Ubuntu

For me, it was a very full day.

I taught a class. I ate lunch in a restaurant. I got to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s daughter, Naomi Tutu, talk about a South African proverb that she translated as “A person is a person through other people.”

Then I went to one bar and watched the Husky basketball team play a pitiful first half of basketball, which was sort of the metaphor for the evening: slow starting.

At Bill’s Off-Broadway, though, where I knew someone, the team, and the evening woke up. By the time the favorites had taken care of business, I was ready for the evening’s main event, the deportation ride.

I never quite got a hold of the English theme at the Rat and Raven, but I appreciated the attempt to engage in what just the other day I learned is referred to as “glassing.” It was fun imagining that one more pitcher would make things last longer, and I amused myself by trying to catch up to the evening’s hilarity, until I got taken aside and made privy to the signature event of the evening, a prank so diabolical you just had to laugh, even if it happened to you and it took a little more effort than expected on all sides.

But then the same thing occurred again at 22 Doors when exuberance won out and ultimately, buyer’s remorse was rejected except by the sellers—which is exactly what Dr. Tutu was talking about: the way in which our oppression of others oppresses us.

Still, it’s kinda funny when it happens to someone else.

Which seems to me the human condition, too: you want to be part of something and unique at the same time; you want to be noticed and invisible simultaneously; everything you do to other people you are doing to yourself, as free and whole as you allow others to be is how free and whole you can be yourself.