I have this weird tendency to try to imagine how other people view things I'm familiar with that they're not. Well, I guess a lot of people try to put themselves in others' shoes, but I feel like I do it more and to a higher degree. I was watching The Lost World the other night and wondered what a person who's never seen the film would think when Julianne Moore and Vince Vaughn brought the injured baby T-Rex back into the trailer; would the first-time watchers realize that the infant's squeals would attract the parents to the trailer (as the bald guy wanted to do with it in order to find and hunt the father) or would it not dawn on them the real danger Moore and Vaughn had put themselves in? Or I'll be watching a commercial for Apple's latest product and wonder what the Founding Fathers would think of such amazing technology.1 Sometimes I think this way consciously, other times without realizing it, and it ultimately ends up with me either able to picture whatever I'm looking at in a perspective free of familiarity or something reasonably close.
It might sound kind of weird — if not out of body — but it's actually pretty cool for the fleeting moments it stays with me.2 For the briefest of times, I can experience something that's familiar to me in a novel way...even revisiting my very first impressions of it. Take a close friend, for example. To you, they're Bob...Bob who has a very distinct personality and physical appearance that you're completely accustomed to. But if you can sink back into the recesses of your mind and try remove yourself from that deeply entrenched familiarity you have with Bob, you might be able to view him as just the commonplace mild-mannered guy with a face that hasn't yet been imprinted with familiarity into your mind. When I can look at a friend or a relative that way, it's not that I'm recognizing that a total stranger would see him or her as a whatever person with whatever-type facial features while being accustomed to what they're like, but seeing the friend or relative as wholly (or as close to wholly as I can manage) new — someone who's appearance and personality I'm getting a first impression of all over again. Sometimes I don't even have to try — I'll just see a certain photo of someone pop up on Facebook, for example, and it suddenly makes the person appear new and give me that first impression feeling over again. I've seen their face hundreds, if not thousands, of times, yet my mind goes, "Oh, so that's what they look like." My familiarity with them has branded them as now unremarkable, like how the long-standing arrangement of the furniture in your living room is unremarkable enough that you don't even think about it. The "Oh, so that's what they look like" feeling is kind of like when you rearrange the living room furniture (except the arrangement's different while the face in question is still the same) — you feel like you're looking at it (the living room or the face) in a whole new way even though you've always known it.
Temporarily loosing one's familiarity with something allows one to have not just another first impression, but to see something in a whole new (or weird) way. Like families. When a mother and a father love each other very much...well, you know the story...they have their kids and now there's a family. But when I try to detach myself from this seemingly universal process it becomes downright weird. If a couple wants more family members, then they literally create them themselves — like how you bake cookies if you're craving them (unless you buy them, of course). They combine their resources to physically make another relative. The couple's female then carries this mutually created thing inside of her, much like a parasite in its host, until it's ready to pop out of her. It's a truly bizarre way to acquire another family member if you think about enough.
When you detach yourself from your familiarity with something, the second first impression or the new perspective you gain, even though it's temporary, can provide an appreciation for whatever or whoever you're looking at. And not just an appreciation for, say, the strangely remarkable way to acquire more relatives, but appreciation for what it means to behold what or who you're focusing on. I'm not sure exactly how to elaborate on that...it's open to interpretation...or possibly two interpretations if you ever revisit it and detach yourself from the first interpretation.
1 Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
2 Just in case you're concerned, this is not some sort of New Age/paranormal woo I'm pushing for this article (even though it may inadvertently sound like it).
It might sound kind of weird — if not out of body — but it's actually pretty cool for the fleeting moments it stays with me.2 For the briefest of times, I can experience something that's familiar to me in a novel way...even revisiting my very first impressions of it. Take a close friend, for example. To you, they're Bob...Bob who has a very distinct personality and physical appearance that you're completely accustomed to. But if you can sink back into the recesses of your mind and try remove yourself from that deeply entrenched familiarity you have with Bob, you might be able to view him as just the commonplace mild-mannered guy with a face that hasn't yet been imprinted with familiarity into your mind. When I can look at a friend or a relative that way, it's not that I'm recognizing that a total stranger would see him or her as a whatever person with whatever-type facial features while being accustomed to what they're like, but seeing the friend or relative as wholly (or as close to wholly as I can manage) new — someone who's appearance and personality I'm getting a first impression of all over again. Sometimes I don't even have to try — I'll just see a certain photo of someone pop up on Facebook, for example, and it suddenly makes the person appear new and give me that first impression feeling over again. I've seen their face hundreds, if not thousands, of times, yet my mind goes, "Oh, so that's what they look like." My familiarity with them has branded them as now unremarkable, like how the long-standing arrangement of the furniture in your living room is unremarkable enough that you don't even think about it. The "Oh, so that's what they look like" feeling is kind of like when you rearrange the living room furniture (except the arrangement's different while the face in question is still the same) — you feel like you're looking at it (the living room or the face) in a whole new way even though you've always known it.
Temporarily loosing one's familiarity with something allows one to have not just another first impression, but to see something in a whole new (or weird) way. Like families. When a mother and a father love each other very much...well, you know the story...they have their kids and now there's a family. But when I try to detach myself from this seemingly universal process it becomes downright weird. If a couple wants more family members, then they literally create them themselves — like how you bake cookies if you're craving them (unless you buy them, of course). They combine their resources to physically make another relative. The couple's female then carries this mutually created thing inside of her, much like a parasite in its host, until it's ready to pop out of her. It's a truly bizarre way to acquire another family member if you think about enough.
When you detach yourself from your familiarity with something, the second first impression or the new perspective you gain, even though it's temporary, can provide an appreciation for whatever or whoever you're looking at. And not just an appreciation for, say, the strangely remarkable way to acquire more relatives, but appreciation for what it means to behold what or who you're focusing on. I'm not sure exactly how to elaborate on that...it's open to interpretation...or possibly two interpretations if you ever revisit it and detach yourself from the first interpretation.
1 Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
2 Just in case you're concerned, this is not some sort of New Age/paranormal woo I'm pushing for this article (even though it may inadvertently sound like it).
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