Plummeting and you and me.
So it’s not weekly, but twice in a month is an improvement for me anyway. So I’ll try and run with this. Sorry if I ramble a bit, trying to get used to this whole self expression thing again.
So a few weeks ago one of my friends fell out of a 3rd story window and wound up in the hospital for a few weeks. I went to visit him a few times and again at his new ground floor apartment while he gets his mobility back and it has been on my mind a fair bit.
I think everyone goes through some sort of moment when someone they know dies when they get very meditative about the nature of mortality and death and all that sort of thing. Meditating over your own mortality when someone else dies has become a clichéd actually, but I think it’s a pretty healthy one to go through (side note: when did all clichés become unacceptable? A lot of them are horrible but there are several I’m very attached to).
However this has been a bit different than that, notably my friend is still alive and recovering faster than anybody thought, so it’s not that I’m worried about the frailty or fleetingness of life. It’s more, through visiting him in the hospital a few times, I’ve become so aware of the network of people and social contracts that I move in. Everyone’s actions seemed so scripted to the situation, people knew exactly what to do. I mean that without cynicism, I was certainly as much a part of it as anyone else (in regards to the scripting part, not time invested) and it was only retrospectively after a few visits I sort of caught on.
I guess I don’t have anything profound to say about the subject, it was just a very good lesson for me in the roles of ideology and assumptions in society. The sort of total lack of surprise at everything, the shared assumptions of how things were to be that underlied all the interactions which orbited said elevationly challenged friend.
It was very reassuring, actually, knowing that such a network exists. As much as it seems totally unsurprising conceptually, feeling yourself to be a part of a larger ideology was for me rather unsettling. But at the same time it’s very comforting to know I have sweet ideology looking out for me. I guess there’s this sort of assumption that links any sort of presubscribed behaviour with strict dogma, and the very word ideology raises the heckles on necks. That was exactly my reaction reading a lot of post-Marxist criticism and discussion of ideology. But well it may lack a place in any utopian socialist paradise, in the current capitalist system its incarnations are not entirely malicious. Hell, if I ever fall out a 3rd story window I’ll count myself lucky to have people react the same way.
So a few weeks ago one of my friends fell out of a 3rd story window and wound up in the hospital for a few weeks. I went to visit him a few times and again at his new ground floor apartment while he gets his mobility back and it has been on my mind a fair bit.
I think everyone goes through some sort of moment when someone they know dies when they get very meditative about the nature of mortality and death and all that sort of thing. Meditating over your own mortality when someone else dies has become a clichéd actually, but I think it’s a pretty healthy one to go through (side note: when did all clichés become unacceptable? A lot of them are horrible but there are several I’m very attached to).
However this has been a bit different than that, notably my friend is still alive and recovering faster than anybody thought, so it’s not that I’m worried about the frailty or fleetingness of life. It’s more, through visiting him in the hospital a few times, I’ve become so aware of the network of people and social contracts that I move in. Everyone’s actions seemed so scripted to the situation, people knew exactly what to do. I mean that without cynicism, I was certainly as much a part of it as anyone else (in regards to the scripting part, not time invested) and it was only retrospectively after a few visits I sort of caught on.
I guess I don’t have anything profound to say about the subject, it was just a very good lesson for me in the roles of ideology and assumptions in society. The sort of total lack of surprise at everything, the shared assumptions of how things were to be that underlied all the interactions which orbited said elevationly challenged friend.
It was very reassuring, actually, knowing that such a network exists. As much as it seems totally unsurprising conceptually, feeling yourself to be a part of a larger ideology was for me rather unsettling. But at the same time it’s very comforting to know I have sweet ideology looking out for me. I guess there’s this sort of assumption that links any sort of presubscribed behaviour with strict dogma, and the very word ideology raises the heckles on necks. That was exactly my reaction reading a lot of post-Marxist criticism and discussion of ideology. But well it may lack a place in any utopian socialist paradise, in the current capitalist system its incarnations are not entirely malicious. Hell, if I ever fall out a 3rd story window I’ll count myself lucky to have people react the same way.