Saturday Evening
Jul. 25th, 2010 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainspiritI just spent nearly two hundred dollars on a whole bunch of stuff. The value of visiting Victoria equals victory!
I also got Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman, which is fitting because I've been feeling something akin to Superman's inner turmoil.
In the most simplest, basic form, Superman is an all-powerful being in a colourful suit who goes out every day to save strangers - the basic gist that anyone somewhat versed in pop culture would know. However, any self-respecting comic book geek with an eye for the details would know that there's a lot more to it than that. Superman's character is a humble, big-hearted man with a whole lot of power and muscle. He tries to use the powers for good, but there have been many times where he speaks of the line he has to walk. Every bullet that bounces off him has the chance of going into an innocent person's eye; one iota of strength more could collapse a guy's spinal column, or send him crashing through a wall, flattening another bystander behind it. More than that, at least in his early "continuity", he fears the life he leads adversely affecting his one true love, Lois Lane... the danger he might pose to her by just being in proximity... the possibility that some villain could use her against him, in another evil scheme.
When I say I feel Superman's inner turmoil, I refer to a couple of things. For one, I'm scared of my own strength... not so much brute force, but the strength of my passion. In this case, the Herculean effort is sexual in nature... since I broke up with my online girlfriend in June, I've found myself surrounded by a whole bunch of women, many of them far too young for me to allow myself to be attracted. I've had to gird my loins, so to speak, not just holding myself back from such thoughts, but curbing my tongue so I don't even say something that would make them uncomfortable, like I was some kind of perverted groundskeeper.
Maybe I worry too much. Or maybe I see what happened to that one acting mentor - the one who lived on the same street as me for a while - and see how slippery that slope could be. One day in the week I'm teaching students and the next I've given in and coaxed a girl into my lap while watching movies, and then the next hour I'm wanting that again, letting desire take over and trying to lure in others like an insatiable creature. All my fears, encapsulated of what I saw when I opened the meeting room to find the acting mentor spooning with a teenage girl I'd seen him get friendly with before.
There're other aspects to my condition, similar to themes from the red and blue hero, and I feel more than his share of humbleness when I bring myself to write about it: There are far too many people that tell me I'm brilliant, more than I'm comfortable with. There are far too many people who've complimented me, told me that I'm an amazing writer, or that the one I wrote as a joke about paychecks (as a love story) should be framed on a wall. There are way, way too many people who've told me I'm special, not just because of familial love or because I've been part of their lives in some way, but because of what they see in whatever I do.
I guess it comes back to conditioning. I don't know if it's "white guilt" or whatever you'd like to think of it, but I've been blessed with some very, very fortunate circumstances, and my analytical mind can't help but worry and doubt my luck. I don't always feel comfortable living off my parents' money, sailing into university while they work a little harder to support me, or bungling a year in VFS by on their dime, when I caved into all the immense pressures that went on there.
I still remember how much I hated being called a yuppie by my project manager and fellow peer from Philadelphia. It's derogatory, for one, and it's a category I could do without. I wasn't raised to expect wealth or to work well in a cushy urban lifestyle. I started on an island community of mostly loving people and then went to a huge, unforgiving city with only a couple friends and very few people who could understand me, while the rest manhandled me with clunky speech therapy schools and built in prejudices. That I still write about how much pain that era of my life caused, how much heartbreak, how far I've held myself back because of those years is a testament to what I went through before I was little more than a pre-teen.
Even now, I think about how many words I've written about my tendency to doubt myself. Approximately how many words, thoughts, and feelings have been written, projected and translated into keyboard strokes within my personal journal? How much psychological damage have I had to heal from, and how many habits and thought patterns have I had to break since the end of that era, eleven years ago?
I should know that I have a gift. I should accept that. But it's like my circumstances, the way I doubt them as well, doubt my worthiness to them. I doubt my claim to the gift of the written word simply because I haven't gotten anything published, or much of anything actually down apart from roleplay logs and the entries of this journal.
So it's like anything else, I suppose. The only way to accept who I am is to test myself and actually do something with it. And after that? I suppose I'll probably feel an emotion I don't remember feeling since as long as I can remember.
I'll feel as if I've finally caught up with my idealized self.
I also got Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman, which is fitting because I've been feeling something akin to Superman's inner turmoil.
In the most simplest, basic form, Superman is an all-powerful being in a colourful suit who goes out every day to save strangers - the basic gist that anyone somewhat versed in pop culture would know. However, any self-respecting comic book geek with an eye for the details would know that there's a lot more to it than that. Superman's character is a humble, big-hearted man with a whole lot of power and muscle. He tries to use the powers for good, but there have been many times where he speaks of the line he has to walk. Every bullet that bounces off him has the chance of going into an innocent person's eye; one iota of strength more could collapse a guy's spinal column, or send him crashing through a wall, flattening another bystander behind it. More than that, at least in his early "continuity", he fears the life he leads adversely affecting his one true love, Lois Lane... the danger he might pose to her by just being in proximity... the possibility that some villain could use her against him, in another evil scheme.
When I say I feel Superman's inner turmoil, I refer to a couple of things. For one, I'm scared of my own strength... not so much brute force, but the strength of my passion. In this case, the Herculean effort is sexual in nature... since I broke up with my online girlfriend in June, I've found myself surrounded by a whole bunch of women, many of them far too young for me to allow myself to be attracted. I've had to gird my loins, so to speak, not just holding myself back from such thoughts, but curbing my tongue so I don't even say something that would make them uncomfortable, like I was some kind of perverted groundskeeper.
Maybe I worry too much. Or maybe I see what happened to that one acting mentor - the one who lived on the same street as me for a while - and see how slippery that slope could be. One day in the week I'm teaching students and the next I've given in and coaxed a girl into my lap while watching movies, and then the next hour I'm wanting that again, letting desire take over and trying to lure in others like an insatiable creature. All my fears, encapsulated of what I saw when I opened the meeting room to find the acting mentor spooning with a teenage girl I'd seen him get friendly with before.
There're other aspects to my condition, similar to themes from the red and blue hero, and I feel more than his share of humbleness when I bring myself to write about it: There are far too many people that tell me I'm brilliant, more than I'm comfortable with. There are far too many people who've complimented me, told me that I'm an amazing writer, or that the one I wrote as a joke about paychecks (as a love story) should be framed on a wall. There are way, way too many people who've told me I'm special, not just because of familial love or because I've been part of their lives in some way, but because of what they see in whatever I do.
I guess it comes back to conditioning. I don't know if it's "white guilt" or whatever you'd like to think of it, but I've been blessed with some very, very fortunate circumstances, and my analytical mind can't help but worry and doubt my luck. I don't always feel comfortable living off my parents' money, sailing into university while they work a little harder to support me, or bungling a year in VFS by on their dime, when I caved into all the immense pressures that went on there.
I still remember how much I hated being called a yuppie by my project manager and fellow peer from Philadelphia. It's derogatory, for one, and it's a category I could do without. I wasn't raised to expect wealth or to work well in a cushy urban lifestyle. I started on an island community of mostly loving people and then went to a huge, unforgiving city with only a couple friends and very few people who could understand me, while the rest manhandled me with clunky speech therapy schools and built in prejudices. That I still write about how much pain that era of my life caused, how much heartbreak, how far I've held myself back because of those years is a testament to what I went through before I was little more than a pre-teen.
Even now, I think about how many words I've written about my tendency to doubt myself. Approximately how many words, thoughts, and feelings have been written, projected and translated into keyboard strokes within my personal journal? How much psychological damage have I had to heal from, and how many habits and thought patterns have I had to break since the end of that era, eleven years ago?
I should know that I have a gift. I should accept that. But it's like my circumstances, the way I doubt them as well, doubt my worthiness to them. I doubt my claim to the gift of the written word simply because I haven't gotten anything published, or much of anything actually down apart from roleplay logs and the entries of this journal.
So it's like anything else, I suppose. The only way to accept who I am is to test myself and actually do something with it. And after that? I suppose I'll probably feel an emotion I don't remember feeling since as long as I can remember.
I'll feel as if I've finally caught up with my idealized self.