(no subject)

[eredien]

I am tired and crampy and so will not put anything cute in the subject line tonight.

The coolest tattoo I have ever seen has both all intrinsic meaning and none: it was an ad wherein one of the bison from the french Lascaux (?) cave was on the woman's left shoulderblade. Absolutely amazing and beautiful. I would get it, except, well, I can't for long and complicated philosophical reasons that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with culture.

This evening I have successfully applied for one job in Cambridge and looked at lots of apartment listings.

Wayman, you like designing games. Would you help me design a card game with body parts?

Rush-that-Speaks, I didn't know you were going to publish your journal.

I kept forgetting to write this thought, but Rush-that-Speaks' and Syona Keleste's journal entries about the Alien Contact panel at Worldcon have made me think about it again, so I am posting it here:

I think the easiest way to explain the mindset of someone who is Otherkin is the fact that you are constantly getting culture shock from an alien culture. However, everyone else assumes you're a native so you can't act like a tourist, who has the perogative of ignorance or immunity and is therefore able to laugh in wonder--or speak out in dismay--at the differences. Sometimes you forget, even, that you're a tourist in that culture, but then something jogs your memory. And, like visiting a foriegn land where the people have a different mindset, it's very tiring but you get to see a lot that the people who live there all the time might not notice.

That's it.
And the fact that you sometimes get very frustrated because you lost your passport on your way here and can't get home.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Not all of it, I think. Selections from my journals eventually, including my LJ, and concentrating on my travel journals, which the LJ will become a more substantial part of when I am in the Peace Corps. But yeah, memoir is on the list if I look back on my life and find it interesting enough.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

What a vivid description.

I don't know as I'd ID myself as Otherkin, but I feel the way you describe - a lot. The feeling of doing Particpant-observation in a group I ostensibly am just supposed to be part of.

We did this exercise last year, part of Diversity and also Bonding and all those things they do with first year students. They divied us up into groups, and gave each group a "culture" with a couple of easily learned customs and mores. And we had to play-act this culture, while sending a couple of people at a time to go observe the other culture. At the end of the exercise, we had a discussion.

It shocked me, first of all, how quickly people had formed alliances to the culture they had been randomly assigned for a mere 45 minutes. Fierce rivalry, group pride, you name it.

And when polled, virtually everyone said they loved their own culutre, and felt strange and confused and isolated when going to observe and try to interact in the other one.

Then there was me. I hated the culture I'd been assigned to, for one. But also, it was so hard to feel pressure to follow all those rules that I didn't understand. But when I went to the other culture, even though I knew less about what was going on there (they were speaking a different "language") it was OK not to know. Becuase I was just a visitor. It was much safer to be a visitor and not quite know what you are doing, than to ever admit you don't know, or understand, or care about the mores of a group that is only nominally your own.

Only it wasn't OK to feel that way during an exercise where everyone else adopted group identity in a heartbeat, and. . .accoring to the rules of the group around me most of the time these days, I guess it's really unsual to feel that way in life as well.

[gallian.livejournal.com]

that makes perfect sense. i was just having a discussion about the phenomanon recently myself. about how it's easier to see clearly because it always seems like i'm just outside. but that being just outside can be really really frustrating. especially when people value what your being just outside brings, but don't understand it, or what it really means.

gallian.

[breimh.livejournal.com]

I find myself dealing with this a lot. I'm an outsider. I've been kept apart since as far back as I can remember, from my family, and thus from my circle of friends. I was always thrust into a type of 'mentor' or leadership role; the one who was kept in the forefront because he could see the issues from all sides and play the peacemaker/diplomat between one group or another.

It's lonely, yes. And often, you feel like you might just fit in somewhere, only to have someone say or do something (whether consciously or subconsciously) to show you're still an 'interloper' or 'outsider' and thus not really a part of that group.

In all honesty, I see so many who are like that, or just don't hold to the norms of a given culture or society, and they seem so... ~lost~ and abandoned. (That's the only way I can really explain it, though that's not really right either.) They want to belong, but have no real culture, and lack the ability to found one on their own, so they seek out groups to try to fit into. Most find the more deviant vestiges of international society's groupings... the ones that are more apathetic, or sordid, or even reserved. And they might feel comfortable with one or another for a while, but like all groups, these all go through the states of forming, norming, storming, conforming and adjourning. Ever-shifting and changing, eventually to the point that one doesn't feel comfortable there, at one of these stages, and moves on to some other group. An endless cycle.

Categorizing someone as Otherkin might work for a few, for others it doesn't. It's all a matter of what one is comfortable with. But in the end, we do find a few who hold ties that bind... interests that hold enough similarity that form a bond and hold a connection. These are the ones who we sometimes take as mates, or other times consider our dearest friends or surrogate family.

Given time, we all come to the conclusion that there are many groups, but we are only truly a part of the group we each form ourselves.

This is what I've learned just through living life and studying relationships. I thought I should share it with you.

[khava.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting.

I've been thinking about this kind of thing lately in conjunction with political parties. It's so easy for people to get caught up in "Democrats are good and Republicans are evil" or "Democrats are evil and Republicans are good" even if they themselves hold some political positions from each of those groups and other positions that neither group believes. Even when your political views evolve away from one of the parties, you can still feel an intense loyalty, a comfortableness around the party you're used to and a wariness towards the party who has been the opposition. (See exhibit A: Democratic Senator Zell Miller giving the most anti-Democratic speech at the Republican convention, but saying "I will die a Democrat.")

I'm also beginning to think that my "outsiderness" has very different roots from yours, Eredien and Gallian, and the rest of our college friends. You mostly describe being confused and left out. I think that I removed myself from the mainstream high school group purposely, because (a) I really didn't have much in common with other people and didn't care to associate with them, (b) I thought it was weird and creepy for everyone to be the same, and (b.5) I was and still am uncomfortable with the feeling of being wholly part of a group in a kind of Neitzschean "Apollo and Dionysos" way.

But the really interesting part is that I recently decided that I'd chucked the whole "mainstream" thing without fully examining it, and that I should go back and check it out. I'm still not very good at integrating, but it involves less acting than I expected and parts of it are actually fun. I haven't decided whether it's true yet, but it's very odd to consider the idea that maybe I'm not really different from "most people", I've just removed myself from them by choice.