saturday, august 25

hello I am in north burke new york, and all the radio stations are in french just like I guess they always were, but I didn't know that because I didn't listen to the radio when I was little. and not much else is the same, really: my old house (a quarter mile south of me right now) has a transplanted abandoned schoolhouse in the middle of the yard where there used to be birch-tree clotheslines, apparently serving as a barn for some heifers and geese; the biggest farms have gotten bigger and some of the little ones have gone all empty; this house where the boys lived is a new blue color and is very full of men plus an antlered, bright-eyed deer mounted on the wall; all the buildings that I remember -- farmhouses and barns and silos and even the church and shops and everything in chateaugay -- as being so big and manmade in the middle of all this field-and-brush-and-skyness are tiny, like little toys that someone dropped out of the sky and forgot to pick up before bed. and even though I was expecting the differences I can't help but feel threatened, because my memory doesn't understand how time works. I've moved so many times and I always miss the people, but I never really want to go back because I know things will be enough the same to make me feel out of place, as if my growing up were some sort of cosmic accident, but enough different to make me wonder if my childhood ever really existed in the first place.

outside there are cows flicking their tails at the people watching and an enormous green half-grown pumpkin that will be hundreds of pounds big by october surrounded by curly prickly vines and rusty bits of once-red farm equipment and no room for breathing because I am too busy looking. it is funny how the part that is really unfathomable to me is not that I ever lived here, but that the people I left behind are still here as if there really were such a thing as stability in the world. it feels all wrong to be on the internet here, because when we lived here we had to borrow a vcr from the library if we wanted to watch a movie, but email is email and once my sister had said "did you update your internet thing?" I had to do it, even though I wasn't planning to.

ps - hello to my friends from north burke, and thank you for all the vegan food
pps - everyone leave funny comments for my friends to read!
16:25 ++

wednesday, august 22

when I was in sixth grade, we had a very uninspired science teacher. her name was ms. mooney, and she was very old and round and her right eye twitched. she had the classic middle-class boston accent, and she chopped words in half by completely omitting the middle consonants, so we were constantly cuh-ing things with scal-ehls before we stored them in bah-els. for some reason these classroom adventures never led to lab reports; instead, we were asked to write essays that were only tangentially related to our in-school activities. and so, after we dissected pig eyeballs (cow eyeballs were seventh grade), we had to write three-page essays on diseases of the eye. (that was the exact assignment, in its entirety: write a three-page essay on diseases of the eye. period, end of explanation.)

I remember the day we turned them in. we had a substitute teacher in social studies, the period before science, so we weren't doing anything. the boys I usually spent most of my social time with were drawing blueprints for teacher-killing weapons, so I sat by myself reading over my (extremely boring) eye disease paper. one of my classmates was watching me, or at least watching my paper. (a somewhat-incidental note: she was the valedictorian of our graduating eighth grade class; I was the salutatorian. we didn't really become friends until seventh grade, and at that point we were still somewhat wary of one another.) when I turned the page, she jumped up, ran over to me, and whispered fiercely, "you have diagrams? no one said we were supposed to have diagrams?!"

eventually we ended up trading papers to read each other's work. I had gotten only a paragraph into hers before I recognized a phrase about cloudiness in the crystalline lens, a phrase that I had read several minutes earlier in my own paper, and the night before in the world book encyclopedia. we looked up at each other and we both laughed and blushed a little, and I felt very ill when I handed in my paper the next period. "it was just such a perfect phrase," she had said, laughing, and while I wasn't worried about being punished for plagiarism (even if our teacher had noticed, she wouldn't have bothered to do anything about it) I felt like the absolute scummiest scum on the planet. I couldn't think of any other perfect phrases I had stolen, but I hadn't really thought of it as stealing when I wrote it; it was only four words after all, and I hadn't even left them in quite their original order. still. I haven't done it since then.

except. two years later, when we were in eighth grade, we had to take health class once a week instead of our normal english class. eighth grade was a drug year, because apparently even the public school system didn't trust the dare program to teach us to say no to drugs, and so every week we talked about a different drug and how evil it was. we talked about marijuana for about two months, maybe because it has so many different names. the whole thing was sort of ridiculous, for many reasons but especially because our english teacher was a not-so-secret alcoholic. by the time it was spring, though, we had run out of drugs to talk about, so instead we had to write papers, and for some reason (I think so that there would be fewer papers to grade) we had to write them with partners.

so, my partner was valedictorian-girl, with whom I was pretty good friends at that point even though we didn't really understand each other at all. (I had never seen general hospital and she had never played a sport; she took in-school clarinet lessons to help her get into prep school and I took them because they got me out of spanish class.) our assigned topic was "burns," and as you might imagine our paper ended up a little on the gory side. but anyway, one day she came over to my house after school so we could write our paper, which blew my mind because doing homework before dark was a completely foreign concept to me, and we pulled out the encyclopedias and first aid books and sat down at the computer and got ready to write. I volunteered to type, because I was faster, so I pulled my chair up and said, "how should we start?" and she was just off talking, and I could barely keep up, and I thought wow, she really is smarter than I am. occasionally I would suggest a slightly different wording, or that we move one sentence in front of another, but for the most part I just wrote what she said for an entire page and a half before I asked if she wanted to trade places for a while.

she said yes, and I got up and let her sit at the computer and settled into the chair behind her, feeling a little nervous because while I was a good and confident writer, I didn't think I could rattle off a well-formed paper justlikethat, and I was sure she would come to the same conclusion I had about our relative intelligence. I picked up the encyclopedia that she had left sitting open on the desk beside us, glanced down at it, and discovered that she had been reading from it verbatim.

I stopped worrying about the paper at that point, and just said whatever came to mind without worrying about whether it was coherent or not. at one point I asked if I thought our paper was too similar to the encyclopedia, and she shrugged and said no, so I shrugged too and kept making stuff up. later, after she left, I rewrote the entire paper. if she noticed the difference, she didn't mention it when it was returned, graded with a red-penned a+, three weeks later. we were still friends. she signed my yearbook "see you in four years!" because she planned on going to harvard and at that point everyone still expected that I would end up there, including me I guess. after that she went off to an expensive private boarding school in the faraway suburbs and I went to the public high school in cambridge, and I never heard from her again. I do know that she went to harvard, though. and me, well, we all see what happened to me.

I'm not sure where my mind is going with this, but it's been banging that memory around mercilessly for the past three days, so there you go and maybe if we're lucky we'll find out why it came up at all?
21:30 ++

perhaps I am overreacting, but I think it's a little upsetting that any google search with the words "rape" and "law" will bring up a "sponsored link" (aka an advertisement) to a law group (I'm not linking to them; you can find it yourself if you like) that says: charged with a sex crime? we can help. free consultation nationwide.

that's not to say that I think anyone should be denied a lawyer or a fair trial, but given that sex crimes so often go unreported, shouldn't it be easier to find information on what the laws actually are than how to escape the consequences of breaking them? ugh.

anyway, this is what happens to my productivity when metafilter comes back from vacation...
14:08 ++

tuesday, august 21

[identity, dishonesty, and the internet, part 5: backtalk]

okay, I think I'm really done this time. somehow it turned out that all these musings on identity and "honesty" have been much harder for me to properly articulate than the things I normally write, and I still don't feel as if I have properly communicated anything I really think or feel on the subject. but, there you are, and here we are, and now that I've thought a lot about who I'm not perhaps someone will clue me in to who I am...
23:16 ++

monday, august 20

[identity, dishonesty, and the internet, part 4: envisioning the world]

several intelligent people have pointed out that it would be silly to judge my honesty by how accurately I translate reality into words, because reality is as subjective as anything. (I seem to not have many objectivists in my audience, or at least not essentialists, which may have something to do with me being so obviously not either of those things in spite of all this scientist stuff.) I've long been a subscriber to the idea that there is no such thing as reality, that we create our own realities on an individual basis, colored by our own perceptions and even by our willingness to let our perceptions color reality. as an aspiring scientist, I've learned that science is much less objective than the media (and some scientists) pretend it is, and that there's a lot of guessing and filling in the gaps, which of course is affected by personal bias. so even the things we think we can count on to be rooted in fact really aren't.

in any case, that's not exactly the point, since the majority of what I write and talk about on the web has very little do with astrophysics or cognitive science. as long as I describe the world the way I see it, maybe I don't have to worry about whether I'm being honest; maybe it simply doesn't matter. I know that I see the world differently from most people, literally and not, and I also know that my perception of the world (not to mention myself) changes and changes and changes. on some basic level I've always been myself, but if I wrote about that all the time it would be boring for everyone.

two and a half years ago I developed a case of combined iritis and episcleritis, both of which are relatively common side effects of rheumatoid arthritis (and some of the medications that go along with it). I had been told by my doctors that eye disorders were something to watch out for, since without immediate steroid treatment they could lead to permanent blindness, and as usual I listened attentively and nodded and didn't really think that it would ever be something for me to worry about. when I found myself suddenly incapable of doing the things I took for granted, like reading text on a computer screen or being able to tell the difference between a sunflower and the sun or taking notes in biology class or just plain opening my eyes, I felt truly handicapped for the first time in my life, despite the fact that my transcripts have school reports certified disability printed conspicuously next to all my test scores and if I had a driver's licence I would be eligible for a handicapped parking permit. I was missing something, and though I had always been fascinated by the visual qualities of the world, and had always thought that I would give up music before I would give up light, it wasn't until I found myself living in a world without corners or colors that I realized how much richness there was in everything around me. when I was little I used to play blind-pretend, where I would close my eyes and see how well I could get along without any visual cues to guide me; on the occasions when I didn't cheat, I usually ended up running into something. it was a fascinating concept, as long as it was a nonthreatening one. but now that it is a real threat, and one that I've had just the tiniest taste of, I don't want to ever pretend that I can't see, because it would mean missing out on seeing something. and I love love love the way the world looks. everything, and I do mean that literally, is beautiful to me in some way.

I am starting to sound like pollyanna, I know. but while I don't think I can really help seeing things the way I do, it wasn't exactly a happy accident or a product of my personality alone. I'm certainly not the same person I was in high school, and maybe a bout of temporary blindness had more to do with that than I think. it surely had something to do with it, since everything that happens to me shapes my character in one way or another, but without that particular experience I don't think I would be quite so enthralled with everything, with the little dimples in the surface of my philodendron's leaves and the reflections in my translucent yellow medicine bottles and the soft black curviness of the remote control sitting next to my keyboard... for me, the power of the internet is in its text; while I enjoy looking at photography and astronomy pictures and good webdesign, two-dimensional images will never be as rewarding as the three-dimensional world. and so I keep trying to capture this world, this wholly indescribable world, by fitting it into words and words and words, and maybe to you it seems embellished or exaggerated or scripted, but to me it seems inadequate and flat compared to the original inspiration. so perhaps I am being not dishonest, but only inexpert in my rendering of the world that is so precious to me -- and that, I think, is a problem that plagues us all, and one of the many things about the universe that manages to be beautiful and infuriating at the same time.

anyway, I am going to keep trying, and as long as I keep failing I will always have something left to aim for. this is no one's reality, but that doesn't stop it from wishing.
19:36 ++

I'm interrupting this serial introspection to point out that wockerjabby.com is exactly one year old today (and since it hasn't disappeared yet, apparently I did okay with all the registration nonsense). so now:

I've been online for eight years;
had a personal website for five years;
been webjournalling in some form or another for two years;
been using blogger for eighteen months;
and owned a domain for twelve months.

based on that scale I can assuredly say that time is not linear.
10:59 ++

sunday, august 19

[identity, dishonesty, and the internet, part 3: pants on fire]

make no mistake -- I make stuff up all the time. all the time. it would be wrong to say that I live in a fantasy world, because my mind is so multi-tracked that not even I can keep tabs on everything it's doing. there are a few things I can count on, though: sensory processing; music; nonverbal thoughts; conversational monologue; visual hallucinations; and hypothetical life. the last three almost invariably involve some degree of fantasy. obviously the hallucinations are completely imaginary, but the monologue is just whatever I would be saying or writing at that particular moment, and while the hypothetical life is a full-fledged, full-screen, in-surroundsound-where-available production in my head, it ranges from the thoroughly mundane (what if I were walking on the other side of the street?) to the utterly chimerical (what if that city bus fell into the river and I single-handedly rescued everyone inside without even bothering to take off my shoes?).

(not that you care, but the only time my conscious mind quiets down to the bare minimum -- sensory, music, thoughts -- is when I'm playing in a rugby game. not during a final exam, not while I'm riding in rush hour traffic, not even when I'm reading a really good book. just rugby. that must say something about the kind of sport it is...)

I've written about this before, but I am convinced that one of the reasons I'm so reluctant to tell people what I'm thinking is because I'm not able to tell the difference between reality and imagination right away. the other day I was standing in the bathroom at work, poking around in my mouth with my finger because something felt funny, and I found what I think was my last bit of oral surgery stitching. it was poking into my cheek, so I grabbed it and yanked it out and it made a tiny, wet pop-snap sound... and suddenly there was blood! everywhere! and I was under the sink faucet trying to get it all out, watching red swirl down and down... except that really there wasn't, and it was only a little bit of blood but it took me a second to figure out that I was still just standing there looking at my reflection.

I don't think that my half-confused imagings are any less a part of me than the true stories I tell, but somehow they don't seem proper for sharing, because they somehow have so little to do with what the world itself is doing. or maybe they make me a little too vulnerable. but mostly I think I am afraid of losing the line between truth and fiction (which is why I got so upset at the idea that some of you thought I might be making up the stories I do tell...) and of saying something that I think is real but actually isn't. I check my speech a lot too, but it's so much easier for conjurings and inventions to fall through the cracks when I write, and then they suddenly become much bigger than they started out, because I do like to tell stories, and because people do seem to like to listen to them.
18:33 ++