let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

I just did a major rewrite of my LJ interests after mostly ignoring them for about six years. I don't know if anyone who isn't me will care, but I'm intrigued by the differences between the words and phrases I chose to represent myself as a teenager and those I've chosen recently.

Interests I had when I was fifteen that I no longer have: amélie, apocalypses, apples to apples, bisexuality, boondock saints, boston, boy meets boy, bullwhips, california, captain jack sparrow, chervil, chuck palahniuk, concerts, cookie liberation, dance dance revolution, discworld, donnie darko, drabbles, dyed hair, erotica, fanfic, french, friends, good omens, grammar, hiptops, hot boys, hot girls, icons, intelligence, life, livejournal, postsecret, questionable content, rain, randomness, ravenclaw, rocky horror picture show, savage love, sleep, slytherin, south park, vampires, word puzzles, wordplay

Interests I have now that I did not have when I was fifteen: 400 babies, at swim two boys, decision science, attention economics, aus as thought experiments, barenaked ladies, being a superbowl hero, being named potato, braaains, coin-operated boys, competence, decision science, elegance in boardgame design, fandom, form-fitting trench coats, functional magnetic resonance imaging, geekery, grant morrison, high-quality satire, interpersonal social dynamics, japanese logic puzzles, jonah lehrer, jonathan coulton, judgment, judgment of judgment, kink, lalochezia, mahjong, making people laugh, malcolm gladwell, metacognition, minimalist fiction, motor proteins, mystery hunt, neuroscience, nociception, normalizing homosexuality, oxytocin, phenomena, phineas gage, physiological algorithms, plain strong black tea, preference, research, science, seattle, self-awareness, self-perception theory, service industry blogs, somatosensation, suit jackets over t-shirts, super-hyphen, tfuckingmesis, the fundamental attribution error, the game, the marshmallow test, the milgram experiment, the oh-shit circuit, the subjunctive mood, thinking, transformative creation, verbing

Interests I've had since I was fifteen: bad judgment, ben folds, body piercings, books, chocolate, cooking, dan savage, douglas adams, fight club (the book), go, harry potter, hikaru no go, homeschooling, honesty, juggling, learning, motorcycles, national puzzlers' league, nine inch nails, photoshop, purple, puzzles, reading, rps, slash, snakes, socks, reading, tattoos, terry pratchett, the administration, they might be giants, traffic hell, veganism, writing

When I was twelve, I spent an afternoon hanging out with a girl who was not like most of the people I knew. I think her name was Morgan. She was also twelve years old. She wore enormous hoop earrings and makeup applied so expertly that I wasn't sure it was there, and she liked SpongeBob SquarePants. (This was 2003, when it was fashionable for teenagers to like SpongeBob SquarePants.) She acted very bored, not with me so much as with the world, and I didn't understand her very well.

I told Morgan that she seemed normal. I said it apologetically, because in the world where I grew up, that wasn't a compliment. I spent my childhood around freaks and hippies, geeks and jugglers, people who valued intelligence and originality.

She didn't seem to mind at all. "Why don't you want to be normal?" she asked.

"Because then you're just like everyone else," I said. "You're just a conformist."

"What's wrong with conformity?"

I was flummoxed. I distinctly remember struggling to even process that question. I ended up stammering something about how I wanted to do something important with my life someday, and that I wouldn't be able to set myself apart if I never did anything differently, but it wasn't a real answer. I didn't have a real answer to that question. Conformity was bad because it was bad, that was all. When I liked things that other people liked, when I got into Pokemon and Harry Potter and Avril Lavigne, I insisted that they were exceptions, that they were good despite the fact that they were popular. I kept doing this through adolescence--sure, this song plays on the radio all the time, but it's actually a pretty great song. This TV show is actually totally awesome, even though everyone watches it.

I was a pretty smart kid, or so I believed because I'd been told that so many times, but I somehow never scraped together the sense to consider the possibility that things might be popular because they were good.

I didn't have an answer for Morgan because I didn't understand what I was talking about when I used the word "conformity." Conformity, in the context that I meant it when I denigrated it, means behaving in socially standard ways because they are socially standard. There are often excellent reasons to do this, which is another thing it took me a while to realize, although it can be dangerous to get in the habit of it.

But there are other reasons to engage in socially standard preference behaviors. It's possible to like a band or fashion for its own sake, not because everyone else does. I am of the opinion that Lady Gaga is a damn good musician, and I didn't come to that conclusion based on how many other people agree or how many people don't. I just like her music. And yeah, some people tend to blindly follow the trends, but trends don't exist because of the people who follow them once they're already there. Trends exist because of a whole lot of people who, individually, just like the music.

It's also possible to engage in a particular behavior not to join the masses, but to understand them. I read the trending tags on Twitter on occasion, not because I think I'll find anything particularly worthwhile there, but because there are a lot of people in the world that aren't me. I don't watch Glee because I think it's good; I watch it because there are a lot of kids growing up right now whose worldviews will be influenced by it, and I want to have that cultural context. (I also watch it because there are two plus-sized characters and five queer characters, and even if they're all as two-dimensional as the rest of the cast and the plots suck like they were written by Edward Hamhands, I can't help wanting to support that kind of presence on such a mainstream show.)

I'm not just figuring all this out now. I think I had most of it worked out in my own head by the time I was sixteen or seventeen. It's just hard to articulate, because preference behavior seems so ingrained. And it's really not. That's just mixing up the concept of ingrained behavior with the concept of impulse. Preferences are extremely impulsive, but they're not predetermined. They can be influenced and to some extent controlled by the most random factors. One of the factors that tends to determine my behavior is the drive to understand how people think. Sometimes that means taking conformist behavior seriously, and sometimes it means identifying and examining it in myself.

I've played Oregon Trail a total of one time, when I was maybe eight. I died because I refused to shoot any animals, and never touched the game again. Until just now, when I discovered Organ Trail, a fully playable zombie apocalypse version of the game. While I still wouldn't want to play a game that simulated hunting animals, I'm totally fine with squelching zombies, so I gave it a shot.

I spent a somewhat embarrassing amount of time playing, and I realized: this game is just like life. The inexorable plodding of time, balancing priorities, dwindling supplies, random surprise benefactions and equally random surprise emergencies, panic as a resource that was just fine a second ago is now completely gone, reluctant acceptance of unfair deals (that other survivor wants HOW many bullets for one muffler?)... it's a perfect little microcosm of adulthood, minus all the awesome.

Everyone else played this game endlessly during childhood and then had this revelation in the other direction, didn't they?

When I was maybe eight years old, I decided I wanted to be nineteen. Everyone else wanted to be eighteen, but I figured it would be better to place my ideal later, after I'd had some experience at adulthood. (An extra year seemed, to me, like plenty of time to iron out the kinks.) I considered aiming for after the drinking age, but that was old. Besides, I was pretty sure--accurately--that obtaining alcohol wouldn't be a problem for me if I wanted it. Also, although I only realize this in retrospect, the word "nineteen" is very aesthetically attractive in my mind.

I was wrong about many things when I was eight, but I was right about this one; nineteen has been a really great year for me. It started at the IJA festival, when my birthday was announced at the juniors competition. I got a Kit and had an extremely lucrative adventure in New York City, then I got a Mike and my first real apartment. I took cell bio and physiology and signal transduction, and really got biology as a whole, where I'd only had fragments and glimpses before. I got to spend some time with each of my brothers, and connected with the older two on a more adult level than we'd been able to when we were living together as adolescents. I was a TA, which was a valuable experience. I wrote my undergraduate thesis, which was actually pretty fun, even as it was kicking my ass. I graduated from college, and I got my first salaried job. I think my baseline happiness has been higher this past year than any previous year. There have been a lot of high points, and the low points have been mild and few.

Today, I deposited the last of the checks my dad has been sending me for college, meaning that from now on I'll be supporting myself entirely. Tomorrow, I turn 20 years old. I'm hoping the next year will be as awesome as this past one.

So kudos, eight-year-old me. Well predicted.