Sunday, July 19, 2020
PAPER MARIO
A thing that I say to my therapist more often than not is that I'm bored. I don't know if that's actually what I'm feeling, or if I'm using the correct word to describe it, but I always say I'm bored. I'm bored by the human condition and how predictable people are, and how often people take the boring path most taken. I don't mean this in terms of career, more like in mindset. I used to work at Lush, right, and I knew someone who bought Lush stuff and said that Lush is expensive, and they wondered why, because higher prices weren't good for the customers, obviously. One of the reasons Lush is slightly steeper in price is it pays for ethically farmed ingredients, it supports socioenvironmental causes, etc. However, the thing that gnawed at me was I worked for Lush, meaning even as a salesperson or brand ambassador (as Lush calls their salespeople), I deserved to get paid a working wage. This person did not consider that the price of the products clearly factors in my wages, and I felt slighted. True, I may not have had to study very much to work at Lush, but it took me a lot of energy to constantly be facing strangers, and be "on" at work. Nobody, no matter how congenial they are, nobody is nice or wants to be nice all the time. Yet service staff are demanded to be, while at the same time not given enough respect to apparently deserve working wages. I attended a healing session for feminists yesterday, and we all shared our instances of misogyny. We talked about how women are usually unconsciously given the task of reparenting themselves, reparenting their spouses, and then also parenting their kids. Reparenting means unlearning what was taught to them by their parents and relearning what they would want to have learned instead. It's a lot of invisible emotional labor that nobody pays women for. I'm bored by people expecting me to educate them about "social justice things" and then saying it's my fault when I don't. I didn't go to school for this, I haven't gone to school for this yet. Everything I know, I read through Instagram posts, through online articles, through academic papers. I didn't pay for any of it, except with my time and energy. If I, as a retail worker, can carve out the time and expend the energy required to educate myself and keep reeducating myself, most of you with your multiple degrees must have some more leisurely time than I do, to do the same, unless you are paying me for it, in which case, sure! I'm bored by people who don't feel good about themselves and set out to make others feel bad as well. Come on, do you know how much of a cliché that is? You have got to stop thinking being broken is a good excuse to break anyone else. I'm bored that you're not doing the work on yourselves, acknowledging the flaws within you, so you can actually be better and do better for you. I'm bored of people who veer towards either the extremely emotional or logical sides of things. The former refers to my mom, who pays too much mind to her feelings, but spends no thought on her mind. The latter, to people who think they are Rick Sanchez, that think it's possible and even encouraged to boast about how brainy they are and that feelings are not real, not important. Rick Sanchez has an abusive manipulative relationship with his closest companion Morty, and his daughter Beth keeps lingering, hoping for scraps of his affection. All of them are broken, and they allow themselves to be. Also, none of them are real, which should be enough reason that you cannot be Rick Sanchez, you literally are not able to. I'm so bored by people who may be affected by toxic masculinity, who don't display the softer sides of their sexuality, or even acknowledge it fully, because of conditions placed upon them by other broken people. You are all clichés, and you bore me. I'm bored that you haven't realized that being in touch with your brain that can always be improved with more information, as well as your heart that can always expand with more compassion, would make you a much more interesting person. This world has been around for eons, and the fact that we are in this situation now, means we've all indulged in being broken for far too long. This is what happens when we're all thinking of only ourselves, without being in connection with the seven billion other people who are alive. Aren't you bored of this already? Wouldn't you want to see or know how the world could be if we all dived a little deeper, and cared a little more, to change ourselves, instead of taking everything at surface value? Wouldn't it be more interesting to see something we've literally never seen before?
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