eredien | (no subject)

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.

Threaded | Flat

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.

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.