Tag: childhood

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Memories of My Childhood as a Girl

When I was five years old, I went to a preschool called Kinderfarm. It was in an old farmhouse east of town, with goats, chickens, bunnies. Lots of kids my age. I was a bit of a solitary child. I tended to play by myself. Coloring, playing with toy cars, dolls, action figures, digging in the sandbox while talking to myself.

One rainy day, while sitting on top of the indoor playground in the big room, a boy came up to me wearing a Denver Broncos football shirt. He really wanted to talk to me. Like, he needed to talk to me. I was low-key ignoring him, but he wanted to know what sports teams I liked. I didn’t know any sports teams. He said, “OK, what do you like to do?” I said I liked to go camping. I started telling him about the nice lady park ranger I met that summer, camping with my family in Arizona. How she told us stories …

“OH THE RANGERS! I like them!” And he proceeded to talk at me about baseball. He was very upset when it became clear I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. After a while, I realized that he was talking, yet again, about sportsball. I remember thinking something along the lines of, “What is going on with this creature? He seems totally alien. Why is he not understanding what I’m saying to him? Why is he obsessed with sports? Can’t he talk about painting and nature like a normal person?” Well, that, but in 5-year-old.

That is the first time I remember seeing strongly gendered behavior that absolutely baffled me. It is the first time I remember someone making a strong assumption about my likes, desires, interests, and knowledge, based solely on what I looked like. Over the years, there would be many more instances of this kind of thing, but each one was more subtle and nuanced, masked by the increasing knowledge of who the world expected me to be. With each such interaction, I got better at bullshitting.

“Haha! Of course I don’t want to try on that dress, that’s silly!”

“Haha!” Of course purple and pink are not my favorite colors!”

“Haha! Of course I don’t want to put on the rest of this makeup after putting on that mascara. That was just a joke! Haha that’s gay!”

“Haha! Of course I am not absolutely fucking mortified at watching “The Birdcage” with my family and being envious of the queens!”

“Haha! Of course that woman I fantasize about while having sex is who I’m imagining fucking, there’s no way that that woman is me and I’m fantasizing about being fucked, as her!”

Now tell me, what exactly is a “Nugget” and which type of ball are they concerned with?

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Thinking About Time

I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of Relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

-Albert Einstein

My friend Jonathan recently sent me a blog post from sci fi writer/mathematician Rudy Rucker’s blog of his memories of Kurt Gödel, compiled from several talks they shared in the 70s.  I think it’s interesting that Rucker published this piece within only a week of me publishing my thoughts about my interactions with RL “Bob” Morgan.  This isn’t by way of comparison of Gödel and RL “Bob” (although “Bob” did win the California state math championship in high school.)  Nor is it intended to compare my writing with Rucker’s.  It’s just an interesting coincidence.  If you read Rucker’s writing about Gödel, you may even come to the conclusion that it’s an inevitable outcome given the givens.

One thing that struck me about Rucker’s piece is his description of Gödel’s thinking about time- specifically, the idea that time is just one factor in spacetime, and that our perception of time is an artificial perception of an epiphenomenon of higher-dimensional reality.  When you combine this with Gödel’s unique way of thinking about thinking, putting himself in a position to think about very complex problems without the constraints of ordinary reality (cf: his idea that the human mind is capable of understanding the set of all real numbers even though Cantor’s Continuum Problem states that we aren’t capable of knowing the answer) I think you can begin to use the idea to think about time in some really interesting ways.

A black swatch watch on a wrist with pink time markings

One aspect of time that is quite odd is déjà vu – the feeling that something that is happening to you or a place you are visiting for the first time has happened to you before, or that you’ve been there before, even though this doesn’t seem possible.  I can remember having regular, powerful feelings of déjà vu as a child.  In one instance, we travelled to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.  There were several places there which I was sure I had visited before – they induced very powerful, almost exhilarating feelings of recognition in me.  Many people who I’ve talked to about these types of feelings report that they had much more frequent feelings of déjà vu as children.  I have not had any of these feelings since I was roughly eight years old.

I think that the Einstein quote at the top of this piece says something about the way we think as children that can be applied to Gödel’s thoughts about our artificial perception of “time.”  Perhaps, when we experience déjà vu as children, we are somehow accessing the  “unflattened” hyperdimensional reality of spacetime.  What is it that makes us lose this ability as adults?  Does everyone lose this ability?  When you start to explore some of the aboriginal cultures of the world, it seems that not all cultures lose this ability.  What is it about western civilization that causes us to fall out of touch with spacetime?