Mutatis Mutandi

Jackson's MuTT bit me.

Is this a narrative or a game or a _____ ?

I tried going back and putting in what I thought were valid answers for various people I knew (without their knowledge or consent, of course). The test results came out different, and even had some resonance with my own unauthorized opinions.

I went back and tried to refine my own responses, making different choices that still seemed valid for myself. I did this three times, and the results were always identical. Clearly, I am just too much of a 3-eyed disopropic parapagus to realize it, whatever that means, and Ms. Jackson is working with some kind of system, whatever that may be.

So how much is this a narrative, and how much is it a game? And how does that relate to traditional spurious categorizations? For instance, as well as a diso-whoozee, I'm a Gemini with Gemini rising, Aquarius in the midheavens, and the moon shifted to Scorpio from elsewhere because my mother decided I was getting born too quickly and stopped me, POW. I get all kinds of accounts of my life from People Who Know, based on that info.

A similar logic to all this, since it passes discrete bullets of info through some arcane algorithm or classificatory maze to produce a set of Qualities that Are Me, through which the actions, emotions, events, memories, experiences that constitute my life can be interepreted.

I never saw a phrenologist, but my father once paid $800 for an involved aptitude test for me. (Was one of Jackson's questions "Do you ever feel that no one knows what to do with you?" Who does know what to do with a parapagus, disopropic or otherwise? You can see how this all starts to make sense). The dp thing was not isolated at that time, though, unfortunately.

What was that story Borges wrote about the Chinese encyclopedia? WIth all the bizarre categorizations? Foucault quotes it somewhere.

Then of course Grandma was given electric shocks to stimulate seizures because she WAS a psychotic (with depressive symptoms, hopefully, because that's what the practice, ECT was/is supposedly for; apparently, clinical practitioners discovered that if you threaten loonies with electric shocks, they act sane). At the same time, the epileptics down the hall (who had mastered seizures just fine, thanks you) where given depressants.

Should I go to school to be somebody?

I have this feeling, though, that the real narrative here is in the code, that Adam -- or Eve, since this is Shelley Jackson's garden -- has named the birds and plants in PERL or C, in a series of nested what-if loops.

It might be interesting to map the script against Patchwork Girl and see what matches.