Have you ever noticed (I am sure you have) how freshly cut hair never falls in quite the way you wanted it to when you started. Perhaps it's more noticeable if you cut your own hair like I do, and you have no one to blame but yourself and your twitchy fingers on the reins of the hungry blades. I suspect this is why it's so easy to keep snipsnapping away until you have nothing left to obscure your prominent widow's peak.
It was just a little trim for this wedding I'm going to this weekend in the dirty heart of Texas, which isn't so dirty, and is actually rather young and hip and Bohemian, not unlike you. It is if Texas is an oyster on the seabed of the country, and in all the obesity and terrible air quality (oh yeah, and rampant racism and backwoods conservative cowboy ethos), some pearl was solidified, fortified and called Austin. The safest place for our kind is dead centre, surrounded by vast expanses of hostile white neo-natives. In fact, it's not unlike Columbus in that regard, I suppose.
My friend getting married, Sahar, constantly had a problem when we were younger: everyone seemed to want to spell her Persian name "Sarah", and you'd think that in the international community and school that we were in, a place where there were more Omers and Osmans than James or Johns, there would be some sensitivity to that sort of false typo. It even reminds me of taking a class with one of my favourite English professors at OSU, Pranav Jani: it wasn't his name that was mispelled, but the course was on Salman Rushdie, which the university printers had graciously corrected on the syllabus to read "Salmon Rushdie". We were headlong into postcolonial discourse (the Western biases of technology and its spell checks) before we had even cracked open Midnight's Children.
My friend Gianna will be there too, and is probably the main reason I agreed to go to this wedding at all. It's not as if neither of us are friends with Sahar; I think we just needed each other's presence to motivate ourselves to go.
And so, for the first time in probably a decade, our three families will all be in the same place at the same time. It feels as if it is some elaborate astrological event, but if it is scattering any tea leaves in my direction, I have done nothing more than ingest them to settle my recently poisoned stomach.
I imagine it like some ghost image of the past, blurred into the present picture. There we all are, standing in line: the Phams - 3 boys, the Bishehs - 4 girls, the Leggios - 3 girls. We hardly fit into the pictures of ourselves, and what is this business now of Sahar getting married? Is this for real?
The ghost image decays a bit, eroding slightly around the edges, not in quality necessarily, but in a more ontological sense, if that is the word. Objects begin to disappear from the field of vision, until all that's left is each of our faces, and how we have even outgrown those.
Am I ready for this confrontation? On one hand, yes. I have my clothes picked out, an outfit that was remarked upon as being "very GQ". Gianna told me that her mom is putting money on me as being best dressed at the wedding.
And on the other hand?...
Who's to say. My family stresses me out. Being in Texas stresses me out. Confronting layers of my past seems to have interesting effects on my head, a palimpsest of escapism and striving to just be enough.
Families reunited. Families expanded. Children gone. Fathers gone. It's not the same picture at all. One wonders how one was ever deceived in the first place.
It was just a little trim for this wedding I'm going to this weekend in the dirty heart of Texas, which isn't so dirty, and is actually rather young and hip and Bohemian, not unlike you. It is if Texas is an oyster on the seabed of the country, and in all the obesity and terrible air quality (oh yeah, and rampant racism and backwoods conservative cowboy ethos), some pearl was solidified, fortified and called Austin. The safest place for our kind is dead centre, surrounded by vast expanses of hostile white neo-natives. In fact, it's not unlike Columbus in that regard, I suppose.
My friend getting married, Sahar, constantly had a problem when we were younger: everyone seemed to want to spell her Persian name "Sarah", and you'd think that in the international community and school that we were in, a place where there were more Omers and Osmans than James or Johns, there would be some sensitivity to that sort of false typo. It even reminds me of taking a class with one of my favourite English professors at OSU, Pranav Jani: it wasn't his name that was mispelled, but the course was on Salman Rushdie, which the university printers had graciously corrected on the syllabus to read "Salmon Rushdie". We were headlong into postcolonial discourse (the Western biases of technology and its spell checks) before we had even cracked open Midnight's Children.
My friend Gianna will be there too, and is probably the main reason I agreed to go to this wedding at all. It's not as if neither of us are friends with Sahar; I think we just needed each other's presence to motivate ourselves to go.
And so, for the first time in probably a decade, our three families will all be in the same place at the same time. It feels as if it is some elaborate astrological event, but if it is scattering any tea leaves in my direction, I have done nothing more than ingest them to settle my recently poisoned stomach.
I imagine it like some ghost image of the past, blurred into the present picture. There we all are, standing in line: the Phams - 3 boys, the Bishehs - 4 girls, the Leggios - 3 girls. We hardly fit into the pictures of ourselves, and what is this business now of Sahar getting married? Is this for real?
The ghost image decays a bit, eroding slightly around the edges, not in quality necessarily, but in a more ontological sense, if that is the word. Objects begin to disappear from the field of vision, until all that's left is each of our faces, and how we have even outgrown those.
Am I ready for this confrontation? On one hand, yes. I have my clothes picked out, an outfit that was remarked upon as being "very GQ". Gianna told me that her mom is putting money on me as being best dressed at the wedding.
And on the other hand?...
Who's to say. My family stresses me out. Being in Texas stresses me out. Confronting layers of my past seems to have interesting effects on my head, a palimpsest of escapism and striving to just be enough.
Families reunited. Families expanded. Children gone. Fathers gone. It's not the same picture at all. One wonders how one was ever deceived in the first place.
