Influences

[tahnan]

This is a truncated and edited version of today's entry in my regular, passworded journal. If you read that, you don't need to read this. You can anyway, if you want to.

Some people on livejournal have apparently been answering the question, "What three people or things have most influenced you?" One heck of a question. One answer is in Cyllan's journal, and she links to others, just to give you an idea of what some people said. Anyway, I figured, what the heck, I can try to answer that. But there's going to be an aside first.

There are, as far as I can tell, two ways in which something can influence you: internally or externally. That is, something can either influence the way you think and feel, or it can influence what happens to you. Moreover, the former category is divided into two categories: consciously and unconsciously. In other words, something can influence your thoughts without your realizing it, or it can be something you think about and decide to change your thoughts because of. I thought, at first, since I had three to choose, I'd pick one of each, but I immediately ran into trouble.

For starters, the "internal unconscious" one is hard to identify--I mean, there must be things out there that made me think the way I do, but it's very hard for me to point to them. I know some minor ones, I suppose; a lot of science fiction authors must have affected the way I think, but I can't really think of how. Loving both math and language might be a genetic predisposition, and it might be an accident, but I imagine someone or something back there tipped the scales, and I'll never really know who or what. Mr. Arena, bless his soul, got me reading science fiction back in 7th grade, but is that one of the top three influences? If I were a science fiction writer, maybe so. But I'm not.

The "internal conscious" one is easier to pick out, but I can't think of any that really fit me. These tend to be things like "Communism, which I discovered when I was sixteen, and it just opened my eyes, I realized how right it must be"; or "Buddhism, which I converted to when I was sixteen"; or "Ayn Rand, which I converted to when I was sixteen." Something like that--a philosophy or a religion. One can adopt one's thoughts for other things as well, I guess, but as far as I know I haven't really done anything like that. (Maybe Richard Montague. I've consciously followed his semantic theories for five years now, after all.)

That leaves external influences, but those seem so boring. Mundane. Unfair--because who's interested in what you happen to have done, as opposed to what you've chosen? Characters who just have things happen to them are dull; characters who make things happen are interesting. (This is why I gave up on reading Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, but that's neither here nor there.)

All right, that's more than enough digression. This is the list you're getting, and you're going to have to learn to live with it.

My parents

Yeah, my parents. Maybe everyone's parents influence them more than anything, and maybe that makes this answer uninformative ("right, sure, OK, your parents, we know that, but besides that what are the three?"), but I really think it's true. They've influenced me when I've rebelled against them, and they've influenced me when I've gone along with their wishes. My father thought I should take Spanish in high school; I took French. My parents thought I should never have dropped out of school, and that I certainly shouldn't move off to Minnesota to live with my girlfriend; and I did. They also made quite clear that if things went badly, I had a place to come back to, or rather, a home to come home to.

And they've given me a lot: not just food and shelter and clothing for eighteen years (and some beyond), and not just "love" (speaking of the mundane and clichéd answer). What patience I have I learned from my mother. I used to hang off the back of my father's chair and do the Times crossword over his shoulder. My father taught me chess. My mother taught me needlepoint. (Only the chess caught on--but the needlepoint was my idea, my mother did it a lot when I was younger, and I wanted to know how.) I accepted a few years ago that I'm pretty much becoming my father, and frankly, that's not such a terrible thing. So, like it or not, that's answer #1.

Judaism

"Hey," I hear you asking, "I thought he said he didn't have any of those philosophy/religion things to write about." Well...no. I said there wasn't a religion I consciously embraced, and that's true. I was raised Jewish, and I'm not really a practicing Jew now, though I don't eat pork and I don't write the name of G-d and I take off Yom Kippur. I've talked about some of this before in my regular journal.

But there you are: it's influenced me in all sorts of unconscious ways. Without thinking about it, I don't write out the name of G-d. It reminds me that I'm Jewish (which is to say "different"; I think a lot of the traditions of Judaism are there simply to remind Jews that they're The Chosen People and thus different from everyone else. For better or for worse--but I digress), but it's also just part of what I do and who I am. And I think that this really is one of those "unconscious" influences, that how I see the world is heavily influenced by being Jewish. Disliking Christmas, of course, but also perhaps a certain reverent irreverence, which dates back at least to Abraham arguing with G-d ("All right, what if there are twenty good men in Sodom?"). And a lot of other aspects of me that I can't put my finger on. So.

The faith my teachers have had in me

In the category of "external influences." This is in some ways a little bit of cheating, because it's a way of acknowledging a lot of different people and their influence, but they all have a common element and they all add up to one large influence. So my sixth grade math teacher who was willing to play chess and discuss time travel. Or my seventh grade math teacher who said "You don't need to sit through two years of pre-algebra. Here's a textbook--go sit in the library and work through it by the end of the year," and who also introduced me to CTY, which was certainly an influence on me. Or Polly Jacobson, my undergraduate advisor, who said "Why don't you write a thesis in semantics?" and who wrote letters of recommendation that helped get me accepted to graduate schools. Or the other professors in Brown's linguistics program, who also encouraged me and wrote me letters. Or all of my professors now, who have never once been discouraging. There's probably a lot of internal influence in all this, but the external influence, the direction my life has taken because these people have nudged me towards one thing or another, is quite noticable.

All right. I'm going to go walk in the snow for a bit, and then have some tea, and then go to sleep. I've got a long week ahead of me.