There might be better places to post this but it will at least it serve a “hint hint”.
I think that I would go on a shadowbox camping trip if one was organised because…
I went camping again & reached some conclusions...
Last time (the first time I went camping) I felt like a liability because of my inexperience but this time it worked out better. However, it was still a bit uncomfortably existential at times. Being “with people” and “being alone” proved to me on a psychological level what I already knew intellectually.ie that private moments of contemplation are more intense (beautiful and distressing)for having to have first been around people in ways that can’t be avoided. Unfortunately this also confirms for me that social stresses, even unobvious ones, are the generators of a considerable amount of “meaningfulness.” This is not great (in my mind) because it just seems dumb to have to create problems in order to feel something profound. And yet I’m still quite detached from the consequences of what this all might mean.
Anyway, I can now say that I would go “shadowbox camping” because I’m curious enough about the dynamics to ignore the awkwardness of meeting new people, not that I would be a sociologist about it…experience is generally poetic before it is philosophical and my conclusions about social scenarios are generally made after the fact rather than as the outcome of a scientific contrivance.
Semi related tangent: I went into Bristol yesterday & Monday and discovered that it was culturally far more suited to me than Coventry is. I got the impression that I could do something creative there and that people might actually be interested. It is funny how it takes a holiday (exacerbating my sense of feeling like an outsider) to create a keener awareness of how others interpret me. In my home city I can’t tell if certain smiles (or other subtle displays of curiosity) are directed at me because I’m a freakish oddity or because I’m interesting in a good way. At Bristol I discovered that there are quite a few people with quirks like mine that seem to be taken fairly seriously (in other words, the attractive female companion doesn't appear to be ashamed to be walking around with a "semi-eccentric" guy). I even went to a bar that some members of our group thought was “bit weird” but, all the time I was there, I was thinking that I want something like this where I live.
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Topic: Shadowbox Camp 2010 Motherfuckers!! (Read 5929 times)