--{ people like us }------
My big discovery this year is that there are more people like me than I'd previously thought. We are just more spread out, more clustered in weird and not always easy to find niches.
People like us, I mean. There are more people like us than I previously thought.
Back in high school, I thought there were no people like us. Then I met people who were sort of like us, and I felt better. But they weren't quite like us.
You know what I mean. They were outsiders, too, those people who were almost like us but not quite like us. They had that same outside energy, that same unhappiness at not being liked, that same peripheral nature. Deriving from oh so many varied reasons, of course, but to the same end. And that was enough, back then. That was a good starting point for commonality.
But college and grad school and, gosh, even law school, went by, and I grew frustrated when we didn't get closer, me and the people kind of like us but not exactly like us. A point of incomprehension was reached, a sort of weird empathetical communications gap.
I have to caveat this here now. I'm not saying that I don't like the people like us but not quite like us. You/they are great. You/they are friends. You/they are people I care about and who care about me. Unlike most comparisons of us and them, I am not putting forth usness as a value judgment. Hell, most of my best friends are ones of them. ;)
But I'm talking about something different here, something not quite effable in that way. I'm talking about usness, this weird sort of energy that isn't what I need in friends and that I'm not even always friendly with, but is nevertheless something I need to be around sometimes. I haven't quite come up with the word for this but there's a word, there's gotta be. For now, though, I guess I'll have to make do with describing.
It's this weird outlook, this weird kind of energy. It's a hyper kind of energy, that makes people like us do silly stuff like rerecord whole albums of Magnetic Fields covers, or call up economic ministers in random countries to see if we can score gushy visits with them, or come up with screenplay ideas to contact our favorite comic book artists. It's all the same, really. It's what we do.
But it's spread, that's what makes usness hard to characterize. People like us are the eccentrics, but we're everywhere. People like us are kind of like the gunners, the people who try to succeed, only we're far less polished, and far more self-mocking about our projects, and even self-mocking about our self-mockingness. We have focus, but only for crazy projects, not in a giant long termy sort of way. We do more wheel-spinning than gunners.
And people like us are kind of like fans, only we don't do so much copying. We'll do tribute-ey things, like computer games kinda based on favorite poets, or papers commenting on our favorite scholars, but they won't be so obvious as to be expressly fanny, they always have their own purpose.
Or at least kinda. People like us are also inconsistent.
Oh, and people like us aren't serious enough to be fans anyway, or gunners. We're too flaky for that. Even when we don't seem too flaky. And we're too lighthearted for gunnerness and fandom, though lighthearted isn't quite the right word. Average whimsical and ironic together, and maybe that's about it.
This is as close as I can get to characterizing it. Though Ghost World illustrates it too, this usness. Seymour and Enid are ones of us. And then there's Rushmore. Max Fischer is one of us, too.
At one point, I would've said that usness entailed a sort of media-obsession. But that isn't quite it. There are **tons** of people obsessed with media, only it's alien media they're obsessed with. Alien media like Armageddon and American Sweethearts and Bridget Jones's Diary and stuff like that. Stuff that I've stopped calling sucky, and even mostly stopped thinking of as sucky, and have replaced with thinking of as alien.
Because that's what they feel like to me. Alien. Incomprehensible. Not part of me-I-mean-us. But it's not like people like us are trying to like different underground stuff, I don't think. It's just that people like us need the challenge of the search. The thrill of doing our crazy projects. Or maybe it's not like we need that challenge, because that's not quite it either. We just get obsessed with the search or project or the whatever sometimes.
At another point, I would've said people like us are misfits. But that's not it either. We fit in sometimes, surprisingly so. Just not all the time.
Anyway, the good thing for me, I guess, is that I'm realizing there's more of us out there than I thought. I used to think there was, like, one or two, but now I think there's a few. And that's a nice feeling, just knowing this. I just have to look harder, or something. To keep some element of usness around, so that it doesn't all just turn into meness.
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