Glitch in the Matrix
I usually go to the student gym about 4 or 5 days a week and on occasions I see Hairless Guy. He's hairless in the same way my cats are--he's got some sort of genetic thing that makes him completely hairless. No eyelashes, no eyebrows, no hair on his arms. Nothing. He wears a wig. Although I understand why, I think it's a big mistake. He's young, maybe twenty or so, and I'm sure it seems to him that this affliction makes him stand out like a lizard in a litter of ferrets. It does, of course, and he probably worries that girls will shy away from him, although he's nice looking in an alien way. He's got good bones, but the human eye is so accustomed to the various arrangements of hair that it's alarming to see a complete absence of it. All that aside, the wig is not helping. It's black, to go with his very Irish blue eyes, I suppose. Perhaps he has a brother with black hair and so it seems like the natural choice, but it's jarring. Ultimately, though, it's obviously artificial because of the missing eyebrows, eyelashes and beard stubble.
The reason I mention all this, the reason it's stuck in my brain a good 12-hours after the last time I saw him, is that I saw him twice. The student gym has a balcony above the main entrance and I often use one of the torture devices up there, just to have a view of something besides the sweating asscrack of the gym patron in front of me. I was up there last night, watching people climb the rock wall and watching people come and go through the front door. Halfway through my workout, Hairless Guy walked in. He went through the turnstile, had his card scanned and walked across the foyer under the balcony.
I thought nothing of it, besides a mental: "Hey, Hairless Guy." I went on with my interminable stair climbing, going up up up towards nothing. I glanced down a few minutes later to see: Hairless Guy, coming through the turnstile, scanning his ID card and crossing the foyer. He took the exact same path as before and wore the exact same facial expression, one of distraction mixed with a bit too much self-awareness, a result perhaps of sending a constant message to others: "Don't look." He tucked his ID card back in his wallet, forefinger sticking out as the thumb and other fingers wiggled the card into its slot. Then the left hand snapped the wallet closed in an identical gesture. He reached back with the left hand, just as he had before, pushing past his jacket and shirt to get the wallet into his back pocket. At the same time, the right hand came up, made a brief and familiar adjustment to the wig. Then he passed under the balcony and was gone from sight.
A glitch in the Matrix.
Now obviously, what happened is that while I was watching people climb the rock wall, Hairless Guy realized he'd left something in his car. He went back out the front door, got it, and returned to the gym without me noticing. Even knowing that, though, I was left oddly unsettled. After all, my day is mostly full of schedule. I walk the same route to work, do the same series of gestures how many times a day? When I approach my office door and pull my keys out of my pocket five days a week, how identical is each approach, each key removal, each unlocking? The human body sets itself into patterns of thought, patterns of speech, patterns of movement, and without being aware of it, we probably perform certain behaviors with an almost robotic precision of repetition. We use the same door of a building, adjust our glasses in the same way, scrape the inside of our cereal bowls at an angle whose trajectory hardly varies from day to day.
Can we stop? Today, if you tried, could you alter your pattern? Take a different route? Hold your body in a different way? Think about the world from a different angle?
Comments
If I alter my routine of leaving the house in any little way, it throws my brain into disarray. For example, I grab my tote bag and my keys. If I have to grab my gym bag, too, that's fine. But add one more thing on top of it, then I will forget something else - namely my keys and I find myself locked out of the house.
But I take your point. A new perspective is valuable, especially for a writer. The place I get most into autopilot is the half of my walk to work that goes through the underground shopping concourses in the city core. I use it all winter long, and when I start going aboveground in nice weather again in the spring, I always notice street-level business or landmarks that have changed in the interim. And it gives me that same kind of pause.
btw: I think the young man's condition is alopecia.
I know a couple of people with that condition--a woman A, and a man P. I wish A would spend the money on a quality wig. And P has been "shaving his head" for at least a decade. Irony: He's a hairdresser.
I just noticed that Patrick Stewart is on the list of famous people with alopecia too. Interesting. It seems to me that he had eyebrows. Perhaps they were drawn on?
When I was working on my M.A. in Critical & Creative Thinking we studied schema and scripts--those patterns of routine you described. They help us organize and remember complex bits of information. Scripts can be personal (such as the daily habits we each have) but usually develop from our understanding of social patterns. For example in the US there is a basic "script" for what happens when you go into a restaurant.
Enter restaurant
Look for table
Decide where to sit
Go to table
Sit down
Get menu
Choose food
Order food
Waiter brings food
Eat food
Waiter brings the bill
Pay bill
Leave restaurant.
There are variations to that script, but for the most part, you can go into any US food joint and expect to follow the same pattern. Scripts like this help our society function when there are so many people with so many different methods of thinking. Personal scripts help us get through our days easier for the same reason--we've got a lot in our heads to process and by nature our brains help us figure out where we can cut corners so we can focus on higher priority needs.Animals even have scripts that they follow, as I'm sure you have noticed with your own cats. My cat definitely has his own crazy routines which never fail to fascinate me.