eejitalmuppet reminded me of this...

[mountain_laurel]

...and i thought i'd dredge it up and share it: how I invented the term "chimped out", by Rowan T. Hamilton.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I heard that foo' left SLAC and is now working for Transmeta.

[merde.livejournal.com]

yeah, i don't know his email address anymore.

i don't suppose you ever met him? he sure as hell wasn't willing to meet me.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I managed to corner him once at Burrito Real. Nice fellow. Tall.

[merde.livejournal.com]

ishecute?

come on, it was my duty as a single woman.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

My memory suggests he was perfectly average. Perhaps a bit rugged.

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

I deeply fear that I chimped out in 1998.

[damienw]

I find this hard to believe.

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

I found RH's "chimped out" post quite delightful when it first appeared in talk.bizarre (and i still find it delightful), but even then i wasn't sure if i really agreed with it. I know that such posts are always simplifications, but this was a simplification which made me uncomfortable. That may well be because it carried some unpleasant implications about my own life...

One of the reasons for my doubts can be expressed thus. There are a number of friends who i have known for a long time, but only see about once per year (if that), thanks to our mutual explorations of life and work taking us in different directions. With some of those friends, there seems to be an expectation that i will behave like the person they remember from the late '80s or early '90s. It's an easy thing to conform to that expectation: to tell jokes that i no longer find funny, to answer to nicknames that i've been trying to escape for 20 years, to try to become the person i used to be (or at least to don the mask i used to wear in order to hide the frightened person i used to be. These days, i like to think that i'm a different frightened person, with new masks). From their perspective, i chimped out at 22. Maybe i did, but there are pieces of writing from my late 20s which imply a mindset i no longer recognise (some of them are unfinished, and will remain so simply because i can't relate to the thought processes which spawned those embryos).

I thought i had a conclusion to draw here, but it seems to have been lost in transit. The only clear implication is that some of those newer masks don't fit as well as i'd like them to... Does my id look big in this?