From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sun Aug 20 2000 - 03:47:43 MDT
From: Emlyn O'Regan (emlyn@one.net.au), Fri Aug 18 2000
>so I changed my surname. It's worked out very well. Changing your
>name, like getting rid of all your crap and moving somewhere with nothing,
>is a very cleansing experience; highly recommended.
...Or even moving somewhere else with a fair bit of stuff is a very
cleansing experience ...! (me: moving to another country two
years ago, next week moving to another city, both with my small
library in tow). Yes, Highly recommended.
The Sufis have an intriguing idea of getting rid of baggage (material
or psychological) *continually*, so that one is always killing a part
of oneself off, i.e. "making a space". A space to think and to be and
to be open to new elements in one's life.
I see Eli's name quest as a fundamental quest for putting a label
on one's identity. It's something that every human everywhere must
come to terms with, yes? (Unless you choose to be not part of any
society and be Nameless), So then, these sorts of questions
arise in a name change:
* What parts of myself do I want to reveal to the world?
* What parts do I wish to keep private?
(both of these are about what masks, if any, to wear)
* What is unique about me, that I wish to show?
* What are my strengths?
* How do I view myself presently?
* How do I see myself in the future?
>Amara also wrote:
>My name seems to fit all of criteria in your post, i.e.
>>Weird
>>Confusing to spell
>>Mistaken for another gender
>>Only one in the phone book
>>Not listed on any off-the-shelf "personalised" merchandise
>Do you find this a helpful thing?
Mostly, since the oddities nudge people in remembering me.
>The gender confusion is sometimes
>annoying, sometimes useful.
Which depends on the context, right?
I receive random pieces of mail in my postal mailbox addressed
to "Herrn" Graps, instead of "Frau" Graps, but that mail goes
into the trash anyway.
On the Internet, The gender confusion can work as a good filter,
because usually strangers that write me want some assistance with
something. I figure if the person wanting my help and addressing
me as "Mr." isn't spending the 30 seconds to learn my gender,
then their requests are usually not worth my time to which to
respond, anyway.
In my career, I much prefer that the random stranger get my
gender right, because the number of women in astronomy is much
less than the number of men (and 100 times less in Germany than
in the US), and, since I'm a noncompetititve person, and
I have other things working against me in science (I'm a
generalist rather than a specialist, I'm older, and my career
path has been unusual), then my name and gender gives me
something distinctive that is helpful.
I think that the people on this list are special- many are
following nontraditional paths, thinking unusual things, so
the name-label, i.e., the way that each chooses to show their
face to other humans, then involves a process to figure out
how to put a label on their natural ways of being.
Now Eli was talking about wanting to put some distance between
himself now, and some posts that he wrote some years ago to the
Internet that he'd rather not be identified with.
I have some bad news for you Eli-
**** The Internet is a strange, very large, sometimes wonderful,
sometimes tragic beast, that WON'T FORGET what you wrote, no matter
when you wrote it, and no matter what name under which you wrote it.
It WILL REMEMBER you, and sometimes it will shape you into a
different lifeform. ****
The following is my very strangest Internet-name experience.
Three years ago, a woman at a department at the Carolinas HealthCare
System in Charlotte, NC, wrote me, in quest of some background information
for a quotation that the Vice President made in a presentation. The V.P.
found the quotation in material he had from his previous job at
a management consultant company: Ernest and Young.
The women told me that the quotation is called "Amara's Law":
"In reacting to change, there is a tendency to overestimate the
impact of change in the short run and underestimate its long term impact."
I thought: HOLY-MOLEY!! (as Batman says). This quotation was taken
from a post I made to the sci.physics Usenet group 1 1/2 years earlier,
about the "Physics of Traffic Flows", where I said:
"One rule-of-thumb in responding to any stimulus that one does not want to
become unstable is: the longer one waits in response to a stimulus, the
strength of that response should be exponentially less with respect to
that time."
(which was paraphrasing my old physics prof, Dr. Elliot Montroll,
at UC Irvine)
So my Usenet post surfaces in a slightly different way as "Amara's Law"
in a management department in a health care company in South Carolina?!!
(EEEK)
I gave the woman my post that began the whole
thing,(http://www.amara.com/ftpstuff/traffic.txt), I asked her
to please get the attribution right (to Elliot Montroll), and
then I asked myself whether it was time to quit Usenet.
So you see Eli, Real Life is Stranger than Fiction.
Amara
********************************************************************
Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain
consciousness." --Ashleigh Brilliant
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