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My performance made even more sense to me tonight, while having dinner with one of the girls on my hall.

This story is going to start off pretty weird but please, just bare with me. So I was telling her about one of the girls I know who, for the first time, smoked weed with a few of her friends. She was telling me about it and she seemed so happy and excited. So happy and excited in fact that she accepted a smoking invitation for the very next night. I was happy that she was happy but that was it. I had nothing against anyone who smoked weed, I just knew that I didn't want to. It reminded me of my ex-friend who smoked a lot of weed. Except, he didn't think he smoked a lot of weed. But in fact, he did smoke a lot of weed. He smoked in the tub, he smoked on the roof, he smoked on his front steps, he smoked walking around the block, he smoked on his lunch break. And most of all, he liked smoking around me. And while I accepted him and his weed, weed to me was not something you woke up in the morning and decided you wanted to do for the first time in your life. It was something your friends told you about, you grew curious about from hearing of it, you tried one night... And so, as he became comfortable being high around me, I grew uncomfortable. Most of his friends (not all because I was the exception) smoked weed. And I felt odd being the one who didn't. It was like high school peer pressure college edition. He wasn't saying I should but he kept bringing weed into my life. If he wasn't high around me, he was talking about getting high, mentioning things he would do sober vs. high. And I got the feeling that if I smoked weed, he would like me better. And for the first time, I realized I didn't want to be around him anymore.

This still has a point. Be a little more patient.

So I tell this to my friend over dinner and mention how I feel bad. I've always been this person who wants to be open. Very very open. Accepting of all things, cultures, experiences, people. But I didn't want to be around this guy anymore and I felt bad. I felt like I was discriminating. What right did Asia have not wanting to be around a guy who smoked weed  rather frequently? That was judgmental and I had been trying to establish myself, for years, as the most nonjudgmental, liberated person to walk this earth. In one of the groups we formed in class discussing the term woman and man, I was the one saying we needed no words. They would only serve to limit us.

But my friend said, 'I don't want to be friends with people who lie to me. Should I feel bad because I am discriminating against liars? We become friends with people who value similar things as us."

But that's not the kind of friend I was trying to be. I wanted to be friends with everyone. Everyone. I wanted to include everything in my life. I wanted to do everything, be everything. But when you try to be everything, you can't be the things you really want to be. In my effort to be all-inclusive, I became a non-entity. I had no choices, I had no preferences, I just accepted everything. I wanted to be unconfined. Permeable. But I realized, without choices and preferences, I wasn't a person. I was trying to avoid the extreme of being close-minded and ended up at the other extreme that was complete open-mindedness. It was noble to be open but structure was necessary.

That's when I started thinking inside of the box. The box was representative of the things about me that were static. Houses undergo tons of renovation, people's genes mutate and yet something about that house and the people have remained constant. So much can change and yet you somehow remain 'you'. So there needed to be something that was fixed. (Discriminant of change)

So long as the top was open, there is nothing wrong with being in a box. But, I decided that I would never allow myself to give up some parts of me in order to fit things inside my box. I would just get a bigger box. And that's what I have been doing ever since this class. Putting some things in the box, taking some things out and, when I want to keep everything, I just get a larger box.