Medicine

            It is odd to go on medication and realize how long you have been unable to properly feel things.  That for so long you were hollowed out like a melon rind.  I don’t know how long I was hollow.  I don’t know how long the color was turned down on the screen of my life.  Maybe I just thought the slow decline was part of getting older.

            I remember being happy in the past.  Able to laugh to myself about some joke that came to mind for no other reason than I wanted to make myself laugh.  I have been doing that again as I pace around my apartment.  I have gotten silly songs stuck in my head and then remixed them with dirty lyrics.  I have messaged people nonsensical silly images.  I have managed to be witty or perhaps just enthusiastic.

            My sleep schedule is all over the place.  It is something to work on with exercise, which doesn’t help, and with supplements, which hopefully will help.  But even then my dreams are different.  I remembered two dreams over the last few years, and both were nightmares.  They weren’t the worst nightmares I had ever had, but they were bad.  Now I have had fun dreams about helping Dwayne Johnson run for Congress or getting into an argument with a school of fish who were in my shower.

            And when I wake up from dreams both aspirational and strange I have the strangest sensation.  I can feel so much more intensely.  My fingertips feel more.  I don’t want to describe it as tingling, but there is no other word for it.  My fingers feel so much more that they seem to be tingling.

            I let myself daydream.  My daydreams used to be a blending of frustration and grey resolve.  I used to buzz with anxiety.  That was the words I used to describe it to the doctor.  I was constantly buzzing.  Other times it felt like something alien was within me.  Drinking me.  That a vine was growing or creeping up the length of my body just beneath the skin and sapping my blood.  I don’t feel that anymore.  I am not buzzing.  I am going un drank.

            Instead, my daydreams let me think of aspirational things that will probably never happen but make me happy.  They let me reminisce about missed opportunities.  And rather than lament those misses they let me turn the event around in my hands like a crystal bobble to see all the angles to it.  I understand my past better and can envision my future better.

            I can lay in bed and feel relaxed.  I can listen to music. 

            I can daydream about silly things.  As I listen to music I can picture myself talking to the singer in a casual environment and being the 10,000 person in their life who was nice but got nowhere with them.  I can think back to the various women in my life that I felt for and learned from and how I wasn’t ready to be anything for them because I was somehow hollowed out.

            I feel more alive and awake than I have in a decade.  And let’s ignore the irony of my saying that during a global pandemic.  That was the thing that finally pushed me over to try something.  The buzzing had reached new levels and I just could not focus.  Looking into the future was a blur.  The only thing I could see looking into the past was my mistakes, that glowed like lighthouses in the haze.  Couldn’t dwell on those, the light told me to steer clear.

            Why did I let myself be sick for so long?  Why did I let this get so bad?  Maybe I was worried that what I was feeling was as good as it could be.  Could you imagine a worse diagnosis than, “That is just how things are”?  How damning would that be?  That there is nothing wrong and that is just how bad it is.  The buzzing will never stop, the vine will keep drinking, the haze will not lift, and that is as good as it will get.

            That must have been it.  The thing that kept me from trying to fix it.  I worried about hearing the words, “Nope, that’s normal”.

Kind of wish this website did a better job of labeling which images they would charge for.
This one was free.

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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Audio Book Discussion, "Blindspot"

I am returning to higher education in the coming weeks.  I have been futzing about with a longer and more navel gazing blog on the topic, mostly having to do with how I decided to try, the hoops I jumped thru, and what I hope to accomplish… That is for another day.

                Today I am going to briefly talk about a book I am reading for my return to Graduate School that I have been listening to on Audible.  This is part of the University’s summer reading and… kind of a mission statement for the University.

The School

                I am going to be attending George Washington University in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington DC.  I will be seeking my Doctorate and I hope to study voting systems, my ultimate goal would be to get a popular referendum passed… Somewhere… that would allow for ranked choice voting, a system I was surprised to learn is gaining traction in the United States and I think is the key to saving the Republic.  Or at least hitting the snooze button on our inevitable collapse for another couple decades.

The Book

                George Washington has decided to emphasize learning about hidden biases.  To do this they have put out for summer reading, “Blindspot” by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald.  Not the TV show, “Blindspot” starring the intensely hot, Jaimie Alexander… I like athletic women with tattoos.

                The book is about biases and mental categorization with the key analogy being the literal blind spot all human eyes have but we are not aware off without doing some deliberate effort to “show” it to ourselves.

                What has surprised me most so far reading the book is how much of it I already knew or anticipated.  Studying politics you begin to understand how people have a mental image of certain jobs, certain ethnicities, and misconceptions about every other possible way to categorize people.

Stereotypes

                In “Blindspot” one of the chapters deals with stereotyping, and it begins with this old… Riddle I guess would be the best term.  The riddle helps frame the rest of the chapter.  Here it is,

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A young boy and his father are on their way home from soccer practice when a distracted driver crosses the center line and hits them head-on. The father dies at the scene of this horrible car accident, but the boy is still alive when the emergency medical technicians arrive. The injured boy is transported in an ambulance to the hospital, where's he taken immediately into surgery.

However, the awaiting surgeon steps out of the operating room and says, "Call Dr. Baker stat to the operating room. I can't operate on this boy. He's my son!"

The question: Who is the surgeon?

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                If you are unfamiliar with the riddle take your time to think about it.

 

This is from an article about Daylight Savings time.
I hate Daylights Savings as a concept.  It is cosmically stupid.

                The answer is that the Surgeon, a role that is typically MALE, is actually the boy’s MOTHER.  Gasp!  Twist!

                Not really.  I had heard it before all the way back in middle school along with other problem solvers… I figured out the answer then too.  Something in retrospect I now attribute to having watched a lot of diverse media growing up (you can read a little about that here).  I mean, Doctor Crusher was a woman and a doctor on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.  The idea of a woman doctor is not all that world flipping.

                But I also get the point.  People do often default to certain mental images that shape what they expect and how they react to the world around them.  The book goes on to talk about one of the first studies on the topic of stereotypes that has been replicated in recent history to show the evolving nature of stereotypes.  FYI: Germans, for the last hundred years, have been consistently thought of as industrious and scientifically minded.

                The topic then moves into what would more often be called intersectional identities, or intersectionality.  That by layering different categories you can picture in your minds eye a distinct individual.  Their example was to first picture a professor, which they said, “white male, tweed jacket, pipe, etc…” they then started talking about how you could build a person by stacking certain ideas.  For instance, “Professor, French, Black, Muslim, Lesbian”.  To show how your mind can construct an image.

                Their idea is that stereotypes help humans to construct individuals based on these categories layering on top of one another until a unique person is constructed.  This allows you to see people as individuals, but also as the sum of their “parts” for lack of a better word.

Again, this chapter was nearly an hour long on the audiobook, I am not giving you all the material.  I do have a reason for explaining all of this.  To set up for an insight I WAS EXPECTING, but NEVER SHOWED UP.

The Un-Twist

                See, the chapter starts with the Surgeon riddle, and at several points during the chapter sexual orientation is mentioned.  The Muslim, French, Lesbian being the one I relayed to you.  So I was EXPECTING, that the chapter would end with a subversion of the Surgeon Riddle.

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A young boy and his father are on their way home from soccer practice when a distracted driver crosses the center line and hits them head-on. The father dies at the scene of this horrible car accident, but the boy is still alive when the emergency medical technicians arrive. The injured boy is transported in an ambulance to the hospital, where's he taken immediately into surgery.

However, the awaiting surgeon steps out of the operating room and says, "Call Dr. Baker stat to the operating room. I can't operate on this boy. He's my son!"

The question: Who is the surgeon?

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                I was expecting the new answer to be, “The surgeon is also the boy’s father.  His parents are a gay couple.”  Apparently, I am either ahead of the curve on subverting expectations in the world by acknowledging that gay surgeons exist in the context of a riddle… Or maybe I should just get around to writing a novel because I am apparently pretty good at writing twists that book end a quasi-narrative.

This is not a well composed photo.  There is so much dead space to the left.

Other Book Elements

                The final thing I want to mention is that the narrator, Eric Jason Martin, has a cadence almost exactly like the opening narration of “The Outer Limits”.  It is not distracting, I kind of like it.

To School

                I am very close to the last day of my current job, less than two weeks.  It is in many ways somewhat scary-exciting.  A life roller coaster for which I am in an interminably long line waiting to take off down the track.

                I am so eager; it is kind of exhausting.  If for no other reason that I will get to read books and have people ask me my thoughts on them.  I had no idea I would miss that so much.

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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

My Writing Output

Limping Along

“It may shock you to hear this, but just sitting down and writing can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a topic already in mind, especially-especially if you are not required to do it for grades or pay…”

I wrote that 2 years ago and since that time I have had significant changes to my life and my writing has completely changed in output and type since then.  I got a career in September 2017 working for my hometown’s city hall and that dominates my time.

While I do not consider my job especially difficult, once you get passed learning how to navigate the bureaucracy it is only a needlessly complicated series of checklists and meetings that could be emails.  However, the job is so time consuming and so lacks creative elements that I find myself unable to write for my own benefit.  Sure, there are exceptions and I have pressed myself to write at least one entry on this blog each month, but it is a side effect of such gainful employment that I do not have the creative spark while working there.

What I do have is a small but regular trickle of work that allows me to write in a professional environment.  It does not stretch my abilities, it is not mentally rewarding, but it is required and has consequences.  I have check what I am writing to make sure I am not breaking the law; while at the same time having no metric to follow; and having to interpret what I am told so as to tell it to other people.

Playing “telephone” via email is its own sort of writing exercise.

Not this Year

            Last year I didn’t bother to give an update on my goal of writing 1,000,000 words, nor did I give an update on my goal of writing a blog for everyday of the calendar year.  I have certainly tried to advance each and have made progress.  I only have 16 days of the year without an entry, and I have crossed the 750,000-word goal.

 

October and November, why are they my weakest months for output?

My writing has never been stronger (at least according to standardized testing, something everyone should question the validity of) as last October I retook the GRE and scored a 5, putting me in the 92 percentile on the writing portion of the exam.  I took the test in order to apply to Doctorate programs and am pleased with the results. (I will be writing more about my decision to do that and the results in the days/weeks to come.)  And let’s be clear, I don’t ever want to take the GRE again.  Two is two too many.

I have had plenty of ideas for what to write, and have a folder of “Draft Zeroes” with ideas for short stories or novels and have written out an outline for a book that is only a couple thousand words but represents something I haven’t done before, a plotted out story with a beginning, middle, and end.  There is even a rough set of chapter breaks along the way for all the shenanigans that I might want to slide in.

New ticks and quirks have emerged, with my tendency to use, “So, …” to start off paragraphs and sentences.  A reliance on evidence, citations, and stating my suppositions causing me to preface everything and then explain my point.  Trying to mix this up with the occasional, “It follows then…” or a “Taking that as a starting point…” could make my writing stronger, but that also makes it more verbose.  SO, I am unsure as to how to tackle that habit.

There are other issues I have that I have never been able to overcome.  My inability to name things is perhaps my biggest weakness when playing Dungeons and Dragons (which yes, I do credit as part of my writing.  While DnD is a game, there is tons of creative work that goes into it and issues from it, just look at the multitude of novels that surround the property).  Names are not my forte and the fact that I made two different recurring characters’ names, “Kevin” shows this sort of wekness.

I like plot and I like setting and I like dialogue, but ask me who is saying things, the name of where they are saying them, or what they call the events they are talking about… and I just don’t know what to say.  Often falling back on the blandest of proper nouns or portentous uninformative claptrap (like “Destiny” a game I dislike specifically because it does something I see as my biggest weakness).

Maybe you all see some other aspects of my writing that need improvement, be it a matter of style, content, or just that I have a number of typos in everything.  I have no editor.  I do my best… or as I mentioned at the start, I do what I can.

The Future

            My writing will continue to mutate.  I hardly ever do movie reviews anymore, not because I stopped watching and having opinions on movies, but because I did movie reviews originally in order to further an aspect of my writing.  And I see my abilities in movie reviewing as sort of complete.  Movies were something I could trust a certain number of people have seen and have tastes in, they have a language that can be understood, deconstructed, and evaluated based on a criteria of both personal taste and technical acumen.

            Essentially, movies are something I could pull apart in multiple ways and in doing so practice my ability to pull ideas apart.  I could teach myself to recognize foreshadowing, metaphor, and visual presentations of information.  I can look at a movie like “Hereditary” and see how the movie planted ideas in the mind of the audience and how well those ideas were capitalized later in the narrative.

            Being able to catch those turns and flourishes is something I think I have down well enough that I am just no longer all that interested in picking them out.  Sure, from time to time, and if I had the time and creative spark, I am sure I would have just written movie reviews for the sake of a creative outlet, but in my current state of not having the time or drive they just do not have that pull on me.

            Honestly, what I want to pull apart more than anything is the old opinions I have on this blog.  My personal world view has changed so much in the last 10 years that I feel the need to write the rebuttal to my younger self.  I feel like I did not become an adult till I was 27 and even then, I was not informed enough to hold a real substantive opinion.

Now that I have degrees, work experience, and have just had to stand by while the world around me became various flavors of strange or hostile, I am a changed man and having the young me’s writing out there informing other people’s opinions of who I am now… it is misleading to them.

SO, it is likely that this blog will have a few dozen entries where I look back on who I was and how I thought at the time and just take myself to task.  Hopefully, I am not just so how much better I am now, but the act of doing this makes me better still.  Maybe I can even show other people why I felt the way I did at the time, why I changed, and why the change is for the better.  Help them change for the better too.

For Those Reading This

            I cannot emphasize enough how important writing is to who I am.  How important it is to my growth as a person.  I cannot recommend it enough to everyone out there.

            Find something you care about and write about it.  Don’t just write for yourself either.  You have to put it out there.  Even if no one reads it.  Even if those who do call you a talentless asshole.  All of that is part of it.

            Writing something that no one but you will read is masturbatory and does not help you grow, and it does not temper your skills.  You have to have some standard that exists outside yourself that you are trying to meet and surpass, even if it is the imagined judgment of potential readers.

            Write.

            Please.

            Trust me, it is worth it.

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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Holiday Chicken Special

            I work in an office.  My commitment to giving a dedicated 40-60% of my all to this job on a consistent basis has left me with little energy to write on this blog with any frequency.  Contrary to what you or others may believe, writing takes a lot of mental energy, it is mental exercise that is taxing.

            But while my job does sit on my brain like a big fat dog keeping me from getting up, occasionally it does give me something to talk about… Mostly stuff I can’t post because pointed criticisms of your work, no mater how many layers of anonymity, is not smart.

            Today I have one of the things I can write about, the office Christmas party.  Last year we did a traditional secret Santa format and I gave a picture frame with a picture of myself in it, and in the picture, I am holding up a sign that says, “The Frame is the Present”.  I am (of course) mugging in this picture.  One of my coworkers thought it was such a fun gift idea, she told her husband and the husband decided to do the same thing for all the people in his office.

            I am a trend setter.

            This year we had a Holiday Sock Party… Which is apparently a thing.  The idea being… It is secret Santa, but with Socks.  Alright.

            The organizing member of the office gathered names, favorite colors, candy, hobby/interests, and a preference on whether the person wanted “holiday socks” or just socks.  I listed myself as “ambivalent” on the sock question.

            My draw gave me a woman from the office I have interacted with dozens of times, but her name never stuck, I am kind of an inconsiderate workmate.  Her interest was listed as “Roosters/Country Theme”.  What an odd choice you might be thinking, I made the most of it.

            I went to a craft store, bought a rooster sculpture that was on sale, and made holiday cloths for it out of printer paper.  I also made it a tiny 3D beard out of layers of paper with trimmed edges and secured it with fish line.  I then made her a card, written in character as the “Holiday Chicken”.  That card is presented below along with the image of the titular fowl.

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Season’s Greetings from the Holiday Chicken,

I am obligated to preface all of this by telling you that I am not acting in any official capacity for the Holiday, I am merely passionate about it.

As such, much like Santa reps for Christmas I am attempting to set myself up as a holiday mascot for Christmas Socks.  I will freely admit, I am a poor choice for this job, as being a chicken, socks are… well, let’s just say I have lots of friends who have worn socks.

But!  I want to break into the holiday mascot industry and we all have to start somewhere.

So, socks it is.

Anyway, I have included the receipts, as I feel unqualified to make judgments about what socks people should receive and want them to be able to swap such things if they need to.

Happy Holidays from the Holiday Chicken.

P.S. if you know anyone who works in Santa’s workshop and could get me an interview do not hesitate to pass that information over.  I am not too chicken to ask for help in professional advancement.

(Resume and References available upon request)

______________________________

            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Nerds/Geeks and Toxic Relationships

            This is a set of snippets I took from some random nerd based group on Facebook that relate to the above image.  I am highlighted in orange; the 4 grey responses are 4 different people who didn’t like that I wasn’t biting on the joke.

            I would like to reemphasize that I don’t think the nerd/geek community is particularly healthy when it comes to discussions of relationships and gender equality.  Just the fact that the original post has a “she” instead of a “they” and uses the term “bro” illustrates that there is some kind of nerd-exclusivity happening here.

            I read on twitter and certain corners of the internet about harassment in nerd/geek communities related to women (especially cosplayers) who have to somehow prove that they know something about nerd culture to not be treated like shit and called “whore”.  This is bad behavior and should not be tolerated or encouraged.

            I have talked about this (kind of) before, with the idea that I leaned hard into my little eccentricities because I had been taught by media that I was the main character of my own story and just had to wait for the narrative to catch up to me and push me along.  I just needed to wear a distinctive hat and one day I would be the hero in some story I was not yet aware of.

            This is obviously not the case.

            I get the impression, I have not done a study of any kind, that many nerds/geeks online put up a front.  They adopt the image of something heroic, magical, or interesting because they themselves are not any of those things.  I see this behavior aligning more with shitty behavior toward women, toward minorities, toward anyone who isn’t a white male.

            This behavior happens so often that I am going to put an idea out there and see if it feels true to your experience.  “Alt-Right or racist comments on things, but the Avatar being used is an anime character”.  Do you have any memory of something like that happening?  Have you seen any mentions of the word “whore” next to a picture of Dragonball Z’s Goku?  Have you seen such comments next to other nerd iconography, maybe a Bat symbol or Captain America’s shield?

            I think a lot of these people have lost sight of life.  They have even lost sight of what makes those characters and icons worth being iconic.  Superman is a character all about having power and using it to do good.  Goku is a character that is all about doing one’s best and fighting evil.  I don’t think either of them would want their face next to the “N-word”.  But I’m seeing it.  And I don’t like it.

            Let us look back at the original image.

            Do you think that the message behind these shows is about excluding people from your life because of hobbies?  (I guess “Attack on Titan” could be about that I lost interest in that show immediately for being shit.)  Do you think Goku is the type of person to ignore someone because they they didn’t share his interest in cartoon shows?

            Of course not.  Because Goku had more interests than that, he went on adventures, trained his body, and went out and did awesome things.  All of these characters did.  Stop ignoring life because it conflicts with your cartoon shows.  Have more interests.  Beyond that, don’t be an asshole about your hobbies and interests.  BEYOND THAT, JUST DON”T BE AN ASSHOLE.

            And if you think I am complaining about the hobby, or your love of the hobby, then I am afraid you have missed the point.

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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

My Very First Video Game

            I have not been posting nearly enough this year and I want to steer back from that.  To that end I have found a 30-day blog challenge and will be writing out entries, hopefully I can get all thirty days without any breaks, and if I manage to do that (since August has 31 days) I will think of an additional entry to write about.  I have done a 30-day challenge before, it for movies, but that was a while back, feel free to read those too if you like.

            Today is day 1, and the topic is fittingly, “My very first Video Game”.

            When I was four years old my family moved from Ohio to Florida, my father got a job and he and my mom got the money together to build the house I grew up in.  While that house was being built we were lucky enough to stay in my grandparents’ mobile home which was in a neighboring county (they were not living there at that time, it was more like a spring and fall vacation spot with the mobile home part being long ago built into a larger house).

            In that mobile home, in the winter of 1989 my family pulled out the 16-inch crank-this-switch-with-pliers-to-set-the-channel TV and attached to it was my uncle’s old Atari 2600 and some assorted games, something I was not at all familiar with but my uncle showed me how to use it when he and my grandparents came to visit for Christmas.

            The only game I remember from it was “Mouse Trap”.  I managed to find game footage of it for the Arcade, and some for the home version I remember…. OH Boy, does that suck the shine of my nostalgia googles.  The colors are simple, the sprites are rough drawings, and the music sounds like the caterwauling of digital watches who were damned to electronic hell.

At least something like this is more conducive to a cartoon, which might have led to it being a little more successful had it gotten off the ground initially.
 

            The game was a Pac-Man clone.  You are a mouse gathering cheese in a maze, hunted by cats instead of ghosts, and when you get a power up (a bone) you turn into a dog and are able to eat the cats.  There was one twist on the classic that did set it apart, the maze had a series of trap doors that you could activate with the press of a button, allowing you to duck away from the cats closing in on you.  Another difference was the presence of a hawk that would swoop into the maze and attack you, but I forgot that existed as an element of play till I started researching for this blog because they took it out of the home version for being pointless.

            And I had to research this.  The game is not iconic and because it was “just another maze game” it did not do well in arcades at the time.  What I do find funny is how this sort of generic knock off thing has always been a part of video games.

While creativity was of the charts in the early days of console gaming (plumber takes magic mushrooms to fight king murder turtle) the limitations of the hardware led to certain game types (platformers and mazes for instance) being super prevalent.  And I could almost understand this game's existence as a competitor to Pac Man, because the trap door mechanic is dynamic and the animal motif is relatable, not so much for Pac Man whose motif is often debated.

One of many possible interpretations of what was going on.

 

What this game needed to survive was a rival system to be released on to compete with Pac Man.  Seriously, if there is anything that makes a mediocre game standout it is being the underdog rival to a much more iconic game.  That is the only reason “Sonic the Hedgehog” is so remembered now, having not made a good game in 20 years.

"Mouse Trap" was my first video game long before I got a NES or Genesis or N64.

I am getting old.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Hair Dye and Fedoras

This was prompted by the question, “Do you find any sort of hair color attractive?” on some random message board and because of a recent excess amount of introspection time this question spurred me to think in a lot of directions.  Hopefully this all comes together as something complete rather than just being a messy pudding of poorly mixed ideas.

I have never noticed myself having an attraction to one style or color over another. I have dated women with brown hair, dyed hair, black hair, and ineffectual hit on innumerable women in countless situations of awkward flirting. But I think I will go on a bit of a digression to mention a trend I sort of see happening that this question strikes deeper into.

I get the impression that lots of people in nerd culture are dying their hair out of the misguided belief that it is the first step to becoming the main character in some anime-esc adventure story. Like how I used to think wearing a fedora would give me a personality before I actually got a personality of my own thru accumulating life events, skills, and lasting personal relationships beyond my immediate family.  But I think people still feel they need to have a flashy trait to stand out because a lot of nerd media substitutes flashy looks for actual personality traits.

For example this is the sort of thing being passed down to children in my (relative) youth. Because I turned 31 this month and I am feeling older than I should.  This is of course a dramatization.  In reality I imagine more drugs were involved.

Designer 1: How do we make the nerd interesting?
Designer 2: Hair.
Designer 1: What?
Designer 2: The craziest fucking hair in the universe.
Designer 1: By human standards? Or by Anime standards? Cause that second option is a summit to climb.
Designer 2: I will show you my vision.

Later...

Designer 1: Yeah, that will definitely serve in place of a personality till we figure out what the fuck this whole series is about.

Designer 2: It is my opus.

  

(When I was a kid I knew how God awful "Yu Gi Oh" was, but until you watch an episode as an adult you can't really understand how much of an extinction level hit to entertainment it is.)

This is not so bad a sin as to be unforgivable.  Lots of people wear clothing hoping it will make them beautiful, popular, or just to cover up something about themselves.  There are a trillion fashions shows telling people to not be themselves and instead be what wealthy people pretend to be.  “Fashionable”.  I kind of wish that I was wise enough when I was a kid to realize this, and I wish I could pass it on to those younger than me whom I see doing it without coming off as the massive tool I feel like every time I try to give advice.  Be a person, not a look.

This is where my own nostalgia and mopey attitude starts to creep in on me.  Sadly the fedora and other quirky hats are no longer distinct fashions that allow people to put on a vibe of aloof intellectual, and instead have become short hand (along with the term “neckbeard”) for someone who is a misogynistic loser, more than likely in the gaming or nerd community.  Now I can’t even look back on my awkward shy years of undergrad and trying to figure out who I was without having to associate it with the phrase, “m’lady.”  Though I was hardly a great person at the time so maybe that is an issue too.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.