The crappy thing about living in Prague 6 is that I work mostly in Prague 4. Don't be deceived by the district numbers. True, Prague 1 and 2 are the center of town but after that all bets are off. Prague 6 is actually easy walking distance from Prague Castle while much of Prague 3 seems accessible only by tram. Prague 4 stretches through suburbs and countryside, while Prague 7 is a short skip over the river. Hundreds of years of sprawl have left no rhythm or reason to it. Mapy.cz has become an English teacher's only weapon against the monsters in class scheduling that would have her stretch thin over miles of city territory otherwise.

As I breezed through the lobby of the pale green software firm building in Pankrác I greeted the same curly haired boy receptionist as usual.

“Dobrý deň!”

“Dobrý deň,” he chuckled.

Pankrác is the subject of hot debates in Prague between the new 'capitalism=Yay!' order and the historical society have been coming into conflict about it for years. At first it may seem like Pankrác is too far away from central Prague to have much worth preserving historically, but Prague is a city in a valley. Beyond that valley are vast golden fields and meadows where tall grasses, wild cabbage and red corn poppies grow unrestricted. Beyond that valley is Pankrác, or it's supposed to be anyway.

The historical society isn't necessarily against the development of these outer reaches of the capital; they're just troubled by the somewhat spastic nature of them. Rather than setting a foundation of suburbia and growing taller buildings as needed, Pankrác remains mostly meadow-- with skyscrapers intermittently scattered throughout like gigantic awkward Sequoias.

The software firm was one of those glass, steel and concrete trees-- painted and tinted green as if that made it less conspicuous-- and was expanding into the space in between its modern form and the bulky high rise of the O2 building down the street. The steel skeleton extension stabbing out from the smooth polished side of the old building seemed warped and tumorous.

Is development out in Prague 4 ruining Prague's classic skyline? It's hard to tell. One can hardly see the high rises of Pankrác from the Center now, but imagine the man made mountains that could engulf the city as time carries on. It does little good to protect the historic buildings if you bury them under modern society.

Yet at the same time, the Republic's relentless push out of Communism is dependent on growth and investment. So much of Prague's economy is built on expansion it remains a question of whether Prague's future is to serve foreigners or Czechs. There's nothing beautiful about the jagged steel peaks of Shinjuku in the endless sprawl of Tokyo, but the Czechs would still be well served to study the lessons of the Asian tigers: sacrifices made for the benefit of foreign companies and foreign investment leave nothing but the shells of empty growth when another area catches the global eye. The Czech economy needs Czech businesses.

“We're doing aliens today?”

Vojta's voice startled me out of my cold appraisal of the horizon. I looked down at the book in my hands.

“Oh ... no, the future.”

He groaned.

“You don't like talking about the future?”

“Not the grammar of it.”

As he swiped us in I was about to apologize for being late when he motioned to the empty classroom. “Things are a little busy today, Petr and David are coming. Lukaš ... I don't know about...”

“I'm here!” he jogged in with his book. “I'm here! Sorry!”

“No problem.”

“Actually,” Vojta discretely closed both doors to the conference room and looked around. “While we are waiting ... I have a question. If that's okay?”

“Sure,” I plopped down in my seat next to the flip chart. The paper pad bore scribbling of the English teacher before me.

I go to the store.

I went to the store.

I will go to the store.

If I had gone to the store

If I went to the store

If I would have gone to the store

I repressed the urge to correct the teacher's work ... or just draw giant Xs through the whole exercise. It's shameful how much of our career relies on the ignorance of others.

 “I don't want to offend you.”

Oh? I was immediately interested. Anything that could offend was bound to be ten times more interesting than what I had been planning to teach anyway.

“Go for it.”

Still Vojta hesitated. Lukaš shrugged when I looked at him for the answer. Finally Vojta committed himself to the task and smacking the table firmly announced:

 “Right, bitch, slut and whore all mean the same thing right”?

I ... I didn't know what to say at first. I wasn't offended, or even really shocked. Actually I was delighted, but perplexed as to why anyone would confuse the three terms in the first place. They had such a clear usage differences to me.

 “What? No! They're completely different things.”

 “Nooo,”Relaxed now, his face scrunched up in disbelief. “can't be.”

Now it was very much a game, because if he really believed that he never would have asked it in the first place, would he?

 “They're all insults for women, but other than that they're completely different.”

 “No.”He continued to shake his head, stretching out the 'o' sound with compounding bewilderment and amusement. “'They translated to the same word in Czech.”

“And your point is?”

“So what is the difference?”

Turns out in when they use the expression “son of a bitch” in America movies it's translated to zkurvysynein Czech, which literally means 'son of a whore'. So the confusion is somewhat logical.

“Bitch is a female dog, a breeding term, so when you call a woman a bitch you mean she's like an animal. She's too aggressive, she doesn't know her place, she's unreasonable, illogical or uncontrollable.”

“Oh...”

 “That's why many American women call themselves 'bitches'. It can be used in a positively way sometimes to mean she's strong, confident and independent.”

“And 'son of a bitch'?”

“There's nothing more insulting to a man in America than talking about his mother.”

“That's normal.”

“Well, we have a whole cottage industry of humor about it. The enduring legacy of 'Yo Mama jokes.”

Yo mama so fat people jog around her for exercise

Yo mama so stupid when your dad said it was chilly outside, she ran outside with a spoon

Yo mama so stupid she thinks Fleetwood Mac is a new hamburger at McDonalds!

Yo mama so ugly they pay her to put her clothes on in strip joints.

Yo mama so fat when her beeper goes off, people thought she was backing up

Yo mama so stupid she thought a quarterback was an income tax refund.

Yo mama so fat every time she walks in high heels, she strikes oil!

Yo mama so ugly that your father takes her to work with him so that he doesn't have to kiss her goodbye.

 “...And the other two?”

 “A slut is a girl who sleeps with any man, no standards, you know? And a whore is a prostitute.”

 “Ah-ha! See those two are the same.”

 “Depending on your point of view. A whore at least has the good sense to get paid for it.” My eyes shifted to Lukaš to gauge how he was following me and-- “Are you taking notes?”

He looked up foolishly and pulled his notebook a little closer.  “Is good learning. Good lesson.”

 “Useful, I suppose?”

He nodded.

“Do you spend a lot of time in the company of whores?”

He snorted, Vojta laughed and Petr swung open the classroom door with a large apologetic smile.  “Sorry for my lateness.”

 “No problem.”

 “Guess what we just learned!” Vojta and Lukaš crowed in unison.

..................................................................

I hadn't even gotten the door open all the way when a vision of petite black haired energy bounded past me, greeting me by name in a sing-song voice. Jan was fiddling with an old black laptop and shrugged meekly at me.

“You remember Ivana?”

I didn't in fact, but I nodded anyway and proceeded to fumble through taking off my heels. Extraordinary bad balance makes the Slavic custom of taking shoes off before coming into the house especially difficult. Unlike my home in Japan where there was a little step between the entrance way and the shoe-free-zone, in the Ugly Little Communist House there was nothing to grab onto, and since Jan likes to line the walls with shoes, buckets, bags and whatever there's also nothing to lean easily against.

From the kitchen Andrea eagerly stuck her head out and led me froward with a deer-in-the-headlight meets small-town-cynical look. When I came through the narrow hallway that dumped into the kitchen she was standing there eating from a plate overloaded with mountains of food on the counter.

“What's up?” I greeted.

She chewed and gestured uncomfortably towards the dining room/living room. “You?”

I shrugged. “Nothing much.”

“How's class?”

I related the bitch, slut and whore story to her as she daintily stripped the last little bits of meat with her teeth from the pork chop bone. As the story unraveled her eyes got slowly wider, shocked by my professional immaturity I suppose.

“You teach them THAT?”

“Why not?”

“You're not supposed to teach them how to curse in English class!”

“It was a serious language question. Helping them understand semantics is a part of my job.” I was amused by the day's events and ambivalent at best to the potential consequences.

Then Ivana came frolicking in, stopped dead in her tracks in front of Andrea and her pork bone and demanded, “What are you doing?”

“Ah...” Andrea seemed more uncomfortable than before. “Dinner?”

Obviously at a loss of words in English, Ivana switched to Czech and prodded Andrea with her knuckly finger.

“She says you shouldn't eat standing up,” Jan translated. “It's bad for digestion.”

“Oh,” Andrea blinked. “No it's okay.”

More Czech, demanding, waving, a fit that was at it's heart warm and friendly but still a fit.

“Really it's fine.”

You can tell pretty easily when Andrea's uncomfortable because her voice becomes a tiny little shell of what it once was. She pretends to be cheerful but really you can tell she's rather be anywhere else.

“I like eating like this.”

I appreciate this kind of shyness because I understood it the way only a mutual victim can. Like Andrea, I hate meeting new people when I don't have a clear reason to. Jan's friends: Milan, Roman, Petra had all been oddly stressful. Walking into an established friendship is a bit like walking into the movies 15 minutes late-- you keep feeling like you're disturbing people, like no one really wants you there. You feel eyes burning into the back of your head as you sweat looking for a place to sit. But in order to find a place where you belong you have to disturb and inconvenience any number of people and you'll wonder for quite some time whether they resent you for that.

Even though Ivana pressed and nagged I noticed at no time did either she or Jan clear a place on the table for Andrea or myself to eat. We simply waited them out and eventually Ivana's outrage got distracted and they retreated back to the dining room.

“I got these for Thanksgiving,” she shoveled another forkful of food in with one hand and held up a full 10 pounds of potatoes in the other.

“Jesus Andrea! There are only 3 of us!”

“I know, but what's Thanksgiving without leftovers? Did you find the cranberry sauce yet?”

“Botanicus was disappointing. I'm going to try Letňany tomorrow. My students tell me there's a huge Tesco there.”

Tesco, if you were unaware, is the British Walmart that has eagerly invaded the Czech Republic. The idea of a discount department store here is still very odd to me; all Tesco normally ends up doing is pumping low quality consumer imports into the country and charging extraordinary prices for them. In most cases what you end up with is a choice between absurdly expensive Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton in their Prague boutiques and slightly less proportionally absurdly expensive crap at Tesco. The is no middle ground.

There are some exceptions: food for example (the Republic, like most places in Europe, fresh food is considered the norm to the point where some people still slaughter their own pigs) cleaning supplies and occasionally home goods are okay Tesco buys. Still it's a bit weird to watch old videos of anti-Communist riots and police brutality at the Museum of Communism and think “Hey that's where I buy my yogurt and bread.”

If you've ever wanted a better understanding of Prague you need only look at it from above: a tight core of perfectly preserved artifacts surrounded by a residential belt with massive shopping malls plopped down into the outer countryside like far flung satellites. Service and consumer choice are an after thought in Prague-- at least to the people who live there-- thrown in out of the middle of nowhere.

Letňany is the farthest of the supermalls, or at least the hardest to get to, having no direct Metro connection and only sporadic buses. On the weekends those buses are packed to standing room only. The bus rocking back and forth, steam from the heater fogging up what the rain-- a slim and airy drizzle-- had left clear on the windows. The stuffiness, the human smell mixed with exhaust fumes, made my head throb and mystomach cartwheel. My thoughts fluttered towards memories of panic attacks past, as they usually did in any awkward public transportation situation, but I disregarded them. Despite the close call at Černý Most I hadn't had a serious panic attack since coming to Prague.

The Letňany mall, like most Czech malls, fakes abundance with high ceilings. The place appears absolutely massive at first glance, but after wandering around for five minutes or so you realize that the store selection isn't really any different from the selection on Na Příkopě or Anděl or in any of the other massive chunks of capitalism shooting out of the countryside. Perhaps I'm spoiled by New York and Long Island where all one needs to find a new dynamic consumer culture is walk two or three blocks North or South, but malls in the Republic typically leave me feeling under stimulated and depressed.

The multi-floor mega-Tesco is a staple of the Czech mall and it's truly surprising how little diversity can be packed into a 38,000 square meter area. Tesco will offer only one brand of granola, for example. If you want another brand of granola good luck finding it. You can have that brand of granola in numerous flavors, even in bar form but no other brands of granola.

On the other hand, if you want bread rolls, which are supplied by local bakeries, you are awash with choices: long rolls, round rolls, rolls with cheese, rolls filled with cream, croissant rolls, rolls with onion, rolls filled with chocolate cream, whole wheat rolls, marble rolls, salt rolls, rolls filled with chocolate cream and topped with onion...

All right I made that last one up. The point is that right now the Czech economy is basically Communism with a better stock room. Gone are the days when people lined up for basic supplies, gone is the oppression and terror, but still British, German and Austrian companies are flocking to “invest” in the Republic because it means a de facto monopoly. They can easily undercut or buy out any Czech rival that tries to compete in the market. Be the first to export granola to the Republic and you will probably be the only brand of granola for quite some time.

As for cranberry sauce, well there are two brands of that but only (I suspect) because Thanksgiving is just a hop away. The Czechs do not celebrate Thanksgiving (and why would they?) but Prague is clearly aware of its approach. For the first and only time imported turkeys appear in the frozen food section, cabbages and yams are more prominently displayed and the potato bin overflows with bounty.

I stared at the two red jars in my hands thoughtfully.

One is labeled “brusinkový” (the Czech word for cranberries) on a shelf three aisles away next to the jam. It's about 100kc cheaper than the other with an older slightly pealing English label that reads quite clearly “cranberry sauce”. I stared and weighed the Tesco import English label brand against the Czech brand thoughtfully.

Is there even any place to grow cranberries in the Czech Republic? A landlocked nation the size of North Carolina doesn't have much room for biodiversity, maybe they were both imports? Was there a English label tax? It wouldn't surprise me. Was there even such a thing as cranberry jam? If there was, was there any practical difference between cranberry sauce and jam?

Because this dinner had become a project to steal the reputation of true American culture away from Michael Moore, I decided to error on the side of caution and buy the more expensive brand I was sure of.

When I got home there was another Thanksgiving essential waiting for me: a box of Stove Top stuffing courtesy of my mother.

“What is it?” Jan asked, not so discretely looking over my shoulder ... or actually I should have said leaning over my shoulder like those ostrich toys that dip their heads into a glass of water.

“Stuffing.”

“What's that?”

“You stuff the bird with it.”

“....”

“You put it in the turkey.”

“Oh.”

The Czech translation for “stuffing” is nádivka, but the concept is not compatible. Nádivka is a dish made with various bits of stale bread, egg, milk, ham, vegetables, and assorted other things depending. It's baked and cut into slices to eat with pork, chicken, rabbit, etc. In practice it is much closer to a quiche than Thanksgiving stuffing and I've never seen anyone put it inside a bird while it's cooking.

“I can make my own, but instant is yummy too!”

Jan picked up the box and turned it over curiously in his hands. For a time he seemed to just stare at the nutritional information, which made me babble nervously about preservatives and MSG and trade offs between convenience and flavor. A long mumbly defensive rant that was about to end off with “Well I only get Stove Top a few times a year and even less now that I live here and Gourmet Video doesn't stock it. So even being unhealthy it's worth it” when he turned around and asked:

“So what is the difference between things and stuff?”

“Huh?”

“The words things and stuff.” he repeated.

“Uh ... nothing? I mean stuff is an uncountable noun, but other than that ... they're about the same.”

“When I was in Kentucky there was a store named 'Things and Stuff' and I thought it was weird.”

“It is weird.”

“You want to see the pictures?”

I nodded.

 

He shuffled through the files on his computer, grunting and going through the CDs piled up on his desk. Jan had this habit of origaming a CD sleeve out of old 8 1/2 x 11 computer paper that made me irrationally uneasy. As he peeked into every sloppy clamshell I hugged the door frame, not bold enough to cross into his room.

“Ha! Here they are.” He opened up a gallery view that let him toggle through the pictures. After a quick loading screen a goofy image of him posing outside a novelty store with a heavy lumber carved sign that did in fact read “Things and Stuff” appeared.

Next to him stood a petite brunette with cute geeky looking glasses.

“Who's that?”

“Ahhhh,” he squirmed. “That was my girlfriend.”

“Oh, the one in Boston?”

“No,” his voice was quieter, wayward and withdrawn.

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't be prying.”

He looked up and made a face-- it occurred to me that he probably had no idea what the word 'prying' meant-- before nodding to himself and changing the subject. “There's a pub in New York, an Irish pub, very famous ... do you know it?”

I shrugged, “Where is it?”

Jan frowned as if to say 'how am I supposed to know?'

“It's supposed to be the most famous Irish pub in all of New York.”

Poor Jan, I didn't have the heart to tell him how fickle and flippant New Yorkers were with titles like that. “McSorley's?”

“I don't know, maybe?”

“Was there sawdust on the floor?”

He blinked at me. “What?”

“Sawdust, you know, if you cut a piece of wood...” I made the motions with my arm. “The powder that ends up on the floor.”

He clicked through the files on the disk, images of Boston flashing quickly across the screen, looking for a snapshot of it or maybe a clue. “Maybe” he hummed. “No, I do not know, but it was a great pub.”

I watched images of Midtown flutter on and off the screen in a fast paced slideshow. Most of the pictures were more personal snapshots, very few of the traditional tourist photos. No Statue of Liberty, no posing with the Naked Cowboy, no peace signs at the Empire State Building.

“Oh hey, you went to see a Mets' game?”

It seemed like an odd choice at the time as baseball is a nonexistent sport to Czechs and the Yankees are more internationally famous.

“Yeah, we had sausages on a long roll!”

“You mean a hot dog?”

“No I mean sausage, with peppers.”

“Are you sure? I've never seen sausages served at a baseball game.”

He snorted. “I know the difference between a hotdog and a sausage.”

“Well it's just they're not called hotdogs here...”

Two irritated clicks of the mouse later a picture of a gray sausage sitting on a whole wheat bun with slimy limp slices of overcooked pepper was staring at me.

“Oh.”

“Sausage.”

“Right,” properly chastised, I slinked away.

 

 

......................................

But the arrival of Stove Top reminded me of my weekly phone date with my mother. Every Sunday without fail my mother called my cellphone, we'd chat like we hadn't spoken in decades before she'd pass me around to the entire family (most of whom are somewhat ambivalent and battle between long awkward pauses with a sense of familiar obligation). So it was of the utmost importance that I kept my schedule clear from 7 to 9pm on Sunday nights.

When the call came I was mindlessly surfing the internet trying to figure out a way to avoid losing my Japanese while I was learning Czech. Foreign languages, even unrelated ones, always support each other nicely. Learning your first language takes years, most of those infant and toddler years your mind records no memory of. You don't remember how difficult it was: grasping for sounds with babbling and gurgling, having no choice but to whip yourself up into a fit so that your parents will save you, expanding your vocabulary ever more sophisticatedly. Your second language is still difficult-- well in truth the process is never easy-- but you work through it without screaming by drawing from what you already know. The concepts and much of the grammar is already buried in your first language.

Your second language makes your third language both easier and harder. Easier because you've already broken out and experienced thought in another tongue, harder because while your first language is safely tucked away somewhere else, your second and third compete for brain space. Many a time I have implanted Japanese words or grammar into Czech sentences or started off in one language and ended in another.

“Kde je gaikokujin kesatsu?”

I wasn't sure whether to search for 'Japanese lessons' in Czech or 'Japanese in the Czech Republic' in Japanese or 'Japanese lessons in Prague' in English. The local expat websites were of no help. Despite the fact that Japan is one of the largest investors in Czech industry (only Germany is bigger) and Eastern cultural events had become a bit of a fad around town, there didn't appear to be many expats with similar inclinations.

“To je watashi no pes.”

I wondered briefly if I could swing a language swamp: free English lessons for free Japanese practice with one of the tiny housewives I saw from time to time in Delvita. It's a good idea. I just have no idea how I would approach that.

“So how are your lessons going?”

“Chěla bych ringo”

I could theoretically study on my own, but that has never worked out so well for me. I need the mental foil of an actual teacher. At the end of the day I suppose I need someone to impress. The idea of hypothetical communication is not good enough.

“Rozumien chotto.”

“Honey?”

The worst is using words that are homonyms with different functions in their respective languages. For example, in Japanese I say “Ano ne...” like saying “Ummm hey” in English before a suggestion but in Czech that is translated to “Yes no...” a turn of phrase bordering on nonsense. “Sou” in Japanese is used as an affirmative much like 'Uh-huh” or “I see” but in Czech (spelled “Co” instead) it means “What?”  I was constantly confusing some form of the Czech verb “nachytat” (perhaps 'nachytu'?) with the Japanese “naruhodo.” The word “ona” is 'woman' in one language, 'she' in the other.

While it's true that Japanese and Czech have no connection to each other, the brain is always going to try to tie bonds between the familiar and unfamiliar.

“Honey are you still there?”

My mother's voice finally jarred me out of my rambling multi-language thoughts. “Huh? Umm... yeah, sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked how your job was going.”

I shrugged, “Okay I guess. It's getting a little routine.”

 

“Mam se genki.”

“Oh?”

“Well ... you know me.”

I could hear her nodding on the other end. “I remember before you left you were talking about an internship with a Czech group that couldn't afford to pay you?”

See? I told you I didn't come here because of the Golem. Did you believe me?

“Hmmm. I dunno about that. Their internships is very structured and my life right now...” I glanced around my room where piles of books, papers and glossy expat zines were stacked up against the molding. Everywhere books, books, photocopies, clippings and old copies of the Prague Post, Metro and 24 Hodin. “Is anything but. I just don't know how it would work.”

“Well,” Could I hear a bit of a disapproving frown? “That isn't the only possibility ... is it?”

My mother often told me that-- though as a teacher herself she couldn't be more proud-- she always knew teaching wasn't what God meant for me to do. It's a fine profession and you're good at it, she would say, but it's not what you want to do ultimately ... is it?

She was right.

“I guess not.” I clicked through a handful of webpages. In the Republic sometimes it seems that there's nothing more underground than charity. Compared to the big business and cultural significance of giving and volunteering in America it's like of dark subculture to Slavs: hidden, unspoken, at times regarded with skepticism. Still, and this is hard to explain, if I didn't look right that second I would feel strangely guilty.

“So, how is everyone?”

My relationship with my mother is very complicated, which I imagine is the one normal thing about me. My mother never really told me when I was diagnosed, not directly anyway. She pushed me hard instead. It's not that she wanted me to be the best: best or worst was never a factor in our family. It's that didn't she want me to quit because of my condition. If I gave up on something because I didn't like it, that was fine. If I gave up because something was boring or confusing ... that was usually permissible. But my mother wanted to ensure I grew up beyond the label “disabled”. 

So she never told me.

She told me that if I needed extra time on tests in school that I was allowed to have it-- even if they said I couldn't, even if the other kids weren't allowed it-- and that if any teacher ever refused to give me that time I should tell her right away and she would fix it. That was the only indication I ever really got from her. As far as she was concerned I was normal, secretly brilliant in fact, and there was no reason why I shouldn't compete with the best in the world.

The problem was I knew something was wrong. Maybe I could just feel it in the way my teachers looked at me and spoke about me. Maybe it was the way everyone seemed to know who I was before I walked into the room. Maybe it was the void where common experience was supposed to be between me and my peers. But I knew something was wrong, I just didn't realize how wrong until about the age of 11 when scholastic achievement became about more than coloring in the lines, competition picked up and that divide between my classmates and I became hostile. It wasn't that I fell behind, actually it was the exact opposite. I started to thrive, stumbling a bit here and there with my writing (I still from time to time leave off the ends of my words or write completely wrong ones or in completely the wrong order), but thrive none the less. I was accepted into the accelerated track for top students and all hell broke loose.

Of course. How could it not? If you're a young child whose parents and teachers have been stroking your ego and calling you 'the best of the best' for years, how are you supposed to respond to a damaged kid who just got through special ed tutoring sessions being welcomed into your elite club? Worse still that I could outmatch them. After all if I was disabled and I was still smarter, what the hell was wrong with them?

Don't you get it? It's not about YOU. I don't exist just so that you can rank your intelligence against mine.

I was a kid: young, naïve, innocent. I was raised to be unashamed of who I was. Of how I'd been born. I was taught differently real quick. My peers taught me to lie, to hide it, to excuse it, to close my eyes and wish it away. To take these parts of myself and my unique human experience and bury it as a secret so deep.

I remember one time in Junior High HomeEc we were doing a project decorating hats with our names on it. I swapped two of the letters in my name by mistake and didn't realize it. I couldn't see it. Even when someone pointed it out to me and all my friends laughed and teased me, I still couldn't see it. For the first time the truth that life had only teased me with was obvious and undeniable: I couldn't see but my brain thought I could.

I never saw the misspelling, although I knew it must be true.

I got so upset I crawled under the table like I was hiding, which everyone thought was so funny. But that's always been what I do when I get upset: I feel safer in small, enclosed, preferably dark, spaces. Places where the kinds of sensations and where they can come from are limited and controlled.

That's the tragedy of disability and society. That's why deaf people protest cochlear implants, and autistic adults push for “neurodiversity”. In the end we really don't want the disabled to succeed. We want them to work real hard and reach “average” but not much more. We pity the disabled because we love the fantasy of perfection. It gives us a sense of control we feel will protect us. It assumes we can identify individual flaws, remove them, improve them, extract them bit by bit and ultimately be better off. The disabled can never be superior: they can only be pathetic or freaks.

Being more PC isn't the answer. It's not that I object to people assuming I'm inferior because I'm disabled: that much is perfectly logical and natural. It's that I object to people refusing to see me because doing so would mean they would have to give up their perceived notions about who I must be. This is what is so insulting about racism and stereotyping: not that people judge on first appearances-- we all judge on first appearances-- but that other people are so narcissistic and self centered that they don't even try to discover who you are beyond the label.

The funny thing is, years later, as adults, I ran into one of those “friends” from HomeEc and after the requisite cheerful small talk she brought up the incident again as if it was a pleasant childhood memory. I was too shocked to comment other than a dull acknowledgment. It was one thing for children to think that being that cruel was all in the good fun, but it's something else when as adults we incorporate that kind of behavior into our nostalgia.

So as a kid I was stuck in a pressure cooker: between my mother who truly believed my disability shouldn't hold me back and everyone else who believed that it was impossible to trust me to complete even smallest task competently. The truth is obviously somewhere in between these two extremes, but hell if I was going to find it while I was simultaneously trying to please my mother and defy my critics.

I have never been able to tell my mother the truth. I've tried but she gives me looks I know too well. She prefers to believe the convenient excuses (my eyes play tricks on me, it's just difficult to see at night because of the glare, we can fix everything if we're just more careful). I can't find the words to break that spell.

The thing about secrets, though, the further down you push them the more they itch to come to the light. The secrets, the lies, the excuses, it all shreds my insides like dusting of glass powder: soft to the touch but deadly once inside. My compulsion for brutal confessions is kind of a psychological compensation for all the things I cannot say. I can't be honest with what I want to say, so I'm ridiculously honest about everything else to a point that questions taste, frequently crosses into too-much-information, and leaves me feeling raw and released until the consequences set in.