indirect thoughts

[calimac]

wild_irises wrote a moving obituary for her brother here. I didn't know him, but he sounds like a charming and wise man - as others have noted, a mensch - and, knowing his sister, I can believe it.

A couple matters in it struck strong personal notes, of different kinds, for me. One is that he became fascinated with computers early on, probably when he was still in high school, and he eventually became a renowned software engineer with a professorship. I suspect the consequent of that arose almost inevitably from the antecedent. Because in those days, computers couldn't really do anything yet. There was no word processing or spreadsheets, there were no games to speak of, there was no internet besides a few universities sharing files with cover letters. If you were fascinated by computers then, it wasn't because of what you could do with computers, but because of computers themselves, and of their future potential. I think anybody who was really fascinated by computers at that time must have had that special gift.

Because I didn't, and this is what has kept me from regret that I didn't get into that nascent booming field on the ground floor, though I could have. I just wasn't interested in computers per se, and I only got interested in them later on, when they could do things, for the things that they could do. For me, computers are just the tool with which I do them, as vehicles are just the tools that transport me to places, and any interest in their functioning is purely practical. "What good is a newborn baby?" Ben Franklin asked rhetorically of those inclined to dismiss a crude new invention, and a fair reply by those who don't care for babies would be, "Bring it back when it's grown up, then." That was my attitude towards computers. I wouldn't have had the drive to make computers grow up, because I didn't have the fascination that motivated those who did that work, and thus I would not have done well in their field.

The other is that "on his own [he] was a complete rule-follower, the kid born in 1955 who never tried marijuana, almost never got drunk, didn't drink coffee (or tea) until long after he moved to Seattle. He didn't date much either." Now this interests me, because it's relieving to find that I'm not the only member of my cohort who's never tried marijuana, who's never been drunk (the closest I came was on my first trip to England; having discovered English cider, still the only alcoholic drink I really like, I had two pints without lunch one day, and wandered around a little woozily for a while), doesn't drink coffee, rarely has tea, and never dated much. (I hated it, and considered the first, though not the foremost, advantage of a secure attachment with B. was that I wouldn't have to go out on speculative dates any more.)

But does that make me a "rule-follower"? I don't think so. I do what I do, and don't do what I don't do, because I feel no compulsion to do things that do not appeal to me, regardless of how many of my peers do them. Were I a rule-follower in the sense of a trend-follower, I'd follow the crowd. Were I a rule-follower in the sense of being conservatively conventional, I wouldn't have grown a beard; all that fashion did there was enable me to do so without being thought of as too eccentric. I grew it so that I wouldn't have to waste my mornings shaving. David N. grew a beard too, and he grew his long. I keep mine fairly closely trimmed for the same reason I grew it at all: it's less trouble that way.

Buried deep in the links to material about him is this talk about diversity, which I found linked to from this newspaper obit. The obit summarizes it: "Notkin said in that talk that when he started teaching, his students all looked and talked and thought like him. They were mini-mes, he said. He recalled joining a Pilates class and realizing that unlike his classes, no one there looked like him. He was in the minority and had to be conscious of how he was being seen and how his actions were interpreted. He told the audience they should all participate in something, particularly a learning experience in which they were the minority, to get a sense of how that feels." In general, he speaks of having been raised in a homogeneous subculture, in which everyone was pretty much like him.

The lesson I learned from childhood and even adulthood was entirely different from this. It was that similarities like a shared race, or a shared class, or even a shared sex are superficial. Interacting with people has taught me that they are profoundly different from each other, as soon as you strip away the social veneer, and they keep on being profoundly different until you get down to a level so basic (everyone needs food and shelter) that discussion of it is meaningless. I know I'm different - I've never met more than a couple people who remind me of myself, and have no idea what having a roomful of mini-mes would feel like - and my biggest challenge in life has been finding milieus where I would at least fit in, even if I was still different. Consequently, if a roomful of young women of color, for instance, would feel alien to me, and if I wouldn't know much about them, I wouldn't feel these things much more than with a roomful of just about anybody else. Maybe this contributes to my belief that everybody should be allowed to go their own way in personal habits and not bother anybody else; I don't know.