Perched

Perched on a hill like a crow on a well-made scarecrow,

the animate on the deceivingly inanimate,

observing traffic patterns as though they

are an enchanting enigma of the natural world.

Kitana and Vygotsky

There is this little girl named Kitana. Her parents named her after their favorite character in a video game called Mortal Kombat. What a great namesake. She has really taken a liking to me, along with two or three other little kids. They are like my little kid posse. Every time I walk in, they come running to me and hardly leave my side. That makes me feel good that there are people in the world that run to see me when I enter the building. (That is quite an egotistical statement, I dare say, but true nonetheless.)

Kitana follows me everywhere like a little puppy dog. It’s kinda cute, but at first, I was annoyed with her. Never in my life have I had someone talk so much to me about nothing in particular. If I am stuck in a conversation with an adult wherein the adult goes off on tangent after tangent with no connection between thoughts and does all of the talking, like my mother’s father used to (may he rest in peace), I usually find a way to stealthy get out of there as politely yet quickly as possible. I do not do that with Kitana. I let her go on and on about her fascination with bats and how she is going to be a bat someday, and other (what I think are silly) ideas that are tangible and real to her. Like I said, at first, it was hard for me to sit there and engage in conversation with Kitana.

But I realized something. Kitana is displaying something that the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky theorized about, namely the progressive internalization of speech. For him, the child, Kitana in this case, has not yet learned to keep her thoughts private—everything that comes to mind is spoken aloud. Only over time and through more social interactions, she will learn to turn these words inward into thoughts. And so it became easier, and much more enjoyable, to think of Kitana as free and unconstrained from the restraints that she will later learn from society on the appropriateness of expressing one’s mind all of the time.

Autonomy

The stars are violently twinkling.

Millions and billions of years ago, they decided to stir it up,

That some thing may appreciate their light messages tonight.

Too Revealing

The way she holds in her hands your face

and closely examines its features;

She pets the multifarious colored man-beard sprouting.

Clear Your Throat

My father's disposition was always something to be simultaneously admired and pitied and embraced.

The characteristic disruption in his voice, when important and mundane and filler words filled with love spilled from his brain to his lips to my ears,

was more like a temporary spastic cough,

than a conventional clearing of the throat, a habitual pause for

emphasis.

You have left me with nothing, save a bitter taste in mouth.

Heraclitus and Morpheus

Heraclitus and Morpheus

Constant waves of change hit my recognition like a heavy wall of water.

Splash.

And then subside

only for a moment.

And,

Splash! Again!

Experience: sense that.

No; sense me.

Conscious

and then back to the dark

and then, permeate

The Dough like

The Cookie Cutter