Who Aren’t You?
The news ticker crawling around the building said “Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Today, Everyone Is Irish”.
Not me. I don’t feel the need to glom onto everyone else’s ethnic festival. I didn’t wear a mask for Purim last week and I’m not wearing green today. Besides, I’m Protestant. I prefer to stand back and watch the festivities and see if there’s anything interesting to be learned about people by observing folk rituals on occasions like this.
One conclusion I’ve come to in both my observations of myself and others is that while many of us will never figure out exactly who it is we are, almost all of us experience moments in life where we discover who it is we aren’t.
One such moment resonates clearly with me to this very day even though it took place nearly a quarter-century ago. It was in the spring of my freshman year in college. I had enrolled at Polytechnic University in downtown Brooklyn to become a civil engineer. I would be following in my brother’s footsteps. Except there were two problems: all of the classes bored me to tears, and I wasn’t nearly bright enough to be able to do the work. Being dumb, bored and 18 I wound up splitting my time between hanging out at the student center and shoving quarters into video games at the arcade on in the Fulton Street mall after a lunch of cheap fried chicken at the local cheap fried chicken establishment (downtown Brooklyn in the mid-80s was a very different place than it is today).
One night in May I wound up in the upper reaches of Yankee Stadium with a guy I had befriended in one of my classes who was a huge baseball fan. Back in those days you could get cheap seats at Yankee Stadium for, well, cheap. Probably under ten bucks. Since we were under age and lacking fake IDs we didn’t drink at the games so it was a cheap night out. We watched the game and talked about the things 18 year olds talk about, and one of them was music. I was just beginning the heaviest live-music-attending phase of my life and was enthusing about this band or that and how great it was to see live music. My parents didn’t let me go to my first show until I was 16 and would never pay for me to see shows so at 18 it was still relatively new and fresh to me. It was during one of my enthusiastic gushes that my friend (I don't remember his name as I fell out of touch shortly thereafter) stopped me and said “You know, I don’t know why you like to do that."
“Do what?” I said.
“See music performed live. If you own the record, you already have the perfected version of the song. All a band can do live is make mistakes.”
I was speechless.
“Besides, now that we have compact disks, the recordings sound better than any live performance ever could.” (For you kids in the audience, CDs were still a relatively new technology in the mid 1980s).
I couldn’t swear to you if it was that exact moment or shortly thereafter but that conversation made me realize that not only was I not smart enough to be an engineer, I couldn’t think like they did either. Seeing the world only in pure, literal, mathematical and scientific black and white was something I was not capable of doing. I’m not saying I’m better or worse because of that because I have no idea if it’s better or worse. It’s possible, very possible in fact that those of us who don’t have that literal, dispassionate view of the world are the ones holding humanity back. We’re keeping pure logic and reason from dictating the future course of the species. Damn, we suck.
The road to self discovery is filled with existential potholes. However part of discovering who you are is figuring out who you aren’t. After all, isn’t that a part of the scientific method? Test your hypothesis, do the experiment, and if it fails think up a new hypothesis. Hell, that’s not just the scientific method, I suspect that’s how most of us live our lives.
Not me. I don’t feel the need to glom onto everyone else’s ethnic festival. I didn’t wear a mask for Purim last week and I’m not wearing green today. Besides, I’m Protestant. I prefer to stand back and watch the festivities and see if there’s anything interesting to be learned about people by observing folk rituals on occasions like this.
One conclusion I’ve come to in both my observations of myself and others is that while many of us will never figure out exactly who it is we are, almost all of us experience moments in life where we discover who it is we aren’t.
One such moment resonates clearly with me to this very day even though it took place nearly a quarter-century ago. It was in the spring of my freshman year in college. I had enrolled at Polytechnic University in downtown Brooklyn to become a civil engineer. I would be following in my brother’s footsteps. Except there were two problems: all of the classes bored me to tears, and I wasn’t nearly bright enough to be able to do the work. Being dumb, bored and 18 I wound up splitting my time between hanging out at the student center and shoving quarters into video games at the arcade on in the Fulton Street mall after a lunch of cheap fried chicken at the local cheap fried chicken establishment (downtown Brooklyn in the mid-80s was a very different place than it is today).
One night in May I wound up in the upper reaches of Yankee Stadium with a guy I had befriended in one of my classes who was a huge baseball fan. Back in those days you could get cheap seats at Yankee Stadium for, well, cheap. Probably under ten bucks. Since we were under age and lacking fake IDs we didn’t drink at the games so it was a cheap night out. We watched the game and talked about the things 18 year olds talk about, and one of them was music. I was just beginning the heaviest live-music-attending phase of my life and was enthusing about this band or that and how great it was to see live music. My parents didn’t let me go to my first show until I was 16 and would never pay for me to see shows so at 18 it was still relatively new and fresh to me. It was during one of my enthusiastic gushes that my friend (I don't remember his name as I fell out of touch shortly thereafter) stopped me and said “You know, I don’t know why you like to do that."
“Do what?” I said.
“See music performed live. If you own the record, you already have the perfected version of the song. All a band can do live is make mistakes.”
I was speechless.
“Besides, now that we have compact disks, the recordings sound better than any live performance ever could.” (For you kids in the audience, CDs were still a relatively new technology in the mid 1980s).
I couldn’t swear to you if it was that exact moment or shortly thereafter but that conversation made me realize that not only was I not smart enough to be an engineer, I couldn’t think like they did either. Seeing the world only in pure, literal, mathematical and scientific black and white was something I was not capable of doing. I’m not saying I’m better or worse because of that because I have no idea if it’s better or worse. It’s possible, very possible in fact that those of us who don’t have that literal, dispassionate view of the world are the ones holding humanity back. We’re keeping pure logic and reason from dictating the future course of the species. Damn, we suck.
The road to self discovery is filled with existential potholes. However part of discovering who you are is figuring out who you aren’t. After all, isn’t that a part of the scientific method? Test your hypothesis, do the experiment, and if it fails think up a new hypothesis. Hell, that’s not just the scientific method, I suspect that’s how most of us live our lives.
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