encoded notions

I collect behaviors and assimilate them into myself. I don’t know when this started, but it definitely isn’t a new thing for me.

Back when I was a kid I can remember wanting to drink tea on a regular schedule. Every day at 8pm (even when away from home) I used 1-2 teabags to make decaf cranberry tea and I drank it out of a specific mug. I suspect that I had seen a movie or read something about English folks having their 4pm spot of tea, and decided that it was something that I wanted to do as well.

Spottily for the past year or so I’ve been picking up the tea-drinking habit as a yin/yang sinusoidal substitute for my regular coffee intake. There is a noticeably strong correlation between my recent tea-drinking binges and watching British television (Doctor Who, Black Books, Shaun of the Dead, A Bit of Fry and Laurie).

To some degree I feel like I would like to “try on” British culture and that drinking tea is a fairly simple way to do that without the need to interact with other people.

The main character in Twin Peaks absolutely adores drinking coffee; to him it is a pleasurable experience. When I binged on watching old Twin Peaks episodes I had strong feelings of wanting to drink coffee—incredibly good coffee. I wanted to be able to associate feelings of being in a small-town diner late at night with the coffee drinking event.

There are scenes in Amélie where she plunges her hands into bags of grain, or runs her hand along the ledge of a bridge to enjoy the sensation of the texture. Shortly after seeing that movie I started doing that and I still do it to this day.

I watched MacGyver a lot when I was a kid—and to an extent I wanted to acquire the same kind of “random knowledge” that he had. There was a single episode early on where we see MacGyver sitting in his Jeep eating a sandwich filled with alfalfa sprouts. After seeing this as a kid I thought to myself, “I should try that out”. Unfortunately I think I only tried that once and deduced it was more of a hassle than Lebanon bologna sandwiches and I aborted. However, since I started watching all of MacGyver start-to-finish lately, I re-tried out the alfalfa-sprout sandwich and found that my more “adult” taste buds enjoy it—plus I get to feel a bit like Mac.

At this moment I can’t think of anymore specific examples, but the feeling I have in my head is that there are plenty more smaller things I’ve borrowed (and a few big ones). I’m not sure what I wanted to conclude from this, but I did find it oddly amusing to think about myself as this walking imitation machine.