Oh. You're not all me after all, are you.

The problem with statements that are trivially true in most cases is that in those cases where they're not, they tend to be very not true, and for very non-trivial reasons -- but that because they're so obviously true in so many cases, it can be difficult to identify or admit those where the statement doesn't apply.

(The above statement may itself be trivially true in most cases. The author chooses instead to invoke another time-honored principle and leave the proof as an exercise for the reader.)

So. The trivially true statement for this evening's exercise is: I tend to become friends with people who think along the same lines as I do.

If you were to chart out my friends based on the relative strengths of their Myers-Briggs types -- ignoring for the moment the conceptual difficulties of plotting anything in 4-space -- you'd see heavy clustering in the NT part of the graph. I suspect there would also be a strong tendency toward introversion, though I don't have any intuitions about how the P/J distribution would shake out. This is not too surprising; I generally test out as INTJ, but have come up INTP in the past. I find it easier to get along with people who tend toward detached evaluation. Big shocker, right? Right. The same can be said for hobbies and interests; throw me in a room with a bunch of random people, and as long as they're all talking, I'll find the hacker/gamer/libertarian/writer/what-have-you within a matter of minutes.

This is all, as I said, trivial.

I was lucky, in high school and my undergraduate years, to happen across people who had similar attitudes to mine not only in what they thought, but how they thought. I found friends who discovered patterns quickly; who had a talent for rapidly identifying the core questions in an essay, a math problem, a psychological situation, what-have-you; who enjoyed both the process of finding answers and the satisfaction of having-found. These people have become far, far rarer over the years, and the ones who don't have this mongoose-like ("Go and find out!" -- it's a Kipling reference) attitude often don't even understand what it is that's different between me and them. (When my last relationship ended, the ex in question remarked on our lack of "common interests" as a way of explaining to himself why we split up. On the surface, the assessment is accurate -- but it's such a surface assessment that just thinking about it makes me feel a bit sad.)

I don't click with a lot of people, but the ones with whom I feel the deepest kinship are my fellow mongeese. Mongooses. Whatever. It's comforting, this feeling of sameness; my brain recognises people-who-think-like-me as nonthreatening, as people around whom I don't have to keep my guard up, people to whom I don't have to explain my motivations because they already intuitively make sense.

The non-trivial bit is one of degree. (I really should have said "usually already intuitively make sense," above.) Rabbit holes (cobra holes?) may go down a long damn way, sometimes forever, and everyone stops at different places. My stopping points are never going to be identical to another person's stopping points, even if our sets have a large intersection, and it's especially jarring when I discover a point that I don't share with someone with whom I have an especially large intersection.

Convincing myself that these discontinuities aren't terribly important isn't hard, but putting the sense of what happens when I find one into words is. This may seem silly, but it's really pretty recently that I came to comprehend the fact that, wow, other people don't all share my underlying principles -- and while I understand now, at least intellectually, that this is not the case, apparently I still don't have it all worked out intuitively.

This has been driven home a couple of different ways, this trip home: in disputes with my mother over how one ought to spend one's time at home, in retrospective conversations with friends about water long since under the bridge, in another (non-TMI, even) conversation that got aborted abruptly because the other party just didn't want to know about it, in a completely unexpected email from someone I once hurt very badly because I just couldn't understand where his motivations and goals differed from mine or indeed why they would at all.

(I am a terribly selfish person, but it hasn't always been on purpose.)

Anyway, universe, you have gotten your point across. We can move on to the next one now, thanks.

I'm unsettled, tonight, but it's the kind of instability that comes from stress-testing foundations and replacing the parts that need it. Perhaps I shall hang an "Under Construction" sign on my head for a little while. In the meantime, though, the world is entering a season of birth and growth; all things in their time, and perhaps this is the time for that.

Merry Christmas, all of you. I wish you health, happiness and understanding in the new year, not necessarily in that order.

I still have my hands.

When I was very small, my folks had a series of hardcover books called The Family Creative Workshop. It was a multi-volume set of arts-and-crafts books, partitioned out alphabetically; the C volume, for instance, had sections on Costumes, Cosmetics, Cryptography, and Calligraphy. (This is in fact where I learned what cryptography was. But that's another story for another time.) I've always had the sort of handwriting to which an epileptic ten-year-old's could be compared favourably, but something about the Chancery Cursive and Blackletter Gothic scripts in these horrible 1970s black-and-white photographs captivated my five-year-old self, and once I discovered that a chisel-tip fruit-scented marker could make a fair approximation of a chisel-tip nib, I was off like a shot, decorating pages and pages of green-and-white tractor-feed printer paper with practice alphabets of every description.

My parents were always quick to encourage anything that remotely looked like artistic ability, so calligraphy markers and, later, fountain pens were provided as part of the stash of art supplies in the cabinet. It was never anything I pursued obsessively, like writing or programming or radio, but it was always something there in the background, an option if I cared to exercise it. I occasionally made illuminated Christmas and birthday cards for people, and once an illuminated set of liner notes for a mix tape, but nothing terribly big or fancy.

Then, a couple of days ago, I discovered that I might need to provide a gift for someone I hadn't expected to hear from. An idea immediately popped to mind -- a copy of Philip Glass' Symphony no. 5 -- but giving someone a burned CD, unless it's a mix CD, has always struck me as a terribly impersonal gift. It occurred to me that one way to remedy this problem would be to provide my own version of the lyrics which, in the boxed-set that I have, came on beautifully printed heavy cardstock folders. Thus, for the last few days, I've been slowly illuminating excerpts from the Rig Veda, the Qu'ran, the Book of Genesis, the Kumulipo, and so on and so forth. I doubt I'll finish it in time to give him the entire thing, if indeed we do end up running across one another at all, but at least it's something unique, and it's been good to feel the pen in my hands again. I like the slow, controlled, deliberate way the letters flow out; when it works with a light touch and your fingers aren't sore from gripping the pen after a few minutes, you know you're doing it right.

(I used to have terrible nightmares about my hands being severed at the wrists. There was never any blood, nor any act of severing; my hands were just gone with no explanation. They stopped about the time I started working for Compaq. I'll leave the search for symbolism to those who know enough about my history to provide their own context.)

I also had a deeply geeky idea which I shall have to put into place once I have more different colours of ink to play with. I see a trip to the art store in my near future.