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| Tonight, on my way home from a diner date with a good friend, I decided to stop off at Walmart. I don't generally shop at Walmart, but where else can you buy a round brush and a bottle of moisturizer at 10 PM? Well, in Ohio, at least.
I haven't felt at home in a Walmart since I graduated from college. There, at least, we had a sort of community of students, locals, and itinerant Amish, but the Walmart here is nothing like that Mecca of ramen, duct tape, and cheap dvds. It's a dirty, haphazard warren of shabby appliances and bent cans stretching out into the indeterminate distance like a surrealist Labyrinth.
A freaked-out wave of disgust hit me as soon as I walked inside. I almost ran for the hair supplies aisle (right between frozen foods and Glade candles), intent on finding my stupid brush and getting out as quickly as possible. A woman in an electric wheelchair that beeped and rumbled like a Mack truck immediately pinned me into the aisle, and I tried to reach the display around her with a mumbled apology. One brush had clearly been pried out of the package, used, and stuffed back into place. Long, blondish hairs tangled in the bristles and wound down the handle. I wondered if maybe I should get out my hand sanitizer. Grabbing a different brush, I started to back out of the aisle...directly into an older gentleman pushing a wide-angled broom.
He made eye contact and nodded smartly as I passed.
In the next aisle, a girl stocking bottles of shampoo spun around to find me right behind her. "Sorry, hon!" she said cheerfully, and smiled at me.
All around me, people--scary-looking, scruffy, disheveled people--were smiling and apologizing for reaching across each other and making small talk. In the checkout aisle, a woman with one tooth and an open bag of chips under one arm gossiped animatedly about the characters in TV Guide as if they were old friends. A complete stranger passing by burst into open laughter at something she said, and cheerfully waved at the lady as she passed. The cashier chatted with the customers about deals at other stores, and gruff-looking men bought puppy chow and toothpaste.
Suddenly, I was very aware of my $200 boots and my designer haircut. I wondered what happened to me in the last three years that I would feel so unnerved by these very real, very ordinary people. I know I've changed. I know my professional life has changed the way I talk, dress, interact.
They're not all bad changes, and they don't make me less genuine. So I've found that I honestly like certain luxuries--good food, expensive shoes, nice perfume--that's not a bad thing in and of itself. So I've gotten used to working with white collar businessmen--that's just the nature of the job. But when liking those things makes me believe somehow that I'm better than someone else...how could I be? I watch the same tv shows as that lady in line, and I probably laugh a lot less with random people in stores. I buy the same brand of hair clips as that woman in the wheelchair, and for all I know, that sweet-faced cashier could be saving up for graduate school. It's alright to like nice things, but not if those things start to define an identity. I paid for my shopping with a sudden sense of humility.
When I left Walmart, I had a brush, a bottle of lotion, and a tin of wintergreen mints...and just maybe, a different perspective on my world. | | |
| After some consideration, I think I'd have to call myself a stealth cosplayer. No, no, that's not right. Cosplayer sounds too much like I'm running around a convention somewhere wearing a damn raccoon tail or carrying a giant foam sword like a handbag. Let's strip the term down, shall we? Cosplay: dressing up in costumes or accessories in order to pretend that one is a fictional character. Nope, that's not it, then...
Alright, let's say that i'm a stealth geek-wearer. I don't go in for obvious costumes (or costume anything really), and I don't pretend to be a fictional character. What I have done, though, is specifically buy articles of clothing that pay homage to my favorite characters. Nothing overtly geeky, nothing impossibly stylized, just everyday elements that remind me of stories I've liked. They look like ordinary clothes, but when I wear them, I feel a little bit more empowered. Like maybe, just maybe, I can be a badass today.
It's the same principle as listening to really great, driving music when you're alone on the highway at night. You drive a little faster, change lanes just that much more decisively, feel almost dangerous. You can almost believe that you're on your way to a rendezvous with fate or returning from a continent-spanning adventure. Maybe you've driven hundreds of miles to get to where you are; maybe there's someone waiting to join you at the end of this road. You're the hero in your own private epic, and it's all just the fun of your imagination in the moment.
...Same principle. On their own, my clothes and accessories are as normal as normal could be, but my associations make them into tiny badges of attitude. A grey button-down evokes salt-cans and Zippo lighters where a deep hooded scarf summons the stillness of Sherwood. A cuff watch remembers treasure and lost kingdoms; the long green sweater could've been swiped from Epona's saddlebags. Today I need Leon Kennedy's fortitude; tomorrow I'll borrow Lara Croft's attitude. Maybe on Wednesday, I'll need a bit of Wendy, or Jack O'Neill, or just the faintest hint of Murdock's crazy. You never know.
It's my private joke with myself, and it's all the geek flag I have to fly. Now if you'll pardon me, my zombie-huntin' jacket and I have some dogs to walk. The wind is blowing through the branches tonight, and I have a feeling I might just need it.
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| I had the most amazing "Conan the Barbarian" type dream last night. It looked like it was set in a typical pseudo-ancient world (you know, where everyone is inexplicably organized into Medieval courts, wearing Greek fashion, and using Roman manners).
As I understand it, the Conan-esque barbarian hero was either a slave or a peasant farmer who had had just about enough of oppression and was ready for a change. The heroine, an aristocratic princess with strikingly red hair, had fallen in love with him and agreed to help him overthrow the tyrannical governor-princes. Like you do. When I picked up with them, they were in the middle of a really spectacular chase sequence through a court feast, pursued by a prince who had wanted to marry the princess (and obviously hated the hero). I gotta tell you, it was as fun as any long chase I've had in a dream in a long time. We were ducking through doors and pushing past crowds of ladies wearing beautiful chitons and crowns of diamonds and slipping past servant carrying trays of lobsters and edible flowers, and it was a blast.
Unfortunately, the chase came to an end, and somehow we managed to arrive at a point that the hero--by now feared to be some figure of ancient prophesy, of course--was presumed dead, and the princess was being forced to marry the jerk prince. One incredibly lucky cat, a magnetized coin, and a revelation of the actual genre of the dream later (science fiction!), the hero and princess escaped to go looking for a lost sword that looked like plastic, weighed all of a pound, and could cut through freaking anything. Seriously, I did so much property damage in that dream while I was figuring it out.
The science fiction details that made the dream so memorably fun were subtle. Apparently, it was actually a post-apocalyptic world, at least a thousand years after some catastrophic event that everyone assumed was the beginning of the world. The catastrophe left every living thing slightly (or more than slightly) irradiated. Would've killed any of us, but apparently Conan, his princess, and even the jerk governor were all a new kind of human. Born toxic, the people of this new world (who had scientific understanding about on par with the ancient Greeks) assumed that the weird things that sometimes happened around them had to be magic.
The princess's red hair attracted certain kinds of metal, so a rare coin she gave to Conan became a magnetic projectile to disrupt her wedding and let her know he was there. Conan's armor slowly turned a gold color as he wore it, leading everyone to believe that he was the prophesied hero--but really, no one noticed before because he never wore armor as a peasant. The sword was some kind of ancient shaped-plasma blade, probably for use in building the super-strong, nuclear reactors of the past. And so on.
It was really creative and cool without being obvious, and it was nice, for once, to have a detailed dream that didn't involve anything really awful happening to anyone. | | |
| Whenever I try to consider the nature of evil too closely, I inevitably reach the point that my ability to comprehend it crashes into a mental wall. It's as though my mind just can't compute the problem; I can't even produce the input necessary to translate the data into a rational form.
I can work my mind around evil on manageable level. It's possible to parse out even the worst crimes when there are only a few people involved. But then I get to the global scale, and I just - blank -
How could anyone hate another people so much that they would decide that the entire race should be wiped out?
How could anyone even consider unleashing a nuclear attack on our own planet?
How could someone who already had everything use their position to hurt their own people? What could they possibly gain from that?
Scale makes all the difference. I can understand, from a distance, murder; I can't even begin to comprehend genocide.
Sometimes I wonder if only our mistakes will be remembered in the long run. I wonder if, hundreds or thousands from years now when America as it exists is only a history lesson, we will be remembered as the only country to use an atomic bomb against humankind. Maybe by then we'll just have been the first. It'd be better if we were the only ones.
America has done so many good things, so many great things. We have created something that will enter into the history of the world alongside ever other civilization that came before us. Someday, our great-great grandchildren will get parts of what we are now, just like we have bits of all the peoples that inspired us. Even if we don't last forever and always as the America we are now, that's not such a bad legacy to hope for--that someday, somewhere, our memory will help the world create something new.
But tonight, I remember that we dropped atomic bombs on living human beings. It was a desperate act, and it was done with the best intentions to end a war, and it worked. But it shouldn't ever have been done. We weren't made to destroy each other like that. We weren't created to poison our planet and make our own kind our enemy. No one should have the power to do so much damage so easily. Not for any reason.
It's bad enough that there are evils on the individual scale. It's bad enough that anger, jealousy and greed can drive us to the kinds of murders and robberies that are on the news every day. But that it can be just as easy to destroy a city, or a country, or an entire race of people?
That's unimaginable.
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| It's been 2,747 days since I wrote my first entry, and it's been well over a year since I wrote reliably about anything at all. With a little bit of luck and God willing, that's about to change.
I've just gotten a new laptop (poor Horatio, who got me through six years of term papers, tablet paintings, Pepsi disasters, and my first post-college job, finally decided he'd had enough), and I can finally type on something other than my iPad. I've gotten a new outlook on life, too. My horrible, horrible job has been slowly crushing my soul out of me, and until two weeks ago, I let it eat my life. Then, one awful afternoon, I realized three things:
1) The head boss never has figured out what I actually do at the company.
2) They will always justify treating (and paying) me like an intern, even though I've been there for nearly three years.
3) I can't end up much worse off than I am now.
It was the best moment of the last year. I can try anything--go anywhere--and even if I choose poorly, it won't be worse than what I've got. I've been holding on to the illusion of responsible stability for so long, and it's not even like I have a constructive, upwardly-mobile job as it is. I can be free, and all I have to do is make the leap.
So I'm making some changes this year. I'm going to find a way onto a mission trip, somewhere, for some period of time. I'm going to find out exactly what I need to do, learn, or experience to get myself hired by a humanitarian aid or relief organization. I'm going to bang on doors until someone gives me a clear goal, and I'm going to go for it. I might start working on a Masters in Agriculture or International Studies. I might go teach English in Taiwan for a year. I might even try to get on an archaeologic dig as a field hand, just to see if I like it. Who knows? But it won't be what I've been doing for the last two interminable years.
I might not be in my dream vocation by this time next year, but one thing is certain--I'll have quit my stupid job before then, and that in and of itself will be an improvement. Everything else is just another step on the journey. | | |
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