Impressions are not easy to gauge and usually we don’t want people to give us their real impressions of us. It’s one of the little joys of teaching Middle School students – they can be brutally honest if they like and trust you. And you can see how people can have wildly different impressions of you even though they may be interacting with you in the same environment.. So they are probably working with a different cognitive map. But we act differently depending on our environment as well. That’s probably pretty much accepted wisdom these days, but actually “getting” it isn’t always the easiest thing to do.
Case in point. Here I am in Bali now with a friend from Sumbawa who knows me only based on what he sees of me in Sumbawa. He came with us to Bali to check out a girl that he might be interested in, and he apparently (I say apparently because I am never sure what my wife is up to) agreed to come and do some remodeling work our house in exchange for a tv for the bungalow that he lives in that we own. (Lots of stuff here to digest for those who are only reading this blog because I mentioned sex and Indonesian women once in a title.)
So my friend says to me the other day that I’m different here than in Sumbawa. Hmm, I’m interested in this. Just what does he mean? He says that here there are masses (yes, there are masses) of people coming and going throughout the day – especially children as we live in a somewhat extended family situation here which means that we often have as many as 20 “children” (saying this as a 58 year old means that some of my children are actually adults in their early 20s) running around the house. Then there are the adults which sometimes number up to 15. So in this structure that we live in, we sometimes have from 30 – 40 people wandering around at various times throughout the day. (If we get a little more specific in an anthropological sense and ask who sleeps here – we have six adults and 11 children for the most part although sometimes it gets much more crowded.
In Sumbawa, I have a fairly large house which sleeps my wife, me and four kids (I’ll leave out the animals because they sleep outside.) During the day we may have a few more kids wandering through and maybe another six or so adults. Basically, it’s a small group if we compare it on a person per square meter basis.
In Sumbawa, I spend a lot of time on the computer doing school work so I have limited interaction with the people there. Here in Bali, I wander around, occasionally coming down my sanctuary on the third floor. The kids make little pilgrammages up to the third floor to ask for money so I can say, “What! Do I look like the Bank of America?”
So to get back to the main point. My friend sees me as a shy person who is somewhat reluctant to interact with people (somewhat similar to my own perception of who I am). But he was somewhat amused by all the interaction I have with people here and how I deal with all the comings and goings.
The big kids (10 -30) see me as a teddy bear with a big bark and a small bite. The little kids are afraid of me because I’m the American with the big voice and sarcastic deameanor who call them on their spoiled behavior (Indonesian kids tend to be terribly spoiled, but I think that American kids are spoiled too so this perception might be a function of age).
Umm, main point is that our identities are flexible to a degree (although diehard Freudian that I am), I think that the basics of our personality are formed as children and we only negotiate minor variations on the theme as we age.
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