- Sep 2023
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hypothes.is hypothes.is
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"Surrendering" by Ocean Vuong
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He moved into United State when he was age of five. He first came to United State when he started kindergarten. Seven of them live in the apartment one bedroom and bathroom to share the whole. He learned ABC song and alphabet. He knows the ABC that he forgot the letter is M comes before N.
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He went to the library since he was on the recess. He was in the library hiding from the bully. The bully just came in the library doing the slight frame and soft voice in front of the kid where he sit. He left the library, he walked to the middle of the schoolyard started calling him the pansy and fairy. He knows the American flag that he recognize on the microphone against the backdrop.
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Tags
- Weeks earlier, I’d been in the library. It was where I would hide during recess. Otherwise, because of my slight frame and soft voice, the boys would call me “pansy” and “fairy” and pull my shorts around my ankles in the middle of the schoolyard. I sat on the floor beside a tape player. From a box of cassettes, I chose one labelled “Great American Speeches.” I picked it because of the illustration, a microphone against a backdrop of the American flag. I picked it because the American flag was one of the few symbols I recognized.
- My family immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1990, when I was two. We lived, all seven of us, in a one-bedroom apartment in Hartford, Connecticut, and I spent my first five years in America surrounded, inundated, by the Vietnamese language. When I entered kindergarten, I was, in a sense, immigrating all over again, except this time into English. Like any American child, I quickly learned my ABCs, thanks to the age-old melody (one I still sing rapidly to myself when I forget whether “M” comes before “N”). Within a few years, I had become fluent—but only in speech, not in the written word.
Annotators
URL
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- Aug 2023
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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I do want to point out one more really significant implication here which is how it affects our experience of time
- for: the lack project, sense of lack, the reality project, sense of self, sense of self and lack, poverty mentality, sense of time, living in the future, living in the present, human DOing, human BEing
- key insight
- we construct different types of experiences of time, depending on the degree of sense of lack we experience
- it means the difference between
- living in the present
- living in the future
- paraphrase
- it's the nature of lack projects insofar as we become preoccupied with them
- that they tend to be future oriented naturally
- I mean the whole idea of a lack project or a reality project is right here right now is not good enough
- because I feel this sense of inadequacy this sense of lack
- but in the future when I have what I think I need
- when I'm rich enough or
- when I'm famous enough or
- my body is perfect enough or whatever
- when I have all this then everything will be okay
- and what of course that does is that future orientation traps Us in linear time in a way that tends to devalue the way we experience the world and ourselves in the world right here and now
- it treats the now as a means to some better ends
- Now isn't good enough
- but when I have what I think I need everything is going to be just great
- So many of the spiritual Traditions taught
- especially the mystics and the Zen Masters
- they end up talking about what is sometimes called
- the Eternal now
- or the Eternal present - a different way of experiencing the now
- As long as the present is a means to some better end
- this future when I'm gonna be okay
- then the present is experienced as
- a series of Nows that fall away
- as we reach for that future
- but if we're not actually needing to get somewhere that's better in the future
- it's possible to experience the here and now
- as lacking nothing and myself in the here and now
- as lacking nothing
- it's possible to experience the present as something that doesn't arise and doesn't fall away
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- Jul 2020
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Starominski-Uehara, M. (2020). Mass Media Exposing Representations of Reality Through Critical Inquiry [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/vz9cu
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