The Burden of Knowing

While we were in Iraq, a fellow Marine told me a secret of sorts that he later quizzed me on to see if I still remembered the details of what he had told me. And although I usually have a pretty good memory when it comes to things about my friends, I had totally forgotten everything about it. “This is important!” he chastised me. “You can’t forget! You’re the only one who knows.”

What he never wanted me to forget were his wishes about how he wanted to be interred after his death if he should lose his life in that godforsaken place the rest of the world called Iraq. And I was rather disappointed that I had forgotten that because what he wanted was so simple and yet so profoundly beautiful…

He wanted to be cremated with his ashes buried in the ground…

And he wanted the sapling of an oak tree planted over him…

To have life continue to grow even in the face of death…

Where his friends and family might later visit him…

And find some much needed rest and love…

Under the shade that he would provide.

——
This wish is also very much my wish…

Another Life Ruined

A very close friend of mine recently told me that I had ruined his life. When I asked him how, he explained that I had done more than anyone else to make him question the truth of reality… thereby ruining his life.

With smug satisfaction on my part.

On This Father’s Day

My wife is a better person than me.

This is something my friends have always known.

When I started dating her, my college friends warned me not to ruin my relationship with her because they knew I would never find anyone better. And now since my military friends from Iraq also have more opportunities to meet her, even they tell me how lucky—and undeserving—I am to have her.

Then a few weeks ago I met with an outspoken Ph.D. who happens to be seventy years old. She asked me about my wife whom she knows, and I answered that my wife was fine. But then I mentioned that so many of my friends have recently been telling me that I do not deserve to be with my wife.

She immediately bent over and started shaking her head with laughter. As she straightened herself to look at me, she reached for my arm to comfort me in a very apologetic fashion and confided with a smile: “So do I!”

That is the essence of my wife…

Where Lies Do Not Hide

I made her laugh.

Speaking in Korean, I told her that lawyers lie so very well.

And she laughed; she laughed heartily, even leaning over the table for support.

Then I asked her who is better at lying: a lawyer or a beautiful woman.

One deceives with words, but the other deceives with looks.

And while holding my hand, she looked into my eyes.

And I into hers…

Helping Others

My wife recently befriended a young woman who has lived a very difficult life. Tears flowed freely when she told my wife about her childhood growing up in a broken home. And life is still so very difficult for her as she never pursued a college education and currently works at a pizzeria.

She told my wife that she hates working there… that she want something better. So my wife made arrangements through personal contacts to get her a job as a customer service representative at an airport. It was not the best or the most ideal job in the world, but it did offer benefits as well as the possibility of being a steppingstone to better opportunities.

And she got the job; she was hired.

But for whatever reason, she declined the offer.

Although saddened by that decision, my wife was glad to have offered some help. It comes with the realization that others are perhaps not where we would like them to be developmentally but that, nevertheless, it is always important to offer others a helping hand whenever we are able to do so.

A Question of Definition

In my household, to be an American was to be bloated and superficial. When my aunts and grandmother called me “American,” they meant I followed pop culture and didn’t know the capital of Indonesia, that I ate junk food and wore jeans and t-shirts and chewed bubblegum and was monolingual. America was an inflated military; decaying cities; sexual repression and the Bible Belt; fast-food restaurants and big gas-guzzling cars; bad slang; throngs of uneducated citizens who displayed an appalling ignorance of proper grammar (even in English! their mother tongue!); and a niece who didn’t forget to turn out the lights because she was forgetful but because she was American, and as we all know—solemn nods around the room, please—Americans are too shallow to care about the environment. Americans, in short, were lacking in nuance, juvenile, and as bombastic as they were inhibited.

— Laura Fokkena, “Sex in Translation” (Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally edited by Angela Jane Fountas)

——
How times have changed.

My Personal Checklist

From “The Seven Ages of Man” by William Shakespeare:

✔ At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms…

✔ And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school…

✔ And then the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow…

✔ Then a soldier, full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth…

☐ And then the justice, in fair round belly with good capon lin’d, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances…

☐ The sixth age shifts into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side; his youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound…

☐ Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything…

——
Four down; three left to go.

Spread Too Thin

Thanks to other technological novelties (from social network sites, to micro-blogging sites, to photo-blogging sites, to all of the other distractions of my BlackBerry®), I have not been able to blog as much as I would like. And thanks to all of those technological novelties where most of them force you to sum up your thoughts in a scant 140 characters, I have noticed that it has become a little more difficult for me to expound my thoughts into something a bit more substantive.

I need to refocus on my writing.

Thoughts on Military-Related Suicides

Combat-training instills a sense that the life of one’s enemy has no intrinsic value.

After returning home from a combat tour, a veteran might deem himself—or the life that he has returned home to—to be his own worst enemy.

Therefore, for some veterans, committing suicide may just be a natural expression of his military training, especially since there is no concerted effort by the military to re-instill a sense that human life—particularly his own—has any intrinsic value absent a kill-or-be-killed mindset.

——
Why should anyone be surprised when yet another service member commits suicide?

Reading the Qur’an in Iraq

“In the Name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful . . . whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.”

— Sûrah Al-Maeda V, 32

——
With the inverse also being acknowledged, God has known from the moment Cain slew Abel that the life of all mankind was destined for ruin.