Tastes change. We change. It’s comforting to know that,
according to Stanford University, you grow a completely new sheath of skin
every week, and each individual cell in your skeleton is replaced every seven
years. But do our tastes evolve to better suit our surroundings, or do we
choose surroundings to suit our tastes? And if our tastes (and skin, and
skeleton) change, are we still intrinsically the same person?
I went to school
at a small mountain college in upstate New York. I spent a lot of time in my
dorm room listening to the Grateful Dead, Phish, and various other similarly
mellow groups. Then I moved to Buffalo and, while courting my future wife,
plied her with mix CDs of my favorite jam bands and bluegrass groups. She liked
one Phish song, but that was about the only track that made it into regular
circulation on her iPod. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t find the bass
lines infectious, the guitar solos nod-worthy. After two years in Buffalo my
own mp3 player became bloated with the Pixies, Sonic Youth, the Clash, and
Dinosaur Jr, all independent of my significant other’s tastes. By the time we
packed up the truck for Chicago my once-modest record collection was bountiful,
and my playlists included a plethora of indie/alternative bands—most of which
my fiancé had never heard of. I was (and am) perpetually choosing Freelance
Whales over Phish, Japandroids over Jerry Garcia. What happened in that two
years? Did being removed from the mountains (and my barefoot hippie dorm mates)
cause me to search for a new identity, or did my preferences simply progress
without regard to location or surroundings?
Music isn’t
the only barometer by which I’ve noticed a difference in my life. I’ve changed
in other ways since moving to Chicago—I can’t say when I actually changed, but
I can tell now that I have. For one thing, I don’t (much to my fiancé’s
vexation when we’re walking together) wait for visual confirmation that a car
has stopped at an intersection before crossing the street. I suppose I feel
entitled as a pedestrian. (It helps that this particular sense of entitlement
is validated by Illinois state law.) But I’ve never before felt entitled to
anything in my life. Did living in a big city change me, or had I always had
this underlying “next self,” waiting for the right time to emerge? In other
words, is it fate or free will? I’m still inherently the same person—I walk my
dog every day, I still love my fiancé, still love Thai food, tea, and bad
movies. But I’m also slightly different—a new version of myself.
So I find
myself wondering an age-old question: what makes me me? I still look more-or-less the same, despite different haircuts
and new glasses. But even at the cellular level I’m a different person than I
was just a few years ago, and at the surface level I inhabit a completely different
person’s skin than I did last week. My tastes have changed, which begs the
ancient question of the Ship of Theseus--whether a different physical person, having acquired the
same likes and dislikes I once had, would, in essence, be me. My personality
has remained mostly stable, but there are a finite number of personality types,
and I’m sure there are countless others who share a type with me. So, who am I?
Am I defined by my preferences, my personality, the shape of my face and the
color of my eyes? Or how about my tastes—if I identify with a subculture, does
that make me necessarily a part of that subculture? Am I nothing more than the medley
of physical markers by which I display my interests and loyalties? I sometimes
think back to myself in middle school, before I had acquired any musical or
cultural tastes, and wonder who that fresh canvas was, or if I was anybody at
all. I don’t know when I started definitively being me, and given my protean history, I’m not sure I’ll ever arrive at
a definitive me.
No comments:
Post a Comment