How to Be a Great Lady Part I

My aunt taught me alot of things I have needed to know, both in her life and in her death. Her presence blazed a way in my family to be the youngest and most rebellious girls of our generations, and is responsible for pointing out the wanderlust and adventure in my blood. She was known to have a tomboy streak, kind of like me, but she had the style of a dame. People have been telling me about how they remember her blazing through town on her bike and on her scooter like a fiend when she was young.

History comes full circle in strange and unforeseeable ways. She once told me that her oldest recurring nightmare was being plunged beneath the sea and wandering the wreck of an old airplane and encountering human remains. Oddly enough, doing this very thing has become one of my favorite hobbies since became a scuba diver. In this case, am happy to step up and live through the previous generations nightmares.

She stopped fearing death at a tender age. I think since her early 20's she had one foot in the grave practically, but this allowed her to live a very liberated life and live out fantastic adventures. Once she told me about traveling the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan as a young lady on camels and on foot. This information was relevant to the conversation that we were having as to where the handsomest men in the world can be found. She advised me that throughout all of her travels, in her opinion she found Afghani men to be the cutest. Of course this was so hilarious to me, especially when she said that the men of Italy were overrated. She definitely was not your typical filipina.

As one of the few western women traveling through the Hindu Kush mountains, tracing the steps of Alexander the Great, it didn't really occur to her to try and blend in and cover her head. Why should she? Everywhere she went she was an anomaly. All around the world people stared at her out of curiousity anyways. She was used to it; as a young woman she couldn't help but offend the societal norms of where she grew up, and to the rest of the world she was a foreigner, a beautiful and bizarre curiousity.
















"All knowledge of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth."We are perfectly justified in maintaining that only what is within ourselves can be immediately and directly perceived, and that only my own existence can be the object of a mere perception. Thus the existence of a real object outside me can never be given immediately and directly in perception, but can only be added in thought to the perception, which is a modification of the internal sense, and thus inferred as its external cause … . In the true sense of the word, therefore, I can never perceive external things, but I can only infer their existence from my own internal perception, regarding the perception as an effect of something external that must be the proximate cause … . It must not be supposed, therefore, that an idealist is someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses; all he does is to deny that they are known by immediate and direct perception … – Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant