Ubuntucat

Not many people I know would want to call themselves conformists. Yet even the self-proclaimed non-conformists I know conform in certain ways.

How do you pick those ways? Why is one person who doesn’t want to date or get caught up on interpersonal drama still decide to get a 9-to-5 job? Why does another person who will eat only food she has killed or grown herself still celebrate Mother’s Day and all the other Hallmark card holidays?

I’ve been called odd, weird, nonconformist, interesting, and different. Most people who know me think I’m not like other people they’ve met. But in many ways I’m not really that different at all. I attend social functions. I pay my taxes. I’m in a heterosexual marital relationship. I watch popular TV shows.

I do find it fascinating to see how people pick and choose what they want to be “individual” about. Everyone conforms in some ways and decides to be “different” in other ways. How do you make up your mind about what falls where?

I think part of it has to do with how much you can get away with. I wore flip-flops through four New England winters (all year round, actually, but people didn’t think it was odd when I wore flip-flops during the summer), and people thought that a little odd. I got asked “Aren’t your feet cold?” more times than I can count. Ultimately—atypical though my behavior was—it didn’t hurt anyone. And I still wore proper shoes for formal occasions.

If, however, I’d decided to be different by yelling back “Fuck you!” to anyone who said a friendly “Hello,” well… that may not have gone over quite so nicely. Instead of weirdo, people would have called me asshole. For some people who are misanthropes, that’s okay, though. They want to be different in that way. They don’t want to be different in ways that are just odd and personally idiosyncratic. They want to be oddly offensive. They want to jar people, have a definite lasting effect on others and not necessarily in a positive way.

And sometimes the dice just fall where they do. A lot of the time, I bet people others label as “different” or “marching to the beat of their own drums” really are just being themselves, and that doesn’t jive with how they were brought up to be. In fact, that’s pretty much why I am as “normal” as I am. I didn’t really go looking for ways to be weird. I just followed my whims for the most part and conformed in ways that were convenient to conform to.

You don’t have to follow me. You don’t have to follow anybody. You’ve got to learn to think for yourselves. Otherwise…

Kind of an odd question for a married person to ask, I know. But I do have single friends.

My gut tells me “No.” It says “You can’t help whom you’re attracted to. Attraction is chemical. It’s coincidence or fate or something magical. It’s not like going to a store and picking something off the shelf or sifting through products online based on reviews.”

I’m not so sure if it’s quite that simple, though. I know quite a number of couples (both fictional and real) who were not attracted to one another at first but who developed an attraction later (for a fictional example, watch When Harry Met Sally…). I’ve also heard of some arranged marriages in which love (actual romantic attraction, not some kind of duty or obligation) developed over time.

And what do we mean when we say “Oh, just give him a chance” or “Wait till you get to know her better” to friends?

I think one of the reasons people tend to be skeptical of the idea of love at first sight is the knowledge most of us have that you develop love as you get to know someone. And it isn’t just getting to know facts about them. It’s the experiences you share together—the memories of the good times and bad times, the things you’ve taught each other, and the things you’ve fought about.

Surely we can’t just be successfully romantically involved with just anybody, but there is a little bit of choice or willpower involved. Just ask any het woman who has said something like “Oh, I used to go out with jerks because I thought they were exciting, and then I realized they were just jerks, and the drama wasn’t worth it.” If attraction were immutable, you would have to say “I’m attracted to jerks, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Even simple physical attraction can change over time, as your tastes change or as you get to know a person better. There are times when you initially see someone attractive (because of a confident presence or good bone structure) and get to know her or him and later consider that person ugly… yes, even physically. And vice versa: there are people who don’t have the best facial structure, but their smile and warm personality come through in their faces and seem to be the most physically attractive people you know.

Whether it comes naturally at first or develops over time, I think everyone wants to feel attractive to her or his mate.

This past weekend, our apartment’s toilet broke. It just stopped flushing. We’d push the flush handle and it would just make a pathetic hissing sound. And it’s not one of those toilets that have a floating buoy in a tank. It’s an industrial flush—the kind you find in shopping malls and restaurants.

So until the plumber could come in to fix it, we were filling up a huge pot with water and then dumping it in the toilet to “flush” manually. It’s not a terribly convenient thing to have to do, but it did make us aware of just how much water we use every time we flush the toilet.

A nice reminder. But now it’s great to finally have an automatic flush back. Ah, the pleasures of modern living.

Since most of my blog readers aren’t people I know in person, I rarely write posts about my everyday life (and most blog posts about “What I did today” are quite boring to read, so this may be too).

Seeing as how I don’t have a rant related to feminism, pets, racism, religion, or computer operating systems, I figured I’d just share a few funny moments from the past week:

• My wife and I bought a large appliance from Best Buy. I wanted to get it from NewEgg instead, because I hate Best Buy. But my wife’s reason prevailed, seeing as how we live in an apartment building, and waiting all day for a delivery would be annoying, and if something was wrong with it, we’d have to mail it back at our own expense. I love it when the Best Buy employees, who supposedly don’t work on commission, try to push X, Y, and Z on you. We just had to keep saying “No” repeatedly. We stood our ground, though, and I’m glad we did.
• I gave myself a papercut while filing stuff at work. It was dumb. I hate getting papercuts. And this one was under my fingernail, too. Ouch.
• I started doing our taxes online and put in the wrong letter for something, so it appeared we owed the government some insane amount of money. I started to despair. Then my wife caught the error, and we both sighed in relief. Seeing as how I pride myself on meticulousness in data entry, I hung my head in shame for a good hour afterwards.
• When I was walking home from work one day, I was singing quite loudly along to my Sandisk player, and just as I got to the bridge of Michael Jackson’s “You Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” a runner passed me, turned to look at me with a smile, and gave me a thumbs-up.

I used to do a lot of stupid things when I was younger. Fortunately, I don’t do stupid things quite as often as an adult, but I still do them.

My mother tells me when I was a toddler I used to climb on unfinished wood in playgrounds and then cry when she pulled the splinters out of my hands… and then I’d go back and climb on the same unfinished wood.

One time in middle school, I went to a camp, and a bunch of friends of mine and I decided it would be a great idea to prank call 911. It wasn’t a great idea. It was a dumb idea.

Then there was that time in college I was pulling weeds barehanded, and it turned out the weeds I was pulling were poison ivy. That was dumb.

Well, last night, I was cutting up an avocado. Usually I dig the knife into the pit, twist, and then remove the pit in one or two strokes. The pit wouldn’t move, though. It just broke in half. So instead of doing what a smart person would do (give up and realize the avocado was not ripe yet), I decided to dig into the pit with the point of a very sharp knife. I slipped and cut my finger. It was painful, and there was a lot of blood.

I’m an idiot.

You live and learn. Well, hopefully you learn…