Partially Hinged
// April 17th, 2010 // People, Theories
I’ve not written so much here lately as everything got very busy and now I’ve moved and there’s lots going on project wise, but we can get to that stuff later, I’ll write more thezig posts soon, today I’ve been thinking about something else, personalities.
Our personalities are way more flexible than most of us imagine like a tide moving in and out. Sometimes we aren’t as nice as other times, because well we’re in a period of life when we just want to get shit done and we don’t have the spare capacity to stay polite, or be patient. We’re always in a state of flux, redefining and reimagining ourselves as a result of how others see us, the situations we find ourselves in, all this external stimuli are ingredients we blend up into the cocktail known as our personalities (this effect is magnifying by moving regularly or living oversees, both throw up loads of friction, stimulus and freedom for recreating yourself). I am acutely aware of this, and I regularly re-evaluate myself to check for signs of too little or too much of one particular personality trait. Did I get too arrogant? Am I talking to much and listening too little? I don’t know if other people do this, but often when I meet people I remember them for one trait in particular, sometimes it might be one specific sentence that they say and a light goes on in my head and I say to myself ‘that’s it for x, that’s my marker’. If I do that, or say that, or feel the same as this person, I’ve gone too far in one direction for that trait.
Thinking about this reminds me of a man I met in Laos although I don’t remember his name. He ran a hostel, he had a Lao wife, he was a strange man. Annett and he didn’t get along. I remember that this was established instantly and equally amongst them both, like two dogs in the park they sniffed each others rears, raised their noses defiantly, and walked away. “Kind of wound tight isn’t she?” “Yes”, “total fucktard isn’t he?”, “Yes”. I liked him, but then I can find something interesting in nearly every sorry specimen that crosses my path. When I meet people I like to try and figure them out, its my favourite game and while I’m often wrong, I play it for fun, not to be right. You get to imagine their whole lives, who their married to, who they wanted to be married to, how they grew up, whether their life turned out better or worse than their expectations, which is an easy one since for nearly all of us it never does.
When I met this man, it took only few minutes or two before I had him in one of my little pigeon hole boxes. In fairness it wasn’t hard, we made fun of some other backpackers together, the simplicity of the Lao sense of humour, then he told me how it took him 12 years to make his wife orgasm. He told me what a shock it was for him, but how it was more for her and that he thought she was having a stroke.
I’m not an old man, I’m still figuring all this stuff out and its not like I’m getting anywhere all that fast, but then I got time, so it’s okay. However, I’m experienced enough in normal social discourse to know that their are certain topics that you don’t cover when you first meet someone. You wait, you build up a certain familiarity, you talk about your dogs, the weather, your football teams, the weather (again), you have a BBQ together, your girlfriends become friends, the weather (again), you hang out when one of you has a bad day, you drink a beer, you talk it through….Then and only then, when that friendship is something warm and special and you can’t imagine, nor remember, not having it, then and only then, one of you can talk about your wife’s former inability to climax.
As this strange guy from Laos who had a hostel told me about his wife who he couldn’t make orgasm for 12 years I was playing my ‘try and work people out’ game and with a statement like that well he might as well have just handed me his biography, having highlighted the key passages to save my reading time. It was pretty obvious he’d been an infrequent visitor to the home of normal society for a long time. I guessed he was probably a hobo. Unsurprisingly it came out later in the conversation, one of several we’d have in the evenings while I stayed there that he was a hobo, that he’d spent his whole life bumming around from country to country.
At the point in the first conversation I put down one of my red flags this one was a giant do not cross marker for being unhinged. As he talked to me all I could think was how in terms of normal life he was broken, what would happen if you transferred him from Laos back to England where he was from. How would he function? He wouldn’t function, he was too far gone. I imagine he’d go crazy, and kill himself in a dramatic way, taking at least a few others with him on the way.
Of course for this to be any normal sort of a scale, if he and that story were going to be one end, I would need an opposing end and this comes from an old ex-friend of mine from England who shall remain nameless. He was so hinged, so functional, so normal that you couldn’t imagine him fantasizing about what it would be like to be king of the world, or him having the impulse to violently stab the person who pushes in front of him and steals the last seat on the subway, or what it might be that makes someone like this Laos guy opt out of normal life and disappear bumming from one country to another with no aim or reason other than that maybe they’re looking for or running from something. This friends hingedness made me as uncomfortable as the Laos mans unhingedness and together they form the scale to which I measure my sanity, how hinged I think I am at a given time. As long as its somewhere between those two markers, but not too close to either, I’m figure I’m doing okay and I’m happy for that level to slide around reacting to whatever else is going on in my life.
Why am I bringing this up now? Well, firstly because that thing with the markers, I always did it without really thinking about it, and only now that I’ve had to, so that I can describe it here for you, I understand it better. Secondly, because lately I’ve been thinking about how I’m slipping further towards the man from Laos end of the behavioural spectrum. Something happens when you don’t work a real job, hang around a lot all day by yourself in doors, live in countries where you don’t speak the language, where you mostly only do whatever you want, whenever you want, when you run weird little businesses like The Hipstery. As my 1st anniversary of self-employment approaches, I can see more clearly the numbing, sobering but very stabilizing effect having a normal 9-5 job has on you. I won’t forget it either, nor will I forget my too normal friend, or my unhinged Laos acquaintance. In between them all I’ll work to stay, but always being washed around by the tide.
Possibly related, hopefully entertaining other posts:
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michel
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Christian
