immortality through monotony or singularity?

ok, so i have this friend. he's a cool friend, we have things and interests in common and we have intelligent conversations. we dress alike, which is often a harbinger of like opinions. we are from the same place and can both agree that it is cold out when other people are still wearing t-shirts and thumbing their noses at us in our parkas. he's very good with people, and has this way of talking to them that makes them feel like he has their number right from the beginning. he will say extremely accurate and surprising things about people, like john edwards. when we first started hanging out, this ability amazed me. i sort of thought he had superhuman friend powers. when people do this kind of thing, it makes you feel like a diamond in the rough; like you are so unique, only certain very rare individuals can recognize how awesome you really are. that's how i felt when i first met him, like he hung out with me for reasons that other people didn't see or weren't awesome enough to understand. but now that's wearing off and he's started seeming pretty cocky, and his supernatural knowledge of what's going on in my head makes me feel less unique and more like everyone is so similar that he can understand me by making absolutely no effort because he knows three dozen people just like me.

this is something that terrifies me; the idea that everyone is the same, and i am one of them - the only thing that makes us think we are different is advertising, or some sort of existentialist need to feel like an individual. or at least, that all boys are the same and all girls are the same and i am one of them (the girls). i vacillate between believing this and believing that most people are so unique that there is no way to really know them. for example, do you think that reading this blog gives you some sort of insight into who i am? guess what, blogging takes up about fifteen minutes of my day, and the rest of the day i am thinking about completely different things. i'm sure in the future there will be a way to be hooked up to a computer all the time from birth and then you can just hand over your data to a person on the first date and they can do the computations right there at the coffee shop and figure out if you guys should go home together, but not yet. there are a lot of existentialist personality psychologists out there who have documented these feelings; the need to avoid the fear of mortality through a. feeling like part of the mob, avoiding death through sameness or b. grandiose claims of immortality because of awesome uniqueness. but no research has actually been done to figure out whether one or the other is true, not in terms of an immortal sense but in terms of whether or not people are the same. we all think we are very different, but think about it; everyone thinks target is cool, the gap is relatively stylish, hip-hop is an incredible and modern form of expression, and new york is the place to live if you want to feel important. maybe living in portland where everyone is my age and thinks the same things about music and authors is getting to me a little.


here is another picture of nikola tesla. i still can't stop thinking about the prestige. my next blog is going to be Nikola Tesla: a Report.