Human Composites

TL;DR I'm awkward, for sure, but there is a reason of sorts.

This one isn't about me tilting out over social interaction, I promise! Also, despite the title, this isn't content you'd find on a site about the Illuminati and everything. It's actually just an insight into the way I think, as far as I'm aware of it. You might equivalently call it "the degenerate ravings of a frothing lunatic," but I don't mind either way.

The basic premise is this: people are divided into discrete, cleanly separable categories in my mind and experience. These little boxes nest together according to type and size. If I can abuse the allegory, there's a big cylinder labeled "Family," inside which are smaller cylinders marked with people's names, and so on. There's also a big rectangle labeled "Friends," inside which nest many different boxes of friends (groups of people, loosely speaking). This is a kindergarten-level way to describe it, but I think you get the gist.

In case I was sounding too sane for you, the patterning of this next part gets a little bit Star Trek: Voyager. The containers for people are separable and fit within one another, but the people themselves are a little complicated. To avoid getting any more ridiculous than I absolutely have to, I'm going to say that people as I think of them are best modeled as functions of position on the axes defined by different categories, and let you figure out what that means.

I'm messin' witcha. The way people work in my mind really is like a position function, but let me explain in a way that makes sense. I just mean people have some properties of mathematical functions, in the sense that they have distinguishable shape, domains over which they're defined, specific amounts of their domains in each of many different categories, and in some cases points where the function goes "we don't play that" and returns an undefined value.

This is all fairly clean and clinical, and makes me sound a little like a machine, but I can verify this is not the case by two statements: a) there's more to it and b) machines work much better than my mind.

The complicating factor is that the functions are defined within the space of the categories I mentioned, but are discontinuous and defined in multiple categories at the same time. Those categories themselves are multidimensional and mobile, and you can easily see how it becomes a damn mess in here in short order.

Let's go through an example to confuse you further, dear reader. I often find myself hanging out with couples (third son, third wheel, as one does), in the specific case where I know both members of the couple.

Now, in this setting, I'm not actually with two people; rather, I'm hanging out with a minimum of three. There's Person A and Person B (the two people who constitute the couple) and a third composite entity representing the couple itself, which is its own different function layered onto the other two. This is really true for any combination of two or more people, but I find the situation of a couple is the most pronounced, easily comprehensible example. Two people they may be, but their individual functions are coupled by a third, higher-order function representing the dynamic between them.

I have a history of visiting with my friends one-on-one or two at a time, and I imagine you can see why. It's not that I don't like going to parties and seeing all my friends, or anything like that, but with how complex the individual function of each person is, and the additional complexity that arises in even a simple situation like the couple, the geometry becomes explosive after about five or so people.

Another example explaining why I occasionally behave so spasmodically, if you please. I made two friends in high school named Laney and Tory respectively, who are in extraordinarily different categories, though they do have their similarities. Laney's a dancer and artistic type where Tory is into chemistry and computers, and they were in disparate friend groups for the most part. Tory, as you might assume, was more in the clique with me and the other disembodied brains, where Laney was friends with a tight-knit group of cool kids (I don't mean that negatively; they were "cool kids" and also actually cool kids). Tory is an ardent socialist, and as far as I know Laney's not much interested in politics. You get the picture; these two functions are totally different shapes, exist in wholly different spaces, and even where they overlap their values are completely different. For the visual people out there, they're colors that don't match at all. (Tory is red, obviously.)

Everything was peachy, then, having figured the two of them out (with some projections and inference on my part, as I do) and sorted them into appropriate separable tubes, until I was made privy to an interesting fact about these two.

Tory and Laney are siblings.

Damn it.

To this day, anytime I see these two together, my mind seizes very briefly and spits out a dial tone while it reboots and corrects for the association. Say you were a neurotically organized cook, keeping everything in exactly the same places for efficiency, to the degree that your organization became autonomic, and then one day all the spices in your rack decided to spontaneously shift one slot over to the right. That sensation, best described as "...uh?," is a fair approximation for what I experience when I see two (or more) people in some unexpected configuration.

Now, it might sound to the reader as if I'm condemning people for being in association with one another, or even for being siblings, but I want to be clear that that specifically isn't what I mean. I love hanging out with couples specifically because of the added layer of complexity; I enjoy being made aware of the architectural silliness of my own mind, and learning to understand how I interact with these big complex composites of people.

Similarly, the momentary disconnection of my logic coils when I see Laney and Tory as a sibling unit is not a particularly unpleasant experience for me. It's like opening the file you keep pictures of bees in and finding a picture of a yellow jacket. (Why I have a mental file of pictures of bees is my own business.) It's not that it's "wrong;" a yellow jacket is just another member of Order Hymenoptera, and in many ways a very similar insect to a bee, it just isn't necessarily what I was expecting based on the file's (incorrect) labeling. Laney and Tory are an extremely cute pair of siblings (IT'S TRUE, TORY, SHUT UP), and are individually dear people; my mechanical mind-graph just didn't project them as a unit at first, if that makes sense.

Anyway, this has been a more personal post, and also a bit more pretentious than normal (if this were an anthropology paper I could title it Autoethnography: A Study of Dissonance between Category and Differential Realities, because ppppbbbbttt). As before, feel free to show people if it's interesting or if you're (God forbid) trying to describe/explain me to someone. I also adore feedback, so leave a comment (or an email to breakingberkeley@gmail.com if you're disinclined to public appearance, which I obviously understand). Ilá al-liqāʾ, everybody C: