i found this in a notebook, dated this day. i find it interesting, somehow. usually my notebooks are not so lucid. --april 25, 2002
It’s so easy to
underestimate people. It’s a very bad habit and I’m trying not to. People, for the most part, seem actually to be acutely aware of their surroundings at all times. I can only say that because I know how people change with regard to their environment. I’m not talking about this in an
evolutionary sense. I’m just noting what we all know: that people act differently around their parents from how they act around their friends, or their dogs or
teachers or
what have you. Usually when someone starts talking to a dog or a little white rat or kitten, their fingers will get twitchy and their voices will get very low or
very high, depending on how masculine the dog or rat etc. is thought to be. Voices and postures change around this or that person, too, but usually it’s more subtle. I don’t like it when people talk like morons to animals, but at least this is easily identifiable: Oh,
ignore him,
he’s obsessing over his
pet rat.
I’d probably need lots of training and whatnot to be qualified to classify behavioral patterns but I can tell you from my view in this philosophical armchair that it all goes back to the earliest years you can remember. I had a friend in first grade who is textbookperfect for this topic. Her name was Sara, and she had a lot of sweaters. She wore sweaters and stretch pants almost every day. She had this one in particular that was black with little teal, blue and pink sweaters on it. It was fascinating. (She also had a planter’s wart on her foot that she liked to show off, but that is entirely tangential. She really was a good-natured girl.) She really wanted to be tough, to be like a boy, but she wanted the girls to like her, too. (Good-natured, yes, but insecure as hell.) So, around the girls, she’d giggle and talk about the horses she wanted and the fashion magazines her mother subscribed to, and around the boys, she was always up for games of Turtles (more on which later) and jokes about vomit. Playing Turtles entails a borderline-violent game of high-energy tag, wherein everybody is (obviously) a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and Sara was very good at it. (I guess I was thoroughly a girl, because somehow I always had to be April, the news reporter who wears the yellow jumpsuit, which was lame.)
It was too bad about Sara that she couldn’t just pick a third personality that resembled who she actually was. Sure, my point’s banal, but I’m feeling wistful to-night. Anyway. This goes on! But the older people get, the more sophisticated they get, and the more seamlessly they blend and hide. I’m not withdrawing my guilt, but I am conscious. I remember I met a guy at the pool at a hotel in California one summer, and, in the course of our one fifteen minute conversation, I gained a year in age (this was before I knew that he was six months my junior anyway) and a brother in the army. I wasn’t trying to impress with that last bit; I just wanted to feel more interesting with no consequences. I can’t be the only one who’s done this.