Thursday, March 11, 2010

You're Just NOT Special

I can appreciate simplicity and complexity, I like a little of both. I'm actually a student of chaos. I prefer my life with a mixture of harshness, sweetness, bordom, chaos & joy. I love to be touched and yet I despise being cuddled. I loathe clothing just as much as I love it. I enjoy the basic labors of a love filled life and yet I mind terribly having to empty the dishwasher and put away clean clothes. One of my favorite things to do is sit in the bathroom and polish my toenails or exfoliate my feet or some other such menial pampering while my children talk at me 90 miles an hour. My mind is always a flurry and barely grasping at a complete thought before it moves on to another so I can easily keep up with their changing bantering and blabering chatter. I enjoy almost all types of music. I love 90's alternative and early 90's hard rock but my favorites are Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow. I feel as though I'm always suffering from a contradiction. I'm not able to be labeled - though sometimes I believe people desperately try to tuck me away in a dimension. I love clean, classic and simple as well hauty and gaudy. Sometimes the uglier the item, the better I feel wearing it...

I've seen, heard, read a good bit lately about other people's lifestyles and I think it's natural to compare that to one's own sense of what constitutes a personal "ideal lifestyle". I see old friends who lead seemingly glamorous lives. They attend fantastic parties in fantastic outfits adorning their fantastic figures and appear to be eating (though some barely), drinking and making merry. Some friends appear to lead a very normal, wholesome and idyllic life with a house full of little ones with picnics on Sundays at lakes with kin folks and a brand new mini van. Others stay tucked away in their tiny and oblivious worlds with no idea what's going on in the world around them. And then there are those that simply make me happy NOT to be around them anymore. I often find myself comparing my likes and dislikes with that of others. Not that one is better or worse but more that I wonder what drives people in their gravitation toward an ideal, a blouse, a platter, a home, a mate, etc... I wonder why what makes me happy doesn't and couldn't make someone else just as satisfied? Why could I not love the life someone else leads and pontificates upon? I love conformity disguised as individuality. We all (for the most part) want, need and desire the same things; Four walls, warmth, touch, talk is all that binds the human race and yet we think that our preference of each of those somehow sets us apart, makes us stand out... When really it's simply concrete confirmation that we are all more the same than we care to admit.

I know that my tastes are often bizarre and sometimes silly. I feel it when I contradict myself and I know when what I say is in direct contrast with how I might appear. I feel different. I always have. And yet I know I'm just like everyone else.