Daily Archives: February 19, 2013

The ever shifting identity that is self.

I have been doing a thinking lately about the nature of a person personalty and just how much it can change over time. This has been prompted by a short story I will start soon, and one that more ambitious that nearly every other one I have attempted.  The changes that a person evolves through over the their lifespan is at the heart of the conflict of the story, and that has made me look at the changes I have experienced.

I not even talking about the changes that can come about due to sudden and powerful trauma. I know that my personality changed due tot he loss of my father when I was quite young. My shyness is an outgrowth of that trauma, I have no recollection of shyness before that terrible event.

No, I am speaking about the slow, truly evolutionary changes that occur as we live, meet people and change due to those interactions.

Consider a single point, musical tastes. In 1978 I never listen to rock and roll music, my radio station of choice was a country western station, and when that didn’t suit my mood I would listen to pop music. The rock music of the period held no attraction for me, yet while I write this post I am listening to rock music from 1977. Even stranger is just before I sat down I was listening to Bossa Nova jazz, and that is something else that used to have absolutely no interest for me. Yet, Country and Western has nearly disappeared from my pallet, with what little I listen too being those songs of my youth, with all the powerful emotions of adolescence holding it fast to my tastes.

You could not have convinced my younger self he would be listening to this music. He simply would not have believed it. That doesn’t even begin to touch on a whole host of things, politics, religion, sexual attitudes, all these things have changed greatly over the years.

It seems that we are not contiguous individuals, but an ever changing collection of traits and attitudes. What if anything is at the core?

 

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Film whiplash

This past week my sweetie and I watched ‘The Spy Who Loved Me,’ as I continued my progress through all the Bond films in release order.

Man oh man the 70s were a bad time for Bond. This camp simply does not work for me. My sweetie had never seen this film and could only react to it in an MST3K manner. I really don’t blame her. I don;t know if she’ll endure Moonraker whenever I get around to that steaming pile.

However today I got the blu-ray for ‘Skyfall’ and just going through the bonus material is going to induced a case of whiplash over story quality. Where ‘Spy’ has a plot, and a bad one at that, ‘Skyfall’ has a story.

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