Archive of things to do with 'perception'

• 03.24.08 Turnaround two-step:

  A: A friend of mine asked me a question the other day. I think he wanted to know: was I happy? but for me, he put things in an interesting light. He said, I thought travel was the thing you loved most of everything. I thought you couldn’t live without it. And yet you’ve stayed here, in the same town, hardly leaving, for four years. You’ve made two cross-town moves but you live in basically the same way. And he was right in a way I don’t think he understood. Because what I love is the regular day-to-day. It’s the regular habits and routine I fall into, that is where my heart is, no matter how simple or homely it is. What I call travel, and I do love it, is just another way of enjoying a routine. It’s the same regularity and familiarity and warmth, renewed and refreshed by exposure to different places and different pressures. It’s a small kind of variety, but it’s the sort that suits me. I wouldn’t like the life on the road and the kind of life that would never show the same face twice, the life of the visitor on the surface. It’s the life of a resident for me.

  
  Tags: self, taste, travel, dialogue, perception, habit, interpretation.
• 03.21.08 Learning about character:

  A friend of mine surprised me last night. I know him about as well as I know anyone, though I don’t see him that often - he doesn’t see anyone that often. I know his interests, I know how he behaves when he’s upset, I know how he’s most comfortable and I know his own particular way of undermining himself. I am familiar with a range of motions and postures and it’s easy to pose him in my mind to match whatever position in whatever diorama I want to fit him in. But I didn’t expect to see what I saw and it makes me wonder what I have learned about him at all. Learning as a concept has been tying me in knots recently, and I get lost trying to think about what makes up character as well.

  We biked up to visit him with a bucket of compost from our apartment, we’ve been helping make mulch for the garden.

  
  Tags: reading, personality, thinking, money, anxiety, perception, character, politics, learning.
• 11.27.07 Message in a bottle:

  Listening to the radio the other day I heard a program (sort of) about the 1977 Voyager spacecraft, launched into space with a golden record and other goodies; the hosts of the show talked to several moderately well-known people and asked what they would include. Philip Glass, for instance, would include Bach and Tuvan throat-singing (details unspecified); Neil Gaiman would include the The Wizard of Oz, among other things. Several of the folks interviewed included things it would be difficult to include on a gold record: mandarin oranges in syrup, or an entire meal at Chez Panisse. Naturally, this got me thinking…

  
  Tags: self, reading, personality, change, taste, travel, detail, project, boredom, philosophy, thinking, water, fear, library, future, letters, language, context, value, music, unfinished, rhythm, mood, pace, time, smell, idle, anxiety, performance, perception, concept, kaleidoscope, level, character, arrogance, navigation, politics, cicada, memory, dream.
• 04.10.07 Stray thoughts:

  I used to think: faces are like characters, or they match them. It might seem that people don’t look like who they are, but you think that because you haven’t understood yet what they look like. I also used to think (and I’ll still say it, if I’m feeling pressured) that people aren’t who they are:

  
  Tags: personality, work, management, turkey, philosophy, simile, money, idle, perception, character, arrogance, politics, history, comics, illustration.
• 04.03.07 Levelling:

  What strikes me more and more now as I am rereading this book is how many different ways it finds to reflect its facets on each other. I’m not sure where to find the point of origin of any of its themes. Or are they themes, like melodies in a piece of music, subject to repetition, variation, and inversion? - or are they more like the instruments, themselves invariant, producing the infinite variety of melody?

  
  Tags: personality, psychology, regression, travel, detail, language, levi-strauss, Tristes Tropiques, perception, concept, kaleidoscope, level.