Heart and Mind

Acting Like Myself

By the way, the subject "I" is implied in the title, as it is about ME acting like myself. So this is a grammatically sound title.

I was updating a website yesterday by reposting a certain snippet of code, with some minor alterations, that I originally posted this time last year and then removed last summer.

When the job came across my desk to put the 2008 version up, I basically thought to myself, "When I removed this last summer, it would have been nice if I had done so in a way that anticipated that I might have to put it up again in the future." (With coding, you see, it's not always as simple as just saving an old file and sometimes you have to be creative in how your preserve your old scripting.) Unfortunately, I had no recollection of doing such a thing, so I figured I didn't. Then I thought to myself, "If I was removing that information today..." and then I mused as to how I would have done it.

Well, when I went in to start my editing I saw that—lo and be hold!—I did use that method that was just going through my head! This, despite the fact that I don't remember doing it.

Now, let's be real. It makes perfect sense that I didn't recall having done it. I work with tons of coding and scripting every day and some of it is pretty involved stuff and it's not like I always remember what I did last year or even last week. That's because it's either too routine ("I update 600 files every day, why would I remember specific tasks a later?") or too involved ("This coding was pretty heavy and I always need to take a few minutes review and re-aquaint myself with how it works every time I sit down to work with it."). Or, it's both at the same time, as I routinley do involved coding.

So, not remembering is to be expected. But because I didn't remember it, it made me more disjointed from it, and it made it feel like the person who originally changed the code (Steve from 2007) was different than the person doing it now, even though, technically, I'm the same.

That sense of "disjoint," makes the whole thing seem really cool, because I didn't expect to find it done to my liking, and, thus, I found it really cool when I see evidence that I am acting like myself. I once mentioned that I, in part, didn't like to not pump my own gas, because it makes me feel "not like myself," but, rather, like someone doing a "bad imitation" of me based on poor research of "what I'm like."

So, this is kind of like the opposite. I like seeing that I did things and thought last year like I do things and think this year. And then it all makes sense. It's like, "Of course I did it this way. This is how I would do it and it was me doing it!" All at once there is a sense of trust, comfort, familiarity, and reassurance. That's a great feeling.

This kind of thing happens all the time. Another example is in old emails and letters. I will find an old message where I'm pontificating on a certain subject, and as I read along, I'll say, "I agree...but there's also this issue to consider...." And, right on cue as I think it, the next paragraph starts and I hit all the extra points that I was just thinking about. And it makes sense because it's me, I know what I think about the subject, and I likely thought the same way in the past, too.

While this is trippy in the small doses, I guess it also points to why it would not be that much fun to have a clone to hang out with. I often wondered if that would be cool because, you know, we'd enjoy the same things, like playing frisbee. So I'd always have a partner as willing to throw the disc as I am, and that would rock! But, to the con-end of the argument, it would get boring because he'd know all my stories and he'd agree with me on all viewpoints and I wouldn't be able to enlighten or amuse him (or vice versa). Nothing would be new in our dialogue or approach.

In the end, though, it's totally cool to see me acting like myself when I look back on old things. And, as I've said about a couple of other posts here on the blog, this concept is perhaps a little esoteric and you need to have a slightly warped way of looking at things to totally "get" why this is absolutely blog-worthy.

posted by Steve @ 1:33 PM