Re: Nanitozo

Cindy wrote:

On May 2, 6:02 pm, "John R. Yamamoto-Wilson"
<j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I learn from people I can relax with, not from deadly serious people
who fly off the handle and start ranting in a rude and offensive
manner when they think (wrongly, as it happens) that they are being
belittled.

You got to wait until I am ready, but it's basically too much to ask.
I want you to, but I can not force you because I am not special to
you, right? I don't know you. I know nothing about you. I don't
know what we have in common. Do I want to know about you? I don't
know. Are you interesting to me? What can you offer me?


I'd like to respond to you with humour, but I can't, because you have
made it clear that you don't want me to. It seems very dry and sad,
but if that's what you want, OK. You've got it.

I am not comfortable talking with you with humor either. What if you
don't understand my joke? What if I don't understand your joke? I
am scared if I didn't do it right. I am going to be embarrassed for
not understanding jokes again. I am so very scared. You never
understand this fear for not doing things right. What do you do when
miscommunication occurs? How do you tell the other without
offending? In fact, what happened in the past was they kept going
without letting the other know. Nobody told nothing, just kept it in
the middle of the air. It killed me so good. I may do humor with
you, but please don't do humor with me (until I come to like you and
feel confident enough that you are not teasing or snickering at me,
instead, having fun with me). Hey, that means I have to like you
first to have any discussion. That would be way too much to ask. I
cancel this. It's so impossible and unimportant.

I was angry when I woke up and found I was being called an *** and suchlike when I was just being lighthearted.

Now I don't feel angry. I feel sad and frustrated. Tapping at a computer keyboard is so inadequate for saying, "Hey, it's all right. I understand what you are feeling, or if I don't at least I want to try. I'm not the enemy. I'm sorry I upset you."

I'm an emotional person, too, you know, and I have the greatest respect for your emotional honesty in what you have just written. I am a teacher in "real" life, and my job is to nurture, not to hurt. I suppose you're right; we don't know what lies behind the words we see on the computer screen - we don't know what sort of *person* is there, behind the words, and we forget, in the war of words, that there is someone behind the words who may be vulnerable and feel hurt.

What I think is that you must be a very brave person, to feel so scared and still to carry on. Being in between two cultures is terribly hard - no one pays you for it, a lot of the time you don't have any choice about it - and yet perhaps it is one of the most important things in the world. You ask what I can offer you. At the very least I can offer a recognition...


=====================================
i am a door ...
i am caught between two rooms
swinging from one to another.
grasping moments as the wind
sways me from the first to the next.
living, loving, caressing life in each
taking a little from one
and giving to the other, and back.

i hear the strains of my mother's voice
over the aroma of the eggplant curry
wafting over my father's intense study
of the Indian Express -- his favorite newspaper.
the aunts and uncles came in droves
to my sister's wedding to eat
and gossip during the ceremony,
and through the night.
glimpses of life ... very Indian.

in the other room, the surround sound
heard Simon and Garfunkel over troubled waters,
while Pink Floyd cried about the walls in our lives.
Simpsons and Butterfinger were definitely in
as Gore and Quayle babbled using innocuous verbiage.
the computer was never shut off
as reams of paper saw term papers
discuss new ways to communicate.
glimpses of life ... very American.

between these two worlds
i am happy, confused, angry
And in pain -- all at the same time.
for i am a door caught between two rooms.
i see and feel both of them
but i don't seem to belong to either.

(Nagesh Rao)
=====================================

We doors should stick together, huh?

John
.