shady side of the moon

I read my last entry over again and i'm not sure how happy i am with it. I didn't quite say as much as i wanted to or in as much detail as i wanted to. This is kind of hard. Not only is it a bit embarrassingly personal, it's a secret and it feels wrong on a number of levels to just give a secret away. Plus i'm not sure how interesting this stuff actually is >.> Also, i haven't thought about this much simply because i haven't had a whole lot of need to. I think it matters, though, so...

So what am i then?

I said 'mooncat' before, which i still like as a sort of imaginary species name. I think, less specifically, though, i'm a shadow. A sort of elemental form of mystery or something like that. As i said before though, shape doesn't really matter to me.

I said i'm concerned with secrets, mysteries and hidden things before. Basically that means that my driving concern is and always has been to accumulate knowledge. As a moonkitten (shadowling?) i focused heavily the physical world. Did fairly well in school, learned a fair bit about how the physical world works. As i grew up i started to narrow my focus a bit. Living things are more interesting for me, particularly thinking people. I'm currently double majoring in biology and literature in hopes of understanding people (and i use that word in the most inclusive possible sense) both in terms of what makes them tick and of how they think.

The problem with doing this while in a human body is that people expect reciprocity from me. I see them, they see me. For me to get to know them they want to get to know me. I've heard of something called 'autistic invisibility' where people overlook you because you're not sending the right body language signals or something. I've always kind of wished i could figure out how to do that, or to do that thing they do in novels where they blend in perfectly with a crowd so nobody can pick you out. Or anything, really, that takes me a step closer to invisible, undetectable. Sometimes i like to just sit on my own in coffee shops and listen to the stranger's conversations happening all around me. Obviously, i won't learn anything useful since i'll never recognize those people even if i do see them again, but secrets have value of their own. They're a source of energy for me, i guess, particularly creative energy.

I keep going off on tangents and looking back and realizing i didn't _really_ say quite what i intended to. I meant to talk about social stuff there, but i didn't so i'll do it now. I'm autistic, but i can converse and interact fairly normally when it's about stuff. I can talk through a school project, say, with another person no problem, i can talk about movies and anime and give opinions on things and make jokes and stuff just fine.

I have a terrible time telling secrets, though, even with people i actually trust (and especially in a medium like this.) I keep secrets reflexively, rarely tell people more than the minimum i think they need to know about me. I'm saying 'secrets' but 'important things' might be a better word. It's a category that covers anything that's important to me that will come as any sort of a surprise to the person in question. It gets easier to tell secrets to people i trust, but inversely, it gets harder to tell them to people who are important to me because their reactions also become more important (which is why i end up hardly telling my mom anything. <.<) And when i say i have trouble telling them i mean first i will avoid any situation where i have to do it like the plague, second if i'm forced into such a situation i freeze up and can't look at the other person (or sometimes keep my eyes open at all, so i don't have to see them seeing me.)

I'm not really shy though. Actually i don't really mind being the center of attention sometimes; i can do public speaking or anything like that where i'm putting on a one way performance for people easily. Because i'm when i'm doing that, i'm acting, and acting really just another sort of lying/secret keeping. I'm showing one face to the audience, even if it's a fairly real face, while keeping most of myself hidden behind the role.

Ok, where was i? Hmmm. More stuff about why secrets are important to me, i guess. When i was younger i used to wander around the walls of buildings, poking at odd bits of pipe and things like that in hopes of finding some sort of secret passage. I came up with elaborate routines of rapping at bricks and rubbing pipes and taking a certain number of steps to the left, which obviously never opened anything but i did them anyway cause they felt sort of special.

More recently, i've taken to exploring the neighborhoods around me quite thoroughly on rollerblades (though i've been lax about this recently, i ought to try to go out again more when it gets warm again.) I'd literally go down every street and every cul-de-sac. I tried to go at different times of the day, too, because there are some places that look very different at dusk and at night. (Near my school, there's a patch of bushes in the middle of a parking lot where the leaves turn to pure gold at night, because of the way the streetlights have been set up above them. It's beautiful. (And that didn't really count as telling a secret because i didn't tell you where or how to find them :P))

That's a woefully unorganized block of text up there and i probably missed a pile of stuff, but i feel a bit more like there's actual content in this post this time, so i'll post it and see if i can't take another run at being clearer some other time.

..actually, i guess i can try to clarify not being a cat while i'm at it.  I like cats a lot.  They're mysterious and graceful naturally.  But while i feel like i have a bit of an affinity with them, i don't think i _am_ one.  imagining myself in a cat shape doesn't seem a great deal more natural than my human shape.  An 'ideal' shape for me would, i think, be a mishmash of a cat's eyes and maybe tail and ears with a lot of cool stuff from a bunch of other animals and maybe some things that don't even exist.  But even then, that wouldn't be a true form; it'd be more analogous to a dream car or a really stylish suit of clothing i guess.  Shadow-me is liquid and takes on the shape of it's container.  If i was the final multi-stage boss in a RPG, i wouldn't revert to my true form after you beat me, i'd just melt or something.  (and like i said before, if i DID have a true form, i think it might be somehow wrong to give away what it is. <.< at least in a public journal like this.  that'd be an important secret.)