Caitlyn Jenner and the Cretaceous - Tertiary (KT) Boundary

            I keep hearing about what a hero Caitlyn Jenner is. For what? Escaping the discomfort of being a rich white woman that lived most of her life in the body of a rich, world record setting male athlete? Seems like, in that situation, the only qualification for being a hero is being famous. It’s as if spectacle has been made the equivalent of spectacular. Caitlyn is living her life as she sees fit and as she feels she should… that does not seem spectacular to me. I feel like spectacular should be defined by the restrictiveness/ struggle/ sacrifice/ discipline or fortitude/ etc required to acquire something. Being a gold medal Olympian, that seems spectacular. Of all the people in the world that were trying to be that one thing, only one person accomplished it. Spectacular. Even silver and bronze - Spectacular. Putting in the work to even compete at that level - Spectacular. Doing the exact same thing that countless numbers of people are doing, but with more resources and a platform to express it - Spectacle. To me, it seems as though she found a way to cultivate social benefits from eliciting pity derived from the narrative built on the struggles of other transgender people. I am in no way trying to quantify or minimize her struggles. I don’t doubt, that even with every advantage in the modern world, she has and does struggle against ideas and beliefs that are resistant to or outright combative against her identity. I think that’s kind of where I got started on this series of thoughts… identity.

            When I take the time to think about it, it is a strange concept to me. At this time, I say that Identity is a concept. Identities are what we, as people, use to establish or indicate who or what (someone or something) is. Even that doesn’t seem like a completely accurate or complete definition. Identities are really only explanations or indications of our perceptions. It would seem that as our understanding and experiences increase, so would the indications and perceptions on which we base the labels we use as identifiers. As a person who has learned multiple languages, I can say that it has been my experience that I understood what a person was conveying before I understood what the actual words were in that language. Language does not make a thing what it is, but we (as people) seem to be intent on limiting every thing we know, to the words we use to describe them. I find that often, it feels like we’ve all agreed on running towards a goal or standard that we are also fighting to keep from being overcome by. Like a life spent making a spectacle of drawing tally marks so that we will be able to count them at the end and say, “Look. I did it. Congratulate me for this collection of lines I drew on the wall. These are the sum of my being.”

            It seems like, the concept of identity has become so intertwined with how we value ourselves and other people that we have created a phenomena where language based identity has been given physical properties. As creatures that seem to be largely unaware of emotional impacts on others, except from our own external point of views that are dependent on our own internal processes or obstacles, are we sufficiently equipped to safely saddle each other with these static identities? So far as it doesn’t cause actual harm, why should it matter to one person how another person perceives or understands themselves? I say actual harm because it seems that some people are so committed to their static identity that they express themselves in ways that indicate they have been physically harmed or threatened, when they have really only felt discomfort about an idea or perception.

            That’s another thing I constantly find myself evaluating about myself. When I feel angry, I try to make the point of telling myself, “I feel angry about that” or “I felt angry when that happened”. As opposed to, “Someone or something did that to me”. “How DARE they do the angry TO ME?!” I think it is too easily built into the English that is spoken in American culture that someone or something is always the cause of our discomfort, which is socially accepted as - someone has committed a specific act against us. Something as simple as, “They made me angry when they called me stupid .” They made me angry? By what process did they create or generate anger inside of me? By calling me stupid? The word stupid is only a series of sounds, it’s not a magical spell, it’s not an element or collection of physical properties, it’s the representation of an idea based identity. Is it accurate? Maybe. Maybe more than maybe, but is the word stupid physically capable of interacting with my body? No. Not until it has entered my ears, been transformed into electrical signals that are transmitted to my brain and then interpreted and evaluated by the ideas developed and maintained by my knowledge based on my perceptions and experiences. The word stupid doesn’t make me angry, I decide to get angry at having heard it and identified with it. I am aware that this process is taking place in such a high rate of time that, initially, it seems as though it is happening without my agency, but once I became cognizant of this process, it was my responsibility to acknowledge my role in it. I’m not saying that people should no longer get angry or react angrily, or that I never get angry, I’m just saying that I have found a significant (and positive) difference in the way I interact with people, now that I work at forcing myself to acknowledge my own accountability for my emotions. It goes: My Thoughts —> My Body —> My Behavior… in that order. My anger is a reaction to my thoughts and it is possible to control my behavior, regardless of what I am feeling in my body based on my thoughts. My actions and re-actions start within me, and although uncomfortable, they are my responsibility to manage, not someone else’s.

            I am really starting to believe that life is not about being comfortable. Life is about living. Do I enjoy being comfortable? Of course. If there are times in my life in which I am comfortable, cheers, but once I die, all that comfort really means nothing. It means nothing because I am not alive anymore to appreciate it. Comfort really only means anything in the context of it being experienced. Especially after my time in the Marines, I have found that most times, it takes more work to try and make something easy or comfortable than it does to just get it done. Mission accomplishment should really be the goal, not thought exercises based on identifying goals that are about making comfort the mission. Once I’ve made comfort my pursuit, I diminish the value of any state of my most present existence and subsequently create a dynamic where no other state of existence has value. My pursuit of comfort becomes all consuming. It consumes my definitions of perception and only leaves ideas of empty space. My pursuit of comfort makes space for a hunger that only recognizes what I feel isn’t there, driving the momentum of that original pursuit of comfort. If I’m not comfortable with who I feel people see me as, are they wrong? If I’m not comfortable with who I feel I see myself as, am I wrong? Are we, as the creatures we have identified as people, physically/ biologically/ philosophically/ emotionally/ etc able to comprehend any plane(s) of existence or the manner(s) in which existence is? Have we determined ourselves to be so much more aware than the other animals that we can only understand ourselves in the contexts that we have constructed? It seems to me that we craft our languages to only accept the idea that people are completely separate from all other things. We have created our own identity, which has forked into multiple paths of identities. Our explanations of each of those forks have become labeled road signs that have developed into culturally based identifiers of roles and values.

            Just as wild as the ideas we have built around what we see when we look at another person, is the physical process of looking at another person. When we look at other people with our eyes, we are seeing them in the past. What we are seeing is what light reflecting off of them was in the fraction of a light year it takes for the light to bounce off of them and travel to our retinas and be processed by our brains. If light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second, and a nanosecond is a billionth of a second, light travels about 0.3 meters or about 0.98 feet per nanosecond. To me that says that when I’m having a conversation with someone that is four feet away from me, light is bouncing off of them and traveling to my eyes in about four nanoseconds. Without considering the time or processes involved in those light beams being received by my eyes and translated and transmitted to my brain, just consider that everything I am seeing of that person is really just beams of light from four nanoseconds in the past. Everything I am seeing of that person is really just beams of light from four nanoseconds in the past. Are you thinking that 4 nanoseconds is such an insignificant amount of time that it’s a waste of time to consider? Then consider, the furthest thing we can see, with the unaided eye, is the Andromeda galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years distance from where we are aiming our little peepers at it. If there are 5.88 trillion miles in a light-year, that’s… 2.5 million multiplied by 5.88 trillion miles away. I can’t even comprehend that distance in miles, but even more mind bending is the simpler way of looking at it. The light that is touching our eyes right now, coming from the Andromeda galaxy, is 2.5 million years old. It was created 2.5 million years ago and is just now touching us. Think of the things that have happened on Earth in 2.5 million years and then consider the possibilities of what has taken place at the source of that light, during that time. Could we say the possibilities are infinite and beyond? Buzz, Buzz, Butt-fucking Lightyear to the rescue, because my brain exploded.