Cool, uncool, and the songs we sometimes sing.
There's a big thing going on right now in the online filking community, all about cool kids and uncool kids and what it means to be cool and what it means to be uncool, and how sometimes people feel left out and sometimes they blame other people and sometimes they blame themselves, and all those other things that always come up in these discussions. And, as always seems to happen when this topic comes up, it's resulting in hurt feelings and crushed toes and resentment and sorrow. Yippee.
Here's a fun fact of human social interaction, one that I have been on both sides of, one that has left me crying and heartbroken more times than I really care to think about:
It always seems okay to belittle the people you percieve as somehow cooler than you, whether this is factual or not, because clearly, they can take it.
Look through any 'us vs. them' discussion; you'll find that almost no one wants to say 'yeah, I'm one of the cool kids, and y'know what? I worked my ass off to get this way'. That has become a shameful statement to make. Anything that says 'okay, yeah, maybe I'm cool' is somehow negative. And it feels like we, as a community, are trying to turn the idea of fun into a fixed quantity -- if I have ten units of fun, and Rob has five, it's not because I can have fun with this here dead rat and the attached string, it's because I unfairly failed to share my fun. I am a bad person, because I had more fun than Rob did. I am suddenly, just through comparison of fun levels, a cool kid, and that makes it okay for me to be targeted.
I am paralyzingly shy, which manifests itself as the appearance of self-confidence, largely because I'm praying not to be killed and eaten. Over the course of the convention, I sang a total of four times in-circle -- twice by request, once because I had just written a new song for a good friend, and once, exactly once, because I was able to work up the guts that the people around me seem to find without any effort at all. I sit there and envy people who can do it. I envy them so bad. I want to be singing...and I can't, because I'm terrified.
There's also the rather vicious issue of perceived popularity. Let's invent a filker. I'm going to call her Milla, because I like the name.
Milla is a reasonably skillful singer. She writes reasonably skillful songs. She practices both these things because she loves to do them, and this makes her better. She gets noted some in the filk community, but she's not 'a cool kid', because she's still 'one of us'.
Milla meets a guitarist. Boy meets girl, girl meets accompanyment, suddenly -- because most singing sounds better with backing -- she goes from 'reasonably skillful' to 'verging on awesome'. People begin to notice. Maybe there is some grumbling, but she doesn't notice, because she's not a cool kid, she's one of us. She's having fun, she's part of the community, she's home.
And then one day, Milla gets a concert, or takes the plunge and records a CD, or wins an award, or does something to attract attention. And suddenly, she's viewed as popular. Now, no one magically likes her that didn't like her yesterday. Hopefully, no one is now writing her name all over their Trapper-Keeper. But she's popular. And now? Now, taking time to visit with the friends that she's had all along is being arrogant. Singing in circles like she's always done is being a BNF and looking for adulation. And it's heartbreaking. She got noticed for being good. She can't stop being good because she's been noticed. And expecting her to suddenly stop hanging out with her friends, singing her songs, and enjoying filk as a filker? Is unfair, and a good way to lose her. Bye-bye, Milla. We're sorry you stopped singing where people might hear.
Can people become consumed by their own cult of personality and popularity? Oh, hell, yes. But there's a difference between 'I want you to worship me' and 'you have dubbed me one of the cool kids when all I did was want to sing with my friends, just like I've always done'. If I skip off down the hall holding hands with Vixy, I'm not showing off that I can hold hands with a cool kid, and neither is she; I'm not stealing the skipping fun or trying to taunt you by skipping where you can see me. I'm holding onto someone I love, who loves me back, and we're finding our dead rat and the string to swing it with. We're creating fun that has nothing to do with popularity or cool, and everything to do with the joy of being people.
Yes. It gets harder to get close to people, the longer they've been in a community, and the more they become 'known'. There are just more people trying to get close to them, and more people that are already there, and time is finite. I made choices about how to spend my time at OVFF. I chose to snuggle Beckett rather than joining open filking early, to eat pumpkin ice cream and to geek out about James Gunn and Stephen King. I did these things with my friends. Cool and uncool? Didn't even begin to apply. The fun I had at OVFF did not involve knocking anyone else down and taking all their fun away. The fun I had at OVFF was the result of years of saying to people 'hello, my name is Seanan, I think you're nifty, will you be my friend?'. Nothing more or less.
And as an FYI? Some of the people -- a lot of the people -- that I've said that to have told me 'no'. And that's okay, too. I have my dead rat. They can find their own.
By a lot of people's standards, I am a cool kid. I'm perky and bubbly and friendly and I write songs and I sing songs, and I've had enough training in these things to know that I'm reasonably good at what I do. I have a reasonably quick wit, I'm reasonably pretty -- I'm reasonable in a lot of ways, and because I'm also vivacious and look a lot more fearless than I am, some people notice me. When I'm a guest, I try to give as much bang for the convention's buck as I can, and people remember that, too. By my own standards?
By my own standards, I'm as uncool as they come, and I have spent a great deal of the last week in tears. Suddenly, I am second-guessing everything I think is fun, from singing in circle to skipping with Vixy. And it hurts like hell, because as far as I knew, I did nothing wrong. And I'm not the only one sitting here watching people making sharp comments about 'the cool kids', when those 'cool kids' didn't volunteer, didn't sign up, didn't wake up one day and say 'huh, I think today, I shall be awesome'. They worked very hard to wind up in a position from which they could be told that they were wrong to want what I thought every filker wanted: a chance to sing and listen and be with the people that they love.
Please remember that 'cool' or not, every single one of us is a person, and no one is immune to being hurt. I don't know when I'll be able to work up the guts to sing in a circle again, because now I have the 'cool kid cool kid not one of us' chorus in my head.
Please.
We need to be kinder.
Here's a fun fact of human social interaction, one that I have been on both sides of, one that has left me crying and heartbroken more times than I really care to think about:
It always seems okay to belittle the people you percieve as somehow cooler than you, whether this is factual or not, because clearly, they can take it.
Look through any 'us vs. them' discussion; you'll find that almost no one wants to say 'yeah, I'm one of the cool kids, and y'know what? I worked my ass off to get this way'. That has become a shameful statement to make. Anything that says 'okay, yeah, maybe I'm cool' is somehow negative. And it feels like we, as a community, are trying to turn the idea of fun into a fixed quantity -- if I have ten units of fun, and Rob has five, it's not because I can have fun with this here dead rat and the attached string, it's because I unfairly failed to share my fun. I am a bad person, because I had more fun than Rob did. I am suddenly, just through comparison of fun levels, a cool kid, and that makes it okay for me to be targeted.
I am paralyzingly shy, which manifests itself as the appearance of self-confidence, largely because I'm praying not to be killed and eaten. Over the course of the convention, I sang a total of four times in-circle -- twice by request, once because I had just written a new song for a good friend, and once, exactly once, because I was able to work up the guts that the people around me seem to find without any effort at all. I sit there and envy people who can do it. I envy them so bad. I want to be singing...and I can't, because I'm terrified.
There's also the rather vicious issue of perceived popularity. Let's invent a filker. I'm going to call her Milla, because I like the name.
Milla is a reasonably skillful singer. She writes reasonably skillful songs. She practices both these things because she loves to do them, and this makes her better. She gets noted some in the filk community, but she's not 'a cool kid', because she's still 'one of us'.
Milla meets a guitarist. Boy meets girl, girl meets accompanyment, suddenly -- because most singing sounds better with backing -- she goes from 'reasonably skillful' to 'verging on awesome'. People begin to notice. Maybe there is some grumbling, but she doesn't notice, because she's not a cool kid, she's one of us. She's having fun, she's part of the community, she's home.
And then one day, Milla gets a concert, or takes the plunge and records a CD, or wins an award, or does something to attract attention. And suddenly, she's viewed as popular. Now, no one magically likes her that didn't like her yesterday. Hopefully, no one is now writing her name all over their Trapper-Keeper. But she's popular. And now? Now, taking time to visit with the friends that she's had all along is being arrogant. Singing in circles like she's always done is being a BNF and looking for adulation. And it's heartbreaking. She got noticed for being good. She can't stop being good because she's been noticed. And expecting her to suddenly stop hanging out with her friends, singing her songs, and enjoying filk as a filker? Is unfair, and a good way to lose her. Bye-bye, Milla. We're sorry you stopped singing where people might hear.
Can people become consumed by their own cult of personality and popularity? Oh, hell, yes. But there's a difference between 'I want you to worship me' and 'you have dubbed me one of the cool kids when all I did was want to sing with my friends, just like I've always done'. If I skip off down the hall holding hands with Vixy, I'm not showing off that I can hold hands with a cool kid, and neither is she; I'm not stealing the skipping fun or trying to taunt you by skipping where you can see me. I'm holding onto someone I love, who loves me back, and we're finding our dead rat and the string to swing it with. We're creating fun that has nothing to do with popularity or cool, and everything to do with the joy of being people.
Yes. It gets harder to get close to people, the longer they've been in a community, and the more they become 'known'. There are just more people trying to get close to them, and more people that are already there, and time is finite. I made choices about how to spend my time at OVFF. I chose to snuggle Beckett rather than joining open filking early, to eat pumpkin ice cream and to geek out about James Gunn and Stephen King. I did these things with my friends. Cool and uncool? Didn't even begin to apply. The fun I had at OVFF did not involve knocking anyone else down and taking all their fun away. The fun I had at OVFF was the result of years of saying to people 'hello, my name is Seanan, I think you're nifty, will you be my friend?'. Nothing more or less.
And as an FYI? Some of the people -- a lot of the people -- that I've said that to have told me 'no'. And that's okay, too. I have my dead rat. They can find their own.
By a lot of people's standards, I am a cool kid. I'm perky and bubbly and friendly and I write songs and I sing songs, and I've had enough training in these things to know that I'm reasonably good at what I do. I have a reasonably quick wit, I'm reasonably pretty -- I'm reasonable in a lot of ways, and because I'm also vivacious and look a lot more fearless than I am, some people notice me. When I'm a guest, I try to give as much bang for the convention's buck as I can, and people remember that, too. By my own standards?
By my own standards, I'm as uncool as they come, and I have spent a great deal of the last week in tears. Suddenly, I am second-guessing everything I think is fun, from singing in circle to skipping with Vixy. And it hurts like hell, because as far as I knew, I did nothing wrong. And I'm not the only one sitting here watching people making sharp comments about 'the cool kids', when those 'cool kids' didn't volunteer, didn't sign up, didn't wake up one day and say 'huh, I think today, I shall be awesome'. They worked very hard to wind up in a position from which they could be told that they were wrong to want what I thought every filker wanted: a chance to sing and listen and be with the people that they love.
Please remember that 'cool' or not, every single one of us is a person, and no one is immune to being hurt. I don't know when I'll be able to work up the guts to sing in a circle again, because now I have the 'cool kid cool kid not one of us' chorus in my head.
Please.
We need to be kinder.