Spare Me the Cookie Cutter
Recently, I've tried to be a lot more supportive and (specifically) a lot less judgemental about stuff. Unfortunately, there's one group of people that I can't stop being judgemental about. So it makes sense to talk about it here.
There's a circle of people I know who share some of the same interests as me. It's not a single group, or even specific individuals; it's more like a personality type who tend to flock. I guess I started running into this kind of group sometime back around 1980, when I first started getting involved in wargaming and Tolkien fandom, and back then I was pretty well immersed in the group culture. You know who I'm talking about, don't you? They're all:
- SCA members
- MIT grads
- computer geeks
- bisexual
- polyamorous
- BDSM practitioners
- early Usenet and Internet users
- long-haired
- unshaven
- fantasy and science fiction fans
- Star Trek fans
- wargamers
- "pagan"
- Monty Python freaks
- overweight
- and (I fear) LiveJournal users
- and so on...
Now, I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with any particular one of those attributes; in fact, I'm proud about sharing a couple of them. But the above list is the universe that defines them, and very few of them seem to want to interact on a meaningful level outside of the aforementioned topics. Despite intelligence and such an obvious breadth of interest, they seem very two-dimensional. That's one of the things that really frustrates me about these people.
Another is that this personality type floods most of the circles where their interests and my own intersect. This personality type dominates the local poly scene, the local BDSM scene, the local bisexual scene, and they tend to drive other people out. I'd just like to meet some "normal" people who share my interests who don't also come with all the predictable other stuff that this personality type engenders. But like kudzu, they seem to overpower a group, suffocating or driving out the real diversity.
And part of my problem is that I'm just so tired of the Python quotes, the pithy geekery, the tired sexual innuendoes. That stuff was funny back in high school in 1980, but it's so stale now that it only turns my stomach. I just want to grab one of these geeks and scream in their face "Evolve!". There's a hell of a lot more to a meaningful and fulfilling life than endlessly repeating 25-year-old rituals like cloven fruit and quoting "Bring out yer dead" and calling your car a "dragon".
I dunno. I used to be one of those people once, and I was happy. I guess I just moved on, finding that other things also made me happy, too. Some of the values I once had, I still retain, because they're still meaningful for me, but I've also surrendered others as I grew and gained more wisdom and insight. Today, being a cookie cutter geek, and never aspiring to anything more than that, seems like a horrible waste of the precious time I've been given, when there's so much more to life than being a "Level 60 High Priest With A Noodle" in Everquest.
For the past ten years, I've been an occasional visitor in that crowd, showing up for a few events and then disappearing for a year or three at a time. Each time I return, I find my patience with that stock personality type getting shorter and shorter. I don't think I'm predisposed against any individual that I meet, but each meeting tends to reinforce my generalizations.
There's no conclusion here; I'm just exploring and recording my own reactions to this group and why they're so strong.