Posts tagged with "vent"

Projection: Prologue (Vent)

Let me make this per­fect­ly clear.

I am not like you. I do not think the same way that you do. Never. Ever. EVER. Ever believe that you under­stand, or assume that you know, how I’m feel­ing or what I’m think­ing just because you are, or have ever been, in the same sit­u­a­tion.

To believe that you under­stand, is arro­gant. To assume that you know, is an insult.

You’re usu­al­ly wrong any­way.

Front

No, I did­n’t learn this mean­ing of the word from grade school, or even from the ebon­ics primer at Dolemite Dot Com.

(Actually, I learned it from 2Pac’s Life Goes On)

Yeah.

I only recent­ly had a mod­ern day poseur point­ed out to me. This isn’t the same as an intel­lec­tu­al poseur, this is the poseur of per­son­al­i­ty. The one’s who want to be quirky, eccen­tric, dif­fer­ent.

At first, I did­n’t notice; I was just annoyed. Then Loo’s per­spi­cac­i­ty put a name to it. I can’t stop catch­ing oth­ers now. I find that the one dis­tin­guish­ing behav­ior is the over-state­ment of char­ac­ter traits they wish to have, such as, “I did this fun­ny thing because I want you to see me in a cer­tain way, and by telling you this, I will make you believe that I am who I want you to believe”. Or “I like this song too₀ I lis­ten to any­thing because I have wide­ly vary­ing tastes!”. Over-state­ment such as this may or may not be based on some kind of inse­cu­ri­ty; some do it to hide because they’re uncom­fort­able with them­selves, oth­ers just want to be mem­o­rable and only end up being remem­bered for the wrong rea­sons.

Sometimes it’s even worse on blogs, where peo­ple write one line posts that don’t say any­thing because they think they’re cool and cryp­tic and that peo­ple are inter­est­ed in what they have to say. Or oth­ers who post con­ver­sa­tions, and expect every­one else to under­stand or appre­ci­ate the humour behind them. Or even peo­ple who actu­al­ly write about how they’re fuck­ing INTELLIGENT, or GRAMMAR FREAKS, or ATTRACTIVE. Why the fuck do you need to state it? LET THE WORDS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES. The key to writ­ing is to SAY not TELL. Telling an audi­ence how some­one is feel­ing is nowhere near as effec­tive as describ­ing direct actions/thoughts/reactions relat­ed to those emo­tions with­out actu­al­ly stat­ing the emo­tions them­selves.

In the end, it all makes me even more zeal­ous about being hum­ble, unassertive. I’ve always been one to “speak soft­ly and car­ry a big stick”, as Teddy once put it. There are tons of great sur­pris­es when one does­n’t present all of one­self from the start. And after all, when one is revealed as a true self that does­n’t match the false image that’s pro­ject­ed on oth­ers, one ends up being a pho­ny.

And I fuck­ing hate phoneys.

Stereotyping The Male

Know what I hate? No, fuck­ing hate.

I fuck­ing hate it when a girl reduces me, or any guy, for that mat­ter, to a sex. When some PETTY-MINDED FUCK gen­er­al­izes some­one as belong­ing to the group of “males” because of a few char­ac­ter­is­tics shared with the stereo­type. Or brush­es off any traits she sees as unpleas­ant as sim­ply being the fault of hav­ing both an X and a Y chro­mo­some.

What the fuck. I don’t place the blame on ‘being female’ when a girl hap­pens to be late get­ting ready to go out. Or when a girl ends up in the mid­dle of a geek talk, I don’t con­de­scend to her and say, “You would­n’t be inter­est­ed cause you’re a girl”. I under­stand that girls can be geeky, or pruri­ent, or cere­bral, the same way that guys can be inter­est­ed in ball­room danc­ing, or chaste, or emo­tion­al.

I don’t do guys nights or any shit like that cause I choose not to judge. I don’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly assume that a girl would­n’t under­stand what hap­pens when the guys are togeth­er. I’ve had girls at my LAN par­ties, I know girls who go to strip clubs. And I choose not to act or do any­thing dif­fer­ent­ly if my girl­friend isn’t around, cause I have noth­ing to hide. I don’t want to be fake with either her or my friends.

Not every male is a slave to some­one with breasts. Beer com­mer­cials are not an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the entire male pop­u­la­tion.

FUCK. God.

Yield To Me

On the way to work I walk adja­cent to a lane of traf­fic, and cars on the high­way can exit onto that street using a lengthy offramp. I have to cross the offramp every day, and there’s a yield sign there for cars com­ing from the high­way, but they nev­er slow down or yield to pedes­tri­ans (unless it’s some­one old dri­ving). Since it’s a busy area, the cars can just keep com­ing, and I’ve spent a ridicu­lous amount of time just wait­ing for the line of vehi­cles to end.

Right now I just get out my frus­tra­tions by pre­tend­ing that I don’t notice any cars com­ing, and tak­ing one step onto the ramp. Most dri­vers don’t care if some­one is walk­ing across; as long as they know that one sees them, they assume that one will jump out of the way. Drivers who believe that some­one does­n’t see them will almost always yield.

This morn­ing, for exam­ple, I pre­tend­ed to be com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous to two cars speed­ing down the offramp. I made one con­fi­dent step across the path and then quick­ly looked up, while con­tin­u­ing to cross. The first car sped past me, but the sec­ond car slowed down sud­den­ly enough to make the tires squeak. The car actu­al­ly pulled to the side of the road and came to a com­plete stop. I could tell that the dri­ver, a book­ish man with light hair and glass­es, was both angry and shak­en, and had to stop dri­ving to com­pose him­self. I swear he was about to get out of his car to tell me off, had he not brought him­self under con­trol, and real­ized that it’s not a fuck­ing MERGE sign, it’s a FUCKING YIELD TO PEDESTRIANS SIGN.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t always assume that I have the right of way (although I do believe that pedes­tri­ans are sup­posed to under the Highway Traffic Act R.S.O. 1990, c. H.8, s. 144 (28), unless the car can’t stop in time) and just walk across the cross­walk regard­less of oncom­ing vehi­cles. It’s in every­ones best inter­est to be safe, but I do my part by keep­ing an eye on vehi­cles, and not jay­walk­ing or cross­ing unpre­dictably. This guy, as well as many oth­ers, have plen­ty of time to see pedes­tri­ans approach­ing the cross­walk but decide to nev­er slow down.