7 August 09
Unidimensionality, a Reflection
Davis is a small enough town that you run into people you know well often, people you know less well just as often, and people you hardly know at all pretty much just as often too (these are the people whose name you have learned several times but can’t remember it, nor can you remember the context in which you last saw them, such memory lapses leading to annual embarrassment which I am now happy to blame on menopause).
One of the middle type (a cyclist) only ever seems to see me as a birder. On running into each other, the conversation tends to go like this:
Me: Hi, D.
D: Hi, A! Guess what I saw at my house yesterday! A heron!
Me: Oh, that’s nice.
D: Yes, it was posing/eating/standing/flying (etc.)
I’m not sure why this bothers me so much, but I think it’s because it reduces me to a tiny fragment of my personality, reflecting only one of scores of interests. (It’s akin to when people catch a tiny fragment of my accent and wonder where in Ireland I’m from.) I have actually raised this with D, that I do a bit more than bird. Readers of this blog probably suspect, with good reason, I’m multidimensional to a manic fault.
So I figured it must be a context thing, and started a map of my different personae across Davis. It’s all in the mapping. What would your personal map look like?
(I realize I have trespassed on Numenius’ turf; it’s both his turn to blog and his profession. Sorry, Numenius. You can have the next two.)
Previous: Two Historical Atlases Next: Gerrymandering
Love it!
Ditto … I mean I love this too! And what a picture it makes of your life in “context.”
You left out ‘Servant of Cats’ at bottom left.
Is that all?
Feral Cat Rescuer?
Funny! You know you’ve tapped into something interesting when your idea makes other people want to think about how it applies to them… and I want to make my own map now!