Exotic Locales

No Google, the Mystery Spot is not actually in North Dakota

Suddenly, I feel famous.

“it’s just human nature!” does not apply to our destructive potential alone;
it also applies to our capacity to learn, and heal.

this strikes me as a very important thing to remember.

it’s hard to focus on the hundreds or thousands when the 1 is so intriguing…

MAPS Email Update: January 25, 2011 (excerpt)

coincidentally, 26 is my lucky number.
:)

here we go.

~ kynthia

sumberkins had a great time in the first week of school, when there weren’t any classes yet, and she really liked her roommates. once classes started, she found that she didn’t really want to spend all of her time with other film students, most of whom were stereotypically pretentious, and talked about things that sumberkins found rather boring. she hung out with her roommates instead, and as a result, by the end of the first year of film school, she hadn’t really clicked with anyone else in her class, and since production work is team-based, this was a disadvantage.

she came back for the second year, and took some animation classes, which were really cool, but she had lost the desire to really be there, and since it was so expensive, it stopped making sense for her to continue. she took a semester off to consider her options, and decided to transfer to the university of california – santa cruz. her mom had just gone back to school, too – she was studying to be a unitarian universalist minister, in berkeley, so sumberkins was eligible for in-state tuition in california.

she picked santa cruz because they had a program called ‘the history of consciousness,’ which sounded really enticing to sumberkins for some reason she could not quite explain, and they also had a fun-sounding language studies program, which sumberkins thought might be the best evolution of her interest in film. she figured that she was interested in film as a sort of language, really, and it was communication in general that fascinated her – the translation of ideas into symbols and sounds that other people can understand. she didn’t know what this meant she was going to end up doing as a profession, but it seemed like a good place to start, and santa cruz seemed like a good place to start starting.

as i’ve already mentioned, this was the first big split decision in our life. i thought about going to santa cruz, but in the end, i decided to go to boulder, instead, where i studied political science, a decision that surprised even me at the time, but also taught me many valuable things. and so it was that sumberkins and i were in different locations, and the years of flatter thinking and confusion began. sumberkins says that when she first got to santa cruz, it was very hard for her to concentrate on being there. she felt kind of distracted all the time, and tired. the campus was beautiful, and she met several friendly people as she explored the new school and got used to being in california. she had visited california a few times before, but living there was different. everyone talked about energy and chakras and yoga all the time, and went camping in the woods and took mushrooms. sumberkins was very wary of drugs. she knew that they were dangerous, and she was very protective of her brain. over time, however, she met several people who convinced her that the balance of benefits and risks was much more complex than she had initially been led to believe.

from that point forward, our conception of reality would never be the same.

fortunately, she still got to go to preschool in the afternoon, and there were other fun things to do at home, like play frogger on the commodore 64. sometimes, she didn’t want to go to school in the morning, and her daddy would tell her that she could stay home if she really wanted, but if she did, she wouldn’t be allowed to play frogger, and that would make her suck it up.

she also made friends with her next door neighbor, bez. bez was a boy, like most of sumberkins friends. sumberkins thought that being a girl was kind of lame, and she hated wearing dresses, and playing with dolls. she played a lot of imaginary games, and her favorite toys were stuffed animals, followed closely by her he-man and star wars action figures. she particularly liked orko, the levitating magical alien from he-man, because he had this plastic pullkey you could use to make him spin around and around, and the speeder bike from return of the jedi, because it would blow up when you pushed a secret button on the back, so you could make it crash into things, and explode. sumberkins still has these toys, but i don’t, because i sold mine at a garage sale when we moved to colorado. i thought i had outgrown them, and it was fun to make money, but looking back, i think sumberkins got the better side of that division.

this is a good example of the kind of little thing that might be different between our universes, so i’m going to take this opportunity to go on a little tangent about these little differences.

it’s a tangents about tangents, in a way.

at every decision point, you see, there’s a chance for us to divide, and sometimes we do. it’s like we’re walking on a dirt trail, cutting through a rocky forest, and for the most part, we’re treading the same ground, but every once in a while, we take different paths around an obstacle, and meet up later down the trail.

sometimes one of us trips and the other one doesn’t, and bellamy says that there’s actually a version of our consciousness taking every possible fork. in some universe i fall off the bed now, and in some universe a bomb goes off nearby, and in some universe i win the lottery, and in another i walk away, disgruntled and suddenly confronted by writer’s block. in most of the universes, however, i keep typing, but there will be some subtle changes to the wording of the examples i give, because each version of me is thinking about things from a slightly different angle of personal experience. it’s like we’re each running along down our own path, and there’s a very narrow spotlight shining on us, revealing our environment, and this is what we call the “known universe.” but really there is an infinity of trails, each separated by the barrier between individual consciousnesses, like soap bubbles that each contain a whole universe. and sumberkins and i are like two bubbles that overlap, for the most part, but not entirely.

there are a few things that are really different between our universes. for example, in sumberkins universe, john lennon is still alive. he wrote some really cool kids books, and started hanging out with syd barrett, who became an eccentric oxford recluse in both universes, and they released a set of crazy weekend jam session recordings that have become a part of the bedrock of the electronic music scene in sumberkins universe, so it’s really interesting to see how those changes have percolated through our cultures.

you can see, then, how some little differences add up to bigger and bigger differences, down the line, but others don’t. we’re not certain, but it seems like john lennon wasn’t shot in sumberkins’ universe because he had forgotten his glasses, and he changed direction really quickly when he realized this, and the bullet went through cleanly without damaging any organs. some of the decisions that sumberkins and i have made differently have added up to dramatic, life-altering differences between our paths, and these differences are reflected in our personalities. some of the decisions, on the other hand, don’t really seem to matter, other than that we think about them sometimes, like toys sold at a garage sale, or lost to a flood.

sumberkins has a few more memories of kindergarten, but she’s feeling a bit bored by telling the story in chronological order, so we’ve decided to switch approaches for a while, and just record any memory, in any order that comes up. the real goal of this project, for us, is to integrate the last ten years or so, when we’ve been apart, so we both keep feeling drawn to think about those memories first, and then we can go back and talk about older memories as they become relevant. there is something appealing about having a written archive of all the stories that we can remember, but we can flesh that out bit by bit when we can’t think of anything else to say.

so, we’re going to jump forward in time for a while, but first, sumberkins wants to tell you about the time she got stitches in her arm, while catching fireflies in mason jars with bez, the next door neighbor. mommy and daddy were not home, and bez’s mommy and daddy were watching her, and she and bez were catching fireflies outside. bez dropped his jar, and it didn’t break! and he thought that was the coolest thing ever. unbreakable glass! his jar was special! so he dropped it a couple more times, to test it, and this activity bored sumberkins, so she sat down on the sidewalk and rocked back and forth on her hands, which was fun. then bez’s jar wasn’t unbreakable after all, and it startled sumberkins, so she tipped over, and a piece of glass cut her arm right below the shoulder, and it bled a lot, and she cried, and bez’s mommy and daddy called her mommy and daddy to come home, and they took her to the hospital, where she got stitches, and it was kind of cool, but then she couldn’t go to the water slide, which mommy and daddy had promised they would do before they moved away to colorado, so she was grumpy and sad for a long time, even though she also didn’t want her arm to get infected.

see, consciousness is kind of like a giant room that you fill up with energy, and sumberkins and i are like two rooms linked together. when our bodies are in the same place, the two rooms are overlapping, and all our thoughts are shared, and more intense. when our bodies are in different places, it’s like the two rooms shift apart, gradually until they’re next door to each other, and we can think our way into the other one, if we want, but we can also stay in our own room, and as a result we’ve learned which thoughts go where and what different kinds of thoughts feel like because, well, there’s another person moving around in our head all the time, so it’s like this rippling thought massage, and we can feel it. we’ve also learned to keep a corner of our room for private thoughts, and we don’t go into each other’s corner without asking, because that’s just rude.

so anyway, we know that our name is a different kind of thought than other people’s names, and so it makes a different kind of echo, which makes it very distinct, but that all seemed kind of complicated to explain yesterday, so i decided to just gloss over it. now i’m beginning to regret that decision because this tangent is kind of ridiculous. i guess it’s good to learn to not make things up, just to make the story easier, at first, because then i’ll just have to make up for it later, or figure out some weird way to work around it. for now i think i’m still just getting used to this whole biography business, and honestly, i’m really only beginning to understand these things myself, so sometimes i figure out a better way to say it the second time around.

back to preschool.

radolf and jazben were fun to play with, and sumberkins remembers that they liked to play superheroes outside on the playground. she was superman, and radolf was batman, and jazben was spiderman, and sometimes eezin, the son of one of the teachers, would try to play, too, but he was littler than them and didn’t really get how to play in a way that was fun, so they would make him be aquaman and send him off on secret missions all the time, which made them feel kind of tricky, but eezin didn’t seem to mind. now sumberkins likes to scubadive, and thinks that if she had to pick a superpower, breathing underwater would be near the top of the list, maybe even above flying, so this memory amuses her, in retrospect.

they played other games, too, like star wars, and sumberkins liked climbing on the monkey bars a lot. there was a sandbox that had a spider that lived in it, and this scared sumberkins, even though the spider was friendly.

sumberkins remembers these workbook pages that they got every week that had numbers and bears on them, and they were fun to color, and she always tried to do it better every week, without coloring outside the lines.

they had spanish class, which was fun, and they sang songs, and there was nap time, for which sumberkins had a teddy bear named walzip, and one time radolf tore off walzip’s tongue, and that made sumberkins really sad.

one time sumberkins took walzip into the potty and made him sit down and then his leg got all wet, and sumberkins didn’t know how to dry it off, and she was embarrassed.

one time they grew radishes in the garden, and sumberkins was really excited about them growing, and then they picked them, and sumberkins bit into hers, and it tasted terrible, and she felt betrayed, and she didn’t eat radishes for years. it still takes a bit of effort.

one time it was halloween, and there was a party at school, at night time, and mommy came, too, and it was awesome. sumberkins was luke skywalker.

there were also these little tray things that were like cartographic representations of different bodies of water, and they were painted blue and green like maps, and they said things on them like “island” or “isthmus” or “peninsula”, and you could actually fill them up with water, and sumberkins wanted to swim in them. she wanted to invent a special gun that would shrink her down to tiny size, and then she could also play in her fisher price barn, which had a slide and everything. then she would also have a tiny gun that she could use to grow herself back. that part was important. she couldn’t invent the shrinking gun until she figured out how to make the growing gun, because otherwise she might be tiny forever, and that would probably suck.

she remembers having chapstick with a picture of santa on it that tasted like peppermint. sometimes she liked to eat it.

she remembers the front porch of her house. it had big pillars, and she liked to climb on them, and one time she fell off and landed flat on the porch, and that was the first time she got the air knocked out of her, and it was very scary.

when she turned 4, she had a birthday party at her house, and her daddy drew a picture of a clown on a big piece of paper, and they played a game where they tried to pin the nose in the right place with their eyes closed.

on the 4th of july, they shot off fireworks in the backyard, and one of them had a little army man in it, and it floated down in a parachute, and got stuck in a tree a few yards away, and they didn’t get it back.

once her kitty, schmaltie larue, got stuck up in the big tree behind their house, and her mommy and daddy didn’t know how to get him down. she came up with the idea that they should put some tuna fish in the laundry basket, and pull it up with a jumprope and see if schmaltie larue would get in, and so they did that, and it worked.

she liked to play catch with her daddy, and she had a big, red, plastic baseball bat, but hitting the ball was harder than throwing the ball.

there was a windy staircase in the house that she really loved to go down, even though it was also kind of scary because she knew she might fall.

she kind of remembers falling down the stairs once, when she was still in a high chair, but that must have been longer ago than these other memories, because she didn’t need a highchair anymore, but it just occurred to her now, so she’s telling me anyway, and she’s not really sure she’s not making it up.

she definitely remembers falling down the stairs once when she was going to visit saltzen, the man who lived in their basement. one of his arms was cut off at the elbow because he was in the war, which was kind of weird, but he was nice, and used to give sumberkins those little pieces of gum that were all different colors, and she liked that gum.

the falling down stairs and saltzen were in a different house that the one with the big pillars, though. sumberkins moved when she was about 3. the new house also had a little cubby closet in the middle of the wall in her room, and she liked to climb in it, and do puzzles of the smurfs. there was a red light bulb in the cubby, and it was her favorite place.

she also played marbles on the big porch, and the floors in the living room. in the kitchen, she played jacks.

there was another kitty, who was the momma kitty of schmaltie larue, and sumberkins was afraid of her because she was mean. schmaltie larue, on the other hand, was nice, and sumberkins used to pull him around on her saucer sled, or put him in her shopping cart, and he didn’t care.

she remembers more about the house with the big porch, and playing outside there, but not until after she started going to kindergarten, and today we’re only talking about preschool, so that might be about it.

sumberkins says no, she remembers one more thing, when she got her own hamster named cinnamon, just like the one at her school, and she loved him very much, and one day her balloon flew away, and she cried, and then she went home and cuddled cinnamon, and he made her feel better. then one time, cinnamon was dead, and she was quiet for a long time, because he was never coming back.

our universes overlap a lot, so we didn’t even notice that we were two separate people for a long time, because all of our thoughts and reactions to things were shared, and we just didn’t know that we were living in totally different universes because the thought never occurred to us. i mean, people in her universe were calling her ‘sumberkins’ and people in my universe were calling me ‘kynthia’, but since that happened pretty much every time? and it was almost always in the same voice as the person who was saying our name in our universe? we just thought it was a weird echo that happens when people say your name, and it seemed silly to us that people were always acting fascinated about how easily the human brain picks its name out in a crowd.

every once in a while, there would be some other weird little difference that we barely registered consciously, like she would want mango-raspberry instead of mango-pineapple-banana for some reason, and i would feel a funny tug, and kind of be able to imagine wanting to change my mind, but then in the end i would go with mango-pineapple-banana, after all. if the difference was something that kept coming up, the tugs would start to feel a little stronger, and our thoughts would feel conflicted about random things that didn’t seem to matter much, which we just thought was normal. if the thought had to do with which direction we should go, sometimes we would trip or stumble a little, but we just thought we weren’t paying enough attention.

we both daydream a lot. we think it might have something to do with the fact that having two consciousnesses makes our thoughts feel thoughtier, so thinking about abstract things we both like is really satisfying, like eating berries straight from the vine. as a result, it’s hard to get ourselves to want to think about material things, because they are different for each of us, and thus somehow more bland. but we can’t prove that or anything. not until solo people learn to think each other’s thoughts. we think the day is coming, but bellamy says the tide has to turn first. but i’ll get to bellamy later.

when sumberkins and i were teenagers, some of the subtler, subconscious differences started adding up to more obvious difference ripples, and we started to have thought static, but we just thought it was the microwave, and we learned to ignore it. it wasn’t until college that we started to feel torn about more serious things, and it wasn’t until after we took a semester off from film school to think about transferring that we consciously split locations for the first time. she decided to go to santa cruz to study language and consciousness, and i decided to go to boulder to study political science. for a while we didn’t really think about the same things very often at all, and we started to live different lives, and forget each other. everything felt a little flatter than the life we had been sharing as children, but we thought that was just part of growing up, and we came to treasure the moments when we still crossed paths in our dreams.

living separately made us kind of tired all the time, and we didn’t really know why at first. we had been kind of spoiled by having two consciousnesses to think with as kids, and so now we had to learn to get by with only half as much energy, which was tough. sumberkins figured out what was going on before i did, because santa cruz is pretty crystal crunchy crazy, and they just talk about shit like that, like other people talk about the weather. they also eat a lot of kale, particularly when there are fresh sprouts, and lemon-tahini dressing. i was exposed to some of the same ideas in boulder and bloomington, but through a very different lens, so we thought about everything differently, which is really helpful and interesting now, but at the time it made things feel pretty muddled. she was meeting people who did drugs all the time, or meditated on mountains, and sometimes both, and eventually she found out that she could hear my thoughts if she quieted her own, and then she remembered a lot of things from when we were younger, and she put two and two together.

she also spent more and more time exploring the parts of our consciousness that neither of us had really visited before, except maybe a few times on accident, and she met bellamy, who is kind of like our guardian angel. he’s not really an angel, at least not in the way people usually think about angels, because he doesn’t live in heaven or anything, and he reports to the alliance, not to god, but like i said, i’ll get to bellamy later. together they figured out a way to make me notice little clues in my environment that would help me access certain thoughts, and sometimes they visited my dreams, until we started sharing ideas again, and found ways to bring our worlds a bit closer together. eventually, we were able to pool our energy again when we thought about some things, which was very exciting for both of us.

when i finally went to santa cruz myself, about a year ago now, and we were in the same location for the first time in years, things got a little bit crazy. the more our thoughts and ideas overlapped, the more energized we got about them, and the more patterns we started noticing in the things we’d been thinking about while we were apart. i only really figured out what was going on very recently (in such a way that i was able to talk about it while i’m awake, at least), and now sumberkins and i have decided that the best way to integrate our separate experiences, and figure out what to do next, is to write down all the memories that really stick out for us as moments that shaped our development. there are some moments that we both really agreed on, and thus they feel really strong and important to us, and there are some moments where we made different choices, and then a sort of dissonance grew, and if we think about those things at the same time, it’s kind of like listening to two different radio stations at once.

the plan is for me to write sumberkins’ memories in this universe, and for her to write my memories in her universe, and then we’ll both publish what we wrote as fiction, because there’s not really much of a non-fiction audience yet for trans-universe undercover reporting. we think that maybe reading about what we’ve learned will be helpful to other consciousness twins, because we know they’re out there, and it would be easy to never notice at all, if you weren’t lucky enough to find someone to explain what was going on, like bellamy. in fact, bellamy says that the reason he’s been helping us is because the alliance is trying to find ways to help people in our universes understand consciousness a little better, so that we’ll be more prepared when the tide comes.

we’re not really thinking about all that yet, though, because honestly, we don’t really know what to believe, except that imagination is powerful, and more so when shared, so we want to begin by documenting our experiences, and then look back on them together, and let the record speak for itself.

i’m going to start by running through sumberkins’ memories, in chronological order, with some allowance for tangents as they naturally arise, and we’ll see where that leads. i’m going to try to editorialize as little as possible, at least until most of the memories are written down, and i reserve the right to rephrase things and organize the stories differently later, after we have a chance to compare notes. i’ll probably have to explain a few things about some of the more confusing differences between sumberkins’ universe and our universe, and i probably won’t be able to resist a few observations about things that are particularly interesting to me, because i want to remind myself about things i want to revisit later.

i will begin, however, by simply transcribing one memory a day, beginning with the first thing sumberkins remembers, which also happens to be the first thing i remember, because we overlapped almost entirely until we were about ten.

in our first memory, we are probably about two, and we are hiding under our crib, staring out at big bird’s feet, which are on a poster on our wall. we hear our mommy and daddy saying “where’s [kynthia/sumberkins]?” and their voices are playful, but somehow we understand, for the first time, that they really don’t know where to find us, and if we keep hiding, they might get scared, and we might get in trouble, and the idea that we have such power is both frightening and invigorating, and we aren’t quite sure what to do…