Out of Context

It has certainly been an interesting 24 hours. Interesting in the same way as getting mauled by a wildebeest is interesting. Its painful, but the same time incredibly perplexing and shocking. It is all a reminder that life surprises people….well, it at least surprises me.

2:30 pm yesterday, I was called into my boss’ office. After 13 months, my background investigation had been completed and I failed receiving a Top Secret clearance. With no clearance, I can no longer do the job I have been doing from the past 13 months. I am not completely sure why I failed. The clearance folks months and months ago asked me a few question about living in China, but most of the interview time dealt with drugs. They asked me why my security form claimed I hadn’t done drugs other than weed while an old preliminary application to the FBI said I did. I explained that five years ago I took half a pill that someone said was E, but because I didn’t feel anything, I assumed it wasn’t. The FBI polygraphs so when filling out that form I used a stricter standard. I’m assuming that was the thing, but who knows. I’ll find out later on.

On the bright side, the United States of America is safer now that I’m not there. After all, I am clearly a huge security risk. Thank God they’re keeping out people who experimented with drugs in college. Everyone knows there is a high correlation between drug use in one’s early twenties and terrorism. Osama bin Laden loved tokin’ the bong. Mohammed Atta? Big raver. Killer with the glow sticks. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were actually tripping on shrooms. They thought they were flying to the moon.

My friends and coworkers were speechless when I told them. There’s some sort of appeals process and I may have to get some lawyers. My boss says he knows some people and will do anything he can for me, but overall, the situation does not look good.

So, where does that leave me?

I was told “tagmeme” was my word of the day. A tagmeme is a linguistic unit. It has meaning based on position, class and context. It also symbiotically affects other tagmemes around it. In this sense, a tagmeme acts as both a particle and a wave. For instance, in the sentence “cup your hand”, “cup” has meaning by itself as a verb (particle), but it also affects the meaning of “hand” since a hand must be a noun and be able to be cupped for the sentence to make sense (wave).

So, what happens when a word is out of context? If I just say “cup”, we don’t know if the word refers to a verb, a drinking cup, an award or a thing to cover testicles. A lane of reality isn’t chosen for it. It sort of has meaning, but not really.

And so today I am jobless. There’s no professional context to judge me. I influence nothing professionally. I sort of have meaning, but not really. A lane of reality has not been chosen. For now, I’m just noise.