30 August 2002 ~ Reading between the lines with Professor Foster...

Woke up this morning, bummed around a bit, checked my email, bummed around some more, and sat around thinking: "I am exactly the same as every other woman who has ever been on this planet."

I thought: "What the fuck makes ME so important?"

I thought: "Is there really anything different about me at all?"

I thought: "I am 22 years old, I am 5'6"-ish, I have reddish-brown hair and a nose which looks like I could maybe train myself to balance a shot-glass on it. I've been told -- by two or three people -- that I look German. I work in a department store. I go to school and I like to read and maybe someday I'll be a teacher, a novelist, and a dog-owner."

I thought: "That description fits a FUCK of a lot of people."

I thought: "Nothing really makes me unusual. I'm just one of the masses."

I wondered why anybody would love me, more than, say, somebody else. Why me over, say, my old friend Marianne, who DID look an awful lot like me, aside from being half-Mexican? Why me, over, say, this chick Erin I used to know, who read ferociously and was a decent writer? And forget all about love; who'd LIKE me for me? When "me" is really quite ordinary and indistinguishable from anybody else?

Then I read something online, and had something like an epiphany. This was it, sort of:

(Sort of, that is, because epiphanies are hard to explain to other people...)

I have a soul. Which is completely, and entirely different from any soul anybody else has ever possessed. Hundreds of people have been educated by the teachers I've had. Hundreds of people have stared at the same traffic lights I've stared at. And hundreds of people, right now, are listening to the same song I'm listening to, which is "Four" by Miles Davis. However, they are not me.

Funny, such a simple realization. But I don't think I realize it often enough. If I did, I'd have more guts, I think. I'm me. You're not. Nobody else is either, even if they do sort of look like me. I'm me, and that's all. HA!

The article in question, the one I read online which brought about such a revelation, was a BBC news article about anthrax. Funny; I don't remember coming to this conclusion, about being an individual with an individual, distinguishable soul, from reading Milan Kundera's numerous tirades about faces, and everybody's face being different, and so forth... It was a fucking article about anthrax.

The FBI employs a man named Professor Don Foster, who is, as the article calls him, a "forensic linguistics expert." This means that Professor Foster does things like taking the letters accompanying the anthrax packages sent through the mail last September, reading those letters, and analyzing them for clues. Professor Foster was quoted in the BBC article as saying that one's use of language is an individual as DNA. It's not handwriting analysis; it's dissecting sentences, looking at every single word, the way the words are joined together, the spellings of the words, the indentations, the spaces, the punctuations, and so forth, observing patterns, and finding a person whose writing patterns match those of the letter, book, or whatever, in question.

If you took two people who speak the same language, and showed them both a picture of a horse, one person might say, "that's a horse." The other might say, "A big animal that eats hay!"

If you showed two people, who speak the same language, the world, they'd have different things to say about it. They'd have different accents, they'd have different vocabularies, different senses of urgency, different belief systems. Professor Foster's hypothesis is that these differences are SO different, that an anonymous document can be analyzed and properly attributed to its author. Professor Foster was the dude who figured out who wrote "Primary Colors," and helped with the Unabomber case. Professor Foster is my hero.

Professor Foster is not my hero because he's an FBI agent and is helping to round up bad guys (although most of you know that this anthrax-in-the-mail shit PISSED ME OFF). Professor Foster is my hero because he doesn't believe all people are the same. Because, not only does he not believe all people are the same, but he believes every person is UNIQUE. One of a kind. Professor Foster spends a lot of time, I suppose, reading letters in search of souls. Unique souls. A man who can read a letter, and identify its author, out of gadrillions of people on the planet, is my absolute hero.

I want to be like Professor Foster when I grow up.

I want to read letters, and books, and diaries, and things -- and I want to understand their authors, understand their authors in such a way that I would never confuse them with anyone else.

Stories don't matter when I read books. I think I'm just looking for spirit.

Once, I found some letters in a garbage can from a dude in London to his daughter, who had lived in my apartment building. Obviously, the dude was unbalanced. I told my friend I thought he was bipolar; he SOUNDED bipolar, and not in a nice, managed, healthy way. I also told her I thought he was something of a pedophile. As it turned out, Dude was bipolar, which he mentioned in one of his letters, AND he was dating a girl younger than his daughter.

Once, my friend Jayden secretly made a debut at a bulletin board I used to go to a lot. She posted three or four comments on this bulletin board, all of which were fascinating -- anonymously. As I spent the majority of 7th, 8th, and 9th grades exchanging notes with Jayden, it only took me a few minutes to recognize her, even though it was pretty freaky that, out of everything on the whole wide internet, she'd showed up at MY bulletin board... I love Jayden, though; Jayden has a beautiful brain and a fucking hilarious writing style.

I would like to read letters and think: "I know who you are."

If everyone's use of language is one of a kind, then every person is unique, and a person's words are part of his soul, as blood, DNA, and strands of hair are part of his body. It astounds me that there are people in the world who KNOW this. I think that putting it into practice is somehow close to divine. Maybe reading a letter is somehow as intimate as looking into somebody's eyes. Or more so.

Maybe that's why I keep this journal. So people will know I'm different. And if I'm different, it means I'm not just every other woman of my age and build and background and IQ. Somehow, that gives me a lot of hope: I'm me, and nobody else is. Ha.

The next time I sent you an email, or a letter -- and yes, I'm talkin' to YOU -- please understand what's in it. Please read it a few times. Please look at the patterns. Please have some idea of who I am and what I'm giving to you: fingerprints. Blood. Soul.

I hope you've read this, and other entries, and so forth, and given a damn. That's all.

~H.T.*