unordinary

In the future, we get to pick our superpowers via gene manipulation. I’m looking forward to flight and color and texture-changing octopus skin in addition to limb regeneration.
science daily article

Disclaimer: This is a totally illogical conclusion, but it’s fun to think about.

My friend Judy linked to an article about women laughing alone with salad, and now i’m hooked on the site. It’s like hilarious sociology-specific wikipedia crack. I keep reading a random article, then clicking a related one at the bottom.  This one was funny to me because I remember saving up for a chemistry set as a kid, and then looking for the “right” set and being insanely pissed off by gender-specific imagery. Most chemistry sets were marketed to boys at the time, and even the ones in the nerdy educational section of the toy store only had pictures of little boys in lab coats on them. I finally found a decent one, which I defined as “decent” because it came in a plain wooden box with a really generic label.
Anyway, I love that sites like this exist. By isolating specific instances of imagery that are meant to be accepted as mundane and normal, it satirizes the overall attempts to define social roles. It makes it so obvious that this stuff is absurd, and is being used to define things like gender in very specific ways in order to sell products. Once you become aware of it, this kind of advertising and imagery stops being a source of anxiety and becomes a source of comedy. Yay!

Hank

by Shayna Y

I’m up too late again. Wondering why it’s considered late, or why you can have an excess of lateness. I’m as awake now as I was at 8am, when being awake was a good and socially-appropriate situation.

Tonight my toothbrush felt too big for my mouth. It’s the little things like that that make you notice it. The benign irregularities that add up to a healthy mess. Then my wife told me to be in bed at a decent hour. Or maybe it was my mother. My unsureness of her identity at that moment, whichever of them told me, indicates that the hour is already indecent.

Even after this morning, when my wife’s… her oatmeal was light pink instead of beige, she still insists there’s a right way and a wrong way to do the little things. The oatmeal wasn’t a big deal. She assumed it was mislabeled. That maybe at the factory they’d put the strawberry-flavored oatmeal in the plain oatmeal box. But she shrugged it off. She ate it anyway. She didn’t care that it didn’t taste like strawberries, and she wouldn’t speak of it again, because it didn’t matter. I asked her why it was beige when she opened the box yesterday. She didn’t think she remembered well enough to be sure of that.

But even after things like that, she insists we keep doing everything the orderly way. Sometimes I think the fact that more people don’t ask questions is proof of it. Proof of something, anyway. Whatever “it” is is indeterminate. I guess it’s irrelevant anyway. If we knew something that big was up, I don’t know that it would change anything. We’d probably go on feeling what we feel and doing what we do, and in the end, we’d expire somehow. I don’t see a big difference between biodegrading, or a total alteration of my consciousness into some spiritual realm, or just some kind of “end program” or whatever.

The knowing might change us temporarily. We’d probably get shook up, then after we got used to the idea, we’d go back to making all the same, apparently irrelevant decisions day after day, like each one was significant and necessary to our health and well-being. I bet we’d slip back into our old patterns pretty quick. Even if the end wasn’t what we expected, right now is still likely all we have, and all we can really comprehend for the time being.

Sometimes I think about it, though, when I’m up at the wrong hour. Whatever it is. How maybe we’re all just a split-second in someone else’s dream. We’re a fragment of a sentence spoken by some multi-dimensional entity. We’re a belch of gas, or a program running in the background of a computer. I think about it when things feel off. When I hear that woman yelling again about bedtime, and I’m not sure if she’s my wife or my mother, or if I’m 6 or 85. And on those days when the air smells wrong; sometimes the whole city smells like hot metal or a musty closet, and no one seems to think it matters. They comment on it calmly, conversationally, and then they shrug it off. It’s when everyone notices, but still doesn’t care that I think maybe we’re a simulation, and I’m an anomaly being worked out of the system. Or I’m on the edge of the gas cloud of dissipating reality, and my electron is spinning out into empty space, weirding my view of the world.

And we can all think about these things, and we can write programs that can tell us how probable they are. I can reason myself into believing I’m a reincarnated king or really convince myself that the world is actually flat. It’s all arbitrary now. Nothing has to be true anymore, but at the same time a whole lot of different things are true to different people in different ways. But we still hang onto rules like what constitutes a breakfast food, the proper way to organize a government, the polite way to greet a coworker, proper waking hours… We’re bonded by the superficial similarities those rules represent, but separated by our infinite dissimilarities. We have this thing in our heads that tells us we’re more important than just animals, but everyone will tell you a different reason why.

Last time I cut my hair, the hairs felt different, too. They were larger, rounder, and farther apart. They looked that way coming out of my skin, but the head of hair in the mirror, of course, looked like it always did. It seems like things are changing so fast now that bits of the world are glitching up. More people than ever are taking pills to fix mental illnesses, when they might just be noticing what’s happening and being reasonably bothered by it.

Maybe the rules are in place to keep us sure that everything is still running smoothly. As long as we have to keep our energy focused on the little things, on what’s appropriate and polite, we won’t notice we’ve been spreading out, and now we’re just a jumble with rough guidelines roping it together. We’re losing our mass, and maybe we’ll steam up and boil away soon, spread out like gaseous waste and become energy for something else.