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Monthly Archives February 2006

a related note

An odd thing happened to me today.

After electronics lab, I went to get some coffee at the little cafe in the new engineering building on campus. As I was standing in line, a girl came up to me, and asked if this was the line. I said yes, unfortunately, and being lunch time, there was a bit of a rush. She said she just needed some coffee, and I agreed that this was a an important goal.

She was a pretty girl, freshman-ish, almost completely forgettable, interchangeable with 3/4 of the female undergraduate population, but for two things: she had bright blue eyes and wore a shirt rather lower than you normally see on such a cold day. She shivered a bit, as if to underline the exposure of bare skin.

Then the odd thing happened. Quite out of the blue, she made some comment about the class she had finished with, and asked me if I was just out of class too. Oblivious to the natural order of things, she was proceeding to engage me in conversation. This is the first time I can remember, in my entire long and storied career at OSU, that someone on campus has actively pursued a social conversation with me that wasn’t directly related to some assignment we had in common. I am not sure why this is so.

I was a bit taken aback, and as I tried to find my footing in this disorienting turn of affairs, I made some feeble conversational efforts in return. She seemed quite nice, cheery and even vaguely interested in my obviously alien schedule of physics classes. We doctored our coffees with sugar and cream together. Unsure of the proper ettiquette, and still unbalanced by the whole situation, I bade her good day and took my leave, feeling like I was missing something important.

Posted 07 February 2006 § Personal ‡ Comments (0)

The Club, part 2

I was thinking, recently, about the Club. You know, the one everyone else seems to be a member of but you, and all the consequences thereof. I almost wrote up a little entry on this, but realized I already had, some time ago in the old journal:

Here

I think in the short years since I wrote that (btw, inspired by a great short story, whose name, author, publisher or anthology I can’t remember) my thoughts have settled somewhat on the subject.

There are many clubs, overlapping and interconnected. They spring from the basic human need to belong to something, be a part of some group. It’s not a need I have ever felt strongly.Most people see themselves outside the majority group, everyone feels like an outsider in some sense. I think it’s normal, it is a symptom of that group-forming instinct most of us have, and even those in the majority will always see some other club they are not part of and want to be included. Being included means being normal.

Here is the catch, none of us are normal. Normal is an average, and we’re all scattered around the continuum of differences, none of us is at the center. Joining the club means changing yourself to fit the requirements. It means learning to drink socially even if you don’t like it, or golfing though you know its a stupid game, it means conforming yourself to that imaginary norm so that all the others who have done likewise will recognise you as one of thier own. Joining the club means trimming off all the bits that don’t fit, or hiding them away, so that you’ll be part of what everyone else is a part of – and the thing everyone is a part of is just the process of conforming.

This is human nature, and in good circumstances creates community, which is largely thought of as a Good Thing. In bad circumstances, it creates racism and hatred. Like it or not, humans are a social animal, and that means more than hanging out with friends. It meas a deep complex of instincts and culture designed to form tribes, hierarchies, families, nations, and so on. We do it automatically, unconsciously, all the time.

Those of us without so much of the social instinct (closer to the autistic end of the emotional spectrum, and I consider myself off center in that direction) may feel proud of our independence, but in the context of our animal evolution, we are an abberation, an error. We don’t have the right attitude to perpetuate the highly successful social structure our species has developed.

In the context of our human evolution of mind and culture, beyond the mere animal needs and genetic selection pressures, maybe we are not so much an error… To Be Continued.

Posted 07 February 2006 § Philosphy ‡ Comments (2)

Blog

Just for the record, the word Blog is an abomination before God and all his little sisters. I dislike it in the strongest possible way. Its sound strips away every connotation and nuance one wants it to convey – there is no prose in it, no music, no literature, no philosophy. It sounds like a less serious form of webserver logfile. It sounds like a euphemism. It is onomatapaeic in a bad way. It sounds like a badly typed hairball. I can’t take it seriously, but it isn’t funny.

Ok, so I don’t have an alternative easy to digest four-letter word for this thing that the unsavvy masses can come to grips with. My question is, do we really need one so badly that we’ll gladly embrace Blog?

Posted 01 February 2006 § Rants ‡ Comments (7)

sleep/awake

Subtle, infuriating signs

tired eyes, slow motion hum

REM stage, a slow blink away

undone tasks are a mountain

and a boulder

and a pillow

and a book

so many reasons to sleep

they keep me awake

with worry.

Posted 01 February 2006 § Personal § Prose ‡ Comments (2)