UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
|
||
|
Universal Donor
We can ill afford another Klendathu You are just a number to me! And that number is: PAGES UD MADE: My Books Page My Reviews Page My Reference Page My Music Page My Pictures My Store UD-RELATED PAGES: My LiveJournal My MySpace music page My Flickr page My del.icio.us page My Last.fm page My Amazon Wishlist HEAVY ROTATION Dan Deacon: Bromst Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavillion Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes BLOGS ETC claude le monde nuncstans rock 'em stock 'em tomato nation postmodern drunkard tuckova 22 ghastly mess constintina total virility fuzzysquid drunken bee stacey nightmare elyse from ANTM stereolabrat dark side points jf_franklin 123 i love you READ NOW brotherhood 2.0 NOT BLOGS ETC qwantz (dinosaur comix) go fug yourself the burg cat and girl book of ratings married to the sea icanhascheezburger fire joe morgan fivethirtyeight.com READ NOW hospitality on parade WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2010 Jeremy Broomfield
Hosted by: HostRocket.Com Comments by: YACCS SITE STATS PRAISE & REVIEWS "[UD] is a genius." --Christian Oates "[Claudia] is fucking awesome, and [UD] is a genius. And vice versa. You should all buy Fear Not." --Tricia Howey MOTTO egeo huic vigorum MY WRESTLING NAME Titan Gently MY PUNK NAME Razor Ection
WHO LINKS TO UD? • from Technorati • from Google • from Yahoo 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. 0 comments |
OTHER REVIEWS: Scrabble NEW! LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store
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?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" - 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. - tattoos in the Courier font - any use of Comic Sans |