Me: cramped inside of an airplane waiting for access to the gate, has to urinate. The human flotsam discharges into the airport and disperses quickly. I too have the chance to relieve myself. Certain properties, relationships between individuals or certain facts about individuals themselves, do not change. I am still Joseph Angus Corneli, whether I am held impatiently waiting in an airplane or seated happily on the curb waiting for a bus. We are continually re-categorized. The fact that we can be in more than one mutally overlapping category at once is rather neat, from a logic standpoint; but it is more interesting, I think, to observe how different the categories are: the conditions of sharing a common space, a common memory, or belonging to some co-defining relation are all rather strikingly different. Each is differently "consistent", along different axes (time, space, identity).
--jcorneli Jan 11, 06