I always feel awkward with gum. Like I'm showing off by chewing it or calling attention to myself. Or maybe sometimes as though I expect people to look at me and say, "Wow, that boy looks damned unnatural chewing that gum."

Chewed six pieces today. I bought five from a vending machine so that I had enough change for the Coke machine in my office. It doesn't take bills. The gum's flavor kept wearing out, so I kept putting another piece in.

I went and asked Chuck, a coworker, if he thought I looked uncomfortable or like a braggart or neither while I chewed. He said I looked fine and gave me a piece of Winter Raspberry razzmatazzsomething to try when I finished with the five pieces I had in my mouth.

I tried it, too. It was potent. For a few seconds.

Then I was telling Kristi, another coworker, about how I never set out to get gum, ever, and how if I'm chewing it I likely just ended up with it. She told me that many people buy gum all the time. She buys it when she's at the grocery store. Sometimes it's on the list. She even uses coupons for it sometimes, if she sees one and has the presence of mind to bring it to the store. She says she doesn't much see Big League Chew around anymore.

I thought that was the best damn gum.

I wonder how much of a minority I am in.

Our bodies are made of tangible materials: bones, blood, fingernails, etc. This is one way of saying who we are. For example, I am bones, blood, fingernails, hair - all arranged in this specific way, taking up this specific space in the physical world. I am the person with these fingerprints, not those fingerprints. I'm the guy with the hat. My mind is physical too, certain synapses firing in different directions, leaving prints of their own. Our brains occupy a specific physical space. This seems insufficient though, when trying to come up with a definition of self. Just the physical space? We are certainly more than just our fingerprints, more than our materials. Because while our minds are tangible and real, everything that takes place inside of them is intangible and unreal, immaterial. Thoughts and feelings - your soul and "heart" - are intangible.

This whole "heart" thing is interesting too... as if the organ itself had some type of consciousness that leads us through matters of love and courage. I've been told that the Ancient Greeks used to think that our brains were in our hearts, as opposed to our contemporary belief, vice versa, that our hearts are in our brains. We've decided to take the tangible heart and use it as a metaphor for the "heart" element of our brains. We use the word heart to speak about our deepest feelings and the word brain to talk about our more formulaic and controlled thinking activity, but we do believe that both the feelings and the thoughts are in our brains, right? Our feelings are in fact thoughts and our brains fall in love, not the blood-pumping organ in our chests. The intangible feelings that are in our "hearts" are so strong, maybe we feel that they must exist in a muscle. They must be as tangible as a tree.

So, thoughts and feelings are all unreal and intangible, but exist inside a package that is real and tangible. I find that I'm always interested in the way that these two elements, real and unreal, interact. What control does my mind have over my body? What control does my body have over my mind? Is one more in control than the other? How the two work together or against each other is fascinating.

Theater is a great forum for talking about this relationship. Everything that you see in front of you onstage is real. Real people, real environments, real lights - you can touch all of it. The performers on stage will hear you laugh or clap, boo or sneeze, and react. They'll tell you to turn off your cellphones if they have to, and they'll shame you if they catch it ringing. However, everyone in the room is pretending that something else is also happening. We're pretending that the people onstage are different people, that the lights are different lights-that the furniture in front of us is actually something we know it is not. We often wonder if we're supposed to respond when the actor onstage asks us a question. Is the actor asking or the character? Wait wait, am I here, or are we pretending that I'm not here?

Our pretending that the person standing onstage is someone else is the only reason that we care about him or her. The furniture is interesting because we can imagine that it's somewhere else. Everything onstage is just an ingredient to take us somewhere else, or, maybe, to bring somewhere else to us, without going anywhere. The small halogen bulb that glows is only important because we are all pretending that it is the sun. Actors are only interesting because we know they're being two people (at least) at once.

It's easy though. We understand it naturally (maybe through cultural education... but most people seem to do it in someway). We all recognize, sitting together, that a person onstage is at once moving through two worlds: the tangible and the intangible, real and unreal. And so is everyone in the audience. We're acknowledging our brains and bodies and all of the things, hard to name, that are taking place inside of them. The beautiful thing is that when we go into the theater, we are all acknowledging that we exist as more than bones, blood, fingernails and hair. Theater is a way of acknowledging both the package and the untouchable magic that we keep inside it. It takes the real materials and makes them unreal and takes the unreal immaterials and makes them real. We each have some infinite non-existence in us and we are sitting in a room together inherently acknowledging it. And it's fun. Entertainment.

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