Friday, February 1, 2013

Musings on Why I'm Indecisve (*Spoiler Alert*: I Blame My Mother)

  Sometimes I wish I had more definite opinions. Even though people who have unwavering opinions tend to bug the crap out of me, I envy the fact that they're so SURE of themselves. I wish I had that solid assurance in myself.

  I blame this on my mother. I was only too eager to support whatever opinions she had when I was a child, and would accordingly try to shape my personality to please her (honestly, I think this is how most people end up with their political and world views).

  But my mom would always throw me a curve ball.

  For example, knowing my parents enjoyed Far Side cartoons, I dove into all our collections of them. One of them involved a mime, I can't remember exactly what the joke was, but it was funny because . . . it's a mime. Duh.

  Anyway, I remember laughing and telling my mom, "I bet mimes LOVE this cartoon! I would!". And mom said, "But what if it was a mime who loved his job and loved making children happy?".

  My heart sank into my butt. A mime like that would NOT love this cartoon. This cartoon implied that everyone hates mimes. So now I could no longer, in good conscience, blindly hate mimes. Because maybe there was a mime out there who loved his job, and it probably depressed him that people made fun of him all the time. So for the sake of this imaginary man, I would never poke fun at a mime again. I would be their champion, defending mimes to all those ignorant masses who did not know about this pretend mime who loved his job! Okay, not really, but still.

  The mime thing is a stupid example, but political ones might make the internet explode in argument, and my point is--I can't join in. Except to play devil's advocate, anyway. Because my mom always forced me to look at the other side. And, true to form, I adapted to be more like her. Or maybe I would've turned out this way regardless, I guess we'll never know. OOH, unless they clone me! We could test all kinds of crap with a clone! That would be awesome!

  *ahem* Musing over.

1 comment:

  1. hahahahaha! Maybe it's 12:41 AM on a weekday, or maybe that mime story is REALLY FUNNY! I had to laugh silently though so as not to wake my roommate who is sleeping peacefully on the other side of these paper thin walls.

    I feel the same way. I'm pretty indecisive. But for me I feel like it's because truth is like space: There's only so much of it we can comprehend at any give time. So even though you may have enough truth to make a political or scientific stand we're eventually gonna learn something new that will throw us off kilter and force us to reconsider our views. But I mean, it's cool, I like forming opinions, most of the time they're pretty nebulous. That's one thing that's changed about me from my childhood self :)

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