smackshack (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
smackshack) wrote2009-05-25 09:59 pm
smackshack) wrote2009-05-25 09:59 pm
Entry tags:
A letter to me
Back when I was angsting about turning forty, jrosehale suggested I follow the examples of Stephen Fry and his fellow royal subjects by writing a letter to myself as a 16 year old. At first I was a bit afraid -- even petrified: after all, Stephen Fry is a demigod of letters, theater, film, television, and the Internet while I'm just another Texas boy with a pot belly and a Chinese laptop.
I'd hate to show the poor fellow up.
I wrote two paragraphs on my birthday but quickly realized that it wasn't working. Besides, the hot new Star Trek and a cold beer were calling my name.
But now that I've had a bit of time to reflect, I'll try again. So here I am, forty years and 11 days old, writing to my teenaged self. Don't tell Stephen (he's so sensitive, you know).
Dear Marvin,
First things first: you, my friend, are a weird dude. You hate being called "dude," of course, or "buddy" -- you hate any presumption of familiarity on the part of any stranger, and believe me I'm a stranger -- but I'm going to call you dude. I wouldn't normally do that, but with the benefit hindsight I can tell you now what you refuse to admit: that you desperately want to be a dude.
You want to be one of the guys, you want to be normal. Remember fifth grade, when a bunch of your friends were transferred to the gifted and talented program, but you had to wait another semester before you were considered and tested and (gasp!) admitted? You spent that whole year saying, "I just want to be normal" to yourself.
That must be why you hate it so much when you're mistaken for an ordinary person, hmm?
You don't want to be normal. You want to be one of the guys, but normal? To hell with that. You want to be god.
(Ok, not the god. You'd be satisfied with a god, maybe just an avatar or a manifestation.)
It sounds crazy, but bear with me. You've already completely rewritten Christian theology in your head in order to reconcile faith and scripture with skepticism and science, and you're already toying with the pop-Eastern philosophy you're seeing in kung-fu movies because you're obsessed with self-realization and spiritual transcendence. In about 20 years you'll be talking to a therapist about the need to be your own Jesus, your own savior.
(Wait, should I tell you that? Will that fuck up the timeline or something?)
Anyway, you're not god. I know it's a shock, but the desire explains so much: your aloofness, your anxiety about maintaining a sense of superiority, your difficulty in letting friends see your inner feelings. You don't want to hurt anybody or rule anybody or be responsible for the world, but you want to be Ultimate.
Too bad you don't believe in Ultimate. Too bad you still believe in sin.
Isn't that a bitch? You're a skeptic, you don't really believe in scripture, but you believe in moral imperative of excellence, and you only know how to define excellence relative to failure and fallenness. You believe in the sin of pride. You believe in the sin of letting down your family. You feel the shame of the distance between what you are and what you think you ought to be. You haven't figured out how to understand excellence in terms of setting goals and meeting them; you can only understand life in terms of fleeing from condemnation, mainly self-condemnation.
But at the same time, you already know you hate this feeling, this whole world-defining network of cancerous motivations, and you're already finding small ways to rebel.
It's why you struggle for good grades, but you're blind to the whole competition for college going on around you. It's why you'll work yourself to the point of self-injury in karate but will never quite understand the business of fighting. It's why you'll major in philosophy as a way to find illumination but never understand what academic philosophy is really about until it's too late to pick a nice sensible degree plan in biology or chemistry or computer science or law. It's like your vision is 10 degrees off from reality, and you're very clever about what you see, but you don't see the things you need to see.
Which I suppose brings us to the topic of girls. There's good news and bad news there. Bad news first: you're very unlucky in lust. And infatuation. It's the same old problem: you don't see what's happening. You see scenes in a drama that you're writing and rewriting in your head, hoping to find your way to the happy ending, but nobody else knows what part they're intended to play. Partly because you're too stupid to tell them, and partly because the part you've written can't be played by any human being.
The good news is that you'll be very lucky in love if you are patient. Don't fuck it up.
Now I've spent a lot of time deconstructing your brain -- Have I mentioned that you're a very weird dude? -- but I want to end on a positive note. So listen up: having a brain that seems to be perpetually just out of step with the world is not as bad as it sounds. People ruin their lives by doing all the right things in just the right order, but you've been saved from that fate by squishy gray lump of meat that finds it hard to cooperate. Treasure that distance, nurture it, and contemplate for a moment the definition of weird:
Now think about what you really value. Think about what the rest of the world thinks is natural and normal.
Be weird.
Love,
Yourself
I'd hate to show the poor fellow up.
I wrote two paragraphs on my birthday but quickly realized that it wasn't working. Besides, the hot new Star Trek and a cold beer were calling my name.
But now that I've had a bit of time to reflect, I'll try again. So here I am, forty years and 11 days old, writing to my teenaged self. Don't tell Stephen (he's so sensitive, you know).
Dear Marvin,
First things first: you, my friend, are a weird dude. You hate being called "dude," of course, or "buddy" -- you hate any presumption of familiarity on the part of any stranger, and believe me I'm a stranger -- but I'm going to call you dude. I wouldn't normally do that, but with the benefit hindsight I can tell you now what you refuse to admit: that you desperately want to be a dude.
You want to be one of the guys, you want to be normal. Remember fifth grade, when a bunch of your friends were transferred to the gifted and talented program, but you had to wait another semester before you were considered and tested and (gasp!) admitted? You spent that whole year saying, "I just want to be normal" to yourself.
That must be why you hate it so much when you're mistaken for an ordinary person, hmm?
You don't want to be normal. You want to be one of the guys, but normal? To hell with that. You want to be god.
(Ok, not the god. You'd be satisfied with a god, maybe just an avatar or a manifestation.)
It sounds crazy, but bear with me. You've already completely rewritten Christian theology in your head in order to reconcile faith and scripture with skepticism and science, and you're already toying with the pop-Eastern philosophy you're seeing in kung-fu movies because you're obsessed with self-realization and spiritual transcendence. In about 20 years you'll be talking to a therapist about the need to be your own Jesus, your own savior.
(Wait, should I tell you that? Will that fuck up the timeline or something?)
Anyway, you're not god. I know it's a shock, but the desire explains so much: your aloofness, your anxiety about maintaining a sense of superiority, your difficulty in letting friends see your inner feelings. You don't want to hurt anybody or rule anybody or be responsible for the world, but you want to be Ultimate.
Too bad you don't believe in Ultimate. Too bad you still believe in sin.
Isn't that a bitch? You're a skeptic, you don't really believe in scripture, but you believe in moral imperative of excellence, and you only know how to define excellence relative to failure and fallenness. You believe in the sin of pride. You believe in the sin of letting down your family. You feel the shame of the distance between what you are and what you think you ought to be. You haven't figured out how to understand excellence in terms of setting goals and meeting them; you can only understand life in terms of fleeing from condemnation, mainly self-condemnation.
But at the same time, you already know you hate this feeling, this whole world-defining network of cancerous motivations, and you're already finding small ways to rebel.
It's why you struggle for good grades, but you're blind to the whole competition for college going on around you. It's why you'll work yourself to the point of self-injury in karate but will never quite understand the business of fighting. It's why you'll major in philosophy as a way to find illumination but never understand what academic philosophy is really about until it's too late to pick a nice sensible degree plan in biology or chemistry or computer science or law. It's like your vision is 10 degrees off from reality, and you're very clever about what you see, but you don't see the things you need to see.
Which I suppose brings us to the topic of girls. There's good news and bad news there. Bad news first: you're very unlucky in lust. And infatuation. It's the same old problem: you don't see what's happening. You see scenes in a drama that you're writing and rewriting in your head, hoping to find your way to the happy ending, but nobody else knows what part they're intended to play. Partly because you're too stupid to tell them, and partly because the part you've written can't be played by any human being.
The good news is that you'll be very lucky in love if you are patient. Don't fuck it up.
Now I've spent a lot of time deconstructing your brain -- Have I mentioned that you're a very weird dude? -- but I want to end on a positive note. So listen up: having a brain that seems to be perpetually just out of step with the world is not as bad as it sounds. People ruin their lives by doing all the right things in just the right order, but you've been saved from that fate by squishy gray lump of meat that finds it hard to cooperate. Treasure that distance, nurture it, and contemplate for a moment the definition of weird:
weird
–adjective
1. involving or suggesting the supernatural; unearthly or uncanny: a weird sound; weird lights.
2. fantastic; bizarre: a weird getup.
3. Archaic. concerned with or controlling fate or destiny.
–noun Chiefly Scot.
4. fate; destiny.
5. fate (def. 6).
Origin:
bef. 900; (n.) ME (northern form of wird), OE wyrd; akin to worth 2 ; (adj.) ME, orig. attributive n. in phrase werde sisters the Fates (popularized as appellation of the witches in Macbeth)
Synonyms:
1. unnatural, preternatural. weird, eerie, unearthly, uncanny refer to that which is mysterious and apparently outside natural law. Weird refers to that which is suggestive of the fateful intervention of supernatural influences in human affairs: the weird adventures of a group lost in the jungle. Eerie refers to that which, by suggesting the ghostly, makes one's flesh creep: an eerie moaning from a deserted house. Unearthly refers to that which seems by its nature to belong to another world: an unearthly light that preceded the storm. Uncanny refers to that which is mysterious because of its apparent defiance of the laws established by experience: an uncanny ability to recall numbers.
Antonyms:
1. natural.
–adjective
1. involving or suggesting the supernatural; unearthly or uncanny: a weird sound; weird lights.
2. fantastic; bizarre: a weird getup.
3. Archaic. concerned with or controlling fate or destiny.
–noun Chiefly Scot.
4. fate; destiny.
5. fate (def. 6).
Origin:
bef. 900; (n.) ME (northern form of wird), OE wyrd; akin to worth 2 ; (adj.) ME, orig. attributive n. in phrase werde sisters the Fates (popularized as appellation of the witches in Macbeth)
Synonyms:
1. unnatural, preternatural. weird, eerie, unearthly, uncanny refer to that which is mysterious and apparently outside natural law. Weird refers to that which is suggestive of the fateful intervention of supernatural influences in human affairs: the weird adventures of a group lost in the jungle. Eerie refers to that which, by suggesting the ghostly, makes one's flesh creep: an eerie moaning from a deserted house. Unearthly refers to that which seems by its nature to belong to another world: an unearthly light that preceded the storm. Uncanny refers to that which is mysterious because of its apparent defiance of the laws established by experience: an uncanny ability to recall numbers.
Antonyms:
1. natural.
Now think about what you really value. Think about what the rest of the world thinks is natural and normal.
Be weird.
Love,
Yourself