So they don't pay you as much as the next guy. You're at the point now that if they paid you in zebras that would be enough.


Two cups of Starbucks chai later....

Run your finger along the map of Africa and see if you feel anything. You don't, because you're human, and if you are successful in that particular juncture enough not to have committed suicide, you're quite numb by now. There, you've dipped your thumb into the Sahara, whisked skin across the Ecuador, and felt a million people with the fragment of a finger. And they're much worse off than you, by the way. I remember hearing a comedian (Dane Cook?) talking about trying to explain an American restaurant to a starving nation. Appetizer? Oh, food we eat before our food. No, you're thinking of dessert, food we eat after out food. Yah, and sometimes, we have so much we have to put it in a bag for later, for the pets or a midnight snack. Yah, that's the food we eat after the food that's after all the food between REM cycles. Yah.

It takes a lot of energy to be compassionate. Whenever I see the man with the white beard on TV, with an African child draped on his shoulder like a woody, living scarf, asking for my donation to the blinking yellow number at the bottom of the screen, I flip the channel. Then, I'm watching an MTV dating game that's draining my brains into an intestinal, syrupy pile on the carpet, and I'm thinking, can people be THAT stupid? And I spend my time thinking about how stupid they are. Plato would have a field day with the insipid irreverence of that, I mean, he didn't even like poets in the first place, much less one wondering about the form of the form of stupidity.

True to the name (I throw in the occasional "my name's charity, I'm an adorable poor college student, give me free stuff please" to everyday conversation, and the real kicker is that it works all the time) I have an adorable little Indian girl magnetized to the refrigerator so that whenever the collection plate at church goes by I can raise a haughty brow "MY tithe is ALREADY taken care of" and glare the people next to me into such self-righteous guilt that my pew neighbor is throwing in her jewelry from shame of her prom night twenty years ago. Okay, so I'm not melodramatic in condescension, but I wouldn't put it past myself. I am regularly stunned by my own insensitivity.

What else could I really ask for in life? But what does it mean to be happy? I used to tell my philosophy teacher in high school that I WAS THE HUMAN ABERRATION because I was truly happy, but I think that was a cry of attention ignited by the release of the Matrix movie, and a sudden conviction in my entire generation that yes, in fact, we are THE ONE. Perhaps I've been satisfied, but I've never had the self control to let fate out of my hands, well, ever. And I have a feeling surrender and peace go hand in hand.

But it's just a feeling. So I'm running my hand on the map of Africa trying to feel, trying to feel my past and my future and to simply feel, reviving the pinpricks in my joints that I had anesthetized, the twists in my heart I had convinced myself didn't matter. Sometimes it's hard, because the things that make you cruel make you a victim in the same instant. It's wrong, to be cold in the finger tips. But it's sad too... Things happen, you get hurt, and you move on... I can't help but wonder, what is the recipe for recovery? Is it surrender? Or is that just a bit to dangerous in this world?