For Rae

It's one of those moments, my friend.

So I was reading Deloria where he explained about, guess what, liminality. He used a really intriguing expression: "like the light at dawn or dusk, when one can speak of neither daylight nor darkness but only of something in between" (Deloria, 1998, p. 35).
Reading this, I just realized that I experienced this liminal moment in my childhood, something that I could never explain, until now.

This happened (especially) when I was in the elementary school. I often woke up from my sleep, then went directly to the bathroom and took a bath. After that, I would put on my red-and-white school uniform and be ready to ask my mom to do my hair. When she saw me, she laughed and asked what was wrong with me. I said I was ready for hair-do time and then school. She said, "But Mel, this is evening, not morning yet."

When I told people about this, they always said that I might be either too excited or too stressed out about school that I did that. Hey, they might be right. Maybe it was liminal as well, the feeling of both excitement and stress, which meant, according to Deloria, that I was at the same feeling not excited and not stressed out. But then what, Rae? I wasn't feeling anything? Lol.

But it could be that liminal time which caused me to "misinterpret" the time. The moment of neither dawn or dusk, just the frozen darkness that, if only I waited for a little longer, would tell me if it were dawn or dusk. So Deloria was right, liminality implied change. The problem was, what should we do with liminal time? We often did not even realize that it WAS liminal time. If we did realize, what should we do? Wait a little bit? For how long? Should we do something? but with which condition? the one, or the other?

Haha, now you know that I'm not talking about my childhood at all, right, Rae? I'm talking about this liminal time between end of (one) master's and beginning of a doctorate. And what is interesting in this is, what if what-so-called liminal involves not two conditions but three? End of one master's, difficulty of breaking through another master's, and beginning of a doctorate?
Where am I?
In both conditions, right. Well, not both, all three, to be exact.
If I am in all three, then I am not in each of the three, but I am in each of the three.
Rae, I'm in the condition of utopia (Deloria, p. 35).


ps: I will seriously miss Frieda's class. But I'm glad I'll get *your* syllabus instead. So proud of you!