New Pics

Hey Everyone

 

We have 2 new albums up online. We went around our town and went on a trip to Osaka and Kyoto with Chris Blackstock. Sorry ahead of time for all the ridiculous photos we indcluded in the albums. One of us thought they were funny and the other was too lazy to go through all of the photos and delete them. So there ya go. Our blog updates should be coming soon.

 

Enjoy!
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http://picasaweb.google.com/EEHoug

IN again...

So, I didn`t think this warranted a mass mailing, but I was feeling that feeling again. The one that prompted me to wax philosophical the other day, and the result was the same this time.

So, I was feeling a lot of anxiety this morning. Erin says it`s the anxiety that comes along with living in another culture where everything is different, and I tend to agree with her. But I was riding my bike along to work and the feeling was just getting greater and greater. I pass students from my school on the way to work, them walking and me on my bike, and the feeling gets greater and greater. I keep thinking to myself about how I feel so afraid/anxious/worried on the inside and there`s no way for me to appropriately indicate that on the outside.

So I get to my desk at school and the work day starts. Of course, I realize that this feeling is coming, once again, from my sense of being cut off from everything around me, it is a sense of being alone.

I`m thinking, though, that I wouldn`t call it being `on the outside` though I still tend to think that has something to do with it. I`m starting to move beyond simple insides and outsides with the way I`m thinking about this/culture. I still think there is this fundamental desire or need or presupposition that we, as human beings, be `inside` of something. That which we are inside is what we typically refer to as our `outsides` (`I am inside my outsides` is manifest), though we delimit it physically in different ways. Some people think of their outsides as that which is on the other side of their skin, and some people think of it as all that which is physical about them, with that which is inside being their `soul, spirit, etc.`

Being in another culture, it`s not so much that I feel outside while everyone else is inside, as I wrote in my last entry, but that I have a different outside than everyone else around me... Additonally, this is not painful or anxiety inducing simply because they are different. Where the anxiety comes from is the experience of their insides and outsides being completely meaningless to me.

I want to try and ground this in my experience. What`s going on around me at this point, as I sit at my desk, is that people are going about their daily lives, like any office workers would do on a Monday morning in any first world country in the world. What`s cutting me off from that, though, is that none of it can have any meaning for me. Another way of saying it is that I don`t understand `why` so and so is going to the copy room. I know they go to make copies, but copies for what, about what, meaning what, what motivates them, who made that decision for them? I know they laugh, but about what, for what. `Why` is another way of asking the meaning. By meaning, I mean that something fits into my outsides, or that which I am in. When I ask why, I am asking how it fits into my outsides. In my office in Japan, I am surrounded by people for whom I can`t answer why, people who I can`t fit into my outsides, and so I am surrounded by mostly meaningless people.

In order to be something, my experience, it would seem, has to have meaning, or, it has to be a part of that which I am in.

The actions of those around me, these mundane daily tasks I`ve seen hundreds, thousands of times before, idle chit chat, making coffee, opening and closing windows, making copies, reading books, are meaningless because the insides of the people around me are meaningless. That is, the people around me, as insides, are nothing. Their insides are not a part of that which I am in. Though I can clearly see that there are insides there where there are people doing what people do, those insides are exist as nothing.

Language, then, must be that which makes other`s insides a part of my outside. Without understanding what people are saying, writing, hearing, and reading, their insides aren`t a part of that which I am in. Additionally, vice versa, my inside (this which is in) is not a part of that which they are in. Language, more symbols in my existential outside, gives their actions context and it gives me, however tennuous, a means of constructing their insides as a part of my outside, of giving them meaning, and of making them something.

I am nothing to them because my insides remain cut off from that which they are in, because I can`t bring my inside into their world of symbols, their outside, that which they are in. They can`t bring their inside into my world of symbols (language) so, though they are acting exactly as I would expect people to act, their actions are the result of nothing. Their actions, their insides, their world, their outsides, are all meaningless to me. They are a part of my outside but a part that doesn`t connect with my outside. This, obviously, brings me face to face with nothingness.

This nothing that exists evidently as a part of that which I am in bares a constant reminder of the nothing out of which I continually fashion that which I am in. That is where the anxiety I`ve been feeling lately comes from, from a nothing in that which I am in that I am constantly coming into contact with. I am constantly coming into contact with that Nothing, dark, lonely Nothing out of which nothing can emerge but within which all things exist.

IN

So...
I put my philosophy degree to work this afternoon. And I just have to write this out because I think it's important for me and may be interesting for some. But this is your warning: mind-numbing abstractions and made up words ahead. Turn back now if you're looking for funny stories! Please read on if you can help me reflect on this some more! If you're a busy professor and just want the philosophy, have a look at about the last two paragraphs.

OK. This afternoon at work, to kill some time, I started writing about the feeling I get when walking into the classroom on a daily basis. That is, I started reflecting on the state of being that I experience when entering the classroom. It's a pretty unique experience for me. Further, I think it's generally somewhat of a poignant, telling human experience. This all began because I was trying, as I often do, to 'put myself in the shoes' of the Japanese students that I'm working so closely with. The teachers reading this will know that understanding your students' perspective is crucial if you hope to make a connection with them, and connecting with students is crucial if you hope to effectively teach them things.

So I was thinking about this and I was wondering what it must be like for them to be sitting in class and have this foreigner walk in and start talking to them in English. And I realized, I really and truly have NO IDEA what that must be like. I can kind of imagine myself as a high school student in Spanish class and the possibility of this hired Spanish person walking in who is straight of the plane and ONLY speaks Spanish. That would've been interesting in high school. BUT, that doesn't really actually help me understand what that would be like for a JAPANESE person. That's because, as far as I can tell, being Japanese is something considerably different from being American. I can't explain that.

So I realize that thinking about this, at this point, will get me more or less nowhere. I will only make headway in this department by being here and working with them and being around them and slowly developing an empathetic relationship.

So I give up on that, and I start thinking about what it's like for ME walking into that classroom. I start to write about the anxiety, the fear, the sadness, that all sort of sit in the back of my existence as I smile and talk and laugh through class. I do REALLY enjoy these classes, but these background feelings are undeniable. They're there.

What is that feeling? What is that experience? I wonder to myself as I sit at my desk. And I realize that it's all about being an outsider. It's the feeling that you get when you're in a group and someone says something like, "Man, that apple tasted funny, you know!?" and the whole group falls out with laughter because there's something deeper to the statement that you don't have any grasp of. It's being on the outside of an inside joke, a feeling we all certainly know very well. It's that times 1000. You're the outsider on and inside LIFE, the outsider on an inside WAY OF BEING. It can be really, terribly isolating if you don't just ignore the feeling and get on with the business of teaching class.

But I was thinking about this feeling. About where that comes from. And I started to think about culture as forms of inside and outside. To really get to know the students, I have to get inside of their culture. So, I started to think about culture as inside and outside, and how we create cultures as ways of being inside. In a sense, then, culture comes from the human feeling of isolation. Culture is maybe our way of covering up that isolated sense we all have. Simply put, if you don't feel an overwhelming sense of your existential solitude, thank your culture.

This led me to realize that human beings, it seems, or at least me, cannot feel at ease unless we are inside of SOMETHING. This is true both spatially and symbolically. To be in something is to be whole. If we are not IN something, we are nothing. Think about it, no matter what happens, no matter where you are, you HAVE to be in something. Imagine yourself not inside of something... That is, imagine yourself in NOTHING. I guarantee you cannot truly do it without obliterating your sense of what it is to be you. If you're like me, you imagined yourself suspended in blackness. But blackness is something. You are IN 'total blackness.' To truly be IN nothing you become nothing. It's like the thought experiment people sometimes try where you wonder what 'the world' or existence would 'look like' if there were no 'you'. But, if there were no you, there would be NOTHING, because you are the one who organizes existence into things to be IN. What's really rough about that is everything that is would not 'disappear.' It would still exist, it would just exist as NOTHING. For there to be something, YOU have to be IN it.

To be you, you have to be contrasted with the something that YOU are IN. If you're not in your room, you're in your house, or you're in your neighborhood, or you're in your city, or you're in your country, or you're in your planet, or you're in this galaxy (which, interestingly, is about when it's no longer 'yours'). This is why space travel is so terrifying to many. I think less because we might die in space, but we can't imagine what we'd possibly be IN when we're in space. Though we call it space, we also know that it somehow IS a whole lot of NOTHING.

So, this being IN is, I am thinking, the source of our culture in two ways, one more talked about than the other. First, we create things to be in (symbolically and really) and, second, we create ways to understand what it is that we are in. The second one is how we usually think of culture. When I was in America, I thought that people in Japan lived in the same reality as me, they just created different ways of understanding what we were both in. When you actually come to a different culture, you realize, no matter how subliminally, that, though you are standing right next to them, you are in the same classroom, you have actually created DIFFERENT THINGS TO BE IN and you are both outside of eachother's INs. Not only do we create the ways that we understand what it is that we are in (which is the shared culture we always talk about), we CREATE THE VERY THINGS THAT WE ARE IN (which we don't talk about because it's our own task). That, I realized, is what the existentialists are talking about when they talk about how we ourselves and nothing else sustain our own existence necessarily. And what the post-modernists mean when they are talking about situatedness: they are talking about the things that we've created to be in.

The point, then, is that walking into a Japanese classroom helped to FINALLY understand postmodernism and Heidegger a little bit better.

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