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cosmolinguistBy the time I was in high school I'd figured out the racket.
It wasn't just that the teachers assigned homework and scheduled tests in a way that would make anybody believe the universe was malicious. They piled on homework as if they were your only class, but paradoxically the teachers also convinced me they got together to make sure all the tests were in the same week. Everybody knew that.
But evnetually I noticed something more subtle at work here. The English teachers might tell us how poetry infused everything, but in choir I heard that all was music. The science teacher sees how science infuses everything, and while I was picking acrylic paint off the table during my drawing class I heard all about seeing the artistic potential in anything.
As soon as I got around to having teachers with specialties, they all wanted to tell me that their specialty was best! Most important. Most enriching or interesting or even exciting. It was obvious, at least with the good ones, that their subject had enriched, interested and excited them. But it wasn't always clear how it was supposed to transfer to me. My math teacher for Algebra I and pre-calc was obviously thrilled with math, but I still struggled with it enormously (though less in his class than at any other time before or since); there was no love lost between me and the x you're supposed to Solve For. X is for treasure maps and text messages if you ask me.
They were all charged up about something, and I am very suggestible, so I often tagged along on their enthusiasm. I'm still susceptible to other people's worldviews, especially when they're excited about something, which I think is why I keep ending up with people who think they might have Asperger's. But this means — and it was far more a problem in high school because I was around more people and they were more often trying to tell me things — that I change my mind all the time about whch thing is best.
For while all these teachers were trying to tell me a different academic subject was the best, they did have in common the implicit suggestion that there is a One Best Thing. And they've found it. No wonder they're so happy (by which I mean "good at projecting outward contentment"; I know enough about teaching from my mom and my friends now to know how much I'd get laughed at for saying they're one-dimensional paragons of sweetness and light and Knowledge). And I'm happy for them. But I'm annoyed for me! How am I supposed to find out the One Thing if it keeps changing every 50 minutes, with only three minutes between classes, which is not even enough time to get to the toilet or push past the freshman in the hallway by the science classrooms?
College also attempts to narrow you down to One Thing, which by then they are calling a major. Which says all you need to know about their attitudes toward it: it is biggest and most important. I sort of fell into the English department, accidentally taking the introduction to the major my first semester (I mean, I knew I was taking the class! but I didn't know it was the pre-req for the rest of the major). One semester I tried my hardest to do physics, which meant I dropped out of Calculus I halfway through, and another I took two politics classes (American and World) and thought political science might be good. But I always had a big mealy literature-survey class, usually some random elective like the hideous Introduction to Creative Writing as well, for my penance.
But one of the many reasons I couldn't finish is that I couldn't seem to handle One Thing — any Thing — for that long. Certainly not the things available to me there or then. In my last year I suddenly stumbled onto linguistics and fell in love, or at least into a crush I stlil haven't gotten out of. It was too late for me by then but now I want to go back to school and if I do it'll have something to do with languages.
In the meantime I have sighed and resigned myself to something more important but also less tidy and thus often less satisfying: there's not One Thing, at least for me.
Perhaps it's telling that I was pretty keen on the local monotheistic religion during parts of high school and the first little bit of college. Most religious people are certain they've found that One Thing, and they're pretty eager to share it too. I didn't have a big dramatic moment of deciding to distance myself from the charismatic Christians; it just happened. I think I'd been going along with it just because it'd been one I was presented with in high school and I knew how the stories worked. But I couldn't keep up the story forever; it can be a lot of work.
I think part of the reason I'm annoyed by there not being One Thing is that I can't handle being wrong. I don't like going back and reading or thinking about what I was thinking or doing at the time; this is one of the reasons I found it impossible to keep any kind of journal before (or even in addition to) LJ. I cringe and revise my own history, like Egyptian pharoahs who had the faces of their predecessors chiseled off the records: It has always been like this of course, I insist, grinning that wary grin of one who's just nearly tripped but caught myself at the last second so I'm hoping to pass it off as intentional as I look around for anybody who might have seen. Yeah, I meant to do that. But usually nobody's looking anyway.
Still I long for the smoother walk of more certain convictions, even if they are a little crazy. I grew up with a lot of stability, familiarity; these are the things I long for now (probably because I've forgotten how boring they were).
I have gone on being swayed by everybody else's Things, by the way. I've absorbed a little bit of Andrew's (not nearly enough! I'm sure he thinks; far too much! I am sure). I tend to confuse books that are written well with ones I should allow to change my life. This is probably why I want to write books; I'm much better at style than substance myself. It's nice to think that might be worth something. Of course, I don't have anything to write about yet, as I lack a grand plan to mold into the minds of the peons.
I used to think the best books were the ones that made me think Wow, I never knew that! Then it was Wow, I never thought of that! Now I think it's Wow, I always thought that, but never realized it or could express it so well!
And I guess I am writing all of this because I found and still am reading one of those latter kind of books. It's about the last thing I would expect: The Science of Discworld. I would've thought it'd be all about science and Discworld, and it is of course, but it's also about magic and stories. I like stories. (I like magic too, but that's another story altogether.)
Hell, I am a story, especially here on LiveJournal.
Here's an example:
When I happened to mention Discordianism to a friend (a Real Life one, for once, so she couldn't just look it up on Wikipedia) I explained myself into a big silly mess. So when we got back here I asked Andrew if he could do it better and he said something about a way of communicating something something between certain types of creative something-or-others. I'm not doing a very good job of reproducing it now because I forgot it immediately, of course, but it was brilliant.
Later that night I thought of this again and said "I wish I had your brain so I could think meta-things and describe them that well." He proceeded to offer me compliments and praise about myself, which is nice but I wasn't feeling insecure about my own abilities, just covetous of his. "You know, facts and that! I can't do that. I can only do stories." This is even before I read about them in The Science of Discworld, but even so I was pretty happy actually about being able to do stories.
It doesn't mean I am a good storyteller — I may be, but only in carefully controlled environments (of which LJ happens to be the best so far) — it means things make sense to me as stories the way they make sense to Andrew as numbers and logic and facts which he somehow manages to arrange and retrieve with greater ease and accuracy than you'd imagine was possible if you saw the state of his brain's external hard drives (though what he's done with an empty bookshelf tonight is glorious! a masterpiece unequalled in the time I've known him). Anyway, I digress.
Andrew said, "I love you. And thats a fact." Which made me grin, but also made my reply obvious. Being obvious did not make me feel any less clever or proud for having thought it up.
I said, "I love you. And that's a story."
(Thus proving my point really. That is such a story I'm almost surprised it really happened.)
He laughed and hugged me. He didn't think it was obvious, I guess.
I suppose something else will come along — something always does; that's the great and terrible thing about things — but for now, I just wanted to say I am charged up by stories. Not prose or diction or exposition or dénouement; not the craft they're dressed in, just the stories. I see them everywhere I look and I think the universe makes sense because of them, just as my old teachers seemed to think about science or music or math or poetry.
It wasn't just that the teachers assigned homework and scheduled tests in a way that would make anybody believe the universe was malicious. They piled on homework as if they were your only class, but paradoxically the teachers also convinced me they got together to make sure all the tests were in the same week. Everybody knew that.
But evnetually I noticed something more subtle at work here. The English teachers might tell us how poetry infused everything, but in choir I heard that all was music. The science teacher sees how science infuses everything, and while I was picking acrylic paint off the table during my drawing class I heard all about seeing the artistic potential in anything.
As soon as I got around to having teachers with specialties, they all wanted to tell me that their specialty was best! Most important. Most enriching or interesting or even exciting. It was obvious, at least with the good ones, that their subject had enriched, interested and excited them. But it wasn't always clear how it was supposed to transfer to me. My math teacher for Algebra I and pre-calc was obviously thrilled with math, but I still struggled with it enormously (though less in his class than at any other time before or since); there was no love lost between me and the x you're supposed to Solve For. X is for treasure maps and text messages if you ask me.
They were all charged up about something, and I am very suggestible, so I often tagged along on their enthusiasm. I'm still susceptible to other people's worldviews, especially when they're excited about something, which I think is why I keep ending up with people who think they might have Asperger's. But this means — and it was far more a problem in high school because I was around more people and they were more often trying to tell me things — that I change my mind all the time about whch thing is best.
For while all these teachers were trying to tell me a different academic subject was the best, they did have in common the implicit suggestion that there is a One Best Thing. And they've found it. No wonder they're so happy (by which I mean "good at projecting outward contentment"; I know enough about teaching from my mom and my friends now to know how much I'd get laughed at for saying they're one-dimensional paragons of sweetness and light and Knowledge). And I'm happy for them. But I'm annoyed for me! How am I supposed to find out the One Thing if it keeps changing every 50 minutes, with only three minutes between classes, which is not even enough time to get to the toilet or push past the freshman in the hallway by the science classrooms?
College also attempts to narrow you down to One Thing, which by then they are calling a major. Which says all you need to know about their attitudes toward it: it is biggest and most important. I sort of fell into the English department, accidentally taking the introduction to the major my first semester (I mean, I knew I was taking the class! but I didn't know it was the pre-req for the rest of the major). One semester I tried my hardest to do physics, which meant I dropped out of Calculus I halfway through, and another I took two politics classes (American and World) and thought political science might be good. But I always had a big mealy literature-survey class, usually some random elective like the hideous Introduction to Creative Writing as well, for my penance.
But one of the many reasons I couldn't finish is that I couldn't seem to handle One Thing — any Thing — for that long. Certainly not the things available to me there or then. In my last year I suddenly stumbled onto linguistics and fell in love, or at least into a crush I stlil haven't gotten out of. It was too late for me by then but now I want to go back to school and if I do it'll have something to do with languages.
In the meantime I have sighed and resigned myself to something more important but also less tidy and thus often less satisfying: there's not One Thing, at least for me.
Perhaps it's telling that I was pretty keen on the local monotheistic religion during parts of high school and the first little bit of college. Most religious people are certain they've found that One Thing, and they're pretty eager to share it too. I didn't have a big dramatic moment of deciding to distance myself from the charismatic Christians; it just happened. I think I'd been going along with it just because it'd been one I was presented with in high school and I knew how the stories worked. But I couldn't keep up the story forever; it can be a lot of work.
I think part of the reason I'm annoyed by there not being One Thing is that I can't handle being wrong. I don't like going back and reading or thinking about what I was thinking or doing at the time; this is one of the reasons I found it impossible to keep any kind of journal before (or even in addition to) LJ. I cringe and revise my own history, like Egyptian pharoahs who had the faces of their predecessors chiseled off the records: It has always been like this of course, I insist, grinning that wary grin of one who's just nearly tripped but caught myself at the last second so I'm hoping to pass it off as intentional as I look around for anybody who might have seen. Yeah, I meant to do that. But usually nobody's looking anyway.
Still I long for the smoother walk of more certain convictions, even if they are a little crazy. I grew up with a lot of stability, familiarity; these are the things I long for now (probably because I've forgotten how boring they were).
I have gone on being swayed by everybody else's Things, by the way. I've absorbed a little bit of Andrew's (not nearly enough! I'm sure he thinks; far too much! I am sure). I tend to confuse books that are written well with ones I should allow to change my life. This is probably why I want to write books; I'm much better at style than substance myself. It's nice to think that might be worth something. Of course, I don't have anything to write about yet, as I lack a grand plan to mold into the minds of the peons.
I used to think the best books were the ones that made me think Wow, I never knew that! Then it was Wow, I never thought of that! Now I think it's Wow, I always thought that, but never realized it or could express it so well!
And I guess I am writing all of this because I found and still am reading one of those latter kind of books. It's about the last thing I would expect: The Science of Discworld. I would've thought it'd be all about science and Discworld, and it is of course, but it's also about magic and stories. I like stories. (I like magic too, but that's another story altogether.)
Hell, I am a story, especially here on LiveJournal.
Here's an example:
When I happened to mention Discordianism to a friend (a Real Life one, for once, so she couldn't just look it up on Wikipedia) I explained myself into a big silly mess. So when we got back here I asked Andrew if he could do it better and he said something about a way of communicating something something between certain types of creative something-or-others. I'm not doing a very good job of reproducing it now because I forgot it immediately, of course, but it was brilliant.
Later that night I thought of this again and said "I wish I had your brain so I could think meta-things and describe them that well." He proceeded to offer me compliments and praise about myself, which is nice but I wasn't feeling insecure about my own abilities, just covetous of his. "You know, facts and that! I can't do that. I can only do stories." This is even before I read about them in The Science of Discworld, but even so I was pretty happy actually about being able to do stories.
It doesn't mean I am a good storyteller — I may be, but only in carefully controlled environments (of which LJ happens to be the best so far) — it means things make sense to me as stories the way they make sense to Andrew as numbers and logic and facts which he somehow manages to arrange and retrieve with greater ease and accuracy than you'd imagine was possible if you saw the state of his brain's external hard drives (though what he's done with an empty bookshelf tonight is glorious! a masterpiece unequalled in the time I've known him). Anyway, I digress.
Andrew said, "I love you. And thats a fact." Which made me grin, but also made my reply obvious. Being obvious did not make me feel any less clever or proud for having thought it up.
I said, "I love you. And that's a story."
(Thus proving my point really. That is such a story I'm almost surprised it really happened.)
He laughed and hugged me. He didn't think it was obvious, I guess.
I suppose something else will come along — something always does; that's the great and terrible thing about things — but for now, I just wanted to say I am charged up by stories. Not prose or diction or exposition or dénouement; not the craft they're dressed in, just the stories. I see them everywhere I look and I think the universe makes sense because of them, just as my old teachers seemed to think about science or music or math or poetry.