first year's master seminar with Doctor G. she's asking us to introduce ourselves. i'm sitting there, hoping that my brain will produce something clever enough when my time comes.

S. is sitting across the room and she introduces herself. i can't recall precisely what she said, or what any of us said for that matter, but i remember thinking at that point 'i must go talk to that girl.' i can't remember if i actually went to talk to her that night. knowing myself i probably waited it out for a couple of days, i'm rarely one to make the first move, but we did get to talk to each other eventually.

in my latest conversation with S. we were asking ourselves why we connect with certain people and not with others. how that sometimes seems to be established from the start. how you run into some people, sometimes, and you *know* that you will connect. how some people remind you, through what they say or how they act, of people you've once connected with and you immiediately feel compelled to talk to them. sometimes finding out they share something of that person, sometimes not.

and how disappointing it is when you are in a situation where you *should* connect with people but eventually come to the conclusion that you just can't. that you can't hear them or that they can't hear you. that true dialogue is, maybe not impossible, but highly improbable.

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i had a discussion yesterday where i felt particularly misunderstood. because people figure i might have something to say about that topic. the truth is : i . really . do . not .

i've rarely ever used the label quebecois to refer to myself and felt satisfied with it. in fact, i am unsure i could ever find a label to associate with and am suspicious of people who do chose to cling to them.

there is a schism between what my heart and my mind know and i chose to let it be. i chose to accept this dissonance because it allows me to be critical. it allows me the intellectual liberty of playing devil's advocate. it allows me to have roots in many places at once.

the human mind has a tendency to want to categorize things, though. it's easier to think of the world as an infinite combination of binaries. yes. no. black. white. anything else just blurs the picture, really.

and yesterday, discussing my political leanings with h. i was just reminded of that. i was prematurely stuck in a category i did not belong to.

stuck in a box. yes or no.

well you know, honey, i'd rather see us breaking out of these boundaries. escaping these boxes that we are asked to fit it. i'd rather stop analyzing my relationships with people by refering to a history that has come and gone, and grown completly irrelevant to my reality. about how this very city used to be divided along an imaginary linguistic and cultural line. i'd rather think of how it has grown more and more mixed in the past 50 years.

but if you must ask me which box i'd rather put my faith in.

i'd just rather check both.