ARCHIVES
Put general comments about this blog here:
Click to leave your thoughts.
A blog by someone who doesn't like or understand blogs.
A major theme of this blog is the love affair between the blogger and the city of New York.
Email me at david [at] danzig [dot] com.
Bloggers with whom I am personally acquainted, in real life, in alphebetical order by first name:
Caren L.
Dav C.
David D.
Eva J.
Jessica D.
Joclyn G.
Lauren P.
Sean S.
Steph T.
If you know me in person, and I forgot to put you here, definitely, please email me, and also please accept my apology!
Take a look at some of my nearby neighbors by clicking this button: 
.
Monday, September 30, 2002
RESPONSE TO "AN ARM OR A LEG?"
External link:
Barry D. responds in his blog to the questions I raise in my very recent blog entry "An Arm or A Leg", though he doesn't actually answer the questions. He's a little critical of some of my phallocentric answers, where by "phallocentric", I mean "reluctant to amputate my phallus". Actually, the word he uses is the in-some-ways-more-loaded-and-in-some-ways-less-loaded term "male-centric". Oh, just see for yourself.
He also raises a difficult question, which I'm paraphrasing: How many years of memories from your life would you be willing to lose rather than lose a limb? In this scheme, you'd keep all the skills you'd acquired in that time, but you'd be unable to recall a single event in the missing time. He expects your answer may be different depending on whether the years come from the beginning of your life or the most recent part of it.
I suppose for me it depends a little on the limb. On the other hand, there are specific memories I have that I would probably pay money to forget. It's hard for me to think of almost any memory worth losing an arm for. There are wonderful memories I'd hate to lose, but I'd also really, really hate to lose my arm. So, I'm going to say that I'd be prepared to have total amnesia before I'd lose an arm. For a leg, I think I'd give up my whole childhood, at least until my senior year of high school. But even then, I'm almost never going to say that I wouldn't give up just one more year to save my leg. But, I'd have to keep something. Barry D.'s friend Halley seems to think we should prefer to lose my most recent memories to my earliest, but I think the opposite is true for me. If I held on to only the last few months, I'd be pretty well oriented in my life. I'd know all of the most important people in my life, and I'd be not that disoriented in dealing with people. By contrast, I don't think about my childhood very often at all, and I certainly don't draw from it very much today in deciding who I am. I don't think I really started to become the person who I think of myself as being, until the very end of high school.
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2002/09/response-to-arm-or-leg.html
Check for older comments: Archived comments on item #85505877
