Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Chapter Two: Aysu Decides to Watch

Asysu had, at one point been looking forward to her “Social Problems” class but now she was not so sure. She was excited because she had wanted to be foster parent later in life and thought that the class would help her prepare for whatever troubles the kids might bring with them. But all this teacher wanted to do was talk about himself. He talked for 25 minutes about his websites and always ended his name with Ph.D. as if the students already didn’t know.
She tried to remember to remove some of her biases long enough to learn something, but that learning never came. They spoke for the last few minutes of the class on what it meant to be non-objective. Aysu was listening with an open mind until the teacher said something about followers of O’Dell never being able to be un-biased.
This remark was something that Aysu could not ignore. The rebel in her said, “If you say not to pray to O’Dell then I will pray all the harder. If you say that worshipers of O’Dell are less than those that worship others or none at all, then I will worship all the louder!”
Aysu knew that countering with such anger was not the way to attack the situation, so she wrote her thoughts down and closed her notebook leaving the class in a state of forced calm.
She spent a fairly uneventful day at school. Her car was in the shop so her mother drove to her to class. Bu the plumber had decided to come to the house so Mother was going to be late. While waiting, Aysu did what most college people did—she surfed the internet.
First, she spent time looking up her favorite thing and the source of her intended transformation: Arabic things and raqs sharqi. That led to other searches such as Egypt. That is when it happened. She found a video claiming that ancient Egyptians were actually black people. It claimed that the most awesome ancient civilization was a black community. She had no problem with this at first, accept that she thought she knew differently.
The teachings of O’Dell said to accept all people and she normally did; she just didn’t talk to people very often (but this shall be written about later). So, rather than judge the one who posted the information, she began to look it up. She found all of the old arguments about “kemet” and the fact that Egypt is in Africa and the look of the sphinx…she spent hours searching and reading.
In the end, she decided that Egyptians were darker skinned people much like the Arabs and Persians. She let it be too. She did not want to be in the middle of a debate like that. It was not that she was giving up it was simply that she chose to believe something about it and came to that decision.
Later that night, she retrieved her car from the shop and was very happy to have it back. She then checked on her ferret, Cain, to makes sure the healing was going well. A few days earlier, she had discovered that Cain’s collar was too tight and had fused to his skin causing a bad wound when she removed it. After all of this an uneventful dinner, she went to her room and watched “Repo!”.
The thoughts she got form the movie were rather profound, she thought.
The future portrayed in this movie may be a little farfetched, but somehow, she didn’t see it all as wrong. The fact that humans could be so brutally interested in their own appearance so much as to take body parts from others is not far from what they do already, surely. Man is desperate to not look old and then to not die. Everything in this world (set in New York or San Francisco?) revolves around the company that can “save your life”. If you can’t keep up your payments for the new body parts then a Repo Man comes and repossess them. Yes…he rips you open and takes what was not paid for.
This may shock you, but along with wanting to live the Old Ways, Aysu also was something of a goth who had been there and back. She had been all of the way to the darkest end and the poser side. Then back to understanding what goth was really about. This is lessons to be written about later as well if you wish.
So the movie was not shocking in the gore of it, but the people in it. Truly shocking, but not too unrealistic.
With this and the people claiming Egyptians as black, it is all the more clear the vanity and pride of man. Truly the fall of man is his want to be all that he can be…maybe not such a great thing after all? Aysu wondered this and said as she laid in bed that night, “Maybe I’ll look into it. Man cannot be so mysterious.”
And so, she began her look at man and herself.

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