Hairdye and Contacts

I work with the latter but not the former.

I guess just thinking about how studying abroad is thought to change your perspectives and make you more mature, more open as a person, and more knowledgeable about the world and about different cultures, made me think that it would to well for me to evaluate my own.

A little to late, you say? Better late than never, I'd say.

Socialization is a funny thing, because as most people know, we are all born with a clean slate. We learn before we take our first breath of air. We learn social convention (some better than others). We learn a language or two natively. We develop who we are as individuals. We begin identifying ourselves and conform to that prototype.

I am no different, of course, and as a person, I have been learning throughout my life and will continue to learn until I die, I suppose. Who am I though? I'm not so sure I know this myself, actually. Here I find that in some ways I am so mature in many ways, yet so immature just based in the fact that I have lived on this planet not two decades yet. Growing up, I've learned through experience more than through dictation how to be have; what to say and what not to say; what people expect of me--and as a result, what I expect of out myself.

Whereas I was spoken to for a while in Cantonese when I was young, my parents always spoke English to each other, and my no conscious decision of my own, I picked up the latter but not the former. In a very immature way, it still boggles my mind that people can think efficiently in a language besides English, my language, and it's always been funny to me to hear little kids speak their native foreign languages. Some things will never change.

I know who I am as an individual, and yet I don't. I'm quick to acknowledge my ancestry, but never would I tout it nor say that I identify myself as Chinese before American, Californian, or even Chinese-American. I find it mildly annoying that some people try to identify themselves by their ancestry as if it is more than residual, because for while some it is, for more it is not. I understand that at anything and everything that I do, I will never be the best of the best, though I will not stop trying. I know that no matter how much I learn and no matter how much I experience, I know but a small fraction of the infinite universe of what there is to know.

I identify myself as Christian, because of how humbled I am by the world and because of the comfort of knowing of a higher power and the solace I find in knowing that nothing I do is really for myself. I identify myself as liberal (in the American sense) because I know that not everything in the world can be done by (fictitiously) saving money, nor solved by asserting superiority on the international front nor on the domestic battlefield. Because who are we to judge others and assert our righteousness in faith, lifestyle, or personal choices that ought to remain personal?

I identify myself as a heterosexual man, who wears darker-colored clothing and finds it better to cut hair shorter than leave it grow, who has been brought to the realization of the subconscious lowering of his voice yet still does it, who finds a woman more appealing with a voice higher than lower.

I see and observe the people here and notice that, while they possibly share more genes with me than many of my classmates back home, they are so different. The girls most all dress like guys and the guys most all talk like girls. But that is, of course, my judgment, and who am I to say anything without making sure that the listener knows its but my opinion, and that while I will defend my own, I still respect all well-founded opinions because what's right is as simple as a consensus of the minds.

If everyone's wrong, then everyone's right. If everyone's a winner, then no one is.

While I won't go so far as to say that I've never thought about it, I've never used hairdye, even as the majority of my classmates went bleaching their hair blond in fourth grade. As much as I say I prefer contacts over glasses because contacts maintain better peripheral vision, the reasons number beyond that.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
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