fuck usa
fuck the president
fuck all you white wasp asses
who never made me feel welcome
who called me a chink
and a gook

—

i have never once felt welcome in this country
and now i feel less welcome than ever

—

in the core of my being i am not white
not protestant
not american

i am the other
i am the inevitable
permanent
threatening
inscrutable
other

the
other

the
other

—

the word of the day is ‘renounce’
which to some minds has the same tenor as ‘traitor’

I’m on my way to work. It has been a strange Saturday in some undefinable way that I don’t quite like. For some weeks now life has seemed so entirely comfortable and familiar. Today it feels as though a strange and vaguely forbidding sensibility creeps inward at the edges of reality.

My wife can feel it, too, I think. She says it’s stress about the coming semester, and I think she’s right. For a long time we have had a fairly well-established routine and things to look forward to in the very near future—first living together and then Poland and then getting a dog and an apartment and then visiting Salt Lake City and getting married and then our first Christmas together. Now with the end of the semester the well-established routine has given way to entirely undefined schedules and at the same time the only thing to work toward in the immediate future is our graduate exam on the first of March, which lacks the lighthearted sheen of our previous benchmarks.

I think we are about to encounter the “early year malaise” that strikes so often during January and February.

Meantime, yes, I am going to work in an empty office on the Saturday before the New Year. Then tomorrow I’ll be working at home on the Sunday before the new year.

is perhaps the wisest and most insightful of all the social sciences, despite what the others might say or how they might feel. And it is of utmost importance that one never lose sight of the wisdom of anthropology if one is to really know what is going on at any given moment, in any given place.