506. Scarring Childhood Memory Department... A Sketch.... Maybe a Poem Someday: The Greatest Love is the Greatest Sting (Live Twice!)

Today is the first day of mental recuperation from about a week... no... about a month of self-exploration of internal landscapes... in order to truly figure out where I was at before my intellectual-life-or-death-committee-meeting (which ended up being not that bad after all... more later!).

I found myself waking up to a horrible nightmare I had around 7am this morning... pertaining to my mother who messed up my room... as she did when I was around 11-12 year old, when me and my sister were bad girls... for whatever reasons.... I also found my mother upset because I was taking out student loans... that's where the argument laid... nevertheless, modern problems were overlaid with traumatic childhood experiences.

I called my mother around 9am at work and said, "I had a bad dream and it was about you messing my room when I was a child. And I wanted to say I love you because hey, I can laugh this off, and many other children were physically beaten, but you were very good at indirect psychological drama. So, thanks." My mother told me that when she was a teenager, she was slapped by her mother for no apparent reason--she was trying to help her mother, but her mother misinterpreted as back-stabbing of sorts--and my mother was permanently scarred, so when she was angry and frustrated with me and my sister, she really tried very hard to minimize her impact on us. Hence the Psychological Trauma Department of Mother-Hurricane's-Children's-Room! So, when I sing, "It takes one rock to make me, one rock to make me, one rock to take me, far far away. The very rock that holds me, can be the rock that harms me, the very rock that leads me, back on my way," this song is devoted to my mother primarily, and a couple of other individuals in my life who have been the same. The greatest, most visceral, instinctive love of mother and child... can also and ultimately be the greatest sting.

I had a conversation with a fisherman about subliminal childhood memories... and we had discussed childhood abuse.... Why? Well, because apparently he was at this shopping mall and there was this little girl who was shrieking and screaming and yelping so loud that you could hear her across a parking lot the size of 5-6 football fields (it's funny how the "football field" is the standard metaphorical SI unit of scale for Joe American). Her bawling wailed across the entirety of IKEA. That child was a mess-up, a failed biological art project. The mother had no control over the kid. The fisherman suggested a good smack for reinforcement. It was so loud, I would probably suggest the same. Duct tape as well? One way or another, that child was a nuisance to about 10,000 people at a shopping mall all at once. That kid was no good news to society... and the sad thing is that she was only 4 year old.

Many children have to deal with physical beatings, and that leaves detrimental, permanent scars for life. I told him about what my mother did to me and my sister. I only remember my mom spanking my sister once in our entire childhood (I think I was around 4 or 5 year old)... not much to speak of.... I remember my father whippin' my face once at a tennis tournament when I was ten years old... I wouldn't stop crying... but I don't blame him... my mother was this fanatic tennis mother who created this entire familial tension such that all of our weekends for about 4 years were filled with tennis tournaments, subliminal arguments, and overt family fights.

One of the most horrifying memories was the early morning (winter-time, it was dark outside) argument behind closed doors between my mother and father. I was outside the door in the dark hallway, crying, listening as to what was happening inside. My father had the most threatening tone-of-voice I had ever heard in my life, and my mother was shrieking. I heard bangs and shoves... I felt so helpless.

The worst part is that they were arguing over me. That's the very worst part. I was preparing for some STUPID exam on World History for my second grade class with 6'4" Ms. Christoffers and history was something I wasn't very good at remembering the facts, and so I had written in tiny words on my hand the answers to the questions (which actually helped me remember what I was supposed to learn!), and so my mother was testing me during breakfast, and she found out that I had written the answers on my hand... and she started excessively scolding me for cheating... it was so excessive that it became abusive and that's when my father intervened... and then the whole shebang of the dark hallway-behind-closed-doors-drama. I went to school that day partly in tears, and so my surprise my mother came to visit me around 1pm in the afternoon and she gave me a very big hug and said sorry, sorry, sorry. I was worried about my mother and father staying together... and of course they stayed together... but man... the beauty of emotions are that sometimes they just blow up out of no-where... accumulated suppression... but after a while... the emotions ware off.... about three days for me.... They say "wounds" heal with time... I do agree.... but there are permanent scars in memory.... This was one of my most vivid childhood memories... and it was negative.... The positive ones, I'm sure I'm full of those... but thankfully my "Collecting Bin of Negative Childhood Memories" is very small, finite, and quite containable....

I don't know how I got into this whole Obama-America-Helpless-Mother-Screaming-Child-metaphor, but here it goes....

I'm writing this and come to understand how stressful it is to raise a child... and I honestly don't know what people are thinking when they choose to have a kid in such a society as today. Raising a kid or running the United States of America? The problems of governance are equally as bad. I feel so horrible for Obama. I think the system right now is so massive and so inert that Obama is more so a puppet to the system, than a player. Just like that mother and that screaming child. America is the screaming child, and Obama is the helpless mother who can't rear or control the child, no matter how hard he tries. Obama didn't create the problems.... He inherited them. That screaming child embodies the rapid inheritance of a suite of American problems. The cart is running the horse... the horse has no control of the cart. I am not an anarchist, but I am a disastrologist. I am a perpetrator of the Phoenix; it's stage right now is that it needs to collapse into ashes. I feel that renewal in this global system will come bottom up, through disaster. Disaster speaks louder than dollar bills (thankfully the Supreme Court doesn't have to write that in the laws). It's just a matter of when, where, and how. Earthquakes and volcanoes are my friends... even though they may have the risk of taking my life... they will be good for society. Enough of my Jesxs Chrxst-kill-myself-save-society mentality.... It's not very evolutionarily... common.

Back on topic here... so my mother was the Master of Indirect Psychological Trauma. She didn't destroy and bruise our physical bodies, but she did destroy our "bowers," hence that being our "array of toys and clothes and tools" in our rooms. If my sister and I were bad for some reason... like for example, I was 12-years-old, I delt with my "friends" Marie and Jyoti who were making fun of me because I was probably the only person in class being nice (respectful) to this geeky dude with excessively huge glasses named "Andrew Wannemaker" in my middle school Algebra 2 math class. I came home crying to my mother, who told me to get a life and focus on "real" problems, which was superb advice, but at the same time, I was being abused by my miscro-cosmal suite of "friends," and so through the mechanism of psychological displacement, I would have these subliminal agendas around the household, like "dump unwanted toys in my sister's room without her knowing" and "putting water in the salt shaker to make all the salt sticky-stuck." And I would call my sister bad names for no reason (poor Jen Jen, she was such a cute wittle girl I wished I could have recognized what a cute little kid she was, I wouldn't have been so mean to her, I might devote a cartoon to Jen Jen to make up for all of my misbehaviors). So, if my mother was fed up with me or my sister, she would go into our rooms and be "Madame Hurricane:" she would tear a part our rooms, throw around everything until nearly ever element of the room was misplaced, and then she would command us, as we watched her devastation in horror, to clean up our rooms that day... which was a multi-hour ordeal. For one stretch of time, my mother threatened us that she would rip up some of our dolls or stuffed animals in to pieces. And then one time she did. She ripped my sister's Rosa Doll in two, and all this cottonish polyester fell our of the middle, and both of us were shrieking horrified, because our stuffed animals were our lives.... We would spend hours upon hours animating these stuff-teed animals and create fantasy worlds in our minds about how they interacted with each other... and for one of them to be ripped in two and see her insides? What was polyester to everyone else was our soulful, emotional blood and guts spewing on the floor.... I think after that super-angry moment, my mother was even appalled with herself, just as we were in shell-shock... talk about childhood shock doctrine. That afternoon my mother took the Rosa Doll and sewed her up very good, and said sorry to me and Jenny, and Rosa was back in business in our self-constructed stuffed-animal-ecosystem. I kind of wished real-life surgery were that simple, one day you get split in two by an act of violence, and then you get sewed up back together again... maybe grafting for plants... but not us megacorporate multicellular organisms of bloody, intricate interdependence of our bodily ecosystems.

The worst case situation of my mother tearing up our rooms is when I evolved such a lowly sense of self-worth that I ended up ripping all of my 6-year accumulation of awards and accomplishements in school (not to mention stamps and smelly-stickers of approval), from kindergarten to 5th grade, all in a few minutes... and now it's recycled, dispersed as whatever materials somewhere and everywhere in the world.... Three days later my mother had been very nice to me and my fickle confidence restored. I was sad that my trash can was emptied... I regretted that I ripped up my awards, and I wished I had kept them to this day... not because they were awards... but because they were memories of school, accumulated 6 years destroyed in 3 minutes....

More evidence of my mother being a master of psychological trauma.... She was very, very good at making me (and my sister, but more so me) feel guilty into continuing to play tennis even though I was philosophically resisting the game from the very start (the first time I ever played a tournament at age 9, I was crying non-stop for 1.5 hours; I felt bad for winning, I felt bad for losing, I am a win-win person and not a win-lose person, I had no incentive to beat people). My mother would threaten us not to going fun places... and she thought that getting sponsorships and tickets to Disneyland was going to convince us to perform... I think not. She threatened us to quitting but never gave us any other options... like volleyball or soccer or track or swimming or whatever sport.... Tunneling us into tennis without providing options. It was a classic situation in which my mother was trying to live her dreams through her puppet children. I sometimes call my mother the Stern Dictator of the Household (the need for regimentality) and my father the Gentle Advisor... he exposed me and my sister to stuff and made everything fun. He gave us options but no pressure to go one direction or another. He expected us to skin our knees and learn from our mistakes, but he would always be there for a hug and a wiping of tears. Obviously this characterization of my parents is different: my mother no longer holds this "Dictatorship" role, more so now a Gentle Advisor as well... but nevertheless the psychological turmoil was intense, and placed my mind in a Box of Good Child Obedience.

The external trauma of the household toned down toward the end of high school when around 16 I started to subconsciously impose trauma on myself during my studies... throwing away food... not eating... excessive OCD-type behaviors with exercising in my room... banging my head against the wall... on the floor.... Inside it was that horrible cannibalistic collectively-induced manslaughter when people passed through the Event Horizon (remember that film?). That was my interior for a while... suppressed interior for a while... only revealed ONCE through my teenage years... in art class... as "The Mask." (refer to Blogs "The Mask" and key words "Live Twice").

Well, what can I say? This is great material for an eventual poem. Woohoo! I had started a poem a while ago entitled "Scars to the Mind" referring to these past childhood memories... but somehow this bad dream I had this morning made this narrative thread of childhood traumas come to full life in emotional landscapes. I might as well capture it as it's fresh. I'm lucky to say that my childhood was benign, and nearly all negativity quarantined. Like I mentioned before, I'm called my mother to say "I love you, and thank you for only messing up my room, because I'm only laughing now."

160. The Peak of Civilization: A Sports Absurdity at Angels Baseball Stadium

I believe it was Sunday, April 6, 2008. I was driving rapidly to the Angels baseball stadium to meet up with my father and the UCR Earth Sciences Department. I was convinced last week to go by Aaron, a new student in the department... I think under Mary. His positive personality and radiating smile convinced me to go... thinking maybe this was a chance to recooperate from the past. In the end, I felt like it was some kind of internal emotional mockery to me. I was far from ready. The experience was humiliating and drives me to further appreciate the situation I have right now at UCSB, perks and all.

I think I have a phobia of homogenization, similarity, and repetition. I appreciated Earth Sciences department when I was a questionner of reality. I was wearing a different hat and was looking into Earth Sciences with an outsider eye. Then I enter the department and I started to panic and freak out because everyone thinks all the same and there were close to no interdisciplinary outlets. So then I panicked because then I felt stuck. Now, the situation is I am at Bren and I am in film. I am surrounded by the most diverse, eclectic group of scholars, in the arts and environmental sciences. Not only that, film allows me to explore the diversity of roles and perceptions of the Santa Barbara community. I am attracted to difference. I live for difference and diversity. People. Tools. Organisms. Landscapes. Everything. And the College of Creative studies let me love it all. Thank you.

Back to my 80-mph car drive. I am a bit disoriented, hopping off the five freeway, from the 101, from Santa Barbara. Bub calls me several times from Mary's cell phone. I pay 8 bucks to park (shxt, that's a lot), and I am approaching the stadium, only to view lots of parking lot, cars, people, and two giant Angels baseball helmets.

Epiphany #1. The historical accumulation of human achievement has resulted in this: the Peak of Human Civilization. See photograph number one. My father is trying to wear a gigantic baseball hat.

Epiphany #2. People are paying lots of money to watch other human beings swing a stick at a ball, and run around a square. Including myself. The last time I was at a baseball game ... two games, summer 1999. I was in the process of exploring life outside of school. It was utterly meaningless. I watched two shut-out games. Angels got bageled. I don't blame myself for not going to a game for 9 years. Or perhaps more.

I am starting to get depressed very quickly. I am walking toward my father and I am already starting to feel very, very empty. Like I'm about to enter Disneyland. Close enough. It is much how I felt when I was playing tennis, even at a young age. My mother was pressuring me and my sister to play very well, and you get sponsors and glorified if you win tournaments. Then you become a pro and you are queen of the world.

I stare at the racket and the tennis ball, and I am subconsciously confused. All I am doing is swinging a stick with high surface area at a ball, trying to get it over this net and on the other side of some rectangle in a cage... and society glorifies you for this. My first conscious recognition of this idea was age 12. I asked: "What's the point?" I don't get it. Where did this come from? Why tennis over other sports? Why do we have the sports that exist in mass production today and not the origination and development of alternative sports, like nuts-and-ladders (invented by Kristin Hepper's new hubby, Jimmy). Not only that, I hated direct competition. I felt bad for winning and I felt bad for losing. In the tennis court, I was rationally stuck. There was no road or any way out to self-satisfaction and happiness.

EvPsych in my daily life. Primitivity in society exists everywhere. The overglorification of sports is a classical example. Music and Hollywood in general, as well. Humans construct a world around them that ultimately reflect and satiate their internal biology. Case in point.

Epiphany #3. My dad says... "We play sports because it prevents men from killing each other." It's a civilized exercise of primitive neurological programs of competition. And if we aren't playing sports, we're off into "recreational wars" like Iraq.

Ya. I know that. Triune Brain Model is Everywhere.

Epiphany #4. I showed my father an image I took of the crowd of speckled humans. As seen above, and the zombied, somber face of the concessions boy, selling junk food to the crowd. Though I saw them selling cups of fruit this time. My father commented: "I don't know how so many human beings can co-exist in one place." I felt like we were watching a modern bullfight match in an arena, except that it is mediated by ball and bat. We were all amused at the same thing. We were all amused with men swinging at balls with sticks and trying to catch them in the field, like Garrett Anderson, and then you get glorified and paid millions of dollars. And the salary of my English teacher Ann Camacho in 1995-1996 was $27,000. Such a discrepancy between what we value and what will keep the infrastructure of this society up-and-running.

Epiphany #5. I was starting to think about the anatomy of an audience. Loose clusters of family and friends, distantly knowing each other. Lots of kids, parents with kids who are little leaguers. We all in this stadium have one thing in common: space. We are all "Angelenos" or Southern Californians at least. I went through flashbacks with my dreaded experience at the Harder Stadium in San Diego in last summer's American Idol. But that is another blog on its own.

Epiphany #6. The Belljar of Advertisement. Buy! Buy! Buy! More, more, more! Every moment you are flashed with hundreds of thousands of advertisements in the stadium. Buy this do that. It's abnoxious. We have televisions now when we pump gasoline. We have advertisements before movies in movie theaters. We wait in line in a grocery store, and they pop a television advertisement there as well. Every single gap in space and time. Every single time a human being waits in line, we are bombarded with advertisements. And such is the baseball arena. Baseball players stamped with advertisements. Are we truly in control and in charge of technoogy, or the summation of coupled-human-technological behavior has taken over our lives? I do NOT wonder why people get depressed and take psychiatric pills, given the summation of the modern system humans have built around us. And I was born in it. I inherited this. Shxt. And we're supposed to clean up the summed mess of our past ancestors? We have to take responsibility not because we have any terms of endearment for dead people. We have to take responsibility because it's a matter of SURVIVAL.

I am in Santa Barbara, and I feel much better. This town gives me hope.

So, this is the Biologically Incorrect ambiance of the Angels baseball Game. Then add the social ambiance of the Earth Sciences department: mostly Mary Droser's lab. I thought I would be happy and excited to see everyone, but it ends up not being an ideal "social environment" for mingling. The loud noise. Mary was with her kids. Diana and hubby. Pregnant. Kristin and Jimmy. Married. Greg's friend. Aaron... and to-be wife. Getting married April 30. Wha? Bub was there and so I felt obligated to give full attention to him. I managed to congratulate Kristin and Jimmy for getting married. Summer of 2007. Bay area. Cool. I'm sad I missed it. But then again I was doing Blue Horizons, so... I wasn't exactly fully aware of what is going on.

A giant knot. I started to freeze again. I felt stuck. Stifled. One. The time gap with everyone. I haven't kept up to par with people and their lives. The sociology of scientists soap opera of Riverside I used to keep track of so carefully. Two. The severed relationships. I felt like a failure. I just wanted to crawl back to Ann Aasen (my social psychologist during 2005-2006). I also felt weird because everyone's getting married and having kids and taking care of kids, and here is me. I felt like this... freak. Simply because I value other things? Because I decided to give birth to ideas and not babies? I wanted to shrivel and leave. I also started thinking about re-defining my gender. I am a female, but I don't fully conform to all female attributes. I'm not gay. Whew. Or bi. Whew. I am a neutralist female, I suppose. Middle of the road. Female who's comfortable with tomboy features. Athleticism. Dressing drabby and casual. No desire for kids. For meaningless relationships. Maybe it's not a gender identity thing. Maybe it's a societal thing. How American society pressures people to be in relationships for the sake of being in relationships. And if you're not... then you're a "quirky alone." Some new lingo from a lady up in San Francisco. Which I feel is misrepresentative as well. So I decided to be ISI: Intellectually Self Indulgent. I live in my own brain. It requires high maintenance so I give it high attention.

Well, enough of that. Being immersed in UCR Earth Sciences in a social occassion reminded me emotionally and intellectually that I have a 2-3 year knot in my mind and my mind's heart. A giant knot to untangle. One day at a time. I am humbled and appreciative.