Just trying to find my way

I never quite got used to this whole human thing. I don’t think I had the proper training, or the right education, and now I’m not sure about even the most basic things. What am I supposed to do, what should I say? Am I standing with the right posture, or am I standing out from ignorance of some  convention? Psychology has a lot to say about norms – acceptable standards of conduct within the group – but none of us ever get a list of what they are, or why they’re expected. I guess most people don’t have trouble with it. You can watch other people and imitate their behavior, and it becomes a kind of self-reinforcing vessel to constrain all these animals who otherwise might be running amok and starting trouble. Are human beings born with an innate understanding of their social nature? How to talk about their experiences and the world they inhabit, in a human way? What even is a human way of doing anything – what is human?

I must not be from this world. Everything is always so strange here.

A conversation between two androids in a Ridley Scott movie went like this:

Android A) When you close your eyes, do you dream of me?

Android B) I don’t dream at all.

Android A) No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams.

Are you Android A or Android B? We’re all just facsimiles of the lessons we learned in daycare, and our  teachers can’t be held responsible for what they didn’t notice we were learning.  I learned how to hide inside blocks and toys, and how to divert everybody’s attention to safe, neutral things. You don’t have to worry about getting to know, or being known by someone else so long as you have a puzzle to solve. All the good will in the world won’t close that gap. It’s resting above a darkened abyss, and nobody knows what lies at the bottom of it but me.