Does anyone else feel like you just can't express how you feel as a cleft person to others, and frustrated because of this? I mean, people who are members of racial minorities can identify with this as in public if they wish to, but I have the impression that if I were to ever chime in about my feelings as a minority, people would just blow it off, maybe not even accept that having a facial difference qualifies you as a minority. "You don't face discrimination," they might say. While some with facial differences may indeed face discrimination, this isn't something I've faced myself. I'm not sure how you would describe mockery from classmates, coworkers or strangers -- maybe it's prejudice, scorn or in some cases just plain hate. But those things are hard to quantify, and again I think it'd too easy for folks to just say "that's just people for you. Some people are just born prettier than others. Find some way to compensate or something. Sink or swim." Etc. It's too easy to make it sound like you were just looking for pity.

Yet a facial difference is something quantifiable. I think, too, there's something distinct that we learn from it. You learn that just because something might look damaged on the outside, doesn't mean that there isn't a whole center of the universe within. That's what it means to be alive; you're a center of the universe. (I read that browsing the first few pages in a library of the Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. just so you know it's not mine.)

Almost everyday at work I have to listen to people (well, mainly one person, but he gets an audience easily enough) making jokes about others' looks. He says some woman is a "nightmare in the face" and people laugh next to me; what am I to say? If I was clever enough, quick and witty enough, if I had some resource of ideas and phrases other people had come up with to draw upon, I would say something in defense of the human spirit, how it's demeaned by focusing on the physical.

It's difficult to go against the grain of a whole culture. Earlier tonight I read an article on cracked.com about different ways our memory can be fooled, and the first one was the power of repetition. Like how Al Gore never actually claimed to have invented the Internet, but the misinterpretation of a single remark and its repetition as an urban legend became one of the more well-known components of his public image. We live in a modern world where a mantra is constantly going on, "pretty, pretty pretty." Nobody really thinks about it. Nobody questions whether our worth is determinable solely on the basis of some outer biological characteristics, our genetic ability to pass them on. We are relegated to the status of cogs in a Darwinian machine by this! Of all the truly astonishing things our brains can do, the most important thing any of us can do ... is breed??

A virus can breed. As humans we can adapt to many different functions, including promoting sanity in a crazy world. Just wish I could say it in twelve different funny ways of ten words or less.