prickvixen | (no subject)

I can think back to high school, during the time when I'd gone from having the school's three or four other rejects as my friends, to being in with the top caste in the school, and I would be over at someone's house or out during an evening with this bunch of nascent frat boys and young professionals, and not really fitting in. Even though I was ecstatic to be there, so much so that I didn't let myself notice the disconnection very much at the time, and felt it very rarely. If I thought about it, I decided that it was because I was weird, or 'artistic,' so of course I didn't fit in.

Which is why it was very interesting tonight, to be in a room full of avowedly weird people, people who define themselves by how odd and eclectic they are, how resistant they are to mainstream culture and the push of society, and still feel myself not fitting in. Am I too weird for them? Or not weird enough? I'm just not buying what they're selling. Whatever it is that it does for them, it isn't doing it for me. I was not excluded, I excluded myself.

And it brings me back to a question which has been on my mind the last couple of weeks. Why am I one of the good guys? Everything about my personality and demeanor suggests that I ought to be on the other side, among those who casually play with human lives and destroy whatever is inconvenient to them. Why do I concern myself with the fate of the weak and the oppressed, and why do I wish to prey upon the strong? Then I wonder to myself, did all the villains of history start out wanting to help everyone? Did they want to belong? Is that how you get there from here?

Something I realized a while ago is that I just do not fit in with human beings. I can operate in such environments, but I'm never really part of them. I try to be adult enough not to blame everyone else for what is so clearly a problem on my end, but it's frustrating sometimes. I sometimes feel like all my social advancement is so much playacting, and that even the 'out' crowd can sense my inhumanity if I stand still long enough, and all my friendships are masturbation, that my friends are cuddling up to something cold and mechanical without realizing.

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Why am I one of the good guys? Everything about my personality and demeanor suggests that I ought to be on the other side, among those who casually play with human lives and destroy whatever is inconvenient to them. Why do I concern myself with the fate of the weak and the oppressed, and why do I wish to prey upon the strong?

probably because you were always a good guy despite however you might think of yourself, despite whatever has happened to you in your life.

Reluctant protagonist. Anti-hero, maybe. I have my own thoughts but I can't express them in a quick bit of a reply.

Maybe you didn't feel 'in' with the crowd trying to be on the outside because they are 'trying' and you are not. I mean, you are the out-side limit so there's no trying on your part; you are you. Everybody else...Well...they're not genuinely bent and their disingenuous imitation of what you are gets under your skin.

Or I may be an ass talking fox.

I don't know about wanting to 'get' them because they aren't genuinely weird enough, but it's possible I'm some other kind of weird which isn't easy to duplicate, or which doesn't allow me affinity with similarly weird people. *shrug*

We still loved hanging with you regardless of whether we met you or an incredible simulation. :)

But you're cute when you're cold and mechanical. :)

I was thinking the same thing you first speak of while wandering around the con. You know, the acknowledgement that I'm walking through crowds of profoundly weird people, and despite being profoundly weird myself I appear to be an entirely different kind of weird than them.

sigh It really hurt and stresed me to see you sitting there, very definitely not connecting with anyone, me torn between wanting to join in, and wanting to try and help you... and to make things worse, I was feeling very unsure what I wanted to do with you, since I'd stumbled over a lot of half-hidden thoughts the night before. I felt like shit in several ways.

You hold yourself back a lot. And everyone who gives half a shit about you really wishes you'd drop the inhuman, distancing mask and just be yourself. You're one of the good guys because you see how fucked up the world is and want to fix it and make it better. Even the megalomaniac fantasies really seem to be about that, not about destruction. Wash it all away and start again.

I need to turn some more stuff about you over in my mind.

Yeah, but you were on drugs!

It bothered me that you were upset, but I myself wasn't really that distressed at not fitting in. Disappointed, maybe, and even then not very disappointed. I've already had ample indication that I'm not on PV's wavelength, and I think you've learned by now that I'm either on the mundane end of weird, or not fully committed to total weirdness. I could just call it what it is, a room full of RPGers who play a game that I have only mild interest in.

To ask me to drop the mask sounds suspiciously like telling me to suck it up and deal, and we know how much water that draws in PV's crowd. I am what I am... if there was something other than this to reveal, I probably discarded it long ago. And I think I'm awfully open, my contrived secrets excluded.

You know, I don't feel particularly deep. That's another thing I don't get. I ought to be going on about how strange and unconventional I am, how others can't possibly understand me, but I don't feel strange. I feel pretty ordinary, despite my interests. Maybe when I was twelve years old I felt strange, and wore it as a badge of rank, but now it's kind of yeah, whatever, like I've outgrown bragging about it.

I brought you a tin of cinnamon gum, but there wasn't room for it in my pockets, so I left it in the car.

You had a bad sample. :) I was being a royal selfish bitch up until that party, and when I dipped into the well of Deep Fun Stuff to say there was absolutely nothing. We have a previous connection, you and me, but nothing that I could be sure you'd be comfortable with me bringing into real life -- and nothing I could get at, at all, when I was already mopey and self-conscious. Your social habits aren't exactly what I'd call bubbly and effusive. :) But don't sell yourself short. I wish I could've gotten to talk to you.

Also, I was still reeling from the sight of perfect [censored] red [censored] cheeks in [censored], even if it her voice did sound like a [censored] Taco Bell [censored].

I want to say something here because I dislike your assertions that it's something as simple as a mask but I cannot construct any statement that would sufficiently explain what I want to say. All I'd do is sound stuidly angsty and arrogantly over-understanding of Ashy's experience.

I've spent like an hour sitting here rewriting this stupid comment.

You can put a warm skin and soft smile over a machine and everyone else may think it's real but the underlying thing is still a machine.

Goodnight.

I had an empty time too.

Dammit. :p Rik and I absolutely ADORED you. (We still do, of course...)