Lay down your walls, they don't mean a thing. Keep on shinin', baby.

I used think I was a teacher. Most people who teach professionally do. Even the very good ones. Sometimes especially the very good ones. Ask them who they are, and they'll tell you, "I'm a teacher!" Of course they do. I've even said that in interviews, that I teach even when I'm not doing it professionally, that it's who I am, deep down. That I taught English not just because I loved language, but also because English classes are the best place to teach about life and how to live it. That is what they want to hear from you in that room, across the principal's desk, portfolio and a suit, that you'll give your life to this teaching thing at their school, because it is your life. Life identity and career match. What synchronicity!

While there is some truth to part of my identity being tied up in wanting to help other people learn and grow, that's a hollow story if I believe it's the full truth; it's just not enough. I've written about how long it took me to get over not being a professional teacher, and how much longer it took for me to realize that my identity wasn't any longer tied up in being a teacher. Now I am just a man. I am just a man.

My friend Adam works as an engineer. This is because he has a mind of a person who can engineer. He likes figuring out how things work. His brain plans and plots and schedules and thinks. But this is not who he is. He's a guy who gets lonely sometimes, and eats muffins whenever possible, and shows up to help when people need help, and likes playing board games, but not all the time, and walks to a place when he can, and more and more and more. All of which makes him a whole, deep, complex, person -- just like, and completely different than, everyone else. But the parts are just parts. And the appellations and descriptors are just that. Adam is a guy. Is he an engineer? Yes, but mostly no. Engineering is just part of it.

What got me started thinking about this, weeks and weeks ago on a sleepy Friday morning*, in the shower and the closet, is that I read a lot of blogs. Blogs on emerging Christianity, and blogs on poker (which I don't play), and gadgets (which I don't buy), and games (which my friend Jeremy would say I don't play), and compounds, and pictures of things in Russia, and lifehacking, and having a baby, and having already had a baby, and Photoshop disasters (two of those), and unnecessarily quotation "marks", and secrets, and satire, and for a while there, ampersands even. Most blogs are this way: I'm a christianarchohippy conservatarian, so I write about that. Or I play poker for a living and golf for fun, so I write about that. I'm famous, let me tell you how. There are people who write only about the sex they have and want to have, and people who only write about the cars they drive and want to drive, or people who only write about the food they eat and want to eat.

But my favorite blogs are where the writers slip the rest of their lives into the mix. It's no longer a blog about Topic X, which is of interest to you, but Topic X, which is one of the things in my life. Like when Pauly talks about how hard it is to be wrapped up in the degeneracy of Las Vegas, or his yearning to become the writer he wants to be and how his job writing gets in the way. Or when Wil talks about his kids and his wife and California sunsets, or how he learned to stop believing the voices that told him he could only find success in being an actor. Or when Gabe and Tycho take a break from gaming comics to talk about their kids.

Overall, blogging seems to be this deeply focused thing, like magazines, that strips away the essential mystery and confusion of being a whole person, and lets you say, "I am just this thing, and this thing makes me who I am." I am a lowrider owner. I am a woman who likes to be titillated. I am a man who likes the same. I am health. I am a person interested in making my living room remind people of the deep south. For me, though, I like seeing the person. For me, Topic X is just a means to the end of knowing a person.

This narrowing is the same sort of exclusionary definition that Rob Bell talks about in his book Sex God. How most people in our culture approach their sexuality from one of two extremes: animal or angel. You're either an animal who can't control your urges, so whatever feels good, do it, or you're a perfect angel, no physicality at all, no hormones, shove your body into a nice little Gnostic package and live like the spirit you truly are.

But we're humans. We feel like mating, and we can stop ourselves. We need to touch someone to feel connected and real, so we can hug and shake hands and sock shoulders and tickle. It's okay to embody your body. Lauren Winner talks a lot about that in her book Real Sex, how the number one indicator of girls not having sex as teenagers is being involved with a team sport. They learn how to use a body, so they don't get used by it.

Rob talks about how Hugh Hefner grew up in an "angel" household where nobody ever even hugged. And how that shaped all of Hefner's philosophy growing up. All the hedonism and depersonalization as the extreme of isolationism. How all he wanted was to break out of that lie that people don't need to be touched. All because his familiy didn't understand how to just be people. He never learned that just being human is okay. But it is. Human is what we are.

But the false dichotomy of Angel-Animal is just one example of how we define ourselves as anything but just a human. De-humanifying definitions abound and spread like memes. Okay, fine, they are memes. I wrote about his a while ago, but how often in a conversation do you hear someone ask you who you are, rather than what you do? Not often, I'd bet. Not that 'what do you do?' isn't a legitimate question to learn more about a person, but it's a form of shorthand, and too easy to depend on. That guy's a doctor, she's a lawyer, he's an engineer, they're students. I will define them as such. Just as easy to define someone by skin color or what they buy.

Obviously the answer to the 'what do you do?' question tells us something, there's something in a person's make-up that caused them to choose to be a chemist, or a salon's schedule coordinator, or a guy who sits at a desk and tells this person to do that and that person to do this, but it's not enough. There's a whole person lurking behind the iceberg tip of their job, or their blog, or their brand of t-shirt.

All the marriage books tell you that it takes a whole life to get to know someone, and you'll always be discovering new things. And all the pop-psych books tell you that it take a whole life to even know yourself. And there I go wanting to crush someone into a single sentence subject. Actuary. (Full disclosure: I don't actually know any actuaries. They have likely predicted this.) Avid reader. Cat owner. Slacker. Anime reader. Homeless guy. Nun.

Then there are terms like Tutsi, Hutu, Nazi, Jap, black, white, American, capitalist, Christian. Reduce, reduce, dehumanize, kill. It's all the same cycle. All the same mindset.

Now, I realize that saying something like "I am a teacher" is a form of necessary shorthand. And shorthand is how we mentally survive the chaos of historically normal life, let alone the rapidly accelerating life we live in this country. Like how we block out unnecessary visual info in visually busy environments (Hi, stretch of I-35 between the Southwest Trafficway entrance and downtown!). But forms of societal shorthand, even good ones, diminish the substance of the thing shorthanded.

For example, when the guy on the news says IED, most people know that means improvised explosive device (Some people may get them confused with intrauterine devices, of course, what with the similarity. How embarrassing.), but IED doesn't have the same lexical impact as the three words laid out. The object is improvised and it is explosive -- both words conjure their own set of ideas. In what kind of place would someone need to be to improvise something to explode? that's a questions worth asking yourself. One that wold unlikely come up when exposed to a term like IED. So, in short (not shortly enough?), shorthand has its place, but it's woefully inadequate. And besides, it leads to dehumanization.

And I want just the opposite. I want people humanized. Living deep in being a person. Loving life and loving people. Being loved. Being more than graphic designers and tech support technicians, and actors, being people.

I think my blog could be more popular if I focused on some topic, though. More marketable. If I wrote about politics or faith mostly, or living in Kansas City, or being married, wrote about games I'd played, or just conglomerated other things I'd found on the internet. That's how to get a readership. That's the kind of thing that draws me into reading someone else's blog, usually. But that's not who I am. Efficacy does not equal necessary action. People like to read things about topics, I know. But I write about topics because they are part of my life. They are the us-upon-a-times and the together-whens. The gathered cloudthreads of life, all woven into a larger whole.

And the reason I write about all kinds of threads in my life, rather than just picking one is because, deep down, I am a teacher. I want to show even one person who reads this thing, even in a small way, that my life isn't constrained to the one topic. Maybe if I write it, someone else can believe it. Just like how everyone with an audience wants to affect the audience to do something. Laugh and applaud, in most cases. Sometimes something more, but something. Even if they won't admit it to themselves. Just so, I want people to laugh and applaud, who doesn't, but more than that, I want the same thing I wanted for my students; I want people to live.




*When I finished writing this, as usual, I had to change the time from when I started it to when I finished it. This is usually a switch from 8:05 to 4:50, or summat similar. Date and time this blog started: 4:38 PM, 4/17/08. I have had the song 'Jezebel Eyes' by Dime Store Prophets stuck in my head ever since. I've quoted from it liberally here. I even considered changing the name of my blog to I Am Just a Man.