“Self-mutilation.”^*
Well, shit. Anyhow, I’m getting really, really good at the no-outward-response-internal-organ-collapse, which I’m sure is a marketable job skill. My soul can wad itself up and then make an arc into the wastepaper basket of my psyche without anyone being the wiser. As an added bonus, I’ll get even more practice at non-response if my dad ever takes a closer look at that scar or my mom notices at all or my brother or my other sister or her husband or… The list goes on, and so do the sitcom antics.
All during the Thanksgiving break, I made a ton of little origami cranes. You know, there’s a legend that says that if you make a 1,000 cranes then you’ll turn into a dragon and burn down Tokyo. Or maybe that isn’t the legend, but as far as most people are concerned it could be, and if they heard it from me, then it would be. The Google.com approved version of the legend (and therefore community verified, ie. truth from collective meaning) is that 1,000 cranes = health in cases of illness or world peace in cases of radiation poisoning^*. Whatever. So, I learned how to make the things during my incredibly boring job and I made a ton of them, all through break and on into exams. Like a lot of things that were hard to do as a kid, it’s surprisingly easy to watch the thin sheet as it twists and projects itself out into the third dimension with a few well placed folds. The hard part is finding square paper.
One fun use of origami cranes is impressing the ladies. For some reason, probably to impress a girl, I’m on the Amnesty International emailing list at school. Their meetings take place during my radio show, so I have a good excuse for not going, but anyhow, I was mass emailed about a party at the apartment of one of the lead girls. Me and my bourgeois hippie friend went to the party. I drove, so he did the drinking for us, but not much. One of my senior lunch friends showed up near the end, and we were both surprised to see the other outside of a lunchtime context. Had I projected forward from past experience, I would have assumed he ceased to exist at around 2pm. He asked if this what I do when I’m not eating lunch. I said yeah. Anyhow, we were all instructed by the email to bring Christmas ornaments, so I made a crane. My friend looked on the internet a made a deformed paper box. It was a really good party in the sense that it contributed to my slowly figuring out why people like parties. I think that assuming everyone else at the party is experiencing the same things as me would be a mistake. We didn’t know many people, so my friend and I stuck close, but we met some people and talked and laughed and all that good stuff. Our hosts had hung some holly and everyone pretended it was mistletoe. It was funny to watch new people go through the mistletoe -> holly? -> shh! -> “mistletoe” experience as they noticed it. Everyone knows that everyone knows it isn’t real but is pretending it is. One girl that I know by acquaintance and her radio show made me kiss her, and then I acted embarrassed by placing my hand over my mouth. That was the first time I’ve kissed a girl in better than a year, I reckon, which is rather sad. She later gave me and my friend backrubs, but we’re pretty sure she’s bisexual, so whatever. When we finally went back to our dorm, my friend left his coat at the apartment, so we had to come back a couple days later to get it. We ended up talking to the people who lived there for an hour and half and having a jolly good time, and during this time I briefly thought about how I don’t really want to talk to people from Rock Hill at all. And here's the thing, at the party, someone noticed my hand, and I just turned to my friend and laughed. Then we explained the thing about the ice and everyone gets a good chuckle. Another girl was like isn't that like in that movie with Brad Pitt? And I'd I'm like, yeah, and the party rolled on--no big deal. So yeah, I like how at school, these things can be no big deal, and I dislike how at home these things can be a monsterously big deal. It all just depends on the meanings you project onto an object.
My friend Shige^* says he’s scared of Japanese people, on accounta he’ll inevitably be beaten in a battle of Japanese mastery by them. So, when I went to see him at his college last year, he would duck and look all scared when Japanese people crossed our path. I’m like that with Rock Hill folk, only with the no look reaction. I’m always afraid that the people from my church that go to Furman will come back with stories of me the swearing drunk. They already come back with tales of my suit coats and mischief, much to my dismay. Back during homecoming, I had to talk to a returned alumnus under the influence of a double shot. Not just any returned alumnus—or else why would I bring it up?—it was in fact my sister’s old best friend. Back when we were all smaller children, she and my sister would come and disrupt the baths of my brother and I. So, yeah, she’s the only girl at Furman to have seen my penis. Last year, back in the days before I had my own car, she would give me rides to and from Rock Hill. I told my friends the penis thing and we had a good laugh. Anyhow, I faked sober with her for as short a time as possible then ran off with my friends.
“Sorry, I have to go. My friends are waiting. It was good seeing you.”
She went for a checkup or whatever and talked to my dad. He tells me about it.
“She said you ran off before you could talk?”
“Yeah, my friends were waiting on me…”
Ugh, I hate these situations so much!
…
Well, not so much that I’ll prevent them from being possible through a lifestyle change.
I’ve tried making cranes out of duck tape^*, but they just pull themselves apart. Sadly, in spite of the incredible hip factor of duct tape, it has limited application as an adhesive to hold posters and as a taped together sheet with which to fold origami animals. When the temperature changes, the duct tape changes sizes and the poster falls down, the animal pulls itself apart. It transitions from one state to the other, and things fall apart. No amount of hipness stops that. Oh well. As hip as I am, I’m still liable to change my shape under the heat of a different light, under the air of a different atmosphere.
After my exams were over, I stayed behind at school another night. My friends still had exams the next day, so I wanted to stay behind and chill with them. Also, it was my last chance to drink until 2002 and I hadn’t gotten drunk in a week or two. My Armani Exchange/Green Party friend let me help finish his Southern Comfort before it would have to be thrown out for the break. The taste of Southern Comfort isn’t to my liking, in truth, but really only vodka and rum are. Maybe that’s because they’re what I first got drunk on. Perverted loyalty. Anyhow, that night was crazy fun. Deep in my brain the life sucks switch was turned off and everything was happy, happy, happy until the alcohol wore off. I read that alcohol works by damaging the brain, but not so much that it doesn’t heal pretty quick. Self-mutilation v. regeneration. A girl came by and a mission to Krispy Kreme was formed. I felt charming and charmed, entertaining and entertained. I projected my feelings, and the world was a happy place. I gave her my keys and she drove me and my friend’s also slightly drunk roommate. I sat in the back, because sitting there gave me the chance to experience the car from a new perspective. At the time, it all seemed so wonderful and whatnot that I couldn’t help but think of how boring it would be at home, waiting for the rest of my family to return from school and hiding my hand. Such a passage from light to dark, I thought.
The Krispy Kreme hat is still floating around in my car. When I drove with my dad to church the next Sunday, I cleared it and some papers off of the passenger seat for him.
The bisexual girl at the party, I let her invite me to sit with her at dinner a day or two before that. It was partially a setup on my part. I had been killing time in the dining hall after my friends went back to their rooms, and I saw the cute green haired girl come in and figured that she’d sit with the other girl. I was right, and the green haired girl joined us. I made a napkin into a crane to impress everyone. It kept conversation moving. I had previously been introduced to the green haired girl by this other girl on the premise that we were all Cibo Matto fans, but it wasn’t a great introduction. I had crushed hard on her during a concert a while before. I thought she dressed in the way that I might as a girl. I would dye my hair green if my mom didn’t implode whenever I do it, after all. My mom imagines other moms disapproving of her because of my hair color, and that’s the end of the matter. Anyhow, she told me that she had done origami for a while before too. The conversation meandered around Shintoism and a couple other things and then everyone was done eating and the diner group broke up. I said it was nice to get meet her, in a move I instantly regretted for being too awkward and forward. Oh well, that’s just my perspective.
A thin membrane separates my selves. I try to make it like the multilayered skins of a pressurized space suit, which firmly separates the inside from the outside, life and living and warmth from death and dying and bottomless cold. But it doesn’t work. Bits seeps through. Here and there is a wrinkle or a tear. In the end, osmosis occurs. Compartmentalization is only relative. Everything breathes, shrinks and grows. Ions flow through solutes, words and papers and scars flow from one place to other. My brother told me he only feels comfortable swearing with me and his friends at home, since at Governor’s School, he has a reputation to keep up. We’re all movie screens and movie projectors just running around the place, looking at each other in different lights. I saw in my brother’s bookmarks a link to my homepage^*. He probably got it from my IM profile. Oh well, I’m sure he won’t read much of it. Or if he does, he’ll just pull a no outward reaction about it.
The last Japanese philosopher I studied for school was WATSUJI Tetsuro. Mr. Watsuji tried to answer the German philosophic concept of “Being and Time” with his perception of “Being and Space.” He said that without an understanding of spatiality, philosophy was pudding headed. Different spaces require different reactions. Strangers shouldn’t be expected to act the way family members are expected to act because the relationship between them is different. Relationships take place in space and relationships are the essential for human existence as we know it. To write, “human relationships do not exist,” is to deny the author-reader relationship implied by the act of writing. Descartes was a fool when he begin by saying that he thought and there he knew that he was, when just speaking implied his existence in a community. Or so I’ve told. It makes sense to me, but so do a lot of things. Too many to be right.
My hand is starting to look better in more kinds of light and circulation, though it still can look Requiem for a Dream under the wrong circumstances. I have some make up that I sometimes rub on it to smooth social situations, but I really don’t know how make up works enough to use it properly. I’m starting to show my hand more; I’m becoming less fearful. These things are relative. We put meaning into things differently at different times. Like the lunch friend at a party, sometimes the meanings we make escape their original contexts. Worse things could happen. Still there are some meanings that we don’t make, we’re just given. Things like family and home, they come close to absolute. Sometimes things seem universal, like the light of the moon. Maybe there’s worse things than my family knowing how I am without them, but for better or worse I want my family to think well of me.
Everyone projects themselves onto their experiences. Like the moon, we all see the man we’re told about, unless we’re told it’s something else. The Japanese see rabbits. I think Native Americans have seen wolves. Galileo saw seas and called it science. The point is, the moon just reflects the sun’s light and reprojects it toward us, while we project on our thoughts onto it’like the purity of a cold winter’s night. On Earth, we, like TV screens, paint ourselves up with the change of the channel. I just want my family to like what they see, but I also have to live my own life. We’re all folding ourselves as we doodle on the margins. Open the fortune teller and find out your destiny. Spinning the web of identity, sometimes things get caught in the gossamer.
I’ve heard there’s a Taoist saying, a painting should be done in one stroke. Not literally, of course, but still perhaps one thick line could best use all of the potential inherit in blank paper and demonstrate clearly all of which it is capable. It would project out perfection by reflecting our gaze with its clarity. Like a perfectly executed cursive calligraphy pictogram of a woman in thick ink of a dry white surface. Yes, perhaps that could completely describe the paper, the ink, the author, the reader and all of their glorious relationships. Sadly though, in all probability, I would ruin this glorious totality by adding a signature, something to contain my identity: