i think also by the time my father gets to his birth, i mean, he mentions his birth date in parenthesis[laughter] you know, in conjunction with another event. and i remember reading that and thinking, well, how very interesting. i think that i could both see that it was, quote-unquote, weird from a western narrative point of view and yet, of course, there's something about it which was incredibly familiar to me, and i understood this. i understood this diminishment of the self. i mean, it was, you know, you know what i mean? one thing was something i knew with my left hand and one thing was something i knew with my right because i had this conflict between an interdependent self and an independent self, both of which are in me. i did have an artistic preoccupatn and sething which i had to say you know, would have t say was definitely mine. and so there is a way in which even as i inhabit all these other people and all my fiction regardless of who i'm talking about, i am also still there. so there's a way i which this problem, if you will, that i have, this split between interdependence