Other
I have a thing for answering questionnaires. Maybe because it's one of the only situations left where one has the chance to answer in direct and unnuanced ways; maybe because there's not going to be a tumid Republican at the other end screeching "what did you mean by 'None of the Above!' Tell me now, don't hide behind words!"; or maybe I just like talking about myself (I mean, I'm here after all, right?).
This morning I got a spam from classmates.com. Back in the day (years ago) I signed up and actually paid them for the privilege of potentially getting in touch with lost classmates, most of whom I have not seen nor spoken to since graduating over 22 years ago. I'm no longer considered by Classmates.com to be Golden, but they do still permit me to answer questions about myself, so what the hell.
This time around, though, there were an alarming number of cases where only the "other" choice seemed apt, but even then it was just the least inaccurate and not a good fit. There were quite a few cases where the question was phrased in such a way as to be nearly orthogonal to the savage garden of my brain. Most of the questions were thuddingly passé.
Now, I knew from the start, even years ago (when I was Golden in their eyes) that any questionnaire attached to such a past-minded organization wasn't going to be geared toward anyone who wasn't heterosexual and who didn't believe they knew what the future held for themselves back in 1982 (or whatever year). This time around, however, in answering the new questions, I began to wonder if that's what today's conservative mindset really has in mind for everyone: following the Path.
They want families to picket-fence themselves into a mortgage and produce a fractional-average number of children, knowing in advance everything they want to occur for themselves in the future. Moving away from the path would be failure. Choosing otherwise is failure. Being Wrong About Something is Failure.
Now, I've been wrong a bunch of times; I'm certain—though I may be wrong about this—that I'll be wrong again. Sure, it's a ding to the ego of someone who prides himself on brainpower. Perhaps the ego is so large as to not mind a ding, but I like to think it's that when approaching learning, when approaching knowledge, a certain intellectual humility must be present in order to actually learn something New. I mean, at some point you'd have to have admitted you don't know a thing in order to be able to accept new information, right?
I had lovely and powerful teachers in both highschool and in college who drove this point home. The Zen call it Beginner's Mind. Linda Kauffman, who taught the Molecular Genetics and the Biochemistry Labs at CMU, would say, "All data is good; good data is better."
She'd written over and over in my lab notebook that the math and the procedure were good, but that I wasn't "getting" the biology of it. I had no idea what she meant by this; I'd plugged away at the math and the procedure, checking for errors in addition and in form, and getting a decent grade, but with the niggling "not getting the biology" comment every time.
Near the end of the semester, I was writing up a lab where we were generating digest maps from liquid chromatography data and what I was seeing sort of leapt past the math we'd done in calculating the dimensions of a high-enough-resolution column, leapt past the data-fitting, and saw what we were trying to do, saw what was going on with the biology of it. The math and the procedure shook itself out into an organized tableau behind the biology of it. I "got" it.
I wrote it up, though, as I'd written up all the other labs: show the math, explain the procedure, describe the significance. Sure enough, Linda saw the difference. Her comment? "Finally!" I was thrilled.
There were two big lessons I learned in this. The first, there's more meaning to any given thing than the laundry list of refutable facts attached to a thing. Secondly, that being wrong isn't the end of the world, it's the beginning of a brand new one.
Linda's Labs (as we called them) happened for me 18 years ago, and I can still see her handwriting in my mind. I can still smell the bleach and the phenol of the lab. And I still try to get the big picture of a thing, because of or in spite of the so-called refutable facts presented in "black and white".
So when I was chugging through the questions on that silly questionnaire, mostly checking "other", I realized that I don't wish to make demands that the world bow to my ideologies, my worldview. That would be boring and I hate being bored. It would be nice, however, if people would look less at the list of literal facts attached to a bigger picture and spend more time looking at the artistry and beauty contained in that bigger picture.
Once you gain the knack of that kind of appreciation, the facts find their own way.