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Started by Junkenstein, May 22, 2014, 05:52:38 PM

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Junkenstein

I'm on about a week of minimal sleep, so it may be best to move along quietly now.

I can't remember the last time I saw my own face in a mirror. For some years now, the reflection has been replaced by my Grandfather. I guess it started when I fucked my leg, foot and hand up in unrelated incidents. For a time, this gave me a limp and clawed hand that initially amused me by their remarkable similarities. We've always been somewhat alike so naturally, it gave me a laugh. Since this, I can't help notice the increasing change into someone else.

It does things to you, having your face stolen and replaced with an older version from a different person. I'm not entirely certain if they're good or bad things. Certainly things. Their opinions and stances come to mind easier. You start finishing lines of thought with "...and they would think that...". This is fine when you're in a general accord but becomes a like aggravating when it's a point of contention. When you're arguing with yourself every time you catch your own reflection, that's when it becomes tedious.

It could be much worse, I suppose. I could have had a genetic disposition to look like a famous murderer or dictator rather than a man who I hold in high regard. That would make the arguments much worse I suppose. Certainly more frequent.

This probably won't happen to you until you're lucky enough to have some substantial aging inflicted upon you or a similar bout of whatever madness I'm having.

What's the point of this raving, beyond disclosing some kind of mental problem? Well, a warning to start with. How often do you consider you likely appearance in 6 months, let alone a number of years? There's probably a damn good chance you'll look like an elderly family member at some point. If it's likely to be one you know and like, you've lucked out big time. Sorry if this isn't the case in either event for you, but this will probably not hit you as much, if at all, so consider that good or bad as you see fit.

I suppose another part would be considering the concept of "me". I'm still "me" but to many, and frequently to my own eyes, I'm not. It's surprised me how easily my Grandfathers mannerisms come to me and I'm relatively certain some are reflexive now and I'm not sure why that is. I guess when you constantly see yourself as someone else, it's easily done. My mockery of things tends to focus on whatever I see so I would imagine this somehow extends into this. Seeing someone else's face at the start of most days sets the mind to the me/not me idea straight away and the dissonance flows from there.

Why are you reading this? It's sleep deprived lunacy. Give me my face back. 

OR KILL ME.     
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The Good Reverend Roger

I thought I'd turn into The Terrible Old Man, rather than my dad.  My dad is a manifestly civilized and decent man.  So was the Terrible Old Man, but he also had some Horrible Bits™.

But I didn't turn into either one of them.  I turned into something else entirely, to a degree that makes me lean towards "nurture" in the nature/nurture debate.  I think both apply, but nurture is definitely the prime mover.

Not just mentally, either.  When I was young, I looked EXACTLY like my dad looked when he was young.  Now I look like some horrible ogre, from what I gather.  That's not entirely a bad thing.
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Junkenstein

I have honestly no idea if any of this is particularly good or bad. I've had this in my head for a while and I'm throwing words at it until I can make it make some sense to me.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

The nature-nurture interplay is something that absolutely fascinates me, and is one of the reasons I want to learn more about epigenetics (the study of how environmental factors interact with and affect the expression of our genetic code). I don't think it's possible to say that nature OR nurture has a stronger role, because they interact so much and the ways in which they interact isn't well-understood at all. You take a kid with a certain genetic predisposition, stick him in one developmental environment and he becomes a psychopath, another environment and he turns out fine... we think. We don't know. You know what would be really awesome, and also is unlikely to ever happen? Take a zygote and clone it, stick these zygotes in 100 different women, wait 40 years, see what the outcomes are for all these genetically identical kids. Repeat the process 100 times with 100 different zygote lines, find out what the concordance rates look like, and then we'll know how much nurture impacts the basic codes we're handed at conception.

We might also find out that it depends; maybe some traits are less mutable and other traits are more mutable.
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P3nT4gR4m

I've naturally developed the odd familiar mannerism I didn't like which stuck around for a while and almost "took" before I clocked what was going on. I find they kinda sneak up, either through the genome or the subconscious or wherever they get in.

Most (if not all) I've splatted, right down to the subtle nuances and mannerisms and expressions. Most of that side of me, nowadays is stuff I like and picked up from other people and stuff that I couldn't put down to anything in particular, maybe just happened itself. If I like it it stays. If it bugs me in others and I notice it in myself, I find a workaround. I fix it.

There's a fatalistic acceptance of the shit you get dealt in life that my old man has, that I almost bought but I prefer my own - if life kicks you in the teeth, kick the fucker right back - thing. I look like him but at my age he was a physical slob I'm still pretty buff for a forty something. A large part of this was a kneejerk reaction to the vision of the future I was presented with at the time.

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