On: Silence

To begin, I must apologize for the extraordinarily long delay. The past few months have been....revealing, to say the least. An existential crisis forced me to examine issues I was probably unaware even existed within my life, which in turn, resulted in a period of narrative silence. Dorothy Smith was right: experience is pre-lingual, and the Heideggerian assertion, "Tradurre è tradire" (to translate is to betray) seemed to ring true in ways my 'productive' life as an academic never could have prepared me for; I couldn't even talk about them, let alone translate the messiness of my experiences into the tidiness of grammatical and lingual rules. However, I like to think I'm not completely un-optimistic, meaning that this period of enormous personal revelation (or, 'shedding my skin,' as qmass (qmass.wordpress.com) would term it) was not without the sociological lessons that I'm always trying to extract from life. In no particular order, and bearing absolutely zero logical coherence--and in my favourite 'listed' style--here is what I've learned/thought about during this time (and am finally ready to write about) :

1. Medical waiting rooms are a sociological goldmine. The 'holy trinity' of sociology I've come to reify--based on the primacy of race, class and gender for personhood and personal outcomes--are contested within these walls, and appear as arbitrary markers of division that are somehow transcended by people grappling with their own mortality. Their truly is a primacy to health, making it (arguably) the richest topic that any sociologist could ever tackle.

2. Psychology will never be able to tell the tale of illness experience, given the relational nature of getting one's medical 'work' done: these day to day activities never exist in a social vacuum. To even enunciate your experience involves entering into communicative relationships with peers, physicians, pharmacists, and others, who, depending on their standpoint, will either validate your very being, or, in Max Weber's astonishingly prolific terms, give you "a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual."

3. I think that Facebook is bullshit. I know many wonderful people who adore it, but I honestly believe that it will eventually lead to arrested development, given that it presupposes a trans-historical and trans-contextual 'self' capable of transcending personal development that can thereby keep us all immutably connected to the past. I also it really speaks to the loneliness of the human condition, which makes me feel sad.

4. The most brilliant movies I've watched within these past few months present characters who defy dichotomous categorizations of being either 'good' or 'evil,' but, alternatively, keep you nervously awaiting their 'true' character, who is never fully or satisfyingly revealed. This truly is art imitating life.

5. In that vein, dichotomies are simultaneously destructively tragic and totally necessary. Opposing forces of good and evil, qualitative and quantitative, left and right, feminine and masculine, straight and gay, etc, etc, etc simultaneously create conflict (destructively tragic), but also force us into dialectic relations that promote a Hegelian 'synthesis' of the thesis and the antithesis, which creates change; this really is the underlying rhythm of our social fabric.

6. If you're gonna live in Cowtown, live in West Hillhurst (or somewhere close by). If Calgary is in black and white, this area is in colour. The trees, the display of alternative sexualities, the giant mess of fabulously rich and direly poor, and the juxtaposition of the young and the old create a 'pulse' in this small corner of a city which otherwise seems to be DOA.

7. And last (brace yourselves for the cheesiness about to ensue), I want to thank those few beautiful people who gave me the space to not narrate, to not produce, to not be reliable, and to simply let me go through it: Ma and Pa, Kaitie, Julia, Nate, Pauline, AWF, Dr. B, and others I'm likely forgetting: I am forever grateful.