No lines

It's an old metaphor, the idea of "staying between the lines"... It's used to connote the notion of a defined, limited, perhaps restricted set of actions that are "allowed" or permitted. To stay between the lines is to follow the rules, do what is expected of one.

(Random thought: hiking on a trail in the second wettest place on Earth means you'll likely end up a little damp...)

And, of course, if one can stay between the lines, one can also venture outside them into forbidden territory.

It might be nice to claim that I love to go outside the rules - it has a certain cache, the notion of the rogue or rebellious spirit. It'd be a lie, though in a weird way.

Rules are what I do. And by "do", I mean, they're something I am fundamentally aware of at all times. I "do" pattern recognition - finding repetitive behavior or observation, relating it back to past knowns, projecting out future possibilities. To do that, you have to know the rules by which you're playing: the limits or conditions that define the boundaries of the field of possibilities.

It's part of the reason I love law, mathematics, logic, and video games: they all set up rules, often arbitrary, within which you try to figure out how to achieve your goal. That's where the fun comes in - not in breaking the rules, necessarily, but in findind out how to abuse them. We used to refer to is as "raping the rules" in old dice-and-paper RPGs.

But there we come to the key - because there isn't just one set of rules. Every ruleset operates within another, at different levels or to different degrees. Rules are a set of Russian dolls, where the most visible ones always contain the restrictions of other rule sets. So, a big part of the game is finding out not only what the rules are, but *which* rules are applicable - and whether or not it's possible to jump up a level or two in the rules to work around something you don't like.

Say a virus is sending out messages from your computer to the internet. In the software ruleset, you have to try and uninstall or clean the virus. In the OS ruleset, you could try turning on the firewall or shutting down the app, or setting up a host redirect or forced route for the virus's destination. In the network ruleset, you could block ports on the router, block all outbound access, or even just unplug the network cable. In the ultimate hardware ruleset, you can just turn the machine off.

A big part of the game is figuring out which set of rules to play by, and changing them when you can.

That's where the lines come in: what may be "staying between the lines" from one perspective or rule set could be going well outside them from another. Me, I'm always staying between the lines - they just may not be the same lines you're looking at.

On Monday night, a bunch of us are up on the deck - two of us nude, the others dressed. A new guy comes up to use the hot tub, and he's wearing a bathing suit; that plus his posturing seems to indicate he's new to the whole "clothing-optional" thing. He flew out today, but last night he and I sat in the hot tub - even after it turned off - for 3 hours or so just talking, and today we were both up on the deck sunbathing. He also commented on how he'd spent one afternoon at the local nude beach and how amazing it felt.

It was kind of cool to see someone's mindset shift from "lines" to "no lines" - no tan lines, in this case, but also fewer mental restrictions on what is or isn't acceptible/comfortable. There are still limits, but they're not where they used to be.

Now to work on the next set of lines.