Surprises

[mrissa]

I am going to get this rewrite done this week, dammit, and that's the long and short of it. Mostly the short of it: it's a short story. I am bigger than it. When I was drafting Thermionic Night and Copper Mountain, there was some question as to whether I was bigger, stronger, and/or tougher than those books (or, for the delusional part of the process, that book). But I am. This week. Really. Even though jmeadows sent me to my room for my characters breaking the Russian Empire.

I am also writing space opera, though, because: zapzapBOOM! P'chiew p'chiew p'chiew! I mean. I hardly ever get to do stuff like this, and it has the dialog as well as the swashing, buckling, and laser weaponry. (Get to do = allowed by brain. No one else is stopping me.) And it's got running jokes about the translation of poetry. And, like I said, Alexandre Dumas and Patrick O'Brian and Woody Guthrie and Buddy Holly. (By influence, not appearance.) And biochemistry and neuropsychology and revenge and underground resistance and spies and long-lost relatives.

Umm. Well, that transition snuck up on me as much as it did on you, actually: I was wondering when to mention this, and I guess now burbling about my fiction has given me the moment. I have a long-lost relative who has come into my life this year. Nothing so close nor dramatic as a sibling, which is what my character has got. A step-aunt, whose absence from my life is not her fault nor the fault of anyone important to me, but...it's a curious thing, thinking about meeting new people one of these days and thinking of the alternate history in which the full-fledged teenage people you are supposed to meet one of these days were babies you hauled around on your hip at family gatherings when you were half-grown yourself. (I was definitely the kind of 9-year-old and even more the kind of 11-year-old who hauled babies around on one hip telling them about the world as she understands it so far. I explained about non-Euclidian cosmologies to my cousin Joe when I was in high school and he was in diapers. Most babies, if you give them a chance, incline definitely towards either the Big Crunch or the heat death of the universe. It's just most people don't give them a chance. Joe was a heat death sort of kid.) So...yeah. We haven't figured out a time for that meeting yet, but it sounds like it'll be fun and remarkably free of dire prophecies, enchanted objects, stolen birthrights, and all the other sorts of things that make long-lost relatives entertaining in fiction and a bit fraught in real life.

So, in honor of the space opera that fell on my head and the step-aunt who found us, tell me about surprises. Tell me what would have surprised your 10-year-old self about your life right now, or what surprises your current self, or just about a good surprise you had once.

Comments

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

I think one of my cats has left me a surprise, but not a very pleasant one. :P

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Is it a pony? Is it a new skirt? Oh, I can hardly wait to hear!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Finding out I had a step-sister at 13. (And then finding out, through my brother nosing through my dad's papers, that there were more than her.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Half, not step. There are so many of both, I tend to get dyslexic on who is which.

[ellarien]

I think my ten-year-old self would have been utterly amazed by most things about my life now -- both the general 21st-centuryness of it and the specific living-in-America part. (Even at 30, I'd have had a hard time believing that one.) The part where I'm actually having fun writing stories again she'd take utterly for granted, but it amazes my current self.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

My 10-year-old self would be surprised by the fact that, despite everything, life turned out all right.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My impulse here is to hand out some *hugs*, but it occurs to me that the impulse is mostly towards your 10-yaer-old self for that bit right now.

[rosefox]

Can't speak for anyone else in this, but my life got a lot better when I started giving my 10-year-old self hugs on a regular basis.

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

Oh, cheers to that.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

the bit where I have lots of extremely cool friends.

[rosefox]

When I was 10, sex was endlessly fascinating. I imagine my 10-year-old self would be rather surprised to find that at some point it ceased being quite so fascinating.

In other nice surprises, someone very dear to me found a trust account that was supposed to be handed over to him when he turned 21. It contains slightly less than my annual salary at my last job. It is not such a nice surprise that the relative who set it up did not in fact hand it over upon the fated date (now almost two years ago), but it is a very nice surprise that he won't be flat broke, scrambling for a job, and possibly needing to move back in with his mother after he graduates college this May. I was worried about what he was going to do; I'm much less worried now.

[theferret.livejournal.com]

Let's see, things that would of surprised by 10-year-old self:

-I'm not afraid of heights, I love them.

-I wear glasses.

-I cut my hair short on purpose. (As a kid, I was always getting my hair cut short and not of my own choice)

-My sister and I get along.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"I'll cut your hair short" was a threat my mother used when I was doing something unpleasant to my hair. For example, I started sucking on the tips of my braids when I was 7, and Mom threatened to cut them off. It was quite effective -- I didn't want short hair -- and also quite proportional. It wasn't like, "If you're not ready to leave for piano lessons in five minutes, I'm cutting your hair off!" It was only a hair-related threat. And I think it was particularly effective because if I had shrugged and said, "Yeah, okay," instead of, "No, sorry, I'll stop!", it would have been a good sign that both of us would have been better off if I had short hair.

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

I believe my 10-year-old self would be entirely surprised to find out he would be going bald. My ten-year-old self had feathery 70s locks, he did.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

My 10-year-old self would be appalled that we haven't been in space yet.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

My inner 10-year-old still is - or at least, that more of us (that is, me!) haven't been, and that we haven't been any further than the Moon. She's got plenty of company, because my inner 8-through-40-year-olds also count it as a major disappointment in life.

On second thought, make that 13 through 40. Up until, say, 1982 (a year after the Shuttle's first launch) I don't think it would have been unreasonable to still be optimistic.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You know, I would not generally say that you are "significantly" older than me at this point in our lives -- the exact year distinctions get blurry after people are no longer in high school or even college. But by the time I was 10, the country had had a few post-Challenger years of fleeing headlong from anything that might have been even slightly interesting -- my 10-year-old self would have been angry but not even mildly surprised.

[aet.livejournal.com]

My 10-year-old self would be surprised (and jealous!) to learn that I DO have an hefty to be read pile of books in my house now.

I was always so hungry for books. Strangely enough, I STILL have this finding books dream (http://aet.livejournal.com/45544.html) now and then. And always part of the books I dream about are in languages I cannot read.

I do wonder how often other people dream about books and it makes me sad that nobody has offered THEIR book-dreams in comments of the entry linked above.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I dream of finding books, too, but it's almost always specific ones, in used bookstores. The ones people never finished, or the extra ones in series they never started, or the ones that would have been such good ideas if only they'd thought of them.

[brooksmoses]

Well, I have now offered a link to a post I wrote a couple of years ago about a book-dream, in your comments.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

My 10-year-old self would be surprised that I was not, after all, too old to care when we entered a new millenium. (I was disappointed when I did that math and found I'd be 33 at the time.) I might have been surprised that I'd decided not to have kids.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And 33, it was obvious at the time, was too old to care about anything?

I had something a bit like that, but worse: when I was very small, it really sank in for me that the reason I didn't have a paternal grandmother was that she had died. My dad's mother had died. I approached my mom about it, greatly worried: had my daddy been an orphan? How old had he been? Mom said he had been very nearly 25 and already married to her and expecting me, and at the time I was greatly reassured: he had not been orphaned, his mommy had not died when he was young.

Then I turned 25, and it sort of knocked the wind out of me thinking about how very much there was left that my mother and dad hadn't gotten to share with me yet, how young I was and how young my parents were. But when I was 4 or 5, 25 seemed infinitely old and capable.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

When I was 3 or 4, I decided 5 was the boundary past which you were a "big girl". I guess big vs little was an important distinction at the time. This becomes funnier if you see the picture of me at 6 or so, standing next to a limousine (my uncle worked as a chauffeur in grad school). I was roughly level with the top of the hood.

When I was 7 or 8, I was quite wroth with my parents when they referred to a 15-year-old as a "kid". Fifteen-year-olds were *babysitters*! And not the youngest ones, either!

Past 30, one would presumably be adult, settled and sedate, sitting with the moms instead of the kids and yes, not getting too exciting over anything except maybe boring stuff like whether your kid had cleaned her room.

Looking back, one factor was that at the time I really did know hardly any adults who did fun things. At most they took their kids to fun things and watched from the sidelines. Or maybe took their kids to fly a kite, but were clearly doing it on the kid's behalf. A little later there was my uncle, who's traveled all over the world, but when I was around 3-5 he was away in Vietnam and I suspect he didn't have the money to do much really interesting traveling until I was in my teens or nearly there.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ah. I had parents who did crazy fun things that shocked me as a child. For example, they took me out for pizza as a snack late at night once! We didn't get home until 9:30! I was just flabbergasted at the time: pizza was a meal! You ate pizza at dinnertime! How could this be?

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

That's probably something that works a lot better with an only child, logistically - when I was of an age to be excited by something like going out for pizza at night, my brother would have been young enough to be merely grumpy at being kept up past his bedtime.

The wildest thing I can remember is that they'd occasionally take me out of school on a June day to go to the swimclub, which we normally did only on weekends until school was over. But still, in that case, it was exciting for me to miss school but not a particularly wild thing for them (unless Dad also took the day off work. I can't remember).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My parents would take me out of school because they felt like it, and I learned a lot more that way, traveling various places and so on. Also when I would recite a school rule to my mother, she would shrug and say, "That's their rule, that's not our rule." And that was the end of that.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Travel is another big part of the lack of adventurous grown-ups in my early life. Someone a decade and a half younger was telling me the other day that she thought we had a lot in common and that she envied my travels because she hadn't gotten to do much yet. That got me thinking about the traveling I've done, and how comparatively late in my life it was.

My immediate family didn't travel much. I probably got out of state before I was a year old, but only because the next state is maybe 20 min. max from my parents' house. I did not get out of the mid-Atlantic states until I was 13 (my uncle took me to Nag's Head, NC); did not get on a plane until the week I turned 21; did not cross the Mississippi until I took my first full-time job on the other side of it at 22. Did not get to Canada and Mexico until somewhere in my midtwenties, got to my first noncontiguous country on my honeymoon at 26, first got to Europe at 30.

We did go on lots of educational trips in our own city, at least - and there's pkenty to see there. We just never traveled anywhere else. In comparison, my husband traveled in a car from the Pacific NW all the way to Florida when he was 7 or less.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I had been to all of the contiguous 48 states by the time I entered college, plus parts of Canada and some European countries. My first plane ride was before I was verbal, and I was verbal early.

This was simplified not just by being an only child but by being the only child of an only child. Logistics are simpler, cost is lower, money was less likely to have been spread out on a bunch of people earlier, on and on. And this was part of what my parents considered when they decided to have just one: they wanted to be able to travel with me and to keep doing certain things they enjoyed, and to share those things with me. It wasn't the only thing that made the decision for them, of course.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Had I decided to have a kid at all (not anti, just ambivalent - and ambivalent is not enough, I think) I would want only one, for exactly those reasons.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You are never too big to sit in your mommy's lap. It's just that past a certain size it becomes a Statement rather than a comfort thing.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

To my ten-year-old self living in DC and being married were certainly not possibilities. Boys (outside of my brother) were decidedly uninteresting beings and who would want to leave Minnesota?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Was your brother interesting to your ten-year-old self?

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

My current self is surprised by how long people can keep going, and how much of themselves they can lose while still remaining themselves.

My current self is also surprised by how wonderfully the words P'chiew p'chiew p'chiew! portray a certain Star Trekky phaser noise that I didn't really think was portrayable in print. Until now.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am pleased to have revealed the way of p'chiew to you.

There are all sorts of things we don't understand about self. I had a great-uncle who could not recognize his wife of several decades, but the things he tried to do to work around his total lack of memory were recognizably his things. Which did not make it easier, it turns out.

Some people subscribe to the bundle-of-sticks theory of selfhood/personality, and I have one friend who uses this metaphor to say, "When I was [age], I dropped all my sticks." I feel as though if this is true, I have a big ol' log in the middle of my bundle: I make sense to myself all the way back to when my memories start, before preschool.

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

P'chiew is totally a revelation, man.

I think one of the most fascinating things is that there are certain alterations of self that we can't think past - for example, graduate students who are failing out of their programs will sometimes kill themselves, because being a part of academia is so central to who they feel they are that getting rejected is akin to death. A friend of mine couldn't think past divorcing her husband for the longest time - this is probably part of what some people are dealing with when they won't leave bad relationships (which is not to dismiss the many other reasons why people sometimes won't leave bad relationships).

And yet the self remains. Even broken or shattered or bloodied beyond belief, our selves are still there. Which doesn't necessarily make it easier.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have to say that giving up the idea of myself as a physicist was fairly hard. It was something I'd had since I was 9. But writing came before it, and while my grades didn't show it, grad school was very bad for me.

One of the things that helped was figuring out that I didn't have to give up my relationship with my undergrad professors. That was part of my identity that was not due to alteration from a change in profession. Which was a relief.

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

I don't know a single person who grad school was good for, honestly. Some people manage to get through it, but the whole system seems designed to flay you alive and apply intense pressure to your most vulnerable points.

And that's interesting, because I feel like a lot of our identity isn't formed so much around what we are, but the people with whom we have relationships. And maybe the fear of giving up part of ourselves is really the fear of giving up connections with people we care about.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And I think there's a subcultural assumption that the difficult parts of any segment of academia are related to the difficulties one will encounter later: that if you strongly dislike one level, it is indicative that you will be poorly suited for the next. But many geeks (possibly even most geeks) did not enjoy high school, and it doesn't mean that they didn't do well in college, necessarily. (And many of the times when bad stuff from high school contributed to doing poorly in college, it was causal rather than indicative.)

What I'm trying to say here is that while the system seems designed to apply intense pressure to people's most vulnerable points, it doesn't necessarily seem designed to apply intense pressure to their most vulnerable professional points. That things that would not disqualify someone from being a good professor or researcher or etc. will disqualify them from earning the degrees that permit those things. That seems broken to me.

But yes. I am strongly a relationship person. I am wary of saying that our identity is formed more by the people with whom we have relationships simply because it's so intensely true for me that I can't see how it might or might not be true for other people. I am standing too close to it. But you may well be right in general; certainly you are very, very right for this subset.

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

Yes! Yes, exactly. The parts of people that grad school tends to break are not the parts that would have disqualified them from academia. It's a really shitty selection bias.

Re: relationship people. I don't know. I know a few people who are not so strongly relationship based. Maybe their triggers for the changes in their life that they would experience similarly to death are different. I still think that people in general are primarily social animals, and even the least sociable of us define themselves in large part through their relations to others, even if they don't think of it that way. So much of who we are depends on who we associate with. I know that's how I process things, certainly.