The places I belong to

At Christmas we'd all wake up early. Well, somewhat early. The idea of early is a variable sort of thing for any two human beings. So, yeah, early for it being the kind of day when you weren't really required to be up at any particular time. I think I settled on 8:30 A.M. or so, which was late for some people's standards but fairly early for a person who'd been up past midnight trying to get a dark mage to case blaze on a group of griffins.

This year I'm celebrating by buying an ugly Christmas sweater. Truthfully, I've no earthly clue why I suggest things like this. I am a self-conscious person. I am shy. I do not enjoy groups of people that I don't know, do know, or perhaps could know. I really only loosen up a bit when I drink, but that's not the sort of thing that we do at work here in the United States. I drank two quick glasses of wine at our wedding reception before going around to talk to all the guests. I think it went swimmingly.

Anyhow, my sweater arrives, and it's pretty clear that it's a women's sweater, but I can't send the damn thing back because it already cost me 20 bucks or so. So now I have the added self-consciousness of actually wearing, not only an awful sweater, but a women's one. This can only turn out well. I'm likely to start hyperventilating on the way to work. I'm probably best found next Thursday near a dumpster where I'll be lighting my new sweater ablaze.

I suppose it's like this for most people. Lord knows I've been in enough conversations with grad school type folks to talk about the gaze of the other, be they woman, black, white, transgendered, or a precocious zebra. You know, the point is, we care about being watched. Which is, of course, kind of odd. I don't actually capital C care what most people think of me when I'm walking down the street. I'm not worried about them in the slightest. In fact, were it not for society I could just as easily shove them all out of the way or steal their groceries and dogs. In a certain way it just is a reminder of a constant theme in my life, which is, people think about you a lot less than you think. Most likely because they, like you, are too worried about themselves. This is not to say that we all should start wearing garish sweater vests every day, though I'd be suggest it's a good idea for all next Thursday.

We sort of admire and revile people who seem to "not care." We've been trying to sort out this whole fitting in thing since we first discovered that we were individual self in a world run amok with other selves. And you start to try and figure out early how to go about becoming a part of group without completely subsuming your individuality. This is apparent as we grow older in things like code switching during speech, something I do unconsciously.

Anyhow, it's tough. It's hard to set about being an individual and making radical choices, when you're well aware that lots and lots of other people are making similar decisions and perceiving themselves as individual as well. Go to college and you're just like everyone else, drop out and you are too. There's just not a whole lot left out there for your average American type person, and this creates either a low level unhappiness, or remains below the level of consciousness and allows a person to sort of cruise through life. I generally switch between the two depending on the weather. This is all just a long apologetic for a bad sweater that merely reinforces the point about being self-conscious. That's it, I'm shaving a line back into the back of my head and getting my lip pierced. Shi- already been done. I'll probably just stick with what I've got going then.