They want to fingerprint us down at the station....

I was, as you do when you have too much time on your hands, going through some old emails of mine when I found this one. I felt that it was somewhat appropriate, given my recent posts.

"For the first 21 years of my life, I mocked and discredited everything that my parents did. It was so odd and I used to think why couldn't we be like everyone else in Australia. I used to be embarrassed because I didn't have an English name and I used to envy my brother who got away with an Anglicised version of his Arabic name. My sisters have English names (Melissa and Kelly) and I used to tell my sisters that they were the lucky ones in our family.

Then, in 1996, I went to Lebanon with my father.

EVERYTHING changed.

Every, single thing.

In hindsight, I realised that you can't 'pretend' to be something that you are not, unless you are so well grounded in it that you can do the 'henka' necessary for the switch.

Nonetheless, you simply can't erase 21 years of being 'Australian' (plus another 6 years of living there). Also, I don't want to erase that because I've come to understand the good of it.

Look at it in this way. Before I went to Lebanon, I was living in denial and trying to be something that I obviously wasn't. After Lebanon, I found that I was trying to catch up on something that couldn't be caught (no matter what I wanted, I DID grow up in Australia).

At that point, I started thinking, just what the hell am I? And then I realised, I am human.

That is my culture.

Sixty years ago, there was no Lebanon as a sovereign state. Two hundred and twenty years ago, there was no Australia as a sovereign state. What would've been my 'nationality' then? What about in two more hundred years?

I decided that, like Soke (I think...) that being a UFO is the best nationality, the best culture, the best ethnicity.

HOWEVER, in order to do this, I have to understand in depth, the humanly developed culture that I was born into. First the basics, then the variation (or is it the other way around?)

Practically, I have found that my Lebanese identity has offered more in terms of discovery (which is to be expected, I guess). It could be argued that it is my Australian-ness (re, Western) that is allowing me to discover more about being Lebanese but I would argue that a questing spirit is just that, no matter the culture. Also, I am learning, at the bare minimum, to be able to move naturally between both 'worlds'. I also think that it is BECAUSE of my study of my own culture, that I have had no problems with culture shock in Japan.

To me, culture is a fascinating area of study, but I don't mean in an intellectual sense....

In anycase, I am hoping that my personal study of all of this will lead me to board that UFO (or am I already onboard?) ....

Does any of this make any sense?"