April 14, 2012

  • Glimpses of Souls

    There is a lovely site, oneword.com, where each day a common word is featured. Everyone has a minute to write about that word, although time limits aren't enforced. Sometimes I write on it just for the pleasure of generating a chain of thought and chunking it onto the Internets. Sometimes I read what people before me wrote, but usually not very much. A lot of them are unbearable, the heartbroken laments of people writing about romances. I've found that any word can be turned into a lament about a romance.

    The trouble is that, like xkcd says, "our brains just have one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit." It works both ways. If one sees many many pictures of Biden eating a sandwich, then some of them become great. And if I see many many tales of heartrending woe, then the scale refits itself, and most of them become merely average. They bore me. Each is enough to occupy a great deal of a person's mental processing. They can induce profound emotional reactions in that person. But to me, sitting here reading hundreds upon hundreds of artistically-vague unhappy sentiments, (often with the exact same imagery! (What is it with teary rain and objects shattering?)) they are all alike.

    I think you can compare love to anything. You probably don't even need to try all that hard.

    Sometimes people write long essays, paragraphs upon paragraphs, or perhaps verses and verses of poetry. I tell myself they are exceeding the one-minute suggested limit, because my limited experience does not permit me to imagine someone who can think and type so quickly.

    But today, I came across this wonderful entry about the word "remember":
    Remember me. Remember who I am. Who am I? I’m 24601. I stole a loaf of bread 19 years ago, but I have reformed to be a better man. Bring him home. Bring him home.
    It's very compelling somehow. The first thing that caught my eye was the number 19, and when the eye falls upon it, I can't help but see "loaf of bread" also, and then I know exactly what it is. What it's referencing, and also that it is referencing my favorite musical, and not its novel or movie counterparts. As I read the words, I hear the songs in my mind's ear, and I imagine the author (identified only by a username) sitting before a computer with his mind full of song. I feel like I've shared a moment with an unknown stranger from the Internets.

    Perhaps he will never know that he's made an Internet stranger take a second look. But it does sort of make me want to generate stuff that makes people take a second look.

    Perhaps next time I write some tropey romantic ballade, I'll compare love to a trilobite or a segmentation fault or something.