In my twenties I wondered about the meanings of things.  Combining imagination and intelligence with curiosity, people that age tend to find a wealth of newness in discovering previously unknown information.  It can feel to them like no one ever had such thoughts before.  In those years, I wondered how the brain works, how its perceptions color our views of reality.
     Differences in viewpoints, worldviews, may lead a young adult to realize "everything's relative."  We live in a post-Aristotelian, post-Newtonian, quantum physical complex of intersecting realities, each mind perceiving uniquely.  I first read about these ideas in Robert Anton Wilson's non-fiction and Philip K. Dick's science fiction.  Percolating in my brain during my twenties, they influence me still.  I changed the way I talked, saying, "I think that's an ugly painting," rather than "That's an ugly painting."  Is suggests absolute judgment, something no one can possibly have.
     In those years I spoke of tendencies: "She tends to lose her cool whenever I mention that."  Saying it this way means I'm aware she doesn't always lose her cool when I mention whatever it is.  This way of talking sometimes goes around listeners' ears.  They'll hear is when I actually said that tends to be the case.  I got irritable with a friend once who didn't hear my tends to be.  I then said, "It can be a problem in communication when people don't listen to the words being spoken."
     My speaking precisely, relating as much of the truth as I'm capable of putting across, stems, I think, from the heady intellectual decade of my twenties, influenced, too, by my adolescence.  Back then I wanted badly to be understood, to be true to whatever information I was trying to convey.  I grew up with a shy personality.  Social situations shut me up but good.  I've always identified with wallflower types.  I still am one, but my personality has grown to still include the introvert, but mingled with an extroverted exterior that doesn't mind talking with almost anyone.  Inside, I'm still carrying on an inner dialogue with myself.  Much of my creativity branches from this original self.  As a writer I am certainly extroverted.  The two psychological conditions, introversion and extroversion, are really one thing: the human personality flowing outward and inward, manifesting itself so that society sometimes notices--the extrovert--and sometimes doesn't--the introvert. 
     Categorizing people as extrovert or introvert, normal or psychotic, attention deficit disordered or possessing the concentration of a spider, can be useful in making generalizations, but to stop at that point, never pondering the subject to gain more information, makes it seem as if people are one-dimensional.  Get to know someone labelled by the medical community, by the government, by a friend, and you'll probably find the label applies only to a condition the person sometimes has no control over.  Or, the person made choices, got labelled, but there are still many layers to his or her personality.
     I try to use language in a non-absolute way because I acknowledge complexities in other humans.  I also judge harshly, as can be read in some of this blog--I do think the man in my July 5 entry, who wrecked his head with the firecracker, was a moron.  I also recognize that he was young and drunk, that he probably had some good qualities, that his friends and family are upset and grieving.
     When I was in my twenties, I had far less experience of the world and life than I do now.  The ideas mentioned above swam freely in my head, an intellectual stew not yet spiced by the suffering I've experienced since then.  My precise way of talking when in my twenties, still used to the point where I'm usually not conscious of it, has nonetheless been tempered by a more free-flowing style, mixing relativity with the spice of direct language.  I don't talk like Donald Trump, whose face explodes verbal diarrhea not backed up by facts, but I have fun with English, and it no longer irritates the fuck out of me when people speak imprecisely, except journalists.

                                                                             Vic Neptune