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

[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.