And This Is Me

Written: June 10, 2011

Because it is my birthday, I have decided that today I shall talk about a hitherto unexplored subject: myself. Why?. Because I am completely, totally and undeniably self-centered.

And because I currently have no other topics in mind.

Now, I won't go around with the I like this and this and this and hate this and this and this lists.

Those are strictly copy/paste and should be restricted to profiles and FB notes.

And we're off!.

Expect lots of these XD

A Short History of Myself

Now, I'm just going to skip the specific events area, as that particular history is rather uninteresting and really best avoided unless you are me or were otherwise directly involved.

It is here that I wish to explain my earlier statement that I am undeniably self-centered.

So let's get right on that then.

From the day I was born I, like all other people, believed that I was the very center of the universe and thus everything should revolve around me.

This feeling of all-importance was sometimes muddied by friends and family whom I spent a great deal of time around. When I was with them, they were with me and our wants and needs usually went along the same lines. This confused the whole “me center” I had. I frequently became confused and believed that it was my friends who were the center of the universe.

But, when they were gone, I once again realized that I was the true center and always had been.

As I became older, I experienced the fact that other people existed. And the vast majority of them not only disagreed with my opinion of myself, but considered themselves to be the center of all that mattered. I'm not letting myself off the hook, but said people were jerks >:(

Anyway, so I eventually determined that I must be off to the side of the universe and dedicated large quantities of time to trying to help whoever actually was the center of the universe stay there. This largely involved the silencing of my own opinions and blindly agreeing with other people.

With disastrous results. At long last, I realized that I did still have opinions. And, when crushed for too long, they revealed themselves without my consent in often unpleasant ways.

It was around that time that I realized that I was the center of a universe. MY universe.

Not only that, but everyone else was also the center of a universe too. THEIR universe.

So long as I understood and respected that, all went along smoothly.

Well, as long as they realized I existed and didn't run into me by accident :P.

However, I'd spent so much time trying to be someone else's opinion that I couldn't seem to quite remember what exactly mine were.

Which is where I started to develop my nasty habit of opening my mouth when I shouldn't and going on long, unrelated rants about completely random and unrelated things. Like these:

I could elaborate on my point, but I think it's been made.

Forcing My Opinions On Others

If I were well-known (or if people who read these posts actually bothered to comment –. –), someone would eventually be asking “where do you get off forcing your opinions on other people!?”.

I....um... don't, actually. Unless of course you live with me or choose to spend time with me of your own free will (you strange person, you), in which case you should be accustomed to my behavior and should no longer be bothered to care. Or at least you think of me as a kitten that just shredded your drapes. You'd love to kick me, but you're afraid you might hurt me and then the ASPCA would hit you with sticks and confiscate your video games (though I personally prefer to think of myself as a parrot: cheeky, noisy and slightly destructive, but well-loved nonetheless. That's my world though, not yours).

Anyway, if you don't live with me or choose to associate with me, I'm not forcing you to do anything.

And, really, if you choose to associate with me, I sure hope there's something in my totally unlikable character that you find remotely appealing. Though I've no clue what that might be, unless it's making the cat happy.

Qualified To Have Opinions

In the same imaginary world in which I am famous and people actually comment on my blog, someone might ask me how I'm qualified to have all these very loud opinions.

Well, let's put this simply.

I don't know much about art, but I know what I like:

Which would be this. I like this.

If we travel back to my past again, we will find the root of my qualifications.

As a young child, one of my favorite activities was watching ants on the sidewalk.

No, not crushing them or pouring water on them or anything of the sort. Just watching.

I would sit for hours, day after day, just watching them do what they do.

And then my interest expanded to their after-dark activity. It wasn't terribly scientific, as the porch lights were always on. But I did get to see a variety of night bugs that way.

But, no matter how much I watched, I simply could not tell one ant from another.

When we got deer in the neighborhood, however, I could tell one from another.

I spent long hours studying them as well, which prompted me to write Gray Buck, which I have never bothered to show anyone because the writing is bad.

This ability to spend hours doing virtually nothing in silence and by myself served me well over time, though that's completely off-topic so I'll save it for another day.

I grew up loving the channel Animal Planet. Everything from Emergency Vets to Planet's Funniest Animals interested me. Truth be known, animals were all I cared about.

I never liked playing house. In fact, I really hated involving people at all.

To my horror, I discovered one day that I DID play the mommy/daddy/baby games but with horses and cats and dogs etc.

 

But I am most certainly getting lost and bogged down in unnecessary detail.

So anyway, I had toy animals, as you might have guessed. And I could spend hours studying every detail of them. I also spent about that much time deciding if I liked them in the store XD.

My computer games as well, I would pick apart.

I would play every possible color for my barrel-racing pony and study every nook and cranny of the game world until I knew it by heart.

Even if I didn't like the game, I felt the overwhelming need to explore every possibility before declaring it bad. I simply refused to give up on them.

I found the same to be true of movies, as soon as I learned not to talk during them unless it was with people who found it acceptable.

No movie, no matter how bad, went unfinished.

This provoked a need to dump the badness on someone else. No bad movie can fully be appreciated until you have picked apart all its flaws in front of a live audience. Preferably one which can neither escape nor reach heavy objects.

The final feature which makes my qualifications complete is my Internet experience.

My first unsupervised visit to the internet involved downloading free content from the Zoo Tycoon 2 website (said content is now unnecessary, as it comes with the various expansions).

Not long after that, I began to explore in earnest. Mind you, I was somewhere between ten and eleven at the time and I had never realized the internet even existed before then.

It took me a year or two to encounter actual people. And it was then that I first encountered vulgarities which held no meaning, internet speak and references to websites I'd never heard of before.

These people did not strike me as the type to explain the phrases they used to casually, so I bluffed until I figured out what the strange typings meant on my own.

I actually found that, more often than not, I could completely ignore the alien words and phrases and still know what people were saying.

So my qualifications are these:

1. Being completely, totally and undeniably self-centered.
2. Having the opinion that my opinions matter (at least to me).
3. Being both hard to please and hard to disappoint.
4. Being impossible to discourage, once I've set on an idea.
5. Having entirely too much free time.
6. Having the ability to pretend I know what's going on.

So in effect: personal experience.

I, myself, have questioned my qualifications at times.

I realize I am not an expert. In anything.

I've never held down a job and have no real talents, other than never shutting up once I get started.

But I also realize that I think most experts are morons who should be shot for saying that their personal opinion is an actual fact when it is actually total nonsense.

Thus freed of any qualification question, I am at liberty to have opinions of anything and everything I feel like and nobody can tell me no.

“Who said you could do whatever you want!?” you shriek.

“Heh, you did” I reply “you and everyone else on the internet. And the people who made the internet. And free blog sites. Yeah, you guys are responsible, not me. I'm just a cheeky parrot who talks too much and destroys your stuff when you aren't looking ;)”

You Contradict Yourself
Noticed that, did you?. Yes, yes, I do contradict myself. Rather a lot, actually.
This is because I'm usually more about the analysis than the actual opinion. I also tend to be thinking about what exactly my opinion is WHILE I'm writing.
Couple that with the fact that I usually stop before I have beaten a subject to the fullest extent of my abilities (which means I frequently leave semi-important details and context out) and you have a recipe for contradiction. But that's okay.
Because, you see, I am not running for Office here. I'm not even getting PAID.
No, I do all of my writing for two reasons:
1. Because I think it's fun.
2. To get these blasted thoughts and ideas out of my head so I can sleep at night.
So heck yeah I contradict myself!.
Actually, sometimes, I'm imitating someone without realizing it as well.
Or I'm explaining the opinion of one of my characters without knowing it because I'm in "character mode".

Your Writing Sucks
Okay, so I'm not Mark Twain. Did I ever say I was? (Aside from the fact that I'm not exactly partial to Twain anyway :P).
 It's not like I'm getting paid for my writing. And, for those of you who want to know, I'm perfectly happy with constructive criticism. The section title is not, in any sense of the word, constructive.
I know I'm a work in progress (like 95% of my stories :P) and so should anybody who actually bothers to read my blog or fiction (all that is made public can be found here: http://darkfiction.weebly.com/index.html ).
One should also note my earlier statement when reading my work. I work for fun.
If it ain't fun, I'm doin' it wrong. This belief is the number one cause of my writing derailments.
It also seems to confuse people that I sometimes write in what they consider to be "poetry" format, but I am not, in fact, writing poetry (or at least, they don't think so). Hey, guys, I HATE poetry.
Why the *expletive* would I WRITE it!?.
No. Shut up. All of you.
I'm not writing poetry. I'm writing whatever it is I feel like. It's not trying to be poetry.
Likewise, my stories are not trying to be art or great works, they're just trying to be That Stuff I Have In My Head And Have To Write So It Will Stop Being In My Head.
Yes. That is precisely what it is.
On a very similar note (so similar that I decline to give it its own section), if you think the writing I put on the internet is bad, you should see the stuff I DON'T make public.
I refer to these as "bad". There is a level even further down which I refer to as "dead fish". These are stories which I even knew when they were in my head that they had no hope of ever achieving anything good whatsoever. And then there's that level that I do my best to forget even exists because I'm pretty sure I was taking stupid pills at the time that idea hit and just don't remember doing so.
So yeah, I could do far worse than inflicting my opinions upon the unsuspecting public and writing about genetically engineered wolf-people and dogs who don't like lamb or peanut butter.
Just think, I could be inflicting Star Trek: TOS fan-fiction on you. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
You must be terrified. Here, this should reduce your panic:














See how relaxed and happy that cat is?. He's not worried because he knows I would never be so cruel to my adoring ( and also imaginary) fans.

Seriously, What Kind of Person Are You?
I'm that weird type of person which is entirely me. Except when I'm doing impressions of other people.
I'm the kind of person who can be incredibly stubborn and opinionated (as you've noticed) one second and completely agreeable the next. I'm very indecisive about what my opinion actually is though.
My beliefs, however, pretty much never change. Expand, yes. Change, not so much.
I have the long-standing opinion that "facts" should be bullied and scrutinized and smashed with potato mashers until they plea for mercy or show up as worthy to be accepted as "proven facts".
This seems redundant. Until you realize how often people say things are "facts" and then later discover that their "facts" were secretly "opinions" and little things I like to call "assumptions".
Obviously, though, if we all lived only by what we knew to be "proven facts", no one would get anywhere.
General opinions, assumptions and educated guesses are how most of us survive.
So why some people reject the term "faith" (religiously implied or otherwise) is a mystery to me.
The vast majority of us make almost every decision in this manner.
I know I do. I get by almost entirely on the faith that I will either make the right decision or someone will be there to catch me when I fail miserably (as I inevitably do sooner or later).
So far, this strategy has worked. And, if you guys are all still here, it works for you.
That's the kind of person I am.
I believe in "proven facts" and live by "educated guesses" and then I make "leaps of faith" in the hopes that someone will catch me when I fall.
This may surprise those of you who were following up to this point but I am, by no means, a daredevil (although Daredevil is awesome and cool). I don't like unnecessary risks and am really very lazy by nature.
So when all my friends jump off a bridge, I'm gonna be at home watching TV and waiting for them to email me with the results of their experiment.
I'm not sure how to end this. So... here, have a picture of a Breyer:

Note that all opinions expressed are not necessarily accurate or even the opinions I will have by the time you comment (and please do, if you bother to read this. Or at least like the link. Or tell me why you don't like it. Or something. It's lonely in this blog by myself D: ..)