Now with more mirror-universeness
. . . and you modeled yourself on a combination of Adolf Hitler and Mr. Spock. - My college roommate, circa 1987, countering my relentlessly logical assertions that it was just as easy for him to put his coffee cup in the garbage as to drop it on our floorI've been thinking a lot this week about why I was the way I was in high school and for a time afterward. Though he was very drunk at the time, my roommate did have it half right.
Spock, of course, prided himself on being relentlessly logical in all things, and was very good at suppressing his human side. But the one thing that agonized him more than having a human side was the thought that others might see the human emotions he so studiously hid behind the mask of pure logic (think of "Amok Time", for example). That's the way I was in high school. Partly, I was a precocious little adult, of whom my AP English teacher could remark in class "I can't picture M as a freshman" (as an aside to his explanation of why he wouldn't teach freshmen, that you don't become a fully rational human being until at least age 16—I took it as a compliment, and think it was intended that way). Yet another part of me was this weirdly Spock-like character. I was shy, like many, and so wary of asking someone on a date that I never did, but if only shyness had been involved I think I would have found a way to overcome it. However, my real mortal fear was of having other people, generally, see that I had human emotions, of which going on a date would be conclusive evidence. It didn't matter who the other people were, or how close I was to them. I remember being mortified one All Saints' Day when my dad found a witch's hat in his car that I had borrowed the night before—damning evidence, to my way of thinking, that I had gone to a Halloween dance with someone. I'm totally serious. This incident concerned me. I didn't want it known—even by my own father, who might have been relieved, that I'd been chauffeuring around a witch or sorceress.
I actually would attribute a bit of this character to watching way too much Star Trek as a kid and identifying way too much with Spock. (There are probably kids from a younger generation who got far more screwed up emulating Mr. Data, and I pity them.) Of course, I'm mostly joking about the Spock thing, but I'm still not sure of the real reasons I was that way. In those years most of my ego-definition was based on being really, really smart. And in those years my ego-definition seemed inseparable from my "presentation of self." I've come to see how silly it is to base such things on any slender reed, but I certainly wasn't reflecting on that at the time. Being smart was the source back then of much of the external reinforcement that in later years I came to take from multiple sources, like having the best neckties. I really think I believed that the reason people liked me was because I was smart, and I remember being shocked when my first serious girlfriend told me that my being nice was much more important to her than my intelligence (this from someone who was positively brilliant).
I'd taken so much of my reinforcement from being "the smart kid" that I didn't really grasp that no one whose opinion mattered to me would change their opinion of me if I did something stupid, or if I revealed some illogical affection for someone. During high school, it seemed to me that showing normal human feelings ran counter to being smart and logical, that it would make people think less of me (wanting them to see me as an intellectual demigod, of course) or even give them a power over me (an idea I have not completely abandoned because it is on some level correct).
When someone recently asked me what advice I would give to my 18-year-old self, I decided it would be "People care both more and less about you than you think." Pity I wasn't around to actually deliver that advice. I might have had much more fun in high school.
Although this blog could be an object lesson in not revealing too much of oneself to the world—this is an unprecedented level of personal reflection for an entry, I believe, and you're unlikely to ever see an unmasked adult likeness of me here—I do think I'm not so much like that anymore. Sort of, but not really. And I've had the goateed "Anti-Spock" look going for me for more than five years. Now perhaps we see the real reason I've never shaved off the goatee.
Anti-Spock did have one thing that's still beyond my reach: a device for remotely disintegrating enemies.
Labels: what passes for introspection
posted at 11:29 PM
3 Comments:
It's not always easy to look at ourselves with the same scrutiny we give others. This was a piece full of fascinating insights. I had never considered how the personality of a TV character--a fictional person!--could have such an influence. Parents, friends, teachers, mentors....yes, but Spock? Well I'll be damned.
The Spock thing was more of a hook than a statement of literal reality. I think being Spocklike doesn't imply that I really modeled myself on Mr. Spock. However, I did watch an awful lot of Star Trek in syndication during grade school. 4 p.m., Channel 12. So you never know.
I wasn't counting the platonic prom date with someone I'd been friends with since age four, for the very good reason that it really doesn't count. I was smart enough to know that I would regret not attending my own senior prom.
Insights like this are so freeing...
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