I just want to take this week to say something that, in our everyday hustle and bustle, I think we forget to appreciate often enough: that it is just, honestly, so strange to be a human being.

Think about it, my dear friend. You and I, no matter our gender/race/whatever else, are just a couple walking piles of meat, steered by some unceasingly strange lake of thoughts sitting inside our brain holes, perpetually swish-swishing around. We don't know where we came from (aside from the birth stories our parents tell us), we remember very little of our early childhood (aside from outside accounts), and we know nothing of our species' history aside from books and spoken word (which we cannot objectively verify as accurate or unbiased).

If we were to look at our lives from what we truly know, not just what we have heard or learned, then the story changes. You and I (at least from what I can gather on my side) just kind of appeared into life, at some point. We started to experience some stuff, small stuff, at some small age, and then became gradually more and more aware of our perception as we grew up, as well as a growing self-awareness of our newfound perception. Eventually, we grow into full sentience from our original nothingness (thanks to our pre-determined DNA) and our peak years could be defined as the years where the height of our sentience collides with the height of our self-awareness.

A bit oversimplified, I'll grant you that, Reader—but I think it bears mentioning. I think this simple idea, that we still don't know what the hell we are, is the core inspiration behind human creativity.

In fact, I believe it is these unknowns that keep us going; it is the image which leads us to seek the object, for better or for worse. It is the threat of looming, omnipotent consequence which allows hierarchical structures to operate. And it is the fear of an eternal end which moves our bodies along, desperately away from death's many fingers only to meet it at some other point.

Therefore, everything which is human exists because of these unknowns. Bakers, mail persons, police officers, school teachers, coal miners, and collars of all different colors: Doing our dishes, cleaning the house, owning and taking care of pets, and having flowers: Work, school, social groups, clubs, and gangs: Towns, cities, governments, territorial lines, and politics: all of this, without exception, is an attempt to cope with this massive amount of unknowns which we term life. An attempt to find some sort of structure within this unstructure.

Those I talk about this idea with usually reply, "The only problem is that everything we have, all of this, is not because of our strange relationship with the unknown. All we have is because of, thanks to, our progress: our desire for better lives." Essentially, this point of view, a popular one, suggests that our relationship with the unknown is a wholly separate one from that which many believe truly drives human activity: our own positive visions of the future.

For a while, this had me stumped: if our motivation for progress is solely that we want life to become better, then it truly was not these unknowns which fueled humanity's creative impulses.

I thought on it for months and months, until yesterday the rebuttal, which, as I realize now, is quite simple, popped into my head. When we say, "Human progress is a result of our desire to become better," this actually confirms, instead of denies that our quest for progress is a quest against the unknowns: for, is not the principal, terminal interest of human "advancement" to cheat death and learn the Unlearnable?

The problem with our desire to learn the Unlearnable is that we have not even found a proper, universal method of communication: and this is not just on the level of individual languages or cultures. Every single person, no matter how close to one another, understands and relates to their own reality, differently.

Let's try something here: what comes into your mind when I say the word 'broccoli'? For some, it may be an abstracted symbol of broccoli, and for others the broccoli may be more detailed. One thing we can be sure of, no matter how detailed our mental image of broccoli is, that image is neither fixed nor fully rendered: the images we conjure up in our heads are abstractions of reality, and they are always relative to context (For example, if I were to say, think of "fresh broccoli" versus saying to think of "disgusting broccoli"). In addition, these images are based off of our own personal experiences, perceptions, and beliefs. Therefore, you and I can never have the same image of "broccoli" in our mind. It is simply impossible.

This is the theory which postmodern philosophers, such as James Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Michael Agar, Michel Foucault, etc., have been talking about for decades. Postmodernism tries to capture that great human sadness of isolation: it laments the continued failures of human communication, human knowledge, and, essentially, any human-centric structure. More existentially, postmodernism questions the very possibility of international cultural reconciliation, especially now that societies are at a point where the divisions between interests and opinions are beginning to occur on individual levels (University of Alabama).

This is just a mess of an essay: I feel bad that I have been writing to my Reader in such an abstract way for paragraphs and paragraphs now, but it is the method by which I feel best able, without relying on one specific moment in history, to address this mass of connections and missed connections which is humankind, and I thank you for sticking with me. The reason I wanted to include information on Postmodern theories of communication, is because I feel that communication is perhaps the strangest, most accessible bi-product of human weirdness.

Have you ever been speaking to someone, a teacher, a friend, and then became aware of your own speaking, your formation of different words, and in the midst of thinking about talking you forgot how to properly form a sentence? Have you ever wondered why it's so easy for us to speak? Why it's so natural? Have you ever noticed that you speak differently, depending on what group of people you are with (family, friends, coworkers, etc.)?

One person who has questioned the source of human language throughout his life is Professor Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has been one of the leading researchers on the front of linguistics, and Chomsky's explanation of language acquisition has revolutionized not only linguistics, but dozens of other branches of study.

Chomsky came to the conclusion that, "The assumption is that physical structures are genetically inherited and intellectual structures are learned. I think that this assumption is wrong. None of these structures is learned. They all grow; they grow in comparable ways; their ultimate forms are heavily dependent on genetic predispositions" (Chomsky).

One way to visualize it, is to think of the human race as a lot of floating coat racks moving around a world of infinitely varied coats and jackets: we pick up some jackets here and there, and our filled racks represent a personal stash of experience. Some of the coats may be similar to the coats on other coat racks, but a single, overall coat rack is an individual, a collection of private experiences.

I love Chomsky's theory of structures which get filled, because instead of picking a side on the nature/nurture binary it suggests that the nurturing of our nature creates the thing that we call 'us'. It suggests that we humans are neither wholly a product of nurture, nor wholly one of nature: that we humans are born with predetermined structures, and it is the unstructured universe around us which fills these structures, and makes us individuals: and that we humans are individuals while also being inseparably similar.

So, I guess for me, that's the weird thing about being a human: that our experience is neither structured nor unstructured: that we operate inside of some strange space between black and white, between everything and nothing: and, most frightening and exciting, that we have access to both none of it, and all of it.