Categorising your life
Disclaimer: Paramount owns the characters and the Star Trek name. I am not making any money of this.
Spoilers: Sort of season 2 and 3.
Archive: If you really want to, but please ask.
Added Disclaimer: I'm Aussie, as is my spelling.
A/N: Loosely based somewhere in Season 3.
I look into my friends' eyes, everyone's eyes, and see that they don't know what to make of me. So different to what they are used to, they've lost the category. They need to figure it out; it hurts that they can't place it, that something's different, that I'm different, not what they expect. They don't realise, though, that you aren't categories, but hey, what can I do, it's how the human mind works. We encounter something new, and we have to categorise it. Is it animal, vegetable or mineral? Quantum physical or classical? It's why we have so much difficulty with the quantum; our brains are just not hard-wired to cope with not knowing two observables at once. We can't say it is at position x with momentum p. We can't categorise it. I follow my own Heisenberg Uncertainty, but they don't know it. You can pin down what I am on the outside, but you'll have no idea what's on the inside. And now, there's uncertainty in both.
But, there's always been uncertainty. As a child, the "smart" kid, the geek, the kid that everybody checks their answer against, content to use, but everybody shuns. The kid that's smart, that doesn't have to work, he's smart, he'll get through. Why would he have to stress? They don't realise how much that grates, how it can fray a kid's nerves, that it's 10 percent brain and 90 percent working your ass off. And now, the thing that everyone wants back. The thing that nobody understands now. The "friendly", "nice" guy. The guy who will listen to all your problems, never lets on about his own. Always cheerful, always happy. Not allowed to not be. Because when he is, they don't know what to do. They don't understand that every measurement they take screws up the previous one. I'm non-commutative. But then, it's the rule of quantum mechanics for me; you don't know what state I'm in until you make a measurement, but by doing the measurement, you screw up the state. I might actually be feeling okay. Then somebody asks how I am, and I'm not feeling okay any more. And it's an irreversible process, all natural processes are. The change is not quasistatic. You can't just give me the heat back, to replace the cold. You have to do work; no perpetual motion machine is going to be possible.
So, they look at me, not knowing what to do with this thing that is defying their categories. Not realising that I can categorise myself, so why can't they? It's easy.
Human.