Robert Heinlein, in his book “Time Enough for Love” said:
A human being should be able to
change a diaper,
plan an invasion,
butcher a hog,
conn a ship,
design a building,
write a sonnet,
balance accounts,
build a wall,
set a bone,
comfort the dying,
take orders,
give orders,
cooperate,
act alone,
solve equations,
analyse a new problem,
pitch manure,
program a computer,
cook a tasty meal,
fight efficiently,
die gallantly.
Specialisation is for insects.
James Blake, about his music (to Channel Tres):
I constantly do different shit.
I think that's why sometimes I don't always have the most uniform sound,
if you know what I mean?
I sometimes wish I did certain things more often.
I think I've got music ADD.
For those who don’t know; James Blake is bloody good.
We’re not one person, but multiple people that change over the year and have already changed a lot over a lifetime. Serendipity did most of the work in bringing me where I am today. I assure you that it was genuinely not fate.
Oftentimes it was the fruit of hard work, sometimes it was the pure privilege of knowing someone that could help, and sometimes I made decisions based on late-night conversations with weirdoes a few hours before making it to work.
We “are” to others a perception, a 10,000ft view based on a series of samples of our life. Sort of the line of averages through an erratic histogram.
Our life appear differently to ourselves, the people we like… and “The Others”, whom we don’t like to talk about. And we also may appear to all and ourselves nothing but an unfair exaggeration of our last 10 minutes of embarrassment.
I am part of a few communities, both by birth and by choice. And I know from experience that the pigeon holes some put me in will shift shape over time. Yesterday’s emperors, who once made us proud, are naked men today. Even our grand-parents might not always have be the honourable people we may now see them as. And love it or hate it, that’s people changing - like a rock with different strata.
I’m not a designer, engineer, writer, or anything else. I am not a specialised, “exceptional-at-one-thing” humanoid. And probably neither are you.
The only places where my life is a coherent narrative are job interviews, and we’re probably all guilty of over-using a creative license there too.
So if you find me to always beep-beep-boop exactly when you think I would, or if I start to sound like a text book, then feel to utter words to help me become a human again.