Aang Waan

I've always found the greeting "What's up," whether inflected as a question or a statement, to be kind of nonsensical. Every culture has idiomatic expressions that don't make sense from an outside perspective, but under some scrutiny they may not even make sense from an inside perspective. I find this to be the case with "What's up?" Asking what is up has become completely acceptable as a greeting or a conduit to small talk, but nonetheless I feel like better greetings exist. Take for example, "Aang Waan." Hello, my other self. That is a pretty profound way of greeting people. Not only do you acknowledge their presence, but also your relationship to them, with them.

On Monday last, I walked out of class in awe of Larry Merculieff. That man, he is brilliant. I've always thought of brilliance as something contigent on advanced thoughts, thoughts inconceivable to my plain vanilla brain, but he suceeded in changing my mind entirely. Perhaps, in this age of infinite information, in which there is so much to process already, brilliance is being able to not think, to unthink... To switch off, in applicable terms considering how many of us walk around strapped with some whirring, girating computerized device that commands our attention. Today, my other self is my Facebook profile, or Twitter tweeter, internet avatar or whatever - not other people. I know a shamefully small amount about Alaska Native for having lived here my whole life, but I would venture to guess that native cultures are collectivist, egalitarian, unlike the Western individualist culture from which I have been constructed. I grew up in the I am me, you are you vein, in which other selves are nonexistent. "It's all on you, it's all about you." Common sentiment where I come from. I never grew up believing that I, and You, We are We. I was never We. I was Me.

I see and hear frequently in pop culture these days shirts that say and soundbytes that announce "I do me." That's cute. No regard for anything but yourself? Awesome. Then I won't care about you in the same way you don't care about me. We shall forever keep our distance from one another. We shall forever not be our other selves. I find that sad, but such is the reality of our cultural dynamic, at least in my generation and probably in subsequent ones as well. But, what I gleaned from Larry's visits to class is that I should make an earnest attempt to zone out from thinking, from stressing about inconsequential shit, from worrying about what is going on, and just be aware. Thinking and awareness, as he explained, are different things, and one is subject to fallacy, the other subject to zen-ness or something more eloquent than that.

Eestaakoon.