Colors are not just colors for me - they’re woven into all the thoughts in my mind and all the experiences I’ve ever had. 1 is gold, 2 is pink, 3 is green, 4 is periwinkle, 5 is burnt orange, 6 is bright orange, 7 is lighter green, 8 is purple, 9 is dark red, and 0 is white. Every letter has a color, every day of the week and every person’s name & emotion. You mad at me? I see those red sharp triangles sparking from your eyes. You flirtin at me? I see those orange-gold stars too. One time I walked out of a store and made eye contact with a strange man on the other side of the street and felt white laser-daggers shoot into me, and first I froze but then I prepared to run. He followed me, but knew he would and so I got away. My mental calendar is a rainbow sidewalk-Möbius strip that stretches vertically upward & when I zoom in I’m on a different square depending on the day and time of year. December and January are at the top, and July and August are at the bottom. Sometimes I forget to switch my position on the strip and don’t realize how far along in the year I am until I move - like today I realized I was still looking out from January when I should be sitting mid-April. Synesthesia has always been a part of me, and other people have cooler kinds than I do but I wouldn’t trade my colors for nada because they brighten my life and have saved my life and sometimes are the only things I remember (e.g. that song is lavender & the right answer is dark green/ you’re a golden person but when you’re sad you lose your sheen)🧡
~ Interview Questions: The types I know I have: chomesthesia (sound to color), grapheme-color (letters/numbers to colors), spatial sequence (time is represented in space), sometimes bits of other types (personification, taste-tactile, taste-color) Spatial-Sequence Associations: Is there some relationship between time and the physical world for you (e.g. the seasons being oriented around your body, the months resembling a hula-hoop before your eyes)?
Grapheme Associations: Is there some relationship between time and colors or personalities for you (e.g. Monday is red, December is sad)?
Do you have other known forms of Synesthesia?
I’ve been aware I’ve had synesthesia since my 12th grade English class when we read A Mango-Shaped Space. Famous synesthetes: Vladimir Nabokov, David Hockney, Pharrell Williams, Richard Feynman, Billy Joel, Nikola Tesla, Mickey Hart, Ramin Djawadi I just read an article telling the story of two 11 and 12 year old girls in Argentina who were raped by 60+ year old men, got pregnant, and tried to get abortions. Their bodies are too small to physically have a baby, even though their hormones have triggered mensuration. The doctors collaborated with the Catholic Church to try and prolong their pregnancies for as long as possible, trying to bribe and coerce and brainwash and scare these CHILDREN into having the child of their RAPISTS 5-6x their age. Abortion is legal in Argentina in the cases of rape and child abuse, but adults still don’t want to perform them. Especially for victims who are poor and powerless. The reality of these children’s lives is that they will be publicly shamed for having an abortion, even though the pregnancy was dangerous to their health, even though they have barely reach a double digit age, even though they are victims of sexual abuse/child abuse/general abuse and have had all their rights violated and don’t even understand what has actually happened to them. Forget about their lives - their small budding lives that have barely begun to take direction. They don’t matter anymore. The only thing that matters is making sure they give birth to this creature of violation and pain, who should never have been conceived in any moral and right world. The protesters are only concerned with making sure this new life makes its way into the world at whatever cost. As soon as it takes its first breath they’ll be satisfied and leave, happily walking away from this helpless, tormented, uneducated child who will struggle to raise her own child without financial, emotional, or medical support. But she did The Right Thing! She brought life into this world! No matter that her own life has been destroyed in this process, that she had no say in choosing her fate, that she is unable to provide any sort of quality life for this new creature even if she wanted to, that this world is overrun with humans and that there are too many children unable to be cared for. “Congratulations child I just met - you no longer have to play with toy dolls, you get your own real live baby that you now must take care of every day for the rest of your life until it has its own child or actually makes it to adulthood and can care for itself!!! Isn’t that wonderful??? So sorry you’re in pain, but your existence only matters now to help raise new life! You don’t count, not that you ever really mattered before, because actually this is the exact life our society wanted for you in the first place!! Great success!!!”
Life, yes - but at what cost? Does the mother’s own life have no value? Of course not - she’s a women. Does the quality of life of the child have any value? Apparently not - especially if it’s another future devout follower of [whatever religion] who will depend on the church for life in many/all ways and thereby strengthening its power. “God’s will.” God’s will is your way of excusing all the shit that happens and how you force your beliefs on other people because you can’t imagine living in a world that has no higher meaning or value. Look at the places where religion is tied to the government and laws and still has a say in the everyday lives of people. And look at how little value is places on women’s rights. Coincidence? Women have the power to give new life. So in this twisted world we are still enslaved by whatever means the powerful can impose on us. Historically birth rates were high because we had no choice - children often died in infancy, birth control did not exist, women existed for their bodies and not much else, children were needed to create armies and religions and give power to the dogmas that needed blind followers. We construct rules out of that blindness, spin meaning from the dark in the absence of objective ways to measure the world (CHC theory anybody?). Before democratic laws and modern medical history, we had the church. The church told us “it is wrong to have sex with more than one person, and wrong to have sex out of wedlock and you will burn in hell for your sins if you do.” Scare tactics aside, in a world without birth control, paternity tests and medical care for STDs when syphilis is running rampant and people are uneducated and depend on the church for information and guidance, I see the logic behind scaring people into having sex with only one person and in an intentional way (paternity/STDs/birth rate - “solved”). But now we have other, better, evidence-backed ways to combat these issues. Yet the messages have not changed. The ones in power never want to give up the power. Few people question why laws or sayings or morals are written the way they are. You are pawns. The masses are pawns for the powerful few and it has always been this way. Those in power want to keep their power. How do you do that? Take away rights, education, opportunities, access to healthcare. Leave people at the mercy of your words, or sword. 11 years old. Your body isn’t developed. Your brain isn’t developed. What kinds of long-term consequences could you grasp at age 11? What was your mind occupied with at age 11? What kind of evil must possess you to hurt this innocence? And what evil possesses the others who turn a blind eye to this torture and turn the victim into the perpetrator? A cluster of cells is not a person. They are not equal to the being carrying them - they are apart of her. And you do not have the moral authority to command the trajectory of another person’s life, especially when they have not had any say in their situation. Are you, the anti-abortion protester pro-life-at-all-costs picketer, going to help financially and emotionally support this fetus that was forced upon this child? Are you going to carve a life for her out from the impoverished town that lacks basic resources so you can make your dreams for this strange fetus that you have no connection to come to fruition? “She could have been the person to cure cancer.” She also could have been another child rape victim perpetuating this trend, which is far more likely. How could she have ever been the person to cure cancer when all of the odds of her life are turned against her? What cruelty and ignorance are blanketing your brain that makes you thing this unborn child of a child has any chance at a good life? And remember the woman who didn’t even know she was pregnant and went to the doctor for unexplained pain and bleeding - and was arrested for murdering her unborn child. She didn’t know she was pregnant. She had an accidental miscarriage. And now she’s in jail. Because women are not people and we don’t matter. If you think otherwise you are in denial. Any law that is written to violate women’s rights is upheld by a society that does not value women equally. How many laws are out there that target everyone who is not a white male? The rest of us are not people yet in its eyes around this world. And now Ohio has passed a law that makes abortion illegal after 6 weeks. 6 weeks does not a person make. Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant by then. There’s hope that this bill makes it to the Supreme Court and overturns Roe v Wade. Why? I don’t understand. I DON’T UNDERSTAND. THIS IS NOT YOUR BODY. THIS IS NOT YOUR LIFE. GET YOUR BACKWARDS MORALS AND UNEDUCATED OPINIONS OUT OF MY FUCKING VAGINA. I AM NOT IMPOSING MY VALUES ON YOU, HOW DARE YOU TRY TO POLICE MY BODY. No one wants an abortion. No one has ever said “you know what I want to do today? I’d like to have this invasive and personal procedure that will wreak havoc on my emotions and fundamentally alter the details of my body and life. It sounds super fun, let’s all go!” NO ONE FUCKING WANTS THAT. MAKING ABORTIONS ILLEGAL DOES NOT LOWER THE RATE OF ABORTIONS. IT JUST MAKES THEM DRASTICALLY MORE UNSAFE. You are a pawn. Are you against the death penalty, foreign wars, and stepping on ants in the sidewalk too since you value the sanctity of life so much? Quality is nothing compared to quantity, right? I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand. IT BREAKS MY HEART AND I DON’T UNDERSTAND The flood of essay-length thoughts continues but there's too much to say and I don't know where to begin. Post-Thailand-Honeymoon haze, slightly dazed walking through the streets of Siem Reap I can see the traces of grabbing hands that fought over this land.. the architecture is French Colonial, the accepted currency is the US$, there are westernized cafes on most street corners, and there is a man with heavy eyes sitting by a small art stand with a sign: "I lost both my hands fighting the Khmer Rouge. Please help support my small business."
~ The Pol Pot-lead Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide officially from 1975-1979, and its repercussions continued unofficially well into the 90s. During those few years, 1.5-3 million people died in the government's attempts to cleanse the nation, and skip the intermediate steps to becoming a self-sufficient agrarian-based society overnight based on the Chinese Communist model of the Great Leap Forward and the international community largely ignored everything that was going on. 25% of the total population died from mass executions, torture, malnutrition, disease, and forced labor. Anyone suspected of having ties to the former government or foreign governments, any professionals or intellectuals (which included anyone who spoke multiple languages or even people who just wore glasses), "ethnic saboteurs" aka people who lived in cities, any ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, or other minority, and Cambodian Christians, Muslims, and Buddhist monks were all targeted, tortured, and executed. The Khmer Rouge regime planted land mines across the entire western border, effectively walling the helpless in. Defining "genocide" as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" and not including other instances of non-genocide mass-killings, the Cambodian Genocide is the third largest in history by death toll, after Holodomor and the Holocaust. " Pol Pot died on 15 April 1998, having never been put on trial." To quote a leader of the Khmer Rouge regime about the value they placed on life, "To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss." ~ Reading the history of what lead to the Cambodian genocide leaves me with an eerie feeling of deja vu, because the ingredients that seem to lead to these kinds of monstrosities become very clear. Cambodia got caught in the middle of the US and Vietnam during the Vietnam war, letting the Vietnamese use their ports for shipping and letting the US bomb Vietnam hideouts in Cambodia - a decade after both Cambodia and Vietnam won their independence from France and a decade before the Khmer Rouge takeover. A disenfranchised society is left in the wake of massive violence, destruction and loss, disenfranchised with the West, and is looking desperately for someone to reinstate hope and guide them... Today, the recovery continues. Siem Reap has been mostly de-landmined, but there are still millions of landmines throughout the rest of the country that continue to kill and maim, and many of the families separated during the regime still have not been reunited. The history of the genocide is not taught in Cambodian high schools. The trials of leaders from the Khmer Rouge regime for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity continue today. ~ "The bones cannot find peace until the truth they hold in themselves has been revealed." -Deputy Military Police Chief Nhim Seila, Cambodia "I would rather live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep." But would you? One third of tiger subspecies have gone extinct in the last century directly from human activities, and of the ones still alive, four are endangered and two are critically endangered. We've poached and deforested 97% of tigers out of existence already, from over 100,000 in the early 1900s to only 3,200 that are left in the wild. 15,000 survive in captivity, but although they live longer there, what kind of life is that? What is the cost of protection, for any and all things? Not a single soul in this world would choose a cage over freedom, and watching a creature pace inside its box, with guilty lenses instead of rose tinted ones, still colors the experience of being up close. Tigers are mostly nocturnal creatures, but instead of getting to sleep all day (#relatable) they get poked and prodded to pose for photos with happy tourists even in the ethical sanctuaries. Understanding something experientially with all of your immediate senses has a different effect on you than when you only understand something intellectually, and petting an animal that has been stripped of its power and of its normal life is simply sad. They're still being hunted, and without serious intervention tigers are on track to become extinct in the wild within the next decade #stopmakingthingsgoextinct
This is my view right now. The tranquility and beauty that lace island life are painted in the clouds. But witnessing this joke from the other side of the world brings tears to my eyes that even the food poisoning of the last 12 hours can't summon. I don't care if you've heard this before. I don't care if anyone actually reads this. I just need to write it some place outside my mind so I know it exists. Almost everything in the world can be traced back to love and fear, and today fear won. As a woman, an LGBTQ+ ally, a survivor of sexual assault, a supporter of science, a believer of climate change, and someone who has friends of all races and varying beliefs, I am truly saddened at the thought of returning to the place I had always seen as progressive with stubbornly hopeful eyes. I'm sorry if this is cliche, but this election was elevated to the level of personal and moral offense. As someone who usually prefers to observe rather than to make noise, and as someone who is aware that multiple friends and family members voted today in a way that makes me feel small, I can't help but feel the need to let out these turbulent emotions. Maybe it's egged on by the fact that I've been puking all day, but even being in this beautiful place can't erase the deep sadness for the values of love, acceptance, truth, and equality that were blatantly ignored for material values and bygone views. If anything, this just shows how much work our out-of-date education system needs, because ignorance is not bliss, and tolerance comes from understanding. Everyone's connected in this strange universe, whether you'd like to believe it or not. I hope one day everyone sees that.
|
AuthorWhen the feelings are ripe, the words must flow Archives
April 2019
Categories |