"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it." -Hannah Arendt
Sunday, March 25, 2007
"This photograph is my proof" by Duane Michals
PROOF
Send in your stories of finding and losing proof!
4 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I was dating a man who told me that he hated having his collar bone touched. One day I touched it and he didn't flinch. This became my PROOF. I convinced myself from then on that he was a pathological liar, a heroin addict, and a drug smuggler. When we spent the night at my parents' house, I convinced myself that he had stuck his used needles and dirty underwear underneath my father's pillow.
I was once accussed of lying. I was accused of lying about something I couldn't remember. I was accused of lying about the fact that I didn't remember.
There was no proof either way. There couldn't be. The horrible part of needing to prove something is that the requirement for proof means that trust is gone. Maybe the trust was broken. Maybe it was never granted. But the requirement to prove was my PROOF that the trust had disappeared.
I can never bring myself to delete chat logs from IM conversations. I save them, always. I continue to look back at proof of friendships found, lost, and found again.
Unfortunately, verbatim isn't always the best way to reminisce.
The only religion that we follow in my family is SCIENCE. It always has to be said in all-caps like that. This is partly because my parents had a controversial mixed-faith marriage, and also because my father is the kind of physicist who lives and breathes physics (not that I've ever met any other kind).
Anyway, because we believe so whole-heartedly in SCIENCE, we always had to use SCIENCE to prove stuff. One of my fondest childhood memories is from when my siblings and I complained that my parents had replaced our Cheerios with an inferior, store-brand product. 'It tastes like cardboard!' we whined.
Whereas in a normal family we would have just gotten smacked or gotten toast, in my family this was the perfect chance for us to spend an evening sitting round the kitchen table, conducting a double-blind taste test.
Happily, this proved that we could, in fact, distinguish between the inferior and superior Cheerio, and thus the familiar yellow box was once again welcome in our cupboard. SCIENCE couldn't help us get Cap'n Crunch, though.
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4 comments:
I was dating a man who told me that he hated having his collar bone touched. One day I touched it and he didn't flinch. This became my PROOF. I convinced myself from then on that he was a pathological liar, a heroin addict, and a drug smuggler. When we spent the night at my parents' house, I convinced myself that he had stuck his used needles and dirty underwear underneath my father's pillow.
All because of the collarbone proof.
I was once accussed of lying. I was accused of lying about something I couldn't remember. I was accused of lying about the fact that I didn't remember.
There was no proof either way. There couldn't be. The horrible part of needing to prove something is that the requirement for proof means that trust is gone. Maybe the trust was broken. Maybe it was never granted. But the requirement to prove was my PROOF that the trust had disappeared.
I can never bring myself to delete chat logs from IM conversations. I save them, always. I continue to look back at proof of friendships found, lost, and found again.
Unfortunately, verbatim isn't always the best way to reminisce.
The only religion that we follow in my family is SCIENCE. It always has to be said in all-caps like that. This is partly because my parents had a controversial mixed-faith marriage, and also because my father is the kind of physicist who lives and breathes physics (not that I've ever met any other kind).
Anyway, because we believe so whole-heartedly in SCIENCE, we always had to use SCIENCE to prove stuff. One of my fondest childhood memories is from when my siblings and I complained that my parents had replaced our Cheerios with an inferior, store-brand product. 'It tastes like cardboard!' we whined.
Whereas in a normal family we would have just gotten smacked or gotten toast, in my family this was the perfect chance for us to spend an evening sitting round the kitchen table, conducting a double-blind taste test.
Happily, this proved that we could, in fact, distinguish between the inferior and superior Cheerio, and thus the familiar yellow box was once again welcome in our cupboard. SCIENCE couldn't help us get Cap'n Crunch, though.
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