Normal to What?

People like to think that they're weird. They like to say that being weird is good. They encourage "just being yourself."
I posit that this is bullshit. [ref: http://xkcd.com/122/]
People are actually normal, and they want you to be normal. When "just being yourself" causes you to behave like a normal person, this is good. I'm not sure if this advice is also for people who are not normal. How much should you need to change yourself for the sake of others? What about just one person? How much should you be expected to fake what you cannot change? At what point are you no longer "being yourself." What if people don't like you? Should you wait until you find people that do? Or do you put more effort into appearing like a well-adjusted member of society? How much effort can you put into maintaining a normal appearance until the friends you make don't even know who you are?

During childhood, it is exceedingly obvious that fitting in is of utmost importance. Later in life we learn that it's also important to differentiate yourself. Just don't be too different. 


There's this idea that we grow up with that out there, somewhere, there is the elusive one. The one for us. A soulmate. It seems to me that the weirder you are, the smaller your pool of potential soulmates shrinks. Of course, you only need the one. But what if there comes a point when no one's left in your pool? What if you are simply too weird to find love? Are you somehow betraying yourself if you decide to become less weird?

What Do You Expect?

I sometimes get frustrated by the disparity between who I am and what is expected of me. Sometimes I feel that I cannot live up to expectations, leaving me a failure. Sometimes I tell Plato to go perform actions unsuitable for polite company, because the main difference between Me and Ideal Me is that I exist and anyone who wants anyone else will just have to deal. And then I remind myself that that isn't quite fair, what's so great about existing that makes Me more important than Ideal Me? And what makes you so sure that Me exists? How do you know that Me isn't just some distorted reflection of all the Ideal Mes manifested in this world of Forms?

There some interesting ideas that crop up in our culture (and possibly others, I don't know). I think that our culture as Americans is very self-centered. So much of our culture emphasizes being yourself. Finding yourself. Being true to yourself. I think of these ideas as very much for white people. It's not always about you or what you want. Sometimes it's about what you must do because that is what is expected of you. 

The idea of a Me is somewhat misleading, maybe even completely wrong. I think of it like an electron. You cannot "find" Me. You cannot pin down Me like a butterfly. Me is not a classical object. Me does not have a position or momentum except as a probability field. You cannot observe Me without changing Me. How can you be true to such a finicky thing? Can Me be discovered or must Me be invented? Does Me even exist? Or is there only the person living your life?

I sometimes feel expectations bearing down on me with the weight on inevitable disappointment. Like it's only a matter of time before I'm revealed as a fraud who never had it in them to live up to those expectations, or even worse, who could have lived up to them but simply didn't. 

To relieve the weight, I tell myself that I owe nothing to anyone. That all I really need to do is survive. I do not need greatness. I do not need happiness. I do not need money. I do not need friends. All I need to do is be alive. All I need to do is be sustainable. All I need to do is be alive until I'm dead. 

And then I become afraid that I can't even do that. I didn't say that my fears were rational. This leads me to a new life goal: Do not become a crack whore. I actually think that I can accomplish goal fairly easily as long as I never do crack. As long as I never do crack, no matter how bad life gets, at least I won't be a crack whore. And that's comforting, I don't really know why. Maybe it's just nice to have a lower bound on my life.

Maybe that is what I will tell My Future Kids: as long as you never sell your body in exchange for crack or leave your life to "find" yourself, I will not be disappointed. 

My Future Savants

I know that memorizing and learning are not the same things. I know that knowing lots of facts does not mean that you are smarter. However, I'm going to make My Future Kids memorize a lot of things. For the convenience, you see. Sure you could derive or look up your times tables every time you need it, but it's so much faster to have it always at hand. I wonder if I would be able to teach My Future Kids an internal indexing of the alphabet. I have to go through the whole sequence whenever I want to alphabetize things, but what makes the alphabet so different from integers? If you could just know the index of a given letter, you could know the relationship between any two letters rather than only as either before or after one another in a list.
I was never made to memorize presidents, but I know lots of children are, and I think that's useful too. Once you have the presidents and the years they were in office memorized, you have a reference for the whole time line of the united states. You no longer have to think about what was happening in the 50s or 40s or industrial revolution, you can just associate events with presidents and have a good rough idea of how it fits into the grand scheme of things. Similarly, My Future Kids will memorize the amendments to the constitution with dates and states along with capitols. They're going to memorize resistor color codes, the NATO phonetic alphabet, prime numbers through 100, basic formulas, trig identities, unit conversions, SI- prefixes, fundamental constants, knots, edible plants, basic first aid rules, and more as I think of them. They don't need to understand them at first. Hopefully, they will just have these lists and facts and things lurking in their brains until suddenly it's useful and suddenly they can go ahead and do things without needing to look up the formula or whatever they need.
As an added bonus, people will think they're really smart, which will make them really smart. Score!

My Future Tauists

This morning in the shower I made a decision. I shall raise My Future Kids to be Tauists.
I admit that when I was child I was a fan of math more than I was a mathematician. And yes, I memorized digits of pi. I now find this a little embarrassing, not so much because memorizing digits is lame, but because pi isn't actually all that great. Sure pi is cool and all, but you know what's even better? e. Ha, I got you, you thought I was going to say 2pi, but yeah 2pi is also better.
Now, it could well be that raising My Future Kids with less wide-spread fundamental constants is a bad idea. But at least they will be raised with a certain elegance that pi simply cannot offer them. Hopefully they will grow up with a deeper understanding of the relationships between circles and sines and cosines. It will be hard, to be sure, to adjust to talking to people who prefer to think in terms of pi (henceforth known as half-tau), but maybe it will help them switch bases.

I say that I want My Future Kids to learn tau because it will offer deeper understanding, but I have another reason also. It occurred to me this morning that should we make contact with an alien species and attempt to communicate in the universal language of math, we will find ourselves sorely embarrassed. In Stargate, I remember that there was some sort of test to prove that one's species was sufficiently advanced that involved half-tau. It is clear, however, that tau is a much more reasonable and intuitive constant to ask another civilization about. If another species approached ours wishing to forge a connection through the sharing of fundamental constants and basic proofs, I know that I would feel quite childish offering up half-tau with a much more sensible constant just a factor of 2 away.

May we all one day be tauists. May My Future Kids be the beginning of the move to more sensible mathematics.

I Wonder Where That Toy Airplane Went

The posts on this blog have two purposes relevant to Future Me: One is so I can remember all my great ideas about child-raising. The second is to record my thoughts and experiences for Future Me's reference, making the assumption that my experience is roughly equal to that of My Future Kids.

So here's my current experience. Here's my plea for forgiveness for being stupid, irrational, and confused.

I get annoyed when people tell me to talk about myself. This is for two reasons. Firstly, I hate having attention directed at me. Secondly, I don't enjoy talking about things that I don't know anything about.

I don't really know how to interpret my own experiences. What am I feeling? I don't know. Does my neck hurt? Maybe I'm stressed. Why do you suddenly want to cry? Did something sad happen? No. Do you miss anyone? Anything? Not really. What the hell is wrong with you? Fuck if I know. Is it the hormones again? Maybe. Why are you doing that thing? I don't know. Because it's expected? Because I thought I wanted it? No you didn't. Well, maybe I just wanted to want it. Well, do you? How can I tell? Fuck if I know.

I have a hard time parsing emotions and other such feelings unless associated with a physical sensation. As an example, when talking to my professors, I don't feel nervous, but the hot feeling in my face tells me that I must be.

I have a hard time trusting myself. Perhaps for because of the above.

I was in love once. I only vaguely remember what I felt, but I can remember what I thought. It wasn't even a very healthy relationship, but I remember feeling like it was the best thing. Being in love was the best thing, and it was unlikely that anyone had ever felt as I did. I don't know why it felt so wonderful and unique, but it did.  When I was in love, I wanted no one else and spending all of my time with my lover was just fine.

But that was love then. I'm a different person now. Different a few times over. How will I know if I'm in love again? Will it feel the same? Will it feel different? Was that euphoria just some kind of fluke? The definition I had for love has definitely changed. I used to think of love as valuing someone more than oneself, but I have since come to the conclusion that that definition is somewhat unhealthy. Those were not the greatest times in my life. Though to be fair, I plan on this definition being valid for My Future Kids and Spouse. However, right now that definition is simply not practical.

I used to think that what I wanted was smooches. Then I thought that what I wanted was someone to smooch. Then I realized that what I wanted was to be in love again. That's the current theory at least. And it makes sense, who doesn't want to be high as a kite forever?

There is a certain fear though. What if what I want doesn't really exist? Maybe I'm not capable of being in love anymore. What if that was just a one-time deal? I've been in a few relationships since, but I've had a hard time feeling anything for any of them. Dates and smooches are fun and all, but at some level, I almost just consider them a way of being polite.

Do you remember this, Future Me? Or as you might call it, Me Proper? When My Future Kids are angsty and confused and just doing shit for no discernible reason to you or them, please forgive them. With any luck, they, too, will grow out of it. Isn't that right, Future Me? Right?

Now, in the future.

This is a reminder to Future Me. This is a reminder to pay attention. This is a reminder to stay on your toes, because you'll never really know My Future Kids. This is a reminder to not get cocky. This is a reminder that My Future Kids will change faster than you can keep up with. This is a reminder to remember. Remember the person you were a few years ago? Keep that vague sense of embarrassment in mind when you bring up the person Child was a few years ago. Remember that Child cannot fix the mistake they made a year ago. Remember that Child is a new person now. Remember that they may or may not have learned from their mistakes and who they were then does not always dictate who they are now.
What I'm saying, Future Me, is that the goldfish incident when they were five does not determine their ability to take care of pets forever more. No matter how recently it feels to you, it happened much longer ago for them.
I have a theory about time in the context of one's life. Maybe we shouldn't think of it as an absolute length but rather as a fraction. Every year seems to go by a little faster, just as every years becomes a slightly smaller fraction of my life as I add more years.
I have another theory. Time we experience is inversely proportional to how much we are doing. As a corollary, time retrospectively is proportional to how much we do.
Maybe it's a combination of these. The point is that however much time you think has passed, Future Me, is not the same amount of time that some else thinks has passed. The point is that if you don't pay attention, My Future Kids will reinvent themselves three times before you think anything has happened.

Good Enough

What will I tell My Future Kids to make them happy and healthy and successful? Do they even get to be all three? At some level, I don't think they do, I don't think that anyone does, but maybe I'm wrong. Do I tell them that they're pretty? Will that make them more or less confident about their looks?
Whenever Parents compliment me, I assume them to be insincere and filling out a parental role in which they tell me things that are supposed to make me feel good. They do not. I either feel indifferent or I take the compliment as a sort of sneaky insult. Like a sort of congratulations for finally being mediocre at something you've been bad at for so long. I think that at some level this comes from my own judgments of the things I've done. If I feel that I have done something completely unremarkable or even the expected thing to do, and Parents praise me for it, then they have just sneaky-insulted everything I've done prior to that.
Should I compliment everything My Future Kids do? Only the things I consider worthy or praise? I want to be supportive, but I also want to be a trusted purveyor of opinions. Is it necessary to sacrifice one for the other? What if I complimented everything that was above-average? What does that even mean? My Future Kids should be held to a higher standard! How do I express to My Future Kids that good at something they really need to step up their game? Does having kids make you automatically love everything they do?
I hear they you're not supposed to tell your kids that they're smart. You're supposed to tell them that they worked hard. I don't know if that's the best way to do it though. I can see why calling them smart is bad. Everything is easy in elementary school. It's SO EASY to just be smart and get away with it, but for most of us it doesn't last, though it does last longer for some than for others. But praising hard work? Who works hard in elementary school? Maybe I don't remember it well enough, but I remember exactly one hard thing from elementary school, and I figured out long division the next day when Father explained it to me. I had friends who worked hard. They did a little better than I did. Is that enough? Why should My Future Kids work hard if they can work smart? How do you teach that? How do you encourage that? Maybe working hard should come first, and working smart can develop later? My hard-working friends still work hard and I still don't work very hard or very smart, but I guess I'm still smart enough that I'm okay but not so smart that I can completely get away with it, and I've always had trouble with classes that seemed useless or that I simply did not like.
Sometimes I can't tell the difference between what should be said and what isn't relevant. I should call My Future Kids beautiful because everyone is beautiful in their own way, but if everyone is beautiful, then why do we even need to say it? To remind them, I suppose.
Perhaps I should operate on the assumption that My Future Kids slash everyone has a very limited memory space and if I want them to know something I must repeat it often to keep them from forgetting. That sounds like good life advice that I will not follow, but maybe I will keep it in mind.
I don't want my praise to My Future Kids to be meaningless to them, but I don't really understand how to be both supportive and also not a blind complimentobot for My Future Kids. Maybe I'll figure it out when the time comes and the problem will unravel itself before me. Or maybe that's what Child 1 is for.