En-gage: You human, you robot 1

you [yoo] (pronoun, possessive, noun)

human [hyoo-muh n] (adj., noun, verb)

robot [roh-buh t] (noun)

I have been working on a writing project since October about defining home (I’m a poet by nature). Although I thought I was done writing about home, its definition is ever-changing. Today, I want to en-gage with two words I’m using to define home, you and human, and one word that is an antonym for human: robot.

I didn’t start thinking of home and human until I Googled human to write this post. Human appears as an adjective. This is not what I intended. Somewhere along the way I began associating human with noun: any individual of the genus Homo, especially a member of the species Homo sapiens. Human evolved to represent me, not describe me.

We are all humans; we are all yous.

Human as a noun stems from this idea I have that we need to slow down and human (verb)–live and accept that we have emotions, even if they are not understandable or rational. I joke about being a robot: a machine that resembles a human and does mechanical, routine tasks on command; used to refer to a person who behaves in a mechanical or unemotional manner. We are expected to turn of our emotions–to be robotically productive.

Thinking of human in this way makes me thing of Andrea Rexilius’s book To Be Human is to Be a Conversation. Perhaps when I met Andrea is when I began thinking of human adjective, noun, and verb.

When defining home, it became clear that to define home, you must have people; you must have yous: one; anyone; people in general. In my project, you is used for names and sometimes appears instead of the personal pronoun I so I can speak in third person. I include you as a possessive word here because one of the most important elements of a home is a solid foundation of yous; or a “family” that chooses to claim you as their own and vice versa.

I use the word human to represent that I am not a robot. We all need to take time to human–to you.