on tangents

of course i realize that my posts go off into tangents, which usually seem unrelated to those people not fully familiar with the inner workings of my brain. i realize this because upon looking at anything i've written, there seem to be a profusion of dashes and parentheses. and because i've been told this by quite a few people.

but there is a method to this madness, and it stems from a number of reasons. i'll seek to be succinct in laying out these reasons, will lay them before you in an organized fashion befitting a research paper or a thesis. anecdotes will be relied upon however, and the Reader may be required to participate in a few mental calisthenics.
i speak in tangents because it seems inherent to my grafted life. i may not have moved as much as some people, but i defy anyone who has fully immersed himself in another completely foreign culture (whether it be during a vacation or an extended stay) to not feel somehow fragmented. as if every experience cleaved one into yet another person. you touch slightly, breathe it all in, then move on. i was born in pakistan, raised in the united states, lived in germany, and have traveled europe, asia, the middle east, and north and south america. in high school, the stakes were simpler - an identity falling somewhere in the taut balance between western thinking and eastern beliefs. but even the west has many hues (as illustrated by the differences and similarities between europe and america), as does the east, and i am the type of person who tries to always fully delve. this tends to drive one a little mad.

those of us who live this way live also more than a bit tangential to the world we live in and the people we know. we touch slightly and memorably, but can move on just as quickly or just as slowly, depending on how much the other has affected us. we are ethereal and boundless, a presence merely that resonates subtly.

i also tend to write purely from stream of conscious thought, without a filter. this is the type of training i'd been given in all my contact with creative writing. before leaving for germany in 2002, i celebrated my 20th birthday in june, and received from a cousin (also a writer, knowledgeable in writer's block, and a bit of a tangent himself) two gifts: a blank journal and a book on overcoming creative block. when experiences were new in stuttgart, and i needed to verbalize them, i turned to the book - i never finished it, but the first chapter always stuck with me. to unblock the writer, the author suggested mandatory "morning pages." these were three pages of pure stream of conscious thought, written first thing in the morning, from which the writer could unearth hidden ideas. it didn't matter what blather you wrote about, you just had to fill three pages.

and of course, there will be some people who understand the tangents, and some people who never will. growing up, i was usually in the honors-level classes, and the gifted-and-talented programs. this created a sort of sifting effect - there was a large group of us in 7th grade, which grew smaller and smaller, and finally dwindled to a group of about 30-40 of us. by senior year, we had become a strange sort of family - very different from each other, but close, prone to finding similarities in people we never dreamed of being similar to. all of us had elected to take the same ap classes in junior and senior year; some of us had even taken the same electives. those people are how i understand the difference between the creative and the rational - those who get the emotive style of writing that i tend to use, and those who don't. there is no lack of intelligence, it is merely a different way of thinking.

there was a group of us who were in both ap biology, and in ap literature, as well as the same few who had taken a creative writing elective. my friends and i, though we did well in it, could barely wrap our heads around the precision and formulaic methodology of the ap biology class - but there were others who loved it thoroughly. they liked that when we dissected a fetal pig or a frog, the organs were exactly where the textbook told us they would be. they liked being able to get concrete answers from formulas, the comfort of the objective. those same people were completely miffed however when we discussed e e cummings in lit class, or were asked to write a creative description in the writing class. cummings made no sense to them, while i and my friends delighted in the nose-thumbing rebelliousness of the poet and author who discarded punctuation and grammar to create something you could only understand by stepping back and feeling it - kind of like an impressionist painting on paper. come too close and scrutinize the dots too hard for coherence, and you lose sight of the flow and rhythm, which is telling you something you have to feel to hear.

sometimes, you have to hear with your eyes and smell with your tongue, listen with your nose and touch with your ears...