Recently, I finalized my move down to Florida. In Connecticut, there are still some people who choose to be Covid cautions and when I go to the grocery, or the salon, or the theatre, I am not the only person there wearing a mask. Florida is different, no one else seems to mask here and when I go out I feel super self-conscious. It doesn’t help that I can see the stares, have heard the murmurs, have actually been directly confronted by anti-maskers demanding I answer them, complete strangers, for my choice.

Last week, I had an appointment to get my hair cut at a fancy salon in Miami. I dug a good-looking outfit out of my closet, and I put on fancy jewelry as well. I wanted to look nice, like I fit-in, like I belonged. I wanted to use my clothes to define myself, to express the me I want to be; I wanted the clothes to be an offset to my mask.

The mask after all isn’t who I am, it doesn’t speak for me or announce my values, when I am accosted in the streets or in stores about my mask, my first thought is “you don’t know me, my life, my health, who I am trying to protect. This mask isn’t a political statement, I don’t want to wear it, it’s just what I need to do to be safe”. The mask is a practically, nothing more. It is meaningless…

A few days later, I got to thinking about LP Thoon’s definition of annata: “These things don’t belong to you, they are meaningless.” I was thinking of examples in my day-to-day to prove it and the mask/outfit came to mind.

What is a mask? It is a piece of cloth I wear over my face to protect this body. I completely reject the idea that it reflects me, that it has some deep meaning, in fact I feel wounded when others, who presumably read meaning into it, accost me. Aren’t clothes — the fancy outfit I picked for the salon, the same? Clothes are just pieces of cloth I wear over my body to protect it from elements, from insects, from the consequences of nudity in our society. I am so frustrated with the meaning folks around me read into my mask, but I read meaning into my clothes. How do I not see these too are meaningless like the mask?

The cloth of a mask, the cloth of my favorite outfits, they are the same in both form and function. How can I understand one to be meaningless, a practicality I use, and not see the same is true for the other?

A long time ago, I was talking to Mae Nee about rupa and I used my favorite yellow purse as an example: I loved it so much because I thought it made me look cool, I thought it made other people look at me and think I was cool. Every time I got a compliment on it, I took it as affirmation that the purse had the desired effect. In my mind, the function of my purse was to make me look cool.

But Mae Neecha asked me if it worked all the time? Later I reflected and realized it worked only some of the time, and the only thing that something that works some of the time proves is it doesn’t work all the time. If there were actually meaning in the purse, in the mask, in the clothes, that meaning would be plain and true, for all to see, all of the time. But this is not the case.

If I insist cloth in one circumstance has some meaning, but in a different circumstance it has none, all it proves is some of the time, to some people. All of the time, cloth, whether on my face or on my body, holds no innate meaning at all. Its just something I use. And one of the ways I use it is to demarcate meaning, to define myself with –or against. And just like I can use it, so too can others. I call my cloths mine, think they can say something about me, but the very fact that everyone is pouring their own meaning into the same object proves this is not what these objects do, not the meaning they have at all.