Imaginary parasites & fallout
Feb. 24th, 2014 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateI had a dream last night in which we (sans Megatherium) had gone to visit jazzfish only to find that he & ulios had joined a band of loonies who were living in an Ikea store-- except this was an Ikea with pseudo-Victorian tea party sensibilities-- without the knowledge of the employees. So the dream was mostly wandering around in a huge space full of frilly display rooms trying to dodge store staff and find an unoccupied bedroom to stay in, and we never did find anybody we knew.
Today (after the Megatherium's 1 year wellness appointment & shots) we spent a little bit wandering around in Hobby Lobby being baffled by the impression of being in a mass manufactured shipped-from-east-asia antique shop. We could have gotten drawer pulls sculpted to look like balls of tiny antlers, but they didn't have the color of fleece I was looking for.
One of the reasons I haven't been writing is that my imagination has been colonized by one of those horrible thought experiments. Someone (you know who you are) posted the question a few years back: If present-you were suddenly redeposited into the body/timeline of 13-year-old you, what would you chose to do differently?
I immediately found this question to be horrifying, in that sort of way where you poke at all the ways it's horrible. After about a week of being upset by the first round of this, I mentioned it to grauwulf & made him promise that if we *both* suddenly were 13 again (despite the fact that I never even *was* 13; I decided to be twelve two years running & then skip straight to 14) then he'd have to track me down, since he would be nearly impossible to find. That conversation mostly laid the demons for a while, but something stirred it back up a couple months ago, and the whole concept has added itself to my thought patterns and goes around with various:
35-year-old-me couldn't possibly masquerade as 13-year-old-me. Everything is different: base vocabulary, posture & movement, context... I'd be the same height, but 45 lbs smaller with a closet largely unsuited to my present fashion sense. And two feet less of hair. You take a full adult & stick them back into an age that's not legally allowed to *do* hardly anything for years, & you wouldn't even remember where your classes were, or your locker combination. If you get on with your parents, the best outcome possible would be that they get cheated out of the rest of your childhood. If you don't, you're suddenly back under their thumbs with an adult understanding of how awful it is. None of your friendships & relationships would work the same way with the age gap, and you're back at the beginning of the teenage hormone rush with five years before you can legally date an adult.
Do you have a moral obligation to try to stop things like the 9/11 attacks? How can you, without getting yourself into serious trouble? What bits of your original timeline are you going to mess up because you can't be there to have the right conversations with people you end up not knowing again? Half you favorite books haven't been written yet, and there is absolutely no way to align all the things that need aligning so that you can re-create any children you might have had in your original timeline. And any kids you had in your second timeline would have shadowy siblings in your head that they weren't.
But even if you don't go all that way back (and have to re-finish school you've learned & already forgotten)... Give me four years & I could probably save the oak tree or buy up the woods they're trying to rezone for houses, but I'd have to watch my father die again. (and, I mean, do you *tell* someone "by the way, you might die of brain cancer at age 64"? or do you just agonize over it yourself for a decade until it's maybe in time to get earlier warning?)
It would be interesting to see physiological differences in a clear-cut manner-- how much did my headaches actually increase over time-- and there are a couple little things where I could make a good difference. But I'd be going not just to a time without the internet, but before I had a computer. Not just paper subs only, but paper market listings. And civics class in the morning, where you've forgotten the names of at least half your classmates.
And it just goes round and round in my head until "if I were 13 again..." becomes one of the normal ways my brain reacts to things when I'd much rather be contemplating cursed buildings that sink into the marsh or what exactly is up with the Nicetas's centurion's slave. Or replotting Greatwood, or making up silly stories to tell my real non-time-paradox child.
It's a displacement thing instead of being stressed in other ways, obviously, but I wish it would go away. If I were 13 again the first thing I would do would be to have screaming hysterics.
jazzfish only to find that he & ulios had joined a band of loonies who were living in an Ikea store-- except this was an Ikea with pseudo-Victorian tea party sensibilities-- without the knowledge of the employees. So the dream was mostly wandering around in a huge space full of frilly display rooms trying to dodge store staff and find an unoccupied bedroom to stay in, and we never did find anybody we knew. Today (after the Megatherium's 1 year wellness appointment & shots) we spent a little bit wandering around in Hobby Lobby being baffled by the impression of being in a mass manufactured shipped-from-east-asia antique shop. We could have gotten drawer pulls sculpted to look like balls of tiny antlers, but they didn't have the color of fleece I was looking for.
One of the reasons I haven't been writing is that my imagination has been colonized by one of those horrible thought experiments. Someone (you know who you are) posted the question a few years back: If present-you were suddenly redeposited into the body/timeline of 13-year-old you, what would you chose to do differently?
I immediately found this question to be horrifying, in that sort of way where you poke at all the ways it's horrible. After about a week of being upset by the first round of this, I mentioned it to grauwulf & made him promise that if we *both* suddenly were 13 again (despite the fact that I never even *was* 13; I decided to be twelve two years running & then skip straight to 14) then he'd have to track me down, since he would be nearly impossible to find. That conversation mostly laid the demons for a while, but something stirred it back up a couple months ago, and the whole concept has added itself to my thought patterns and goes around with various:
35-year-old-me couldn't possibly masquerade as 13-year-old-me. Everything is different: base vocabulary, posture & movement, context... I'd be the same height, but 45 lbs smaller with a closet largely unsuited to my present fashion sense. And two feet less of hair. You take a full adult & stick them back into an age that's not legally allowed to *do* hardly anything for years, & you wouldn't even remember where your classes were, or your locker combination. If you get on with your parents, the best outcome possible would be that they get cheated out of the rest of your childhood. If you don't, you're suddenly back under their thumbs with an adult understanding of how awful it is. None of your friendships & relationships would work the same way with the age gap, and you're back at the beginning of the teenage hormone rush with five years before you can legally date an adult.
Do you have a moral obligation to try to stop things like the 9/11 attacks? How can you, without getting yourself into serious trouble? What bits of your original timeline are you going to mess up because you can't be there to have the right conversations with people you end up not knowing again? Half you favorite books haven't been written yet, and there is absolutely no way to align all the things that need aligning so that you can re-create any children you might have had in your original timeline. And any kids you had in your second timeline would have shadowy siblings in your head that they weren't.
But even if you don't go all that way back (and have to re-finish school you've learned & already forgotten)... Give me four years & I could probably save the oak tree or buy up the woods they're trying to rezone for houses, but I'd have to watch my father die again. (and, I mean, do you *tell* someone "by the way, you might die of brain cancer at age 64"? or do you just agonize over it yourself for a decade until it's maybe in time to get earlier warning?)
It would be interesting to see physiological differences in a clear-cut manner-- how much did my headaches actually increase over time-- and there are a couple little things where I could make a good difference. But I'd be going not just to a time without the internet, but before I had a computer. Not just paper subs only, but paper market listings. And civics class in the morning, where you've forgotten the names of at least half your classmates.
And it just goes round and round in my head until "if I were 13 again..." becomes one of the normal ways my brain reacts to things when I'd much rather be contemplating cursed buildings that sink into the marsh or what exactly is up with the Nicetas's centurion's slave. Or replotting Greatwood, or making up silly stories to tell my real non-time-paradox child.
It's a displacement thing instead of being stressed in other ways, obviously, but I wish it would go away. If I were 13 again the first thing I would do would be to have screaming hysterics.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-25 03:04 pm (UTC)I also think of the saying "Good judgement comes from wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement". Maybe you'll get to make better mistakes, or different mistakes, but if the fantasy is supposed to provide you with safety from error and hardship- how much of an option is that, really, and how much of those hardships are actually necessary to round you out? I'm not romanticizing trauma; if you made me 13 again one of the first things I'd do is learn some really nasty self-defense moves and for some fairly good reasons. But turning your past self into a vehicle for fulfilling your present self's fantasies seems as cruel as any parent who rejects a child that refuses to be a carbon copy or a vehicle for their ambitions. I can't find it appealing.
(I would quote David Ray's poem Thank you, Robert Frost, but I think I've done that here before and would hate to be repetitive, although it might be thematic for the topic)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-25 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-25 04:48 pm (UTC)Yup. I have spent the past nine years getting to where adults-in-general do not have control over me and assume my incompetence, I am Not Interested in going back to that. There are maaaybe two life-things I could improve with greater perspective. But I do not want to impugn the work I did back then to get here by skipping over it in a time-paradox like Moffat's Doctor Who.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-26 08:44 am (UTC)These things together make me wonder... in most alternative histories that I've read, the protagonist with future knowledge is able to remember and apply it usefully. If I were trying to prevent 9/11, I'm not sure how much actionable intelligence I'd be able to give the authorities. I don't remember flight numbers or departure details clearly enough, I wouldn't be able to name most of the attackers or even give accurate numbers of how many were from what country. You never see that kind of uncertainty in those books.
If you don't, you're suddenly back under their thumbs with an adult understanding of how awful it is. None of your friendships & relationships would work the same way with the age gap
This seems to me to be how my late childhood already was. At 12, I had a really accurate grasp of adulthood. I was profoundly frustrated that I thought I was one and no one else did. In hindsight, I believe myself to have been right. I did know what I was doing, and no one believed me about that for years.
and you're back at the beginning of the teenage hormone rush with five years before you can legally date an adult.
This part I wouldn't have had... I hit puberty really late. So by the time my body cared, I was able to date an adult.