I am highly effected by everything. Sensitive may be a better word. When I was a kid, I couldn't use but a few types of soap for fear of all-day itchy repercussions. My mom had to buy and use expensive 'for sensitive skin types' detergent to wash my clothes or my skin was sure to break out in itchy welts. My Aunt Kim once sent a big, perfumed, birthday doll to me and after spending one night snuggled up to my new stuffed friend, I awoke, itching, red faced, miserable, and down one stuffed friend.
I am also allergic to penicillin; every Dr.'s appointment I can remember included my mother's retelling of my first and (then) only experience with penicillin. As an infant, infected with some sort of bacteria capable of penetrating all my body's natural attempts to create antibodies, a Dr. prescribed kiddy penicillin to me. "So maybe you were allergic to the suspension, and not the actual drug," my mother always explained. Recently, however, in Korea, my allergy to the drug was confirmed by a Dr. who failed to ask about my medication history and so prescribed me something in the penicillin family. When the glands around my neck swelled up so big it hurt to open my mouth fully, and breathing became a task, I figured it wasn't the suspension.
In the same way that my skin and blood are highly effected by various common elements, so too are my preceptions, feelings, emotions, and awarenesses. A few weekends ago, I was staying alone, in a Hotel in Seoul. I awoke hours before I assumed my mates in the next room would begin to stir, so I flipped on the TV and searched for the few English-speaking channels. I came across a movie, that had I been in an English-speaking country, I surely would have flipped past, however, I decided to watch Armageddon this early Sunday morning. Two minutes later, Liv Tyler is crying as she talks to her oil drilling, recently-made astronaut, hero, father, Bruce Willis, over the NASA TV phone, and I started crying. I wasn't crying heavily, I don't even remember my breathing getting much deeper, but tears definitely fell out of one of my eyes.
When I was in High School (it may have been Jr. High), I was reading a book about a woman who was domestically abused by her husband. I can't remember the specifics of the story, but I can remember reading the book in my parents' music room, and setting the book down one afternoon, when my step dad suggested that I stop reading the book. He insisted that it was changing my moods, which I refused to knowledge in my stubborn teenage self. But if I can cry over 2 minutes of Liv Tyler saying good-bye to Bruce Willis as he is about to die saving the Earth, I'm sure I was moody, mean, angry and sad while reading an entire book about a woman regularly being smashed into by a person she once loved.
Recently, I've been tearing through books, in the past three weeks, I've finished an atheist's manifesto on how 'religion poisons everything'; a short story suggested by a friend about a fella who has no real substance thus faking everything he does in life, from his relationships to group meditation; the published journal of a man who, in the 1950s darkened his white skin, so he could travel through the racist south as a black man; David Sedaris' hilarious accounts of his ordinary life in his not-so-ordinary accounts of life; and I am 50 pages away from finishing a book that discusses ADD in such great detail that I've made mental lists of all the people I need to send this book to.
When I was reading the atheist's manifesto (God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens), I found my mind constantly considering ways that secular society could work harder to provide some of the invaluable services that church societies (for example) notoriously do well. I even envisioned conversations where I would passionately prove to some devout believer that the (few) benefits of religion can exist without all the scary lies of an 'invisible man in the sky' (to quote my partner) and eternal burning hell for sinners.
As I read the published journal of John Howard Griffin, entitled Black Like Me, I couldn't help but constantly think and talk about homogeneous Korea and its overwhelming problems with racism. Usually, westerners feel 'positive' racism here in Korea. Store owners give us freebies just because we are the first westerner to walk into their store; Children say 'beautiful' and 'pretty' in Korean with looks of awe across their faces when we walk past. However, we do get a fair share of mean stares from the older generation who'd rather English not be such a priority for their country's future.
Additionally, when I showed a picture of black South African children to one of my 5th grade classes, they couldn't stop laughing. And when I showed them a picture of white South Africans, they didn't believe that these people were African. A friend of mine while teaching an adult class, was explained by a Korean adult that a black person couldn't swim to safety off of a deserted island, because black people can't swim, they just sink. Regardless of whether the treatment is positive or negative, the motivation behind the behavior is one based purely upon race; and so is racist.
Furthermore, I couldn't help but imagine someone performing this same experiment in Asia; Korean Like Me, we'd name the book. Some westerner would disguise as a Korean, speak the language fluently and take note of all the differences felt by Koreans if they considered you 'one of them'. Upon completing this book, I vowed to study Korean harder!
While I was reading David Sedaris' latest book (or at least I think it's his latest), When You Are Engulfed in Flames, I couldn't help but narrate my life in short stories that started and ended with the same funny sequence. I began noticing the hilarious irony in everything mundane,. I couldn't help but think and rethink about those various stories that I'd told and retold to friends, which were capable of eliciting some sort of laugh; hence the increase in my blogging over the past few weeks!
Currently, I'm reading Scattered by Gabor Mate, M.D. He discusses, in detail the importance of unstressed, loving parents for the brain development (to avoid developing ADD) of infants. I find my mind wondering to stories of my own infancy, my partner's, my brothers, my mothers, my fathers, my step-brothers, my nephews, my step-mothers, my step-fathers, my friends, my friends' partners, my friends' partners' families, and so on. Not to say that I believe everyone in my life and in the lives of everyone I know to have ADD, but in my wondering mind I am certainly assessing why people I know seem to have more stability versus other people that I know.
This book has made me infinitely more thankful for my mother and her innate kindness and empathy, and it is scaring me silly at the prospect of one day becoming a mother as well.
I suppose a less-sensitive person could be more sensible with their thoughts and feelings; able, possibly, to read a book without transforming their every thought into the issues discussed in the book (or heavily feeling a senseless, overly dramatic good-bye scene in a 2 star action movie). But I'm certain that were I to become less sensitive, it would only numb my feelings, rather than make them more logical!
