Curious Issues
What is it that makes one community stick and another slough? Is it commonality, or the lack thereof? Perhaps both. It's a curious thing - it's a die roll to see what will be carried with us and what will be left behind. There are places, like this one, to which I often return but from which I also often depart. Then there are places where I never leave, full of people with whom, it seems, I share no commonality beyond the basest of genetic similarities - similarities not so remote from those I share with the basest of my fellow primates. And yet, somehow, I end up failing to continue posting here, coming back only in the tragedies of my life, like an ungrateful child coming back to a mother only when tragedy has struck, and never at the moments of crowning success.
However, months ago I decided never to take it from behind for anyone from whom I didn't really enjoy taking it from behind, and anyway only if they ask permission first. Something about always being the one to give things up in order to keep peace (or keep friends, or families, or communities, or social networks, or even my job) became too much for me. Now, of course, I'm jobless and living with my parents, and self-respect certainly hasn't fluttered back by my way. And still, somebody finds something to take from me, and always in the form of a choice. Always there's that binary decision of what to surrender - myself, or my friends.
The last few months I've gotten in the habit of surrendering my friends. It's uncomfortable, really, bearing under these conditions. I suppose, I just need the opportunity to be uncharacteristically open. I'm posting this in fora I love but rarely attend, in an artistic blog in which this will be the first post where I directly and in plain English say what I mean, and perhaps in other places as I think of them. I suppose it's a sort of apology.
I'm sorry - I'll never be like any of you. Really, I'll never be anything like any of you, beyond gross genetic generalizations, and even then there are adequate genetic abnormalities that behaviorally, even cognitively, I've been described as thinking in ways utterly unlike those of any human being. Neuropsychologists, cognitivie scientists, even philosophers have all come to similar conclusions, each stated in slightly different terms.
That I will never be like any of you. Ever.
And so help me, but I'm glad of it. So there. I said it.
However, months ago I decided never to take it from behind for anyone from whom I didn't really enjoy taking it from behind, and anyway only if they ask permission first. Something about always being the one to give things up in order to keep peace (or keep friends, or families, or communities, or social networks, or even my job) became too much for me. Now, of course, I'm jobless and living with my parents, and self-respect certainly hasn't fluttered back by my way. And still, somebody finds something to take from me, and always in the form of a choice. Always there's that binary decision of what to surrender - myself, or my friends.
The last few months I've gotten in the habit of surrendering my friends. It's uncomfortable, really, bearing under these conditions. I suppose, I just need the opportunity to be uncharacteristically open. I'm posting this in fora I love but rarely attend, in an artistic blog in which this will be the first post where I directly and in plain English say what I mean, and perhaps in other places as I think of them. I suppose it's a sort of apology.
I'm sorry - I'll never be like any of you. Really, I'll never be anything like any of you, beyond gross genetic generalizations, and even then there are adequate genetic abnormalities that behaviorally, even cognitively, I've been described as thinking in ways utterly unlike those of any human being. Neuropsychologists, cognitivie scientists, even philosophers have all come to similar conclusions, each stated in slightly different terms.
That I will never be like any of you. Ever.
And so help me, but I'm glad of it. So there. I said it.
posted by Josephine S. Blick at 3/08/2009 07:52:00 PM
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