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Jeremy Broomfield



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and here's something
weird: my place
in Humor 3-space

Wednesday, September 01, 2004
 
Supposition: Some people are just born crazy, others born cautious. Tendencies emerge in early childhood, are purified in junior high, and by mid-HS you're pretty much in the state you're gonna be for the next ten years or so.
     No, that's not right. Obviously it's a continuum from crazy to cautious, and people fall wherever along it, with people on the extremes standing out as particularly wild or tight-assed, and the bell-curve's central humpers just sort of chug along, watching the show from the wild ones while relying on the cautious folks to keep shit from getting too out of hand.
     Everybody can remember the really crazy people from their childhood, though of course they weren't actually "crazy" in the sense of "certifiably insane" or "serious medication candidates" but more like "attenion-seeky" and "risk-takey." Maybe "expectation-subverting" or "authority-flouting." In any case, they can be very fun, these people. Okay, let's rename the continuum the Danger/Caution Axis. Stated that way, it becomes a weird societal judgment thing, because everyone is supposed to be cautious, but everyone knows that danger is sexy. Too charged. And certain behaviors I'm trying to classify don't fit, like the girl at a party who decides it would be a real hoot to discharge the nearest fire extinguisher all over her friends. God damn! Not immediately dangerous, but certainly not gonna win any merit badges.
     Did that example make you snicker, or cringe, or what? Where on the Snicker/Cringe axis did you fall? Is the axis of behavior really Annoying/Not Annoying? No, cuz that sucks lameballs. Maybe Spontaneous/Cautious. That's better, because both extremes are valued as good qualities, but in high concentrations can be bad. Maybe it's the old fave, Thought/Action, where the latter is good for stopping cars that are rolling downhill with babies in them, and the former is good for designing handbrakes that work in the first fucking place -- both valuable qualities.
     Why am I even thinking about this stuff from square one when I'm sure this is like Psych 101 and a quick google of "personality test" would allow me to test myself across thirty common, useful personality matrices? It's because I'm stupid, stupid and lazy, and a little too proud of my brain.
     Okay, that's why I'm not doing research. But really I'm obsessing about it because I think I used to fall on one end of the spectrum I've been trying to describe here, and that over the years I've slid speedily to the other. I think I used to do stupid shit, and be spontaneous, and take risks, flirt with danger, flout authority, act crazy. And now I am almost paralyzed by thought about the right way to proceed in any situation. It's useless to fight it, I'm pretty sure, and accepting one's destiny is a hallmark of sliding towards the cautious end anyway. One thing I fear is sliding from Acceptance to Judgment, in terms of how I see others. I can hear some of you unconsciously typing "LOL" after that last sentence, because you think I'm like Mister Judgypants or something, but really I want to make it clear that I reject that reading. I may -- do -- believe that there is a right way to do many things, and that not coincidentally that right way is also my way, but even if I think you're wrong, I usually don't think you're a bad person. What a relief, right? Of course there are bad people, like polluters, robber barons, and on a more individual scale, murderers and rapists and such. Bad people. But people who pee on stuff for fun? Just somewhere else on the spectrum. What spectrum? Fuck if I know.
     I used to be less cautious. I suspect that I was also more fun. I am bummed out about this. If it's just part of getting old, I guess I'll just have to suck it up. And I guess it's better than the alternative spectrum-slide, which would be to get wilder and wilder and take more risks, because you can get thrown in jail for real, or, like, overdose, or hang glide into a mountain. I don't even know. I wanted to describe a bunch of crazy behavior at the end of this post, but a survey of my friends' behavior in college just depresses me now, mostly because I thought it was all so charming at the time.

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MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS

Chan Marshall
Rotem of the IDF
Eleanor Friedberger
Amy Goodman
Bernardine Dohrn ('69)
Maya Rudolph
Joanna Newsom
Imogen Heap
Caroline Dhavernas

Shana Rae Ray

DISALLOWED FOREVER

"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!"
-
"from whence"
-
"...the exception that proves the rule"
-
any use of the question "spit or swallow?"
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the phrase "drop trou"
-
fake-o reviewer verbs:
"penned" for wrote
"helmed" for directed
"lensed" for whatever
-
"expat"
-
the euphemism
"passed away"
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pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!"
(see also: "grassy-ass!")



PET PEEVES

"confinscated"
-
trying children "as adults"
-
"drownded"
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misuse of reflexive pronouns, as when someone says "Please talk to Bob or myself." Come on people now. "Myself" is not just a fancy version of "me"! LEARN IT.
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tattoos in the Courier font
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any use of Comic Sans