Lost In Me

While I've been in Ohio, I've been spending most of my time working on my parents' garden, planting and watering tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, pumpkins, sesame, scallions, and so forth. Deciding that our plants weren't growing very fast, my parents and I applied some plant food from an unnamed company that promised healthier leaves, stronger roots, and bigger vegetables for all garden plants. The next day, I found that over half of our garden had been wiped out during the course of the night, seemingly poisoned by the plant food we applied. It was the strangest thing, and I still don't understand how anything could have killed the plants so quickly. Either I somehow didn't apply the plant food correctly, or the government has found a new way to get rid of their nuclear waste.

On the bright side, I now have plenty of work to keep me busy, as we will be replanting much of our garden.

I've been in Ohio for the past week, and again, I have not had regular internet access. I've been keeping myself busy mostly with housework and running. I'm finding out that being around my father isn't helping my nascent alcoholism much.

I've been reading half bemusedly about Rumsfeld being thrown to the lions by his superiors. It seems that he is to be the scapegoat for this latest embarrassment for the Bush administration, just as Rice was the scapegoat just a few weeks ago for the 9/11 security failures.

I find this morbidly amusing, because by concentrating obsessively on which individual is to blame for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the American media dismisses the real issue: whether such an abusive occupation of Iraq is justified. By focusing exclusively on which official is to blame, the media fails to address the more fundamental questions which must arise about American policy in Iraq, as a result of this "information leak". Of course, glossing over the central issues and dwelling on the unimportant ones is a very basic tactic in propaganda. But I think it is not hard to see, after filtering out the BS, that the abuse of the hapless Iraqi prisoners by the American soldiers merely reflects a fatal mistake in policy; the mistake of occupying by brute force a people whose culture and religion American soldiers have nothing but contempt for, as a result of countless years of relentless brainwashing by a racist, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim propaganda machine (the American media).

It may very well be true that Rumsfeld is a screw-up. So what. Let's not forget here what the real issue is: the ongoing suffering of the Iraqi people under occupation. And that is a result of policy.

Lee

I met Lee my freshman year simply as somebody to work on physics and calculus homework with. Many of his acquaintances knew him as "the complex analysis guy", because he had worked through most of the standard curriculum for math and physics majors in lieu of high school, before he ever started college here at Cornell. I remember that, unlike Galwang, I was never very impressed by his academic resume, maybe because of my natural skepticism. I was impressed, however, by Lee's attitude: his appreciation for scholarship, and his desire to learn and to grow.

From the beginning, it seemed to me that Lee had been something of an academic badass in the past, but that he was completely unable to fulfill his potential as a student here. And by that, I don't mean the grades and the GPA's, as those are not so important to Lee, but that he found it impossible to learn here in the face of the pretentious distantness of the faculty and the insecure defensiveness of his boujii-fied fellow students. I think that he was much more sensitive to the institutional and industrial atmosphere of this Ivy-League college than I was (see Nov. 1, 2003 entry), perhaps because unlike me, he had seen first hand what the alternatives were.

I watched him get burnt out by the ceaseless march of industrial education, and the endless academic hoops that we were asked to jump through. I watched him grow more and more disillusioned by his experience at Cornell until I don't think it was worth it for him to stay. And I was glad when he found some happiness in his Claire, as well as an excuse to get away from this place for a while.

I went to lunch at a quaint little cafe in downtown Ithaca with Panna today. Our conversation strayed to the topic of Lee, and she mentioned with some bitterness that he had never bothered to contact her since going to study abroad in Ireland. Of course, I too have not heard from him at all, but I told Panna that I didn't mind. I think that what Lee needs now is to competely forget about this place for a while, and if that means cutting his ties with all of us, then that's what he needs. I hope that he is finding a chance in Ireland to simply be, along with his Claire, and that his thoughts do not stray back to Cornell, along with all its scholastic disappointments as well as its Pannas and Galwangs and Lostins. And I am optimistic, as after all, no news is generally good news.

And of course, as Lee would insist, all this is merely a snapshot in time of what is essensially a dynamic creature.

Motte and I have taken to waking each other up at 6:30 in the morning. This is, of course, a matter of great convenience for the both of us, as it's much easier to give somebody a early morning wake up call when they live 14 times zones away. Apparently, it is a fad in Korea these days to wake up and start your day at obscenely early hours in the morning.

And I thought all those other fads were painful.

Last night I fell asleep at around dinner time, and so, already awake, I'm waiting around for Motte's phone call and getting caught up on some over-due blogging.