What does this make me?

From an early age I began to receive training in psychology. I watched grownups as grownups watched me, and I learned the most cardinal of lessons in behavioral psychology; that there is no trainer and trainee, there is no unchanged component. There are at best two beings that modify their actions in the context of each other. There may be a power imbalance, perceived or real but there is no true distinction in the level of commitment to communication, you will always get exactly what you give.

So a lot of people worked on training me to listen, and I listened. When they wanted me to speak they could barely shut me up. I learned from them, sometimes even what they wanted me to learn, sometimes no more than I never wanted to see them or their kind again. The best thing I learned from them was to question myself intensely.

Several years ago I decided to start writing down my dreams. This in and of itself isn't a very big event in my life but it pointed to a continual desire to understand the closest most fascinating creature in my field of view; myself. If this seems a tad egocentric it probably is, but to me it seems fairly silly to try to understand anything else first... I am my first lens and my only true tool, if I don't have a firm grasp on me, how can I hope to have a firm grasp on anything I am seeing? My dreamlife was alive and powerful; I had no idea what it meant but it seemed a shame to let it all slip away from me. This was the raw stuff of my mind and I wanted to get in there and learn how it worked. I wanted to learn how to change it, to read it and rewrite it and understand my own psyche at the level it operates. Dreams were only one of a thousand ways I went in and began to explore my gray matter.

Like any decently complex and powerful system my mind is not easy to learn. I have dabbled in any number of different approaches... explored what I could in neurophysiology, clinical psych, Jung, anthropology, mythology, several religions, 12 step programs, self help books, family history and genetic likelihoods and many nights sitting alone, writing and thinking or just thinking. I have drawn something from all of them, though probably none so much as simple and honest thinking and accepting what I find as true, pleasant or no. Waiting on my own thoughts and trying to stand on two sides of a pane of glass. It has been a long and painful and tedious process. It has rarely looked terribly worth it, but I have to admit to some success. I am by no means the master of myself, but I have rewritten parts of myself, I know how bits of me work, I have begun to embrace what is.

Dreaming for me is like a low level graphical interface to my psyche. Imagine a language that changes its words everyday to fit the perfect purpose of its communication, like the perfect extreme ideal of onomatapaea. This is what my dream life is. I have dreams about the ability to use my understanding of the world around me to change it, and I wake with an intense feeling that they are about programming somehow. programming computers is something I fight with a terrible mental block about... sometimes I feel the apprehension of that mental block in these dreams. I often wonder if they are about computer programming or programming myself.

I have reprogrammed my dream world a bit, just as I have reprogrammed how I respond to the world over the years, and in a deliberate manner.

In my dreams there used to be a turbulent and threatening sea, in recent years it has calmed a bit and I have learned to swim in it much more safely, though it's not a safe place. I built this structure by the sea, underground and usually vaguely leaky. It is made of stone and the place where I generally prepare to enter the ocean.

I don't correlate these to any direct events in my life, I see them as the result of actions I have taken that also directly affect events in my life. I see them as ways of interpreting output from the changes I have made.

That process of changing who I am, confirmation that I am a dynamic being with at least some influence over my own path give me hope and health and happiness.

I can't remember my first impression of computers. I was very young, eight I believe when we got the first TI 99/4As at my school. I can remember adoring them, loving to spend time with something so neutral and amazing. They were something I could interact with that was never cruel to me. I learned some Basic and Logo and made stuff, first at school then later at home, where I would write what amounted to interactive fictions in Basic that would insult the user then make my mother play them. (How's that for passive aggressive?) My best friend was richer than me; she got a Mac the year they came out and I as one little body still managed to crowd around it. Before long I knew it better than her, or any of the adults around. Above all, whether at the desktop or in Basic I loved making the computer do things. I loved figuring out how it did them. Whatever I was looking at I began to take apart. I pressed on all the buttons to see what they did. Occasionally I would even listen to the tapes of my programs from the TI, wanting to know how those sounds became my words and became actions within the space of the computer.

Grandma got me a cup that said "I'm the computer genius" which embarrassed me horribly, because I knew how deeply untrue it was and no one around me did. I knew that I knew nothing, that there were vistas unexplored, and that I was alone in exploring them or even knowing they existed. Eventually the computer fell into disuse, eventually life's weirdness took over. But I remembered that I loved computers even if they were a distant quantity in my life.

The phone in some minor way took its place, through sheer ubiquitous presence. There was always a phone around and phones were always magic. I took them apart and experimented with how I used them. I wanted to understand how they worked and more ways to work with them. I spent one time period dialing entirely by tapping the hangup. I memorized the number tones and tried to play songs on them. I experimented with how long it took for the line to disconnect after one party hung up. My fascination was as much for how we worked with the thing as it was how the thing worked in and of itself.

The first time I sat down at someone's computer and dialed up to a BBS I sat there holding my breath. And on the other end of the wire were my vistas, enlarged, intimidating, beautiful. I had no computer, no idea how to get one and no modem, but I used them at other people's houses every time I got the chance. I learned the interfaces of the BBS's and began to connect to other people. When I was online I was nothing and no where but interface, connection, my power to communicate. I left the cruelties of my real world behind, but it wasn't long before I found more cruelties. Still always from the people, never the machines. In the BBS'ing days of the 80s it was very hard to be a girl, very hard to get in on the knowledge if you were. For the next few years sharing my love of anything technical was impossible because the underground of computer understanding was a boy's playground. I was told many times to give up and go away and that I would never be smart enough to understand computers.

I still took computers and interfaces, phones and interconnections apart every chance I had. Time passed, and eventually I found a chink and started squirming my way into the computer world. In 92 when I finally looked at a UNIX prompt and first typed nn I think I knew my vistas had grown to where even the boys couldn't throw me out. I was still taking things apart in my mind, I was still operating in a relative vacuum. I soon passed up my boyfriend's UNIX knowledge, but it was slow going. I remember sitting on my bed with at my apple laptop, my first computer since the TI and typing in "man" and phrases I thought might be commands to that I could try and discover how to use my UNIX prompt. No books, still no mentors, but my vistas to keep me company. I knew I confronted more world to understand than I could in a lifetime. On top of it I discovered net culture. People talking, places and communities that existed in the spaces between computers and phone and new ways they had discovered to relating. They even had their own legends, myths and celebrities. I wanted to understand them all, know them all, get every in joke even if I didn't laugh. I fell into USENET and no one knew they were supposed to reject me.

Between computers and the internet I had discovered what was for me the mutable world. Changability, for me the idea that I could get inside and make things different and understand in a fundamental way how things worked.. for me this was why to get up in the morning.

I seem to have been born with an urge to get inside of and change anything I touch. I think of it as the hacking urge. I wonder how much I just have a touch for taking things apart and these happen to be the things I have encountered.

I am amazed at how alike my relationship with my mind is to sitting down to something like UNIX and just deciding that you want to know how to do more than use the basic apps. Partly I am driven by dysfunction, that moment when we know the system is fucked up and we're going to have to learn how to fix it and partly I am driven by the hacking urge. Like the user/programmer/admin I have spent a great deal of time trying to coexist in two places, one the world as I perceive it (such as the user) and one where I am trying to perceive myself in the act of perceiving. (such as trying to understand how the computer is working.) I am hardly the first, I am hardly special in this regard, in either computing or psychology. Mostly I am saying they are born of the same instinct, and that it is intrinsic to my being.

I have changed how my mind works, and now I'm testing the new configuration. It's great fun. it comes with that amazing sense of release that you get from finding the elegant answer or get closer to an over all understanding of how the system works and where you can tweak it to make it work better. I think that drives me a lot. I know it drives my fascination with computer interfaces and the net a lot.

Fascination with interfaces in me is fascination with change. It is in the places in between the static solidities that I exist in mentally, and they are where everything interesting to someone like me happens. The only sad part in this for me is that I've spent so much time doing it alone and undoubtedly reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Does this make me a geek, or a neophile, or are they the same thing?

{...q...}