#oprideons

tssblink182 sent me an ask about my "top five fascinations" and I answered it but I don't think it actually... went through and I meant to publish it anyway, and it definitely didn't publish, so I'm just gonna paste my answer in a text post (because I was smart and copied it on my phone because I had a feeling this would happen).

(RE: the twins portion)

"My fascination didn't really start all that long ago, I suppose. I discovered my favorite band (Tokio Hotel; my icon is their symbol) in 2009 or so? And the band leaders are identical twins. It led to a lot of reading about just them, initially, but oftentimes their relationship as twins gets brought up in interviews & they're always pretty vocal about the fact that they consider their bond unbreakable, and that neither believe any other relationship they've had, have, or could have would compare. And that just led to a lot of reading about other twins to sate my curiosity on whether it's the same for all of them, which just led to a lot of research through interviews and studies and whatnot. And the more I read, the more I identified -- I came to understand that, though I often fail at describing it, the type of friendship/relationship I've always wanted would closely mirror that of twins. A sort of no-boundaries relationship, an unbreakable bond that transcends that of our other friendships or even romantic relationships.

Unfortunately, I've stopped holding out hope for this, but it's also why I don't really consider a romantic relationship a viable option for me. That's just not the type of connection that I feel would really fulfill me; I can easier imagine a relationship mirroring a twin connection lasting long-term into my future, including living together and whatnot, but something romantic elludes my ability to picture. The problem this poses, of course, is that most people envision their romantic partner as the person they'd want to spend their life with (which is fine! I think this is awesome, just not for me) and that doesn't hold up to the lack of separation I'd need.

I've had one person with whom I felt our connection was close to or on this level, but we no longer speak very often. And that's kind of why I don't hold any expectations on finding that sort of "twin" connection. I fear losing people enough as it is; forging a bond, connection, and a trust with somebody that deep would result in some pretty deep pain if something happened between us and we stopped talking.

Fascinate is an interesting word.

Psychology. All facets of it. Anything that has to do with a person’s psyche is just infinitely interesting to me, not to mention the mental health diagnosis process, medications, therapy and alternative treatments, theories, diagnosis criteria and the fact that they are ever-changing… I could go on, okay.

Sociology, and I’m counting this separately because it’s really a separate field. The way people interact — with others, with themselves to an extent, animals, the differences between family and friends, and I am extraordinarily interested in the developing ‘internet/online sociology’ and the differences between social interaction between people online vs. people that meet face-to-face.

Twins. This probably seems weird but twins really, really fascinate me, and I’ll lump multiples in general in here also, but mainly twins. The connection that they share, the differences in that between fraternal and identical, the dream process and frequency of shared dreams, the statistical probability of twins being able to answer each others’ unasked questions (ie: “where —” “under your desk”), how twins cope with separation whether willing or not, how romantic relationships develop, if they experience a “gap/hole” when living apart for any reason, and just specifically their general psychological/sociological aspects.

Foreign languages! I don’t really know any, aside from some very rusty, rudimentary French, but they are infinitely fascinating, especially those that use entirely different alphabets from our own. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, and so on, the way what we would perceive as “letters” are actually words for them, the perfection required to write in their languages, and beyond that, the grammatical structure of so many languages, the combination of words that can say something entirely different when tweaked just slightly, and so on.