3 posts tagged “ramblings”
It's possible that while we were dreaming
the hand that casts out the stars like seeds
started up the ancient music once more
-like a note from a great harp-
and the frail wave came to our lips
in the form of one or two honest words.
- antonio machado
I was sitting at a starbucks in downtown Brisbane on a moderately gorgeous day last week with a stack of books acting all poser intellectual like in a sea of beautiful people. I've promised myself that I will make progress on at least two or three books before I head back but I'm falling behind. I've been side tracked working on some code for a facebook app. However, let me get back to the story I was trying to tell before I so rudely interrupted myself. I was reading the Pigeon by Patrick Suskind which I picked up on a whim after re-reading On Love and Death. I enjoy Suskind's writing because his approach towards isolation and neuroticism and wrapping them up in interesting characters. His characters are usually pretty self absored (honest, i'm not like that :P) and perhaps the best example is in Perfume with his most fiendish of characters Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. In the Pigeon the main character is thoroughly neurotic and has built a wall between him and the world but he draws you slowly to his own internal mad house. As I was reading it the following seemingly innocuous lines had me stop and think for a few moments.
"Good day, Monsieur Noel," she said as he passed her at an intentionally vigorous pace.
"Good day, Madam Rocard," he muttered. They never said more than that to one another. For ten years - as long as she had lived in the building - had never said more to her than "Good day,madame" and "Good event, madam" and "Thank you, madame when handed him his email.
I was giggling (like a little school girl) to myself about how there are many of these types of relationships in our lives. In the building I live in I share this relationship with many people. We'll say hello and make small talk but beyond that we don't know anything significant about the other person. It's possible to live years in one place and not really know the people who live next door to you. I wonder if it is a symptom of modern living that we have become quite isolationist. Only seeking refuge in a minimal set of people and otherwise leaving all others at bay with chit chat. I don't really have a good reference point but I'm going to assume there are other cultures out there that do manage to make a stronger community but that could just be because of homogeneity of the people. Do we only seek people who are more like us?
I remember when I used to go home from work late at night the security guard would always say goodnight to me. One day I stopped and decided to talk to him just to find out about his life. It turned out he had lived in lots of cities and had kind of bounced around in life. He was also a huge fan of music (much like myself) and he got very animated when he started talking about playing his guitar. I made it a point after that to spend five minutes with him before I left just to get another story about his life. One day he wasn't there anymore and the new security guard didn't like talking much. I have no idea where the guy is now but I still remember all the stuff we talked about.
One more story before I bore you to death. I used to take a bus home from work in Brisbane many years ago. One day this girl sitting next to me asked me where a particular stop was. I told her it was my stop (perhaps this would have been a great pick up line) and she asked me if I could remind her when to get off. She said she might miss the stop because she was so engrossed in the book she had. When it was time to get off I reminded her and as we walked from the bus stop she started talking about her life. She had come from India to study at a local university and was visiting her cousins for the weekend. She talked about how she was adjusting to life in the dorms and how her one big dream was to become a journalist in NY. After seeing her off at her cousins place I headed home and put the conversation away as another random meeting. A week later I bumped (no, I wasn't stalking her) into her again on the bus and we kept chatting and did the same thing we did before. This continued a few more times and then I never saw her again. The strangest thing was that neither one of us ever asked the other person their name. I guess we were both content having a random conversation with a stranger and leaving it at that. I was reminded of the event when I was walking home after going downtown and passing the same house where the girl had gone to visit her cousins. I was wondering if she ever made it to NY and what her life is like now.
controlled or not controlled?
the same dice shows two faces.
not controlled or controlled,
both are a grievous error.
- mumon?
I felt inspired by this post that Omar wrote. I'm sitting back at my parents place in Brisbane with lots of time to ruminate on things past and future (so this is a warning of many more posts to come over the next two weeks). Today it's time to talk about the past and in particular crushes. Think of this as three crushes and a friendship. As Omar points out our imaginations have the incredible capacity to embellish reality with rainbows and unicorns and it's only with time that things come into better perspective. Crushes can be fun or heartbreaking and everything in between.
The first one I already covered in a previous post. This was a crush shared in childhood with another friend of mine. The best part was the bonding experience I had with my friend who I ended up seeing this year after many years apart. Crushes can be based on very little besides just liking how someone looks and what you perceive that they are like. This is where the imagination kicks in to fill the details. When the gravitational pull of reality takes hold and you look back you see it as completely crazy and swear you'll never be like that again but how short our memories can be.
Asymmetry is often the nature of crushes and the following two stories present it from my perspective but with both sides of a crush illustrated.
I was once on a project where I had to work pretty closely with a co-worker to get some code out quickly. We ended up staying at work relatively late so bonded over our sorry lot in life. One day she started to tell me about her personal life and how she was feeling a bit depressed at the moment. I've been known to be a sucker for sad story so I listened and offered some random advice. After we left work she said she was hungry so I suggested we grab dinner. This was perhaps mistake number one because in my mind it was benign because we were both hungry. At dinner she talked more about what was on her mind. Most of the time I feel like people just want an ear to listen to them and advice is secondary to just dumping your emotional state. On our way out she asked if I wanted to come to her place to hang out but I was starting to feel a little weird about it so I made up an excuse of needing to get home and get sleep. Over the next month or so even after the project was over she'd stop by and start talking about random stuff. Now this might seem like a regular thing but the disconcerting thing was she'd talk about relationships and then start muttering "you just don't get it do you". In my mind I was thinking "Oh I get it but I don't want it". My office mate started commenting about it and asking me if I was interested in her. I think my face gave away too much (I have a horrible habit of making really contorted faces when I don't like something) and told her I thought this girl had way too many self esteem issues. Now perhaps a better man would have just told her that he wasn't interested. I basically tried to ignore it as much possible and hoped she'd find someone else. In the end it all worked out she found a guy and is now married. Though it must have been horrible for her to have this immature guy basically ignore her. It's a mistake I don't want to make again. It's not really a problem for me because being on this side of crush is a black swan in Taleb's parlance for me ;).
This is another co-worker story. This time I was on the other side. We weren't on the same team but we'd occasionally hang out. I don't really know why this developed but I think it had something to do with the fact she was a super friendly person that was always smiling and used to crack me up with her jokes. It was actually quite a fun crush at first because I kept thinking "she's so cool" and I genuinely enjoyed being around her and the sight of her would make really happy. The logical side of me kept pointing out how different we were in terms outlook in life but my imagination took over and I fixated on the simple stuff. At some point the fun turned into anxiety because when she'd come around and talk to me my heart would start to beat really fast and I'd get super nervous about how she'd perceive what I was saying to her. I think it was getting a bit obvious when another co-worker and I were at a party and he txted me with a "you have a crush on X don't you?". I thought it was getting pretty ridiculous so I went to have a drink with another friend of mine and dumped on her. I told her about the crush and why I have the crush and why it didn't make any sense. This was the best remedy just getting the words out and getting someone else to give their perspective brought the light of reality in. After this the crush went away and everything returned to normal. I'm glad it was such a simple fix and I'm still friends with the girl and look back at it as a moment of temporary insanity (not that she isn't a lovely girl).
Ah, to have one's heart a flutter :)
Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits-and then
Re-mold it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Every now and again I believe solitude is necessary for us to better understand the way we think and feel. I think the term loner is misunderstood like the word love. It's a filler term where we group many different types of people together and just assume the label means something useful. I use the term to describe someone who is comfortable being alone and can enjoy their own company. The usual connotation of the term is negative describing people such as the unabomber or that creepy person who leers at young children divorced from the real world. I detest the fact that the term has been co-opted to describe something that shouldn't be negative. Many of the greatest innovations of humanity are from people who have been who have been comfortable in their crowd of one.
I spent a great deal of time as a child alone. I could imagine new worlds , learn by myself, explore and create. The greatest feeling of liberation I got when I was around 7 and my father brought home a computer. I was in love with the machine the first time I sat down to play with it. I spent all my time free time with it. My parents got concerned many times and I thought I should spend more time outside and being around kids. The machine had all my focus I wanted to learn how to master it and do things other people couldn't do. It was pure fun to me and the hours would melt away. I still have that feeling being around computers. When I was in high school I was letting my grades slip because I was spending so much time working on code (writing software). I felt it was more important to figure out how render polygons quickly than learn about covalent bonds. At one point my parents out of concern talked to most of my teachers. One teacher sat me down and told me to stop spending so much time behind the computer it wasn't good. I thought he was a fool. He didn't understand it was the computer that would save me not his dry advanced level math class. I wasn't stupid I just had a different focus from all my peers and if people didn't get it was their problem. This attitude of mine probably kept my parents up at night and has caused all kinds of heartache. I'm just incredibly lucky to have the parents I have. I don't think I could have survived in a more traditional home where parents were to always be obeyed.
By now you probably have the impression that I can't function with regular people. I actually do enjoy being around and meeting new people. I just don't like spending excessive amounts of time with them. I like to listen to what people have to say from cab drivers, to kids to the people sitting next to me at a coffee shop. Like anything it can be a mixed bag of curiously penetrating insight to utter drivel. I do have a general mistrust of regular people. Their thought patterns are curiously monotonous and are heavily peer influenced. I guess it's natural to want to be one of the crowd but it seems ridiculous the lengths to which people will go to fit in. I guess this is why religion thrives because it's another way to be accepted just suspend rational thought and you're part of the group. There is no point in thinking because the group knows better. The crowd is not always so wise despite what pop-science authors will have you believe.
I'm not as socially flexible as most people are when it comes to friends. With acquaintances it's easy because there is minimal interaction and I'm quite happy to put up as many masks as they wish to see. With friends it's a different story and I try to be careful but often make horrible mistakes. I'm ultimately a very sensitive person. I feel way too much so I naturally keep most people at an arms length. My most intimate thoughts are shared with a tiny fraction of people I consider friends. It's not a lack of trust but it takes a certain kind of person to understand me. I prefer clean cuts and if a friendship has run its course I prefer to let it die quickly instead of slow lingering death of awkward conversations and ever increasing silence. I think many people fail to see this because they are under the misguided impression that it's some how noble to stick to someone even though you don't gain anything positive from being around them. It's funny the number of times I've sat down with people where they have actively talked about a mutual friend and understood their flaws and know that on the aggregate the person isn't that stellar but are willing to suspend reality just to have someone to hang out with. What a tangled web we weave.
More food for thought:
