Pre-departch starch. (aka auto-generated comfort food).

Note: The short anecdote below is loosely based on a "true story" (as they say). Names, places, characteristics and details have all been drastically changed-- so as to protect folks-- but the essence of what I learned from the interaction remains in tact. (Or so I hope).

"My last boyfriend told me to 'stop acting so goddamn masculine' when I let out a little burp after sharing a pitcher of beer with him. To hell with that. We broke up in 1972, and by 1973 I had a girlfriend with a rocking mustache."

And so began my Thursday afternoon. Crammed between the volunteer coordinator and the driver-- like a napkin forcefully stuffed under the leg of a wobbly restaurant table-- my illegal ride in the FurnitureForGood van proved to be one of the most interesting road trips to New Westminister in my entire life.

The day of volunteering began with a statement as personal as the one written above. Katie, the driver of the van, freely shared her reflections on how gendered dating practices have influenced her understanding of self, and the kinds of relationships she feels comfortable in. At risk of sounding like a cold-hearted academic, the conversation initially enthralled me almost entirely on an intellectual level. Having been out of sociology seminars for nearly five months now, my neurons keep begging me to install a post-structuralist vs. post-modernist see-saw between the synapses to "keep them busy," but I haven't gotten around to their pretentious request. (In other words, I haven't touched a non-fiction book since April...). Instead, I have lazily resorted to analyzing things--like how my nightmares are a reflection of the internalized gender, class, and race scripts I learned as a child-- and discussed them with such attentive audiences as my bouncy cat.

Thus, on Thursday, when Katie began divulging such details, I was swept away by the intellectual nature of her reflections and less attentive toward their emotional quality. I was interested in how our society perpetuates and challenges understandings of gender roles through different mediums; I brought up my personal experience with online dating as an example of how I felt both liberated and confined to gendered scripts when trying out the virtual love medium this summer. 

The intellectual aspect of the conversation soon morphed into goofiness, as I told Katie about the guy who asked me to write him love songs after five minutes of chatting, and the existentialist philosopher who justified his attempt to kiss me after an hour as an application of "free will." 

Suddenly-- in between my laugh-snorts and Katie's cackles-- I realized that we had not included Jad, the volunteer coordinator, in our dialogue thus far. I quickly attempted to amend that by asking him--sheepishly, at that-- if he was currently seeing someone.

"I've been widowed for ten years," he replied quietly. "That's it for me. She was the one. Now any time I have off work I spend on E-Bay."

His remark pushed all of the air out of my lungs, and all of a sudden I could hear my foot tapping nervously on the ground. It suddenly hit me that, without ever consciously knowing it, I have this very specific mode of operation for conversations with strangers. Over the past few years, I have developed this sort of intellectual agenda for dialogue that is supposed to "protect me" from emotional surprises: I filter information relayed to me through my "sociological lens" and try to leave their remarks at that, as "interesting micro-examples of macro-scale trends."

But as soon as Jad made his comment, all of this DurkheimMarxGoffman-esque masquerade snapped crisply in half and I felt, not thought. I felt deeply for this stranger, and realized that I had been trying to protect myself from doing so the whole time by attempting to remain on an intellectual level.

It's not to say that I never "feel" for strangers. I do all the time. What I mean to express is that so much schooling, so much "thinking", so much compartmentalization of thought and feeling over the past five years has led me to kind of develop this very clinical approach to conversations with strangers where I somehow decide that focusing on the "sociological" nature of their thoughts will somehow create a greater connection to them, rather than simply allowing the conversation to flow, and my mind go where my feelings go when I talk to them...

Does that make any sense?

Probably not, but this whole revelation caused me to take a step back and re-iterate to myself why I'm moving to Guadeloupe.

Indeed, this past week has been exceptionally hard for me as I try to come to grips with why I am leaving a place with so many people that I love so very deeply, for a speck in the Caribbean where I feel for no one. 

This is what Jad's heartfelt comment made me realize:

I'm moving to Guadeloupe because "I want a [life] with a sloooooowww hand." In other words:  the Caribbean is known for it's easy-going, slow-paced nature. I want to apply that easy-going nature to my brain. So that, when I meet new people-- converse with them, learn about their lives, ask them their opinions-- I can hear all they have to say, and interpret it as a human, not as a textbook. 

Hopefully, when I come back to Vancouver, I can apply this philosophy to other parts of my life as well, so that I do not understand my life as a series of theories, but a complex web of moments.