aphorisnt's blog

In all this talk about place and placelessness and belonging and home and porosity and everything, I remembered an idea I heard a few years ago in a Vlog Brothers video: the improbability of place. The video (which I'll include here if anyone wants to watch it) does a much better job explaining this concept that I probably could, but the idea more or less boils down to just how amazing it is that things are where they are and how they are and what and when. We condsider all these places when we talk about home–Bryn Mawr, Houston, Oregon, Madison, Chicago, Istanbul–but we never stop to think about how these places came to be and how amazing it is that they exist at all. The United States, for example, exists because a group of settlers formed an army and defeated the British, and ruthlessly laid claim to this entire swath of land, and came out on the winning side of both World Wars and the Cold War. But the US also exists because one explorer went the wrong way trying to find India and landed at a continent that existed where it did due to the motion of techtonic plates and the breaking up of Pangea, but only after the infamous Big Bang created that which is the Milky Way galaxy and our solar system in the first place. And if one takes the time to think about all of these events, and the billions of others not mentioned but of equal importance, that conspired to create any of the places we call "home" in the first place, claiming a city or a state or a two-story structure in suburbia as "home" seems rather arbitrary and shortsighted.

When I was little I loved climbing. I frequently put on a rather perfect impression of a mountain goat and, at the rocky outcroppings of the lake near my dentist's office, would jump from boulder to boulder, summiting each in turn to spend a brief moment standing on top and surveying the land around that to my three-year-old eyes possessed a sense of majesty.

At ten I still played at the park, running throughout aluminum and plastic playground structures sunk in to sandboxes. However I never let myself be limited by the parts of the play equipment and their "suggested use." I would climb on top of the monkey bars and crawl across them like a bridge. I would sit on top of the tunnel instead of crawling through it and slide down the seven or eight foot drop to the sandbox below. I would climb on top of railings and roofs and climb backwards up the slide.

One memory that really sticks with me, though, is from a trip to Yosemite at age thirteen. I was a teenager and of course thought I knew everything, and was very sure of my own limits. I wanted to climb Half Dome. It had been a dream of mine for years, since that three-year-old hopped between rocks and that ten-year-old abused the jungle gym at the neighborhood park. Unfortunately, my mom did not agree. I hiked and climbed whatever I could, but Half Dome is still a far off dream for me, something I'll have to do in adulthood (given I manage the funds to travel to California on my own).

Morton had me at Wall•E. That right there was and remains to this day one of my favorite Pixar movies (though I still love you, Toy Story and The Incredibles) if only for the ecological message. It fascinated me that this movie, which contained almost zero dialogue except for the ubiquitous John Ratzenberger, a Hal-like sentient steering wheel, and an old tape of Hello, Dolly could explain to the masses the importance of an ecological conscience much more easily and accessibly than any explanation I had ever offered. I had tried to tell people for years to pay attention to what people have done and continue to do to the planet, gave examples of contemporary disasters, and pointed out the consequences social, political, and enconomic that such degradation has engendered, but most often I was met with condescencion, blank stares, and sometimes outright hostility. Most Texans, I discovered, don't take kindly to someone telling them why their gas guzzling pickup truck might be a bad thing for the planet.

I wished with all my heart that I could pee in the woods. Honestly, that was the only thing that ever made me feel jealous of boys when I was growing up, that they could pee in the woods easily while I could not, at least not as comfortably. I was proud of my girlhood from a young age, preferring feminine clothing (as in that made for female-bodied people), joining Girl Scouts, riding a bike without the bar from seat to handles, etc, but out in nature, camping and on long hikes and places generally free from the normal facilities and peeing in the woods was sometimes the only option, I wished I could be a boy, even if only for five minutes.

    “Home is where the heart is,” so said Pliny the Elder. Home need not consist of a physical place, a city or location one can visit or the material structure in which a person grew up or currently inhabits. Rather, home comes to exist more as an emotion, a feeling of belonging and comfort, of safety and welcome, a space–be it physical or mental–one can claim as one’s own. However, when asked to describe home and what it means to me I find myself grappling to identify one single physical location, thinking of the houses in which I have lived (four in total, though only three of which I honestly remember), my dorm rooms this and last semester, the three states and four cities I have inhabited. In each of those places I can clearly picture my house (or the dorm building), my room, the environment just outside, the people and rooms and structures nearby, and I almost feel compelled to identify one as unequivocally home. The problem is, when I really consider home, which in itself is quite a charged word loaded with myriad connotations, nothing stands out as my one true home. I can talk ad naseaum about the different places in which I lived at one point or another, and I can turn right around and launch into a discussion about how home need not be a place but can instead take the form of people or feelings or smells or air temperatures or the taste of the tap water.

Hey, folks! So I think this is the part where I explain my user and avatar and whatnot.

Well my username is actually the one I used for twitter when I used twitter (which lasted about a week, but there you have it). I had no idea what to put as my username because I'm really bad at coming up with usernames–I can't do sudden creativity when put on the spot and under pressure, even if the pressure is imaginary–so I scoured the depths of my brain to come up with something interesting.

At that time, we'd been reading Oscar Wilde in my high school English class, so I had aphorisms and epigrams on the brain, and thus my username was born. I thought something to do with aphorisms would be kind of creative, and given the limited character form of expression that is twitter, something short and sweet like an aphorism seemed fitting. However, I am not Oscar Wilde (I only wish I could be that awesome), and I lack the ability to continually come up with witty sayings, hence the "isnt" portion.