Seventh Post
I got a great email today from a past instructor of mine, Dr. Ellsworth Lapham Fersch (yes, that is his amazing name — and scroll down to the bottom of that link to get a great little intro on him). I took all three of his courses: Law and Ethics, Law and Psychology, and Delinquents, Criminals, Psychopaths, and Terrorists (that last one went by a much shorter name when I took it), and I’d say we’ve become something like friends as a result.
Or, I think he’s really great, and he’s nice enough to remember my name and chat me up whenever we run into each other. In fact, he calls me “Mr. Herwitz,” out of which I can’t help but get a kick.
Anyhoo, we were looking for a date to have coffee, and we settled on this coming Wednesday. In his email he wrote, “I’ll recognize you that day by the ashes on your forehead!?” To this, I had to muffle my laughter…naturally, I had NO idea that the 6th was Ash Wednesday, and even if I did know that, my utter lack of religious affiliation would preclude me from participating.
My response to him was thus: “Don’t be fooled by my first name — its combination with my last makes no religion suitable for the person those names describe!” Let’s be real, people. I mean really real: my name makes no sense. Christian Herwitz is about as oxymoronic as a name can get (my friend Johanna’s student’s name, Christian Pagan, notwithstanding).
This of course got me thinking in a more general sense about what I’ve noticed is the fairly contradictory nature of my…well, existence, basically. I was going to go into it in more detail, but then I realized that I’d probably end up with something of an autobiography, so here are just five handy-dandy bullet points:
Why Christian Herwitz is Inherrently Contradictory
(in addition to his name)
- He was born in the south — Hotlanta, specifically — but maaaaan does he hate him a southerner.
- He’s a vegan (sorta…read: freegan), but doesn’t give half a damn about animal rights.
- He’d consider himself an artist, but he really just doesn’t care very much for artists.
- He appears to be very outgoing and outspoken, and yet struggles to evade panic attacks in even the most casual academic or professional settings.
- He comes off as white male, middle class, but his childhood was spent as white trash, lower class.
It’s funny…whenever I try to think of how to describe my feelings of contradiction, the words are hard to produce. I get one image in my head, though:
…and one word does make itself prominent: suspension.
Heheh, I think my posts have BPD.