Introversion & Memory
I didn't want to go on the trip with these kids, but I felt torn between my awareness that I was being too antisocial (as usual) and earning a figurative gold star on my college applications as a useful member of this particular school club. I lived a lot in my head as a teen. My home life was adrift and full of conflicting messages ever since my dad died and my mother started turning into the type-A worrywart she remains to this day. (Theme song: Mel Brooks singing "High Anxiety," accompanied by female crabhat-wearing accordion-squeezing retirees.) I had a lot to think about. One thing I didn't give enough thought to was bonding with my peers. If it happened, I was pleased. As a senior, however, I sensed that it was a bit late in the day to be making bosom buddies with kids who usually couldn't get my first name right.
This was a yearbook field trip, and I honestly remember only about a half dozen things.
1. It was at UGA and we were chauffeured there somehow, probably in a big van or bus. Many of the kids were excited, because they planned to go to UGA if they got accepted. They needn't have worried. My brother went to UGA and was never a studious soul and he managed to get a degree after 5 or 6 years.
2. I was listening to bands that only three of my friends knew about or could pronounce. My traveling companions brought three cassettes with them: Billy Joel, Jackson Browne, and one I have blanked out. Probably the Eagles or Jimmy Buffet or Elton John. The sad thing is that these artists were equally popular with their parents, which is because these musicians were already having successful careers twenty years earlier. If you do the math, and assume an unlimited amount of battery power + tapes that were an average of 45 minutes long + 24 hours in day + a ride that lasted 4,000 years, you can estimate how many times I heard the entire content of each tape. Note also that my traveling companions enjoyed singing along, and not a one could claim fine pipes. Volume and enthusiasm were applied to cover the lack of technique, but it was not a successful attempt.
3. I got WAY too excited over chipmunks. They were everywhere, and I was charmed. My peers thought I was retarded, gooning over striped rodents.
4. We were housed in what was then the second-tallest building I had ever been inside, on the umpteenth floor, and the elevators worked when they felt like it. The building was a giant cinder block. It had no air conditioning. It was approximately 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At one point, my hair burst into flames.
5. There were a lot of discussions about parties I had not attended. I had been invited to a few, attended one or two, and had no interest. I recall being more annoyed by the casual impoliteness involved with discussing social events in front of excluded or absent parties like myself than anything. Only years later did it dawn on me that I was supposed to be envious or hurt.
6. I learned absolutely nothing about yearbook stuff.
There were some dramas going on. Girls threatening to pee into the currently disliked girl's shampoo. (I took this as a hint to forgo shampooing my hair, and was thankful my hair was dry and that it was only a three day trip.) Boys describing the only African-American in the high school as being so dark that if he closed his eyes and mouth in a dark room, he'd disappear, thus they all vowed to call him the Cheshire Kevin when they returned to school. Complaints about how someone wanted X type of car or boat, or Y brand of clothing, but their horribly neglectful parents had refused to furnish the desired item. A particularly long discussion about whether grape Bubbalicious gum smelled fantastic or foul. Gripes about sunburns (we all got one), then complaints about peeling skin and blisters, then tanline competitions. Plans to insert as many candid photos of themselves and their friends and secret in-jokes into the yearbook as possible before the typing teacher assigned to mother the troops reigned them in. Some innocent hijinks were plotted, but it was, as it happened, too hot to carry out anything complicated.
I didn't keep a journal then, so I can only remember turning inwards and thinking about chipmunks and developing a permanent hatred for Jackson Browne. I kept wondering why I agreed to go, and why I thought it would be a good idea. Now, don't think I was treated badly. I was, by my own passivity, human wallpaper. Pleasant enough, but not really the most important thing in the room. I worried about the babysitting jobs I had turned down so I could go on this trip in which I (honestly) had no deep interest, and counted all the unearned babysitting dollars I would have made. I regretted not bringing more books to read. I discovered that disc cameras suck ass. I bought my mother some cheap crap with her sorority's Greek letters on them, since mom and dad also went to UGA. I saw the disparity between the Greek housing and the GDI housing, and knew, then and there, UGA would not be on my list of colleges I applied to. I never had dreams of being in a sorority.
But...WHY don't I remember more?
It's weird what we DO remember. I had a conversation with an undergrad today, and we had similar childhoods. Separated by about ten years, we both were raised in "semi-backward" areas. She grew up in rural, farmland-rich Virginia. I grew up on a marsh island that had a grocery store, a Chu's convenience store, and two stables and some housing, but nothing else. We grew up without girls our age to hang out with, so we learned to hang out with adults or wander the woods as quietly as hunter-gatherers. We were reading Shakespeare at age 8, and understanding most of it, and our parents had both those annoying "for looks only" leather and gold-leaf-trimmed "classics" (that we read anyway, in terror that we'd spill something on them), but also had shelves crammed with less fancy books. We both picked up lizards and were not particularly dismayed by snakes, and had both been so inobtrusive as to be able to touch baby bunnies and squirrels. We kept racking up similarities, surfing with ease through the stages of childhood, until we reached high school. The similarities continued.
We recognized, without superiority and without begrudging it, that we were not part of the crowd in high school. Not because we were special or unique or, conversely, unpleasant or freakish. We just grew up learning how to blend and to internalize, to think and say little. Perhaps we had our own little doses of Walden, without the total isolation or poetic gifts of Thoureau. (One of my earliest attempts of poetry, at age three, involved rhyming things that were particular colours with those colours. I decided that, for example, that pink was like "no colouring in ink," because I had no pink ink pens in my otherwise complete set, I had only pink pencils if I felt the need to make something pink, and I wasn't overly fond of the impermanence and prissiness of pink, and I also decided that yellow was "a sunbeam warm and mellow" and grey was the color of "a donkey's bray". I guess that was pretty good for a three year old. Not high art, though.)
We both were raised to have minimal interest in television, and we grew up to be keenly interested in dark movies and black humor. Maybe this, too, is what comes from being an observing, nearly mute, solitary, constantly thinking, book-obsessed, sad (but not lonely), introverted child. Apparently an interior world is not sufficient to form useful long-term memories. We both recall feeling like we were incased in some kind of glass, like a museum display. We weren't unfriendly. We made friends. We cared about them and liked them. Thing is, folks who were casually insensitive or uninteresting (and, to be fair, we didn't give some folks a chance to BE interesting), we may have been wallpaper to them, but they were wallpaper to us, too. Our interior contemplations and friends were sufficient. We learned to be self-sufficient and comfortable in solitude and silence. I'm not sure this is a valuable kind of skillset in this modern world. Humans are social animals.
I found the conversation interesting, because there seemed to be a shorthand subtext operating. Each type of commonality seemed to eliminate the need to explain much about the next area of commonality. Soon we had a signal, a dipped chin and a pointed index finger, which meant "go on, me, too, I know what you mean and you can skip the 'why' behind it because I get it."
The conversation was inspired by some research presentations given by undergrads in a class I observed. This gal had done one on "netspeak / 1337" and when I offered to share my TA notes and observations with her, since she admitted she needed to finish her term paper that afternoon, we began to uncover those odd commonalities. Perhaps I'll go into detail about some of the discussion we had about her topic specifically, but I suspect that when I do, it will appeal mostly to my fellow Grammar Nazis who, for whatever unfathomable reason, subscribe to and read my less-than-regularly-timed blog posts. (I'm actually usually busy rather than uninspired; today I thought about about 20 things I wanted to write about, though, which is a bit more than I usually have to go on when I start typing.)
I think that I'm trying to sort out some ideas about how important introversion v. extroversion and activity v. passivity are when forming clear memories. I know that the more senses you engage, the more likely an event will "stick," especially if it is a "step-child" sense like smell or touch or taste. If you grow up primed to be powerfully observant and inobtrusive, even respectful of your surroundings (if you are, for example, in the woods and trying not to leave a trail or alarm the animals living there), does being so quiet and still reduce the power and duration of memory, because most of your memories are thoughts and subtle, quiet actions? I think this helps with concentration and "reading" people and situations, but it retards some abilities to tolerate small talk, and encourages you to ignore most fleeting interpersonal glitches. (Unfortunately, if you ignore most minor annoyances, you are not good at nipping things in the bud which will inevitably develop into major peeves, or which will lead to you having inadvertently encouraged a toxic acquaintance to push at your boundaries.)
It's been a day for ideas anyway. Some examples:
1. Exploration into games designed to help abused children who are in situations that encourage sociopathy develop empathy in other ways.
2. Handheld games / portables that are addictive and interactive enough to give smokers something to do with their hands, to replace fidgety smoking during downtime with an interactive activity instead
3. Microphone and datachip karaoke systems exist, but still need a television or projector. What if you went a further step and used cheap "laser pointer" tech (or similar) to project lyrics onto any flat wall or screen nearby? This would result in a truly portable teleprompter / karaoke / PA system.
4. Adoptable real-sized digital pets that are bought, for a pet adoption fee, to function as species-specific Tamagotchi-like replicas to train potential real pet owners, vets, et store owners, etc. "I need to be fed / walked / enriched with playtime now; my cage / box needs cleaning now; have you found a vet for me yet? / teach me a trick" Same idea as fake babies used in high school parenting awareness programs. Cost of adopting pet covers cost of electronic one, and so owner can trade in fake for real one, if they prove they can be responsible; but if they prove irresponsible, forget to return it, or prefer the bot, they keep it.
5. Also got more ideas related to my thesis topic, how to expand on a particular area of my concept. Insert boring waffling here.
6. Tangled with malware infestation on Spifftop (hence am currently on Craptop); and, despite being almost finished tidying up, I decided I had the best idea of all: I needed a really, really, really long nap.
There's a nest of idea nuggets I'm intrigued enough about to inspire me to Google around in hope that I will tie some things together and it will all click, and then it will either be an old idea I can learn more about, or a new idea I can think more about and see where it goes.
Naptime now, though.
.
This was a yearbook field trip, and I honestly remember only about a half dozen things.
1. It was at UGA and we were chauffeured there somehow, probably in a big van or bus. Many of the kids were excited, because they planned to go to UGA if they got accepted. They needn't have worried. My brother went to UGA and was never a studious soul and he managed to get a degree after 5 or 6 years.
2. I was listening to bands that only three of my friends knew about or could pronounce. My traveling companions brought three cassettes with them: Billy Joel, Jackson Browne, and one I have blanked out. Probably the Eagles or Jimmy Buffet or Elton John. The sad thing is that these artists were equally popular with their parents, which is because these musicians were already having successful careers twenty years earlier. If you do the math, and assume an unlimited amount of battery power + tapes that were an average of 45 minutes long + 24 hours in day + a ride that lasted 4,000 years, you can estimate how many times I heard the entire content of each tape. Note also that my traveling companions enjoyed singing along, and not a one could claim fine pipes. Volume and enthusiasm were applied to cover the lack of technique, but it was not a successful attempt.
3. I got WAY too excited over chipmunks. They were everywhere, and I was charmed. My peers thought I was retarded, gooning over striped rodents.
4. We were housed in what was then the second-tallest building I had ever been inside, on the umpteenth floor, and the elevators worked when they felt like it. The building was a giant cinder block. It had no air conditioning. It was approximately 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At one point, my hair burst into flames.
5. There were a lot of discussions about parties I had not attended. I had been invited to a few, attended one or two, and had no interest. I recall being more annoyed by the casual impoliteness involved with discussing social events in front of excluded or absent parties like myself than anything. Only years later did it dawn on me that I was supposed to be envious or hurt.
6. I learned absolutely nothing about yearbook stuff.
There were some dramas going on. Girls threatening to pee into the currently disliked girl's shampoo. (I took this as a hint to forgo shampooing my hair, and was thankful my hair was dry and that it was only a three day trip.) Boys describing the only African-American in the high school as being so dark that if he closed his eyes and mouth in a dark room, he'd disappear, thus they all vowed to call him the Cheshire Kevin when they returned to school. Complaints about how someone wanted X type of car or boat, or Y brand of clothing, but their horribly neglectful parents had refused to furnish the desired item. A particularly long discussion about whether grape Bubbalicious gum smelled fantastic or foul. Gripes about sunburns (we all got one), then complaints about peeling skin and blisters, then tanline competitions. Plans to insert as many candid photos of themselves and their friends and secret in-jokes into the yearbook as possible before the typing teacher assigned to mother the troops reigned them in. Some innocent hijinks were plotted, but it was, as it happened, too hot to carry out anything complicated.
I didn't keep a journal then, so I can only remember turning inwards and thinking about chipmunks and developing a permanent hatred for Jackson Browne. I kept wondering why I agreed to go, and why I thought it would be a good idea. Now, don't think I was treated badly. I was, by my own passivity, human wallpaper. Pleasant enough, but not really the most important thing in the room. I worried about the babysitting jobs I had turned down so I could go on this trip in which I (honestly) had no deep interest, and counted all the unearned babysitting dollars I would have made. I regretted not bringing more books to read. I discovered that disc cameras suck ass. I bought my mother some cheap crap with her sorority's Greek letters on them, since mom and dad also went to UGA. I saw the disparity between the Greek housing and the GDI housing, and knew, then and there, UGA would not be on my list of colleges I applied to. I never had dreams of being in a sorority.
But...WHY don't I remember more?
It's weird what we DO remember. I had a conversation with an undergrad today, and we had similar childhoods. Separated by about ten years, we both were raised in "semi-backward" areas. She grew up in rural, farmland-rich Virginia. I grew up on a marsh island that had a grocery store, a Chu's convenience store, and two stables and some housing, but nothing else. We grew up without girls our age to hang out with, so we learned to hang out with adults or wander the woods as quietly as hunter-gatherers. We were reading Shakespeare at age 8, and understanding most of it, and our parents had both those annoying "for looks only" leather and gold-leaf-trimmed "classics" (that we read anyway, in terror that we'd spill something on them), but also had shelves crammed with less fancy books. We both picked up lizards and were not particularly dismayed by snakes, and had both been so inobtrusive as to be able to touch baby bunnies and squirrels. We kept racking up similarities, surfing with ease through the stages of childhood, until we reached high school. The similarities continued.
We recognized, without superiority and without begrudging it, that we were not part of the crowd in high school. Not because we were special or unique or, conversely, unpleasant or freakish. We just grew up learning how to blend and to internalize, to think and say little. Perhaps we had our own little doses of Walden, without the total isolation or poetic gifts of Thoureau. (One of my earliest attempts of poetry, at age three, involved rhyming things that were particular colours with those colours. I decided that, for example, that pink was like "no colouring in ink," because I had no pink ink pens in my otherwise complete set, I had only pink pencils if I felt the need to make something pink, and I wasn't overly fond of the impermanence and prissiness of pink, and I also decided that yellow was "a sunbeam warm and mellow" and grey was the color of "a donkey's bray". I guess that was pretty good for a three year old. Not high art, though.)
We both were raised to have minimal interest in television, and we grew up to be keenly interested in dark movies and black humor. Maybe this, too, is what comes from being an observing, nearly mute, solitary, constantly thinking, book-obsessed, sad (but not lonely), introverted child. Apparently an interior world is not sufficient to form useful long-term memories. We both recall feeling like we were incased in some kind of glass, like a museum display. We weren't unfriendly. We made friends. We cared about them and liked them. Thing is, folks who were casually insensitive or uninteresting (and, to be fair, we didn't give some folks a chance to BE interesting), we may have been wallpaper to them, but they were wallpaper to us, too. Our interior contemplations and friends were sufficient. We learned to be self-sufficient and comfortable in solitude and silence. I'm not sure this is a valuable kind of skillset in this modern world. Humans are social animals.
I found the conversation interesting, because there seemed to be a shorthand subtext operating. Each type of commonality seemed to eliminate the need to explain much about the next area of commonality. Soon we had a signal, a dipped chin and a pointed index finger, which meant "go on, me, too, I know what you mean and you can skip the 'why' behind it because I get it."
The conversation was inspired by some research presentations given by undergrads in a class I observed. This gal had done one on "netspeak / 1337" and when I offered to share my TA notes and observations with her, since she admitted she needed to finish her term paper that afternoon, we began to uncover those odd commonalities. Perhaps I'll go into detail about some of the discussion we had about her topic specifically, but I suspect that when I do, it will appeal mostly to my fellow Grammar Nazis who, for whatever unfathomable reason, subscribe to and read my less-than-regularly-timed blog posts. (I'm actually usually busy rather than uninspired; today I thought about about 20 things I wanted to write about, though, which is a bit more than I usually have to go on when I start typing.)
I think that I'm trying to sort out some ideas about how important introversion v. extroversion and activity v. passivity are when forming clear memories. I know that the more senses you engage, the more likely an event will "stick," especially if it is a "step-child" sense like smell or touch or taste. If you grow up primed to be powerfully observant and inobtrusive, even respectful of your surroundings (if you are, for example, in the woods and trying not to leave a trail or alarm the animals living there), does being so quiet and still reduce the power and duration of memory, because most of your memories are thoughts and subtle, quiet actions? I think this helps with concentration and "reading" people and situations, but it retards some abilities to tolerate small talk, and encourages you to ignore most fleeting interpersonal glitches. (Unfortunately, if you ignore most minor annoyances, you are not good at nipping things in the bud which will inevitably develop into major peeves, or which will lead to you having inadvertently encouraged a toxic acquaintance to push at your boundaries.)
It's been a day for ideas anyway. Some examples:
1. Exploration into games designed to help abused children who are in situations that encourage sociopathy develop empathy in other ways.
2. Handheld games / portables that are addictive and interactive enough to give smokers something to do with their hands, to replace fidgety smoking during downtime with an interactive activity instead
3. Microphone and datachip karaoke systems exist, but still need a television or projector. What if you went a further step and used cheap "laser pointer" tech (or similar) to project lyrics onto any flat wall or screen nearby? This would result in a truly portable teleprompter / karaoke / PA system.
4. Adoptable real-sized digital pets that are bought, for a pet adoption fee, to function as species-specific Tamagotchi-like replicas to train potential real pet owners, vets, et store owners, etc. "I need to be fed / walked / enriched with playtime now; my cage / box needs cleaning now; have you found a vet for me yet? / teach me a trick" Same idea as fake babies used in high school parenting awareness programs. Cost of adopting pet covers cost of electronic one, and so owner can trade in fake for real one, if they prove they can be responsible; but if they prove irresponsible, forget to return it, or prefer the bot, they keep it.
5. Also got more ideas related to my thesis topic, how to expand on a particular area of my concept. Insert boring waffling here.
6. Tangled with malware infestation on Spifftop (hence am currently on Craptop); and, despite being almost finished tidying up, I decided I had the best idea of all: I needed a really, really, really long nap.
There's a nest of idea nuggets I'm intrigued enough about to inspire me to Google around in hope that I will tie some things together and it will all click, and then it will either be an old idea I can learn more about, or a new idea I can think more about and see where it goes.
Naptime now, though.
.