what's it like

to walk among your fellow humans as if you were not really one of them? So a friend of mine says she doesn't think she's really human. Maybe she's an alien. I said, "baby! You, too?!" Exception: I've known I wasn't human well since I was a wee kitten. Anyway, I went through a phase where realizing that my paws were a tad too big and that my torso, and hind quarters were way misconfigured I didn't really fit in as well as I wanted to among the cat folk.

Liminality.

Being both betwixt and between. (Anthro lingo: I think I will always be an anthropologist.)

So I confess, the source of my interest in liminaltiy is my own identity. One one hand people belong and don't belong in a lot fo ways. Particularly I'm more sensitive to it, since I've had a number of personal experiences which force me to be more aware of it than others are. Lately, the highlighter that raises it is how I've been dealing with my friend's death. Yehuda joins the ranks of those who have died who really mattered to me:
Robert Barnes, WBHS -AIDS 1994
David Wilkinson, Princeton physics -cancer 2002
Carrie Gordon, Princeton-in-Asia -cancer 2003
I noticed that what I learned from them was their fire for life. I saw a video of Yehuda the other night and it shocked me cold. Afterwards I think I just needed to struggle to connect with the world to remind myself I'm part of the fabric of those living still. That's much harder to do when you're not even sure you are a member of that species.

I will have to resume this thought later on, but for now this is as far as I've gotten.
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List of things I'd like to do:
understand how the body works, decide whether the major purpose of life is procreation and contiuation of the species, finish writing my research proposal on friction-structure relationships in planar materials, and have some good experiences with friends