Thursday, November 15, 2012

Who The Hell Am I/Who The Hell Are We/You?

On Monday my brand-new Nokia Lumia 920 (Red) arrived - about which more later* -  and, being Jon, I totally fucked up the activation somehow, so by the end of the day I still didn't have service on the new phone.
To resolve this, I opted to stop at an AT&T store on the way home from work.  The nearest, most conveniently-located** store that I knew of was in the Dulles Town Center, so that was where I headed.
On the way there it occurred to me that there's a Walmart Super Center near the Town Center and that there were a few things that I could stand to pick up from there while I was in the area.
That thought prompted this exchange:

Me:  Are you fucking kidding me?
Also Me:  No, I'm not "fucking kidding."  We're right here; we might as well stop there.
Me:  But it -
Also Me:  I know.
Me:  I just -
Also Me:  I know.  I also don't care.  Just do it.
Me:  Asshole.
Also Me:  What was that?
Me:  You heard me.

These sort of exchanges happen between myself and myself pretty frequently, as I've mentioned here in the past, and as I've also mentioned in the past, in thinking about myself, I tend to vary the pronouns I use, which  is something of a reflection of my splintered consciousness.
Sometimes I use "I" or "me," but I frequently use, "you," and, on those occasions when all of the splinter personalities have achieved consensus, "we" or "us."
We I have been trying to get away from this practice, and attempting to standardize on a first-person view of myself, but it's been tricky (to say the least), given that, as can be seen above, I don't often find myself agreeing with - or even getting along with - myself.
Beyond that, there's just forty years' of habit backing it all up.
So far it's mostly resulted in things like this happening:

(Getting ready for bed)
Me:  (Thinking)  Okay, tomorrow is cardio day, so when we get up -
Me:  (Aloud)  I, dammit!  When I get up!

I'm thinking that the solution is to make a fundamental shift in how I think.  That is, I have to stick to a mode of thinking that's primarily visual, or based on impressions, rather than in a combination of images and impressions accompanied by a sort of expository voice over narration.
Honestly, I don't need to think in complete sentences at all - I understand my thoughts without having to explain them to myself - so I'm not sure why or how I ever started doing that in the first place.
That will probably be even trickier, and I don't know if we're up to it.

*I will provide more detail at some point after I've used it for a while longer, but I'll let Eddie Money give the overview of my initial impressions:



**To the extnet that anything in Northern Virginia - a place designed by people with a fetish for inconvenience - can be considered conveniently-anything.

3 comments:

Merlin T Wizard said...

I know why...comic books. Full narrative whether you needed it or not, augmented by Saturday morning cartoons. All of you in there were doomed from the beginning. Doomed, I tell you, doomed!

Tevyn said...

Um... why change? Are you just tired of the multiple commentaries. I can tell you I'm not tired of it. I rather enjoy your rough battle of self as I think it ultimate defines a large part of who you are. I LIKE who you are! But if you feel the need to correct what you see is a flaw then you have my support. Tell me how I can help.

Jon Maki said...

Yeah, I've more or less figured as much - my life is just as static as the images on a page, and most of my life tends to be lived in the space between panels, so I have to provide some expository narration to fill in the gaps between action sequences...

As for the "why" question...a lot of reasons, though I suppose that the main reason is that I tend to be at odds with most everything in life, so it seems like, in the face of that, I should present some sort of unified front, and at the very least stop being at odds with myself.