Eccentric Flower:199911/I dont wear silly hats

I stopped doing the gender tracking chart several weeks ago. I didn't realize I hadn't mentioned I'd stopped, not until Jette wrote her entry about packing.

I stopped keeping the chart because it didn't tell me what I needed to know. My girl days and boy days - defined mostly by mode of dress and amount of attention I paid to my appearance - turned out to be situational; they depended on who I would be seeing that day, where I was going, et cetera. No news there. What I was hoping to find was some sort of hormonal or mood cycle, an answer to why I feel the way I do - good, bad, sexy, ugly - some days without discernable rhyme or reason.

Some days it's easy. I am depressed today, for example, but I know why. It's partially because I'm tired, but mostly because the mouth organ message board has made me sad. A reader is angry at my comments, thinking it's a rejection of him/her. Rather than explain the whole situation, let me give you an analogy, one which has happened here several times.

I say, "I dislike fandom. I hate it when a bunch of people gather together to share stupid Star Wars jokes and act geeky in one large group. I recognize it as a form of mutual support and enthusiasm, and I can see where it's useful and beneficial to them, but I personally will not get involved in any such thing."

Pretty clear, yes? Let's break it down again, just to be sure:

1. I don't dislike the fans themselves, just their group activities;
2. I would never deny them the right to those activities; I just abstain from such activities myself.

So what happens next - and it always happens next - is that I get mail from someone saying, "Hey, I'm a devout Fan, and I'm pretty offended by your remarks - it makes me think you hate me."

How do I make this any clearer? Why does it cause this kind of reaction every time, whether I'm speaking of Fandom or polyamory or celibacy or a religion or the Green Lady only knows what? How do I get people to understand that I can hate the institution, hate the behaviors associated with the institution, but love its members nonetheless?

This is very important because I hate almost all institutions as a rule of thumb, but offhand I can only think of one person I'd claim instantly to hate. When I hate a person, I mean that I would be willing to kill that person if given an opportunity. I dislike some people or am annoyed by them, but I don't hate them. Hate means I think they're evil. Institutions, on the other hand, are evil ... until proven otherwise.

My stock answer for why I distrust institutions, groups, clubs et cetera is that they stress a single common set of characteristics; they are reductionist. That is, when you are in an SF fan group, you tend to concentrate on the SF-fan aspects of each others' personalities, excluding all kinds of other stuff.

That's the polite, intelligent answer. My real reasons for distrusting institutions are deeper, more visceral, complex, and not very rational. They are probably tied into my horrendous notion of my own self-worth and my fear of personal exposure.

When I let my hair down (metaphorically), I increase the chances that I will have a good time. I also increase the chances that I will look ridiculous. These two are part and parcel. (I would know; my life has been a search for ways to have a good time without looking foolish.)

Others, given this dilemma, might decide to damn the torpedoes and just cut loose without worrying about how foolish they look. My solution is to not cut loose. Not very often, anyway.

I'm rambling, aren't I? You're probably wondering how this connects to institutions and groups and such. Well, try it this way:

Spider Robinson defined Fandom (in part) as a place where everyone can get together and wear silly hats. When I see a roomful of people wearing silly hats, it doesn't make me more inclined to take the risk and put on a silly hat. It makes me less inclined. What happens is, I see the roomful of silly-hatted people and think, "Oh, god, they look utterly ridiculous; I don't want to be like that, I don't want to be a part of that."

I'm also cranky about the mouth organ messages because the site's being taken down for a month and when it comes back up it won't be the same, and no one has expressed curiosity or concern about this. I guess they don't care. I guess none of them will come back in January. Oh, well.

I'm cranky about a little quarrel on the journals list this morning, not just because the fight was completely needless, but because I was (silently) on the Wrong Side of it. Apparently.

I'm cranky because I've been meaning to write about the slew of movies I've seen in the last few days, but now that I've finished reading everyone else's comments about these movies, I have very little left to say.

I shouldn't get in a mood like this. Everything sets me off when I'm like this. (It just occurred to me that I also haven't had any real food today. Well, that doesn't help a bit.)

Even reading something as innocent as Iain's slap to Dave Stewart - man, I am getting tired of people picking on him. Everybody is doing it. People talk about "Annie Lennox and that other person." Entertainment Weekly reviewed the new Eurythmics album "as if we had never heard of these people before," and concluded, "Wow, this woman should consider a solo career." Ouch.

I admit it - I am a Dave Stewart fan. I bought Greetings from the Gutter - I was apparently one of the only people in the United States to do so. I believe Dave has a lot of talent. (He does have the tragic fate, though, of being named Dave. There have been a number of Daves in my life and so far every last one of them has been sociopathic. No, not drawing conclusions, just pointing out statistics.) Dave, for example, can play an instrument or two or three. He can write music. Annie, on the other hand, can only sing. Okay, she sings fabulously, but I am the sort of person who respects a mediocre musician above a good vocalist - probably because I can sing passably but not play any instruments well. Vocalists are like actors. When you get right down to it, all they do is read lines.

(Of all the things in this entry, you know what I'll get mail about? That last sentence.)

(But not after that parenthesis. That will prevent anyone from writing about it.)

(Except the ones who will now second-guess my second-guessing.)

I did a lot of shopping this weekend. I bet there are some readers who wish I'd written about that instead. On the other hand, for every one of those, there's a reader who thinks, "No, no, please don't write about looking for shoes again!"

You can't please everyone.

Some days, in fact, you can't please anyone.