| Nov. 8th, 2009 @ 04:12 pm who are you exactly? |
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Point of clarification, honorable friendslist! Please allow me this moment of narcissism, so that I may spare you some eye-rolling if it comes up in future conversation.
I am:
- A software developer by vocation. Sometimes reluctantly.
- A writer by calling. Quite serious about it. This is no mere hobby.
- An aspiring game developer, who for a host of reasons just can't seem to put a game together on his own. But not for lack of trying.
- A would-be neophyte playwright, if I knew anything about theater outside of doing theater. (More on this later.)
- A geek. Yeah, you finally have me admitting it. I've had an adversarial relationship with that lifestyle ever since college, and it took me Otakon to figure it out, but for all its ugliness geek culture has always been where I feel most at home, and that is unlikely to change. (The literally thousands of video games I've played, many of which are generally known only to collectors, speak for themselves.) That said, some subsets of geekdom, while friendly, depress the living shit out of me, and whenever I find myself in those circles I just want to get the fuck out of there. Even if I like the same anime or video games or tabletop RPGs.
- A Christian. A devout left-wing Christian. No, that is not an oxymoron--and the irony belongs to the Christian Right. Jesus pushed over tables, people. Tables where people were selling shit in His name. He healed a blind dude who disrupted His sermon, who His followers rebuked and tried to drag away. In His own words, He said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. He was a good guy--the best--but neither a polite nor excessively respectful one. He didn't die for your right to make money and live well, nor to shun outsiders out of respect for His institutions. In fact, I recall He warned you explicitly against doing those things. But these days, Jesus would be labelled a liberal, a socialist, a religious extremist, a cultist, a race traitor, a threat to the American way of life, and--for his claim that he would destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days--maybe even a terrorist. Which is more or less exactly what happened, two thousand years ago...
I am not:
- An engineer by lifestyle. Don't get me wrong, I love video games, the Internet, new technology, whatever...but I think I'd go crazy living like the guy at the beginning of Fight Club, drifting through my entire life in an endless cycle of unfulfilling work and mindless materialism. Where buying a new iPhone is a lifetime achievement, and going to IKEA is a pilgrimage, and Grey's Anatomy on your TiVo with a couple slices from that new gourmet vegan pizza place on your lap when you come home from work is the closest you'll ever come to real human experience. Yuck. I've had a taste of that life and as comfortable as it was, I never want to go back.
- A poet. I can write poetry, some of it passably good, but I don't have any particular talent for it. You want me to write a poem for you, I will, but I can't guarantee it'll be fantastic.
- An actor. I'm a better performer than most of my friends who have never seen me live are aware--I've been told I am a forceful speaker onstage, and I don't experience stage fright the way some people do--but I don't crave the spotlight, and I am certainly not a born entertainer. I'm just not enough of an attention whore to love doing stuff like that. I genuinely find it much more satisfying to stand backstage and watch other people bring something I made to life than to stand up there and do it myself. (Also, I can't improvise worth shit.)
- A musician. I mean, I enjoy and write about an eclectic range of music, and I play the guitar for fun, but come on guys. Writing and programming are giving me carpal tunnel fast enough as it is. :]
- A theater person, in general. Oh, don't get me wrong, I want to be. I love theater; I've read and seen a lot of plays, and trained in playwriting at Oberlin, and written quite a few. I've been making lots of theater acquaintances (and even a few close friends) since high school, so a lot of them at least know who I am. But I'm just not on the same social wavelength as actors and directors and stage managers and yes, even other playwrights. I'm introverted, I'm not extraordinarily attractive or charismatic, I deliberately refuse my carefully allotted share of attention, I'm not good with big groups of people, I don't know the words to every Broadway song in existence, and so on. Sometimes they make gestures to welcome me in and we talk enthusiastically about Ibsen and method acting and Law and Order for a while, but personality-wise this reverse magnetism eventually kicks in and there's a frustrating, ephemeral sense that we're just not the same kind of people. It's taken me a long time to realize that, as much as I like them and as much as I like what they do, it is highly unlikely that they will ever accept me as anything more than a friendly outsider. Something I'll have to learn to work with, I guess.
In short:
I am a programmer, but not a yuppie.
I am a writer, but not a bohemian.
I am friends with both yuppies and bohemians.
You have no idea how many times I've had to explain this to people. |
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stirred
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