"Deep Thoughts": June 2008 Archives

I don't normally go in for advertising slogans, except to notice them in a professional sense (I sometimes have to analyze them for work purposes).

But there's one that's coming to mind today because it slots in neatly with what I wanted to talk about here. It's that USA Today tag: Characters Welcome.

I love people who are odd, unusual, unique, maybe a bit off-kilter - just thoroughly themselves. I mean, I don't love every crazy homeless person who bangs into my knees with a pilfered shopping cart full of their prized bottlecap collections.

But my favorite humans do tend to be those who have their own way of thinking, perceiving, talking, dancing, two-step shuffling down the street. Those who favor rare nerdy-looking bicycles whose frames are constructed like airplane wings.

Those who wear clothes they dyed themselves because they really like the way the fabric takes the color a little unevenly, as if it's been waving about at the bottom of a coral reef for a while.

I like crazy cat ladies and men who paint their fingernails blue, artists who make elaborate virtual pieces in Second Life that cleverly piggyback on the environmental programming that rules the movements of clouds, in order to create slow color changes in their "sculptures."

I like people who talk to themselves, especially when the conversation looks interesting.

I liked the guy with the crab codpiece whose skin was not only painted blue but also precisely stenciled with a ghostly white webbed pattern.

So why, when I'm newly dating somebody, in the phase where I am certain that I like the person but it hasn't yet moved into the boyfriend stage (and may never do so), do I fall prey to the fear that the guy (one of whose proclivities is mentioned above) won't be similarly enchanted with my own unique character?

I mean, there are objective signs that he's down with at least aspects of my particular idiom (to borrow a Pythonism).

He didn't bat an eyelash when I introduced him by name to my bicycle (and vice-versa).

Our conversations typically rank fairly high on the geekometer, and he doesn't seem put off when I do my deep sea diving act.

But I can be really, really earnest, and I suspect there are times when I resemble a large, enthusiastic dog, and, well, that can scare some boys off.

I dunno. It's just nervous-making, that early time. And I don't have much of a strategy for surviving it.

A friend was advising me today to try and just stay in the present, which is funny, because I'm quite spectacular at doing that - in every other area of life.

Sigh. I am trying. Somebody pass me the Zen.

PS. Shut up, Boywich, I know what you're thinking, but I have become spectacular at it in the past couple of years. Really.

PSdeux. Aren't they wonderful, these faces? Click to embiggen, of course.

I wasn't going to post tonight, but I've had a little bee buzzing around in my bonnet all day, and now I just read two other blog posts that seem to tie into it.

A friend recently turned me on to a severely sarcastic (funny but also disturbing) blog dealing with bikes, and - more accurately - fads surrounding bikes, particularly in this city.

The weird thing about reading a blog devoted to commenting on Bike Culture is that I had been blissfully unaware until very recently that there was such a thing.

That's not to say that I haven't noticed the Central Park roadie fashion show, or the tendency to one-upmanship within cycling clubs throughout the suburbs, or even the fact that track bikes are what the cool Billyburg kids are riding these days. But a Culture, and for that matter, a Couture surrounding bicycling just never entered my radar. And I think I wish it hadn't.

There's nothing that can ruin one's joy in something one loves so quickly as the feeling that one has to dress a certain way, or own the latest version of whatever it is, in order to be cool enough to participate in that love.

Honestly, I don't know what to make of it. Yeah, I'm more immune to this sort of thing than I used to be, but it still sort of makes me want to run screaming from the room and go hang out in a big field alone. Which is pretty much how I always reacted to that stuff when I was in school, once I recognized that I was never going to fool anybody into thinking I was one of the cool kids.

Anyway, posts here and here are very much worth reading, for a similar take on a different hobby. Franklin puts it with his usual eloquence, and in words I swear I've used myself before (though not here) - the idea that because we are unique, we are inherently valuable.

And don't come writing me asinine comments about Hitler being unique but not valuable. I don't give a good god damn about the logic of the argument; you know exactly what I mean.

PS. At least somebody still thinks knitting is cool.